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WADE WINGLER: Welcome to ATFAQ, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions with your host Brian Norton, Manager of Clinical 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: Hello, and welcome to ATFAQ, episode 14. In the room with me today, I just wanted to welcome our guests. We have Belva Smith. She’s the team lead for our vision team here at Easter Seals Crossroads. Belva?
BELVA SMITH: Hi.
BRIAN NORTON: And we also have Mark. Mark is the team lead for our mobility and cognition team here at Easter Seals Crossroads.
MARK STEWART: Hi, everybody.
BRIAN NORTON: And we also have Wade. Wade is the director of our technology division here at Easter Seals Crossroads, and also the host of the popular podcast AT Update. Wade?
WADE WINGLER: Hey, everybody.
BRIAN NORTON: Great. Before we get started, I just wanted to jump in and for our new listeners wanted to let people know how the show works. Throughout the week, we collect lots and lots of questions. What we do here as we try to answer those questions. If you guys have questions that you guys are thinking of, there are several ways for you guys to get them to us. The first is through our listener line. That’s 317-721-7124. You can also email us at tech@easterseals.org. Or send a tweet with the hashtag #ATFAQ. Those are all great ways to get us your questions. Please take a minute to do that. Throughout the show if you think of things that you’d like to ask, we should love to know. Also if you are looking for our show, obviously found it already, but you can find our show on iTunes. You can find it on ATFAQshow.com. Or you can look us up on Stitcher. Or just through our regular website. That’s www.eastersealstech.com.
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BRIAN NORTON: First question of the day. We’ll jump right in. The first question is have you heard of Dragon Anywhere from Nuance. What do you know about it? I’ll kind of throw that out to the group. Anybody?
WADE WINGLER: I’ve heard of it, but I’m not the expert. That’s for sure. I’m looking to defer to Mark here.
MARK STEWART: Haven’t used it yet. Let me speak to it historically a bit. I’m thinking processor. It does a lot. It really adds a lot of capability to an app. I think Nuance was just holding back on this for some time because there was a lot of functionality that worked on a PC and they had kind of a stripped-down voice to text app initially, and now they’ve really rolled out something that can do a lot of things that would otherwise have had to have been done on a PC in the past. That’s just exciting.
WADE WINGLER: So what is it?
BRIAN NORTON: From what I can gather, it’s a mobile platform for Dragon. Back in the day, they used to have a Dragon app. This is a lot more sophisticated. It comes with quite a bit of efficiency and productivity built in, a lot of customization there. It looks like you can dictate really robust documents on iOS device or an Android device, and then once you’re done with those, it looks like you can import those are sync them off to the cloud and open them up on the other devices there as well.
MARK STEWART: Easily synchronize, templates can be stored in the cloud and worked with easily. Is it functional? The recognition accuracy from the demos that I’ve seen are pretty impressive. Is it going to be as accurate as on a PC with just the right microphone and things like that? I really doubt it. For a lot of folks who don’t have voice challenges, I think it’s probably going to be very functional.
BELVA SMITH: I think they are really looking to ditch the dictation that’s built into our smart phones. Like, if you’re used to dictating a note to yourself or your text messages or something, it’s supposed to be a lot more accurate.
WADE WINGLER: Like compared to Siri?
BELVA SMITH: Yeah.
WADE WINGLER: Okay. I’m looking at the website and it says it’s going to be available this fall, so it’s not out yet? Or have you guys seen it in beta or anything?
BELVA SMITH: I don’t think it’s out yet.
BRIAN NORTON: I think it’s coming.
BELVA SMITH: I think it’s going to be out in maybe early October.
WADE WINGLER: Is this something we’re talking about as an assistive technology for the people with disabilities that we work with, or is this something we’re thinking about for ourselves? You guys are road warriors and writing reports all the time. Is this something that you’re going to dictate an evaluation report or a training report while you’re driving down the road, or do we know enough about it yet?
BELVA SMITH: I think it’s really going to allow us to do editing and formatting, which is another thing that we can’t currently do with our iOS dictation or Siri. We probably could; however, I don’t think that’ll be very safe.
MARK STEWART: You’re not going to edit while you are driving.
MARK STEWART: A potential yes to that is, and this speaks to the robustness that Brian described, you can email by voice, something that you can’t do with a simple voice to text app. That you can potentially do hands-free and looking down the road. Would we use it or would consumers use it? Either one. We have consumers who are road warriors as well.
BRIAN NORTON: A lot of our folks are in wheelchairs and things like that. It may be easier to maybe mount potentially a tablet or a phone device or a computer itself, and so much easier to kind of mount those kinds of things and get those in and around the wheelchair environment than it is for a full-fledged laptop computer and other kinds of things. It sounds like it’s going to be really a useful thing where you can kind of sync it if you want to from your device back to your PC or your Mac and move between those two platforms. It also sounds like there’s going to be a lot of capabilities built-in with commands for accessing things like the photo options. So you can say, choose photo, and it might access the camera. Again, these are things we are waiting to see. I’ve heard rumors of it, and it sound like a robust system. I’m excited to see what it will do for folks.
BELVA SMITH: You can be notified by Nuance when it’s released, can go to nuance.com —
WADE WINGLER: Put your email address in there.
BELVA SMITH: Yeah.
WADE WINGLER: What I find here is it says you’re going to be able to edit Word documents. It’s going to sync across Dropbox and Evernote. It will sync with Dragon desktop, so you can be working on dictation on your computer and then do it on your phone. It will work on iOS and Android. Interesting.
MARK STEWART: To dovetail on to what Brian said and to step back to why I opened up with my thoughts about the historical perspective of it, for better or worse, whether that was the best way to open up. That is what came to mind for me, this form factor. We are all waiting, especially working with folks with disabilities who have lifting restrictions, etc., we are watching and waiting for and hoping for more and more to be able to be done and be done efficiently and effectively on devices that are smaller and lighter and things like that. This is one of the examples of what we’ve been waiting for.
BRIAN NORTON: I’m a heavy user of the dictation portion of my iPhone. I use that quite a bit. It’s really just a voice to text piece of software. Like what you mentioned earlier, Belva, when you want to edit something, you can’t edit it, you’ve got to use your finger, you got to touch and selecting all those kinds of things manually instead of by voice. This is going to be hopefully be able to allow you to take that one step further and then use it for an access tool instead of just a dictation tool. I’m anxious to see what it will do.
BELVA SMITH: And the fact that it’s going to sync is going to be helpful. And I want to take my phone with me to the meeting and do some work, but then continue it or finish it on my computer, then I should be able to sync it. I’m looking everywhere trying to find a price. I’m not finding a price anywhere.
BRIAN NORTON: Probably not until it gets released will they may be shoot out a price for that.
MARK STEWART: I think the last show was when we went pretty deep into talking about voice recognition accuracy in comparison to functionality. Now, this is one of the things that was holding us back, is look, we are going to go to a PC because we need that recognition accuracy. Well, not only are we getting all the different functionality on this device, a smartphone or an iPad, but now if the recognition accuracy is there as well, that’s just a wonderful thing.
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BRIAN NORTON: So take time, and if you have a question, go ahead and send it to us over our listener line. You can give us a call at 317-721-7124. Our next question is from an email from Claire. Claire emailed us. Her question is, would you have any recommendations for where to find accessible computer games for someone with low vision? She put very specifically with bold, bright graphics, and high contrast, but not for children.
BELVA SMITH: I’m going to jump in there and say playing games is not something that we typically get to do.
WADE WINGLER: We don’t have fun around here.
BELVA SMITH: Exactly. I often get questions from folks that are low vision or totally blind, where can I go find some games? I don’t have a really good answer for that, but I did find a website — and I know that this question specifically was saying that for children. I did find a website that has a lot of different websites that you can go to four different games, specifically for adults. If you go to www.vipconduit.com. I’m sure they’ll put that in the show notes. That is a link to a list of a bunch of different places that you can go and check for some games. That’s really all I got.
WADE WINGLER: I figured we would be all over this one. A good friend of mine is Mark Barley who is the friend of Able Gamers. He started a group in Washington, DC, and that’s all they do. They give awards for games that are made accessible. They do training and education for developers so that they can make their games more accessible. They even have a new foundation. In fact, I’ve been talking with Mark recently about getting him on my show, Assisted Technology Update, again, to talk about what they’re doing with that. I have always found Able Gamers, which is at AbleGamers.com, to be really a great resource to figure out what accessible, what’s happening in terms of development. And Mark is very out there with the fact that he is a gamer with a disability himself and really lives in that space and those I told about it. Able Gamers is where I would go for that.
BRIAN NORTON: We’ll plug that website into our show notes as well.
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BRIAN NORTON: If you have a question, don’t forget to go ahead and send it to us. You can email us at tech@eastersealstech.org. Take some time here and go ahead and give us those questions. That way we can add them to our future shows.
Next question today is, I have difficulty unlocking my Samsung Galaxy S6, which is a phone, manually using the touchscreen. Is there a way for me to unlock it using my voice? That is possible. There is something in the Galaxy phone called S-Voice. I’ve actually had experience with that with the consumer that I work with. It’s very difficult for her to get access physically and manually to the screen on the phone. We have set up S-Voice to go ahead and set up a wake up command for her. You can make that wake up command anything you want, any word that the person can say very easily to be up to go ahead and say that command. It continually listens for it. Once it hears it, it goes ahead and wakes it up. Then using S-Voice as well, you’re able to then voice activate and move around the phone, somewhat. It’s not a complete access tool. You can open and close programs, but to be able to use and navigate, there is still sometimes that’s necessary to be able to get the cursor in the right places. S-Voice is an app on that particular phone and a Galaxy phones that will allow you to set up a wake-up command, it was command, to be able to start your phone.
BELVA SMITH: Voice command will actually unlock your phone?
BRIAN NORTON: Yes.
BELVA SMITH: Okay. Because I was just going to also say that, unless you, for some security reasons, have to lock your phone with a passcode, you can always go into the settings and disable that —
BRIAN NORTON: Right.
BELVA SMITH: So that it doesn’t require a code to be entered.
BRIAN NORTON: It’s fairly easy to set up. You can go into the settings. You can speak it, say it four times, they would rephrase. It’ll give you an indication that it heard it those four times and then you are ready to go.
BELVA SMITH: That’s awesome.
WADE WINGLER: Apparently it also works with Bluetooth. It does more than just that, right? It’s sort of like Siri and any of the other voice input systems. I’m looking at a list of common commands that you can use with S-Voice. It includes stuff like call Charlie, mobile, to voice dial, or text to message, or search your contact, do a memo, set an appointment to your calendar, set up a task on your task list, or even play music and update your social media stuff. It looks to be a fairly robust interface.
BELVA SMITH: It sounds kind of like Siri for the iPhone.
BRIAN NORTON: It does. Same question to kind of jump back. When we talk about Dragon Anywhere, same issues that you would find with that particular software, with Siri, where although you can do dictation and you can operate the phone, certain things very well, editing text and navigating text on the screen can be a bit of a challenge. It’s very similar in nature with this particular software program, where you can’t do that stuff, but you can access phone features and add appointments and do all those other kinds of things much like Siri. You are right. It’s very Siri-like.
MARK STEWART: We didn’t say that exactly about Dragon anywhere that it’s really kind of designed as a productivity tool, where I think you’re describing Siri as more of a navigation tool within the device itself.
BELVA SMITH: Companion. Siri is more like a companion. She’s going to help you do things. Dragon Anywhere is productivity.
BRIAN NORTON: Right.
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BRIAN NORTON: So our next question is, I have a client with a very thick Spanish accent. Dragon is probably going to be her best option for typing needs. Any suggestions on voice recognition use or set up of Dragon to accommodate for that thick accent? I’ll throw that out.
MARK STEWART: Yes. When you are initially training the user profile, select Spanish-accented English.
BRIAN NORTON: Okay.
MARK STEWART: There is a category right along those lines. The last two versions of Dragon have brought in accents, maybe it goes back three, where they had some minimal variations, but the last couple of versions they have a number of different types of accents. That helps significantly. It’s already programmed in to be listening for that when it’s analyzing the person’s voice with their algorithms.
WADE WINGLER: And is that one of those answers where read to it, read to it, also solves additional problems?
MARK STEWART: Yes. I did just check there. Word for word, what you would look for under accents, you would choose Spanish-accented English. Yes, Wade, this question did say that the client has a very thick Spanish accent, so it probably will require both. The interesting thing is that, in a previous version, or if you selected just English, presumably they are speaking in this but with a Spanish accent. If they just picked English and you did the training part, you may never get there. Sometimes if you start off — there is too much of a mismatch. I’ve seen the training even go down the wrong road. It just doesn’t get the idea of where the voice is, what the voice is trying to do. If you set the foundation with the Spanish accent, it’s very likely going to be working really hard to get it right and eventually will get it.
BRIAN NORTON: I’ve been surprised over the years with folks that I worked with who have difficulty with speech, whether making hard consonant sounds like “ch” which is something that critical in getting access to Dragon. Choose one, choose two, choose three, that’s a real common command in Dragon. We’ve been able to work with folks over several training sessions to be able to help Dragon get comfortable with how they actually say those words and how they make the sounds. It’s quite fascinating how adaptable it can be over time as long as you put the time in. It’s going to help. It’s going to get there.
MARK STEWART: I guess maybe I’ll take the opportunity to speak. What does training mean? I might be missing something. I’m doing this from the hip. Let me try three different categories. The first category is yes, it will legitimately continue to learn your voice over time, but think about it. It doesn’t know what you’re saying. It’s guessing. It’s that kind of a learning process. It’s running algorithms off of what it thinks you might be saying. If you’re close enough, it will continue to learn your voice and move forward in a positive way and get more and more accurate. Then there also are a number of readings within Dragon where it knows what each word is, and you can go through and read those stories. That’s a direct match. One of the things we always do is, even for example there’s a bit of a reading-based disability, we work with the person so that they are saying the words quite accurately, because Dragon knows what the words are custom what a wonderful opportunity to really make a good match. This is the sound that they make for this word, and yes, that’s what they are trying to say, so learn from this.
BRIAN NORTON: A controlled environment.
MARK STEWART: Thank you. Very good. The third one is really kind of word by word or phrase by phrase. You can do a lot with that too, but you can’t do the whole dictionary. Sometimes, frankly, you can do a lot. It depends on what the person really needs it for. It would require a lot of training. Sometimes really working through a number of phrases or particular words that it seems to be having difficulty with, now combined with the other methods, can help it get back on track of really understanding the nature of the person’s voice so that it gets a good analytical lock on it. Brian, I’ve never forgotten your story about the clients. I think you’ll think of it. The background noise? It was the client themselves. They had a distinct–
BRIAN NORTON: At one point, I had a client who, for whatever reason, every time she would say something, she would end it with — she would have this sound at the end of every word she would say. It would be hello, and there would be a smacking of the lips. I actually recommend Dragon for this person. I went out. This was several years back when the recognition accuracy with Dragon wasn’t that great as it is today. With the smacking of the lips, every time she would say something, it would put “it” or “to” or some word at the end of everything she said. It was really hard and cumbersome that first visit with us. I was a little bit coming back as an evaluator thinking, well, maybe this isn’t the best product for this particular client. All of a sudden, I said let’s keep training, let’s keep working with this, I’ll just come back in a week and try some more training. I think it’ll work for you. I came back in a week, and Dragon had learned, because she kept reading those training in that controlled environment where Dragon has a very specific word that I wanted to say, and won’t move on until you say that very specific word, it dropped all of the extra words that it would put in because she would smack her lips every time she would do something. Just a great sample of how Dragon does adapt over time and can learn as you go in that controlled environment, because it completely disregarded that from then on.
MARK STEWART: That’s a great story.
BELVA SMITH: I had a sort of similar situation. Is it okay for sure it?
BRIAN NORTON: Sure.
BELVA SMITH: This is many years ago, probably seven or eight years ago. Dragon was not as good as it is now. I drove to East Chicago to meet with a consumer who said Dragon never listens to me, it always just put on the screen whatever it wants to. I say one thing, it puts another thing. I sat with her for probably a good 40 minutes before I realized what the problem was. She was right. She would say “Hello, my name is Susie. Today is a sunny day.” It would get the hello, my name is Susie, today is in a day, but it would go on just putting random words on the screen. The problem was her smoke detector.
WADE WINGLER: What?
BELVA SMITH: Yes. Her smoke detector. It needed new batteries. Every two or three minutes, it would go off and Dragon was doing the best it could to distinguish–
WADE WINGLER: To speak smoke detector.
BELVA SMITH: To figure out what the sound was. I literally got up and took the batteries out of the smoke detector. Dragon worked beautifully. We resolved that problem with batteries for the smoke detector.
BRIAN NORTON: I will also say, just to throw it out there, there is a Spanish version of Dragon. If they’ve got a heavy accent, they might be able to use the Spanish version. Although they are trying to do dictation in English, they would have to do that.
MARK STEWART: Yeah, but those are ideas. Try this on for size. I want to be careful about what I’m saying here, because it’s an evaluation type thing. It’s where the clinician needs to make this decision along with the client. I understand how you may not touch this topic at all in certain situations. But with other situations, it would be totally appropriate to do this. Ask the client to develop a little bit of a Dragon voice. If you think that it’s an appropriate situation, you would actually work on the side finding that degree to which they are comfortable modifying their voice towards an English accent a little bit more. It has nothing to do with cultural topics or anything. It has to do with the fact that the computers are only so smart. Find a voice where they can actually help Dragon. Again, you may not want to touch that, or it may be totally fine to do that. It’s not just an accent thing. When I use Dragon, I have to put on a Dragon voice. Frankly, a lot of the listeners here probably would appreciate it if I used a little bit more of my clear and crisp, not trailing off at the end Dragon voice when I speak and communicate, because Dragon likes that a lot better. But it’s not as casual. There’s no inflection. There’s no humor and things like that because Dragon doesn’t like those things. But it helps with anybody to kind of clean up their voice, hit their consonants, and make it easy on Dragon. I think that goes for accent as well. What you think?
WADE WINGLER: Yeah. I remember doing Dragon training years ago back in the day when actually worked and just didn’t sit around. I had folks where I would say, think about talking like a newscaster and I know that’s in some of the Dragon training materials as well. Just to get the even tone and that more well-spaced-out articulation. Yeah, I’ve done that. I think that is certainly applicable when somebody has an accent regardless of what kind of accident is.
MARK STEWART: Look, we obviously think Dragon is a product that helps folks a lot. Nuance has a lot of great products out there. I disagree with the verbiage that may be floating out there a little bit, like NaturallySpeaking, just start talking to it and it’ll learn you over time. No, it’s not developed to that yet. You need to help it out from the start.
BELVA SMITH: Right.
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BRIAN NORTON: If you haven’t done so already, if you have a question that you thought of as you’ve been listening to the show, send us your questions. Just give us a call at 317-721-7124. That’s our listener line. We look forward to hearing those and answering those on future shows.
Our next question for today is, what do you know about navigational devices for the visually impaired? Products, costs, pros and cons of those different devices?
BELVA SMITH: Nothing.
BRIAN NORTON: I’m kind of looking over there at Belva, our team lead for our vision team.
BELVA SMITH: I’ve had experience with both the devices and the apps. I’ve got to say, I’m a fan of the apps versus the devices. But one of the more popular once is the Trecker Breeze. It’s been around for several years now. The cost on it is $800. They have done lots of improvements to it from when it very first came out. The design has pretty much stayed the same. What it will do has greatly improved. I remember several years ago walking downtown with one and being very impressed at the auditory information that I was getting about the stuff around me, like knowing that there was a stop light up ahead in a curb up ahead. Trecker Breeze is still around and still very popular. One that I have not used, but I have worked with people that have used it, is Kapten Mobility. It’s like $770, so right about the Trecker Breeze. What it’ll do is pretty much the same thing. You’re going to have to spend some time before you go out with your device putting in your favorite places that you want to go to. And as you’re going along, I don’t even know, I haven’t used a Trecker Breeze in a while. I remember several years ago you would do things like drop breadcrumbs to leave tracks as you are walking. I remember walking around a college campus with a young man, and we were dropping our breadcrumbs as we were going so we could get from his room to the different places he needed.
BRIAN NORTON: Not actual breadcrumbs?
BELVA SMITH: No.
WADE WINGLER: Digital crumbs.
BELVA SMITH: Digital crumbs, yeah.
BRIAN NORTON: Interesting.
BELVA SMITH: But yeah, that way you can, say you need to get to the coffee shop, and it’ll follow your crumbs and get you there and get you back home safely.
MARK STEWART: What if the digital ducks eat the digital crumbs?
BELVA SMITH: You are digitally in trouble.
BRIAN NORTON: I think for listeners, it’s Kapten instead of captain.
BELVA SMITH: Have used that one?
BRIAN NORTON: I’ve seen it. I’ve had in my hand. Someone came to a group of low vision users and was kind of demonstrating it and stuff like that. I don’t know much about it. I didn’t get to see it in action. I’ve heard that a couple of folks that have had some experience with it had some issues with the. Again, I want to say that’s fairly new compared to the Trecker which has been around for a long time. I think a lot of those devices, where they were five, six years ago was really kind of the start of the GPS, and they were what they could do was dictated about what kind of map they had access to. Now with mapping becoming like it is, it’s so much better. They get better information. I think what I’ve had most of my experience with is that Trecker.
BELVA SMITH: I believe you have to pay an actionable cost for additional maps. I’m not sure if that’s still true, but I know at one time it was. Some of the apps for the devices that I have an expense with and have clients that are using, Adrian.
WADE WINGLER: Ariadne?
BELVA SMITH: I knew I wouldn’t say it right. Most people will call it Adrian. You go ahead and say it right again?
WADE WINGLER: Ariadne.
BELVA SMITH: Okay. That one is $4.99 and very popular.
WADE WINGLER: But does it do point to point? Because as I’ve downloaded it and played with it, and it’s been a while. In all fairness, I haven’t looked at it in a while. But I’m not sure that it does point to point navigation. I think it tells you where you are. I think it tells you what’s nearby, but if you say give you walking directions from here to the drugstore, I don’t know that it does that does it?
BELVA SMITH: Yeah, you can. With the GPS, you can add your favorite places. See you can say how do I get to the coffee shop or how do I get to grandma’s house from here.
WADE WINGLER: I know it does points of interest, but I didn’t think it would say turn right here to get there.
BELVA SMITH: It does do a great job with exploration. You can hear a lot about the things that are around you, which is one of the things that folks often want to do. As they are going from home to work, they want to know what am I passing along the way in case I need to stop and explore a little more. Blind Square is another very popular one. I haven’t used that one, but I hear folks talking about it all the time. I believe Blind Square is free. iMove is another tracking app. It allows you to create recordings as you are going, so if you like a location and you want to create a note that you want to hear when you come back to that location, it will automatically do that. So if you say from work at this point, I pass the bank that I need to cash my check at, when you get to the point, your audio note will pop up and remind you the bank is in the area. Or also use it to keep track of your favorite restaurants and stuff like that. I believe iMove is also free.
WADE WINGLER: Belva, I checked. As of our recording right now end of September, Blind Square is $30. I know it ran free for a little while, but is $30.
BELVA SMITH: Okay. That may change how people feel about it.
BRIAN NORTON: Is it a subscription-based app? I know the one I’ve had some experience with, and I have a friend who uses it, the Seeing Eye GPS. Have you heard of that one?
BELVA SMITH: That one is $99, I think.
BRIAN NORTON: It’s $69.99 for a one-year substitution, so you have 2 actually subscribe to that one, but it does all the things like routes and points of interest and other kind of stuff your
BELVA SMITH: Can’t you paid $99 for Seeing Eye—
BRIAN NORTON: $9.99 for a 30 day subdivision, and then it’s $69 and an intense for a one-year subscription.
BELVA SMITH: Okay. I had a consumer who was very interested in trying that, but we never got to the point. Talk about the pros and cons a little bit. One of the cons to using your phone as your GPS is battery life. One of the pros to having a dedicated device for your GPS is that you’re not going to get stranded somewhere and not be able to make an emergency phone call if you need to. If you are out to school or work and you’ve got a long day, eight, nine hours or something, probably it would be best to have a dedicated device for your GPS rather than to rely on your phone. I always want to point that out, because we like to carry as few devices as he possibly can, and I obviously we want to do things as cheaply as we can, but sometimes we depend on our phones to do so much for us. I know my phone does not get through the day. I’m using it — well, yeah, I am, because I use MapQuest. I want to throw MapQuest and there too. MapQuest does a great job. Everyone laughs at me for still using it.
BRIAN NORTON: MapQuest?
BELVA SMITH: I know. I didn’t realize it was so outdated.
BRIAN NORTON: Wait, you’re not joking?
BELVA SMITH: No.
BRIAN NORTON: I use Apple maps and Google maps. That’s all I use.
BELVA SMITH: MapQuest does a great job giving auditory information. It’s easy with voiceover to type in where it is I want to go and hit start and it’ll get me turn by turn information. It doesn’t give me information about what’s around me, so maybe a combination of that and one of the other apps.
BRIAN NORTON: In fact, even beyond MapQuest, I use the Waze app.
MARK STEWART: Waze is really coming on.
BRIAN NORTON: It’s a great GPS.
BELVA SMITH: Is it great with voiceover?
WADE WINGLER: I don’t think so.
BRIAN NORTON: I don’t think so.
BELVA SMITH: See, I’m going back with —
BRIAN NORTON: A lot of context with my answer there.
BELVA SMITH: Maybe that’s why I’m still using Google maps, because Google maps is good with voiceover.
BRIAN NORTON: The benefit of Waze is it’s got a social component to it as well. If there is road construction or a hazard on the road, it actually notifies you by voice that there’s a car on the shoulder up ahead.
BELVA SMITH: I would say for anybody who is really thinking about needing a GPS system that’s visually impaired, think about how you’re going to be using it. Does it make sense for you to have a dedicated device at an $800 price tag, or would having it on your phone. Because most of those, I don’t think, are just iOS, the ones we were talking about. I think they work on Android as well. Would it make sense to have it on your phone for a lesser cost but at the risk of maybe needing to charge your phone throughout the day? Would you have the ability to do that? Mark is dying over here.
MARK STEWART: Wade, not long after I started, you talked me up , schooled me, talked about satellites and the nature of satellites and triangulation and how that works and some of the inherent challenges there and how it is or is not coming along. Of course, that’s how these GPS devices work, and of course we want accuracy. I thought that was really good point.
WADE WINGLER: It’s getting better. Basically the GPS satellite are putting down a that these devices can respond to. Based on triangulation, at least three different patterns of where it finds itself on the grid, that’s where it tells you it is. That’s why they don’t work well when there’s a ton of tall buildings around, because those signals get bounced around before they get all the way down to the ground. That’s also why they don’t work inside, because the satellite signals don’t go through the roof or the canopies that you might be under. That’s a limitation. They are getting better, smarter about triangulating. And then they are also being paired up with some Beacon systems where, I think in Boston like the subway tunnels, they are putting in some beacons that are GPS responsive but you can use another app to know where you are, kind of do some wayfinding. It’s so funny because I remember years ago at some AT trade shows where people were walking around with backpacks on, and in the backpack was a laptop computer with a little rubber ducky antenna sitting on the back of their backpack. In their hands was a joystick, and they were using one of the original Arkenstone products, I can think of the name of it off the top of my head. They were doing some navigation. One of the first questions they had, this probably 15 years ago, is yeah, but will it work inside. They didn’t work inside because of that reliance on satellite technology. It’s coming along. It’s in your pocket. It’s less expensive, but is still limited.
MARK STEWART: I’m thinking some of the apps, maybe also tie into cellular towers, or is it all satellite?
BELVA SMITH: That’s what I was about to say. That’s a good point. It also would be very beneficial to have an app on your phone, even if you do have a dedicated device, because those devices will, like in downtown Chicago, I totally lost my navigation, but I think it still would’ve worked fine on my phone. My GPS usually doesn’t lose its connection.
WADE WINGLER: They can triangulate with cellular towers and figure some of that out. That’s how they did it before GPS worked well on your phone. They also can use things like Wi-Fi signals. After a while, you get downtown, there’s a Panera, a Starbucks, a Macy’s, there’s all these places that have Wi-Fi signals that are only so strong. I think in more dense urban areas, they are starting to build a database that says if the Starbucks signal is this strong and the Panera signal is this strong, and you can barely see the Macy’s Wi-Fi signal, that means you’re standing approximately this area. I’m starting to see more of that technology coming around as well.
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WADE WINGLER: And now it’s time for the wildcard question.
BRIAN NORTON: So don’t forget to send us your questions. You can email those to us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Our next question is the wildcard question of the week. This is where I turn it over to Wade and he gets to ask is an off-the-wall question that we haven’t had time to look at before. We met at wild pic is not necessarily off-the-wall. I think is a little bit of an opinion don’t end there. Off-the-wall?
BRIAN NORTON: Off-the-wall.
WADE WINGLER: I want to set this up just a little bit. The people in the sermon on this panel mostly due to assistive technology evaluations and trainings and installs for people who are going to work, for people who are either college students, sometimes high school, but mostly college students or they are employed, either trying to retain their job or trying to go back to work or even go to work for the first time. The question for you guys is, how do you deal with recommending quote/unquote entertainment technology when it has a legitimate assistive technology application? For example, are there times when an Apple TV is assistive technology? Are there times when a big-screen TV that is really good for watching movies or playing video games is assistive technology? Is there a time when a videogame console is assistive technology? How do you deal with that? A follow-up that I can repeat if you want me to. Some kind of question related to smartphones. How do you deal with the fact that sometimes an iPhone or an android phone is assistive technology, but a lot of our funding sources don’t want to pay for an ongoing cost, a monthly subscription? They might be interested in paying for a phone up front, but they don’t want to pay the $100 per month or whatever it takes to keep it going. In the past, there’s been all this traditional assistive technology stuff, but the waters are getting muddier about what’s assistive technology and what’s not. How do you guys do with that? First, when something’s really an entertainment thing, but it’s AT, how do you justify that? And how do you deal with the ongoing cost?
BRIAN NORTON: I think absolutely we recommend stuff like that all the time. But I think we focus in on the work aspects of it. What are they really using it for? You talk about the Apple TV or maybe the phone and those kinds of things, obviously there’s a whole lot of entertainment value to those particular items, but we’ve been hired for a very specific purpose of looking at a lot of time vocational outcome for folks, and you can certainly use those types of devices for vocational needs. We focus in on the vocational need instead of, oh, and by the way you can do these 100 different things with it elsewhere. What we are you really trying to address is that vocational need. As the most cost-effective, it meets the need, so we make the recommendation for that item.
BELVA SMITH: I want to just clarify, vocational rehab will not, NOT, pay for ongoing charges. One of the first questions that we have to ask our clients or consumers is, though an iPhone or a smartphone with particular apps could be very beneficial to help you get to work and get access to or print materials and read barcodes and read colors or see colors and all sorts of things, there’s going to be a monthly cost involved with that. Is this something that you are willing to and can afford to do?
WADE WINGLER: I’m going to put a qualifier there. In 2015, in Indiana, it’s a capital NOT, they won’t pay for it. There may be some variation. When you tell people that, Belva, what do they say? What is the response?
BELVA SMITH: They are usually pretty honest about whether or not they can afford it. I also have to remind them, I just had the situation with a college lady a couple of months back. Not only did she need to be concerned with the monthly cost of having the smartphone that she so badly wanted and really would benefit from having, she has bad credit. She was going to be stuck with a large deposit to be able to get that phone turned on. Now, there are ways around those kinds of things now. I understand that there are places that are offering month by month for the iPhone, which is alleviating the need to have to pay those huge deposits that some of the places I went in. But I think, I also want to say, with the iPhones and iPads, they really have become so important to our consumers, whether they are students were doing a job, especially for the folks that are visually impaired, because there is so much they can do with those devices. I have never sat with a consumer and said, oh, but look, we can also do iTunes and we can do YouTube and we can do this and we can do that. I stay focused on what they are going to be able to do with the device that’s going to help them be productive. Now, if they come back to me during the training time and say, hey, I heard that I can do this with my iPad and I heard that I can do that. I’ll let them know, well, yeah, you certainly can. However, you need to keep in mind that if you’re watching YouTube videos and you are doing this and that, you are also using a battery, so you may need to get access to a print material and not be able to because you used your battery up doing something else. That’s pretty much how I handle it.
WADE WINGLER: I totally heard your mom voice in there.
BELVA SMITH: Did you?
WADE WINGLER: If you use your battery looking at cartoons, you’re not going to be able to do your homework.
BELVA SMITH: Exactly.
MARK STEWART: Our referral source, if it’s vocational rehabilitation, will write up an individualized plan for employment with the consumer. That’s between those two parties and follow certain criteria with regards to being reasonable and what have you. Then they call us and with regards to significant challenges or needs that are going to hamper that consumer from being able to successfully pursue that plan that would otherwise be reasonable. They call on us to look for solutions to make it reasonable and a viable again. They respect us as the technical expert with regard to assistive technology, so we go meet with the consumer, and if we find something that we think and solve the problem, not with regards to choices of technology options, we need to look for the least expensive reasonable alternative to actually successfully solved that problem. We need to go with that. If it falls into one of these categories we were talking about, Wade, as the technical expert, not only in assistive technology but with regards to the process, and I have a good relationship with that VR counselor, I’m going to try to put myself in their shoes a little bit. I’m going to try to head off problems or questions on their part at the pass. In my right up with the justification, I’m going to respectively mentioned some of those things. It’s understood that it might be commonly considered, this device might be commonly considered for this purpose, but I realize that, and I’m not using it for the purpose. I’m targeting it to use for this other purpose that is directly in line with your goals that you are establishing with the consumer. And then in the justification, just spell things out a little bit more, even after making the distinction, that, yes, I’m aware of this potential issue. I’m using it for the right reasons. I think it’s on me a little bit more to spell out or spoonfeed just why that device is going to help so much versus some other device.
BELVA SMITH: Apple TV is a good example of that, Mark. The first recommendation that I made for an Apple TV as a way for an individual who was low vision to project the information from his phone and his iPad onto the larger screen, I really had a difficult time convincing VR that we weren’t buying an Apple TV because it was an Apple TV. But we did with the right justification and some conversation, we did get it. I’ve recommended the Apple TV a couple times just for that reason, because it is the most cost-effective way that you can do this with some of the CCTV’s that are out there, but they are much more defensive than buying a $200 TV and a $100 Apple TV.
BRIAN NORTON: I’ve actually done it with a Nintendo DS system before to be able to chat back and forth with someone who’s hard of hearing. That was back before texting was really off the ground and stuff like that. You can use a little feature of a Nintendo DS to actually talk back in forth to another DS, which each of us could have in our hands and we could carry on a conversation just texting back and forth. Completely an entertainment device, but very practical.
WADE WINGLER: With the Nintendo’s, you can type and also draw, right? You can scribble back and forth on those devices.
BRIAN NORTON: Very cool.
MARK STEWART: Your examples where gaming devices used for other purposes, right? But we actually tried to use mainstream tools all the time, all kinds of things, headsets, just everything.
BELVA SMITH: Nothing excites us more when it’s a mainstream device that we can take and use it as an assistive technology device.
WADE WINGLER: Why?
BELVA SMITH: Because it’s easy. It’s out-of-the-box. We don’t have to worry about what we are going to add to it to make it do what we need to get it to do.
MARK STEWART: And because of philosophical reasons. Normalization and independence. We are all the same.
WADE WINGLER: And capitalistic reasons. It’s usually cheaper and it’s easy to get the thing fixed when they are fixing thousands of them as opposed to dozens of them.
BELVA SMITH: Absolutely.
WADE WINGLER: And manufacturing. If they are doing it in mass quantities, they’re going to be less expensive.
BRIAN NORTON: Thanks, everyone. That’s the show for today. Again, here’s how to find our show. You can search as assisted larger questions on iTunes. Look for us on stitcher or visit us at ATFAQshow.com. Also, please do send us your questions. You can call our listener line at 317-721-7124. You can send us a tweet at hashtag #ATFAQ, or email us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. We want your questions. In fact, without your questions, we really don’t have a show, so be part of our show. Have a great day.
MARK STEWART: See you, folks.
BELVA SMITH: Thanks, guys.
WADE WINGLER: See you later.
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.