Welcome to the eleventh episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
The show is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if you have an app or player that supports chapters. Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Introduction 0:00
- Update on Facebook accessibility 0:53
- Bryan Blazie and David Goldfield of Blazie Technologies 4:33
- Accessibility of the RODECaster 44:43
- Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses 49:35
- Playback Magazine and other publications of the past 53:50
- Boutique on how to engineer an AI prompt 54:56
- Tech tip, Scribe for Documents 56:25
- Closing and contact info 58:00
Transcript
Speaker 1: Live life you want.
Jonathan Mosen: Welcome to Access On, the official technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. Almost a year after the launch, I speak with Bryan Blazie and David Goldfield from Blazie Technologies. We learn about how the BT Speak's evolving and get firm details about their first refreshable Braille product. Our Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility is inviting you to a boutique on AI prompt engineering. And there's an update to last week's story on emulating the Facebook mobile site on a Windows desktop.
It's Jonathan Mosen, delighted to be back with you for episode 11 of Access On, coming to you from the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Before we go on to our feature interview for this week, I want to circle back to the topic that we led with last week, and that's the accessibility of Facebook. We mentioned that Meta are starting to roll out some positive changes to their iOS app, which hopefully will improve the experience there. And significantly, many users on the Windows and Mac desktop have been having issues with the regular Facebook site, which caused them to use the Mbasic.facebook.com site, and Meta deprecated this late last year. As a result, it made Facebook difficult for some to use, impossible for others to use.
Facebook has responded to this with a temporary fix and as we made clear last week, we don't consider this the end of the journey. For us the end of the journey looks like a fully accessible main Facebook.com site that works well with screen readers, and is a joy to use. In the meantime though, Facebook has released a URL that you can visit, which will render the mobile version of the site on desktop browsers. And if you want to know what this sounds and feels like, you can go back to episode 10, the previous episode, and I gave a brief demo so that you will know when you are on the mobile version of the site and when you're on the desktop version. To go to that mobile version, you go to Facebook.com/?force_mobile=1. That's Facebook.com/?force _mobile=1.
The reason why I bring this up again is that I did mention in episode 10 of the podcast that we were receiving reports at this stage that this URL was working for some people but not others. I want to thank Meta for working with the National Federation of the Blind on this. They took our reports on this seriously and we worked with them to try and figure out what the variable was. It was not browser related. It didn't appear to be geography related.
Some people in the United States could access it, some people in the United States could not. We did assemble a small team of volunteers who agreed to allow their Facebook accounts to be used for testing purposes. They wanted this URL to work for them and it was not. Meta worked on those accounts and saw a common factor, which they have now been able to address. And as far as we can tell, at the time of recording this, anybody who goes to the URL now gets the mobile experience.
As is usual with a situation like this where we don't have a perfect fix, we're getting mixed response. Some people say it is so much easier to use. What you find is that at the top of the page you get a little bit of extra clutter, people you may know, various things like that, just as if you were using the mobile version of the app. And then ultimately, it does settle down and you have a long list of Facebook posts from your timeline.
I think the encouraging thing out of all of this is that Meta is responding. We are enjoying good quality dialogue with them, and we hope very much for that to continue. If you have any feedback about the Facebook experience, you're welcome to be in touch with me. If you want to share it with the podcast, use the typical address [email protected], and we play a selection of listener comments on the podcast.
If you want to be in touch with me in an NFB capacity, not necessarily for sharing on the podcast but just to let me know what you think, you can contact me here, jmosen, that's [email protected] and we'll certainly continue that dialogue with Meta. But the good thing now is if you want to try this experience, as far as we can tell, everybody who wants to now can.
There was a lot of excitement when the Blazie team re-emerged with a new product and a new company. The company is Blazie Technologies and the product is the BT Speak. I thought we'd catch up with David Goldfield and Bryan Blazie from Blazie Technologies, to find out what is new and we'll see if we can tease anything out about what might be coming. So Bryan, welcome and David, welcome to you. It's great to have you both here.
David Goldfield: Thanks for having us.
Bryan Blazie: Yes, thank you very much.
Jonathan Mosen: Bryan, after some time has elapsed, how do you feel about being back in this space? Was it the right thing to do?
Bryan Blazie: I believe it was. My father and I decided to come back into the industry because we haven't found anything else to do with our time that provided us with the same feeling of satisfaction as designing and building technological products for blind people.
Jonathan Mosen: And the response, how has it been received by the blind community? Given that obviously you're in a very different market now, a very different environment, when there is so much choice out there.
Bryan Blazie: The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and that we have heard nothing but, "Glad you're back," from people. I will say that the industry and the market has changed considerably. It's hard to process the changes sometimes when you come back and you look at prices, everything seems to be expensive, but I realized I'm comparing that to the costs 20 years ago. And in reality, the prices have come down if you factor in inflation rather considerably, and things that were out of reach of people 20 years ago are the standard now.
The best example I can give is a Braille display on a product like ours. The Braille 'N Speak was hugely popular and must have for everybody when we came out with it in 1986. Fast-forward to now, almost 40 years later, and everybody wants something with a Braille display. And the added cost when you factor in inflation makes them comparable. So the BT Speak is significantly less expensive if you factor in inflation than the Braille 'N Speak was in its time.
Jonathan Mosen: How much involvement does Dean Blazie, whose name along with yours is legendary in this industry, have in the product? Is he sort of an emeritus role or is he actively working on features?
Bryan Blazie: He probably works harder than any other person in the company, in terms of number of hours, time put in. He is extremely active, surprisingly so for his age and where he is in the world. He really is passionate about making this happen.
Jonathan Mosen: And that's the thing, he doesn't have to do this at all, in a financial sense. It's obviously very much a labor of love for him and something he feels passionate about.
Bryan Blazie: Yes. In fact, the entire family is, this is not a source of revenue for us at this time. I mean, I'm not going to say that it never will be, but we didn't set the company up thinking that we were going to make a lot of money. We set it up as a give back project. Each of us have put up a significant amount of our own money to make this happen without the consideration of well, this may turn into something in the future. It may, but that's not why we're doing it.
Jonathan Mosen: David Goldfield, I'll bring you in at this point. I first came across your name actually on the Blazie email list, which was so busy, so popular, particularly back in the '90s when everybody was jumping on email lists and wanting tech support and you always seemed so patient and knowledgeable. And I lost track of you for a long time, and then you popped up one day on I think the Mosen Explosion radio show on Mushroom FM, and every time you would send in a message, I would jokingly say, "What's wrong with my Braille light, David? Why won't it work?" So, here you are back with the Blazie family.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background? How did you get into technology?
David Goldfield: Yeah, it's funny because the Blazie Technologies list is now just as busy as the Blazie Engineering list was.
Jonathan Mosen: Goodness.
David Goldfield: How I got into this field is by working for the Blazie's. I became a Braille 'N Speak user in, let's see, I think it was, yeah, it was 1989. I had a Versa Braille and I decided to sell it, believe it or not, and I got quite a good price for it at that time. You couldn't do that today, but it was a Versa Braille P2C, and I had heard about the Braille 'N Speak and saw it and just fell in love with it, it was like magic to me.
So I bought one in 1989, stayed up half the night and learned all of it. And there was a point where I just realized I wasn't thinking about making a career in this field. I just thought, wow, it would be really cool to work for Blazie Engineering. And I used to write to them and send them bug reports, and every once in a while I would tell them I was interested in working for them and I kind of became a pain in the neck about it, but I was pretty persistent.
And then in 1991 I found out that they were looking for a support person. Went down to Maryland where they were and interviewed with Dean and Bryan, and then started with them for almost seven years. It was about six years and 10 months. So, I've done things since before coming back to Blazie Technologies, but it was Blazie Engineering that got me started. And even when I was working for them for the first few years, I wasn't really thinking long-term that this might be a good way to start a career. I just saw it as a really fun job and a fun role and a great place to work, and just a lot of fun being able to help people out and being a part of the product.
Jonathan Mosen: And I know you're doing a lot of information sharing as well in a personal capacity, which people appreciate because the speed of change in the tech sector is dizzying. There's just so much going on and now we're in this era of AI where one company is flavor of the month and the next thing you know there's some disruptor that comes along and it's just constant change. So, people really do appreciate that dissemination of information that you're doing.
David Goldfield: Thanks, it's a passion of mine. I didn't come up with that idea. I actually got it, if I can mention her name, from someone who some people may know named Amy Ruell, who started a technology announcement list in the '90s before we had RSS feeds and all of these other methods for obtaining information. So, that's something that I'd like to do as a side project.
Jonathan Mosen: And Amy has been a board member of this organization, in fact, of the National Federation of the Blind, and she's still pretty active and I was talking to her quite recently. So, it's great that you've picked up that mantle.
So let's talk about the latest firmware, and as we do that, I think it's important to say that this product is evolving very quickly. You're obviously quite nimble, in terms of the way that firmware updates are rolling out. So, somebody who saw a BT Speak when it first came out might be quite surprised by what it can do now.
David Goldfield: Oh, yeah. We come out in the days of the Braille 'N Speak, we would have updates once a year, usually in the summer. Now I would say we come out with updates roughly every six to eight weeks. It sometimes can be even less, depending on what we need to put in. And of course, all of that now is done through wifi, "over the air." So, there's been a lot that we have added since the product began shipping last March, including, I mean, there's so much we could talk about, but we have since added a phone book and calendar capabilities, which you can optionally sync with Google. So if you have Google Calendar or Google Contacts, you can sync your BT Speaks contacts with what you have on Google.
We have a radio tuner, which currently has over 52,000 stations, both terrestrial standard broadcast and internet, including a blindness category with blindness specific stations. There's a YouTube streaming app where you can, even though it doesn't have a screen built in, you can still listen to your YouTube videos and search for videos and take a look at the channels that you've subscribed to.
We also have a ChatGPT app that we've added, so you can literally open this app and communicate with ChatGPT, there are several models that you could flip back and forth to that we support. It has a scientific calculator, of course clock and calendar functions. It also has a voice recorder, so if you're in a class or a meeting and you need to do a quick voice recording or even maybe a not so quick voice recording, you can do that in a variety of formats. Wave MP3 and Lossless Audio.
Jonathan Mosen: The phone book that you have in the calendar which syncs with Google, that makes a lot of sense. If somebody is using Microsoft Outlook in their workplace, does that mean that you can kind of DAISY chain them together so you could integrate your Microsoft Outlook with your Google account, and then effectively get your contacts between those two?
David Goldfield: Yeah, you should be able to do that, and I should really try that because I use Outlook on a regular basis on my Windows machine. So, if you can successfully sync your Outlook appointments and contacts to Gmail, then technically the BT Speak, yeah, once it's on Google, the BT Speak doesn't care where those appointments and contacts come from. It should be able to pull them down.
Jonathan Mosen: So that is quite compelling because one of the questions I've always had about the BT Speak is, how do I integrate it into my existing workflow? And we'll talk a little bit later about the Linux side of this and some of the more advanced capabilities, but obviously if you can do those things, if you can get content seamlessly between this and the devices that you're using now, it becomes a pretty exciting value prop.
David Goldfield: Yes, it does.
Jonathan Mosen: Let's talk about the radio tuner then. Who are you getting your radio stations from? Which directory do you use?
David Goldfield: Yep, so we're getting them from radiobrowser.info. Although the blindness category we created, I don't think that was theirs, they don't really have one of those as far as I'm aware, but that's where we're getting them from. And we have an option in the radio tuner to re-index the database, so to speak, or refresh the database. So that if they add let's say 25 stations in the past week, you can do a refresh and it'll basically pull down the latest database including those new stations. So whatever they add, the BT Speak is able to pull that down.
Jonathan Mosen: And ChatGPT, does that require an API key from the user or are you handling the API key on your side?
David Goldfield: It does currently require an API key from the user. I believe if you go to platform.openai.com, you can get a key and they're extremely inexpensive, as you probably know. I think I paid $10 for mine, and I've been using it for a bit and I don't remember how much activity or tokens or whatever that you get with those keys, but once you purchase an API key, you would then copy that onto your BT Speak. We will see the key once it's on the device, and we'll process it accordingly into the app.
Jonathan Mosen: What's the speed like of ChatGPT when you're using it on the BT Speak?
David Goldfield: I think it's pretty reasonably fast, and I think that the delay is minimal, if not negligible.
Jonathan Mosen: Bryan, can I bring you back in and just ask you about the BT Speak form factor? For those who have not seen one, can you describe that in detail so that somebody can get a mental picture in their head of what this device is like?
Bryan Blazie: Yes. The top surface of it is roughly the size of the screen of an iPhone 14. That was the measurements I used when I sat down to design the device. And it is roughly twice as thick to accommodate a much larger battery so that we have a significant battery life, eight to 12 hours depending on how people use it. The top of the device has an ergonomic keyboard, Braille keyboard. It's six keys angled at the top away from each other so they fit the hands, and then a space bar in the middle with dot seven and eight to the right and the left of the space bar.
David Goldfield: I could give you the exact dimensions if you would like.
Jonathan Mosen: Sure.
David Goldfield: It is the width is 6.1 inches, which is 15.5 centimeters. The depth is 2.8 inches, which is 7.1 centimeters. The height is 0.75 inches, which is 1.9 centimeters, and it only weighs half a pound, 249 grams.
Jonathan Mosen: And for people who want to really geek out, you're using Raspberry Pi under the hood, right? Can you tell us about that?
David Goldfield: It's called a Raspberry Pi Compute Module Four Board. It's using a fork of Debian, which is called Bookworm under the hood, and when you go into the desktop mode, which we can talk about if you'd like, that's using something called the Mate desktop, which is M-A-T-E, looks like the word mate, but it's pronounced mate.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I learned that the hard way, actually.
David Goldfield: Yeah, right, right. We used to call it the Mate desktop and then I realized, oh wait, that's not really how they pronounce it. Bryan can probably speak more about the actual CM4 board, because he and Dean were heavily involved and really did all of the hardware design.
Bryan Blazie: Yeah, the CM4 board is a quad core micro processor. The board itself has more power than the laptop that was used to design the product. It's pretty impressive how much power is there.
Jonathan Mosen: What interests me is that for people who want obviously a portable note-taker, organizer, I guess we've used that term note-taker historically, but for a long time these devices have been so much more than that. And the fact that you've got even a text-based browser and a radio directory and all of these things illustrates that. So they've got that in a form factor, but I'm actually very intrigued by what power users might be able to do with the full Linux desktop on such a small device. I mean, it's actually technically possible for people to be running web servers, their own email servers, all sorts of things on such a tiny devices in their pocket.
Bryan Blazie: Yes, it is a full-blown computer. Once you're running that desktop, very little difference between what's in our box and what would be on some kind of a brick that you would buy and plug a keyboard and a monitor into. We've got a very, very small form factor. The major thing that you would get by buying one of the larger bricks that sit on the desk is more ports, the hardware ports. We only bring out the one USB on the BT Speak, a very small micro SD card, and that's just because there's only so much room in the package.
Jonathan Mosen: And is that the reason why there is no physical headphone jack on the device? Because certainly for the deaf-blind community, the demise of the physical headphone jack on a range of devices has caused some issues. Did it just not fit or is it not technically possible?
Bryan Blazie: Honestly, it was just a bad choice on our part. We debated it and came up with a conclusion that cell phones today don't have that, everybody is moving away from it. The headphones with the adapter on it are getting harder and harder to find, so we just thought that, well, that's not the future of things, and it was a bad choice. The BT Braille that we're working on will have a headphone jack on it, and future products as well.
Jonathan Mosen: You've really piqued my interest there with that little reference. Is there anything else you want to say though about the firmware before we move on? Are there other enticing features that you'd like to tell people about?
Bryan Blazie: One thing I think is worth mentioning is, is that the use of Raspberry Pi guarantees a product life of at least 20 years, they will support this hardware for that period of time. And that's significantly different than what you get if you were to say, buy an off-the-shelf tablet of some kind and modify that. We don't know how long those particular boards are supported and typically, general market products evolve much, much faster because the usage is so high. In our case, we have a small industry and the products represent a much larger purchase for most of our customers, so they need to have a fairly significant product life and that's one of the reasons that we went the way that we did.
Jonathan Mosen: Is there any potential for a QWERTY device like this, that just has the speech but a QWERTY keyboard instead of a Braille one?
Bryan Blazie: There's huge potential for that. It is on the product roadmap. I was making promises six or eight months ago about when we would have these things done and I have quickly figured out that I'm setting myself up to be wrong a lot. I don't need any help in that, so I'm not going to make any promises as to timing. I will say that it is something we are working on.
Jonathan Mosen: You have a wide range of text to speech engines. This thing, I was having a play with a BT Speak when I first arrived here at the Jernigan Institute, and really enjoyed doing that. And I was very impressed with just how many text to speech engines you've got in there.
David Goldfield: We have a combination of some newer ones and a little bit of classic and a little bit in between. So we've got the real modern voices, we have three vocalizer voices, Tom, Nathan, and Samantha. We also have all of the DECtalk voices for people who remember that who really like the DECtalk. We support E-Speak. And optionally you can install RHVoice, which has a very nice human sound. Sometimes a bit of an Irish accent maybe, but really clear. And also the Festival voices for people who want to play with those.
Jonathan Mosen: What about eloquence?
David Goldfield: We would love to have eloquence on there, but it's not unfortunately available for the architecture that we have.
Jonathan Mosen: It was good to catch up with Old Perfect Paul and beautiful Betty and my buddies there on DECtalk, and it was the gold standard for such a long time. Everybody aspired to own one of these things and they were not cheap. And then eventually it came out in software and I remember people being very excited about that.
David Goldfield: Yes, I remember the software versions of that. That was one of the original ones that we had in the first shipping unit. We had DECtalk and E-Speak and we still do, we've actually added a lot
more E-Speak voices and languages now, for people who like that. I personally do, I often use E-Speak with NVDA, because even though it may not sound very human, it's very responsive and it's consistent, and it's predictable, and it's very clear, and overall, it has good pronunciation. So if that is something that is of value to people, you can certainly get that.
Jonathan Mosen: Bryan, let's talk about what you called the BT Braille. I'm excited about that because I haven't heard that product name before. So, this is the next generation Braille Lite, I guess. What can you tell me about that?
Bryan Blazie: The first one that we release will be a 20 cell variant. It will be based on the Raspberry Pi CM5, so the next version of this processor. Roughly twice as fast as the BT Speak. The next question everybody asks is, well, can we get that processor in the BT Speak? Unfortunately, it would require a much larger package because that device is very power hungry. With the Braille display, we've got a lot more room for battery and we've taken advantage of that. So at this point in time, I don't see how we could make that work in a BT Speak unless we made it a lot larger.
Before I go on about the BT Braille, one thing that I think we've missed on the BT Speak and our products in general is something that makes us very different than everybody else, is that our box is pretty open. We don't hide anything from the users. We encourage users to write software for it, you can write your own programs, you have access to the Linux command line. We support people doing it and help in any way that we can. So, it's an excellent STEM tool.
Jonathan Mosen: The BT Braille, what kind of cells are you going to have on that device? Have you made that decision yet?
Bryan Blazie: Yes, they are going to be piezoelectric Braille cells, we're currently sourcing them from KGS.
Jonathan Mosen: When I spoke with Dean at the launch of this product, he was quite excited about some new Braille technology that was beyond piezoelectric. I take it that you've evaluated options like that and just concluded they're not ready for prime time at this point?
Bryan Blazie: Yes, there are a couple of technologies that I think show incredible promise and I would really like to design a product around them, but for our first product out of the gate, I did not want to add the Braille display as another variable. I wanted to go with something that people accept and is known and everybody likes and is very high-quality.
I even looked at some other piezo manufacturers and there is a number of them that show great promise and may be great product, but I went with KGS because they're a very well-known entity and I didn't want the Braille display to be any point of contention.
So, the first product will use the existing technology and then in the future we hope to look at... The most promising technology I've seen so far is what's coming out of Tactile Engineering. It's got huge potential for the future. The product that they have right now is quite good, it seems to work well.
The Braille cells and it seemed to work very well. They do not have it available in the 20 cell form factor right now, which is one of the reasons for not pursuing it faster, but that is on their product roadmap as well. So when they get there, maybe we will review and decide to go that direction with another product.
Jonathan Mosen: Cursor routing keys on this device, will we have those?
Bryan Blazie: It will have cursor routing, a toggle on either end of the display for going up and down, or function yet to be decided on that, but one of them will definitely take the display up and down, maybe the other one forward and back. David and the other people will have to decide exactly how we map those keys, and that may be a menu selection too.
Jonathan Mosen: So that'll be a departure because people remember the famous Blazie product advanced bars on the Braille products.
Bryan Blazie: Yes, the Braille Lite had a bar or bars above the display. These are right and left, mostly because the cursor routing is directly above, and that would... Was trying to keep the product as small as possible.
Jonathan Mosen: What about thumb keys? Because a lot of us have become used to not having to take our fingers off the Braille display and just being able to scroll by pressing a key on the front of the device with your thumb.
Bryan Blazie: Yes, we will not have any keys on the front of the device.
Jonathan Mosen: It does have a headphone jack, whereas the BT Speak does not. Anything else that makes it different?
Bryan Blazie: Yes, it'll have a number of USB ports. It'll have about one terabyte of memory, built-in storage.
Jonathan Mosen: What's the price point for this product and when can we have it?
Bryan Blazie: Price is to be determined. The initial release price, I'm hoping to hold the Braille 'N Speak or the Blazie Engineering prices from old. It's kind of a tradition that I've started, so when we release the products, I like to try to release them at about the same prices as our products used to be. So, I think that puts us at approximately 3,500 dollars for the 18 cell.
Jonathan Mosen: When do you think this first iteration of the BT Braille will be available?
Bryan Blazie: December of '24. See how wrong I am?
Jonathan Mosen: I was going to say. [inaudible 00:31:21].
Bryan Blazie: That was my target. In a perfect world, we'll have something to show at CSUN and have something to ship by summer conventions. That might move a little bit. I mean, there are way too many variables that are way beyond my personal control. I'm waiting on other people to finish things and they're not inside the business, so I have to be patient.
Part of it is we designed around some things, chips and things that are supposed to be available now, but we can't seem to get them in the quantities that we need for production. That's a small excuse, but it is true. So we're waiting on that. Plastics is taking longer than it should, but we're progressing.
Jonathan Mosen: It's all contingent on the release of the first product. So let me put it this way, how much gap do you expect there would be between the first product, which is 20, and the second, which I presume would be a 40 cell version?
Bryan Blazie: I would like to think that it will happen pretty quickly. It'll be the same delays as is happening now. It's the same two entities that are going to be involved in this next one. I have to get a plastic case for it and I also have to get a, it requires some changes to the way the board's laid out to accommodate a 40 cell display. It should be faster, it's easier to do the 40 cell than it is the 20 cell version. So, I don't think it'll be too much longer, but three months, maybe six months.
Jonathan Mosen: It's a bit of a different market now, because there's a blurring of the line between what I would call traditional Braille displays, which essentially just connected to your computer and that was your lot, and your note taker, which had so many full features. And now there's this sort of middle ground where you can get some devices and they may not have a web browser, but they actually are quite feature rich. They have NFB Newsline built in and Bard built in, and various things like that. So I guess positioning this product is going to be critical in this new market. You're going, I presume, for the fully fledged note taker market?
Bryan Blazie: I think we've gone way beyond note taker at this point. We refer to these devices as pocket computers, because they really are full-fledged computers.
Jonathan Mosen: If you're talking about a pocket computer though, there is a lot of talk at the moment about bringing out a Braille device that runs full windows. Is that something that you considered that maybe if you did that you could replace the laptop and people could be running Windows 11 on this thing and use it for everything, pretty much?
Bryan Blazie: The question I would ask is, if users ask themselves, what do they use Windows for? A very, very small percentage are going to come up with any application that doesn't have an equivalent that runs in Linux. It is a much more reliable operating system, it's much more open, it's faster, it's smaller. It is superior to Windows in absolutely every way. There is not one category where Windows would win the battle, other than there's a lot of software written for it that's proprietary. So a lot of people are locked in, but that's changing. Windows itself inside, deep inside uses a Linux core, Apple uses a Linux core.
Eventually Windows, it's going to fade away, it's already bloated and has a ton of problems. So, I don't see us going that way. That was a fundamental decision we made in the very beginning. So, I don't think that you'll see us do a Windows product.
Jonathan Mosen: There could be an argument that the one area where Linux is not superior is screen reading, that there's still not a screen reader as polished or as intuitive as the options on Windows.
David Goldfield: What we have in the Linux, and I'm a Windows user also, so I'm very familiar with JAWS and NVDA and narrator, and certainly with voiceover on the Mac. So on Linux, what you have is a screen reader called Orca, O-R-C-A, and it's been around for a while. And in many respects, I think people will find that it's a very similar experience to using some of the screen readers that they might be familiar with in Windows and on Mac.
I myself am not a power Linux user, I'm actually a good test case for this. I consider myself a very competent power user of Windows, I've been using it for 30 years, and I've been using these screen readers since they came out.
And what really surprised me was how similar the interface was, so that you don't have to learn a lot of Linux commands. You don't really have to learn any Linux commands if you don't want to, because when you're in the desktop, it's very similar to the Windows desktop. And in fact, with web browsing, the experience is very similar.
You have almost identical navigation keys to browse the web, not only arrowing around with up and down arrows and moving by word and by character, but also the single letter navigation commands like H and shift H for next in previous heading, and E for edit field. So, I think people may be surprised at how similar the experience actually is.
Jonathan Mosen: Can you go through pricing for me of the current BT Speak? How much is that selling for and what do you get?
David Goldfield: Sure. So the current price of the BT Speak is 1,195 dollars. You can also purchase an optional leather carrying case for that, which is made by Turtleback, for 92.95 dollars. People who already have a BT Speak who don't have a case can purchase that separately, and there's also a package where you can get them both together through our website. So what you get, not only a USB-C cable, but you even get a wall charger, which is something you don't often get now with a lot of cell phones and tablets. And we also give you an adapter, if you have a three and a half inch headphone jack, you can plug that into your USB port and connect the headphones to the headphone jack.
Jonathan Mosen: Initially when the product was released, there was a pro version and a standard version, but that distinction is now gone. Is that right?
David Goldfield: Yes, there was a BT Speak and a BT Speak Pro. And after a very short time what we saw was that sales were overwhelmingly leading to the pro. That's what people wanted, they really wanted a product with more features. The standard unit just had all of the standard applications that were built in, but it didn't have the desktop mode, but people were just more interested in the Pro. And so we made the decision to stop selling the basic unit, and so the BT Speak Pro is what's available now.
Jonathan Mosen: And if people want to learn about the product, there is a good audio tutorial available on the Blazie Technologies website, and I enjoyed that. I actually was entertained by it on a long flight from New Zealand to Baltimore at one point, and really did enjoy that. So there's a written user guide and there's also the audio tutorial available on the Blazie Technologies website.
David Goldfield: Yes, we have the audio tutorial, which is a little over two hours long that was recorded and edited by Steve Clower. He did a fabulous job for us. Anybody who wants to can listen to that or download that. You can download the entire tutorial or just segments of the tutorial. We also have our getting started text version. We have a full user manual that anybody can download and read in Word or accessible PDF.
And we also have all of the release notes for all of our updates going back to last March that anybody can read. And by the way, in the BT Speak, the audio tutorial, the getting started guide, and the user manual are built into the device, but people who don't have a device yet who just want to learn more about it are free to download any of that material and we're happy to make it available.
Jonathan Mosen: Is there a podcast client on the BT Speak?
David Goldfield: There currently is not, but we've definitely had requests for it, and it wouldn't surprise me if it happened, but currently not at this time.
Jonathan Mosen: And what about services in the blind community that people love to use like Bookshare, NLS, NFB Newsline, of course?
David Goldfield: Perhaps literally as we speak, we are developing a barred app for the National Library Service, so that is coming. I don't have a timeline for that, but what I remind people, because a lot of people don't realize this, is that you can download Braille titles from BARD right now, today, and you can transfer those into your BT Speak and read them in our editor, which does support contracted Braille, either UEB or the older EBAE code. And the same is true for Bookshare, so if you download Bookshare files as Braille files, you can open them up in our editor.
If you download them as word or RTF files, you could still open them up. We will automatically convert those so our editor can read those. So technically, Bookshare is supported and Braille files in BARD are supported. But what you're asking about are apps that you can directly interface with these services and download content, as well as audio files from BARD, which of course is a big part of the BARD service. So, BARD is definitely coming.
Jonathan Mosen: What about DAISY support? Because obviously that would unlock a lot of this content around the world as well. A lot of libraries that offer accessible formats have gone to DAISY audio and DAISY multimedia.
David Goldfield: Yes, and that's also a supported format of Bookshare as well. So that I think is not only very possible, but I will say that it's very probable, but again, I don't want to give a timeline for that. There are some DAISY players that we're looking at that have already been written for the Linux operating system, and it's just a question of making sure that we find the best one that's accessible and incorporating that. But I do see that as a very, not only reasonable request, but a very likely reality.
Jonathan Mosen: Bryan, any final thoughts from you as we wrap?
Bryan Blazie: The one thing that I do want to mention is, is that Blazie Technologies is a customer-focused company. We started the company with the idea of bringing back the Blazie Engineering service policies where we offer exchange units to people, so that when people buy product from us, they are not stuck without the product if something happens. If you're under a maintenance contract, you contact us, if we can't fix the problem remotely, we ship you a replacement unit and you put your old unit in the box and the exchange is over.
You've got a working unit to use and the exchange unit becomes your unit so you don't have to worry about going back and forth over and over again. We also get our advancements from the customer, so any feature that we come up with, any new improvement, it's directly the result of customer input. We don't claim to be the experts, we just know how to implement things. So when customers tell us what they want, that's what we focus on.
Jonathan Mosen: And that was Bryan Blazie, we also heard from David Goldfield, both from Blazie Technologies. Sounds like it's going to be another interesting year for them.
We are also interested in your day-to-day experience of this product. Have you bought a BT Speak? How are you integrating it into your life? What do you use it for? Are there things you'd like it to do that it doesn't at the moment? Are there things you'd like it to do differently? Real-world experiences are so important, so we'd like to get yours if you are a BT Speak user, [email protected] is how you can be in touch.
Access On is all just one word. You can attach an audio clip to your email if you want to record something, maybe on a BT Speak, which does have a recorder function where you can just write the email down and we'll be pleased to play a selection of comments about the BT Speak.
Let's go to some listener feedback. Always good to get it. Kevin Wozma is writing in and says, "Hi, Jonathan. I know you use a RODECaster to record your podcasts. I have a few questions I hope you can answer for me. First, how user-friendly is the RODECaster for blind people? I understand that some of it is touch screen. What I don't want is to record an episode of my podcast and then accidentally touch the screen and have my recording messed up, just because I touched the wrong part of the screen accidentally.
Second, can I use the software that the RODECaster comes with in order to set the parameters to my liking? Also, I have a Shure SMB that is plugged into my Scarlett interface. The audio on it sounds terrible. I use a Phantom to power the Shure SM7B, but I still can't get it to sound as professional as it should. Is it because I am using the Phantom to power the mic instead of a cloud lifter?"
Thanks for writing in, Kevin. I have never used a RODECaster. I have read about it on email lists, and at one point maybe a couple of years ago, there was a lot of talk about dialogue that was going on between some members of the blind podcasting community and RODE, the Australian company, and I believe they do have an American subsidiary that makes the RODECaster. You're right, it does have a touch screen. I know of one or two blind people who used one or maybe used one still, but they did find some accessibility challenges.
There was some indication that somebody from RODE was taking an interest, and then I understand that person left, and this is always the risk. Sometimes you can find somebody who is a champion of accessibility, you feel like you're making progress, and then that champion moves on to another gig and you've lost all the momentum.
So, there has been another RODECaster that's come out I guess in the last year or so. I'm not familiar with that at all. So if there's anybody listening who has used one, by all means, be in touch. You may be able to answer Kevin's questions, but this is a device that I've never personally used or even put my hands on, so my experiences are pretty much based on what I've heard other blind podcasters discussing.
You mentioned your microphone. I'm assuming that it's the SM7B from Shure that you have. And a device like the Focusrite Scarlett should be able to power that microphone okay. It is notorious for being a quiet microphone and requiring quite a bit of gain, but the microphone is immensely popular in the podcasting industry. So, a lot of manufacturers use the SM7B as a kind of a gold standard for testing, whether their pre amps are up to the task.
If you're really not getting enough gain even after you maybe normalize or something like that, then yes, I would say a Cloudlifter is the answer. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you use a Phantom. Phantom power is normally something that you would switch on to power condenser microphones that needs some power to make them go, but the SM7B is a dynamic microphone and it does not require Phantom power, so if you're really not getting enough gain from it, definitely give some sort of Cloudlifter a try and that should do the job for you.
In terms of other viable products, the device that you have, one of the Scarlett range from Focusrite is very good. Focusrite also do a device called the Vocaster, that's V-O-C-A-S-T-E-R, and it comes in a couple of models, and it's actually what I'm using to put this podcast together. It is a very handy device and you can pair your iPhone with it via Bluetooth if you want to do interviews that way, have people hear what's coming out of the device. The Vocaster Two has two microphone inputs, it has some basic dynamic audio compression that you can configure. It's pretty good, in terms of value for money.
Also, Zoom do a product called the PodTrak P4, which has analog controls and is really easy for a blind person to use. That will also pair via Bluetooth and also a TRRS cable to your iPhone, just like the Vocaster Two will. And while not a direct replacement for podcasting specific product, you could potentially have a look at the Essential series from Zoom.
The big plus from a blind person's point of view is that those devices have fully accessible menus, so you can navigate, you can be sure that you're recording, and they've done a very good job of implementing accessibility into the Zoom Essential range. So, best of luck with your podcasting. It is our intention by the way here at the Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility to hold an extensive webinar later in the year on getting started with podcasting. And based on all the feedback we are receiving, I expect that will be quite popular.
Shan is our next contributor and says, "Hi, Jonathan. Congratulations on your recent new position with NFB. I've been a long time listener of your podcasts but am a first time submitter of a question to the podcast. I recently received a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses for my birthday. I'm very impressed with the things I can do, like read a menu and get information about, say, the hamburgers on it. However, I've not been successful at finding a site that lists a comprehensive list of commands, or in particular a place where blind and visually impaired users who are using the Meta glasses to learn from each other."
"The other item I'm really interested in is items like the glasses can now be used with Be My Eyes support calls. However, I have found that the Be My Eyes AI option does a better job at describing pictures, as compared to the Meta glasses. Now that the Meta glasses camera is accessible to Be My Eyes, do you know if Be My AI will be an accessible application on the Meta smart glasses?
Do you know if anyone else is going to add other accessibility features, like say access to GPS things? For example, the Meta glasses can tell one what streets they're on, however, they cannot give you the address that one is on in the street. Also, one can only call contacts that are on their contact list, the Meta glasses cannot call a phone number. These items would be extremely useful." Concludes Shan.
This is a really helpful email, Shan in a number of respects. We are having dialogue with Meta regularly now, discussing features that the blind community is saying they would like to see in the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and we'll certainly pass on this feedback to them. Meta seems genuinely pleased by the fact that the blind community has taken up use of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in such large number, and I think the fact that they allocated resources to making Be My Eyes integrated in the way that it is into the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses platform as a testimony to the excitement that they feel about this.
They are aware that there are many in our community who would like more detailed descriptions from Meta AI. The kind of descriptions that a blind person might require are different from those that many sighted people may think are adequate. Meta's thinking about how they cater to that need. I'm happy to be wrong, but I think it's unlikely that we will see Be My AI in its form as it is in the iOS and Android apps and on the Windows app in the Meta smart glasses, because it's using a competitor to Meta AI.
So it may be a bridge too far for Meta to incorporate that. I think what we will see though, is some way for blind users to get more detailed descriptions using Meta AI, and I think there will be some very positive changes coming in due course in that regard. So, we'll keep you posted there.
I'm not aware that anybody has tried to compile a comprehensive list of commands. I know one of the biggest things that we get feedback about here at the Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility at the NFB, is people want a surefire way to just read a document. Not paraphrase the document, but read it word for word. I've heard some people having success with this with commands like, "Read the entire document top to bottom." I've heard one command that also seems to be working is, "Read word for word," but it seems to be a little bit hit and miss, and I think we will get some clarity on all of that in due course as well.
The best resource that I am aware of for blind users of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to get together is actually called that, it's a group on Facebook. Blind users of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. You can search for that if you are a Facebook user, you can ask to join that group, and if any of your friends are already on it, they'll receive a notification inviting them to approve your membership of that group. It is busy, but you'll be able to ask all sorts of questions about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to your heart's content, so it's a useful resource. Blind users of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, is the name of that group on Facebook.
Tina Hansen has similar more thoughts on Ed Potter. She says, "I recall Playback Magazine and a number of magazines that brought the blindness community together from the 1980s to 2000. I especially enjoyed the product demonstrations. When you hosted Main Menu, I really enjoyed that. And now to hear your podcast, I feel as if everything has come full circle. I know I've said this before, but your tech podcast is one of the best. Thank you for doing it." Well, thank you, Tina. I appreciate that. And there have been some interesting cassette based magazines over the years.
I definitely remember with a lot of fondness, I've mentioned NewsBits from Doug Wakefield before, and also Technical Innovations Bulletin. I used to look forward to that. That was a great magazine, sort of quirky but interesting information coming through that. And also, the Raised.Computing newsletter. Somebody pointed me last year I think it was. To a place where you can review all of those Raised.Computing newsletters. And I'm glad they've been preserved because it's a really important part of our history.
We are working on something pretty exciting right now, we always are at the Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility, and I want to give you as much notice of this as possible so you can make some time available to attend if you want, and I think there'll be a bit of interest, and it's all about how to engineer an AI prompt. AI tools are becoming ubiquitous in our lives as technology rapidly advances. To get the most out of these tools, it's important to ask the questions the right way. This practice of properly communicating what you want to an AI model is called prompt engineering, and it's critical for making sure you get the information you're looking for as efficiently as possible.
Join the National Federation of the Blind Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility on Tuesday, February the 25, 2025 from 2:00 PM until three 3:30 PM Eastern, via Zoom, to learn how you can get the most of your use of AI. We'll cover why prompt engineering is important, how to craft a good prompt, the effects of good phrasing on AI responses, real examples of how this can be useful in daily life. Register for the How to Engineer an AI Prompt Boutique today. You can go to Nfb.org/cena, that's Nfb.org/cena, and if you go to the events and training link there, you will be able to find information about the boutique and register. I look forward to seeing you there.
It's tech tip time. Oh my goodness. Try saying that a few times quickly. If you'd like to share a tech tip with us, we are always interested in getting them. You can drop me an email [email protected] and put tech tip in the subject. It could be something that you record, you can write it down as well, and Rich Yamamoto has done the latter. He says, "Here's a tech tip for those who use Scribe for documents. If you're doing a document conversion and you know that it's in one language, it's wise to set your language settings to just that language.
For example, English as opposed to the default of automatically detect. In my experience, some letters get translated into different languages, primarily Spanish, and combined with the English, it looks quite nasty on my Braille display. Ever since setting the language up beforehand, it's made my life a lot easier, especially since the materials are pieces of curriculum that I'm doing with a student one-to-one. He did enjoy watching me struggle with the translation, but now I won't have to worry about that anymore."
hanks very much, Rich. Always good when you can take the guesswork out of these things, right? Even in the zero of artificial intelligence or perhaps even more so. We will be talking some more about Scribe in the next little while because I understand that Pneuma Solutions have made some changes, some enhancements there, and it's a useful tool. So we'll talk about how you might use Scribe for documents in various scenarios, when you might find it helpful, and we'll be doing that in the very near future here on Access On.
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.