Home / Blog / iA Cast

ACB Community Replay for 6 June

Transcript

[0:01] This is an ACB Community Call presented by American Council of the Blind.

[0:10] Music.

[0:17] This Unmute Presents Community Call was hosted on Tuesday, June 6, 2023.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another Unmute.
We want to get everyone’s tech questions answered. So go ahead and raise your hands, and we’ll get to you as quickly as possible after a couple of announcements here.
We also want to remind everyone we’re going to go through all the first hands up.
And if we have enough time, we’ll take second hands and be respectful to everyone, as you would want to be for yourself to get everyone’s questions answered, no matter how easy or tough you think they are because we always say there’s no dumb questions.
Michael, how you doing?
I am doing well. I tried to get Mallory to come live with us today.
She called me right as Chanel’s announcement was playing and I’m like, we’re live in like 30 seconds. You want to go live with me? And she got off the phone real fast.
She was not interested. Oh, well, one of these days we’ll have to get her on.

[1:17] That will be a first cause she’s never been on any of my podcasts, uh, intentionally intentionally anyways. Uh, so Marty we’ve been publishing some interesting things over at unmute.
Haven’t we? Yeah. A couple of things here and there, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
Technically working dropped yesterday with Demasi and I, if you haven’t listened to that and you want 110 minutes, Marty loves those longer episodes of rambling this between Demasi and myself, go capture that episode.
And then on Sunday I posted a follow up to a question someone had asked us related to the numpad commander on the Mac.

[1:53] Interesting thing there is I learned how I should probably configure my numpad commander because I have it configured in a way that probably could be done more reliably. And then Lynn and Marty sat down, talked about some tech things on Friday. So that was that episode that dropped. And then on Thursday, as we typically do, we had something a little bit more in depth. And that was a fun episode with Allison Sheridan from the Podfeet Empire. Uh, so if you’re interested in that, learning more about how she as a sighted Mac user tests, some apps for accessibility and what she’s done with podcasting and some fun adventures, uh, real worth the listen.
Then we posted on the shell phone show on Wednesday of last week, accessing the manual on the blind shell classic too.
Once you have that blind shell classic too, how do you go and learn more about operating the device itself? And then of Of course, we had the ACB Community Paul replay for May 30th.
We’re already in June. Can you believe it, Marty? Crazy, I know.
We’re halfway through the year already. It seems like I’m still getting over the holidays.
Definitely. Let’s go take some of these hands and then stay tuned because we have a cool demo that we will show you before the end of the hour that’s exciting that I guarantee some of you will be using this summer. Monica, who do we have first? Doc.

[3:17] Hey, Doc. How are you doing? You are muted. Good morning. Oh, there you are. Hope I’m unmuted.
Yeah, you are. We can hear you. Well, okay. I was going to give you a report on how to delete mail folders. I told you once before I was just deleting them and they were coming back.
So, I finally have figured out the routine.
Okay.
Okay. When you’re in email, you hit F6 until you get the mail folders preview, arrow to the folder you want to delete, press the application key or shift F10 if you don’t have one and then down arrow to delete folder And wallah, it is gone forever.
And you have to hit enter a second time to confirm that you do want to delete it.
Right. So that’s how it goes away forever. So let you know.
Thank you.

[4:15] Yeah. Appreciate your directions. Okay. Have a good one. You too.
Thank you. Next we have Beth.
Hey Beth. Okay. You can.
Yeah. I just saw that you, Michael, that just noticed that you had sent me an email. Yeah.

[4:38] And I didn’t read it yet, but I just noticed that before this call, but I also have a problem.
When I get into the app games, it will, no matter if I swipe, like usually you hear at the very top of the screen, like, look, Wi-Fi, cats, Wi-Fi, and then orientation, like stuff like that.
My phone just says no matter where you go on the screen.
And I don’t know why it does that.
I have an idea for you, Beth, because I saw your email and I didn’t have an immediate answer, but I think I might know what’s going on.
What I want you to try doing is and I can email these steps to you after the show as well.
Change your rotor to screen recognition, and it will probably say on and flick down once, and it should say off.
And I think then that might actually fix it.
Mine did say off because I had asked on iPhone and iPad apps for the blind and visually impaired.
I did ask about the games, and she said, make sure your screen recognition is turned off.
And mine is interesting. Okay, I don’t have another answer for you.
That might be one to reach out to the Apple Accessibility team, and they may be able to get your phone and see what’s going on there.
Okay. And I emailed them yesterday. I can’t is iPhone 13 mini. That should be good.

[6:08] Phone. Good. That’s a perfectly good phone. It was released a year ago.
Yeah, a year or a year ago.
Yeah. Yeah. So email is fine. But Beth, what I actually recommend is just give them a call.
OK, I’ll call. And if you need, I’ll email you their phone number.
But give them a call because then you get someone on the phone and they can answer the questions you have.
Emails can get lost, as we’ve all learned.
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Thanks Beth. Okay, thanks. Next we have Herbie. All right, Chris May.

[6:41] Hey, Chris, what’s going on, fellas? How you doing? Great, Chris.
Hey, so question, what did you guys think about the WWDC as far as the VR headset?
Do you think that might have some interesting potential for low vision individuals or people that are, you know, high partials? And if so, what would that be telling?
Interesting question. We’ve talked about this quite a bit actually.
Yeah, do you want to jump in and give your thoughts and then I can give my thoughts?
Well, so far my thoughts are I haven’t seen anything in terms of low vision or no vision accessibility yet.
So it’s one of those things where we’re kind of waiting to see what and how it’s going to be used.
There is an accessibility talk that’s going to be coming up sometime this week and we’re hoping they’re going to talk about it during that session.
Session. And then also, they always announce things and they always don’t announce things, and then they bring them as the year goes on before the gold master gets sent out. So.

[7:49] We’re going to see what happens here and we’re going to see how they’re going to implement it for accessibility, but it’s so new, we don’t really know yet, but we’re hoping that there will be some benefit. And this is a great representation to show you that Marty does not spend any time on social media because it was confirmed yesterday that voiceover will be supported on the VR headset. So yeah, which is super exciting. And honestly, I had no, and probably like Marty, I had no doubts that they were going to find a way to have voiceover be supported on this headset. I’ve told people on a couple of different shows that I’ve been on, I will be buying one, probably not this edition, but yes, I will be buying one. How is it going to work for a for a blind user?
I have, I don’t have that answer right now. My thought is gonna work similar to, you know, IRA.
You could put it on and it will read to you what’s around you, what’s in front of you.
If you’re walking down, you know, a doctor’s hallway and you’re looking for the room number you’re supposed to go in, or if you’re in a hotel and you’re looking for your room number or read signs, things like that.
I mean, I think that that’ll be a really good use case for it.
To actually do something like that.
All right, that sounds great. And one more last question, real briefly.
Is there anything that we should be aware of in the new iOS 17?
I think it was iOS 17, right, that they announced during WBC briefly.

[9:14] Yeah, there were some cool features. One that was really something people were liking a lot is.

[9:20] If somebody leaves you a voicemail, say like you’re in a meeting, it’ll transcribe the message, while it’s leaving the message. And you can decide whether it’s something important, you could pick it up right away, right from the voicemail if you want, or just leave it and let it go to voicemail. So people were excited about that.

[9:39] God, there were so many things. What else, Michael? Another thing that I’d recommend you do is if you join in on the BITS call tonight, I believe Herbie at 8 p.m. Eastern will be talking about it as well. So that way, more things that will come up. I think for me, one of the other cool things that I forgot about until someone else brought it up is the check-in feature.
Every time my wife or her mom or we go anywhere or her sister goes somewhere or any of us, the rule is check-in when you get to the place that you’re going. So we know everything’s okay.
Sometimes we forget to do that and you know, but we do try.
And now this can make that automated and just be that extra level of insurance to be able to say, Hey, my family is safe.
Another thing is messages.

[10:27] Another thing that was really cool is if you meet someone while you’re out and about, you can bump your phones and send your contact information over to their phone. I thought that was pretty cool.
And in FaceTime, if you call someone and they don’t answer, you can actually leave them a video message and they’ll get it when they get back to their device.
All right. Well, thank you, fellas. I appreciate your feedback on WDC a little bit. Thank you.
Yeah, no problem. All right. We do have one other person in Clubhouse, Mary. Hey, Mary.
Hello, everyone. How’s it going? Well, it’s been very frustrating. I hope someone can help me.
Help me. I had to switch email providers, so therefore my email address changed. So therefore I wanted the daily menu to come in.

[11:15] And on my new email address because at the end of May I discontinued my own one.
However, I’ve been working on it for a month and I get no response and I get, I get, and every day it’s not there and I’ve tried several different things but nothing seems to be working. So I was hoping that someone could reach out and help me. I may actually have a lot easier of a self-help solution. Let me verify that I’m understanding what you’re trying to do correctly though. You’re looking to get the daily community emails. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So if in your web browser, you, and I’m doing this right now, so I can verify that I’m telling you this the correct way, but if you go to the, yep. If you go to the website, acb.community, so no.com, just go to acb.community. There’s a, that’ll take you to a page and there’s a pay email address that says ACB community events plus subscribe at groups.io.
If you click that link and send a blank email to that email address, you should get a response email that says, Hey, are you sure you want to subscribe to this email list and just reply to it and hit send like you normally would.
And then you should start getting the daily emails and that should automatically get you on there.

[12:36] Okay, I will try that and see if that works. if it doesn’t let us know if it does or if it doesn’t but that is of course you can always send an email to community to acb.org but you’re looking for more of an automated way so hopefully that’ll help you out well i’ve sent many emails to acb community you know to different people and different but i have gotten no response check your junk mail too because that that’s not normal so i’d make sure you’re checking your junk mail as well and make sure you’re you’re sending the email to community at acb.org. Okay, well, I’ll try all those things and hopefully I’ll be happy tomorrow morning.
No problem. Just go to acb.community and that’ll take you to that page.
Okay, thank you. Bye bye. Thanks. Who we got next Monica? Lisa G. Hey Lisa!

[13:26] Can you hear me now? Yes. Yep.
Okay. I lowered my hand instead of unmuting. Hi, everybody. I wanted to give an update and a big thank you.
Okay. Big thank you. I have been struggling with Zoom, the one tap mobile for months.
I mean, really just gotten out of control.
And you gave me the Zoom email address and I sent them an email and then I said, I said, I’m depressed, like I need to get into the community.
It’s a lifeline for me, very explicit. They said, what’s the problem?
Just the day before, there were three calls I could not get into with the OneTap mobile, and I told them pressing the numbers takes too long, I’m always getting thrown out.

[14:15] I don’t know what they did. I sent them that. I haven’t heard from them again.
I said, please let me know what’s going on.
I had been able, I got into this call. I couldn’t get into this call with the one temp mobile.
So now all of a sudden it’s like magic.
I don’t know what they did or how it happened, but now it works.
So thank you. Did they make you do an update or anything or what did they do?
You don’t know what they do, anything, but that just tells you.
And I’m going to go ahead and actually send this podcast over to the access team because we’re all guilty of saying, Hey, this isn’t working, but now that it sounds like they hopefully have fixed it, we’ll definitely share that positive feedback with them.
And thank you to let us know that hopefully that has fixed it and you are now able to use one-touch dialing.
Thank you. And I hope that other people who hear this will email Zoom.
Can you repeat that Zoom email for people who might be listening?
Certainly. It’s access at zoom.us. Yep. Access at zoom.us.
You’re awesome. Thank you so very much. No problem. Thank you, Lisa. Yep. Thank you.

[15:18] Who do we got next, Monica? I don’t know if Herbie has another question in Clubhouse.
Maybe I forgot to lower his hand, but if he doesn’t, we can go to Greg.
He went away. So Greg is a let’s go to Greg. Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Hello, everybody. How are you doing? Good. Good.
So my question is, I have an iPhone eight, and I know everybody’s saying dinosaur dinosaur in the background.
But I’m happy with my iPhone 8.
What can I do to preserve that, you know, as long as possible?
What should I be doing to, you know, continue to make it work as long as possible?
Well, so the first thing I would tell you is that my dad also had an iPhone 8 plus up until about a week ago.
And he got it when they came out. And the only reason why he finally got a new phone was because it would stop charging.
The battery just was completely kaput on it.
And when he went to go get a new phone, he traded it in and they gave him $800 towards a new phone.
And I couldn’t believe it. I was blown away by that.

[16:36] The first couple of things I would say is make sure that you do the battery optimization so that your battery will last as long as it possibly will.
And what that means is you just go in and make sure that it’s set to the setting where it will charge up to a certain point, and then it will stop charging until it knows around the time that you wake up and then it will charge the last 20%.
And what that does is it doesn’t keep your battery charging, charging, charging all the time and burn your battery out.
So definitely make sure you’re doing that. that. It’ll make your battery last longer. And then I don’t know how to give a hard drive space you have on your phone, but I would definitely make sure you keep hard drive space free.
You need usually about 15 to 20% of free space for your device to run at optimal level. And keep it updated to as much as you can, until it won’t let you anymore. Those are the three things I would say to do right out of the gate.

[17:37] Yeah, and one thing I’ll tell you, Triple G, is this iOS 16 is the last update you will receive on that iPhone 8.
The iPhone 8 and iPhone 10 or X will not be supported for iOS 17.
IOS 17 will only go back as the XR.
Okay, but it shouldn’t, as long as I check my storage, and do you know how to do that?
Shouldn’t affect, you know, other apps that I download, um, correct.
As long as my storage is, is good. And, you know.

[18:10] The only thing you’re really going to have, Oh, sorry, Michael, go ahead.
I was just going to say, yep. So you can just go to settings, general and storage and check the storage, uh, of your phone, if that’s what you’re asking. And that won’t really affect it unless you fill up your storage, Marty.
I was going to say right now, you’re probably not going to notice really much of anything.
But as time goes on, once they release 17, and then that starts getting going, you’ll notice that you’re probably gonna start having apps that may not work on your phone.
Your web browser may not work on every website because you’re only gonna get to a certain point, and then it’s gonna start having security issues and things will get updated, but you won’t be.
So that’s when you start having issues, once it gets really far away being able to get updated anymore.

[18:59] Okay, I know call me a dinosaur, but I’m just, you know, I just like things, you know, that, that iPhone se 2022 has a very similar form factor to the iPhone eight, and you’ll be very comfortable and it’ll give you a lot faster of a device.
And you get to keep all the features you like just just throwing that out there.
Okay, thank you.
No problem. I do see we have another hand. So I’m going to go over to Monica and ask her who that is in a moment. But before we do that, Michael D., if you don’t mind, after we take this question, getting ready to unmute to share some stuff with us. So who do we have next, Monica?
We have Kim. Hey, Kim.
Hello. I think you probably just answered my question. They do have an FE-22?
Yes.
Okay. And are they gonna keep making those, hopefully?

[19:53] They haven’t said one way or the other yet. Yeah, we don’t know what Apple’s going to do.
Hopefully they will, but we don’t know.
I will say, though, that the SE22 currently has the same processor in it as what’s out now.
So you’re pretty up to date on that.
They only make it in a regular size, though. They don’t make it in a plus or a large size.
So that’s, you know, it is what it is. I still want it to go in my pocket.
And I still want my home button. I love my home button. Yeah, I mean, if you’re going to do it, I would do it probably sooner than later because we don’t know if they’re going to discontinue it or not. You’re getting a pretty current processor and you can still upgrade the hard drive. I believe 256 is the max on that device. Yeah, that should be good. Thank you. Okay. Alrighty, Michael, are you there? I am here.
Hello, everyone.
Hello. Thank you for joining us.

[20:50] Thanks for having me. Yeah.
So we wanted Michael to come on and come share some information with people because he’s an intelligent guy who’s always got his fingers in a lot of different things.
And one thing didn’t work out. So he may be back next week. We’ll see.
But I said, well, what can we have you come talk about? And I think you’ve been working on something.
Do you want to share a little bit about what you’ve been working on?
I do. So, I’ve been working with Jeff and the ACB Media team for quite some time, and everybody is great and it’s been awesome doing this again.
But we’ve been working on an update to ACB Link, the iOS version of ACB Link, the app that lets you connect to ACB media, find out more about your affiliate, your closest affiliates, and to learn more about the American Council of the Blind in general. And we have not put out an update in quite some time. And so we thought, you know, it would be a good idea to do this. And so.

[21:57] ACB media, I mean, ACB link 3.0 is now, uh, we’ve been working on that for a little while.
And so I’m very happy to be able to announce as of about 10 seconds ago that the app is now released in both the iOS and Mac app stores. It’s out in the wild. Now it’s out in the wild. Now Now it’ll probably take some time for it to show up for everybody to download, but it is now live now.
So a lot of things have been streamlined. A lot of things have been really improved in this version.
If you’ve used the app in the past, you know, it’s been great, but it’s even better now.
So Michael, you’ve been testing it. What are your thoughts of it?
Oh, I love this. I’m going to show people the iPhone real quick.
I’m not going to plug it into the mixer, but I’ll bring it close to the microphone so you guys can hear it.
So, uh, let me turn my speech right down a little bit.

[22:55] All right. So, uh, as you can see across the bottom now, Tab bar, home, tab, one of five, affiliate tab, two of five, selected streams, tab, three to five, podcast tab, four to five, about tab, five to five.
And so as you heard it said, streams, tabs selected. Now here’s my favorite part, because that means I opened the app and it, as of, well, maybe because I didn’t close it out of the app switcher, Mike, we can clarify, But it automatically put me on the streams tab.
If it didn’t, all I do is tap that middle tab in the, at the bottom.
And then of course I’m getting a phone call because that’s what happens while we’re doing stuff live.

[23:32] But you heard us say ACB media five, which is about a third of the way up the page, watch us double tap.

[23:38] And of course it’s probably.
So now I’m listening to ACB media five. If I don’t want to listen to this anymore, now we’re on ACB media. That right there is magic to me. The podcast will allow you to search the podcast. It looks like, Is that correct, Michael?
That is correct. So you can search through all the podcasts.
You can even search individual podcasts, like you can go through each podcast themselves and do searches on each of the screens.
So all of those things are there.
It’s a very easy app to navigate and you can use dictation, all of those things.
So now you can listen to the streams without needing an A-late.
You could just do it right on your phone.

[24:27] Exactly. Your phone or your Mac, if you have a Mac. So what is the devices that you can get the app on and computers?
So you can download the app on iOS, iPadOS. And now for the first time, a native Mac experience is now live.
So you’ll be able to get the app on the Mac App Store as well as you can on iPhone.
You’ve been able to get the the iPhone app on the Mac, but this is a proper Mac app now.
So, yeah, it’s pretty cool too.
Um, and, uh, what’s really nice about it is there’s one table you interact with when you get to the content you want, if you want to go to that tab section, there’s a tab bar that you go to and you interact with that and you can choose any of those five tabs and, uh, it dynamically updates and it’s really easy to navigate by keyboard.
So if you already have a CB link, all you need to do is check for updates.
And then when it’s available, you can download it or you can go find a CB link in the app store, correct, Michael?
That’s correct.
Perfect. Well, thank you. And, uh, yeah.
Do you have anything else to say before we go on to the next hand?
No, I, I would like to just share a few thoughts if that’s okay with you guys.
Yeah, for sure. If you guys, um, have not been aware, the IACAST podcast is back.
We’ve been talking a lot. We’ve, we’ve done basically a prediction show and then we did a, uh, summary show that will be coming out soon about WWDC.

[25:57] And we kind of go into detail. It was before we really had an understanding of the accessibility of the glasses.
So as I posted on social media last night, people are going to get very tired of me talking about these glasses, because I use like the Patriot viewpoint to help me enlarge text and I messed it on just went off, which is going crazy last night whenever I broke the news that we found out about voiceover being on the glasses.
So being able to magnify doing all these things and accessible apps on a VR AR headset is just going to be a huge thing and I think we’re gonna be you know you guys I’m sure on unmute and everywhere else are gonna be following this very closely. I think that this this this WWDC the OS updates were interesting but the what we got with the the glasses is going to be even more impressive so I I was very happy to hear during the second big presentation they did yesterday there, that platform state of the union, that, uh, we would have accessibility features and they’re even doing sessions throughout the week on how developers can make their apps and games accessible on this headset.
So that’s all very exciting.

[27:12] So that’s everything I wanted to share. So thank you guys for having me. Yeah.
Thanks for coming and sharing that. And as I also, when I shared your post on mastodons, it was yours or someone else has said, you know, this is a great time to be in. I’m, I was excited for this WWDC and I’m more excited for next year’s because hopefully this will be out in the wild for a couple of months and we’ll build and see what people have done with it.
And y’all know I’ll have one as soon as they’re Thanks, Michael. Monica, who do we have next? Thanks, Michael.
We have Peggy. Hey, Peggy. Thanks for your Hi, I have a question.
This has probably been since the latest version of iOS, but every once in a while I’m in my email And a mail will come in that.
Was something I sent out like a week or two before to someone.

[28:06] It’s like, almost like a reminder or something.
And it shows up at the top of your inbox. And it’s like, did I send this? Like, what is this?
It drove me crazy until I figured out what was going on. So what’s going on is Apple has decided in their infinite wisdom that they want to be our reminders in our email.
So if you send an email to someone and I believe you can go into your mail settings and turn this off But if you send an email to someone and they don’t respond to that email within 72 hours It will resurface the message and as you will read in it It says something like reminder or resending or something like that. And yeah first that I recent I mean I did I don’t remember sending that evil But no It’s just a reminder for you and your inbox that they have not replied to a message you sent them.
And I’ve, I’ve, I know where we’re coming from. I’ve experienced that a few times at this point.
And I think the idea is good, but the implementation is not that good.
Cause they don’t really tell you exactly what it is. It’s just all of a sudden shows up in your inbox and you’re like, wait, what?
It doesn’t make any sense.
Really. Yeah. And I keep thinking, well, maybe the message is at the bottom.
You know how sometimes people.

[29:22] Have too many times and the message that they write back is on the bottom.
No, no, that’s yeah. Okay. You’re not crazy. It’s that’s what’s going on. Okay.
All right. Thanks a lot. No problem. Who do we got next? Monica? We have Scott. Hey, Scott.
Hey, Scott. How’s it going? All right. Well, okay. How do you turn that off? First of all, I will have to look that up and let you know for sure, because there is a way to turn it off, But I will see if I can find that.

[29:54] Yeah, it’s like settings, mail, and then there’s a preference to turn it off.
Uh, also, so getting to my question, I understand blind shell was supposed to make some major announcement today that about some new app or something they’re adding a new app.
Yeah, I know that there was. So Diane was on vacation last week who does the blind one-on-one calls and there There was a mix up and so the call wasn’t canceled yesterday.
What I can tell you is Blindshell has a Thursday call this week called Talking Points.
So if you’re not subscribed to BlindshellUSA.com slash Talking Points, probably go over there.
That’s all the information that I have.
Well, I was just curious. I’m not that interested.
It’s not urgent if I don’t have a blind. No, no, because I was on the call last Monday when Diane said next Tuesday, we’ll have a new app. And yeah, so I would go to the Thursday call and see if they have any ideas.
Or I’m sure I’ll hear about it sooner or later. Probably. I have.
I keep abreast of forbidding sources. You’ll definitely hear about it.
I’ll hear about it. All right.
Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Scott. Who do we got next, Monica? We have Beth back. Hey, Beth. Hey, Beth.
Okay. Yeah. Yes. So the app you were talking about, about, about the ACB. Yep.

[31:23] Well, well, that see, I can go on my phone to ACB media five.
It does tell me a link, but that goes to Safari, right?
Yep. This is this is completely different. That’s what I was demonstrating.
So the current ACB link app, it does bring up a page And then you’ve got to find the little play button and then play that, um, the update that is out.
So you would want to go check for any updates sometimes going and doing a search for the app and bringing the app up itself and three finger flicking down to reload the page, uh, can bring that update available.
But now what happens is you tap on streams at the bottom and then you tap the stream number you want, and then it starts playback.
There’s no going to find a play button, no swiping around it’s streams.
And then the number you want and it’s playing.

[32:08] Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I want to, um, no, if it has like, um, the radio, the ACB radio and they, it only has a cafe is yep.
Cafe is on there.
It’s all, it’s all 10 of the screens that are available. Yep. Okay. Yeah.
And, um, I was gonna ask about my media player on my computer.
I tried what you told me to try to shift F 10 and, and it does not say, um, anything about playlists. So, okay, I am not that familiar with media player, Beth. So maybe there’s some other people that are listening that might have some additional resources. And if they do, hopefully they’ll call in or they’ll email us to let us pass that along to you.
Okay. Oh, sure. Okay. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Monica. Next, we have Astoria.

[33:03] Hello. I do a couple of weeks ago, you told us how to get rid of the and I don’t know, I can’t remember the terminology.
But when you search for something to get rid of that list, and the history, what device are you talking about on which device? I have an Android phone and I have an iPad.
Okay.
And where are you searching that you want to get rid of the history from?
I’m Google, I guess.
Gotcha. Okay. So what you can do is you can go to google.com slash account, and there’s an option to clear your Google history there.
Um, and it is a pretty seamless process if that’s what you’re looking for.
Uh, I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you’re looking to clear.
Google.
Would you repeat that? Yep. Google.com slash account. Okay.
And then you can clear your history, your account history there as well. Okay.
Thanks. And I did reply to your email. It took me a little while, but I did get back to you. So yeah, perfect.
Thanks for calling in.

[34:15] Who do we got next? Monica. We have Greg. Hey, Greg.
Hello again. I’m good. I’m still good.
Um, and I’m still a dinosaur, but anyway, um, I’m still a dinosaur.
I have a question regarding deleting a row on Excel with JAWS.
Now, it’s a whole row that I want to delete. Actually, it’s quite a few rows.
I’m doing something for ACB students right now, an affiliate I’m working with, and I need to delete several rows.
How do I do that?
So I forget the keystroke, but I can tell you, and someone may have a different or faster, easier way to do it, because I’m not seeing we have any hands right now, but I can tell you if you do alt Q like Quebec, that’ll put you in a search, and then you can just type in delete, and delete rows should be one of the options that pops up.
Okay, okay. And can I ask one more question? Certainly.
Google Docs has always, always, always been confusing to me, no matter how many YouTube videos I watch on it.
I’m just wondering if you know of a good way, I’m a JAWS user, but if you know of the best way for me to work with Google Docs, because like just typing into it and just, you know.

[35:41] Just it’s not been very, very friendly, you know, to me.
So I told you about a keystroke in Excel called Alt-Q to search the menus.
In Google Docs, there’s a keystroke, which is Alt-Slash, and that brings you to search menus.
Type in accessibility and make sure that you have screen reader access on and braille access on because that will improve the experience even if you’re not using a braille display.

[36:09] Make sure that you turn your JAWS cursor off with JAWS key plus Z And then you should be able to use your up and down arrow keys like you normally would, Select text like you would and use ctrl B ctrl I etc Like you’re familiar with in Word and that might help you a little, Okay, thank you. The dinosaur is out, Problem. Thank you next Monica Harvey, Alright, well, first of all, I just gotta ask and this is rhetorical but no, it’s a dinosaur going to get on the mastodon, But I digress as Chanel, Yes, so a couple things If you’re for some reason ever using a Mac don’t turn on braille support in Google Sheets because it kind of doesn’t work very well.

[36:58] Yeah, and so this new app by the way, is it also called a CB link in the Mac App Store?
Yep, okay, cuz I just came out so it might take a little while for it to Get around for everyone to be able to see it I think literally it’s came out in the last like 20 minutes or so So might take a little bit for it to show up for everyone So just give it a little time, but probably you know by this afternoon everyone will be able to see it I’m assuming and then cuz I know in the iPhone app I really haven’t used it a lot because you have to go to stream Or you have to go to radio, then streams, then the name.
So hopefully it’s a little bit easier. So I’ve been testing this to give some feedback to help make it a great experience.
I will tell you, I have used ACB media and listened to ACB media in the last week and a half more than I have in the last three years, because all I have to do is open the app, tap streams, and then tap the stream number I want to listen to.
It’s that simple. in the play button or anything else.
Which I’m super excited to use it during convention because as you know they’re on different channels So you can just switch back and forth between the different channels And michael, what is the exact name so people know exactly what to look for?

[38:16] Uh acb link So yeah, you’re looking for acb link and go ahead chanel. You had another question, One other thing, um, you mentioned or herbie sent me something you shared the other day I don’t know if it was you or whatever but on the new mac os you don’t have to, Did you turn on quick nav to use quick keys?
So I have not installed this. I cannot speak directly, but it is my understanding that you can just use like H to jump to headings or shift H to jump to previous headings and not have to use quick nav. That could be incorrect.
Again, that was as of yesterday’s beta one first day. So very cool. Yes.
Stuff is being done with voiceover. I can’t get into what is being done. So.
Okay, cool. All right. Thank you. Yep. No problem.
Hey, Monica, next we have Desi. Hey, Desi. How’s it going? Good morning. It’s going great, I love this call. So thanks so much for that. Um, I.

[39:13] Wanted to ask you about of an app that a friend of mine told me about and I believe she said it was called It’s called ZoomCuts.
Is that?

[39:23] What is it, what does it do, and why should I want it? So, I don’t know why you should want it.
It is an app that was released yesterday, so what I know is very limited.
It is a tool that implements about 13 different shortcut actions into shortcuts on the Mac for using with Zoom.
What that means is, potentially you could set up a shortcut that you have a keystroke that, I don’t know, that, I don’t know, lifts off the raised hands or something like that.
So I don’t know the details for it yet.
I will have more details probably by the end of this week because it is something I am very intrigued by.
And it’s made by a company that was purchased by Zoom itself and that company released a software because Zoom has become more synonymous in the broadcasting industry.
A lot of your broadcasters use Zoom to bring multiple sources together now, both in audio and video.
And so there’s been some companies out there that have created more advanced interfaces to Zoom.
So for example, if you’re in a live environment and you wanna take Desi’s audio and separate it from everyone else’s audio and send it to the overhead speakers, and then while the host is getting other people muted, the only person you hear is Desi, you have that type of flexibility with the Zoom ISO tool.

[40:45] I can’t speak to accessibility. It does only work on the Mac.
I will say that from the tests that I have done with it and played with it, it looks like it’s fairly usable if not with just voiceover, but using tools like VLCR and other tools out there to make things that aren’t the most accessible accessible.
So it’s something I think you’ll start hearing more about in the near future, Zoom cuts and Zoom ISO.

[41:10] Okay, and then my only other question is because I have returned to the Mac, which I’m so delighted about. Welcome back.
Yay! Well, you know, I got the Mac mini M2 and yeah, it’s going really well.
Although I am finding it not as intuitive as I thought I remembered it being several years ago.
Some of the things that I try to do don’t necessarily work and I find myself getting frustrated sometimes and having to walk away and come back later.
And sometimes that does work. But I was curious to know if you know where I can get a comprehensive listing of Mac commands, you know, just general Mac commands for I, I mean, I know that it’s possible to go through the menus and look at all the commands there, but I would, I would love to have just a compendium, if you will, of Mac commands.
You’re talking about just in general, or are you talking about voiceover?
Well, well, in general, but I mean, all those commands work with voiceover as well, right? And voiceover commands, too.
So, Desi, all commands. I’m going to give you the obvious answer.

[42:22] I Googled it, Mac keystrokes. And the first thing that came up is an Apple help center article that says Mac keyboard shortcuts. So there’s that.
And then there’s also an article from computer world that has 30 Mac keystrokes.
Um, so that might be helpful for you as well. I have some too, which if you want to email feedback at unmute.show, I can send those over to you.
Great. And I will make one other recommendation. If you really, really want to get familiar with your Mac and get more fluid with using your Mac, Chanel has a great class that she teaches. So you should reach out to her and get all the details and do that class. You’ll definitely learn a bunch. Chanel and I have been talking and unfortunately the next one of those isn’t until September, but I’m ready to be there when it is.
Very good. All right. Thanks a lot. We’ve got about 12 minutes left.
Who do we got next, Monica? We have Debra.
Hey, Debra. How are you doing? Hi.
I got an iPad Pro and I use the wireless keyboard. Would it work almost like the Mac?

[43:30] So did you get the keyboard that plugs into the little magnetic piece on the bottom of your iPad or is it just a regular Bluetooth keyboard?
The Bluetooth. I did order the one that’s attached to it, but it’s not an amplifier, but I can’t see where the, you know, the keys are so I end up using the wireless.

[43:52] Right. So a Bluetooth keyboard will work on a Mac, but you have to make sure that the Bluetooth keyboard you have will work on multiple devices. Otherwise, if it does not work on multiple devices, then you would have to re-sync it to the new device. So you would want to make sure that the keyboard you’re using would be able to work on multiple devices, if that’s what you want to do.
No, what I’m saying is instead of buying a Mac computer, does the iPad Pro, can it function the same way?
Gotcha. So there are keystrokes that you can use on the iPad that would let you navigate it as fluidly as you could on a Mac and, you know, use like Command S to save.
What I’d recommend you doing is, are you a voiceover user?
I’m trying to learn to do that, yes. Trying to learn some of the hot keys and I don’t know all of them yet.
Gotcha, so there are some great resources Marty may know one or two that can give you some, Keyboard commands to use on the iPad But yes You can you can do a lot of the things you can do on an iPad Pro is what you could do on a Mac with a Bluetooth keyboard Okay, so how I get some of those hotkeys man.

[45:04] So the best way so I’m gonna go ahead and do it right here is if I go and I type in best keystrokes for iPad it does bring up a help article looks like from Apple and it gives you a couple of common support or a common commonly supported keystroke so if you’re able to get to Google then just type in keystrokes for iPad and Google gives you five right here that you can start using in your workflow, Hello. Thank you.
No problem. Hope that helps. Best keystrokes.
Yep, best keystrokes for iPad. Make sure to put for iPad on there or it’s going to give you all types of keystrokes.
Okay, thank you. No problem. Monica.

[45:49] Lisa G. Hey, Lisa. Hi, I just had an idea of what I use for the past two people.
Whenever I want to know anything about strokes or shortcuts, I call up Apple and I like to call it the accessibility and I’ll ask them if they could email it to me because they can email me the strokes if I tell them, especially if I’m looking for something in particular, like if they have a list of basic strokes or things that would help me.
And I always ask them, I say, so do you have any little tips or tricks that you know for people with vision issues?
And when you get new people, sometimes they have no idea, but you’d be surprised at what you learn just by asking that question.
I find it kind of cool.
So it’s just my two cents. Thank you, Lisa.
I appreciate you bringing that up, because sometimes we don’t think about the obvious, and that is just picking up that phone.
Call the either general support team because, you know, sighted individuals use keyboards, too.
So there’s no need to just say what are the the keystrokes for blind people or contact those accessibility numbers, because that’s a good resource to have as well. So thank you, Lisa. Really appreciate that.
Yep. And I’ve actually had them send keyboard shortcuts to, you know, by email and they do do that. So that’s a great resource. Who do we got next, Monica?
We’ll go to Eugenia. Hey, Eugenia.
Hi. For the person that was asking about the keyboard for the iPad Pro.

[47:16] There is a class that is starting now in June at Braille Institute, Laguna Hills.
So if you can find the class catalog for Braille Institute, they will have there, they have the keyboard with the iPhone in the afternoon and on Mondays at 10 a.m. they have the keyboard uh, for iPad and they teach that class twice a semester.
So I’m taking it. That’s what I know about it.
Well, good. Thank you for that. And see, we can’t know about all these resources.
So that class is available. So search for Braille Institute and, uh, classes.

[48:00] Laguna Hills. Yeah. Yeah. They have several centers, but this one is from, uh, this person in Laguna Hills center.
That’s in Southern California. Yeah.
Perfect. And do you know if they do virtual classes or are they only in person?
Oh, that’s virtual. Oh, no, totally. Yeah, it’s too far from me.
Yeah. Okay, good. Good. So, so that is a good resource. And thank you for bringing that up.
Appreciate it. Thank you.

[48:24] And our last hand for now is Kim. Hey Kim. Hey Kim.
Hey. Just for the person who was asking about keystrokes and all that, I, you know, I’ve taken the Apple class and, but there’s times when I still forget and I look back at my notes and I’m like, boy, I took rotten notes this time.
Anyway, National Braille Prints have the Mac reference cards that, that probably, I don’t think it has all the shortcuts, but it has the basic command for the Mac.
And it’s just, um, the Mac reference card. Yeah. I see it.
I see that right here. It looks like it is for Big Sur, but that would give you some getting started details for using the Mac.
Cause a lot of those keystrokes haven’t changed. They’ve just added new ones.
So thank you, Kim, for bringing that up. That’s nbp.org, you can get that at nbp.org, and that’ll get you over to the National Braille Press.
And we are getting tight on time, so let’s try and… Let’s do one more hand here, Monica, and then we’ll close it up.
We’ll take Lori.
Hey, Lori. Hey, Lori. Okay, hi.

[49:39] To keep with the theme of the keystrokes, don’t forget that you can still go into VoiceOver, commands and you can touch keystrokes and it’ll give you a whole list of keystrokes. The keyboard, the iPad also, if I remember correctly, it used to work. I haven’t done it in a long time. You can either hit the command key or the control key and it’ll pull up those shortcut keystrokes for that app that, you’re in.
Oh yeah, that globe key hit that in the back in the bottom corner. Right.
Perfect. All right. Thank you very much. No problem. Michael D has his hand up. Do you want to throw something in really quick, Michael D?

[50:20] I’m guessing not. So. All right. Oh, real quick. I didn’t know I was muted on both places.
The holding the command key on the iPad is currently bugged with voiceover, so it will bring up those keystrokes, but it does not read.
Good to know. Yeah. Plenty of other resources out there to get the keystrokes for sure.
And with that, I want to thank Michael for coming and sharing information about what what we’ve got going on with ACB link.
Go check that out if you haven’t yet and Monica for hosting us, Marty, you want to close it up?
Yep. Thanks everyone. We appreciate you coming. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and email us feedback at unmute.show and we’ll see you next week. Same time, same place. Have a good one everybody.

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-e4dc67 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Unmute Presents.

182 – Reddit API Pricing, WayAround, and WWDC 2023 Predictions

Episode Notes

Join Michael Doise, Lynn Schnyder, Taylor Arndt, Angie Fisher, and Michael Babcock as we discuss the following topics.

News

Topic

We discuss what we think will be released tomorrow at this year’s WWDC 2023 conference.

Picks

Providing Feedback

We love hearing from you, so feel free to send an email to feedback@iacast.net. You can follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. You can also find us on Reddit, and all around the web. Also, don’t forget to check out our YouTube page, and for all things iACast, check out our iACast page. If you’d like to help support us, you can do so via our and Patreon pages.

Support iACast by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/iacast

Find out more at https://iacast.pinecast.co

Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/iacast/7703904c-4a5e-4584-8b0b-9b56575dc37e

Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-3bc504 for 40% off for 4 months, and support iACast.

Read transcript


Unmute Presents – Using Voiceovers Numpad Commander

Transcript

Michael:
[0:04] In today’s Sunday teaching episode, I’m going to show you how to configure your numpad commander, and then I’ll give you a little bit about how I have my numpad commander configured.
So this will work if you’re a voiceover user on Mac OS. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to start by tapping VOF8. This’ll bring us to…
VoiceOver Utility, VoiceOver Utility, VoiceOver Utility, Window, Utility Categories.
Now, when you’re in the Utility Categories, you can simply tap Command 8, which takes you to the Commanders tab, if that’s what you’re looking for, and then press your VORide arrow key, and choose Numpad. I’m going to select that.
If you press VORide arrow, you’ll find a checkbox that says Enable Numpad Commander.
Yours might be unchecked. Go ahead and check that. Now let’s press VORide arrow.
This is important. This is the modifier, which you can press with numpad keys to be able to perform different commands.
If we press our spacebar, we have a menu with several different options.
I’ll down arrow through those real quick.

[1:15] So as you can hear, there’s several different modifiers. Now, once you have the numpad commander, if you press VL right arrow, you’ll hear a table that you can interact with.
When you interact with this table, you’ll find two rows.
One is the number associated with the command that you’d like to modify.
And the second one is the command that you’d like to associate with that number.
So let me give you a quick rundown of how I have my numpad commander configured.
And I recommend you take a look at all of the options that are available because there’s a lot there.
I think there’s 13 different categories of different items you can set.
So the number one is associated with item chooser for me. The number two is a down arrow and the number three is my tables.
So it’ll jump to the next table. Four is VO left arrow for me.
Five is VO space and six is VO right arrow.
Seven is stop interacting. eight is up arrow and nine is start interacting.
Which means that I don’t have to press V o shift up arrow or down arrow, but here’s where it gets really fun.
The clear key for me is my applications chooser, which means I don’t have to press V o F one F one.
I can just reach over and hit the clear key. The slash key is my window chooser.
So I don’t have to press V o F two F two, or remember that I have to press that twice quickly in order to pull up a list of windows that are active in the current application.

[2:40] Now, the enter key for me is my actions button.
That way, when I’m quickly navigating through notifications, I just hit enter to five, enter to five to clear them out, Apple, that’s what I want in the next OS, a button to clear all my notifications at once, one last command that I’ll give you that can be helpful is you can also assign voiceover numpad commanders to shortcuts.
So if you’re using a shortcut that maybe tells you what hosting opportunities you have available You could assign that to a keystroke That’s available on your numpad with one of your modifiers and trigger that or any other shortcut that you use slash automation service Hopefully this has inspired you a little bit to go take a look at the numpad commander available on VoiceOver on the Mac and if you have any questions reach out to us feedback at unmute dot show and you can also Also, connect with us every Tuesday, 10 a.m.
Pacific Time, that’s 1 p.m. Eastern. Visit acb.community for more details or tune in live. ACB Media. Bye.

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-e4dc67 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Unmute Presents.

Unmute Presents: Friday Finds: Navigating the AI Landscape – AIRA’s Blindness Initiatives & The AI Chatbot Controversy”

Welcome to a new episode of Unmute Presents, where we dive deep into the ever-evolving landscape of AI and tech innovations.
In this episode, we discuss Everett Bacon’s new role as vice president of blindness initiatives at AIRA, a leading organization in providing sighted assistance to blind individuals. We also ponder the reliability of AI chatbots and their potential risks, as evidenced by the recent controversy surrounding an eating disorders hotline chatbot.
Marty and Lynn delve into AIRA’s revolutionary service that pairs technology and human assistance, helping visually impaired individuals with everyday tasks. They also explore the backlash against recent subscription rate hikes and highlight free usage opportunities at locations like airports and Starbucks.
The conversation shifts towards the fraught topic of AI chatbots, specifically addressing the problematic advice given by an eating disorder hotline chatbot. This raises vital questions on the reliability and programming of chatbots, the role of AI in critical health support, and the necessity of human oversight in these AI systems.
Finally, we eagerly anticipate the upcoming WWDC event and speculate about new Apple products, from larger screen MacBook Airs to AI-powered virtual reality goggles.
Join us as we navigate the promises and pitfalls of AI technology, the groundbreaking advancements and critical ethical questions they bring to the table.
Don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to stay updated with the latest tech trends and AI developments!

Transcript

Marty:
[0:05] Hey all, Marty here and we’re back with another Friday Finds and with me, as always, I have Lynn. How you doing, Lynn?

Linn:
[0:11] Hey, how’s it going, guys? So meet Mr. Everett Bacon. You may not know him, but he is new with AIRA.
Been named vice president of blindness initiatives.

[0:29] And what is that exactly? So, of course, we know, most of us do know what IRA is, but for those who don’t, basically what it does is it provides sighted assistance to a blind person.
Say, for example, you dropped a pill on the floor, you need help locating it, you are not sure that two pieces of clothing match, or maybe you think you have a stain on a piece of clothing and you’re not really sure, you can actually call up and talk to a real human and they can do all kinds of things.
Like they can, they will tell you where to point your camera.
I’ve used it sometimes for like, if I have a box of, say I wanna make a cookie mix or something and I want real quick help to know how to actually do it.
What’s nice about them is that they are bonded. So all the people that work there are bonded.
So there’s a little bit more safety, like if you need to do personal things where you need to use a credit card or a social security or whatever, they are trained.

[1:43] So there’s just a lot of nice things And they’ve had a little controversy because of some, well, like everybody else, they were raising rates, you know, raising the amount that we had, that people have to pay. It’s a paid service.
You get like five minutes for free. and, So, you know, it’s a great service if you can afford it, which I really can’t.

Marty:
[2:09] And a couple of things I will say also right out of the gate that’s really cool.
First of all, it is an app, you put it on your phone and then you use the app to contact a person to help you. And then the camera on your phone, they’re able to see through your camera and tell you what you’re looking at or what you’re trying to look at.
So that is pretty cool.
Also, as Lynn was saying, yeah, there was a little bit of controversy earlier because they were raising their subscription fees and everyone’s getting subscriptioned out as we’ve talked about here quite a bit.
But there is some cool stuff also. For example, they’re working with a lot of the airports and if you’re within an airport, if they offer it, which a lot of airports are jumping on board, you can use it for free within the airport if the airport you’re in offers it.
Also all Starbucks offer it so if you’re inside of Starbucks you can use it for free. So there’s a lot of places all over that you’re able to use the service for free which is pretty cool.
And like Lynn was also saying you get I believe a free five minutes I think it’s every couple of days or something like that. You’d have to check and find out exactly but they also have other plans that you can get for amount of minutes.
So cost you know something for you know like a 15 minutes and a little bit more for 30 minutes and so on and so on.
So, all right, Lynn, sorry.

Linn:
[3:32] This gentleman, he used to be a sighted guy, and he started to lose his sight. He is now blind.
And he’s being put into a leadership position, which I think is a great thing.
He worked where he kind of gained some leadership skills.
And as he lost his sight, he started to realize that he was going blind.
And he did have some managerial experience.
He was a district training store manager for Blockbuster Video, both Dallas and Houston.
And so he really does come with some managerial experience.
He successfully managed 10 stores with an average operating budget of $20 million. That’s pretty good.

Marty:
[4:30] Yeah, that’s a couple of dollars there.

Linn:
[4:32] Yeah. So, you know, he worked in a fast-paced, customer-driven environment.
And he said it gave him the confidence to multitask and do other things.
So he started to need video magnifiers and low vision tech as he was losing his sight.
And then eventually he did need screen reading software.
He said he learned how to be a blind person using braille and a white cane.
Awesome. Yeah. He then went on to earn a master’s degree in vision rehabilitation therapy from Western Michigan University.
So, you know, he has a CV. He has a pretty good CV.

Marty:
[5:23] Well, we’ll have to see what he does and how things move forward with them and what kind of things he can bring to improve and make Aira different, better in the future moving forward. So we’ll see.

Linn:
[5:37] Last week, we did a story, about AI chatbots becoming an option for people who need mental health assistance and can’t get it for some reason.
And we sort of pose the question, you know, is this possible?
Is this a good idea?
Just this morning, there was a story in Yahoo, this is Thursday morning that we’re recording, there was a story about a chatbot that was supposed to replace a human-operated eating disorders hotline.

[6:27] And the funding ran out for this hotline and they were going to eventually shut it down.
So it’s the National Eating Disorders Association.
And so they had this chat bot named Tessa.
And what they were going to do was to replace human hotline workers with this chat bot. So it was, you know, really designed to to provide body positive information.
This is an article from Yahoo to aid those with eating disorders.
But what happened was it sort of got caught giving wrong advice.
It got caught, there was an Instagram user that reported how the chatbot gave weight loss advice to eating disorder sufferers.
And apparently, um, it was the, they’ve actually taken down the, the bot.

Marty:
[7:35] Um, do we know what the bot said to the person?

Linn:
[7:40] Um, so it’s instead of providing advice that could be, you know, That could be safe for someone with an eating disorder or you know somebody that’s dealing with this issue the bot.

[8:03] Actually argued that. That intentional weight losses and eating disorder recovery could safely coexist.
So the person was typing in some stuff and apparently the chatbot said, well, sure, you can still be on a diet and deal with eating disorder recovery.
So this Instagram user claimed that the chatbot advised a goal of shedding one to two pounds per week alongside weekly body measurements, counting calories and aiming for a daily 500 to 1,000 calorie deficit.

[8:48] So obviously, there was apparently they said it was a bug in the software, I guess, that allowed the guardrails to be breached.
And when we talk about guardrail, that’s something in AI that really means rules, okay?
Just rules about what it’s allowed to say and what isn’t.
And there was a lot of controversy about this eating disorder hotline shutting down the human part of the bot or the human part of the hotline.
And I guess they didn’t have the resources or the budget or whatever.
So they just kind of of figured that this chatbot could replace the human touch. Obviously not. Yeah.
So, I think that…

Marty:
[9:38] It just goes to show you that, you know, as cool and as awesome as this technology is, it still has a long way to go without needing a human still there to oversee what this chatbot says or does or the way it acts because it sounds like…
And this is not the only story like this. There’s been a ton of other stories out there where the chatbots are just saying weird, inappropriate things for at a left field, you know, so it sounds like there’s a long way to go still.

Linn:
[10:12] Yeah. And the guardrail part of it is, is something that they apparently they, they said they tested it and they really tested it. And they were in the process of phasing out the human part of it.
Um, I think that’s a dangerous move to make. I love AI. I’m really into AI, but I don’t think I would be so confident in it that I would…
Eating disorders are, especially anorexia, has one of the highest fatality rates of all mental illnesses.

[10:47] So I don’t think it’s safe to leave that in the hands of an AI chatbot, because it has such a high mortality level.
So, you know, I mean, I think this is where we all have to step back and take a deep breath and say, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s get a grip, let’s do a reality check about what AI is and is not capable of doing.
Of course, we had a few more AI is going to ruin the you know, destroy humanity.
We had a few more of those stories this week where leaders like Sam Altman have signed statements about what what’s going to happen and how AI is like a threat to humanity.
I, my problem with these kind of statements is these are the people that created these systems.
So could you instead of giving us these statements, could you maybe give us some possible solutions?

[11:57] Instead of, you know, instead of saying, Oh, well, this is, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re headed for an AI train wreck. Yeah, can’t we?
I would like it if I mean, these are scientists, these are the people that built these systems and work on them for a living.

Marty:
[12:15] Do they what did they think would happen i mean they create these systems and um i feel like these statements are a little too late um i mean the the horse is out of the barn where they say that the horse is out of the barn or whatever you know it’s the genie’s out of the bottle it’s too late um, i don’t i mean and to go back to what you were saying about what did they think would happen i’m not sure they totally knew what would happen when it got released to the masses i mean I mean, you’re talking about trying to program something to do certain things, but then at the same time, you want it to have a personality of its own, to be able to act similar to what a human would act like, but not actually be a human.
And sometimes it just goes south, obviously, with all of these stories, in the way these chatbots are acting, is out of left field, some of the things they say and come up with.
So, you know, they obviously have a lot of work to do still.

Linn:
[13:13] Great, and I would like to know how, I guess, see, I believe you can get an AI chatbot to say anything.
If you want to, I guess, engage in some malfeasance or, in other words, I think if you know enough about chatbots, you can make them say whatever you want them to say.
You just have to know how to- Yeah, you’ve got humans programming them, so, you know.
Yeah, and you have to know how to prompt that correctly. Some people are really good at prompting, and prompting is where you’re actually engaging with the chatbot.
You’re asking it questions, and if you, you know, kind of make the prompt in such a fashion that you can make it say anything.
And I just, yeah, it’s an interesting, we live in interesting times, that’s for sure.

Marty:
[14:07] That’s true.

Linn:
[14:08] Yes. Okay, so we’re all waiting with bated breath for the big WWDC next week.
Are you guys- That’s true. Yes.
Everybody.

Marty:
[14:23] Yeah, I’m super excited. I mean, it’s Monday, so just a couple of few days, and we’re going to be there having the keynote, and there’s so many rumors that it’s hard to keep track of everything, but I know they’ve talked about new Macs.
They’ve talked about new MacBook Airs, maybe a new MacBook Air with a larger screen.
Right now, they’re only in 13-inch, the MacBook airs and so they’re talking about releasing one with a 15-inch screen which would be super cool I think a lot of people would really like that a lot they’re talking about coming out with AI or artificial intelligent type goggles you know where it’s like virtual reality that’ll be really interesting to see is everybody really excited about all these virtual reality things I mean I mean, I guess people are, but I don’t know, it’s just…
Yeah, I mean, you put on the goggles and it transforms like a whole room and now you’re in a whole other environment kind of a thing.
And so depending on what you want to do, whether it’s playing games or being in some kind of an educational environment or whatever, I mean, it’s kind of endless what you can do with it, you know?

Linn:
[15:38] Yeah. I wonder, I guess for blind and visually impaired folks, I don’t know how much we really benefit from them, but I guess we could if they had like image description type things, well, the glasses, like I’m trying to think of the name of the company that does the glasses.

Marty:
[15:59] Yeah, forget it.

Linn:
[16:00] Envision.

Marty:
[16:01] Envision AI.

Linn:
[16:03] Yeah, they do the glasses.

Marty:
[16:04] It’s still though, if you’re someone who’s not sighted at all, if you don’t have any vision, you’re depending on audio.
And so, unless the glasses have some other purpose, I mean, almost, well, I guess if you have the glasses on, there’s the camera and the camera is looking at what’s in front of you.
And then the audio describes what it is that the camera is looking at to you. Yes.

Linn:
[16:31] I mean, that certainly is. We’ve had glasses in the past that do that.
Like I said, InVision has glasses. I think there are a couple other companies, but we haven’t really seen wide adoption in the blind community.
I’m not exactly sure why. I know cost is an issue.

Marty:
[16:53] Yeah, cost is huge. I mean, they’re super expensive.

Linn:
[16:56] Right. But wouldn’t it be nice? Although every time I wear glasses, they just irritate me. I don’t really like wearing glasses.
I’m not used to it, but yeah.

Marty:
[17:11] Yeah, so we’ll have to see there’s lots of really cool stuff coming.
So, you know, yeah, I’m excited.
I hope they announce a 15 inch MacBook Air. I think that would be super awesome.
And there’s so many other things I can afford.

Linn:
[17:25] That would be nice.

Marty:
[17:27] Yeah, definitely.
Well, all of that news is going to hit Monday. So we’ll relay all that stuff once we see what comes out and what they announced.

Linn:
[17:37] So yep, you have to get your beverage of choice and your little snack and sit there and I’m sure that we’ll be covering, um, you know, on this network we’ll be covering.

Marty:
[17:49] Yes, we definitely will be.

Linn:
[17:50] And so you’ll have to, you know, we encourage you guys to join us for that.

Marty:
[17:56] And one way or another, we will definitely be doing it. We don’t have exact details at this point, but we will soon enough.
And one way or another, we’ll definitely be talking about all the things that happened at the keynote and the event is all through the week.
There’ll be kind of other things coming out all through the week.

Linn:
[18:12] So yes, so you have a lot to look forward to and a lot to be afraid of too, if you’re afraid of AI.

Marty:
[18:21] That’s true. All right, and on that note, thanks so much, Lynn. We appreciate it.

Linn:
[18:26] Thank you and thank everyone for tuning in. I hope you all have a great weekend.

Marty:
[18:33] Yep, everyone have a great weekend and we’ll see you next time!

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-e4dc67 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Unmute Presents.

Uncovering the Power of Podcasting:

Below is the transcript.

Marty and Michael sat down with Allison from Podfeet to have a conversation about her history with tech and how though she doesn’t use VoiceOver she knows a lot about trying something to help others.

Below is a list of links Allison shared:

Episode Transcript:

Marty:
[0:04] Hey y’all, Marty here and welcome back to another Unmute, Michael, how’s it going?

Michael:
[0:10] I think me coming back to these Thursday episodes is starting to turn into a more regular thing. I’m doing well, Marty. And you havea friendly guest to introduce.

Marty:
[0:18] We do friend of the show and super awesome person. And also 18 years, you’re going to have to talk about that. 18 years of doing herpodcast.
Allison from Podfeet. How are you?

Allison:
[0:32] I’m doing great, Marty. It is it is such a pleasure to come on with both of you. I’ve been at least texting with the two of you in someform for as long as I can remember. I mean, I feel like it’s been a decade, but I haven’t actually checked and gone back to see how far we’veknown each other.

Marty:
[0:46] It’s been a while. I was a cast away, Michael was a cast away, and then at some point we contributed and to And then we started ourown podcast and here we are, you know.

Allison:
[1:01] I think you introduced me, Michael, if I’m right. I have an email from you on October 12th, 2017. You sent me something about a,uh, a, uh, it was entitled transmitting ducks.
Cause I was using, uh, I was using cyber duck at the time and you wanted to know if, uh, you were interested, I was interested insomething else.
And I think you sent me a recording. Yeah, that was, uh, Demasi and I recording the DM series.

Michael:
[1:23] Demasi and I are recording the DM series on our old show and I was talking to you about checking out transmit, I think.

Allison:
[1:31] Oh, was it that? Okay. Let’s see. Marty, I go back as far. Let’s see.
That might be Marty. Did you write to me about circus ponies, baby? No, that might be somebody else.

Marty:
[1:41] I can’t remember. God, that sounds horrible.

Allison:
[1:42] But everyone on my show blames you for the money you make them spend that all of us bought the Elgato Wave XLR after you dida review for the no silica cast on that.

Marty:
[1:50] Yeah. And everyone still has it.

Allison:
[1:52] Oh yeah, I mean, I love this thing. I bought one for my husband, I mean, everybody’s got one. Everybody says, Marty spent mymoney.

Marty:
[2:01] Yeah, well, sometimes less is more. You don’t always have to go out and buy the giantest, largest thing with all the buttons in theworld on it, you know?

Allison:
[2:08] Well, that’s what I wanted was something with far fewer buttons.
I wanted, in fact, this has one more feature than I’d like. I would like it to have one fewer feature.

Marty:
[2:17] Well, actually, the main thing that you love the most about that is that the XLR cable, jack and the headphone jack were on the backof the device, which was something you really, really wanted. And no other device had that. Yeah.

Allison:
[2:31] Why do I want it coming out onto my desk? Why would I ever want that? Ever, ever, never.

Marty:
[2:36] Yeah. And still it’s hardly ever do you see the ports on the back of the device.

Allison:
[2:41] Yeah.

Michael:
[2:43] Allison, let’s go back to the beginning. Marty mentioned 18 years, which is awesome.
What can you tell us about the beginning of podcasting and how things were like podcasting then?

Allison:
[2:53] Oh, that’s, that’s a fun story. Um, so podcasting started in October of 2004 and I started in the middle of May in 2005.
And, uh, part of the reason I, I brag so much about the 18 years is it’s not just that I’ve been doing it for for 18 years, I haven’t missed aweekly show in 18 years.
Now, there’s a little asterisk on that. I gotta admit to you guys, there, see, I said guys.
I have to admit to you and your audience that there’s a little asterisk.
I did four episodes, and then I podfaded, and a guy named Neil wrote to me, Neil from Florida wrote to me and said, hey, where’s thepodcast?
And that’s when I found out somebody was listening, and I came back, and since then, I have not missed an episode. So it’s actually a fewweeks after the beginning of the show, but if you back up to the very beginning.
Lila port was on the radio here and then he started a podcast and i was that i was hooked on that and so i had to figure out this thing calledthe rss feed which for people who don’t know it’s a small text file that identifies exactly everything about the show that’s gotten deliveredto you so it’s an rss file like you would read in a in an rss reader But it defines an attachment and the attachment for an audio podcast islikely an MP3, maybe an M4A, if you’re getting kind of wacky.

[4:20] And the way I figured out how to do a podcast was I downloaded Leo’s RSS feed, which was this giant text file, and I figured outwhat all the pieces meant, and I built my own, literally typing it from scratch.
And so I was typing in, okay, it says title. Okay, that’s probably the title of the episode.
Okay, let me type that in, you know. And then it got to the attachment and I was completely baffled because it said length equals and it wasthis really long number.
And I sat there looking at this number, I mean, it had just a ton of digits and I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was the number of bytes inthe file.
And it took me the longest time to figure that out. But I was very happy when Steve Harris started the app from Reinvented Software.
He has an app called Feeder, which does all of this automatically for me now.
And I’ve been using that ever since. I don’t even remember how far back it goes, but it was really shortly after I got started. But yeah, weused basically a stone and a chisel back then.

Marty:
[5:20] I would love to know what the setup you had when you first started podcasting and over the years to what you ended up now,because I know how much you care about sound.
So, if you go back to the beginning, what was it like when you first said, hey, I’m going to do a podcast and how did you decide what tobuy and get going with it. And then over the years, I’m sure it’s changed a lot.

Allison:
[5:43] Oh man you should add i could come out with like probably photos of it of where it came from what i started with i’m pretty sure ihad the titanium power book when i started.
I’m in a simple usb mic i don’t i don’t remember which one was it i’m sure i’ve written about it because one of the interesting things aboutmy podcast is every single thing you hear me say is also a blog post everything you hear me say on the podcast so it’s, It’s got, I’ve gotzillions of blog posts over the years, and anytime I can’t remember anything, I know I’ve already written it down.
So it’s in here somewhere, if I could find it.

[6:22] But I did do the classic thing of upgrading a few times on microphones.
I didn’t take a lot of steps, because my husband Steve is a huge supporter of the podcast and absolutely could not do it without him.
I mean, he does all of the cooking, he does all of the laundry, he does all the grocery shopping. That’s part of why I’m able to do this.
And he also likes buying me toys.
So I bought a Heil PR20 at one point, and then he upgraded me to a Heil PR40, which is why he has a Heil PR20 now. And this Heil PR40has been running absolutely forever.
I’ve gone through a few interfaces. We were talking during the pre-show, Marty did the review for my show for the Elgato Wave XLR.
And that is a beautiful little interface that’s just got, it’s got one USB cable and the XLR goes in the back and it’s got a big button on thefront that you switch between the mic and the headphones to turn it up and down.
And most importantly, you tap the top of it and it mutes and unmutes.
And that is my favorite device. I’ve gone through, like I had a mixer at one point where this guy Victor Cahill was really into audio. Hecame to my house and he set it up and it had so many dials and sliders.
I mean, you know, housekeeper came through and all of a sudden you couldn’t hear me.

[7:39] So I actually ditched that for Audio Hijack and ironically, Audio Hijack, I have something set wrong, it’s not working for me at thisexact moment, but Audio Hijack is software that allows you to do routing very much like a mixer would, but it’s all done in software.
And when I got that, I was like, yep, that’s the end of that mixer and that was the last day I ever looked at that.

Marty:
[8:02] Yeah, it’s awesome. how things change over time.

Allison:
[8:06] One of my fun stories to tell, by the way, is I’ve taught not one, but two people how to use Audio Hijack who are blind, and one ofthem is Demase.

Michael:
[8:16] Hmm. So that’s where he got all of his knowledge from. Pretty sure he’s told me that before, but he’s who I go to when I need helpwith loopback or audio hijack. And I love what Roku has done with their software and voice over you for sure.

Allison:
[8:28] They just I mean, it’s it’s foundational to what they do. It’s not even it’s nowhere near an afterthought. It is the basis of the way theywork now.

Marty:
[8:37] Sometimes I wish Apple would actually, I don’t know, observe what they’ve done with voiceover and the interactions and make thatpossible throughout the operating system to something really cool that they did recently is they have a piece of software that’s digital thatallows you to virtually have the triggers where you can activate a sound and it will put it into your recording so you can have you knowpeople applause or horns or whatever you want you can just load the triggers up with whatever you want.
Now, at one point, I got a stream deck because it’s all triggers.
And I thought, oh, man, this is going to be so much easier to be able to activate things really quickly on the fly just because you have thebuttons right there.
And the problem that I had with it was that the software is not accessible at all. So the device became completely useless to me. I couldn’treally do anything with it.
And so now what those guys did was they made this software and they made it so it’s accessible and that it works with the Stream Deck.

Allison:
[9:52] To be clear, you’re talking about Ferrago that Rogamiba make?

Marty:
[9:57] Exactly, that’s exactly. I could not think of the name of the software, but that’s exactly what it is.

Michael:
[10:01] I cheated, I looked it up.

Marty:
[10:03] You too.

Allison:
[10:04] Yeah. Mm-hmm.
So they, so Rogamiba made Ferrago work with the Stream Deck?

Marty:
[10:09] Yeah, just in this last update, they redesigned the software and put out a new version of it. And one of the features is that it workswith a Stream Deck now.

Michael:
[10:16] So you can trigger your sound effects with the Stream Deck, which gives you tactile buttons you can feel.
Because the Stream Deck software is not accessible with VoiceOver and Intuitive.
So I ended up with Marty’s Stream Deck and we’ve been playing with BitFocus.

Allison:
[10:33] Another thought, have you looked at a better touch tool with Stream Deck?
Because I know people have completely replaced the Stream Deck interface with better touch tool.
So if that’s accessible, that might be a better way for you to actually use the Stream Deck.
Like they build all the buttons with better touch tool.

Marty:
[10:49] And of course, I don’t have a Stream Deck anymore because Michael has it.
So you’re going to have to test that out and see if it works.

Allison:
[10:58] There was something else I wanted to tell you. Oh, one of my favorite things, and I just love RogaMiba so much, I was on ACBradio and we were talking about how the accessibility of the RogaMiba software, and I brought up one of my favorite things is that whenyou enter your license key, they throw confetti on the screen.
And as I’m describing it, I realized, oh my gosh, you guys don’t get to see the confetti.
It should really make some sound. And so I wrote to Paul Kaphasis, the CEO of Rogamiba, and I said, why doesn’t it make sound for theblind people?
What’s wrong with you? And he wrote back, he’s like, oh my god, you’re right, I should do that.
And then he forgot about it for a really long time.
But that turned out even more funny because he wrote this fabulous blog post referring to me telling him about this idea and how he forgotto do it.
And so it became this amplified message that they have now put it in.
You hear applause and happiness when you enter your license key.

Michael:
[11:55] That is awesome. So you mentioned you started on a power book.
I think that’s what you said. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So your show has an ever so slight Apple bias. And I think that’s what attracted Marty and myself in the beginning because I started using.So my first experience was an Apple 2e.
My school was cleaning them out.
I am young. I’m only 35. So my school was cleaning out their Apple 2e’s and they said, Michael, do you want this?
And we had an extra echo, which was a external hardware synthesizer that you can attach to the Apple two week.
And so I said, yeah, let’s, let’s, uh, take that home and I’ll play with it.
I don’t remember what happened to it, but I went to windows and then I switched over to a Mac book in 2006 with tiger because that’swhen voiceover came onto the Mac.
And I’ve been off and on. I always come back to the Mac, although I do real, I play in both worlds, but I find it interesting that you’reYou’re an Apple centric podcast that reviews and talks about accessibility importance.
Can you share a little bit about how those discussions come up?
Cause you’re not only about accessibility and that’s what I really like.

Marty:
[13:03] No, but I will say though you it’s in your DNA and I know this because I saw a very funny post from you just a couple of days agowhere you were wearing a clockwise t-shirt, but you explained, oh, I have my clockwise t-shirt and I’m got short curly hair with glassesand I was like, see, it’s in your DNA.
You explain everything so that even if someone couldn’t see, they get an idea of what it is you’re showing off, you know.

Allison:
[13:29] So you’re talking about in the alt tags. I like to throw in Easter eggs for you sometimes too. Not super often, but every once in awhile I’ll just do something goofy.
But you know, this is a problem with Mastodon. With Mastodon, it makes it obvious that there’s alt tags and now the sightlings are readingthe alt tags. So they’re not secret Easter eggs for you guys anymore.
Their regular sightlings can see it too. I was kind of disappointed because I had kind of a riddle going except I had to explain it, the image,I had to explain it in alt tags and then everybody just read the alt tags and they figured out what I was was talking about, I was kind of sad.
But it is, that is my way of saying it’s really great that all tags are front and center in Mastodon.
Definitely. In answer to your question, when I was 11 years old, I read the book Follow My Leader by James B.
Garfield. And it’s a story of a little boy who’s playing with fireworks with some friends and he’s blinded.

[14:29] And he ends up learning braille, he ends up getting a seeing eye dog, he goes to a blind school where he learns how to navigate witha cane.
And I was fascinated by this, and on page 46, 47, and 48, they showed the braille alphabet.
I happen to know that because I’m holding the book in my hand as I’m telling you this.
And I was fascinated by this, so I went and got a piece of cardboard and a punch, and I made myself a braille card.
And so it’s like you say, in my DNA, I was like, this is like a secret code.
I want to learn this too, you know.
And so I’ve always been interested in assistive tech. You know, it just seems like a fun, there’s so much fun to be had.
So when I started doing the podcast, I realized that I got a lot of feedback from people who said, by the way, I’m blind.
And I started realizing that I had a lot of blind friends now because of the podcast and then started learning about, you know, hearing aboutvoiceover and what it meant.
And so in, let me see, I brought the video up and I can give you these links if people are interested. In 2012, I did a tech talk at Macworldup in San Francisco and I did it blindfolded.

Marty:
[15:39] Oh, I remember this. Yeah.

Allison:
[15:41] I, so I taught myself voiceover on the, on the iPhone and then on the Mac.
And it was, the iPhone’s like super easy, right? you just slide your finger around, double tap, everything, you know, it either works or itdoesn’t.
There’s not that much to it. The Mac’s really hard though. It’s really hard.

Marty:
[16:02] I know it’s a deterrent. A lot of people who are losing their vision or who have lost their vision, they stream to the iPad or to theiPhone because not only do you have to learn how to use the Mac, but then you also have to learn how to use voiceover.
And for some people, it’s just too much. They’re not techie people and it’s overwhelming and too overwhelming.

Allison:
[16:26] I think there’s just so much variability on the Mac.
When I did my presentation, I nailed it on the phone. I practiced this thing probably 400 times.
I mean, I had a very narrow set of things I was going to do.
I was going to create a calendar invite, and I had a specific person I was going to invite, and it executed perfectly.
But I did the one thing you should never do right before a presentation. I changed something.

[16:54] I decided literally right before I went on stage that it would be easier to open the keynote presentation if I had it on my desktop.
And I got it stuck to my cursor and I couldn’t get it off.
I don’t know. I still don’t know what I did, but no matter what I did, it was just like opening, closing, opening and closing, opening.
It was like somebody with glue on their foot stuck spinning around in a circle.
And my husband kind of yelled at one point because I was starting to just open random things or just open up my screen. He was like, youknow, you might open some personal documents here.
So sadly, I did have to take the blindfold off for a minute or two, and then I put it back on for the rest of it.
But it was really fun to exercise my brain and try to learn it to where I could actually execute some maneuvers.
That turned into, now that I know, and I would put me as like a low intermediate, like I’m I’m not, maybe I’m a little above bunny slope,but I’m pretty low on the skill set.
But I can look at an app that I’m reviewing, and I can very quickly tell you it’s not accessible.
Whether it’s goodly accessible is another story. I don’t know how to do a lot of the trickier stuff.
Never understood what the rotor is to this day, but I can tell if the buttons are labeled, I can tell if you can open menus, or if somebody’sdone something stupid and done something with a graphic.

[18:16] I love doing that because I can tell you whether you should waste your money on it, should you even look at it?
But I also then will just shoot a note off to the developers to find out if they can fix those things.
Because a lot of times they’re close, but they’re just missing some fundamental piece. And a perfect example, I did a review of an appcalled Hush that removes background noise.
And it’s an amazing app by Ian Sampson. And I realized that it had a drag and drop interface. You had to drag your file into the center ofthe screen.
I thought, well, how the heck would you do that?
It’s probably hard in voiceover. So I went on Mastodon, I asked people and a bunch of people said, yeah, that’s a real pain that doesn’twork very well.
So I wrote to Ian, and he said, oh, this is great feedback.
I’m going to work on this. I have a couple other people who know voiceover helping me. And just a couple of days ago, he sent me a newversion said, okay, I’ve got the drag and drop part working. It’s not all working right yet.
But he actually changed his software because I knew enough to just ask and say, hey, can you fix that?

Marty:
[19:17] We were helping someone just yesterday, actually. And it was a Slack thing.
And he had downloaded the Slack DMG.
We got him to open up the DMG. And then he said the same exact thing.
It is so hard to drag and drop with voiceover.
And what we ended up saying was, well, once you get the DMG open, and you get to the thing where it says, drag the app to theapplications folder, just copy and paste it.
And he went, oh, that’s much easier. So you could copy and paste it if you ever have to.

Allison:
[19:53] Actually, we should give him a shout out. That’s Ed Howland, who’s a castaway. He’s super into our Programming by Stealthpodcast, which is one of the shows I do.
And he’s been super helpful. Great nerd, man. He’s he’s real nerdy. He’s awesome.
But he was really struggling with that piece of it. You know, I just think it is something he could have just opened the terminal and said,said, uh, you know, move through install Slack too.

Michael:
[20:15] We, we talked about that after we went through everything and, and we’re like, yeah, we could have just did that too.
Um, and Marty, he did get Slack working and it did get opened.
He had to, uh, uh, enter a code or click a link or something that Slack wanted him to do, but that screen to tell him that wasn’t reading verywell, and that’s where sometimes accessibility, just making a slight change or, or, uh, making some alteration can make your app accessibleor your tools accessible to anyone.

Marty:
[20:42] Right.

Michael:
[20:44] That fixing it starts with the conversation with the app developers.

Allison:
[20:49] Yeah yeah the nice thing is i’ve never had anybody just go no.
Right everybody i’ve talked to is gone you know at worst case they go well i’ll think about it but i never get anybody who just says no.
People seem to be interested in making their app better and one of the reasons i did.
I did a talk at the Podcast Expo.
It was Blog World Podcast Expo at the time. And my talk was how to increase your audience size through accessibility.
And because that’s where I look at it is why would you want to put up a wall that keeps anybody out from listening to what you’re reading,what your content is? That doesn’t make any sense, right? Yeah.

Marty:
[21:31] But yeah, you’re right. It was.
And he was an awesome guy. We had a lot of fun with him. He was great.
So we’ll keep in touch. We got his info. So, you know, we let him know if you ever need anything to let us know, and we’ll do what we canto help him out.
So, yeah, he’s a great guy.

Allison:
[21:44] I really appreciate you guys hooking up with him and helping him.
Now, you did that through Zoom?

Marty:
[21:49] Yep. That’s interesting. Well, actually, I cheated a little because he did email me his phone number and I called him first.
Okay. And then once I talked to him for about 15, 20 minutes and kind of got the lay of the land a little bit, then we got him in Zoom andgot him sorted out the rest of the way from there. Okay.

Allison:
[22:06] And you used Zoom so that you could hear voiceover?

Michael:
[22:08] Yes, so what we did, and I’m going to tell you what we did and what we can do in the future because of a new tool that I keepmeaning to send you, but we’ll tell you about it now.
So what we did with Zoom is he had headphones not plugged in so we could hear voiceover and what voiceover was saying, which is anadvantage to using a screen reader is you can troubleshoot over the phone.
And then we directed him with the keystrokes for what you need to do to go to the places is to do it and it’s just complete hands-off, useyour keyboard, don’t use a mouse and we were able to help copy the file over and stuff like that.
That works and for the longest time, remote desktop access to be able to remotely control his computer, just using as an example and wedid not do that yesterday, has been not obtainable for a completely blind individual using voiceover over the time that voiceover has been athing.
So there’s a new app from NUMA solutions called RIM and you can get it, getrim.app.
And what that will let you do is as a completely blind person, you on a Mac or Windows can remotely access someone else’s computer.
And it doesn’t matter if they have a screen reader on or not because it comes with its own screen reader.
So it works like TeamViewer, except for instead of you using TeamViewer, you’re using RIM so you can control that person’s computer.And that’s another way to help people troubleshooting if they have access technology.

Allison:
[23:35] Oh, that’s really interesting. Yeah, one of the things I did a blog post about listing all of the, what I consider interesting, audio hijacksessions that I’ve created to solve interesting problems.
And one of them I worked out for a conversation with Shelly Brisbane to allow two people to have have a conversation in, at the time itwas Skype, where both of us could hear each other’s voiceover.
So she was demonstrating things in voiceover and I was able to hear voiceover through the, I was able to record our conversation with thefull digital high quality audio of voiceover along with her voice.
I should send you guys that session.

Marty:
[24:22] Yeah, that’d be cool.

Allison:
[24:24] I gotta find it.

Marty:
[24:26] So here is a question for you. since you look at apps and test them for accessibility and things like that.
Someone who’s going through the app store looking for an app or maybe someone recommends something, what would be, you think, thebest way for someone to determine whether there’s an app, and this could be on the Mac or iPhone, iPad, whatever, that works or doesn’twork with voiceover?
And one other thing.

Allison:
[24:55] Trick question.

Marty:
[24:56] I have my own opinion, but I’ll ask you first, of what you think could be improved in the future so that people would know whetherthe app that they’re trying to download, install, will or will not work with VoiceOver. But I wanna hear what you have to say.

Allison:
[25:13] Two very different questions.
The answer I would probably give, and I don’t know if this is a good answer, but in my experience, I have seen that Apple Viz tends toreview software on whether it’s accessible.
So I send people to Appleviz. If it’s not there, I don’t know what to tell them.
Is that a bad answer?

Marty:
[25:33] No, that’s a good answer. Okay.

Allison:
[25:36] As far as the other thing, you’d have to come out with a standardized rating system that people had to pass a certain level of test withtheir app to get it some sort of number, right?
To be able to say, because there’s accessible and there’s, yeah, that’s kind of accessible.
And there’s really accessible with, the Rogue Amoeba’s at the top and other apps a little bit lower down. So I would think it’d be almostlike a safety rating of, you know, you get a seven out of 10. I don’t see how you could do it otherwise, because the developer could go,yeah, yeah, it’s accessible.
I didn’t break the API when it said to leave it alone and it would be accessible.

Marty:
[26:15] And so developers who are really on their game and who really pay attention to that, they take the extra time and in the descriptionof their app, they say it works with voiceover.
Not everybody does that. Few people do that, but I’ve ever seen it.
Yeah, there, there are, uh, some that do it.
It’s not real popular, but those who do it, it’s much appreciated.
I will definitely say, um, what I thought would be really cool.
And I, I’ve talked about a lot of people with this and they’ve always had kickback because they say the process would take too long to getit approved, But adding a space somewhere in all of the things that they put, you know, in the app store, does it work with voiceover?
Yes or no. You know, I mean, then you would at least know straight away whether it does or it doesn’t, but yeah, but there isn’t a yes or noanswer.

Allison:
[27:11] It’s a gradient, right?

Michael:
[27:13] Yeah, it could work with voiceover, but none of the buttons are labeled, but because voiceover has the image recognition, voiceovercan recognize Recognize those images, but is that app accessible then?

Allison:
[27:26] Yeah, let’s give the hush example since Ian is open minded and fixing it is sure all his buttons were labeled.
They’re all great. You just couldn’t use the app because you could if you were really good at this, you know, figure out how to do it.
But I wouldn’t have called it accessible, even though all the buttons were labeled, but he may have looked at it and thought it wasaccessible because he didn’t know that that piece wouldn’t work easily.
So that’s why I think it’s a continuum, Marty.

Marty:
[27:53] Yeah, they also say a lot of people, um, that the process to approve the app would just take way too much resources.
And so that’s why they don’t do it. Yeah.

Allison:
[28:05] I mean, you’d have to invent a way to do that and I don’t know how, how you would do that, but it seems like a reasonable goal.

Marty:
[28:14] I would think so.

Allison:
[28:15] But I mean, there’s also, uh, we can’t forget things like color contrast for people to, you know, that would be a thing.

Marty:
[28:23] Oh, yeah. And there’s a lot of other accessibilities, you know, you could go down a whole rabbit hole. So maybe that’s why theydon’t do it. I don’t know.

Allison:
[28:30] I don’t know. That’s a good, a good thought, though. I would definitely support trying.

Marty:
[28:36] Yeah, definitely. I would, uh, I would second you on that.

Michael:
[28:40] So I have an easy but maybe hard question for you, Allison, to transition.
In your 18 years of not missing a week of podcasting, what would you say has been the most unique opportunity podcasting has presentedyou with?

Allison:
[28:56] I did a talk at MaxDoc a few years ago that I called it a make your own adventure game.
And I was really proud of this. I figured out that in Keynote, you can add buttons to a slide that change to a different number slide.
So like on slide one, you could have a button that takes you right to slide 32.
So I put five pictures in the middle of the first page, and depending on which one the audience selected, it would take you on an adventurethrough a bunch of slides showing you how I ended up standing in front of them, or how a certain event occurred.
So for example, one of them was a picture of a total eclipse of the sun.
So if you press that button, it always started with, Alison picked up a microphone.
That’s the first slide in every one. the way I end up seeing a total eclipse of the sun is a different path through the slides than how, forexample, I got to know Gene Roddenberry’s son, the maker of Star Trek.

[30:02] I like that set of slides because it kind of described a lot of what opened up in my life because of podcasting, all because I picked upa microphone, the Total Eclipse one, for example, was, I was on the Mac Roundtable and on the Mac Roundtable was Don McAllister.
Got to know Don McAllister, started working screencasts online for him.
I do video screencasts for his tutorial service.
And then through him, he recommended me to be one of the speakers on a Macmania cruise in Australia to see a total eclipse of the sun.

Marty:
[30:36] That would be awesome. I’d love to go on a cruise like that.

Allison:
[30:39] Yeah, it was really cool. They stopped doing them. Unfortunately, when Macworld fell apart, it was Macworld sponsored, But it wasduring the day when there was nothing to do on the ship, you know, we don’t gamble or anything like that.
So during that time, they had, we had classes.
And then when we would go ashore and go snorkeling or scuba diving or whatever it was, we would, we would all disband and go do that.And then you’d come back and go back to class again.
And I absolutely loved it, but they made me do nine, no, eight 90 minute talks on that Whoa, that’s a lot. Unique talk. That’s insane.

Marty:
[31:17] I mean, You accepted it, and you obviously did it, right?

Allison:
[31:21] I got a free cruise to see a total eclipse. Of course I said yes, and I would do it again, but I mean, I had to start working on thoseslides in February, and the thing was in October.
I remember being so stressed out, a friend of mine went shopping for clothes for me because I needed new clothes, and I just literally hadno time for seven months.
But Don told Neil, the guy that ran it, said, don’t ever do that to anybody ever again. It was too hard.
But that was certainly a big event. But again, if you go, Allison picked up a microphone, ended up on the Mac Roundtable.
On the Mac Roundtable was Adam Christensen, who I believe is the first Apple podcaster, and he’s still going. So he’s been going longerthan I have, but he misses a lot of episodes. So anyway, he was.

[32:09] At.
The sale of one of the new iphone so i don’t remember which one is called iphone four and he was in line and a guy overheard his voiceand came running up to and said oh my god i love your show let me introduce myself my name is i ride riding very.
And so it is like you know i was like oh my gosh this is amazing and adam says rod says look i listen to all the mac podcast i love all oftheir all great invite all of them and all of the podcasters I want them to be my guest at the screening of the new Star Trek reboot.
And we’re going to do it on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles.
Oh, I was invited. David Sparks, Victor Kahiao, Adam.

[32:52] None of them came except for me and Steve, my husband, Steve and Don McAllister flew over from England to go to it.
It’s like you guys live in Orange County. I mean, it’s like a 20 minute drive to the harbor to get on the boat to go over to the island. And soit was ridiculous that they didn’t go, but we ended up getting out to hang out with Rod.
I ended up getting him on my show. He is a lovely, lovely young man.
He’s just absolutely delightful.
And then at Macworld, I ended up having, I used to do a, have a party for the Nocella Castaways, a cocktail party at a place next to the, tothe theater there.
And I invited him to come and he not only showed up, we had set up a, so everybody was thrilled to get to meet him because, you know,minor celebrity and all that, big celebrity in our nerd world.
We had set up a laptop with a camera on it and had an open Skype session for people to call in who couldn’t be at the event. And Rod spent45 minutes talking to those people.

Marty:
[33:53] Wow. That’s amazing.

Allison:
[33:55] Just, yeah, you know, so those are the kind of things that just happened because I picked up a microphone. You.

Marty:
[34:02] You’ve made it lots of friends doing your podcast from all over the place.
And I think that’s pretty cool. You’re such a people person.
So I would probably say…

Allison:
[34:13] I don’t know my own neighbors. I’m serious. I know the names of the people directly across from me on either side, and I don’tknow anyone else on my block.
But I know people across the world.

Michael:
[34:23] I can relate to that. I don’t know any of my neighbors. I don’t even know their names.

Allison:
[34:27] Yeah, I mean, that requires talking in person, like going to a party or something.
I don’t know. I doesn’t sound right.
By the way, I should qualify my statement about 18 years without missing an episode.
The show has not missed an episode, but people stand in for me when I go on crazy vacations, like going to Australia for a total eclipse orwhen I went to Antarctica recently, Bart Bouchat’s from England, from Ireland, whoops, he’s going to kill me for that.
And Alistair Jencks from New Zealand are probably the primary suspects who carry the load when I’m gone. And it’s so I can’t take fullcredit for it.
It takes the support of everyone.

Marty:
[35:05] But now with all this new technology we have out there, we can just make a virtual you while you’re gone and make like it’s yourpodcast and it’s really you.

Allison:
[35:13] I did that. I had, I lose my voice pretty much once a year or so, sometimes twice.
And in February, March, I lost it just continuously. I mean, it just was not coming back and it was getting worse.
And so I went back through a bunch of episodes and I taught 11labs.io my voice.
And since I script everything, I was able to have 11labs.io read my podcast for me that week.

Marty:
[35:42] And it seems that it happens always around the beginning of the year kind of thing with that loser voice thing.

Allison:
[35:48] Yeah, i’m thinking I should go back through my through my podcast, uh through my scripts to see How often I say it and whatmonth it is.
Maybe I could just prepare for it Now you have 11 labs just planning.

Michael:
[36:00] Yep You’re gonna record my podcast for me because you know, I tell people with this ai and technology that we are right now Weare at the worst that it will ever be which means it’s going to just improve from here on I don’t remember who said that, but it’s somethingthat’s just stuck with me. This is the worst.

Allison:
[36:14] Oh, Michael, that’s, yeah, that’s fabulous. This is the worst it’ll ever be.

Marty:
[36:20] Yeah, he, without telling me, made a virtual me like it was him and I. And it was pretty funny.

Allison:
[36:26] That’s awesome.

Marty:
[36:29] So you had a book you wanted to talk about.

Allison:
[36:31] Oh, I did already. That was Follow My Leader.

Marty:
[36:34] Ah, there we go.

Allison:
[36:34] When I was a little kid.

Marty:
[36:35] Cool.

Allison:
[36:36] I recommend it.

Marty:
[36:38] We’ll have to see if that’s around anywhere still to get it.

Allison:
[36:41] Yeah, it was written in 1955. I’m old. I think there was a reprint.
I actually don’t have my original copy.
I talked about it to a friend of mine and she went and found me a used copy of it from, let’s see, 1985, which is now, what is that, 40 yearsago?
So anyway, it’s a fun, you know, young adult book.
But what should I learn beyond what I can do now? Do I really need to learn that rotor thing to be helpful to y’all when I’m trying toreview something?
Or can I just keep skipping learning that?

Marty:
[37:18] You probably can get away with not learning it.
It’s a lot of people customize it because people who don’t know how to use the rotor real well, sometimes they’ll do something and then allof a sudden it will speed up their voiceover.
And it’s all of a sudden talking really, really fast and they don’t know how to fix it.
Or it’ll turn the volume up on their voiceover because the volume for voiceovers, the same as everything else.
It’s a separate volume. So you can actually turn up or down the volume on voiceover by itself, Siri, you know, and the same with the wholephone.
So I tell people if they have issues with those to remove it off the rotor so they don’t continue to turn the volume way up loud or way downlow or speed up the voice.
But I also will tell you, they’ve changed it a little bit where you can go in now and you can customize the rotor so that you can do adifferent gesture than trying to take two fingers and turn your phone like all weird, you know, in a circle, you can do like two fingers andswipe right or left and it will go through the rotor.
So there are ways that they’ve made it easier to use now, but people still don’t like it. It’s not the easiest thing to figure out.

Michael:
[38:32] So I guess my question for you, Allison, is what is it about the rotor that you don’t understand?
Is it the concept of using the rotor to change the granularity of navigation or is it actually doing the rotor gesture?

Allison:
[38:46] I don’t even know how to turn it on. Okay.

Michael:
[38:48] So the rotor is always on by default when voiceover is there, you always have things in the rotor. And so.
As Marty was saying, you can change the gesture to change between the rotor.
Um, and, and I know that’s probably making a little confusing, but, uh, so for, for example, you can navigate by character word or line byflicking up or down with one finger with voice.

Allison:
[39:12] So are we on the Mac or the iPhone?

Michael:
[39:13] This is on both, but we’re talking about the iPhone right now. Okay.

Allison:
[39:17] Cause I mostly use voiceover on the Mac cause that’s where I’m usually testing apps.

Michael:
[39:21] Okay. Okay. Well then you don’t need to worry about the rotor on the Mac.

Allison:
[39:25] Okay.

Michael:
[39:26] Yeah. If you’re thinking about the iPhone, it’s more advantageous to learn about, but the rotor, I think you can.
So, so the rotors, when you press V O U like uniform, I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but that brings up a list of all the links on apage, or you can tap your right arrow and that’ll give you all the headings on a page or all the controls on a page.
So you can get those all in a list view while using voiceover.
And that’s what the rotor is, is you’re just changing between what am I going to navigate when I’m using up and down arrow keys after Ipress VO plus you.

Allison:
[39:56] So is that mostly for navigating the web or does that work inside of apps?

Michael:
[39:59] That that is mostly in the web, but as you know, a lot of times apps can also pretend like they’re fake web pages too, which means itcan work that way inside Okay.

Allison:
[40:09] But its main function would be in the web. Yes.

Michael:
[40:15] If you were to want to, so I think you’re doing a great job with how you explain things with voiceover.
If there was one thing on the Mac that I would tell you that could help either make you more productive with voiceover on the Mac or helpyou with, uh, my favorite thing, which is automation on the Mac while using voiceover, uh, spend some time in the voiceover utility withVO plus F8 after voiceover is enabled. And then go down to commanders.
And I believe I’m doing it right now. So I can make sure to tell you the correct keystroke because I’m all about keystrokes.
Command eight will actually take you to the commanders tab inside there.
And then you can use, uh, you have three different commanders and I recommend looking at the numpad commander because withnumpad, if you have a numpad, you have access to putting all of the buttons on your numpad to perform different actions while runningvoiceover, but there’s also a dropdown. What was that?

Allison:
[41:10] I don’t have a numpad.

Michael:
[41:11] Oh, okay. Then nevermind. Ignore me. Shoot.

Allison:
[41:15] I was writing all these great notes down.

Michael:
[41:16] I was going to say, cause what you can do is go in and trigger shortcuts or trigger automations just from your numpad, just byhitting it.
And then you have modifiers cause you can use control option, command shift and zero as different modifiers. So you have six differentlevels of commanders you can use from the numpad.

Allison:
[41:32] What’s a commander.

Michael:
[41:33] So commander is, um, we’ll use it in, in reference that you can relate to without a number pad.
In the same section under here, if you choose keyboard commander or track that, but we’ll say keyboard commander and you turn that onwhen you hold the right option key down specifically, and you can pick what that key is, but we’ll say the right option key and tap the letterS with voiceover by default, this open Safari or tap the letter M this will open mail, but you’ll see on here, you can pick all your letters andthen there’s a dropdown with hundreds of different actions you can make VoiceOver do, including for example, if you wanted to, youcould have VoiceOver turn on or off its visuals with the commander.
You can explore different parts of the screen, but under custom commands, there’s an option that says run automator utility, you can runshortcuts.
And so commander is do one thing with VoiceOver and a modifier to do something else, either in VoiceOver or in macOS.

Allison:
[42:34] So I have to say the one one thing that stops me in my tracks is when there’s hundreds of things you can do.
I need there to be like three. I could learn.

Michael:
[42:45] I get it. Yes.

Marty:
[42:46] Like, let me give you a couple of things that might make using voiceover a little bit easier. OK, the first one and a lot of people don’tactually realize this.
But when you’re using voiceover and you’re navigating around, There’s what’s called the VO keys and that’s control and option.
And then if you use the arrows, you know, you navigate around and if you use those two keys and the space bar.
It’s selection. Right. Now, it gets a little crazy when you got to then interact and un-interact because now you’re trying to do finger twistergame when you’re trying to do all that.
So you can use the cap locks key in place of the control and.

Allison:
[43:29] No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I believe in the caps lock key as as nature intended.
I learned when I was in sixth grade, and you will never pry that caps lock key out of my cold dead fingers.

Marty:
[43:43] No, it helps you in the voiceover because it takes away those two keys.
So when you go to interact, you just do caps lock shift and down arrow.

Allison:
[43:51] And when you want to have caps lock anymore.

Marty:
[43:54] Yes, you do still there.

Allison:
[43:55] How do you how do you type NASA?

Marty:
[43:58] Just type NASA. I mean, it doesn’t take away this. It doesn’t change anything.

Michael:
[44:01] So you’re missing an important part, Marty. You, instead of just pressing Caps Lock once, double press it. So Caps Lock, CapsLock, and then you type NASA, Caps Lock, Caps Lock, turns it off.

Marty:
[44:15] There you go.

Allison:
[44:15] Ugh. Ugh.

Marty:
[44:17] The other thing I was going to say was you could use your trackpad.
If you use your trackpad, then it’s swiping like on your iPhone and you can do it that way.
So a lot of people who have issues with being able to use all the key commands, what they do is if they have a computer like a desktop,they buy the magic trackpad and you can use that.
If you have a laptop like you do, then you can use your trackpad and you can then do all the gestures with swiping and all of that stuffinstead of doing all of the key commands. Okay.

Allison:
[44:50] Okay. You got me there. Now that that one I’ll get along with.
A lot of people use the reason I had such a vehement response to reassigning the caps like he is a lot of the automation nerds specificallyfor keyboard maestro all think that the best thing in the world is to reassign the caps lock key so that you can, it basically means mashdown all the other keys.
And I just, no, caps lock is made to do caps lock. And I just can’t imagine, I’ve had so many arguments with people about this, like, how doyou type something in all caps?
I had to write Wonderboom 3 last night, or last week, about 45 times, it’s all caps. How do you type that all caps without going shift W,shift O, shift N, shift D, shift Oh my gosh.

Michael:
[45:39] No, you need a caps lock. Yeah. So I like you. I have to have that caps lock key in some instances for sure.

Allison:
[45:47] I have, when I tell these stories, I realized that I just sometimes like to learn something that maybe not everybody else knows how todo.
When I was in sixth grade, I had the Hong Kong flu and pneumonia at the same time. So I was sick for a long time.
No, it wasn’t, but I was laid up for a long time. My mother gave me her 1945 secretarial typing book and an old, you know, real old-fashioned typewriter back then with it, like before the Selectric was even invented, kids, if you know what that is.
And I taught myself to type and I was sick so long that I started going through the book a second time learning to type with my toes, butthen I got better.
I just like to learn stuff. Wow. Yeah.

Marty:
[46:30] That is, uh, would be a sight to see. I’d love to see you type a blog post with your toes. That would be interesting. Yeah. I haven’ttried it.
How would you do the caps lock?

Allison:
[46:39] Yeah, there you go. Actually, I wonder, was there even a caps lock on this?
I don’t remember. I think there was. I know when I leave.

Michael:
[46:49] Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Allison:
[46:50] Go ahead. Follow my leader.

Michael:
[46:51] I was just going to say, and, uh, and I was going to start to wrap it up and say that follow my leader is available on bookshare. I’vedownloaded it, and this will be a book that I’m going to read in the very near future.

Allison:
[47:02] Oh, cool. It is a young adult book, but I liked it. It meant a lot to me.
Eventually, my mother ended up going blind, and so she was awesome.
When she started to lose her vision, she immediately went to Braille.
I remember she came home, and she took all of her cookbooks and threw them in the trash, and she said they told her to do that becauseshe says it’s just going to depress you because because you’re not going to be able to read them anyway.
So just clean it all out. So she bought a bunch of gadgets. She was a real gadget hound and loved accessible tools. She wasn’t very good attech, but she really enjoyed it.
And I ended up going, I go to the CSUN Assistive Tech Conference every year and get to learn about all the coolest new tech gadgets forpeople with assistive needs.
And I think it’s really cool. You guys get all the fun stuff.

Marty:
[47:51] Yeah, I’m going to try and make it to CSUN next year. I didn’t get to go this year.

Allison:
[47:56] Oh, well, hang out. I do lunch every year with somebody.

Marty:
[48:00] All right, we’ll definitely do that.

Allison:
[48:01] Whoever’s up for it.

Marty:
[48:02] I’ll have to drag Michael down and we’ll all go.

Allison:
[48:05] That’d be cool.

Michael:
[48:06] There we go.

Marty:
[48:08] Awesome.

Michael:
[48:09] I really appreciate you jumping in with us today and hopefully you had a little bit of fun. I’m going to let Marty wrap it up and thankyou again for joining.
And I’m glad to know that it was October of 2017 I first emailed you.

Marty:
[48:21] Yep. Thank you so much for coming. We really appreciate it and love having you on. So thank you. Thank you.
And why don’t you tell everyone how they can find you wherever you want them to find you at?

Allison:
[48:35] Absolutely. The best place to go is podfeet.com. P O D F E E T.com.
I designed the name of all my shows and my website to have zero SEO, no search engine optimization possible. You’ll never find me.
Podfeet, my husband says I have feet like pods, and that’s why it’s called podfeet.com.
But you can find me on mastodon at podfeet at chaos.social.
And I don’t do much on Twitter, but spam people with blog posts and such.
But you can still find me there at podfeet.
And as I like to say, everything good starts with podfeet.com.

Marty:
[49:08] Awesome. Thank you so much again. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Allison:
[49:13] I really had fun.

Marty:
[49:14] All right, everyone. Thanks so much. much and we’ll see you next time.

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-e4dc67 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Unmute Presents.

Shell Phone Show: accessing the manual on the Blindshell classic 2

[Music]

This is the Shell Phone Show.

[Music]

Showing you how to do something on the Blind Shell Classic 2.

Brought to you by Peyone Media LLC.

[Music]

If you’d like to access the manual on the Blind Shell Classic 2,

You can do so within the phone itself.

Press and hold the back button until you hear the time.

  • 7.31 PM.
  • Press the up button until you hear.
  • Call one of seven.

Turn off the phone.

Seven of seven.

Manual six of seven.

  • If you press okay on manual.
  • Blind shell classic two user guide.

One of eight.

  • You’re then presented with a menu of eight options.

The first one is Blind Shell 2 User Guide.

If you press OK.

Blind Shell Classic 2 is a buttoned phone for blind and visually impaired people.

The phone is controlled via the physical keypad or by voice commands.

So that tells us there are two menu options here.

If I press the down arrow.

Important notice, if you let your phone’s battery discharge completely,

it may appear that the phone is not able to charge at all.

And you’re able to continue reading through that manual.

Tap the back button to go back to the menu.

> App blind shell classic two user guide, one of eight.

> We can press the down arrow key.

> Getting started, two of eight.

> So in getting started, we’ll press “Okay”.

> Package contents, one of six.

> Each one of these sections has more information inside of it.

So when I press “Okay”.

> To turn on the phone, one of one.

> Because you didn’t hear a chime,

That means that you don’t have a menu option.

And if you hear it say more than of one, then you just use your down arrow keys to hear

the next lines of content.

The music used in today’s Shellphone show was thanks to Andre Louis and his Shorts collection.

If you or someone else you know is interested in the Blind Shell Classic 2, be sure to stay

Stay subscribed to The Shell Phone Show on your favorite podcast platform.

This is a Peyot Media production.

[MUSIC]

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-e4dc67 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Unmute Presents.

UnboxCast – Victor Reader Stream 3rd Generation

Episode Notes

In this UnboxCast, Taylor Arndt unboxes the Humanware Victor Reader Stream 3rd Generation, and sets it up.

Victor Reader Stream 3rd Generation

Providing Feedback

We love hearing from you, so feel free to send an email to feedback@iacast.net. You can follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. You can also find us on Reddit, and all around the web. Also, don’t forget to check out our YouTube page, and for all things iACast, check out our iACast page. If you’d like to help support us, you can do so via our and Patreon pages.

Support iACast by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/iacast

Find out more at https://iacast.pinecast.co

Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/iacast/3d8eca99-cf97-430d-b0e7-9e757cc2e635

Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-3bc504 for 40% off for 4 months, and support iACast.

Read transcript


ACB Community Replay from May 30 2023

[0:00] Today is, what is today’s date? The 30th. Tomorrow’s the last day of the month.
This on Mule Presents Community Call was hosted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2023.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can not talk today. That’s good. Just keep the blah, blah, blah in. We’ll just put that in really.
All right. I’m going to do it one more time.
This is an ACB Community Call, presented by American Council of the Blind.

[0:27] Music.

[0:40] This Unmute Presents Community Call was hosted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2023.
Hello everybody, welcome back to another Unmute.

[0:48] If you have questions about technology, go ahead and get your hands raised and we’ll get through everyone. We’re going to take everyone’s first questions first and if we get through everyone, then we’ll take second questions, second hands.
Also be respectful to everyone in the same way you would want to be and let everyone ask their question and get it out so that they can get their questions answered.
So we want to let you know that we are on Mastodon now. So if anyone wants to follow me on Mastodon, mine is marty.unmute.community.
And if you have any other questions, you can still email us at feedback at unmute.show for questions, comments, or anything else. And Michael, what about you?
What do you got going on?

[1:33] Oh, I’ve always got like 10,000 things going on, Marty, and I’m like, eventually I’ll catch up.
That may never happen. That’s not going to happen.
Yeah. Yeah. Never going to happen. So, uh, like always, I want to go ahead and give a quick overview of the content that, uh, is available in the unmute presents podcast feed.
You can find it in your favorite podcast app and we’ll go over the most recent seven episodes. So yesterday, technically working, and I’m actually looking at this and realized it didn’t get published in the unmute feed. So it’s going to go out here shortly. So I messed that one up, but technically working was published yesterday, which is a show that Demasi and I host.
And in yesterday’s show, you learn about some of the networking woes that I’ve ran into.
And we also follow up on Demasi’s concerns about Apple and partnering with Tracker.

[2:21] Databases. So you’ll want to give that a listen if you’re interested on Sunday, Marty recorded an episode that we called demystifying external hard drives, choosing the right hard drive for your needs. So if you’re interested in what is an external hard drive, what do I need and how can I get the best one that fits my needs, then give that a listen.
Lynn and Marty sat down and talked about fake news and AI in Friday’s finds episode. On Thursday, Demasi came back and surprisingly sent me a longer amount of content than I thought he would have that was 35 minutes of talking to you about password managers, the importance of what they do, why you need to use one, and what options you have out there. You always hear us talking about one password if you’ve listened to any content we’ve produced, but he gives you some other things to think about and some free solutions. And then Wednesday, we published the Shell Phone show where I showed you how to save an email out of your email in the blind shell phone and keep that in your notes if someone sends you something you want to refer back to.
And then of course last Tuesday we published the ACB Community Call Replay for May 23rd.
So that’s a quick recap of what we published. Marty, anything to add before I ask Sheila if we have any hands? Not that I can think of. I guess one last reminder is WWDC is Monday, so So think about that.
What do you want from WWDC?

[3:47] What are your wishes? WWDC wishes. Yeah, there you go. Share those.
Sheila, who’s our first hand?
Monica. Yeah.

[3:54] Hey Monica. Hello. So my question today has to do with the Spanish language. I want to know how I can get Spanish on my rotor so when people send me messages in Spanish I can read them in Spanish and not in English. Yep that makes perfect sense. If you stick around, I do not have an immediate answer to you. I believe there’s a language option that you can add to your rotor but I I will look and get the exact terminology for you.
And what I would do, I don’t know if that’s the right way and someone else may have another suggestion.
So if you do raise your hand, but this is what I would do in a second.
I’ll let you know, Monica. Thank you.
Yeah. All right, next is area code 201, ending in 406. Can you tell us who you are please?
It’s Lisa G, hi everybody. Hello Lisa, how are you doing?
Very good, how is everybody doing on a fine Tuesday, not a Monday.
Yeah, we’re all a little thrown off, I think, but we’ll make it.
I do have a couple of questions.
My one question I will ask now and then go back in the queue.
Is there any recommendation? I have an iPhone and iPhone 12 mini and I have an Alexa.

[5:10] And I wanted to know if what kind of outlet I could get. My neighbors would tell me, oh, they got this outlet, they plug their lamp in and they can tell it to turn on and turn off.
Is there any recommendation that you’ve heard of?
That is a good one, because some of them I get so confused. It’s like, you know, they work with different things and I just want something simplified that I can just plug it. Some of them you plug in, some of them you need a controller. I just want to get a basic.

[5:36] Plug it in and not have a command base. Can you recommend anything by any chance?
There used to be ones called Wemo plugs and basically all you did was plug that into the wall And then the other side has like a plug that you can plug something into it.
And then you can give it a command, you know, living room lights and say, turn on or off the lights. So those are the most basic ones that I know of.
Anything else is going to turn into more a hub and having to do more stuff.
So there is, um, if, and I apologize, I was looking at Monica’s question.
So are we looking for a good, smart, like power strip? Is that what you’re looking for?
Not just like he was just speaking about just the plug, you plug it in and then you can plug in your lamp or whatever it is.
Like a we will plug Michael.
Yep. Yep. So Maris also makes one and I believe they do have a single one and they also have a power strip that offers USB things.
And what I like about Maris is they are and I believe it’s M A R R A S is they work with all three home kit on Apple.
Also work with the a lady and they work with Google Home and they’re affordable as well. So that might be another one to look at too. Thank you. Yep. Right.
Evelyn. Hey, Evelyn. How’s it going? Star six will unmute you. Oh, there you go.
Yeah, I’m here. Hi. Hello. Hi. I don’t know.
Fine. Um, I…

[7:03] Michael, I purchased the power bank and I got a question about that.
Does it only vibrate when you plug it in?
Plug it in to charge? It does not only plug it or vibrate when you plug it in to charge.
So, there’s a single button on the power bank.
If you press and hold that, that will cycle between three different modes.
One is beep, one is beep and vibrate, and one is just vibrate.
So if yours is set to just vibrate, and it’s just vibrating when you plug it in, then you can change that mode by pressing and holding that button.
Pressing it once should vibrate or beep up to four times to represent what percentage the battery has.
And then when you plug other devices into the power bank, then you should receive some audible or tactile feedback, letting you know that you’ve actually plugged something into it.

[8:00] Okay. And also, I noticed that, okay, the little cable that came with it, I can’t use to charge it because on the other end, I don’t have anything that I can plug it into. So I’m using the blind shell cable. Is that okay? No, that’s perfectly fine. And let me explain that to people who might be curious because the blind shell classic 2 uses what’s called a USB type C to charge and the power bank in the middle uses a USB type C so you can charge the power bank or other devices. That little cable that you have would let you charge the blind shell with the power bank. I don’t know if you’ve done that because it’s type C on both ends or you could plug the one type C into an AC to Type-C adapter, and I know that’s a lot of letters, but primarily it’s the same thing that you have for the blind shell or other devices, except for the part you plug the The cabling is a lot smaller because type C is smaller.

[9:08] Okay, so it’s okay for me to use that one. I don’t really need to get another cable for it.
Yep, it’s good for you. And if you’re not getting the feedback you expect, reach out to us and either myself or Demasi can help you with figuring out what exactly is going on with the PowerBank if it’s not giving the feedback you need. Okay, Evelyn?
Okay. Well, one more question about the keyboard. I also purchased that.
And okay, there’s three different modes, I guess you can put it in.
So for the, for the blindshield to use on the blindshield, it’s Android, right? That you would pick.
Yep. So you choose FN and Q to switch it over to Android.
Okay. All right. That was it. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Evelyn. Yep. Okay.

[9:51] Desi. Hey, Desi. Hey, Desi. Hey guys. So, um, I, as you know, uh, not so long ago got a Mac and I’m really enjoying many aspects of it.
It. I find Zoom posting to be just a breeze with the Mac. I love it so much more than Windows Zoom posting. I love hearing all this. My problem seems to be that having used a Mac several years ago, I do remember about interacting and all that stuff, but I’m having a hard time distinguishing when I’m supposed to interact with something versus when I would VO space or enter on it or you know that kind of thing. So like when I go into my mail app, I’m just using the standard Apple.

[10:47] Mail app, when I go into that and I want to go to my mailbox table and select a new mailbox for instance. I’m having a hard time figuring out the best quick sequence for that and I do eventually get there.
I’m not doing it consistently enough to figure out exactly what I did every time.
It’s almost always like a new rediscovery.
So do you have any ideas or thoughts about that? When you’re actually in mail, there’s actually a keyboard shortcut.
Actually is Chanel here? What’s this keyboard shortcut? I forgot what it is.
But if you say like you’re on a mail, in the list of mails, you wouldn’t even have to interact.
You can just hit the keyboard shortcut, and it’ll put you right into the body of the email.
And you could then read it.
And when you’re done, you hit the same shortcut and go back to your list again and go up and down the list.
This is Chanel.
Gotcha. Chanel, what’s the keyboard shortcut? Yeah, well, I don’t like doing mail that way.
I hate doing mail that way.
Because I want, because the problem is that it marks mail as read automatically when you arrow through the list.
So I always collapse the pane.
I can’t stand doing it that way.
But if you really wanna know, it’s VOJ. but I don’t even have a need to interact in the mail app really unless.

[12:05] Really not at all unless you really want to understand the structure of how the mailboxes are laid out or unless you want to navigate in the mailbox by a particular column like subject but there’s really no need to interact at all in mail. Well what about when you open a message though and then don’t you have to interact with it so you can see what the with the text in there. Not necessarily. If you want to explore it like you know if.

[12:34] If your quick nav is off, because I never use quick nav, so yeah, my knowledge, I haven’t turned it on.

[12:41] Yeah, you don’t really need to know. Yeah, so I’ll back up.
But you Yeah, I was just testing this out. Because because like, Desi, I’ve always interacted with the mailboxes.
And I’ve overcomplicated hearing Chanel say that I’m like, I’m gonna go try this.
So if you set your voiceover focus to the list of the mailboxes, you actually don’t have to interact.
Simply use your up and down arrow keys, find the mailbox you want to work with and tap enter. It looks like if you then use your up and down arrow.
You don’t even need to tap enter. You can just VO write twice and then you’re in your mail, in your mail, in that messages list.

[13:17] There you go. And then you just tap your up and down arrow and then I just hit enter on a message.
And what I like about this too, Desi, is it puts you at the top of the message.
So if you press your down arrow key and it says we have a customer who requested.
So I can actually go to the home line and use option right arrow and select the we have a customer and hit command C to copy that.
So it works a lot more like the experience you might expect when you’re using Windows and you don’t have to use the voiceover.
Chanel, you have just changed my mail life. I appreciate that.
Oh, yeah. Well, you guys have helped me. I’m trying to remember what specifically, but you’re always so yeah, I can’t know.
So you’re here. Oh, that’s right. I did not know that you could do command and then the numbers to jump to different categories and the voiceover utility.
When I heard you do that last week, I did a double take like, huh, what’s he doing?
And then I tried it and that was so cool.
So yeah.

[14:14] And Desi, one other thing, if you do get stuck with the interact thing, if you at the top of an email, so say like you pick an email out of the email list and you end up having to interact, you basically have to do it twice.
Is at the top, there’s going to be the header section, which is the, where everybody sent you, where the email was sent and has the headers.
And then the second one is going to be into the body. So it would be kind of doing it twice.
And then you do it twice to get out of it again. That would be if you had to interact with it. And this is Herbie.
I can, am I unmuted? Yeah, you’re unmuted, Herbie. All right.
Just one general tip I will try to give on interacting. And there’s no exact science, perhaps, but, okay, so basically if something says it’s like a list or a grid or a frame, those things usually mean that you’re probably going to need to interact to see the contents of said items.
So.

[15:24] Music is a good example of that. Like if you use Apple Music on your Mac, when you go to your search results, it usually presents it in a grid type thing, and so you have to a lot of times interact to actually see the contents.
That’s a good guide to use when knowing when to interact. I’ve seen a couple of times people, see the need to interact in places I would never think to need.
Like, for instance, if you ever want to work with audio hijack, I never…
Other people think that they need to interact on the blocks, and I do mean people, plural.
I’m not singling one person out here. And it’s always interesting to me, because I think I always knew that UVO is based on them.
And so I think there’s some kind of language that tells other people, oh, you need to…
And I don’t remember how I knew, like, if it was intuitive or what, because I…
Yeah, and one thing I’ll go back to, Ari, and then we’re going to go on to the next hand, because there are several people that’s been waiting.
Demasi and I mentioned this on technically working, and it was also brought up on DoubleTap last week.
And that’s just the inconsistencies with Apple on the Mac.
And unfortunately, that’s not something that’s going to change tomorrow.
So appreciate your question, Desi. We’re always learning and taking on new things.
So Sheila, who do we have next?
Beth. Hey, Beth.

[16:48] Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Yeah. Yeah, I, I had a problem this this past week, I talked to Apple because I download a one node. It was downloaded. But I tried this game blindfold phrase madness. And it’s a direct touch area where I put so I put it off, but it got stuck in the direct touch. I tried to swipe left, right, and I couldn’t get it out of the direct touch, so I had to exit it, app switcher. But I called Apple and because also when I, after I’m done making a call, there’s not speech on the iPhone for a while. And I know that’s been a problem too. And he couldn’t figure it out. He said, you know, try to go, he tried to fix it, you know, well, we were both on the line and he.

[17:49] Said, go to your home screen. And I couldn’t get to my home screen. He kept saying app switcher and it would have disconnected us. So I’m, I’m a little, little, um, um, disappointing cause I thought that that was going to be fixed that direct touch. And, and yeah, cause I called Apple, um, this is a third or fourth time now, and it’s been going on for a year for a few years already.
So, so if I’m understanding correctly, you’re, you’re having issues with switching out of direct touch.
Yeah. Or, or if I do put it off or sometimes I can’t, but yeah, this particular game I could, but then I couldn’t play the game that.

[18:30] I tried to swipe left and right. One thing you want to make sure, Beth, and I’m going to be fully transparent and say, I don’t play the blindfold games and I don’t use any apps that require direct touch.
I do know that we do have a couple of listeners who do. So if you have any input, please raise your hand and we’ll love, Beth will hang out and hear your responses if you do.
But if you haven’t yet, go into your voiceover settings, go into the rotor and make sure that it says selected direct touch.
Because if that’s not selected, then flicking down won’t take you out of direct touch.
So you want to make sure that that’s on your rotor.
And if it’s not on your rotor, then turn that on. And then you should be able to change to that option and then flick down to get out of direct touch or into direct touch.
But I believe the app itself switches you to direct touch. And then when you go home, that should take you out of direct touch. But if it doesn’t, then maybe someone else will raise their hand and give some feedback, okay?

[19:26] Okay. Sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I would, you know, it was developed for the blind.
So I would think that they would have considered that.
Well, hang out best because it looks like someone did raise their hand and I believe this person will be able to help them. We get to them. So hang out.
And they may have an answer for you. Okay. Okay. Thanks.
Who do we got next? Sheila?
Brian. Hey, Brian. Hey, Brian. How you doing? Hey everybody. This is my first time.
And welcome. Thank you.
And hopefully this is an appropriate place to ask this question, but I have recently got a Samsung smartwatch and the phone and the tablet.
And I’m not real tech savvy and I kind of feel like I’m in a sports car going in for a skier.
You know, there’s a lot of things I don’t know about in there.
In there and I don’t expect you to tell me everything but are there places that are kind of written or easy to understand that can give me ideas of what options I can use it might be really fun because, like I said, I’m…

[20:32] I know I’m underusing it by about 95%, so. So, first thing I will recommend is when you first turn on TalkBack, because TalkBack is going to be the screen reader on the Android platform.
When you go and turn that on for the first time, which you typically can do by pressing and holding the volume up and down keys together for about three seconds if it’s not on already, or you go into Settings and you go to Accessibility and tap on TalkBack at the top.
And I know that’s a lot. I’m trying to find a resource also that has some written directions for you, and if you email us, we’ll give you our email. We can send you these directions too.
But you can go in there, and at the bottom is a tutorial for using TalkBack.
Does that sound familiar to you at all? I’ve heard of it. I haven’t used it, so.

[21:26] Okay. That would be a good resource to get started. And then also, how comfortable are you using the web on your computer?
I can do okay. Okay, so there’s a website called blindandroidusers.com.
And if you go to blindandroidusers.com, there’s a podcast here, some YouTube videos, and they have a lot of content to get you up and running with Android.
For Apple users, this is similar to a one-stop resource as Apple Viz, but that could be a good place to get started with it as well.
And then you can always send us an email at feedback at unmute.show with specific questions and we can help you further as well.
Oh, great. Thank you so much. No problem. And if you listen to podcasts or you have an A lady, you can also tell it to play the blind Android users or search for blind Android users your favorite podcast platform.

[22:23] Okay. Hey, I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Of course. If you have any other questions, we’re here on Tuesday, so you can always come back here.
What do you got next Sheila? Brad. Hey, Brad, how are you doing?
Hey guys, I didn’t want to interrupt before, but we’ll follow up on Chanel and the, uh, as, as you confirmed, you do not need to interact with that mailbox list.
However, if you do, there is additional information in there.
There’s groups, your favorites is a group, each individual mail account is a group, and these groups have headings which actually can be navigated with your heading.
Nav, use your letter H, and you can move forwards or backwards through those.

[23:11] So, I mean, you can, a sighted person, I have a little bit of vision so I can see them. They’re faded.
They’re like not full bright like the others, but they’re in there.
And that can help you quickly navigate from, you know, if you’ve got like, I have several mailbox, ATT Yahoo, I got a Gmail, I got an Outlook.com.
And you can jump from one group to another and then navigate the individual mailboxes in those IMAP accounts.

[23:39] So, you know, even though you don’t have to interact, there are times when you might want to, and it might save you a few keystrokes doing so.
And I feel silly for not realizing this, and Brad, you might be able to relate to this.
Sometimes you do things and you don’t even think about it. So what I have actually been doing lately is interacting with the list of messages, navigating to the subject line, because I can typically tell if I want to keep it, and then I just hold shift key down and start down arrowing, and then all I hear is the subject line.
So then I’m selecting the messages and I can delete those quickly.
So that’s one of the advantages of interacting as well.
That’s right. And you can, there’s additional information. Like you said, if you interact with your mailbox list, you can move through, you know, if you’re not interacted as you arrow up and down, it, it, it reads the entire line and a lot of times, you know, it goes through kind of fast and you’re like, what was that?
So you can interact with it and then move through the line and read each, each column, the sender, the subject, and the other information that’s in there.
So even though you don’t have to interact, sometimes it is beneficial to interact, and navigate that way.
Anyway, that’s it. Awesome. Appreciate that so much. That’s a great tip.
You can also use first letter navigation if you know what directly what you wanna jump to. Yep.

[24:57] So. Thank you, Brad. Appreciate that. And Sheila, who do we have next?
Jewel. Hey, Jewel. How you doing? Thanks for raising your hand.
Hey. It’s like I was talking to you. What’s that? Oh, were you raising your hand because of the direct touch question? Actually, no. Oh, okay.
I had my hand raised for a question.
I think I missed the direct touch question.
No problem, go ahead with your question. Okay, and maybe you could repeat what the question was about direct touch.
I might be able to help with that.

[25:27] The question I had is, I’m starting to use JAWS with Microsoft Office more, and I know the basic stuff.
I’ve been using JAWS with Microsoft Office for over a decade.
So I know the basic stuff. I’m wondering where good resources for advanced would be other than free and scientific because they don’t cover everything.

[25:48] Um, they’re starting to cover more advanced stuff, but there’s not everything.
I wonder if there’s a book or…

[25:54] I don’t know. So I believe there is a book where I got more and I don’t have a name for you but I would check National Braille Press and just type in Microsoft Word there.
Chancey Fleet at the New York City Library often does some JAWS training for different applications specifically.
And what I like about her, she works at multiple different levels and she’s able to help you where you are at as well.
And I know she’s done some more advanced training.
Another thing that I can recommend is, I believe Microsoft also does some training.
So check out the aka.ms slash dad website and look for some training from Microsoft.
And let us know if you have specific questions because that could be a gap that may need filled that if anyone else has any other resources we’d love to hear about too.
That’s the problem is every time I see an advanced training thing from free and scientific, I go, oh, I could really use this, you know?
And then, you know, but then there’s other stuff that I don’t even know I need and could be very handy.
Yeah. I don’t even know what to ask. I will say Alt-Q is my best friend.
I believe if I remember right, it’s Alt-Q in a word that will let you search the menus for what you’re actually looking for.

[27:07] I also think that Chansey Fleet last time I heard she was also working at Braille Institute out of San Diego location.
So you might want to check that out.
I think that they do workshops online. you can be anywhere. And so that might be a good option for you as well.
Cool. Yeah. I’ll check those all out. Thank you.

[27:26] And could you repeat the dark touch? Maybe I can have a answer.
Oh yeah. And it looks like we don’t, yeah, it looks like we don’t have any other hands right now either. So real quick, uh, Beth was using the blindfold games and I told her I don’t actually play those, games and I don’t use direct touch.
And she says she’s having problems getting out of direct touch.
So could you walk someone through the process of how they get out of direct touch?
Yeah. Um, that’s actually pretty easy. Um, if you add direct touch to your rotor, um, if you know how to add to the road, if you go into voiceover, um, rotor and add direct test to your rotor, then you can just flip to it in your rotor and, and switch it off.
And you just flick down to turn it off. Right. Exactly. Just like you would anything else. Yep.
Perfect. Perfect. I told her. That’s a really easy way to do it.
Yeah, I told her that so I’m glad to know that that works. So thank you a lot for confirming that.
That’s great. Sheila, who do we got next? Doc.
Hey, Doc. Oh, sorry. Excuse me. So you added to your rotor, you just, how do you add it to your rotor again?
Beth, if you raise your hand, we’ll get to that after we answer Doc’s question, OK?
Thank you. OK. Cool. Doc?

[28:36] You are muted, Doc. Oh. Okay, how about now? There you are.
We can hear you, Doc. How you doing? Okay. I need a keystroke.
I can turn JAWS off with Insert F4, but I don’t know the keystroke to turn it back on the shortcut. Yep.

[28:54] So, the shortcut should be Insert J. And the reason I say it should be is because I have never gotten that to work, but people tell me that they do.
The best way that I can get JAWS to come back, because insert F4 is actually exiting JAWS completely, is to hold your Windows key down and type the letter D.
And if the only thing on your desktop is J, or is JAWS, if I can talk, if the only thing on your desktop, starting with the letter J is JAWS, you can just tap J and hit enter.
Or if you know what version of JAWS you’re running, you can, and there’s a lot of ways to do it.
So when you figure out the best way to work for you, then run with that.
You can always go to run with Windows key R, type JAWS 23, for example, and hit enter and JAWS will come back. Insert J should bring JAWS back.
If all you need to do is suspend your speech though and not actually exit JAWS, it’s recommended to just do insert space, or insert key space followed by the letter S to be able to put JAWS on speech on demand.
And then do that again so that way you don’t actually completely lose jaws and you’re not without speech.
Yeah. Well, I’ve been having a lot of, you know, I just got a new computer and, and I’d say it’s all the very latest of everything.

[30:19] Um, and it’s doing a lot of quirky things and, um, sometimes jaws just Quit talking.
And no matter what I try, I’ve tried even the Windows JAWS 23, you know, insert 2023 enter. Yeah.
And that will make it talk. It’s like it’s still on, but it just won’t talk.

[30:50] So, Doc. So I have to shut it clear down. Remember this keystroke. Instead of having to shut JAWS down, This is how you can actually force JAWS to restart. It’s the same as turning it off and turning it back on.
And that’s insert space. You’ll hear the two clicks and then just press F4 by itself.
So insert space, F4, insert space.
So that’s its own keystroke. So press insert space, you’ll hear JAWS click, and then press the F4 key by itself.
So again, that’s insert space followed by F4. and that will turn JAWS off and turn it back on.
And I find that to get me out of situations where JAWS stops talking. Great.
I’ll give that a good try. Thank you very much.
No problem. Come back to us and let us know if that works for you.
We appreciate your support. And Sheila, who do we got next?
Beth.
Hey, Beth. Beth wants to know how to get that. Oh, how to get- The action on the rotor.
Thank you for the reminder, Marty. So if- Yeah. Do you know how to get there, Marty?
You would go into Settings, Accessibility, VoiceOver, Rotor.

[32:01] Exactly, and then you would go down and you would find the one that says Direct Touch.
If it doesn’t say Selected, if it just says Direct Touch, that means it’s not in your rotor right now, and that’s why it’s not working.
So you’ll need to double tap on that so it says Selected Direct Touch.
And when that says Selected, then it’s in your rotor and you should be able to find it to switch out of direct touch.

[32:24] So so that will only work in the blindfold games because I want to just make sure I can use other things without, you know, it’s saying direct touch.
Well, it should work anywhere where a direct touch is active.
So if direct touch is not active, it won’t matter.
Right. Yeah.

[32:44] And now I also had a question about media player. I still can’t get I don’t know if it’s something I talked to Microsoft and answer desk. I think it’s because See, one time I got it to play my music, I don’t know how I did that, it just, you know, But it’s asking for folders, but and I tried to play what was in the folder, which was a bunch of music and only played like two or three songs and then it stopped. So I don’t know.
I didn’t find any things that said playlist or anything like that.
So you’re trying to play a whole folder of music. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah.
Okay, somebody said on the system access, just, you know, play a folder, add it to, you know, select it. I did all that.
But maybe every computer is different. I know.
So, so I believe if you go and I could be wrong, and I’m going to give you something to try. And if you I did write it down, follow up with us next week and remind us, we may have some more information for you.
But I believe if you locate the folder inside of File Explorer, you go into it, and then you do a Control-A to select all.

[33:57] If you press Shift-F10, there should be a Play a Media Player option if you’re using Media Player, and that should play all of those files in the order that they are in the folder.
So I would try that and see if that works. And then, as I said, follow up with us next week.
And I will try it as well because I don’t use Media Player to play music.
And you’re using Media Player, not Groove, correct?
I used to use Groove, but I don’t think they have that anymore.
So you’re using just Media Player then, correct?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I will play with this in Windows and see what I can do, but give that a try, okay, Beth?
Okay, thanks. Yeah, I kind of missed Groove because that was real easy, but… Gotcha. All right.
Sheila, who do we got next? Teresa. Hey, Teresa. You’re muted, Teresa.
Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes, ma’am. Yep, we can hear you. Okay.
I have a very, very stupid question. I’m almost too embarrassed to even tell you all this, but…
There’s no dumb question, so whatever it is, it’s fine. You haven’t heard it yet.
I have I still have this iPod touch. I hate to tell you what generation, but it looks to say I’ve had it a good while.
Back in its heyday, it used to play tune in, play iHeart, the radio stations from TuneIn and iHeart.

[35:19] I used to be able to do Facebook with it. And up until very, very recently, I have a Gmail account, and I could not only read what I received, but also reply.

[35:34] But I was trying, about a week or so ago, I was trying to reply to something, and I got this thing that said error. Now, every time I have moved in the last.

[35:44] Well, since I’ve had it, I’ve moved twice, it seems like just something goes wrong every time my move, you know, physically move, you know, to a new physical address and have to get reestablished with, you know, Wi-Fi and everything. So there’s a couple of things here. The first thing I would recommend looking at… Go ahead. I just wouldn’t even want to tell you what iOS it has. So one thing and the first thing that you should look at since it’s older is how much hard drive space you have available on there. Because if the hard drive space is getting filled up, it’s going to run super slow and maybe not run certain things. So that’s one thing. And I can tell you how to check that. The second thing is if you haven’t updated the operating system on it at all, then you’re going to be really outdated because everything else is moving forward. And what happens is is the security patches that they put in and the different things that they do to upgrade the software as well as what’s out there on the internet.
If you stay too far back, it’s going to be really sluggish and not really do what it’s supposed to do.
Or you’re going to find that you’ll just get errors and things like that.
So those are the first two things.

[37:07] And I’m not even sure how far you’ll be able to go forward with the operating systems on there.
If it’s a really, really old one, it’s probably not gonna get very far.

[37:19] Even a current model, which is already over five years old now, I think it only goes up to 15.
You can’t even put 16 on it, and we’re about to go to 17, and that’s on the latest one.
So even the latest ones are pretty outdated at this point.
They have not updated them in a very long time, And I don’t think they’re going to.
Perfect, Marty. Thank you for that. And hopefully that helps a little bit. Sheila.

[37:47] Before we go on to the next one, I realized I hadn’t followed up with Monica. So I want to go ahead and follow up with Monica real quick in order to get the answer to your question about switching languages. If you go to the voiceover settings, so I told Siri to open voiceover settings and then I tapped on speech and then if you go down the very last heading option is voiceover rotor languages and if you hit the add new language button you can then come down here and pick which other languages you want to add. So for example I’m going to add Ireland to this, and now I have Ireland here and I can pick different voices here that I want to build videos. So I’m going to choose Alex, for example, and then, uh, actually you have to download it.
But then what happens is that will add a languages section to your rotor. And you can flick, you can switch to language and then flick down to the appropriate language that you need to use Monica.
So hopefully that helps. And, uh, one more thing really quick before we take the next person, to the lady I was just speaking with, I just wanted to let her know to check the hard drive space on there to see how much you have available. You would go into settings, general, storage, and then you’ll see there how big your hard drive is and how much available space you’ll have and it’ll give you some other information in there as well. So that’s how you check that to see how much hard drive space you have, or don’t have in this case.

[39:16] So general storage, you said, right? Yeah, settings, general storage. OK, I gotcha.
OK, because my son, I think he tried to help me update the iOS back, oh, I want to say eight to 10 years ago.
You know, that shows you how long I’ve had this.
Yeah, I mean, you might have to kind of retire that and find a newer device, maybe get, you know, like an iPad mini or something since they don’t make those anymore.
Another thing you could do if you want to try and stick to something as close to that as possible is you can get like an iPhone SE and then you just put it in, you turn off the data mode on it and just use it like you’re using your device. You just don’t hook up a phone number to it. You just use it like a iPod Touch. So then you would be up to date and you could pretty much do what you want with it. Oh, okay. That sounds like a good idea because actually somebody did give me an iPhone a few years ago. I’ve never used it as a phone, but I probably activated just enough.

[40:19] You wouldn’t even have to activate it. You can just keep it in your house, turn off the cellular and just use Wi-Fi and you’ll be good to go. It’d be like having a brand new iPod touch.
Oh, okay. And she gave it to me like in, I want to say 17 or 18. Hopefully it’s what I have.
Yeah. You’ll just have to give it a try. It wouldn’t cost anything to give it a try.
Just put it on Wi-Fi and turn off cellular and you’ll be good.
The main thing I have, you know, in the in the old iPod Touch that I’d want to keep or maybe some pictures and CDs that transfer to it.

[40:53] If you have iCloud and you’re signed in your iCloud account on your iPod Touch, then you can have those pictures sync up to your cloud.
And when you put the new device, you sign in with your iCloud credentials.
And then when you go to the Photos app, your picture should be there.
Okay, thank you. Because like I said, my son tried to update the iOS.
Yeah, you’ll just have to see where you go, see what it allows you to do.
All right. Well, thank you very much. I should be seeing him next week. Hopefully, maybe before this.

[41:27] Call meets again. Yep. Well, good luck to you on that. And if you have any other questions, come back and let us know how it went. And Sheila, who do we have next? Ann. Hey, Ann. How’s it going?
Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay. I can’t believe I’m actually trying to help somebody. I always need help. But for Doc, the way I do it, I do it the simplest, fewest keystrokes I can find. I turn JAWS off with Insert F4 and I turn JAWS back on with Alt Control Alt J, Control Alt J. And that always works for me.
You can try that. If it doesn’t work, you can try something else.
But that always works for me.
Great. Thanks. Did you have another question or was that it?
No, that was it. I just wanted to help Doc with that. All right. Well, thank you very much. I’m sure he appreciates that.
And I bet the reason Insert J doesn’t work for me is because I bet the keystrokes probably actually Control Alt J, which actually makes more sense. So thank you. Appreciate that.
Sheila who do we got next? Monica. Hey Monica.
Hello. So my question was, when I add the Spanish voice, can I sample it first before I add it?

[42:54] Yeah. So what I would actually do is go into speech and then you can go to the different voices and scroll down to the language that you’re looking for, see the different voices. And then when you double tap on it, there should be a, I think there’s a play button there. Is there not?
So if you, um, yeah, apparently it’ll just switch it over to out.
So there, no, no, maybe not.
You might have to download the voice and try it out and see if that one fits you.
I thought there was a preview button option, but it looks like there’s not.
Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem.
Monica. Thanks for your question. Appreciate it. All right. Bell mills.
Hello. Hey, Bill. How are you doing? Okay. Well, I hate to say it, but Alt-Ctrl-J does not work for me.
Okay. I have to be different.
And another thing is, I am to the point to where I’ve got to make a decision on what to do about buying a computer.
And I think I want to go to the Mac.

[44:03] Okay, going. Yay. But anyway, I just am really discouraged with Windows. I mean, with, I’m I’m sorry, with Microsoft, but anyway, not to go into it, belabor it or whatever.
What is the simplest book to get started? Or I guess maybe I should wait until I buy them.
I don’t know.
My suggestion for you, if you’re looking to get some training once you get it, is talk to Chanel because I think she has a good option for you.
Okay.
And another question, if it’s okay to ask. Okay.

[44:45] Okay. Why does JAWS repeat the last, well, not just the last word of a document, say you’re reading a document and it says, say it’s an email, and it says, when I’m proofing, it says, bell, bell, you know, at the end, I sign my name, you know, why does it do that?
And it repeats it. It makes me think that I’ve written my name twice.
I don’t have an answer to why, but I can tell you that I’ve observed it as well.
And I’ve seen that before.
And I see Brad’s got his hand up. You probably want to chime in on the Mac thing. So go ahead, Brad.
Actually, I was going to clarify the control alt J thing. That is a shortcut for a desktop icon.
And in JAWS, it’s not there by default. You have to set it.

[45:37] If you go to your desktop shortcut, I don’t know why they don’t put it in there.
I guess, you know, they never have.
They used to on Magic, they would put it in, but never on JAWS.
So if you put your focus on your desktop icon, do Alt-Enter, you’ll open up your properties.
Then you can do Alt-K, and you’ll put your focus on the shortcut field.
And then you can simply do Control, press Control, then Alt, and the letter J, and you’ll put it in that field.
And then you can just hit your Enter key. Now, you may get a prompt that tells you you can’t save this.

[46:19] Because that icon has been put in the public desktop folder, not the desktop folder for your individual user.
But all you have to do is either hit Alt C or just enter because continue is the default, and it will complete the action. Then you can open up the shortcut properties again and confirm that it’s there.
But that’s why you’re not finding it. Michael, your insert J, when JAWS is running, we’re bringing up the JAWS user in either the run from tray menu or if you’re running it from your.

[46:55] Taskbar to bring up the JAWS user interface. And that works only when JAWS is running, of course.
Gotcha. Gotcha. And if you’re using laptop keyboard layout, the Caps Lock J does not work. You have to do Control Shift Caps Lock J for that to pop up.
Yeah. And I should know that. I should be running desktop just to reinforce it.
And as far as Mac training, I do training with Chansey in the New York Public Library.
And I do a Mac class every other quarter with them, 12 weeks, similar to what Chanel does.
So that’s just another resource. We also do a Mac help session every fourth Saturday of the month from 2 to 4 Eastern time.
And you can go to their website, talkingbooks.nypl.org and find out all about what’s being offered by the, how do I say it, the Haskell Braille and Talking Book Branch of the New York Public Library.
Awesome, Brad. Thanks a lot. Is it Zoom? Yes.
Yep, they do use Zoom for their classes. Oh yeah, they’re all on Zoom.
Yep. Yeah. Sign up for their email list on that website as well, and then you’ll get the updates. They don’t come very often, They’re not going to bombard your inbox.

[48:13] Cool. Thanks, Brad. Appreciate it. We have about 10 minutes and a couple of hands. Sheila, who do we have next?
Marie Nelson had her hand raised. I’m not sure if she had a question. Marie, did you have a question?
I’m guessing not. I guess not. We’ll go to Diane.
Hey, Diane.

[48:32] Yes. Oh boy. I, you know, I had my hand up and I put it down because I found someone, had said the same thing, said the same thing I was going to say about the shortcut, how you had to add it. But the thing I, the thing I would say, unless something has changed, I think you can actually go into that edit box and it, and just type J and it will like, I think it like, I thought it like hit, uh, selected Alton control by default.
It might, but it’s always best to do what you expect the keystroke to be just that way. There’s no surprises.
Yeah. Yeah. But, um, I, I think I’ve also done it that way too.
Just typed in the J and then the Alton control like added themselves.
Um, anyway, that, that was about all I had. Um, so thanks for letting me in there.
No problem. All right. Thank you very much. I’ll talk to y’all later.
Have a good one. You too. And who do we have next? Jewel.

[49:38] Jewel, go ahead. Hey, Jewel, again. Yeah, I had a follow-up on the languages.
Actually, if you, instead of tapping the voice that you want to check out in languages for VoiceOver, if you would swipe down, it automatically puts it in the action menu, and it’ll say sample or speak sample and then I’ll give you a sample of that language. Also a random tip for everybody that just figured out in voiceover commands of course you know you can customize gestures but there are gestures that are not assigned to any you know things that are not assigned to any gesture. If you wanted to use something for example item search which is very handy in JAWS and a lot of people don’t realize they can use it on voiceover but I use it with my keyboard. If you put that on an unassigned gesture, you can then use that gesture to bring up item search and it’ll search for an item on the on the screen, so like a word or something, which can be very very handy. I use it with my keyboard and it’s very handy. So like if you’re on an email and you just want to go to the unmute present on the schedule, then you could do an item search.
I have it with a four finger tap, single tap, and then you type in unmute present and it goes straight to that spot on in the schedule.
So I just thought I’d throw that out there.
Cool. Thanks a lot. That’s awesome.

[51:00] All right. Hey Lisa, how are you doing?
Hi, my second question was, do you have a phone number or a way to contact Zoom or a text, the text section of ACB because I’m still having trouble when I got a call into your call, it says, oh, engineer, you know, meeting ID and it completes it and then it hangs up on me.

[51:25] Yeah, so let me interrupt you because we’ve been trying to troubleshoot this and for a lot of people, Lisa. So first of all, it’s not just you, it is a Zoom issue. And you’re using the one touch dialing specifically or not. Yeah.
So with the one touch dialing, I’ve heard from several people not related to ACB.
So it’s not even an ACB thing that are having issues.
And unfortunately, the only thing I can suggest to you is you can send an email to Zoom or reach out to Zoom and let them know that you’re having issues with it.
I don’t have an immediate solution for you, but that is a known issue.
You happen to know, does anybody happen to know their email that I can reach them?
Because I have a low level account and they say, I don’t have the ability to call them to speak to somebody.
Yeah, stick around. I found an email just for someone the other day.
I will find it for you and give it to you within the next five minutes.
Thank you, very kind. Appreciate your assistance. I’m not the only one.

[52:23] Yeah, Sheila, who do we have next? And actually before we do that, I used what Jewel was talking about, an item chooser, and I found the email address by doing a search for the at sign.
And that email address is gonna be access, A-C-C-E-S-S, at zoom.us.
So again, that’s access at zoom.us. Sheila.
Hey, Doc. Excuse me. Hey, Doc.
Yeah, how can I tell for sure when I have Wi-Fi calling turned on on an iPhone.

[53:01] It is under your cellular settings and there’s a Wi-Fi calling option and if you go in there, it’ll either tell you if it’s on or off. You do have to set it up the first time you use it though. So if you haven’t set it up yet, you have to set it up, which is a little bit of a process.
Yeah, you do have to actually complete the 911 calling numbers. Yes, it will not let you, It will not let you use Wi-Fi calling unless you complete the 911 thing and that’s because they’re considering it your main place of residence and if you’re using your phone and you need to call 911, they need the information to be able to show up.
If you don’t do that process, then it won’t show up for emergency services.
So that’s why they force you to do it.
Okay. Thank you.

[53:50] Yep. All right. Marie. Hi, I have a comment and a question.
I just checked, and when you add a language on the iPhone under voiceover, the only way you can preview the voice is you have to download it first. And then if you swipe your finger up and down, you’ll find a preview button and you can hear it, what sounds like.
But my other question is, once you have downloaded and added a voice, does anybody know how you remove a voice you’ve added?
You could go into the voices, I believe, and as long as it’s not one of the stock ones, you can remove it.
But how? Maybe there’s a delete key. Okay. All right. Thanks. That’s it.

[54:31] Yep. All right. You’ve got four minutes. Do you want to take hands or?
Yeah, let’s try and knock out these last two hands really quickly. Hopefully. Ma’am.
Yes. I hope you can hear me. Zoom has been acting weird today.
Okay. For the for Monica. Yes. In fact, you can preview sample.
Marie, you’re missing out on this.
Turn your hints on for heaven’s sakes.
Go in, add the new language, select the voice, and you may have to hit that button again in order for the context menu sort of a thing to come up, but then if hints is turned on, It will say actions available, click down with one finger, and there is preview sample.
It is there. I just checked it a few minutes ago. It is there.
Perfect. Perfect. Thanks Pam. We’re running out of time.
We’ve got one more person. You’re welcome. Who do we got next Sheila? Hey Beth.
Beth, you’re muted. Okay, sorry. Yeah, I don’t understand the voiceover commands like.

[55:43] Reachability because I tried to make it so that it’s not quite as sensitive to the touch. Like this week I tried to kind of explore that and it’s so sensitive. I barely touch it and it will say you know, something or, or lock screen when I don’t even mean to and.
So Beth, send us an email so we can try to figure out exactly what’s going on.
Cause this seems like an ongoing issue.
So send an email and Marty, I’ll give you the email address to send it to when we close it up and we can follow up with you and see if we can help you out.
Cause it sounds like there may be some other underlying issues with your voiceover. Okay. Okay.
Sounds good. Perfect. Marty, why don’t we go and wrap it up? Yep. Yep.
All right, everyone. Thanks so much for being here at another Unmute.
Okay, can I sign something?
Oh, Abby didn’t send it out in time.
Okay.
Sheila, can we mute Beth? But I organized your spice cabinet.
Mark and form. And threw out. Perfect, thanks a lot.
All right. Okay, once again, thanks everyone for being here.
We appreciate it. And if you need anything, have any questions, you can reach us at feedback at unmute.show and we’ll be here next week, same time.
And everyone have a great day and we’ll see you next time.

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-e4dc67 for 40% off for 4 months, and support Unmute Presents.

181 – Streaming Services

Read transcript


Episode Notes

On this episode, Angie, Lynn, Marty, Jeff, and Michael discuss Logic Pro for iPad, Final Cut Pro for iPad, and the changes that are coming in streaming services like Max, and more.

Picks

Providing Feedback

We love hearing from you, so feel free to send an email to feedback@iacast.net. You can follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. You can also find us on Reddit, and all around the web. Also, don’t forget to check out our YouTube page, and for all things iACast, check out our iACast page. If you’d like to help support us, you can do so via our and Patreon pages.

Support iACast by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/iacast

Find out more at https://iacast.pinecast.co

Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/iacast/3ecd51de-27a6-4eea-b0df-c6bc42f9649b

Check out our podcast host, Pinecast. Start your own podcast for free with no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-3bc504 for 40% off for 4 months, and support iACast.

Demystifying External Hard Drives: Choosing the Right Drive for Your Needs

Summary: In this episode of Unmute Presents, host Marty dives into the world of external hard drives. Marty explains the different sizes of drives, including the standard 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch drives, highlighting their uses and benefits. He then explores the difference between platter drives and SSD drives, shedding light on their performance and durability. Marty also discusses the various connection types (USB-A, USB-C, and Thunderbolt) and how they affect data transfer speeds. Whether you’re looking for a drive for simple file backup or more demanding tasks like video and audio editing, Marty provides insights to help you make an informed decision.

Fake News and AI

In this episode of Friday Finds, Marty and Lynn discuss some recent stories involving AI and fake news, such as the hoax explosion near the Pentagon and the misuse of alt tags on social media. They also talk about the upcoming WWDC and some app updates that you don’t want to miss.

What is a Password Manager and Why You Need One

In this episode of Unmute Presents, Demasi explains what a password manager is, how it can help you create and store strong passwords for all your online accounts, and what are some of the pros and cons of using one. He also addresses some of the feedback he has received from previous episodes and how he plans to make the security segment more accessible and beginner-friendly.

Back to Top