Visually impaired (VI) people often face challenges when performing everyday tasks and identify shopping for clothes as one of the most challenging. Many engage in online shopping, which eliminates some challenges of physical shopping. However, clothes shopping online suffers from many other limitations and barriers. More research is needed to address these challenges, and extant works often base their findings on interviews alone, providing only subjective, recall-biased information. We conducted two complementary studies using both observational and interview approaches to fill a gap in understanding about VI people's behaviour when selecting and purchasing clothes online. Our findings show that shopping websites suffer from inaccurate, misleading, and contradictory clothing descriptions; that VI people mainly rely on (unreliable) search tools and check product descriptions by reviewing customer comments. Our findings also indicate that VI people are hesitant to accept assistance from automated, but that trust in such systems could be improved if researchers can develop systems that better accommodate users' needs and preferences.

翻译：视障人士在日常活动中常面临挑战，其中购买衣物被视为最困难的任务之一。许多人转向线上购物，这虽能消除实体购物面临的某些障碍，但线上服装选购仍存在诸多局限与壁垒。现有研究多以单一访谈为基础，仅能提供主观性强且受记忆偏差影响的信息，亟需更深入的研究来解决这些问题。我们采用观察法与访谈法相结合的双重研究路径，填补了视障人士在线选购服装行为认知的空白。研究结果表明：购物网站存在服装描述不准确、具有误导性甚至自相矛盾的问题；视障人士主要依赖（可靠性不足的）搜索工具并通过浏览用户评论核验产品信息。此外，研究发现视障人士对自动化辅助系统持谨慎态度，但如果研究人员能开发出更契合用户需求与偏好的系统，其对此类技术的信任度有望得到改善。