About Time
TT: Accessibility

I fine myself totally irritated and tired of waiting for accessibility to come about in some of the simplest of ways. It particularly makes me angry when retailers take backwards steps to make things more difficult rather than moving forward and making things better. Today's growls go to Safeway. In 2000 Safeway here in Port Angeles had perfectly accessible Credit/Debit card machines with buttons you could feel and push without assistance or difficulty. When they updated their computer system, they also downdated their equipment to mere touch screens which are totally unusable by those with low vision or who are totally blind. I have been working with our store for well over a year trying to get them to do something about this problem. Repeatedly they say something is in the works, but repeatedly nothing is done.

I must say they once came through with Braille templates which took real power of forethought to design with Braille being a touch language. Touching anything on this template triggers whatever is below it on the screen. Of course, the template comes nowhere near matching up to what is actually printed on the screen. I fear I found this more offensive than no effort at all.

Why is it that people must make things more difficult and create problems that they had the solution to once?