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Comment on Undo codes for Japanese elevator floor buttons

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I'm still surprised nobody does the obvious.

Have a voice announce each floor. Much better than a stupid chime as each floor is passed, as then blind people have to count.

The voice is cheap as dirt, too. As the IBM PC showed, you can get perfectly intelligible voice from connecting a speaker to a 5V IO pin and turning it on and off rapidly, based on a recorded waveform. Wouldn't cost any more than a chime.

My furnace has a blinkenlight for its status. Slow blink, it's working ok. Fast blink, something wrong. I go have a look, it's blinking. Is that a fast or slow blink? I hate the people that design these things.

Wait, you don’t have that in your country?

Voice-announced floors is pretty much universal in China. In Hong Kong, it’s also done in three languages. The current direction (up or down) of the elevator is also announced. There are exceptions, of course, like really old buildings that don’t have rich incorporated owners to retrofit the elevators.

Otis offered that as an option from the 1960s. Here's the vocabulary.[1] It's still available, but seems to have fallen out of fashion with the decline of elevator music.

There was even a "You are pressing too many floor buttons" message.

[1] https://www.soundboard.com/sb/OtisElevatorVoiceAnnouncements

I’ve been in elevators like that and it’s annoying

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