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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Tips for using the TurboTax website and iOS app as a blind user | AppleVis http://buff.ly/1Xg1XEW
How to Use a Livescribe Smartpen to Study Smarter NOT Harder! http://buff.ly/1T3vn8F
Air Carrier Access Act http://buff.ly/1SFVcgS
App: Instacart www.BridgingApps.org
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——-transcript follows ——
MARTY SHULTZ: Hi, this is Marty Schultz, and I’m the founder of Kid Friendly Software, and this is your assistance technology update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Welcome to episode number 246 of assistive technology update. It’s scheduled to be released on February 12, 2016.
Today I’m excited to talk with Marty Schultz who is the president and developer of blindfolded games over at kid friendly software. Those games are sort of becoming very popular, and they are designed to be used without the benefit of site. We have some tax tips for folks who have disabilities or use iOS as a blind user with voice over; interesting tips on how to use the Livescribe Smartpen as a study tool; a 30 year update on the air carrier access act and what the PVA is doing to share stories about air travel; and then we also have an app review by BridgingApps on the Instacart app.
We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project.
Like this show? You will surely love our question and answer show called ATFAQ, or assistive technology prettily asked questions. Check us out over at ATFAQshow.com.
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From our friends over at AppleVis, there is a headline that reads, “Tips for using the TurboTax website and I was app as a blind user.” Ted Drake works over at Intuit, the folks who make TurboTax, to make their stuff more accessible. There is a great blog post that talks about how to do things like take pictures of your W-2 to automatically fill out a part of your tax forms. There are links to tax tips for the blind, how to get IRS tax relief for folks with disabilities. They talk a little bit about some of the specific features related to accessibility with the TurboTax app, and even talk about how, in some situations, if you are doing a simple return with basic deductions, you can get your taxes done for free with their absolute zero program. There is too much to talk about in this particular story, but there’s a lot of great information. I will pop a link in the show notes over to the AppleVis blog post and you can learn more about tax time and how you might do that as a blind user.
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We have been using Livescribe Smartpen here at the INDATA Project for years. Just this week, I ran across a blog post from our counterparts in North Dakota, the North Dakota Interagency Program for Assistive Technology, or IPAT. Trish Floyd has created an article on their blog about how to use a Livescribe Smartpen to study smarter not harder. I like the fact that the blog post that only includes a lot of written stuff but some links to really good videos to describe some of these techniques. One of the things they talk about is how to use a Livescribe Smartpen and paper to create a study guide, which is kind of cool. I will play a quick bit of audio from that clip.
SPEAKER: So it’s really simple. I would just use the echo smart pen, hit record, read my question, and while I’m saying the correct answer, I’m going to write any icon that I choose. That could be a square or smiley face, a star, whatever. So that when I go back to study, I’m going to be reading the question and if I can think of the answer to the question, I’m going to hit the icon and hear the answer. Let’s give it a try. So I’m going to hit record.
WADE WINGLER: That is give you a quick glimpse into what they are doing with the smart pen there. This blog post is great because it links back to a number of their articles and other kinds of great information about how to use that live scribe pen. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes directly over to this blog post on the IPAT website and you can learn more about how to study smarter not harder with the Livescribe Smartpen. Thanks to our friends over at North Dakota for doing this great blog post.
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From our friends over at RESNA, we have learned about a new website that was created by the PVA, paralyzed veterans of America, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the ACA a caddy air carrier access act. Back in 1986, it was signed into law by President Ronald Ragan and aims to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities when it comes to air travel. The website is interesting because it is based on stories. You can go there if you’re someone with a disability who has a story to share about air travel, whether it is positive or negative, and you can submit that story. You can put a picture in and tell them about what happened at whether it was good or bad guy with your experience with air travel. As I go there, there are a few stories now. One is but a gentleman with multiple sclerosis traveling in the Washington DC area. There were some challenges with his flight, and through some perseverance was able to get to where he wanted to, although late and with some pretty extensive discussion here of the challenges that he experienced.
There is also a story from a gentleman who found out a little too late that his wheelchair would not fit on the particular flight that he was scheduled for and some troubles with getting baggage from one airline to another.
And then another story from a doctor who has a lot of experience with air travel and give some advice on how communication in advance of your travel is key to success.
If you have a disability and utilize air carrier travel, if you plan planes or are just interested in the topic, I would encourage you to check out the website. The website is airaccess30.org. I will pop a link in the show notes so that you can get directly to it. Read some stories and share your stories. Interesting correlations happening there.
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Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an App Worth Mentioning.
AMY BARRY: This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is an App Worth Mentioning. Today I am sharing the Instacart app. Instacart is often described as the Uber of grocery shopping. It is a service where a customer selects and orders groceries online or via a web-based app. When the order has been placed, an Instacart shopper collects the items and delivers them to the customer’s home or preferred address within a selected timeframe.
This is an incredibly convenient product delivery app with very powerful implications for some people that go way beyond the convenience factor. It can be of particular significance to persons that may struggle to independently and physically get to a storefront supermarket, especially during hot weather and for those who are homebound. The service can also ease the worries of families that live away from a loved one who may have issues accessing food and groceries. The app can also be an interesting creative way to virtually teach grocery shopping skills in a classroom environment.
Our BridgingApps registered dietitian trialed and reviewed the services of Instacart and found the app easy to understand and use because of its good, clean design. There was an excellent availability and variety of perishable staple, and even unique, foods including milk and dairy products, meat and egg items, and brought fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables. In addition, the selection of nonperishable foods and household supplies was excellent.
To help with purchasing decisions while virtually shopping, food items have very useful piece of information listed including the nutrition facts panel, the ingredient list, directions for any preparations, and other product details. This enables shoppers to make up early informed purchasing decisions, especially for those with special diet and food allergy concerns. The list and recipes feature is really clever with the ability to create and save different shopping lists for repeat use and for reference.
Our dietitian loved having her own family grocery list, a list for a homebound elderly family member who lives several states away, and a created list for a client to assist in teaching them how to shop for groceries that follow DASH Diet of health eating and cooking. And as a side note, she really enjoyed the from the conversations and interactions with the Instacart employees when they hand-delivered the ordered groceries to her home.
Not all US cities have the Instacart service available castle the potential user must first check the delivery zone ZIP Codes in order to determine which, if any, regional stores participate in the Instacart experience.
There is a delivery fee, item up charges, and a tip involved in addition to the actual cost of groceries. An optional yearly express membership is available for purchase which waives any delivery fees. And it is possible to order from warehouse stores without having an actual number ship to the warehouse, so that is also a little added bonus.
Though there is a cost for the delivery services of Instacart, BridgingApps valleys this app as a supportive research, making life easier for individuals, caregivers, and families that may have less flexibility. With the features and ability to help loved ones from a distance, a way to provide respite and a creative way to foster or encourage independence, Instacart is a wonderful resource for the community.
The app is available at the iTunes and Google Play stores and is compatible with iOS and android devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
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WADE WINGLER: Before we jump into the interview, you’re about to hear some audio from a game called blind bowling. It will make sense after we jump into the interview, but check this out.
NARRATOR: Using one coin to play. You have nine coins left. To get more coins, click get upgrades. To go back to the main menu, set up with three fingers. Start a game, tenpin, one player, simple throw. It is your turn. Move your finger left and right and then click it. The ball will travel straight towards the pin.
VOICEOVER: Center, one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, enter.
NARRATOR: You made a strike! It’s your turn, frame two. Throw your first ball. You knocked over seven pins splitting three pins standing: four, seven, ten. Throw your second ball. You knocked over to pins, living one pin standing: ten. It’s your turn. Frame three. Throw your first ball. You knocked over six pins, meeting for pins standing: one, two, four, seven. Throw your second ball. You made a spare. It is your turn. Frame four, throw your first ball.
WADE WINGLER: Games, everybody needs to play a game every once in a while. Everyone needs a diversion sometimes. If you are someone who is blind or visually impaired, uses was over or another screen reader technology, I’m going to say your options might be a little bit more limited than if you didn’t rely on the assistive technology. However, I’m exsighted today because Marty Schultz, who is the founder of Kid Friendly Software and the Developer of the Year from AppleVis’s Golden Apple Awards 2015, is on the line today to talk with us about some blindfold games. Bowling is something you heard a clip of as we came into the interview. We are going to talk about more games.
Before we do all that, Marty, welcome and thank you for being with us today.
MARTY SHULTZ: Thanks for having me.
WADE WINGLER: I am exsighted to talk with you because I had a chance to play the line for the bowling app, and I know you have a bunch of other games that people are buzzing about and talking about. My staff here talks about your games and they are exsighted about hearing this interview today. Before we talk about the games, tell me a little bit about you and your story and how you became interested in and became very successful in creating games for people who are blind or visually impaired.
MARTY SHULTZ: I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I started at five companies before this one. I learned how to make apps about three or four years ago, and I saw my daughter making up her birthday wish list of what she wanted. Every day would be a new list with any piece of paper. I said there should be enough for that. I looked into probably building an app like that and having some of her friends – this time she was about 11 years old – and having them in a focus group. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity for kids through fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. I contacted the head of the school where she went and said I want to run an afterschool club where the kids and I will design a wish list app for the iPhone. They will run about three days a week, about an hour. We will need about six weeks to do it. We went ahead and did it, finished the product. It was in the App Store for a while, called Wish List.
The kids came back and said we want to do another app. I said I can run the club again but I don’t want to have to do an app like every other app in the store. They also said they wanted to do a game. So I sent them off to find a game that was unique. They came back two weeks later and all they gave me were clones of other games. So I said let’s create something really different. I also didn’t want to have to hire a graphic artist at the time just to do a game, so I said let’s do something where you don’t need the screen. I said let’s make a driving game for blind people where the sides of the roads are represented by music, and the idea is to stay on the road, and is the game gets more complex we can put in obstacles, like you want to avoid a cow or get prices that you aim for. In essence you steer your iPhone or iPad just like a regular steering wheel and you go from level to level to level, listening to what is on the road, avoiding the obstacles, and getting the prices. I think we put the product out about two years ago, 35 levels, and the month it came out it was the pick of the month for AppleVis.
The next thing that happened was I heard from some of the people at the Perkins School for the Blind, and Brian Charlson set the next time you’re in Boston – because we go back and forth a lot – could you come by and visit? So we set up a time and then he counted me at the last minute and said I’m not going into work today. I have a bunch of people coming over. Can you come over to my house? So I visited him at his house. He was up all the prior night with three other people playing the game. The next morning I met Brian and his wife Kim who was the president of the ACB, and Judy Dixon who runs the Talking Book Program for the National Library of Congress, and Doug Wakefield who has been active in accessibility for the last 30 or so years and is retired now. They basically told me all the things they needed of games, what makes a game successful, and Judy asked me to do a sudoku and Doug asked me to do a cryptogram game. Then a few weeks later I met Joanne Becker at the Perkins School, which she had just gotten back from a trip to Las Vegas where she and a sighted colleague were playing blackjack. She said she would make a blackjack game. Just one game followed after another. I said hearing from hundreds of visually impaired people saying can you do this, can you do that. So over time we have come out now with over 30 games.
WADE WINGLER: Wow. That is an interesting laundry list of people you had involved in the initial development. Judy was on our show not all that long ago. We enjoyed our conversation with her. 30 games? Can you give me some examples of what those are? We had talked about a couple.
MARTY SHULTZ: I divide the games into four different categories: games that require a lot of movement, that have a lot of physicality to them; card games; casino games; and puzzle games. So the puzzle game category, I have things like the Simon game, which I heard a lot of people wanted. We also just came out with a game called color crush, which is a crush between bejeweled and candy crush. In the movement games, we have things like blindfold bowling, air hockey, breakout. I just did a horse racing game where you are actually racing by walking your finger on the screen. The faster you move your fingers, the faster your horse races against the two horses your racing against; one you hear in your left speaker, one you hear in your right speaker. In the casino games, it started with blackjack. Then I added video poker and roulette and I am just about to release bingo. The card game started with Solitaire and then Crazy Eights and a version of Uno and Spades and Hearts. And then a few others. We just Gin Rummy. So we had a wide variety out there.
WADE WINGLER: Marty, the games obviously have a visual component or at least some visual component. But they are primarily audio, is that right?
MARTY SHULTZ: Actually they don’t have a visual component. If you are a low vision user, there is enough information on the screen that makes it where you can use both the audio and the visual. But all the games are designed for rapid audio play. The things on the screen really help debug the game when I’m building it because I’m sighted. As for low vision users, I have done things so they can use both combinations of auditory and visual cues.
WADE WINGLER: There you go. Hence the name blindfold games, because there is no requirement for site. People who are sighted, they don’t have any advantage over someone who is blind. Am I getting that right?
MARTY SHULTZ: That is definitely true. The thing is very few sighted people play these games. Blind people have a much more developed audio cortex than sighted people. From that they can play these games much more effectively. I remember when we were first testing blindfold racer at the lighthouse of the blind in Miami, one of the girls came up to me who had been blind her whole life. She said I just can’t wait to play this against my sighted friends. I’m going to soap beat their butts.
WADE WINGLER: That is great. Do you have a favorite yourself?
MARTY SHULTZ: Each game just gets better than the last one. Blindfold horse racing is a lot of fun for me to play. There is another one, blindfold barnyard where you have to drag animals into the North, South, East, or West fence by navigating on the screen either using compass directions or clock directions. You find the animal you want, you press on it, then you pull it to one of the fences and then you move the animals from the fence to the barn. They are a lot of fun.
WADE WINGLER: When you are treating these games, how is it different to create games for people who are blind or visually impaired versus creating games or other apps for people who are sighted? Talk to me about the creative process there and some of the technical pieces of that.
MARTY SHULTZ: Is actually really interesting. As a sighted person, when you’re playing a game, you are viewing the world of the window on your iPhone. So if your iPhone is four inches by three inches or something like that, that is the world you are operating in. When you’re playing an audio game, it is true virtual reality. You are not limited to the size of the screen. You have things happen anywhere. It took me a little while to really understand that and build the games to allow that kind of expensive landscape. Once I got the hang of it, it was a lot of fun. All of these games need a good audio environment and they need very simple gestures. The gestures have to be consistent across all of the games, otherwise people get confused and there is a huge learning curve. One thing people find with my games as they are all laid out the same way, the gestures pretty much transfer from game to game, and I have as much physicality as is feasible for the game.
WADE WINGLER: I guess that sort of makes sense. I am not a gamer but I know a lot of the games I have played are pretty similar in terms of the way you control them. There is a lot of commonality between them. That sort of makes sense. What are the limitations in the technology that keep you from creating the games as you want them to be? Are there challenges surrounding the current state of technology and treating these games?
MARTY SHULTZ: It took me a long time before I could find a reliable 3-D audio package. I started using one out of Papa Sangri — but they’re kind of pulling out of this market and are putting the products into open source. But there isn’t any good 3-D audio out there which would give you even more of a playing field. All of my games right now operate in a 2-D space. Before the games that is pretty sufficient. I think if you’re doing a very complex role playing game, having 3-D audio is important. One of my goals with the blindfold games is to not only focus on gamers who like a fully immersive environment but have fun games out there that anyone likes to play, crazy eights and wildcard have been very popular along those lines.
WADE WINGLER: If people are interested in these games, and I know they will be, what are the costs and what platforms are you on and how would people find a game?
MARTY SHULTZ: The games work on iPhone, iPhone, and iPods, on the way back to versions of iOS that are three years old. So if people don’t have an iPhone or have an android, they can pick up a used for your old iPhone for about 50 bucks. I just did one of those to make sure. All games can be found at blindfoldgames.org. They have a list of all the games. Also my blog is about once or twice a week I will blog about something, how I build the game, what’s interesting, or observations I make in building the game or working with a group of 50 very good visually impaired testers.
WADE WINGLER: What about cost?
MARTY SHULTZ: The games all come with a bunch of free play at the beginning, and then people can purchase an Apple upgrades which are coins that they use, where one coin is one game. They can either buy a dollar’s worth of coins or they can buy unlimited coins. Unlimited coins are anywhere between five and $10 and you have unlimited use at that game.
WADE WINGLER: What is in your crystal ball or what is in the hopper when you think about the games that are coming out of kid friendly software? What is coming down the road?
MARTY SHULTZ: I have about a list of 100 or so games people would be to build. About every day I get a suggestion for another game. At this point I am probably up to 50 to 100 unique games people want. There has been a lot of demand recently for some of the sports games, some sort of soccer or baseball or football or basketball game. I’m looking now at collaborating with some of these existing people who have built audio games over the past 10 or 15 years and have them on other platforms and working with them to put them over to the iPhone so that it is more accessible.
WADE WINGLER: Are you doing the development yourself on these or is there a team? It sounds like you are busy.
MARTY SHULTZ: It is just me.
WADE WINGLER: Well, that is remarkable. Tell me a story. Tell me a story about somebody’s life who has been impacted by your work.
MARTY SHULTZ: A really interesting email I got was from a fellow who was in a motorcycle accident about 20 or more years ago. He used to love bowling. Up until we came out with blindfold bowling, he missed that part of his life. When he got the game and it just brought back all of his memories. He had lost the use of his legs and lost his eyesight. This just makes him feel like he was bowling again. He plays the game nonstop. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who tell me every one of my games are addicting. I hear this with testers where they say this is such a great way to waste time. We have a game called blindfold hopper which is a take on the old videogame Frogger. I got an email from a woman whose child was about seven years old and blind, and she said through the game hopper, she has taught him about imaginative play. He can now picture in his head what is actually happening while he is playing the game. This is the first and the experience that.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. Tell me the website one more time. If people say I want to go play some of these games are what is the next step to make that happen?
MARTY SHULTZ: They should visit blindfoldgames.org. It is a fully accessible website. One of the pages is a list of all of the games that are out there. Or they can go to the iTunes store and look for blindfold games. When they download one game, when it first starts up, it gives you a full list of other games that have come out so far.
WADE WINGLER: Great. Marty Shultz is the founder of kid friendly software and AppleVis’s Golden Apple developer of the year for 2015. Thank you so much for being with us today.
MARTY SHULTZ: Thanks again for having me.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.