—If every home appliance came with just one button and no displays, would we all be better off?
The short answer is no, we would not be better off. But for some customers, this is the stark reality of what is regularly offered to them as a solution for disability access.
You’ll need your phone to wash your clothes
Imagine you are moving into a brand new house, and you are shopping for all the appliances you need: a washing machine, a dryer, a convection oven, a microwave, an air fryer, a dishwasher, a refrigerator, a coffee maker, a toaster.
You are in a store and all of the appliances have no buttons, and no displays. They’re all the same. For instance, the ovens have a door you open, you put in your uncooked food, and then with no buttons to press, you cannot start cooking anything.
But no, wait! There are also some fancy appliances in this store that have just a single button, marked “Pair.” The washing machine has a door you open, put in your clothes, and then what? You have to grab your phone. You find and download the app from the online store. You put your phone into Bluetooth pairing mode, and you push the “pair” button on the machine to connect. Now, on your phone, the controls and displays appear. You can choose your wash temperature: cold, warm, or hot. You can choose your spin level: low, medium, high. And when you select the start button on your phone, you can tell how long it will take to be done: 1 hour and 5 minutes.
You decided to buy all the appliances with the “Pair” button. Sure, they were a bit more expensive than the ones with zero buttons, but at least you now have an interface on your phone to control all of your new appliances.
This idea—controlling your appliances with your own smart phone—is offered by many manufacturers as the solution for people with particular types of disabilities to control machines. For example, because a phone can talk through its built-in speech output software, an interface with buttons and displays can be provided on a phone for users who are blind.
This is a good thing, right?
Maybe not…
You also need your phone to cook your dinner, and, and, and, and…
So you got your washing started, and your phone goes back in your pocket. You return to preparing this evening’s dinner. Is that dish that’s been in the oven ready yet? You open the door and check it, and it isn’t as hot as you had expected. Maybe you forgot to put it on the convection setting – there is no fan noise. Pull your phone back out of your pocket. Open the connected appliances app, select oven from the list. Select bake settings. Go down the list to convection. Select. Confirm. The fan starts. Now you need to reset the timer. Go back to the main menu. Select timers. Enter 3o minutes. Select. Confirm. (Why do they want you to confirm every time?!) Now… what about the other food cooking in the air fryer? Back to the list of appliances. Select the air fryer. 8 minutes remaining.
In this imaginary world, this is your life now. All appliances in your home can be controlled with the convenience of your phone. Your home alarm system. Your television and sound system. Everything. There is not a single display to read. Not a single physical button to push – well, except for the “Pair” button on everything.
The simple dial on a regular oven would have a convection setting. Just turn the dial. But for you, no. You need to do all those multiple steps in your app.
For everything.
Does this sound like utopia, or does it sound like a nightmare?
But it’s worse than that—what if your phone interface didn’t work?
Sure, there’s the usual problems of needing to find a charge, or the internet going out which renders your phone useless. But add to that an additional problem of software programming. For controlling appliances, not all phone apps are created equal. The manufacturer needs to intentionally program their app to work with speech output on blind users’ phones. They often do, but sometimes they don’t. (Sometimes they do, but then they hire a new programmer who somehow misses the accessibility training, and that new programmer introduces changes making an accessible app inaccessible.)
The blind user goes between the options in the app, hearing “Unlabeled button. Unlabeled button. Unlabeled button.” It doesn’t work.
This happens more than you might expect.
Your shopping experience—how would you know what you’re buying?
In this imaginary world, when you are shopping for all these “connected” appliances, you do not know in advance whether the app will be accessible to you. Will it work, or won’t it?
Actually, this is not imaginary; this is the present day reality for shoppers who have disabilities. The appliance has a connected app, but will that work for me with my disability? There is no rating, no score, no information, no support, no store associate who knows the answer.
In the real world now, there are, of course, buttons and displays on all of our home appliances because, let’s be honest, who would want to have to pull out their phone for every single thing they had to do? For those with disabilities, who would only be able to operate the appliance with an app, wouldn’t shopping be easier with a score that told them in advance if the app was programmed to be accessible?
This is what we need to create. A scoring system for letting all consumers know whether the things they are buying are going to meet their needs. Developing such a system is the mission of our nonprofit organization, Standard Accessibility Reporting, Inc. (SAR) We are bringing together industry leaders in accessibility to define how such labeling could and should work for the benefit of all of us.
The next step towards equal access—making appliances talk
You can go to the an appliance store right now and find Braille on a washing machine. This is a close up photo showing a fraction of the multitude of buttons on a modern washing machine.
Next to the power button is the Braille letter “p”, and above that p is a visual (not Braille) label which indicates that if you hold that button for 5 seconds the sound gets turned off. But you, Braille, user, you just get the letter “p”; and not the additional instruction to hold for 5 seconds.
Only one other of the buttons has Braille, and this is the Start button, denoted by the Braille letter “s”. But visually the icon actually means both start and pause, so maybe the Braille should be “sp”?! Also, below the icon it says “Hold to Start”, which is an instruction that does not come over with just a single letter “s”. But that’s it for your Braille. The other buttons shown in this close up photo, that you have zero access to, are Pre soak, Fabric Softener, Delay End, Deep Fill, Super Speed, and Smart Control.
(Wait, does “Smart Control” mean I need to press that button to use my phone to control the interface? Why yes, it turns out that it does! Being so useful, this begs the question why this button doesn’t have Braille on it?)
The use of Braille here is at best a marketing gimmick to suggest to the public at large that the manufacturer is being inclusive. But what you get as a blind user is a “p” and an “s”, together with a smooth surface with other buttons you can’t operate without sight—one of which would at very helpful if you wanted to use the machine via your phone—which does not seem to be even a bare minimum for “inclusivity”.
The smart phone interface as an accessibility solution only works because your smart phone already has the capability to talk (open your phone and go to the accessibility settings to try it out). But what about cutting out the need for a phone and an app, and make the washing machine itself talk? A talking washing machine has been technically feasible since the early 1980s (after all, Speak ‘n’ Spell, the first commercial talking product came out in 1978). In the intervening decades between then and now, adding speech might have involved adding parts like computer chips and speakers, so you might have expected some push-back from manufacturers on the basis of added cost. Today, however, all washing machines have computer chips and speakers built in already. Essentially, all that is missing is the software programming to make the speech happen.
A new reality—accessibility scores in shopping?
Now, if we were to imagine a row of five fairly similar looking washing machines, from five different manufacturers. How would we score them for accessibility?
- The first machine has no connected app.
- The second machine has a connected app that, when tested, is found to be not accessible.
- The third machine is like the second, except that when tested, the app is found to be accessible.
- The fourth machine has a connected app that is accessible, and also has speech output on the machine to enable blind users to operate it without a phone.
- The fifth machine is like the fourth, but it also has bright displays and controls that can be used by people who are not considered blind, but who do have great difficulty seeing.
If we were to put an accessibility score on each of these, we could easily think of an increasingly high score with the additional features. In this example, adding a talking capability would be a good solution for washing machines, but it does not reach the highest score. Currently available machines, assuming they did feature an accessible connected app, would reach only the third level on the above list of five. In other words, the current app based solution to provide access for blind users is a start towards inclusive design, but it certainly should not be regarded as an end point.
Driving accessibility innovation through scoring
—an idea worth pursuing?
Could the introduction of the scoring system actually drive the introduction of more accessible control apps for appliances, and even talking appliances? Would this be an idea worth pursuing?
From our list above, if we created a five star rating system for accessibility and tested the appliances in our current stores, we would surely be getting one, two, maybe at most three star ratings. No fours, and certainly no fives. Most appliances would be revealed for what they really are today: not accessible to millions of people with disabilities.
Such a revelation through publicly available scores could be the catalyst for any given manufacturer to take the lead in being inclusive. It is good marketing for a brand to stand out from the others by striving for the best ratings.
First, we need to create a standardized scoring system for reporting. This is what SAR’s professional members are currently working on. The system must be one that is agreeable to those who work on accessibility and technology, and so our membership structure is based on engagement and participation, and, ultimately, voting for the adoption of new reporting standards.
We would like to produce these standards as soon as possible. With support from people like you, we can achieve this mission faster.
Chris M. Law
Director, Standard Accessibility Reporting, Inc.
December 20, 2024
Support our work through your donation, and explore membership options at www.standardari.org
Pricture Credits: SAR, Inc.