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WADE WINGLER: Welcome to ATFAQ, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions with your host Brian Norton, Director of Assistive Technology at Easter Seals Crossroads. This is a show in which we address your questions about assistive technology, the hardware, software, tools and gadgets that help people with disabilities lead more independent and fulfilling lives. Have a question you’d like answered on our show? Send a tweet with the hashtag #ATFAQ, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. The world of assistive technology has questions, and we have answers. And now here’s your host, Brian Norton.
BRIAN NORTON: Welcome, everybody. This is ATFAQ episode 18. I want to welcome into the studio Belva Smith who is our guru with all things low vision. Belva, you want to say hey?
BELVA SMITH: Hi, guys. Thanks, Brian.
BRIAN NORTON: Also want to welcome Mark Stewart. He is our all things cognition, mobility, those types of things.
MARK STEWART: Hey, everybody.
BRIAN NORTON: And we also have Wade Wingler in the studio.
WADE WINGLER: Howdy.
BRIAN NORTON: And we are a question and answer show for those that haven’t listened to us before. This is Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. We have lots of folks submit questions, and we here as a panel go through those questions and try to enter them. If you have questions and you’d like to send them to us, you can email us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, you can also send them out via Twitter with the hashtag #ATFAQ, or you can call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Our preference would probably be the listener line. That way we can actually play your message on the radio or over our podcast and let the world hear you.
WADE WINGLER: We’ll make you famous.
BRIAN NORTON: We’ll make you famous, exactly. If you’re looking for our show, you must of found it already if you’re listening, but you can also find us in iTunes. You can find it on ATFAQshow.com, that our website. You can find us on Stitcher and/or EasterSealsTech.com which is our agency website. We also have a link over to the on air section of that website where you can find the show as well.
Before we jump into questions for the day, we did have some listener feedback. Debbie Armstrong who is from Cupertino, California, had a comment about a question we handled on podcast 15. I’m going to let that play.
>>SPEAKER: Debbie Armstrong, DeAnza College, Cupertino California, commenting on podcast 15 where you discussed reading PDF files if you have a physical disability. You immediately launched into audio and came up with one — I have one solution that you had not come up with, and that is a program called Balabolka. We use it here at our college. It’s free and it will read any PDF that has underlined text.
I want to go back to the idea of using audio. Your requester was physically disabled, not visually disabled. We don’t know if he’s a visual learner. If he’s in audio learner, audio works great. But support suppose he is a visual learner, then the only problem is really that he cannot physically manipulate the computer or physically manipulate the printed book. I would then suggest the Windows voice recognition program. I personally love Windows voice recognition. Originally I learned it just because I wanted to be able to help my students. I’m blind, I figured I type fast, I don’t need the Windows speech recognition. But I discovered it was wonderful because when I was cooking or cleaning or doing anything where I didn’t want to get my dirty hands on my keyboard, I could put on my Plantronics headset, and I could dictate to my computer.
You say this guy didn’t want to dictate, he wanted to read a PDF. Well, you can do that with an add-on called the Windows speech recognition macros. It was in beta for Vista and most of the documentation has not been updated for Windows 7. I don’t know if it works on Windows 8 or 10, but it certainly works on Windows 7. It’s a wizard-based program that works in the background. When you want to create a macro, — where you actually speak what you want it to recognize. Then you choose whether you want that shortcut that you spoke to be associated with keystrokes or a string or several other events. Once you’ve created your macro, you’re all set to go. So I made a few macros for PDFs that do things like next page, previous page, open the find box, go to the top, go to the bottom, or stop, or speed up. It was very quick and easy to make these macros because it was just a wizard. Now I can read all the science fiction I want while I cook dinner for my family. Thank you very much for letting me comment. I absolutely love AT facts. I’m so happy I had that night of insomnia one time and discovered it. I’ve been staying awake listening to it ever since.
BRIAN NORTON: That was Debbie Armstrong from Cupertino California, giving us some feedback on episode 15, talking about accessible PDFs and that kind of information. I thought some of the information she presented was useful. I’ve heard of Balabolka before. It’s really good PDF reader. You can do lots of things with it with annotations and things like that. That’s great. But then also bringing up that window speech recognition macro software. I’ve had heard of that. I’ve not used personally. With the client I have, we do a lot with Dragon, and if folks really do need a lot of scripting with that can we go with Dragon professional and things like that. But if you’re looking for a basic speech recognition program, the Windows speech recognition macros is a pretty good program for that. I don’t know if anyone else has comments.
BELVA SMITH: I’ll say thanks to Debbie for listening and thanks for sharing. I had not heard of that program. It’s always good to get the word out there.
WADE WINGLER: It was new for me too.
BRIAN NORTON: If you guys do listen to our shows and you have additional feedback or additional answers, maybe other things, please don’t hesitate to give us a call. You can leave us your feedback on our listener line at 317-721-7124. We love to be able to answer your questions or take the questions that you have but also to take your feedback and put it on our podcast.
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BRIAN NORTON: A second caller, Jermaine from Champaign, Illinois, he emailed us some feedback on a question that we answered about how long will it be until PCs go away. I’m going to go ahead and read his email. This is some additional feedback. It says, I was listening to the last show where the wildcard question was how long until PCs go away. The question is what counts as a PC? Several years ago, the Motorola Atrix was basically a phone which plugged into a dummy terminal and gave you a bigger screen and a full keyboard. Even though we haven’t seen a proliferation of phones to do this, I think it’s going to be a very smooth process and more commonplace for you to link your phone to a screen and input devices and for that to be the one piece of hardware in your life. Since more and more AT is being natively made for the phone environments, it looks like we are actually going to see the relative cost decrease as people no longer have to differentiate between AT for the home and on the go. Is a PC a dedicated device, or does your phone/tablet linked seamlessly to a monitor and input device count as giving you a PC?
WADE WINGLER: Come on, that’s a really good point.
BRIAN NORTON: I think we talked about it last time, because we talked about every phone has a processor, has a hard drive, has essentially is a PC in and of itself. You think about that. It is a good point. Things are moving to being more portable and transportable devices.
WADE WINGLER: Everything is cloud based. Even as we use the show, we use Evernote as our backend storehouse for information that we passed back and forth. Sometimes I’m looking at it on my phone. Sometimes I’m looking at it – right now I’m in a studio on a big screen looking at it, but we’ve got it on our laptops. As information becomes less device dependent, the ability to use it on your phone and splash it on whatever display you want is becoming more prevalent. Jermaine is a regular caller on our show. We can tease him a little bit.
BRIAN NORTON: Absolutely. Great feedback. I appreciate it, Jermaine. If you guys have feedback to any other questions we handled in previous shows or even in the show today, please give us a call. You can call us at 317-721-7124. That’s our listener line.
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BRIAN NORTON: Our next question also came in through our listener line. This is from Angie. She was calling about a young man. I’m going to let you play the voicemail there.
>>SPEAKER: My name is Angie and I’m calling regarding a young man who is a consumer of mine who has autism and works in the healthcare field. He gets picked up every day from his job by Open Door, and sometimes Open Door has not shown up. Recently there was a time that he had no one to go to to help him figure out a way to get home. His family now is looking to get him a phone, but due to past experiences with his losing things, they want to get the simplest phone with maybe five numbers programmed in to where he can just contact the people that would help him and one that has an alarm on it so he knows when it’s too late to keep waiting for the bus, as he does not have a good concept of time. I’m looking for suggestions of phones that are very simplified that would help them with these few things. Thank you.
BRIAN NORTON: Thanks for calling in and asking us your question. I think I’ll jump in right away. There are lots of different solutions, a couple of low tech phones I was able to find that have some very easy to use, very easy to understand ways to dial folks. The first one I came across was this MyFilip phone. You can find that at AT&T and other kinds of places, but it’s actually a watch. It’s designed for kiddos. It allows you to preprogram five phone numbers that the child can either call or receive calls from, so it really limits the flexibility so you are not able to open up and call anybody want to, but it will allow you with five preprogrammed phone numbers, to be able to receive calls from that number or to call those numbers straight from something that’s kind of a wearable technology item.
Something maybe a little bit easier, I think sometimes losing things, you stick in your pocket, you put it down someplace. If it’s more of a wearable technology item, probably less chance that you might lose it if it’s on your wrist than it’s on your pocket or you’re taking it in and out and placing different places. The first one would be the MyFilip phone, which is kind of a watch, a wearable technology.
BELVA SMITH: How much is that?
WADE WINGLER: It’s about $150. It’s associated with AT&T. Is that right?
BRIAN NORTON: That’s correct.
MARK STEWART: It’s also app related. It ties in directly to the parent’s smartphone?
WADE WINGLER: There is a app for the parent that can geo-locate them. Did you say that?
BRIAN NORTON: I didn’t mention that but it does do that. It allows you to be able to find your child if you’re looking for them.
WADE WINGLER: And also has some geo-fencing built in as well according to what I’m looking at here on the website so that if you are kid enters or leaves a safe zone, it’ll send you a note, like when you could get to school or leaves home or leaves work it will let you know. It’s pretty impressive.
BELVA SMITH: So if they are stuck on Open Door and taking way too long, maybe at your spouse and that your kid, they should be home by five and it’s going on six they are not home, this should be able to locate where they are. Because we all know how Open Door get sidetracked and can sometimes take twice as long than it should.
WADE WINGLER: For folks who aren’t in the central Indiana, Open Door is our local paratransit group here. That’s what we are talking about.
BELVA SMITH: That sounds cool.
MARK STEWART: It has an emergency button, a red button on the side. If you hit it for four seconds continuously, then it calls the primary person of the five phone numbers on the phone. If that person doesn’t answer, he goes down to the list.
BELVA SMITH: Can you set an alarm on that? I do know they specifically asked for that.
BRIAN NORTON: I don’t know if you can set an alarm or not. It’s a pretty simple device.
WADE WINGLER: It does time and date. You can also send text messages from your smartphone on your apps, so you could send a message that person.
BELVA SMITH: So if it’s an hour past the time the ride should be there, you could text them and say time to look for a different route.
WADE WINGLER: The other thing it said, it only fits wrist sizes up to a certain size. On the website it shows you how to take a soft tape measure and measure your wrist and make sure that it fits. There are three sizes of bands you can put on this, but it is limited in terms of how big around your wrist can be.
BRIAN NORTON: It’s a primarily designed for kids, so parents who want to keep in contact with their kids or find their kids. When you talk about wrist size, it probably leans towards smaller wrist then maybe something much bigger.
BELVA SMITH: Another phone that might be appropriate for this situation would be the Jitterbug. It’s easy to dial, cheap to purchase, cheap to pay the monthly bill. But I think they just come out with the new Jitterbug, so the one that I am specifically thinking of is I think being discontinued.
BRIAN NORTON: The other option would be if you have an iPhone, if you are concerned about the losing of an iPhone, you have find my phone or find my iPad, all those different options there where you can actually geo-locate those devices as well. But if you’re also then thinking about the simplicity of the device and how complicated just being able to dial numbers within the regular phone app that’s on the iPhone, you may also download some different apps. There’s one called Face Dialer. There’s another one called Custom Dial Unlimited Photos. And then there’s another one called Picture Dial. And all three of those apps allow you to be able to take a picture of somebody and gives you a user interface where all you see is faces. If you press a person’s face or image, it’ll go ahead and dial the number associate with it, so it really simplifies that interface rather than having to remember lots of phone numbers. You can just press on somebody that you think you know and it’ll dial.
BELVA SMITH: If you’re going to use an iPhone, it’s going to be a lot more expensive than either one of the two other options that we talked about. If you’re going to use the iPhone, and also just use Siri to – as long as it’s been set up to say call mom or call Tom or whoever.
WADE WINGLER: Depending on the person and how inquisitive they are and how much you need to restrict it, you can also just take all your icons and put them on a secondary screen and put just a phone or a couple of apps on the dock that you want to have available. Even creative things like making your home screen a picture of some instructions or things that give them a clue as to which button to hit. I’m even imagining a home screen with a down arrow that says press here for phone pointing at where the phone icon lives on the dock. You can do some pretty creative stuff, especially if you got an older iPhone that is the one that you just upgraded away from. In our family my wife just got a new iPhone so my daughter got her hand-me-down iPhone.
BELVA SMITH: Another good place to look for used iPhones is Gazelle. They purchase and resell your devices. You can get some pretty good prices on that. That’s Gazelle.com.
BRIAN NORTON: Interesting. I’m sure just like with the iTunes, the App Store, can also find a lot of things on Google Play to be able to adapt Android devices in much the same way you are talking about earlier. Lots of different options. Any other comments?
MARK STEWART: Just what I like about the Jitterbug, it’s not a matter of having to lock anything out. It’s designed for seniors. It’s designed to be simple with big, tactile buttons.
BELVA SMITH: The one concern with the Jitterbug and the iPhone that I don’t think you would have with the first device that you talked about, Brian, is the soliciting phone calls. Those are getting to be more and more popular. In fact, I got one just last week that was awful. With those other devices, you would have the possibility of the person receiving some type of a soliciting phone call that they might not know how to handle. They might answer a question that they shouldn’t be answering. Something to think about.
BRIAN NORTON: I would also say, if you’re really concerned about losing something which leads us into our next question a little bit, but they sell lots of tracking devices like Tile. I think there are several other versions of those things. You can attach those to things that you want to keep your eye on. Those are great devices to be able to track things.
WADE WINGLER: And the Find My iPhone app. We use that in our house a lot where it’ll show you on a map where it is and you can also make it sound an alarm so that phone will beep until you find it between the couch cushions or wherever it happens to land.
BRIAN NORTON: Great.
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BRIAN NORTON: So as I said, that kind of leads us into our next question. It seems like there’s a lot of questions about losing things. This next one is a question about — I’m working with someone who has a brain injury that struggles with losing things, things like remotes, pill bottles, wallets, keys, other kinds of things like that. Do you have any feedback on a particular product or other products that I should be looking for and how well they work? I kind of threw out there that Tile is a new Kickstarter project. Now they are out on the market. You can get them through Amazon or lots of different places. It’s kind of a square key fob that you can attach to different devices. If you lose them, you’re able to look them up through an app on your phone or even through a computer and be able to find those with some geo-locating options.
BELVA SMITH: Is that something that’s sticky that I stick onto my remote or my wallet?
WADE WINGLER: It can be a keychain. It has a hole in it. It’s about the size of the key fob from your car. Or you can stick it onto stuff with a piece of adhesive so that it will wrap around the back of whatever you don’t want to lose. They have a battery that lasts a couple of years. The app is pretty cool. It helps you find things. It will also make a beep when you say I’ve lost it. It’ll beep so it will put it on a map and make it be for you.
BELVA SMITH: How extensive?
WADE WINGLER: They are $25 if you buy a single, but they also have some discount packs. If you buy four, it’s $70; if you buy 8, it’s $130; to buy a bunch of them, you can get it dozen of them for 180 dollars.
BELVA SMITH: that’s not bad.
BRIAN NORTON: Another similar product, the Stick and Find. Stick and Finds are pretty close in what they do. They’re another kind of device we can stick it. They’ve got a sticky back to it. You can stick it on to things and they can track it and it makes a tone to alert people where it is if you are in range. You’ll be able to hear it as well.
MARK STEWART: You have to be within 100 feet of it.
WADE WINGLER: I wasn’t aware of those.
MARK STEWART: You can hit a button on your app and it can make an alarm sound. That’s another way to find it.
BRIAN NORTON: Again, there are probably 10, 15, 20 different options that kind of circulate around like that. I remember back in the day for Christmas, I got, since Christmas is just around the corner, I got a keychain kind of thing where I had five different key fob things and you can put them under keys, but then I had one locator that you keep at home and you press that. If you’re looking for a key, kind of the very same thing but now they are a lot more sophisticated. You use an app to be able to find things in search for them and locate them. This kind of world has changed from that old RadioShack key fob that used to have in the past.
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BRIAN NORTON: So the next question is what apps do you recommend for struggling students with forms? Essentially we need the iPad to upload the form , either through an email or the camera and allow the student to be able to fill it in. They’re looking for some possible solutions with that.
MARK STEWART: They mention iPad, and certainly things can be done, but I’m going to suggest or emphasize going PC-based just for the processing power. And also if we are talking about forms in particular, we really want to emphasize getting as much accuracy as we possibly can and responsiveness. If we are considering PC-based format, OmniPage Ultimate is their latest version. It’s a Nuance product. That’s a PDF converter and more of a suite that handles those things. Also Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Document Cloud, is another one. There is some cross-platform compatibility as well, but I think as a starting place just working on the PC and handling those forms and then putting them over to whatever form factor you want to read them. That’s probably the best approach. A scanner that I really like that is pretty portable, good form factor, and also has some really good technology. We’ve had a lot of success with, does a very good job just from a plug-and-play standpoint, is the Canon LiDE 220 flatbed scanner.
BELVA SMITH: You can get those on Amazon for $89?
MARK STEWART: 100 dollars or so. Not bad.
BELVA SMITH: They are very portable. They’ll fit in most backpacks. There is a little lock on the bottom of it so you can lock it so you don’t have to worry about it moving back and forth while you are traveling with it.
MARK STEWART: There is OmniPage, that partners with Evernote, and Adobe tr tries y to do a lot of that on its own as far as getting all of the technology onto the iPad or the iPhone. I’m kind of interested in – especially if you’re going to scan hard copy documents in, having a PC pot from to start with, and the full-fledged suite of software.
BRIAN NORTON: Right. I’ve actually had a situation where I was working with a child in fifth grade, K-12 environment, kind of a situation that they really wanted an app and they had iPads and Android devices in the school and they wanted to be able to then — they wanted teachers to be able to easily take a picture of something and then put it in front of the student and let the student fill it out whether he was at school or could take it home and fill it out to be able to do his homework. Something that we ended up doing with him as far as apps are concerned, we actually used Notability as the app. You can take a picture with your iPad, and then he can save the image off into a particular app. You can upload or export that photo into Notability and it becomes a template for them to work from. Then Notability offers you the opportunity to go in and fill in anything. It becomes your worksheet essentially and you can be able to tap someplace, start typing text into the blanks that are there. There are some other apps that are very similar to that. Another one is called Snap Type. There is a free version or you can pay for a version as well. The paid version has more bells and whistles. Again, the very same thing to be able to take a picture with your iPad. I believe in the Snap Type app you can actually do it directly from within the app, whereas Notability you do have to use the camera feature on the iPad to be able to take that picture.
BELVA SMITH: Do you lose your formatting or does it keep it for many?
BRIAN NORTON: It’s just like it’s a picture of a PDF. It worked fairly well for us. There’s also PDF Reader Pro which will let you do the same things as well, being able to import a picture into that particular app. I think initially we started using Prismo as our scanning option to be able to scan it, and then we were able to export it as a PDF and put it in of those apps. We definitely want it to be in that PDF format so that you can upload it into those different apps. Those are three. Notability, Snap Type , PDF Reader Pro will be some different apps to be able to try and see if it would work for your student.
BELVA SMITH: All right around 20 dollars right?
BRIAN NORTON: Most of them are less.
BELVA SMITH: I think Notability is $9.99.
WADE WINGLER: Snap Type is $3 or $4.
BRIAN NORTON: They are very inexpensive.
MARK STEWART: That cost differential is huge as far as you get the folks know that you need with the ones you mentioned, fine. If it goes more towards the professional executive need, then you may want to go that direction I was talking about. One of the reasons that I so readily went to OmniPage was usually 500 dollars software or so which can be cost prohibitive for a lot of transition student situations, they are offering it now for about 150 dollars which makes it really nice.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s pretty good. I will say the other interesting thing about the app versions of this type of solution is once you are done filling something in — what we had this particular student in the K-12 environment doing was, after he thought that in, he was then able to email it to his teacher. There’s a button that you can click within those apps to be able to email it out to somebody, share with someone through that way. The teachers were then able to take the information and grade it and do what they needed to do with it. That was good. It turned out to be a pretty good solution for them.
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BRIAN NORTON: Our next question is about accessible sculptures outside. We’ll go ahead and play the question.
>>SPEAKER: I’m looking for some assistance. I’m working with a nonprofit art organization. We have some outdoor sculptures we would like to make more accessible to the visually impaired, possibly audio description or describing the content of these outdoor sculptures. Do you have some suggestions for us?
BRIAN NORTON: To answer this question, we brought in a friend of ours, Ray Bloomer. He’s going to help us answer those questions. Ray, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and help fill us in on some of this accessible sculptures and stuff like that.
RAY BLOOMER: Thank you, Brian. I am Ray Bloomer. I’m the Director of Education and Technical Assistance at the National Center on Accessibility. I am also an accessibility specialist with the National Park Service. Interesting question. There’s a couple of approaches you can take.
Number one, audio description is the process of describing something specifically for people who are blind. It’s done by people that are professionally trained in ensuring that people who are both adventitiously and congenitally blind will be able to take the information and get an understanding of that. I only recommend audio description as a sole method of providing accessibility if some other means of access cannot be achieved. Usually audio description is done in conjunction with something else.
The other thing that I would recommend, probably two things I would recommend, number one, may be if you know the artist that did the sculptures, if they are able to repeat their art in a smaller scale method so that it’s small enough so that a blind person will be able to tactically examine the entire piece. The other aspect then is this kind of new ground but it might be looking into the possibility of using some form of technology such as 3-D printing where you would get a digital photo of it specifically scanned for the purpose of doing digital or 3-D printing. That may enable people who are blind to be able to understand what this particular art piece is like. The National Park Service is actually doing a little bit of experimenting with some 3-D printing on wayside exhibits which are the outdoor exhibits that you find on trail sites. That’s pretty much the immediate suggestions that I would have. Hopefully they’ll be able to do something with that and share their success stories.
BELVA SMITH: Ray, could you help me understand how the 3-D printing would work in an outdoor environment?
RAY BLOOMER: The way it’s being used right now, it’s being used in something that’s a little bit more than a bas-relief. In other words, something where at least 50 percent of the image is exposed. For example, if you had a ball, at least half of the ball would be exposed. The problem with doing something in 100 percent is that unless it’s done in a way that can be easily secured, which is a little bit of a problem that some places are having, you’re going to have a lot of vandalism so it may not last very long. However, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be done in a full 360 degree 3-D piece.
BELVA SMITH: That’s a really interesting and fascinating.
WADE WINGLER: This is Wade. Every time you talk about bas-relief, I always think about Empire Strikes Back and Han Solo because that’s the first exposure I had to something in that situation. Leave it to me to be unprofessional.
BRIAN NORTON: It’s interesting because I was involved a few years ago with a study. Unfortunately some people go to the bas-relief as an easy, quick solution. You have to make choices when you’re doing bas-relief to ensure that the end result is going to meet the intended need. What I mean by that is, for example, if you have something where having only a small portion of it in relief really is giving you a false image of what the item that you are trying to project is doing, you’re really doing a disservice to people who are blind. You have to be able to be careful when you’re making your selection what things can be done in a bas-relief. When you make that choice, how much of the item that you are exhibiting, how much of it needs to be exposed in order to enable a person who is blind to tactically discern what the image is.
BRIAN NORTON: Fascinating.
RAY BLOOMER: For example, I’ve seen someone give me a bas-relief of a pinecone, a big sugar pinecone that you typically find in Northern California, and asked my opinion to see what I thought of it. To be honest with you, because the relief was not very good, it was probably be less than 20 or 30 percent exposed, it looked like a pinecone that a truck ran over. It didn’t look like — it did not look like anything a pinecone I’ve been familiar with. I think that’s an example of what happens if you expose only a small portion or small percentage of the item. Some things can be done that way. For example, you can take the bas-relief of a leaf, because it really does not have a lot of dimension to start with. It could be very successfully done in something that’s relatively flat.
BRIAN NORTON: How common is it to be able to find these types of descriptions, audio description, bas-relief in outdoor venues?
RAY BLOOMER: Audio description can be found in another venue if a person has the ability to access. For example, you can have audio description that can be downloaded before people would go to the outdoor venue so that they can then put it on whatever device they are fully with, whether it’s a victor stream or an iPhone. They can put it on whatever means they would like to hold that recording and then examine each piece while they are there or and enjoy each piece while they are there.
The other aspect that I talked about in terms of exhibits, and that going to say that it’s very common, but it’s increasing as time goes on. More people are learning how to go about providing accessible outdoor experiences. Unfortunately, the population of people who are blind really need to be more outspoken to be able to drive the need. People need to realize that people who are blind really have a great desire to participate in these. When these opportunities are available and yet not accessible, agencies that are providing these need to be aware of the fact that they have an obligation to do so.
BELVA SMITH: What about cost? I’m assuming that something like this would be rather expensive.
RAY BLOOMER: It all comes down to the media that you use. For example, three-dimensional printing is bringing the cost down of doing something like this. The other suggestion I had was trying to get an artist to repeat what it is that they did with the original piece on a smaller scale. I would say that’s a cost that is going to be greater. But it’s all relative. It costs something to put the original art out. From my point of view, making the art accessible ideally, if people are doing this from scratch, so let’s say for example someone is doing a brand-new art sculpture garden or venue, that’s actually the time to talk to the artist. When you commission a piece, commission two of them. A full-scale one and a smaller one. If that’s part of the original commission, it certainly is going to bring the cost down. Or maybe instead of commissioning 10 pieces you only do eight, but now you’ve got eight that are accessible.
BELVA SMITH: Thanks so much for your insight on this. You really brought us a lot of good valuable information today.
BRIAN NORTON: I was just wondering. Are there other interesting products you’re working on? How can we connect people with you and your work?
RAY BLOOMER: I can be reached at the National Center on Accessibility. Our website is NCAonline.org. I can be also reached directly by phone at 812-856-4424. The last really exciting project that I worked on that people might relate to is the White House Visitor Center. That was a really fun project that we did. We were able to really move accessibility across the board for all people with disabilities. I think people who are blind and people with low vision have a greater benefit only for one reason, and that is the challenges of making things, exhibits in particular, accessible to people who are blind are little bit greater because, traditionally, they are the things that are behind class and in graphics. It’s nice to be able to get something that is done in models, three-dimensional models and make them accessible to everyone. So when you look at the White House Visitor Center, there is not only a large, 16 foot model that is up about five foot high, and at the bottom of it it has a touch screen interactive. we made sure that the touch screen was interactive, navigable by people who are blind, using the easy tag. We also made sure that that was fully audio described. In addition, we made a six foot model of the White House that is fully available for tactile examination, very attractive. There’s also a 2 1/2 foot massing model. That enables – I guess the best way to describe that is to say that it’s a three-dimensional silhouette. It essentially gives you a sense of the mansion in the middle that’s a little bit higher, the terraces are little bit lower. The general shape of east and west wing. Then when you look at the six foot model, it really enables you to understand the pieces of that and how they fit in together. We also made sure that there was a model of Presidents Park so that you can understand where the White House is in relation to the ellipse and in relation to the park that’s on opposite side of the White House lawn.
But what’s really important about that is there are several different references throughout the rest of the exhibit that will reference things within Presidents Park. If you don’t understand where Presidents Park is, you’re not going to appreciate the context of other things in the exhibits. That’s why we felt it was really good to have that full environment accessible to people who are blind so that all those relationships come together and everyone can appreciate the same thing. That was the last big project I worked on that I really enjoyed.
BELVA SMITH: We can hear the passion in your voice as you were talking about it. That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that.
RAY BLOOMER: What was really fun about that one was when they had the grand opening, First Lady Michelle Obama came to look at it. Without any prompting or any relationship with accessibility, her comment was something to the effect of this is really great. There are so many things here to touch. My kids would love it.
WADE WINGLER: Great.
BRIAN NORTON: Nice. Excellent. Thank you Ray for joining us and helping us enter that question. We appreciate it. I know our listeners do too. Thank you for providing your contact information so that they can reach out to you think are the questions in this arena.
RAY BLOOMER: Thank you for having me.
BRIAN NORTON: Take care Ray.
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WADE WINGLER: And now it’s time for the wildcard question.
BRIAN NORTON: Get ready for the next question. This is the wildcard question. This is where Wade gets to throw us a question, one that we haven’t seen before. Wade, why don’t you throw it our way.
WADE WINGLER: I’m going to be gentle this time. It should be a pretty easy question. Or it might be hard, I don’t know, it depends on how it grabs you.
MARK STEWART: You said easy, and then he looked at me Wade, and then you said I don’t know, it might be hard.
WADE WINGLER: You’re the one who’s sitting here with a football. I’m kind of figure out what is going on today with the football.
MARK STEWART: It’s football season.
WADE WINGLER: There’s a reason for my question. We are going to, next show, do a special episode. Next episode of ATFAQ, after this one, is going to be something we haven’t done on the show before we have done on Assistive Technology Update for five years running. We’re going to have a holiday show. What we do for the holiday shows around here, we realize that we are talking about Christmas and Thanksgiving and other giftgiving sorts of opportunities. We like to know what does it mean for people who use assistive technology. What kind of assistive technology holiday gifts what people like to get. For five years now on Assistive Technology Update, our weekly news program, we’ve kind of broken from our regular format and we brought some folks in, played some Christmas music, and talked about holiday gift giving ideas.
For ATFAQ this time, and for both shows, we did something special. We took this group, Belva and Mark and Brian and myself, we also add a Nikol Prieto who’s our community outreach coordinator and has always cohosted the holiday show with me for assistive technology update, we sat in this very studio and we talked about holiday gift ideas for people with disabilities. People who use assistive technology. Next show will be a special episode where we do nothing but talk about holiday gift giving ideas. Then when we come back after the Christmas holiday with our first episode of ATFAQ, we will be back on to our regular format with questions and answers. We hope that during that break, you guys have lots of feedback and give us lots of calls and IMO something like that.
All that rambling to say here’s the wildcard question. What do you want for Christmas? What technology thing do you want for holidays. We are all a fairly technical group so I don’t want to know that you need a new sweater, but I’m interested in what kind of technology holiday gifts would you guys like to have this year.
BELVA SMITH: Since you said Belva, I said I’m supposed to answer first. The first thing I would like to add is that my boyfriend is visually impaired, and I have to be very careful when I buy them gifts, because if I buy him gifts that are helpful for him, sometimes he says thanks for my blind gift. I have a special gift picked out for him for Christmas that he’s not even going to think that about, but it is going to be that. After Christmas if anyone wants to know, I’ll tell you. For me, I want — I either can’t decide if I want the iPad Pro or if I want the Windows Surface Pro. That’s better than what I did want. I wanted a Mac. I’m going down in size. That’s what I have on my want list for Christmas.
BRIAN NORTON: What I want for Christmas is a projection clock.
BELVA SMITH: You weren’t kidding? You said that.
BRIAN NORTON: I cannot see my clock anymore in my room. We only have one plug. Most of our plugs are attached to the light switch in our room and so when I turn it on and off, everything makes your clock blink because it turns the power of. The only one that isn’t connected to the light switch is the furthest away from our bed. When I’m trying to see what time it is as I try to get up in the morning, I can’t see it. I want one of these projection clocks to make things like two feet up on the wall. Essentially what it does is you got your clock where it has the time but also has this prediction thing to be able to throw things up on the wall so you can see it in large print.
BELVA SMITH: But when you slip your switch, it’s going to —
BRIAN NORTON: I can put it all across my bedroom and it’s trending up on my ceiling were on the wall or anywhere. I really – I turned 42 and I just cannot focus anymore. I’ve heard that comes with age but I’m learning it the hard way.
MARK STEWART: Where are you going to get this gift? At a pawn shop?
BRIAN NORTON: Maybe. I don’t know. That’s kind of what I want. I want a projection clock. I need to know how long I can sleep in in the morning before I actually really do have to get up and get ready for work.
BELVA SMITH: The question is, does Leah listen to the show?
BRIAN NORTON: She does.
BELVA SMITH: So she knows now.
WADE WINGLER: The hint has been dropped. I don’t know what I want this year. I thought I wanted an Apple Watch, but frankly we got one around here and I work for a couple of days and played with it and I don’t want an Apple Watch anymore. I thought I might’ve wanted an iPad Pro, we’ve got one coming that should be here today or tomorrow so that we can play around with it. And then I got a new MacBook, just a straight-up regular MacBook which is so small I don’t think I want any iPad either. Last year I wanted a Kindle Paperwhite to read books on at home, and I got it and I don’t really read books on it anymore. I don’t really know what I want. I don’t have a technology – I think I might want the Amazon Echo, the Alexa thing to have in the house. But I’m pretty sure that my three-year-old and my four-year-old will talk to it all day and it’ll talk back to them and I don’t know what kind of things they would order for me with my credit card while I’m away at work. I’m sure that the front porch will be stacked up with Amazon boxes full of Transformers kind of stuff. I don’t know what I want anymore. Do I want books on tape to listen to in the car? I listen to podcast all the time. I don’t know what I want anymore. I’m spoiled.
MARK STEWART: I’m a little that way too. I want – I can’t get this answer off my mind. I could’ve gone first. I want a Tesla.
WADE WINGLER: I want an electric Smart car.
BELVA SMITH: Did you hear about the Google car that got pulled over?
BRIAN NORTON: For going too slow.
BELVA SMITH: It didn’t get a ticket.
BRIAN NORTON: They top out at 25 miles per hour and I got pulled over because of going too slow.
BELVA SMITH: Slowing down traffic.
MARK STEWART: My wife’s birthday was in October and I got her the Echo. It’s fun. It’s not the bridge of the Star Trek enterprise but it’s a nice start.
WADE WINGLER: So tell us about this Tesla. Why do you want a Tesla?
MARK STEWART: Because it’s cool and expensive. I was trying to say environmentally conscious.
WADE WINGLER: Yeah right.
MARK STEWART: Smart car I would be fun.
WADE WINGLER: I drive just enough miles that I could get back and forth to work. I have about 40 miles each way. Many miles a day, I think that’s a bit much for a smart car. Maybe they go that far and not much further. I think when I did the research I thought I can go back to work and I’ll be fine as long as long as I’m only going back and forth to work.
BELVA SMITH: I think it’s 40 or 45 miles that you have to charge up again.
WADE WINGLER: I also noticed that we have a gas station nearby that has a place where you can pull up and plug your car in in charge. I don’t know the cost to do that or if it’s free. Who is going to sit at a gas station for two hours while you charge your car?
BELVA SMITH: There’s one at the Walmart gas station on Emerson and Greenwood.
BRIAN NORTON: How quickly does it charge?
WADE WINGLER: I don’t know, but this particular neighborhood that I was talking about, I don’t want to spend more than about 10 minutes in that neighborhood before I’m getting out of there and moving on.
BRIAN NORTON: Interesting.
BELVA SMITH: I need to go faster than 25.
BRIAN NORTON: I need to hit about 85.
WADE WINGLER: We’ve all got some pretty cool wishes except me. I don’t know what I want. Mark wants something he can’t have which is not the way it goes around here. I guess one of my wishes is that you guys will this and next week or next show to our holiday show and listen to where we talk a lot, for almost an hour, about various kinds of holiday gifts that are assisted technology related.
BRIAN NORTON: So that’s a wrap for episode 18. I want to say thank you to Belva.
BELVA SMITH: Thanks, guys.
MARK STEWART: Thanks everybody.
WADE WINGLER: Happy holidays in advance everybody.
BRIAN NORTON: Here’s how to find our show. If you’re looking for us, you insert assistive technology questions on iTunes. You can look for us on stitcher. Or visit ATFAQ show.com. Also send us your questions by calling our listener line at 317-721-7124. You can send us a tweet at hashtag #ATFAQ. Email us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. We want your questions. In fact, without your questions we wouldn’t have a show. It was a call. We love to hear from you.
WADE WINGLER: Information provided on Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions does not constitute a product endorsement. Our comments are not intended as recommendations, nor is our show evaluative in nature. Assistive Technology FAQ is hosted by Brian Norton; gets editorial support from mark steward and Belva Smith; is produced by me, Wade Wingler; and receives support from Easter Seals Crossroads and the INDATA project. ATFAQ is a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. Find more of our shows at www.accessibilitychannel.com.