Code jumpers, JAWS, Braille puzzles and more

00:21S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from March the 12th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, Associated Stations of Australia or perhaps 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 down the canal 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, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well: Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's start with a product available from the vision store of Vision Australia. This is one that's been around a few years. Code jumper, which is an interesting collaboration between the American Printing House for the blind, which is very strong on education, and Microsoft indeed.

01:22S2

So this is called Code Jumper in its basic form. It's a way to teach children coding through physical manipulation of objects, if you like. So what you've got is a hub, which is basically got a speaker in it and on off button, and then some ports that you plug these little modules into. They're all connected via cables. And then on each of these little connector units called pods, you've got two switches or one switch which does different functions such as play a sound faster, repeat a sound, do looping. So if you play, you know, a sheep sound, it'll just loop it how many times you want to leave it for it's controlled by an application that you can run on windows, which funnily enough is called Code Jumper. And you can also run the Android version of it. And I must admit the way that it teaches coding, because when you basically plug each module in and if you're using the app on windows or on Android, you literally got each line of code that comes up on the screen. So you can very quickly see that is locked. 

That's... a function because I'm doing certain things inside a particular couple of lines of code. That's where it goes. If then statement because it branches off. If this happens, go to there. If that happens go to somewhere else so you can have it as basic as you want. You know, just plug in all these things and just basically press start. Or you can have it as complicated for doing loops and if then statements and all sorts of amazing things. It comes in this really nice plastic case. I think from memory there's about eight pods that you can plug into the hub of Code Jumper, and it's just a really fun thing to to play with. So if you log on to the Vision Australia Vision Store website, which is shop.visionaustralia.org, search for Code Jumper - two words. I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised how fantastic this thing is. It's aimed at children that are getting into coding at school, but it is a really fun way to do it.

03:31S1

What's it cost?

03:32S2

Last time I checked it's about $1,800, so it's not cheap. Primarily, most education systems tend to buy the units for their schools.

03:41S1

Very interesting. See, son, the big technology event in the United States, California State University Center on Disability, I think it's called. And it's a worldwide interest, the event that takes place each year in March next week.

03:58S2

Indeed, this is the one that comes up every year that I look forward to is, this is the 39th conference. And I think this year is going to be interesting. I know we're getting a bit sick and tired of talking about this, but I really do think artificial intelligence is going to take a main focus this year on not only what you can do with hardware, but software and the interrelationship between hardware and software. Not only for things like smart classes, but for the computing side of things as well. So that's what I'm looking forward to. There's already been some interesting nuggets coming out already. But I thought, why don't we just let the conference happen next week? And then the following week after that, we'll do some highlights of the conference. But I'm definitely really looking forward to this one. I don't think I've had much as much of excitement looking forward to a season conference than I have for this one.

04:49S1

You can catch some of the proceedings online.

04:51S2

You can. So the best way to do it is just go to the CC website and I'll have that link in the show notes. And then from there you can quite easily navigate to things like the keynote address and other online sessions as well.

05:01S1

For Spiro or Freedom Scientific have brought out some updates for their Jaws screen reader and their fusion screen reader and screen magnification or screen enhancement tools.

05:13S2

Yep. So just to remind people so fusion is basically zoom text and jaws together. So zoom text is the screen render fire jaws screen reader. So when you put them together, that's called fusion. What has astounded me to do with jaws specifically, is they introduced this function back in 2019 called Picture Smart, which basically generally described a picture, uh, to you. So it might say, you know, dog on a mat or people at the beach. Well, now they've introduced a new version of Picture Smart, which is called Picture Smart AI. And it's using artificial intelligence to give you more information about a picture. So remember I just said picture smart would say people on the beach. 

But what the AI does is it would say something like people sitting on the beach, the person on the left appears to be looking towards the camera, smiling. They're wearing a yellow shirt and they appear to be talking to the person next to them, and so on and so on. So you really are getting a much better idea of the picture. It's very much like, be my eyes. I um, to just it just it's so rich in the content it gives you. It's absolutely amazing. And with this function, you can do it for image files on your computer or pictures on the internet instead of social media type websites. So it's absolutely amazing.

06:36S1

On his weekly podcast, Living Blind Fully, Jonathan Merson does pretty well at tuning in to latest developments in blindness and low vision tech. He had an interesting conversation recently with a man named Dean Blasi, whose work goes back a long way back to the Braille and speak device back in the late 1980s.

06:56S2

That's right. And if you remember that we talked about, I think it was last week before, we also talked about the the new BT speaker and the BT Speaker Pro, which is basically Dean Blasi re-engineering the new version of the Braille and speak. But it was interesting. It was a look back in time over his career spanning a very long time, and it was just interesting to hear how he developed different types of technology with, you know, different blind folks along the years. And it was amazing because I just remember that I had actually forgot a few products along the way as well that I, I had also come in contact with in the late 70s and early 80s. So if you're lucky, a bit of a historical perspective on where things came from and perhaps where they're going to, it's very much worthwhile listening to.

07:42S1

Yes, very much so. Now there's a little Braille word game that you've discovered.

07:48S2

Yeah, this was actually cute. So it's a web based game on a old-fashioned thing called a word game. Except this time, not only do you have to correctly get the number of characters in the word correct, but you're also limited by the amounts of dots that each letter makes up in the word. So you might have a word on there that's, I don't know, four characters, but then you can only use a certain amount of dots. So it's a really good headspace board game. On trying to work out this word and by the number of dots you're only allowed to use, so it's free. It's on the web. You can play it on your mobile device or your desktop, and it's just one of those fun little fiddly things that you can do. So if you've got a bit of a spare time on your hands or your board or whatever else, have a play. And it is quite a lot of fun.

08:35S1

Recently we talked about the Invision app now being available on the Blind Shell Classic two phone. You've discovered a bit of an issue.

08:44S2

I honestly do not understand this particular way that things have done, so I tried to log in to the In Vision Eye app on my Blind Child Classic two. The Google option didn't work, but the email did. So I emailed the developers of the blind Show Classic and said, you know what? What's the what's the story? Why is it not working? And they said, oh no, no, no, you can't use Google signing on anything to do with the Blind Child Classic. And I thought, well, that's a bit weird. So I wrote back and said, well, if that's not an option, then why let a developer have that option on the app they've produced? And the response was, well, they don't like to control what people do when they produce apps for the blind shell. 

So I thought, well, that's a little bit weird. If it doesn't work, then why not developers? It doesn't work. So for the sake of people's mind, please don't try the Google option if it ever pops up on the blind show classic too, because as I got told by the blind shelf, it doesn't work. So when you try the great Envision Eye app, email works beautifully. Don't try the Google and don't bother actually emailing the blind show because they already know it doesn't work.

09:48S1

Fair enough. Well, there was a major software updates from Apple last week.

09:53S2

Basically everything got updated across the whole iOS OS range. The one that stood out for me in particular was iOS 17.4. Now, the one that doesn't affect us in Australia is the EU. The European Union is decided that Apple has to offer other third party app stores because they think that Apple's controlling things too much. So that's been introduced in Europe. It doesn't. Us all doesn't think anybody outside the European Union. I'm in two minds about this. I love the fact that they're making Apple open things up a little bit, which Apple is fighting tooth and nail about, but it also means we may have an extra level of openness, which sometimes scares me, because openness means that any cowboy on the market can then start producing apps that may follow Apple's guidelines, but we may fall a bit short and accessibility, but I guess it will see what happens in the future with that one. 

But the other one that I find extremely gratifying about is we now have these transcription functions in the podcast app. So what happens is you go to your favorite podcast, you turn on transcription, you start playing the podcast, and then you can, you know, for a voiceover user, you can flick down or you can scroll down through the whole transcriptions you get. Do you think, oh, look, that sounds a bit interesting. They're talking about, I don't know, ramp access to buildings or trains. You double tap on that and hey presto, it takes the audio straight to that spot in the transcription and starts playing it. And you can, you know, you can zip forward and backwards like you can, you know, flick back by word by word or paragraph, whatever you want to do with voiceover and just flick around the whole podcast if you really want to. 

But it's absolutely amazing. And by the way, it only works in the podcasts app. But this may be one good way of dealing with those podcasts. You think, oh God, these guys talk too much. They don't really say anything for the first ten minutes, so you can flick through all the general chitchat, go to where you want to start listening, double tap on the transcript, and hey presto, off you go.

11:56S1

You're not talking about our program, are you?

11:58S2

Certainly not.

12:00S1

This could be great news for people who are deaf-blind.

12:02S2

That's right. Because you add in a refresher brow display and hey presto, you've got 100% accessibility and you've got control over the whole podcast. I just might say, Stephen, it's really funny reading a text version of a podcast, which is basically based on human speech, because you hear people say things like and so and perhaps that's it's quite bizarre. But no, it's truly is the transcription of what's being spoken on the audio podcast.

12:30S1

So that's iOS for the phone and the iPad. Um, the other products, software upgrades.

12:36S2

Yep. So watch OS 10.4. I didn't have any accessibility changes in it to the OS. Didn't either. The Mac OS one did have a small change to VoiceOver and VoiceOver utility to do a quick nav, so when you press your left and right, Erica using VoiceOver to turn quick on or off, you now have an option where the quick note on can also turn on single key navigation for you as well, which used to be a separate thing you'd have to do. So that's a little change. But besides that, most of the actual updates across the board to do with emojis. So different pictures that you can have, like people using a white cane, a person in the manual wheelchair and security bug fixes as well.

13:17S1

Some more Apple device accessories.

13:20S2

Apple released a brand new set of Apple Watch bands and some iPhone cases, and an interesting Belkin stand. I believe it's a stand that's to do with using your Apple TV, 4K, and your phone as the camera for the Apple TV, where you can sit in your lounge room, you can see your family or loved ones or friends on the big, big screen in your room. And of course, your phone's looking at you to provide the camera for them on the other end of the FaceTime call.

13:51S1

Very interesting. 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.

13:58S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David. Would it be a podbean pod band com?

14:05S1

David would be our podbean, podbean.com to write to the program.

14:11S2

You can write to me at visit the show where I work - which is David Woodbridge - how it sounds - at Vision Australia - dot - org.

14:18S1

davidwoodbridge@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.