Welcome to the twenty-second episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
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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.
- Join us for our Autonomous Vehicle boutique 0:00
- Rob Quinn from MakeSense Technology discusses the Vector 1:38
- Problems copying text from web pages using JAWS 32:54
- My perspective on different earbuds 34:43
- Accessible televisions 44:36
- Working with multiple tabs in Google Docs 49:51
- Getting to the iOS status bar 54:02
- Closing and contact info 59:24
Transcript
Speaker 1: Live the life you want.
Speaker 1: Access On.
Jonathan Mosen: Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. Vector from MakeSense Technology is an ambitious new travel tool for the blind. There's been a problem copying content from web pages with some browsers in JAWS, but a fix is now available. More on accessible TV options including some thoughts on YouTube TV. And it looks like a happy ending to the problems some people have been having getting to the iOS status bar.
Thank you for being back with us for episode twenty-two of the podcast. It's Jonathan Mosen coming to you from the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. We're getting ready to bring you the boutique on autonomous vehicles. Hope you can join us for that. Plenty of information about the state of autonomous vehicles, how well they're rolling out around the country, how they work, and some of the things that the National Federation of the Blind has been doing to make sure that we are included in this work. It's going to be happening on April the 29th at 2:00 p.m., Eastern.
We will get around to bringing this to you on Access On, but of course the beauty of actually being there is that you can take part and ask any questions of our expert panel. So do register. You can go to nfb.org/cena to do that. That's nfb.org/cena and you can click on the events and training link and sign up and get your invitation to participate via Zoom.
MakeSense Technology is a company with a vision of navigating the world with a device that guides you through touch, eliminating the need for audio cues or constant smartphone checks. It's still under development, but their vector handheld device uses haptic feedback and advanced computer vision to provide precise navigation assistance for blind people. Joining me is Rob Quinn, the CEO and co-founder of
MakeSense Technology from the UK. Welcome, Rob. Good to have you on the podcast.
Rob Quinn: Thank you, Jonathan. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Jonathan Mosen: What inspired you to found MakeSense Technology and develop the Vector?
Rob Quinn: I did a PhD at the university in England called Imperial College four or five years ago, and I ended up doing a post-doctoral research position after this PhD and I worked inside a lab called the Manipulation and Touch Lab, which is run by a guy called Dr. Adam Spiers, which focuses on essentially developing new types of human machine interfaces for navigation and specifically Adam Spiers' expertise is in developing navigation interfaces for people that can't see screens or people that are blind.
And I did some work with Adam Spiers and we developed essentially a new invention, a new type of human machine interface, which was proven to be so effective that we essentially spun it out of the university and tried to commercialize this technology for helping people that can't see a screen navigate their environments.
So it was a technological discovery, but I was already working in this field of developing human-machine interfaces, people that are blind and broadly this academic field is called sensory substitution and that's where this has come from essentially.
Jonathan Mosen: It's interesting how people get to this industry because some people have a blind family member or something like that and they set out to develop a product that improves somebody's lives because of that kind of connection. And then there are other times when there's a technology that just develops and then people think what's the ideal use case for this technology? And that's when the blind community can come up as well.
Rob Quinn: Yeah. So I mean I don't actually have blindness in my family, although I do have a blind friend called Mark Baxter that I'd known before I started this project. This is a technology push as they call it. So we've made a discovery, found that it could be really, really useful for a certain kind of user group. But actually the research that we were doing set out to actually develop an interface for people that are blind. So we didn't actually just accidentally develop this. We purposefully developed and were funded to develop a navigation interface given that there's such limitations in the current ones that exist with audio and vibration. And it was funded by research council in the UK specifically for this purpose.
Jonathan Mosen: And to do that, you must have perceived some sort of deficit in the products that are available right now. Is that correct?
You felt there was a gap that you could fill?
Rob Quinn: Yes, exactly. So this all started out with me getting something called a discovery fund grant from Imperial College where I worked in the field of sensory substitution already, but I felt that despite the latest advancements in computer vision, and AI, GNSS, which is global satellite navigation systems that are capable of navigating a drone or a driver's car or even a vacuum cleaner for an environment.
I was really shocked that these kinds of technologies hadn't really made their way into helping blind people navigate through space. And given the kind of background I had in developing human-machine interfaces, I had the intuition that actually the reason why these things aren't particularly useful at the moment is simply because there's a lack of suitable human-machine interface or there's no suitable human-machine interface that has fidelity that's required to actually leverage these high-precision technologies for the benefit of people that can't see.
So it was this Discovery Fund Grant that we got was to investigate whether it might be possible to actually develop a new type of way of communicating information and it's kind of just spiraled from there. We then developed a grant proposal, the title of which was called Advanced Computer Vision Interface for Visually Impaired Persons. So that was the grant proposal we put in. It was 500,000 pounds. About 700,000 dollars. And with this money we were testing a few hypotheses about how we might communicate navigation instructions. And in doing so, doing this work over the course of one or two years, we developed something which is undoubtedly the most efficient way of actually communicating this information, which we're really, really pleased about.
We did a comparative study at Imperial College in collaboration with Blind Veterans UK, which compared what we have with audio vibration and even for a control group with people that could see with eyesight for doing a number of tasks. And these were just simple things like getting a person to point their hand in a particular direction through space. And what we developed has turned out to be approximately ten times more efficient than audio or vibration.
And in fact, for seven out of the ten people that we tested that were our control group of people that could see, there was no statistically significant difference in the time it took them to complete the tasks with their eyes versus guidance from our interface. And this is published in nature, which is the top scientific research shown in the world. We started with a conviction to help and we've ended up with something that is not precisely what we've initially envisioned, but something that we believe is really, really useful and it's been quite a journey over the past couple of years.
Jonathan Mosen: It sounds like it. I had a play with your Vector product, I took it for a spin at CSUN. Your booth was popular. There were a lot of people interested in this. Can you describe how the Vector functions and what sets it apart from other navigation aids?
Rob Quinn: Yes, I had a great time at CSUN and our booth was really popular. Everyone was really interested in what we were doing. It was really good to speak and interact with so many potential customers or people that could actually benefit from this technology. Because everything is still so much in flux. There's a million ways that we could go and to get so much feedback so quickly was just so helpful.
We'll definitely be going next year. We're definitely going to attend your conference. But to answer your question, yes, how does this thing work or how does it actually... Why is it useful? The device itself is handheld. It's about the size of a flashlight and it has a dial on it on which you place your thumb. This dial can be left and right or anywhere in between and it can do so incredibly rapidly. So from one extreme full left to full right, it's about half a second to make that transition.
The reason why this interface is so effective at communicating navigation instructions is that this dial is directly coupled to the movement of your body. We call this a kinesthetic interface and what that means is that if you imagine you've got a phone that you wear on your chest which has a camera that faces forwards, if this camera is seeing an environment in front of you and it wants you to go in a particular direction or move in a particular way through space, the dial itself on the device will point in that direction.
The person will then having been instructed to touch, use the device, move their body or move their walking heading in such a way that if it points to the left, the person turns to the left. If they overshoot their turn to the left, the dial will then point to the right and it is constantly and instantaneously providing closed loop feedback with respect to where the boat person is moving and how that body is moving.
And it's this instantaneous and fluid feedback that makes it so effective. This idea that we can use kinesthesia or the movement of a person's body to actually communicate information is not really anything new. It's just never been done in a technological form before because if you think about it like a guide dog or a service dog, the way that animal will actually communicate navigation instructions is through subtle manipulations of the person's hand.
If the person that's holding the guide dog's harness is essentially being tugged left and right, they're having to follow that movement with their body and in doing so, they're able to make very precise movements through space. Or similarly, if a person that was being guided through, for example, CSUN was putting their hand on a shoulder of somebody who was helping them navigate the space, again, that navigation instructions being communicated through kinesthesia or body movements or subtle manipulations of the hand. So we've just developed something that's operating with the same sensory mechanisms, but that is of a pocket-sized form factor and this is the first of its kind as far as we can tell. So essentially, long story short, it's got a dial that points in direction and you move in that direction in a much more simple sense.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I was impressed when I was walking with a Vector for a block around the Anaheim Marriott. What I found was it was a little bit like working a guide dog because not once did my white cane actually come into contact with an obstacle.
Rob Quinn: Yeah, exactly. So the way that we try to describe this, I haven't done a very good job of describing this, but we call this a positive navigation tool, whereas we call a cane an exclusionary tool. So a cane will tell you where not to go. A guide dog will tell you where to go. And in the same sense that guide dog tells you where to go and a cane tells you where not to go. If you think about by process of elimination with a cane, you can find a way through an environment. A guide dog or a sighted human chaperone will take you directly through this most efficient route. This machine is essentially the first viable alternative to a sighted human chaperone or a guide dog and is made to provide instantaneous fluid continuous feedback.
We've proven scientifically it can have a person follow a path of any arbitrary size or shape to within about three inches of precision, which that's an absolutely ridiculous degree of precision compared to, for example, a vibratory haptic interface or any kind of audio cue that a person could be provided with. And so we believe it's got transformative potential, although it's still under development and it's still got its kind of limitations, but we're doing our best to commercialize this in a way that's going to be very helpful for people that would like improvements in their mobility.
Jonathan Mosen: So what are the key limitations you would like to see addressed before the initial release?
Rob Quinn: So because this is still an experimental tool, there's quite a lot of usability things that we haven't addressed yet. So we're hoping to roll this out for a very small trial in a month or two's time, followed by a much larger trial in 2026. But there's all sorts of things related to what we call starting conditions. So how does a person start the journey? How does the person tell the device where they want to go? Under what conditions is it able to provide what we call ultra precise guidance? So we define ultra precise guidance as keeping you within plus or minus 0.5 meters, which would be enough precision to keep you on a sidewalk or safely cross over a road, etc.
There are certain conditions under which we're not going to... at least for the first product we make, that we might not be able to achieve that level of precision. There's some environments that are much more difficult than others for our localization systems. For example, if you've got a very, very densely built up area such as New York City right in between skyscrapers, it makes it very, very difficult for your satellite navigator. The system we use has multiple sensory inputs, one of which is a military grade GPS that under good conditions can get you down to a centimeter of precision, half an inch of precision.
This GPS system, although there's only one component within this whole stack of redundancy that we've built under the condition of walking through New York City in the densest parts of New York City, is unlikely to achieve precision of less than a meter. And so we have to rely on other systems and sensor fusion to advance this forwards to eventually be able to get through those environments.
But then again, there are other environments where we can have absolute reliability. So for example, when you tried the device, we were outside the Marriott Hotel at CSUN which is still relatively built up. Those hotels aren't small. There's auto buildings, but there was at least some decent views for an open sky. And so essentially the conditions under which this thing has limitations will be indoor environments to begin with and very densely built up areas.
Jonathan Mosen: The Vector integrates LiDAR technology, computer vision at the moment through a smartphone. How does that aid navigation? How are you utilizing that?
Rob Quinn: So that's a good question. So if we consider this whole idea that we've got this capacity to actually communicate navigation instructions to within three inches, we can keep a person on a three-inch trajectory basically, but across any winding path. In order to actually make use of this machine, we have to actually locate a person to a similar degree of precision and locating a person to within a few inches is not possible to do with your iPhone, unfortunately. It's not possible to do with your iPhone alone at least. And so we have to do what something we call sensor fusion.
So no single sensory input or electrical sensor is capable of providing the accuracy, the robustness, the refresh rate that we need to make this thing useful. And so what we do is we combine a military-grade GPS, which is updating its position once per second, but it's an absolute position on earth. We're fusing that with a camera system from your iPhone. So it's called visual odometry whereby you can track relative movements through space, at very high frame rate.
We then got LiDAR from the iPhone, which is capable of doing things like detecting obstacles in front of you and also doing some detection of movement through space by working out relative distances and how they change over time. And these things are combined using what's called a Kalman filter in real time to give a level of robustness that you couldn't get from any single one of these, either a LiDAR camera or GPS. That GPS is in the device itself, which is the handheld device, which is a much, much more high quality GPS than you'd find in your phone. So to answer your question, we use all these things as a collective or a composite to give high reliability position estimates and spatial awareness for the machine.
Jonathan Mosen: What challenges did you face in ensuring that the device is reliable in a whole bunch of conditions? Because obviously people are going to use this in the rain, aren't they? In the snow and all sorts of things or in some parts of this country. It can get incredibly hot in the summertime.
Rob Quinn: So again, a really good question and something that we're still developing the commercial product. But we're trying to work to... Well, we are working to quite rigorous standards of ingress protection and things. Ideally I would like the device to be so robust you could chuck out a wall and just pick up again and that would be a military spec level of robustness. We are testing this across a wide range of environments and conditions. There are certain companies which I think at some point we're going to pay who can actually give you certification for putting the device and its sensors through an absolute barrage of different tests.
So there could be shake tests, there could be water tests, there can be heat tests. And in order to obtain a CE mark you have to pass some of these or certification for sale, you have to do some of these tests anyway, but we're going way beyond what the norm would be. And in terms of how we're going to make sure it's reliable for use, so we're doing a gradual rollout, but we're anticipating that for our first year of sales, which we're anticipating in 2026, we are going to make a limited production one of 200 units.
And with these 200 units, they can be marketed specifically at early adopters at a greatly discounted price. We'll be making huge losses next year financially and we'll be subsidized by our investors, but we'll be very, very closely monitoring these 200 people in the field to the extent where if this is still to be confirmed, but we're considering having... Any person makes a journey with a Vector can have the option of free of charge being observed by an Aira agent for the entire journey just to make sure that the device is functioning properly and that things are performing... And that the person is safe.
If we can have a whole year of usage by 200 blind customers in the field without adverse instances, then I think we could reasonably conclude that we've done the best that we can or that this device is safe enough to be deployed at scale internationally. So this is the business plan at the minute is to do this kind of gradual build up towards a 200-person trial.
Jonathan Mosen: So you've been doing the self-testing. Some of that went on at CSUN to some degree. What sort of feedback are you receiving from that testing and is it still evolving or would you say that the product is pretty much set at this point?
Rob Quinn: It's still very much an evolving thing at this point, and the feedback from CSUN was particularly useful because there's never been such a time where we've got so much feedback so quickly from such a huge diversity of different kind of people with different ways of living, etc. There was also a lot of O&M trainers, there was distributors, people that actually sell these kinds of products. It does seem to be the case that everyone loves the idea that you could integrate this device, at least end consumers. I would love the idea that this device could be integrated with a cane as such that you could have one-handed operation.
We're still not sure whether this is physically feasible for us and have the haptic interface still be as effective as it is, but people seem to love that idea and to touch an extent that we're actually putting enormous resources right now into investigating whether that's a feasible thing for us to do. We also had quite a lot of feedback around how the device integrates with a camera system.
So at the moment, the device uses an iPhone that you wear on a lanyard on your chest and the cameras from the iPhone need to be facing forwards. And we use the LiDAR too. Again, this is something that's with the feasibility of which is being investigated. A lot of people like the idea at least that you could use a pair of Meta Ray-Bans or a similar pair of smart glasses instead of that phone for the camera system.
And so it's something we're taking very seriously. We haven't gotten to the point yet where I think we'll start getting really, really useful feedback when we have people try to program the device, set themselves on a journey and use the whole thing for A to B independently because at this point in time we've been trying to de-risk the technological feasibility of even making something like this, even making a ultra-precise navigation tool of this kind.
And we've put less emphasis on the UI, the user interface, or user experience. And so typically for the trials so far and then we've been programming the device for them and then basically observing the journey in the entire way. So it's a bit like we did with you, Jonathan, at CSUN where we kind of just kissed you up, put the lanyard on you, start the device in your hand and said, "Just follow instructions." And that was just to show you what this is capable of, but it'll be really interesting to get feedback at some point from the customer base when we've tried to have people totally independently doing all of this stuff.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah. It's a very important point about holding devices for a blind person because you really need one hand for a guide dog harness or a white cane And then if you've got another handful of some sort of device, then it can be difficult to use your hand to identify landmarks and various things like that. The other interesting comment you made was about having this on a wearable and unfortunately it looks like at this stage there's not some sort of OpenSDK, OpenAPI from Ray-Ban Meta for their glasses.
But it was interesting to hear from the AGIGA people who we've had on this podcast recently who were doing their EchoVision smart glasses. And I don't know whether you came across them at CSUN, but it looks like they are trying to establish a platform that people like you, companies like yours can tap into and create this ecosystem.
Rob Quinn: Yes, we tried it out. It was really impressive. There was just these smart glasses that are not much bigger than a normal pair of glasses and they are very good at providing audio descriptions of what's going on without providing too much information, which I thought was really impressive because that's quite a difficult thing to do to provide the useful information but not overwhelm. But anyway, the kind of technology that we require for our system from the cameras on a pair of smart glasses is called visual inertial odometry and it's not actually available on their smart glasses unfortunately.
It's quite an advanced feature and in fact it's not actually available even on the Meta Ray-Bans at the moment, but it is available on... So Meta have made these other types of glasses which are for experimental purposes only, which are called Aria 2. It's a research platform for people like us or people... there's other use cases. These glasses are capable of doing visual inertial odometry and we are at some point going to approach Meta, show them what we have and ask them whether they would be willing to participate or contribute to our product rollout, our trial that we'll be doing next year. And potentially this is... Again, it's to be confirmed, but we can press ahead with the iPhone on the chest and that's not a problem.
But if Meta were willing to support us, we might be able to actually do maybe a different version of the device that uses the glasses that they provide for the odometry part of our solution.
Jonathan Mosen: Yes. And that's the thing. There are some really compelling use cases being demonstrated in those Aria glasses, but right now they're in the lab and their invitation only. So the question is when will they go mainstream? When will that technology be commercially available? Before I walked the streets of Anaheim with Vector, I went through an onboarding process and it became really intuitive to me very quickly. What is your current thinking about how intuitive this is to use the degree of the learning curve and whether that learning curve can be minimized any further?
Rob Quinn: You asked really good questions, Jonathan, because basically we are a very scientific company. Well, the scientific pedigree is most of the people that are on the team have a kind of research background and have worked in this kind of field before. And so it's very much about making scientific presumptions or making hypotheses and then evaluating these with scientific methods.
In our original trial that we did with blind individuals at Imperial College, we had an onboarding process or a training process whereby we'd just give a person some verbal instructions and then we would just let them try and find some targets with the device. And we had a huge degree of different ages in this trial. Some of the people were very elderly and some of them were very young. Some of the people picked up very quickly and some of them picked up more slowly.
But because we were paying these participants and we had them in our lab for two hours or more, we had the luxury of just observing a person learning it how to use the device without intervention for the first time. And what we found is that even the people that were much slower to learn eventually became as good as the people that learned it very quickly.
So someone that learns very quickly could within five minutes be pointing or orientating themselves within a seven degree arc, very, very rapidly less than two seconds or cause any arbitrary kind of position space. And then the people that were slower to get the technology would still reach that level of proficiency. It would just take them longer, which is really promising because my old postdoctoral advisor, Adam Spiers, he's been in the field for about twenty-five years, would say that he used to work at Yale and there were some sensory substitutions and machines that they made that would take eighty hours of practice to have basic kind of understanding of how it works or basic usability.
Whereas when I onboarded you, although you were a particularly quick learner, it literally took about four minutes. And then after four minutes you were following the device perfectly, ideally would automate this onboarding process. So it's a bit like if you ever played video games where it kind of teaches you what the different buttons mean and you have a quick go at doing something practical with it and then you can... As long as you've got eighty percent of the way there, then you can learn the extra twenty percent towards proficiency on an actual journey.
Jonathan Mosen: And are you looking at anything else at this stage or is Vector exclusively what the company is focusing on right now?
Rob Quinn: So it's exclusively what we're focusing on right now. We've raised a venture capital round about seven months ago specifically to commercialize this as a technology. As far as we can tell, and this has kind of been even further confirmed in our mind since going to CSUN and CES and things, there's quite literally no other ultra precise navigation technology out there. And by ultra precise, I mean there's no other technology that's capable of keeping a personal sidewalk or crossing a person over a road reliably, robustly and repeatably.
So that solution does not exist, but it's very much needed. And I find it really interesting that something like reading devices for people that are blind, that's an enormous market. The idea that you've got these screen magnifiers, you've got screen readers, you've got all kinds of accessibility software. That market for reading eclipses the navigation market. It eclipses it. And the reason why it eclipses it is because apart from a person using a cane and smartphone as far as we can tell, there's not really any other devices on the market that actually add value beyond that.
And so it makes it really difficult for someone that is blind to have a high degree of mobility, although it's possible with great skill and training. And I think that there is a gap in the market there and it's something that we're trying to address. It's clearly got value. If you look at something like a guide dog or a service dog, the training cost of a service dog is about 70,000 dollars and it's still considered to be a... That's a golden standard and it's considered to be a worthwhile expenditure at that level.
We are hoping to have something that has a similar capabilities that's twenty times cheaper. And so this is our sole focus and I think it is a commercial opportunity for us, although it's difficult to get investors for this kind of thing when we can't actually point to any prior successes in this market and say, "Look, if we just did this, we can be as successful as these guys." We've had to convince people from the ground up to say, "Look, everybody wants to do something helpful and all investors like to think they're doing good with their money."
So that's one angle we take to try and convince people to invest. But ultimately in order for this to be a commercial opportunity, it needs to be commercially viable, but I believe this actually is despite there not being any other successes that we can point to.
Jonathan Mosen: How does this device interact with existing mobility tools? Do you see this as say replacing the guide dog or replacing the white cane or augmenting those things?
Rob Quinn: Definitely not going to replace the white cane. I think the white cane is an essential and grounding mobility aid. First of all, it's for anyone that's got any experience at all of trying to make journeys without their eyesight, it takes only a brief experience to realize that having a cane that connects you to the floor is something that's essential. And also if we marketed this as a device that's a replacement for the cane, we would be opening up ourselves to a world of problems because we couldn't possibly certify something for sale like that.
What we have to certify this or what we need to be marketing this as and promising we can do is that this is an advisory guidance tool to be used in addition with a cane. For someone that already knows how to use a cane. We would never recommend that a person uses this without a cane. But then to the question on would this replace a guide dog, again, no, I don't think it would replace a guide dog because guide dog isn't just a navigation aid. It's a living, breathing companion. It does so much more than helps you navigate.
But what we might be able to do is we might be able to provide similar navigation functionality or even superior navigation functionality to a guide dog without replacing it. So for example, in the UK, Guide Dogs UK is one of the largest charities. They spent 127 million pounds last year, which I think is about 160 million dollars or so on servicing 3,000 guide dog relationships in total. There are 300,000 blind people in the UK and there are about a 100,000 blind people that might benefit from a guide dog.
So we are hoping we can provide an interim or even just something in between to reach more people than it's currently possible to reach with guide dogs because they're simply too expensive to train. So we're not going to replace a cane. We're not going to replace a guide dog. This is a different idea altogether. What we might replace under some circumstances is a society of human chaperone.
Jonathan Mosen: We're obviously going to be delighted to welcome you to New Orleans in July for the NFB's National Convention and I'm sure you'll enjoy that and there'll be a lot of people interested in the technology. Is it too early to talk about specifically what you might have in mind for the NFB convention in terms of what people will be able to do with Vector?
Rob Quinn: That's a good question. We're still trying to prepare what we might be able to show there. I don't want to over promise and under deliver, but at the very least what we'll be able to do is we'll be able to arrange demonstrations with interested parties where we will have a booth. We'll have devices on display, which will probably be active devices where people can feel, sense how it works and people can have a very brief kind of... Once you take a device in someone's hand and just get them to do a few things, it immediately becomes apparent what we've made.
For people that are further interested beyond that, we can arrange outdoor demonstrations. But beyond that I can't specifically say what we're going to do because we just don't know yet.
Jonathan Mosen: So if people would like to find out more and keep up to date with what you're doing, you've got a nice shiny website, where can people go to keep up with MakeSense Technology?
Rob Quinn: So we've got a website www.makesensetechnology.com. We've got a form on makesensetechnology.com whereby you can essentially sign up for updates or even put your name in the ballot for our user trial. And we've got a LinkedIn. We do need to stop being a bit more outward facing because we've been a bit stealthy until now, but we are going to be launching a social media campaign. We've got a BBC News coverage piece that's coming out next month and you'll probably start hearing more of us and more from us, but for now the website is the best way to contact us.
Jonathan Mosen: Makesensetechnology.com. It has been a fascinating discussion, really looking forward to having another play with this in New Orleans. It'll be very hot in New Orleans, but still, I'll have a play with that. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Rob Quinn: I really appreciate you inviting me and it was great to meet you in person at CSUN as well.
Jonathan Mosen: When we come back, more listener feedback.
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Jonathan Mosen: And if you run a business that seeks to reach the blind community, your message could be here as well. Access On and other NFB audio publications are now accepting sponsor messages. And if you would like to find out more about how to participate in this and get your message out to our audience, you can go to nfb.org and choose the publications link. You'll find information on that page about running your message on the National Federation of the Blind Radio Network, Access On and also the Nation's Blind Podcast.
Let's talk about JAWS and I'm prioritizing this one because of its time sensitivity. So an email has come through last week from Rich Yamamoto. He says, "First I'm trying to select texts from tables on websites, but when I press Ctrl C, it doesn't copy. The same is true of Ctrl X. Am I missing something in regards to this?"
Rich, no, you're not. There was a little incompatibility issue that got introduced between JAWS and Chromium based browsers that would include Google Chrome itself, Microsoft Edge, Brave and quite a few other browsers that are lesser known. It did not affect Firefox, so that was one workaround. The other workaround was that you could go into the JAWS verbosity settings and tell JAWS to copy from the virtual cursor not directly from the screen.
The downside of that was that it just gave you the text, it didn't give you all the formatting, which wasn't always optimal. But Vespero has come up with a fix for this, so if you download the latest update to JAWS, you should find that all of that is resolved now and everything is working as it used to, which is good because certainly that caused quite a bit of inconvenience for many people.
Rich continues, "Also when it comes to navigating by links on a web page, pressing K doesn't work like it does in NVDA. This navigates by PlaceMarker in JAWS. How do I use the keyboard manager to modify this command?" Well, there are quite a few managers in JAWS, Rich and in this case you don't use the keyboard manager. What you do is you press the JAWS key with F2 and you go to navigation Quick Key Manager and that is where you can customize all those keys that jump you to certain things on a web page. So if you go in there, you should be able to customize it to behave how you would like.
Asia: Hello, Jonathan. This is Asia. I have emailed you in the past. I just wanted to say thank you, thank you very much for getting me in contact with someone from Microsoft. They were extremely helpful despite the differences in our time zones. We were able to get the issue resolved and they have contacted me back and the issue was fixed, and that is greatly appreciated. I actually wanted to talk to you about the most recent podcast that I listened to was about the different types of earbuds out there and the convenience they have for people who are blind.
I have two different perspectives I'd like to give about that. I currently have the Beats Power Pro first generation. This is my second set of them and I absolutely, absolutely love them. I think they will always be my daily driver of earbuds as long as they don't totally break something within the software or hardware that I extremely dislike, I think they will always be my daily driver earbuds.
And the reasons that I like them is that each individual earbud has controls. They both have a volume up and volume down rocker and they have a button on them which controls play slash pause. It rewinds fast forwards and I can use it to activate Siri. So each individual earbud has that. These are the ones that you were talking about in the podcast with Karl that have a rubber tip. They form very tightly inside the ear canal and these actually have a loop that goes around the outside of the ear made specifically for people who are looking for a more secure earbud when performing sports.
And I will definitely say that they do a great job. They do an absolutely wonderful job. I will walk outside typically with using one of them. If I am outdoors or I'm doing tasks where I need my hearing, I will only wear one and that works fine for me. It may not work for other blind people.
Another thing that I really like about them is their battery life. Each individual earbud has a 10-hour battery life and I have actually tested this. I have used an earbud, one earbud at a time or both. Usually it's one at a time I use more often. I have had it in my ear for 10 hours before it beeps at me to say that it's dying. And that is with doing team talk throughout the day. That is with just doing general phone things, listening to a book, doing Zoom.
I have flipped through multiple different tasks with having one earbud in my ear for 10 hours and that's about the time it starts to die. The case that they are in is a bit bulky, but because the way that the earbuds are shaped, I don't find that to be a problem, but the case itself typically lasts about four to five days, sometimes longer if I'm not using them that frequently, but that is what I love about them.
A second generation has come out about a month ago I believe, and I am very, very intrigued with the new features that they have. They're supposed to have transparency mode and I have never had an earbud or a transparency mode, so I don't really know how that feature... How well it works. But the second generation Powerbeats Pro are supposed to have them and they're supposed to be made slightly different, so I'm very enthusiastic to give them a try whenever I have the bucks to get them.
Karl mentioned a few different brands and I have years ago, probably like five years ago, I got my dad a very cheap set of JLabs. They were 20 bucks. He wants to try Bluetooth earbuds. Here, I'll give them to him. He still has them to this day. They still work. I was very surprised for such a cheap set of earbuds that they still work. He decided to get me a set this past Christmas of JLabs. It is the active ones and I can't remember the specific name at the moment. I apologize.
And they have a loop around the outside of the ear. They are a much, much smaller case. I'll be very honest. I am not a huge fan of them. I've gotten so used to the intricate things that my Beats do that I don't really like what these JLabs do. You have to have both and to use the controls that you want because the right ear earbud does volume up the left earbud does volume down.
The left earbud does, I believe rewind. The right one does fast-forward and I think only the left one does like your Siri or Google. And I just don't like that. I've been spoiled with the Beats that each earbud has those controls, so I don't really like them. I have connected them to my Apple device, my iPhone 15 Pro and I actually find that there's at least half, maybe a millisecond lag with a voiceover and I do not like that at all.
I have connected it to my Samsung Galaxy S24 and it actually makes... I'm using vocalizer, AVA Vocalizer and I actually find that it seems to muffle talk back. So maybe I'm not giving a very good review of them. The one thing I have found that they're extremely useful for is I have the Victor Reader 3 and I play them with the Victor Reader 3. Unfortunately because either it's the way that the JLabs work or type of Bluetooth profile, I can volume up and volume down with the Jlabs. But if I want to play our polls, I have to use the Victor buttons.
But that is fine. I can throw both ear buds in my ear, crank it up really loud and do chores. So that is fine with me or I can just use one ear bud and do my chores. So that's working out just fine for that very simple task. But I gotten spoiled with my Beats and those are definitely the ones I use daily. I use them integrated with my iPhone and iPad and maybe it's not so much of a good review about the JLab active, sport active, something like that, but I have found a pretty good use for them and they work really good for listening to my Victor.
One thing I am having trouble with them is they seem to have a very, very long battery life, but when they connect into your ear and they connect to your Bluetooth device. They say Bluetooth connected battery high, but after a few weeks of using them, they don't tell me that they die or that the battery has gotten low or medium. They just stop working. So then I'm not fond of, and I know sounds like I'm giving a pretty bad review, but at least for the Victor, they're working well. I know they were under a hundred bucks.
I looked them up. So I just wanted to give my perspective on the two earbuds I have tried. I went through a bunch of different types after I went blind, when I realized that I would have to have a phone talking to me. I went through LGs. I went through earbuds that had the wire connecting in the back that would just lie on your neck. I went through several different types and I'm stuck on the Beats now. I really, really like my Beats. I've considered trying the Beats Studio Pro, but I'm personally am not fond of a headphone band on my head, so I haven't made the step and actually purchase them.
Jonathan Mosen: Thanks, Asia. The beat goes on or should that be the Beats go on. I'm glad that we were able to help you with getting that issue resolved with Microsoft and your job and we appreciate Microsoft's response to that issue because it will help other blind people as well. And for the geekily inclined, I guess that's many of us listening to this podcast. Asia says I am slowly getting into good recording equipment, but am still working on getting cool things. That's good. I recorded this MP3, she says with my Olympus WS-852.
I'm using it a lot for lectures. It is not accessible, but I have no problem taking the recordings off the recorder and putting them on my computer. This recorder has a USB-A slider on the back where I can plug it into my computer, which makes this a lot easier. I also like to name them and organize them on my computer. This setup works good for me now. I have been doing it this way for almost two years.
I'm hopefully going to get an external microphone set to plug into the Olympus soon to get even better recordings. If I need to, I will transfer to my VR3 to listen and do any other rewinding or fast forwarding.
Daniel Garcia: Hello, Jonathan. This is Daniel Garcia again from the National of Federation of the Blind of Missouri, Kansas City chapter and I just got done listening to episode 20 of your fantastic podcast. And somebody was asking about TV streaming services and all that. I recently joined the ranks of the cord-cutters myself. I'm late to the party, but I would recommend a Roku stick and I'll get to that in a minute.
But let me make a comment about Apple TV which I think you mentioned. I did play around with one in an Apple Store and the only complaint I have about it is the remote. I don't care for. It's very tiny.
And of course you can use your phone to control it, but still I already have so many apps. I already control so much with my phone. I'd rather not. But if you're steeped into the Apple ecosystem, that's an option for you. Now, Roku, I was familiar with it because my family who lives in another state, they have one and they did a little quick search and they figured out that if you press the options button four times fast, it turns on guide narration and that button is below and to the right of the directional pad, the arrows.
Now I was able to independently install it myself, no assistance. There was a small hitch, but you can get around it and that is the Roku website. It asks you do you have a cable provider? Yes, and then you have to pick your provider .and then I would pick it, but it would not go to the next page. So I just went back and said, "No, I don't have any cable providers. I don't think it makes a difference against the installation process."
Once you install the app, you just go to the streaming store and download whatever app you want. And another thing I like about Roku is that it does have an app and yes, you can control the Roku device with your phone as well, but again, the remote is much, much better. I'd rather use the remote, but it does have this feature is called headphone mode, so I can take my phone upstairs and I can put headphone modes and I can still listen to the TV. It is just awesome. I would recommend it to anyone.
Jonathan Mosen: Thank you very much, Daniel. Appreciate the information. Debbie Gillespie says, "We are using a Samsung TV purchased in 2018. We also have a cable box that also talks. We often alternate between the Samsung's built-in speech Bixby. We use some of the apps directly from the TV and others through our cable box. I agree the speech from the Samsung is not great, but you do get used to it after a while. I learned it by reading the onboard user guide after purchasing the set. You could also navigate the user guide by skipping through sections and so on. We keep our cable box as it has the ability to record shows using the TV program guide, which is also accessible from the box.
It is based on the Comcast box and works well in Canada. Thank you very much, Debbie. Now that Bonnie and I are in an apartment of our own, we're getting things set up in this regard and we're currently trialing YouTube TV. It's pretty impressive when there are YouTube TV apps for pretty much everything, these specialized devices, Smart TVs, and of course Android and iOS. The iOS app is very accessible and you get a DVR function where you can record unlimited shows and they will stay there for up to nine months. You can just select to record a series and it goes ahead and records that series.
If you record and there is an audio description track available, it records that too, so it records any and all audio languages that are available on that TV program when it comes into YouTube TV. What I've found is that if you switch to the supplementary audio channel on YouTube TV, it remembers it forevermore for that channel, but you have to do it on a channel by channel basis. There's not a universal setting that says give me audio description whenever it's available.
There's all sorts of ways to get to content, which is pretty important because you've got over 130 channels, and that's on the basic plan. You can add sports and things if you want to do that. I should also add that the DVR functionality is unique to each user and you can have up to five additional users as part of a family plan if they're in the household with you. So you can be watching on concurrent devices and that works well.
If you've used YouTube TV and want to share, what you think of it or you've used competitive products, then do let us know about that too because there is a lot to be said for having all of this on your smartphone and being able to watch on that device as well as bigger devices for when you're watching with the family.
Let's talk Google Docs now. This email comes from Curtis Chong. He says, "Hello, Jonathan. I'm writing to share experiences and questions raised as a result of questions and experiences with the relatively new feature now available in Google Docs which enables one to set up and use multiple tabs within a single Google Docs file."
"Having just become acquainted with this feature myself, I became frustrated because the fine folks at Google did not include any of the keyboard commands related to managing tabs within a single Google Docs file in the help section where usually finds such information, i.e pressing CTRL slash to bring up a list of keyboard commands. I started down this road because a teacher of blind students who works in a school district where Google Docs is heavily used by teachers and students reported to me that a blind student was presented with a Google Docs file, but could not find out how to switch between the tabs that were contained within this single file using the JAWS screen reader."
"The classroom teacher who provided this document to the class had no idea what keyboard commands to use, but the teacher of blind students family persisted and ultimately found out what needed to be done. So here is what I have learned so far about working with tabs in a Google Docs file. Information gleaned from my personal efforts and from other blind colleagues without whose help, this would not have been possible."
"One, if a person is creating or editing a Google Docs file over which he or she has full control, the way to create a new tab within this document is simply to press shift F11. JAWS will simply say, tab added. But you are not told that you are now focused in the new tab that you just created. Two, if you hold down the alt and control keys, do this with your right hand. If you can, you can quickly press the letter A then H with your left hand to be taken to the tabs area."
"JAWS will say show tabs and outlines along with telling you how many tabs are in your document. In my test document, I have one tab. If I have more than one tab, I could use my up and down arrow keys to select a different tab within my document. By default, the first tab is always called tab one."
"Three, the control shift page-up or control shift page-down key commands can be used to move between multiple tabs within the Google Docs file. However, unless you are highly confident about what you are doing, I don't recommend using the shortcuts in as much as JAWS provides no verbal feedback to let you know to what tab you are moving."
"Four, assuming you have say two tabs in a Google Docs file, the best way to get to the area to manage or move between these tabs is to hold down both alt and control and then to quickly press A then H. After expanding the button where you land after entering this command, you are now able to move up and down between the tabs you have in the document. Pressing enter moves you to the tab, but before doing that, you might want to tab to the tab open button, expand it with space, and review the choices you have for the tab, including renaming and or deleting the tab."
"Five, finally, if the Google Docs file is downloaded to the computer as a Word document. Only the tab that has focus is saved, not the entire Google Docs file. The frustration I experienced had to do with my inability when bringing up the Google Docs keyboard shortcuts to find any tab-specific keyboard commands. Perhaps these commands will be shown in a future version of Google Chrome, but I am not seeing them at this point."
Fortunately, the state of Colorado, which is a Google enterprise, has opened up a trouble ticket with Google. Thank you for sharing that with us, Curtis. That's useful information indeed for those working in the Google ecosystem. All right. Lots of responses to the iPhone status bar issue. Let's just go through a few of them. Chris Westbrook says, "I can confirm that I am experiencing the bug where space with S doesn't take me to the status bar. I also can't get this to work with my Bluetooth keyboard, so perhaps it has something to do with phone settings. I'm using an iPhone 16 Pro Max."
Joe Norton: Hi, Jonathan. Joe Norton here from Dalton, Georgia. Don't have a lot to report, but I do have three things that I'd like to talk about. First of all, I can confirm the problem of the status bar not coming up on the iPhone. I have an iPhone 16 Pro, and whether I use the NLS e-reader or the Mantis, I can't get the status bar to come up for me either. If I tap on it with my finger, it comes up and then I can execute the status bar command and the iPhone will go back to what I was doing.
However, again, it doesn't seem to want to bring up the status bar. I'm thinking of resetting my settings, but that's such a pain. You've got to redo your cards and reset Bluetooth and all that, so I'm hoping a software update will fix that. So I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one with this problem.
Now, for the second thing, I finally got around to purchasing the Turtleback case for my Mantis and I love it. It feels like I'm using a completely different device almost. It's a tad heavier, but it feels well protected. The case is quite padded and features a very nice strap so I can carry the Mantis with me and such like that. It also features a rubberized pad on the bottom of the case. That'll help keep the Mantis steady on a desk or table. And here's one little thing that I also appreciate. The case holds the Mantis firmly, but it allows you to be able to operate the control.
The power button is the only control on there, and you can also reach the ports very easily. The power button is actually quite a bit easier to press now that the Mantis is in the Turtleback case. When it was in that bumper case that was provided by HumanWare, it was very hard to press that power button. And when I'm working and want to take a break, I can pull the cover flap over and that helps to keep the Mantis protected from dust and that sort of thing. Another nice thing is that the cover flap on the case closes magnetically.
So once you get it folded over to the bottom of the case, it clicks right into place. So it's a win-win situation here and that LB12 code still works, which I appreciate you working that out. That was a big help. The last thing I wanted to talk about was elevators in hotels. I was staying at a Marriott property and I ran into a potential problem with the elevator. It turns out that the elevator talked.
In fact, it uses the EVA voice from Nuance to tell me the floors and that sort of thing. Problem was it didn't tell me that I needed to use the room keycard so I could go back to the floor where my room was. I was going to try and record a demonstration, but that elevator was so busy I couldn't really tell if I was doing the right thing. You had to tap the reader with your keycard, I think after you press the button or maybe before, I'm not really sure.
I do believe I did the right thing, but then again the elevator was being called to the floor that I wanted to go to, so I still don't know if I got it right. Rather annoying. Speaking of keycards, I do find them generally annoying. Things are a little better now when you can tap the card on the reader for your room or whatever, but you used to have to put it in the slot and try it four different ways.
Now you just have to try two different ways, but it's still annoying. I would think with mass production technology, it wouldn't be hard to put something on the keycard to let you know which sides you are holding. They could even mass produce a Braille card that says, "This side up." Oh, well. But great job on the podcast. Keep up the good work.
Jonathan Mosen: Nice to hear from you, Joe. Thank you very much. And I guess we can call this our tech tip because we're almost out of time and I want to keep going with the status bar issue. But one tech tip is that certainly in a lot of hotels now, the room keys are using NFC, near field communication. And what that means is that your smartphone can now often act as your room key. Certainly if you go into some of the Marriott's and Hilton's out there, you might want to ask them about whether they have a way for your smartphone to become your room key.
Often they will give you the option in the app for the respective hotel property, and it works really well. I like being able to just take my phone out and unlock my room that way. And it also serves as a key to anything else to which you have access. So if you need to use it in the elevator or to get into the Business Centre or fitness facility or club, if you've got enough points, it all works that way too. And it's nice to have a happy ending, a good conclusion not only to the podcast, but to a tech saga.
And let's go back to Karen McDonald who raised this issue about the iPhone status bar, and she says, "Thank you so much for giving my issue some attention during your last Access On podcast. I am happy to report that after the latest update, the issue of getting to the status bar has been fixed. This was apparently a bug specific to 16 Pro models. It's interesting, Karen, because I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max and I wasn't seeing it, so it must have been a very niche bug. And this is often the thing with technology that there's just some little thing that goes wrong in a particular model for some reason, and it can be very tricky to track those things down.
But it's great that the Apple engineers have done that and rectified that one. And thank you for letting us know. 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] 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 Nations Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.