Real #disabled life:
In theory, our Crock-Pot is one of the pseudo-accessible models. It literally has one physical dial with four distinct clicks: Off, Low, High, and Warm.
Except after not using it for over a year, my #blind partner and I both forgot the order of those clicks. We made a decision to set it to the rightmost position based on logic, because Low and High are both hotter than Warm. Then we asked a sighted person to verify, but the labels are in English and they only speak Spanish so somehow they got mixed up.
The end result is that our raw chicken has been sitting on the Warm setting, in 32 degrees C weather, for 2.5 hours. This is a cascading set of bad circumstances, all because a device manufacturer can't put tactile markers on their products. It's also why I like devices with companion apps, not as an alternative to physical controls but as an extra line of defense and piece of mind against human error.
@jscholes Yeah, memorizing order and writing it down is one thing, but having confirmation through app or other means really is useful. I guess you didn't feel comfortable with an Be My Eye virtual volunteer telling you that kind of info?
@twynn Unfortunately we were both in a rush to get to work meetings. Had we had more time, we could've asked our sighted cleaner to confirm the ordering and then made our own determination, used AI, called Aira, whatever.
@jscholes I wasn't trying to be critical, and apologies if it came across that way. Fully understand how those series of unfortunate events could, and would, have panned out just the same in my case.
@twynn No no, it didn't come across that way at all. If anything, it's healthy to acknowledge that disabled people don't magically gain time/resources to deal with things like this.
@jscholes Yeah, people don't often talk about the necessity of paying for, say, grocery deliveries, as a need when you have a full-time job on top of life struggles. Not a convenience, but necessity because the cost in time and effort to do otherwise would mean that you end up with no spoons left.
