Welcome to the sixtieth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
On this week's edition:
- Introduction 0:00
- APH announces Monarch price reduction 1:53
- Dave Williams discusses Dot pad 3:05
- Fix to Adobe Acrobat accessibility regression 42:11
- Updating credit card on Innosearch 43:35
- Matrix treadmills, and some Microsoft Word tasks 46:45
- ChatGPT voice shortcut 53:29
- Vispero 54:59
- Closing and contact info 1:01:21
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live life you wanted.
Speaker 2:
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week, APH has announced a price reduction for the Monarch and it's effective immediately. Dave Williams from Dot Incorporated joins me to discuss the Dot Pad multi-line Braille tablet.
Adobe has fixed an accessibility regression, affecting completing PDF forms. From licensing changes to public beta deprecation, there's more feedback on recent changes at Vispero.
It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to episode 60 of Access On. And as I record this, there's plenty happening at the Jernigan Institute.
We're getting ready to go to the Washington seminar, and there's a chance that you are listening to this podcast on your way home from the Washington seminar, given our publication schedule. So I hope that you had a great time in DC. And isn't it always good to be part of the organized blind movement and get involved in this collective action to make the world a better place?
Well, we're also preparing for a little bit of snow, actually more than a little bit of snow. As I put this together there's some speculation about how much snow there's actually going to be. But one thing I'm pretty confident about is that it is more snow than I have ever been exposed to in my life.
In New Zealand, there is snow in some parts. In fact, some people come from the Northern Hemisphere to New Zealand, in the Northern Hemisphere, summer months, Southern Hemisphere winter months, to go skiing and escape the hot temperatures. So I'm not a complete stranger to snow, but this is sounding pretty hardcore based on what the forecasters are saying. So that's going to be an experience.
But let's talk about technology, that's what you're here for. And we go to follow up on the Monarch. There's a lot of feedback on the Monarch demonstration and review that we included in Access On episode 59. And of course, since it's Braille Literacy Month, we also heard from Greg Stelson in episode 58 of Access On talking about what's coming in Monarch. And what we can tell you now is that there has been a price reduction.
As of Monday, January the 26th, APH has implemented a price adjustment for Monarch. This change they say reflects their transition from early production of a new technology into later stage manufacturing. As adoption has grown and production has scaled, they're able to realize cost efficiencies that they're intentionally passing along to customers.
So let's look at those new price points. The quota price is now 12,900 dollars, and the non-quota price is 15,500 dollars. It is a lower price, and every bit helps in terms of making that justification to funding entities if you can see that a Monarch would make a big difference in your life. So that's great news from APH, and we hope that the price will continue to go in that direction.
Many of us have looked forward to the day when we can use a device that gave us the ability to move beyond a single line of Braille to perceive shapes and maps and complex data layouts with the same spatial awareness our sighted peers enjoy. For decades, we've lived in a letterbox world, but that is finally changing. We have entered the era of the multi-line Braille and graphical display, and we've been talking about that in the last couple of episodes of Access On.
Remarkably, we now actually have choices in this space. Joining me today to talk about one of the most significant entries in this category is someone very well known to the Braille community. Dave Williams is the chair of the Braillists Foundation, and he now serves as the customer success manager for Dot Incorporated.
David, it's good to be talking with you again after all these years.
Dave Williams:
Hi, Jonathan. Wonderful to be with you and fantastic podcast. I listen every week, so thank you for all you're doing.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Thanks so much. Dot Incorporated produces the cells that power the Monarch. How do you describe the relationship between these two devices? Is it a collaboration or are we looking at a kind of a Mac versus PC debate? How would you perceive it?
Dave Williams:
There's a couple of really important points there. Firstly, we have a brilliant relationship at Dot with APH and HumanWare. They're probably Dot's biggest customer, right? But I think you said it in your introduction that this is about choice and clearly the Monarch is a wonderful device, many, many capabilities in there, lots of software and apps and so on.
But I think at Dot, we wanted to bring something to market that was perhaps a little bit more portable, is designed to fit in with your existing tools, with screen readers, something that you could maybe pull out on the bus or the train. Something that perhaps comes in at a different price point.
And actually, as you know, Jonathan, it's not uncommon in the tech industry for manufacturers to supply components to competitive products. Many of the components in the iPhone are sourced from third parties. And Samsung, they make components for competitor devices.
I think Sony at one stage, we're making camera sensors that go into smartphones. So while sometimes it is portrayed and perceived that companies are out there at each other's throats, that actually a lot of the times behind the scenes, we are collaborating and we are working on trying to bring different options to the market.
And finally, actually we've co-presented with APH and HumanWare at a number of events. And so huge kudos for all the work that those guys do. We're standing on the shoulders of giants, but I do think that Dot Pad offers something different.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we'll go through some of those differences as we talk. But one thing that might surprise the listeners is that the Dot Pad X actually uses a newer generation of your actuator technology, this is the vision 3.0, I believe, than what is currently inside the Monarch. Can you explain why that matters for the user? In our experience here at the International Braille and Technology Center, we definitely find that it does refresh faster.
Dave Williams:
Yeah, that's right. So Dot actually have just celebrated 10 years making Braille technology, which came as a surprise to me. I didn't realize that Dot had been around for quite that long. And the first generation Dot Cell was found in the Dot Watch, and that was a four cell wearable device. And that was really Dot dipping their toe in the water. And they learned a lot of important lessons from that product about the shape of the pins, about the reason most Braille devices fail eventually.
And that's because of the dust and dirt and ingress that you sometimes get with all those moving parts and all those pins going up and down. And so Dot learned from that and then came up with the D2 Cell, which is what you find in the current version of the Monarch. And we know that that is a very reliable cell. There are something like 1300, 1400 Monarchs now out in the wild. And only a couple of those units have come back with one cell that's had an issue. So the reliability with the cell protector, the little layer that's over the cells is definitely there.
So then the next step that Dot wanted to take in terms of the evolution of this technology was to really speed up that refresh rate because we know that the incumbent technology, the piezoelectric cells, one of the characteristics of that that people really like is that speed of refresh. And so the D3 cell can refresh up to 10 times more quickly than the D2 cell. So that means that the information's going to be there straight away and that you're not going to have to wait for anything to appear. It just comes up instantly.
Jonathan Mosen:
I know that you've done a fair amount of audio production in your time. So you will relate to the fact that if I'm trying to time something, it's very difficult with these devices because if I'm trying to look at the sickens ticking over, unless I take my fingers off the display, they're not going to tick over.
Dave Williams:
That's absolutely right. The cell is a low power electromagnetic technology, so it doesn't have the power at the moment to resist your finger. So if you're pressing down on the dots, then the pins aren't going to push your finger up. But I absolutely understand that use case, Jonathan.
And there might be other applications as well where perhaps you're looking at a stopwatch for some other reason. And so increasing the power and the force with which the pins raise is certainly high on our priority list and something that Dot is keen to address going forward.
Jonathan Mosen:
Obviously there'll be a bit of inventory in Monarch that they will want to get through, but is there any possibility that this newer generation of Dot Cells would appear on the Monarch in future?
Dave Williams:
Well, anything's possible. I can't commit to that. That's obviously a commercial conversation between Dot and HumanWare and APH, but personally speaking, that would be my expectation that eventually we would see that this next generation of cell will appear in other products.
Jonathan Mosen:
So the Dot Pad X features a 300 cell tactile area, and then it has the separate dedicated 20 cell Braille line at the bottom. What was the rationale behind that?
Dave Williams:
So the multi-line area is designed first and foremost for graphics. And for that reason, the pins are distributed uniformly across the display. So a triangle feels like a triangle, right? If you've got an image of a house or a flower or something, it's going to be as much as you possibly can given the resolution, the right shape.
It's not going to be stripey. Now we know that with Braille, the distance between cells is greater than the distance between dots within a cell. And so that single line display at the front has two functions. One is to provide descriptive information about an image that you may be viewing, so the alt tag or the label, but also to offer that accurate Braille spacing that is preferred by some readers.
And I think that's one of the unique things about the Dot Pad is that we've got this tactile graphic area that can also show multiple lines of Braille with the slightly wider cell spacing, but also a more kind of traditional form factor Braille display in the same product.
Jonathan Mosen:
One of the compelling demonstrations that I've seen while people, frankly, is when we show them the Dot Pad and it's connected to an iPhone. And on that little Twitter cell Braille display, it has the name of the app on an iPhone's home screen. And then you look above and for the first time, a blind person actually has access to what the icon for the app looks like. And that really is a moment for many people that makes them realize the value of these sorts of devices.
Dave Williams:
Yeah. It was a moment for me being able to feel the telephone receiver that represented the phone app. And I actually asked somebody at Apple, "Do young people recognize that shape?" Because you ask a young person to make the sign for a phone and they hold their hands as though they're holding a rectangle of glass rather than a traditional telephone receiver. But yeah, the heart for the Health app and the house for the Home app, it really is mind bending and quite fun.
But for me, the more useful practical kind of day-to-day benefit of our voiceover support on iOS is just simply being able to read in Kindle. So I can take Dot Pad on a train or a plane and have it connected to my phone running the Kindle app, and I'm able to read up to eight lines at a time. And as much as the graphics kind of give you that wow factor, actually when people say, "Dave, what is it you do with your Dot Pad?" It is reading, really.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. It's interesting for us having a look at NFB-NEWSLINE publications, for instance, and just being able to read the newspaper in that multi-line format. One thing that would be helpful, I think, for people who have not seen one of these devices, can you paint a mental picture for us of what this device looks like, its size, the controls on the device?
Dave Williams:
Absolutely, yes. So Dot Pad is about the size of, I would say, an iPad Pro. So it's 11 inches by nine inches and it's about three quarters of an inch thick. And then the device has a raised area towards the back. So it sits at a slight angle, which offers a very natural kind of reading position for your hands.
The multi-line area, the 300 cell tactile graphics display obviously dominates the top surface. Below that, you have six navigation keys that will let you pan. And then below that, nearest to you is the 20 cell Braille reading line.
And then on the left hand side, you'll find a Braille letter D, which indicates the position of the data port, that's a USB-C port for connecting to a laptop for support in JAWS or NVDA or installing any firmware updates. And then over on the right-hand side, you've got a Braille letter P, which indicates the position of the power port, the USB-C port there. And then there's a physical switch that you can feel the position when it's towards you, the device is off.
And then when you move that switch away, you'll feel a vibration to indicate that Dot Pad is switched on. And then you can hold down the two out of most of those navigation keys for about a second and you'll get a number of pulses to indicate the battery level.
So hopefully that gives you a bit of a flavor. It's a very smooth kind of finish, the Dot Pad. It comes with obviously any USB cable that you might need and a power brick or a wall wart to recharge. You get a full charge in about two to three hours from a dead battery.
And then actually the battery life, I'm often debating with the guys at Dot because they're quite conservative in their estimate, they say a day of usage, but I get many days of usage out of my Dot Pad battery. There's a silicon bumper to protect the corners because we know that sometimes these devices are used by children or somebody who might be a little heavy-handed.
And then Dot Pad is supplied with a carry bag that just slips over your shoulder. You can also fit an iPad in that bag or even a small laptop. So very portable, weighs I think about two and a half pounds.
So very easy. I've been carrying Dot Pad around in a backpack with my laptop and all the cables that you often need on the road. And that's, I think people say, "What's your favorite Braille display, Dave? If you didn't work for any company." It's the one you have with you, I think is the answer. And I often have the Dot Pad with me because it is so portable.
Jonathan Mosen:
How plug and play is the Dot Pad X with our daily screen readers? So if I'm an iPhone user or a JAWS Power user, how does the device handle those real-time connections?
Dave Williams:
Well, the good news is you don't need to install any drivers. So on iOS since I think 15.3, so that's going back a little way now in terms of iOS, voiceover includes support for Dot Pads.
So you just connect in the same way that you connect any other Braille display, go to settings, go to accessibility, voiceover Braille, and Dot Pad will be discoverable at the bottom of that screen. And you just simply tap on it and then obviously make sure that your voiceover is set up to send your preferred Braille code and so on.
Also, you've got support in NVDA, the free screen reader. So I think NVDA 25.1 introduced native support for Dot Pad. That's just via USB at this point. There is also, I think, a third party plugin for NVDA that offers a bit more kind of sophisticated support when it comes to graphs, that sort of thing. And then in JAWS, from September 2025, JAWS introduced very comprehensive multi-line Braille support, I would say.
And the two main modes I think that you'll find useful, one is what JAWS calls the Cropped Mode, that gives you the physical layout of information on screen. So again, native support in JAWS for Dot Pad, and then the other is Wrapped Mode, and that makes most efficient use of the available Braille real estate. So fills up the Dot Pad with Braille so that you can read fluently.
Jonathan Mosen:
And does Braille work as well so that you can have two applications visible on the device at a time?
Dave Williams:
It does. And you can choose how much of the display is allocated to each application. So you might have, say the top three lines in one app and the bottom five lines in another app. And depending on whether you have that line that shows you where the split is, will determine how many lines are available. And then I think you can choose which way up they go as well, so which app's at the top and which is at the bottom.
And then the other thing that JAWS does helpfully is to show the cursor position on the single Braille line. So on the single bra line, JAWS sends us some status information and you're able to read there where the cursor is and other details about the formatting of text.
Jonathan Mosen:
One of the most frequent questions we get here because people come to us for impartial advice and they say, "Well, when should I get a Dot Pad and when should I get a Monarch?" Particularly given that there is quite a substantial gap in price. I think the Dot Pad is what, around about 5,000 US dollars, is that correct?
Dave Williams:
Yeah. So Dot Pad is I think 5,900 US dollars, I want to say. So I would say that the Monarch is very well suited to that kind of K-12 audience. If you need access to a graphing calculator and if you need access on device to things like the APH tactile image library that they have, then certainly Monarch is going to be a better fit.
And if you need the device to include a keyboard, for example, and be able to access those Android apps, then clearly Monarch is going to be more suitable for you.
If you are perhaps a professional or you want just multi-line in your life more generally, and you want to be able to take your multi-line Braille display with you and that actually you're a voiceover user and you're a JAWS user primarily and it's the screen reader doing the heavy lifting in the case of Dot Pad when it comes to the translation, then maybe Dot Pad would be a good option.
The other scenario as well, I'm not sure how it is in the US, but I know that some employers in Europe, they prefer that your Braille display not have internal storage, and the Dot Pad is just a display, right? There's no internal storage, it doesn't have any apps built into it.
And so if you're working in a secure environment where you need multi-line, but actually you don't want to have to have that fight with IT over, well, this device has some storage or whatever, then Dot Pad might be a good fit in that situation as well.
Jonathan Mosen:
So to simplify the answer, what we say to people is if you look at the Dot Pad, it essentially gets, it's smart, its functionality from whatever device it is connected to. Whereas with Monarch, it is a standalone computer, as you say, with input, it has email, word processing, everything built into the device. So it's an interesting evolution that we've seen with Braille devices over the years.
I can certainly recall a time when a Braille display was just that and you would connect it to a computer and it would do its thing. And then eventually there was a little bit of what I would consider scope creep where the traditional note taker style of device crept into standard Braille displays.
And now it's almost expected that you're going to have a suite of applications in the Braille display that you buy. So in a way Dot Pad has gone back to that conventional Braille display concept where the smarts come from whatever device it's connected to.
Dave Williams:
Yeah. Some of us ... Look, I mean, if you were to use TV as an analogy, some people want to have a TV with the apps that are built into the TV. Other people have something like a stick or maybe an Apple TV or something like that because there are distinct benefits from being able to separate the display from the smarts.
Because of course the criticism often that's leveled at smart Braille displays and Braille note takers is, "Well, when's the software going to be updated?" Or, "Will it keep pace?" And all of this kind of thing. And everybody has different requirements in terms of features and functionality. So Dot Pad gives you that separation. So it's a bit like, I guess, AirPlaying or casting your content onto a separate display.
Jonathan Mosen:
Do you think it's unfair to say it's more of a content consumption device? Because if you want to create content, you've got to have a Dot Pad and some other input method. I mean, you've got to have a keyboard of some kind. I guess if you're proficient with Braille Screen Input on an iPhone or iPad, then you may get by with an iPad and a Dot Pad, for example, or an iPhone and a Dot Pad.
But if you want to work on a Word document that you're creating, there is no Braille input. So you're going to have to have your laptop out and you're also going to have the Dot Pad there.
Dave Williams:
I think that's fair. Some people have gone down the route of having a Braille keyboard, like something like a Hable or an Orbit Writer, and some people have taken that approach. For me personally, if I'm using it with my laptop, well, I'm using my laptop keyboard. If I'm using it with my phone, then I'm using Braille Screen Input. So it's great that we've got these choices and these options available.
And I'm fairly sure that if people feedback and they say, "Look, we really want this feature available on a future Dot Pad," or whatever. Dot, they haven't got their head in the sand. They are listening obviously to customers. The Dot Pad X was released in September of last year and we've got a distribution network now around the world. So there's lots of channels of communication.
And that's why Dot have brought somebody like me into the fold a little bit is to really try and represent the voice of the customer. So if there is something that customers feel very strongly about in terms of, well, we want to be able to use Dot Pad more for those sorts of productivity tasks on device, then it'd be great to hear what those are.
Jonathan Mosen:
Another area is cursor routing, and that's where there is quite an innovative solution on Monarch because you don't want to have a massive number of cursor routing keys on a large display. But if you are working with a document where you're editing that document, the Dot Pad, I don't believe on the device itself there's a way to get the cursor somewhere.
Dave Williams:
That is correct. So you've got navigation keys and obviously depending on your screen reader will determine how those navigation keys are assigned. And of course, if you're editing a document in Word on your laptop, then you're positioning the cursor using your keyboard. But you're absolutely right, that is a productivity feature and Dot are actively looking at that.
We've definitely heard that as well, that some folks want to be able to rout the cursor. And so we will obviously, when there is something to announce, we'll announce it. But at this point, you're absolutely right that there isn't cursor routing on the Dot. It is a display and it is, as you say, a content consumption device first and foremost.
Jonathan Mosen:
When you give presentations and you're working from Notes, do you have the Dot Pad with you up there on the lectern?
Dave Williams:
I have done. I've used it with the note, just scribble something in the Notes app on the phone and then have it connected to Dot Pad. And obviously that means that you've got less panning. And the other thing, of course, as you'll know, some lecterns, your single line Braille display will slide right down to the front of the lectern, and sometimes you've got to get your hands in a pretty funky position.
So it's the nearest thing that I've found to having hard copy. I do quite like occasionally still to have hard copy. But yeah, I would say in terms of an electronic Braille reading experience, then Dot Pad is as near as I've found to hard copy.
Jonathan Mosen:
Talk to me a bit more about that because I'm sure that like me you will have spent many years doing audio production or whatever, working from single line Braille devices. And you kind of get a technique, at least I have, where there's a buffer going on in your head where you scroll ahead with the Braille display and sometimes you have to scroll back.
And there's a knack, but it's just muscle memory now. And one of the things I noticed when I started working with these multi-line Braille devices is I almost had to rework my technique a bit to take advantage of the extra Braille real estate. But now that I have, there's definitely a speed increase there.
Dave Williams:
Yeah. And reading fluently from a single line display is hard. Let's make no mistake about it. There's a lot of very competent Braille readers that we both know that would find reading out loud, whether it's into a microphone in front of an audience or in the studio, and there's definitely an act to it and a skill to it. And I worked for years, because when you and I worked together years ago, I said, "How does this guy do this thing?" And I'd go meet people like Peter White and Gary O'Donoghue, and I would kind of quiz them about it incessantly like, "How do you do it? How do you do it?"
And it does take a lot of practice to get to that level. And I hope that with multi-line, we can offer that opportunity to more people because there are lots of roles that open up when you are able to stand up in front of a bunch of people and read digital Braille as fluently as you would read hard copy Braille.
Well, you were talking about buffering, you buffer it in your head and you do. And so when I get to the bottom line of the display, I can press the forward button and I get a whole new eight lines. And in fact, if I'm using the Dot Book app, I can have 10 lines of six dot Braille. So the lines are a little bit closer together.
So it's giving me quite a bit of content. And so I can still be speaking. And as you would with paper, your left hand goes back up to the top and then you can start reading and then your right hand picks up that second half of the first line if you're doing that scissor thing.
Jonathan Mosen:
Sure. So typically you'd have eight lines, but with that app, you've got 10.
Dave Williams:
That's right.
Jonathan Mosen:
How does that app work? What functions can it perform?
Dave Williams:
So it's pretty basic at the moment. So this is a free app that you can download from the App Store. And there are a few actually. So there's Dot Canvas, which is intended for graphics. So you can create your own graphics and access Dot Cloud, which is our free kind of public library of tactile graphics. But Dot Book lets you open Braille files. And then in Dot Book there are some setting, just a couple of settings lets you choose the language and things, but also you can set the number of lines.
And so if you're a beginner and you need perhaps wider line spacing, then you could choose fewer lines, but you can have up to a maximum of 10 lines of six dot Braille, which obviously increases the amount of content that's visible at any one time and obviously reduces the amount that you have to pan forward.
Jonathan Mosen:
And how many characters wide?
Dave Williams:
You get 20 Braille characters on a line. So it's 30 cells, but obviously because the dots are uniformly distributed, we leave a dot in between each Braille cell. So if you're an experienced Braille reader, when you come to read from a device like Dot Pad, you'll notice that the Braille characters are very slightly further apart, but that's only something that you notice for about the first five minutes. After you've read a couple of pages, you just don't really register that anymore. You're just used to it.
Jonathan Mosen:
Is that something that you can pass on to third party screen readers? So there might be a rotor gesture, an iOS, or some setting in JAWS, or NVDA where you can set the spacing?
Dave Williams:
I would love that. So yeah, contact your screen reader, developer, and tell them that you want that feature, because I know I am.
Jonathan Mosen:
So it is in the API though, it's something that a screen reader could implement, is that right?
Dave Williams:
Well, they could, but most screen readers by default are set up for eight dot Braille because they want to be able to show you if something's highlighted or where the cursor is and that kind of thing. So obviously there would need to be some design decisions about what would happen in those scenarios. But obviously Dot Book is designed for reading only. It's not an app in which you need eight dot Braille necessarily.
Jonathan Mosen:
So the one thing that makes me a little nervous is the fact that you do have to have Dot Pad paired to something else if you're going to give a public presentation, which is one of the reasons why I asked if you'd do this. And normally it's fine, but sometimes you get into an environment where there's just a lot of wireless around, lots of people using Bluetooth or some other technology and things get a little bit patchy.
And I guess it would just give me a little bit of comfort if there were a little bit of storage where you could put a Braille file or a Word document direct on the device. And I realize that then you do get the potential for scope creep, "Well, if we do this, what else should we do?"
But to me, just being able to take the device on its own, put it up on a lectern, switch it on, bring up your file and read it in confidence knowing that you don't have any other connection to worry about that might go down would be an incredibly useful thing.
Dave Williams:
It would. I've definitely fed that back to the team because I hear that requirement. But as you rightly say, you've worked in product management and you know about feature creep. And of course, once you've got a file system in play, then you've got to determine what are the features of that.
Do you have a menu? And then can you delete files? And on and on. And then people want other things. And so I definitely think there might be some scope to do something with the USB-C port perhaps where you maybe have some sort of external reader, but that's a live conversation and certainly something that I would like to see in the future.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. So potentially putting in a USB-C thumb drive with your files on it, for example.
Dave Williams:
Yeah. I mean, the Dot Pad has a very sort of stripped back architecture. It's not a note taker and it isn't going to be anytime soon. Other people are taking care of that very, very well in a way that I'm not sure Dot would go there. But, I understand what you're saying about in a busy environment where there's lots of Bluetooth devices.
We all know sometimes screen readers, none of them are perfect. They're made by people and people, they work really hard on these things, but we all know sometimes you need to restart your screen reader or whatever, or there can be distractions and things like that.
So certainly Dot Book is a kind of a step towards that, being able to curate a reading experience that isn't wholly reliant on the screen reader and we'll continue that. So please do keep that feedback coming.
Jonathan Mosen:
When you're in iOS and you're using something like Kindle or Apple's Books app, is it scrolling okay continuously so that when you've got through a full page of Braille and you press the key to go to the next page, it's all just happening without you having to do anything else with the app itself?
Dave Williams:
Yeah. So let me just talk about the button assignments then because we've got six buttons below the multi-line area and then there's a single line Braille reading line and so the arrow keys, which are the outermost keys of that row of six, so the first and the last button, they will pan the single line in voiceover and then the second button and the fifth button, so just in, they are the keys that you need to use with voiceover to pan the multi-line.
And so when you get to the bottom of your Braille page or the eight lines, you press that fifth button and it goes to the next part of the page. And when you get to the bottom of the Kindle page, you press that same button and the app will move on to the next page and you can keep reading seamlessly.
Jonathan Mosen:
What is multi-line Braille support in Android like, if any?
Dave Williams:
Google are working on it is my understanding. So right now there isn't support in TalkBack for a Dot Pad, but it's definitely a live conversation and something that we're really keen to see happen.
Jonathan Mosen:
And presumably narrator on Windows is the same way at the moment, right, from Microsoft?
Dave Williams:
Yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
The failure rate, as Greg was talking about with these cells is remarkably low. And as someone who spent a long time in product management of piezoelectric devices, it's almost mouthwatering the failure rate that you have with the Dot Cells. But let's say there is an issue. What is servicing like for the Dot Pad in the United States?
Dave Williams:
We have a number of distributors in the US and they have access to resources so that they can swap out individual cells. So you don't have to return the Dot Pad to South Korea where it's made in order to repair an individual cell. So there's a cell ejection tool, the cell just pops out and then you can replace it with a new cell. But as you say, the number of times that anyone's had to do that is so small. It is phenomenal.
And I think part of the reason for that is Dot took the, I think, quite bold and courageous decision to go with this cell protector, which is the protective membrane or skin, as some people call it.
I like to call it cell protector because it does what it says on the tin, it's like your screen protector that some people use on their phone. And that massively reduces the amount of dust or dirt or moisture, anything that can ingress into the cells. So it keeps the cells lasting for a very long time.
Now, you can't really do that as easily with piezoelectric cells because of the kind of the springy nature. If you start pulling a sheet over those, they're going to be quite tricky to read. So I think that was a brave decision because some people initially were like, "Oof, I'm not sure about this."
We've heard that comparison. Some people say, "Oh, is it like Thermoform?" Not quite. Maybe a little bit initially, but you don't get that sort of horrible feeling that you have after you've read about six pages of Thermoform where you just can't feel it anymore.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, yeah. And in your experience, how long are the membranes lasting?
Dave Williams:
Well, I haven't changed ... So the unit I have in front of me, I've been using for a year and I've traveled quite extensively in that year and taken this to a lot of shows and a lot of people have handled it.
And I've still got the original cell protector that's on there. I'm aware of one customer who got through a couple of cells. So you get three in the box. I think our expectation is that it should last you up to a year, but obviously your mileage will vary depending on your usage and the environment that you're in. And then if you need more, look, just get in touch.
Jonathan Mosen:
I would echo that. I've been using a Monarch for a little over a year, and I think there's just the tiniest tear I'm starting to detect in the membrane now, but that's really good because I've been using it daily. So that's pretty remarkable that it's taking that long to identify any kind of issue with them.
Dave Williams:
And it's really great that we've got both Dot Pad and the Monarch out in the market because we can hear that feedback, we can learn from one another. We're going to different places, different types of users. And so I view these products as being complimentary and offering that important choice.
Jonathan Mosen:
Do you think the price of this technology is going to come down further? And a 6,000 dollar device that gives you all of this Braille real estate is very remarkable. We wouldn't have predicted that a few short years ago, but it's still out of reach of many people who would like one.
Dave Williams:
That's right. And one of the challenges with piezoelectric technology is that it doesn't really scale very well. It doesn't get vastly cheaper the more of it you make. And so I think in 2011, the Transforming Braille Group was established, and I'm sure NFB was active in that, to try and find a more affordable technology.
And with these Dot cells, they are more affordable to produce. And the more of them you make, the cheaper per unit it becomes. And so that gives me real hope that actually in the future, Braille displays are going to become more affordable.
And I absolutely hear what you're saying. And you and I are both kind of Braille guys, and I think we want everybody to enjoy the benefits of digital Braille and multi-line Braille.
I know you presided over price cuts in Braille technology when you worked in this industry, and I know that that's something that Dot are very keen to do as well, because it's in nobody's interest to keep the price high. We want everybody to benefit from this technology. So yeah, we'll keep working on it. And this electromagnetic Braille cell that Dot have developed does appear to be scalable and will help in that quest.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we have one at the International Braille and Technology Center, and we'd be delighted to show it to people. So thank you for that. And also, I'm sure that there will be a presence at our national convention in Austin in July, right?
Dave Williams:
Definitely. Yeah. Dot will be there. I don't know if I'll be ... I hope they'll send me. So yeah, hopefully meet some of you at convention in Austin. But yeah, certainly come along to the Dot booth or any of our distributors and ask to get some hands on time with Dot Pad.
Jonathan Mosen:
Where do people go on the web to find out more information about the Dot Pad?
Dave Williams:
So Dot's website is dotincorp.com. It's D-O-T-I-N-C-O-R-P.com. And you can drop an email to [email protected] and we'll get back to you and answer any questions that you have.
Jonathan Mosen:
Dave, thank you. That's Dave Williams talking about Dot Pad. We'll take a break and when we come back, some listener contributions.
Speaker 5:
I can't see it.
Speaker 6:
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We can count on our Access On listeners to be full of advice and questions and opinions, and I really appreciate that, but I do want to put this one at the top of the queue because it's something we have had some feedback on. This email comes from Curtis Chong, and he says, "I was informed by Adobe today, January the 12th, 2026, that an update was released for its Adobe Acrobat software.
Among other things, this update fixes problems relating to the filling out of PDF forms. Many people have been reporting that when entering text into an edit field in a PDF form, the text could not be reviewed with a screen reader such as JAWS. I'm pleased to report that as of today, the Adobe update fixes this quite vexing problem. It is unfortunate that this problem surfaced in the first place."
He is hoping that Adobe will give greater attention to future updates so that this doesn't happen again. Thank you so much, Curtis. Understandably, this is something we received a lot of feedback on here at the National Federation of the Blind's Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility.
We also reached out to Adobe, as I'm sure did many others. I know screen reader developers also contacted Adobe about this issue because they were being inundated by customers who were concerned about it and didn't know where the problem specifically lay, so nice to have this one wrapped up.
Kathy Blackburn writes, "I have used Innosearch occasionally since last summer with mixed results. I always write to support at inosearch.ai when I have difficulties. Currently, I have been emailing back and forth about the following. Unfortunately, an unauthorized person in Japan though less used our credit card. Chase Bank sent a new one. I need to add the new credit card to my Innosearch account.
The way innosearch.ai has set up their system. I must put something in my shopping cart and check out before I can add a payment method. When I go to check out, the system leaves Innosearch and goes to Stripe. Innosearch emailed me detailed instructions, but their directions do not match anything I see on my computer screen.
I never found anything saying add payment method, which the support people said I should look for. I am using Windows 10, JAWS 2025 and Microsoft Edge as instructed. I'm starting to wonder if the Innosearch support people use screen reading software.
Could there be something in my JAWS settings I need to change? One problem I have with JAWS is, for example, if I open an email message, JAWS reads the subject line four or more times."
Thanks, Kathy. I think this is a potential shortcoming of using a third party processor, which is what Innosearch is doing. And it's kind of a contrast with the way the rest of Innosearch works because they pride themselves on providing a complete customer experience.
So even though they're working as an aggregator to other websites or other companies that are selling things, your experience is exclusively with Innosearch. As you've noted, the exception to that is when you're actually making the purchase and they hand you over to Stripe.
So it may be that the instructions that the customer support people are working from are different because Stripe might have changed something somewhere. I hope you have managed to figure this out. It may just be a bit of a trial and error thing and looking at the prompt and seeing what makes contextual sense.
Regarding your second point, I can certainly imagine a scenario where you might hear the subject line several times. For example, when you press enter on a message, you are loading it into the view of your email client, and that window title may be spoken automatically depending on your JAWS settings.
I am still using Microsoft Outlook classic. That said, there's a lot of commendable progress that Microsoft is making here with the new Outlook, and I know that they've spent a lot of time and consulted with a lot of people on it. So I'll get there and we are working with the new Microsoft Outlook whose internal code name, by the way, interestingly enough, is also called Monarch, which is very interesting sometimes when we're having technology discussions.
But anyway, I found that I can optimize the experience by going into the JAWS verbosity settings and turning off the automatic reading of window titles, specifically when I'm in Outlook, and that can reduce the verbiage in terms of repeated subject lines. There might be some other tricks that you can deploy as well that other people would like to comment on.
This next email says, "Hello, Jonathan. This is Asia from the Lorraine County chapter of the NFB in Ohio. Recently, I was listening to an episode where someone was having difficulties with matrix treadmills at their local Planet Fitness. I work at my local YMCA." Oh, it's so tempting to burst into song. I'm not going to inflict that on you. "And we just got four Matrix treadmills.
I do not know if their model is slightly different or not. The start and stop buttons that are on the flat bar right in front of where you would step onto the treadmill does have very slightly raised tactile bumps.
On the left side is the start and on the right side is the stop. On the left handle that you would reach up to is the incline and on the right handle you will reach up to is the speed changer. This is how my Matrix treadmill is set up.
To connect your Apple Watch to the Matrix treadmill, sighted assistance is necessary. The Matrix treadmills can connect Apple watches and Samsung watches. It has a lot of other features that you can do for watching things or playing music or whatever you want. So I have been told by many of my sighted friends and coworkers that these are very unique machines to even go running in Hong Kong if you feel like it.
To connect an Apple watch, you will need a sighted person to tap on the screen where it says Apple Watch. You'll now start an indoor walk or indoor run on your Apple watch. I usually use Siri to do this. There will be a circle on the Matrix screen where you now tap your watch.
The watch will vibrate when you have successfully tapped the circle. The Apple Watch will ask you to confirm if it is an indoor walk or indoor run using the Matrix machine. Once you tap on the one that you want, your Apple watch will load the exercise.
This does not give the ability to control the treadmill. This only gives you the ability to have extra tracking information of the treadmill connected to your watch. I was also disappointed when I found out it does not allow me to control the treadmill. The extra tracking information is useful since it can now track my precise distance walked or run.
After I've gone through this Apple Watch connectivity to the treadmill, that's when I actually press the start button on the treadmill. I'm not coordinated enough to try walking slowly, getting sighted assistant and tapping my watch on the screen."
Yes, thanks for that, Asia. I'll come back to your next point in a moment, but I will observe that recently we bought a Peloton treadmill and it's got TalkBack built in. It's an interesting experience, but you are required to unlock the treadmill every time you use it with a four-digit pin.
And I've tried all sorts of ways to speed that process up. What I've decided is the best way is to start the indoor walk on the Apple Watch, then unlock the treadmill because certainly in watchOS 26, it's taking a bit longer than it used to get those workouts going.
Asia continues, "The issue that I wanted to bring up today about Microsoft, I'm currently a student and doing a very heavy duty project that has more complications with the professor than I will get into right now. The big complication I am having is when I am using Microsoft Word and I am copying and pasting information into my document where I am just wanting the text.
It still will sometimes end up as font from wherever I got the information from. So when I am done putting everything I want into that document, I go to select the document entirely to change the font to what I prefer and the size I want it. The size changes with absolutely no problem. For some strange reason, the entire document is not changed over to the font I want. I need an Aira agent to assist me with this.
On top of this, there is a feature where you can change your cap size for anything that you have selected. For example, if something happens to be all capitalized, then you can change it to what is called sentence cap. I have found where to get this setting, but if I click on it with JAWS it does absolutely nothing. If an Aira agent clicks on it with the mouse via remote incident manager, it works correctly.
The issue I have been having is I keep getting points docked off my assignments because I am assuming that JAWS is working correctly to change font to what I want it to be, and it does not. I do not always have the time, patience, or even the Aira minutes per my budget to read every single document to make sure my font is correct.
If Microsoft is able to be contacted to see why these features are not working correctly with JAWS and hopefully get this fixed, that would be greatly appreciated. I am currently using JAWS 2026, so that could be an issue."
Nice to hear from you again, Asia, or the best with those studies. First, let's take a look at pasting text. Microsoft has recently changed some of these keyboard assignments, but in checking with askma.microsoft.com, which is a handy resource for this sort of thing, it stands for Ask Microsoft Accessibility, and we talked about this all the way back in episode one of Access On, In Days of Yore.
I asked about it there and it says the current keyboard shortcut is control, shift, V. So you should be able to select text from the source, copy it to the clipboard with control C. And then rather than just pressing control V to paste the text in, formatting and all, you should be able to press control, shift, V and you'll paste the text in, but no formatting changes, which would help a lot.
If you've accidentally kept the caps lock key down or you want to change the case in some way, you can definitely do this from the keyboard and JAWS gives you excellent feedback about the consequences. Using the shift and arrow keys, select the text in the normal way that you want to be affected and then press shift, F3 repeatedly.
Every time you press shift, F3, JAWS is going to start speaking a character at a time and depending on your settings will indicate to you what's now uppercase and what's now lowercase. And if you keep pressing shift, F3, you should eventually get to the kind of output that you want. So that's how you do both of those things from the keyboard.
It's good that this issue was resolved, but I wanted to include it here in case you'd given up thinking that it was never going to be. And we're going to Canada and ironically enough, I used ChatGPT to try and help me to pronounce our correspondent's name. It tells me I should pronounce it Jeanfranc.
So I hope that is correct. If it's not, I'm sorry about that. But he is in Canada and the email says, "Hi, Jonathan. I have found out that the ChatGPT voice mode shortcut isn't working with the iOS app. My clients use this function a lot to enable this shortcut with Siri. If you experience the same issue, could you please report it to OpenAI?"
We certainly did experience that issue and we did report it and it's great that it is now resolved and working again. And I know that there are some people who use the action button for this purpose. If you have a new iPhone and it's got an action button on it, you can assign it to a shortcut or a control center widget.
So that will allow you to invoke ChatGPT very easily and talk to it. Of course, Apple has now confirmed the rumors that have been floating around for a while now that we're about to see a new Siri and under the hood, there's going to be a lot of Gemini assistance powering this new Siri, that is the large language model that Google is doing. So we should see a significant transformation there with Siri very soon. It may well be coming to the iOS betas by the time we get to 26.4.
Let's talk Vispero and Stephen Hudson's writing in on this subject. He says, "Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for keeping us up to date with what's happening with the dialogue between the NFB and Vispero." Many things were covered by President Riccobono's letter and Vispero's response, but there was something that didn't get mentioned, and I hope that it can be discussed with them at some point. As was discussed on previous episodes, significant changes to perpetual licenses have also been made.
To recap, new perpetual licenses are now time-based. When a customer purchases a time-based perpetual license, they will be licensed for any version of the software released before the term of the license ends instead of the license being tied to major releases.
If the licensee's software maintenance agreement isn't renewed before the term ends, they will need to purchase either an entirely new perpetual license at full price or a subscription to get up to date. Additionally, any licenses that don't have a current software maintenance agreement prior to the change are no longer supported, meaning customers with such licenses will need to purchase either a new perpetual license or a subscription to get up to date.
At the time of this writing, the cost of a new perpetual license for JAWS Home in the US is 1,572 dollars, which includes a software maintenance agreement good for two years of updates starting on the day of purchase. That's not an insignificant amount. And although the home license is now considered mainly for state rehabilitation agencies to purchase for clients according to the blog post, there will undoubtedly still be individual customers who will make that investment themselves if they can.
I realize that Vispero really want people to move to the subscription model, but forcing someone to pay full price for an entirely new perpetual license, simply because their software maintenance agreement expires for any reason seems like predatory behavior, especially when the price is considered and there doesn't seem to be any sort of grace period before someone has to pay full price.
Also, I still don't know who in their right mind is going to pay over 700 dollars per year for a subscription to use a screen reader if you don't qualify for the home annual program and don't have an agency handling the cost of a home license subscription. This just doesn't seem realistic, but I suppose time will tell.
Speaking of the Home annual license, I think there definitely needs to be more transparency about who qualifies, not just instructions to call to find out if someone qualifies. Also, what happens when someone has a Home annual subscription, but no longer qualifies for it?
Will they no longer be allowed to renew their Home annual subscription and be forced to pay over 600 dollars a year to use their computer, somehow save over 1,000 dollars for a perpetual license that they have to make sure is up to date before it becomes unsupported, or just switch to a free option such as NVDA.
Regarding Vispero's decision to discontinue the public beta program, it's a bit concerning. Public betas weren't just for testing entirely new features. They also allowed people to test other changes in major versions before they were rolled out officially.
Sometimes people running the public betas would catch issues that the private beta team missed, and things like that aren't likely to end up in the early adopter program. I suppose we'll just have to see how things go from here. JAWS 2026 seemed to roll out smoothly enough.
As far as these new Vispero accounts go, I'm not really a fan of being forced to create and sign into an account just so I can use a screen reader. I can understand if certain cloud and AI-based features may require an account, but I don't believe an account should be mandatory just to use the software in general.
We pay for and activate the software, and once the license key is on the machine, that should be the end of it. We should be allowed to use the basic features of the software without an account, with the understanding that we will need to sign into an account if we want to use the features that require one.
Also, Vispero forced accounts on everyone without having any features tied to them yet and provided no real explanation and apologized only after they were called out for it. In my opinion, that really doesn't look good at all. Not only that, while I do appreciate that an apology and explanation were given, some of the language of the blog posts is extremely vague. As an example, Other than setting synchronization, what sort of personalized experiences and cloud connected features are these accounts supposed to eventually support?
Lastly, the claim that you'll only need to sign into an account once unless you sign out is technically false. There are situations in which the software doesn't shut down properly, such as if the machine crashes or there's a power loss leading to an improper shutdown.
For some reason, this sometimes causes the software to be signed out the next time it started. I even had to sign in after a normal restart of my machine, which may have been because JAWS was running for quite a while and didn't have a chance to completely shut down before Windows forced it to shut down.
I'm grateful that the NFB is on top of these issues, and I sincerely hope that meaningful dialogue with Vispero will continue. I'm starting to wonder if those in charge of Vispero now don't really understand the market they're serving, or if we, the customers, simply don't understand why these changes are necessary due to lack of clear communication.
Perhaps it could be a bit of both, but I hope some sort of understanding can be reached." Thanks for a very articulate email, Steven. Much appreciated.
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].
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