  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.
