Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> To be honest this is a general problem with the UK

Hotel lifts would appear to be another example of this. Automated "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements seem to be present almost everywhere.

Presumably a significant number people suffer appaling crush injuries from lift doors in other countries ... or maybe they don't, and companies across the UK just let their Health and Safety conslutants get the upper hand.



...or visually impaired and thus use those announcements to understand what state the lift is in.


Blind person here, I find the "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements pretty tiresome, and I don't think they provide any benefit to us.

They sometimes even make things worse. Especially on bilingual elevators (not that uncommon in European countries where English isn't an official language), there are so many announcements that the elevator just can't keep up when there's a lot of traffic. I've seen a few elevators that were always a few announcements behind during periods of high activity.

The "lift (elevator) going up / down" announcements, on the other hand, are quite helpful, and I vastly prefer the European system than the American mess of ADA-compliant beeps.


Why is the American system a mess? One chime for up, two for down. It's simple and doesn't bother anybody.


(speaking as a person who isn't blind) The biggest omission seems to be that there is nothing to tell you what floor you've arrived at. This is probably fine for an empty elevator but as soon as it gets busy and there are 10s of floors I'd imagine it gets hard to navigate.


Lol yeah of all the examples to choose

Why are the pavements at crossings so bumpy?! It's political correctness gone mad!


> ...or visually impaired and thus use those announcements to understand what state the lift is in

...but only in lifts in the UK? No, that's not a credible hypothesis.


We have those in the US too but we use beeps. Some elevators do use speech so you'll hear "going up" sometimes.


They’re not only in UK lifts and even if they were, that still wouldn’t change the intention of those announcements.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: