So why is today’s shopping experience still inaccessible?

Anyone who enters a store to buy essential items like clothing, regardless of disability, shares the same basic needs. Yet most retail environments are still designed primarily for sighted shoppers. This is not because people who are blind or have low vision are few in number. Rather, the barriers they face often discourage frequent visits and make their concerns less visible. Our personal experiences shape how deeply we empathize with the challenges others face. We all have blind spots and biases influenced by what we have not personally experienced. Through this project, I realized how much I rely on visual cues and how that dependence can limit my perspective, and that true empathy for users does not come from theory or training; it comes from direct connection and experience.

To avoid assuming anything on behalf of our users, we took the next best action: to work closely with the direct user group, hand in hand, throughout every step of our journey, which greatly expanded our mental models and values as user experience designers.