> Initially, the designers wanted to put small changeable batteries in the new glasses. Beskind pointed out to them that old fingers are not that nimble.<p>I've watched my father change batteries on his hearing aid, and this is very true (he is also 90 with macular degeneration). The hearing aid battery people now sell their batteries in dispensers that make it easier to insert the battery, but they don't help with removing the old dead battery - he has to shake it out over the trash can.<p>Sometimes he loses his grip and the entire hearing aid ends up in there. Or the battery misses the can and ends up on the floor where he can't see it, and it then acts like a ball-bearing and becomes a fall hazard. So a stupid $2 battery that gets changed a couple times a week could potentially result in a broken hip, which drastically shortens the lives of seniors.<p>Thinking about the entire life-cycle of a product and how the customers are going to use it is always worthwhile.
>"Well, in the Depression, if you can't buy toys, you make 'em, " she says.<p>>Beskind has macular degeneration and only has peripheral vision. So she draws her designs with easy-to-see thick black felt pens. She hands me a design for glasses that would help people like her.<p>Necessity is the mother of all invention. My father also has macular degeneration, and he has developed his own tools and life hacks to assist him. Now I always seem to notice and take interest when someone has macular degeneration, and inevitably people have tools they developed on their own. Just recently an elderly gentleman with macular degeneration came into the law office and when it came time to sign an agreement he pulled out a credit card with a rectangle cut out that he had placed over signature lines so he could feel where to sign.
> That required an engineering degree. In those days, women couldn't get into those departments.<p>My grandmother worked as a mechanic for the phone company in the 1920's. She met my grandfather, who sold correspondence courses through which one could get a degree, by buying courses in engineering from him.<p>(In those days, the way to get a degree if you couldn't afford college was to take correspondence courses.)
Ok, so I get that tech hasn't been very good at recruiting older workers. But this? Seriously?<p>> In Silicon Valley's youth-obsessed culture, 40-year-olds get plastic surgery to fit in.<p>This is unsubstantiated. Has anyone met a 40 year-old in Silicon Valley that's gotten plastic surgery?
I've often thought there is opportunity there for building consumer electronics for older people. Every time daylight savings changed, I would go over to my Great Aunt's place and update the clock on her VCR and make sure all her shows were programmed in to record.<p>I've also seen her insist her TV wont switch on as she impatiently pounds the on/off button again and again, saying, "See, it's not doing anything!"<p>I wished the remote had a separate on button and off button, so she could pound that on button as often as she liked until the picture showed up on the TV. Idempotent remotes!