Announcer: Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast presented by the National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans. Live the life you want.
Anil Lewis: Welcome to this special episode of the Nation's Blind Podcast. This is Anil Lewis and I'm not joined by Melissa Riccobono today, but I am joined based on the topic that we're going to be discussing by members of our Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility, Karl Belanger and Kennedy Zimnik. How are you guys doing?
Karl Belanger: Very well.
Kennedy Zimnik: Doing well. How are you?
Anil Lewis: Doing great. Doing great. We'll let you guys take a little bit of opportunity to introduce yourselves after I introduce the topic. Today we're talking about the work that we do in our Center of Excellence and Nonvisual Accessibility affectionately referred to as the CENA, especially on this particular season of the year, which is near Global Accessibility Awareness Day. So these guys here know more in your little finger about accessibility than I know in my whole body. So why don't you guys introduce yourselves to our listening audience?
Kennedy Zimnik: My name's Kennedy Zimnik. I am a nonvisual access tech specialist here at the NFB. I've been at the NFB... It'll be six years in September, so time really flies. Really happy to talk about accessibility. Always excited to.
Karl Belanger: I'm Karl Belanger. I'm a nonvisual accessibility analyst, and I have been here going on ten years in September. I joined in 2014. I also quite enjoy a lot of the things we do here around accessibility and we have a lot to talk about.
Anil Lewis: Excellent. We have to also make sure we give a shout-out to the Maryland Department of Disability through our Nonvisual Accessibility Initiative grant that's offered by the state of Maryland and we're able to collaborate on a lot of issues that makes Maryland a more accessible state, but also the work that we do is leveraged by the work that the members of the National Federation of the Blind support through their contributions.
So let's get right into it. Let's talk about global accessibility awareness, and to do that, we're going to be talking about some of the technology that's evolved over the year. We'll talk specifically about some of the areas of interest around accessibility that's funded through the MDOD Nonvisual Accessibility Initiative grant, and then some of the things that we do outside of that particular spectrum to kick it off because it is the talk of everything, accessibility is artificial intelligence. I personally am pleased about artificial intelligence, but it's also somewhat scary. We had a Nation's Blind Podcast where we talked more directly about artificial intelligence, and I'd like to know what you guys feel. How do you think artificial intelligence, is it good, bad, ugly?
Kennedy Zimnik: I think just with a lot of things in this world, it's a little bit of all. I think it's good overall. I think it's great. I think it's evolved in a scary pace over the last couple of years. If you look at the images it created a year ago and then the images it's creating now, it's pretty scary how fast it's evolved and I think it's dumber than a lot of people think. I wouldn't use it to write a thesis and turn it in or do my whole essay because it's just using things that humans have done and it's getting its information from somewhere. It's not coming up with all the information.
Anil Lewis: It's interesting that you reference that one because I've heard stories of how students have used AI to create their papers, but essentially, like you said, it's pulling information that already exists and they're actually engaging in plagiarism because they're not actually given the proper citation for the information that they're using.
Kennedy Zimnik: Exactly. Yeah, and it is funny, you can tell when big companies use AI engines and just copy and paste into blogs or their reviews or something. So yeah, it's pretty rampant, but I think it's a good thing overall.
Anil Lewis: How about you Karl?
Karl Belanger: Yeah, I think there's again, a lot of potential, but people need to be careful as to what they use it for. I've heard plenty of stories including one lawyer who's been suspended for using ChatGPT or other AI tools to literally just do their law research without double-checking. So-
Anil Lewis: Wow.
Karl Belanger: ... AI can be useful. It can also backfire horribly.
Anil Lewis: Yeah. Yeah. I've heard stories of how AI actually generates precedence. So when, like you said, the person's using it for legal research, it makes it sound like there's actually a case that it's referencing, but it actually made up that case. So, yeah.
Karl Belanger: Exactly.
Anil Lewis: So let's talk about some of the tech that's being used in the world of artificial intelligence. We know that everything AI in this space seems to be founded on ChatGPT, what is ChatGPT?
Kennedy Zimnik: ChatGPT is an engine, it's an AI engine created by OpenAI. It was one of the first engines that really started to gain popularity over the past two or three years, and its bread and butter was a text bot and you could chat to it, ask a question. At first, it was kind of like a search engine, but the more it learned and the better it got, it started creating more human-like answers and you could actually kind of have a conversation with it and ask a question.
It's a little creepy for people that maybe a little bit skeptical, but it's pretty useful. And OpenAI actually just came out with a... They call the ChatGPT bot that uses a realistic voice with human-like speech pattern and they just revealed that and it does things like scene description, which is just incredible. You can point your camera at a room and have it describe what's in the room and it's pretty accurate. Yeah, like I said, the speech is kind of creepy. The human-like speech, it really kind of sounds like you're talking to somebody and it does things like it says, "Um," it has pauses.
Anil Lewis: Oh, wow.
Kennedy Zimnik: It really tries to mimic a human.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, that's good and bad. I'm thinking that it's going to lead to more of those robot phone calls that sound more realistic.
Kennedy Zimnik: Exactly.
Anil Lewis: So there you go. And this relationship to Google Gemini, is that something similar but just in a different operating system?
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah, exactly. Google Gemini is Google's answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT. So it does a lot of the same things. Some things I didn't mention, you can input what you want to create images. So if you want to create whatever image, a T-Rex ice skating with a Santa hat on, that's actually one I've done before. You can input and have it in 100 different styles, whatever you want. And you can also input pictures into Gemini and ChatGPT and have it described to you.
Anil Lewis: I found it very intriguing when you guys were telling me that AI and Chat, whatever, can produce images, and I really thought it was very enlightening when I had both you and Karl actually get different engines, create a picture of God that kind of speaks to what the potential benefit and potential adverse impact it can have. It was just interesting that one of them, after you guys put in all the characteristics, all-powerful, all-knowing, etc, that one of the engines generated four pictures of older white men with hair beards and whatever, which to me is kind of scary because again, that kind of perpetuates more of a singular perception of what people in general would think. And then the other one gives me hope. I forget which engine it was and we don't have to name it in this particular episode, but it was interesting that it says, "No, I cannot generate this image because there are too many diverse opinions on what this deity...
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah.
Anil Lewis: I think that was really cool. So if we can make sure the AI is more accountable in that fashion, I think we'll be better off. Let's talk about some of the software that's kind of built on top of the engines themselves on top of ChatGPT, and let's see... We have the Seeing AI, which Microsoft puts together, which I think is pretty cool. Any comments on Seeing AI?
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah. So Seeing AI is mostly a smartphone application and Seeing AI does a lot of cool things. It does some scene description, currency detection, so if you put a bill-
Anil Lewis: Does OCR, it reads documents really well.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah, I was going to say probably the most powerful and coolest thing it does is OCR. So OCR is optical character recognition. That means you can just take a picture of a physical piece of text, a page from a book, a piece of mail, and it scans that text and reads it back to you. So there is a document mode where you can take a picture and it reads it back to you, or there's a quick text mode where you just hold up a label or a business card or something and it automatically start reading to you. That's a free application that I recommend everybody check out, Seeing AI.
Anil Lewis: Yeah. And what about Be My AI? What is the difference between those two?
Kennedy Zimnik: Be My AI is mostly for seen descriptions. Like I briefly mentioned it before, seen descriptions you can point your camera at a living room, for example, and have it ask you, "What am I looking at?" And it describes, "There's a brown couch in the middle, there's some green pillows on the brown couch. It seems like there's a cat sitting on the window sill to the right of the couch." Things like that. And of course, there's a ton of accessibility applications that you can think of to describe what's in front of you, points out if you're trying to find a stage, if you're trying to find a bar, you're trying to find a bathroom. There's a ton of things. And you can also ask a question about-
Anil Lewis: That's what I love. I love that feature. President Riccobono was telling me that he was using it in a store once and he pointed it at a rack of potato chips and it says, "This is a rack of potato chips." And then he says, "Well, where are the..." I forget what it says. Let's... Doritos, see. And it came back and it said that, "The Doritos on the third shelf down fourth chips from the left." That's pretty impressive.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah.
Anil Lewis: Yeah. I know that Be My AI is part of the Be My Eyes app, which also gives you access to live volunteers that also give you information as well. So not only can you independently use the artificial intelligence to get information, you can also at any point hit a button and be transferred to an actual human. So I love the fact that we can marry both the technology and also the human intelligence interface, the AI and the HI.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah, definitely. It's definitely important to have both and not rely on just AI for everything.
Anil Lewis: Now I know that Microsoft just released something really powerful in the artificial intelligence space called Co-Pilot.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah. So Co-Pilot is a part of the office product suite. So any of your office products, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, have this cool bot called Co-Pilot, and you can do a ton of things with Co-Pilot, and we actually just started exploring it here at the NFB, Karl and I. You can do things like have it summarize emails, you can input text prompts and have it create texts. You can do things like have it do some formatting for you. We're definitely still exploring it, but the fact that it's being integrated into these products is really the coolest part. Things like ChatGPT and Gemini are kind of separate and you kind of have to go to them. But things like Co-Pilot are integrated right into the product.
Anil Lewis: Nice. It's like having a virtual assistant.
Kennedy Zimnik: Exactly.
Anil Lewis: Cool.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah.
Karl Belanger: It can even summarize existing parts of documents, which can be useful and it can also get things, as with any AI, amusingly wrong, I was working on a blog post for a product we're going to talk about a little later, and I said, as part of my blog, I typically do a brief description of the product, and so it's a smartphone. I told it to summarize the physical description and basic specs of the smartphone, and it gave me a nice generated specs of what it claimed was the correct smartphone. But I could immediately tell from looking at the data that it was some random other smartphone. So it gave me a nice little summary, but not of the product I needed, which was... So again, just to reiterate, you got to really check what it's putting out, because even though you may tell it exactly what you want, it may go wrong somewhere in the interpretation.
Anil Lewis: Sure. The tagline is artificial intelligence. Trust, but verify.
Karl Belanger: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Anil Lewis: Looking forward to seeing what happens in AI, it's a technology that seems to be evolving exponentially, so I can't even imagine when we have this discussion next year, what artificial intelligence is going to be doing. So let's move into some of the technology we've had an opportunity to take a look at over this past year. I love that this is based on an old favorite, the BT Speak. I remember when I went blind back in 1989, one of the most interesting pieces of technology that were available back in the day were the Braille'n Speak by Deane Blazie, a really good device, just the Brailleinput and audio output. It connected to everything back in the day. So tell us about the BT Speak.
Karl Belanger: Sure. So the BT Speak is kind of a modern take on that old Braille'nSpeak. I used a BrailleLite, which was the Braille'nSpeak with a Braille display back in the day myself. So I was very familiar with it, but it looks fairly similar to the older Braille'nSpeak. You have your Braille keyboards with your dot seven and eight keys next to the space bar. It's got a USB-C port and a HDMI port and an SD card slot and stuff, but I believe it also runs on Raspberry Pi or some other type of mini computers that they software on. You can turn it on and then if you've used Braille'nSpeak in the past, it has a very similar chord structure. Chord F still opens your files list and C we'll create a new file.
Anil Lewis: And the O-chord all gets you to the options list. We could do everything. Life was much simpler back in those days, yeah.
Karl Belanger: And they've done really well at replicating that kind of straightforward interface while adding in modern support like Wi-Fi over-the-air software upgrades, Bluetooth capabilities.
Anil Lewis: Nice.
Karl Belanger: But it has a mode that the main function is it works as the old Braille'nSpeak did a basic file editor. It has a little clock alarm. You can open BRF files, open some pretty large BRF files too, and it just jumped right around the file, no lag, no processing time. So it's really nice and snappy. And then if you get what they're calling the Pro model, you can actually boot up a full Linux graphical desktop environment and navigate it using a Linux screen reader called Orca and you can actually open LibreOffice and do a full formatted report or document and you can open the Firefox browser and go watch YouTube videos or things like that. So it just came out. It is developed again by the Blazie family, Deane and Brian Blazie and them... We're doing some testing on it now. I expect to do a blog in the future and I'm very excited to see as they continue to roll out software updates. They've been very quick and responsive, so I'm very eager to see where this thing goes.
Anil Lewis: Nice. And when you were saying you could do a document, so can you open up like a Word file or a Google Docs file?
Karl Belanger: In the basic editor, it'll convert it to a text file and you can read it that way, but you can, if you have the pro version, open it up right in the LibreOffice and get the full functionality.
Anil Lewis: Nice. Does it have a Braille display or it's just audio like the Braille'n Speak?
Karl Belanger: It is just audio. I have not tried this yet, though I have heard rumblings that it's possible to connect it to a Braille display.
Anil Lewis: Sweet. One of the things I liked about the Braille'n Speak is tiny, very portable and it's very quick. You pop it on Braille'n Speak ready back in the day. So I imagine they still keep that same functionality. It's really kind of a simple interface, simple, straightforward, like you said, text editor, etc.
Karl Belanger: Yes.
Anil Lewis: Nice. Nice. I know this has been kind of the year of emerging dynamic tactile displays and we've been able to get our hands on, buh dump bump, these tactile displays. So let's tell our listeners a little bit about some of them like I see here the Cadence Tablet.
Karl Belanger: Yes. So the Cadence Tablet is a newly developed, still in kind of the early adopter phase, Braille and tactile graphics display. And what they do is a little interesting. So there are four modules that make up this whole display and each module can run as its own kind of mini little graphics display, or you can pair them two at a time, either horizontally or vertically or all four to make the full tablet.
Anil Lewis: So when you say module, it's actually a standalone Braille display on its own?
Karl Belanger: Yes.
Anil Lewis: That you can combine with others to make a bigger display?
Belanger: Yes.
Anil Lewis: Nice.
Karl Belanger: So definitely an interesting concept. It does make for, as you're reading it, there's little gaps. They're not big, but they're kind of noticeable if you're reading or looking at a graphic. So that can be a little something to get used to at first, but it does present a pretty solid tactile graphic. So the Cadence connects to a laptop running what they call the Cadence OS software, and it lets you read documents, display tactile graphics, and they've also done several Braille games and things like that. So they have everything from Connect Four and Tic-Tac-Toe to even things like a version of Pong they call tablet tennis where you have a little Braille cell moving back and forth across the display and Racing One where you have to watch for different symbols indicating different cars coming down the display and steer to avoid them and things like that. So they're doing a lot of interesting things.
Anil Lewis: Pong takes me back to the days of the Atari systems. So yeah, that's nice. And you see how far we've come since there.
Kennedy Zimnik: I always think that Cadence is really cool because it's the first time that sighted users really get to see exactly what's going on on the Braille display itself, because like Karl said, there is a user interface right on the computer for anybody to see. And you can also interact, you can play games, one person can be one side of the Pong on the computer and the other person can be the other side on the actual display. So I think it's really one of the first of its kind.
Anil Lewis: Nice, nice. I'm looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve. The one exciting tactile display I'd like to talk about, because it is a collaboration between the American Printing House, Humanware, and the National Federation of the Blind is the Monarch tactile Braille display, which I think is extremely impressive.
Karl Belanger: So the Monarch is more of a standalone device, so it has an operating system, you boot up and you can load files directly to it and navigate around. You can load documents, you can load tactile graphics. The Monarch does a little more from what I've seen with panning and zooming around the graphic. It has your scroll bar so you can see how far you're panned to each side.
Anil Lewis: I think that's a pretty good feature, especially for blind individuals. So to be able to look at something in a larger scale, say a tactile map of the United States, but then you want to zoom in on one of the best states, Georgia, you can do that and you can make it the state itself kind of take up the whole tactile surface and the way that it integrates the graphics and the Braille all on the same screen I think is really, really nice.
Karl Belanger: Monarch also does have the ability to have some other apps and things on it. It has the game of chess as well, and-
Anil Lewis: Don't miss that, man. I think that's wonderful. Being able to play chess dynamically and being able to get the whole board underneath your fingers, I think that's pretty impressive. But I think that the most, I've heard from a lot of the teachers that have been evaluating devices, the integration of the Nemeth, so the Braille math, et cetera on the Monarch seems to be something that is really touted to be a game changer in the use of this type of technology.
Karl Belanger: That is a good point. The Nemeth and the graphing calculator. So a student now on the Monarch on a standalone device can go put in whatever equation the teacher just gave them or from their textbook or a test, hit a key and see an actual raised Braille graph of that equation right on the display in front of them.
Anil Lewis: Nice.
Karl Belanger: Which is very powerful because I know going through school I always had to either just rely on tactile graphics or just try to envision what the graph might look like or get sighted assistance and it was definitely a challenge at times.
Anil Lewis: Sweet. I know that this is not necessarily a tactile display, but it's really more a way to interact tactfully with information and that's the... Is it Tacto Reader?
Kennedy Zimnik: Tactonom. And it took me a while to say, don't worry, I just got it the other day. It allows for interaction with physical graphics through audio, so it's really cool. It has a camera pointing down probably two feet above the base of the device, and you clip in graphics that have a QR code. That's probably the data for the graphic is stored and four markers. So once you scan in this graphic and we got the device and we had a bunch of sample graphics sent to us, once you get the QR code scanned, you can point to... For example, we already used the example of a US map. We have one of those. You can use your finger and point to anywhere in the graphic, and as long as you just point with one finger and fold your other fingers back, the camera sees where you're pointing and it reads out information about where you're pointing.
So if you point to Texas, it would read Texas, it would read the population, it would read the bordering states, things like that. There's also different modes. So there's a quiz mode that it asks you to point to a certain state. There's a bunch of different graphics. The map was one of the most basic ones. There was one really cool graphic where it was a symphony orchestra and you pointed to different sections of the orchestra and you heard the instrument playing.
Anil Lewis: Oh, nice.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah. This is one of the coolest devices we have in the IBTC in my opinion. And it also gives, if you were to put this in a library or where a professor had one of these, it's accessible to everybody. Of course, it's accessible to Braille and low-vision users because they can just point and interact using audio. But it's also accessible to people who aren't maybe technologically savvy. It's pretty easy to learn and it allows for teachers to interact with students in a different way and it allows for students to interact with graphics in a super different way. So I think it s really a cool device.
Anil Lewis: The graphics that are on the device, are they tactile graphics?
Kennedy Zimnik: Yes. Yeah.
Anil Lewis: Okay.
Kennedy Zimnik: They're tactile graphics so you can feel them.
Anil Lewis: Okay, very nice. I see a lot of potential educational benefits in using that as well.
Kennedy Zimnik: Oh yeah, definitely.
Anil Lewis: So we also have and or exploring different 3D printers. That's a new kind of evolving... Well, it's not new. But an ever-evolving technology that allows this layman now to actually produce three-dimensional representations of a variety of different objects.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah. And we actually just got a new 3D printer. It's from Bambu Lab. It's called the P1S. It has a lot of bells and whistles, which is very cool. It has a camera that allows you to monitor the 3D print. So in case something goes wrong, you can go up and check on it. But 3D printing, for those who don't know, it is exactly what it sounds like. It prints heated plastic in layers until it makes the object you want. So if you want to make a model of the earth, for example, it layers plastic by plastic layer by layer until it has a globe and you can feel the different sections of the globe. What's really cool about 3D printing is yes, you can design your own, but you can also just download files that other people create so you don't have to go through the process of creating your own. There's a ton of applications for education. 3D prints give people the option to feel and touch things and hold things that they'd never be able to.
Anil Lewis: I'm really impressed with this Motorola Moto G play telephone. Karl, you want to tell us about that?
Karl Belanger: Sure. Everyone's probably very familiar with the iPhones and the Samsung Galaxy phones and the flagship smartphones that you hear advertised all over and the whole big press conferences for. But there are also budget smartphones out there and inexpensive smartphones have been around for years, but until recently they've been very laggy and you touch the screen and it takes it a second to respond or you do a gesture and it doesn't do anything or it does the wrong thing. But even the budget end has been improving of smartphones lately. And we recently tested the Motorola Moto G Play smartphone. We tested the 2024 version, and this is a budget smartphone retail price is about $150, and you can often find it on sale for less.
That will give you all the accessibility features you need. I've tested it with Braille displays. I've done various apps Seeing AI, Google Lookout Smart Glasses, which I'll be talking about in a little bit, and it can do all of those. Is it going to be as snappy or responsive as your iPhone 15? No. Is it going to be able to run every app and do every feature that the iPhone could? No. But if you're looking for a solid-performing smartphone for calls, text, email, occasional Uber ride or anything of that sort of nature, we've reached a point where 100 dollar smartphone is viable.
Anil Lewis: Nice. Very nice. So we could talk about all types of tech, but we only have less than an hour to get through the whole Global Accessibility Awareness Day podcast. So let's move more specifically to the work that we do under the Nonvisual Accessibility Initiative grant through the state of Maryland in partnership with the Maryland Department of Disability. So we really work on access technology in specific areas. We work on education, employment, we do a lot around smart cities. We administer a dynamic program called Accessibility Fellows, and then of course we do a lot of boutiques and trainings around access to technology throughout the year. So just to give a little sampling of what we've done in some of these specific areas, we partnered with the Maryland Department of Disability and the Maryland Department of Education to develop some modules to help train people within the education environment. Let me ask Kennedy too, to tell us what we've been doing in that partnership.
Kennedy Zimnik: There is a law called the Equivalent Access Requirements for Students with Disabilities, 7-910, for short. And this requires local education agencies or LEAs to only purchase accessible digital tools that are used in classrooms. So this ensures that all students get the same level of education and that students with disabilities are not left behind because of inaccessible software. So we partnered up with MSDE and MDOD to create two training modules that covered the basics of digital accessibility, explained what the law meant in plain language because there was some language that not everybody would know. You know how legal writing goes. That's not always the easiest to understand. And then we also had a module on how to read VPATs, which are Voluntary Products Accessibility Templates. These topics are important for education professionals in Maryland because it's now the law and there are penalties for not having accessible software.
Anil Lewis: And getting them to understand access technology in at least a functional way, and then focusing on making sure that as the state acquires technology that they're acquiring accessible technology, is a huge step forward in making sure that not only blind students can access technology in the classrooms, blind employees, state employees, make sure they have access to their equipment that's necessary for them to be competitively employed and that the blind citizens of Maryland have access to the information and programs and services that Maryland offers. I think that we would be remiss if we didn't state that the law that Kennedy referenced was passed as a result of legislative advocacy efforts of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland, realizing that this was going to be a key legislative effort to make sure that we can create that paradigm shift of accessibility within the state. We also are working in areas of employment.
MDOD reached out and asked us to help develop a training for the individuals who work in the Maryland Department of Labor. And we've been working with the Maryland Department of Labor to provide customer service training and not to their customers, but actually training for the individuals that provide customer service within the Department of Labor. And we recognize that if we can educate them on how to work effectively with people with disabilities, then they can bring their professional expertise that they offer to every other Maryland citizen to the citizens with disabilities and make sure that Maryland citizens with disabilities can also access the services and programs through the Department of Labor. So whether it be to obtain training, obtain employment, or just access unemployment benefits, we want to make sure that the Maryland citizens with disabilities also have access to those same systems and services. The Smart Cities work we do happens in a lot of different spaces and we could highlight some of those, but let's talk mostly about the wearable tech.
Karl Belanger: Yeah, so we've been looking into more smart glasses and headsets recently. In the last couple of years, we've seen like the Envision Glasses and others come out. And more recently, we've tested one called the ARx Headset, which is a device that plugs into an Android phone via USB cable and then has a camera that can work with apps like Seeing AI and ARx, their own ARx vision and others, to allow a user to just be able to look at an item or a scene and get it described. So like we were discussing earlier with the scene descriptions now, instead of holding up the camera and trying to align it properly and make sure your finger's not covering it or that there's good lighting or that your hand is stable, now all you just have to do is stand and face a certain direction and push the button on the headset and it will take a picture and describe the scene.
And then you can use voice commands to ask questions. And this can also be, as the technology develops, people will definitely be using this out and about reading signs or getting descriptions of potentially layouts of intersections or upcoming things on the sidewalk or identifying business stores in a plaza or things like that. Another company we've talked to, and we will be likely evaluating the glasses later in the year, is the Celeste Smart Glasses. These are actual glasses that again have the camera and their own app that lets them do scene descriptions, optical character recognition and similar features to the ARx headset.
Anil Lewis: Is the Ray-Ban app actually doing something similar as well?
Karl Belanger: They are, and I was about to mention that. We have not tested these yet, but Ray-Ban in cooperation with Meta, the owners of Facebook, are developing a pair of smart glasses as well that purport to have a lot of image recognition features and AI features they advertise. You can ask it to give you a description for it to caption your pictures to post to Instagram and other things like that. They can do video calls and all sorts of different features. So those will be a very interesting product to check out as well.
Anil Lewis: Cool. Again, another exciting space that's evolving. Again, we can't wait to see what this looks like a year from now. I mentioned earlier one of the programs that we offer through our Nonvisual Accessibility Initiative grant is our Accessibility Inclusion Fellows. Kennedy, want to tell our listeners about the Fellows' program?
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah, sure. So our Accessibility Inclusion Fellowship program was created to help incorporate cultures of accessibility in higher education in universities and colleges around Maryland. Accessibility in the classroom materials are kind of what we're talking about. So incorporating making sure that the classes, your PowerPoint, your syllabus, anything you hand out in class is accessible. But the culture of accessibility is also making sure that the students produce accessible content. This year, it's four different professors from four different universities around Maryland. We have Towson University represented, University of Baltimore, University of Maryland, and Anne Arundel Community College represented. And the four classes that we're going to be helping with, we have an introduction to sociology, a statistics class, a health systems class, and a microbiology class. So a wide range of different classes. That's kind of the point of the program. We don't just look for STEM classes. We like to work with a wide range of different professors that teach a wide field of different topics because accessibility can be incorporated into anything.
Anil Lewis: And the beauty of this is we're teaching the professors to create accessible content so that they can teach blind students. We're also making them aware of accessibility throughout their whole professional engagement. So as they interact with other colleagues, they can talk about accessibility and the students themselves get access to a quality education. But then all of the students in the classroom recognize that accessibility is important. So as they go forth and engage in whatever professional careers they are employed in, they can also speak to accessibility there as well. So if they're moving into a space where obviously they're producing technology, they can produce accessible tech.
Where they're working in the areas of sociology, they can make sure that interaction with their patients can make sure that that's accessible. So they create opportunities for blind or low-vision individuals or other individuals with disabilities to take advantage of their services in a way that's accessible as well. Now in the area of the boutiques and trainings, the boutiques are little small kind of training snippets, and then the trainings are usually about half day. We could talk about this all day. So what we're going to do is rapid-fire of a few in brief descriptions of some of the boutiques that we've done. So what about the job-seeking websites?
Karl Belanger: Yeah, so last October we did a review of several job-seeking websites such as Indeed and USA Jobs and a couple of others. We went through and looked at their ease of signing up for an account, searching for jobs, applying for different jobs, hosting resumes, and generally going through the process of browsing and finding and applying for jobs on those sites.
Anil Lewis: Very nice. How about the streaming services boutique?
Karl Belanger: This one we just did in April. We covered a variety of music and radio streaming services, including things like Apple Music and Spotify and iHeartRadio and SiriusXM. And again, we go through each service and talk about what is it, what features does it have, why you may want to use it, some of its pros and cons from an accessibility standpoint, the different features they offer and the type of content they provide.
Anil Lewis: Nice. What about a tactile graphics seminar?
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah, so this was a seminar we did in March. This was one of our half-day seminars and we went over tactile graphics creation software. So Karl did a section on Tactile View, which is an accessible tactile graphics creation software. It uses a menu system and you can input that using a screen reader to create tactile graphics. I covered Tiger software, which includes Braille translation and a couple of other softwares that had to do with Braille and tactile graphics creation.
Anil Lewis: Sweet. And we also had one that was an AI, artificial intelligence boutique.
Kennedy Zimnik: Yeah. So this was us kind of dipping our toes into the water of AI. So we went over some paid AI subscription services like ChatGPT and Midjourney. And then we also covered some free AI services like Bing AI. And this was just going over each one, kind of what Karl was saying before, the accessibility of each, if there are some accessibility applications, it can be used to create accessibility. We tested with the image creation with Midjourney trying to create a tactile graphic like images that would be good to create graphics from.
Anil Lewis: Very nice. Just really quickly give our listeners a sample of some of the topics that we'll be discussing in future boutiques.
Kennedy Zimnik: So future boutiques, we have an accessible video gaming boutique coming up in July. We have accessible video games. Then we have an August advanced PDF tagging boutique. We're going to go over how to tag forms. Our September seminar is going to be accessibility in the classroom and intro to manual testing. Our September boutique will be native low-vision accessibility features, Mac versus Windows, and that'll be a collaboration with MDOD. October, we have an employment-related boutique, and in November we have how to train friends and family on a screen reader, which is a really interesting one that we're excited about. And then to wrap up the year, in December, we have our accessible device showcase, which is devices that are accessible before the holiday season that might be good gift ideas.
Anil Lewis: And it's always a popular one. This has been a lot of tech, a lot of tech that needs a lot of training, a lot of technology that needs to make sure that we're in that space where we're making sure it's accessible. And I commend you gentlemen for being at the front of making sure that we're interacting with our corporate partners and other individuals who are interested in creating accessible experiences because we recognize that when we make technology accessible, it's not just accessible to blind and low-vision users. It's also a better technology for everyone because we create multimodal educational experiences, multiple ways that anyone can access employment technology to be more productive. So that's important. But the key is not for you two to do it, because if that was the case, we would not be able to meet the need. So one of the things we recognize is we have to empower individuals to be the first line, those first responders when it comes to accessibility. So we created the Nonvisual Accessibility Self-Advocacy Toolkit. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about that?
Karl Belanger: Certainly. So the toolkit is on our website and from nfb.org/cena that you can access it and it contains three main components. First, the toolkit itself, which is a document that outlines ways that you can gather information and report accessibility issues to companies in a way that is actionable that they can understand and use, and how to follow strategies for communicating those and following up on issues. Companies want to hear from you, their customers, the people who are paying for using and influencing their products. Getting in there and letting people know and telling the companies, "Hey, when I'm trying to do this, I cannot. I want to be able to use your software," is very powerful. So in addition to that toolkit with the written steps, we have a recording of an accessibility boutique which walks through with demos, how to gather this information, demos and discussions of reporting some accessibility issues from certain webpages and things and other conversations around that.
And then lastly, we want to know of what issues you are facing as you go through in your daily lives and what accessibility issues you're commonly coming up against. So, we have the inaccessibility tracking form where we encourage you to submit websites and apps where you have encountered accessibility issues. Whether or not you have reached out to the manufacturer or developer, we'd like to know about them though we certainly do encourage you to reach out as well. And if you've reached out to a company and they have fixed issues, we'd like to know about that as well so we can be aware of companies that are showing a commitment to accessibility and are making improvements to their products.
Anil Lewis: Absolutely. We try to make sure that we arm individuals who have the desire to really create systemic change in the area of accessibility with the tools that are going to be necessary for them to be successful. Because as Karl said, just complaining about something is not going to be helpful toward moving toward a solution. We do want to be sure that you let us know when there are problems, but if you can let us know specifically what their problem is, if it's a web page, specifically, which page, if it's a particular workflow, I
Can't input my credit card information. Those types of things are very helpful.
And the beauty of all of this combined is we get an army of individuals who are out there fighting for accessibility, but we also get an army of individuals that we can collaborate with and partner with these companies to make sure that they can create more accessible experiences because it's our reality that most companies or entities out there who are inaccessible, it's not intentional, it's just that they don't really know. So if we can work collaboratively with them to educate and train them, then that's a win-win for everybody. So again, this has been enormous amount of information, short period of time. You guys have anything to offer as we close?
Kennedy Zimnik: Just we appreciate everybody that's listening here. Of course, thank you for listening today and for coming to our boutiques and calling us. We appreciate the questions and hope you feel comfortable and want to reach out and talk about technology.
Karl Belanger: Certainly. And stay tuned to nfb.org/cena. We have plenty of the boutiques coming up. We have other events. We'll have new blog posts, technology reviews. Come to our seminar day at National Convention and please reach out if you have questions. We're here as a resource. Access at nfb.org or 410-659-9314 and choosing option five.
Anil Lewis: Outstanding. Thank you, guys, for taking the time off your busy day to share with our listeners about technology in this Global Accessibility Awareness Day environment. And until next time, everyone remember, you can live the life you want. Blindness is not what holds you back.
Announcer: We'd love your feedback. Email [email protected] or call 410-659-9314, extension 2444.