Tech for your eyes, avoiding obstacles, phoning one-handed and more

00:21 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition, available from July the 23rd, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of RPA 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 Download... can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced.

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 Minute segment where we talk about Vision Australia's Vision Store. And a point that you suggested we cover today is that the store is perhaps of interest to more people than many of us might realise. 

01:11 S2

Exactly. My wife works in an optometrist. Now, what do you assume in optometry? Who deals in glasses and, you know, eye checking? Everything else would would actually have more things in their shop than just glasses and so on. And the fact of the matter is that they don't. So if you're looking for things like, you know, a little manual magnifier or let's say a magnifier. It's got a torch in it or extra magnification or things to make things, you know, the old three B's: bigger, bolder, brighter. Then you're not going to find that at an optometrist. However, the Vision Store and I want to make an exclamation on mark on the word vision. That's exactly what we do. Of course, all the other stuff for blind people as well. But as far as vision goes, we've got all the stuff that anybody would need. 

And there was that classic thing we used to run in the late 90s was when glasses don't help and that's when you need extra magnification. Things need to be bigger, bolder, brighter, all that sort of fantastic stuff. And that's exactly where the vision store goes in, because sometimes, you know, for us have been around for a long time, we associate Vision Store or Vision Australia with the Old Royal Blind Society, Royal Victorian Institute for the blind. And you sort of think in the back of your head, well, well, maybe it's sort of, you know, more for blind people than people who have just general vision issues. 

But it's not, it's equally important for both people with, you know, party sidedness, blindness, but also just that niggling thing where you think, oh my, my glasses just aren't strong enough or I just can't see enough contrast, or I just can't do this and I just can't do that. I can't use the telephone anymore. All those little things. So what do you reckon?

02:57 S1

Visit one of our stores or start with the website?

03:00 S2

No, I would certainly start with going into the Vision Store, because then you can actually talk with staff that are there and you can get your hands on things and literally try them out, because for low vision in particular, or for people who've got vision issues, it's really good to try things out. Maybe then when you've had a bit of a look around the store, that's when you would go onto the shop visionaustralia.org website, but I would certainly visit, I think we've got 23 stores around Australia. Pop in, have a look, have a play, have a chat and then see what you can do after that.

03:28 S1

Shop visionaustralia.org is the website for Vision Australia's Vision store. Now last Friday afternoon, I turned the radio on for the first time in about two hours because I was doing other stuff and the broadcaster said, we're bringing you coverage of the global IT outage. Well, like anybody else who put their radio on about the same time, I was astounded. Just explain what happened.

03:57 S2

A good old Australia because we were the first to actually encounter the the global outage. So windows computers that were in a corporate environment. So, you know, an enterprise environment started displaying the dreaded blue screen of death. And once that happens, you know that... you're at the end of the line. And lots of people tried to restart their computers and it still wouldn't work. And then, of course, everyone originally thought there'd been a cyber attack - and, you know, it's going to be the end of the end of the world. Or most like things were just quite awful. But as we found out late afternoon on Friday that it was actually a buggy updated file from a company called CrowdStrike, who are a cyber security company, to prevent, you know, malicious things happening to your computer. 

So one of the control files had a bug in it. And unfortunately for Microsoft Windows operating system, that file completely stuffed up the whole operating system, to put it bluntly. And you had to wait until CrowdStrike actually released a fix for it. And what they've been saying over the weekend and what they're even saying, yesterday, Monday and today, Tuesday is absolutely do not try and fix this yourself because you'll probably get yourself in more water or hot water, as the case may be. Wait for your IT department to contact you. You really do have to log in again to your network, on your proper network, in your enterprise. And then normally an identified person, if you don't have a local IT support identified person in your workplace will then go through the fixes. 

And of course for us that are blind and low vision and rely on access technology, there is no way that you could even try and do it with your own access technology, because this is part of the boot sequence into the system. So it's not the fact that Jaws or Zoomtext would even be running. So again, you'll have to wait for sighted support, to intervene.

06:05 S1

Let's hope everybody's back to normal now. But it was amazing that around the world it affected health systems. Finance, travel media, was amazing.

06:14 S2

Correct. And I did see a a message from the ministry with this sort of stuff over the weekend. And apparently we're seeing it's going to take about a week or two for things to come back to normal. So yeah, it was it was a bit of a taste of what could happen with, you know, a very serious issue that can bring things down like we just discussed.

06:34 S1

Now let's talk about a product called Biped Noa, a very interesting one that you've been playing with.

06:41 S2

Yes. Biped is actually the name of the company. So it's Biped Robotics. And the system itself is called NOA, which actually stands for navigation, obstacle detection and artificial intelligence. So, NOA, and if you can imagine wearing almost like a bit of a vest over your shoulders, so on the left hand side, on the top of your chest, you've got a camera module which contains nine cameras. On your right hand side, you've got another little control rectangular unit that's got your buttons to control it, and then it goes up and around the over your shoulders, round the back of your neck, and you've got a very lightweight battery. What it does is, it's only interested in obstacles that you will collide with or that will collide with you. 

So if a fixed obstacle or obstacles that are moving towards you or away from you, um, it does have standard cane mode. It's also got a guide dog mode. And one thing that I've always wanted, uh, two things in mind to do with is it does holes and it does stairs. And when I say holes, it also does. It is a platform that railway stations properly. It'll tell you about stairs, whether they're going up or down. And by the way, this is all audio. So it's not saying there's stairs there, but by the audio tones you're getting back from the system, you know what those are. And the app that comes with it actually teaches you about these different sounds, which once you've done the training is pretty amazing.

08:04 S1

So did you find it sort of comfortable using it? You were getting useful information from it, I did.

08:09 S2

I found the obstacle detection amazing. The artificial intelligence function was also pretty incredible as well. It's currently being worked on overseas. I would say there's a high likelihood that Vision Australia will be selling it later on this year, but that's only a hoping one at the moment. So we'll see what happens. Because you're wearing this on your chest or over your shoulders. It's a very stable platform versus I always find it when I'm using smart glasses. I tend to always look down because I've, you know, I've been blind since I was eight, so that's always been an issue. But having it over your shoulders, it's a nice stable platform for the cameras to work properly.

08:43 S1

I guess it'll cost a fair bit.

08:45 S2

So it's 4,200 currently. So if we do indeed decide to sell it, I guess it's going to be between, I don't know, let's say around about $7,000 and let's see if it's a bit below or a bit above.

08:57 S3

Mm.

08:57 S1

And it's called the NOA. NOA from Biped Robotics. Well watch out for that one David.

09:05 S2

Indeed. Stay tuned.

09:07 S1

Now there's a product called Ipx8, Ipx8 E which shall we say mucks up scammers.

09:15 S2

It does. So this was developed by some folks at Macquarie University. So I don't know if it's sort of deployed in the real world. They were just showing some examples of it. But what it does is it listens to the scammer in a core and effectively just wastes their time. So it does different types of phrases to what the person is saying. So, you know, and they've got different voices like an older person, a medium middle aged person, etc., etc.. And so when the scammer says something like Can you get your credit card for me because I'm here to fix your IT issue... then you know, some of the systems go, Oh, my credit card. Is that the same as my bank card? Because I don't know if I've got a credit card. And it'll just keep going on and on. And the different questions... and the scammers, it'll do different things. So in effect, it actually tricks the scammer into just completely wasting their time.

10:07 S1

I'm reminded of the classic one where the scammer asks you to open Windows and you say, Ah, sorry, there are no windows in this room.

10:15 S2

The other one that I sometimes used is, Oh hang on, I've got, I've got about 13 windows. Which one should I open? And of course, they think you're talking about the computer. And what I'm really talking about is how many windows is actually in the main part of my house. So yeah, but look, it's a really good idea. And just as a matter of thing going back to our global internet outage. Please only talk to your proper IT. People don't think that people are going to ring you up and say, We've got a fix for you right now about CrowdStrike are going to be from reputable people, because they won't be. 

10:46 S1

Mm. Let's talk about AI visual models now. They're blind.

10:50 S2

Yeah. This sounded really weird. And it caught my attention because I thought Hey wait a minute there, how can they be blind when they're looking at imagery? Basically what it's talking about is the fact that when the systems get an image, they're comparing that image to a database of that what they've been trained upon. So that's when you get what they call the hallucination by AI systems that for some reason or another, it can't map what the image is to its database. And it was interesting because I was talking to a person during the week who's a data analysis type person and is working with AI and computer vision and everything else, and apparently there's a classic one where you can change one pixel in a picture of a bird and it becomes a camel. 

That's just a good thing to think about that when our systems do object recognition, as in That's a bus or that's a car or whatever else, take it with a grain of salt and a bit of common sense, because it's only matching the image to a database. It's not a real person going, Yes, this is a so and so. And the other one example they had quickly was if you do separate rings like five rings, it'll get them. If you then cross over those rings slightly, it can't determine that there's still five circles on the page.

12:13 S1

So it's mapping what is detecting with something in a database. So if the two aren't exactly the same it's got no idea really what it is. Correct?

12:21 S2

Yeah. It's not like a us humans that can sit back and go, well hang on a minute. That's obviously intersecting, intersecting circles on a page. And yes, there's still five circles there.

12:30 S1

You have some encouraging news for those who need to use a smartphone with one hand.

12:36 S2

Yes. And this is a good reminder because as phones get bigger. So we've got you know six plus inches diagonally phones now, and you think Well hang on a minute. If I'm using one hand like I've got my cane on my guide dog in my left hand, how can I possibly navigate my smartphone? Then there's an option where you can actually pull down the screen. And this is like from a sighted concept, but it's also accessible as well. You can pull down the top part of the screen to bring it down towards the bottom part of the screen, so then you can access all the icons on the screen at the same time, and you can find it in basically settings under both iOS and Android. And it's just a good reminder. 

So the link I've got in the show notes explains it, how to do for Vanilla, Android and Samsung in particular. And of course the reachability function under Accessibility settings for your iPhone.

13:28 S1

It does work with VoiceOver or Talkback, certainly does.

13:32 S2

So literally the way you use it quickly is that you would use, say, the bottom icons down the bottom, and you think, Oh, I need to get to the back button at the top. Well, this is where you would perform the reachability function to pull those icons from the top of the screen down towards the bottom, and then you can reach exclamation mark, the back button. Then that's basically effectively in the middle of the screen.

13:51 S1

Very interesting. Before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program. Indeed.

13:58 S2

So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David Woodburn Podbean bad Ben.

14:04 S1

Com David would be our dot podbean pod b e a n.com to write to the program.

14:11 S2

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

14:17 S1

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. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.