Welcome to the sixty-fourth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
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Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week, it's an episode devoted entirely to questions and comments from listeners around the world. We'll talk smart glasses, Microsoft and Apple accessibility challenges, AI and smart devices. A listener seeks advice on tools to assist an older blind parent live independently. And would you like a sign of inaccessibility?
With that, we are receiving reports that Papa John's accessibility has regressed. It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to episode 64 of Access On. There you go. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me when I'm at episode 64?
I guess time will tell. Before we get into the main part of this episode, which is all about listener contributions, I do have something for you that may interest you if you are an Android user. Mediavoice is an Italian company looking for beta testers for its new Android app, which is called SpeakyAI.
That's all one word, S-P-E-A-K-Y-A-I. It's going to be launching in the United States market soon and they do intend releasing an iOS version at some point. SpeakyAI is a patented conversational screen reader that gives blind users full access to the digital world. SpeakyAI enables natural interaction through conversation, allowing users to ask questions and receive spoken responses in real time about any app, document or website including those that are not accessible with traditional screen readers.
So if you are interested in testing SpeakyAI and helping the company to improve it, then you are encouraged to contact Mediavoice. You can contact them via WhatsApp and the number to do that is +39 351 6143569. I will repeat that. It's country code 39 and then 351 6143569.
If you prefer to email, you can do that by emailing [email protected]. That's [email protected] and they will be pleased they say to offer remuneration to beta testers in recognition of the time, thoughtful feedback and valuable insights that you share.
We have had lots of interesting guests, some fascinating issues that we've discussed in recent times, but of course, we also have many interesting listeners with contributions to make, [email protected] is the email address if you want to be in touch and as listener engagement that we're focused on in this week's episode, starting with Rich Yamamoto who says, "Hi Jonathan. I've noticed an interesting quirk when trying to view attachments with an audio or video extension in the Mac mail app.
For some reason when audio and video attachments are sent, they get embedded into the email body and I don't see a play button when I view the message as opposed to the file in question, meaning that I can't save the attachment to work with it in other areas.
Is there a way to make them show up as files instead of embedding them into the message? This also means that it doesn't announce that it's attached." Thanks for writing in, Rich. You can control click the attachment if you can get your mouse cursor to the attachment and that will allow you to save it.
I'm also told that it should work from the file menu where you can save attachments from there, but there is also a more permanent fix and that is that there is a terminal command that you can execute. It's a little bit complex to recite it here, but if you do a search on this in some search engine of choice, you should be able to find the terminal command that you can execute, which will permanently change the behavior so that you won't see that embedded play button in an email anymore.
You'll just be able to save the attachment like you do any other file. Here's Christopher Wright who says, "Hi. I'm responding to Joe's concerns about the Windows 11 25H2 installer. Microsoft recently updated the media creation tool to include the patch Tuesday build from December the 9th, and I'm happy to report narrator works as expected. I'm not sure why it broke again, but we once again have a fix. This happened with 23H2 as well and it was subsequently fixed. Use the tool to either create a USB drive or an ISO file."
Thank you so much, Christopher. Let's go to Hungary where Peter is writing again and he says, "Thank you for publishing my message about how I missed good old WordPad. I'm typing this message in. Guess what? WordPad. I found the solution on a Hungarian mailing list." And he gives me a very long URL.
He says on this page are the older Windows components are available to that are no longer appearing in current Windows versions. WordPad works absolutely fine reports Peter, well, hopefully people can search on that and take a look for WordPad if they really want it back.
There are plenty of good text editors out there that are being maintained and have a lot of good features, but as my youngest son would say, "If WordPad is your jam, I'm glad that you have it back, Peter." Here's Darrell Hilliker who says, "Hi, Jonathan. First, I hail from the Phoenix chapter in the December 17 episode. I was intrigued by Maurice's mentioning inaccurate weather forecasts.
I think the crux of the problem here might just come down to AI hallucination, especially if he is asking Siri for this information rather than just accessing it through the weather app. I'm thinking this way because of my experiences with early releases of Envision's Ally app. I am located in Peoria, AZ and I had just held a conversation about this with Ally. Then I decided to ask for a weather forecast. I was told that the weather in Peoria, AZ was 20 degrees with snow.
Now, we all know, or at least most of us know that it never snows in Peoria, Arizona. My next prompt was, are you sure about that? After which I got an apology along with the correct forecast. I'm wondering if a more detailed Siri prompt like provide a weather forecast for Peoria, AZ from the National Weather Service might yield more reliable correct answers. I don't know because believe it or not, I am still rocking an iPhone 14 pro that doesn't have Apple intelligence capabilities."
Thanks so much, Darrell, for that. Yeah, it's amazing what you get if you say to an AI, are you absolutely sure about that? Sometimes that is the nudge that's needed to get the correct answer. Now, let's go to Melbourne, Australia and hear from Peter. He says, "Hi Jonathan. I was very keen to get up early in the morning to hear your webinar on password security. This is the one that we did last year now. 2:00 PM your time was 6:00 AM Melbourne.
Well, that's dedication. I wonder if you could explain the concept of passkeys in more detail, not the physical ones and how to use them as the inquiries I have made to organizations such as Telstra and our bank have resulted in nothing but blank looks so far. Well, that's concerning, Peter, especially from those organizations, but I'll give it my best shot. A passkey is a modern sign in credential and it replaces a password.
So instead of you typing in something secret, a password that you've either had a password generator make for you or something you've committed to memory, instead of typing that into a website or an app, your device or your password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden uses cryptography to prove this is really Peter in a way that can't be copied and reused by an attacker.
So you can appreciate right away this is way more secure than the old password method because we hear from time to time about people who've broken through some security or rather and downloaded a gazillion passwords belonging to people and unfortunately what makes us so much worse is that too many people use the same password across multiple sites and hackers know this, so if they're able to breach the password database of some site or other, they go away immediately and they try that same combination of username and password on multiple sites to see if they can wreak even more havoc.
So by having no password at all, they can't do that. You deprive them of their fun. So a passkey is built from a pair of cryptographic keys. You've got the public key, so that's sitting on the website or the app and then you have the private key.
That bit is stored securely on your device or in your password manager. When you sign in, the site sends your device a one-time challenge, your private key signs that challenge and the site verifies the signature using your public key and the private key never leaves your control. It could be stored in the operating system, so built way into Windows or iCloud or the Google Password Manager, whatever you happen to be using.
Or if you use a password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden which is cross-platform, it could be stored in the password manager. You would still approve the use of the key through usually something like biometric authentication, so touch ID, face ID or a pin.
So if you use a Windows computer, you might need to type in your Windows pin in order to log in, but that's pretty straightforward, just typing your Windows pin to log in instead of some sort of password that you may be tempted to reuse because that's simple, so it's way more secure than entering a password.
There is an increasing number of websites that support this technology now. Amazon does quite a few shopping sites here in the United States in fact do and the people at 1Password are operating a directory where you can search for sites that support passkeys, so you can set up a passkey.
Actually, I also have a passkey I'm pretty sure for Uber, so when I'm signing into Uber Eats or just the Uber app now, I'm no longer prompted for a password because I have a passkey set up and I just authenticate and it logs me into Uber. So it is pretty widespread now, so I hope that helps.
If you can switch to using passkeys over passwords everywhere that they're available, you will substantially improve your cyber security as a result. Now, we're going to the UK and we are hearing from Kevin Garwood who is in Cheshire. He says, "In response to your request about text editors and what people are using, I use Jarte. It's spelt J-A-R-T-E. Jarte is based on WordPad and therefore is compatible with Microsoft Word Doc format.
It may not have some of the advanced formatting features of Microsoft Word, but I find that Jarte works well for me in general word processing requirements. I as a church warden have to produce lots of reports and agendas, et cetera, and I have no problems at all and best of all, Jarte is free and automatically detects if you are running a screen reader and puts itself into screen reader mode. So give Jarte a try and you might be surprised."
That sounds pretty cool. Thank you, Kevin. I'll check that out in fact. Now, let's talk about one of my favorite subjects, the Brava Smart Oven. I've never eaten better since getting what I tell you.
Now, Charlene Ota is writing in and she says, "Jonathan, thanks to a comment you made several podcasts ago about your experience with the Brava. I had to check it out after several podcasts and reading about it. That was my Christmas present this year. Granted, it was an early Christmas because I got mine on Black Friday. It's the best thing since sliced bread." Well, that's appropriate given the subject matter, Charlene, she says, "We just got bacon grilled cheese sandwiches.
I've made several things now, and due to some oral surgery, I have to wait a little bit yet, but the ultimate thing I want to have of course is a steak. I can't wait. Thanks for telling us about the Brava and for your great and informative interview on Access On." You're welcome, Charlene. We had steak last night in the Brava.
It really does such a good job, and as I said at the beginning of the year, we had one or two wee mishaps where things got a bit smoky, but now that we are measuring the meat carefully, we have not had a glitch for a long time.
I'm just knocking on the wood, but we use our Brava all the time and we're being quite inventive with it and cooking all sorts of things. We've kind of started enjoying the Costco cauliflower pizzas, the nice and low-carb you see, I don't often have pizza eating the low-carb lifestyle that I do, but we do enjoy the Costco ones and they came out all crispy and nice in the Brava.
Really good purchase. Yes, I did pay for it myself and very much glad that I did. Richard Turner is talking to us about Narrator. He says, "Hello, Jonathan. I just got around to listening to your podcast concerning improvements to Narrator. You mentioned installing the Braille package for Narrator in the not too distant past that would prevent other screen readers from using their Braille drivers.
Did Microsoft finally fix that? I went round and round with Microsoft a few years ago about this and it had not been resolved as of a couple of years ago. It would be good to be able to have a Braille display working with Narrator and also with Jaws."
Richard, I am still hearing of problems relating to this. I'm not convinced it is completely resolved at this point. If others have had better luck and found in recent times that actually you can have a Braille display coexisting with Narrator and other screen readers, that would be good to know [email protected].
As I say, we continue to hear issues about this, so perhaps it's because people are running older versions of Windows, but as far as I'm aware, this is still one that Microsoft could do with a little bit more work on. So let us know if you've had experiences with this. James writes in and says, "Hello, Jonathan. I have been a listener of yours since the Main Menu days." Wow, that's going way back, James.
"And have a question. I have produced websites for various plastic model groups in my area using HTML code, but would like to use one of the web development programs that are out there for the sighted world. I use JAWS and/or NVDA and would like to know what you use to produce websites that are accessible to the blind community."
Well, I guess the big two, James, would be WordPress and Drupal and I have worked with both at the National Federation of the Blind, we use Drupal with a lot of success. Drupal is an open source project. There are a lot of blind people who've contributed to it over the years and it's in very good shape.
Similarly, WordPress is also in great shape and although I'm still one of those people who prefers the good old WordPress classic editor, I guess I've just been using it so long that using it that way has become habit for me. I believe that the new block-based WordPress editor is actually accessible, so if you're starting from scratch, you may well want to start using that and become familiar with it.
There will be other options I'm sure, content management systems, perhaps web editors where you can load individual pages in and work with HTML so people can comment on what they're using. I'm sure that would be a very useful discussion.
You can drop us an email to [email protected], but if you are using a control panel type situation where you can install content management systems, chances are that either WordPress or Drupal or both are available. You can choose the installation you want and you'll be up and running. It's a case of just becoming familiar with how each of them works.
Here's Roy Nash who says, "Recently, you interviewed a representative of Envision and you discussed the Ally solos glasses. I had difficulty understanding everything he said because of his accent. This is not a criticism. I have a hearing problem and some accents give me trouble. Besides, I have an accent of my own and sometimes I have difficulty understanding myself."
He says, "I found the podcast particularly interesting because I have wanted to be able to recognize people if I understand the gentleman correctly. I think you said that the glasses offered that feature. Several years ago, I purchased the first pair of Envision glasses believing that the feature was available on those glasses.
I was disappointed and I gave the glasses to a former student who was still using them. I am happy that he got some use out of them. I have looked at the website and watched the video of the Solos glasses. The video demonstrated every feature except the one that I was interested in. Can you tell me if the Ally Solo glasses have the feature which enables one to recognize people?
I would like to see that feature demonstrated. If the NFB orders the glasses, perhaps you would be able to do a demonstration of the glasses." Roy, we do have them here at the International Braille and Technology Center. I am not aware of that feature being available in them at this time. There is a lot of debate about this subject at the moment.
There was a New York Times piece that came out a couple of weeks ago suggesting that Meta is looking at this name tag they're calling it and trying to find ways that will allow us as blind people to recognize people while also preserving privacy.
One way might be, for example, that if you are friends with someone on a Meta platform, so in other words if you were sighted, you would be able to see their photo in the Meta platform. And if you saw them in the street, you'd know who they were because you'd seen their photo on Facebook or Instagram or whatever Meta platform that you have.
Then in that case, it would be permitted to identify somebody to a blind person. So these questions are very much now ethical and not technological problems, which is exactly the point that I was making when I addressed the National Convention of the National Federation of the Blind in 2025 in New Orleans that we are going to have to come to terms with these issues and come up with ethical solutions that give us access to information that people take for granted.
So it's good to see Meta taking a look at this and we look forward to further discussions with them. But to answer a specific question, I am not aware that the Envision Ally glasses are doing this at the moment.
Let's hear from Francisco Crespo. He says, "Hello Jonathan and audience, I would like to report something that is not technically an accessibility issue but a regression in terms of usability, and I know many of you will understand because we keep fighting against unnecessary verbosity.
Recently, WhatsApp added AI-based writing tools on iOS. The problem is that after a few phrases were typed on the text field, WhatsApp will send an alert to VoiceOver saying, "Writing help is now available." I have Braille screen input with keyboard echo set to off, and this message gets me distracted with every message.
I hope Meta understand that it's a bad idea and reverses the change. Another example now when reading through chats, if someone has quoted another message, it reads the quoted message first. The problem with this approach is that since we are participating in that chat, it's very likely that we are already aware of the content of that message. If they wish to implement such a thing, it would be better to read the quoted message at the end. Would you please suggest this to Meta?" Thanks, Francisco, for the feedback.
And here's an email from Germany from Daniel and Gary Wunder has written in with the same report and Daniel says, "Last year, a firmware update was released for the Zoom H1essential recorder adding three new features, the ability to record an MP3 format, AI noise reduction and input gain adjustment. The first two options are supported by voice guidance, but the third one is not.
The input gain values are added using the previous and next buttons with a range from zero to 100. Unfortunately, as mentioned, this is not covered by voice support, so we have to rely on sighted assistance or try to set it by guess. I believe this would not take much time to fix and would make the device accessible to blind users as well." Thanks for bringing this one to our attention, Daniel.
And Gary Wunder has been in touch on this as well as I say, he says he's been talking to the Zoom answer desk about this and that they're apologetic about the omission. They hope to get it fixed, so he's hoping that in the next edition of the firmware we will see this one addressed. Here's more feedback on the H1essential from Zoom, "My name is Stephen from Michigan and I have a bit of an annoyance thing with the Zoom H1essential digital voice recorder.
Although I have my recorder up to date and the AI noise reduction and the fact that you can change the file format is awesome. I have a bit of a complaint when you are in recording mode. The issue that I'm having is when you press the play/pause button, there is no tone or a voice prompt that indicates when you are paused or when you resume recording.
My question is how can I let the accessibility team at Zoom know of this issue or do you know something about the pause/resume feature on the recorder?" And Stephen says, "As always, let's go build the Federation."
Yes, let's go do that, Stephen, good to hear from you. We did have Samuel Greene on the podcast last year who talked about new Zoom recorders. I do believe he gave his email address in that interview and you can also contact Zoom by phone if you want to provide feedback. I imagine this might be one that others have provided feedback on already, so hopefully it's one of those things that they will get to in time.
This next email says, "My name is Brian and I'm reaching out because I recently discovered the Access On podcast and have been very encouraged by the discussions you share about technology and accessibility." Well, welcome aboard, Brian. We're delighted to have you here. He continues, "I'm writing on behalf of my mom who is 77 years old and a retired special education teacher.
She is visually impaired and currently only able to distinguish light and dark. She very recently lost my dad who served as her primary support in daily life, including driving and helping with tasks around the house." I'm really sorry to hear that, Brian, for you and for her. That's a tough thing to go through.
"His passing, continues Brian, has left her needing to navigate almost everything on her own. My mom lives alone in Ohio in a big two-story house. I live in Florida, but my sister, brother-in-law and her grandkids all live about 15 miles away, so she has strong local family support. We are planning to work with the Cincinnati Association for the Blind to provide retraining on some mobility and daily living skills she hasn't needed to rely on in a while.
She is comfortable with some technology. She uses the JAWS screen reader on her computer, writes emails and even produces a newsletter for her church choir. I recently updated her iPhone and configured Siri to be highly responsive to help with calling and texting. Now, I'm trying to compile the best assistive tools and adaptations to help her around the house.
I'm hoping you might have suggestions or experiences with, and there's quite a list here, TV accessibility options for someone who watches only cable, no streaming, including TVs or devices that help with channel navigation or audio feedback and menus."
I think I'll deal with these as they come up. So let me talk about this one first. There are a few options. All of the options that I'm aware of are smart because that's just the nature of TVs these days. Pretty much every TV connects to the internet, but that doesn't mean that you have to use those smart options necessarily.
So LG and Samsung both do some pretty respectable accessible TVs. They give you good speech feedback, configurable accessibility, and when you move through the menus, you should get feedback as to what it is that you are moving to. I don't know what cable provider you specifically have, but there are some accessible set top boxes as well with very good text to speech.
We have an Xfinity set-top box at our house actually and it has a voice control button so you can hold that button down and tell it what channel you're switching to. You can tell it to enable or disable audio description.
It has a range of functions and you can also watch on-demand content, although I suspect that requires an internet connection, so there will be other similar products that offer that as well. There should be no difficulty in finding a TV that will talk satisfactorily and a cable set-top box that will help navigate the menus. Next is voice or sensor tools to tell her if lights are on or off.
There are several light detector apps available for this purpose. Seeing AI, which is a very popular tool from Microsoft, which is free, does have a light detector in it, so that will make a high-pitched noise when there's lots of light and not much noise at all when there is no light.
If you really want to go the smart route, you can install smart light bulbs such as those from Hue from Philips. When you do that, you can ask Siri have the lights on or off and it will tell you definitively what their status is.
Outside of phones and smart things, there are light probes that you can buy that you could just switch on and they make a sound depending on how much light is available. Next, reliable devices or apps to detect paper currency.
For example, telling a 5 dollar bill from a 20 dollar bill or a 50 dollar bill. Again, Seeing AI will do this. There's also an excellent app called Cash Reader that does the same kind of thing and there are hardware options available as well, but if you're interested in an app and since she has an iPhone, certainly Seeing AI or Cash Reader will do the job just fine, and he continues, "Any other tech or household tools that you've found especially helpful for someone with very limited vision?
We are really trying to create a safe, supportive and empowering environment for her as she adjusts to this new normal without my dad. Thank you so much for any guidance you are able to provide. I am looking forward to listening to more episodes of Access On and learning from the community."
Well, thank you for writing in, Brian, and also for the concern that you clearly have to make this work for your mom. I have no doubt that you and she would benefit from a visit to the Independence Market, which the National Federation of the Blind operates.
We very carefully choose all of the products that we carry in the Independence Market so you can have a high degree of confidence that if you find something there, it's been evaluated, it's been assessed and it's good stuff, and you can shop online at catalog.nfb.org and make your purchases that way, catalog.nfb.org.
You can also give us a call at (410) 659 9314. That's (410) 659 9314. Choose the option from the main menu to talk to someone at the Independence Market and one of our specialists here would be happy to discuss any requirements that you have.
The one piece of advice I think is most important is to connect with your local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind. There is nothing quite like blind people learning from and supporting other blind people, and if your mom were to join the local NFB chapter, she will find plenty of support, companionship and lots of advice from people who are living the life they want as a blind person.
The website for the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio is nfbohio.org. You can head there now. It's a great accessible, informative website, nfbohio.org. If you have other tips that you might like to share as a result of Brian's email, do be in touch, [email protected] is the email address, that's [email protected]. We're going to take a break and there are more listener contributions when Access On continues.
Speaker 3:
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Jonathan Mosen:
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Turn your sense into independence. Enable Roundup at checkout on Innosearch AI today. This is Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. We're going to Israel to hear from Haya who says, "I've been trying to learn GarageBand on the iPhone. I can select an instrument and record, but I can't play it. On the Mac, I can't even start recording. I searched Google for advice and found a post on AppleVis where a user asked a similar question.
Another user said they were working on a user's guide, but it was 10 years ago. I haven't found any such guide. I think it would be helpful if you or a listener could create a segment on this. I read Apple's instructions for VoiceOver users on the iPhone, but I still have the same problems. Any help would be great."
Well, let's outsource this one, Haya, and hope that somebody can get you up and running with GarageBand. It's been a wee while since I had a play, so my memory is very rusty indeed of how you do this, [email protected].
If you can help Haya out with this, [email protected], but I have made a note of this and maybe it's something that we can add to our list of potential Access On webinars for the future. Here's Rakesh Jain from India. Rakesh, I bet that you are interested like I am in the Cricket World Cup at the moment.
Not going so well for New Zealand I have to say, but New Zealand did have a one-day international series win in India over India recently and that is so rare that I had to mention it, but let's get back to technology, and Rakesh says, "May I request you kindly to please prepare a comprehensive demo of the Sonos app, which is a great labyrinth where we get lost and return with nothing in hand.
That is it is so much cluttered that we fail to achieve anything. I have a Sonos Arc Ultra and I use it only with Alexa. Please help. I am sure thousands of blind Sonos users shall be thankful to you." Message received, Rakesh, yes, it's not as good as it used to be, unfortunately.
This is an example of where as Franziska was saying earlier in the episode, accessibility doesn't necessarily equal efficiency. There was a period where there was serious accessibility issues with the Sonos app.
Largely those issues are behind us now, you can do everything in the Sonos app, but it is nowhere near as efficient as it used to be before they made all those disastrous changes in 2024. So hopefully we can keep working with Sonos on improving the user experience. We'll see what we can do in the future in terms of taking people on a tour.
Basically, it just requires lots of swipes and it's difficult because you can't navigate the app by heading very much so it just is tedious to use, there's no doubt about that. Here's an email from Edward who says, "Hi, Jonathan, I got a pair of the new Ray-Ban Metas for Christmas." Lucky you.
"And find them really useful. However, it feels weird wearing glasses, since with my vision impairment, I didn't wear glasses at all through my life. I do wonder about a few things. Should I turn on auto software updates or keep them off? The thing is that I would like to know what's new in the update before installing it and I assume if I keep the auto updates on, it'll just install it and won't tell me."
Well, Edward, it's a personal choice thing. You can go and look at the release notes, the Meta website and they do publish them there. It can be a bit difficult to find sometimes, so if you prefer, absolutely go ahead and manually check for updates and have a look at those release notes.
There's nothing wrong with that and I suppose it does give you an option not to install an update, if you read somewhere on social media that doing so will cause you a problem, and he continues, "The other thing, a friend of mine has also gotten a pair of the Ray-Ban Metas, and in his case, the Hey Meta word doesn't work if he is on a call with me for example, but it does work for me.
Is this something that needs to be on? I have to say they are just great and they're not just for lazy sighted people as someone told me a few days ago. They're also very beneficial for US vision impaired people."
Thanks for writing in Edward. Always good when you get a new gadget and you like the gadgets that you've got. I don't know about Hey Meta on a call. I must confess never to have tried this, so if anyone knows what the secret is to making Hey Meta work when you are on a phone call, do let us know, [email protected] is the email address.
This next email comes from Maya, and it says, "I keep searching for software that helps me to read EPUB books on Windows with no result. Could you guide me to anything, if possible?" I would be delighted to do this. There is a wonderful app that is actively in development. It's coming along consistently and it's called Paperback. It's put together by a blind developer.
It supports EPUB and PDF and Microsoft Word files and help files, a wide range of other formats and it's really good. It's free as well. You can find it at paperback.dev, so go to paperback.dev, download this thing. I don't think that you will be disappointed.
And I should mention here that I have been delighted over the last few months to see a little bit of an explosion of apps that have come out from blind developers who are identifying a niche that needs to be filled and blind people are filling these voids ourselves, and in some instances, not all but many, AI is playing a real part in this, democratizing the software development process with tools like Claude Code, so it's a very exciting time to see blind people getting into this stuff.
Anyway, Paperback is out there and it's a tool that many of us are using daily to read a wide range of material. Paperback.dev is where you will find it. Josue is writing in from Quebec in Canada and says, "Did you experience this issue? If a person wants to join a Teams meeting, he must now enter the text in the picture or do an audio test. There is no checkbox. I am not a robot. It is a problem for a lot of my clients to access their meeting on Microsoft Teams on Windows."
I'm glad you raised this because I experienced this late last year when I was invited to attend a meeting that was being hosted by a federal government entity and I was curious about this. It was frustrating for me because I don't always find those audio captures easy to hear.
I wear hearing aids, I have a significant hearing impairment and sometimes that audio is just so garbled that it's impossible to proceed, and in fact, in that case, it locked me out of that meeting and I had to email the meeting organizer and say, "I can't get into this meeting because there's this inaccessible capture there." I haven't thought about it anymore because I haven't seen it since.
The Teams meetings that I've been on haven't presented me with that capture, but your inquiry inspired me to reach out to Microsoft and ask them about this and they told me that this is an option that a team's administrator can enable, so I would advise you to contact the team administrator and let them know that this is causing accessibility challenges. If they want to be inclusive, they need to turn this off.
I mean, there are other tools that they can use. There's the waiting room. They can boot people out of a meeting who should not be there. There are other things that they can do. For the medium term, Microsoft acknowledges this is not optimal. They are working on this and hopefully there will be some sort of way of just eliminating this pesky capture entirely or making sure that there is a genuinely accessible way for a blind person who may not be able to hear the audio to proceed.
Here's Chris Cook. She's writing in to say, "Hi Jonathan. I just got through listening to Access On episode 60 where a listener was feeling frustrated with editing Word documents, dealing with font changes that were time-consuming and challenging to identify and fix. I wonder if she has ever used the JAWS Text Analyzer.
I haven't used it much, but in my exploration, I found some training materials and information that might be helpful. The Freedom Scientific, FS Training podcast presented an episode that released on April 28th, 2025 about this very topic.
I also found a nice YouTube video of someone demonstrating working through identifying font and attribute changes in a Word document. Seems like this could be really helpful. Insert in the spacebar and then the letter A turns on and off the text analyzer. Then you can move through all the instances of text changes with Alt Windows I or Alt Windows Shift I to move backwards through the text changes. I hope this information is helpful."
Thank you so much, Chris, Text Analyzer is indeed a fantastic feature in JAWS, let me just clarify how it works. So you can use Alt Windows and I or Alt Windows Shift and I anywhere, just press that and it will jump you to the next issue that Text Analyzer wants to identify, or if you use the shift key, you'll jump to the previous one so there's no need to turn text analyzer on, that hot key always exists.
What happens though if you press the JAWS key with the spacebar followed by A is that just as a matter of course when you are arrowing through a document, if it finds a text analyzer issue, it'll just voice it for you as you proof the document. So what some people do is when they get very close to completing a draft of a document, they do the JAWS key with space and A to switch text analyzer on when they're doing their final pass of a document before saving it and considering it complete.
So it is a very useful feature. Ray is writing in and he says, "Back in the last years of my Windows days I took to using Firefox and just fell in love with it. Then in May 2009, I switched to the Mac, not too long afterwards, I heard that Firefox had broken all of the lovely accessibility I and other blind users enjoyed during my Windows days. I seem to recall you making mention of this and saying how terrible it was they did such a thing, and moreover, seemed not to care for the prospect of restoring it.
In short, they seemed not to listen at all. Meanwhile, a few of us were testing out Firefox on our Macs just to see what there was to see, from my perspective, a total disaster. Now, fast-forward to yesterday, I was beginning to study a little of NVDA, not because I am contemplating return to Windows, but merely to gain a better general understanding of what's what with this free Windows screen reader.
Firefox was mentioned at the material I was consulting. Suddenly, I found myself asking if what I'd heard was true that the folks over at Mozilla had been diligently working to make Firefox accessible on the Mac. Somewhat skeptically, I decided to download it and give it a try. What do you know? It works. Just to give you one actual example of something I was now able to do using Firefox that I cannot make happen with Safari under Ventura, the latest macOS this laptop will support.
If you forget your user ID or password, you need to enter your email address. Then do the usual capture thing. There's supposed to be an audio version if you're blind.
Now, under Safari, no matter what I try, I cannot get this audio to play at all just now using Firefox, I got it. So a major point to Firefox so far as this user is concerned." Thanks so much, Ray. Yes, Firefox has improved a lot over the years and is pretty responsive as well. I keep Firefox around because of that speed, but also because a lot of the other browsers are using the same engine under the hood, the Chromium engine.
Firefox uses its own, so there are circumstances where Firefox will render something better than other browsers will. It's pizza time or maybe not because John Real is writing in and says, "Hi, Jonathan. I'm writing to ask for some advice on my next steps to take on trying to get a major pizza company to make its website and app accessible and usable.
A couple of months ago, I was able to order pizza from the Papa John's website, which is papajohns.com with no problems. About three weeks ago, all that changed. Apparently, Papa John's has completely redesigned its website and its iOS app.
Now, both are completely unusable, at least to this blind user using JAWS 2026 and Firefox and the latest iOS with VoiceOver, a sighted friend went to the website and found that he could not navigate the website using the keyboard. He had to use the mouse.
The feedback on the Papa John's website only allows one to comment on an individual store. There is no general contact us address I could find. I called the Papa John's customer service line, registered my complaint and got an email address I could write to. I've written twice with no response.
I'm writing to ask for your listeners' advice on how to proceed next. I'm a strong believer that communication and talking are the best ways to resolve accessibility issues. I'm happy to do this, but I'm not sure how to proceed. Any suggestions?" John, thank you for taking the time to write us about this.
Rest assured that we too at the National Federation of the Blind would always rather sit down and talk to an organization if accessibility breaks in the hope that we can find somebody who takes the issues seriously and is willing to work with us to get the issues resolved. We have heard from others who are reporting similar to you that there has been a a significant accessibility regression with the Papa John's website and app.
At the moment, this is in the hands of Ron Miller who is our accessibility excellence advocate for home and independent living. Ron is collecting data, so if you have any experiences to share about the Papa John's website, including any workarounds, anything that we might be able to pass on to Papa John's, you are welcome to email him, [email protected], that's [email protected].
It is undoubtedly the case that there are times when the National Federation of the Blind can break through in a way that's much more difficult for individual consumers.
We hope that this is the case in this situation and that we can work together on getting it resolved. So here's hoping and we encourage any Access On listener with something to share about this to email Ron and we'll gather what information we can. Now, we are off to Belgium and Bart Simons is writing in, Bart says, "Thank you for all the information about Monarch and Dot Pad.
Will there also be attention to the Graphiti Plus from Orbit?" Yes, there will. We are having our service right now and when we get it back and it's up and running and in good shape, we will certainly come back to the Graphiti. Bart says, "I only saw the three devices in exhibits and I have no hands-on experience with these devices.
What I liked about the Graphiti is that the dot height is adjustable, which helps in understanding tactile graphics. I also found that the distances between brown dots felt more natural and closer to the spacing that I'm used to.
There is also the Tactonom, that is spelt T-A-C-T-O-N-O-M and that's from a company called Inventio." Bart says, "I don't know if they have a partner in the US who is showcasing the device. It has the biggest tactile surface of all four products and they have clever applications for it in education and beyond. Very exciting times indeed, after so many years of experimenting, several products are coming to market."
Thank you, Bart. That is one that I have not heard of before, so we'll check that out, because if possible, we would like to get one for the International Braille and Technology Center. This email comes from Mike Calvo. He writes, "Hello, Jonathan. I just finished episode 62 and I'm really glad you aired it.
You handled that conversation well. You asked real questions. You didn't let it drift into policy, comfort language, and you gave Ronza space to say what a lot of blind federal employees are living right now.
Let me say this clearly, the NFB is doing serious work, collective advocacy matters, showing up in person matters, getting laws passed like Marilyn's matters. That kind of organized pressure works and I respect it deeply, but listening to this episode, I had two reactions at the same time. Validation and urgency, validation because it was finally said plainly, a reader is not compliance.
A workaround is not compliance. A reasonable accommodation is not compliance. Independence is the standard that needed to be said, but urgency because we are still dealing with structural problems decades into 508, self-enforcement does not work. VPATs without consequences do not work. Procurement without real testing does not work.
Accessibility treated as an afterthought does not work and with the mess this current administration has made of accessibility infrastructure, we cannot afford to just wait for things to normalize. We as a community of blind people need to push harder and smarter.
We need to treat accessibility as leverage. If accessibility is a breach of contract, then it needs to be treated like one. Vendors who misrepresent compliance should face consequences that actually hurt. Otherwise, this stays performative. We need to push at the state level. If the federal government weakens enforcement, states must step up, the more states that adopt strong procurement standards with penalties, the more vendors will comply nationally.
We need to stop framing accessibility only as equity language and start framing it as operational integrity. Accessibility failures are productivity failures. They are security risks. They are taxpayer waste. That language crosses political lines. We need automation and infrastructure, not just accommodation and complaint cycles.
Accessibility has to be baked into development pipelines and procurement systems, not handled through human workarounds after the fact, and we need data, public scorecards, transparency, real visibility into which agencies are compliant and which are not.
Sunlight creates leverage. None of this diminishes the work NFB is doing. It builds on it, but we as a community cannot assume the system will fix itself. We cannot assume guidance alone will move the needle. We have to create pressure that is consistent, informed and strategic. This episode was important because it didn't pretend everything is fine. It shows where things are fragile.
Now, we take that information and act on it. Thank you for putting this conversation on the record." Well, thank you for your steadfast contribution, Mike, and of course, there is always a place for anyone in the National Federation of the Blind who wants to advance the agenda of accessibility and compliance and making sure that entities are held to account.
Now, here's an important public service announcement from Curtis Chong. He says, "This is Curtis Chong, treasurer of our Aurora chapter and the NFB in computer science.
I have been distributing the following advisory as widely as I can and I'm now working with Microsoft to see what can be done about the inability of Outlook to connect to Yahoo Mail with a comcast.net address that has been migrated over to Yahoo. Here is the advisory. If your email address is not something at comcast.net, feel free to disregard this. However, if your email is being handled by Comcast, and more importantly, you use Microsoft Outlook to send and receive your Comcast email, then please pay heed to this.
Starting in June 2025, customers with a Comcast email address were being invited to upgrade their email account to Yahoo Mail for a better email experience at no extra cost. Parenthetically speaking, what this represents is a not so well hidden attempt by Comcast to reduce the number of customers for whom it needs to handle email. According to the Xfinity page on this subject, your comcast.net email address stays the same as to your messages, folders and contacts.
Xfinity says this is an upgrade. We are offering customers at no cost so they can access their email on a better platform with enhanced security, more features and a mobile app for easy access on the go. I have been working with individuals whose Comcast emails were with their permission transferred to Yahoo.
While their emails are reasonably accessible using Yahoo's web mail interface and while comcast.net emails handled by Yahoo are retrievable using the native iPhone mail program, it has been virtually impossible to connect Microsoft Outlook to comcast.net emails that are processed by Yahoo email servers.
I am working with the folks at Microsoft and Yahoo in an attempt to resolve this issue, but so far, I have not had any luck solving this problem. The bottom line, if you rely on Outlook to send and receive comcast.net emails, do not accept Comcast's invitation to have your emails transferred. They say upgraded to Yahoo."
Thank you for the advisory, Curtis, and hopefully it saves people a lot of hassle if they haven't done that yet. Now, recently, we were speaking with Michael Hansen from AppleVis about their report card which talks about Apple bugs.
Hopefully, Scott Rutkowski from Australia had an opportunity to fill this in because he sent email that he has forwarded to Apple Accessibility summarizing some problems he is having. He says, "Dear Apple Accessibility, I am writing to express my deep disappointment and frustration regarding a critical accessibility bug within the email app that remains unresolved in iOS 26.3.
I first reported this issue in December last year. At that time, I was assured by your team that the matter was being investigated. However, months later, the core functionality of the email app remains broken for VoiceOver users. When composing a new email, the toolbar buttons for insert photo and add attachment are completely inaccessible via VoiceOver.
When swiping through the interface, these elements are not detected, making it impossible to attach files or media independently. While I have always relied on Apple's commitment to inclusion, it feels as though accessibility is increasingly taking a back seat. Critical bugs reported months ago are persisting through multiple public releases. Users with sight can use the mail app without friction.
While VoiceOver users are being left behind by deteriorating user experience. As a loyal customer, it is disheartening to feel that the tools I rely on for daily communication are no longer a priority for the engineering team. I ask that you please escalate this feedback to the appropriate engineering department immediately. Accessibility should be a fundamental part of the operating system, not an afterthought that stays broken for months at a time."
Scott, thanks for sharing that email, not to detract from it in any way because it is a mission-critical bug, but in the meantime, if you want to get the work done, there is a convoluted workaround and I'll share that with you and other listeners just so it can keep you going. In the meantime, let's hope for a speedy resolution. What you do is you go into the message body of an email message, so you choose to compose a message.
You go into the main area of that message, then you perform a three finger single tap. When you do that, there's a little menu that comes up and it includes a couple of items like paste, unintuitively enough, if you double tap on the word forward, when you flick right through that menu, that exposes a lot more of the menu, so you flick right after double tapping on forward, and eventually you will get to the option to attach a file to an email. Not exactly intuitive, but it does work and it does mean that you can get your emails attached for now.
Eric Duffy:
Greetings fellow Federationists and Access On podcast listeners. This is Eric Duffy, Treasurer of the Capital Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio. Jonathan, congratulations on episode 61 and 62 of Access On. Episode 61 was recorded shortly after the Washington Seminar and Jonathan interviewed President Riccobono not only about our legislative initiatives, but many other issues of importance to blind people and to the Federation. It was a brilliantly done podcast on both sides.
Jonathan did a tremendous interview, but President Riccobono clearly and strongly laid out the position of the Federation on many issues and explained how he reaches some of the decisions he does as President and why this work is important to blind people throughout the country and sometimes throughout the world, whether or not they're members of the Federation.
This was a vintage Federation podcast. Then in episode 62, Jonathan interviewed folks from the US Access Board, followed by an interview with Ronza Othman, who is president of our government employees division.
Ronza was spot on. She was factual and did not hold back, which is exactly what those of us who know Ronza to any degree would expect from her. Again, the podcast was well done by both Jonathan and Ronza. If you haven't had the opportunity to listen to either one or both of those, I very much encourage you to take the time to do that. Great work, Jonathan.
Thank you. On the technology front, I will say that it was about a year ago that I first submitted a contribution to this podcast in which I asked if anyone knew whether MLB was accessible or particularly whether the Beat the Streak part of MLB was accessible. It turns out that it was, it was accessible enough for a few of us in Ohio to engage in a contest throughout the 2025 baseball season. I happened to lose a little money in that contest, but that was okay.
I plan to win the contest this year and I'm hoping that once again Beat the Streak will be accessible enough for those of us using VoiceOver to play. Also, I want to say that I have taken a little walk down the experimentation aisle with televisions. Over the summer, I bought a Vizio TV and I found the screen reader to be very slow and difficult to use no matter what I did.
It was a frustrating process and I literally gave away a brand new TV out of frustration. I contacted Vizio several times. They did not seem to at least be able to put me in contact with anyone who had any knowledge about accessibility or the screen reader, and so eventually I went back to a tried and true product and bought Amazon Fire TVs. I purchased one Amazon Fire TV for my living room, one for my bedroom. In the living room, I now have an Apple TV connected to the Amazon Fire.
And for those of you who are unsure, the Apple TV is simply a set-top box without a television of some sort to connect it to, the Apple TV does nothing for us. In my bedroom, I have the Xumo box from Spectrum connected to that Fire TV. Both of these devices work very well and of course are very accessible. Also, over the summer, I bought an Ecobee thermostat. I'm very pleased with this thermostat.
I can control it from my phone or from the Amazon device, and both ways work very well. The one thing is that I did have to buy an extended power kit before I could connect the thermostat, so it took some time to figure that out, but the Ecobee tech support was extremely helpful. So those are my comments on technology for now. And again, thank you for your work, Jonathan, and to everyone who supports Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thank you, Eric. Certainly appreciate your positive and encouraging feedback. Glad you got the Beat the Streak working okay. I got to say I feel a bit guilty because the Orioles had a really bad season last year and I feel like I've jinxed them since I arrived or something.
So I am hoping for good things from the Orioles. I did go to the ballpark last year, that was a bit demoralizing in terms of the score. So all being well, the Orioles will make it all the way, all the way to the World Series in 2026. 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 announcements 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.