ATU659 – ReBokeh Vision with Rebecca Rosenberg

Hi, my name is Rebecca Rosenberg and I’m the founder and CEO of ReBokeh Vision Technologies and this is your assistive technology update.

Hello and welcome to your assisted 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 Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 659 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on January 12th, 2024. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Rebecca Rosenberg. She’s the founder and CEO of ReBokeh Vision and she is here to tell us all about their app and how it can assist individuals with some visual impairments. We also have a quick story about a new device that could maybe turn your iPhone into your old school Blackberry. Also, if you’re interested, we just released our list of full day trainings that we’ll be doing here at the Indata Project over the course of the next year. You can find those at eastersealstech.com/fullday and we’ll put a link to that down in the show notes. But for now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show

Folks, our first story today actually comes from something somebody brought to my attention. For a lot of folks, especially those probably my age or maybe a little bit older, they remember the good old days where you didn’t really have much of a touch screen on your phone or if you did, well, it didn’t do a whole heck of a lot. But a lot of folks and enthusiasts had a Blackberry. Now for folks who don’t know what a Blackberry was, a Blackberry was a cell phone, maybe about the size of an iPhone give or take, maybe a little bit wider and a little bit shorter, but the screen only took up the top part of that and at the bottom was this large full tactile keyboard. The buttons were kind of small, rounded, easy to press with your fingers. For folks who used a Blackberry and enjoyed a Blackberry, I tell you what, they could type out an entire blog post, a really long email very quickly with kind of the two hands, and there are a lot of folks out there who are still huge Blackberry enthusiasts.

In fact, the person that sent this to me, I’ve known for years and they are a Blackberry enthusiast and have missed it ever since. They sent me a link over to a company called Clicks and it’s at Clicks.Tech. In fact, we will put a link down in the show notes in case you want to go check this out for yourself, but the device that they have is the Clicks Creator keyboard, and essentially what this does is it is a keyboard case that connects to an iPhone. Looks like they have models for iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. What this case does, it’s kind of a silicone case you can easily slide to your phone into, and then at the bottom of it has what I can only describe as pretty darn close to being that Blackberry keyboard.

From what I’ve been able to read about it, it sounds like it works a whole lot like that. In fact, once you connect the case, the onscreen keyboard completely and totally gets disabled, so you’re only using that keyboard. A couple of advantages of this, of course is a whole lot more real estate on your screen, so if you’re using magnification very large font, you could easily have that show up on there. For other folks, just having that tactile keyboard could be a really great accommodation. I know I have some folks who that is the biggest thing they miss. Give me buttons, give me actual things that I can hit down here. In reading a little bit about it, it says that you can even kind of have keystrokes and other things kind of set up on there that can make it even a little bit more accessible. For me and I have not tried it, but looking at it, I feel like it would take me a little bit of getting used to not drop my phone every time that I was actually trying to use it.

Now the device itself, it says if you purchase now, some models it looks like will be shipping February 1st, others in mid-March and others in early spring. So this isn’t quite out yet, but a few of the reviews that I could go and kind of find online for folks who had maybe a kind of a hands-on demo said that the buttons are pretty easy to use. It did say if you have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, the bigger guy, that it seemed a little bit easier because the keys of course were a little bit larger. So on just the Pro model, a little bit smaller, so a little bit kind of harder to get used to. But they did say what was really nice was having all that extra screen space because if you’re writing something very long or again, if you’re using larger font or maybe something else that takes up a lot of that space, you can really get a lot more information on the screen without the keyboard coming up.

So I know some folks I’ve kind of worked with, we’ve used external keyboards for their iPhone and maybe some other kinds of Bluetooth devices in order to be able to kind of access it and have that tactile not have to worry about trying to touch a screen which really doesn’t have landmarks or a whole heck of a lot to go by whenever you’re trying to type. This could definitely be a pretty good accommodation. They are not cheap. It looks like the iPhone 14 and 15 Pro models are about 139 and the iPhone 15 pro is 159, so they do definitely have a price to them.

But at the same time, if this is something you’ve been looking for, if you’re that Blackberry enthusiast or if you just feel much more comfortable with an actual tactile QWERTY keyboard connected to your phone, this could be a really good accommodation or a great way to get back that nostalgia of the good old Blackberry right there on your iPhone. Again, I will put a link over to their site down in the show notes and I’m really looking forward to hopefully being able to get my hands on one and actually try it out, see how it works and see if it’s something that might be able to help out somebody out there with their access needs.

Listeners, our guest today is Rebecca Rosenberg and she’s here to tell us about ReBokeh and how it can assist individuals with new and more accessible ways to visually access the world around them. Rebecca, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I’m looking really forward to talking about the technology, but before we do that, could you start off by telling our listeners maybe a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. So my name’s Rebecca and I have oculocutaneous albinism and as a result of that, a vision impairment that I have grown up with. I was born with it. I’ve had it my entire life and as I was growing up, I really was unhappy with the assistive technologies that were available to me as someone who had a really moderate case of low vision. There was a lot of things I could still do. Most people who looked at me wouldn’t necessarily even as a kid been able to tell that I had a vision impairment and it felt like everything that was coming in my direction was really geared toward totally replacing vision or giving me options that are just solely audio-based. Where on the other side of that it was like kind of just your basic physical glass magnifier, and I didn’t really feel like those were what I needed when I was growing up.

And so had kind of thought about that problem for many, many years. Ultimately went to school for biomedical engineering at Bucknell, learned a whole lot about how a lot of things work and was able to take some of that knowledge and turn it into this opportunity to create assistive technology that is really appropriate for people like myself who have this sort of moderate vision impairment who really just need something to help enhance the existing vision that they do have. So kind of started off on that pathway, continued finishing up my degree in biomedical engineering, actually moved on for a couple of years to get my master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design, and then really discovered that the technology that we had created for ReBokeh was in a place where it needed me to be tending to it all the time. And so that’s how I became sort of the full-time CEO of ReBokeh.

Awesome. Well, you kind of led me straight into my next question. What is ReBokeh?

Great question. ReBokeh is an assistive technology that is smartphone-based. So it’s an app-based assistive technology that allows users to augment the way that the world looks to their specific needs in any situation. So what that actually means practically is that we are using a live camera feed from your device, so from your iPhone or your iPad, and we’re allowing people to add custom video filters on top of that live camera feed so that they can adjust things like colors and contrast and exposure all in real time so that they can just use their device as a portal into a world that is geared to exactly what they need to see. And then they use their device to kind of read menus at fast food restaurants or the board at school or we have people who use it to play in an orchestra to actually follow along with their conductor or play board games or spot their friends in a large crowd.

I could go into a whole lot of detail on the creative ways that our users have found ways that ReBokeh has benefited them specifically, but that is really the basis of the technology is providing those known vision assistive capabilities in a already really well-known piece of hardware so that people can make the adjustments that they want in any setting.

Awesome. Well, we’ll probably get into some of the cool ways that folks have used it here later on, but you mentioned some of the color filters and the contrast and things. What all kinds of visual things can I manipulate using ReBokeh?

Yeah, all sorts of things. Contrast I think is one of the most used features in the app because I think there’s a lot of vision impairments that do lend people to be more contrast sensitive. I know I’m one of those people. That is usually the first button that I am going for. Things like exposure, so if you’re in sort of a dark setting, you can use exposure to brighten things up, but the brightening that you’re doing, it’s happening in software instead of turning on your phone’s flash, which a lot of people like in especially restaurant environments when they maybe don’t want to blast everybody in a like 10-foot radius with the camera light but they need a little bit of extra brightness. That’s something people like a lot. Different color filters. So when I was a kid, I was provided these sort of elastic transparencies that were all just different colors and I didn’t understand it as a kid.

I was like, “This is kind of ridiculous. What am I doing with this?” And my social worker was like, “No, just try it. Just try me.” And so I placed that on what I was trying to read and it was immediately more easy or it was immediately easier for me to look at. I think that it helped increased contrast, it helped to decrease glare in some circumstances, and I really found that yellow was a color that I liked, but everybody has a different preference. I know a lot of people like red, a lot of people like green, and so we basically recreated that same sort of concept but digitally with our color filters. Plus you can do all the things you would expect to do with different inversion types, you can totally invert all of your colors, gray scale, things like that. And you can combine those sets of adjustments together and when you find a combination that you really like that works for you in a given situation, you can save that as a preset for quick access later.

Oh, nice. So I can save it for different situations and things like you mentioned being at a restaurant or trying to find friends. I can just have those presets so I’m not jumbling through all the different settings kind of for every unique situation.

Exactly. The example I give is I had a professor in college who liked to write on the whiteboard with green marker for some reason, and that’s one of I think the lower contrast colored markers that you could choose. And so had I had this when I was in college, I would have created a preset specifically for that class that would help make that green stand out a little bit more against that whiteboard, and it’s something that I could come back to every other day as I had that class.

Awesome. Awesome. Rebecca, you kind of mentioned this a little bit, but you said growing up a lot of the assistive technologies didn’t really fit your needs. Can you kind of dig into that a little bit and just how that led you to create ReBokeh?

Yes, absolutely. Growing up, there were a lot of different assistive technologies and things that were provided to me. It kind of all started when I was in fifth grade and I started receiving sort of these really big print textbooks and they came in a couple different varieties, but they were all incredibly large and on actually physically very large paper. I think it was like 11 by 18 sized paper and I was not a very large fifth grader, and so the book was pretty much the size from my knees to my shoulders just about, and it was really great. I could write in them most of the time. Then there was sort of these other versions that for my sort of bigger middle school science textbook, because of the way they had to print them, there were usually 10 volumes of this big textbook to make up one book. While that was really good and the big print was really helpful to me, what wasn’t so great was when the teacher decided to skip from chapter two to, “Oh, today we’re going to take a sidebar and go to chapter 11.”

Well, then I would have to walk all the way down to the counselor’s office, search for whichever version of the textbook had chapter 11 in it and walk back to class sometimes 10 or 15 minutes later halfway through the lesson already having been done. And so while these big books were really helpful to me, they also had a lot of downsides and right around the time I was entering seventh or eighth grade, I think the iPad had just come out. It had been out maybe a year or two at that point, and I sort of started to dip my toe into the world of digital books and realized that there might be an opportunity for me to get my textbooks as PDFs. So it took quite a bit of, I guess, personal advocacy on my part, but I did convince my parents to get me an iPad for this purpose and I did manage to convince my state’s low vision support organization to reach out to publishers and see if they could get me the textbook as a PDF.

And I pretty much saw as I went into eighth grade how the iPad completely transformed my school life workflow. My backpack wasn’t as heavy. I wasn’t the weird kid with all of these huge books. I was like the cool girl who got to take her iPad to class. I mean, especially for things like math where some of the audio-based formats or some of the big books would sort of augment the way a fraction looked in a way that was very difficult, these PDFs didn’t have that problem. And so I really saw how this transformed my life and as it turns out, my state’s low vision services organization also saw how that transformed my life because within two years they were giving iPads to quite a number of their students to do exactly the same thing.

It was sort of something that I very unintentionally kind of pioneered when I was, I mean, even just 13. Having seen how quickly assistive technology that is digital and that is based in pieces of hardware that we are already familiar with and already using, seeing how that transformed things for me, I think really set up the work that I ultimately would do with ReBokeh really well and taking these assistive technology features out of these enormous expensive clinical devices and putting them into a format that is comfortable for people. I think that’s the trajectory that it all took.

Nice. Very nice. Your experience is one I’ve heard from a lot of folks with different kinds of disabilities just going from, like you said, the huge books or maybe huge devices or 10 things to do 10 different things all the way down to using one device with maybe some different apps and some different accessibility settings. Not only that, but you hit the nail on the head that I’ve heard from other folks. I’m not singled out by having all these giant books. I’m using a device that other people understand, other people use, so very, very, very cool. Well, the app itself, where is it available?

Yes. Right now the ReBokeh app is available on the App Store. We do not have an Android version yet, but there is an Android wait list on our website, so if people are interested in the Android version, we very much welcome them to sign up for the wait list and they will be the first to know when we have updates regarding the development of the Android version.

Very cool. And then the app itself, is there a cost or a subscription, anything like that?

So the ReBokeh app is free to download and we provide a set of basic features totally for free. Fundamentally, we believe that assistive technology is something that everybody should have access to. With that said, if we’re going to continue doing this work, we do need to make a little bit of money, and so there are some plus features, we call it ReBokeh Plus behind a $3 a month paywall, and that’s in the United States. Those are transferred to other currencies all around the world. The other way that we provide ReBokeh is actually working with organizations to make ReBokeh Plus available for free in their space. And so when users download the app, one of the things we ask is to be able to use your location occasionally, and the reason that we ask that is so that we can provide ReBokeh Plus for free to you when you’re in those locations that work with us. Can’t say too much about those locations at this moment in time, but we’re very excited to be announcing some really major partnerships in the next couple of months.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we’ll make sure to try to give an update on the show once those kind are announced, just to let folks know where that’s available. I love that because it allows kind of the businesses to take on some of that and try to make their spaces a little bit more accessible, so very, very cool. When we’re talking about the subscription service, what kind of benefits do you get? Because you said, I know you get the basics for free, but what kind of extra features or settings or things do you get for subscribing?

Yeah, so you get access to the ability to save more presets, which is something that we saw a lot of people have interest in having. Access to additional filter options, so different inversion things, the yellow on blue things people are kind of used to seeing, plus the ability to actually, and this is I think my favorite functionality, the ability to actually upload photos to ReBokeh and adjust them in the app instead of just being able to use the live camera. That was a highly, highly requested feature, and one of the ways people use that I think of a lot is when I was in school, if I was maybe sick a day and my friend took pictures of the board notes in class and then sent them to me, they weren’t necessarily the most accessible again because of that green marker on the whiteboard problem. So instead of just being at a loss or needing to ask my friend actually for pictures of their notebook, I could upload those pictures to ReBokeh, make those adjustments and then save those pictures again with the adjustments that I made. So that became accessible to me.

Nice, nice. Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Earlier on, you said some interesting ways that folks use this, and I know when I was kind of researching this, I saw you use the ReBokeh app at a basketball game, which I thought was super cool and something you don’t always think about using your phone or an app or something to be able to access. So what are some really kind of cool ways that you’ve heard that folks have been using the ReBokeh app? Maybe some that even surprised you or some that are just cool stories?

Yeah, so many ways, and I always encourage people when I do things like this, if you’re a listener and you have a cool way that you’re using ReBokeh, please do reach out to us. It’s something that keeps our team going to just see how creative people have gotten with the technology. Oh gosh, where do I even start? We had one person who was in college who actually used ReBokeh to take an American sign language class because without the technology, she actually wouldn’t have been able to see the professor sign but she could use ReBokeh to actually access that learning experience, which I just think is so cool. Another one of my favorites absolutely is the person who used it in the orchestra, and so you could kind of see that had set up the iPad to look at the conductor, but the iPad was close to that person and really zoomed in on the conductor.

That’s obviously a situation where operating in real time is incredibly important, which is something that our technology does really, really well. Another example of the basketball game I think is a great one. I’ve had a lot of people reach out recently and say they’re using it at concerts. I don’t go to a lot of concerts. I wish I did, but I did go to a concert a couple of weeks back and I think we were in the most nosebleed seats you could possibly have been in that arena. Even I having developed the technology was shocked at how much better I could see what was going on on stage using ReBokeh from my incredible nosebleed seats. It was incredible. It really made all the difference.“ I could actually see the dance moves and the facial expressions of the people on stage is just not something that I would have ever thought was possible.

I think one of my other favorite examples is we have a user who plays Dungeons and Dragons, and so if I understand that correctly, you kind of jumped back and forth between needing to see distance, so seeing the pieces on the board and reading your cards or your character sheet kind of up close. And so he said normally he’d need two additional tools with him, one to see far away and one to see close up. But with V, he pretty much needed zero extra tools because he had his phone anyway and could use it to go back and forth both between distance and that closeup reading that he had to do.

Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, I love that people are just using it everyday life. The things you’re trying to do, and hopefully you can make some more concerts this year, call it clinical research. Maybe you can kind of work that kind of in. And kind of along those lines, Rebecca, I know you said that you’re kind of working with businesses to get it in, but maybe what’s next for ReBokeh and for you?

Absolutely. So I think one of the next things that we are working on that I am most excited about is actually the integration of some AI technology, and I can’t say too much about what that means yet, but we are well on our way to the development of AI for low vision in a way I have not seen anybody else do to date and I do not hear anybody else talking about. And so we are so excited to be really kind of pioneering this section of AI for disability and can’t wait to show people we will be taking or intaking beta testers for this in the near future, but we’re so excited to show what that’s going to do and how that revolutionizes this technology even further.

Awesome. Well, if our listeners want to find out more about ReBokeh, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so they can do that online. Our website is just reRebokeh.com, R-E-B-O-K-E-H.com. We are on Instagram, we are on Facebook, Rebokeh Vision I think on both of those platforms. We are on TikTok. Anywhere that you sort of get your social media, you will find us and if they’re interested in learning more about the low vision space and different challenges, I have actually recently started a blog on Medium at Real Rebecca Rose where I’m sharing a lot of the experiences and learnings that I have found through building this company and just having the opportunity to talk to so many people with vision impairments. So really excited about that.

Awesome. We will put links to that in the show notes so that folks can find all of those and definitely keep up on updates because it sounds like you got a lot of cool, very interesting stuff coming out here in the future. Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on the show today for telling us about Medium, kind of the thought process behind how it was made, the cool things that are coming up with it and the great ways that it can really help folks. Thank you so much.

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 INTRA. You can find out more about INTRA at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Peto 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 are 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. Looking forward to seeing you next time.

Bye-bye.