Welcome to the seventy-third episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
This week on Access on:
- John Ternus to become Apple's CEO. What might it mean for accessibility 0:00
- An examination of home audio options 14:45
- Obtaining support for your smart home 39:55
- Jonathan Mosen describes his smart home, and Josh.ai 40:44
- Closing and contact info 1:00:37
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Speaker 2:
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind.
John Ternus will become Apple's CEO in September. What might it mean for accessibility? We conclude our highlights package of our smart home webinar, looking today at home audio. And what's possible if you push the boat out beyond standard consumer level home automation?
It's Jonathan Mosen of the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to episode 73 of Access On. And let's start right off with a story that came out just after we finished putting last week's Access On together. Apple will soon have a new chief executive.
On April 20th, the company announced that Tim Cook, who's led Apple for nearly 15 years, will hand over the reins to John Ternus. He's the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering. Tim Cook becomes Executive Chairman on September the 1st, the same day that John Ternus formally takes the CEO title and joins the board of directors.
Now, understandably, we have received numerous queries from people who use Apple's products and their accessibility features asking what kind of steward of accessibility will John Ternus be? So let's take a look at who he is, how he got here, and what the public record tells us, and just as importantly, doesn't tell us about his posture on accessibility.
John Patrick Ternus is 50 years old. He was born in May 1975. He grew up in California. He's been working for Apple for nearly a quarter of a century, and on September the 1st, he will be Apple's eighth chief executive in the company's 50-year history.
The Apple press release announcing the transition quotes Tim Cook calling John Ternus, and I'm reading directly, "A visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count and without question, the right person to lead Apple into the future."
Ternus studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, graduating in 1997. At Penn, he swam on the varsity men's team, and interestingly, from an accessibility perspective, his senior design project was a mechanical feeding arm controlled by head movements intended for people with quadriplegia. That product is the single most concrete disability related moment in his documented history, and of course, it's from 1997 before Apple.
After Penn, he spent four years from 1997 to 2001 at Virtual Research Systems in Santa Clara, designing virtual reality head-mounted displays. In retrospect, that looks like a foreshadowing of his later oversight of Apple Vision Pro, a point Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has made repeatedly. Ternus joined Apple in July 2001 on the Project Design Team.
His first project, as he recounted in a commencement speech at Penn Engineering in May 2024, was the Apple Cinema Display, the large clear plastic desktop monitor. He told graduates that on his first day, he "wasn't sure I belonged there" because his colleagues around him seemed so much smarter and more confident.
From there, he climbed steadily through Apple's hardware organization. He became Vice President of Hardware Engineering in 2013, taking charge of Mac, iPad, and later, AirPods on the iPhone 12 line. In 2020, he took direct command of iPhone hardware engineering. And then on January 25th, 2021, Apple announced that Ternus was becoming Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, joining the executive team.
Over the next five years, his portfolio only grew. In late 2022, he picked up Apple Watch hardware. That was part of the reshuffling after Jony Ive's departure. In January 2026, Bloomberg reported that Cook had quietly given him oversight of all of Apple's design teams, a role previously held only by a very short list of people, including Ive himself, Cook, and Jeff Williams. By early 2026, he also oversaw Apple's secretive robotic unit and aspects of environmental sustainability and product marketing.
The product line he has shepherded is vast. It includes the full Apple Silicon transition of the Mac from the M1 in 2020 through the M4 generation, the entire iPhone lineup up until the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and the new iPhone Air launched in September 2025, AirPods, including the Pro 2 and Pro 3 with their hearing health features, Apple Watch, including the Ultra 3 with its 3D-printed Titanium case, Vision Pro, and most recently, the 599 dollars MacBook Neo, which was unveiled in New York on March 4th, 2026.
The New York Times credits him as a key leader in the Intel to Apple Silicon transition. Bloomberg also credits him with pushing Apple to build a distinct iPad operating system and with creating the magnetic stylus and keyboard systems for iPad. Not every bet has landed though. Bloomberg has reported that he championed the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, later discontinued, and that he internally opposed development of Vision Pro and the now canceled Apple Car Project.
Colleagues quoted in Bloomberg and The New York Times describe him as charismatic, well-liked, and decisive. One source who worked closely with both Cook and Ternus told Bloomberg that Cook presented with an A or B choice tends to ask a series of questions while Ternus will choose. It could be right or wrong, but at least it's a decision. Cameron Rogers, who is a former Apple engineering manager, told The New York Times, "If you want to make an iPhone every year, Ternus is your guy."
As for why he got the job and others did not, the succession story has three threads. First, Jeff Williams, long seen as the heir apparent, stepped down as chief operating officer in July 2025, and then retired fully on November 14th, 2025. Apple called it a long-planned succession. Williams is 62, and reporting by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who is a pretty reliable source most of the time, indicated that the board wanted a longer tenured successor.
Second, other executive contenders such as Craig Federighi in Software, Eddy Cue in Services, Greg Joswiak in Marketing, and Deirdre O'Brien in Retail are mostly in their early 60s. Ternus, at 50, mirrors Cook's age when he took the job in 2011, positioning him for a potential decade or more in the chair. Third, both Gurman at Bloomberg and John Gruber in Daring Fireball have argued that Apple wanted a product-focused engineer back at the top as the company navigates artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and home robotics.
So let's talk accessibility specifically. And unfortunately, John Ternus has essentially no public on-record statements about accessibility as a topic. We searched Apple keynotes, Apple press releases, and other statements. I could not locate a single instance in which John Ternus speaks directly and substantively about voiceover, Braille, disability, or inclusive design using those words.
The one tangential on record quote came in Apple's September 9, 2024 press release announcing hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2. Ternus says, and I quote, "With AirPods 4, customers can enjoy active noise cancellation and the most advanced audio experience ever in an open-ear design." But the explicit reference to hearing loss and hearing aids came from Tim Cook and others.
Ternus has also used the word "accessibility" in a different sense when he described the 599 dollars MacBook Neo as "making the Mac experience even more accessible to more people around the world." That is accessibility as affordability, not accessibility as disability inclusion. That said, consider what has actually shipped under his hardware leadership between January 2021 and today.
The hardware foundation is, by any measure, strong. The shift to USB-C on iPhone in 2023 means a single cable now pairs blind users brow displays, audio interfaces, and storage across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The Action button on iPhone 15 Pro and later and the camera control on iPhone 16 give users programmable hardware controls that can be mapped directly to magnify voiceover or a custom accessibility shortcut.
The H2 chip in AirPods Pro 2 became the platform for the first FDA-authorized over-the-counter hearing aids, and that was cleared on September the 12th, 2024. Apple Silicon has vastly improved voiceover's speed on the Mac. LiDAR on Pro iPhones enables door detection and people detection in Magnifier, and Vision Pro for all its commercial struggles shipped with a remarkably competent accessibility stack, including voiceover, point of control as an alternative to iTracking, Switch Control, Dwell Control, Zoom, and sound actions. Many blind people did, however, express disappointment that there was no ability for third-party apps such as visual interpreter services to leverage Vision Pro.
The software side, of course, is where the headline blind user features come from, and Ternus has not had direct involvement in that. As the recent AppleVis Report Card makes clear and as listeners to Access On have reported, concerns remain regarding long-term software bugs that in some cases, have existed for years without remedy.
Voiceover on the Mac in particular is the source of considerable frustration. No one disputes the power and performance of Apple Silicon that powers the Mac, but voiceover on Mac incurs consistent and fair criticism. Only time will tell if Ternus will pay attention to those issues as CEO.
The institutional machinery of accessibility at Apple is deep, tenured, and unlikely to be disrupted by CEO change in the short-term. The hardware decisions Ternus has made over five years have been on balance accessibility positive. They are, however, not the same thing as public advocacy. Tim Cook, by contrast, personally advocates.
He did so at the 2014 shareholders meeting pretty famously on February the 28th of that year when he told a shareholder from the National Center for Public Policy Research, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the return on investment." I have cleaned the quote up a tiny bit. And then he added, "If you want me to do things only for return on investment reasons, you should get out of this stock."
He spoke up on accessibility at the Auburn University Awards at the United Nations in December 2013, calling accessibility a matter of human dignity. He has spoken up repeatedly on the annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day posts, and he did so sitting down at Apple Park in 2017 when he called accessibility, and I quote, "a core value of Apple."
That public voice matters. It shapes shareholder expectations, developer priorities, and the way the broader technology industry understands its obligations. Ternus, as of today, hasn't provided that voice. He may. Perhaps he just hasn't had the opportunity. He has not yet though.
Tim Cook isn't disappearing. As executive chairman, he'll continue per the Apple press release to engage with policymakers around the world. That likely preserves his public-facing advocacy role on civil rights questions, including accessibility, at least for transition period. So we will all be watching with interest.
We'll see whether Ternus uses any of his first keynotes as CEO to say in his own words what accessibility means to him and to Apple under his leadership, and whether Apple accessibility will be sufficiently resourced under his leadership to ensure that defects that would not be considered acceptable to non-blind people are also considered unacceptable for blind people to put up with. We wish John Ternus well in his new role.
Do you have any thoughts on what the ascendancy of John Ternus at Apple might mean for accessibility? By all means, share them with us. [email protected] is the email address. You can attach an audio clip to that email or you can write it down. [email protected].
Speaker 4:
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Jonathan Mosen:
You're with Access On from the National Federation of the Blind, and now we are concluding our highlights of the webinar that we did back in September of 2025 on the smart home, and we're going to be talking this week about audio in the smart home.
Multi-room audio systems allow you to play music throughout your home using multiple connected speakers. And that means that you can enjoy synchronized sound in every room or different audio in each space that you have. And you control everything centrally, often, through a smartphone app.
You can use voice commands as well. You can start a playlist in the living room, say, and then have it continue in the kitchen and the bedroom, and turn on an audiobook in one room while someone else streams music in another, and it's all controlled by this central system. The result is, really, this immersive audio experience right across your house.
When it comes to multi-room audio, Sonos is arguably the pioneer and the most recognized name, and Sonos offers a series of high-quality smart speakers. They're renowned for staying perfectly in sync throughout your home when they're grouped. And certainly, in the early days of Sonos, that was quite an art form. Technology's come a long way, and others have caught up, but Sonos cracked it first.
So if you play a song on multiple Sonos speakers, they will all stay time-aligned. There's no echo, or lag, or anything like that. Sonos provides quite a range of speaker types to fit different rooms and different needs.
They've got small bookshelf speakers, and you might want to nab those while they last if you want, because the partnership that's created, those bookshelf speakers is coming to an end, and they have large soundbars and even portable battery units. And I go into some of these models in a little bit. So it doesn't matter what the form factor is. All those devices work together over Wi-fi.
Sonos' focus is on easy user experience, and that has become a little bit arguable of late, and believe me, I'll come back to that. Setup is typically very straightforward. It's plug and play for the most part, and the system is designed so that even if you're not particularly technical, you can get it up and running, you can add speakers as you need to. There are some exceptions to this for a blind person.
There are a few Sonos products, including the Connect and some of their Sonos Subs where you have to enter a PIN, which is located on the device. You are going to need sighted assistance of some kind to find what that PIN is. Usually, something like Aira is sufficient, although it can be located in some pretty inconvenient places, particularly with the Subs, which are mighty, big, and heavy.
And sometimes it can be difficult to angle the camera just right so that someone on Aira or Be My Eyes can see what that number is. The good thing is though, I suppose, that the PIN never changes. So once you have it, save it in a safe place just in case you need to set it up again, and you'll be able to refer to it.
Sonos also integrates with many popular music services, which you can control from Sonos' own app. So, as long as the app is accessible, it is nice to have a common interface across all those many services, because we certainly went through a lovely long period where Sonos was, in some cases, a lot more accessible than the individual apps for those services.
Let's talk about some specific models. The Sonos One and now the newer Era 100 are compact smart speakers. They're great for bedrooms or kitchens. Sadly, we do have a couple in bathrooms as well because we're major Sonos geeks around here. Then, you get to larger speakers like the Five and the new spatial audio capable Era 300, and they're more powerful. They're a bit bigger. They have stereo sound for big rooms, and the Era 300 also does Dolby Atmos, which we'll talk about a bit later.
Whenever I travel, I always take my Sonos Roam with me. It sounds great for its size. It easily fills a hotel room, and there's also the Sonos Move, which is larger. It has a handle. So if you have a deck in your house or an outdoor living area in your house, the Move is really great because you can just take it somewhere and put it outside. It has a rechargeable battery, as does the Move.
For home theater, Sonos offers several soundbars. The mid-sized Beam is good for, say, small apartments, smaller spaces, and then you've got the Sonos Arc Ultra, which is a mighty long thing. They can be paired with a subwoofer for rich bass and even used as part of a multi-room system when the TV is off. If you pair the soundbar with other speakers and the subwoofer, you've got a full surround sound system.
So, for example, here we have the Arc Ultra. When we're sitting on the couch, the Arc Ultra is in front of us some distance away. We have the subwoofer in the corner putting out all the bass. Then, behind us, we have two Era 300s, which gives you the rear surround sound effect. A surround sound system like this is not only great for movies and TV shows, but Apple Music and some other services are now streaming an increasing amount of music in Dolby Atmos.
It really feels like you're immersed in the band, and if something is recorded well and you're listening to a piece of classical music, it really is quite remarkable. I would recommend, surprise, surprise, checking out some of the new Atmos mixes of some of The Beatles albums. I particularly recommend Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which came out very nice in Atmos. It did came out very nice. And of course, the Abbey Road album as well. It's a glorious thing.
Now, there are also components like the Sonos Amp, and that's used to power traditional passive speakers and make them Sonos-capable. They can integrate with your Sonos system that way. And there's also the Sonos Port, which integrates an existing stereo system into the Sonos network. I will tell you a slightly interesting use case for the Sonos Port because we do have quite a few people in our community who are blind and also have a related hearing impairment perhaps because of the condition that causes their blindness or maybe it's an age-related thing.
I use a Sonos Connect to plug in a Phonak TV adapter to my Sonos system. And what that means is that I can play anything that's coming through the Sonos system directly to my hearing aids, and that's fantastic. It's great for watching TV and hearing the dialogue more clearly. But it's also fun in the morning if I'm wandering around and want to hear the local radio that we have on in the morning, then I can just switch that in as well, and the audio is piped directly to my hearing aids. It's very, very cool.
Now, all these Sonos devices communicate over Wi-fi, and the newer models even support Bluetooth and Line-In for additional connectivity. That can also have some interesting blindness use cases. For example, if you've got a Victor Reader Stream, or a SensePlayer, or a device like that, or even one of the NLS players with a headphone jack, you could play any of those into the Line-In jack of your relevant Sonos speaker, and you can broadcast whatever that player is playing all over your living space.
So, as you move around the house, maybe you're cleaning or doing something like that, you can pipe your BARD book or whatever you're listening to anywhere through the Sonos system just by plugging it into the Line-In of one of them.
Another interesting blindness use case is that if you have a Sonos soundbar connected to your TV, you can pipe the sound of the TV to any other room in the house that has a Sonos speaker, like the master bedroom. And since a blind person doesn't need to see the screen, it is a great way to get TV sound anywhere in the house. You can group any combination of Sonos products or use them independently. Every new speaker you add instantly joins the whole home network without you having to go to any particular trouble. It just happens, and it's controlled from the Sonos app.
Sonos speakers are tuned by audio experts. In fact, I don't know if he's still there, but Giles Martin, the son of The Beatles producer, Sir George Martin, and the guy who has mixed all these Beatles albums in Dolby Atmos, he was working for Sonos. So that's a pretty high recommendation, and people generally consider them great for their size.
Sonos offers a feature called Trueplay that may have come to Android now, I think. For the longest time, it was only on iOS, and that can automatically adjust the speaker's sound based on the acoustics of the room that you're putting it in. It sends these very weird tones. I haven't heard something quite as obnoxious since the emergency alert tone actually, but it does work, and you can hear the sound of the speakers changing to match the acoustics of the room.
For a given form factor, Sonos generally delivers really pleasing sounds. So there might be a bit of debate about that like there is with anything audio, but generally, people think that Sonos does a pretty good job of it, and it's certainly a step up from your basic smart speakers.
Most current Sonos speakers have built-in microphones, and they can directly run Amazon Alexa. Some older speakers also offer Google Assistant, but Sonos and Google had a bit of a falling out. Sonos sued Google for patent infringement, so newer speakers don't offer Google Assistant.
As well as Alexa and Google, Sonos has its own Sonos voice control feature, and you say, "Hey, Sonos," to make that go. And that's a custom voice assistant, and it's focused on quick private control of your system. Sonos Voice processes all requests locally on the speaker, so nothing is recorded, nothing is sent to the cloud, which is obviously a big privacy win.
With "Hey, Sonos," you can do things like adjust the volume, you can pause and play, you can skip tracks, and you can even do unique multi-room trickery. Only Sonos' assistant lets you group and ungroup rooms with your voice, so you could say, for example, "Hey, Sonos. Group the living room and kitchen," to instantly sync those rooms, or you can say, "Hey, Sonos. Ungroup all speakers." You can also move music with your voice from one room to another. You could say something like, "Hey, Sonos. Move the music to the bedroom," and off it will go.
Another benefit of Sonos' voice control is that it coexists with Alexa on the same device. So you could, for example, use "Hey, Sonos," for music and grouping commands and still use Alexa for news briefings or one of the many skills, like NFB-Newsline, and they coexist. There's even integration with Apple's Siri in an indirect kind of way.
If you have an iPhone and you use Apple Music, you can use Siri to send audio to Sonos speakers via Airplay 2. For example, you could say to Siri, "Play this album in the living room," and that'll work with the Sonos if it's set up in Apple Home, which is pretty easy to do.
Sonos may be a dominant player, but it is certainly not the only player for high-quality multi-room audio. Bluesound is often mentioned as the audio file's alternative to Sonos. It supports high-resolution audio up to 24 bit and 192 kilohertz, and it even supports MQA streams for those using Tidal's highest quality tier. It offers a range of products. It has the PULSE wireless speakers and also the NODE streamers, and like Sonos, they sync music across rooms.
In terms of sound quality, Bluesound gear is generally praised for its clarity and fidelity. You might choose Bluesound if having studio quality sound in each room is your top priority. Bluesound devices are typically a bit more expensive than Sonos, and the BluOS app can feel a little bit complex apparently for new users.
But from an accessibility point of view, BluOS has been ahead of many others. I have seen blind people talking about this and saying that BluOS's iOS app is one of the most accessible options that they've tried, so that's encouraging. I haven't experienced it personally myself.
Good old, longstanding brands like Denon-Marantz are in this space as well. They have a platform which is designed to compete with Sonos and similar products. They have AV receivers, and they also have standalone wireless speakers all working together. It's called HEOS, H-E-O-S, and people say it's a great option.
If you're a home theater enthusiast, you could have a Denon AV receiver, and it can play the TV's surround sound in one room while also streaming music to other HEOS speakers in the house. It supports high-resolution audio, and it has integration with services similar to Sonos.
A big advantage is if you already own Denon or Marantz's gear, adding the HEOS speakers extends your system. Reviewers have said that the app experience isn't as polished as other players. Many consider the app somewhat clunky. From an accessibility point of view, it hasn't been highlighted for excellence. Anecdotal reports from blind users say that while you can accomplish basic tasks with voiceover, certain screens like choosing tune-in stations, for example, may not be fully navigable, which can be frustrating, so proceed with caution.
And if you want to try this, because it's a reputable brand, you might want to see if you can try it at home and have the right of return if you need to. The HEOS ecosystem does work with voice assistance to some extent. There is an Alexa skill, for example, so that might be a workaround.
And of course, when we're talking about audio, we should talk about Bose. They have long been a big name in audio, and they have their own multi-room offerings. Bose's older SoundTouch series and the newest smart home speakers like the Bose Home Speaker 300 and 500 can be grouped for multi-room audio. Both focuses on rich room-filling sound.
There's a certain sound of Bose that you can pretty much walk into a room and tell when someone has Bose gear, if you know what you're listening for. Many Bose speakers come with Alexa or Google Assistant built-in similar to Sonos.
In the past, Bose's controller software, which was called the Bose Music App, had some accessibility problems. But the good news that I've heard from others is that apparently, Bose has improved this a lot over time.
And as of recent updates, blind users report that the Bose Music App is now fully accessible. That's great news. So all buttons are labeled, and the interface can be navigated with voiceover without much trouble. So well done to them for delivering on that.
Now, we should come back to Apple's HomePod. We've talked a bit about this during this session and HomePod Mini, of course. They do deserve mention as an alternative path to multi-room audio. And while it's not a sprawling ecosystem of different speaker models and options like Sonos has, Apple's speakers leverage AirPlay 2 technology for multi-room, and that means any AirPlay 2 supported speakers, including HomePods and even Sonos speakers, can be grouped together pretty easily.
On the slightly less high-end side, but still relevant, you have got lots of Google and Amazon speakers. And I do think despite some of the limitations pertaining to the really high-end functions being limited to Amazon Music, the Echo Studio is a very nice device. So that's something that you might want to consider.
It would be remiss of me not to mention a real risk of smart homes. We've talked about this a little bit in the context of lights that suddenly stopped working and various other scenarios, but this is a pretty dramatic one that Sonos showed us last year.
In May 2024, Sonos released a completely redesigned app that eliminated fundamental accessibility features literally overnight. And it affected thousands of blind users who'd invested heavily in their multi-room ecosystem. And the reason why they'd invested in it was because it was so accessible, and then it wasn't.
Luckily for us, the app was a debacle in every possible respect, not just accessibility-wise, and the chief executive of the company lost his job as a result. The regression was so severe that explore by touch functionality completely failed, voiceover focus jumped randomly around the screen, and essential controls became unlabeled.
Users needed three or four swipes between each speaker control, something that hasn't been completely resolved actually even when you go into the system view today. Lists randomly jumped around, and you got to the top of the screen when you didn't want to get there. And this change happened after years of exemplary accessibility from Sonos.
So, well, we were all surprised and deeply concerned, so much so that the National Federation of the Blind that is always on the lookout for these sorts of regressions issued an official press release condemning the inaccessibility of Sonos and highlighting how accessibility isn't just a feature. It is fundamental access to technology users have already purchased.
What made this particularly devastating was the comparison to Sonos' previous excellent accessibility. The old S2 app featured proper tab-based navigation. So you had a tab bar at the bottom of the app. It had efficient focus management. It made some use of the actions row to... I mean, it was just a fundamentally better app.
This new app just has a single screen. It's very busy, and it still, in my view, creates suboptimal navigation experiences. There's really not much of a heading structure to speak of, and there are essential functions buried in the interface. We don't have the actions row to many or any places anymore.
So while Sonos has made significant efforts to address these issues, and they have added blind users to their beta program, and they've been talking to people like me, really, it's just not the same. They release updates, and at one point, they were trying to admit defeat, and they played at one point with the idea of bringing the S2 app back to coexist with this new one for people who wanted it. And they just found that so much had changed that they couldn't do that anymore, but that was an acknowledgement of how badly this had gone wrong.
So this also highlights that accessibility and efficiency, as I said in my speech to National Convention this year, are actually different things. For the most part, I think the Sonos app is now more accessible than it was, but it is not anywhere near as efficient to use as it once was. So you can obviously imagine that sinking feeling that blind people had when they tried to use an app and found that they couldn't.
One way to minimize the risk of this sort of thing happening is to adopt protocols that are supported by multiple manufacturers that are standards, if you will. And coming back to Apple, the Airplay 2 ecosystem is the most accessible multi-room audio solution available.
The native iOS home app provides seamless voiceover support for speaker grouping. You can control the volume of things from there, you can manage rooms, and you can control things from the control center as well. And of course, you've got Siri as well.
The accessibility advantage here extends across Apple's entire ecosystem, HomePod, HomePod Mini, Apple TV, hundreds of third-party Airplay 2 compatible speakers. The key advantage lies on Apple's ecosystem consistently. So unlike third-party apps that may introduce accessibility regressions, whenever they update, Apple's commitment to accessibility extends uniformly across all these native apps.
Users report that Airplay 2 synchronization works pretty reliably, actually, and I have found this myself. Even if you've got different types of speakers, but they all support the Airplay protocol, it works pretty well across rooms, but there are some trade-offs of going this route.
Obviously, it only works in the Apple ecosystem, so iOS, macOS, various other Apple devices. It's much more tricky to get that working with Android or Windows. Additionally, while Apple devices seamlessly integrate, some third-party Airplay speaker manufacturers' apps could still present accessibility challenges when you're setting them up.
So once you get past the setup process, then you're good because you can use Apple's technology, but you've got to set it up in the first place. And the big one, Airplay doesn't send multi-channel audio. So if you have music in a spatial audio format and you've invested in equipment capable of playing it, then Airplay is only going to give you stereo certainly across different manufacturers' devices.
Amazon's Echo multi-room system excels through its voice-first design, which people do like. You can just talk to this thing, but of course, you may find that the speaker fidelity other than the Echo Studio isn't enough for you if it's high-end stuff you want.
Talking about home theater, a fundamental accessibility barrier affects most of the streaming industry. Most streaming services provide audio description only in stereo or mono formats while offering surround sound to other subscribers, paying the identical premium rates. To give you an example of this, coming back to The Beatles, it was very exciting when The Beatles: Get Back documentary was released a few years ago.
That was beautifully mixed in Dolby Atmos, and we had the equipment to play it, but what we found was we had the choice. We could listen to it in stereo with audio description and not feel like we were in the room immersed with The Beatles, or we could listen to it without audio description and get the surround sound, but we couldn't have both.
An exception is Apple, whose Apple TV+ services provide blind users with the most immersive sound that their equipment can play, even when audio description is on. So well done to Apple for getting that right. And the National Federation of the Blind addressed this directly at National Convention. We passed Resolution 2505, and that demands that all streaming platforms include high-quality, immersive audio, so Dolby Atmos, and DTSX, and spatial audio when audio description is enabled.
The resolution specifically calls out Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Video, of course, and Peacock. And it makes the point that there was actually no technical barrier preventing the inclusion of audio description in Dolby Atmos or comparable formats. It is a decision that should be fixed.
So that's a overview of multi-room audio. I still feel like Sonos is safe, reliable bet, and you can be sure that we will keep working on Sonos to try and bring back some of the efficiency that we have lost.
Kennedy Zimnik:
And I just wanted to mention, we did talk about accessibility issues when you're setting up your device. I just wanted to go through and list some of the companies that do have some sort of accessibility or disability answer desk.
So Microsoft has their Disability Answer Desk, Apple has their Accessibility Support, Google has their Disability Support Team, Amazon has Accessibility Customer Support, and Samsung has Accessibility Support. So if anything comes up when you're setting up these devices, please reach out to one of the disability answer desks or general answer desks, and they will be able to help you.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thanks to Kennedy Zimnik for a bit of advice there about where to turn if you need support with all of this smart home technology. And to end this feature, I'd like to give you a little addendum because a lot has changed for me personally since we put that webinar together in September of 2025. Bonnie and I were living in our apartment then. Now, we have our own home, and we've done a lot with smart automation.
Since I mentioned this on social media several times, I've had many inquiries about exactly what we've done and how it works in practice, so this seems like a good time to talk about it briefly. Bonnie and I decided that we'd go in a different direction from the consumer products that we've been talking about in this series on the smart home, and I got immersed in the true geekiness of this project, choosing the right products, finding the right consultant to work with.
And I do want to emphasize before I go any further that this is a very high-end response. It's not something that most people will want to do or even need to do. It's something I've dreamed of doing for a long time, essentially fitting a home before I moved into it so that it really is set up for the smart home that we want now and that we will want in the future. So this is really an example of a different approach that most people will not take.
We spent over a month between when we purchased our home and when we moved into it, working with a professional automation consultant. That company is called Project IOT here in Baltimore. To maximize reliability and give us technology for the future, we made structural changes to the house. We opened up the walls and installed Cat 7 ethernet cable with plenty of dual outlets right throughout the house. And then, of course, we got somebody to put the walls back together and make it look all seamless.
Back in New Zealand, I had good luck with Ubiquiti equipment for our network, and we've stuck with that. So we have Ubiquiti Wi-fi 7 access points on the ceiling in every floor of the house. We get very strong Wi-fi wherever we are, and this is all managed by a Ubiquiti gateway, and we have an ethernet switch as well.
The centerpiece of our system is a platform called Josh.ai, and we've been talking on this series on the smart home about Amazon Alexa, and Apple's Siri, and Google's Gemini. Josh.ai is a different category of voice control entirely.
Those consumer platforms are designed for the mainstream market. They're good at simple commands. They're convenient, but they weren't built for whole home control at a serious level, although it is true to say that the newer generation of Amazon and Google products are starting to make some progress here.
Josh.ai is sold exclusively through professional home automation dealers, and it's installed and configured by certified integrators. Normally, you would have a contract with your certified integrator to continue to maintain and maybe build on your system. For example, when the internet goes out here, I get a call from our consultant asking if I know why it's happened.
Sometimes it's because I'm doing some work myself. At other times, there is an outage. So they can keep an eye on things for you, and our house actually has its own email address for internet-of-things-related technology, and sometimes messages and notifications get sent there. Both the consultant and I can monitor that email address.
You can't simply buy Josh online and plug it in. That is by design. What you get in return is a system that actually understands how you live in your home rather than a system that knows how most people live in their hypothetical homes. Obviously, in an era of cloud-based AI and smart home automation, people are concerned about privacy, and Josh puts privacy first.
Unless you ask a question that requires it to go online, say, to look up an answer like, "What's the weather outside?" or, "How brilliantly are the Orioles doing today?" all its activity happens locally, so your personal data isn't sent to the internet, and your data can't be used to sell things to you or build a profile on you.
The heart of our system in each room is a little Josh Micro. It's a small palm-sized device with a far field microphone array and a capacitive touch surface. We have seven of these right throughout the house, and we can speak to Josh and have it answer from anywhere.
The only reason why it's not answering right now, and I am recording this part of the show in my home studio, is that I've asked it not to listen to me in here. Otherwise, it would be responding all the time during this segment. The wake word is simply "Hey, Josh." You can also use "Okay, Josh," and then you would talk to it the way you talk to a person.
While things are changing with Alexa+, although I have to say I have still found Alexa+ a little rough around the edges at times. If I say to Alexa, "Turn on the lights, turn on the TV, and play some music," Alexa treats those as three separate commands that I've inefficiently strung together. With Josh, that's one natural sentence, and Josh executes it fluently all at once.
So you're much less constrained in terms of how you say something. Natural language is a strength of Josh. And because each Josh Micro knows which room it's in, if I say, "Turn on the lights," it doesn't ask me which room. It turns on the lights in the room that I'm standing in.
Josh is also good at remembering context. If I say, "Turn on the fan," and we do have ceiling fans in this house that are controlled by Josh, and then a moment later, I say, "Set it to medium." Josh will know that I'm still talking about the fan. I don't have to say the whole command again, and that's the kind of conversational intelligence that consumer voice assistants are still struggling with.
So here are a few examples of what our specific Josh system is doing at the moment, but the thing I enjoy about it is that I'm building it out over time. Our doorbell has a camera. This is from a company called DoorBird, so it is not your standard consumer doorbell. When someone rings the doorbell, the system captures an image. It then has a large language model that analyzes that image, and it will give us a description of what's going on at the door.
That description is spoken through every Sonos in the house or at least those Sonoses that we elect to have the description coming in. For example, in the studio, I do not have it speaking in here in case I'm on a radio show or producing something and don't want to be interrupted. But most of the other Sonoses get that description sent to it.
So wherever I am, I can hear something like, "I see a person in a UPS uniform standing at the door holding a package. There is a UPS truck visible in the background." It will often describe what the person looks like and what they're wearing, and describe any vehicle outside the house.
That video is stored locally. We do have a hard drive where all this is stored. Our hard drive is a Synology Network Attached Storage System with plenty of storage space. So this is all stored locally, not in the cloud.
And if I want to, I can go back and send a particular bit of video to a blindness AI tool like PiccyBot and ask questions about it. Whenever someone opens the front door, we're notified through the house. And similarly, when it's closed, we get that notification as well on relevant Sonoses.
We have Xfinity for television service, and Josh.ai has a full integration with Xfinity X1 cable boxes. We can tell Josh to turn on the TV and put on the news from anywhere in the house, and it happens. Even though our primary TV, which is an LG TV, which has good accessibility, is downstairs in the family room, given that Bonnie and I don't need to see the screen, we can be listening to the audio of the TV on a Sonos upstairs and tell Josh to change to a specific channel. It'll know where we spoke that request from and pipe the audio to the speakers closest to where we spoke from.
Now, many smart home automation systems, as we've discussed during these sessions, will create routines where a sequence of things happens at a certain time or with a specific command. Josh lets us write to those routines in natural language. You can go into a user interface and configure it at a deep level if you want.
But often, using AI and natural language, you can type what you require in an edit box and that is sufficient. For example, I can tell it, "Every weekday at 6:00 AM, I want you to play NPR on the speakers in the family room in the main bedroom and set the volume at 30%," and that's good enough for it to understand.
We have Lutron lighting throughout the house. Lutron is a well-respected brand for lighting. It is rock solid. It works when Wi-fi goes down, and the integration with Josh means that you can set all kinds of different scenes, and commands, and sequences that happen based on various criteria. That's not particularly unusual. A lot of home automation systems do a good job of working with lighting, but I think the most significant thing is that it's all happening locally in this case.
As part of ripping everything up, we put new switches right throughout the house, which actually linked to the automation system. One of the big problems that I had with our home automation in New Zealand, which was consumer grade, particularly as someone who doesn't have light perception, is that people would come in and switch the light off at the switch.
And that would mean that the home automation system wouldn't work until you switched it back on at the switch again. But with the system that we have, the little rocker switches on the walls are actually controlling the home automation. And as I say, because of the lighting system we've gone with, that will work even when Wi-fi goes down.
Our house has its own website. You can also do this with an iOS app, and accessibility isn't 100% right now. I have been very fortunate that the consultant that I worked with did put me in touch with the chief executive officer of the Josh.ai company who has talked with me about accessibility, and they say they are making some progress.
But there is that level of dissonance at the moment where there are some tasks that are better performed via the website and some tasks that are better performed via the app, and sometimes you just have to learn which is which. I'm hoping to see some progress on that.
If you log into that website though, it gives you a complete dashboard view of the entire home. So you can see temperature in every room, other environmental things like that, which lights are on and at what level, the status of locks on every door, the status of the security system, and we went with Alarm.com for that because of its deep Josh.ai integration and also because it actually does have accessible apps in its own right.
The status of every connected device, what music or video is playing around the house. All of it in one place. If I'm traveling and Bonnie wants me to make even a detailed change to a characteristic of the house, I can do that anywhere in the world via its website.
Now, the total cost of our installation was just under 33,000 dollars. That includes product, labor, and the Josh.ai software subscription, which runs 330 dollars a year. I tell you that number not to boast, but to be honest. This is a high-end installation. It's not for everyone, but I also tell you that number because I want you to know what's possible when you plan thoughtfully, work with a good installer, and make structural investments before you move in rather than retrofitting afterward.
The question I get asked most often is, "Was it worth it?" And the answer for me is unequivocally yes. In the time I have left just a couple of quick demos, I'm in the iOS app now. I find that I spend most of my time looking over the house on the website because it just feels like a better experience. But in this case, I'm just going to turn back on the Josh Micro in the studio. So I'm going to flick right.
Speaker 1:
Room icon. Button. Devices plug icon. Button.
Jonathan Mosen:
So text could be better here, but it says, "Devices plug icon," and that obviously means that we can configure devices here. If I double tap this, I can go into the categories of devices in our home.
Speaker 6:
Selected devices plug icon.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, when I flick right.
Speaker 6:
Lights. Climate. Button. Logo. Other. Button. Cameras. Access. Button. Log- Button. Logo. Other. Fans. Keypads.
Jonathan Mosen:
We do have various keypads around the place for unlocking and arming the house. I should say that we also have a Schlage lock. Kennedy talked about Schlage locks in his segment on security, and one of the things I do appreciate is that we do have that scenario play out that I talked about in that segment where we have a cleaning company that comes at a certain time every two weeks.
And I've created a key that people can use by typing in a pen on the keypad of the lock, or they can also, if they're an iPhone user, store that key in Apple Wallet, so you can walk up to the door and unlock with your phone or your Apple Watch. But that key does not work at any other time other than when we expect them to turn up to do the cleaning. And Bonnie and I get a notification to tell us that they've entered with that key.
Speaker 6:
Button. Logo. Other. Button. Logo. Other. Locks. Music. Button. Button. Video. Security. Button. Josh.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, I'm going to stop there and go into the Josh section because I want to turn this controller back on. So, as you hear, there are a few buttons where you hear the button, and then you hear the label. This is all stuff that I have demonstrated to them, and they say they are committed to trying to improve this experience.
Speaker 6:
IOS. Back. Button. Josh. Heading. Mute. Button. Unmute. Button.
Jonathan Mosen:
In here is the master control. If I just want to stop Josh from listening right throughout the house, we can do that this way.
Speaker 6:
Basement Josh. Weak Wi-fi. Entryway Micro Josh. Family Room Josh. Kitchen Josh. Studio Josh.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's the one I want. I'll double tap.
Speaker 6:
IOS. Back. Button. Studio Josh. Studio. Settings icon. Button. Microphone disabled. Button.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll double tap.
Speaker 6:
Microphone ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, it's listening in here. You can talk via the app. But now that the controller is back on in the studio, it will respond when I talk to it, and it just responds through a couple of Sonos Play:5s that I have here in the studio, which, believe me, sound a ton better than the tiny, tiny speaker in these little Josh Micro units. That speaker is not going to win any prizes at all, so I'm glad that we can pipe the audio through the closest Sonos instead.
Hey, Josh. What's the temperature upstairs?
Josh:
It's 69 degrees in upstairs.
Jonathan Mosen:
Hey, Josh. And the temperature downstairs?
Josh:
The temperature in downstairs is 67 degrees.
Jonathan Mosen:
Hey, Josh. Set both thermostats to heat.
Josh:
I've set both thermostats to heat mode.
Jonathan Mosen:
Hey, Josh. What's the status of the security system right now?
Josh:
The security system is armed for home.
Jonathan Mosen:
Hey, Josh. And is the front door locked?
Josh:
Front door is locked.
Jonathan Mosen:
Hey, Josh. What's the weather outside?
Josh:
It will be mostly cloudy with a high of 73 degrees and a low of 48 degrees in Baltimore.
Jonathan Mosen:
Hey, Josh. Turn on the TV in the family room.
Josh:
Powering on.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, I'll give you a quick overview of some of the things you can do with the website for our home. So if I perform a JAWS key with T.
Speaker 8:
Portal. Google Chrome.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm in the portal on Google Chrome. Let's just have a look at what's on the homepage here.
Speaker 8:
Mosen Home. Heading. Level 1. Need help button. Link release notes. Currently active button. Link 1. Josh device is muted.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, I don't know what Josh device is muted. I don't believe I want any Josh device muted at this point, so I'm going to press enter to find out what that device is in case it affects our ability to talk to the house.
Speaker 8:
Portal. Google Chrome. Page. Portal. Link 1. Josh device is muted. Portal. Document.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now that I'm on this page, I can navigate by checkbox, and that should tell me which one is on and which one is not on.
Speaker 8:
Hallway checkbox, checked. Bedroom checkbox, checked. Family room checkbox, not checked.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now, the family room one is not checked. And I think the reason why we did that was because Bonnie and I were listening to an audiobook. We're actually catching up with the audible versions of Harry Potter that have come out. And I think it was triggering it, but I'm going to switch that back on. All I have to do is press space on the checkbox.
Speaker 8:
Portal. Google Chrome. Page. Portal. Family room checkbox, not checked, checked.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now it's checked, and that will be back on listening to us. So that is fixed. Let's go back home.
Speaker 8:
Link to list dialogue. Link profile. One home. Two of 22.
Jonathan Mosen:
I press enter.
Speaker 8:
No links.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it's loading.
Speaker 8:
Portal. Link. Profile. Link. Visited link 2. Lights on in the exterior.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we have the exterior lights on. I don't think we intended to have those on, so I'm just going to say, "Hey, Josh. Turn exterior lights off." And Josh replied, "You got it." And now-
Speaker 8:
Currently active button. Link. Thermo stats on in two locations. Link. Arm. Home.
Jonathan Mosen:
So no reference to lights anymore. So if I'm trying to troubleshoot something with Bonnie, and I'm away, and she's in the house, she can say things, and I can see what effect it's having here.
Speaker 8:
Currently, I link thermostats on in two locations. Link. Arm. Home. Main dashboard. Unlabeled one... Device icon. Graphic. To pin a device to the dashboard, hover over any device. Enter. Visited link devices, and click the pin icon. Site bar, expand, expand, site-
Jonathan Mosen:
So if I want to see devices that I really want to engage with regularly, you can pin them to the dashboard. Otherwise, we can go back up.
Speaker 8:
And click visited link devices.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can drill down by room so you can find out what is going on in every room of the house by choosing its room name. It is important to be consistent, obviously, about the room name and where you're assigning devices, or we can go into the Devices View.
Speaker 8:
Portal. Document.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I've pressed enter on devices. So now we're on that page we can go to-
Speaker 8:
Devices.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'm just going to press down arrow.
Speaker 8:
Visited. Current. Page. Link. Lights. Visited. Current. Page. Link. All off.
Jonathan Mosen:
So they are all off now.
Speaker 8:
Link. Music. Link. All off. Link. Video. Link. All off. Link. Cameras. Link 1. Live. Link. Thermo stats. Link 2. Running. Link. Fans. Link 2. Running.
Jonathan Mosen:
We do have Ecobee thermostats, so we can work with the Ecobee app, and we can also work with Siri. So you don't have to lock yourself into Josh all the time, but it is a hub where everything lives if you're consistent about the Josh ecosystem, and that really does have advantages. But equally, if I've got my hands full, when I get out of my chair, and I want to unlock the door, it is incredibly handy to be able to tell Siri to unlock the door, and I can do that.
I don't even need to take my phone out or hold my watch to the lock. A Siri command will unlock the door. A Siri command can also change temperature. So you don't have to use Josh for everything, but it's nice to know that you can use Josh for every home automation task.
Speaker 8:
Link. Fans. Link. All off. Link. Keypads. Link. All off. Link. Fans.
Jonathan Mosen:
So if I press enter on fans, for example-
Speaker 8:
Portal. Fans all off link.
Jonathan Mosen:
We can go down.
Speaker 8:
Fans. All off button. All on button. Unlabeled zero button. Family room fan. Off. Family room checkbox, not checked. Family room. Guest bedroom fan. Off. Writing Cave checkbox, not Checked. Writing Cave. Main bedroom fan.
Jonathan Mosen:
The Writing Cave, by the way, is where Bonnie works.
Speaker 8:
Off. Main bedroom checkbox, not checked. Main bedroom. Studio fan. Off. Studio checkbox, not checked. Studio. Sidebar. Collapse. Collapse.
Jonathan Mosen:
So those are where the fans are in the house, and we can switch those on, but you can also use commands like "All fans on" if you want to turn all fans on. So we could continue to play with this website. It's pretty good. Neither the app nor the website is perfect, but it's navigable for most tasks that we need to perform. So that's a very quick look at Josh.ai and the home automation system that we have set up.
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.
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