How blind is blind?
Saw a fellow walking on the sidewalk the other day, kind've idly wagging a red-tipped white stick in front of him. He certainly wasn't using the broad sweeping motions of the cane that I'd come to associate with blind pedestrians. But then he also:
(a) was wearing spectacles, andProbably the guy has severe myopia or macular degeneration or something such that he's "legally" sightless, but if you're okay with blocking out all environmental noise with your headphones while you walk the city streets, how blind are you really?
(b) had headphones on.
And is this the sort of person the braille on the drive-up ATMs is intended for? I've long wondered about that.
1 Comments:
My assumption has always been that the braille on the drive-up ATMs is the result of some brainless Federal government regulation requiring braille on ATMs without specifying "only ones that might actually be used by blind people".
OTOH, now that I'm working at NCR, another possibility presents itself: It might just be that the ATMs are one of a handful of standard machine types, and that the same model used for drive-up ATM stations also gets used for walk-up stations. Therefore, it may just be more efficient to build braille into all of them than to have separate manufacturing processes for drive-through vs. walk-up machines.
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