I recently purchased a microwave combination oven and after unpacking it from its box a friend of mine positioned it in the kitchen for me and she put it on the work surface with the right hand side of the oven almost touching a wall. I politely pointed out that this was a stupid place to put it but I had to agree with her that a lot of people do have them positioned like this whether or not they are sighted or non sighted. In my mind it is still a stupid place to position an oven whatever your visual capability is and my reasoning follows below.
When you open a microwave oven door to remove hot food or hot liquid you have automatically made a barrier to your left hand side and you have a wall as a barrier to your right hand side so when you have picked up the contents from the oven the only way you can go is backwards and then move to the left hoping you have moved backwards far enough to avoid be open microwave door, and if you have negotiated that successfully you then have to place the hot item on a work surface not knowing if there is something there to be knocked over or to get in the way. As you can understand this process seems quite hazardous as you can easily spill the hot contents onto the floor or even on to yourself during this procedure.
In my opinion, it would be better to position the microwave oven so that there is plenty of work surface to the right hand side of it. Better still to also have a bit of work surface available to the front of the oven. This means that when you open the microwave door and remove the contents you can pull the contents out and slide them to the right and push them into a safe position on the work surface. Youcan then close the microwave oven door safely and then move the hot food or beverage without having to use reverse gear and have the added obstacle of the microwave oven door.
I hope that all made sense.
In a few weeks I will do a review of the talking microwave combination oven as this will have given me a good length of time to test it out.
