Low vision experiences and tips

00:08 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition, available from January the 21st, 2025. 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 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. 

Well, Damo McMorrow continues his annual leave. I believe he'll be back with us next week. I'm speaking with another from the Access Technology team at Vision Australia and today it's Access Technology lead, Jim Pipczak from Melbourne. Welcome, Jim.

01:03 S2

Thanks, Steve. Good to talk to you again.

01:06 S1

Tell us a little about yourself... what's your role, actually, in the Access Technology team?

01:13 S2

Our lead team helps all of the adaptive technology specialists with advice and helps out, especially when they first start with us. Most of the adaptive technology specialists really have no access technology experience. There's very few that do. So part of our job is is a really good induction, teaching him all the the bits and pieces that they need to know. And then it's the ongoing support. In the beginning we'll go out with them, you know, to see clients, see how they're going. Give them some advice along the way. And at any time they can give us a call and ask us questions. And we also get together at times and get the all of the specialists together as as many at a time as possible. And so it's an ongoing support Their system is basically what our team's involved in.

02:12 S1

They may not have had much experience when they first start. You've had decades of experience. Tell us about yourself. You have low vision, don't you?

02:21 S2

I'm partially sighted. Legally blind. Yep. About 3% sight. I've got an interesting sight condition. Mine was from birth, and I've got scarring on the back of the eye, so I use my peripheral vision. Technically, I should have a dead spot in the middle of my eye, but I don't see it. Probably because, you know, the brain's a really clever thing, and it fills in that little gap that would normally be seen so that I walk into a room and my eyes move around and I get the entire picture, so I don't get to see the dead spot at all. Interestingly, sometimes I walk down the street and somebody just pops out of nowhere because obviously they were in that spot and my eyes hadn't moved as yet. 

But apart from that, I use my peripheral vision. I use, you know, a screen reader on the computer. I use a lot of the things that I talk about all the time when I'm doing group talks.

03:17 S1

Now, you said you use a screen reader. Do you look at text on a screen as well?

03:21 S2

I can see that there's text there, but I can't necessarily read it unless I'm up close and unless I enlarge it. So but it means that I can follow along with what the screen reader is reading, and that's definitely an advantage. Yeah, you can see where the images are, where the text would be. I've also got enough sight to be able to use the mouse cursor. I tend to have the mouse speak anything that's under it. So by, uh, moving the mouse around the screen, I can actually sort of skip-scan text.

03:54 S1

Yeah.

03:54 S2

Very interesting. Start on the first paragraph and that's not interesting. I'll just go to the next one. So yeah, that's a real advantage as well.

04:03 S1

So you walked in the door of Vision Australia 30 years ago. What brought you there? What were you doing before you started this sort of work with the organisation?

04:12 S2

Back then I was working for VicRoads as a switchboard operator. VicRoads had 6000 extensions when I first started. They had one of those flick folders where, you know, there was 6000 names on this thing that you had to spin around and find what it was, which wasn't all that easy to do because the text was pretty small and there was eight switchboard operators - you know, all the others were sighted.

04:39 S1

So you mean telephone switchboard operators, for the modern generation who mightn't know that concept?

04:45 S2

It was one of those switchboard situations where the moment you open the switchboard in the morning until we close at 5:00 with eight people answering calls, there was always 20 calls waiting to be answered. And, you know, that's how busy it was. So looking up an extension was pretty vital. But to their credit, they they put computers in with an interesting system. And so we had a database of all the extensions. And to their credit they actually hired someone to make the system talk. Took him three months to do it. I could then look up a name and it would actually tell me what it was, tell me what the extension was, and it made things so much quicker. We're talking 37, 38 years ago. That was my first introduction to a computer.

05:37 S1

Then you joined what was then the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind became Vision Australia. Years later, in 1994, what were you doing just prior to joining the organisation? Why did you join?

05:49 S2

Luckily, I started picking up books and reading about the computers and the speech, and on my rostered days off, I was actually selling the system to other government departments and installing it. David Blythe - who a lot of listeners might know of - David Blythe was one of the managers at the Beeb at the time, and he approached me and offered me a position as an adaptive technology consultant because he wanted somebody who had a vision impairment doing the job. He thought that was, would be a really good need, and that wasn't around at the time. And there were very few adaptive technology consultants around the country at that time. And there was really, the [?vibe] had the vast majority of them. There's another one in Sydney. There weren't many. 

So those early years, when David offered me the position, I jumped at it. It was just something new for me and and being able to get in and actually help other people. That's what I really wanted to do. I love that, you know, getting together with people and showing them, you know, what's available, showing them what's around.

07:02 S1

I seem to remember one of the main issues of the day was this business of using the DOS or text environment, and then computerisation moved to the graphic user interface as it was described with the graphic icons on the screen. There was that. And what other things were you really thinking about at the time?

07:24 S2

DOS was easy. I actually thought that was a really easy system for screen readers and other programs. Windows came in and that was a whole new world. We were lucky that people like Choice Now, Freedom Scientific got into that. Windows Arctic was around then. It was extremely expensive equipment back then. The other problem was, of course, being able to read a document. Just something you're given. So, you know, OCR devices at the time, it was reading a bill, reading a letter, all that sort of thing. They were the the real challenges of the time.

08:07 S1

And even computerised PDF was impossible. And it was a bad word amongst the blindness and low vision community back in the mid to late 90s, wasn't it?

08:16 S2

Very much, yeah. It was very difficult to to try and read those sort of documents. Yeah. We've come a long, long way in that period of time.

08:26 S1

So what have been some of the highlights for you over that time while you've been with Vision Australia?

08:31 S2

It's those periods where something came in that really changed the... something like, there were mobile phones, you know... Nokia mobile phones, but all you could do is make a call and receive a call. Right up until the Symbian operating system came in and Talks was released. So there was a program for the mobile phone called Talks, and it spoke everything, you could... all of a sudden you could read your text messages, you could, you know, go into your contacts and... have hundreds of contacts and they'd all be read out to you. 

And then came a program for those phones called KNFB Reader. And that was a program where you could take a photo of a document and it would read it to you. And yeah, for something that was, they're so small, so pocket-sized. You could read a document, you read a sign on a wall. It was surprisingly accurate.

09:30 S1

What was your impression around late 2009 when you first saw an iPhone?

09:36 S2

Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I can still remember the the talk that Steve Jobs gave when he introduced the the iPhone. He spoke for an hour about everything it can do. And at the end he said, Oh yeah, and it can make phone calls. Yeah. And of course, the very first iPhone didn't have the accessibility built into it. But when they brought in VoiceOver, the world just changed. Yeah. That was your computer in your pocket.

10:06 S1

Mm. Well let's look forward now thinking about the present and what's ahead over the next few years. What are you going to be playing with?

10:14 S2

Yeah. Artificial Intelligence of course is the big thing at the moment. And what it can do now, there's... all sorts of equipment around, but the interesting stuff is Ray-Ban glasses, for instance. It's not meant for people with a vision impairment. It just happens to work for us. I think it was a real accident that the Artificial Intelligence that they put in there... actually works for, you know, for people with a vision impairment. All of a sudden, people started saying, Hey, we can do this and we can do that. And the people that actually... puts in all of the intelligence into the glasses started to think, Well, this does more than what we thought it was going to do.

11:03 S1

Because originally it was just thought of as a solution for people who wanted to be able to take videos, listen to their music, etc., hands free.

11:11 S2

Exactly. And, you know, it was like I said, it was more of an accident that the... AI... component to it actually did a lot more people might be familiar with an app called Be My Eyes. They now have Be My Eyes built into those glasses. And the really interesting thing was all of the engineers, all of the software engineers, they can choose what they want to work on. The vast majority wanted to work on that component, because it had that something that was completely different from what they're used to, and they really liked the idea of being able to, you know, help out a whole stack of vision impaired people.

11:51 S1

So I was thinking about these devices, like the Meta glasses and some of the what we would call mobility devices that are going to be around. How do you think people are going to do things differently, things they couldn't do before? How is it going to change people's lives?

12:05 S2

Well, that's the interesting thing. You really don't know. You can go around, you can do things, and then somebody will do things out of the box. Then everybody else realises they can do that too. So it's a bit like when the iPhone was introduced. I don't believe that Apple really knew what it was going to end up. And that's with all of these new devices that are going to be coming out, all of the new the new mobility devices that'll have the Artificial Intelligence built into it. It'll be able to tell you when when something's coming up that you're going to bump into or going to need to move left or right. It's going to give you all sorts of information that is going to be absolutely amazing. 

But I don't know that we really know what the end result is going to be until, you know, everyone gets it in their hands and are able to start playing with it.

12:55 S1

And the word gets out very quickly now, doesn't it? Because we can easily listen to a webinar that's taking place in another part of the world. There's old-fashioned email lists and other forms of social media that get the information out to blind and low vision people that couldn't have been done decades ago.

13:14 S2

Yeah, well, when I started, there were bulletin boards. There was no such thing as Google around. And, you know, Google has made all the difference. So YouTube, we can see all of those videos and, and look at the technology and see what it's going to going to do, how to how to use it. It is amazing. Absolutely amazing.

13:33 S1

Jim, it's been terrific speaking with you today. Good luck with your work as it continues with Vision Australia. And I hope we can talk again sometime on Talking Tech.

13:42 S2

Same here. Thank you.

13:44 S1

I've been speaking with Jim Pipczak, who is an Access Technology Lead with Vision Australia based in Melbourne. 

Before we go, a reminder that you can find details of this and previous editions of the program by going to VA radio, Talking Tech, VA Radio, Talking Tech, and to write to the program, all you need to do is write to Damo at Vision Australia, Damo at Vision Australia. This has been talking tech. My guest has been Jim Pipczak, Vision Australia Access Technology Lead. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.

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