Most professional sites are quite accessible to screen reader software.

I'm not blind myself, but I have a good friend who is completely blind and who I chat with every day. She uses the internet almost like everyone else, including shopping. In fact, in our online community she goes undetected for the most part, with only a few people knowing about her handicap at all.

From time to time she drops me links to images asking whats on there and I give her a brief description. Same for Amazon product pages where she shops quite a lot, asking for details that might be in the pictures instead of the description. It's rare, though.

She told me her brother sometimes sets up some of the more complicated stuff when he's in town (and probably helps with credit card and address information), but for the very most part she can do everything on her own.

I know her for over 10 years now and she still impresses me. What I've learned from knowing her is that blind people aren't as depended on other people as you might think. They adapt, they learn the quirks, and they aren't stupid. When a website isn't very well optimized for the visually impaired she knows her workarounds and still manages to navigate the page and reach her goal. Sometimes she vents about crappy sites, but she only accepts help after she tried herself for a good amount of time.

Sad part is: While commercial sites work very well she sometimes has problems with government sites or the site of her health insurance company, and has to rely on e-mail instead of using online forms.

I generally have no problem using Amazon or eBay and I am totally blind with no light perception. The only thing I need to really worry about is descriptions of items or images on eBay. Usually have someone sighted who is good with that to describe, for example, what a pendant or whatever looks like.

I'm not totally blind, but my functional vision is very very low. I can't read text or see images at all, so I have to rely on descriptions completely. It's ended up with some mishaps because descriptions were wrong, misleading, or missing entirely, but that's just par for the course.

In general, I don't have a ton of issues with shopping, and I'm the main grocery shopper in my household. Lately, my biggest issues have been with Stop and Shop's app. First, they made the time selector completely inaccessible, then they moved to a different app and now the gesture to go to the top of the page doesn't work so navigating the app is way clunkier and it's annoying as shit to use, but still doable.

I'd highly recommend against making a new screen reader. Blind people can use the internet just fine and adding an extra screen reader into the mix probably won't help as you've probably not used a screen reader before so wouldn't know what to add and what to avoid.

I can use amazon, tesko and asda just fine, although I don't hsop that much online these days apart from using amazon.

Screen reader friendliness on most of them is utterly hideous, but I use stuff like ebay. I would usually have someone double check it because it's so clear it's not really set up to be used that way.

I am visually impaired, but not completely blind. (I'm actually curious myself how fully blind people can manage! That must be sooo frustrating!)

I shop online the same way that I use the rest of the internet. I use an extension that inverts colors (so I have a dark background and light text) because too much brightness makes the screen unreadable for me (think like snowblindness) because I am light sensative.

Seeing the pictures is more difficult now compared to when I was normally sighted, because the color is inverted. I can toggle the color inverting feature to see pictures more easily, but it can still be problematic. I rely on descriptions and screen readers to figure out what exactly I want to order (The same way most people use descriptions to understand what product they are ordering).

I have only had one mishap with ordering this way, it was a pair of prescription 'sport' sunglasses (the wrap around kind). I had no idea sport sunglasses can be made be simply attaching prescription lenses behind the tinted glasses of otherwise normal sunglasses. When I recieved them I was very disappointment tosee what I had ordered. When I was chatting with their customer service I explained the problem, and had mentioned that I am visually impaired. They were willing to take them back and credit me towards a different pair, which I was OK with.

When I asked the person I was chatting with 'how can I tell if the next pair will be made the same way?', because I didn't see that anywhere in the description, the CS lady told me "It's clearly visible in the photos of the glasses.". It was a text chat, but I think I heard her banging her head against her desk when she realized the issue there. She told me to pop back into a chat with customer service, and they will guide me through it.

Edit; And some online stores are easier to use than others, just like for normally sighted people but maybe for different reasons. The overlay and moving ads/popups give me hell sometimes, and I find that the color-inverting extension for chrome tends to crash if the page is too complicated. Instacart takes me forever to use because of constance crashing of the extension and especially with the really small '+' symbols that they attach to the images of the products to add them to the cart. UUUGGGHHHH.