Welcome to the thirty-sixth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Access On Live from the National Federation of the Blind national convention in New Orleans 0:00
- Ayan Kishore, CEO of Benetech, discusses Bookshare and a special promotion for NFB members 1:54
- Sponsor message, The People Make the Places Podcast with Mike May 16:1
- Introducing our panel 17:06
- Tactile graphics 21:29
- The exhibit hall 28:58
- AI, the tools, the benefits, the pitfalls 32:52
- Tech tip, JAWS licenses explained 51:57
- Closing and contact info 1:00:04
Transcript
Audio:
Live the life you want.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. I am Jonathan Mosen. It's great to have so many of you here. How many of you are Access On listeners already? Anybody here who has not heard the podcast yet but want to know what all of this is about? Yeah. Okay. All right. Welcome. See, that's brave, that is. Well, I hope you find it worthwhile. So Access On comes out every week from the National Federation of the Blind, and we cover technology news and tips and tricks.
And the thing about Access On is that the podcast belongs to the National Federation of the Blind. So not only do we hear from the movers and shakers, but we also hear lots of people who have grassroots opinion and grassroots demonstrations, and it's a super exciting thing to be a part of.
Now, what we're going to do this evening is fairly typical of an Access On episode. It's just that we've got an audience to boo when I get things wrong and giraffe me when I say something you disagree with. Yeah, so that's all very interactive. We are going to have a feature guest in just a moment who is, we're going to do an interview with them, and then we have a panel here of federation renowned, in some cases, world renowned experts.
No pressure and we'll see how that goes. And, of course, you are very welcome to respond and engage from the audience, benefit that you don't yell at us, because we're not going to pick that up very well on the microphone. So I hope you enjoy this. And what I'd like to do is introduce our guest, and that is Ayan Kishore from Bookshare. He's the chief executive of Bookshare. All right. Welcome.
Ayan Kishore:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Jonathan Mosen:
How many conventions have you been to?
Ayan Kishore:
I'm a rookie. This is my first one.
Jonathan Mosen:
I wondered if that was the case.
Audience:
We got to ribbon.
Ayan Kishore:
Oh, this is ribbon. I was not aware of that.
Jonathan Mosen:
What's that like for you? I mean, this is quite an experience. There's nothing in the world like an NFB convention. What's it like?
Ayan Kishore:
It's been amazing. I've obviously read about it. I've read about it in books. It's famous, and honestly, the best part about it is just seeing the microcosm of the diversity all put together in one. It's just a lot of fun. I mean, I can see people trying to get dates. I can see people having a smoke outside and it's just beautiful honestly. That's the way I describe it.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. When did you become chief executive of Bookshare?
Ayan Kishore:
About three and a half years ago.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. What took you so long to get here then?
Ayan Kishore:
I know the pandemic.
Jonathan Mosen:
Got to ask the tough questions, yeah. Bookshare is a much loved institution, isn't it? And it's kind of evolved because I remember I was doing this sort of stuff when Bookshare came out, which I guess dates Bookshare and me. But when Bookshare started, it was all about people volunteering to scan material and it was cleaned up and uploaded and it was kind of like the Napster of books.
There's probably a lot of people in the room who aren't even old enough to remember what Napster was, but it was like that and it's evolved. And now you've got this buy-in from the publishers.
Ayan Kishore:
Exactly. Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan. It was called Bookster at some point and we had to change it. But yeah, it is very different now. We still have some chop and scan that happens, but a lot of this is actually working directly with publishers. We work with about a thousand publishers directly, and every year, we add about a hundred thousand books.
And the idea here is that whenever a book is published, it comes on Bookshare at the same time so that this community can read it at the same time, and we are very proud of making that happen.
Jonathan Mosen:
Bookshare is available worldwide now. When it started, it was United States only. So that's an exciting development. And there are some states in the United States where Bookshare is available for free to absolutely everybody, library patrons.
Maryland is one of those actually. When I enrolled in the Maryland Library recently after moving here, I was delighted that I was able to get Bookshare. Are those sorts of programs under some degree of threat at the moment given changing political climates?
Ayan Kishore:
There are, I mean, I think we do work with different libraries and states, and some of them have come up to us this year and shared that their budgets are less than they had planned for, and they've had to make tough decisions. It includes, in some cases, not offering Bookshare memberships to their patrons. So that's an example of one.
The other thing is, as many of you know that Bookshare gets some funding to a grant through the Office of Special Education Program, so Department of Education and even that future funding is... which makes it free. If you're a student in America, you get Bookshare for free, whether you be in K12, higher ed, or adult. So that's amazing and we want to make sure that continues. But yeah, that has also got us a bit worried.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right, and I think it's important that people know that at the National Federation of the Blind, your leadership and some of our leadership who are key in this area have met and are talking about how we can work together. Because at the federation, we value Bookshare too. We wanted to succeed. We want people to have access to this information so that collaboration is ongoing.
Ayan Kishore:
Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it.
Jonathan Mosen:
And actually, that segues us nicely into a bit of an announcement we got. It's always nice when you're sitting here sitting on something exciting. And part of this collaboration that we've been working on, I guess reflects the fact that times are tough, your costs are increasing, inflation keeps happening, and here is a way where being a member of the National Federation of the Blind makes it another difference to your pocketbook. Can you tell us what we've cooked up here?
Ayan Kishore:
Yes. So we are very excited to announce this, and this is the biggest discount deal we've ever set up. And we thought it was appropriate to do it because it is the 25th anniversary of the organization that makes Bookshare. In fact, I just found out that Chancey, you've been a member for 25 years on Bookshare. That's amazing.
Audience:
I was close, I was close.
Ayan Kishore:
My God, you were close too. Oh, my God. Wow.
Audience:
I was there from the beginning.
Ayan Kishore:
Wow. Congratulations to all of you.
Jonathan Mosen:
And she's read all the origami books. All of them. Yeah.
Ayan Kishore:
Anyhow, but so we are really excited that we have this partnership that we are just launching this week with NFB, which allows NFB members to get a special discount on a Bookshare membership. If you've never been a Bookshare member, you get 30% off on your annual subscription, and if you're already a Bookshare member, you get 20% off on your renewal. So very excited about that. Basically, that brings down the price to almost a dollar a month, sorry, a week, which is I found out not even the cost of a coffee at 7/11. So there we go.
Jonathan Mosen:
So that's really exciting. And can we talk a bit about how NFB members avail themselves of this? So basically, there were two tiers as I understand it. One is if you've never been a Bookshare member before, you have a pretty nice membership to get signed up. And then if you've let your membership lapse or if your membership is about to come up for renewal and you're thinking, okay, I need to pay again, then there's a way to get that discount.
Ayan Kishore:
Exactly. Yes. So if you've never been a member, we definitely want to entice you to come try it out. The best way to do this is to go to bookshare.org/NFB. Very simple. All the details are over there, including how you could avail the discount. And yeah, we'd really like to sign up people as much as possible.
If you're at the convention, we are actually doing it on the spot and approving your account right away, which itself is a big thing, because in the past, approvals to actually get access to the copyrighted content to take a little bit of manual approval. But we have those people right now at the convention so they can do that too.
Jonathan Mosen:
And this morning, we were at an Accessibility Professionals Meetup and you were there, and it was great to get your perspective on that. And you were talking about some of the positive benefits that you see AI bringing to Bookshare. Could you reflect on that?
Ayan Kishore:
Oh, this is very exciting and very close to my heart. I am an engineer and I have met so many amazing blind kids who want to be in the sciences and in engineering, and that's been a passion of mine since I got to Benetech to make sure help Bookshare makes happen. So one of the things that we have done AI is we have made equations, particularly math and chemistry equations, that are images we have gone through and used, applied, basically trained AI models to make those equations accessible.
And there are tens and thousands, honestly, actually millions of math equations in books in Bookshare that have been made accessible all in the last couple of years. And we've seen the impact of that. You all have actually read more STEM content in Bookshare than ever before as a result of that. So congratulations to all of you.
So yeah, that's very exciting to us. There are a couple of other sneak peeks if I might provide. And these are capabilities that we are building and actually looking to pilot them from this year. So if any of you're interested, holler or reaches through the page that I shared earlier on bookshare.org/NFB, but some of this is trying to look at materials for learning beyond books and applying AI to see if you can actually make some of the materials, learning materials, particularly through models trained over learning materials accessible on the fly.
So imagine uploading a PDF or taking a picture of a math worksheet that was handed out to you for a God knows what reason and trying to make that accessible on the fly. So that's a scan feature. And then the other feature that we are piloting is something called a reading companion that allows you to, while you're reading a Bookshare book, basically launch a chat window to inquire with the content and do things such as try to simplify text or really challenge yourself with some comprehension questions as well.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're very excited about the Monarch era and when you do the numbers, it makes a lot of sense to give a kid a Monarch when they need one instead of the huge amount of hard copy Braille embossed books and the delays inherent in that, we can save a few trees and it's all good stuff. How is Bookshare ready for the Monarch era when the e-Braille format really starts to take hold, particularly for STEM students where they will be able to have diagrams that can be rendered in tactile form alongside the text in this e-Braille format? As my youngest son would say, are you down with that?
Ayan Kishore:
So that's a great question. That's really exciting. The good news is we have actually been working with APH on the e-Braille standard and been involved with that. And the goal is that when it becomes more widely available, which we are hoping will be soon, Bookshare would actually add e-Braille as another format like any book is available. So as you all know, it's available in five different formats right now, EPUBs, audio to primarily to text-to-speech and many others, but e-Braille will be one of that. So you could bring those books into the Monarch.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put you to work a little bit if I can, and what I'll do is I'll entertain a few questions from the audience, so they're just not, I mean that didn't come all the way to New Orleans just to sit and listen to our podcast. So let's see if anybody has any questions for you.
Joe:
Yeah, this is Joe. I just wanted to verify what were the prices for the signing up again for the new members and existing members?
Ayan Kishore:
So the regular price is 79.99 for a year, and if you sign up as a new member, it's 30% off, which if my math is good, brings us to around $55. And then if you are renewing as a member or if your membership has lapsed and you renew it, it's 20% off, which is around 63.
Sunish Gupta:
Hi, this is Sunish Gupta from Boston. Thank you for putting all the [inaudible 00:12:36] on Bookshare. It's been a great resource. How about the figures and graphs and diagrams and charts which are part of the book? How can we make all text as part of the standard offering, whether it's old books or existing or new ones?
Ayan Kishore:
Sunish, that's a great Question. So there's a few different ways we are trying to do that. We add a lot of books every year and there's no feasible way apart from us putting... There's two things we can do. We can put pressure on the publishers to make sure those books are more accessible. And we do that through a program which is the Global Certified Accessible program, which is one of the only independent accessibility certification for publishers.
So we've had big, big publishers like Wiley and Pearson's higher ed, et cetera, that goes through the process, and we ensure that any new books they put out actually are fully accessible with those diagrams all properly described. So that's for some of the new content. On the other side, this reading companion, which we are building out, we are hoping actually does provide descriptions that are AI generated that help with some of the charts and graphs that hopefully as that improves, the context improves as well.
So these are the two ways we are primarily trying to do that so that more of the charts and graphs are accessible. We did also do some things on our own that we are rolling into the models that we built. So we built the largest data set, about 60 to 80,000 graphs that were labeled and it's open if anybody else wants to use it, so that we could train our models to actually look at a graph.
We use the four most common types of graphs and actually produce tabular data from that. So those are some of the things as we process books into Bookshare and ingest them. We hope there'll be improvements, but it is a journey.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, absolutely. All right, I think we will take one more if there is one more.
Elijah :
This is Elijah, and I'm wondering if there's a way that you could make a few improvements to headings. So one thing is a lot of books do have good headings, but a lot of them don't, where the heading might just be a random sentence from the book or there won't be any. Instead of chapter two, it'll be a random sentence or things like that, whether it's extra needy ones and stuff like that.
And also when you download the DayZ audio and play on the NLS player, often the heading, it won't be pronounced when you go to next and previous chapter, you won't hear the heading because it's not defined as the heading in the DayZ audio, if that makes sense.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's not marked up right. That's what... Yeah.
Ayan Kishore:
Elijah, those are great questions. I'll actually connect with you offline and see also which particular books that you're mentioning, because when a book gets flagged, we can go back and see what the issues were and try to fix it. But we realize that some of these books are not perfectly marked up like you were saying Jonathan, but that's good feedback.
I'll take that from you and bring it to the team. Whenever you see a book on Bookshare, and I think we've added this recently, on the book detail page, you can actually report if there are accessibility issues with the book and what they are so that we can actually follow up on those books.
Jonathan Mosen:
All right. Well, thank you so much for not only being here, but for a much cherished service in our community. I know that people value Bookshare really highly, and at the National Federation of the Blind, we're extremely excited to be announcing this partnership with you. And we are glad you're here at convention. So there'll be plenty of opportunities to say hello, I'm sure, and thank you so much for being a part of Access On live.
Ayan Kishore:
Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you everyone.
Speaker 1:
Check out my podcast, The People Make the Places, Mike May and Friends travel tips, tricks, triumphs and challenges published the first weekend of each month based on 50 years of travel to 35 countries, 3 million flight miles so far, consisting of travel journals and recordings from the '70s to the present. When people ask me where is your favorite place to visit, I say, it is the people who make the places. Travel as a blind person can be complicated, frustrating, and fun all at the same time.
The choice for all of us is to embrace and meet the challenge of complex travel or to stay home in fear of it. I am in awe of the blind sailor, James Holman, who traveled the world in the early 1800s without any of the technologies we have today. No frequent flyer miles for James, just nautical miles. Have a listen to The People Make the Places, Mike May and Friends, available on all the podcast platforms including the Victor Stream.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now what I want to do is tell you who's on our panel tonight. I first met this panelist through Mushroom FM, the Home of the Fun Guys.
Audio:
The Home of the Fun Guys.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. In about 2011 when he started doing a radio show and it was called Brett Boyer's Bag of Goodies, which was a huge coincidence because his name was Brett Boyer. And to promote the show, he devised an earworm of a promo with a little jingle he developed with technology that allowed him to harmonize with himself. It was bizarre. These days he is harmonizing with the National Federation of the Blind and his bag of goodies consists of a lot of access technology. So I want you to welcome tech expert and president of our tech trainer's division, Brett Boyer.
Brett Boyer:
Thank you.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's good to have you here. Brett, you enjoying the convention?
Brett Boyer:
Absolutely. I always do.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. You've got your big division meeting tomorrow and no pressure.
Brett Boyer:
No pressure, no pressure. Tomorrow at 3:00, it's okay. We got this.
Jonathan Mosen:
All right. Well, we'll talk a bit more about some of the things you've noticed so far in a little bit, but I want to introduce our next panelist who I also met through Mushroom FM when he and his wife, Marianne, would call into The Mosen Explosion to tell me about the amazing meals that they were having while they were listening to the show. And those meals were prepared in the main by Jack. So Jack is the new age man many of us aspire to be.
I got to say though that my wife often says to me, "Jonathan, it doesn't matter that you're useless in the kitchen. It doesn't matter that you can't fix a washer on the tap when the tap breaks. As long as you can fix my technology, I'll keep you around." So anyway, these days our next panelist is cooking up magic as part of our NFB-NEWSLINE team. So give a tremendous welcome to Jack Mendez. You're doing good, Jack.
Jack Mendez:
Yeah. Hello, hello. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming to Access On live. I will add before I go here that you can show up to try to win a Pixel 9a phone because of our new Android app on NFB-NEWSLINE. Thank you.
Jonathan Mosen:
So you've got that new NFB-NEWSLINE Android app and it's on the Play Store now.
Jack Mendez:
It is.
Jonathan Mosen:
And the Android users are very excited about this.
Jack Mendez:
They are.
Jonathan Mosen:
And so you're given a Pixel 9 away.
Jack Mendez:
Two of them. Two Pixel 9a.
Jonathan Mosen:
Two.
Jack Mendez:
Yes, we have two, so.
Jonathan Mosen:
How do I get that?
Jack Mendez:
Yeah. So you can register at the exhibit hall at this point. We did have an open house today. Lots of people showed up, curious about NEWSLINE, NFB-NEWSLINE. So show up to the exhibit hall, register. You can be an existing subscriber or a new one. So show up.
Jonathan Mosen:
I love NEWSLINE, registered trademark. It's amazing. So I want to introduce our final panelist who was someone that I became aware of long before Mushroom FM was a thing. She is famously into origami, but when it comes to accessibility advocacy, she never folds. She is doing some nationally renowned work at the New York Public Library and I tell you, if she can make it there, she'll make it anywhere. So please welcome the federation legend, that is Chancey Fleet. Interesting acronym, Chancey.
Chansey Fleet:
Hey, folks. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Hope some of you got a chance to visit us in the art room. If not, we're all around all week. Anytime you need to get some of that restless energy out and do some origami or some drawing, you know where to find us.
Jonathan Mosen:
Is that what you do in the art room? I mean, what do you do in the art room?
Chansey Fleet:
What do we do in the art room?
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Chansey Fleet:
So many things. We do origami, we do drawing, sculpture, we have puzzles, flip books. So spatial communication is for everyone. Most people think coloring is visual and drawing is visual and origami is visual and none of those things actually are. So we can help you live the life you want in the arts.
Jonathan Mosen:
So when I think of tactile graphics, I think of you because you're like the expert on tactile graphics. And I have a question for you. I find it interesting that tactile graphics seem to come very naturally to some people and at least without training. They're incomprehensible to others. I still remember this thing that happened to me at school, and that was a very long time ago now, where somebody put a Braille diagram in front of me or sort of a tactile representation and they said, "What is this?"
It's an animal. And I felt this thing and I really couldn't turn those dots into representing what this thing was. And they said, "Ah, you are useless, Moses." And they took it away and they gave it to another girl in the class and she immediately said, "It's an elephant." She immediately knew that it was an elephant. Can somebody be taught tactile diagram literacy?
Chansey Fleet:
Absolutely. And like all literacies, it's a spectrum and the most helpful thing to do for people at any point on that spectrum is to encourage exploration and progress and not sort of sort people into buckets of those who are good at it and those who aren't just like Braille, just like anything. Sighted kids from the time that they're babies, grow up with a million images to look at every day.
They grew up coloring and doodling and there's encouragement for that. When I grew up, I had a pretty great advocacy structure around me, but when art showed up, I was invited to maybe work with clay or weave. It never occurred to anybody that I could do sort of the 2D representation of drawing, things like that.
And so I don't suppose that I was all that conversant with tactile graphics until I started doing my library work. So what you need is lots and lots of exposure. And what I do at the library and what I do with American Action Fund tactile graphics programs is give people a chance to experience all kinds of graphics and experience them again and again and practice interpreting and practice drawing. And absolutely, yes, everyone can learn. By the way, if you hand a blind person a graphic and you say, "Hey, what is this?" You are the same as the person that rolls up to you and says, "Hey, do you know who this is? Guess my voice."
Jonathan Mosen:
That's what it's like. Yeah.
Chansey Fleet:
Don't be that guy.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's exactly what it's like.
Chansey Fleet:
Nobody likes that.
Jonathan Mosen:
No.
Chansey Fleet:
Instead, you can say things like, what do you notice? What stands out to you? What questions do you have? Are you using both of your hands to explore? Sometimes one hand can explore and the other one can kind of follow along and be your placeholder. And there are all kinds of ways to engage and people have different learning styles and different rates of progress, and that's all good.
Whatever aptitudes you came in with, whatever history you came in with, the federation way is to help you be in community, to believe in yourself, and to be feeling safe enough and confident enough that you can get to a place where you can progress at the rate that is going to happen for you. And everybody can progress.
Jonathan Mosen:
Brett, you're naturally in the next position there. What's your take on tactile graphics and learning them and the value that they represent?
Brett Boyer:
So I actually just got a little bit of a crash course in this tactile art drawing last month with Chancey, came out to the Colorado Center for the Blind. We had an awesome drawing day where we learned how to draw and we learned about perspective and all kinds of really cool stuff, and then we got to teach the next day. This tactile graphic, tactile art is just amazing. I myself was one of those kids too. I was either putting, "Here, give him some clay," for about four or five years of art class in school and then the rest was, "Oh, you don't really need to be in art."
So I was very discouraged to even try. But honestly, learning how to draw and learning that I can draw has opened my eyes to now how I approach tactile graphics and what I'm feeling for as opposed to just kind of, oh, here's some dots, here's some lines and here's some circles. Now, I'm really trying to get perspective. I'm trying to understand the outline of what they're trying to show instead of a full side-on view versus a top down view. So very cool stuff.
Jonathan Mosen:
I feel like that we are sitting here among friends. It's kind of like being in the pub without the beer. And so I feel like I'm in a safe place to recount that I did not miss out necessarily on tactile diagrams as a kid. But you know what I did miss out on was PE. And the reason for this was even then I was negotiating and advocating and it turned out that, I don't know why, but I knew, just intuitively knew how to use the Apple IIe in the resource room at the high school, where they had a few blind kids there and I was one of them.
And we had an Apple IIe with floppy disk drives that really were floppy. Those disks were floppy, dude. And we had a Versa Braille. So every time you loaded a document, the thing would shudder and shake and clunk. And if you were lucky, you got your document. But they confiscated from me because I took it to economics class, and I found the audio overlay on the Versa Braille, and I was playing the Genesis Invisible Touch album.
Audience:
Oh, my God.
Jonathan Mosen:
And didn't know that the economics teacher had come back into the room. They were going to confiscate the Versa Braille. But anyway, I worked out how to use this, and it turned out that the teachers really didn't know how. And I bargained with them and I said, "If you pull me out of PE period, I'll show you how to use the Apple II." Quid pro quo right there. So that's what I missed out on. Anyway, what's non sequitur? What's your take on the tactile diagram thing, Jack? Because you've done a lot of training in your time as well before coming to NEWSLINE.
Jack Mendez:
I sure have, and I would say I am very excited for our young people to be working in this space. For me, I was also given clay. Now, I did get quite into pottery. I learned to use the pottery wheel and all sorts of stuff, so that was quite fun. But we heard a lot about gaining perspective, and I had the chance the last couple of years to look at different tactile maps which had graphics. And one particular thing that struck me was when I looked at maps and layouts of sporting fields like golf course, and this is from APH, and there were a couple of other, I think there was either a basketball or tennis court something. I had no idea that there were names of sections of the field and what their shapes were like.
I just sort of thought a sporting arena as a big wide open space and people just wandered around hitting balls at each other. So it was really good to understand that layout, and I know that that's something that people with, and she mentioned about people growing up seeing these things. I had walked around on a baseball field for example, but I never felt a model of one or never. And so when you can feel that shrunk down and then understand the scale when you moved around in the physical space, that really adds to your understanding of the entire world. So I am very excited for the potential there.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. So you were excited about technologies like the Monarch, I take it.
Jack Mendez:
I am, yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Have any of you been to the exhibit hall yet?
Audience:
Tomorrow morning.
Yeah, all day.
Jonathan Mosen:
We've got some audience members who have. Any of the panelists been?
Brett Boyer:
I was there most of the day today. I did some marshaling this morning, got a pretty on the escalator, and then I just dove headfirst into the exhibit hall. It was amazing and always great to network with. Even the most unlikely company you might think, oh, I've seen them, I've talked to them before. And then next thing you know, you're learning something brand new, just like hanging out with Benetechs.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. We've got listeners who haven't been to an NFB convention. So I should explain, the marshaling thing is quite extraordinary because you meet these people, and when you meet them in life, you think, wow, these people are so softly spoken and sort of gentle, and then all of a sudden, they turn into these voluminous ninja yelling people. "General session this way." It is extraordinary, but it's very effective and it's like it's good technology, it's just basic alternative technique stuff. So what did you see in the exhibit hall that grabbed you of anything?
Brett Boyer:
I saw my good friends at GoodMaps, of course.
Jonathan Mosen:
How's that been working for you here?
Brett Boyer:
I am still in the process... I think our mic died. I am still in the process of testing our GoodMaps, the GoodMaps app. I'm definitely a novice at it, but I love the fact that they brought back the look around feature, which is really cool. And actually, they've labeled, mark the entire exhibit hall. So you can literally walk down the corridor between the aisles and know what tables on your left and without actually having to zoom into each table.
Audience:
Cool. [inaudible 00:30:47] vendor. It will take you there.
Brett Boyer:
Yeah, you can put in one of the vendors and it'll give you directions. And that I haven't really played with yet, because I didn't bring my bone conduction headphones today, but I plan to do that. Definitely get a holster from AT guys for my phone. Just want to give a plug to JJ and yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Chancey, you've not been to the exhibits yet?
Chansey Fleet:
I have not been yet. I was at work today, doing the American Action Fund meeting and resolutions and the art room and I'm looking for it tomorrow. But if you're going to go to the exhibit hall, I can tell you what I know about from past years. You want to bring a bag because there's going to be all kinds of good swag and business cards.
And some kinds of the business cards are even going to have Braille some of the time. So bring a big bag and you're most comfortable shoes, get a lot of coffee beforehand and unlike this microphone, bring a backup battery so that you can use your phone to camera around and look at stuff. So I always have my go bag with my backup battery and my big bag and my caffeine and that's how you conquered the exhibit hall.
Audience:
[inaudible 00:31:58]
Chansey Fleet:
AT guys probably is.
Speaker 2:
Mike, get a speaker.
Jonathan Mosen:
We've been advocating for Meta to put Bluetooth support into the Ray-Ban Meta glasses for external audio devices. And one of the things I said in support of our advocacy around this was, guys, when you come to this convention and you want to demonstrate the cool things that the Ray-Ban Meta are doing, it's going to be really hard in the exhibit hall, but if you paired with a Bluetooth speaker then you'd have no problem. So it'd be great to see if they get there. Jack.
Jack Mendez:
I have been at the exhibit hall today. I was working the exhibit hall, so I can tell you that the crowds were amazing. I did work at the NFB-NEWSLINE booth of course, but I did have to say that I did pass several of our affiliate tables. They were selling T-shirts and chocolates and from all over the region, and it's very exciting. I didn't get to see any of the technology yet, but I'm excited to do that.
Jonathan Mosen:
I want to get your take on the panel about the state of AI. It was interesting yesterday. We had a discussion about the new AI features in Google, both Gemini and their related things and ChatGPT and also with Claude, which is quite a good AI for academic things. And there was so much interest that the room was packed to capacity standing room only, and we actually in the end had to turn people away. So there's a lot of interest in this. And somebody in the digital access professionals meeting this morning said something interesting.
He said that AI is accurate about 70% of the time in his anecdotal experience, and that if you had a recipe for a cake and the cake was only sort of 70% accurately baked, we wouldn't accept that. So I'm curious to hear from the panel just how valuable you find AI, where it falls short, where it's really doing well for you, and what advice you'd give for managing expectations around AI.
Jack Mendez:
I use AI in a number of ways. I do use ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude Code on the command line. Now Claude Code is for programmers, and I would say that if you're programming, you can get very, very fast, what I would call, prototyping results where you need to audit the code and read it. And I find it very useful there. With ChatGPT, I use it for assistance with drafting materials, working with PowerPoint, working with Excel, writing yourself formulas.
If you don't know, Excel 365, it now supports Python statements to replace VBA code when you're building more complex spreadsheets. So I use the ChatGPT, Excel, Python integration to write code for those. And with all of these things, I would say 70% for me is a little generous for the more complex stuff that I'm doing. I would say 40% or so, because I have to do a lot of finessing to get the results I know are accurate and the results that I need for the work that I'm doing.
But the thing about that 40% is that if I were to do that 40% level of work myself, the amount of time that I save that's generated that 40% of work is amazing for me because I don't have to do as much, and I can finesse it and get the other 60% in less time. So for me, the benefits there are, it saves me a lot of time with whatever project I'm working on. I also do work on open source models and are encouraged for the more techie of you, take a look at something called Ollama.
It is a command line tool also that lets you download language models. I've been learning to train my own models with my own source data, and I do find that I get more accurate answers when I can train using a local model. Lots of open source tools there, and I do generate even more accurate answers that are specific to me when I use that local system.
Jonathan Mosen:
And how is that spelled?
Jack Mendez:
O-L-L-A-M-A, I believe. It's available for Windows, Linux, and other platforms. I use it on the Linux side and you can research that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Do you find that it's better than it was? I mean is it improving, the AI?
Jack Mendez:
Yes, they're absolutely improving. I would say that I don't think the improvements are as significant as advertised. I think you have to become better at prompting and better at interpreting and being skeptical of the accuracy of the output. One other thing that I've learned to do recently is asking the AI to judge its own output based on criteria.
So you can say something like, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the accuracy of your own answer? And you can ask it to use external sources. So again, it's really about how you prompt the system to generate that output. You can ask it, re-examine the image you've just posted, describe it for me, and then re-examine the original prompt. And does the image you've generated reflect what I asked for?
So you can ask it to judge its own work. Of course, you have to then use your own judgment when looking at whatever it is you've generated. But the biggest thing I can say is that none of these AI agents do the work that if you read the marketing materials as effectively as they say they do. You have to still be a part of the process and ultimately assess the final output.
Chansey Fleet:
Most of us had a friend in high school or college. If you're super lucky, you might still have somebody like this in your life. There's no topic you can raise that they don't have some kind of educated sounding opinion about. You want to ask them about magnesium out of nowhere, they're going to tell you about magnesium for 10 whole minutes. They will be supremely confident and verbose and convincing and often flagrantly wrong in a way that you cannot readily detect. This person-
Jonathan Mosen:
Is like a marriage sort of discussion.
Chansey Fleet:
... very entertaining. This person is great at parties and they might even teach you something now and again, but you become careful as you learn with what you do with the information that this person gives you. Welcome to AI. You don't know what you don't know. That's why you're asking the AI and the AI doesn't know whether what it is telling you through its predictive analysis is true. So between the two of you, neither of you knows what is true. So sit with that a minute. Last year, I got NFB's most unwanted door prize, COVID, and I showed my test to three models and three models said it was negative. It was not.
So what I like to do with AI when I'm working on my own and when I'm working with library patrons is to identify things where it's easy to tell whether the output is usable and the stakes are kind of low, and it's kind of a fun thing. So a couple non-dystopian, non-harmful things that I've recently used AI for. Explain to me in plain language how to draw a frog. I don't know how to draw a frog, break it down into basic shapes, walk me through it, then let's take a picture with a different AI model and see if it sees a frog.
There's not too much that can go wrong for me there except maybe I squiggle something wrong. I like to read in Spanish. I read out loud to a voice mode AI and I ask it to translate to English. So I get reading practice and then I get translation of something I might be reading out loud that's above my reading level, and I'm learning a lot and it actually is useful. And if it gets a little thing wrong, that's not going to be the end of the world.
Of course, things continue to be refined and progress is happening. Accuracy maybe is overall improving, although I think it's non-linear. So I think we can approach with adventurousness and caution. And then if I put on my advocacy hat and pick one thing, most of the leading AI models can understand and generate lots of different kinds of graphics, lots of different languages, lots of different dialects. None of them can seem to scrape together a working understanding of properly spaced and contracted Braille.
And that's not because Braille is harder, that's because Braille is underrepresented in the training data. So if there's an engagement point, anybody feel like writing resolutions next year, let's get the leading AI providers on board with making sure that there's sufficient training data that we can get usable Braille. So I can say for example, hey, that really interesting democratic primary that just went down in New York that I'm trying to make a graph about. Can you label those bars in braille so I can see how people performed? Right now the answer is no, but 12 months from now, if we advocate, the answer could be yes.
Brett Boyer:
I don't know if it's just because I'm lazy, but I am just in love with AI from creator standpoint, from an instructor standpoint. I do know that it is not perfect, and I'm okay sometimes if my cake is 70% right, because that means the next time, it's going to be 75 and then maybe 80, and then further on down.
But if we don't try it and if we don't keep messing with the recipe and we don't keep taste testing it, that's what we're going to get. I think the more people play and try and do and work at it and train the data and do the things that Jack and Chancey are talking about and coming up with all these cool ways of using AI, to help us not just be independent but to help us almost be creative in new ways.
But I think it's really fun and creative and I think down the road, there's a lot of potential that we can do and see with entrepreneurship. I think it's just such a cool new frontier that's worth exploring, and it's worth setting up a little hut and trying to get along with the wild animals and things. AI to me is the future. I don't think we're going to get away from AI. I'm really loving a lot of the new Google Studio stuff.
People are always coming out with new projects and beta things to try under Google Studio like NotebookLM, which is a closed system for you to upload notes and links and audio and documents into all kinds of, it will put it into quizzes, it'll put into an AI podcast. If you haven't heard that yet, it's pretty trippy.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's a bit of a gimmick though, right? I mean after you hear it a couple of times, don't you think the novelty wears off [inaudible 00:43:11]
Brett Boyer:
It is, but if it's your material, so I know some folks who are like med school students who take their, it's all just their own notes and they love the digestible form of Campy AI co-host, but the point is that it's your data too. I know someone who creates stories, and they use NotebookLM to keep all their character sheets and everything all in one space. And what Jack was talking about, training his own data, I'm like, oh, I want to do that. So I mean, I'm have to get more techie like Jack, I'll have to work at that because I'm definitely not the first, the most tech person.
I don't know Linux and any of that stuff, but I'm really excited to be able to train my own data and that's the other thing. I want more blind folks to get in there and start working with AI and really start helping to train data and help be part of the system and not just an afterthought. One of the things I'm really trying to work at our center is to get into more AI with folks maybe coming up with some kind of working with Microsoft or Google. We have so many cool ideas. I think that the potential is there for us to really own this instead of waiting for people to tell us what to do with it.
Jonathan Mosen:
Obviously, a lot of us are using AI for identifying visual information or for engaging with vision information. And I'm curious to know of all the tools that are out there. Be My Eyes. There's the Aira Access AI. We can't yet talk about the Project Astra that some people here are testing, but there's also Envision AI. There are a number of these. We're seeing AI of course, which is that venerable tool on Android. You've got Lookout, and of course the Ray-Ban Metas, which have just gone so viral in our community. It's remarkable. So I'd be curious, if you had to pick one AI blindness specific technology that identifies the visual world for you, that describes the visual world, which one would you pick and why?
Jack Mendez:
I guess for me, that's going to Be My Eyes at this point. Be My AI provides incredible depth of detail. My wife and I were at the Spotted Cat the other night, which is a jazz club here in New Orleans. I was able to take a number of pictures from the audience from different angles just by moving my camera around, and I got descriptions of the band, the style of clothing. One of the guys was wearing a black cat T-shirt, descriptions of the windows, and the instruments. And I took it on myself to take a number of pictures, and then I picked the one that was most descriptive and send it to one of my sighted friends.
I send him the description and I said, "Pretty good for a blind guy taking the picture huh." And he laughed at that. He said, "That's a great picture." And just to get a compliment like that from a distinctly visual process for me, because I could then interpret or gain that interpretation from Be My AI using those descriptions. They just have a winning process on their back end with the additional prompts they had and the other secret sauce, whatever it is. I don't know of any tool that's better.
Chansey Fleet:
Well, whatever I answer now, it could be different in three weeks, right? And it's also quite task dependent. So for example, if I need to zoom in on something and get a super close-up view, it's going to be Aira Access AI, because it's the only one out of the pack of them that lets me really zoom in on an image. If I want to save an image with a description and not have a lot of hassle about it, it's going to Be My AI because it sends it right to my photo roll with the description attached.
If I want it to be context aware and maybe remember the vernacular that I talk about certain things in and what I like to prioritize and how much description I like and what kind, right now, it's none of the blindness specific apps. It's main ChatGPT because if I have told it that I do or don't prefer something, there's at least a 50 chance that it may quote, unquote, "remember."
And then I want to give a shout-out to the humble local models that are still AI. I don't know if anybody is a huge fan of the touchscreen elevator panels around here, but just on the off chance that you don't love pressing that one button that starts the count up, the live recognition point and speak feature on your iPhone, which is AI driven and which is a local model, which means it's not submitting your data anywhere, and it's not giving you any lag time, will track my finger and let me point at some text and then touch that text and trigger it. And I've been calling elevators without pressing that button. So today-
Audience:
[inaudible 00:48:11]
Chansey Fleet:
You're going to see me offline. Today, that one's my favorite.
Brett Boyer:
I don't have much to add except I love Be My Eyes. Like Jack said, what they've done with the back end, the way they've prompted everything, and the way they've filter things down, it's just amazing. I'm going to give a shout-out to PiccyBot because I know that Martin's been working tirelessly to get that going, and I think PiccyBot has some really cool things and that's the video describe app. So literally, I took a video a few years ago of my nieces and nephew, just having a good time in the backyard, and having them describe how the kids were dancing and what they were doing was just so cool. So I'm going to give them a shout, but Be My Eyes for sure is my go-to when I really need something well described.
I love arguing with ChatGPT. It's like my favorite pastime. I mean, fine-tuning my prompt engineering style. But other than that, I think, yeah, the gold standard right now is Be My eyes and what they've done and the way they've sort of taken this on and made everybody's lives is just amazing. We took a hike in, I don't know, April with our center at CCB, shout out. And the way it describes the pictures, it really has some great features and added things to it.
Jonathan Mosen:
It is not an election year for your division, right, Brett?
Brett Boyer:
It is not.
Jonathan Mosen:
No. Right. So they're not going to tell you to take a hike tomorrow.
Brett Boyer:
I hope not. I mean, I guess they could always.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. No, no taking a hike tomorrow. I would just add one thing to that and some really good answers from the team there. If I'm asking about something very specific, and I'll tell you an interesting thing, and I mentioned this on a previous episode, I have one of those wonderful big anchor power banks and it's just so wonderful in a convention like this, where you just have to keep things charging, keep things going.
What I found was that when I used various AI tools to ask how much capacity is left on that power bank, I got a radically different answer from each and every AI tool that I used, and it was extraordinary. So for those sorts of tasks, I do use Access AI from Aira, and the reason I do that is you've got human verification as an option. So if there's a very specific piece of data, you want like a number and you're not convinced, if the AI comes back and tells you it's 59% charged and you think there's no way it's that flat, then you can just push the button and the Aira agent will come back and tell you whether it was hallucinating or not.
Well, this has been a really fun discussion. I want to thank the panel we've made do with just a couple of mics, and it reminds me of an old broadcaster who told me once, "Jonathan, some of the best radio comes out of boxes," and so we make do. I also want to thank you and the audience for taking the time to be a part of this, because there's so much that you can do at convention and also for listening to Access On. And I do want to remind you that Access On is all about you.
So if you have any opinions you want to share, if you have technology that you think is particularly cool or that maybe you want to warn people about, Access On is all about the grassroots. We love to get your product demos, your opinions. We want to hear from you. And the email address to do that is [email protected]. You're welcome to send audio into us and also to just write an email down. So thank you so much. We're going to linger around a little bit if you want to say hello and thank you very much for being part of the podcast. It's been a blast. All the best.
Brett Boyer:
Thank you, Jonathan.
Jonathan Mosen:
Quite the topical tech tip and a lengthy one to end the podcast with. This is all about JAWS licensing and we thank Curtis Chong and Jim Barber for putting this together. And they write, Vispero has introduced new licensing options and prices for its JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion software. Many people have found the new licensing and pricing options are more than a little difficult to understand. In this article, we endeavor to provide a concise, clear explanation of the new licensing and pricing structure using JAWS as an example.
We believe that once people understand how the licensing and pricing for JAWS works, they will be better able to understand the new pricing and licensing for ZoomText and Fusion. While we include specific pricing information in this article, we also recommend checking with Vispero to obtain the most current pricing information that is in effect. Perhaps the most notable change in the JAWS licensing structure is the introduction of a subscription license.
A subscription license will stop working, i.e., JAWS will run in 40-minute demo mode when it expires. Types of licenses. Shown below is information about the two primary license types that Vispero is now offering for JAWS. There may be other license types offered to students, developers, IT professionals, and support organizations that are not discussed here. One, JAWS perpetual licenses. The perpetual license for JAWS is one with which most users of JAWS are quite familiar.
Historically, when a perpetual license was purchased, users were entitled to receive two annual major upgrades for JAWS usually released in fall before having to pay a software maintenance agreement, SMA fee, to become eligible to receive the next two major upgrades. The new perpetual license comes with a two-year software maintenance agreement, SMA, which starts as soon as the license is purchased. The maintenance agreement no longer relates to any major upgrade releases of JAWS.
Customers purchase SMAs to extend the life of the license by an additional two years. SMAs must be purchased regularly now every two years to keep the perpetual license active. SMAs are significantly less expensive than the initial cost of the perpetual license. SMAs must be purchased before the license expires. If the license expires, JAWS will continue to function normally, but no new releases will be authorized to run. So JAWS will begin to age noticeably as bug fixes and features are released that can't be taken advantage of.
The only way to bring an expired JAWS perpetual license up to date is to purchase a new license. In other words, to keep a perpetual license active, an SMA must be purchased every two years before the current SMA expires. Two, JAWS subscription license. The subscription license is a new type of license that is being introduced by Vispero.
This type of license acts more like a software rental. A subscription license is purchased for a one, two, or three year period. The longer the period, the lower the annual payment. When the subscription license expires, instead of only refusing new upgrades, JAWS reverts to running in demo mode. However, the expired license can be reactivated at any time by paying for a new one, two, or three year license.
Once paid, the license becomes active, the software will function, and all new releases are authorized to run. What we don't know is whether or not the reactivated or new license would need to be paid at the same annual cost as the original license, or whether something similar to a software maintenance agreement could be purchased to continue a license that has already been subscribed to.
The two versions of JAWS. JAWS comes in two versions, home and professional. JAWS Home is intended for use by end users for personal, non-commercial use only, and runs on all supported versions of the Windows operating system.
JAWS Professional is intended for use by organizations and end users for any purpose, whether commercial, educational, or personal. JAWS Professional runs on all supported versions of the Windows operating system. Additional options for JAWS Professional include multi-user enterprise and district licenses, as well as features like remote access, which allows you to establish remote sessions from your computer to terminal services using Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Citrix.
If the above paragraphs challenge your understanding of the universe, just think of JAWS Home as something you would use for yourself personally while JAWS Professional would be used in an employment or self-employment situation. Pricing for JAWS licenses. The type of license version of JAWS and the length of the license combined to set the price of the license. The professional version of JAWS costs more than the home version. The extra cost includes free remote access to terminal services.
In the long run, the subscription license costs more than the perpetual license, but results in the buyer having to spend a lot less upfront. Longer license periods have a less expensive per-year cost. Shorter periods allow for more payment flexibility. Here are a few examples of JAWS pricing. A three-year subscription license for JAWS Professional totals 2,778 dollars. That's 926 dollars paid per year. We're not sure what needs to be paid beyond the third year, whether it be a software maintenance agreement or a continuation of the 926 dollars annual payment, but we are sure that something will need to be paid to keep the license active.
A perpetual license for JAWS Professional with a two-year SMA costs a total of 2,267.50 dollars. By the second year, a software maintenance agreement fee would need to be paid probably on a biennial basis. A three-year subscription license for JAWS Home totals 1,869 dollars. That's 623 dollars per year.
We are not sure what needs to be paid beyond the third year, whether it would be a software maintenance agreement or a continuation of the 623 dollars annual payment. A three-year perpetual license for JAWS Home with a two-year SMA costs 1,548 dollars. Beyond the second year, a software maintenance agreement fee would need to be paid probably on a biennial basis. Vispero offers a discounted subscription license if the user is a blind person using JAWS at home.
This license currently called a home annual license is 104.50 dollars per year, and is available only to people living in the United States. Acquisition of this type of license is initiated by calling Vispero at 1-800-444-4443. The Jaws Home annual subscription license includes one-year automatic renewal, managed from the user portal, non-commercial use on your personal computers at home, installation on up to three of your computers and technical support and all upgrades and updates during the license term.
This type of license is ideal for people who are short on cash and need JAWS on computers they would use exclusively at home for non-commercial purposes. Well, thanks to Curtis Chong and Michael Barber for putting that together, and we hope that that is informative. That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind.
To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip, or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Mastodon.
To subscribe to an announcement only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org, or phone us 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314, and be sure to check out the Nation's Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.