A set of stickers is making it possible for more people to clean their clothes, run the dishwasher or set the oven to the right temperature.
The stickers — produced on a transparent plastic sheet — also took a gold medal in the 2024 Industrial Designers Society of America's International Design Excellence Awards for GE Appliances.
Louisville, Ky.-based GE, which is part of Haier Group, introduced the Access Kit earlier this year as an "inclusive tactile offering for blind and low vision appliance owners" that it developed with the American Printing House for the Blind. It is priced at $19.99. The kit has more than 400 different stickers that represent the 80 most common settings on thousands of appliances.
Users simply place them over existing controls, allowing buttons, knobs and other functions to be identifiable by touch. Because they're printed on transparent film, other appliance users can still see the traditional controls and continue to operate them as they normally would, GE noted in a news release.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 6 million Americans have some level of vision impairment, GE said. Because not all those people use Braille, the kit's stickers use a combination of Braille and common symbols that are easy to interpret.
GE Appliances first introduced a limited set of stickers for some of its ranges in 2015, but the 2024 kit works across "every appliance category" and can be used on other brands' products.