Accessibility of the Revolut Android app for the blind users

Dear Revolut community,

Having heard about the Revolut services from friends and through the media I have decided to give it a go. I travel quite frequently and I can see myself using Revolut a lot when being on the road.

I am blind and I access the various features and apps of my Android smartphone thanks to Talkback, Google’s own screenreader which reads information displayed on the screen outloud with a speech synthesizer. The way it works is I have to highlight an item on the screen of my phone with my finger, it is announced, if that is what I want, I tap twice and it’s activated. If an app’s interface is completely new to me, I have to perform a swiping gesture to the right or left to get to the next or previous item in order as if I were using the arrow keys on a computer. I can usually handle most apps this way, in order to do that however the apps need to be made accessible so that their interface is not only comprehensible to humans but also to another piece of software that acts as a gateway between the app and the blind user.

I was curious whether I would be able to use Revolut independently and while it is definitely possible for me to access all of Revolut’s features, the interface is quite confusing from a blind user’s perspective and requires a lot of exploring to figure out what does what.

So far I have identified two main issues persistent throughout the whole experience:

  1. Unlabelled buttons: a lot of the buttons contained within the app lack the accessibility labels necessary for Talkback to tell the user what the button does. In such a case all that is said is “Unlabelled button”. Of course, one can resort to the trial and error method, this is however extremely risky when dealing with actual money. Examples of such buttons can be found on the main screen where neither the "Account Manager button, nor the :“Exchange rates” one is labelled or on the currency exchange screen where the buttons for changing the input and output currencies both are unlabelled.

  2. The labels for certain elements exist but are separated from the actual, clickable item that triggers them. This means that highlighting such an item produces silence on the part of the screenreader. If we flick left and right however, the label can be found sometimes right next to the item, at other times in a completely different spot. This makes the app extremely unintuitive for beginners, cumbersome to use even for more experienced users and usable for power users with huge amounts of patience. :slight_smile:
    Examples of this can be found on the PIN entering screen where the digit labels are placed after the buttons that enter the digits or in the main screen where the buttons for topping up and exchanging currencies have their labels scattered all over the screen but the buttons that trigger the actions.

I am looking into arranging an internship abroad and I consider Revolut to be my finance management solution while there. It would be great to have these issues fixed as it would help not only me but a great number of blind travellers around the globe to spend money smarter. Once the bugs are fixed, I could start promoting Revolut to the blind community worldwide . and chances are the app could be even more accessible than the actual apps of banks in some countries. Accessibility could add another aspect of the smart future approach to your portfolio as then Revolut would be possible to be used by everyone.

You can learn more on how to code accessibility on Android at:

http://g.co/androidaccessibility

You can also perform an automatic scan for accessibility issues using the Accessibility Checker app available on Google Play.

Sadly I can’t check how accessible your app is on iOS as I don’t own an iPhone. It is also however worth looking into.

Thank you in advance for your interest in making Revolut accessible. It would make my life and the lives of other blind users so much easier.

Have a nice day.

kind regards

Paweł

1 Like

Hey Paweł,

I do hope the Revolut team hears about this and takes good note of it, especially the moderators, including @anon33247966 and @anon71086934. This is an important issue that could be relatively easily rectified and make Revolut a leader. By the way, it’s fantastic how useful and detailed your post was.

1 Like

Hi there. Thank you for your feedback. We’re actually looking into it, and we have already done this on iOS on the recent releases :raised_hands: