Damo slips into the expert seat

00:21 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from September the 17th, 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]. It can all 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. 

Regular listeners to the program would be well used to David Woodbridge coming along now - but if you didn't hear the program last week, you may not be aware that that was David's last regular program with us. He's making a change in his career. We hopefully will hear from him from time to time. So now stepping into the chair, Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. Damo, welcome to Talking Tech.

01:28 S2

Thank you Stephen. It's good to be here on what I hope is the first of many shows to come.

01:33 S1

Yes, I'm looking forward to it. Let's start by finding out a bit about your role at Vision Australia. Then I'd like to learn a bit more about Damo McMorrow himself. And then you've got some news items we'd like to cover. Let's start with your role as national manager, Access Technology. What's that all about?

01:51 S2

It really has sort of overall responsibility for the different components of our access Technology service. So some listeners might be familiar with our IT Help Desk, which provides phone and email support to Vision Australia clients who use Access technology. So if your Jaws suddenly stops talking, or you're wanting to know which phones are the most accessible or that kind of thing, that's the sort of thing that the Help Desk can help with. I also provide support to our 43 or so Access Technology specialists out in the field. So they're scattered through all of our different offices and sort of work directly with clients to help them navigate the range of technology options out there. 

So I provide field support to them, along with a couple of access technology service development leads. And then we also do some corporate consulting work. So when we have organisations that want to check whether their systems are going to work with Jaws, Zoom, Text Fusion, various other products, we go in and sort of test workflows in detail and that kind of thing. We also train software developers in how someone navigates a screen reader so that when they're doing in-house software development for organisations, they can test their own work and hopefully not break the accessibility in the process, and also get involved a little bit with new products and demonstrating those and supporting launch activities and recording demos and those kinds of things. So yeah, it's a fairly... broad role.

03:28 S1

Let's talk about the IT specialists. What do they actually do for a person, a client of Vision Australia.

03:36 S2

They really are there to try and help navigate the various tech options. So the first thing is what's the person trying to do. Are they looking for technology for school. Are they looking for technology to use in the workplace? Are they looking for technology to use around home or just to access their phone, their iPad, their computer, whatever it may be? So our clients range in age and life stage from 2 to 102 virtually. And they also then will conduct some of the funding bodies, require you to have an assessment or to sort of seek expert advice and have a written report so that you can seek funding for whatever tech solution you need. So they help to sort of conduct that assessment and do that process.

04:20 S1

So is this all done over the phone or...

04:23 S2

No, sometimes it's ... in person, particularly if it's, you know, for things like magnification devices and those sorts of things, you really need to try them, have a hands-on. Same with Braille devices. We can certainly support sessions over Telehealth where that makes sense or where the person is in a somewhere fairly remote. But we also, you know, will will actually normally try to provide someone a hands on trial with the different devices so that they can see how they work and which one they like and which one works for them, that kind of thing.

04:55 S1

And what about the person who's not working? How do they get into the system and get support?

05:00 S2

Well, there's still funding schemes like the National Disability Insurance Scheme or NDIS. There's also some equipment and training and services available through things like my aged care and also Department of Veterans Affairs. So there's a number of different funding schemes depending on where people are at and what they need. And there's also it's not just the technology and the equipment, but it's also training after the fact as well, so that you actually, you know, get the best out of the equipment that you've got. So a big part of what we do is training on things like iPhones and computers and those kinds of things as well.

05:38 S1

Hope to explore all that a lot more over the coming weeks. Sure. What about yourself? You're a technology user.

05:44 S2

I am, yes, definitely are and have been for for many years. I think my... technology journey probably started with, I suppose, a couple of things. The Braille to Print - when that came out, I was about seven, and that enabled me to sort of exit specialised schooling and attend mainstream schooling because the teacher could see what I was writing. And then, my dad got me a Super Voice cartridge, which fitted into the Tandy TRS 80 Color Computer that we had. And so that was sort of my introduction to talking computers. And then we sort of progressed on to things like the Keynote and the Eureka, which I used right through high school and onto uni and that type of thing.

06:30 S1

So what do you use today?

06:32 S2

I'm a Jaws user, so I have a couple of laptops with Jaws. I've also got a a MacBook Pro, so I sort of have a foot in both camps in the laptop space. I am an iPhone user and I also have a Braillesense 6. I'm a very strong advocate for Braille, and I don't think I could do a lot of the things that I do without that. So I use a Braillesense 6 Mini and a Brilliant B40 x and I've got a BT Speak as well.

07:07 S1

So you're totally blind. 

S2

Yes, I am. 

S1

Braille and synthetic speech user all your life.

07:14 S2

Yes I have, yeah. 

07:14 S1

How did you go, moving into the low vision space which you needed to do for your role as IT person across Vision Australia?

07:24 S2

It was certainly a steep learning curve initially... but I was lucky in that I had some people who were very good at describing things, so they could explain to me visually what the various sort of magnification options did. You know, what does Lines and Blinds look like? What are the different contrast options? And I got used to sort of asking a lot of questions. So making a small incremental change and saying to the person, Does that help at all? Is that better? Okay, what if we make it a little bit bigger again? Is that better or worse? And just sort of doing things incrementally and asking a lot of questions. 

I've always been, I think a reasonably good communicator. So asking the questions that I need to get me, the information that I need to sort of help the client came fairly easily to me. And so then it was really just a matter of memorising the controls on the various... video magnifiers and learning what all the options were in the sort of computer magnification screen magnification space, and how to apply them. But it was a learning curve, certainly.

08:32 S1

Today on talking Tech, we're meeting the new co-presenter, Damo McMorrow. Damo, you're based in Brisbane?

08:39 S2

Yes I am, yes. I've been a Brisbane boy most of my life. I was born in Melbourne, but I kind of consider myself a Queenslander because I've lived here since I was two.

08:49 S1

Now let's talk about some recent developments. This week we've seen from Apple the dropping of new versions of the software bigtime in September. Tell us about those.

09:03 S2

Yes. So there's been quite a bit of buzz around obviously the new iPhones, but also the release of iOS 18 for the iPhones and iPads. And there's some quite significant updates for those of you that use Braille screen input. It's had quite a significant makeover. You're not limited to just doing five finger characters, so you can type, for those of you that you know your grade two Braille, and there's a number of other things. So you can have Braille screen input come up automatically every time you get an edit field and things like that. So I think that's going to be quite an exciting change. 

Siri has also had a makeover. So we've now we will have the Apple Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro and the new iPhone 16 range... which is good because I don't know about you, Stephen, but I've been finding Siri feels like it gets sillier and sillier by the day sometimes, so it'll be nice to for that to have a makeover. And there's a number of other improvements and changes there. We've also got the new watchOS 11, for the Apple Watch, and they've also announced a couple of new Apple Watch models as well. I haven't sort of delved into all of the changes yet coming in WatchOS 11, but we we might explore that in a bit more detail over the next couple of weeks.

10:24 S1

Yep, that'll be good. And with the Mac, Sequoia, Sequoia name this year.

10:28 S2

I haven't had an opportunity to play with the Beta of that one yet, and I always find their naming convention slightly interesting. But I believe there are some good improvements coming in the... new Mac OS as well. So all that will be very interesting to explore. Mm. Definitely.

10:46 S1

Let's talk about some specific blindness technology. Now, the Sense Player had a significant update a couple of weeks ago.

10:54 S2

That's right. Yes. And as part of that they've addressed a number of bugs and complaints that people have made around things like not resuming playback where it should and navigation in things like the podcast app and so on, and also some fine tuning of... the menu system. So you may find that some things have moved around a little. I'm... an avid Sense Player user as well, so I'm looking forward to putting that update through its paces, because there were a few annoying little things that really did need attention, and I believe most of those have been addressed. 

11:27 S1

For the casual listener or the regular listener who hasn't quite tuned in to Sense Player, you'd better quickly explain what it is.

11:35 S2

Yes, sure. So the Sense Player is the audio player from... [? hims or Selva's] that it... is able to play Daisy books, podcasts, regular audio books,... music. It has a an internet radio as well as an FM radio. There is an OCR version as well, which has a built-in camera for capturing and reading text. You can also use it as a voice recorder. It looks a lot like the old Candybar style mobile phones from the mid 90s or early 2000. So it has a numeric keypad, and a sort of removable battery behind the back cover, USB-C, headphone socket and also support for Bluetooth headphones. So things like your Apple AirPods and so on. Work extremely well. So it's a... really versatile little pocket-sized media player.

12:36 S1

Yeah, my 21st century transistor radio. It's fantastic.

12:39 S2

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, definitely.

12:41 S1

You've got a message for people who use Jaws, which is the windows screen reader that a lot of people around the world use.

12:49 S2

Yes. So Vespero traditionally released their major version updates towards the end of October, so we'll be expecting Jaws 2025 to be released then. So the reminder is, if you're a current Jaws 2024 user and you've got a software maintenance agreement or SMA, you might like to check whether you have any upgrade counts left. If you wait until 2025 comes out, you'll have to purchase an upgrade and then the software maintenance agreement. Whereas if you renew your software maintenance agreement in the next few weeks, you'll be able to just download 2025 when it's released. And then, of course, 2026 next year.

13:31 S1

Now, as we finish up, let's let people know where they can go to find details of what we've been talking about in this, and it will be past programs as well. And that's the address: varadio.org/talkingtech. VA radio dot org slash talking tech. And to write to the program... people can get into your inbox, can't they Damien.

13:57 S2

They certainly can. They can email Damo. Damo dot McMorrow. That's m-c-m-o-r-r-o-w at Vision Australia dot org. And as far as if you if you can't remember how to spell the surname, it's the same as tomorrow except it's Mc...

14:13 S1

damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org ...

14:17 S2

That's right. Welcome. Any comments, feedback or questions? I'll do my best to answer them for you.

14:22 S1

This has been Talking Tech. With me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.