Welcome to the fourth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
The show is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if you have an app or player that supports chapters. Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Introduction 0:00
- How you can win a HumanWare Victor Reader Stream or a Blazie Technologies BT Speak Pro 2:12
- You can enter the drawing until Dec 8 by visiting https://nfb.org/donate
- Mathieu Paquette from HumanWare discusses the Victor Reader Stream 3 6:47
- Hearing aid compatibility with iOS, and Apple intelligence on the Mac 41:15
- Lotus Smart Ring 44:41
- What is happening withFacebook accessibility? 47:00
- Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses 54:59
- This week's tech tip 58:16
- Closing and contact info 1:00:48.766
Transcripts
Jonathan Mosen: Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week we are giving away a HumanWare Victor Reader Stream and a BT Speak from Blazie Technologies. We'll hear all that's new in the Victor Reader Stream and find out what its product manager would like to see in future. In response to listener inquiries, we tell you about the advocacy we are doing with respect to Facebook accessibility. And with the release of Apple's iOS 18.2 imminent, our tech tip offers some cautionary advice.
It's Jonathan Mosen welcoming you to episode four of Access On, another little moment in history for the podcast because this is the first to be produced from Baltimore Maryland at the Jernigan Institute. And since this is a technology podcast, I thought I would mention how I'm doing this. At the moment my studio is about to be packed up in New Zealand as we complete this move to Baltimore Maryland.
But audio equipment has come a long way in terms of affordability, accessibility, and the ability to produce reasonable sounding audio essentially from anywhere. So I'm producing this using my Lenovo ThinkPad and connected to it is a Focusrite VoCaster Two. This is an audio interface designed specifically for podcasting and into the Vocaster Two I have a Heil PR 40 microphone, one of the very same microphones that I've been using in my studio at home. So the audio should sound fairly consistent compared with what you are used to hearing from me. Add to this tools like Cleanfeed, which can produce broadcast quality remote interviews, and you can do this show from anywhere with minimal equipment. Podcasting is a great thing to get involved in and sometime in 2025, it is our intention at the Center of Excellence in Non-Visual Accessibility to produce a webinar on podcasting.
So if you've always wanted to be on this side of the mic, stay tuned for that. We do intend to do this sometime next year and we will give you all the details in advance here on Access On. As I said in the intro, we have a BT Speak and a Victor Reader Stream to give away this week, and I want to tell you all about how you can get into the drawing for that. This is a way that we are celebrating our generous donors during the week of Giving Tuesday. Our friends at Blazie Technologies are giving away a free BT Speak Pro to one person who contributes to the National Federation of the Blind during the week of Giving Tuesday. The BT Speak Pro is a pocket computer made especially for the blind, offering an eight-dot braille keyboard and speech output, ensuring that you always stay connected.
Here at the International Braille and Technology Center, we have a BT Speak Pro, just like we have a lot of technology so blind people can investigate it and find out how it might work for them. And I've been using the BT Speak Pro over the last couple of days. It is a handy device that's very easy to use and dare I say, deceptively powerful. At first use you'll find that it looks and feels a lot like a Braille 'n Speak, which was a venerable piece of technology in its day, and you have that ease of use, the ability to quickly get into a file and start writing something down. But there's no doubt that this is a product for the modern era. It has WiFi and Bluetooth. You can connect a range of peripherals to this. And if you want to go beyond the user interface of the BT Speak, which has been updated to include things like internet radio, you've actually got under the hood a full Linux desktop.
Now, this is completely optional. If you want to just stick with the classic interface you probably know and love, then you can do that. But you can really extend this device and what it does by running full web browsers, Linux applications. As they say in some parts of this country, knock yourself out. It is amazing the things that the BT Speak can do in such a tiny package that you can fit in any pocket. There's a variety of voices, so it's going to sound the way that you want it to sound for sure, because if you like the classic sounds like Deck Talk and eSpeak, which has become more popular in certain circles in recent times, or you want a more human sounding voice, this product does have you covered. So check it out and you can find out more about the BT Speak by going to Blazietech.com. That's B-L-A-Z-I-E-T-E-C-H.com. And when you go there, you can also download the user guide or the audio tutorial.
And I was saying on Mastodon, I really enjoyed listening to this audio tutorial because it's been deliberately produced in a way that might evoke memories for those of us of a certain age who grew up with these audio tutorials on cassette and really looked forward to them and devoured them. And Steve has done a great job of producing this audio tutorial. So do check it out. It's all at blazietech.com. Now, the Victor Reader Stream, you may well know about this one and we're going to be talking about it a lot more in a moment. But it is a handheld digital audio player to enjoy your media content and it features a fully tactile interface. These giveaways are part of the Invest in Dignity Gifting Match Challenge, and your contribution will be doubled thanks to HumanWare and the other partners. It's a win-win.
Now here's the simple way that you can give to the National Federation of the Blind and be entered to win a BT Speak Pro or a Victor Reader Stream 3. Anytime during the week of December first through eighth, all you have to do is give online at nfb.org/donate. That's nfb.org/donate. If it's easier, you can contribute by phone using a credit card. And to do that, you call 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314, extension 2430. That's extension 2430. We're going to be doing a random drawing on December the 11th. You can follow us on social media to learn more. So you've got the opportunity to win yourself some pretty cool tech right here.
And by contributing to this campaign, you're helping create an environment where blind people can share information, make independent choices, and live with dignity. What is not to like? With your generosity, we can continue advancing the next generation of assistive technology fostering inclusion in the classroom, at home and in the workplace. Believe me, I know how busy this time of year can get, so why not head over now while you're thinking about it and make that donation and get yourself in the drawing. Nfb.org/donate is where you go, nfb.org/donate.
Despite all the advances in smartphones and other technology, any host of a podcast for a blind audience will tell you that when you look at the anonymous statistics that show how many people listen and what they're listening with, HumanWare's Victor Reader Stream remains a very popular way for people to hear podcasts, and many use it for other things as well. It is their primary book player and it's their way to read news from NFB Newsline. Each generation of the Stream has a long shelf life. HumanWare is up to the third generation now and they promise to keep adding improvements to the device through firmware updates. One such update was released recently. So to check in on the Victor Reader Stream, we'll check in with Mathieu Paquette from HumanWare in Canada. Welcome to you Mathieu. It's always good to catch up.
Mathieu Paquette: Hey Jonathan, super glad to be here today.
Jonathan Mosen: Would you do anything differently in retrospect with the Victor Reader Stream, third generation, because you only get one chance every few years to revamp the product?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. So this is a product that's been in development for a few years now, a little bit before my time as a product manager, but honestly, no, we're pretty happy with the way that the product turned out. We're really happy that we went with allowing people to use huge SD cards. I've had reports of people telling me they've put in two terabyte SD cards, which is a lot of content as you might imagine. We're super happy. The one thing that I know that was discussed when we started the development was do we keep things as much as possible or do we try to innovate and everything? And I think the happy medium was that on the hardware front we left everything as is. So pretty much almost everything with the exception of the jacks, the headphone and the microphone jacks, everything remained in place.
So your bookmark key is still on the top right corner, your go to key still on the top left and so on and so forth. But on the software side, we've made some small improvements and given that I was in technical support previously prior to being a product manager, I had a lot of experience with guiding people going through the settings, configuring WiFi and everything. So we did a little bit of a revamp in the settings menu, but otherwise we tried to keep everything as much as possible the same so that someone transitioning from a Stream Two towards a Stream 3 would be able to just pick it up and use it easily.
Jonathan Mosen: Replaceable batteries were a bit of a controversial issue when you changed the third generation. Are people getting used to that or do you think, yeah, look blind people use this so much that having a spare battery on hand is useful and I wish we'd done it differently?
Mathieu Paquette: I remember the controversy a lot and I think people have gotten used to it. I think what the apprehension the people had was that the second generation Victor Reader with the removable battery only had about eight to 10 hours of listen time. Whereas with this one, yes it is internal, no, it's not replaceable, but you get 15 to 16 hours of battery, which allows you to go easily on a full day. Whereas before with a single battery for eight hours, if you were really doing a lot of listening, you might not have been able to get your full day out of it and you needed a replacement battery.
So there are still people who would've preferred to have an external battery, and I understand that and I appreciate that and I respect that, but I've also heard the opposite people saying, I'm so happy this decision was made. And you know what? Once again, I go back to my tech support days, but we don't have people calling in for broken battery latches anymore. It's less movable parts, it's more reliable. So I think overall I'm happy with that decision.
Jonathan Mosen: How's quality shaping up when people get a Stream third generation? Is it lasting for them? Is it reliable?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, from what we're seeing here, we are not seeing a whole lot of returns for repairs. We are seeing some obviously as you would with any product, but the numbers of repairs and everything that we were anticipating are on level or lower month to month than what was to be expected. So quality-wise and everything, it seems to be going really well.
Jonathan Mosen: And it is evolving in some pretty interesting ways. I know that you changed the way that you access radio stations since when the Stream was first released.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, for sure. So with the Stream Two, we had introduced the internet, so we had the internet radio, which uses the ooTunes database to search for links and play them. And now with the 1.2 update last year we introduced TuneIn radio. So TuneIn Radio is a great partner that we've been working with for a couple of years now. We've been trying to get this on the road. It was my predecessor who started talking with them and once she left, her name was [inaudible 00:11:29]. Once she left, I took the ball over and resumed the discussions with the TuneIn people and they were really wonderful people. They really wanted to work, given us a lot of help. And with the implementation last year, it wasn't a perfect implementation.
Some of the things like for example in podcasts such as this one, when you would listen to a podcast, it would not remember your current reading position, and that's because their API didn't have that built in. So we reported back to them, we told them this is something that we would like to have for the API. They got to work, they got it going. And as of the last update, we got the podcast position remembrance as well as in the books. So if you're a premium user with TuneIn, you can get access to books and now remembers your last reading position once you go to a different application for example.
Jonathan Mosen: Is the Ootunes database no longer being updated? I know that there hasn't been an update in the iOS App Store for Ootunes for a very long time. So is it actually still an active thing, do you know?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, as far as we know, it's still active. We do have a yearly contract with the people atOotunes, they still maintain the database. How actively is it being done? What I've heard from some people on some user lists is that when they send a broken link to, if I remember correctly, a guy's name is Steven, when they send him a link, it gets updated in the database. So I don't think he's updating the app anymore, but the database is still being updated as far as I'm aware.
Jonathan Mosen: Does that mean then that Stream 3 users are bombarded with the ads that TuneIn will insert in streams, particularly at the top of the streams a lot of the time?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, it's the same experience. We try to make it as much as possible, the same experiences we would have on a phone. So for example, I think if you're a premium customer paying, I think it's a few under $10 a month, I think that removes some of the ads or all of the ads. But yes, it's the same experience. So if you would get an ad on the phone, then you would also get the ad on the Stream, but if your subscription level allows you to bypass the ads, then on the Stream as well, it would bypass the ad.
Jonathan Mosen: Okay. So why did you elect to go with TuneIn as opposed to say a public database? There are several quite good ones these days of streams that don't insert stuff into other people's content.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. So we are looking into enriching the Stream internet radio database. I don't have the name on top of my head, but I know there's another database that we have looked into that is fairly popular within the blind community. So we are looking, but they have to have the proper APIs that we can integrate into them. And that's the reason why we can't just add any database, but we are looking into enhancing that because we know that the internet radio side of things and the podcast side of things on the Victor Reader Stream is more and more popular as time goes by.
Jonathan Mosen: And Audible is a key thing for the Stream. It's something that people loved in the second generation. There were a few fishhooks there getting it working in the third. How is it going now with the Stream in Audible?
Mathieu Paquette: The Stream is first and foremost a book player. Having the internet radio and the podcast and the notes recording and all of those features is nice, but its primary feature is really a book reader. I wasn't here 10 years ago, but I've been told the story about how when the Stream Two launched, about 10, 11 years ago, Audible wasn't supported and there was a huge campaign by the folks at NFB who did some petitions and everything and got it to be supported by pretty much bombarding the technical support at Audible with calls and emails and so on and so forth. Now, when I came on board as a product manager about two and a half years ago, it was in March of 2022, I started trying to engage with Audible to get them to support us on the Stream 3. And I was sending them emails, not getting any response.
Sometimes I would get a response, but it'd take a week or two before they would respond to my emails. And then we finally got some commitment, started working on it. But again, the commitment wasn't super firm. We were getting some difficulties getting some answers to our questions. Once we announced that the Stream Two was going to launch, at that point, it was too late in the process to be able to support Audible. So I remember going on your podcast and then you and I and with my colleague Dominic were talking about Audible and how difficult it is and everything. And you launched a petition which garnered, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think around 750, 800 signatures, something along those numbers. And I can tell you the signature was launched on a Monday or a Tuesday I think, and by Friday I had an email saying, urgent, we need to talk from Audible in my inbox.
And we hopped on a call with our contact at Audible and they told us that they were very moved with the letter, with the open letter that you wrote, and they were really impressed by the community, the engagement from the blind community to get this going. And from that point forward, they committed to giving us more regular updates. We started scheduling weekly calls with them, we started getting responses to our emails within 24 hours, sometimes even quicker. So we were able to launch Audible with a subsequent update to the Stream 3 and we're super happy about that.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah. And this is one of the benefits of collective action. The nice thing about-
Mathieu Paquette: Absolutely
Jonathan Mosen: The good thing about working with the National Federation of the Blind is that we do have extensive networks in the technology industry. We seek to build those all the time. So when there are issues like this, there are things that we can advance that might not otherwise be possible if all of us did them as individuals. So that's a real benefit.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, they say squeaky wheel gets the oil and sometimes that's used in a negative way, but sometimes it's also a very positive way and you have to make your voice heard for sure.
Jonathan Mosen: This does raise a wider question though. Do you think the Stream's taking the right approach. You've got some competitors out there, obviously the key one is the SensePlayer and they've taken a different approach where they're trying to leverage open applications, put a skin if you like, a blind friendly accessible user interface on top of those applications. And that means that they are not requiring that engagement that is necessary for the Stream. Was that a missed opportunity when the Stream 3 was being put together to go that more open route and do the hook into existing Android based apps, for example?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. That's a very fair and very valid question. I don't think it was a mistake. I think a lot of people like the Stream for what it is. It's a simple device that's a standalone player that has its place in the market. We do have some customers who don't own a smartphone or even a cell phone. And we're going to, as time goes by, obviously smartphone users are going to be more and more, but we do have some people who really appreciate having a standalone player that doesn't have to rely on their cell phone, that doesn't have to do anything.
And I understand that the SensePlayer can also operate without a cell phone, but a lot of people are not willing to learn all of the cell phone operations and everything. So the Stream Player being a dedicated player is the route we decided to take and stick with. And honestly, it's something I'm proud of and I think there's room the SensePlayer, I'm not going to sit here and say the SensePlayer is not a good device. It's a pretty good device, and I think both have their rightful place in this market.
Jonathan Mosen: So the Audible arrangement, the TuneIn arrangement are examples of what is possible if the other manufacturer, the other developer cooperates and gives you an API and talks to you and lets you integrate that. What else would you like to see come to the Stream in that fashion?
Mathieu Paquette: There's a bunch of services that a lot of people are requesting that we would love to see on there. One of them that I see I think the most often is SiriusXM, which we've tried reaching out to them several times and I know that our friends at APH have also tried to reach out to SiriusXM quite a few times. Unfortunately we haven't had any responses. There are some other services like Spotify for example, which I've reached out to them I think 3 times so far through emails and a partner's forum that they have on their website. Haven't heard anything back yet, and when I say yet, I mean it was like a year ago, so I'm not expecting to get something after this. Another one that came to my attention recently is Libby. So the Libby, which used to be known as OverDrive, if I remember correctly, one of our customers told us that apparently as of November 15th, they won't allow MP3 downloads anymore.
You'll be required to use the application. We've tried reaching out to Libby. I've tried at least twice in 2023 and once in 2024, and I haven't heard anything back from them. We would love to be able to integrate with Libby, especially for United States people, but there are services where, YouTube, for example, is another one that I'd like to have. There's a lot of audio descriptive content on YouTube. We've had some discussions with YouTube to be fair, and they were open to getting it done. There are some APIs and everything that we perhaps can use. We still have to explore more on that.
But the thing is from the inception, which is the first contact to being able to push out the service, it's going to take at least a year, obviously sometimes two. In TuneIn's case, the commercial agreement and everything took about two years just for the agreement, then about a year of development. But the sooner we can get in touch with those people, the better, and we can enrich the offering on the Stream.
Jonathan Mosen: How long would it take if somebody came to you today from one of those companies and said, yeah, we've got an API, let's talk, let's integrate it into the Stream? Presumably you've got limited engineering resources as well, and there's only so much that you can do at once.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. We have a wonderful team here in the research and development team led by Dominic who you've talked to before, but they also work on our brilliant product and they also work on, we have a wide array of products, so obviously I am finding with my colleagues, especially with my colleague Andrew Flatres, who's the braille product manager here at HumanWare.
So we are constantly fighting, and when I say fighting, I'm saying it with a smile. Obviously it's not a real fight, but we are trying to get the resources for, we're each pulling on the cover and trying to get our own little bit of resources and everything. So if a big opportunity came by, if let's say after this Spotify reached out to me and said, Hey, we want to get it going, commercial agreement and everything, I would say at least a month or two probably, because obviously lawyers get involved and so on and so forth.
And then in terms of the development, the actual development, it really depends on what their API is. I would say the fastest that we could do is probably within 3 or four months, and something more reasonable is six months to a year, depending on the complexity of the API.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I have been on the inside on some of those fights in a product manager capacity in a past life, and I can tell you they're not always friendly.
Mathieu Paquette: No, they're not.
Jonathan Mosen: They can be pretty robust discussions when you are battling for limited engineering resources to get things done that you believe in. Which begs the question about the value prop. There are people out there with smartphones, be they iOS or Android or some other more open device and they can just bring up SiriusXM today or YouTube today and listen to this stuff. It's interesting to me that with all of the progress that we've made, people still love their Victor Reader Streams. It's one of the most used products in the blind community.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah. Honestly, and I get the same question very often on the Stellar-Trek, which is another product that I'm the product manager for, which is our GPS orientation and mobility device. And people ask me, well, I have a cell phone, so why would I use a Stellar-Trek? Or I have a cell phone, why would I use a Victor Reader Stream? And then I tell people, my answer to this is it's very simple, is I have a rice cooker and it might sound like a weird answer, but I can cook rice on the stove. I don't need the rice cooker. I could use just a plain stove and a pot and make some rice, but I like having a dedicated tool to make my rice. It makes it easier. It's simpler. I don't have to measure anything besides putting in the rice, the water and pressing a button.
It gives me a little music chime once it's done. There's all kinds of, yes, I could have saved myself a hundred dollars and not bought a rice cooker, but I decided that I wanted to have something dedicated to making rice because I love rice. I eat rice every day. So it's the same thing. Yes, you could use a phone to do your navigation or your book reading, and if you're happy using your phone doing those things and you don't need anything else, then by all means use your phone. I'm not here to sell you a product that you don't need, but if you like having a really dedicated book players that has controls, you don't have to fight with voiceover or any accessibility thing. It's all built in. It's designed for blind people. It's really made for that one purpose. Then the Stream is a great device or the Stellar-Trek is a great device and it's really made with the blind community in mind.
Jonathan Mosen: Sighted people use their Kindles, of course, and they have smartphones.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Jonathan Mosen: You didn't mention Kindle in your little list. Given that you've got that relationship with Audible, which is an Amazon company, do you think that Kindle could ever come to the Stream?
Mathieu Paquette: I would love it. I did prompt them a little bit and they remained evasive. It's a different team at Amazon to be fair, but I'm still trying to this day to get a contact within the Kindle team, because I would absolutely love that.
Jonathan Mosen: Yes, it's perhaps difficult for people to appreciate who aren't involved in advocating to big tech, just how large these companies are. And just because something bears the Amazon moniker as it were, it doesn't mean that they have any contact at all necessarily with another part of the company.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, exactly. At HumanWare, we're a small company. We're about 130, 140 employees-ish. We're obviously part of the EssilorLuxottica family, which is a much, much bigger company. But my day-to-day life is within this small business that is HumanWare and with an amazing team of dedicated, I'm in the office today because we do a hybrid in-office and remote work, and I'm in the office today and I have my colleagues from the marketing team that are there today and my boss, and we were talking this morning about a bunch of things and everything.
So yeah, it's very easy for me at HumanWare because if I want to talk to someone in a different department, I just go up the stairs and I can talk to them. But when you're in a multi-billion dollar company like Amazon, it's in a different state, it's in a different country. It's so big that it is something that is difficult to think about.
Jonathan Mosen: You've just released fairly recently a new firmware update to the Stream. Are there any particular highlights you want to tell us about?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. So with this latest update, one of the things that I pride myself as a product manager is to be able to listen to the user community and what they want. A lot of the new features that we released were things that were very much requested by our users, notes categorization, the top one among them. So people can now assign a category to their notes and sort them by category. So if you're, for example, a student and you want to have a folder for your math class, a folder for your chemistry class, a folder for your literature class, you can have a different folder and category for each of your notes.
Jonathan Mosen: For those who don't know the product, are they voice notes or are they text notes or both?
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, correct. So they're voice notes. So basically it's also a recording device that if you press the record button you can record a voice note up to eight hours. So we have people who use the Stream to record either quick note, just oh, a reminder to pick up some milk tonight on the way home, or we have some people who use it to record entire lectures when they go into a classroom, they bring the Stream on their professor's desk, put it there, press the record button, and then they get the full recording. You can even plug in an external microphone if you'd like to get better sound quality. So those are the notes that you can now categorize for using this new feature.
Jonathan Mosen: Do you think you might ever add the ability to use T9 or a texting type method so people can jot down quick text notes using the good old telephone keypad texting method?
Mathieu Paquette: That's a good idea actually. That's not something that we've considered before, but I'm definitely taking notes here. That's possibly something that we could do in the future, perhaps in having a different category for text notes.
Jonathan Mosen: You've got Bluetooth in the device as well, so it would technically be possible potentially to connect the little keyboard to the device.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. I've discussed that and we've made some improvements on the Bluetooth side of things as well. So if you have any listeners who tried in the past to connect their Bluetooth headphones or hearing aids to a Victor Reader Stream, we've made some improvements to the Linux driver that we use to be able to support a wider range of devices. So we've had a lot of people report that their speakers or their hearing aids now do work. And yeah, I've checked with the R&D team and having a Bluetooth keyboard is something that might be possible in a future update. It is something that we could do.
Jonathan Mosen: Is there anything that we should know about in terms of the Bluetooth requirements to pair to the Stream, are you using Bluetooth 4.2 or 5.2, what you got in there?
Mathieu Paquette: So it's Bluetooth 4.2 on it, but Bluetooth should be compatible in between versions. The reason that some don't work sometimes is that they use different profiles. So Bluetooth is, you've got the version number, but you've also got the profile. So is it a hands-free profile? Is it a headphone profile? So there's a bunch of different profiles and some of them, there's even some devices that make up their own profile, their own protocol. And as time goes by, more and more of those become available.
But as you can imagine, Linux being less of a mass market friendly platform than something like Windows or Mac, for example. The drivers and everything are updated less frequently, but as time goes on, we will keep up to date and we will support more and more of those Bluetooth devices.
Jonathan Mosen: And people love new voices. I think you've got some new Acapella voices in the firmware now.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. We've updated to the latest Acapella version, so version 12.1, which has in particular for my Canadian because I am a Canadian, so for my fellow Canadian, there is a new voice called Melanie, which obviously Americans can use as well or anywhere in the world you can use them. But Melanie, the particularity with Melanie is that she's a bilingual voice, so you still have to install her as two different voices, but she has French and English, so if you like her tone of voice and her intonation and everything, you could use install both Melanie French and Melanie English. And then for people like me in Quebec who speak both languages, you can listen to your material using the same person talking to you in both languages.
Jonathan Mosen: Does it seamlessly switch languages? If you are in a document that is marked up correctly, will it switch seamlessly from-
Mathieu Paquette: Currently, no.
Jonathan Mosen: ... English? Yeah,
Mathieu Paquette: Currently, it doesn't. And one of the reasons why is that there aren't a whole lot of documents that are marked up correctly, because you're right, that it would have to be, but this is something that we are looking at for a future update.
Jonathan Mosen: When I talk to people about their streams and people wax lyrically about their streams, one thing they do say to me is, I love my Stream, but I wish it had Eloquence on it. Do you get that?
Mathieu Paquette: Yes, I've heard that. And I can promise you if we had Eloquence on it, you would get people saying, I love my Stream, but I wish we had Acapella on it. TTS preference is a very personal thing. I was talking to one of my colleagues, Peter, the other day, and Peter was telling me, as long as I can understand it, I don't really care who's talking to me. And then some people will have a very strong preference towards a certain voice or even a type of voice. People will prefer the Eloquence type of voice versus Acapella. Some people hate Eloquence and love Acapella. It really is a mixed bag.
So given that with the voices, obviously there's a cost associated to that. So Acapella nor Eloquence nor any company are, those companies are companies that are giving it to voices away for free. So we have an agreement with Acapella. We think they're appreciated by most people, but that's not to be said that in the future. We might not look into offering a wider array, but the problem with a device like the Stream is it's a small device in terms of the processing power and everything we have, it's limited. It's not as powerful as say a phone, like a thousand dollars phone obviously. So we can only do so much on it. But yes, it is something that I'm hearing every once in a while.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I think there are two categories of voice, although it's becoming much more complex now in this world of AI, but you've got the concatenated speech where it's essentially taking samples of a human somewhere and that's what Acapella is doing. So it sounds relatively human-like and some people like that, particularly those who didn't grow up with Texas speech engines. And then you have the other category, the Formant speech engines which are more traditional like Eloquence or Deck Talk or eSpeak, those sorts of things. And what people like about those is that it's responsive and you can crank it up to very high rates and still have it intelligible.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, exactly. When you use things like the Acapella voices, as you said, they'll sound more human-like. They try to make some linking between words and use context a little bit and everything, so it is a little bit more natural sounding, but it does have the downside that when you use them at higher speed or then you start losing some things and you get some bugs as well. A really quick example that we've found on the Stream 3 since we had the last update is some of the voices, Lily and Taylor in particular, instead of seeing copy note, it says cope a note.
So it's not the end of the world, it's not a big thing. Pretty much everyone understands in context that it means copy, but there are those little glitches and tweaks that sometimes might happen. That being said, I think from my understanding, most people prefer the more natural sounding voice, but I totally respect the fact that some people might want more, as you said, more, I'm not going to say robotic because it sound negative, but more neutral voices.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah. So you don't think there'll come a day when a user has a choice about what voice they use in that context?
Mathieu Paquette: Never say never. That's one thing I learned as a product manager. Never say never. It's not something we're currently envisioning, but I'm not going to say never, ever again.
Jonathan Mosen: Fair enough. What else have you got in the firmware that's interesting?
Mathieu Paquette: Well, one of the things that a lot of people on the user list in particular were reporting and were asking for was the where am I key on the internet radio that tells you who's playing, what's the band name or the singer and the song name, and that is something that worked on the Stream 3 but not as good as the Stream Two, and it only worked 40% of the time and it was bugged. So we did fix that.
We brought it back to the same level that it was on the Stream Two, and I've heard great things people telling me that, thank you so much for bringing this back and no need to thank me. Actually I should be apologizing because we should have had that from the start. We implemented again the custom sleep timers, so on the Stream Two we had that feature where you could put in any number between one and 99 minutes for your sleep timer.
On the Stream 3, we wanted to have that at launch, but it was causing some issues, so we had to take it out. We only had the basic 15, 30 or 60 minute timer. Now you can choose a custom sleep timer and put 72 minutes if that's what you'd like. And we brought back the 10 items skip while you press and hold the left or right arrow, four, six, it skips by 10 items now instead of going item by item exactly like it did back in the Stream Two as well. And then we had a bunch of bug fixes and everything. I'm not going to go through all of them, because it's going to put your listeners to sleep, but we fixed quite a few bugs. We brought back the loop feature, we lowered the volume on the power on beep, which was a bit loud, especially on headphones. So yeah, quite a few things actually with this update and the feedback that I've gotten so far has been pretty positive, so I'm happy about that.
Jonathan Mosen: How frequently do updates typically come out?
Mathieu Paquette: So we try to do one to two updates a year, so depending once again on the engineering time that I can get my hands on, we are trying to get, I think this was our second update in 2024. It is towards the end of the year. In 2025 we're going to have one to two updates once again, one's for sure. The second one, I'm not a hundred percent certain yet if we're going to have, but we are working on 1.5 for a release towards the middle to, I'm going to say the third quarter of 2025 probably.
Jonathan Mosen: I wanted to ask you about the Mac because I think when I spoke to you last there were some issues with Mac users connecting their Stream and copying to and from. Where are we at with Mac users in the Stream?
Mathieu Paquette: So basically it's the same problem that braille users have with their PI to BI devices. Basically we moved over to the MTP protocol, which is something that is a very Android thing. Mac doesn't support MTP natively. There are some third party tools that you can get on our website on the support page at HumanWare that will allow you to get some MTP support, but they're a bit difficult to use sometimes and it can get a little iffy. But yeah, we did do some improvements in the Stream and I think it was in 1.1 or 1.2, I'm not sure, but we did remove because the Mac creates some files on the SD card and the Stream was reading all of those files starting with a dot or an underscore.
So we did remove that so that the behavior was more similar to what the Stream Two had. But in terms of the connecting to a Mac, I've heard some people with having great success. I've heard some people having some frustrations. It really is a mixed bag in terms of the MTP support. I hope that one day Mac decides to just... I understand they have the iPhone and they're trying to protect their market. I get that. And if I were in their shoes, I might've been doing the same thing, but I really do hope that they open it up to MTP support a bit more in the future.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, because I guess it's important to meet the market where it is, and this is a problem as you say, that has hit the braille displays from HumanWare with respect to HID in the sense that HumanWare went all in on HID and Android has not yet. They're getting there and I understand that is very close now to HID support over Bluetooth, but it's the user who suffers. They can't use the device in a form that they want. And I wonder, given that it must have been known that Mac did not support this protocol when the Stream 3 was released, why not have some option that would've made it easier for Mac users?
Mathieu Paquette: So once again, the decision to go with the Linux platform was before my time, but even back in the day, the Stream 3 uses a platform that is, the software platform that it uses is very similar to what the BI devices have, and it's also one of the reasons that helps me in the sense that we have the same team working on both platforms, the BIs and the streams, and it also means that when we do a feature on one of the two platforms and pointing it over to the other platform helps. So again, it's a decision that was made a bit before my time. I think it was even before the pandemic because the BI came out in 2020 and so the development must have started in 2018 or 2019, I'm imagining. But yeah, I don't know why the decision was made to go that way.
I think it's a question of ease of development and all of that, but yes, it is unfortunate that it's hurting our Mac based customers, which is a small percentage of our users, but an important one regardless of course. The upside to this is that we've designed the products as much as possible to be able to operate independently. What I've seen when I was in technical support is some people who had Macs and they weren't able to get their things on, they would get a friend or a family member who had a PC and they would go there once a month and load up a bunch of books and everything. And you don't need to connect your Stream to your computer every day or every week to be able to have some content. You just do a big dump, get a bunch of books, a bunch of things for a few months and you're good to go. But yes, we're always looking for solutions and try to make it easier for people of all platforms, whether you're using Windows or Mac to be able to use it.
Jonathan Mosen: Well, it's always good to see what's happening with the Stream. There's always something new and evolving and I wish you luck with working with those third parties. If you had to pick one, if there's one at the top of your list and you think, man, that's the one I'd really like to knock off in 2025, what would it be?
Mathieu Paquette: I think I would have to answer with Sirius. If you ask me on a personal level, I am a Spotify subscriber, I would love to have Spotify on my Stream. But that being said, I think that one that is the most requested by our end users and if I could snap my fingers and get it done tomorrow, I would snap my fingers and get Sirius done. That's something that's so requested.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, because you'd be able to listen to audio from the TV networks like CNN and those sorts of things. You'd be able to listen to all the MLB and sports games. They have a ton of sports action on SiriusXM. I get why people are asking for that.
Mathieu Paquette: Yeah, absolutely. It is very, very popular. I know it's a little bit US centric, although they are available worldwide, but they're more popular in the US than they are in Europe, for example. But I do think that regardless it would be a great platform to add. And to be fair, the US does represent a good segment of our market, I would say probably plurality in our customer base, so I would absolutely love to have Sirius on board.
Jonathan Mosen: It's always a pleasure to catch up. I appreciate you coming on to Access On and we look forward to keeping in touch in the future.
Mathieu Paquette: The pleasure is absolutely mutual Jonathan, thank you so much.
Jonathan Mosen: And if that has whetted your appetite, don't forget you can get into the drawing to win a Victor Reader Stream 3 as well as a Blazie Technologies BT Speak Pro. That URL to do that, nfb.org/donate. This email comes from Maurice Mines who is president of the National Federation of the Blind's DeafBlind Division. Good to hear from you Maurice. And he says, I know that there were some of us who use hearing aids who might be listening to the podcast. I also know that in my circumstance at least, there are issues with iOS and watchOS, so I'm going to include the custom support number to reach Phonak customer support in the United States. They're open from 8:30 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. Central time and I found the staff to be helpful. The number is 800-679-4871. That's 800-679-4871. Please note that you are likely to get some old commercials or new products from the company while you're on hold.
Just before I go on to the next point in Maurice's email, thank you very much for that Maurice, and I'm sorry that you are having so much difficulty with making all of your technology play nice. And any of us who wear hearing aids will tell you it can be difficult sometimes. Sometimes there are optimizations made to Bluetooth and it just breaks things in unpredictable ways and hearing aid users are particularly vulnerable.
We did have some good dialogue with Apple about some regressions that are crept into iOS 18 with respect to some hearing aids, which would cause hearing aids to drop out in one channel from time. To time to the best of my knowledge, they are largely resolved now and I want to thank Apple for their responsiveness. They reached out to Phonak, Phonak reached out to Apple, and they've been working together on these issues.
But it sounds like for Maurice, there are some issues that are ongoing. If that is happening for you as well, it would be useful for us to know about that. Now moving on to Maurice's other topic in this email, he says, doing research after the introduction of Apple Intelligence on my M2 Mac has become a breeze. All I have to do now it seems is ask Siri my research question and then use voiceover to arrow into the conversation and the collection of results. Do a video space on those results and then locate the one I really wish to look at. This then takes me to a Safari window, allowing me to read the web page as if I've gone there directly. Also, if I don't like any of the suggestions, there is a search with Google button at the very bottom of the list.
Since I don't normally use Google for searching if I don't have to, I haven't tried it, but I think it should work. If all of these options don't work, you can certainly go up to the top of the window and use the type to Siri feature. Here's a note of praise for Apple support. One of the disability support people taught me how to do this while doing a screen share. This is after the introduction of Apple Intelligence. Before the introduction of Apple Intelligence, my computer would just simply freeze whenever I attempted the above steps. This has also helped me to dictate this email. In fact, in addition to being deafblind, I have a written expression disorder. This just means I can't spell to save my life. I can read braille just fine. So for me, up until the introduction of Apple Intelligence AI assisted dictation, I had to make very heavy use of Dragon in Windows, even to the point of using windows in a virtual machine on my Mac.
This, of course, requires quite a bit of computer power. Here is a listener contribution from Kevin Chow and he says back a couple of months ago at the Ignite Accessibility Entrepreneur Pitch competition at the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, I learned about Lotus control objects at home by pointing. As someone who has worked in tech accessibility and has experienced a full smart home with the 3 different ecosystems with close to 100 smart home devices, I've been smart free for most of the year, but was excited about the simplicity and just works nature of this, especially since it can be used when mobile traveling.
I was wanting to pay for a kit that day and take it home, but had to be happy with pre-ordering and waiting until December. I received my Lotus kit yesterday, a month ahead of schedule. Yeah, this email was written in mid-November, but ordered a size seven ring when it is too small and almost got stuck on my finger.
The box packaging is very simple and intuitive with the 3 rectangular light switch magnetic covers in white ring charger/ holder and USB-C cable and AC adapter and ring. I was able to easily and quickly magnetically snap the covers onto 3 light switches, put the ring on, point and click where I could hear the motorized mechanism to toggle the rocker switch. Unbox and setup happen in just a couple of minutes. And Kevin goes on to say that Lotus was incredibly quick about exchanging his size seven ring for a size 10 that actually fits, and they went out of their way to get him a replacement ring within the day. He says, this is excellent, above and beyond, unheard of customer service in the industry and world. I'm glad you're happy with it, Kevin. I do hope that we will feature Lotus on a future episode of Access On.
It is a smart ring and you point it at appliances to switch them on and off. It has benefits for anybody who just wants an accessible, smart home, but particularly with those with physical disabilities who may not be able to switch devices on and off as readily. This is great stuff, so we will certainly see if we can connect with someone from Lotus for an interview on Access On in 2025. Thanks for letting us know about your good experience, Kevin. It's important to showcase the good when it happens. Now, a couple of contributions on the same subject, and it is important. This one comes from, I believe it is Paul, based on the Gmail address. There's no full name here, but the email says this is to confirm that Facebook is inaccessible for those of us who are blind. They removed the mbasic.facebook.com, which was accessible. Help us raise the voice, the email concludes.
And Rick Roderick says, Jonathan, have you had any more luck with your conversations with Facebook? I find the company misleading and cryptic. They said my browser would not work after December the third. I am a user of the basic mobile app on the desktop. I thought this would at least give me a week to adjust. Yesterday when I logged into the basic mobile site, I got a web page very much like the Facebook desktop app. I have this and it has some real accessibility problems.
I have not been able to go to my newsfeed without all the clutter. I have written to Facebook, but they don't respond directly to individual inquiries. Do you know why the basic mobile site has been taken down? Do they eventually plan to replace it with something better? Thanks very much for your email, Rick. This is also coming up on several NFB net email lists. It's coming up on social media, so I will address where we're at with this as best I can.
A few weeks ago, the National Federation of the Blind did reach out to Facebook, and I've been leading that advocacy on the Federation's behalf. Now, the good news is that Facebook has been very responsive to the Federation's inquiries, and on a couple of occasions, we've got all the key people in a virtual room who can make a difference. This includes people on the development team, people involved in product management, and people with an interest in accessibility, and there is genuine interest in improving the situation. Now, that situation has become critical because as those two correspondents have indicated, the old Mbasic.facebook.com site has been deprecated. And I queried Facebook about why that was necessary.
Facebook says it's an old site, and while they won't go into detail, it did need to be deprecated for security reasons. Technology moves on though saying that was just not a secure site anymore. Now, they have replaced that Mbasic site with a mobile site that is modern and reasonably accessible. I think there are some things that could be improved with the accessibility of the new mobile site, particularly navigating from item to item such as one item in your newsfeed to another item in your newsfeed. In that regard, it's not as good as the Mbasic site was. And if you go to Facebook.com in a mobile browser, it will detect that you're coming in from a mobile browser and present to you that new mobile experience.
Now, the problem with this is that it doesn't take into account the use case that we are seeing all the time, which is that many blind people on the Windows desktop used the Mbasic site to compensate for the fact that the main Facebook.com site is cluttered, and over time, serious accessibility regressions have crept into the product that have not been fixed.
There is no easy way for a blind person to experience the new Facebook mobile site on their Windows desktop, and that's something that we are talking to Facebook about at the moment. We think that while work is ongoing on the main Facebook experience, and I'll come back to that in just a moment, there does need to be an easy way for blind people to force the Facebook mobile version of the site. If you have some technical ability or you can get somebody to assist you with this, you can force the Facebook mobile experience on a Windows browser, but it isn't particularly easy. It's not for the faint of heart, and the Federation's argument is blind people really shouldn't have to have that degree of technical proficiency just to interact with friends and family on Facebook.
For many, Facebook is a key way for keeping in touch with not just friends and family, but also organizations like the National Federation of the Blind, so it's critical that this be addressed in a timely manner, but if you want to, you can go into the development tools of your web browser when you are on Facebook.com and tell it to emulate a mobile browser. For example, if you go into the developer tools of Edge and Chrome, you can make it emulate Safari for iOS, and then if you refresh the Facebook site, you will get a different experience.
Not optimal yet, but a better one than the main Facebook.com is for screen reader users right now. Another way to do the same thing is that there are some extensions available for browsers, Chromium based browsers like Chrome and Edge and also Firefox that will seek to emulate a mobile browser on specific sites.
So if you're very keen to do this now, you may want to see what browser extensions are out there that will make your browser emulate another one in specific circumstances. What we are hoping is that sooner rather than later, Facebook will grant our request that there be a specific URL that we can give to the blind community that blind people can go to, to force this experience. We don't consider this a permanent fix, but we understand that what we are really after is going to take a little longer. And what we are after in the long term is a fully accessible Facebook.com. So we don't have to go through the back door as it were to get to Facebook. We should be able to expect to go to Facebook.com, the main desktop site on a desktop browser and have an experience that we can use. We are confident that that is Facebook's long-term goal as well, and we'd like to hope that sometime in 2025 Facebook will get there.
In the meantime though, we need something now to give people some degree of accessibility back. We are also reporting to Facebook some accessibility regressions, which have crept into the iOS app. We have a number of these that people have told us about. We have taken those reports to Facebook. I don't want to suggest that by singling one out, we haven't got the others. There are many we do have, but the biggest one right now is the issue with composing posts in Facebook where sometimes you try and type into the compose edit field in Facebook for iOS. And this problem manifests itself in two ways. One, as many of us will know, there's no keyboard echo coming back. So it's as if you're typing into a password field, but you can review what you've typed afterwards. The second version of this bug is even worse.
Again, there's no keyboard echo, and after you've finished typing, you find that it's impossible to review something in the edit field.
The only workaround for this is to compose your Facebook post in another app such as Apple's built-in notes app or your text editor of choice and then paste it in. And again, we shouldn't have to do that. We never used to have to do that. This is something that has crept in in recent months. Now, while at the time of recording, we don't have a fix for this yet. I can say that Facebook has been engaged, they have been interested. I have produced some screen recordings for them, and the dialogue continues.
I completely appreciate that that's no help to you as a Facebook user if we don't get some tangible outcomes from this. So we're hopeful Facebook is now aware of the way that blind people used to use the Mbasic.facebook.com site and the impact its deprecation has had on many in the community. We're grateful for the discussions, but we do call on Facebook to turn those discussions into tangible outcomes that will help the blind community better engage with Facebook.
More on the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. They really are the topic of the moment, aren't they? In the Blind tech community. Message here from Chris Westbrook who says, I am deafblind and use a cochlear implant. I wish the glasses were able to send their audio to my implant via Bluetooth, but I find I can still hear them pretty well in most situations by placing the arms of the glasses near the microphone. I have used them with Aira to help me get around the hotel at my NFB State Convention, as well as reading mail and reading touch screens with Aira, even with the drawback of not being able to Bluetooth audio to my cochlear implants, they have been a good addition to my life. Appreciate you sharing your experience, Chris. Thanks so much. It's good to hear members of the deaf-blind community coming forward on this podcast and sharing what they're experiencing.
Maureen McEntee says, hi, Jonathan. I love your new podcast. Well, that's kind of you, Maureen. Thank you. And happy Thanksgiving. Well, thank you. A belated happy Thanksgiving to you. I hope it was a good one. My question is, can you read books or manuals that come with appliances, and do you have to have very good lighting? I'm in a basement apartment and the lighting isn't good. I can't wait to hear your show on accessible appliances because I'm looking for an accessible portable induction cooktop, but I can't find one that isn't a touchscreen. Appliances are important and Access On is about more than computers. We want to talk appliances as well for the very reason that you are citing there Maureen. We should source this one out and see if anybody can help you with an accessible cooktop. What options are out there that might suit Maureen? [email protected]. If you want to write in with a written email or attach an audio clip, and if you are from a Federation chapter, be sure to let us know what that is so we can give a shout-out to that chapter.
Regarding a question about whether it's possible to read manuals with Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. My answer would be no, really, because it is quite difficult right now at least to get the Ray-Ban Metas to read a whole page entirely. I'm not saying it's impossible, but sometimes you have to give it very clear instructions like read this whole page top to bottom, left to right, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So when you're talking about a user manual where every word may count, I'm not sure that the Ray-Ban Metas at the moment are the best solution for that particular use case. You also mentioned lighting. And in my experience, the Ray-Ban Metas are quite sensitive to lighting conditions. And if it's a little dark, you may not get good results.
So again, I think at the moment your best bet would be to use an app if you want to be mobile, like Seeing AI or VDScan or something like that to completely do OCR on a document. And you can get stands for cell phones that put them at just the right height for reading documents. They clip the phone into place, and then you can put the document under the phone. It's at the right height to take a very accurate picture of the document, and that does make it easier. You can just flip pages and take pictures of the whole document. So I think for that kind of use case, a smartphone is still a better bet.
And we are concluding with our tech tip for this week. It's widely reported that it was Mark Twain who said, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." But then when I looked this up in preparation for this segment, I found out that Mark Twain did not say exactly that. So the quote itself has been exaggerated, but it is a good line and it's a relevant one to segue us into this week's tech tip relating to Apple Intelligence. As of iOS 18.1, if you have an Apple intelligence compatible device, so that's an iPhone 15 Pro, or anything iPhone 16, you can elect to have notifications summarized.
You can choose the apps in which you want this summarization to occur. And the tech tip for this week is simply that you may want to be selective about where you enable that summarization, and where you have enabled it go deep into the summarization to actually read the real notification if there's something that sounds particularly consequential or alarming.
This affected me directly recently, and it's amusing to me, but I think it was frightening to the person that it happened to. There have been a lot of farewell posts being sent on LinkedIn about my departure from New Zealand of late because my departure has created a bit of news in New Zealand, and I've also been serving on some public facing boards. So some of the board members, particularly on LinkedIn, have been saying goodbye and making some generous comments and saying they'll miss me, which is all very nice. But where Apple Intelligence comes into this is that I was contacted by somebody who uses LinkedIn and had elected to have the summarization of notifications enabled for LinkedIn. And Apple Intelligence concluded that because so many people were saying nice things and that they were going to miss me and all kinds of things like that, that I had actually died.
So I got an email from somebody who said, the notification summary says that you've passed away, and I'm pretty sure that isn't the case, but I hope I get a reply from you because it said people are reflecting on Jonathan Mosen's passing. Well, I don't know how long I've got, but I am still here as of recording of this podcast. So the moral of the story is just go in, drill down into the notification if it sounds like something really significant has happened, and make sure that the summarization is accurately reflecting what the notification says. This is AI. It is still prone to making mistakes and jumping to erroneous conclusions. And assuming that that prophecy doesn't come to pass, I'll be back next week.
That concludes this episode of Access On, the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon. [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Mastodon.
To subscribe to an announcements 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.