ATU642 – ViewPlus Technologies, Inc with Dan Gardner

Hi, this is Dan Gardner and I’m the CEO of ViewPlus Technologies, and this is your assistive technology update.

Hello, and welcome to 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 individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 642 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on September 15th, 2023. Today’s show, we’re very excited to welcome Dan Gardner from ViewPlus Technologies Inc. He is here to tell us about all the great things that they do and offer. Please don’t forget, if you ever have an idea for someone we have on the show, a comment, a question, anything that we might be able to help you with or some constructive criticism, never hurt anybody, we’ll take that as well. Go and give us a call on our listener line at 317-721-7124 or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. We always love hearing from you, but for now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners today, we are very excited to welcome Dan Gardner to the show from ViewPlus. And he’s here to talk about all the hardware and software they offer to assist individuals who are blind with accessing print pictures and so much more. Dan, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I am really excited to get into talking about ViewPlus and all the great things that you all offer, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I guess I’m the son of the founders of ViewPlus, so my parents are still active in the business and I came into ViewPlus in 2015 to help them when they needed some help, and it entitled bringing my family down with me back to my hometown in Corvallis, Oregon. So this is where I grew up, but we had spent 20 years up in the Portland area. It was a nice change to come back and my kids are now, well almost, well, I guess we’ll say 19 and 21. And so they’re not kids as much as young adults.

They never really stopped being kids, though. I don’t care what anybody says. At least that’s the way I always seem to feel about them. Well Dan, you kind of said that your parents were the founders. So I guess let’s kind of start at the beginning. When did they start ViewPlus and why?

Yeah. Well, it goes back to my dad was a physics professor at Oregon State University and around, it was 1988. Look at the story on our website, but he went in for eye surgery and came out without sight. So that’s kind of where the thing stems from, and he worked with Oregon State and their access technology program and multiple different grants from different places to kind of form the basis of a tactile graphics embosser. And that led to him inventing a technology that Oregon State had a patent on and tried to get someone else to manufacture it and couldn’t find anybody that wanted it. So ViewPlus was born in 1996.

Awesome. I guess that’s kind of their loss and you all’s gain that they kind of decided not to be able to do that and you kind of had to do it on your own.

Yeah, well, the general perception at the time was that why do blind people need access to graphics?

Oh.

And that was my dad. There’s an experimental physicist interpreting the data. Right. We have all these conversations about poor descriptions and things, but it’s also difficult to interpret data if you can’t access the raw data or be able to render it in multiple different ways.

Sure. So kind of talking about that, let’s start talking about some of the different stuff that kind of ViewPlus is able to offer. So I guess let’s start with some of the kind of the hardware that you all have.

Yeah. Well, I mean the base product, I mean, there’s a lot of different things we’ve done throughout the years, but the key part of our technology is most people know us as the Tiger embosser people, right, which was a moniker for tactile image graphics embosser that my dad came up with before we even had a name for ViewPlus. It was one of those napkin moments brainstorming with people. But yeah, so I mean having an embosser that could make both braille and tactile graphics as well as from the very beginning there was plans and very early on there was also including ink on that so that you could have a truly inclusive ink text with braille and also ink overlay on the graphics so that for teams you could partner on things and collaborate on things regardless of sight.

Well, I think that’s what kind of sets it apart and what makes it a whole lot easier. I mean, yeah, for teams, I mean, I also think for teachers, for anybody to be able to, like you said, be inclusive, to be able to read along no matter how you’re accessing that text, I think is a big, big difference and a great selling point and just a great thing to just kind of, like you said, make it inclusive for everyone trying to access that information.

Yeah. And early on, I mean, my dad’s vision early on was that trying to access standard graphics without air quotes, having to make them accessible was something that the only way you were going to level that playing field and not have to wait two weeks, six weeks, six months or whatever for access to the same content that everybody has out of the box. And so that’s where another piece of hardware, which is our IVEO touchpad, which allows audio tactile. So if you can get a graphic and extract by touch as well as by voice or sonification, the sort of the multimodal approach, but it was also better set up because trying to put braille on things ultimately makes things not scalable since braille isn’t a scalable font. So that was an idea that we’ve had that hardware for a long time, but it’s also been maybe the hardware is ahead of its time. I see in the industry, a lot of great hardware products, but try to get the content to play on them is a major hurdle in most of these startups and sort of grant to entrepreneur type ventures that I see.

Dan, tell us a little bit about kind of the software, kind of the Tiger software and how this kind works to oh, kind of change and manipulate the information in order to make it more accessible for the embossers and for the folks, the end users who are using it.

Yeah, I mean, the Tiger software suite is really three core tools, but the basis of it really was to allow braille translation inside of Word and Excel. So those are the two plugins, having the Tiger ribbon in those two to allow you to generate braille out of the text. But the nice thing about Word is you can also bring in pictures and draw. They have all the standard objects you can draw, and all of those things can just hit print from Word and boom. You can mix the text, the braille, and the graphics all in one. And so it really makes it a perfect landing page where again, most of the braille translation tools have no support for anything other than braille. So getting some minimal support for interline text, but nothing more than leaving a spot for the graphic,

Yeah. Yeah.

Or an appendix or something to do the graphic. So that was the core part. And then the other piece is the Tiger designer and slash Tiger viewer, which allows you to see the rendered thing and design things kind of at the dot level. And so we call it a tactile version of Windows paint type of program. So those are the three core components. And we’ve also added in recent years, six key, eight key entry capabilities as well as a sort of, we’ve always had a kind of standalone translator, but we upgraded it to do clipboard translation and back translation. So you can just cut and paste from standard applications that support fonts. So think Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, where you would just be doing labels. And so you can cut the text, bring it, have the translator running in the background, translate it, and then drop it right back down in there as braille text, either over the top of the ink text or just leaving it there separately as well, so that if you can have both if you want.

So those are kind of the five tools I guess, that make up the Tiger software suite. But really the core of it is the Liblouis braille translation, which I didn’t realize what a big, I knew that ViewPlus was involved, but I was talking to my dad the other day and just tell me more about this. And it’s like, because the person that actually implemented, right, just passed away, but he was paid by ViewPlus to do of that. I didn’t realize that ViewPlus had started the thing. I knew that we were involved, but that really, that’s one of the things you look back at. If nothing else, survives ViewPlus changed the world by essentially creating the framework for providing a global open source braille translation software.

Nice. Dan, I have to ask you because I think this is very important. I’ve attended some of your booths and kind of other demonstrations at conferences kind of over the years, and I was really impressed with how you can convey color on pictures for folks who can’t access that information visually. Can you tell us a little bit about that in some of your tactile graphics and how colors conveyed?

Yeah, I mean, historically we’ve always had the ability to do multiple dot heights, which is still something unique in the industry. And so if you think of rendering things in sort of an eight level gray scale, that’s always been the capabilities. And then we’ve also had the ability to support different textures to represent things. But it was one of those aha moments when I couldn’t travel during Covid and was walking along the beach and I’m like, well, can’t we merge those two. And so that’s something that again, seemed like something simple, but it’s led to a great awakening, I guess, as to the power of what you can do. And again, we create hardware. We aren’t always thinking, we’re not the content experts, but this is something that we’ve seen that really has helped to expand the scope because people know us inside of STEM and complicated graphics, but the color aspect of it by auto applying textures to colors has really opened up beyond STEM.

So we say adding the A to STEM makes STEAM, but the whole arts concept, and whether it’s pop culture stuff like cartoons or even just rendering cool logos that are texturally cool to feel, right, has opened up a whole breadth of conversation. And again, it goes to how can you make graphics accessible without going through the seeing eye human? Right. And a lot of times the graphic isn’t in isolation, right? There’s description talking about the graphic, and if it’s referencing color, well, how are you going to know which regions and what colors they are, unless there’s some way to identify those.

And so that’s where I think the auto applying of the textures to the colors would allow a standard to emerge to where people know what blue feels like and green feels like and yellow. And so then therefore you’d be able to find a particular portion of the diagram that may be laid out with a specific color, whether it’s a bar chart, pie chart, map, whatever, cartoon character, doesn’t really matter. Right. Or even seeing now our blind intern shopping on Amazon for shirts and being able to use it to tell color.

Oh, sure. And I mean, you bring up a great point because yeah, your description might say a red and white shirt. Well, is it red white stripes? Is it checks? Is it big stripes, little stripes? I mean, there’s so many different variations that, I mean, granted, that’s a pretty crummy description, but hopefully it’d have more information than that. But just being able to get that a little bit more information can make a huge difference in what you’re actually looking at or the information you’re trying to access.

Yeah. And I think that’s the part, right, when you think about what do you need from a description, right? Well, maybe you just need a cursory thumbnail at first, but then yeah, you want to look into it. Is that a red and white striped shirt? Is it a soccer jersey? Right. I mean, what is it that if somebody really knew what that was and wanted to go deep into it, but maybe you don’t care right away.

So that sort of progressive disclosure of, I want to keep digging into this. And so it just gives another level. And I think the other part is the multi dot heights are great when the regions are touching each other. Right. You can tell a change, but it’s very difficult to say if this thing on the far side of the diagram versus the other side, if they’re different by one or two dot height levels, it’s very difficult to tell in isolation what they are. So you may know that this color’s a little bit brighter than this one if they were touching each other, but that’s all you’re going to get. And with the textures, you definitely get the capability to do differentiable pieces of the diary.

Oh, for sure. And I mean, you mentioned kind of adding art in, but I could see how that could really help with complex things in the STEM world too, just to think about all the little, oh, I wish I could remember all the different things in science, all the different parts of the body, the cells and things like that. But being able to have that really, I think adds an even another layer of depth and understanding probably to individuals as they’re able to feel those differences in those very small, very compact kind of building blocks of life, I guess.

I mean, I guess. Yeah, the big point is, right, is like if you’re limiting yourself just to line art, which is what you get with most other devices, the refreshable and the other embossers, right? You’re pretty limited there. Okay. You can basically do coloring pages, but then when you start looking at the gray scale, that gave a one level of differentiation. I’d say this really gives you another huge depth. I mean, it started off, Bart Simpson started the whole thing off. I was trying to describe what it is that we can do and trying to say, you don’t need to wait until they’re 15 years old and failing math to use tactile graphics. These are things you can start in preschool. Right. I mean, just go grab Bart from the web, print them out, right? He’s got a nice black outline that he is been colorized in, and he had different dot heights for the different parts.

So his skin was a yellow orangey color, and so he could feel that from where his clothes, and then they had the outlines around it so he could feel where his shirt versus shorts were. Well, so the first thing I tried when we started with the color mapping library to the textures was, let me try my Bart guy and see how this works. And it’s like, it was just amazing. Printed out a color wheel with the textures, and I mean, this really started, I think ATIA probably was the first one because we were kind of isolated with Covid because we hadn’t had a chance to really try it too much.

And so started going to those shows and showing those. But the color wheel, in about less than five minutes, someone was studying that and then went over to Bart and said, oh, Bart’s got a red shirt on, just mic drop, right? It works. Right. And then it keeps going, right? It’s like, oh, and his shorts matches his shoes. Those are things that, because they had blue ones and before you really couldn’t really tell his shirt color from his shorts because they were both kind of medium intensity colors, so they were about the same dot height. So again, it was a whole nother level of detail that could be self explored from something as simple as a Bart Simpson.

So Dan, can you tell us about the inclusive coloring book?

Yeah. Well, again, this was one of those things that seemed obvious to us, and we kept talking about it, but didn’t really have anybody that felt comfortable in their drawing skills to do something. And again, every time you try to cut something, cut and paste it off the web, which is what most of my stuff I do as examples, I wouldn’t want to publish that,

Oh, sure.

Getting all the licenses and things. But we had a new person join the team and she ends up, I’m pretty good at drawing stuff. And so sure enough, we went through multiple different rounds and released volume one earlier this year. And I say volume one because we’re just about to launch volume two because we did a fairly large selection of different options, and then the volume two is more focused on the most popular part, which was more animals.

But yeah, so we’ve launched it and have it available for sale on our website as well as we’re adding some Crayola, the triangle crayons with braille labels. So the idea being, yeah, it’s got ink text as well as ink outlines as well as tactile outlines and braille. So it’s something we’ve seen surprised to me all ages love it, right? It’s like I’ve had groups of parents and grandparents and kids with all different abilities and just being able to do something together where, and in some cases it’s been one of the, again, when you see the things things and you’re just like, you don’t really expect when you hear this is the first time that I’ve had a book that isn’t just white on white. I have something like what everybody else has type of comments. And so it’s been fascinating both to see people getting distracted at trade shows when we say, Hey, check this out, and they disappear for four hours instead of tending their booth and coloring in the hot air balloon or the butterfly or something.

So yeah, so that’s again, one of those things that’s like, it seems so simple, and yet it filled a need where we want to show people how if they have our embosser, they can just print their own or make their own. So we’re ramping up that for on August release, so that by the time this goes live, hopefully we will have then more of this up there on the website. So right now, the volume one is available for sale, but yeah, we’d love to have people be able to contribute and make their own. I mean, that’s the whole point of what we do.

Dan, you probably got a ton of these over the time you’ve kind of been there at ViewPlus and everything, but can you tell me a story about someone using some piece of your kind of technology and how it really helped them along in their journey in their life?

Oh my gosh. Yeah. This year I’ve been swamped with a National Science Foundation, OPI grant team, but last year I took a Stanford leadership class through my Vistage CEO group, and one of the three-month sessions was on storytelling. So I collected some absolutely amazing stories, and so there’s three that really stand out, but to me, the one that most hits, I think probably this audience, right, it was inspirational to me because a lot of times you get those testimonials that are snapshot in time. And in this case, I went back and checked on things that I’d heard about from years past and kind of how did they progress.

And so there were some amazing things there, and it’s actually led to ongoing then relationships with some of the subjects of the story because I was always searching for a lot of times the teacher, right, the TVI, the teacher for the visually impaired, they’re the hero of the story because they’re the ones that you always hear that, well, at least in a lot of cases, someone that makes it through. Right. We’ll give a lot of credit to that TVI of going above and beyond and figuring out ways to get them included in things. But then I was looking for ones where yeah, where is the blind individual? Where is that person? Not the hero of the story.

And so one that stood out to me was the New York Public Library and Chancey Fleet’s team because they’re amazing. They hold technology sessions at the New York Public Library and teaching blind people how to make their own tactile graphics. So they’re like hand coding SVGs, and they’re using our equipment, of course, and we’ve helped them out with some software licenses and things over the years. But when I reached out and asked for stories, Chancey got backed to me within 15 minutes or something, right on a Saturday and said, yo, I love, I have a great story for you. So she started telling me about during Covid library shut down. So she took her Columbia Embosser home with her and started using it more and more just for everyday things.

And again, this is one of the things that, something that is usable, right, but maybe slightly out of reach of the average person, but then getting that advantage of having something at home. So she’s like, yeah, you’re never going to believe this, but I credit it with saving my marriage. And I’m like, what? Tell me more. I don’t believe you. So she’s like, well, okay. During Covid, we decided to remodel our house, and my husband’s pretty good at techie stuff, so he was laying out floor plans and things, and he was planning the remodel, but I know it sounds weird, but I’m the spatial thinker, and he was having a really hard time trying to describe what he was trying to do in the context of it. And so with some slight modifications, he was able to take those floor plans and just print them on the Columbia so then I could help with the layout of the changes.

Oh, nice.

And we were butting heads over not being able to communicate the same language to then being able to collaborate together on this project. And so she’s like, and I go, oh, yeah, well, if there’s a kitchen involved, how many times have you heard that kitchen remodel is the reason for divorce, right? So I guess I could believe your statement that it saved your marriage now. We also heard some goosebumps stories from during Covid, you heard all the horror stories of kids falling behind because they weren’t getting access to content. It was difficult to do. And we had helped explain to a mother in Texas that, yeah, through the APH quota program, there’s a chance you can get a PixBlaster, which is a Columbia we make for APH through that program. The funds are available. Right. If they’re not using it for schools, then perhaps you could get one. And so she was able to get an embosser.

Nice.

And she’s like, and again, it’s not the kind of stuff I could say, but there’s a testimonial on the website that talks about your products were a godsend. They were so easy to use. I was able to get her up, and she went from six months behind to being right on task, and we credit it with keeping her engaged enough that she was a finalist in the National Braille Challenge.

Nice.

And so that was a great testimonial. But during the Stanford thing, I went back and said, tell me more about the backstory and the forward story of this at the time, 12 year old girl in Texas. And she’s like, oh, well, they’re here. Then she sent me a link to a local NBC news program where they had adopted their daughter from a Chinese orphanage, and I think she was three years old at the time and was nonverbal.

And nobody was sure if it was because of, they knew there was eye problems, but they thought there was, but then they also, and then she was underweight, and so they weren’t sure. Right. Does she have any cognitive things as well going on? And they said, well, they’d already adopted her two brothers and no one thought anyone would even want this girl. So that they’ve said, yes. And after five eye surgeries, she ends up at least stabilizing, but she has no sight at all. But again, it was one of those like, oh my gosh, the story was so much deeper than some kid that had struggled mightily to learn the language and ended up being super, super smart and a good musician to then falling behind during in Covid. That was one of the ones that they’d spent so much effort getting her caught up and then was falling behind and then managed to self-advocate and get back on track. And so I think the latest update was she had already learned violin, but now she’s moving on to ukulele as well.

Oh, well, why not? Holy moly. And that’s great. And like you said, I love that you were able to get some more of the story of beginning and end because yeah, otherwise it’s just mean a lot of students fell behind during Covid, and I’m sure a lot of folks were helped, but it’s like you really get the richness of it when you’d learn those two different parts. Well, we could sit here probably doing stories all day, but we’re going to run out of time. So before we do, Dan, could you tell our listeners how they can find out more about ViewPlus and just all the great things that you guys offer and maybe read some more of those stories?

Yeah, I mean, viewplus.com, right? We’ve just went through an overhaul to hopefully make it more accessible since my dad keeps beating us up that it’s not as accessible as it could be. But yeah, so there’s stories on that as well as you can sign up for our newsletter where we share a lot of those. Not a lot of marketing stuff goes out on the newsletter as much as just trying to share some of these stories and some of these lessons learned. And of course, we’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, not so much anymore, but I guess we’re still posting stuff to there. But I’d still say most of the things we send out, the full depth would be just signing up for a newsletter, which is a simple click of giving us your email address on our webpage.

Awesome. We’ll put a link to that down in the show notes. Well, Dan, thank you again so much for coming on today, telling us about all the great things that ViewPlus offers, as well as just kind of really digging into the tactile graphics and just how those can really help folks with all different kinds of well learning and just life needs.

Yeah. Thank you.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your assistive technology update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful, Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.