My credit union recently installed a new ATM. It’s really nice. It has a decent sized canopy to keep rain out of your car. It has soft overall lighting in the canopy and task lighting for the ATM itself. The screen is beautifully lit even in strong light. It is well positioned and you don’t have to dodge bollards to get close to the window, they are just far enough back. If the machine is down for some reason, a traffic light on the side turns from green to red to let you know it is out of commission.
And it has a fatal flaw.
This is the kind of ATM where you momentarily slide your card in and then pull it out. Even that is well thought out. If you insert your card the wrong way it stops it immediately to let you know to try again.
But if someone inserts a card that needs to be seized for some reason does it suck the card into some vault? Oh, no. It clamps down on the offending card with the jaws of death. It cannot be inserted further nor pulled out. The machine is down hard until the card is removed. But the staff at the bank cannot remove the bad card. They have to call the company that services it and request a service call. No one can use the machine for as long as it takes for the company to send someone out. And for a final part of this flaw - it does not even turn the traffic light red so there is an endless stream of would be users driving up and staring at the damn thing.
As has been pointed out earlier, it is easier to make one ATM machine model rather than one with braile and one without. Plus just because it is a drive up ATM doesn’t mean every user will drive to it. I oftent walk to a drive up ATM.
ATMs are sometimes on the passenger side, and sometimes the same design is used for walkup ATMs. It would be an unnecessary complication to have multiple designs of ATM, with a different design without braille only to be used on the driver’s side at drive-ups.
Me too. I could see it on a ATM inside a store. But a drive up? It’s just one of those silly things. They discourage walkups to my favorite ATM. There’s even a warning sign.
I have been behind a guy using a headset from his car. That seems plausibe. I wonder though, is he driving with so much vision impairment that he can’t see the ATM screen. I assume he can read. He obviously has a lisc. to drive. Weird.
Around 25 years ago, Citibank ATMs were touchscreen only (no physical buttons). But there was a small label below the screen with Braille instructions. I found this amusing, so I used the phone (they had a phone handset next to the ATM so you could ask for assistance) to inquire. I was told that the display could be changed to a low-contrast mode with large text buttons, which would be usable by someone with low vision (but obviously not someone who was completely blind).
Actually my guess is that it is some sort of ADA requirement, although I still think it is silly.
I think it is about as likely that a blind person would walk up to a drive-up ATM that it would be for them to drive up to one.
I have never seen a drive-up ATM with a machine on the passenger side. Not saying they don’t exist, but I’ve never run across one in my 30-something years of ATM use.
Even if it is an ADA requirement, why is it silly? The only reason to have an ATM without braille is because the manufacturer wants to make a special effort to exclude blind people. Why should it be legal to make a pointless gesture of exclusion when designing public infrastructure?
Why? They do walk around, you know. And the drive-up ATM I use most frequently is pretty accessible from the sidewalk. It’s just plopped right onto the side of the building, which leads me to…
I’ve seen plenty of ATMs where it’s trivial to go through backwards if there isn’t a line. (In any case, as mentioned, most cars have a passenger seat on the driver’s side.)
My bank has lovely ATMs with quick service buttons on the touch screen. After entering my PIN, I can, with a single touch (i.e. no extra steps needed), take out $40, $60, $80, $100, $200, or select “other” to enter in an amount or do another transaction.
The dumb design? The buttons are all very close to each other, the “other” button is right next to $200, and the touch screen is… imperfectly aligned. Every time you try to, let’s say, deposit into the account, you risk taking $200 out of it instead.
Once upon a time I came across an ATM machine that didn’t keep your card in the machine while you completed your transaction. The issue with this is that you have to stick around to manually end your transaction, i.e. if someone walks up after you and you neglected to hit “I’m done!” they could take money out of your account without re-entering your PIN. I thought that was beyond crazy.
I wonder if this (the clamping/shut down action) is designed to thwart an attempt at attaching a skimmer to the machine. That would make some sense. The locks the machine until service personal can fix it or give it the all-clear and clamping down on the card, or skimmer, so that the person can’t remove it and install it elsewhere. The service person can also collect it at that point and do whatever they do with it (ie hand it over to police).
Hijack, but this comment reminded me of that line on the IRS tax forms that says “Check this box if you are blind.” I can’t help but morbidly imagine IRS agents laughing among themselves at their own cleverness in never having to allow anyone to claim that deduction.
They have since fixed this issue, but for several months, my bank’s new ATM would take the card swipe and then display “Reading your preferences…” and then the next question would be “English or Spanish?”
As far as I can tell the only “preference” I ever expressed to the machine was for English, but it asked each time, right after assuring me it was freshly aware of my preferences.
There was a scene in Terminator 2 in which the young John Connor and his friend used some sort of skimmer to get cash out of an ATM (I think they had a stolen ATM card). I assumed it was made up for the movie. But was something like that possible back then (which was almost thirty years ago)? Is it still possible today?
A skimmer steals card information. There are handheld ones that involves you having physical access to the card (like a waiter at a restaurant taking your card to run it) and there are small, almost unnoticeable ones that people retrofit into ATMs and gas pumps. Many people don’t even know it’s there, they slide their card through the skimmer and into the ATM/gas pump. The card works normally and the skimmer quietly collects mag data all day long.
With this info, particularly before chipped cards, they could then take this info and encode it onto a blank credit card and use that just as if they had the actual physical card.
From that perspective, yes, it’s totally possible. Though I don’t know how common it was 30 years ago. Even then, I don’t know how well one card would work on other bank’s ATMs.
Having said all that, I assume the ability to clone a credit card has been around for as long as credit cards have been around.
