Welcome to the thirty-first episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
- Introduction 0:00
- Brett Boyer, President of the Tech Trainers Division of the National Federation of the Blind 2:05
- Brian Buhrow, President of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science 17:39
- The next generation of Meta Smart Glasses is on the way 35:39
- Major, confusing changes to JAWS pricing 37:40
- Recommending the Honeywell TH2320WF thermostat 44:07
- Questions about Microsoft365 46:02
- My experiences with the HP Smart App in Windows 11 51:41
- Demonstration of Chatterbox TTS 54:18
- Closing and contact info 1:01:01
Transcript
Intro: Live the life you want.
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen: Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. Ahead of national convention we hear from Brett Boyer, president of the Assistive Technology Trainers Division. Brian Buhrow gives us a preview of convention activities of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science. There's widespread concern and confusion about changes to JAWS licensing and pricing.
And Meta has a new set of smart glasses coming, boasting a better battery and a better camera. It's Jonathan Mosen welcoming you to episode 31 of the podcast from a very busy Jernigan Institute here in Baltimore, Maryland where the weather is really warming up and so too are we warming up to convention season. We've got lots going on here and we're looking forward to seeing you either in person in New Orleans, which is the great way to experience this or for the virtual convention experience, which anyone can attend from anywhere in the world.
To find out more about all of that, head over to nfb.org/convention, that's nfb.org/convention. And of course, registrants can now use our NFB25 app for iOS and Android, the very latest in schedule information there and also the ability to plan your itinerary. And it's important to do that because there are so many options at national convention. It's really the best thing to do to sit down and work out the events that you want to go to and sometimes you have difficult choices to make.
Sometimes, there are two events on at the same time that you want to attend and what I tend to do is just add them both to my calendar and on the day, I will make a call about that difficult decision, which one to go to. Looking forward to seeing you in sunny New Orleans very shortly and indeed, our feature interviews today all have a convention theme.
With the national convention of the National Federation of the Blind fast approaching it's time to have a chat to some of the divisions who are putting on tech related content at the convention in New Orleans. One of those divisions is the Tech Trainers division and its president is Brett Boyer. Brett, welcome to Access On. Good to be talking with you.
Brett Boyer: Thank you so much. It's good to talk with you again, Jonathan.
Jonathan Mosen: Let's introduce the division. Tell me a bit about it and first maybe a history lesson. How long has it been around for?
Brett Boyer: This division has been around for, without having Googled this ahead of time or gone through the archives ahead of time, I would say at least 30 years, but probably longer because I remember seeing the agenda back in the mid-'90s for this division. So, when it was founded, I don't know but do know that it has been in the background. It has not been a prominent division, but we're still here and we're still speaking for blind trainers.
Jonathan Mosen: And what's its purpose? What do people get out of it if they become a member of the division?
Brett Boyer: Well, to be honest, that's one of the things we're going to talk about at the meeting because I think through the years, we have sort of lost our course and I think one of our purposes really should be supporting blind trainers, so not necessarily to be a resource list because we know that we can find resources everywhere, especially at this wonderful podcast, just had to throw that in there, but also, to support trainers who are blind.
Maybe it's hard to function as a blind person in a site where you're the only blind person in a center of sighted folks or maybe teaching remote is really... You're struggling with how to carry these concepts over. More of the training aspect, I think that's the thing. We have so much coverage on the tech aspect, but we don't really talk about the training aspect and what good training should be and how some training could be lifelong training versus what I call route-based training, which is, hey, let's just train for this and get it done.
We also try to focus on that support system for blind, specifically trainers who are low vision or blind. And for me personally, it's a focus on structured discovery, which of course, is one of the founding pillars of the Colorado Center for the Blind and National Federation of the Blind philosophy is the fact that structured discovery is one of the ways that we have found to really have blind people raise their confidence, raise that expectation.
So, we're not just trying to get one app taught, we're trying to get the landscape just like you would teach somebody in travel. If I could take you to every single building, that would be lovely, but what I do is we would teach you the core skills, how to use your cane, how to know direction by the sun, how to actively listen for landmarks and things like that. Structured discovery for me is such a key part of what I believe is good tech training for the blind. So, I'd like to really carry that through with this division as well and really help the certification programs over at NCRTB to really push for more of that.
Jonathan Mosen: It is tempting, I suppose, for people who understand the promise of this technology but don't particularly find it intuitive to get a set of instructions about completing a particular task, whether it's in the workplace or at home to get certain things done and you just get a list and you follow those steps. You might have it recorded on a little voice recorder or written down somewhere on a note taker and then you follow those steps.
The trouble is, of course, it doesn't give you a concept of why things work the way they do, so you can't extrapolate that to other situations. And then of course, software updates, so one set of instructions that might work one week suddenly stop working the next. And if you don't have those problem-solving skills, you're not sure how to get out of that problem.
Brett Boyer: Yeah, people seem to want the short answers now and I want to give them the long answers first and the short answers later because, again, I have such parallel lines drawn in my mind to travel when it comes to how this works. Like we said, using these tools, understanding how to interpret your environment is very similar to something as unstable as, I don't know, the Windows platform.
I mean every day something new might pop up, and if you're not ready to navigate that and you're not ready to really listen to what your screen reader is telling you and you're just throwing out step one, press this, step two, press that step three and one day they might take away that keystroke and you might have to use the start menu to open a program instead of this shortcut that you've relied on.
Jonathan Mosen: What do you think the impact is of AI in this space? I note for example, that Microsoft has, its Ask Microsoft accessibility AI, which I must confess I find quite useful sometimes when I just have forgotten how to do a particular thing. You also have the FSCompanion that's now built into JAWS, which proves quite effective a lot of the time. Do you think that these sorts of tools are useful both for the student and the trainer?
Brett Boyer: Well, I'm a big proponent of AI, so I think it definitely is going to be the future, and I think if we don't really embrace it now as trainers or students and learn how to navigate the new frontier, I think we're going to find ourselves in the dust. For training, I am seeing the world of AI trainers.
I would love personally to train data on the way I teach and the style I teach and create a virtual Brett Boyer that would help you work on training. So, yeah, though I could get a quick Q&A like, oh, how do I sort a column in Excel, just get a keystroke, but more importantly, I'm a visual learner who needs more of a tactile approach, so how could I teach a student who has this way of learning?
I think the adaptability of AI for a trainer is really, really special. I think being able to take exercises and mold them to students' interests instead of forcing them into things that aren't practical, I guess I do worry that students are going to just want the quick answer and not try to figure things out for themselves, but I think that's a common problem we have with AI in general. That's not specific to what we're doing here.
Jonathan Mosen: What goes on between conventions for the division. I note for example, I joined a while ago now and I subscribed to the email list and there is some very interesting discussion that goes on there about how you teach certain concepts that for some people aren't particularly intuitive.
There are some people who just intuitively take to this stuff and some people who find it incredibly frustrating and struggle with everything, a face ID is one of those things that has come up quite a bit and so is the home gesture on the newer iPhones now that there's no home button. So, you do have that community, if you like, of tech trainers to help one another out between conventions, right?
Brett Boyer: Absolutely. Again, I am new to this role, I took this division over from the wonderful, world-renowned Chancey Fleet who is amazing, does amazing stuff with tactile graphics and has been dedicating her last several years to that. She handed this over to me and I was so honored to take it on, but it is new for me.
I just was elected last year and my purpose is to give more activity to this division between conventions because in the last several years and actually I think even longer, it's really only been the highlight of the division is to have this convention, but I see a new way of check-ins. We have now started a WhatsApp group as well for those who find WhatsApp a little more engaging. We also have done, like you said, the Tech Trainers Lounge, which is really something that I, from the beginning, sort of envisioned, and that's a place where trainers can, without guide rails, just get on and really have good open discussions.
There's a pretty famous teacher's podcast out there that a lot of folks listen to for mainstream. It's teachers talking about their experiences with students, and I just thought, how cool would this be to get trainers who understand trainers just to be in a space where we can kind of vent, where we can inspire, where we can help and do these things not in an agenda, not with one speaker, but really get an open sense of community of how we can help each other.
Jonathan Mosen: Is it generally a supportive community? Because I suppose there's not really a lot of competition that goes on. There might be a little if people are doing this for a living and it's commercial, but I would imagine for the most part it's all pretty collegial.
Brett Boyer: For the most part. There are people who have their stout opinions on how certain things should be or certain things. We definitely want to make sure people feel like they can express themselves and always have these new ideas, but I think in the end, most of us really just want to help each other when we get into some of these breakouts in the structured discovery sessions that we do as part of NCRTB, there definitely is this, how do you teach this or how do you teach that?
There's not a lot of folks who are closed off. There's a few people who don't want to give up their secrets, but I think most what we want to see is blind people succeed. I think part of that speaks to the NFB aspect that we're all here as part of NF because we have a different belief in our blind students.
I was not taught by a blind instructor growing up. I was always taught by state representatives who were sighted reading out of a book. And to me it never made an impact, like having a blind instructor show me the real, I would call it like street travel. Like, okay, here's the proper way and now here's how blind people do it. And what that means is it's that it's not proper, it's just that sometimes we know the shortcuts, we know the ins and outs and we can call people out when we know they're not doing their full due diligence to find out where they are.
They're just waiting for someone to come rescue them, and that's the last thing I would ever do as a blind instructor as far as getting them into a screen or a dialogue box. One of the things teachers would always do for me is run over and quote, unquote, rescue me by clicking the mouse or grabbing the keyboard out of my hands and hitting a couple of keys and then putting things back right like the world is better again because someone sighted came and saved you.
Jonathan Mosen: What's going to happen at national convention then? I take it that there's the board meeting and other related activities on the agenda for the division.
Brett Boyer: We have a smaller meeting this year, it's a two-hour meeting. But essentially what we're going to do is we're going to have a guest speaker, I'm sure you spoke with him before, Mr. Curtis Chong. He's going to give a nice pep talk to our trainers. APH is going to come and show us a couple of nifty things. One of the things I did different this year is I didn't have a lot of tech companies come to show their stuff. I figured that with everything we have now, like I said with the resources and everything at convention, I would like this to be more of a space for trainers to learn and engage with each other.
So, I reflected that in this agenda. The brunt of the meeting is actually going to be some discussion on the division and what people want out of this division and where it's going. I have a little bit of a speech that I'd like to make about where I see this going, and then I'd like to have an open honest discussion on that.
And then we're definitely going to do some AI brainstorming, which I think is going to be really fun because again, I'm going for that open feeling. I don't want to speak to my division, you know what I'm saying? I want it to be more of an open feeling. For anybody who's even thinking about becoming a trainer or even if you have kind of, hey, I helped a couple of friends do this and that, I like this.
Definitely come check it out. I do want to say one of the things when we come back to how this division, the trainers, it is more of a friendly environment. But I will say one of the things that I'm seeing that I don't necessarily like to always talk about, but it is something that is worth mentioning is that there are a lot of folks out there who maybe aren't the best trainers, but they're really good with tech.
And sometimes one of the things I would like to help people do with this division is find that place either to enhance those training skills or sometimes come to the realization that, you know what? I just might be a better accessibility tester or a developer, and maybe training isn't my thing because we do have a lot of folks who though they're very good with tech, there's a lot more to training than just being a tech.
It's being relatable to people. It's being able to be flexible, being able to push people a little bit to make sure that they get what they need. So, you can't just let people come and tell you, this is what I want and this is how... You have to be willing to make those bold statements sometimes to a client or a student and be like, I know you want to race the car, but first you got to learn how to turn the car on, put on your seat belt.
Jonathan Mosen: It's a really important point you make because it's actually quite a rare skill set for somebody to have all of this knowledge to really know things intimately enough to be able to help somebody else. But then you've got to have the ability to impart that knowledge to communicate it sometimes in quite inventive ways so that it resonates with the student and that might vary. Some students learn differently from others,
Brett Boyer: Very. I've been working at the center full-time for seven years. I was a contract trainer off and on for 10 years before that. Definitely, you have to be willing to try to explain things in so many different ways. Sometimes we do employ visual aids, tactile aids to show things. Sometimes I paint pictures in their mind like File Explorer, I say picture a file cabinet and you pull out the drawers. That's kind of like your tree view with your branches. Now if you want to see everything that's in the file drawer, you have to pull the file drawer out of the cabinet and put it on the table to the right. And that's when you hit enter on something in the tree view and tab over to your list view.
I know I'm throwing it down in 30 seconds, but something like that, sometimes you have to be... It's an art form. Really, they say most of teaching is an art form, so you have to be thinking about that. And then of course, I just want to mention there is that rehab conference. We will be hosting a breakout at the end of the mini conference for NCRTB. We will be hosting the breakout to also talk about some of this stuff, so also stick around for that if you're part of that.
Jonathan Mosen: My thanks to Brett Boyer for that interesting chat and if you would like to contact Brett, you can email him [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Now, the meeting is happening on Thursday, July the 10 from 3:00 until 5:00 pm. Teaching tech that builds confidence is the theme for this meeting and the venue is Gallery five.
A long serving affiliate of the National Federation of the Blind is the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science and its current president is Brian Buhrow. Brian, it's great to have you on access on Thank you for doing this.
Brian Buhrow: Good to be here.
Jonathan Mosen: I had a chat with Curtis Chong a little while ago for a project that I was working on and I said, "How long has the NFB in Computer Science been around?" And he said he attended his first convention in the early '70s and it was going then. That's quite remarkable that in those days computers were a very, very geeky thing with the punch cards and everything going on and the NFB in Computer Science was still around and I don't think we ever got to the bottom of when it was actually founded.
Brian Buhrow: Its first president was Curtis Willoughby, so it's a chain of the Curtises. I don't know exactly the year that Curtis Willoughby started it, but I believe it was around 1970. I know that the student division was the first division, and so it came after that, so you can bracket it by when the student division began, which I think was around 1968 or so, or maybe it was '66 or '67 just before Jacobo Stenberg passed away.
Jonathan Mosen: And how long have you been president for?
Brian Buhrow: I have been president since 2016.
Jonathan Mosen: And for those who aren't familiar, the name is pretty self-explanatory, but how would you describe the purpose of the NFB in Computer Science?
Brian Buhrow: I would say that the purpose of the NFB in computer science is twofold. On the one hand, our primary purpose is to highlight and showcase people who are working in computer science or IT fields who happen to be blind or low vision. It's really my contention, of course, that employment is far too low and unemployment is far too high, and that technology offers a way for blind people to bridge that gap.
So, my focus is to showcase and teach people who are members of the federations that there are folks who are working and having successful careers in the fields of computer science and information technology. That's a wide area of work. You can do all kinds of different things in that space. And then the second purpose of the organization is really to further the first purpose, which is to engage with technology companies, organizations, providers of software to encourage them to make their software and services accessible.
And what accessible means is always, of course, a question for debate and discussion and whether something is accessible or not is of course always available for debate and discussion, but that's the secondary purpose. So, if you think about this year's meeting this year, we're going to have an agenda that's full of different items but is focused on those two purposes. We're going to begin with your bit, which is the bit about what the Center for Technical Excellence is doing to try and further the relationships between us as a community and as an organization and technology companies and getting accessibility and access equity going.
We're then going to follow that with a piece from Amazon where we have been encouraging them to make their AWS services more accessible primarily through the command line interface, but not exclusively that. So, after a number of years of effort and working with them, they're going to bring some technology that they're excited to show us. It will make AWS more accessible than it's been in the past.
I think there's still going to be a lot of work to do after this year's presentation, but it's a wonderful start and it's a great thing to have Amazon come and talk with us. Then we're going to have Microsoft come and talk about some of the things that they're doing with Windows 11 and changes to mail.
Microsoft is usually a regular feature of our meetings because so many people use it in so many different capacities and you could have an entire day just talking about Microsoft products and that wouldn't even begin to scratch the surface of the products they have available, let alone this list of products that they have available to which one might wish were more accessible. We're then going to follow it up with a couple of panels from our members who are talking about their experience as employees and as contractors. And then we're going to finish it up with another panel where we're talking about how blind people are utilizing and taking advantage of AI tools and how are they using AI tools.
Finally, we're going to finish up with a woman who is coming to us from Russia who has written her own speech synthesizer software and how she is using that to create voice synthesis for languages that are not commonly available for voice synthesis and how they're using that for open-source projects and also as commercial product.
Jonathan Mosen: Sounds like an eclectic mix there.
Brian Buhrow: Yeah, it's a pretty full agenda and I think it covers quite a few areas of discussion. I try to get at least one panel every year of blind people who are employed in computer science or IT because I think it's really important to remind folks that people are employed and having careers and making money and paying taxes and doing all that that is part of being a first question, is it?
Jonathan Mosen: What are the barriers in the main do you think that are preventing more people from entering the IT industry? Because we do want people to be there. We know that that lived experience is so important when products are being designed and it can only take one person to be in that mix and they can be an evangelist. I guess sometimes the pressure is a little intense when an individual finds themselves in that position, but they can make a difference. How do we get more people in the field?
Brian Buhrow: That is a really challenging question because the field has changed so much. I was sort of brought face to face with it recently myself in that I have recently changed jobs and in the new job there's all these new tools and web browser-based things that are in use that I'm having to learn that I have not had to use before. And unfortunately, the access technology that's available for these tools is much, much less efficient than the tools I've been using in the past.
So, while I'm able to make them work and I'm learning to make them work better, there's a huge learning curve and there's also a huge inefficiency to work around just because the access technology that we are using needs to be improved so significantly. It's a really big challenge and I'm not sure I know the best answer.
Part of the problem, I think, for me is that because I've been working in the field for a long time, I'm not necessarily familiar with how things work in the university environment and how people are coding these days because they're not doing it the same way that I did it when I learned it.
I think probably though the best way is the way that we've been doing it in the past, which is that we meet people who are interested in going into these fields and then we try to learn with them and bring the tools and the skills that we have learned as seasoned professionals over the years and bring that knowledge to bear and help the young people who are coming up try to leverage those skills into new forms and new creative ways to think of using the technology and making the technology work for them.
Jonathan Mosen: You were drawing a distinction there between accessibility and efficiency and I think this is really important. That struck a chord with me. It's something that is of increasing concern to me because I guess there is more awareness than there's ever been that accessibility is important, but what we sometimes find is that there are people making some pretty erroneous and actually dangerous assumptions about what blind people need to hear in a particular environment.
For example, with the screen reader. On many occasions it is so verbose and so over the top that it's actually slowing us down, so it's like we have to adapt to that now that many people have got the whole accessibility thing, but boy, as I have said to several big tech companies recently, it's possible to kill us with kindness as well.
Brian Buhrow: Yeah, I'll give you an example. I do use a modern browser for things that need it, but if possible, I will use links, the CAT, the text browser to read web pages because what I have found is that I can read much more efficiently with that. I can get through much longer documents and find my place and work through those documents much more effectively, assuming that I can read them at all on that browser, than I can if I use a modern browser.
And even for forms that are very simple, it's much slower for me to use a modern browser with a screen reader. I find that I am learning more as I do it more, I'm getting faster, but there's just a lot more mechanics. There's a lot more of searching around, finding a particular link, making sure that I'm on the link that I think I'm on when I click through it, having the page refresh periodically.
I work in an environment where I'm very much interrupt driven, and so it's likely that I'll open a page, the phone will ring and it might be 20 minutes before I come back to it and if I come back to it on a modern browser, the page is timed out and so then I got to start the whole process over again of logging in at which point, the phone rings again and I'm interrupted and I... You get the idea.
And that's very inefficient. I know excited people have the same issues, but I think that the inefficiency factor is multiplied several times for folks who are using access technology. I don't think it has to be that way, but I'm not sure that I want to spend all my time writing access technology software.
Jonathan Mosen: What are some of the benefits of becoming a member of the NFB in Computer Science?
Brian Buhrow: I think the biggest benefit is the community working with people who are professionals, who are very skilled at their work, who are very creative in their solutions and who have access to the network of people who know how to do the thing that you probably want to do or even to say don't know directly how to do the thing that you want to do, they have ideas on how you can do the thing you want to do and are willing to collaborate with you to help figure it out to get the thing that you want to do doing.
Jonathan Mosen: And it feels to me like most of the people who are heavily involved in the NFB in Computer Science are in the software development industry. They're writing code in some way as opposed to just being general computer enthusiasts. Is that a fair assessment?
Brian Buhrow: I think that we have a mix of people. We have people who are just enthusiasts but enthusiasts who want access technology information would typically go to the Tech Trainer's division. We are trying to get people who are more than enthusiasts who are interested in maybe producing their own software, maybe building their own hardware, who are more interested in the more technical aspects of it as opposed to just using the technology. There is an overlap between the Tech Trainer's membership and our membership because we do get the general user in our meeting.
They may not be as active, but if you attend one of our meetings, you will find that we usually have about 50 people and I would say of that 25 or maybe 30 even of those are just there because they want to know about accessible aspects of technology and they're sort of intrigued by the idea that people can be working in the field, but there are also people who are very technical who want to work in IT or in computer science.
Jonathan Mosen: Are there activities that go on between conventions that people can participate in?
Brian Buhrow: We haven't been doing too much of that in the past. It's something that I would like to explore more. We've talked about doing hackathons, we've never actually organized one. Part of the challenge there, I think, is that hackathons tend to be very fast-paced and time framed. I don't know much about them and the people that I know who know about them have wondered about how to actually make them work.
So, we sort of need to have a hackathon of hackathons in the sense of, part of the challenge of doing computing with access technology is that you first have to learn how to use the tool with technology and then once you know how to use the tool, then you can actually do work with the tool. And during the hackathon you are expected to show up and already know how to use the tool to do work.
So, there's that bit of challenge and I'd like to see if we can figure out a way to resolve that. Last winter, we had a winter meeting, conference in December where we did that via Zoom and that was a meeting where we discussed access technology and access to mathematical aspects of teaching computer science and that was very interesting. That was the first year we'd done it.
We sort of modeled it after the winter seminar that the science and engineering division has been doing for a number of years and I would like to further that effort, but I would also like to have some more hands-on activities, but that's a little bit challenging as I say, because as demonstrated by today's meeting, just getting a silly website to work... be challenging.
Jonathan Mosen: So, people can pay dues I guess when they're at the convention, right? Just ahead of the meeting if they want to become a member of the NFB in Computer Science and hear that series of presentations you have.
Brian Buhrow: Well, our meetings are always open regardless of whether they register or not. We will have a registration table open before the meeting and during the first part of the meeting. We encourage people to register online. We have a page that will take your details and take your money and that's much easier for us if you can register online.
The perk of registering is that we will make a recording of the meeting and we make that recording available to registered members after the fact so that if you couldn't stay for the whole meeting, you can go back and listen to it later or if you were unable to attend the convention, you can get a copy of the recording after the convention is over.
Jonathan Mosen: Does that have a friendly URL that you can tell us about how people can join online?
Brian Buhrow: It is https://web.nfbcal.org/nfbcsreg. That's https://W-E-B.N-F-B-C-A-L.O-R-G/N-F-B-C-S-R-E-G.
Jonathan Mosen: And that's Brian Buhrow, president of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science, which is meeting in Gallery two. It'll start at 12:30, that is on July the 10. You can make a difference with the National Federation of the Blind's Lead and Drive, Give 25 in '25. When you give 25 dollars or more between May 15 and July 11, you're entered into the Give 25 drawing. Each 25 dollar increment is a chance to win. Your support helps us continue to lead courageously and drive lasting change for blind people across America. You could win prizes like round trip transportation for two to the 2026 NFB National Convention, hotel accommodations, registration, banquet tickets, or 2,025 dollars cash. Oh, do you want a chance to announce our Give 25 winner at the convention banquet? Become a Federation challenger. Ask friends and family to make donations and indicate that you prompted their giving.
We'll have drawings for prizes at convention for our challengers, and if you were the challenger who prompted the most gifts, you can announce our Give 25 winner at the banquet, but that's not all. Be one of the first 100 people to give 100 dollars or more and you'll receive a pair of Aftershocks headphones and thanks to an anonymous donor up to 25,000 dollars will be doubled. The annual Give 25 drive supports the Kenneth Jernigan Fund, SUN Fund, tenBroek Memorial Fund and the White Cane Fund. You can choose a fund when you donate. To enter, visit nfb.org/Give25Donate. That's nfb.org/Give25Donate. You can call 410-659-9314 extension 2430. That's 410-659-9314 extension 2430 or you can send a check to National Federation of the Blind and mention Give 25 and the fund in the memo. The winner will be announced July 13th, 2025. Thank you for your generosity.
I'm producing this edition of Access On on Friday, June the 20, and that is the day, as I record this that Meta has announced its next generation of smart glasses in conjunction with Oakley, the sunglasses manufacturer. The limited edition HSTN model is going to cost 499 dollars and it's available for pre-order beginning on July the 11. Now, other models with Meta's technology will be available starting at 399 dollars and that'll be happening later in the Northern Hemisphere summer.
Like the existing Meta Ray-Ban glasses, the Oakley model features a front-facing camera along with open-ear speakers and microphones that are built into the frame. After they're paired with a phone, the glasses can be used to listen to music or podcasts, conduct phone calls or chat with Meta AI and by using the onboard camera and microphones Meta AI can also answer questions about what someone is seeing and even translate languages.
Given the design of the Oakley glasses, which really target athletes and sports people, Meta is positioning these new glasses as being geared towards athletes. They have an IPX4 water resistance rating, so that means if you like to wear your glasses in the rain, these may be for you. And most significantly, I think, they're boasting double the battery life of the Meta Ray-Bans because there has been a bit of criticism of the short battery life. So, this will give you double.
If you get these new glasses, that means you would get eight hours of use along with a charging case that can power them for up to 48 hours. The built-in camera now shoots in 3K video, so the video is better on these. That's up from 1080 pixels for the Meta Ray-Bans. So, a few very tangible and practical improvements for those who get a lot of use out of their Ray-Ban Meta glasses, these Oakley ones, double the battery life and even better quality video.
Onto listener contributions now, and this one is something that a number of people have written to us about at [email protected]. You can write into if you have something to say for the podcast, attach an audio clip to that email or just write it down. The address again, [email protected], but we've also been hearing plenty about this from other Federation channels as well.
I think one of the best summaries I've received of this is from Jason Stradone and he says, "Jonathan, thanks for all you do and the hard work you clearly put into everything you do." Well, thank you Jason. "Well, let me get to the point," he says, "I was caught off guard when I recently found out that Vispero had a recent large increase to the price of JAWS and Fusion. I'm also concerned that it seems this was done quite quietly, as nothing is noted on the blog news section or any other place that I can find on the site, this seems like an unfortunate way to celebrate 30 years of JAWS.
Also, it appears, they have removed the SMA option altogether. I'm not surprised that seemingly no notice was given for us to at least upgrade prior to what appears to be a significant increase. I would appreciate if you could discuss this on the show and if possible, get someone from Vispero on the show to explain what is going on and why it was done seemingly as quietly as it appears."
Jason, I appreciate you writing in with that concern and to the many others who've written in with similar sentiments. We are concerned about this because transparency is important. JAWS is a product that people literally depend on to get their job done and their studying done. And when there is a significant change and the pricing structure that is not clearly articulated and clearly explained and clearly foreshadowed, it is going to cause some consternation and anxiety.
We've communicated this concern to Vispero and I understand that they have agreed to publish a blog post. As I put this podcast together on June the 20th, we've not seen that blog post yet. But things can happen quickly, so it may be that by the time this podcast is published, which should happen on the 25th of June, maybe it's out by then. So, we would encourage you to keep checking blog.freedomscientific.com.
I will do my best to communicate what I understand to be the position and particularly addressing the concern of the JAWS home annual license, which sells for around about 100 dollars and which is available to customers under some strict conditions, particularly that you are using this at home and you are only using it for home purposes. You're not using it on the job or anything like that because that's the employer's responsibility and there's a different pricing structure in place. But clearly, the home license is great for people on a fixed income who want to use JAWS because you don't want to get into that catch 22.
The reality is that JAWS is the screen reader that helps most people do their job. It is the screen reader most commonly used in workplaces for reasons of power and configurability, scriptability, all those things. So, if you invest in JAWS when you're at home and you might be seeking a job, then it stands you in good stead to hit the ground running when you do land that job and you know how to use JAWS and applications with JAWS.
So, it is a very important offer and the National Federation of the Blind praised Vispero when they released this, I think it's about seven years ago or more, it's been a wee while now. What caused a lot of consternation was that the annual home license just disappeared from the Freedom Scientific E-store and people weren't clear about why that was. And I think it is in the absence of clear communication about this topic, reasonable to assume that the reason why it had disappeared from the E-store was because the product had been withdrawn and that was a natural conclusion for people to reach.
It turns out it is an erroneous conclusion, it is still there. And what Vispero has been telling people who ask about it is that you should call Vispero customer support to find out if you qualify. And if you do, Vispero will sell it to you, but it hasn't been on the website. In response to us raising this issue with Vispero, they have agreed to re-add the home annual license to the web store with guidance that directs users to call to complete the purchase.
Vispero says that while they continue working towards a re-brand and clearer differentiation from the new home subscription option, they wanted to immediately remove ambiguity for those who are actively looking for this option. Of course, the trouble is that that's not how many people have interpreted what's happened. What they interpreted was that there was a massive price increase in JAWS for home users from 100 dollars to over 600 dollars.
In fact, this latter product is a new one and it reflects Vispero's desire to go to a subscription model, which is the way that the software industry is going. So, the price that's quoted on the website for the home license, the 600 odd reflects what government purchases, agencies, et cetera, would pay for people who want a software license. Now, in the blog post that Vispero says they're working on, it is going to clarify the difference between perpetual licenses, which is what we're used to, software maintenance agreements and subscription offerings.
Vispero hopes to make this blog post live by convention time, so we very much look forward to that. Vispero also tell us that in honor of the 30th anniversary of JAWS and in appreciation of their long-standing partnership with the National Federation of the Blind, Vispero will be offering discount codes in July for those who pay for JAWS themselves and we should receive details prior, again, to national convention. They're also working on improving the messaging around the E-store, so it should be clearer what is going on. So, it does sound like there are some significant changes and we look forward to that blog post making it clear what's happening and why it's happening.
This next email says, "Hello Jonathan and Access on listeners. This is Melissa Riccobono and I'm a member of the Greater Baltimore chapter of the NFB of Maryland." That's my chapter two, Melissa. "I am writing to let listeners know about a wonderful, new thermostat President Riccobono and I just had installed in our home. It is from Honeywell and the model number is TH2320WB. That's TH2320WB. It is also known as the Smart Focus S200, I believe. This thermostat has the best of all worlds. It is Wi-Fi enabled and it can be connected to the Resideo First Alert App for control. The app is usable. I am able to see and set the thermostat temperature very easily. The thermostat can be programmed, but I have not explored that portion of the app yet.
It can also be connected to Amazon devices through the First Alert Alexa skill, and though it does have a touchscreen, it also has actual honest-to-goodness buttons for controlling temperature and other things. Again, it does not talk, so I'm guessing all of the buttons will not work perfectly, but I am able to push a button to raise or lower the temperature, which I never thought I would be able to do again due to the popularity of touchscreens.
To be fair, we've only had this for the past few hours, but I'm definitely loving what I am experiencing so far. So, if anyone is in the market for a new thermostat, you may want to check this one out. I purchased it on Amazon and the price was very reasonable. Thanks so much for a fantastic podcast," concludes Melissa. Thank you so much, Melissa. It's really good when we get listeners coming in with some feedback on appliances, devices that are working well for them.
Here's Michael Bullis writing in who recently took me to dinner at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. He's a friend of mine and I got to say, I think that Ruth's Chris is like the magical kingdom of food. It's the happiest place on earth. For those who aren't in the United States who've never heard of it, it is the most amazing steakhouse, the most amazing steakhouse. Anyway.
Michael says, "Hi Jonathan. I recently discovered that I am using Office 2019. I understand now that the current version is Office 365. I've known this for several years, but since I have been able to do everything I wanted to do, I just left it alone. My questions are one, can I still download standalone versions of Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, et cetera if I have Office 365? Would I still want to?"
Yes, to both, Michael. You can download those versions and yes, I think you would want to. Perhaps it's just that I'm used to what I'm used to, but I find working with the standalone applications a far more efficient screen reader friendly experience. You can still download those applications. They're updated regularly, sometimes with quite substantial fixes. So, you may well notice quite a big difference between the current version of Office 365 and the version of Office 2019 that you have including Copilot if you want that.
"Second," he said, "I understand that most of Office 365 is online. Is it accessible and friendly? Articles I read by Microsoft don't discuss any difficulties, but I don't trust that." Yes, I think so. Mainly, I've played with Outlook and Word on the web and they seem okay, but again, I would say refer to point number one. I still think that working with the standalone applications is more efficient, but it does mean that if you find yourself on some other web browser somewhere and you want to get some work done, you can log in with your Microsoft 365 account and go ahead and do that work.
So, I guess there are some benefits in that regard. I would still tend to stick with the office applications that you download and it's absolutely possible to do that. There are some pretty sweet licensing deals out there. You can get a family license, which I think last I checked, allowed you to install Office on five different computers and also as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription, users get a terabyte of OneDrive space and that can be useful.
Now, we're going to Hungary and we're going to hear from Peter who says, "Hi Jonathan. I know there is no such thing as a free lunch." It's no good if you can't have a free lunch when you're Hungary. Sorry, bad pun there. "But when I was using Eleven Labs Reader yesterday, all of a sudden, the reading was interrupted. I was told that I reached my two hours weekly limit. If I want to continue listening to the audiobook, I have to subscribe.
There are different packages. I use the app one hour a day, more or less, so my 30 hours a month subscription would cost 4,490 Hungarian forints, which translates to 13 U.S. dollars. My problem is not that after a year of free access, the application has now become a subscription based model. I use a service, providing this service costs money, but this method of communication, to say the least, is not the nicest on earth.
I could have gotten an email explaining why the change is necessary. I could have been prepared for the switch. I could have time to make my decision. Eleven Labs Reader's TTS is way above all other competitors on the market, at least in my opinion, and at least regarding the Hungarian language. I admit during this last year, I've gotten used to it. When I heard about this application in Living Blindfully, I installed it immediately and never looked back to my previous method of reading electronic books that was on the PC with JAWS.
After a brief consideration, I will return to JAWS. 13 dollars per month is a bit too expensive in my financial universe. And the way I was told I had to pay for access is thing I don't like, to put it mildly. This transition to a subscription model reminds me of the case of Voice Dream Reader. What do you and other audience members think about the change? Am I the only user who feels a bit uncomfortable?"
Thanks very much, Peter. It's not an app that I have used a lot, but I know it's much loved in the community. I tend to like to have text-to-speech-like Eloquence cranked up. I don't want my books necessarily to sound like audiobooks, I just want to plow through them. But this is an app that is certainly very popular in our community and it's interesting that we have two examples of this in the one podcast of companies making quite dramatic changes to their pricing structure or in the case of 11 labs actually introducing a pricing structure for the first time and not taking people with them on the journey.
A bit of transparent, empathetic communication can make all the difference. In other words, just a spoonful of sugar can help the medicine go down. If anyone else has any comment on this or any other issue that we are talking about today, [email protected]. You can also raise something new. That's accesson, all joined together, @nfb.org.
This next email says, "Jonathan, I am responding to Jason's comment on Access On episode 30 regarding his experience with the HP Smart app in Windows 11. My name is Christopher Sabin," I hope I haven't mispronounced that. Christopher, my apologies if I have, "and I am secretary of the Cincinnati chapter of the Ohio Affiliate of the National Federation of the Blind. Unfortunately, I have not found the HP app in Windows 11 to be accessible and my experience mirrors Jason's pretty much exactly.
HP had a device driver app that ran similarly to the current HP smart app in Windows 10. That app also allowed a user to scan and copy documents like the current HP Smart app. The Windows 10 app was accessible after a fashion. I was able to use it to scan multipage documents and save as PDF without assistance as the app was designed pretty much like a web interface. I do contract work and often must scan and send signed contracts and other forms using email. What I typically do is scan the contracts using the HP app and email as a PDF.
Unfortunately, this app was redesigned in Windows 11 and posted to the app store and the current HP smart app is completely inaccessible. To complicate things further, I have found that in order to set up a new printer or uninstall and reinstall my current printer driver, as almost happened to me this morning, the HP Smart app upon finding the printer in my Wi-Fi network apparently displays a security code on the printer screen that you have to enter into the app for it to install.
Unfortunately, this is completely inaccessible and requires me to obtain sighted assistance. Since the process of entering that code is time sensitive, if I recall correctly, Aira is sometimes of no use as the screen times out before the agent can identify it on the printer display and read it. I hope the Federation has a connection at HP Corporate who can help address the issue as I certainly do not and customer service is of absolutely no use. Just wanted to pass this along."
Thank you for sharing your frustrating experience with us, Chris, and we will certainly reach out to HP once the convention season is done and attempt to have some dialogue with them about improving this user experience.
Robin: Hey guys, Robin here. Today I'm going to demonstrate a really good utility called Chatterbox TTS from Hugging Face. They have provided this tool so that you can quickly, really quickly, clone your voice and have it speak out some text that you give it. Now, we're going to look at the demo, I don't know about the paid tiers, but the demo has a limit of 300 characters. So, let's hit E.
Chatterbox TTS: Text to synthesize left paren max chars 300 paren edit. Contains text.
Robin: So, I'm in the edit box straight away if I hit enter.
Chatterbox TTS: Main region, text is synthesize, left paren max chars 300 right paren edit. Contains text.
Robin: And I do a say line.
Chatterbox TTS: Now let's make my mom's favorite. So, three Mars bars into the pan.
Robin: Okay, so that's the text it gives you, but let's make it something completely different.
Chatterbox TTS: Selected.
Robin: I've selected all that. Let's make it, this is a quick demo of how natural dash sounding, I wonder what it'll do with a dash, the speech is that Chatterbox TTS provides after only a very quick sample of your voice. Let's see if I've made any mistakes there.
Chatterbox TTS: This is a quick demo of how natural dash sounding the speech is that Chatterbox TTS provides after only a very quick sample of your voice.
Robin: Okay, let me tab.
Chatterbox TTS: Clear button.
Robin: So, we don't need to clear that.
Chatterbox TTS: Adjust volume button.
Robin: Now we're getting into a section where if I keep tabbing...
Chatterbox TTS: Adjust playback speed to one, skip backwards, play button.
Robin: So, this is a sample of what you could turn that text into. This is the sample of the speech that it gives you by default, but we are going to record our own in a second if I hit space.
Chatterbox TTS: Pause.
Place in the distance, it's huge and-
Play.
Robin: Okay, so that's the sample of... So, we don't want it to sound like that. If I keep tabbing.
Chatterbox TTS: Skip forward by zero. Reset audio, trim audio upload, record audio button.
Robin: So, record audio. That's the one I want. Hit enter. Now, I've got to find the record button, so I'm going to shift tab-
Chatterbox TTS: Upload file [inaudible 00:56:21].
Robin: ... a couple of times.
Chatterbox TTS: Select and put device combo box. Default dash microphone paren USB audio.
Robin: Okay, that's got my microphone. Shift tab.
Chatterbox TTS: Record button.
Robin: Okay, I'm on the record button. Now, it's going to get snatches of JAWS in the recording, which is unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. If I want you guys to hear JAWS in this demo, so apologies for that. So, let's do it. If I enter, this is me, Robin Christopherson, talking a very brief sample or example of my spoken text and it will use this to clone my voice very quickly and then use it to speak out the text that I've just put into that edit box. So, let's shift tab.
Chatterbox TTS: Main region, clear button. Stop button.
Robin: Stop.
Chatterbox TTS: Main region. Okay, let's hope that Ava hasn't been intermingled into my voice too much. Okay, let's tab.
Main region, clear button, adjust volume, adjust, skip backward play button.
Robin: Okay, let's hear my sample. This is me, Robin Christopherson talking a very brief-
Chatterbox TTS: Play.
Robin: Okay, so that's me, so it's now going to use that.
Chatterbox TTS: Skip forward, reset audio button. Trim audio [inaudible 00:57:27].
Robin: Tabbing.
Chatterbox TTS: Upload file.
Robin: That upload file.
Chatterbox TTS: Upload file button.
Robin: If you've done a pre-recording of your voice or of somebody else's that you've got from somewhere, then you would use that upload button rather than the-
Chatterbox TTS: Record audio button.
Robin: ... record audio button, which we just used at moment ago. So, I keep tabbing.
Chatterbox TTS: Number input for exaggeration, left paren neutral equals 0.5. Extreme values can be unstable, right paren, edit spin box 0.5.
Robin: Now, you can change, what was that? Enthusiasm. You can change two particular properties, but I'm going to leave it as is because I want it to sound as much like me as possible. If for tab, again.
Chatterbox TTS: Reset to default value button. Range slider for exaggeration left paren neutral equals 0.5. Extreme values can be unstable, right paren left-
Robin: Exaggeration.
Chatterbox TTS: Number input for CFG/pace edit spinbox.
Robin: Oh, that's for pace. Let's tab again.
Chatterbox TTS: Reset to default value button.
Robin: Yeah, that's for the speed so you can speed up how quickly you want to talk. If I tab again.
Chatterbox TTS: Range slider for CFG slash pace left right?
Robin: I don't know what CFG stands for. Tabbing again.
Chatterbox TTS: More options. Black down pointing. Try and-
Robin: Let's not look at any more options for the moment.
Chatterbox TTS: Generate button.
Robin: Okay. Generate. I'm going to do it. So, I hit enter on generate and-
Chatterbox TTS: Blank. Processing vertical bar 4.0 slash 10.3 S.
Robin: So, the text I put in it thinks will last 10.3 seconds when it's done.
Chatterbox TTS: Output audio.
Robin: And I think it's done it.
Chatterbox TTS: Blank. Generate button. Blank. Output audio.
Robin: Output audio.
Chatterbox TTS: Download button.
Robin: So, you can download it. Or if I tab from here-
Chatterbox TTS: Share button.
Robin: ... you can share it. There must be a-
Chatterbox TTS: Adjust volume button.
Robin: Okay, let's keep on tabbing here.
Chatterbox TTS: Adjust playback speed to 1.5 x button.
Robin: Tab.
Chatterbox TTS: Skip backwards by zero. Play button.
Robin: Hit play. Okay, let's see what it sounds like. I think you're going to be surprised.
Chatterbox TTS: Play button. Pause.
Robin: This is a quick demo of how natural sounding the speech is that Chatterbox TTS provides after only a very quick sample of your voice.
Chatterbox TTS: Play.
Robin: Wow. I think I was a bit excited there when I was doing it. Maybe I should have been a bit more mellow. Let's do it again.
Chatterbox TTS: Play button. Pause.
Robin: This is a quick demo of how natural sounding the speech is that Chatterbox TTS provides after only a very quick sample of your voice.
Chatterbox TTS: Play.
Robin: OMG guys, this is amazing, isn't it? Have a go. For me, it's going to be incredibly useful. I have to do a lot of voiceovers and because I'm not a proficient, I can't listen to a paragraph of text and have it spoken back fluently in one go. So, something like this where I can just put the text in and quickly claim my voice like this, I might have to go for the paid one because then I'm sure I would be able to save this cloned voice and just put in the text each time and then I could just download the file each time and add them into whatever the project is. So, yeah, amazing. The URL is pretty ugly but if you search for Hugging Face Chatterbox, TTS, then you'll get it and you'll be able to go straight to this page and have a play for yourselves.
Jonathan Mosen: Thank you very much, Robin. It does look like Chatterbox TTS is open source, so if you have the skills to download it and install it somewhere where it can run. You can use it absolutely free. If you want Chatterbox TTS to be hosted somewhere on hugging face or otherwise, there will be a cost involved in that. I wish I could explain the cost structure, but it does look a little bit complicated, but it's certainly very interesting technology, isn't it?
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.