PayU's Accessible Payments Checkout — India's First RBI-Mandated, Screen-Reader-Native Payment Gateway

In October 2024, the Reserve Bank of India mandated that digital payment providers make their websites, apps and checkout software conform to the Bureau of Indian Standards' IS 17802 accessibility standard for persons with disabilities. In August 2026, PayU — one of India's largest payment gateways — announced it had become the first provider to comply, launching an Accessible Payments Checkout purpose-built for blind and visually impaired users.
The checkout is fully optimised for screen readers, announcing every element — payment method selection across UPI, net banking and cards, form fields, and confirmation — via voice, so a user can complete a transaction without sighted assistance. It adds adaptive profiles letting shoppers resize cursors and buttons, switch to high-contrast, greyscale or colour-inverted display modes, and scale text up to 200% without content being hidden or overlapping. Because the accessibility layer is embedded in PayU's existing checkout rather than a separate product, merchants already integrated with PayU can offer it without modifying their own code.
PayU Chief Product Officer Manas Mishra framed the launch around financial inclusion, stating that 'financial inclusion is only possible when every individual can access and use digital payments independently.' As of this review, however, PayU and independent press coverage report the feature's design and regulatory basis but no post-launch usage figures, transaction volumes or user-testing results — the practice is evidenced so far by regulatory compliance and product design rather than by measured outcomes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.businesstoday.in/personal-finance/news/story/payus-new-accessible-checkout-aims-to-make-online-payments-easier-for-visually-impaired-users-548778-2026-08-13