Accessibility features, upgrades and a launch

00:21 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from September the 24th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us - listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words. Talking tech and Dan O'Connell. Come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast.

With me for his second week in the chair: Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. Welcome again. Damo.

01:08 S2

Hi, Stephen. How are you.

01:10 S1

Very good. And what sort of a week have you had playing with the new Apple software?

01:15 S2

Yeah, I have been taking iOS 18 for a little bit of a test drive, and I have to say, overall I'm pretty impressed with it. I'm really liking the updates to Braille screen input because I tend to use that a lot, and they've really made some significant leaps forward with that in terms of being able to activate it using a dedicated gesture so you don't have to have it in your rotor anymore. You can now use it in Command mode, which means that you can almost drive your phone as you would if you had a Braille display with the space key held down. So you can do sort of swipes and those kinds of things. 

From within the Braille screen input mode, you can do your rotor gestures and all of those kinds of things. So Braille screen input is a mode that allows you to type text. So if you're writing an email or a text message or something like that, using a Perkins style of entry. So what you do, there's a couple of different modes, one that they call Tabletop mode, where you... put the phone on a table or on your lap, and you put the three fingers from each hand on the screen as though you had a Perkins Brailler in front of you the other way. 

And the way that I use it is what they call Away mode. And that's where you actually point the screen away from you. You have the volume buttons pointing upwards, and you hold the phone sort of with the... two short ends of it in the palms of your hands, and you use three fingers from each hand on the screen to, to type the Braille letters. And it's much quicker than the, sort of using the... virtual on-screen keyboard, and also a lot more private than using Dictation or Siri. Or those kinds of things. And now, as I said, you can do so much more with it. You can even pop have it pop up in Braille screen Input mode automatically every time you double tap an edit field now... so you can, you know, pretty much do everything in Braille now without having to select it each time, which is very nice.

03:34 S1

Any other iOS features that are really jumping out at you?

03:38 S2

Yes, you can now make some pretty significant customisations to the voices. So for those people who have a little bit of hearing loss, you know you can alter the bass or the mid or the high frequencies in the voice to make it more listenable and more understandable. And the what used to be the language rotor is now called the voice rotor. And you can add almost an infinite number of voices to that. So you can you can switch voices, you can adjust things like the inflection and how the voice speaks. 

And you can actually also now use personal voice as the voice for voiceover, so you can record essentially yourself as a text to speech engine and use your own voice on your phone if you if you really wanted to. It's something I'm planning on trying. I haven't done it yet, but it's on the list of things to tinker with over the next week or so.

04:33 S1

Yes, it's an interesting one that might appeal to a lot of people. I think I hear enough of my voice, actually.

04:38 S2

Yeah, you and me both.

04:40 S1

Tell me about messaging. I find this attractive. The Send Later feature, so you can schedule a message to go off at a particular time, not at the time that you compose it.

04:51 S2

That's right. Yes. There's a couple of nice features in the... Messenger app. That's one of them. So with messaging you can text someone, you know, at 6:00 in the morning or something like that, or you want to, you know, send them a message tomorrow for their birthday. And you've you've remembered now. So you think, OK, I'll type that now. And they can, it will, we can have it send to them at 7:00 in the morning. You can do that with the Send Later feature. 

The other nice one is the RCS or Rich Communication System, which means that you will be able to message someone even if they're using Android. You'll still know things like, Have they read it? Are they typing me a message back? So you know, your typing indication - all of the things that iMessage currently gives you when you're messaging from one iPhone to another, you'll have that regardless of whether the person is on an iPhone or an Android phone.

05:50 S1

For those with iPhones that are not the iPhone 15 Pro or higher, iPhone 15 or the 14, etc., they won't have all the features that we hear about in the new iOS, will they?

06:05 S2

No. That's right. So some features are only available on the for example, the 15 Pro and the newly released iPhone 16 models. So things like, for example, you can now have live recognition added to your rotor. So that is the feature that allows you to do door detection and people detection and those sorts of things. But some of those features require a lidar camera. And so that pretty much means it's only the... Pro models of phone that will have that option. So not every feature is available on every phone, unfortunately...

06:44 S1

Now in addition to the iOS, there was the new software for the watch OS 11 and the new software for the Mac. Have you played with either of those?

06:56 S2

I have upgraded the watch, but I haven't really taken it for a good test drive. I haven't noticed a lot of difference. Certainly the upgrade went pretty smoothly, and the Mac... I'm planning to upgrade my MacBook Air this weekend, so I'll know more about that then. The only thing that is holding me back, and it's probably worth our while mentioning this one, is that I do use Remote Incident Manager or remote from Numa solutions. For those that are not familiar with that, it is a remote control software so that if you, for example, need to provide help to someone else, you can do that regardless of whether they're on a Mac or a Windows machine. 

Or you might use Rim to so that someone can connect to you so that if, for example, you use a service like IRA, you and you're having problems with an inaccessible web checkout, you can use Remote incident Manager and have the IRA agent connect to your computer and help you through it. Now, I use Rim in all sorts of different ways when I'm helping family members, but also for controlling my home machine when I'm out and about and those kinds of things. 

And there is currently an issue with Sequoia and the Rim product, and Mike and the team at Pneuma Solutions are advising people, if you are a heavy user of the Rim product, they're suggesting you delay upgrading to Sequoia until they resolve that issue. There's some issues around permissions, I think, and unattended access to systems. So at this stage, their advice if you are a Rim user. So if you use it with IRA or you help other people at this stage, the advice is to delay the upgrade to Sequoia for a couple of weeks until they have that issue sorted.

08:47 S1

We'll put Apple aside now because we can think about the freedom scientific upgrades, which come out from the end of October onwards with the Jaws, the screen reader, the Fusion and the Zoomtext - Zoomtext being the screen enhancement and the Fusion being really the combination of screen reader and screen enhancement, isn't it?

09:10 S2

That's right. Yes, yes. So Fusion is the email. I always describe it as an amalgam of Zoom text and Jaws.

09:16 S1

And there are Betas available for those already.

09:19 S2

Yes. So for people who like to be on the cutting edge, the Beta versions for the 2025 updates are available for people to road test, and you can do that by simply going to Freedom Scientific Comm. And there's a 2025 Betas link. And you can then select your your versions, depending on which product you want to test. There are a couple of caveats. Obviously, the support for Beta versions is limited, and if you have some Jaws scripts and things like that. So if you use the Lacie product from March and consultancy or the station playlist scripts or... other Jaws scripts that you might be using in a previous version, they may or may not work... with the Beta version of... Jaws 2025.

10:11 S1

We talked last week about the SMA process. Perhaps you might go over that again and explain how people can check what they're up to with their SMAs. 

10:21 S2

Sure. So a software maintenance agreement, or SMA is something that you can purchase, and it's essentially pre-purchasing the next two major version releases ahead of time. So if you were buying Jaws 2024 today and you bought an SMA, you would have access to 2025 and 2026 when they're released. That's essentially how an SMA works. So if you don't have any upgrades remaining, I would strongly encourage you to renew your SMA before Jaws 2025 is officially released sometime in late October. And the reason for that is that if you wait until after 2025 is released, you'll have to purchase the upgrade to Jaws 2025 and then the SMA. So you can save yourself some money by doing that. Update before 2025 comes out. 

11:14 S1

What's the best way to check how many of those updates you've got left?

11:17 S2

There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can just go into the Help menu and go to About, but a more accurate and more detailed way of doing it is to pop over to FS Activate. That's Foxtrot Sierra, activate dot com. And there's a link there that you can select, which is check the number of activations remaining. They'll then be an edit box where you can type in your serial number. Press Enter and you'll get a bunch of information will come up. It'll tell you how many activations you've got. So in other words, how many more times you can install Jaws, because when you purchase a license, there's three. You're allowed three activations or three installs, in other words.

11:59 S1

On three different machines.

12:00 S2

Correct. Yes. Yep. And you'll also be able to find out what's the the latest version allowed. So if I look at mine, the latest version allowed is 2024. So that tells me that my SMA has run out and that I need to renew it, and practice what I'm preaching and do it sometime in the next couple of weeks. And that'll give you other details, like it'll tell you, you know, whether you've got things like remote access enabled and whether it's a pro or home license and a whole bunch of things.

12:28 S1

Let's talk about the tactile Braille displays that are being developed around the world. There's one called the Monarch, which is attracting a lot of attention.

12:37 S2

And understandably so, because... it does allow you to view things like tactile graphics, and it is a multi-line display. So it's about the size of a large gaming laptop and probably a similar weight. It has a suite of applications like most of the Humanware products. So we have things like the the Kingsoft suite of applications, Keyword and so on. But we also have a graphics viewer. So if you were reading a Braille book on the device, you could view... instead of having to scroll the display line by line, you can view a page at a time because it's a multi-line display, but you can also use it to view and zoom in on graphics. 

So for those people into the sort of science, technology, engineering, maths, those sort of Stem subjects, it really is quite an interesting tool - because it would enable you to... view diagrams and those sorts of things as well, in much more detail than we've been able to in the past.

13:38 S1

It's not going to be cheap, is it?

13:39 S2

No it's not. I don't have the exact figures, but the last I had heard was around about $27,000. So it's not something that you, you know, you would buy unless you were really serious about needing it and had a genuine use case. But for those that do, I think it has the potential to be quite a game changer.

13:59 S1

There's going to be an event to launch this product in Australia in October.

14:04 S2

That's right. The 10th of October at 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

14:09 S1

We'll put the link to that in the show notes so you can register for it. Just before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program, and that link is VAradio.org/talking tech - VA radio dot org slash Talking Tech. And to write to the program, Damo?

14:31 S2

You can email me Damo Dot McMorrow....That's damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org ... 

14:42 S1

Damo dot McMorrow at Vision Australia dot org. This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.