Welcome to the forty-seven episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Bard Mobile 1:01
- NLS digital talking book machine 2:51
- Locked out of Uber due to inaccessible ID verification 8:03
- Camera in the iPhone 17 range 9:00
- amazon first oven smart oven 10:58
- JAWS public betas are no more 13:08
- How do I stop my locked Android phone from talking when I tap the screen 14:56
- What can the NFB do about show stopping Apple bugs 16:53
- VoiceOver takes an efficiency hit 23:49
- Color detector apps for iPhone, and typing sounds 26:47
- Problem with bulleted lists in Google Docs 28:43
- Degraded WhatsApp on the Windows desktop 30:04
- How do I get Seeing AI to describe videos? 31:39
- How can I stop my iPhone from going to the App Library? 33:15
- Using Discord with a screen reader 34:48
- Interesting bug with UK voices in iOS 26 37:17
- How long should post-production take on my podcast? 38:25
- Editing with Microsoft Clipchamp or some other accessible alternative 42:31
- Comments on iOS Personal Voice comparison 45:03
- Braille input on the Mac 45:54
- Thoughts on 1Password 47:57
- iOS Live Captions 52:42
- iOS 26 and continuous glucose monitors 54:55
- Ongoing accessibility problems with Plaud products 55:52
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week it's an hour of questions, opinions, and tips from Access On listeners. Listeners have plenty of feedback on the releases of Apple's latest operating systems. By now, we'd be in the middle of a JAWS public beta cycle, but Vispero says public betas of JAWS are no more. And with new hardware from the AI transcription company, Claude, the software remains inaccessible.
It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to Access On, episode 47. Well, we'll be hitting the big five-oh very shortly and we have quite a few listener contributions to catch up on this week, so let's get right into those with this email from Reginald George and he says, "This is just a quick note to let anyone interested know that in the private beta of BARD, 2.5.2, the problems with speakers and headphones not stopping playback has been addressed along with many other features. This is a private beta at this point and you would need to check with support at the National Library Service to find out when it will be opened to the public."
Thank you very much, Rich. Good to hear that help is on the way at some point soon and still on the BARD mobile app. Melissa Kane is writing in and she says, "Hi, Jonathan, for about the last month using the BARD mobile app on an iPhone 14 Pro running the current iOS 18." Yes, it was current at the time she wrote this. "I have noticed that if I am rewinding or fast forwarding it no longer announces how far I have moved. Previously it would announce 20 seconds, one minute, five minutes, etc. And it just says nothing now. So I'm having to guess how far forward or back I have moved, which is a cumbersome and inefficient process. I'm wondering if anybody else is experiencing this issue."
Perhaps this one has been resolved, Melissa, or maybe it's a bit more complex than just checking to see if it works for everybody else. But what I can tell you, I'm currently running iOS 26.1 beta two, living on the edge on my iPhone 17 Pro Max, and at least with that configuration, I am able to hear the announcements about how much time I'm winding back by when I double tap and hold that control. It would be nice to think it's resolved for you by now or when. By the way, important info Melissa says that she's writing in from the Jefferson City chapter of the National Federation of the Blind.
Rich Yamamoto:
Hi Jonathan and Access On listeners. This is Rich Yamamoto from Kansas City back with a kind of review of the Digital Advanced Talking Book Player from NLS, the DA2. I won't be demonstrating anything today. I just wanted to give my thoughts on it and what I like about it, what I don't like about it, and if anybody wants features demonstrated, do let me know and I can do my best to make that happen.
I like that it resembles that of the Victor Reader Stratus and it looks to me like it is from the Victor Reader Stratus 4M. It has the Braille next to or on the keys, so which is super nice, so it has some Braille letters to kind of help you figure out what. I like that you can go onto the player and download NLS books directly to it, and I like that there's a cartridge slot and a USB slot.
The one thing I do not like is there is no SD memory card slot. All of my books that are on SD cards won't be compatible because there's not an SD card slot, so I have to find a flash drive that is a terabyte in size that I can put all of those books onto or I have to put them on multiple cartridges. However, the internal space on the DA two is massive. For a player like this, it's huge. It's 32 gigabytes, which for the average book you can fit tons and tons and tons of books on it.
So I like that and I like that it's all controlled through TTS, which means that as menus update and features roll out, it will be easier to add those things without having to have somebody pre-record those menu prompts. So that's really cool. I like that there seems to be a way to copy and move books around if you have a cartridge or a flash drive plugged in.
I don't know really how that fully works just because I don't have access to cartridges or flash drives at the moment. I kind of got super big into SD cards and I took them for granted until I got this player. So now I don't really know what to do, but I guess I'll just have to buy a flash drive at some point, but you can kind of move things from the internal memory to the external memory and I think you can even do vice versa. I might be wrong on that. I'm looking forward to the Bookshare features that they're supposed to be implementing. I think that will be really nice to see in action and I'm looking forward to when they figure out the bookshelf sorting feature.
I wish there was a way to do other types of books on this so you could put your music or your MP3 audiobooks on here, but I understand that it is the NLS Digital Talking Book Machine, so its primary focus is NLS, but I wish you could add other types of media like you can with the commercial players. And my students at the school really like it as well. They think that Pete the Cat on the big speaker of that player is fantastic and they always ask me when I'm going to bring it back so that they can read Pete the Cat.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on that new player, Rich, and if you would like to read more thoughts on that player, you can do so in the October 2025 edition of our flagship publication, the Braille Monitor, we have a review of that new player there we were supplied to for the International Braille and Technology Center. I did smile, Rich, when you talked about wishing that you could play music on those players because I can remember in the 1980s I had one of those APH four track cassette machines and the economics teacher was out of the class and I had a copy on cassette of the new Genesis album, Invisible Touch, so egged on by my fellow students, I put that in that APH player and cranked it up, but they didn't tell me when the economics teacher had come back in the room, so I got in a little bit of a spot of bother over that.
You were right when you say that 32 gigs is quite a bit of storage for a player like this, so if you've filled up a one terabyte SD card with books, you've got a lot of books there, Rich. There is a way though that you can play your SD card in that player. There are adapters that you can buy that just look like a thumb drive, but there's a little SD card slot in that thumb drive. So you slot the SD card in, plug it into the USB port and you're good to go. So those are pretty cheap.
They're widely available. If you pick one up, you should be in good shape. If you have the new super-duper Wi-Fi enabled NLS player, let us know what you think about that. [email protected] is the email address that's all one word. [email protected]. You can attach an audio clip to the email or you can just write it down and remember, if you're coming in from a chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, do let us know which one.
A serious issue to raise now from Sean, he says, "Hello, Access On, I have been blocked from requesting rides and now ordering food through the Uber platform because of a random ID verification process they have implemented. Several attempts to reach out under their, I have feedback about talkback and voiceover feature have yielded no real response.
They have asked for a screenshot, which is not helpful as there is no method to depict what voiceover sees on the phone screen versus what is visually obvious. I finally sent them a screen recording that demonstrates the issue at the end of July and they have not written back." Sean, we are onto this. We are having discussions with Uber about this process. We understand how concerning and frustrating it is and we will certainly keep people informed regarding any progress that we make. So thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Vaughan Rolls:
Hi Jonathan, thanks again for a wonderful keynote summation from a blindness perspective on the iPhone 17 and iPhone Air launching. It's Vaughan Rolls calling you from Australia, but I'm just touching base to say that Judy Dickson hinted at it, but I think most commentators have missed the point in relation to iPhones and the use by blind people. To me, the camera is the critical element in this process and I appreciate that the iPhones are quite expensive and for a lot of people it's not something that they can readily afford the latest and greatest of all the technology.
But let me run this by you. I'd love to see you or somebody in the tech area interview the people from Be My Eyes, meaning the engineers from Be My Eyes, the engineers from Envision and an engineer from Aira, and ask them to do a comparison based on specifications that are currently in the public domain of the improvements that they see with iOS 26 and the cameras on say the last 14, 15 and 16, the last three iPhones.
So if you took the Pro models, what do they see are the improvements between the 14 Pro, 15 Pro and 16 Pro Max? What are the pros? Because that would be a tangible benefit to blind people to know how these phones are going to work with AI in terms of is the camera going to help more?
So for example, if you using Ally, the Envision app and you are looking for a sign in a railway station, are you going to get greater focus with the new cameras than you will with say a camera on the iPhone 15 Pro Max or a 16 Pro Max? They're the type of questions that are very hard for blind people to answer and we would really, I think value the engineer's perspectives.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thank you, Vaughan. Fair question and we'll see if we can round up some answers for you and get some professional opinion.
Stan Luttrell:
Greetings everyone, this is Stan Luttrell and I wanted to provide an experience that I found out about, I have an Amazon First Oven smart oven and I've had it about five years and about a week ago I had an unhappy experience when Wednesday night it decided to stop working and I thought the oven was gone, long gone and I wasn't sure because I really couldn't afford to replace it because it's also a convection oven as well as a microwave. And I was having a little problem, didn't know how to deal with it.
Well, yesterday I was listening to the Mystic Access podcast and Chris and Kim mentioned that they were having trouble with their First Oven and they weren't sure what was going on. Well, this morning their First Oven decided it would start working and so after listening I said, "I had better check out and see if mine will work," and I did a little test and now my oven is performing as per usual and I'm providing this tip just in case you may have some listeners who had the same experience and I always like to be helpful when I can.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's always a worthy endeavor, isn't it, Stan? To be helpful when you can makes life worthwhile for everybody. So thank you for that. Sounds like there must've been some sort of server side glitch going on with that oven. Glad that it is resolved and it magically came back to life.
We have had several emails which I can consolidate into one sentence, where is the JAWS 2026 public beta because normally the public beta of JAWS would be well underway by now and we have a statement from Vispero that answers that question and it goes like this. "You may have noticed that we no longer offer a public beta for JAWS. In the past when we introduced major new features once a year, the annual public beta gave users the chance to test those big releases ahead of time.
Today we deliver new functionality continuously throughout the year rather than in a single large release. Because of this change, we have decided to discontinue the annual public beta. Instead, we now provide more frequent incremental updates and also offer features via our early adopter program, which gives interested users an opportunity to try out new features before they are broadly released. This approach ensures that everyone can benefit from the latest improvements as they become available."
So what do you think about that? Are you disappointed that the JAWS public betas are no longer a thing? Because it did mean that people could preview the releases. There was a timed release essentially where you could try, you could kick the tires and if you wanted to keep it then you'd have to make sure that your software maintenance agreement was current. Well, now it's all very different and there is no public beta anymore. What do you think of that? Does it make sense in the context of a more staggered release of features and the subscription model that JAWS has moved to? Let us know what you think [email protected]. Attach an audio clip to an email or write it down.
Josue:
Hi Jonathan, it's Josue from Quebec City. I have a question with the Google Pixel. Talk back to be enabled only when I press the side button, but when my screen is locked and I touch the screen, talk back is always talking a lot and I'd like to know how to do it and would it be possible to access a forum with blind Android users? Thanks a lot for your help and have a great day. Bye.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thank you so much for being in touch. Let's try a few things. You could double tap settings and then scroll down to display and double tap that. Then there's an option called lock screen. Now there are a lot of settings on there, but if you go to the section called when to show and then there's an option called tap to check phone sometimes apparently it's called tap to wake, which is what it's called on iPhone.
If you double tap that, it should switch most of the problem behavior off or at least it's a problem for you that when you tap the screen it's waking up and talk back is starting to talk. In terms of getting support and being connected with other blind Android users, you could go to BlindAndroidUsers.com. This is a very active community actually and it's as the name implies specifically for blind Android users.
In addition to the website itself, they've got various chats on various platforms, but the jump off point is BlindAndroidUsers.com. You can head there also, Google does have quite a few resources that you can tap into for support should you need it, and they do also have an accessibility hotline that you can call or write to. Good luck with your droid.
I'm going to read this email even though as I've mentioned in a previous episode of Access on, Apple has resolved the serious bug in question because it does raise some questions about the National Federation of the Blind and I'm happy to answer. So Scott Rutkowski is writing in from Australia and he says, "Hi Jonathan. Hope you are well." I'm wonderful. Thank you Scott. Hope you are too. "I am wondering whether you can work with Apple to prevent this kind of thing from happening in future. This is not the first time we have had this particular bug in iOS and I am asking the NFB to work with Apple to prevent this kind of thing from happening moving forward."
Now if you're wondering which bug Scott is talking about, we've got a letter that he wrote to Apple Accessibility and he says, "I'm writing to you today as a concerned member of the blind community and a dedicated user of Apple products. I am writing to my extreme frustration and disappointment with a serious and debilitating bug that has been affecting the voiceover feature since the recent release of iOS 26. I understand that iOS 26 was released last week," so sometime has elapsed since Scott sent this in on Monday, September the 15th, 2025.
"While I appreciate the new features and improvements, this specific bug has created a very difficult and inconvenient situation for many of us who rely on voiceover to use our devices. The issue is that when certain devices are restarted, voiceover does not always start automatically. This is an intermittent problem, but it is a significant one. For someone with no vision, this means the phone is completely unusable. We cannot get voiceover to speak, which prevents us from entering our passcodes to unlock the device. I have heard reports of this affecting older devices like the iPhone 12 and 13, as well as some iPhone 15 models."
"Many of us are now hesitant to restart our phones for fear of losing access. This is unacceptable. I have friends who are now completely locked out of their devices and have to seek sighted assistance just to get their speech back. This is not only frustrating and inconvenient, but also a major violation of our privacy and independence. I implore you to take this issue with the seriousness it deserves. This is a critical bug that has a profound impact on the daily lives of thousands, if not millions of users.
A fix needs to be pushed out as soon as possible. Please prioritize this in your next update. Furthermore, I urge you to consider a fundamental change in how voiceover is handled in future iOS releases. There needs to be a failsafe mechanism to enable voiceover even if it fails to launch at startup, whether it's a dedicated button combination, a specific Siri command that works at the login screen or another method, we need a way to get our speech back without relying on visual cues or sighted help.
We have a long-standing trust in Apple's commitment to accessibility and this bug is a significant setback. Please work with the blind community and do what it takes to resolve this very serious issue immediately." Now Scott, I've got to say that was a very articulate and well-written letter, so congratulations for sending that because you weren't grumpy, but you stated the problem and you talked about the impact that the problem was having. So that is a great bit of advocacy.
The one thing I would add is that we have been encouraging the concept at the National Federation of the Blind of a defect equity framework, which is to say if you took blindness out of the picture and this bug was affecting non-blind people, what would be the equivalent? And in this case, the equivalent would be that you restarted your phone as a sighted person and the screen didn't work. Now, if that were the case, then clearly there would be very swift action implemented to fix that, although goodness knows how people with no screens would update their phone. So it would be a significant crisis. And yes, you're right. When we rely on these tools who engage with the world and something really significant like this comes along, it is a very big deal.
We do have dialogue with Apple, Scott. I think the dialogue is cordial. When we find something or someone reports something to us that is particularly concerning, we do let key people at Apple know and Apple is receptive to those reports from the National Federation of the Blind. We are grateful for that. What I can tell you is that during the beta cycle we did have devices running iOS 26 at the International Braille and Technology Center and we didn't see this ourselves. So it's difficult, isn't it when you have a bug like this that is intermittent, it affects some devices but not others and they can be difficult to troubleshoot.
But that said, Apple is a large company, they got lots of quality assurance resources and if they don't have sufficient, they can get more. And sure, when something as significant as this happens, if it happens to you, it's a very big deal because you never know when it's going to happen and suddenly out of the blue you've lost access. It could be a critical moment for you. So we certainly don't downplay this in any way at all and obviously we would like to understand what happened there, what lesson if any Apple took from it so that the chance of this can be minimized in future.
To give Apple some credit, they did push a fix out in a double dot release, which is quite unusual to have a voiceover fix in a release like that. So in iOS 26.0.1, this one was addressed. That was the first release after iOS 26. So it's good to see that Apple responded in that way, but clearly if quality assurance can ensure that those things don't happen to us in the first place, that would be fantastic. So I appreciate the frustration. We can pass on that frustration.
Scott, obviously the National Federation of the Blind doesn't manufacture the products, so we can't wave a magic wand and promise you that it will never happen again, but we can certainly indicate the severity of what we've experienced. And to be fair, I think Apple will probably know that when they've had people calling their accessibility hotline deeply upsets that's their phone doesn't talk, I'm sure they got their message and they'll be aware of that.
Feraz:
Hey, Jonathan, Feraz here making my first contribution for Access On. Of course, I have been a listener for a very long time for... I've been listening to your other podcasts that you've been doing for a long time. I did have one comment and one question. So starting with iOS 18, but there is one kind of small thing, but it kind of affects voiceover in a little bit and how you use it.
You know how in previous versions, like in the past you would go to the home screen, you can instantly tell if your phone is responsive because instantly goes right to the home screen. But starting in iOS 18, I don't know what Apple did, but when you swipe up to go home, it'll be like home and then it says the icon. It has to say the word home and then the icon, it kind of slows you down a bit.
It's kind of tedious. The only workaround I found is if you tap your first icon on your phone, the first icon that's on the top left of any page, then you go to the home screen, then you get that responsiveness that you've always known for. But here's the thing, I have a 16 Pro Max.
Even on iOS 18, it felt like it didn't feel the same as my iOS 17 device or previous versions. So I'm just wondering is there a setting for that? Because I know in iOS 26 it's the same behavior. In fact, it might be a little bit worse, it slows you down a little bit more.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thank you for your Access On contribution, Feraz. I've been playing with this since you pointed it out and what I can tell you, and this is with an iPhone 17 Pro Max running iOS 26.1 beta two, if I execute the home gesture from an app, you are right. It is saying home, but I hadn't noticed it because it interrupts itself. So if I flick up from an app to get to the home screen, it will say home, but then only a little bit of the word home often gets spoken and then it says settings, which is my first icon on page one of my home screen.
If it's slowing you down, then I wonder what the difference in setting is. It could be the text to speech engine I'm using, it could be some other setting that's having an impact. So I don't have an immediate answer, but we'll do a bit of playing and see if we can find out what might be the cause.
If anyone has any thoughts on this. [email protected] is the email address. When you execute the home gesture and you come out of an app and you're on the home screen, is your iPhone saying home when voiceovers on and pausing enough that you feel like it is slowing you down compared to iOS 17? And as I said in my convention address this year at national convention, some people might think these things are trivial but they're not because they do add up over time. So for us, we certainly have some sympathy for what you're saying.
Amanda:
Hey Jonathan, this is Amanda from Wisconsin and I wanted to ask you a question. Do you know of any apps on the iPhone that can detect colors? And also I wanted to know, I downloaded iOS 26 to my iPhone 12 and for some reason when I type on the keyboard, the keyboard sounds are not displaying anything like that. And then I turn the voiceover off to see if it was going to work and it clicked when the voiceover was off with the keys but not when it was on. [If] That makes sense.
Jonathan Mosen:
That does indeed make sense. Thanks so much for being in touch, Amanda. Let me deal with that first question first. Anecdotally, I would say that the most popular color detectors on iPhone are built into Microsoft's Seeing AI and the Envision AI app, both of which are free, but there are dedicated color detectors as well. My need for color detection is pretty basic. I've never seen, so I don't have a lot of knowledge of colors, so I find that what's in Seeing AI or Envision AI is adequate for me.
If there are those who use more complex color detectors, maybe you can recommend some apps. Be in touch and give Amanda some intel on this. Regarding your keyboard sounds question, it's possible that there is a bug with iOS 26 and your particular model of iPhone. I can confirm that they're working for me and since they do work for you when voiceover is switched off, which was a good bit of troubleshooting to check that out, it does make me wonder whether there is some sort of issue.
I don't know whether you might like to try changing your text to speech engine in case that helps, but it may just be a temporary glitch with your particular model and that it could be worth reporting to [email protected]. But if anybody else has the same iPhone that you do and the keyboard sounds are gone, maybe they can let us know.
Curtis Chong is writing in once again and says, "Hello everyone. For the past few weeks, I have no idea actually how many weeks, there has existed a bug in Google Docs running under Windows relating to bulleted and numbered lists where a particular bulleted or numbered item contains more than one line of text. It would seem that such multi-line items are repeated as you navigate up and down through the particular document using your arrow keys.
The workaround, which seems to work, is to temporarily turn off Google's Braille support using the Ctrl-Alt-H Google command. As you navigate through each multi-line list item, it seems that everything is fine until you reach the end of the multi-line item. Moving down or up to the next or previous line respectively causes the entire item to start being read out loud again, at least using JAWS. Here's hoping that Google is able to fix this rather frustrating problem soon."
Yes, indeed. Curtis, thank you so much. And I did see this one come up a few weeks ago on the NFB and computer science email list. We do have good connections with Google, so as soon as I saw this, I let them know, Curtis, that you'd discovered this problem and they were very grateful to get the bug report. Well, sadly, many of us are coming to terms with the facts that WhatsApp on the Windows desktop is not what it used to be. Someone who has discovered this as it rolls out slowly around the world is Siva Moodley in Pretoria in South Africa.
He says, "On Wednesday this week I tried to open my WhatsApp on my desktop and was requested to log in. I was immediately taken aback but decided it would be correct to do so. However, when the process was complete, the layout was totally different. I had and still do have difficulty in easily navigating through the messages and other fields. I uninstalled the program and went on to the Microsoft store to download another version.
On completion of the installation, the result was the same. Have you come across this change or is there a workaround for this?" Yes, many of us are coming across this change Siva and unfortunately this is the future. Meta who owns WhatsApp have decided to standardize the WhatsApp code base, which makes it easier for them, but clearly there is at the moment a degradation in the user experience on the Windows desktop.
I have seen on Mastodon that Hartgen Consultancy that makes some WhatsApp scripts for JAWS are working on new scripts that seek to optimize the user experience. That may take some time to roll out. In the meantime, unfortunately, yes, it's not as easy or intuitive an experience as it once was. Here's Kathy Blackburn in Texas who says, "I listened to Jenny Lay-Flurrie's address to the NFB National Convention.
I thought I understood her to say that Seeing AI can now describe videos. I have the latest version of Seeing AI running on my iPhone 14 Plus and the iOS 26. I selected the describe tab in Seeing AI and didn't find anything about videos. I next selected the more tab and didn't find anything about videos working either. Is there a separate app?"
No, it is there in Seeing AI, Kathy, but I can understand why you might not have found it. To get a demonstration of this, you can go all the way back to episode two of Access On where we showed you this working. But what you do is you go into the describe tab of Seeing AI, so the tab strip is at the bottom of the app and then you choose browse photos.
And I did make the point when we were doing the demonstration that that's a little bit ambiguous because I would not think to go into browse photos to try and get Seeing AI to describe videos and I think a lot more people would use it if the user interface better reflected what the function can actually do because it describes photos and videos and if you go in there and you can browse your camera roll or your photo album and you find a video, you can double tap and then double tap describe. There is a limitation though, it'll only describe videos that are less than five minutes in length. So give it a go and that should get you up and running.
In episode 45 of Access On, we included our webinar on what's new in iOS 26. Typically, we don't include the Q&A because there's got to be some incentive for turning up to the webinars, right? So if you want the Q&A, you turn up to the webinar or you register and get the recording. So if you didn't turn up to that Q&A, you wouldn't have got the answer to this problem.
So let me go through it now. It is an important question that's coming from Alco Canfield who says, "I really enjoyed your last podcast dealing with all the new features in Braille from Apple. Since I upgraded my software to 26.0.1, I am continually haunted."
Well, I mean it is Halloween pretty much. "Continually haunted by the app library. It comes up when I turn off and then turn on my phone instead of taking me to the home screen. I have talked with Apple about this and there is an open ticket for this issue because evidently other people are experiencing the same annoyance. If you have some kind of fix for this, I would appreciate your help." Sure.
So let me communicate the fix again. What you do is you go into settings and then accessibility and then keyboards and typing and make sure that a feature called full keyboard access is switched off. No voiceover user wants that on it is the source of many bad things happening, so be sure that that's off and you'll find that everything behaves normally and you won't have that app library problem.
Well, let's add a bit of discord to this podcast. Oh my goodness, because this email says, "I'm Patrick Gormley, vice president of the Western Maryland chapter in Frostburg. Recently I installed Discord on my computer with some cited help. I did this because our local radio club has a server on their system. This interface is really rather clunky, but apparently it's very mouse driven and doesn't offer keyboard support. The interface was designed by gamers.
It apparently doesn't support conventional email and I am thinking of presenting this problem to these folks to see if it could be made more accessible." Patrick, the best resource that I know of for a guide to using Discord with a desktop screen reader is available on the Starship Changeling website. So if you go to StarshipChangeling.net and then when you're on the main page of that website, perform a find on your screen reader and search the page for the word Discord or you can bring up the list of links, you will find a very comprehensive guide to Discord.
I think based on what I can tell, it was last updated in 2024 and it does contain a lot of information that may well be very helpful for you. And since Discord has come up, I think it's important that I do make mention of the fact that Discord has disclosed a third-party vendor breach that exposed roughly 70,000 users government ID photos tied to age verification and support tickets. Discord says that its core systems weren't hacked. The incident stems from a compromised customer service provider account. Reported access began around September 20 with disclosure on October the third.
Exposed data may include names, emails, limited billing details, IP addresses and ID images. No passwords or Discord login tokens were taken according to the company. Hackers say they've got a lot more, Discord denies that and says that's a bit mischievous. Meanwhile, Discord has severed all ties with the company in question and they've notified impacted users. So if you haven't had an email from Discord about this, you're probably in the clear at this point. And of course they've contacted law enforcement.
And now we're going to Ian Lackey who says, "Hello Jonathan. For me, installing iOS 26 went smoothly. I have been using Braille access and finding it useful. However, I have had one strange problem. I found that voiceover was on occasions running words together or reading words character by character. This is purely a speech function as everything is fine using my Braille display.
The really strange thing about this is it only happens with UK voices. For Apple purposes, UK doesn't include Scotland." There'll be some people happy about that and some not. "This means I can run Fiona and she speaks as she should. I have reported this issue to Apple Accessibility and it is being investigated. So far I haven't heard of anyone else having this problem."
Thank you, Ian. I'm not having this problem and my default voice is Daniel actually, the compact one, and I have not seen this myself, so it's curious the way these bugs can creep into some people's iPhones and not others. Now here's Catherine Samuel who says, "Hi Jonathan. I have a consulting side job and they asked me to create a podcast interviewing customers to share tips and tricks for using our software with other customers.
I have a little but not a ton of audio editing experience and if the radio industry weren't such a cutthroat place, I would have seriously considered broadcasting as a career. So I took on the project with enthusiasm and just made my first episode. I'm pretty pleased with how well it turned out. I don't have Reaper, so I just used Audacity for the editing work and it did just fine. I think I used Cleanfeed to interview the guest and that yielded very nice clean audio on multiple tracks so I could edit each one separately."
"My question is for a ten-minute podcast, about how much time is reasonable for audio editing and post-production. This includes syncing all the tracks, putting in the intro and outro music with fade in and out, cleaning up the mouth clicks, pauses, vocal stumbles and trimming content to get the length I need, plus writing the show notes and sending it out for captioning. It took me about three hours for editing and post-production.
I'm new to this of course, so I hope to speed it up a little for the next episode, but I feel like it just takes a lot of time to get a quality professional sounding podcast. What would you recommend I shoot for as my target post-production time. Any other recommendations? If my podcast sounds half as good and professional as yours, I'll be very happy." No, thank you very much, Catherine. I hope you enjoy this podcasting game.
It's certainly a lot of fun, but doing it well does take quite a bit of time. In the general podcasting community, the rule of thumb seems to be you should expect it to take about three to five times the length of the podcast in post-production. So if you can get a ten-minute podcast down to an hour, that's pretty reasonable. There are some accessibility considerations though because sometimes people don't listen to the whole podcast.
If they can see the screen, they can see certain things and get used to where the ums and ahs are so that you can go straight there without listening to the whole thing. There are also increasingly sophisticated tools that you can use. Auphonic, which we do cover in our podcasting webinar that was serialized on Access On now has some pretty good tools for trimming verbal utterances automatically. So there are now AI-based tools that are speeding up the podcast editing process, and you're absolutely right.
The more you do this, the faster you are going to get, and that's why I think it is good to settle on a tool and stick with that tool unless you have a specific reason for concluding that you have to use something different and go through a whole new learning curve because the tool you were using just isn't doing something critical that you need it to do.
And that's why in the podcasting webinar I suggested that even if you don't think you need a multi-track digital audio workstation now it's a good idea to bite the bullet and start using one from the get-go because as you become more confident, as your podcasts become more sophisticated, you're going to want to do multi-track at some point. You're going to be talking to a guest, you want them on a separate track so that if they're coughing away on the Cleanfeed or whatever it is that you're using, you can edit them out.
So multi-track is the way to go. In the case of Audacity, that is a multi-track environment and if you are happy and you feel like you can be efficient in Audacity, then now that you've started with it, stick with it. There is support from blind people out there who are using Audacity very effectively and happily. So best of luck as you speed up your workflow, Catherine.
The prolific Rich Yamamoto is back and says, "Hi, Jonathan. Is there a tutorial somewhere out there involving using Microsoft Clipchamp with a screen reader such as NVDA or JAWS? I've got some students who are trying to get into video editing, but they want to use something that is accessible with NVDA primarily. I've been looking at the article from Microsoft in which it details how to perform basic tasks in Clipchamp with a screen reader.
However, I'm still a bit confused as to how to do this in a way where I would feel comfortable training my students on how to do it. I also know that I will be needing to use this myself for some video editing for my student teaching credits. If there are other accessible alternatives that you are familiar with, I would be interested in knowing about those as well. Obviously, I've had lots of experiences with audio editing, but alas GoldWave only saves the video files as audio. Thanks for any help that you can provide."
Rich. I have had a little bit of a play with Clipchamp, but when I'm editing video, I use Reaper because it's the environment I spend a lot of my life in anyway, and when you load a video file in Reaper, you can edit the video and save it and it's great. Reaper does not to the best of my knowledge record video though, you have to record it somewhere else and load it in. That's not usually a problem for me because I can just use the camera app on the PC or I can use Zoom or Teams to record screen reader demos even if I go into a Zoom room or a teams room and record and then I take the output there and edit it, that works just as well.
But you did ask specifically about Clipchamp, so let's see if anybody using it successfully can point us to a tutorial or give us a few hints and tips. Yes, I did a bit of searching and found that Microsoft does have some articles, but it sounds like you're wanting a bit more. Maybe some sort of audio tutorial on Clipchamp would be helpful and if someone wants to produce that, if they're a Clipchamp expert, then we'll run that on Access On if you produce it with good quality audio and the speech is at a good speed and you're telling us clearly what you're doing. We love the idea of getting these grassroots demos in the mix. [email protected]. if you can help with this one or if you want to raise anything else at all relating to technology.
And Pastor Gil Price is writing in and says, "Hi Jonathan, I really enjoy your podcasts." Thank you so much. "I'm not an NFB member." Well, it's never too late. Never too late. We'd love to have you. There's always a place for you at the National Federation of the Blind, but he says, "I am a pastor who is blind. I thought the demonstration of the two voices was very interesting.
The second voice sounds almost exactly like you except at a slightly lower end pitch." Oh, I'd have to agree to disagree on that one, I'm afraid. "The accent in this voice was exactly like yours. Keep up the good work." Oh, you go. I really thought that second voice had a very rich Australian accent. It got badly wrong in my view, but it just goes to show these things are in the ear of the beholder, doesn't it?
Here's Haya Simkin in Israel and he says, "Hello Jonathan. Thank you for your discussion of iOS 26 and particularly Braille access mode. I am currently using it to compose this email from my Mac. To be more precise, I am utilizing Braille input mode, employing the U.S. contracted Braille table. However, I'm currently between Braille displays, which restricts my ability to fully utilize Braille access mode.
I have a few questions regarding this Braille table. How do I insert a new line or delete text? When I press any key other than those that function as Braille dots, nothing occurs. This includes the return and backspace keys as well as the keys that would correspond to dots seven and eight if I were using a table that utilize those dots. I have not yet discovered a work around for this issue, but I have only recently begun using Braille keyboard input."
Thank you very much for your email Haya. I can't immediately reproduce this here at the International Braille and Technology Center. Everything seems to be working as I would expect, so do seven and eight are where they should be and are having the effect that they should be. Dot seven is backspacing, dot eight is enter.
When you are in Braille input mode, the traditional backspace and end keys do indeed nothing. I thought that it might be because we had the Braille table set to English Unified Contracted, but I did go back and add the English US Contracted Braille table and switched to that and I was still able to use the dot seven and eight keys as I would expect to use them. So I'm afraid I don't have an answer, but I'm sure that if we crowdsource this, if somebody is having a similar issue and worked around it, they will be kind enough to let us know at [email protected] and if that person happens to be an NFB member, do be sure to tell us what chapter you are writing us from.
Let's go to New Jersey and hear from Rick Fox who says, "Hello, Jonathan. In October of 2020, you published a demo of 1Password in episode 74 of the Mosen At Large podcast. Do you still like it? Is it still as usable and accessible as it was then? Thanks for the great work that you and the senior staff are doing." Thank you so much, Rick. And Rick, by the way, is the president of the northern chapter of the NFB of New Jersey, so thank you for all you've contributed over the years.
Yes, 1Password is still an accessible, very viable solution, but if anybody's interested in learning more about 1Password, I would definitely not recommend listening to episode 74 of the Mosen At Large podcast because 1Password's user interface has gone through a complete alteration since I recorded that podcast. That's because it's a similar thing actually to what's happened with WhatsApp.
They've standardized on a code base, they've gone within Electron app and the 1Password experience now with 1Password 8 is very different. It did go through a bit of a rough patch for a while and there was some serious accessibility problems. Thankfully the 1Password people were aware of this and they kept 1Password 7 around long enough for them to fix those accessibility issues because they were all over the place.
They were not only on the PC, there were also some issues with iPhone as well, and then it was safe to upgrade and they have shown a pretty consistent commitment to accessibility over the years, even though they released a wee bit too early in my view in terms of that upgraded 1Password app. So it's in good shape now. I use it on all my devices. It is cross-platform and for those who are not aware of what 1Password does, it is a way to store not just your passwords but also credit card information and various other important notes in a secure place and they're available on all your devices.
It is called 1Password because the developers of the app hope that you will only have to remember one password, which is the one to get into their app, and then you can use a unique password for any website that you visit and that means that if that website is compromised because you've only used that one password on that one website, the damage is minimized, certainly compared to people who use the one password across all of their websites because they're trying to commit it to memory and often those passwords are pretty weak, so a password manager is a good thing to have.
1Password also does some cool tricks like helping you with two-factor authentication. It is worth pointing out though that if you use a password manager not just to complete your password but also to fill in two-factor authentication, obviously that sort of defeats the purpose of two-factor authentication because you're not resorting to another device for that second authentication, but it is mighty convenient. That cannot be doubted.
So 1Password's great. I have various credit cards for various things and when you're on a credit card field you can just down arrow and choose the card you want and it fills it in, all sorts of things like that. There are alternatives that are also worthy of consideration. Bitwarden is another one that is well-liked in the blind community because of its accessibility and that has a very good reputation. So Bitwarden's also worth checking out and often I think it just comes down to personal preference.
If you used either 1Password or Bitwarden, you really can't go wrong. They're both highly respected. This is something that we are going to come back to here at the National Federation of the Blind's Center of Excellence in NonVisual Accessibility, and we'll do a webinar on this at some point, but one thing I would say is that no matter what you use, find an accessible password manager and please use it.
It's a dangerous old cyber world out there and if you resort to remembering a single password or a couple of passwords, even if those passwords are strong, it only takes one data breach and you have got major identity theft and all sorts of serious things to contend with. So using a password manager of your choice and having unique passwords for every website that you visit is really sensible stuff. It's so difficult to get yourself out of the mire and the distress that identity theft can cause you.
From one Rick to another. Here's Rick Roderick. He says, "Hi Jonathan. The live captions feature for Braille sounds exciting. I am wondering one thing, I sometimes attend meetings and I want to go over what we discussed afterwards. Is it possible to transcribe a meeting as a file?" I don't think so, Rick. I don't think so.
You can go in and summarize and that for me has been a little bit hit-and-miss in terms of whether it produces a summary at all. You might be able to copy that summary to the clipboard, but I'm not aware of being able to just select all of the material in live transcripts and copy to the clipboard. If I'm not correct about that, if somebody's found a way, that would be good to hear, but goodness me, that has made such a difference to my life that live captions feature.
Just the other day I was speaking to the Baltimore County chapter of the National Federation of the Blind about technology and they made me feel very welcome and I loved it as I do love going to all the chapter meetings where I get asked to speak, sometimes virtually and sometimes in person, but in this case we didn't have assistive listening at the venue and normally I would've struggled or I might have asked for somebody to take my little wireless Roger microphone around if somebody was asking questions, but I was able to follow the questions by reading the captions in live caption mode.
It's quite significant when you get a feature like that that is so impactful and really does just change your ability to function. It's literally that dramatic. Changing your ability to function in certain environments. So I look forward to seeing some improvement there only in the sense that Apple's live recognition in my experience is not quite as accurate as others I have seen.
So sometimes you have to really think about what you are reading because it hasn't transcribed accurately, but I'm not taking anything away from the fact that it really is quite a significant breakthrough. This email comes from Rebecca Skipper and she says, "I really want to update to iOS 26, but I understand that if you were using a continuous glucose monitor such as Libra 3, you are likely to run into compatibility issues if you update. So how long should patients wait?"
Rebecca, I personally have not heard this before and I did some searching and I couldn't find any definitive evidence that said that there was a problem with continuous glucose monitors and iOS 26, but obviously people should be very cautious about this for such critical technology. So if you have any more information you want to share or anyone else does about what they're hearing with respect to this, then please let us know. Conversely, of course, if you are using such devices and you have upgraded and it's working for you, that would be useful information as well. Now let's revisit something that we talked about back in episode seven of Access On and that is the Plaud NotePin.
Reg George is writing it about this and he says, "Hi Jonathan. I'm hoping you'll revisit this topic soon and that the National Federation of the Blind can put more pressure on this company." I have done my best. "A friend of mine was thinking about buying the Plaud pin recorder." I wonder if that's the NotePin that we reviewed or something else. Reg says, "I advised against because of handling noise and recommended the NotePro, which is coming out this month, more on that below.
However, I can't recommend any because of the continued inaccessibility of the app. Here is my breakdown of what I found and my attempts to resolve the issue. You must enable on-screen recognition to really navigate anything once you enter the screen for playing and transcribing a file. Few of the buttons are labeled, but voiceover makes its best guess from the icons as to what most of them are. The rest say button, button, button."
"Back to the app with screen recognition on which I have put on my router and it remembers that setting per app, it will recognize play fast-forward and rewind and speed buttons sort of. They all have weird names. I sent them a screen recording of trying to navigate with voiceover. I love how files can automatically upload to the app when you open it and how you can turn on fast transfer, which temporarily connects your device to your Wi-Fi network, vastly speeding up file transfers.
I dialogued with their support staff for a while and they sent me a page to try to contact the developer directly. They never answered. Their excuse is that they have a very small staff and they are swamped with their success and coming out with new products. My conclusion is that setting up your account and managing the device and updating firmware is all pretty slick. Working with the files is not. Here is what I know about the NotePro. From all the reviews I have read, I would take it any day over the Pin."
"It has dual HD microphones, more storage, double the battery life and way less handling noise. They are taking pre-orders on their website and it's close to the same price as the regular Note. It also comes with 600 minutes of transcription free, which is double that of the regular Plaud Note and double the onboard storage. They both do 30 hours of recording on a charge and standby up to 60 days. If they would just fix their app. I haven't generated one transcript because I'm so frustrated with it.
In its little leather case, it supports MagSafe, so if you stick it on the back of your iPhone, it will record phone calls. They even supply magnetic stickers in the package for Android phones. Their recorders use one of those proprietary magnetic charging cords, so don't lose it. I continue to hold on to my applaud in the hopes that the situation with accessibility will someday improve."
Well, it's very timely that you send this in, Reg. I can tell you that the National Federation of the Blind has reached out to Plaud. We've had some dialogue with them as have you and I know I've been contacted by other Access On listeners who were really interested in this product after we reviewed it and pointed out the accessibility shortcomings.
They certainly make the right sounds, but I was very disappointed to note that they've come up with version three of their app in recent days and I thought, surely all this talking may finally have paid off. It's not that much better. It really is still necessary to enable screen recognition to get some key elements to work. It is disappointing and I find myself not using it as much as I used to because as you say, it is quite a frustrating experience. You can get used to anything and it's not completely inaccessible if you turn screen recognition on. It's just very clunky.
What I have recently acquired is an Apple Watch Ultra three, and I'm very pleased to be back in the Ultra Apple Watch ecosystem again, and that has an action button. And I have assigned the action button to the Voice Memos app. The battery life just goes on for so long with the Apple Watch Ultra that you can do a lot of recording this way. And this actually going to be the tech tip for this week, since we're talking about this. What you can do, assign the action button to the Voice Memos app.
If you need a transcription of a meeting, you just press that button on the watch that's on your wrist anyway, it will record and do a very good job of recording. The microphones on the Apple Watch are excellent. Then I've been taking my recording into iCloud Drive and uploading it to Google Gemini because Google Gemini, if you pay for the plus version, now transcribes audio up to three hours in length.
So if you're a paid Gemini customer, you can get very good quality transcription and summarization of audio by uploading the file to Gemini. If you use the free tier of Google Gemini, you still have audio transcription, but it's quite limited. It's about five minutes long. I agree with you, Reg, completely. They're great products. They're nifty. They do a lot of things, but it is very sad that they seem to continue to put accessibility on the back burner.
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 Mastadon. [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Mastadon. 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.