Blind Perspective: I Got New Appliances at Home

Most of you have probably had to replace home appliances at some point. Or perhaps you’ve bought some new technological marvel that promises to make life easier for the whole family. Recently, I’ve found myself in a few similar situations. So, I decided to write about what happens after purchasing a new home appliance and what steps I, as a blind person, need to take in order to use it.

I’ve written about home appliances before, but in previous articles, I focused on choosing the right one or understanding the user manual. This time, I want to describe what happens from the moment the appliance is delivered to my home, through the first use, and finally, learning how to operate it.

First Steps

Some household appliances, such as refrigerators, washing machines, or stoves, are not only delivered but also installed by qualified personnel. This part doesn’t usually pose any challenges for me because the company I bought the appliance from takes care of the setup, ensuring it’s ready for use.

However, before I can do my first load of laundry or bake my first dish, I need to learn how the appliance works. This takes some time and often requires help from a sighted person.

For a washing machine, for example, I need to document all the available programs and additional settings. If it’s a stove, I go through its features and available temperature ranges. For an oven, I determine which programs use convection heat, and so on.

I generally avoid appliances with touch panels, but even traditional models often have screens displaying the available functions and their current settings. This often means that image recognition apps struggle to interpret them correctly. They might read the text on the display, but if the selected option is simply highlighted or changes color, AI-based recognition isn’t always reliable in indicating which option is currently active.

Because of this, having a sighted person assist me when learning to use a new device is often essential. Not always, but in many cases, it makes a significant difference.

How Does It Work in Practice?

The process takes time—sometimes even several hours. For instance, when learning to use a new washing machine, I followed these steps:

• Describing the control panel. This part was relatively quick. The goal was to describe the dial and all the buttons. At this stage, the key information included general details, such as the fact that the dial can be turned in both directions. Another important detail was that when the machine is turned off and on again, the dial resets to a default position instead of staying where it was left. If the buttons adjust parameters (e.g., spin speed), we note down the available values. My washing machine allows settings of 0, 400, 800, 1000, and 1200 RPM. Quite a lot of details, right? And that’s just the first step.
• Listing the main options. Here, I go through the key functions. For a washing machine, this means the available programs along with their default settings. It’s crucial to establish a good system for recording these settings to make navigation easier later.
• Adjusting the settings. This is the longest step and involves going through all possible variations. Some programs, for instance, don’t allow increasing the temperature beyond a certain level, while others don’t support pre-wash options. When a sighted person helps me go through each program and its settings, we document all available options or note any limitations. Other users can rely on the display for such information, but I need to have a detailed record in case I want to adjust these settings in the future.

In practice, I often record voice notes during this learning process. Once everything has been thoroughly checked with a sighted person, I sit down at my computer and write out my own instruction manual. For the washing machine, I created an Excel table listing each program’s default settings, along with additional notes on any restrictions.

Do I refer to the manufacturer’s manual when creating my own? As is often the case in my articles, the answer is: it depends. In the case of washing machine programs, it wasn’t necessary since their names already indicated their function. I could have included the maximum laundry load for each program, but since that information is always easy to look up, I decided to skip it. From experience, I already know that quick wash programs or those for delicate fabrics require smaller loads.

Challenges in Learning New Appliances

Beyond the display-related difficulties mentioned earlier, one of the biggest challenges is icons replacing text labels. Why? Because the sighted person helping me often has to consult the manual to understand what the icons mean.

Another challenge is correctly assembling some appliances. For example, in some mixers, the beaters are only color-coded, which doesn’t help when trying to distinguish left from right. This means it sometimes takes me longer to fit them correctly. The same issue can occur with headsets that have separate jacks for audio and microphone—if they’re not tactilely marked, figuring out which is which can be tricky.

In Summary

Bringing a new appliance into my home usually means I have some work ahead of me to learn how to use it. However, this doesn’t take away from the excitement of upgrading my household. It’s simply a challenge to navigate. After all, I need to find a patient person willing to help me figure it all out.