Machines with apps in a relatively uncommon use case

HI all,

 

I am a Jura E8 owner, and am a veteran of the Delonghi Eleta Explore, which I was forced to return. I have noticed a trend regarding commentary about coffee machine apps. Most people feel that the apps are superfluous at best and unusable at worst. Many have even questioned the wisdom of a coffee machine requiring an app in the first place. So, I’d like to flag something that simply never gets considered, with which I have been struggling for some time.

 

I had to send back the Delonghi Eleta Explore not because it made bad coffee (it didn’t) and not because my partner found out and had a heart attack about the price (she didn’t). I had to send it back because it was a touchscreen, the app was basically unusable and we are both blind.

 

I knew when I ordered the machine that Delonghi, like most other makers, was sadly obsessed with putting touch screens on every possible appliance. I figured that after learning to tolerate and label a touchscreen washing machine, drier and oven, that I could cope with this too. But the main reason for my forbearance was the app. I thought it would be no problem to just wake up, open the app on my iPhone and tap a coffee into existence. Sadly, as foreshadowed above, the app is, to put it politely, a steaming pile of shite.  It fails to connect all the time, it does not expose most of the error messages on the machine’s display, and some of the functions simply aren’t available in the app. Try finding a cleaning programme on a touchscreen without looking at it – I promise you, instead of a clean coffee maker, you’ll end up with espresso all over your floor and milk foam trickling down your nearest wall. Ask me how I know this.

 

But the other problem is that even if the app worked perfectly, its accessibility with the iPhone’s built-in screen reader (called Voiceover) was absolutely woeful. I had to coopt someone’s willing eyeballs just to get into the menu and go through the connection process, only to need to do it again because the programmers who created this godforsaken app clearly were paid in user tears. None of the drinks were labelled and figuring out which was which involved listening to the name of the picture file corresponding to the relevant drink, so I’d hear something like: “005 flat white pic 1 dot jpg”. I could figure it out but seriously?

 

This leads me to the Jura E8. The coffee is fantastic, and the unit has buttons – wonder of wonders! Jura thinks a touchscreen is somehow a premium feature!       , you delightful Swiss bastards. The machine exposes all of its error messages to the app and I can do most of what I need right from my phone. There are a few issues, but frankly, after the Delonghi shitshow, I’ll tolerate anything at this point.

 

The reason for this lengthy screed is quite simple. If you work with these machines, or if you have the ear of anyone at any of these big companies – please don’t forget that disabled folk also love coffee. Remind them that things like the European Accessibility Act exist – ask them to test their apps and make them give us a way to activate the machines without needing to coopt our neighbours and traumatise them with our obsessive love of freshly-ground hot bean juice.

 If you review these machines, demand a better quality of app, question the logic of always needing a touchscreen, mention that actually if the reader has low vision, they might struggle.

 

Thanks Jura, for getting it perhaps about 65% right. For most consumers, that would be unacceptable – but if you’re a blind purchaser, that’s well above the average.