28 June 2007
Voice-Guided Automated Teller Machines Helpful to Blind People
Machine’s 40th anniversary a celebration of ingenuity and convenience
Washington – Forty years after the first automated teller machine (ATM) made it possible for people to get cash from their bank accounts at any time of day and from virtually any place in the world, companies are equipping them with voice-guidance features to improve their ease of use for people who are blind.
“Life should be as convenient for blind people as it is for anyone else,” says Christopher S. Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).
The ATM was invented by John Shepherd Barron, who reportedly came up with the idea when he was locked out of his bank in England. The first machine was in front of a Barclays bank in a London suburb and began dispensing cash on June 27, 1967.
Now there are about 1.5 million ATMs around the world and 400,000 ATMs in the United States, according to Lana Harmelink of the ATM Industry Association.
The technology to make ATMs voice-guided has been available since 2000, when bank-owned ATMs began equipping the machines with voice-guided software, but privately owned ATMs in such places as convenience stores, gas stations and airports have been slow to adopt the new technology, Danielsen said.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), enacted in 1990, requires banks and companies to equip the ATMs with Braille, the widely used system of reading and writing for blind people developed by Frenchman Louis Braille in 1821. The system relies on raised-dot characters. But Braille is not dynamic, Danielsen said, so although the tactile characters make the machines accessible to blind people they do not make the machines convenient to use.
ATMs require interaction between the user and the machine, he said. “The machine asks you questions that you need to answer in order for it to give you cash or transfer money or provide a balance,” Danielsen said. “Braille helps you locate things on the machine but it cannot actually help you use it.”
Cardtronics, the largest owner of ATMs in the United States, with more than 23,000 ATMs nationwide and more than 25,000 ATMs globally, is equipping its machines with voice-guided technology as the result of a legal settlement between the company and the NFB. The federation claimed in a lawsuit that ATMs need to be convenient to use for blind people. Cardtronics owns 1,500 machines in the United Kingdom and 500 in Mexico.
Joel Antonini, a Cardtronics spokesman, told USINFO that although the machines outside the United States are not covered under the ADA, the company has chosen to equip all its new ATMs, including those headed for the United Kingdom and Mexico, with the voice-capability technology.
Triton Systems, a global ATM manufacturer with 158,000 machines in 24 countries, now features an audio jack for voice guidance on all its machines, according to Alicia Blanda, a company spokesperson.
To ensure privacy, voice-guided ATMs are not equipped with speakers and require users to plug their own headphones into the machine’s audio jack. Once a person is plugged in, an automated voice-guide prompts the user, sometimes incorporating Braille or other tactile locators on the machine, to use the keypad to both initiate and complete transactions just as a person would using the voice-guidance features in a telephone transaction.
According to Danielsen, when the ATM dispenses paper bills, blind people fold them in unique ways to help them identify the denominations in their wallets. Usually ATMs dispense cash in $20 or $10 bills, Danielsen said, and sometimes the voice-guide will prompt users to select a preference. Using scanning and audio-recognition technology to read money and other printed material, the NFB makes the Kurzweil Reader, but the high cost of the machine -- $3,500 -- takes it out of reach for many people. Other hand-held personal digital assistants that only read money cost about $300, according to Danielsen, and these machines are becoming popular.
There are 1.3 million blind adults in the United States, according to the NFB.
For additional information, see Americans with Disabilities.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
