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In 2002, I launched a nine-month activity to body my dream kitchen. Walls were demolished, an accession complete and architects and carpenters were my circadian companions. We traipsed about countless showrooms and retailers, so I could get my easily on aggregate from ablaze accessories to faucets to windows and doors. It was my project, a dream creation, and my disability to see pictures or accepted blueprints sparked a assertive adroitness in anybody involved.
In 2002, I launched a nine-month activity to body my dream kitchen. Walls were demolished, an accession complete and architects and carpenters were my circadian companions. We traipsed about countless showrooms and retailers, so I could get my easily on aggregate from ablaze accessories to faucets to windows and doors. It was my project, a dream creation, and my disability to see pictures or accepted blueprints sparked a assertive adroitness in anybody involved.
Eventually, it was time to boutique for appliances. What should accept been the best fun angry out to be the best aggravating.
For about 30 years, I'd adapted the commons and done the clothes with old accessories again coaxed into service. The anticipation of agleam new machines was boundless indeed. But award ones I could accomplish was a nightmare.
I can't see the agenda displays or aflame letters on a high-tech clothes dryer or bake oven. In lieu of the four advance buttons per burner on my bulky electric range, new ones offered collapsed panels with no controls apparent by touch. For years, I had counted clicks on axis knobs or bound affected the dots I'd alert on to announce baptize height, circuit cycle, affable time or any address of added ambience capital back operating machines that ablution our dishes and clothes, baker our aliment or alloy our margaritas.
Eventually, I amid admirable accessories that, with a little adeptness and assistance, I could acclimate for use after vision. My General Electric gas oven has a filigree with a aside aloft band basic a aboveboard about anniversary number. Back pressed, numbers beep, so that by alert and counting, I can set the oven temperature. My Whirlpool washer and dryer accept knobs that circle and, by counting clicks or application the Braille appearance I accept added myself, I can set the controls.
But award these articles that would assignment wasn't easy, and nonvisual admission was not allotment of the aboriginal design.
The aforementioned claiming presents itself with anniversary allotment of customer electronics I use. I can't artlessly buy a TV or DVD player, fax apparatus or copier based on its acceptable performance. Instead, my arcade centers on controls that can be acquainted or accept aural feedback.
Although I am accepted amid accompany as a techno geek, the actuality consistently testing the latest MP3 amateur or corpuscle phone, the one who knows intricacies of voice-mail systems and assorted software applications, I am abandoned in the grips of a flat-screen kiosk for blockage in at the airport.
The irony actuality is that it doesn't amount abundant to accommodate beheld or concrete elements into customer electronics back they are built. And back those elements are included, they wind up actuality acclimated by everyone.
A decade ago, for example, Panasonic appear a "talking VCR." All of the airheaded were accurate back accompanying buttons were apprenticed on the alien control. Back I alleged the company's public-relations administrator to inquire, his acknowledgment was not uncommon.
"I've gotten e-mails or calls from about 150 dark bodies this week," he told me. "It never occurred to us that dark bodies would like this machine. We aloof capital to advance a artefact that was beneath alarming and anticipation accent would be fun."
There are some 12 actor Americans whose eyes is abundantly bound to cede agenda displays absurd to navigate. The irony is that it doesn't amount added to body articles with a nonvisual interface, not if that affinity is included from inception. Some companies do it accidentally, and some accept stepped up to the bowl with intention.
Apple is a absolute archetype of the latter. The company's accepted iPhone and new iPad can be acclimated out of the box with or after sight.
And so it is that my accepted hero is Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who alien House Resolution 4533, the Technology Bill of Rights for the Dark Act. If passed, this proposed legislation would authorization the enactment of basal nonvisual admission standards for affiliation into the interfaces of customer electronics and would actualize an appointment aural the Department of Commerce to accomplish such standards.
I don't alive in Illinois, so I can't vote for Schakowsky. But a lot of dark bodies do vote there -- and actuality -- and in every added state. And voting machines, by the way, are able with a nonvisual interface, so we apperceive absolutely which button to push.
Deborah Kendrick is a Cincinnati biographer and apostle for bodies with disabilities.
dkkendrick@earthlink.net
