[Massachusetts-NFB] Bank Site Automation

[Derek Davies]

Dear NFB members,



I have this driving need to know what my banking information is, often
under non-ideal time constraints and emotional distress and when there
is no one I trust that I can ask for help.  I also need to reliabley
transfer money between accounts.  There's more,but speedy, reliable access to those two
basic banking functions would be very, very helpful to me and to my social and financial life, as well as to my overall mental health and usefulness.

I dream of a day when I can
access the data and functionality of banking websites, and other essential sites,
so that I can process, store, use and present it in exactly the way I neeed, even when my needs change over time, place, device, lighting conditions, noise conditions, mental health state, etc.

I can't see any way that industry can provide this at even the
slightest profit, nor can I imagine much of any other incentive for
their effort.  Further, I don't think it's possible to build something
first class without it being tailored to, developed by and tested by
blind/low vision people.  Harder still is to do thisover many years so
that there is a stable interface and coherent integration of new
technologies.  Note that configuration changes (review and
application) must be first class accessable parts of the interface,
but are often incoherent even for sighted users.

Since I'm a programmer and experienced blind person, I know what I
want and can produce it.  I will make my code available gratis.  Happy
to talk more.  The problem is getting the data and acessing the
functionalty of my banks web interface (or phone app).

I'm looking to work with anyone else that is interested in automating
(aka "scripting") their banking.

There are a handful of banks that offer proper APIs to customers --
the same interface web and phone applications use to communicate with
the bank's back end servers and this would be ideal except none of
those banks seems particularly well-known and none are local with
brick and mortor offices.

A fallback approch is to use "screen scraping" or other methods to automate
the web browser or phone app in order to get the data and actions (eg
transfer between accounts) functionality exposed, which is then driven
by an interface tailored exactly to blind/low vision use.

There is even a company that, for a fee, and by being given
co-custodianship of one's banking information, provides a uniform API
for many banks and other financial institutions..  This not only costs
money but I then must trust this company with very personal
information.  but it would work as long as this company stays in
biz and maintains their API service.

Yet another helpful solution would be for banks and other critical
sites to provide access and docutentation of the protocols their web
and phone apps use to effect banking state.  Note that this does not
incur more security risk for the banks or customers/users since the back end services are already
secure and exposed to the entire internet anyway.  Is there anything
wrt to ADA going on with this?  It is a major leagal effort,
obviously.  But it is just as obviously useful to disabled people and
without harm to the banks, other than to document their APIs, which
they need to do to some degree in order to develop the web and phone
apps they already provide.

And if banks are going to support an open API, is there any standard
banking API that they could adopt?  Just wondering, I dont' even want
to google for this since there is so little industry incentive to
provide scriptable banking.  They seem to have no incentive to do this
work.  I actually sympathize with the standards effort companies would
incur and if I owned stock I would object to the company funding such
an effort :)

If you're still reading and have this same desire I would like to hear
from you.  I will probably have another stab at screen scraping, but I've
never had success getting through the login screen reliably.  Please
let me know if you've tried this and have any experience or advice.  I
also happily /accept money andor prayer -- LOL ;)

Please forward this and my email to anyone you know that is into this sort of thing.

Thank You!
Derek Davies