ON the heels of concerns from the blind community about automated banking machines (ABMs) becoming more inaccessible as they are upgraded, National Commercial Bank (NCB) said it has already started implementation of the necessary infrastructure.

“Over 70 per cent of our ABMs across the country have been outfitted with Braille kits. These kits offer clear, tactile guides to assist our blind and visually impaired customers in confidently conducting their transactions,” Danielle Cameron Duncan, vice-president for payments and digital channels, told the Jamaica Observer in an email response to queries about the issue after it was raised by the blind community.

“The Braille kits provide instructions on where to insert cards and cash, where to retrieve cash, and where to take the transaction receipts. However, that’s only a limited use,” NCB said further in the response.

While acknowledging that most NCB machines have Braille kits, Daemion McLean, chairman of Jamaica Society for the Blind, is challenging NCB’s response that it assists the blind and visually impaired to “confidently” conduct their transactions. McLean said what is provided is not sufficient.

“All the Braille instruction does is label the different parts of the machine. It does not help you to put in your pin or your dollar amount. It does not help you in terms of withdrawing the cash,” he explained.

Still, there are machines that are only touch screen, limiting their use even further by the community.

“If you [are] going to do a deposit, it can’t tell you. If you [are] going to check your account or [doing] an enquiry, it cannot tell you. That does not come out in Braille,” McLean stressed.

Despite the challenges, NCB said so far it is the only bank that has made some progress in accessibility for the visually impaired by including Braille kits.

“Our efforts to make banking more accessible will not stop there; we are also in the process of deploying an audio guidance solution at our ABMs. This innovative feature includes a text-to-speech function that provides systematic instructions for navigating the ABM menu options via the keypad, “the response from NCB said.

While McLean commends NCB’s efforts in exploring new ways to include the visually impaired community, he said plans to incorporate audio options within the machines have been at a standstill.

“They had a meeting with an overseas entity that ran through the whole audio drill and how it works, and we were a part of that meeting and, it’s stillbirth. Nothing came of it after that meeting,” he revealed to Caribbean Business Report.

Another concern raised was the incompatibility of online banking applications with the visually impaired. That issue was put to NCB.

“The NCB mobile app solution has also been redesigned to address the needs of the blind and visually impaired community, to make it more compatible with screen reader technology,” NCB said in direct response to our question on the matter. “We have consulted with members of the Jamaica Society for the Blind prior to and during implementation of the solutions, to ensure that they meet the needs of our customers,” the reply continued.

McLean has confirmed consultations with NCB on the redesigning of their mobile app, and is calling on other banks to improve accessibility in their ABMs also.

“The other banks are worse. I think I felt a VM machine with braille in Liguanae but JN Bank and Scotia are worse! There machines have no braille. The JN Live online platform that they have is incompatible. The Scotia Online works well but their ATMs don’t,” he said sternly.

“First Global bank is not in the picture. JMMB Bank is [also] not [accessible]. Their [JMMB] Moneyline, [which is] their online platform, is not bad. It works relatively well but the ABMs, the one or two they have scattered about the place, nothing! I can safely say that no ABM in this country is fully accessible for blind people in Jamaica.”

Caribbean Business Report reached out for comments from Scotiabank and JN Bank, but they did not provide a response. JMMB said it would respond but didn’t do so before press time.