January 27th, 2006
The new office in which I am working has bright shiny kitchens with big shiny vending machines full of heavily-subsidized soda pop (25 cents a can) and chocolate bars (mostly 50 cents each).
And those shiny vending machines have a single big sheet of glass on the front acting as a window where you can look through to see:
- The tasty piece of junk food you would like to buy
- The code number to enter on the keypad to buy that tasty piece of junk food
And then, to aid the blind, the keypad next to the window has Braille written on it. That way, if blind people want item #54, they just touch the numbers on the keypad until they find the 5 and the 4 key, then they press those numbers and out comes their food.
Right.
So someone tell me how those blind people are going to know that their chocolate bar (which, with its code, is on the other side of that big piece of glass) is code 54 in the first place. I mean, there was no legend on the machine ... nor should there be: What happens if somebody puts the Snickers bars into the Smarties slot?
For that matter, how do they know the price of the chocolate bar? How do they know where the coin slot is? (I can see and it still took me more than a few moments to find it.)
You know, if I were blind, this would really piss me off ... it would infuriate me more than if the machine-makers and -designers just hadn't thought about it at all. This would tell me, "This is the token effort we think you and your blindness are worth. We still don't care, but now we are clear of liability."
Ludicrous.
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