TL;DR: Coinbase’s mission is to increase economic freedom in the world, for everyone. This commitment includes the unbanked households with a member who has a disability. We are building more accessible products to better serve them.
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Coinbase’s mission is to increase economic freedom in the world, for everyone. This commitment includes the 21.5% of unbanked households with a member who has a disability (and that’s just the U.S.), and we’ve been hard at work building more accessible products to better serve them. As we’ve made these improvements we’ve found that building for accessibility leads to higher quality experiences for all of our customers, not just those who use assistive technology. Specifically, we’ve found that designing for accessibility promotes clear visual hierarchy, simple UX patterns, improved localization, better automation, and superior navigation — all things that benefit Coinbase customers as a whole.
As a result, we now view accessibility as a critical quality metric. Not only because we want to build accessible products, but to continually improve core product quality.
At Coinbase, accessibility begins with the Coinbase Design System (CDS). With 94% adoption across our products, it’s the ideal starting point. CDS provides product teams with common UX components that let them ship consistent, high-quality products quickly — and accessibility is built in from the start. For example, our mobile app is built with components that support screen readers, voice controls, captions, and dark mode. By building accessibility into CDS, with minimal configuration, our designers and engineers can focus on creating high quality experiences without distraction.
Over 24% of our customers configure text to be larger than default on their mobile devices. To serve them, our designers ensure that their work uses sufficient spacing so that these customers are able to adjust text size to meet their needs. This also benefits our international customers, as it provides added space for longer language strings.
Similarly, advanced trading products, like Coinbase Advanced, often require designs to be more dense. Thanks to CDS, our dense components adhere to spacing, layout, and click target standards that support users with limited mobility. This benefits all advanced users by supporting sufficient click and tap targets, while providing all the functionality they need to trade.
Accessibility doesn’t just benefit international customers in terms of text length, it also does so with color. Thanks to our accessible design work for customers with vision impairments, Coinbase avoids using color as the sole means of communicating information. This benefits customers in parts of the world who may not associate green and red with positive and negative, respectively. Coinbase now requires that our designers use multiple means of sensory information to communicate—including text parameters, color, and icons—so customers from any region in the world can understand the information.
At Coinbase, we’re building automated developer tools to improve accessibility at scale. Recently, we introduced automated unit testing and linting for accessibility for both our web and mobile experiences. Unit testing allows Coinbase engineers to run a large set of rules against our code to ensure it meets our standards. Linting offers guidance to our engineers on how to make our code more accessible. This automated testing suite allows Coinbase engineers to avoid introducing accessibility mistakes and ensures code quality does not regress.
How do we measure the benefits of accessibility? One way we measure success is through metrics. We focus on improving areas that are measureable, and we do that by tracking customer satisfaction and success. In 2024, the accessibility team defined a series of metrics through our “A11y Scorecards” that allow us to determine if we’re providing a quality and accessible experience.
Through the A11y Scorecards, we measure how many customers are using our accessibility preferences. Together, with our partner Fable, we measure:
How likely a person with disabilities is to complete a core user journey
How much coverage we have via automated testing
How many accessibility-specific issues our support team receives
All of these automated measurements enable our product teams to understand our customer needs and provide a customer-focused experience.
Accessibility is frequently misperceived as something that benefits a small group of people. However, as we’ve discovered, accessibility is a key driver of higher quality in our products. This starts with our design system and extends to our use of text size, color, automated tooling, and more. In 2025, we’ll continue our efforts toward improving product quality through accessibility. Fostering an environment where products are built for the 16% of the world population with a disability benefits all of us, and is a priority at Coinbase.
TL;DR: Coinbase is partnering with Shopify to bring the future of commerce onchain. Beginning in June, consumers can pay with USDC on Base through Shopify Payments, bringing onchain payments to millions of storefronts.
