Tech failing to serve blind-deaf users
posted Jun 27th 2005 2:47PM
A survey by the U.K. charity Sense has found that the tech needs
of people who are both deaf and blind are not being met, despite the fact that the majority of the country's 23,000
deaf-and-blind individuals rely on assistive technologies for their daily needs. Among the areas representing the most
concern were items such as remote controls, stoves and cellphones (the survey group included those with some limited
sight and hearing, who can use devices such as cellphones without requiring a TTY hookup or Braille printer). In
particular, respondents cited the ever-shrinking size of cellphones and inconsistent controls as ongoing problems — one
individual inadvertently started a grease fire in his kitchen by turning a burner up to its highest setting instead of
the lowest. It turned out that the rear burners used a clockwise orientation, while the front ones went
counterclockwise.
"It turned out that the rear burners used a clockwise orientation, while the front ones went counterclockwise."
You don't have to be blind for that to screw you up. Seriously, what kind of half-assed design has 2 burners clockwise and 2 counter-clockwise?
Not sure if tech in general is not serving the needs of the visually or auditory impaired. The CSIDC competition focusing on students creating projects that deal with "real world" solutions, several of the entries address the visually impaired in interesting ways.
http://www.yellospark.com/blog/MT/archives/2005/06/final_project_s_8.html
http://www.yellospark.com/blog/MT/archives/2005/06/final_project_s_5.html
Wow. Those burners. Totally agree. If you're interested in how forgetting to think can cause bad design, you should check out Don Norman's books, especially "The Psychology of Everyday Things."
The burners on that stove fit perfectly into Dr. Norman's third rule of How To Do Things Wrong:
"Be inconsistent: change the rules. Let something be done one way in one mode and another way in another mode. This is especially effective where it is necessary to go back and forth between the two modes."
big companies never help disabilities that much when they need it like normally people.
Whoever did the burner knobs needs to be slapped repeatedly. Stupid, stupid, stupid...
I still can't think of a practical reason to have done that.
And yet someone with disabilities purchased that stove? No offense, but even if it was shitty design, that doesn't mean it needs to be purchased. If you know you have disabilities, you should probably ask for help when purchasing anything that might be difficult to operate.
Most of us who have disabilties tend to know this, but don't have other people with us 24 hours a day. I *like* making my own dinner and going online, among things. That said, the stove design was most definitely a horrible one. I've cooked on stoves where all the knobs were smooth. The "on", "off", "high" etc. were printed on and not raised. Not fun.
That burner had a design team full of boneheads. Since they're using different controls, they have an excuse to jack up the price (and calling it some whiz-bang feature that exsists on competitors' models).
In the 1960s, "designer" stoves with ovens on top of the burners were dangerous. Some of the designs back then had the oven controls on top and the burner section rolls out; however, forgetting to slide that back in and grabbing something underneath will cause a nasty gash on one's head. Let alone the top oven rack tipping over and spilling/dropping whatever was cooking onto them. Luckily, some designs have improved.