The New Pixel Phone

00:36

S1 (Speaker 1)

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from October the 10th, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us, wherever you're listening may be through Vision Australia Radio, associated Stations of Australia or perhaps the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. The way to find that is to search for the two words talking Tech and Dan it can come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. 

Another option is to ask a 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 game that's become very accessible. Tell us about Forza motorsport.

S2

For people that don't know what this game is, it's literally a racing game for a console. So you've got your, your controller for your Xbox, your PC, and then you've got the game, of course, and you can choose different racing tracks around the world to race your particular car. Now of course, all this is very visual. What they've done with the release that's coming out this week is they've got all these accessibility things, not just for blind and low vision people, but for other disabilities, but particularly for blind people. They've got all these different types of audio signals and assistance to help you drive your car. 

So, for example, when you're on the right line, so everybody knows about when you listen to racing like F1 and so on, all the separate cars that talk about the racing line, well, you can hear an audio tone when you're on the racing line. If your wheels start to go off the side of the track, you can hear a different sound. To do that when you need to start to brake, accelerate and so on. Around the corner, you get different tones again to help you. 

And it's also other features which I think one of them is called something like heavy assistance, which basically means the software itself will help you drive the car a bit better. So it'll be a bit more generous about you putting the accelerator down or braking. It'll try and help you learn when to accelerate a brake and that sort of stuff. So it really does mean, particularly if you like me and my daughter has a whole racing wheel. So it's like you've got your foot pedals and your racing steering wheel that you really do feel like you're driving that car because you've got all the other sound effects, you know, of the engine and revving and braking and squealing tires and the crowds and all sorts of wonderful things. 

So if you're into that type of sports and you would always love or wanted to play a game that sort of people play, then this is your chance. So it's again, it's called Forza Motorsport and the official date that it came out is going to be October 10th. But basically I'm saying it's available this week. So go forth and race to your heart's content.

S1

And just remind us what technology do you play it on?

S2

So this will be the PC as in Windows Computer or your Xbox. But of course most people play it on the Xbox and it has to be the latest version of the Xbox. So it has to be the Xbox One s, which is the new Xbox.

S1

Very interesting. Yeah, It's the time of the year when Freedom Scientific or we know them now. As for Spyro from their stable come the public betas of Jaws fusion and zoom text. Please elaborate.

S2

So Jaws of course is the screen reader which feeds off information off the screen. For blind people, Fusion is a combination of the screen reader Jaws and their main product for low vision people, which is called Zoom text. So you've got three products Jaws, Zoom, text, so screen reader screen magnifier. And when you combine the two of them, they're called fusion. And what they've got now is the 2024 public betas that are now available to download and use. So these are like ones that you can actually use to have a bit of a play for them before they're commercially released and give them feedback. 

The two main features that I know caught our attention. One was to do with when you're on a video call to make sure that your face is in camera view. If you've got enough lighting and if you're moving your head around that sort of stuff too much, which most video cameras don't like you're doing. And another mode, particularly for Jaws, is structured Braille mode, which means you can split up the display to monitor or and or read different documents open on your Windows computer. So that's going to be interesting for people that want to be a bit more productive using their Braille displays. 

And as far as Zoom Text goes. And when I say zoom, text them. Also talking about fusion, because remember, it's part of draws and zoom text in one package. They seem to have spent a lot more time making the interface much easier to use. They have made a few changes, I believe, to enhancements to do with the mouse cursor and so on. But reading the documentation over the weekend, it seems primarily that they've been trying to make all the the toolbars and the menus more streamlined. So it's much easier to pick up and start using straight away.

06:09

S1

And the actual official release certainly of Jaws is around the end of October each year and the others are around about the same time, aren't they?

S2

Exactly, yeah. Correct.

S1

Now, our friends at Nvda, it's an Australian company which has software which is freely available, though a donation is very helpful to them. The public beta is out for this year.

S2

That's right. So they do a number of betas per year. I think it's round about four per year I think. So I think this one's number four. Again, for people that might not realize Nvidia is a course again, a screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Nvda stands for Non-visual Desktop access, and the update for their public beta is primarily around bug fixes to do with things like Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Word and so on, and a few behind the scenes twists and a few more commands to do with their Braille display. 

Remember that you don't actually have to buy a commercial screamer like Jaws or Supernova from Dolphin. You don't have to use the narrator built in screen reader. You've always got Nvda there to get you out of trouble.

S1

A wonderful Australian success story.

S2

Absolutely. Yep.

S1

The new pixel phone and watch. Tell us about them.

S2

This is the pixel eight phone and of course the pixel to pixel watch. These were announced last week. And the reason why I always like to mention these is because these are the official versions of Android slash Google that you always get the latest and greatest updates from. So if you're with other manufacturers like Samsung, HTC and so on, you basically have to wait to get their software update that's done by those particular manufacturers and developers of the updated versions of their slightly different versions of Android 14, for example. So that's one huge benefit. 

The other benefit, which I thought was quite interesting, was that they also announced that the Pixel eight will be software supported definitely for seven years. So I think that's actually a really good thing because normally we think, oh, you know, 3 or 4 years out of a smartphone that you should be it. But no, they're doing it up to seven years. And of course with the Pixel two watch, they're also announcing some more accessibility stuff to do with that watch as well. 

So like I always say, with both Android, in this case, the Pixel eight and the Pixel two Watch and Samsung, they're always great spaces to watch because they keep improving the interface and accessibility almost every single year.

S1

There's been some very good work done with information about various Android accessibility features and some YouTube productions. Tell us about that.

S2

In the link up in the show notes, I've got a few interesting YouTube demos on the Lookout app, which is the one you use for object recognition and text detection and so on. Also, Talkback itself, which is the actual screener that you actually use to make the phone talk to you. And there's a few other ones there as well. So again, this has been one of the things that's been a little bit, I guess, missing in the Android world is that there's no real good documentation or videos or tutorials from Google or other places. 

So this is a really good start in making sure that people have got something to both watch and listen to, to start learning how to use the Android system properly, particularly with Talkback.

09:49

S1

At that time, we talked again about tactile or Braille graphic displays. Explain what they are and what's happening at the moment.

S2

We've got three what are called tactile graphics display on the market and what they are are effectively ten lines of a broad display all in one big array. And when it displays diagrams or Braille itself, as in real brother, you can read as in literally Braille. It uses those ten lines to produce the Braille. And when it does the drawings of a tactile diagram or a chart and so on, it then uses more pins on that Braille display. Ten line area to make sure that all the lines and pictures that you're feeling are sort of very continuous lines and everything's shaded in properly. 

So it's like filling a real picture. We don't have much to do with the one from orbit research, the ones that we have in Australia at the moment we're currently looking at is the dot pad which I've already talked about in the program and the one that I'm going to be having a look at starting this week is actually going to be the monarch. And as far as I can tell, Stephen, the main difference between the two of them is the dot pad is more for grab stuff off the Internet or do your own drawings. 

So if you're a teacher, you can quickly do a drawing on your iPad or your iPhone comes out on the actual dot pad itself. And I can also do my own drawings, whereas the monarch seems to be, here's a system where you can download all I think it's 15,000 diagrams worth of tactile whatever from the main printing house for the blind in the States. And you can also download Braille files that the software will then translate into extended brief or brown files so that they look really good on the actual Braille display. Plus it's going to have a scientific calculator and all sorts of other things. So it's a very much geared to education.

The price of these things. The monarch is going to be about double the price of the dot pad. But as far as I'm concerned, they've got very specific niches in the market. The dot pad is very much of your this is what you can do if you want to muck around, whereas the monarch is we've got all these nice things for you to use. And by the way, people that are familiar with human wear, yes, it is based on Qi soft running on Android.

S1

But we're not talking about them for the individual. Probably more for the educational environment.

S2

Definitely for the monarch because we're looking at $20,000 us for the dot pad. It's $10,000 US. So maybe with the dot pad you can see yourself, maybe even also getting it for job access and those sort of things. But yes, they're more aimed at the educational market, whether that's, you know, school, TAFE, college or university.

S1

For something completely different. Tell us about some interesting apps you've found recently.

S2

This was actually really cool. I listened to the Double Tap podcast that Stephen Scott does and he had a person that came on and reviewed a little app called Train Sounds. This app in particular is actually free and you run it and you get 46 different types of sounds of trains, including my favorite one, which is where you get that other train going through a level crossing. So you get that ding, ding, ding, ding, ding sound as the train goes past the level crossing and it sort of gets louder and fades off in the distance. But then when I had a look at settings, the button, the only thing that was under the settings button was other apps that we produce. And there were all these other apps with to do with sounds like different crow sounds different, other bird sounds, different sort of city based sounds and so on. So if you're very much into all the different types of sounds that you might want to listen to, it's not a bad way to do it. The only thing I didn't like about the train app itself, though, they weren't labelled, so I didn't have, you know, train going through a level crossing that was labelled Train Sound three. But besides that, I did have a really nice time. Listen to all 46 different train sounds.

S1

Just before we go, a reminder of where we have details of what you've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

S2

You can check out my blog site, which is David would be a dot podbean pad veon. Com.

S1

David would be our dot podbean podbean to right to the program.

S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work. David Dot Woodbridge How it sounds at Vision Australia-ot-org.

14:37

S1

David-dot-Woodbridge at Vision Australia-dot-org. This has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.