Accessibility.
This is one of the air conditioner/room climate control units I encountered during my recent storm chasing trip.
I woke up in the middle of the night, wanting to change the temperature the unit was trying to achieve. As I stumbled around in the dark in an unfamiliar hotel room, it was the sixth or seventh night of the stay, I found myself groping for buttons on the front of the panel.
There are none. Zero. Like everything aiming to be modern, hip, and edgy today, this unit has nothing but a touch panel, with the added bonus of providing absolutely no clue as to where on the touch panel I’m suppose to touch. Forget about trying to navigate the user interface in a darkened, unfamiliar hotel room. I found a light switch, flipped it, and was blinded by the light.
This is when I realized how idiotic user interfaces on standard pieces of technology have become, all in the name of growing profits.
There’s no reason to not put some sort of physical button, or even a raised area to indicate where one is suppose to interact, on this device. None. When I’m staying in a cheap hotel, I’m not really impressed by the smooth, sleek lines of an air conditioner propped up by wood blocks on the outside of the room. The unit was making quite a racket while it was doing its thing, so I don’t know if I was suppose to be impressed with the touch interface or not, but overall I was not impressed with the experience of this unit.
Then I got to realizing, as I sat there in my underwear under a bunch of lights I didn’t want to turn on so I could see what the heck I was doing: how in the world do blind people navigate all these newfangled electronic doo-dads? At least when we had membrane type buttons and other such things (in the interest of cost cutting and forced obsolescence), there could be a raised pad or mark or something so the person who can not see would know they’re actually touching a button. But this monstrosity had nothing of the sort, just a smooth piece of plastic with words screened in such a way that they had absolutely no texture.
What an absolutely awful design for our folks that don’t have the gift of sight!
The manufacturer of this device is GE, or more likely has licensed the GE brand. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals GE Appliances was sold to Haier in the mid 2010s. Haier has rights to the brand until 2056.
I hope they figure out how to bring buttons back by then.
