Welcome to the fifteenth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
The show is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if you have an app or player that supports chapters. Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Introduction 0:00
- Register for our PowerPoint training boutique 1:15
- Finding the earbuds that are right for you 2:29
- Amazon announces a significant Alexa upgrade 42:30
- Could logging into Gmail become less accessible 47:08
- Thoughts on the BT Speak 51:06
- Tech tip, converting photo file formats on Mac 55:36
- Closing and contact info 59:27
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. This week, many people wear earbuds these days and there's a wide variety of styles and manufacturers. We discuss considerations when choosing the right earbuds for you, including the needs of blind people. Amazon has announced Alexa+, it's a significant upgrade in capability, but it comes at a price. And if Google drops SMS as a form of two-factor authentication, will this create accessibility problems? Welcome to episode 15 of Access On, it's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute here in Baltimore, Maryland.
And you might be listening to this on a plane, potentially heading to the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference. I'm heading there too. Looking forward to meeting many Access On listeners and we will be preparing a post-CSUN recap where we'll be talking with some NFB members about presentations and technology that were particularly interesting to them, so stay tuned for that in the near future here on Access On. I want to thank those who attended our Prompt Engineering webinar, we really enjoyed presenting it and we've had some great feedback on it.
The next one is how to create a PowerPoint presentation as a blind person, and this is happening on March the 25th from 2:00 until 3:30 Eastern Time. In professional and educational settings, PowerPoint presentations are often expected. A PowerPoint presentation reinforces what you're communicating verbally with concise bullet points, relevant images, and possibly other multimedia content. Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows is screen reader accessible, but putting together a compelling PowerPoint presentation may not seem intuitive.
Some topics covered include what makes a captivating PowerPoint presentation and how to create one using a screen reader, working with speakers notes and delivering your PowerPoint presentation with either Braille or speech. You can register for how to create a PowerPoint presentation as a blind person boutique right now. Go to nfb.org/cena, that's nfb.org/C-E-N-A. Drill down to the trainings and boutiques link, go in there and you'll be able to find how to register for this Zoom webinar. We look forward to seeing you there.
Many of us love our audio, understandably and these days, there are so many choices when it comes to earbuds that you can connect to your smartphone or your computer, they can be wireless and they can give you great sound at a wide variety of price points. Karl Belanger from our center of excellence and non-visual accessibility is a bit of an earbuds' ninja. We all have things that we collect and take an interest in, right Karl, how did you get into this?
Karl Belanger: I've always just been interested in different earphones and audio stuff, and then as these wireless earbuds started rolling out, I just got fascinated with because there's so many different varieties in terms of form factor, of sound quality, of different little features these companies add in to differentiate themselves. I just found it very fun to collect different ones that have different features or different sound profiles and just try them out, see what's new from time to time and just started building up a collection of them.
Jonathan Mosen: What do you do? Do you have favorites or do you think I'm going to wear these earbuds today or does it depend on the use case, like you change your earbuds based on what you're doing?
Karl Belanger: It's a little of all of that. Some earbuds that I have have better transparency modes if I'm out and about. Some have better sound quality for if I'm listening to music or books. Sometimes it's just random, okay, these first ones I grabbed today, so I'm going to go with those.
Jonathan Mosen: Now let's talk about what we're talking about here. Tell me about what earbuds are in the context of this discussion.
Karl Belanger: Sure, so wireless earbuds, initially they were sometimes called true wireless earbuds to differentiate them from the neckband or other Bluetooth earbud styles that had a cord connecting the two earbuds. These are generally two earbuds that'll be in a case of some form and you can pop one or both out, stick it in your ear and it will pair to your phone or computer or what have you and off you go.
Jonathan Mosen: And when you're evaluating earbuds, there are several categories that you might take into account starting with form factor.
Karl Belanger: The three main categories really are in-ear categories, which generally have the little rubber tips. There's the semi-ear AirPod style and then there's the truly open earbuds, some like the newer AfterShokz, OpenFit or things like that that really are designed to have your full ear exposed, be able to hear your surroundings very well and things like that. Starting with the in-ear, the form factor, you'll generally find three different styles depending on what you want to do with them or what style you like.
The first is just the regular round or oval earbud style. There may be a little rubberized fin or wingtip to help hold that earbud into your ear, but generally you just pop them in and go. Next is the stem style, which look a little more like AirPods, but these will still have the round or oval top with a little rubber ear tip that goes in and then you have a stem coming off of that generally for battery and microphone and things like that.
For the semi-in-ears, there's pretty much just the AirPods style, which are the stem with the little piece at top that goes into your ear. And then for the open earbuds you have two main form factors. One is the ear clip style, which has a thing that goes up over your ear to hold it in place and a little speaker sits your ear or the newest style, which is the ear clip or earring, which have essentially a little piece that clips over the back of your ear with the speaker unit sitting right in the curve of your ear, near your ear canal, and then a little control unit sitting behind your ear. I should also mention I skipped over the in-ear style buds can also have the ear clips as well with the hook that goes up and over. And these are more intended as sports or workout earbuds.
Jonathan Mosen: I don't wear any of these earbuds because I wear behind the ear hearing aids and the earbuds just aren't really that loud enough for me. I can hear music from them but not loud enough to really enjoy it. And it sounds like the one that you are describing where you can have an earbud form factor that hooks in behind your ear and then you have a piece that goes in is fairly similar to what a behind the ear hearing aid would look like.
Karl Belanger: It's possible, yeah.
Jonathan Mosen: Can we talk about the use cases here of these form factors? Because obviously this might depend on what a blind person wants to do in particular, and I say blind person specifically because we've got some unique use cases. If we're traveling, then we're listening to our GPS app, we want to hear maybe a text message come in, but we also need to be aware of our environment and I know we're going to be talking about how some of these earbuds offer transparency mode, but for those that don't, obviously that's a real consideration, isn't it, when you make a choice?
Karl Belanger: Just briefly, and as Jonathan said, we'll get into this more later, a transparency mode is a mode that uses the microphones on the earbud to bring in outside noise. But for the other two styles, so if you want awareness of your surroundings and don't want to use a transparency mode, then the in-ear style really isn't for you because they're designed with the little rubber tips to form a good seal and block out external noise.
The two options really are your semi-in-ear, the AirPod style, which will provide you some spatial awareness while generally getting a little deeper into your ear than the truly open ones, potentially a little fuller sound than the open, but you do sacrifice some of that awareness. Whereas the fully open ones, either the ear clip or the earring style will have the best awareness, you'll be able to hear your surroundings, you'll be able to know what's going on around you.
But the downside of those, and also to a lesser degree, the AirPod style is that if you're in a very loud environment, if you're walking along a city street and there's buses and trucks and people beeping their horns, you may have to turn up the volume louder than you'd like or they may just get partially drowned out if you're using the open earbuds.
Another piece I want to mention from a safety perspective is that all of these earbuds, no matter what will provide, even the ones, provide a very slight obstruction to your hearing. And so it is always okay, and I will certainly do this if I'm at a busy complex intersection or whatever, it is always safer to just pause your music and take the earbuds off if you really feel that you need full awareness in a complex situation or a very dynamic situation.
Jonathan Mosen: It may be that you would have, unless you're extreme like you and just connect them all, you might have two sets of earbuds that you use. One might be for home use where environmental sounds aren't a factor and the other might be for outdoors unless you go for something that can perform both functions and have different modes. Because I'm wondering what you think about whether when you're at home, are you better with earbuds that seal you off and give you amazing bass and everything or are over the ear headphones a better option for quality listening at home?
Karl Belanger: They're both good. At home it's more so what feels comfortable to you. Some people cannot stand a rubber ear tip in their ear. Some people find the pressure of a headband going across their head annoying, so for those people, the other style may be more appropriate.
One thing that you can do if you have say an over the head headset that you're using for your computer or gaming or whatever, you could have that headset on one ear and an earbud in for monitoring your phone or taking calls or notifications, things like that if you're just at home. There's always the option whether you're at home or out and about of just using the one earbud in whichever ear you'd like and keeping the other one open.
Jonathan Mosen: I've talked to a few people who love their AirPods and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, it's hard to go past that deep integration that they have. And there are also some very interesting features now with AirPods Pro, including them acting as hearing aids for those with moderate to mild hearing loss. But one thing I hear from some people is they're really worried about them falling out.
Karl Belanger: The AirPods Pro do use the rubber tip and do seal. Regular AirPods though have just of the plastic piece that sits in your ear. They do make it so that it's compatible with as many ear types and shapes and sizes as possible, but not everyone is going to get a good fit.
If you find that AirPods don't sit well in your ear or you are concerned about them falling out, yes you will lose some of that tight integration and things, but maybe looking at another earbud that seals into your ear better, has the ear hook or other form factors may be more recommended for you. Also, as Jonathan mentioned at the beginning, you can get earbuds now that are perfectly viable, you're not going to get the world-class sound quality, you're not going to get a ton of extra bells and whistles, but you can get a very serviceable, very decent sounding pair of earbuds for 20 or 30 bucks these days.
Jonathan Mosen: Audio has just come way down generally. When you think of how easy it is to produce a podcast like this one with audio gear that's much cheaper than it would've been even a few years ago, that is really a good progress to report. Another factor too is the cases that accompany these earbuds. You were showing me one yesterday that was really intriguing, that had a case with a little physical button on it, which act as a toggle. You can press it down to move through different modes and you can twist it to change the volume.
Karl Belanger: Cases traditionally and still for the vast majority of earbuds, the case is just a little plastic box, it can have various form factors and shapes and sizes, but it's just a little box you stick the earbuds in, they clip into place magnetically and they charge in there and that's all the case does. But earbuds are starting to come out with, as Jonathan mentioned, I have a pair that has the button and volume dial on the case, but that is really the exception.
A few cases are starting to come out with little displays that will show you your battery life of the case and earbuds and some of the higher end flagship earbuds are starting to have cases that have a little touch screen that you can turn on and off things like the low latency or transparency or noise-canceling modes, things like that directly on the case, which is an accessibility concern because since they are touch screens, you may not know what's going on or you might accidentally trigger a mode you didn't mean to trigger just by taking the case out of your pocket.
Jonathan Mosen: And it's hard to try these out I presume. Can you just go into a Best Buy and put them in your ear? Because that sounds like a bit of a hygiene issue there, so it must be hard to try them.
Karl Belanger: It is, and that's one of the biggest issues is that really the only way to try these is one you can look up, there's many different YouTube channels and things out there that do reviews of these earbuds and cover a lot of the sound quality feature sets, things like that. But otherwise you're really pretty much reduced to just looking up information online, buying something you think you might like off Amazon or Best Buy or what have you, try it and return it.
Jonathan Mosen: And some of them are waterproof so you can wear them in the rain and even wear them in the shower?
Karl Belanger: Yeah. One thing you'll see on a lot of earbuds these days is what's called an IP rating, which is just a standard that denotes how resistant to water and dust these earbuds are and a higher number is better. But if you find ones, there are many out there that have what's called an IP... The second number is the important one, if that number is seven or higher, seven or eight, you can literally use them in the shower or by the pool.
And while I still wouldn't recommend taking them underwater for multiple reasons, you could definitely use them to have some quiet tunes in the shower or while you're sitting by your pool or floating around in your home pool or whatever or at the lake or beach, you can use them in any of those conditions without fear of damaging them. I will note though that generally the earbuds have a much higher waterproofing rating than the case, so you will want to make sure they're nice and dry before you put them away.
Jonathan Mosen: Presumably a lot of these earbuds are also used in exercise conditions, so I wonder how they fare in something like a sauna and whether it's safe to wear them in there because they get really hot, but then earbuds might be designed to withstand that.
Karl Belanger: That's not something that manufacturers really talk about. I would say for general, working out and doing exercises and things, as long as they have a decent IP rating, a four or five, you're going to be fine. For saunas, I would be careful, your earbuds may hold up, but if you're one of those people who likes to take an extended stay in the sauna until you're nice and hot and sweaty, you might want to leave the earbuds outside for that one.
Jonathan Mosen: Now when we talk about the in-ear earbuds, tip sizing is obviously an important factor and I presume that some of those come with a range of tip sizes, some of which will be more comprehensive than others.
Karl Belanger: Generally you'll have... For even the least expensive earbuds, you'll have generally three tip sizes, a small and large in the box and a medium already on the earbuds, and it's generally best to try a couple different ones to see what you like best. Overall, I think they're designed that the medium will fit overall majority of people well, but it definitely varies and having the right tip size has a number of impacts. It can help them stay in your ears better because the silicone of the tip will help form a seal with your ear canal to hold them in place. You'll get better sound quality because there's less leakage. And then also if you're using noise-canceling, having the right size tip will help with passive noise-canceling and just blocking out of your environment so that the active noise-canceling doesn't have to work as hard.
Jonathan Mosen: Let's talk about noise-canceling, particularly in a blindness context because sometimes it's something that we want just like everyone else wants, but at other times, noise is important environmental information that keeps us safe.
Karl Belanger: Many earbuds now at many different price ranges, we'll have noise-canceling and the effectiveness will vary depending on the brand and price and things like that. And so noise-canceling can definitely be useful if you're in a louder environment or on an airplane, on a bus, things like that.
And I have experienced, and this will again depend on the exactly how the noise-canceling works, but sometimes it can actually be easier to hear things like someone talking to you in a loud restaurant or a bus announcement on a crowded rattly bus than without noise-canceling because noise-canceling often focuses on those lower end engine noises, bass noises, things like that and it really tries to focus those out, which can actually help you hear some of the vocal stuff more clearly. It'll still be muffled, but it'll be more distinguishable than if you didn't have them.
The flip side of noise-canceling, which most earbuds if they offer noise-canceling, they will generally offer transparency mode, transparency mode, which can be also called awareness mode or hear-through mode or various other terms. But essentially what it does is it uses the microphones that uses for noise-canceling to provide a simulation or an approximation of what it would sound like if you didn't have the earbuds in. And as with noise-canceling, these will vary wildly in their effectiveness and what sounds come through.
Some are more tuned so that they focus on vocals, so it may be easier to hear if someone starts talking to you. You can pause your music, turn on transparency mode and carry on a conversation, but may not be as suitable for things like hearing environmental noise or detecting traffic if you're out walking. Some may be good at amplifying general noise and you hear traffic real well and things like that, but then vocals may not be as clear. Look up reviews, try them, but again, no transparency is going to be as good as unobstructed hearing if you're in a complex dynamic environment, especially where there's safety concerns.
Jonathan Mosen: You're walking along and you're using your cane safely or you have your dog and you get to an intersection and that's where it really counts, can you just flick into transparency mode at that point, some sort of toggle will normally make those earbuds go into that mode?
Karl Belanger: The way controls work on a lot of these is they'll either be a touch sensor or a button, touch sensor is much more common and then they'll have a series of taps or holds. For example, to get into transparency, a lot of earbuds that that will have you press and hold on one earbud or the other and it will put the set into transparency mode.
Jonathan Mosen: I know that there's some good noise cancellation in some these, and also as we mentioned, the AirPods Pros are doing hearing aid functionality now, but I have also had a play with an app called HeardThat, this app will give you a slider, it works on both Android and iOS, where you can control how much noise you hear in the background. It's got a custom algorithm that's designed to filter out background noise and by default it can use the microphones in your device, but they also have a kit you can plug a dongle into the USB-C port of your smartphone. And then there are two remote mics, so if you are at a restaurant or something like that, you can pin a microphone on two people or it might work for a small meeting environment as well.
The only downside potentially is latency, and I know that this is something that we'll come back to, but latency is important with these sorts of things, but there may be other apps that can augment use cases, particularly if you have a fairly mild hearing impairment and you might not feel like you require hearing aids right now and maybe you don't want to spring for the AirPods Pro 2 that have the hearing aid functionality. There are apps that can augment these earbuds and do interesting things. We've got semi in-ear earbuds as well, so this is AirPod style. Is there anything more we should say about those?
Karl Belanger: Yeah, I just think they're a good fit for people who don't like the feel of the in-ear style, you're being sealed off ear tip feel, but don't want to go quite to the open earbuds which have their own drawbacks and things and benefits and drawbacks to them. But the AirPod style, some of them are starting to offer noise-canceling, which is an interesting effect on a earbud that doesn't fully block your ears. Most notably being the AirPods 4, they have a noise-canceling option, which I have tried and it actually does work reasonably well. It's not going to be as full and complete as say, getting a nice pair of Bose or Sony earbuds in there, cranking the noise-canceling up and blocking out the vast majority of everything, but it will certainly tone down a significant spectrum of audio when you're using the AirPods with noise-canceling, so that's an interesting relatively new development.
Jonathan Mosen: This is the thing, AirPods are selling so well, particularly in Apple land and you do pay a premium for having an Apple product, but what I infer from what you just said is that in your view, you might actually get better sounding audio by going with a different manufacturer maybe at a lower price at the sacrifice of that incredibly slick integration. You can see your battery percentage on your iPhone screen on a widget. You just open up the case and it immediately recognizes that there are AirPods there. It seamlessly switches between your Apple devices, so if you're well steeped in the Apple ecosystem, you can go from your iPhone to your watch and your Mac and it all just happens. Those are all considerations, but it sounds like you're saying that audio quality is not necessarily that superior.
Karl Belanger: Right, and it really depends on what you're looking for in your audio quality. The AirPods Pros do have the ear tips, but otherwise the AirPods are just the little in-ear one size fits all tip, plastic tip, which generally because it's not forming that tight seal may have a slight roll off in certain areas such as the bass performance though that's not to say the sound quality is bad. I have listened to AirPods and they do sound pretty good, and there are other manufacturers who make AirPods like earbuds for pretty reasonable prices if you like that form factor. But that is a consideration of... And that's more just due to the form factor and the way they sit in your ears.
Jonathan Mosen: A lot of these devices are very dependent on the apps and obviously if you've got some devices coming out with tiny wee touch screens that you have to navigate, we are unlikely to be able to do that. Do any of them have speech so that when you touch the screen you get some verbal feedback? I actually did play some years ago with some Sony noise-canceling full headphones, not earbuds, and I was pretty impressed actually that when you switched modes, you could enable a voice feature that gave you feedback about what mode you were switching to, but is that the case with some of these earbuds?
Karl Belanger: Yeah, so the earbuds, when you're controlling them from the earbuds themselves, a lot of them will have speech that will say like noise-canceling mode, transparency mode, game mode on or off, things like that, or announce battery status. My concern is, and I have not tested this extensively, is that for these earbuds, some of the higher end flagship earbuds that are starting to have little touchscreen controls on the case, I do not believe the case itself has any sort of audio output for accessibility purposes. Though that said, a lot of these earbuds, even the less expensive ones, are starting to have app-based controls as well.
Jonathan Mosen: How dependent are they? Because you have all these modes, they're quite dependent. I'm thinking for example of the UE Boom series of Bluetooth speakers. Now, they really want you to use their app, but what I found is that for most functionality, it's not absolutely essential to use their app because it just appears as a generic Bluetooth device and once you've paired it, you don't really have to do much. You can do everything that you need to do from the device itself. But the difference here is all these modes that you have to move between, and that's where the app comes in.
Karl Belanger: Earbud manufacturers generally do a pretty good job of getting most of the controls onto the earbuds themselves. Things like volume, play, pause, next and previous track, toggling, noise-canceling mode. But there's only so many gestures you can really reliably do with press, double press, triple press and press and hold on two different earbuds, so as these earbuds get more and more complex, the apps do get more important.
And the apps will have things like some of these earbuds can have firmware updates now, so you may get a notification, "Hey, your earbuds need to be updated." Or they also have things like equalizer presets where they can change how your music sounds and let you choose between different presets such as pop and rock and bass boost and things like that, or even have custom equalizers where you can tune the music to your liking based on different sliders and things.
They'll also a lot of times let you customize the controls. For example, say I'm not a big voice assistant user, so I will often go into the app to modify the controls on my earbud. And so I'm a gamer, so I'll put it so that it can control the low latency mode, but I'll relegate the voice assistant feature, just turn it off and so that if I need to activate it, I use my phone, but I use it so rarely personally anyway that that doesn't really matter to me.
Whereas maybe someone else doesn't care about accessing the gaming mode, so they want to have the voice assistant with a press on one of their earbuds. And so you can have features like that in the app. I will say each manufacturer has their own app, so for someone like me who tries different earbuds from different manufacturers all the time, I end up with nine different earbud apps on my phone and... Yes.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm not judging.
Karl Belanger: And the accessibility of those can vary wildly, and this is a big potential concern. If you're happy with the controls, you're happy with how it sounds, or you're willing to use the equalizer in your Spotify app or other app to tweak your music and you don't really care if the app's not accessible, it's mildly annoying, but it's not really going to do any harm. But if you're one who likes to heavily customize things or wants to play with a different sound presets, the accessibility or lack thereof of the relevant app can really make or break the experience.
And unfortunately due to the way these apps work is that you might have one or two intro screens, which may be able to give you a very initial impression of the accessibility. The vast majority of the app's functionality are locked behind actually pairing an earbud set to your phone and having that earbuds connected so that the app can know what set you have and what features that particular earbud has and be able to customize it. It's really hard to get a feel for the accessibility of an earbud app before you actually own the earbuds.
Jonathan Mosen: Yes, sometimes when you're buying an appliance or something that uses an app, you can put an app in demo mode and have a look, and I've done that quite frequently, but with these it seems it's not as easy to do because you've got to have a Bluetooth pairing take effect. Just out of interest, is there anything as transparent as seamless as elegant in the Android world, be it for Samsung or a Google Pixel or whatever as the AirPods under the Apple ecosystem?
Karl Belanger: Yes, so I haven't explored the ecosystem integrations quite as in detail because I tend to be one of those people who has a little bit of everything technology-wise. I have an Android phone, Windows computer made by different manufacturers, things like that. But from what I know, yes, Google with their Pixel Buds and Samsung with their Galaxy Buds do offer a fairly tight integration and device switching between Google or Samsung devices pretty seamlessly as well. Other manufacturers who are developing phones such as Motorola and OnePlus are starting to get into this kind of ecosystem integration area as well, though maybe not as advanced as the big three.
Jonathan Mosen: You mentioned a low latency mode. Latency is just a fancy term for delay or lag, and I got to tell you, to give you an example of where this is important, I'm sitting here with you in my office and I've got a Focusrite Vocaster Two and it has two ways that I can make my iPhone talk to it. One is via a Bluetooth connection and the other is by plugging a TRRS cable into the USB-C port of the iPhone.
And then there's a little jack in the Focusrite. And initially I thought I'll just pair my phone with Bluetooth, it's wireless, it's hassle-free but the latency, the delay when I was doing things like Braille screen input or even swiping through a series of options on the screen was noticeable and it was noticeable enough to drive me quite annoyed, so I got one of these cables and the difference is just incredible. And this is the thing, sometimes wires are just better. How are we doing with latency on these things?
Karl Belanger: They're getting pretty good depending on the Bluetooth version, older Bluetooth headsets that ran on older Bluetooth versions definitely could have a lot of latency. They're definitely improved now with the latest Bluetooth, you'll see versions like 5.2, 5.3, even 5.4 now. And as long as you're running one of those later versions, it's going to be pretty good. And then a lot of earbuds now will have low latency, what's often called gaming modes, and what these will do is they'll sacrifice some of the range and connection stability to really get as good and snappy of a connection as possible between your phone and the earbuds.
I find that for me, with most earbuds, you may notice a very slight delay when you first start using them, but once you've used it for a little bit, it just fades into the background. But for gaming or things like that, you can definitely enter that mode and the low latency mode will help. As with any earbud, any manufacturer though, how effective that gaming mode is will vary between model, manufacturer, what device you're using it with, things like that. That said, if you're looking for absolute lowest latency, fastest response time possible, no Bluetooth device is going to be as fast as just a wired connection.
Jonathan Mosen: What impact is that low latency mode or gaming mode having on talkback and voiceover performance when you flick through when you may be brailling into it? Is it noticeably better when you switch that mode on?
Karl Belanger: For earbuds that do a good job at making the low latency mode work, yes. Again, as I said, the effectiveness will vary depending on the manufacturer, so the performance may be more or less noticeable depending on which set of earbuds you're using.
Jonathan Mosen: What about when you find yourself at an accessible ATM or one of those kiosks that we talked about recently that has a headphone jack? There are devices are there not that allow you to pair your Bluetooth earbuds with them and then the device itself plugs into a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. This is an important blindness use case, but also I think the reason why a lot of these devices were created was that people saw a market for people who want to use their Bluetooth earbuds on planes, but it could potentially help people with using ATMs and things of that nature.
Karl Belanger: That it could, it is an extra piece of technology you'll need to carry around and pair and go through that process with and deal with, so that is certainly a viable option. You can certainly do that though. It would likely mean unpairing or turning off your phone's Bluetooth so your headphones disconnect and pair to the other thing if they don't have the ability to pair to more than one device, which some, but not all earbuds have. And at that point personally, and I mean yes, I know of many people who choose to go this route, personally for me, I think it's just faster to have a very inexpensive pair of just wired earbuds in your pocket for the times when you need to access a kiosk.
Jonathan Mosen: One thing that I'm not sure if you've researched but I'm very excited about is this whole area of auracast that is coming. And the idea here is that in the next five to 10 years, we're really going to see rolling out a protocol where people can subscribe to public channels and get information sent to their Bluetooth earbuds or Bluetooth hearing aids. And we'll probably do an entire feature on this at some point, but for example, if you are at an airport, you will be able to subscribe to the flight announcements and have them come straight to your earbuds.
Or if you go into a movie theater and you want audio description, you'll be able to subscribe to that audio description auracast channel and just have it come to your Bluetooth earbuds. And it's also great for example, at conventions of ours where instead of assistive listening devices, people will just be able to use the device that they already have and once you've purchased the equipment to make this happen as a broadcaster of this technology, it is very low maintenance and pretty simple to operate, so this is a very exciting new area that's going to take some time to roll out.
Karl Belanger: It's definitely a very interesting aspect. I have researched this a bit and even just what it's starting to be marketed to as well is if you go to a gym or a fitness center that has the line of workout equipment in front of a muted TV, people could just connect their Bluetooth device to the auracast channel for that. Or if you're in a bar watching a sports game or a restaurant watching a sports game and the sound may be muted but connect to that as well, so it's an interesting new tool that I hope takes off. Right now the feature is on very few earbuds and not deployed very far, so it's definitely one to watch and I hope it does really take off.
Jonathan Mosen: Because it's got to be nudged in both directions. It's not on many earbuds at the moment and it's also not available very widely either. And so it's like it's a game of chicken and we just hope that in some way it gets implemented because I think it will be huge, particularly for people with hearing impairments of any kind, but it has a wider use case too, which gives me hope. But the other day I was at a live performance and they had two separate receivers.
One was for audio description and one was for the feed from the stage for people with hearing impairments and I needed both. And what you could do with auracast is you could have three separate channels that you could choose to subscribe to any one of those, so you could have just audio description, just the feed from the stage or both, and it would be very easy for a provider of auracast to do that. I know that people are going to say, all right, so what's your favorite? If you had to pick one and you're not going to, I take it.
Karl Belanger: There are so many out there. If you go on Amazon and search wireless earbuds, there are dozens or hundreds of brands out there that have earbuds that range in price anywhere from 20 dollars to 400 dollars or more. And it really comes down to what features you want, what extra bells and whistles, what style or form factor because different people like different styles. And so I really just encourage you to watch some reviews.
I will not name specific earbuds, but on the budget end, a couple brands that I like are, JLab, SoundPEATS, that's all one word, S-O-U-N-D-P-E-A-T-S, and EarFun, again, all one word make some really high quality budget earbuds that give a lot of the more flagship earbuds like AirPods and Sonys and things like that a run for their money. On the more expensive side, again, Bose, Apple, Samsung, Sony, all offer earbuds in the one to 300 dollar range that really are top of their class, have great noise-canceling and transparency modes, different sound signatures, depending what you're looking for, different form factors and fits.
For the open earbuds, which are a little newer, the over the ear style with the clip. SoundPEATS again does one, they'll do a couple, both styles. Soundcore, which if you've ever used an anchor battery pack or cable that it's their audio brand does some good stuff. Bose has their Ultra. OpenShokz, which used to be AfterShokz has their OpenFit and Fit Air earbuds that are the open style. There's many different options out there, all over the price point and it really just boils down to what features you want, how much you're willing to pay, how fancy you want it to get. And just go out and explore. There's a lot out there, there's a lot of good reviewers and both videos and article reviews and just go explore.
Jonathan Mosen: If you get one and you don't like it, I take it that returns policies still apply, so if you really don't like what you bought from Amazon or whatever, they will take it back?
Karl Belanger: Yeah, the earbuds, you can definitely follow your store's normal return policy and try not to be returning too frequently. I've heard stores are cracking down on some of that, but you can definitely buy a set of earbuds, try them if you don't like them, send them back and that generally as long as it's within the other requirements of the return policy, there's no problem there.
Jonathan Mosen: And we would be interested in hearing by email at [email protected] from people who like their particular earbuds and why they like them. And particularly it will be helpful to find out how accessible the experience of toggling any modes is, whether that's on the earbuds itself or via an app and that could be very useful information. But this is a great discussion Karl, and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast to do it.
Karl Belanger: Certainly happy to be here as always. And earbuds are a very interesting area of tech to explore and hope everyone found this useful.
Jonathan Mosen: When we come back on Access On good news and some concerning news from big tech.
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Jonathan Mosen: On February the 26th, Amazon held a media event. The media events that Amazon holds are typically not streamed publicly, but they do issue media releases and also of course there's plenty of media coverage of the Amazon events. And the focus of this one is a completely revamped Alexa. Because Alexa is so popular in the blind community this is really big news and by all accounts, it's something that Amazon has been working on for a very long time.
Amazon has announced Alexa+ and this introduces generative AI to Alexa. To understand the significance of this, it's a bit like comparing the way that Siri has been for the last few years with the way that the ChatGPT or Gemini voice features now work. Those latter options are far more conversational, they're far more intelligent, they recognize context and increasingly with the help of AI agents, they can do more things for you. Siri is in the process of being revamped right now, and we're expecting that by iOS 18.5 we really will start to see some significant differences with Siri, but this is a big deal for Amazon.
It's a project that apparently they've been working on for quite some time. It has been fairly difficult to hatch and very soon we will be able to try it for ourselves. What difference will you notice? Well, it'll be a lot more conversational. It'll remember context and it'll also allow you to do more things. Amazon is hoping that you'll use your Alexa device for a lot more than just checking the weather and asking basic queries. Alexa was originally invented to facilitate easier shopping via Amazon, which is their core business. Some people do that, but apparently not a lot of people do, and Amazon wants Alexa to be a greater part of your life. It'll have deeper calendar integration. You'll be able to do things like order Uber and book a table at a restaurant thanks to partnerships with Uber and OpenTable respectively, and it's supposed to be a very conversational, easy, reliable experience.
Those of us who are used to working with computer devices, just take it for granted that there is a certain way to talk to this generation of voice assistants. But for people who aren't used to it, who expect to be able to talk naturally to it, this could be a significant breakthrough in terms of making this device easier to use. If you choose to tell it, Alexa+ will know a lot more about you and family members so that it will suggest recipes that are appropriate to what you like and what family members like.
The whole thing is just more interactive, more conversational. Initially, Amazon Alexa+ is going to be available on Echo Show devices. Now, these are the Alexa devices that have a screen. We do have an Echo Show in the International Braille and Technology Center of course, so once it rolls out to us, we will put it through its paces and do a demo for you on Access On so you can hear exactly what this is like and how good it is in practice.
Amazon is positioning Alexa+ at a similar price point to other offerings in this category such as ChatGPT Plus and the Google Gemini Premium feature, so it'll cost 20 dollars a month to use Alexa+. If you have a compatible Amazon Echo, you will still be able to use it the way you always have without paying for Alexa+. And if you are an Amazon Prime member, then there's good news for you, it's being included as another benefit of having Prime membership.
This seems like smart marketing on the surface because those who were on the fence about purchasing Amazon Prime now have one more potential benefit to think about when they decide to commit to an Amazon Prime subscription. That is a brief overview of Amazon Alexa+. We hope to have more to say about this in future episodes of Access On and it may well be coming to an Echo Show device near you and then eventually rolling out to other Echo devices.
I believe the first generation Amazon Echo is exempt from this, but eventually you should be able to get it on most new Amazon Alexa devices. You can find out more by going to Alexa.com and this is a new domain name from Amazon, Alexa.com, and you can sign up for early access there. And it looks like there will be a period where we'll be able to try this out before Amazon starts to charge the 20 bucks per month. Head on over to Alexa.com and it's possible that this could resolve the issue that a listener raised in last week's episode of Access On about the deprecation of alexa.amazon.com, so maybe there'll be some functions that will replace some of the things that we lost with the deprecation of that site. Obviously if you have any experience with this going forward, let us know what you think of the new Amazon Alexa+.
Meanwhile, let's talk Google and this email comes from Curtis Chong. He says, "Hello, Jonathan. I received the article shown below through a notice generated by my NewsBreak app, so far I have received nothing official from Google. The state of Colorado was a Google enterprise. Consequently, I sent this on to the folks who work on to promote across the board accessibility for the technology used by the state. I thought Access On listeners should be made aware of this potential and possibly detrimental change in the way Google would authenticate individual users." Thank you, Curtis. I'll paraphrase this article. It says that Google intends to phase out two-factor authentication for Gmail via text message. To explain what this means, if you log into your Gmail account and you receive a text message, just a good old-fashioned text on your phone to authenticate that it's you after entering your password, this article suggests that Google will be phasing that out in favor of a QR code that you somehow have to scan.
And I have seen this from other media outlets as well, so it does seem to be a thing. I have lots of questions about this and they include whether you can use an authenticator app which is more secure and it's actually a bit more reliable than SMS. And if it's possible to use an authenticator app, it's a good thing to get into the habit of doing so wherever you can. You can use a password app like 1Password to completely automate this process, it will enter the two-factor authentication code for you. The reality though is that even if this is possible and you don't have to scan a QR code every time you log in, it does add complexity and it will make it more difficult to log in if they take the basic SMS authentication away. The reason why this is a hot topic, and I think it will be a hot topic in industries like banking as well, is that the original SMS standard, which stands for short messaging service and that's what we use with the basic text message is not secure.
It can be easily spoofed, your phone number can be easily spoofed, so it is a potential security risk and that's why people are trying to move away from SMS as a two-factor authentication method. Although I have to say my bank over here in the United States still uses it and many other payment institutions still do. And I think there's probably a trade-off being made between security and just the fact that it is such an easy standard to use, so it might be argued that the geeks have taken over here and come up with a solution that may not be particularly user-friendly. We have a very good relationship with Google. We talk with them about a range of topics, and I would describe the relationship that we enjoy here at the National Federation of the Blind as constructive and cordial. And as soon as I started reading information on media outlets about this possible change, I contacted people at Google and said, "What are the accessibility implications of this?"
Clearly this is going to cause some concern. It's not always easy to locate these QR codes as a blind person. I'm not saying it's impossible to do it, but sometimes it's a little bit hit-and-miss and it takes effort and all you really want to do is check your Gmail and keep things secure, but not at the expense of making life difficult. I contacted one of our key contacts at Google at the time of recording, I don't have any further information, but this one is something that we take seriously and if accessibility hasn't been thought about with this change, we will at the National Federation of the Blind, do everything we can to ensure that accessibility is taken into account and that any changes made are not detrimental to the access that we enjoy to Gmail. As they say, this is a developing story and we will keep you updated here on Access On and via other methods if necessary.
Alexander: Hello, Jonathan. Hello dear Access On listeners and contributors. This is Alexander from Munich, Germany. I'm referring to the interview with Bryan Blazie and David Goldfield in the last episode. It was nice to hear their voices. I read a lot from David and the other guys at Blazie Tech on the mailing list, which is actually very busy sometimes. You can measure the incoming messages, messages per hour, sometimes at least. In fact, I'm in two mailing lists, BTSpeak support and BTSpeak beta testers, so you have probably already guessed yes, I am a user of the BTSpeak. And not only that, I'm not only a BTSpeak user, I'm a BTSpeak enthusiast. I'm a fan and I'm a volunteer in the background. I do the German localization of the BTSpeak in the traditional mode that is in what we could call the note-taker or organizer operating mode of the BTSpeak.
I translate the message catalog into German, which is of course work in progress because new messages keep coming from time to time, and that is because new features keep being added from time to time in the beta versions and then in the official updates. I've been able to use the BTSpeak productively for a few months now, if I remember correctly, since September 2024 as a beta tester because since then I've been able to enter German computer Braille. And I also do some things in the desktop mode on the Linux side with the MATE desktop using the web browser, for example, and LibreOffice. And sometimes I play around a little bit with the command line, but how is it then that I am perhaps the first user at all of the BTSpeak here in Germany? Well, I owe it to you dear Jonathan. On the 1st of March last year, you did an interview with Deane Blazie. You talked about a Linux based device that would feel somewhat like the Braille and speak of the old days and that this new one was being ready for delivery soon and I was really hooked immediately.
Sure, I have an iPhone 15 Pro, I have an Apple Watch Ultra. I have a mini PC with Windows 11 running on it that I often take with me when I'm on the go. But the efficiency of a small portable Braille device that is even similar to the good old Braille Lite. A Braille Lite 40 was my companion from 2001 until 2011. To cut a long story short, the very next morning Blazie Technologies received an order from Munich, Germany and since the end of March 2024, I've had the BT Speak now. And of course I'm looking forward to the BT Braille because of the Braille display built in and because of the new hardware in general. At the moment, I'm in the process of translating not only the messages, but also all the help files and the complete user guide into German. For this recording here, I do not record this one with the BT Speak itself.
The built-in microphone is decent for voice notes and for participating in a Zoom meeting or something like that, but there's no audio editor and an audio contribution like this one here for the podcast, I prefer to do them either with the iPhone, the Apple Watch, or with an audio recorder. As is the case now, I use the Eltrinex V12Pro and then I do some post editing with the studio recorder software from APH. In any case, thank you very much again, Jonathan, for the podcast Living Blindfully back then and of course for Access On now, I don't miss an episode. Keep up the great work. And all the best.
Jonathan Mosen: I enjoyed your testimonial there, Alexander. And it'll be interesting to see what people do with the BT Braille when there are more USB ports on board because it occurs to me that if you could get a good USB microphone and connect it to the BT Speak, and of course there'll be a headphone jack as well in the BT Braille, so you'd be able to monitor what you're recording with the headphone jack and some USB microphones have a headphone jack in them so you can monitor that way. I think the BT Braille will be an interesting device and we will certainly purchase one here at the International Braille and Technology Center, and we will provide feedback on that when it is available.
Time for another tech tip from the prolific tech tipper Rich Yamamoto. And if I may, I will just make a couple of additions and corrections along the way. First, this pertains to people who are using the Mac, and I'll just give you some clarification as we move through. He says, "Here is a tech tip regarding images taken from an iOS device and uploaded to some sort of cloud storage or any other type of storage for that matter. Most of the time when you save a photo from your iPhone to some sort of storage media, it saves as a .HEIC or .HEIF file. If you plan on doing nothing outside of the Apple ecosystem, then this won't matter to you in the slightest. However, since this is a proprietary file format from Apple, this poses some interesting complications if you want to paste these files into, say, a Microsoft Word document or in my unfortunate case, 50 plus Google Docs."
Now, I'll just pause there and say in fact, that file format is not proprietary to Apple. It is an open file format that has been developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group. It is the next generation of file format for photos because photos are getting more and more definition and they're getting larger, and there are some very advanced compression, which means that you can have very good quality photos with this file format in a small file size. That means that they're great for uploading and also for storage. They don't take up too much space. The downside, however, is that they are not widely supported on all operating systems, including Windows, so you may need to install some sort of converter. You can in fact make your iPhone change its default file format so it doesn't create these files in the first place. And if you are doing a lot outside the Apple ecosystem, that's the way to get around this.
And in fact, it is what I have done because while I have an iPhone, my day-to-day computer is a Windows device. Anyway, Rich continues, "Here are the steps for converting these photos into a mainstream format, and a reminder that we're talking Mac here to convert files to .JPG, open them in preview, which is the default application for opening these files as opposed to photos for some inexplicable reason, navigate to the menu bar with VO plus M and navigate to the right until you find the file menu. Expand the file menu with the down arrow key. Look for the export option in the sub menu. Press VO plus space to open the save as dialogue. Leave all settings as is unless you find different things work better. Navigate to the format options with VO plus right arrow. Press VO plus space to expand the pop-up menu. Choose the desired format from the list, HEIC, JPEG, JPEG 2000, Open EXR, PDF, PGN, and TIFF, T-I-F-F."
Wow, I haven't heard about that file format for a long time, "Make sure the file path is correct. Press enter to save the file." Which concludes, "Note, I don't know a lot about how photos work, so I'm not sure if any of the settings needs to be changed to accommodate for the JPEG conversions." Now, you're probably wondering, can you do this with multiple photos at once? The answer is yes, but just prepare for the possibility that preview will burst into tears and protest. It's a lot more sluggish when you do it this way. The process is the same. You would just click export selected images in the menu instead of export. If you need to edit anything in the save dialog, click the options button towards the end of the window. Then you can select desired formats, paths, et cetera.
That concludes this episode of Access On the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip, or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, [email protected], that's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected].
That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website nfb.org or phone us 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the nation's blind podcast right from where you heard this podcast.