Labels and Tactile Marks

At the first of the year I, along with my fiancé, Larry, moved from our small 2 bedroom apartment into a larger 3 bedroom split level duplex. With our new home, of course came some adjustments, some very good, such as the fact we now had our own, second hand, washer and dryer rather than having to use a pay washer and dryer in a far off shared laundry room. Some things I found to be a bit of a pain, like the fact nothing was marked which required me to come up with some ways of either marking the things I needed or learning to use them such as they were.

Shortly after Larry and I started seeing each other, when I was splitting my time between my home in Wichita and his home here in Olathe, just outside Kansas City, Kansas, he helped me mark some of his things such as the controls for the air and heat, and the stove and oven controls in his kitchen. He also showed me things we could not mark, but that I could learn by memory to run such as the washer and dryer in the shared laundry room in the basement.

Materials

Several things can be used to mark things, from rubber bands, to nail polish, stick on dots to puffy paint. I have found some of these work better than others, and that some things that would work well one place in the home may not work as well in another place, some things will get you by in a pinch, if you need it and most of all you've got to try out different things that sound as if they may work, even if they are not covered here, and see what works best for you.

Some places such as Beyond Sight, http://www.beyondsight.com, sell kits that you can use for marking things. These kits can contain tubes of liquid puffy paint that would go on like normal paint, but when it dries it puffs up so you can feel it. A good thing about using this puffy paint is that you can draw any sort of shape you could want, a line, a circle, a squiggly wave. Other kits are composed of pre-fabricated shapes, half spheres, shapes that look like the letter O or the letter X. These you simply stick to whatever it is you need to mark. I personally have used a brand of clear half-spheres called "bumpons". They can be ordered in small, medium, and large sizes. I have always bought the clear kind so that Larry can still read whatever is written beneath but I do believe they come in other colors. With these, much as the shapes, all you do is pluck them off their little card and then stick them to whatever you are marking. We've marked our microwave and stove and oven, and soon will adhere them to our washer and dryer.

There are, of course, more "home made" methods of marking that work just as well for folks as the kits you can buy from a store. When I was first starting out on my own, nearly ten years ago, I inherited a very old microwave oven, the kind with the big dial you twist to measure out the time. And that was that. You couldn't set the heat, it was either attempt to unfreeze something by letting it run for a minute at a time, or letting the thing cook whatever you were attempting to heat past the point that it could be eaten.

This very old microwave had once belonged to an equally very old relative who, in her older years, had to develop ways of doing things more by touch than by sight (we never said the word blind in our family). As it was she was moving in with other family members because she could no longer live on her own this is how I came by way of the microwave. This microwave came to me all togged out in bright pink drippy fingernail polished glory.

I had never thought of fingernail polish as an alternative marking choice, but it seemed to of worked well for her. She had put a blob of polish on the business end of the dial, and then she marked just about every setting you can think of, so this microwave had a sunburst of closely spaced blobs of fingernail polish going all the way round the dial.

Some folks will find that this is what they feel comfortable with, but I, and many others, have found, and some times space will only allow, that a hand full of points be marked on something like an oven dial. If you think of the dial as the face of a clock, you may want to only mark the spots for 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, 7:00 and 9:00. Which might match up with the heat settings of off, 200, 350, 450, and 500 degrees respectively, if you need another heat setting, then you can put the dial pointer between the two markers that would encompass the range of heat you need.

Another "home made" method of marking could be that you file notches into the surface of whatever you are marking. This may work well for a stovetop because cooking grease may splatter on the place where your marks are, and if they are something like bumpons, or some other thing you stick to the surface; they could very well fall off over time. Anything that will make a mark, pocket knife, etching tool, and so forth can be used to notch something. As you would with the stick on dots, or puffy paint just mark where you feel you need the marks.

braille Labels

I have seen the Dimo tape Braille labels used most effectively for such things as those flat panel pushbutton microwaves, and for some settings on washers or dryers. When I attended the Colorado Center for the Blind, the microwaves in the student apartments and at the center were marked in these Dimo taped labels. So were the soft drink dispensers. You could label all of the numbers, the start button, the defrost, and any special settings such as beverages, popcorn, or TV dinners that some microwaves come preprogrammed with. Here at home our microwave has only 2 bumpons on it. One on the stop button and one on a button that, when you push it; it automatically comes on and runs for one minute. Oh and of course, we also have a marking on the popcorn button!

Still More Ideas

Some things you will find don't need marking, or as in the case with our shared laundry room at the apartment, would not work well being marked. Some examples of things that may not need special marking are kitchen timers you can buy from any store with raised numbers. The controls for the air and heat in our duplex don't need any special markings because the controls to switch between heat, off and air click, and you can feel them clicking, the lever that controls how hot or cold it gets slides from right to left and can be set with a fair amount of correctness by feeling where along the line the lever is. The dials on a gas stovetop also may not need to be marked because you can feel how high the heat is, and feel if it goes up or down, depending on what way you turn the knob.

I hope this has given you some ideas for marking things around your home!