Abstract
Electronic vending machines are a wide-spread system for delivering and accessing goods: the possibility of operating in a completely automated fashion and independently from business hours makes them extremely convenient for serving public and private locations. However, they fail their purpose in serving individuals with special needs: their lack of accessibility prevents users who are blind or have severe visual impairments from autonomously purchasing products. In this paper, we focus on the ergonomics of electronic vending machines and their automatic payment systems: we discuss their human factors and, specifically, usability to individuals who have severe low vision. Furthermore, we present a user experience analysis of their components and we detail the results of a study that evaluated the performance of different common types of commercially-available vending machines in the three steps of a purchase, that is, product selection, payment, and collection. Our results demonstrate that poor design, lack of tactile information, and absence of non-visual feedback have a significant impact on accessibility and prevent most customers who are blind from being able to independently select, pay, and collect a product.
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Caporusso, N., Udenze, K., Imaji, A., Cui, Y., Li, Y., Romeiser, S. (2020). Accessibility Evaluation of Automated Vending Machines. In: Di Bucchianico, G. (eds) Advances in Design for Inclusion. AHFE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 954. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20444-0_5
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