OrCam, Apple, VoiceOver and much more

00:46S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from June the 18th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us, listening maybe through Vision Australia radio associated stations of RPH 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 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.

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 the product from the vision store of Vision Australia. What have you got for us today?

01:42S2

I have the OrCam Read 3. That's OrCam, OrCam Read 3. And this is a little handheld device. And if people that know about the OrCam in general are the ones that normally go on your glasses, basically you point the little camera at handwriting or any text, what it might be on a piece of paper or even on a computer screen, and it will read it back to you. So it sort of does very similar things. It also reads handwriting, which is for me, very cool, but the really exciting stuff to do with the the Read 3, the OrCam Read 3 is the fact that it actually comes with a stand. So it literally turns your little portable handheld reading device into a standalone reading machine, which we used to call them back in the old dark days. 

And the third really cool thing, and this is the one that I like about it, is that if you link it up to your windows computer or your iPad via a web browser, you can run some... so I'm going to use the word Artificial Intelligence to do things like summarise the page you're looking at, or perhaps ask it how much an item costs, or to search for particular things. It does quite a few different types of things, and you can also use it as a video magnifier as well. So not only does the camera do the optical recognition and the eye stuff, you can also use it as a video magnifier. So you're really getting around about three machines in one. So it's one of those great improvements that I've been thinking about for 2024, where sort of AI meets assistive or mainstream technology for us blind and low vision folks.

03:26S1

It is quite amazing how small it is.

03:29S2

I would say it's about the size of those very sort of thick marker pens. So it when I say tiny, it's very tiny and literally you potentially where you can hold it like a pen. And it's just one of those things that you can just, you know, have in your pocket, pull out when you need to. It's also got LED lights, I might say, too. So if you want to have a quick read of something in your pantry which is normally fairly dark, you can do that as well. But yes, the size of it, is like a marker pen. Or if you ever had an OrCam MyEye, which is the one that mainly connects to glasses, but at the same size as that as well.

04:08S1

It's available through the vision store of Vision Australia. It's a Quantum reading learning vision product, isn't it?

04:15S2

It is. So if you want more information or you want to demonstration, you can either contact the Vision store locations around Australia or you can also contact Quantum, which has also got different places around Australia as well and have a bit of a hands on play with it. It's about $4,000, but in this case, I think the technology in it and what it's going to do now and into the future is pretty amazing.

04:37S1

That's the Orcam Read 3 from the Vision Store of Vision Australia. We'll spend time now just whetting the appetite about what we can expect from the new Apple operating systems when they come out in September. You've been playing with the Beta version.

04:55S2

Yes, I'm doing Mac OS, iOS, iPadOS and the watch one as well.

04:59S1

Okay. What have you got across the whole Apple ecosystem to tell us about?

05:04S2

One of the major things is, and I know this sounds a bit boring a bit, but your Apple ID account now, anything associated with it is now called your Apple account, which makes more sense. Apple ID was getting a bit weird because it was associated with so many other things. It didn't make sense, and probably the overall other one is the fact that we've now got, well, they call it music recognition. Back in the old days, we used to call it Shazam, and that's your way that you can get your phone, Siri, to listen to music and tell you what the song is.

05:34S1

Anything with passwords.

05:36S2

Passwords is normally built into your system preferences, particularly on the Mac. Well, now there's a separate passwords app on both iOS. And Mac OS, and I must say, just be able to run an application, then you can just search for your passwords is a lot easier than having to keep going into system preferences and try and find it in there. So I really think that's actually a huge improvement.

06:01S1

Let's look at each device now, the Apple Mac and the new operating system 10.15 A new tips app.

06:11S2

People might not remember, or maybe you've just got bored of it, but iOS has a tips app. So does iPad OS. Well, now you've got it on the Mac as well, and it's just a little application that will pop up. Or you can go and have a look at it, and it will give you tips and tricks on how to use your system better, in this case, how to use Mac OS better. So it's just one of those little things that's quite handy to have.

06:29S1

And what about all those sounds you can hear?

06:32S2

To me, this is a huge improvement because when you turn on hearing on your extras menu before, when you turn background sounds on like rain and ocean and Brooks, that sort of stuff, it just said enable sound for each one of them. Well, now it actually has proper names of each sound, so if I feel like rain or ocean or brook, then I can turn the appropriate one on. So it's just a little change, but I think it's actually quite nice.

06:58S1

And there's a new voiceover tutorial.

07:01S2

This is just not a slight improvement to the VoiceOver practice tutorial. This is a wholly rewritten tutorial which is highly interactive, and it's a lot more extensive than the old one used to be, so that is actually very worthwhile, even for experienced users. It's worthwhile having a play with even in the beta or when it comes out in September-October.

07:25S1

What about with shortcuts on the Mac?

07:28S2

I'm going to cheat slightly and say this is also available on iOS, so you can assign any voice command to an action as long as it's supported by the operating system. Of course, it's more extensive on iOS and on the Mac. For example, I can say turn on background sounds now to my Mac. And because that's a command shortcut, it will turn my background sounds on or off rather than me having to go and do it manually. So they're the little things that you can assign voice commands to.

07:55S1

Let's talk more about iOS now and some interesting things in iOS 18. Firstly, you can power it off a slightly different way.

08:04S2

We had a chat about this before he went on air. I don't do it your way, Stephan. I do it a weird way. Yes, the power button where you can, you know, power off your device that's now available in the control centre. So if you're one of these control centre people that use the control centre all the time, right down the bottom of the screen, or you can always change them around is the power off button now. So if you've done it the long way, which I do, then that's actually a huge improvement for productivity.

08:29S1

Here's one that I'm looking forward to in settings. And it's about the settings for a specific app.

08:36S2

So you know your current version of iOS, you can imagine your settings folder having all these applications. I've got about 450 of mine, but what they've done now is they've put all those apps in a folder called apps. They're alphabetised and you've got your vertical scroll down the right hand side where you can flick through A, B, C, D and so on. So it's a much more efficient way to find an app when you want to adjust its settings.

09:01S1

Just a little thing when you're turning VoiceOver on, there's a haptic indication as well.

09:08S2

It does. It vibrates now and then. That's particularly good for deaf blind people if you're using a Braille display, because before it would just say voiceover on and the braille display didn't work, you didn't know that voiceover was on. So adding vibration to it is a really nice little feature.

09:22S1

Tell us now about the rotor and what we called the language rotor.

09:26S2

Let's now change to voices, because you can do a lot more things to do with your primary and different voices now. So I think they're trying to make it to say that it's much more than just languages. It does everything else for you.

09:40S1

Yeah. So there's lots of little accessibility changes, isn't there? Particularly with iOS.

09:46S2

They're more sort of tweaks under the hood type stuff. So they're not you know, they're not horrendously amazing. But I think as you know, as in iOS improves, they're always just little changes that do make our lives a little bit better.

10:00S1

Live detection is an example of a change that will make it easier to get to it.

10:04S2

That's right, because normally when you want to use things like door detection, people detection, scene detection, etc., you had to bring up magnifier. Well, now if you turn it on in your rotor, you can turn on all those ones that just mentioned scene door people, etc. clearing text OCR. And then you've also got a four finger, I'm going to say double tap. You can turn that function on or off which makes it very very handy indeed. So I love the fact that live detection has now come to the voiceover rotor.

10:36S1

Tell us about the big one for Braille users.

10:41S2

Can I say I've been dying to talk about this one? All show. So this one is the Braille screen input, or as people in the know like to say, the BSI. So normally when you turn Braille screen input mode on, you use your the soft keys on your screen to Braille in to an edit fill, which is all well and good. But now if you switch over to what they call command mode, it turns those keys into your navigation keys for the whole operating system. So it's as if you were using your, say your Brilliant by 20 or 40 keyboard. So you know, normally when you do like space one to go left and space for to go right, well that's exactly what you can do with the command mode. If you put it in command mode, it knows when you press 1, it's like pressing Space and 1, if you want to go home, you just press H rather than doing space H and so on. And whenever you like to, you can very quickly switch between Braille input mode and command mode. 

And the other thing you can do is the way you can turn on the BSI now is much easier. You simply touch one finger on each side of the screen. So like you're doing a letter C in Braille. So dots one and four and that will toggle it on or off. So they've even made the way you can turn BSI on and off far easier as well. I haven't extensively used it so far, but I've used it enough to think this is just amazing. And I have a funny feeling this is probably going to turn into one of my ways of navigating on. Of course, the iPhone or the iPad is the Braille on screen mode. So so two modes keyboard input or Braille keyboard input and the command mode. And it's just like I've already said several times. Incredible.

12:29S1

Looking forward to that. Let's talk about the watch now. A couple of little changes.

12:34S2

There's a few things to get excited about if you're an exercise person, but the one that I've definitely used is the vitals app. It's like a sort of a cut down version of the health app to give you your main biometrics like heart and exercise and calorie burn and everything else. So that's pretty cool. You can pause your rings. So me, like a fanatic karate person who always trains every day. If I want to be slack and take half a day off, I can turn off my rings for the rest of the day. But interestingly, what they've actually got rid of, which is probably a little bit sad, is they've got rid of the Siri face. So if you used to use the Siri face on your Apple Watch, they've got rid of it. And I have a funny feeling they've got rid of it because hardly anybody used it. It was always talking. It was annoying. So I just think they went well. We tried. That didn't work. We'll take it away.

13:20S1

I just hope Mickey Mouse is still there for my granddaughter.

13:23S2

Mickey Mouse is still there. And I think there's one called Snoopy. But I think Snoopy might have been there already.

13:28S1

You haven't discovered anything about Apple I yet. There is something for people to know though, and that is that that's not happening in the watch world.

13:39S2

No, it's not happening in the watch world and it's not happening in the HomePod world either. And remember that they're not even really going to touch upon this stuff until probably middle of spring our time. And then it's going to be a gradual implementation. I did see on a day where they did say that Siri will probably get more of a conversational mode, but it certainly won't be any other Apple intelligence stuff going on. So that's something to look forward to. I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe next year, Steve, we get an updated HomePod and an updated Apple Watch that can definitely do the AI stuff from Apple. 

14:15S1

Thank you, David, for giving us your initial impressions of the Betas for the new Apple operating systems. Before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about.

14:27S2

Indeed, as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David Woodburn Dot Podbean pod Cbn.com.

14:33S1

David would be r dot podbean podbean for.com to write to the program.

14:40S2

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

14:45S1

david.woodbridge@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.