That system works very well in my local doctors surgery, including for elderly patients. When I've sat in the waiting room I never seen anyone having trouble with the touch screen nor needing help from the receptionist who are usually very busy taking phone calls for appointments.
Well, maybe your practice can make some money teaching other practices patients. I think a lot of it is in how its done and whether they carry the patients with them, so to speak. Obviously its not going to work for blind people, but as you say if its done properly, then it so work, but so many times it does not, either due to implementation or just springing it on an unsuspecting group of patients who will if they feel pressured say piss off and take your tech with you. That is most certainly the attitude I see. The next problem is coming up in booking via the internet. it has been tried by many of us and it simply does not work even for people relatively net savvy but blind. Brian
First thing I do on any computer is disable caps-lock.
My Ford sat nav is a pain to enter postcodes, because numbers, space and letters are three separate character sets. Each time you have to select letters, numbers, space, numbers, letters. :-(
Chris
And then remap it to á??°w access to extended character sets...
They have to be cheap to make. How else can the company that won the tender make any money ?
If I want to do something with odd chars such as ? © ? ? it suffices to open Keyboard Viewer and press alt to see where they are on the keyboard.
There's really no excuse for that, for a built-in one.
For some reason no. I suspect because the car park operator would then be liable for stolen cards being used.
Does highlight that when the word "convenient" is used to sell something to the public, it's never clear *whose* convenience ....
With the audi one you can speak them, or enter them by writing the letters/numbers on top of a large touch sensitive knob in the centre console ... for a right-hander in a RHD car that is pretty awkward.
Other than making it so complicated to use that they trick people or make them give up so you can then fine them you mean? ;-(
The point is, it *is* possible to make a user friendly system and we have (or used to have) one at out local hospital.
You drive in and park, often the highest priority if turning up for an appointment.
When you leave, X time later (as it's a hospital and you can rarely guarantee any times with them), you go up to the terminal and start entering your reg. As soon as yours is on the screen (it whittles them down as you type), you select yours (touch screen) and it tells you what you owe for the time you have been there. Then you can pay by cash, card / contactless (or by phone I believe but have never used).
You may even have up to midnight that day to pay, in case you don't have the means at that time.
So, you rarely have to enter your entire reg (on a tiny alphanumeric keypad with half the letters worn off), just the first few and on a big touch screen.
You don't have to note what time you got there or get / buy a ticket within X time.
You don't have to try to guess how long you will be there or run out to top up if you overrun (every time I think I'll be quick and only buy 1 hour, I'm in there 3. Every time I pay for 3 I'm out within 30 mins).
I have heard of it going wrong of course (as would most tech at some point) where my BIL went to check out and his reg wasn't on the list (there was one very similar that was probably his that had been incorrectly ANPR'd). Not being able to select his reg he just drove away, expecting some sort of PNC to follow but it never did.
We would never know if the system would be able to deal with a reg that appeared to arrive but never leave or one that left that never arrived. ;-)
The interesting thing about the solution I mention above is that you rarely see any queues at the payment terminals or irate people because
*after* their appointments / visit they are generally not in such a rush.Cheers, T i m
I use caps-lock quite a lot. There are drawings and documents that need large quatities of (sometimes all) text in caps and using shift means lifting off it whenever a number or special character is needed, while caps does not.
Maybe requiring it to be held for a period before changing state would work. I know there is a way to put such a delay on keys for people who have movement problems and are likely to hit many wrong keys, but I've never investigated whether it can be applied to a single key. I shall have to take a look.
Anyway, my main gripe is with password entry, especially as you usually cannot see what you have typed and it would be trivial for systems to accept passwords with completely reversed case.
SteveW
My Garmin is only two sets (as space appears on both), but yes, why can't they use a single set, where holding a letter for a second enters a number instead? Like on many phone onscreen keypads.
SteveW
I use this:
It's built in. You have no choice.
I can't begin to put into words how underwhelmed I am by the inbuilt Citroen Satnav. And that's before you see the prices they think they can charge for updates. Mind you, at least my version can use postcodes. I gave a colleague a lift once, and he had a year older model that wouldn't take postcodes.
It's hard to overstate how much easier (and cheaper) it is to just have an old MotoG with HERE maps.
really car manufacturers should just provide a screen and Google/Apple auto connection. Let the driver bring the rest ......
Lots of things are "possible". But few are as easy as making excuses for why they aren't done.
That's what they do on newer cars, shame it operates over USB, not WiFi.
That does look a useful possibility, although it still doesn't get around caps-lock being on when logging in to the machine in the first place.
My wife would object to that.
SteveW
Back in my student days, we had rooms full of terminals.
Some had Dacoll terminals - these could use a line editor or a full-screen editor, but the full-screen editor would corrupt the screen when you reached the bottom and you had to press a key to refresh the screen.
Some had Dacoll terminals with the "Salford ROM" which could use a different full screen editor without corruption.
One had some newer terminals (I can't remember the type) that worked full-screen, but only the up, left and right cursor keys worked and you had to use F2 as the down key. We were told that it would be too expensive to have the system corrected.
One had Volker-Craig terminals which just worked and were much more responsive as they were in the room next to the datacentre and had direct connections, without a slow multiplexor.
SteveW
or bluetooth. Mind you, that can be added to the list of "underwhelming things" that appears to be related to getting older :)
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