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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Zoomtext Fusion with Jeremy Curry | www.AISquared.com
Australian AT Conference 2016 – Arata http://buff.ly/1NkZ3Yo
AppleVis Unlimited: What’s New in Accessible Apps for November 2015 | AppleVis http://buff.ly/1PYtBpx
App: Grey Matters www.BridgingApps.org
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JEREMY CURRY: Hi, this is Jeremy Curry, Director of Product Management for AI Squared, and this is your Assistance Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Welcome to episode number 237 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on December 11 of 2015. We hope you enjoyed our two weeks of special holiday shopping episodes. Today we have a fascinating interview with our friend Jeremy Curry who’s going to talk about ZoomText Fusion, the latest stuff coming out of AI Squared. We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project, or call our listener line at 317-721-7124.
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Wendy Stevens is the services manager of Life Tech in Queensland Australia. She is a friend of the show and recently she sent an email that tickled me. It said, “Fancy a trip to the sunny Gold Coast of Australia next year?” Of course I want to go to the Gold Coast of Australia. It turns out Wendy and some of her colleagues are organizing an AT conference in Queensland Australia. It’s going to be held on the 27th through 29th July in 2016, and they are taking an interesting to the conference. They have opportunities for oral presentations, which are 17 minute papers with three-minute questions and answer, so a 20 minute session; poster sessions, 90 minute interactive workshops; and then even AT spotlight where you can take about 10 minutes to informally demonstrate and discuss AT products, service issues, and solutions with an audience. Interesting stuff. They have a call for abstracts or papers right now that’s open. It runs through 29th of January, and then presenters will be notified in March whether or not they are selected. I’m pretty fascinated with all the details about how this conference is coming together and the way they are organizing it. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to the website where you can learn more about how to submit a proposal to present in Australia or learn about how to attend the conference in July of 2016. Check our show notes.
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For several years now, we have had a lot of interaction with folks over at AppleVis. AppleVis are really good at understanding what works well when it comes to Apple products and screen readers and accessibility and those kinds of things. They are a group of volunteers who spend a lot of time reviewing different apps and talking about the accessibility of them. I was kind of struck where a couple of weeks ago they had a newsletter come out that was talking about a bunch of games and frankly stuff that I think might be fun around the holidays. Here in the US, we are coming off Thanksgiving and moving into the Christmas holiday. For me at least, and many people I know, that means a better time at home and sometimes a little bit of downtime. Those might be time you’re looking for something like entertainment or education or information. I’m just going to run down some of the things I found in their newsletter that I thought was interesting.
They first talk about a group of blindfold games from an organization called Kid Friendly Software. These are accessible audio games that work well with voiceover or that have built-in speech. There is an air hockey, so plan for their hockey, blindfold breakout, blindfold craps, and blindfold vee-ball. Those are all titles that were released not too long ago in November. On the AppleVis website, there is a discussion in the AppleVis forum where folks are talking about those games. Those are interesting.
If you’re interested in puzzle kinds of apps, they talk about one called Cube Alone and list it as a nice traditional puzzle at the simple and totally accessible with voiceover. It includes sounds and hints for solving and is about one dollar in the US app store.
If you’re interested in more adventure style games, they talk about a couple here that I think are pretty fascinating. One is called Madness’ Days, it’s a dollar app in the US app store. I’m going to read a little bit here. It says ,”Prepare yourself to relive Jennifer Dudley’s experience as she wakes up in a madhouse and have to run to hide not from the usual fairytale monsters but from real life kind of threats.” It’s a horror game and they say it has 3-D sounds and some amazing graphics. It’s listed on the AppleVis website where they talk specifically about the accessibility of that game.
Another one is called Mind Sight which is a Pregame and is an interactive audio adventure that uses binaural recording techniques and tells an immersive superhero story purely by sound. It’s controlled by swiping up and down and left and right and sort of ends up being like one of those old choose-your-own-adventure novels.
Another one that I think sounds interesting is a free app called My Baby Sim. I’ve always liked the [simulation] games as they’ve come out. This one makes you a parent. It allows you to take care of a baby to see how good you are as a parent. According to AppleVis, it even includes a community where you can get advice from baby care experts and other community members.
The last one I’ll talk about is when I’ve been using myself a lot recently called NPR One. If you are somebody who likes NPR shows it’s a pretty cool app because you simply turn it on, it figures out where you are so it syncs to your local public radio station, and then it starts playing stories that you might like. It always starts with the news, the most recent news that’s happening on NPR, and then you like things or you fast-forward things and it’s kind of like Pandora or those other music customization services in that it figures out what kind of news you are interested in. It even allows you to favorite show that you always want to hear. But after a while, it kind of figures out what news stories you are interested in from all the NPR shows and will constantly play NPR in a way that you like it. It’s honestly something that’s become part of my day every day. I listen to it when I’m getting ready for work and I’ve really enjoyed that app. Totally accessible. In fact, I haven’t turned voiceover on with it. The controls are so intuitive and so simple that I’m going to say it’s pretty accessible whether or not you’re using voiceover. Certainly you can try that. That’s another one they are talking about over at AppleVis.
Lots of good stuff that I think you might take advantage of if you have some downtime during the holiday. To help you find the stuff, I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to the AppleVis website and you can check out this newsletter that has all these cool games and information and apps.
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Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an App Worth Listening.
AMY BARRY: This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is an App Worth Mentioning. Today’s app is called Grey Matters. The Grey Matters app does a phenomenal job of enhancing the lives of older adults with dementia, individuals recovering from a traumatic injury or stroke, and even older adults without dementia. We love how it evokes positive memories from one’s past, improving their mood and making them smile. Through an interactive life story book, paired with music and games, the app helps patients and families preserve yesterday’s memories as well as share today’s joyful moment. With a strong belief that people with dementia are “still here”, Grey Matters taps into the abilities that remain to keep individuals engaged and connected.
The developer, Jenny Rosbrook, was inspired by time spent with her late grandmother Frieda who suffered from advanced vascular dementia. Grey Matters is built on the activities that worked best to draw out her long-term memory and spirit and have worked for many others as well. The activities include hearing stories from one’s life, looking through old family photos, and listening to music from one’s youth. Reminiscent therapy and life story work are powerful tools used in dementia care that can help to improve quality of life for both memory impaired individuals and their caregivers.
Simple and intuitive, even inexperienced mobile device users are able to navigate the app. A caregiver is able to set up the app for the user in a few minutes by personalizing it with a photo, choosing a stage of memory loss (early, moderate, advanced, or very advanced), and then selecting subjects that may be of interest to the user (entertainers, films, political figures, sports, pop culture, and even babies). BridgingApps highly recommends Grey Matters. The Grey Matters app is free at the iTunes Store. It’s compatible with the iPad. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
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WADE WINGLER: Jeremy Curry is a friend of the show and has been on a lot of our shows for a lot of different things. He’s a good and dear friend of mine and has been really busy lately blowing up my social media feed and everybody’s with stuff about a new thing called the ZoomText Fusion. We are excited to have him on the show to get the word from the horse’s mouth. Jimmy Carter you still there?
JEREMY CURRY: Yeah, how’s it going? It is great to be here again, my friend.
WADE WINGLER: We are doing really well. It’s great to have you back in the show. I think you and I need to get together face-to-face sometime. I think we need to find a restaurant to go patronize or something.
JEREMY CURRY: You can say that again. There’s a Giordano’s here in Indianapolis, just saying.
WADE WINGLER: That’s true. I hear the waiting lines are three hours now. It would give us a lot of time to catch up in line.
Jeremy, we are here to talk about the ZoomText Fusion. It’s been hitting my social media feeds. I know you’ve been working on it and it’s been given you really busy. I want to talk about ZoomText Fusion. But for folks who might not know you — I just forget that not everybody may know you — tell people a couple of seconds about who you are and what you do for AI Squared.
JEREMY CURRY: For AI Squared, I basically deal with product management. When there are new products like ZoomText Fusion, I kind of want those things through from the design product to the market, so the whole entire gamut, A to Z.
WADE WINGLER: You’ve been in the industry of assistive technology for a long time and have a lot of experience. I can’t imagine a better guy to do that. So tell me a little bit about ZoomText Fusion. Who is it for and what does it do?
JEREMY CURRY: ZoomText Fusion is basically – I call it ZoomText on steroids because it does so much stuff. Everything that ZoomText Magnifier Reader has, which is the world’s number one screen magnifier, plus complete and full screen reading. We made sure that we had everything that we’ve already had plus complete screen reading. It’s designed specifically for people who have progressive eye conditions like macular degeneration where their sight starts out well and they lose it over time. But it’s also effective for anybody that is on the low vision to know vision spectrum. So if you are somebody who’s low vision and just needs magnification and speech sometimes, it’s a great product. You can use it for that. If you’re somebody who is on the no vision side, the blind side, it certainly is usable there. And then the people who are in between, it’s a great product because you can define how much speech you want. Do you want a lot of speech, a little speech? As you need more speech, it can progress with you. It basically grows with you so that you will always be able to use your computer anywhere from that low vision to no vision spectrum, wherever you fall.
WADE WINGLER: I think good assistive technology products have always had some adjustability in flex ability. That’s because, quite frankly, people who are vision needs or whatever have a varying needs. We are all people with different needs and that accessibility is important.
JEREMY CURRY: Absolutely.
WADE WINGLER: Is it fair to say that this is a ZoomText plus Window Eyes? Or is it more than that?
JEREMY CURRY: It’s actually a lot more than that. We spent about the past year and a half plus that researching, going out in the market, determining what people wanted out of our product like this. It’s more than just ZoomText and Window Eyes.
For example, people wanted an all-in-one product that had complete speech and complete magnification, and big on the list were tracking to make sure whatever I am saying I am also hearing and vice versa, as well as hotkeys that didn’t conflict with certain things. I didn’t have to learn multiple sets of hotkeys and things of that nature. There’s a lot more to it. But those were big on the list of needs from customers. This is more than just saying we took two product and put them together. It’s not that. It’s a whole new level.
What we learned was that not only do people once those things, but people are very comfortable with the ZoomText user interface and they really like ZoomText as a product. If you are a ZoomText customer, which there are hundreds of thousands of them out there, this looks, feels identical to what ZoomText already had, so we wanted to make sure that their comfort level is there so that as people start to lose her site, we don’t want them to have to shift to something completely different. We made it so that it’s very easy to use and easy to learn. On top of all of the great technology that we already have, we added a lot more to it and really refine things to make this an all-in-one product that’s easy to use and easy to learn.
WADE WINGLER: I’ve done a little research in terms of ZoomText Fusion. What I haven’t done is look to see what the current lineup looks like. Is it still ZoomText and the ZoomText with speech, ZoomText Mac, Window Eyes? What does the product lineup look like? Has it changed?
JEREMY CURRY: This is in addition to all the other products. We’ve got ZoomText Magnifier which is ZoomText Magnifier without any speech; ZoomText Mag Reader which is some speech if you need it every so often, but it’s not full speech as we would think of full screen reading. And then we got ZoomText Fusion which is a combination of the best of all the technologies that AI Squared has. We still have Window Eyes out there for people as well. It’s definitely available through the free offer through Microsoft office. There is still ZoomText for Mac. This is basically a new product in addition to everything we’ve already had that adds new features that not only have complete screen reading but things that people have been asking for for a long time. As an example of one of those things, in ZoomText magnifier reader, sometimes things aren’t pronounced the way you would want them to be pronounced. In ZoomText Fusion, you can change the pronunciation of any word. If you have a word like Porsche and you wanted it to be pronounced “Por-shuh”, you have the ability to change that. That’s just one of the many things that we’ve added inside of ZoomText Fusion.
WADE WINGLER: What is the answer? Is it Porsche or “Por-shuh”?
JEREMY CURRY: I don’t know.
WADE WINGLER: I don’t either.
JEREMY CURRY: I think it’s Corvette.
WADE WINGLER: There you go. That’s funny. Why do we need Fusion as opposed to separate products? I think we hit on that a little bit but clarify that for me. Why this particular thing to fill in a niche?
JEREMY CURRY: There tends to be this large segment of people – as we were looking through our product line, we noticed that there was a percentage of people that, as they started to lose their vision, they had to go to just a screen reader. But they still wanted to hold onto their vision as long as possible and use magnification. We thought why should they have to give up what they know and love? Or if you are somebody who is just starting to lose your sight, do you want to not be able to see anything and have to transfer to just speech, just a product like Window Eyes. Well, there’s this whole segment that needs a product like this that needs full magnification plus full speech.
But we also know that as people progress and they start to have to learn how to use a screen reader, we noted that it was really difficult for people to do that because it’s something that they’ve never done before. They have to use the computer differently. We wanted to make sure that we made this transition very simple and very easy for them. So we added in tools, for example, for something called tutor mode, where if I am on any part of an application, whether I’m in the ribbon of Microsoft Word or on the control on the desktop, I just was sitting there for a few seconds and I don’t know what to do because I’m new at this and I have no idea. If nothing happens, you’re going to get a spoken message that says you are on this item, press your arrow keys and move to the next one. If you’re on the ribbon, press the tab key to move inside of the ribbon. It’s giving you these hints to be able to make it easy to use and easy to learn.
In addition to being able to have those hints automatically, we’ve developed something that I really love because it is truly innovative, something called the Learning Center. The Learning Center is a collection over 50 audio, visual, and text tutorials. It doesn’t matter if you’re low vision, totally blind, or both, we’ve got you covered with these particular videos. What will happen is you start, Learning Center says hey, welcome to Learning Center, here’s how you use it. The videos are actually magnified which no other company does. They are magnified so you can actually see them and see what’s happening in be able to walk through all of these different items. What we have noticed over the years with both ZoomText and Window Eyes and other assistive technology products, is people would have questions like I need to know how to use this on the web. Could you show me how to do that? Of course we have classes and things like that to be able to solve those problems, but typically the answer is yeah, you need to know how to use the web. First thing you need to do is open a browser and go to www.whatever.com – it was the chicken and egg thing. Learning Center is completely self-contained. You open it up, everything actually streams from the Internet; there is no set up to do; you don’t have to do anything as far as media. It just starts walking you through these things and you can edit it and come back later. It’s a really awesome thing to make ZoomText Fusion easy to use and easy to learn. These are some of the tools that we added in once we got the ability for people to transition smoothly and easily.
WADE WINGLER: It sounds like that’s a pretty cool and interesting approach. To use Learning Center, just to make sure I get the technical note right, you do have to have an Internet connection on the computer you’re on, right?
JEREMY CURRY: You do have to have an Internet connection. There is a way to download the videos, but at some point you have to have an Internet connection. Today’s market, most everybody has an Internet connection of some type. That’s pretty ubiquitous.
WADE WINGLER: That’s what I find too. A couple of logistics questions or practical questions: what does it cost and what platforms does it support?
JEREMY CURRY: There’s an introductory cost right now. If you are brand-new to ZoomText Fusion it’s $999, that’s introductory, eventually going up to $1299. If you are a magnifier reader user, it’s only $399 to upgrade. That price will go up after the introductory offer is over so it’s something that you definitely want to get a hold of today. It supports Windows 7 8.1 and Windows 10.
Something else that I hadn’t quite mentioned yet, there are some other tools in here that we’ve actually made browse the web faster, such as something we call browse mode which gives you EVT navigation to access things or page navigation which makes it easy to access office documents as well as the web. Besides learning mode, Tudor mode, we’ve got other tools that make it easy to access the web. Everything tracks.
One of the things I also love about ZoomText Fusion is we’ve added something called the setup wizard. We tried to think of every single detail with ZoomText Fusion including the installation. We rewrote the installation from scratch making sure it has adjustable magnification, accessible scrollbars, all sorts of stuff to make sure that you can see it when you start installing it. After you install it, it used to be with ZoomText, now you a need to enter into your serial number. What if you can’t see that? Now what happens is the first thing that comes up as here’s the setup wizard. It says do you want your magnification set to what? You can actually increase or decrease it with the mouse or keyboard and see it in real time. What do you want the color saturation? How much speech do you want? Do you want speech? All of that before you even get to the serial numbers. You literally have everything set up instantaneously right after installation. I’m making it easy to learn.
WADE WINGLER: It sounds like there are some pretty cool bells and whistles that are included. Tell me about some more. You got me excited about features.
JEREMY CURRY: One of the things that I really like, especially in regards to browse mode, is if I want to get to something quickly, you used to have to bring up a list and all sorts of things. Now once browse mode is on, I can just press a key and get directly to a heading. What’s great about that is you don’t even have to have speech to use that feature. There is a visual indication that actually tells me if browse mode is on or off so I can see this big part to my mouse pointer that says we are in browse mode. Maybe for example I’ve got a favorite part of the website that I always want to get to every single time. Take me there. I can just go there instantly. Or maybe I want to go to a link, or if I want to give a link or links or headings. If I have really limited vision, I’m still able to get to all the information.
And additionally for those people, as I mentioned, don’t need any speech or don’t need it that much, or their eyes just get fatigued, we rewrote App Reader from the ground up. Maybe I’m just using Magnifier and I need some speech inside my documents and I do my alt-shift-left click, or I start App Reader, however I start it and start highlighting all the words, now what happens within just a split second — before it would take a little bit of time, now it’s just instantaneously reading quickly. In addition to that, we added new vocalizer expressive, human sounding voices. Neospeech is still there, the calm cadence you are probably used to, but vocalizer expressive allows the ZoomText user to be much more responsive and you can start to listen at a faster rate if you want to. App reader, rebuilt from the ground up, much faster, much more reliable. We’ve got new synthesizers. We’ve got complete screen reading, browse mode to make the web faster. The page nav to navigate office documents and the web, PowerPoint, there are so many different things about ZoomText to make it awesome. There’s so many things to list. Setup wizard, Learning Center, pronunciation, tutor, lots of stuff. It’s a fantastic product.
WADE WINGLER: Lots of cool stuff. It’s pretty exciting. We are just about out of time for the interview. Quick question: you mentioned intro price. This show will probably air in early December 2015. Any word about when intro pricing is going to be stopping?
JEREMY CURRY: We haven’t announced an end date yet, but if it’s in December, you’re still good to go. It will probably last for several months at least because we really want people to have the opportunity to go out and get ZoomText Fusion because we really love it. We think it’s a fantastic addition to the AI Squared family of products.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. If people want to check that expiration date on the intro pricing or they want to learn more about ZoomText Fusion, where should they go?
JEREMY CURRY: They can go to ZoomText.com. You’re going to see a video about Fusion there. They can see all the pricing. You can see the features and benefits. And you can download a free 60 day trial. By the way, if you’re using Magnifier Reader today or Magnifier, you can still download a trial of Fusion and actually use it in addition to the ZoomText that you already have today.
WADE WINGLER: Jeremy Curry is my good friend with AI Squared and today has been talking with us about their new products, ZoomText Fusion. Jeremy, thank you for being on the show once again.
JEREMY CURRY: Thank you so much, Wade. It’s always a pleasure to be here, my friend.
Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.