2014-03-12-soft skills 2 - · web viewwelcome to seminars@hadley. my name is larry muffett....

Seminars@Hadley

iOS for Deaf-Blind Users

Presented by Scott Davert

Moderated by Larry Muffett

October 14, 2015

Larry MuffettWelcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s Seminars teams and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is iOS for Deaf-Blend Users.

Our presenter today is the coordinator of the New York Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program, Scott Davert. Scott’s program is designed to be a free telecommunications equipment to people who has combined vision and hearing loss who also have low income.

He is also a member of the AppleVis editorial team and publishes guest entries on several blogs that relate to dealing with vision and/or hearing loss. He has most recently published his annual review of the accessibility changes in the latest versions of iOS. Today, Scott will share his professional expertise on

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how iOS devices and applications can assist individuals with combined vision and hearing loss. So, now let me welcome Scott and we’ll get underway. Welcome Scott.

Scott DavertWell, thank you Larry. Good morning to those of you on the West Coast, good afternoon to the rest of the country. This is Scott Davert and I want to start off by kind of going over a couple of things very quickly from the last seminar that I did last month just in case some of who were not at that seminar are at this one.

And the first thing that I want to quickly go over is what is deaf-blindness and how do we define that? Some people think of deaf-blindness as someone who is totally deaf and totally blind and that’s certainly is someone who would be classified as deaf-blind obviously. However, we have a lot of sub categories, if you will, of people who are deaf-blind. For example, I myself I’m considered deaf-blind. I am totally blind and hard of hearing.

You would be considered deaf-blind as well if you have a low vision and are hard of hearing or if you have low vision and are deaf, and of course if you have neither of either sense. So it’s really important to define that before we go into this because many of the things that I’m going to be talking about apply to one sub-section or another and in some cases all.

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One of the things that I figured it would be good to kind of discuss also is some of the struggles that people with deaf-blindness and its various forms encounter with different apps. As you are all aware the technology revolution, if you will, in the last quarter of the century or so has really taken the world by storm and improved people’s lives in a lot of ways.

In fact, 25 years ago this exact seminar could not have occurred, because well we just didn’t have the technology. Even just a dialogue between Larry and I, Larry is in Illinois, I’m in New York. That couldn’t necessarily happen on such a good quality audio connection. Of course, you could call each other on the phone or something, but we couldn’t have this type of a platform available. And just like in the mainstream how technology has advanced and has created a lot of conveniences and a lot of great things, the same can be said for people who are deaf-blind.

I want to go over some very basic apps first and a few limitations as I said. This particular webinar is on iOS only. The reason for iOS only being in the discussion at this point iOS of course the operating system that iPads, iPhones and iPods use. The reason why we’re discussing that specifically and not including operating systems like Android and Windows phone is because the widest variety of apps for different circumstances are available on the iOS platform, and also there are a lot more accessibility features that

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are built into iOS that aren’t built into other operating systems, and I’m getting to that here in a second as well.

So looking at the different categories of deaf-blindness, we of course have individuals who are totally deaf-blind. Many of these individuals are going to be relying on a braille display to interact with their environment in the digital realm. Whether that be on a Windows computer or in the case of the mobile market and the case of the focus of this webinar on iOS.

While Android support exists for braille displays it’s a much more limited experience both in terms of the number of apps that you have braille available and also the amount of support even in the native Android apps that you have.

With that we’ll go exclusively iOS now. And for those who are totally deaf-blind we do have native support for braille displays on iDevices. What that means is I don’t have to install any other applications, I don’t have to do a whole lot of configuration or setup in the process of actually connecting the device to my braille display. All that’s really required is a braille display with a Bluetooth connection for the most part.

There are a couple of exceptions to the rule, braille displays that came out more than I would say about seven or eight years ago are not compatible. So

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braille displays like the [inaudible 06:04] and mPower for example are not covered, but other displays are. For example, the first generation braille display from Humanware, it doesn’t have a keyboard on it, but you can connect it through Bluetooth and get it to display what VoiceOver is reading.

One of the challenges for braille users and that is specific to Apple and the iOS realm, it’s not even a problem on the Mac, is connecting the braille display to the iDevice. With iOS the connection must be established through Bluetooth. And what that of course means is that you’ll have to initiate the pairing in some ways you perform. And to do that on iOS we have to go into settings, general accessibility and then VoiceOver and then braille; that’s the sub-menu that you have to go into.

And then choose the device to pair with and then enter an authentication code on the braille display if it’s required. Some don’t require it; many do. The best course of action really is to consult your user manual for whatever device you’re connected to or connecting with.

And then you have to enter that authentication code and tap¸ “Pair,” on the iDevice and the way you go, which is great. However, if you are totally deaf-blind you will not be able to complete this process yourself. If you have some residual hearing or some residual vision you will hopefully be able to see the screen well

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enough to – or hear the feedback from VoiceOver well enough to make the connection. But if you don’t have that ability, unfortunately you won’t be able to set it up yourself.

The good news is that once you have established that connection, it stays. So once you say for example have locked your iDevice and you’ve turned off your braille display or maybe walked out of range with Bluetooth, once you have it set to go back on. Say for example I walk back in the range and my braille display is on in what we call discoverable mode, if the iDevice is active it should, and I stress the word, “Should,” automatically pair backup with that braille display. VoiceOver is back on and you can basically pick up from wherever you are currently at using braille.

So it’s not necessarily something that someone can’t do independently who is deaf-blind, it’s just that initial setup process that can be a real challenge. And really, I know a lot of people who have gone that are totally deaf-blind who’ve gone literally over a year without having to have their device repaired. And I’ve seen other circumstances where it just happens. One limitation of this in iOS 9 we’re later to be aware of is that when you are in – when you go into airplane mode which disables all of your communication with the outside world, which includes Bluetooth, even when you turn Bluetooth back on the pairing of the

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braille display will not resume. So that is a bug in the latest operating system version.

Now, in order to get braille working of course you have to have VoiceOver enabled. VoiceOver is Apple’s screen reader for iOS and it will basically drive the braille display. And that’s the case with all operating systems, whether you’re talking about a braille display on Windows, you’ll need a screen reader to run that, like maybe JAWS or NVDA or Window Eyes. Or in the Mac same thing, you have to have VoiceOver in order to run the braille display and that’s also the case here on iOS.

Which means that by in-large many of the apps that are compatible with VoiceOver are also compatible with braille. Basically what happens is VoiceOver instructs the braille display and what to display and it just magically shows up.

There are limitations to this of course. There is limitations to everything in life. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. But a lot of the limitations that we have relate to apps that are self-voicing. Things where you have no need according to the developer for the use of VoiceOver and these are usually apps that are created for novice users or maybe beginners who may need the support or in certain situations some GPS apps for example will do self-voicing to give you instructions on where you’re going once you have a route planned.

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And unfortunately when that self-voicing occurs the speech is not sent to the braille display, and the reason for this is that it’s not using VoiceOver, it’s using its own internal speak. So that creates some problems and we’ll get into a couple of examples of that here in a minute.

Other things that you have on iOS are of course the zoom function for those who are low vision, whether you have a hearing loss or not of course. And that is an additional setting; it can be enabled under accessibility. And you can also setup what you call the accessibility shortcuts so you can toggle zoom, invert colors or any of the low-vision enhancements on and off quickly if you need them say for example in some apps and not in others.

Now, let’s get into the actual content of where we’re working with here and that is different apps. I’m going to mainly focus on braille apps, because that’s what a lot of deaf-blind people that I work with use. And certainly some of these apps will apply just as much to the low-vision user as they will the braille user. I’ll try to kind of give examples and point out where that is and where that isn’t as we go along here.

The first category is news. News is something that as a deaf-blind person is kind of a challenge to get up until very recently. And the reason for that is we can’t turn on the radio and just listen to the news or watch

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TV. If you don’t have enough vision you can’t watch closed captioning, so that’s not really going to be an option for this population, myself included. I can listen to the radio, but I prefer to read.

So having access to braille, whether it’s on the computer or in this case iOS is really something that has opened up the world for a lot of deaf-blind people. They’ve been finally able to get up-to-date news information that is relevant to their community and is updated regularly.

For braille and as far as I know anyway low-vision users, we of course have NFB-NEWSLINE. NFB-NEWSLINE is a free app and service. It’s only available her in the United States unfortunately, but it does give access to over 300 newspapers, as well as I think somewhere around 50 different magazines. And it gives full access to the text of these publications. It’s fully usable with braille, it’s fully useable with speech, and to my knowledge works quite well with the zoom and many of the low-vision enhancements as well. So you have that as an option.

And that’s great for people in the US. It’s great because it’s specialized. It was made specifically for blind and deaf-blind users, but if you’re outside the United States or if you’re someone who doesn’t want to get their news directly just from newspapers, you may want to look at other apps. I certainly have

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another app that I use very frequently and I think it’s a great model for accessibility, and the way accessibility can be implemented into a regular mainstream app is the BBC, whether you’re using BBC UK or BBC World, these application gives you really good access and it’s really easy to find content whether it’s print or if you have the ability to hear or watch videos, you have all that right there.

Unfortunately, the videos don’t always have accompanying textual content. So sometimes that can be an issue, but if you’re looking at the article section of the BBC, it’s all written or there is usually an equivalent written form to the video. So you can have readily available access to latest news headlines around the world.

Kind of switching back to the US or US-based media outlet, another app that I use frequently with a braille display is AP Mobile. AP of course is the Associated Press. And again, a very well put-together app. Most everything is useable and all the articles are available and able to be read by everyone and it works well with braille, and also has the ability to zoom and do all the different things that many other low-vision users would like to have in their articles.

I did want to mention briefly the news app, the news app meaning Apple News. This is a news app that you’ll find in iOS 9, which was released about a month ago now. News is accessible. You noticed there I did

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kind of hesitate a little bit. The reason I hesitated was because depending on the news source, you know, you have a wide variety of different choices, literally thousands of them; everything from CNN to Fox News to Reuters, to much lesser known or less mainstream publications. In fact, AppleVis the website I help run, we are also available in Apple news.

Depending on the source and depending on the type of media it may or may not be accessible to your needs. And the reason for that is because first of all they are ads, that sometimes flash and that can cause both the VoiceOver and/or the braille display they move around the screen which makes it really difficult to read. But also there is a lot of video content with feeds such as CNN and Fox News. Many other mainstream TV outlets have a lot of video content up there, which isn’t really accessible to somebody who can’t hear the audio. And I don’t think many of them have captioning available on their videos either, so it kind of creates a situation.

So news or Apple news as I call it is something that’s usable but certainly not something that you would want to have as your only news source residing on your iDevice.

Continuing on, but sort of shifting gears to another category of apps that we have. We have a lot of apps out there for different things such as managing your money. And some of the bank applications are more

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accessible than others. For example, I use Bank of America. And Bank of America is relatively accessible, even in the way that you take pictures of the checks when you deposit them for example, which is sort of a challenge for the braille display, because you have to hold the check, or I’m sorry, hold the phone over the check – you’re using the backward-facing camera. And well, it’s kind of hard to activate the camera in that case if you’re holding the camera over the check and you want to keep a steady picture and either double tap or you use the braille display and hit the cursor writing button to activate that.

But it is usable, and if the image is not clear enough the app will actually say, or make you retake the picture say the front of the check or the back of the check for example. But once you get decent with taking pictures it’s actually quite usable. With the Bank of America app and I’m using that is an example here, because it’s what I’m most familiar with.

It just not allow you to do certain things, for example setting up bill pay accounts. So, say for example you want to mail a check to somebody, while that process is usable on the PC and the Mac it’s not usable on iOS. So you may go in and try to select a date, and that’s the issue that I’ve been having with it. You might not be able to actually schedule a payment other than for the next available day. So if you say for example you wanted to a schedule payment to someone out, that’s not going to really work because

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it’s just simply not usable with VoiceOver or braille. So that’s something to be aware of.

My understanding is that Wells Fargo, another bank, is also fairly usable; their app is. So if you have Wells Fargo you might find that to be a usable application. Or on the topic of money there is of course the LookTel Money Reader. LookTel Money Reader is a $10 purchase, $10 US. If you’re in another country you’ll have to do your own calculation on what that will be in your currency, but it does offer both speech and braille output for the recognition of several denominations of bills. I know it does the Euro, it does the British pounds, it does Australian dollars, it does of course US dollars and several other currencies.

That is a good option. It’s $10, but I find it works much better than if you’re in the US and you want to use a free app, we do have one available but it only recognizes US currency and that is UIENote. U-I-E-N-O-T-E. And while UIENote is free and it does work with braille – First of all it only recognizes US currency which may or may not be relevant to you depending on your life circumstances, but it also takes a lot longer for the device to grab the image of the bill and then give you an actual result. So I guess it is true, you get what you pay for in this instance.

Moving on, we have the games category. Everything is not always serious. And using your iDevice is no

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different. We have a lot of different game options for deaf-blind users, and of course blind users. And one of the ones that I use very frequently is an app called Dice World. And Dice World is Dice space World. Dice World is available – it’s a free app but you do have to, under with the free app you actually have to watch a video everyone once in a while. Of course, the video is not accessible but it’s an ad anyway. And then you have to get back out of the video. That part is not accessible, but if you pay for the $0.99 thing to remove ads then you don’t have to worry about that.

Dice World is actually six games. The more common ones that many people are probably familiar with are Yatzy, Farkle and also we have Pig. Those are probably the three most common ones that they have. There are three other games in the app. It's mostly usable. When I say mostly, because it does take a little bit of configuration from the setup. If anybody really want I can go into that here when we get to questions. But what it does is it gives you access and it does have special settings for VoiceOver, but you don’t have to use them. And it allows you to play all these different games with people around the world.

And it’s really great for me, because my family lives in another state for the most part and it’s kind of a way that we can really interact with one another by just using this app and playing games. And there’s a chat message function on there as well.

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So there is that game. There is also a game called the Worder. The word, well Word with ER in end. And Worder is an anagram game. It’s available I believe for free, but I downloaded it so long ago I’m not a 100% sure. But Worder is an anagram game where you can – you get a bigger word and you have to make some of the smaller words out of it. And it works really well with VoiceOver and braille as well.

There is also a game called Hangman. You have to get a specific version. Larry, if you want I can actually compile a list of links that if people are interested I can e-mail out later. But Hangman actually works better with braille than it does VoiceOver, because you have, you know, a number of dashes for the word. And VoiceOver doesn’t read them automatically all of them, it will just read three and it might skip to a three because there the VoiceOver is set to only read three punctuation marks regardless of whether there are six or seven there, it’s only going to read three of them.

And this is another accessible game that is available and it was $0.99 in the US app store. And again, it’s fully usable. It is not an interactive game, meaning you’re basically just playing on your own, but it’s another option that’s out there.

There are many game applications that deaf-blind users can get a hold of. One of their text adventure games is Alter Ego. Alter Ego is another, I think it

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was $2 in the app store and you basically go through the life of either a male or a female, you get to choose your characters and then you get to basically make life choices and play the game out. So those are a few games. We did have a lot of other usable games out there, but that’s just a few that are on the market.

Switching gears a little bit now. Of course, text messaging the messages app is fully usable by VoiceOver and braille users and that’s really nice, again to keep in contact with many people. Most of the Apple apps work really well with VoiceOver and braille, so pretty much anything you look at the app store is going to be usable. I know that there are a few issues of Keynote, which is the Apple answer to Microsoft PowerPoint, that last I checked anyway it was fairly usable on as far as just reading slides and things like that.

One of the other things that a lot of people want to access to is of course weather alerts and emergency alerts for their area. And you have a number of apps that work well with VoiceOver and braille. The thing with those are that many of them are localized, so for example I have an app here called Mass On Now [26:50] which is for my county, which works and works fine. I can read alerts and evacuation notices if they’re up there, things like that. But it doesn’t really work outside of a county. So it’s a little difficult to do some of these reviews with localization. But for

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weather alerts it’s a $10 app with a $6 subscription. But I use an app called the Weather Radio by WDT.

Weather Radio is a radio yes, but it also gives you the alert as a text, whether it’s a weather alert – and you can also of course look at forecast just like you can in the native weather app that comes with your iDevice. What’s neat about Weather Radio is that you can actually subscribe to a yearly thing that will give you alerts as when there is lightning within six miles of your current location. Especially for somebody who isn’t going to see lightning or hear thunder, they might feel it if it’s that close but otherwise isn’t going to have access to the information and this app will give you access to that. And if you’re in there and it gets a lot of thunderstorms that could be really important.

We have a lot of other applications. We’ll switch gears again here a little and go into GPS apps. One that I use very frequently is iMove. i-M-O-V-E. iMove is a free app and I believe it’s available worldwide. I know that they have it in Australia and several other countries and we have it here in the United States. It’s not a route-planning app, but what it does do is it gives you an approximate address and you can look around you to see what kind of points of interest there are.

I use it when I’m on a bus, because I cannot hear bus announcements very well. So I use the iMove app and I know where I’m going, so I know about what the

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address should be from where I’m going. So I can track where we’re at on the bus as long as long as I have a cell signal and knowing it’s time for me to get off the bus. I don’t need to hear the bus driver. I don’t need to really necessarily interact with anybody. I just know when it’s my turn to get up and go and so I do. And it works quite well for that.

Again with GPS like I mentioned previously, some of the challenges are going to be things like self-voicing apps. MotionX GPS is one that a lot of blind people were using for a while. That has self-voicing. Blind Square which is a very popular app for the blind – it’s basically a GPS app that also takes information from a social networking site called FourSquare. And this works fairly well with braille, but there are still some speech information that is not conveyed in braille unfortunately. And so while it’s a usable app in many situations, even planning routes is achievable through this app, you’re not going to get some of the voice alerts.

I’ve been dialoguing also on with the developer about this, but it’s not yet perfected in my opinion. Hopefully we’ll get there though. I’m going to have a little brief section about that as well here at the end of my presentation.

Another app that’s fairly popular is Seeing Eye GPS. That’s of course the app developed by Sendero Group and it is $100 a year or there are also monthly

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subscriptions available and I think there are a couple of other payment subscription options. What that app has done is they have try to take the experience of some of the special iGPS software that they have developed for other products and they’ve been able to a large extent duplicate that experience in a lot of ways on iPhones.

One of the neat features of it is of course the fact that it vibrates to over each when it’s time to turn or to do something depending on what you have it set to do. And this is really a nice thing for me, because I can set it up and get a vibration alert that, “Oh, I need to look down at the braille display, because if I can’t hear the speech I’m not getting that information and I can’t always have one hand on my braille display while I’m walking down the street. If I have a dog or a cane that’s not really going to work for me.” So, that is the GPS category.

There are a few other different apps for people who maybe hard of hearing. Maybe you’re blind and you have quite a bit of hearing but there are certain situations where some sort of amplification may help you.

There is an app called Petralex, P-E-T-R-A-L-E-X, Petralex Hearing Aid. It is free. And what it does is it will take either of the microphone of your iDevice and you can hear the output of it if you plug headphones in or if you have it paired to a Bluetooth headset. Or if

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you’re on a headset and you want you can use that or you can use the microphone and a headset. What it does is it basically broadcasts to you whatever is around you and it amplifies I think to 30dB, which is 30 decibels, which is not a lot of amplification, but if you’re somebody with a mild hearing loss it may help.

If you are going to use that app once you get it setup I recommend turning off VoiceOver. So it’s not really a good app to use in conjunction with a lot of other ones, because if you’re a VoiceOver user and you’re trying to use speech obviously that’s going to interfere with whatever this app is doing. And it does allow you to customize to a certain extent equalizer settings and things like that. It’s relatively accessible and it’s free, and who doesn’t like free?

One of the other things that we have that’s kind of coming down the pipeline actually is made for iPhone hearing aids. And this is not something that I had a chance myself to look at, unfortunately I don’t have that kind of money, which is of course a big challenge in the field and that’s something that actually the program that I work for is hoping to help address. But made for hearing aids actually connects directly with – Made for iPhone hearing aids, I should say, connects directly to the iDevice. So if you have a pair – I believe ReSound is the one company that’s doing it. R-E-S-O-U-N-D or ReSound, that’s usually how I’ve heard it pronounce, they have it setup so that there’s no device required to go in between the iPhone and

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hearing aids. So it connects directly and the sound is played directly into the hearing aid.

Those have a ways to go as I understand it especially for people who want to listen to VoiceOver, because there is a significant delay on the – By significant, I mean almost half a second in some cases between when VoiceOver said something and when you actually get it in your hearing aids, but that’s something that they’re working on. Even in the later versions of these hearing aids that have recently come out they’ve kind of addressed and they’ve kind of put down on some of that delay. So that’s something that’s kind of coming down the pipeline, which is really interesting.

There is an app for this ReSound hearing aids and the app is primarily usable by VoiceOver users. There are some challenges with it, but I know that there is an active group of beta testers with ReSound who are VoiceOver users that are also kind of working with them to try to get some of these kinks worked out. Because what you can do with the app is you can actually adjust the amount of the type of frequency that you’re hearing more of or less of, in addition to going into a lot of programs in your hearing aids. So there’s a lot of different things coming on to the market now that really have made a difference.

And then you also have devices that will go in between your hearing aids and the iDevice for

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example. They may connect to Bluetooth, to both your hearing aids and your iDevice. Or in some cases you might use a cable, which is what I do to go from the device to the iDevice and then it’s also – it’s still connected wirelessly to your hearing aids.

And I found that with the set of phone app hearing aids that I have and a device called a Compilot, C-O-M-P-I-L-O-T, that it actually is very usable and I haven’t been able to hear music for example or different types of sounds the way that I have with this device patched into my system. This way and probably close to 20 years. So it’s really made a huge difference.

I’ve got a few minutes left here before we go into question and answer, so I’m going to talk a little bit about specialized apps for the blind and deaf-blind. You do have apps that work for the blind but also for hard of hearing, things like Be My Eyes, that’s three words, where you can connect to somebody through a video connection if you have a good enough internet connection or good cell signal. And it will allow you to get help. You can speak with the person or they can look at what’s going on, on camera around you to describe what’s going on.

I actually used this recently in a hotel when I was trying to figure out how in the heck the thermostat worked. I couldn’t figure it out. It was like a 110 in there, so it was time to get help. I can’t sleep when

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it’s quite that hot. So I was able to connect with somebody on that app and get the assistance I need.

There’s also another app that I haven’t tried personally yet, but hope to soon called CrowdViz, C-R-O-W-D-V-I-Z, that is one word. And it has a similar concept, same idea as what you have on Be My Eyes. The difference between Be My Eyes and CrowdViz is primarily that the people who work with CrowdViz are screened and are put through in some kind of an interview process, but because of that you do have to pay a fee for that service.

By My Eyes is totally free, but you just never know what you’ll get. So of course it’s important to make sure you’re careful about who and what you’re connecting to and who sees what’s going on. You don’t want to have your credit cards laying around those types of things. The challenge of course is for those people who don’t use speech and can’t hear. There’s no way to text the question, and I’ve offered this as a suggestion to both services and has not been implemented yet.

You can’t text the question and then have somebody text you back to answer. So say for example if I want to read the service stat or if I want to know what I have in front of me, maybe a canned good for example. I can’t text them that question and get a text or response back. So I’m reliant on audio for that and

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it’s kind of a shortcoming for a lot of people that could otherwise really benefit from a service like this.

Would it be slower? Absolutely, it would be slower, but it’s a difference between having service and not if you were able to access text. And if you can’t in this case, if you’re not able then both these apps are pretty much be useless to you.

One more app that I want to mention before we open up for questions, and I could go on for days and days and we don’t want that, is KNFB Reader. Now KNFB Reader is a very expensive app. It’s a $100 US. But what it does better than any app I’ve ever come across, as you take a picture of it and it will show up as text. It basically converts printed text into digital text.

And it’s sort of a challenge to use for a braille user in the sense that it is self-voicing but it also works with VoiceOver. Remember I said earlier how self-voicing and things were kind of a challenge and it didn’t worked necessarily with braille. But the thing is once you take that picture, the self-voicing starts pretty much right away. You just have to scroll around a little bit to get it to where you can read it with your braille display.

So it can be a challenge to use. So there is that limitation to KNFB Reader, but I scan all my mail with it and read it on braille and things like that. It does

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take a bit of training and it takes a bit of getting used to in terms of how to level the camera and what to do to get a good picture and we don’t have time to get into that.

I think we’re about to the point where we’re going to open up for questions and/or comments. So Larry, I will turn it back to you and if there’s any questions that have come in on the textbox or whenever you want to facilitate that, go for it.

Larry MuffettYes, Scott. Fantastic as usual. Hopefully we will get some more questions. There’s none in the textbox, but I’m going to open up the microphone here and let people queue up and ask you some questions. One thing I did want to put out is that would be great if you could compile that registry you were talking about that list. We can put that along with the recording of this seminar and eventually when we have the transcript prepared we can list that resource page along with that and I think it would be very helpful.

Having said that I’m going to release the microphone here and if people have questions go ahead and queue up and let’s ask out. We’ve got an amazing resource here, let’s take advantage of them.

All right, I’m going to start – I’m going to prime the pump here with a question and ask Scott just to sort of use your predictive powers here. In what sort of

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area are you thinking that we’re going to be seeing some future apps in? Is it all of the above or is it going to be in the GPS realm or – What sort of area do you see the most progress coming or the coolest new things coming out in?

Scott DavertHonestly, I don’t know. I could pretend I’m a meteorologist and give you a guess, but really there is kind of a lot of those things for a lot of situations where you don’t know what will come down the pipeline and what won’t. One of the things that I’m hoping for is that we’ll actually get access to the Apple Watch with braille displays and we currently don’t have that.

You can kind of interact with it using the watch app on the iPhone, but I’d like native support for that in the watch so that it’s not really going to be a confusing thing and I can interact directly with the watch and look at the information. So I’d like to see that become an option. I’m hopeful it will.

You know other things it’s really hard to predict what will happen in the iOS realm. I think that as a general rule I’m hopeful that as more and more apps become accessible people will start to recognize the value of universal design and the value of having people with disabilities have access to apps just as much as everyone else. Because in a lot of ways while having access to an app as a sight and hearing person is

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great, you know, again and we’ll use the news thing as an example, you can still turn on the TV and you can still turn on the radio, whereas again somebody who can’t hear and/or see that information hasn’t had access until now.

So I do think that, you know, there’s a very positive hopeful future in technology in the way things are evolving, but what that exact evolution will look like? I have no idea. No way I could have predicted 10 years ago that I would be sitting here giving a demonstration to a bunch of people on Apple devices and how they work with braille displays, you know. I don’t think that’s something could’ve foreseen in 2005. So, I guess my answer is I don’t have a good one for you.

Larry MuffettI appreciate that. Jeanette has a question. She says, “I have a new deaf-blind student. She just recently got her first iDevice and a portable braille display. Is there a particular GPS app that you would recommend for a first-time user? I know there are several GPS apps to choose from, but I’m curious as to which you would think are best for a beginner?”

Scott DavertOkay. Well, I don’t think GPS is a good place to start in general for a new user. But just to get a general idea I do think that iMove, again i-M-O-V-E is a really good app for things like that because it does give you

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native support, and there’s not a whole lot of fighting you have to do with the app. But no matter what app you do decide to go with, you know, you have to be aware of both the limitations of GPS as it pertains to, you know, the person and travel, because I know that a lot of the companies tend to market. It is the end-all to travel issues and anybody that’s been around for a while can tell you that’s definitely not the case.

But the one thing that you really have to learn to do and to be patient with is the fact that you’re going to have to scroll through information, because you get information line-by-line. Say the information you want is halfway down the app, you’re going to have to scroll until you get to that point and there are different ways that you can work around that depending on the context of the app. But iMove is definitely something I would recommend as a beginner, just for tracking your current location. Again, it does not allow you to plan routes and that’s again – that’s more advanced feature of iDevices for a lot of people. So I hope that is helpful.

Larry MuffettDiane who works here at Hadley has a question for you. She says, “Can someone who uses a deaf-blind communicator use any of these apps, would they need an additional iDevice?”

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Scott DavertBy deaf-blind communicator I assume that you’re referring to the mPower and companion phone that’s connected is that correct? Hopefully can answer in the textbox.

Larry MuffettYeah. Diane says, “Yes, I know it has a cellphone but I don’t know if it’s equipped for apps. Thanks.”

Scott DavertUnfortunately, the deaf-blind communicator package does not really – you can’t really interact with any app. You’re basically restricted to whatever you have on the mPower. That’s the only compatible device with the deaf-blind communicator.

You can do text messaging with it, but you’re not going to be able to say for example use an iPhone to connect to the mPower for a few reasons. One of them being that the Bluetooth technology inside the mPower is just way too outdated. I think they started making the braille mPower like maybe 10 years ago, 9, 10 years ago, something like that. So of course Bluetooth technology has evolved a lot since then.

And then also because of that and the design of the braille note mPower, or the braille note in general, the software that is written for that and the operating system is called KeySoft, but it’s only compatible with things that are specifically written for that device. So

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unfortunately, for those on the deaf-blind communicator a lot of these apps that we’re talking about are not going to be usable.

That said, a lot of the keyboard commands that you’ll find on say the deaf-blind communicator when you connect a braille display to an iDevice many of those will be the same, assuming you’re using the braille keyboard version.

Larry MuffettOther questions for Scott?

DelsinaHi, this is Delsina. First, I want to say thank you for the opportunity and yes I am grateful for the advance that we have in technology so that people like myself that deaf-blind can use. My one question is you have mentioned there were something that one can use with a hearing aid with the iPhone, where you have to turn over – turn off VoiceOver. Could you please repeat that information for me? Thanks.

Scott DavertSure. The app is called Petralex. P-E-T-R-A-L-E-X Hearing Aid. It’s a free app and it will basically – If you’re a VoiceOver user or you’re working with somebody who is a VoiceOver user you obviously have to set it up in such a way that you can use it, and it is mainly usable. Some of the button labeling is

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a little confusing. But it is something that you can use.

The reason why you want to turn VoiceOver off, unless you’re using braille in which case you can just turn speech off and keep using it, is that the speech will interfere with the audio that’s being broadcasted to your headphones or your Bluetooth headset. Again, you can set it up with speech and get it to the way you like it. But then, you know, if you’re using speech while this app is active you’re not going to be able to hear the sounds around you as well, because VoiceOver is going to always be there talking.

That’s why there is a kind of a limitation to that. There is a couple other apps – I think it’s called Awareness. I’m not exactly aware of the app name. Awareness I believe it’s called. It kind of does a similar thing. And again, if you’re using speech it cuts in to the noise that the microphone on your headset or you iDevice is going to, you know, send to you. So you can technically do it, but that’s just a limitation of it, you know, because you’re trying to use both the speech out and the sound output from the app itself. You’re trying to listen to both with your ears, so that’s why it’s kind of a limitation.

Larry MuffettWe have some time and we have a great resource here, so feel free to jump in or type in a question in the textbox. I believe a few people are typing some

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stuff and I get a little indicator in the screen when people are typing who are participants, so hopefully there’s a couple of questions coming. If not we’ve got about five minutes left so we might start wrapping up here if we don’t get some questions in about the next 30 seconds.

There we go. Diana wants to know how do you manage on the bus with iMove using braille note and iPhone? Too many devices?

Scott DavertWell, that’s a good question. To me devices know, because I’m sitting down hopefully, you know, unless I’m on a early crowded city bus in which case I might have to stand. But usually what I do is I’ll have the phone in my pocket or I’m using – The braille device I’m using is a Braille Sense U2 and I have a pouch in the case. It’s not the case that came with the unit. That doesn’t have one, but there are cases out there that you can get for it and I put the phone in the zipper pouch of my braille device and then I’m able to only have to use the braille display. And I have that as around my shoulder on a strap.

So once I get it set so that it’s in the area where it’s displaying the address all I have to do is move back and forth. In other words one element to the left and then back on to the address to see it refreshing. And actually the one nice thing about it with braille is that it keeps refreshing on its own so I don’t usually have to

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do that. So that’s how I use that app. It doesn’t work in the subway unfortunately. So I don’t take the subway very often unless I’m with somebody or I know exactly where I’m going, because you know the subway kind of works, but it’s underground so in a lot of places there is no cell coverage, thus no information about where I’m at with GPS.

Larry MuffettAdditional questions for Scott? Okay, hearing none we will begin our wrap-up this afternoon. I want to let everyone know that this seminar like all of Hadley’s seminars will be archived on our website and available for your use anytime around the clock.

Also each Hadley seminar is now made available to podcast, which you can download to your computer or mobile device. Also, this seminar like all of our seminars will be made available eventually as a transcript. The recordings get posted in about usually 24-48 hours. It takes a little bit longer for the transcripts to get posted up on our website, but they also – this will be turned into a transcript and available for you to use, but that probably takes about a month. So just to let people who need or want that written transcript that that will become available.

If today’s seminar has you interested in this or related technology topics, please check out the seminar archives, Hadley’s course list and Hadley’s YouTube channel. Scott and I both thank you for your

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participation. Your questions were outstanding and greatly contributed to the value of the seminar.

Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics. One way you can do that is by dropping us an e-mail to [email protected]. I’m going to turn the microphone back over to Scott one last time to see if he wants to make any closing comments. Scott?

Scott DavertWell, thank you Larry. Thank you to Hadley for giving me the opportunity to come in here and present. I hope that the information was helpful to those of you who did participate. And if you’d like to get a hold of me you can drop me an e-mail. My e-mail address is [email protected]. Thanks again, Larry. Have a good afternoon.

Larry MuffettThank you, Scott. Fantastic job. And I want to personally thank all of you that took the time to be a part of this today and let you all know that I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you and goodbye for now.

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