Devising devices with accessibility in mind

‘Baking’ accessibility into the household can make the day brighter for everyone.

Imagine stepping into the kitchen to start the day with some freshly baked pastries. After a quick glance at the box to find the temperature and time required, the oven’s touch-sensitive control panel can be deftly navigated to get things going. A few taps on the microwave and the hot chocolate is warming up. Effortless, right?

Yet, on closer inspection, this seemingly simple routine reveals a profound problem. Touch screens and buttonless designs on devices have become the norm, not a definition of the ultra-modern any more. Which means, as a blind individual, that finding accessible household appliances has become increasingly challenging.

The shift by manufacturers towards touch-sensitive controls creates a significant barrier for tens of millions of visually impaired people across the EU. Physical buttons or dials offer a tangible means to navigate devices: feeling, say, the third button from the left to start the oven timer or the second from the top to activate the sensitive cycle of the washing machine is straightforward and intuitive.

Touch-sensitive panels thus inhibit our ability to explore and locate the desired controls by feel. Visually impaired individuals, myself included, have for years had to resort to applying tactile and Braille stickers to appliances to compensate for this lack of inclusion.

Imagine, for a moment, that devices were activated by sight alone, without touch. An inadvertent glance at a device could trigger an unintended action: a brief focus on a button on the dishwasher could start it going; a search for a defrost button on the microwave might activate all of the buttons at once. It would be discomfiting—yet akin to what I experience, exploring touch without sight, on a daily basis.

Significant omission

This situation persists, with no imminent change on the horizon, due to a significant omission in the 2019 European accessibility act. While the act is a step forward, mandating by June 2025 accessibility for a range of services and devices—e-commerce, banking, audiovisual media, check-in and payment terminals, ATMs and so on—it neglects household appliances. This gap has not gone unnoticed, with the European Blind Union advocating for change.

Do applications, artificial intelligence and home automation not provide solutions? Several touch-sensitive devices can indeed be controlled via a mobile app and voice commands. And smartphones include various tools to make apps accessible: a screen reader, for example, can read out the controls and texts on the screen to a blind user. Yet apps come with their own set of accessibility requirements, which developers need to incorporate. In many cases, especially for household-appliance manufacturers—for which the app is not a priority—accessibility is lacking for the app too.

Moreover, it is unethical to force an individual to use a mobile app just because of their disability, simultaneously subjecting them to unknown amounts of data tracking and possibly security loopholes. Smart home appliances have been repeatedly caught transmitting excess amounts of data to their manufacturer’s servers or being used as a tool by malicious parties in a cyber-attack. Being blind should not be a reason to have those doors forced open.

Richer interaction

So what is the real solution? Incorporating accessibility into the design and manufacturing process is essential. Does every device need touch screens? User-experience experts say that many advanced features go unused and touch-sensitive controls are impractical in many situations, where most users still prefer physical buttons. For example, touch screens work less effectively when hands are inevitably dirty or wet in the kitchen. Integrating voice activation and including Braille on devices are practical steps toward making appliances more accessible, allowing for a richer interaction that does not rely solely on sight.

It is possible to add a voice mode for several appliances, so options on screens, status and error messages can be read out and the machines’ work can be accessible orally, not just by looking at a display. Including Braille in the design—for buttons, controls, signs, user manuals and packaging—allows a blind user to find more easily the required button or control and, at first use, understand its purpose. Well-thought-out systems which communicate with the user through multiple senses allow us to use them independently—more and for longer.

The European accessibility act is today mainly a digital act, concentrating on various electronic products and services. Lack of accessibility however extends beyond this.

In the pastry-cooking example outlined at the beginning, a blind person would need to use their smartphone, make sure that the pastry package was fully visible in the camera frame, take a photo and use a combination of apps which, with varying accuracy, would utilise AI to read out the printed text on the package—that is, if the person could afford a smartphone, had sufficient skills to use the device and spoke the language their phone and the AI app supported. That is a lot of hurdles to open up a pack of pastries.

Thinking differently

Thus we must consider accessibility at all levels when designing our products. Legislation, such as the European accessibility act, is valuable in unifying accessibility across several different industries. But legislation cannot change everything. There needs to be a desire to think differently, in a more accessible way.

A common household-appliance manufacturer just needs to stop and think for a second: can we make a change? Yes, you can. We, as users and as accessibility experts, are here to help you make your solutions better. We want everyone, including us, to enjoy those fresh pastries in the morning, without immediately being confronted with a world not designed for us.