S1: Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from
S1: October the 1st, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have
S1: you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia radio, associated
S1: stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
S1: There's also the podcast. To catch that, all you need
S1: to do is search for the two words talking tech
S1: and Dan O'Connell. Come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just
S1: after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your
S1: Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio
S1: talking tech podcast. Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast with me.
S1: Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.
S2: Hi, Stephen. How are you?
S1: Very well and lots to chat about again today. Let's
S1: start with smart wearables, and I'd like to ask you
S1: in particular about the meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.
S2: Sure. So these are made by Ray-Ban. So they look,
S2: for all intents and purposes, like a regular set of sunglasses.
S2: Ray-Ban have partnered with meta, who is the company that
S2: is responsible for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, those sorts of platforms.
S2: So these glasses have a small camera in the sort
S2: of left hand top left hand corner of the frame.
S2: The right hand arm of the glasses is a touch
S2: sensitive area that you can use for adjusting volume, and
S2: that type of thing. The speakers you get the audio
S2: from are built into the arms of the glasses, so
S2: they're not bone conduction, it's just that they sit sort
S2: of at the ends of the arms very close to
S2: your ears. They have a camera built into them. They
S2: pair to your phone via Bluetooth. They were really designed
S2: originally for the kind of Instagram Facebook market. So the
S2: idea being that people could take point of view, type
S2: photographs and post them straight to their Instagram feed or Facebook.
S2: But these things have some nice features that we as
S2: blind people can use. So they use Meta's own AI engine.
S2: And so you can do various things with that. You
S2: can use them like a set of Bluetooth headphones, as
S2: it were, so you can play your music through them.
S2: You can send messages, that type of thing by voice,
S2: but you can also ask it various questions so you
S2: can say things like, hey, meta, look and tell me
S2: what you see. Uh, hey, meta, look and read me
S2: any text. Um, look and tell me if there is
S2: any signage. Um, look and tell me what color this
S2: shirt is. Uh, look and tell me what color pants
S2: this would go with all of those kinds of things.
S1: You use them yourself, don't you?
S2: I do, yes. Also, I should mention they do come
S2: in a few different frame styles and different lenses so
S2: you can get polarized ones, or you can just get
S2: the sort of plain dark lenses. I have the Ray-Ban
S2: Meta Wayfarers, which are a sort of a trapezoid shaped lens.
S2: My wife has the headliner, which are more the traditional
S2: sort of round glasses, and then they have another one
S2: called the Skylar, which I haven't seen yet, but it's
S2: a different shaped lens again. Um, I got them really
S2: just to experiment with. I mean, they're a they are
S2: a mainstream piece of tech. Um, they're around about sort
S2: of $450, and they're available from your standard sunglasses type shops.
S2: And I just sort of wanted to see what I
S2: could do with them. I liked the idea that it was,
S2: you know, perhaps a mainstream bit of tech that we
S2: could use. Um, it doesn't do all of the things
S2: that things like the envision or the Arcs vision can
S2: do in that it when you try to read text,
S2: it will want to summarize it rather than reading it
S2: in its entirety. But certainly for environmental scanning and that
S2: kind of thing, I find it quite good. I was
S2: in Melbourne the other week and, uh, was using it
S2: to just help me find some shops. I don't come
S2: from Melbourne, I'm based in Brisbane and I was trying
S2: to navigate the Block Arcade in Collins Street in Melbourne
S2: and you know, just being able to use it to
S2: help me identify shops and things was actually quite helpful.
S1: Now with these glasses, meta have recently gone into partnership
S1: with Be My Eyes. Now Be My Eyes are one
S1: of the organisations who have support people or agents available
S1: from anywhere in the world as volunteers who will explain
S1: things to you that you might want to know about,
S1: like where the battery went to, that you dropped on
S1: the floor, etc. but this is an interesting partnership, isn't it?
S2: It is, and it's probably one of the biggest news
S2: stories in assistive tech of the week. So yes, they
S2: are partnering officially with meta. And the idea is that
S2: once the feature is released, you will be able to say,
S2: hey meta, call the volunteer on Be My Eyes and
S2: the volunteer will then be able to interpret things through
S2: your glasses camera rather than the camera built into your phone.
S2: So if you were, you know, needed some hands free
S2: navigation or something like that, or if you were cooking
S2: and you wanted to know, hey, does this steak look
S2: like it's done? Um, what have I got the stove
S2: set to? That kind of thing. Um, you know, all
S2: of those sort of visual interpretation tasks that we would
S2: normally use our phone for. It just gives you a
S2: nice hands free option. Um, you know, if you were
S2: navigating through an airport or something like that. IRA also
S2: have an implementation in beta as well. So IRA is
S2: a similar kind of visual interpretation service, but it's not free.
S2: It's a paid subscription. Whereas uh, Be My Eyes utilizes volunteers. Unfortunately,
S2: the IRA implementation at this point in time is a
S2: little clunky. And it's it's using WhatsApp as its video
S2: call engine, whereas the partnership between Meta and Be My
S2: Eyes means that it's seamless and accessible through the app.
S2: So it is quite an exciting development, I think.
S1: Is that available in Australia yet?
S2: No. Not yet. It's only just been announced in the
S2: last couple of days, I think Wednesday or Thursday last week.
S2: But I get the impression that it's certainly not far away.
S2: It is in beta. I have heard that there are
S2: people testing it and that kind of thing. So I
S2: don't think it'll be far away.
S1: Let's turn to Humanware now and prodigy. There's been a
S1: major update.
S2: Some of you may be familiar with the humanware prodigy magnifiers,
S2: the old prodigy duo or the Prodigy Connect, which was
S2: their tablet based solution. They've now released the prodigy software
S2: for windows, and the idea of this is that you
S2: can run it on a windows laptop or tablet and
S2: have a document camera connected, and it can serve as
S2: a portable magnification slash OCR solution. So you could, for example,
S2: if you know as a student, you might use it
S2: to OCR, for example, a worksheet, or you might just
S2: choose to magnify it if there were graphics on it. Um,
S2: you can, depending on the camera that you have connected,
S2: you can also use it for distance, magnification and then
S2: potentially again, uh, OCR that and convert it to spoken text.
S2: And they have it in a few different versions. You
S2: can download the software as a 14 day trial, which
S2: is nice, and you can get it as a software only,
S2: or you can get it as a bundle with a
S2: camera or with a camera and a surface. Microsoft Surface Laptop. Um,
S2: so yeah, it provides a nice a nice portable option
S2: for students or anyone needing a portable magnification and OCR
S2: solution on the go.
S1: Mm. Very good. Tell us now about Harjanne consulting and
S1: amongst the work that Brian Harjanne does the Lacie product.
S2: So Harken Consultancy is headed up by Brian Harken, who's
S2: probably one of the world's most prolific jaws scripters. And
S2: they do a range of different products including things like
S2: scripts for the station playlist. Broadcasting suite. They've got scripts
S2: for the Twitter website. Scripts for Zoom and Teams. And
S2: they also do a bunch of online training courses. Lisi
S2: is a productivity tool that bolts onto Jaws, and it
S2: provides a whole range of different options. There is a
S2: couple of versions of it. There's one that sort of
S2: functions like a menu system for people who are very
S2: new to computer use. And then there's the Lisi advanced product,
S2: which allows you to do all kinds of things. You
S2: can do things like have a whole bunch of shortcuts.
S2: For example, if there's different blocks of text that you
S2: frequently use in a report, you can set those up.
S2: You can call up any of your web favourites from anywhere.
S2: You can use it for posting to various social media
S2: platforms from anywhere. You can listen to radio stations in
S2: the background while you're working. There's a whole bunch of
S2: sort of time saving things that they've introduced and the
S2: latest build, addresses some issues with things like the VLC
S2: media player. If you do a an insert t in
S2: jaws 2024, which normally gives you a window title, it'll
S2: tell you the status of the window as well. If
S2: you if you quickly press that key twice, it is
S2: a product that's constantly evolving and you know they generally
S2: have an update ready as soon as there's a new
S2: version of jaws available. And yeah, it really does offer
S2: a lot of, um, a lot of productivity improvements and
S2: just ways of getting to information with a couple of keystrokes.
S1: Lisi l e a s y. We'll put the address
S1: to Harjanne Consulting in the show notes. You mentioned jaws 2024.
S1: Jaws 2025 is not far away, along with the other
S1: Freedom Scientific Updates, fusion and Zoomtext. Tell us about that.
S2: Sure. So, um, the there are some quite exciting new
S2: features in jaws slash fusion. Probably the biggest ones that
S2: come to mind is the PFS companion, which is an
S2: AI search type tool that allows you to ask questions
S2: about Jaws commands, Microsoft products, you know. So how to
S2: do something in Outlook or Excel for example? It is
S2: limited to sort of Jaws use Microsoft product use that
S2: kind of thing. So you couldn't ask it for a
S2: recipe for chocolate muffins. But if you wanted to know
S2: how to, for example, sort something in Excel or how
S2: to use the OCR feature in Jaws or something like that,
S2: you can do that. You can ask it questions in
S2: that sort of conversational style, and it will respond and
S2: give you the, you know, a number of different pieces
S2: of information. So it's a good way to, uh, to
S2: search for, you know, commands, particularly given that the things
S2: like the Microsoft Office suite seems to change every five
S2: minutes at the moment. And, um, you know, so there's
S2: always new commands or slightly new ways of doing things.
S2: The other big one is the continuous OCR feature. We've
S2: had convenient OCR for a while, which enables you to
S2: scan or OCR things like PDFs that have started life
S2: as a scanned document or controls on your screen that
S2: are perhaps not labelled. But this allows you to do
S2: continuous OCR so that as the screen changes, it continues
S2: to perform OCR and drop the results into a virtual
S2: viewer so that you can look at them. So if
S2: you're trying to navigate screens that are not accessible. It
S2: provides a really good way of doing that. As usual,
S2: a whole range of other bug fixes and performance improvements
S2: and that kind of thing. Likewise, with zoom text, they've
S2: made some changes to the multi-monitor modes in response to
S2: user feedback. They've also made quite a few tweaks under
S2: the hood that improve things like start up time with
S2: the zoom text and so on. Definitely some some quite
S2: exciting improvements coming.
S1: So that'll be out from the end of October. The
S1: upgrades to those products, zoom text, Jaws and fusion from
S1: Freedom Scientific. Now hats off and thank you to our
S1: friend and colleague Jonathan Mohsin, because over the weekend, he
S1: dropped the final edition of the Living Mindfully podcast 305.
S1: It was. That includes the Mohsin at Large podcasts that
S1: were available for many years as well. Great service to
S1: the blind community of the world with lots of product demos,
S1: conversation and discussion of blindness issues. It's going to be missed.
S2: Absolutely. It's something that I listen to very regularly. It's
S2: a great source of, as you say, demos, but also
S2: some really good discussions around ride share refusals and behavior
S2: of airlines when it comes to assistance dogs and all
S2: of those kinds of things. So hats off to Jonathan.
S2: He's done a fantastic job, provided a really well produced
S2: and informative podcast.
S1: Those podcasts will stay around for some time If you
S1: haven't caught up with them yet and downloaded them, and
S1: I'm sure we'll hear from Jonathan from time to time
S1: as he moves into his new career phase with the
S1: National Federation of the blind in the United States. Now,
S1: just before we go, a reminder of where there are
S1: details of what we've been talking about in this and
S1: previous editions of Talking Tech, you can go to VA radio,
S1: dot org slash talking tech. VA radio, dot org slash
S1: talking tech and to right to the program.
S2: People can send an email to Damo Damo McMorrow mkmo
S2: w r o w at Vision australia.org. I always enjoy
S2: receiving your emails.
S1: Damo McMorrow at Vision australia.org. This has been talking tech
S1: with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager
S1: Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Stay safe. We'll talk more
S1: tech next week. See you.