30 years of change in assistive tech

00:21 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from August the 27th, 2024. 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's also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words Talking Tech and DNA 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 for the last 12 years I've been saying Vision Australia's David Woodbridge. Well, David is still with us, but you're not Vision Australia's now, David, there's been a bit of a change after 34 years of service through Vision Australia. Congratulations on that.

01:16 S2

Thank you. But it also sounds like I'm getting very, very old, so I'm not too sure. But yes, I have moved on from Vision Australia. And can I say though, is that while I've enjoyed my time at Vision Australia and number two, I am really excited to look into the future. I can't share much yet, but I will definitely be around and about.

01:35 S1

Don't worry, I'm going to try and get more out of you over the next few minutes about the future, but let's go right back. 34 years ago, when you walked in to the office of the Royal Blind Society at Enfield in Sydney, what sort of a job did you walk into?

01:50 S2

Well, back then we were called the Technology Resource Officer roles, which actually made me feel like I was a troll hiding under a bridge somewhere and popping out and surprising people. Basically, what I used to do for the next 15 years or so was to basically assess, recommend, install, support, and train people on assistive technology and or mainstream stuff for home, work and education. So it really hasn't changed that much, except the thing that I had back then to use as far as technology went was a landline phone, original Toshiba 1000 PC plus running keynote. And I think about a year when I first started, I think I also got a Braille and Speak. So there were the three things that I use. 

So no mobile phone, no smartphone, no graphical user interface. It was all DOS. People might remember good old WordPerfect 5.1. That's what I used a lot of the time. And we were we were really great, Stephen, because later on in a couple of years later, we got a pager. So you got a beep, beep, beep notification from the pager. And then when you got to the next town, when you're out and about seeing clients in rural areas, you then could find a phone and then ring back the office and say, I believe I've got a message. So I remember those days fondly.

03:17 S1

I think it was in 1994 I first had a conversation with you. I was wrestling with the graphic user interface for windows, and a friend said to me, talk to this bloke at the Royal Blind Society in New South Wales, David Woodbridge. Fortunately, where I worked, I had access to an STD line, so I rang David Woodbridge. You probably don't remember that conversation, but it did help me along the way with one of the early screen readers. It was the IBM Screen reader. So there was the graphic user interface, and there's been other challenges as well. Tell us about sort of the maybe the three things that have made a difference that you've had to conquer.

03:59 S2

Yeah, of course, as we all know, it was the graphical user interface. Of course, with windows. And it took a long time between, you know, windows 3.1 and 3.11 coming out until we got proper screen reading, because doing it via the IBM Screen Reader OS 2, because you had to run OS 2. So GUI stuff. Can I just say that from an Apple loving point of view? I was using the Mac in 1990. So I wasn't too worried about the GUI with windows because I had already been using a mac already with outspoken. So Windows. The next major thing was smartphones. Now I won't say who this person was, but in 2009 I got really excited about, of course, the iPhone and then subsequent Android phones. The person at the time said, oh, do you really think this will take off? Or does David just think it's a gimmick? And I still remember that person's statements quite well. 

And of course the third one, which I'm excited to see. Where that goes, of course, is the multiline Braille and graphics display from Humanware. So, you know, so we go to DOS to go. We go from, you know, landline phones to mobile phones to smart phones, and we go from single Braille lines to multi-line Braille and graphics. And so that's to me, are the three amazing events that have happened in the 30 or so years I've been at BHS, and then Vision Australia.

05:24 S1

For the person listening who's not a Braille person, maybe the casual person driving somewhere that's hearing talking tech, just unpack that one a little bit more about the multi-line braille display and the graphics.

05:37 S2

So traditionally a Braille display is normally, you know, the tiny little ones are 14 cells, so 14 characters across. Then you've got sort of different ones. You've got 20, 24, 32, 40 and then the humongous ones which are 80, um, which you'd have on your desk, of course. But the thing about that is that you can't then like, look at a graphic or a tactile graphic on the screen because you've only got one line you can imagine trying to if you're a sighted person trying to scan up and down a visual screen, one line at a time. Well, what this does, it puts that whole graphic on and the really cool thing about it, Stephen, with the monarch, you can have an overall picture of the tactile, let's say the Eiffel Tower, and then you can zoom in and see much more detail. And that to me is absolutely amazing. So we're getting very close in a way to what sighted people get.

06:28 S1

So what's going to be catching your attention in the future?

06:32 S2

A couple of things. Smart glasses, because they are really getting close to being an assistive technology as well as a mainstream product. Number two is to see where orientation mobility goes, because we're always knowing that there's things coming out like the biped, the glide, and so on. And the third one, and probably the most important one for me, is where artificial intelligence will take us as far as assistive technology, mainstream productivity, education, so on and so on is concerned. So to me, you know, this came on the market very rapidly in the last 3 or 4 years and it's just like a snowball. It's just gathering momentum. It's gathering more mass as it goes down the hill. 

And I've really jumped on the bandwagon with AI because it's made my job for doing research, for talking tech and other stuff that I do for social media and so on a lot easier.

07:27 S1

You can see a lot of good with AI. More good than bad though. Any bad could be really big bad, but that's for sort of the external world.

07:36 S2

To look out there. That's right. And look like like if everything. I mean, every time I listen to the news, I take it with a grain of salt because I think it's one person's point of view or it's one media corp point of view. So like if everything just use it with common sense, like if you're told the world's black and then you know quite well that it's blue, then I don't know if I'd actually believe it. Somebody told me it was black. Use everything with a grain of salt and a bit of common sense, and I think everybody will be fine.

08:03 S1

So what's happening for David Woodbridge over the next few months and years?

08:07 S2

I've got some interesting prospects coming ahead, which I'm actually really excited about. Hopefully I'll be able to share one of them hopefully next week when I come back to do the program again. Besides that, all my social media stuff stays in place, so I'm still doing Mastodon X, I'll still be doing my IC podcast. I'll still be sharing all the information that I normally share. So really, in some ways not much has changed. I'll still be around in some form or another.

08:37 S1

Yeah. Well, that's very good. And of course, as we go into September, we'll have Apple announcements to deal with.

08:45 S2

We certainly will. And the speculation at the moment from quite a few different sources. So again, take this with a grain of salt, is the fact that the Apple event will be on September 10th, of course, which will be September 11th, 3am. Our time in Australia on a Wednesday morning. Correct. And it'll be a thing, of course, the normal stuff. So it'll be the iPhone... it'll be the Apple Watch. There's some speculation that they may release Mac OS alongside of it, because there's new features in iOS 18 that requires the new version of the Mac, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Mac gets the same launch date, because normally it's about a month later. 

The Beta stuff's going really well. I must say, it's actually quite stable now. I think I mentioned a while ago that it was very unstable. Now it's quite solid and I'll still be doing it on the Tech Doctor blog and podcast. So I'm really looking forward to the date and see what happens. Mm.

09:41 S1

You say the Beta is going well. What things can we look forward to? You have mentioned in the past the simulated Braille device keyboard that we'll get with iOS.

09:52 S2

Yeah. Look that's actually really amazing. So for people that have used things like um, let's see the table one and all the other concept keyboards, plus the, you know, the input keyboard off your different devices like your, your Braille sense scents. And, you know, I've got a few devices in front of me now, including the brilliant P40. Well, this is just using them on the flat screen of the phone. So besides being able to Braille in, you can actually Braille navigate by using your normal navigation keys like, you know, chord or space for space one and so on. So that's actually really exciting. 

The other one that's really exciting is the notifications from your iPhone to your Mac. So when your iPhone is on the same Wi-Fi network as your Mac, you can have your iPhone in the other end of the house, and the notifications from your phone will pop up on your Mac screen. Then you can check them. So that's a really great way of being able to sort of, you know, have your iPhone on charge, different spot in the house, and then you can just basically get on with your life. 

So the third one, Steven brings me back to I. And that's the function where you have all these things available with VoiceOver. You've got object detection, door detection, people detection, text detection, point and speak where you can point in a touch screen and find out where the buttons are and so on. So that's just going to make it extremely interesting. And as far as things like camera based systems coming up that do similar things to what the software does, I'm looking forward to at some stage, somebody doing a comparison between what a smartphone can do. 

Let's not forget Google Lookout that does similar things to what VoiceOver does with its own inbuilt systems in iOS 18, and I think it will be a good comparison to see the difference between your smartphone and what these other hardware devices can do. Because when I got my iPhone in 2009, I replaced about 30 different items that all these apps replaced. So it'll be interesting to see where the the iOS and Android goes as compared to these hardware devices in the future.

11:56 S1

There's an app you've been telling me about that you run on the Mac called Whisper.

12:01 S2

Yes. And this is one of those things that I wish I had a long time ago. Mind you, it probably didn't exist a long time ago. So what it is, is you can bring in any audio file. So normally that would be an audio file of somebody talking in an interview or a podcast or whatever else it might be, and then you can very quickly ask it to then transcribe that into basically a text file. And then you can do anything you like with that text file. So for me... a lot of the research for talking tech that I really haven't spoken about lately and how I do it, I just don't check out social media stuff. I listen to a lot of audio content, but I can speed it up because I grabbed the podcast. I work it in to whisper for the Mac. I then can very quickly just go through the text and go yep yep yep. No. Yep no no. Yep yep yep. And keep all the stuff that I want and I end up with a summary. 

Now, if I was going to be a little bit smarter, I could then take that text into ChatGPT and say, summarize this document for me. So, you know, I've only been doing that lately, but this thing is as flexible as your mind can make it.

13:09 S1

So there's this audio that you might discover in a podcast on your phone. How do you get it to the Mac and get the text? How quickly can you have it as well?

13:18 S2

So let's say that it's already downloaded. I'm on my Mac. It's a little bit hard in the podcast app because it buries the audio file and it's not named very well, so that's one way to do it. The other way that I tend to do it is I airdrop it from my iPhone to my Mac, so it ends up in a nice spot that I can access it properly. So that would take, I don't know, let's say 45 seconds to transfer across. I open the app, I then tell it to go and open up this file. That takes another, I don't know, 10s. I then run the transcribing function that takes probably up to about a minute and a half or two minutes, depending on the size of the file. I save it. 

So I think all up, from having the audio file on my iPhone to having a text file on my Mac that then I've got to edit, of course, and have a look at probably takes no more than about three minutes.

14:04 S1

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.

14:11 S2

Indeed. So as usual, you can still check out my blog site, which is David Woodburn dot podbean.

14:18 S1

Com David would be our dot podbean p o d b e a n.com. Give me another email address.

14:28 S2

Indeed. So the new email address is David Woodbr, funnily enough. So d a v i d w o o d b r at gmail dot com.

14:38 S1

David Woodbr, David Woodbridge without the i d g e at gmail.com. davidwoodbr@gmail.com ... This has been Talking Tech with me has been Australia's leading blindness technologist, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.