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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.
Special Guests:
Davide Esposito – PhD Student Fellow – Unit for Visually Impaired People – Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
Website: https://www.iit.it/it/web/unit-for-visually-impaired-people
facebook – https://www.facebook.com/iit.uvip/
twitter – https://twitter.com/UVip_iit
Email:
Davide Esposito: Davide.Esposito@iit.it
Monica Gori: Monica.Gori@iit.it
Papers about the platform:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9629699
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.699312/full
Stories:
Website Access Story: https://bit.ly/3GICgZD
Horizon Game Accessibility Story: https://bit.ly/3GHYLOr
Beach Access Story: https://bit.ly/3JfHayU
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—– Transcript Starts Here —–
Davide Esposito:
Hi, this is Davide Esposito and I am the PhD student of the unit for visually impaired people at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and this is your Assistive Technology update.
Josh Anderson:
Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology update. A weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the Indata Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcomed to episode 560 of Assistive Technology update. It’s scheduled to be released on February 18th, 2022. On today’s show, we’re super excited to have, Davide Esposito on and he’s going to talk about a really cool virtual reality acoustic archery game. And how he’s using it to do some different research and maybe find different ways to use virtual reality to help individuals with vision impairments. We also have some different accessibility stories. We’ve got a story about website accessibility, not so much from the point of using IT, but just in the language that’s used and how it’s written.
Josh Anderson:
We’ve got a story about out a new game for PS-5 and PS-4, and a new accessibility setting that’s being built into it as well as accessibility for beaches and public spaces. Don’t forget if you’d like a transcript of our show, go to Eastersealstech.com and you can find the transcript just below our show. Our transcripts are generously sponsored by InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at indianarelay.com. We want to thank everyone that attended our free full day training yesterday on job accommodations. If you ever would like to attend one of our full day trainings or find a recording of the ones that we’ve already done, those can also be found at Eastersealstech.com. And let’s go ahead and get on with the show.
Josh Anderson:
Maybe you’re looking for some new podcast to listen to. We’ll make sure to check out our sister podcast accessibility minute and ATFAQ or Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. If you’re super busy and don’t have time to listen to a full podcast, be sure to check out accessibility minute, our one minute long podcast that gives you just a little taste of something Assistive Technology based so that you’re able to get your Assistive Technology fixed without taking up the whole day. Hosted by Tracy Castillo. This show comes out weekly. Our show is Assistive Technology frequently asked questions or ATFAQ on Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Brian Norton leads our panel of experts, including myself Beva Smith and our own Tracy Castillo, as we try to answer your Assistive Technology questions. This show does rely on you.
Josh Anderson:
So we’re always looking for new questions, comments, or even your answers on Assistive Technology questions. So remember if you’re looking for more Assistive Technology podcast to check out, you can check out our sister shows accessibility minute, and ATFAQ, wherever you get your podcast now, including Spotify and Amazon music. Listeners over the last few weeks, we’ve had some different stories about accessibility. We’ve talked about Harvard’s website and how, they had all that great accessibility information right on the very front page. We talked about Wordle and sharing your information to individuals who may use a screen reader and just how well absolutely annoying that might be for them and inaccessible. Today I found a story over at Ad Week and it’s titled only 2% of sites meet accessibility standards. Let’s change that.
Josh Anderson:
This story’s written by Martin McKay and he is actually going to be our guest next week on the show. So seem very timely to put this story in there. What I like about this story is we all know that online website accessibility isn’t always the best, but a lot of times it at least on this show and most stories I see, attack that from the part of if I’m using Assistive Technology. So a screen reader or something like that. The website isn’t fully accessible. It doesn’t work with my Assistive Technology or something’s not labeled. There’s not all text. There’s not this information. I can’t bring you information down, find headings, things aren’t labeled correctly. And that is definitely a problem.
Josh Anderson:
But this gets more into the language that’s used in there. In literacy, in and of itself, it talks about websites using jargon, long sentences, complicated language, different things that you have to have an above average reading level to even get to. If you read down through the story, it shows that the average reading age in the US is between 12 and 14 years old, but in an audit of the main banking websites, the average reading age is 19 years old or at a college level. Now, of course, this can create huge barriers for individuals with disability, individuals with lower reading levels, really just anyone.
Josh Anderson:
And as a website, as a business, as someone who wants to get the word out to get people to look at your stuff or access your information, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t make it accessible to everyone that you possibly could. Let’s suppose sometimes you probably keep all this stuff in there to really just talk to a particular group or to maybe make yourself sound a little bit smarter. What you’re really doing is you’re just keeping people from accessing everything in the way that they should. Of course, Martin in here talks about some of the things that we’ve talked about on here quite a few times of just accessibility and afterthought. It’s not something you think at the very beginning or at least a lot of businesses don’t, I guess I probably shouldn’t generalize, especially about the listeners of this show.
Josh Anderson:
And of course he follows it up by just saying it’s a marathon and not a sprint. This is something that goes on for a very long amount of time. It’s going to take a long time to keep your website accessible, to make it accessible. But if you build that in, if you ingrain that from the very beginning, then it’s just going to make it to where more people can access that information that you’re trying to get out there and can really just use your website, buy your products, use your business, use your service, or do whatever they might need to do on your site.
Josh Anderson:
But again to the story over in the show notes again, I know we’ve been talking a lot about accessibility lately, but I really think it’s something that’s important. And I really liked Martin’s take on this just because it’s very different of not just talking about making it work with assistive technology, but also making things readable, making things accessible from the beginning in the writing of the website, not just the code, but in the words that are actually there on the screen, but again, we’ll put a link to this down in the show notes, so you can check it out for yourself.
Josh Anderson:
I found a story over at the PlayStation blog that I think fits into us talking about accessibility, also fits into a little bit of our interview today, just from the archery standpoint, but also talk about a really cool accessibility setting that I must admit, I don’t think I have seen before. So the story I’m referencing over on the PlayStation blog, and we’ll put a link to this down in the show notes is about a new game coming out called Horizon Forbidden West. Now this is a second part to a game called Horizon Zero Dawn. In this game you’re a warrior and you walk around and you’re fighting all these giant robots and stuff. And you use a bow and arrow. You use different kind of weapons like that. It’s a big open world game where you have a lot of adventure and things like that.
Josh Anderson:
And the story is just called accessibility features in Horizon Forbidden West. Now this game actually comes out today, at the same day as this show, February 18th. And it talks about all the different accessibility settings. Now we’ve talked about some different accessibility settings that are in games, of course, by the one we all know the most is captions. That’s been in games for a really long time, since they had a bunch of words to say, in fact, really video games started off as text base. So I guess they were there before the words were, this mentioned some of the ones that have been in other games, changing in contrast. This has a full tutorial. So if you forget how to do something, you can go, you can enable popups to pop up, remind you what you’re doing, where you’re supposed to be going.
Josh Anderson:
You can slow down game play. You can have aim assist. You can have things like that. So some very cool stuff. That’s in a lot of games these days, because they are again thinking, Hey, this is more people we can have play our games. Well, this one has a new feature called co-pilot system, which I thought was just plain cool. Now granted with Assistive Technology accessibility, the idea is always independence to be able to do things for oneself by oneself, without having the need for another individual to do it. But the video games, part of the fun, I guess is doing it with someone else with a friend, with a family member with something like that. So this co-pilot system, it says here that it grants a second PlayStation controller with mirrored controls access to the game. Says it only requires that you have another controller for either the PS-5 or the PS-4 depending on which one you’re playing. And a second user profile.
Josh Anderson:
Says that this was implemented. Thanks to incredible feedback and support from a sightless accessibility consultant. There’s only a time little blurb on this blog, but I’m pretty sure, hopefully there’ll be some more stories coming out about this co-pilot mode or co-pilot system. Once the game actually drops and people get it in their hands and get to play it. I just thought that a, since we’ve been talking about accessibility a lot on this show, and b, since our interview actually involves archery a little bit, this is a good story to include. Also, it’s neat to see some of these accessibility features come in as a direct result of, of feedback from folks trying to play the game. Plus going up, I can remember the old school two player game where you both on the screen at the same time, it’s kind of a side scroller. And just how fun that was to sit there and be able to play with the other person. And you work together to solve these things and do these goals.
Josh Anderson:
It’s a great way to be able to play with a brother, a sister, a mom, a dad, a cousin, another family member and or friend who may have a disability and difficult time accessing the game on their own, a way to assist them without just doing it for them and something that you can do together and really team your way through. So I’ll put a link to this blog over in the show notes that you can go check it out yourself. And as I said, this game Horizon Forbidden West comes out for PlayStation four and PlayStation five today, and just a really cool new accessibility feature called co-pilot system.
Josh Anderson:
We talked about website accessibility. We’ve talked about video game accessibility. So our last story today, we’re going to talk about something that really just sounds great as I’m hearing the frozen Tundra of Indiana right now, and that’s beach accessibility, not granted the story’s about a beach in Milwaukee. So I guess that’s probably not any warmer than it is here, but still just thinking about the beach is a great thing. So the story is over at Technical.AY. It’s titled accessibility means opportunity. This founder is bringing both to Milwaukee’s public spaces. This is about the ability center and their founder and CEO, Damian Buchman. It’s written by Stephanie Beecher and it talks about all the work that he’s done in order to make sure that Bradford beach is the most accessible beach in the nation. And to do this, they put in concrete ramps, they put in seasonal access mats, and they also have free sand wheelchair rentals that people with disabilities can use.
Josh Anderson:
So if you really think can imagine in trying to take a wheelchair through the sand, I can’t even imagine how hard that’s got to be, but in the story here, it says that the founder and CEO of the Ability Center’s ramp up program Damien and Buchman, really just all lack of equitable access to public space. And one of these PE places is the beach. It goes into a lot of information that we all know, one in four American adults live with a disability, things like that, but I really just wanted to include this because it’s something that we don’t always think of. There may be a ramp at the office building or other places where these things are, but what about the beach? Everybody likes to go to the beach and everybody should be able to go to the beach. And right now in the mid-February cold of Indiana, the beach sounds amazing.
Josh Anderson:
Maybe one a little further Southern Milwaukee, but anyway, I’m going to put a link to this story over in the show notes, just so that you can actually read it for yourself. But I just, as we think about accessibility, as we think about Assistive Technology and all the amazing things, we also need to think about public spaces and places where everyone would like to go. And these beach mats and other things like that are great accommodations, as well as of course, those sand wheelchairs that individuals would be able to borrow and use. So go check the story out in the show notes.
Josh Anderson:
Listeners, when we think about virtual reality, we think of an immersive visual space, VR goggles go over our eyes and ears and change the world around us to make for a whole new experience. But how can virtual reality be used to assist individuals who are blind and cannot access, maybe visual cues and information. Our guest today is, Davide Esposito, from the Italian Institute of Technology. And he is here to talk about an exciting study and new technology that developed that may bring virtual reality to the visually impaired community and lead to assistance in orientation, mobility and beyond all from an acoustic archery game. Davide, welcome to the show.
Davide Esposito:
Thanks for inviting me.
Josh Anderson:
I am really excited to talk about this technology, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Davide Esposito:
Sure. Well, I am a PhD student and an engineer. I did my bachelor in biomedical engineering and my master in a weird thing that is called bio engineer that is biomedical, but a little bit more focused on bio robotics and on the study of the nervous system. And in my PhD, I have been focusing on the use of virtual reality to study assess and guide development of the sensory motor system in both actually vision and hearing.
Josh Anderson:
Excellent. And in the opening, you don’t think of virtual reality such a being such a visual thing, but you developed this special acoustic archery game. Start off by telling us about the game.
Davide Esposito:
Yes, well it is, as it sound a simple archery game where the target is a sound, a wide noise that is rendered as sound in space. Thanks to the possibilities that are offered by the knowledge about the hearing, all the special features of the hearing system of the human brain. There are some cues that the brain uses to encode a sound position in space. They can have different degrees of complexity and some of the easiest cues that the brain uses are differences in time at the arrival to the two years and intensity. And with these two cues, the brain makes most of their estimation about the orientation of the sound. So the angle, the horizontal angle, and then there is the intensity. There are some special features that are used to encode the height of sound.
Davide Esposito:
It is in front of us or on our back and there is also the reverberation that is a bit more complex to encode and to represent and to virtualize, let’s say, and there are some works that are running about the reverberation in virtual reality. And another very important cue is the movement of the body in particular, the movement of the head, that has big impact. And the thing may sound actually so simple, but in fact, it’s not because then you add the movement. And when you add the movement, you add compared complexity that is difficult to understand and to program in a virtual environment while for our brain is a little bit, let’s say easier because our brain is used to deal with movement and to dynamic environments. And our brain learns from moving and from interacting with the environment.
Davide Esposito:
So what I did was basically to try and exploit the fact that our brain learns from movement and from associating a change in perception to a voluntary movement. So this is basically what I exploited. I created a virtual reality archery that helps people to learn how they are a place in an acoustic environment, actually by changing the way they perceive a change in sound, according to their movement. So I change for example, the sensation that is perceived when you rotate the head or you rotate the trunk. In this way, you alter the standard relationship between perception and action, but you also augment it in some way, because you are partially controlling it and you can boost a little bit. You can encourage the brain to relearn or to learn something that it didn’t learn.
Josh Anderson:
That is it really cool? I know you’ve had done some research and had some folks try the game. What was their experience like? Or what did they tell you their experience was like?
Davide Esposito:
Well, it was actually cool. It was cool because the video gaming world and the reality world is indeed something that is more focused on the visual aspects. And so visual impaired people, blind people very often don’t have the, I don’t want to say the chance because there are things out there that are built for viewing per people, but maybe they are not well informed. They do not find interest in that because they don’t know that there is something like this involving people that had never tried an acoustic experience of virtual reality or acoustic games was actually nice, actually fun. And it was nice to see them having fun. Not everybody, obviously, because you cannot please everybody. It’s a matter of days, but still a lot of people were actually happy to come, happy to try out the archery game. They were happy to do our experiments and they were interested. And so it was cool.
Josh Anderson:
Good. That always makes it a lot easier when they’re interested in what they’re doing. And I’m sure you get probably better feedback from that as well.
Davide Esposito:
Yes.
Josh Anderson:
Davide, what do you see are the practical uses that’ll come out of this study going forward?
Davide Esposito:
Well, the practical uses are still actually under investigation because so far we’ve been using the platform for assessment. I have developed it with the idea that it may become something to rehabilitate, to train special orientation, but still we don’t have enough data to say it works. I mean, that’s the next step we are going to validate the effect to rather than validate, I would say assess the effectiveness of such a training where auditory motor cues has trunk are altered in a controlled way to simulate audio special learning. We have a good feeling about it. We think it can work because even though we didn’t validate this platform in the lab where I am, we work on audio motor feedback, we’ve been working on audio motor feedback for a long time. And we have developed my, my boss, my PI, my principal investigator has developed an audio bracelet.
Davide Esposito:
And with this audio bracelets that is called ABBI, it means Audio Bracelet for a Blind Interaction. My boss tested effectiveness of this bracelet and results were actually striking. There was an improvement of spacial performance. There was this improvement in both usually impaired children and adults, as you may imagine in children, the improvement was given more than in adults. And that’s actually a cool result. And now we are in the process of trying to make not the device, but the knowledge that came out of these device, something that can be solved on the market, but we’re still in a, let’s say developing phase.
Josh Anderson:
Oh, for sure. And that definitely takes time. Definitely takes time. And it might be a mixture of all the things together that ends up being able to really, and truly help people. Davide, if our listeners want to find out more either about you, about the study, about the Institute, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Davide Esposito:
Well, we have two social channels. One is on Facebook and his name is the UV-Goriss group. While we also have a Twitter account and its name is @UV_IIT. And we also have a webpage of our group it’s web address is iit.it/it/web/unit for visual impair people. And if you want to keep in touch with me or Monica, my PI, I am leaving my email address that is Davide.esposito@iit.it and Monica’s address is Monica.gory@iit.it
Josh Anderson:
Excellent. And we will put links to all of those down in the show notes. So the folks can easily find those. Davide, thank you so much for coming on today and telling us about this, just really, really great project that you’re working on. And we can’t wait to see what comes out of it, as well as the whole program as a whole. We can’t wait to see where it all goes.
Davide Esposito:
I hope it will bring something really interesting, not only for us, but also for people who are using it.
Josh Anderson:
And it definitely sounds like it will. It sounds like at least you got the right mindset and as you find new things, I’m sure you’ll find how it can be useful, or if nothing else, hopefully it’ll lead on you to the next thing. That’ll be even more useful.
Davide Esposito:
Thank you.
Josh Anderson:
Do you have a question about Assistive Technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter at Indata Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com, a special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and front over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guest are their own and may or may not reflect those of the Indata Project. Easterseals Crossroads are supporting partners of this host. This was your Assistive Technology update. And I’m Josh Anderson with the Indata Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye