A Day Through The Eyes of a Blind Woman: Part 3

In part 2, we followed Lisa, a blind woman and examined what kind of challenges she faces using everyday technologies, such as the computer, a mobile phone, the internet, or just reading the menu in a restaurant. In this part, we will see how Lisa does her groceries, reads the mail, or watches movies.

Grocery shopping

After a long day, on the way home Lisa wants to buy something to make dinner from. She goes to her favorite grocery store, and she is going there all the time, somebody is greeting her by the name and offers a hand to her. Though she could learn to find the different isles, but it would be impossible for her to read what's on the packages. It is always great when somebody can help her out. However, sometimes she has to wait, because nobody is available. Of course, she has options here, too, as always. She can buy a scanner with a personal note taker, which reads the bar codes and tells her what's in the package. But it is really not much fun to go through packages of rice one after the other to read what kind of rice it is. As much as she wants to be independent, a little help can save her lot's of time.

Reading the mail

As Lisa gets home, she empties her mailbox. Probably you know what's next: as far as she is concerned, her mail is just a pile of identical envelopes that she can't make much use of. She could have somebody to read it to her, but there is some aspect of security and privacy to it. Even though she trusts the reader, maybe she doesn't want to have all personal letters read out to her by somebody else. She has a solution which works most of the time, she can buy a scanner, which is pocket change these days, but she needs to spend another thousand on an accessible character recognition software which will convert the letters into text that she can read with her screen reader. However, this software does not recognize handwriting, and also, it does better with one page than with the other, sometimes the results are useless. And even if she could use this as a perfect solution, she would still have to scan all of her letters just to find out that much of it is junk mail. What takes you a minute or two to flip through your daily mail to select the useful ones, maybe Lisa would spend close to an hour if she gets lot's of junk.

Once she is done with the mail, the other headache will be paying the bills, but hopefully she can do it over the phone, or through an accessible web site. While many banks offer online payment options, not all of them would be easy to use for Lisa.

Cooking

When she is done with her mail, she decides to make some dinner. She wants to try a new recipe that she downloaded the day before. And while Lisa is a great cook, some things in the kitchen work a bit differently for her. Just one example: the recipe instructs her to cook the meat until it's brown. She probably learned some tricks to do it, maybe one of those would be checking the meat temperature, but she will need a talking thermometer to be able to do it.

Dishwasher

When she is done with dinner, she puts the dishes into the dishwasher, but she has the same issue that she had with the microwave or the coffee maker, many of the dishwashers don't have tactile buttons, and even if they do, she needs to label the different settings so that she can use all the functionality.

Watching a movie

And there's nothing else left for the day, but to sit down and relax. Just like most people, she would love to watch the tube, if for nothing else, to be part of the conversation the next day when her coworkers discuss the latest shows. So, she turns on the TV, puts on her favorite channel, and listens. She will get much of it, but it is really not too clear to her what's so funny, people are laughing hysterically and she didn't hear anything special. Well, that's the point of the TV, you have to see what's funny. It's even worse when she watches a movie for two hours, just to find out at the end that she didn't get it. The last sentence spoken was: "you are arrested". After listening to all that mystery, she couldn't see who was arrested. She just wasted two hours... Again, she has options: she can rent a movie which has audio description. Unfortunately, most movies don't. When a movie has audio description, you can hear a narration in the background, which tell you everything that's happening on the screen in order to understand the movie. But to watch something like that, you need an easy to operate DVD player, which allows you to turn on the audio description by a touch of a button, so that she doesn't have to navigate through the DVD menu, which is not accessible most of the cases.

Turning on the heat

After hopefully she enjoyed a movie, Lisa is ready for bed. She just wants to turn up the heat a bit for the night. If she has a regular thermostat, she won't know what the temperature is set to, even if she remembers which button turns it up. So, she will either just change it until it feels good, or she will buy a talking thermostat, which is not that easy to find, and costs at least ten times as much as the other ones.

Conclusion

And a day is never that simple. There are always special, or unexpected events, let alone all the ones which I didn't even mention. I just tried to concentrate on those things which could happen to an average person on an average day.

It is definitely possible for a blind person to lead an independent, quality lifestyle, but it takes lot's of adjustments, lot's of compromises, and even more money. Technology is available to make it much easier, but this technology is not yet built into most equipments. It only takes a little thoughtfulness to produce equipments which are usable to many more people. Not only that, but it also makes more business sense. If more people can use it, more people will buy it. But if people like Lisa will have to purchase specialized equipments all the time, the companies which sell it will have a much higher price, as they are serving a narrow market and their production costs will increase. Not to mention that takes choices away which other people have by default.

Next, find out, how similar tasks are done by somebody, who has low or limited vision.