Accessibility: Coffee Makers

Finally, after years of wanting a coffee machine I have finally been able to acquire one to replace the old coffee press, which was largely inaccessible to me. I am a huge lover of coffee and now I have a way that I can brew the drink in my own home without assistance. It is these small things which add up that make the biggest difference when coping with a disability so I have decided to profile accessible tech: coffee brewing.

My major difficulty when it comes to completing most daily tasks is that I have a very poor executive memory. I am not able to hold that much information in my head about what I have to do or what is going on around me at any one time. For this reason, I tend to forget to do things that would normally be obvious for other people or leave certain tasks half completed because I have to attend to something else and the previous task gets easily crowded out of my mental space. Routine helps me cope with this to a degree.

Brewing coffee is one of those things which is not on a routine, I make it when I feel like drinking it. This makes it difficult to cope with.

The coffee press was easily the most inaccessible piece of technology for me. In order to use a coffee press properly you must fill it with coffee and water and let it sit for about 15 minutes to a half hour for it to brew, then use the press to strain the coffee grounds from the brew. For me, what would often happen would be that I would prepare the press and, because it took so long to brew and staring at a metal carafe is extremely boring, I would head off to do whatever else I was up to. I would then promptly forget I had ever prepared the machine. At some point, usually after a couple hours, I might wander back into the kitchen and I might notice the coffee machine with its extended plunger and strain it. I would then have one cup of coffee which I could bring back to my room and sip. Of course, the rest of the coffee in the carafe, having slipped from my mental space, would be completely neglected, turn sour, and go to waste.

Enter the coffee machine. With this device I am able to load it, press a button, and be certain that the coffee is brewed properly 100% of the time (as opposed to having the coffee be bitter and over-brewed roughly 90% of the time). Also, it keeps the coffee fresh and warm for several hours so I still have an acceptable drink even when I forget I'm brewing for extended periods of time (most of the time). It also has an attention-grabbing light on it!

Of course, the machine keeps the coffee's temperature far too hot so I'm forced to let the beverage cool in my cup which is prone to be pushed out of my mental space and forgotten. About half the time I drink room temperature coffee because of it, although this isn't that bad for my palette. For this same reason I also had the tendency of pouring myself two or three cups of coffee at the same time because I would pour a cup, forget I had poured it, decide I want coffee and head off to pour myself another cup. I fixed it, though, by assigning myself one specific mug which I use in exclusion of all others.

Reading over what I have written it seems a little silly. Someone might be tempted to comment that if this is what autism does to me then it's not really much of a disability, is it? Yet, at the same time that's rather the point of this piece: It's not that I have a great deal of difficulty feeding myself a specific beverage but its the fact that so many of the things which I need to do to get through life become more difficult in subtle ways. We don't often think of those subtle ways which they do, especially when we don't experience them first hand. This is one of those minor difficulties which have a way of adding up.