Marni Roper 0:00
Man with information on the latest developments in assistive technology and initiatives from the studios of 2RPH in Sydney and around the country on the Radio Reading Network of Australia, we bring you Ablequest. Hello, I'm Marnie Roper.
This week, David Woodbridge, who has been a regular guest on ablequest for over 10 years now, speaks more about his new role with Humanware. After 25 years as an adaptive technology consultant at Vision Australia, he is now the Braille Product Specialist at Humanware. In this role, he not only looks at advances in Braille, but also its integration into other technologies and their application at all levels of education and in workplaces. He speaks in particular about the latest platform called monarch, which breaks new ground in the sciences. Barbara Sullivan spoke to David to learn more.
Barbara Sullivan 1:00
Welcome back to Ablequest this week, David. Now recently, you've made the big move from Vision Australia to tech company Humanware.
David Woodbridge 1:10
I have, yes, I've officially been what's about 34.4 years of business Australia. And well, you know... you have to be exact about these things so... but no, look, I got snapped up pretty quick after I left Vision Australia, because in some ways it's been an absolute nice job to end up with, because as part of my previous role, I had to be across all the technologies, which in my personal life I still do. So I had to be across Amazon, Google, Apple, Windows, Linux, etc, etc - whereas with Humanware, I can concentrate on all their blindness products, so the speech products, the Braille products and so on.
But it really does feel like I'm going back to my original roots, technology consulting, and rather than being general, I guess I'm a bit more specific, but it's to me, like my previous job, I get paid to enjoy myself demonstrating and changing through that technology.
Barbara Sullivan 2:09
Well before we move on to discuss the new role at Humanware, tell me - are you still involved with all your work with Apple?
David Woodbridge 2:16
I am, yep. So I'm still an Apple accessibility ambassador, and I've been doing that now since november 2008 so I still be the test iOS with VoiceOver, iPad iOS and all the other iOS, including watch and the Mac as well. Because even though I have to use Windows in my new job, I can still use my my Mac at home.
Barbara Sullivan 2:36
Well, that's good to know. We can keep in touch with you via your personal blog, I guess, on Indeed, absolutely. Now, so onto Humanware. Tell me a little bit about the company. I know them as being a company that has groundbreaking technology solutions for people who are blind or living with vision impairment.
David Woodbridge 2:54
Yeah, look, they've been around for a long time. I mean, back in the sort of, I want to say, the mid 80s, they were originally called Pulse data. I think they started as in New Zealand, and then I come in when they transformed into Humanware itself. So now they're actually based out at Canada. Now they've got businesses all over the world, including Australia now. So Humanware does both, as you just said, blindness and low vision products, and probably their most famous for in the low vision space, with all their video portable and desktop video magnifiers. Of course, the famous ones are, which are all the Explore range, explore five, 812, and so on. So all the low vision stuff is really cool.
Now for me, as the blindness product specialist, now I'm focusing on more the blindness products themselves. People might remember things like the Stellar Track, which is the GPS, the brilliant Bi-x range, the 20 cell and the 40 cell Braille displays. And also like the Braille Note Touch Plus, which is, of course, the note taker. So all that really cool stuff, including, I guess, sort of three, two new things, and sort of one older thing, which very sadly, is not talked about that much. I'm not too sure why, but I'm going to make sure that's going to be changing.
Now there is a Braille display that's been around for a while, and it was a combined project between APH and Humanware, and it's called the Mantis Q 40 as an ACQUITY cable with a 40 cell Braille display. The nice thing about that display is that, like me, I'm a better typist in some ways that I'm a Braille list. So this allows me to type on a quote query keyboard, but still have Braille at the same time for reading stuff. For me, it's cool and really good for the workplace. It's been around for about several years, but I think people tend to forget about I think given where, you know, Brilliant Brain, No Touch, they forget about the beloved Mantis. I'm going to fix that very, very soon.
And as far as the other two newer devices, one device is not as new as the other one, but I'm probably sleeping the newest one to last. The nice thing about this other one is the it's called the Any Braille Teach device. And it's aimed at young children, sort of primary school, you know, four to five, six years old, who want to learn Braille. And it's got these huge dots done, as in for the Braille cells. It's got a little six dot braille display so you can get to learn the normal size of the dots. And then it's got a perpen style keyboard with your dots, 12345 and 6.
But it's an all enclosed self teaching Braille device, and it links up to a learning education system where support people and teachers and that sort of people can actually set their own curriculum to teach the child Braille. So that's pretty amazing. So that's called the Any Braille Teaching device.
Barbara Sullivan 5:38
Humanware are particularly good at that, aren't they integrating the teacher's tool and the students tool?
David Woodbridge 5:44
That's right, because they're always talking about curriculum, and because this is sort of in combination with APH and wearing Printing House for the Blind, then yes, you can all that curricula behind the device. That's the same with productivity, with their different products, that they have all this curriculum that you know, if you want to use it is there, of course, if you don't want to use it, then fine, read the manual and listen to and watch videos and offer yourself.
Barbara Sullivan 6:11
Now let's get on to Monarch.
David Woodbridge 6:14
Yep, so Monarch is referred to as a dynamic, tactile display. I'm getting tired now. So what it is, it's a 32 character width and 10 lines from top to bottom. And not only does it do multi-line Braille, but it also does tactile graphics as well. So again, because it's a combination between human wear and APH, you've got access to a huge library of tactile diagrams. So and that's across the whole science technology, engineering and mathematics in general, fun things to do as well or different types of diagrams.
The other really cool thing is it's got a full, fully scientific graphics calculator in it, so you can do an equation in Word on Windows transfer over to the monarch, and you can work for that equation properly. Plus you can also generate a graph from that equation on the monarch. So if you want to see where x and y intersect on the graph, you can do that on the monarch itself, rather than having to sort of emboss it out on an embosser and do it that way.
Barbara Sullivan 7:21
Before this, people with an interest in science who had vision loss faced enormous challenges.
David Woodbridge 7:29
That's right, because one of the things that people keep talking about is time to fingertips, and that's where you know, if you're at a school or a university, it doesn't matter what you do. As soon as the word diagram was mentioned, you think, Oh dear, I've got to get it sent off to a production place and get it translated into Braille, embossed on a piece of paper, get it sent back to me, and fingers crossed at the teacher or the uni lecturers, have it moved on to the next topic by the time you get it, whereas this one, you get an outline drawing off the Internet, or if it's part of the APH library, it'll be there straight away.
And later on this year, hopefully there's an application called Wing It, which I think is quite a cool name, where you can do your own drawing on the iOS device, hopefully Android as well, and then you can transfer it onto the Monarch. So again, if somebody wanted to sell look, I want to show you mitosis, for example. Then they could do a quick drawing of that transferring after the monarch, and you can read it straight away. So that'd be cool. And then early next year, we'll have what's called Terminal Mode. And people that know about braille displays, terminal mode is normally used to connect the device up to a smartphone or a desktop computer, Mac or Windows.
So that means then I'll be able to have multi line Braille and graphics running on Windows, the Mac, Android, hopefully, and iOS. And that is really going to then start blowing things out of the water a lot more than it is already.
Barbara Sullivan 8:56
Well, this is a giant step towards inclusivity, isn't it?
David Woodbridge 9:00
Well, it is - particularly for the STEM subjects, because, you know, doing mathematics and engineering and that sort of stuff, if this thing's just going to make it straightforward and so much more efficient to get access to that information. And I must admit, being able to read stuff on a multi line grow display, for me, is actually really remarkable, and it's got this sort of really new little nifty functionalizer. Rather than me pressing a little button above a character to jump the cursor there, it's got an infrared sensor at the top of the display so it automatically knows where my fingers are on the 10 lines by 30 characters across, and I just press a button and it goes, Oh, look, your fingers on the fourth word across on the eighth line. I'll just move you straight there. And I think that's pretty cool.
Besides word processing and the graphics, you've also got access to the Business Australia library. So if you want to get their podcasts and newspapers and DAISY books, they can read them all there. It comes with. Say, a learning tutorial for learning how to use mono, because it does have all those, you know, for side of person, barber, zooming in and zooming out to make the image larger and smaller. It has all that. So it comes with a bit of a tutorial so they wouldn't get learn things about zooming in and scrolling.
Then finally, which to me, as a yuppie person, it's got a chess program so I can play against the Monarch as a chess player on the tactile display, or against the side of person, or anybody else for that matter. It's just a platform that I think this is a base platform, and like I said, Once, when it gets here, the screen reader stuff next year and beyond. You know, as people say, softwares doesn't have any limitation. We've only limited by imagination. So the hardware is here. I think it's going to be really exciting to see where this software goes in the future.
Barbara Sullivan 10:48
And David, I imagine this puts less onus on the classroom to provide special services and and it would reduce costs, wouldn't it for the educators?
David Woodbridge 10:58
Well, it would. And also the fact the classroom teacher, I mean, this happened in a rural university, you know, they'd say, Oh, and by the way, I just thought today we might do this particular module, and then, as a blind person, sort of grown and go, Oh no, why didn't you tell my person about this a week or two ago? Whereas now it's Oh, yeah. And Dave, I've got the notes and the graphs on this little USB stick. Here it is, I pop it into the monarch, import it into the graphics here, and hey presto, I can keep doing the topic like everybody else does.
So the final thing, of course, about Braille too, is that it's it's literacy, because I get really lazy listening to speech output, whereas when you're using Braille, you think, Oh, yeah, that's right, that should be capitalised, or I've got too many spaces, or I've got my punctuation mark. So that's also really important as well.
Marni Roper 11:47
With information on the latest developments in assistive technology and initiatives from the studios of 2RPH in Sydney and around the country, on the Radio Reading Network of Australia, we bring you Ablequest.
David Woodbridge 12:00
And the other thing, of course, you can plug into this is a HDMI monitor. So if you're a side of person, you want to see what the child or the person is doing on the mark, you plug in the HDMI monitor. And if you like me, and you're a bit faster typist than you are at Bayless, then you can plug in a query keyboard and used as a proper computer type keyboard, rather than using the broad keyboard. So it's got all different types of advantages, depending on what you want to do. It's pretty amazing.
Barbara Sullivan 12:31
I imagine that increasingly people are very competent on a keyboard, people with vision loss.
David Woodbridge 12:37
Yeah. Look, I must admit, when I first started learning typing, which was back in 1974 really old, I learned touch typing. I remember at the time I thought, Oh, well, I'm never going to use this like, why on earth would I want to learn how to touch type? But I'm really glad I did. And that's one of the things that I always started to if you're going to be efficient with your screen reader, your application using the computer as a whole, you really do need to know and touched on, that's one huge skill that not only do you know where the keys are, but when you start having to use people at shortcuts, then, yes, you are going to be a lot more efficient.
Barbara Sullivan 13:10
Now this job's taking you all over Australia. I gather you'll be on the road demonstrating. And typically, who would you demonstrate to? To educators, to the public?
David Woodbridge 13:21
At the moment, it's probably more to do with educators. So we're really focusing on schools, initially in universities. Couple of expos in Adelaide. I'm talking to some educators in Queensland and Victoria, couple of people in Canberra, couple of folks, including University in New South Wales, in Sydney. But it's one of those tools that I think, from a certain perspective, it's really for large organisations like libraries, museums and art galleries, because I can imagine the museum, they say, look, we've got a whole set of sculptures available.
And by the way, here's an outline drawing of them. Would you like to touch and explore these particular artworks on the monarch. And I think that would be absolutely spectacular.
Barbara Sullivan 14:04
It is life changing for people. David, I wish you well in your new role. Look forward to chatting with you again before too long, today's guest was David Woodbridge, Braille Product Specialist at Humanware.
Marni Roper 14:23
And you have just been listening to Ablequest, a program that looks at developments in assistive technology from Barbara Sullivan and Marnie Roper. Thank you for listening and goodbye to your next program.
