Making of an Accessible Soda Machine

14 Million people in the U.S. are visually impaired, of these 3 million have a visual impairment that cannot be corrected with glasses or/ contact lenses. Fewer than 10% of the 1.3 million legally blind people in the U.S. read Braille. The 2012 National Health Interview Survey reported that 20.6 million American Adults 18 and older experienced vision loss.

Every MTO soda kiosk has different navigations, user interfaces, physical dimensions, and other various aspects that visually impaired people have difficulty using. Many machines lack ADA compliant features such as providing braille, tactile feedback, audio feedback, and gestural responses to navigate through the interface. As a result, It prohibits people with visual impairments from having a seamless user experience while using an MTO Soda machine.

How might we design an MTO soda machine dispenser that is accessible to people with visual impairments to have seamless experience?

We interviewed many people with blindness who have faced issues while vending or making a drink while visiting fast-food chains, cafeteria, etc. These are commonly seen problems in restaurants and cafes -

1. Findability - A blind person does not know where the machine is situated in the store or restaurant.
2. Reachability - Once the machine is discovered, the next task is to understand buttons, navigational cues, and enabling accessibility, which is a tremendous task for almost every legally blind person.
3. Making a drink choice - there are so many options that are hard to select on inaccessible machines.
4. Every machine has different dimensions, which makes it even harder to remember past choices.
5. A blind person ends up relying on their friends and family to get themselves a drink.

Physical Cues for legally blind person -

1. Haptic Feedback for performed actions
2. Joystick for navigation
3. Remote control for selections
4. Musical cues and feedbacks

Feature list -

1. Audio Feedback
2. D-Pad for control
3. Volume and Accessibility Button
4. Aux Input
5. Extended Platform to place the cup
6. Circular slanted dispenser to fit the cup perfectly
7. Touch Screen with border frame
8. Scanner to identify cup size at the button of the dispenser.

Interview background -

1. Total interviews - 2
2. We blindfolded our users to test how the machine would work.

How we conducted user testing interviews?

1. We wanted to test user flows.
2. How user is making the decisions?
3. How users are interacting with the D-Pad?
4. How user would react to the responses he’d receive from the machine?

And, there were the key takeways.

1. Users are able to find the buttons and having understanding of D-pad quite easily.
2. Users had a bit of problem while going back one step.
3. Sometimes we witnessed confusion while pressing ‘UP’ & ‘Right’ arrow key.
4. Users responded quite neatly when given a free choice to choose their drink.
5. On the last screen where user was supposed to dispense flavors/regular, came as a surprise.
6. There’s still room for development and design improvements. But adding a D-pad was a big success. Navigation becomes simple and easy to comprehend.