News from the Vision Store

00:17S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from February the 20th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolly. 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 get the podcast, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and downer 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.

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 little bit of a vision store off. That's the the shop of Vision Australia news for people particularly who use the Parramatta Centre.

01:14S2

Indeed, what's happening between February 21st and April 22nd is that they're doing quite a few renovations downstairs on the ground level, which just happens to be where the vision store is. So of course, with renovations, that means the vision store has to close. So what we tend to recommend is then you can certainly purchase all your Vision Australia products via the online shop, which is the Shop Vision Australian website. Or if you need to get your hands on a product to have a bit of a play with before you purchase, then remember that you can also visit the Caring Bar Office, the Epping office and they'll be able to give you hands on demos. 

Just keep in mind though, that with the comb bar and the Epping offices, they're actually smaller places and we just can't fit the amount of stuff that we actually have in the vision store at Parramatta. So ring up beforehand via the main one 308 4746 number, just to see if the item that you want to have a bit of a play with is there. But certainly you can ring us up on that number. I've just mentioned the website that I've also just mentioned. And hopefully we'll be back in business in about two months time.

02:27S1

Yep. Great website shop Vision Australia George. Now a Vision Australia store product. Our product Minute and my spotlighting the mini guide this week.

02:39S2

This is always been my favourite device. I want to say almost from the year dot. It's a little handheld device. It almost feels like a torch in your hand. It's got a little cap over the end of it, and when you pull that cap off, you've got two sonar sensors. And of course, when you turn the unit on by the big button on the top of it, um, you can have it preset to three different levels. So I've got my anomaly set to 0.5m, two meters. And I've got mind set to a whopping four meters and it vibrates. It does have this weird option, Stephen, that I've never actually used because I can't stand it when I first heard it. But you can plug in a pair of headphones and listen to the sonar pulse. 

And I must say, there's nothing worse than listening to because you can't adjust the volume. The sound just is basically overwhelming. So really, it's a handheld vibrating device. The faster it vibrates, the closer the object is to you. It's got a little lanyard on the back of it, so when you're not using it, you can sort of simply strap it around your hand. Or I normally put it back in my pocket, but it's a really great adjunct to your cane or your your guide dog, because you can just sort of whip it out when you feel like it, sort of scan around and take it from there. So I tend to cheat sometimes when I'm at one of the stations, because I know when the thing stops vibrating, then I know it's the end of the world and I can just tell my guide dog to, you know, turn left and find the ramp. But I've always liked the fact that these devices that just have one function, dare I say, which is object detection, only work very well, and the mini guide is certainly one of them.

04:06S1

And it's not too expensive.

04:07S2

I don't think so. And look, you know, when we say not expensive in blindness terms, it's always relative. If I had to buy this as a sort of person, I'd say it's a bit horrendous. I think it's about $700 Australian... hmmm, very good.

04:20S1

And that's the mini guide available from the vision store at Vision Australia. There's some other products that you are going to be investigating and telling us more about in the future. One of those, the Ultra Cane.

04:33S2

So this is a cane. And again it's only function is object detection. That's all it does. It's got two ultrasound devices in or two sonar sounds actually. And again what the what they do is the one that sort of goes straight out in front of you to detect objects above your waist height. And then of course, one that you can do above your head height. Now, I believe you can change the angles up. I'm not too sure about my demo units turning up this week. Again, what I want from an object detection sonar device is, you know, my cane has already taken care of stuff below my waist height. I want to know about stuff above my waist and above my head height in case I hit my head on a, you know, back of a backed up high truck or branch and so on. So I'm still on the search for the holy grail of sonar units. I still remember back in the 1970s when I first tried out the Sonic glasses, and it still has been nothing yet that replaces the functionality of that device. What's that practically? Was that 50 years ago?

05:34S1

It is. Yes. And I was one of the fortunate ones who spent time with that device as well. There are sonar glasses on the horizon for us.

05:42S2

This is done by a company who produces two products once called the sonar glasses, and the other one's called the sonar. I know I mentioned that briefly in a minute. The sunglasses, it's using sonar, pulsed sound waves to detect objects in front of you. Again from above your waist height and above your head height. Very straightforward design from I think it's one up to three meters you can set it for. And they're just a nice pair of simple glasses. Now in the States you can also have them with prescription lenses. So if you happen to be a low vision person that wants a bit of extra object detection, you can get that as well. I don't know if we'll be going to that level here in Australia if we decide to bring them in or not. But I thought first the thing we need to do is evaluate them. So I'll be doing that. 

And the reason why I mentioned the sonar guide briefly before, it's a device that attaches to a wheelchair. Now it has to be custom made to fit a wheelchair. Over the years, I know there's been a few blind people in particular and very, very low vision people that are actually in a wheelchair. Uh, so I find it a bit hard to use a kind motor in a chair. And I think something like the sonar guide, which attaches to the chair and then gives you indication objects in front of the chair would be very interesting. So I'm going to talk to my my boss about that in the future. But initially it's going to be us having a look at the sunglasses, which will hopefully turn up to evaluate for me in the next couple of weeks or so.

07:05S1

Staying with object detection with the release of the iPhone 12 Pro that was in 2020, came a technology that was new to that environment and that's LiDAR. Object detection is one of the things about LiDAR. Where are we now? Uh, as we are post the release of the iPhone 15. So it's good three years.

07:29S2

The LiDAR itself is still as good as it's ever been, because literally it's the light bouncing back off an object. And, you know, if you use the magnifier app in the iPhone 12 Pro and above, um, people might remember in COVID that you can tell how far a person is in front of you. And of course, they've extended its functionality to do more sort of object recognition type stuff like door detection, but it's always improving. And there's a few apps that I will put in the show notes about some LiDAR apps that will actually help you indicate how far objects away, because at the moment, object recognition apps that tell you that the object in front of you, as far as I'm concerned, still doesn't work properly. And that's why I'm so keen to rely on there's an object in front of you, rather than saying there's an object which is in front of you, because most of the time I've been finding with my stuff, I just gets it wrong. Anyway.

08:25S1

Now something with an emphasis really on the needs of people with low vision. Shelley Brisbane, who lives in the United States. She's a journalist. She has low vision. She has explored recently the Apple Vision Pro, a very interesting article about her initial experience with it.

08:43S2

And I'd say it's a very fair article because she talked about her experience as a low vision person, the difficulty to some extent that she had in the actual shop doing the demo at the Apple Store, uh, she then went through and basically commented on her experience with all the different types of demos that she was getting shown what I liked about it, and she also talked about that. This is just the starting point for us in looking at what the Vision Pro can deliver, blind or low vision people. And I thought that was really good because this is only the start. Remember, it's a 1.0 product. It's only been out for less than a month. It's very, very early days. So rather than us thinking, well, it certainly won't do what things like the envision glasses do or other stuff. This is just the beginning. So let's wait to what happens in the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. 

And certainly let's see what happens when a new device 2.0 comes out, or a lighter version or whatever else happens. So I think it's watch this space for the next two years, and I think we'll be pleasantly surprised.

09:51S1

Shelley Brisbane does a very interesting podcast to the parallel podcast, which talks about developments in accessibility alongside mainstream technology. Well worth catching up with if you like podcasts.

10:04S2

It is. It's one of those excellent podcasts and I find she does a really good job.

10:08S1

Let's move into the screen reader world now. One of the things that came out with the jaws 2024 release from Freedom Scientific. It was the split screen mode and human were have taken quite an interest in this as well.

10:23S2

So this is basically the way that sighted people were being able to have multiple screens. So what happens is when you use draws with your browser display. So in this case the B40 um, you can actually set it up so that one part of the display will focus on one item on the screen. And another part of the display will focus on something else. So you can keep monitoring things rather than having a sort of alt tab around or tab around or anything else. This allows you to be much more productive now. The YouTube demo that I watched was actually very interesting, but I think it's definitely one of those things that you're going to have to learn how to use it by just doing it, because it had six different modes that you can use the actual split brow display mode with. 

So what I would suggest is pick the one that you want to use and play with that. And then once you get comfortable with that particular one, go on to the next one. But no, it's certainly a really great advancement in using a screen reader with a Braille display.

11:22S1

Yes. And the wider the braille display, more cells per line, the better it works for you.

11:27S2

Yeah. This is where you. Wouldn't it be lovely if you could do this? Well, you can do it on 90. So Braille display because of the focus which is from Freedom Scientific. Anyway that would be really cool. Maybe that's an excuse to get a bigger Braille display.

11:38S1

Thinking back over 30 years to the Braille and speak, which we talked about a few weeks ago, and its descendant, the BT speak from Blazey Technology. You found a tutorial about this exciting new device.

11:51S2

So this is the first of, I hope, many tutorials that Blazey technology will be due in relation to the BT speak and of course the BT speak Pro and it sounded really nice when I listened to it actually today, you know, you could hear the good old dick talk speech in the background. You could hear what I would consider the keyboard to be a little bit noisy. For people that do podcasts, that might be an issue because you're recording the noise. But no, it definitely went through a physical introduction of the device, talked about the options menu and everything else and device, how to connect it up to WiFi and so on. So it's looking very real now. I mean, I know it's going to be real as of March 1st, and hopefully I'll have mine very soon after the March 1st release in the United States.

12:38S1

I'm going to ask you more about this in a week or two, when you've had more experience with it, but you've started playing with the 11 labs voices.

12:46S2

Yes. And this is where you can generate your own personal voice. In my case, you can choose different already preset voices. So what I've done is I've taken one of my recordings up to about five minutes. I put it through the system of 11 labs and generated a similar sounding voice to my own. And then what you simply do is you drop text in this edit field. You then turn it to generate into a talking document, i.e. my voice speaking. And what happens is initially there's about three parameters that you can change easily by default, which is to do things with stability, clarity and emphasis, I think. 

So they're all sort of sliders. And what you do, you play with each one of those sliders. I played it to my wife and I said, does this sound like me? And she said, yep. Was that you really doing it? I went, no, that was a generated version of my voice done by an AI system. And that's really scary because as we said before the the radio show today, Stephen, we could almost write up her own script and have two eyes talking. People wouldn't know. It's not. It's not real after all.

13:48S1

Don't worry everyone, we won't do it. Just before we go, a reminder of where you can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

13:58S2

You can check out my blog site, which is David Woodbridge Podbean-dot-com.

14:03S1

davidwoodbridge.podbean.com to write to the program.

14:10S2

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

14:16S1

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 - stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.