#warning beeps

[sluggoonthestreet]

Nadine and the Rear-Mounted Hamster

[msbarrows]

Design Fail

So my dad has been having a problem with a device failing on his iMac the last couple of days. When it fails it goes into a mode where it does a repetitive high-pitched warning beep to let you know there’s a problem. Very loud and high-pitched; it carries so well that it woke me up out of a sound sleep this morning, despite me being upstairs in bed with a closed door and a flight of stairs between myself and the living room where his iMac is.

Great, right?

Except, not so much. My dad is in his 80s. Like many people his age, he has bad hearing and wears hearing aids to be able to hear properly. Guess what’s one of the first thing people with hearing loss typically stop hearing? If you guessed “high notes”, you’d be right.

When I first called my Dad’s attention to the repetitive high-pitched beeping the night before last, he sat down at his computer to try and figure out what was wrong and could not hear the beeping. Even after taking out his remote and adjusting the sensitivity/volume of his aids. I was being driven up the wall by it having been beeping for over an hour at that point (despite my being upstairs at my own (comparatively noisy) PC with my eReader reading aloud to me, I could still hear it all-too-clearly) and he never heard a peep. And for me high-pitched noises like that are pretty directionless; I could tell it was something at his desk, but not which something; my guess was his UPS (which also does high-pitched beeps when it’s set off) but his checking of desktop utilities showed nothing wrong with it.

It wasn’t until he’d gone out for the evening and come back (thankfully putting his iMac to sleep before he left, which stopped the beeps), and hadn’t been listening to anything loud (TV, radio, his iPod) for a while, that he was finally able to barely make out that, yes, something at his computer after he booted it back up was indeed making a noise (turned out to be the external two-drive brick backup drive he has - looks like the cooling fan is possibly the culprit).

And I’m sitting here thinking about how while it’s great that electronic devices do try to tell us they’re having problems, it’s a bit of a design fail that the most common method seems to be high-pitched beeps, which not all users are capable of noticing. My dad also has the secondary problem of being colourblind, so while he guesses that the green “ready” light on the drive maybe also goes to red when it’s in failure mode, he can’t tell a red from a green (I get to be his eyes to check anything that has a red/green indicator, like his wireless cell phone car speaker battery level light does). His UPS does failure better; as well as beeping and a flashing light (which can’t really be seen since it’s tucked away underneath his desk) when power fluctuation/loss causes it to take over, it also spawns a message popup on his screen when it kicks in or has a problem.

Obviously there’s no one solution, but at minimum I wish devices that did warning beeps had a way of adjusting the pitch; high notes are fine for people with decent hearing, but they can be totally lost on anyone with even partial hearing loss. A lower pitch, while it wouldn’t carry as far, would at least be audible until a far greater degree of hearing loss had occurred.

Which tangentially reminds me that I need to be sure my Dad knows that he can probably change the ringtone on his cell phone; it’s default ring is, you guessed it, a high pitched noise that he can’t reliably hear.