Cindy Hamilton wrote:
In article ,
Stormin Mormon wrote:
You'd likely heard about the old late night joke about
"why does a drive up ATM have braille on the buttons?"
For those who don't know why, the blind often have relatives or a taxi
drive them to ATMs. They want to operate the machine themselves
because, like everyone else, they want privacy and don't want others
to know their PINs and account information. So, they use a back
window to access the ATM or get out of the car and walk up to it.


I've helped my friend Jason (who is blind)
at the ATM. Much of the information comes
on the TV screen behind the glass, and would
not be available to a blind person. A blind
person with no seeing eye human could not
operate ATM, at least not the ones he uses.

I see them with some kind of headphone jack for
audible instructions. I'm surprised that's not
required by the ADA.

Cindy Hamilton
--

If you read some of the write ups on why there are Braille markings on the
ATM's, you find that the ADA rules are very vague regarding everything
except the requirement that the Braille markings be present.

The theory was that if the Braille and some loose "handicap accessible"
requirements were put into place, the banking/ATM industry would figure
everything else out - eventually. At the time the initial requirements were
put into place, no one was really sure how to handle all of the various
aspects of accessibility, so they didn't address it very firmly.