ATFAQ175 – Q1. Document translation, Q2. AssistiveTouch for visually impaired, Q3. Word prediction for Win10/11, Q4. Android alternative to SeeingAI, Q5. Text Reader for Win10, Q6. Wildcard: Holiday shopping and traditions

I have a question. Huh? Like what? I’ve always wondered. What about? Do you know? I have a question. I’ve always wondered. Like I have a question. I have a question. Oh, I have a question. I have a question. I have a question.

Welcome to ATFAQ, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, with your host Brian Norton, Director of Assistive Technology at Easter Seals Crossroads. This is a show where 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 us 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 let’s jump into today’s show.

Hello, and welcome to ATFAQ, episode 173. My name is Brian Norton and I’m the host of the show. And we’re so happy that you’ve taken some time to tune in with us this week. We have a great lineup of assistive technology questions for you today. But before we jump in, I just want to take a moment to go around our virtual room and introduce the folks who are here with me. The first is Belva Smith. Belva is our Vision Team Lead here at Easter Seals Crossroads. Belva, you want to say hi?

Hi everybody.

Excellent. Next is Tracy Castillo. She’s the End Data Program Manager. Tracy, do you want to say hi?

Yes. Hey everyone. Thanks for tuning in.

Excellent. And then we’ve got Josh Anderson. Josh is the manager of our clinical assistive technology team.

Hi everybody.

Also popular host of AT Update, kind of the flagship of all of our podcasts here at Easter Seals Crossroads. One of three, actually. We do AT Update, ATFAQ, which is what you’re listening to today, but then also Accessibility Minute as well. And so if you’re looking for those, you can go to our website. That’s eastersealstech.com to learn more about all of the podcast offerings that we provide. So want to take just a moment as we jump in to talk a little bit about how our show works. So for new listeners, we come across various assistive technology related questions throughout the week, and then we try to gather all those up, put them into a show, and we try to answer those as best we can, making sure that we always solicit feedback because we understand that as we give answers, we’re not probably filling in all of the blanks.

Maybe there’s some things that we don’t mention. Maybe there’s some experiences that you have with what we’re talking about. And we’d love to be able to hear about those and provide those to the folks who do call in and leave us questions. We have a variety of ways for you to go ahead and ask us questions, but also to provide that feedback. You can give us a call on our listener line that’s (317)721-7124 or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Looking forward to a good show.

So without further ado, let’s jump into our questions that we have for today. Our first question is an email from Keith. The question is I know there is a device that reads to an individual. Scan the device over print and it reads the pages. I believe he’s talking about Seeing AI, something that he’s seen before. Now, is there a device like this that can translate as it reads from English to Spanish? So I think what he’s really looking for is something that obviously things like Seeing AI and Vision AI, I don’t know, there’s Sullivan Plus. There’s lots of different apps these days that for folks with visual impairments and or learning disabilities, I find it very helpful for those folks as well, where they hold their camera with either their tablet or their phone above text and it goes ahead and reads it to them. He’s looking for something that would do translation. And so I just wanted to kind of throw that out.

So I think so. So I think you can use Microsoft Translator. I know you can open it up online and it’s translate.microsoft.com believe will get you in there. And you can take text and drop it in there and it will definitely be able to translate it all for you. And there’s a camera button on it. I just have never been able to completely get it to work. Oh no, it works just fine. So yeah. You can also do the Microsoft Translator app. Whenever you first open it, there is a little camera button, and if you open that up, you can translate English to Spanish, it can read to you, it can translate into quite a few different languages and read most of them. So you can take text, take a picture of it, and translate it into whatever language you might need.

Okay. Now that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, so Brian, I’m reading the question different than that because he says that he knows that there is a device that can read to an individual. So I’m thinking that he’s looking for one of the what I refer to as the portable scanners that can scan the document but then scan it in English and read it in Spanish. And I could be wrong, but the device that comes to mind for me with this would be the Clear Reader, which is a little portable scan or capture and read device and it can capture in English but then read it back to the individual in Spanish.

Are you serious?

Yes.

Okay. I never knew that. Wow.

You change the language to Spanish. And I found that out the hard way because I accidentally got into the menu and changed the language to Spanish and had a hard time figuring out how to get back to English from the Spanish. But yes, if you just change the language to Spanish, it will capture the print and then speak it back or read it back in Spanish. And that’s the Clear Reader.

Nice. Belva, I knew it could read Spanish, but I did not know it could do the translation. So that’s really cool. Now just real quick, about how much does a Clear Reader cost?

I knew you were going to ask that and I’m going to guess, and this is a total guess, around 1500.

Okay. So the app that I was just talking about is free.

Free is always better.

Yep. So all you need is a tablet, a computer, something to run it on. So I guess it’s not free free, because you have to have something that can actually run it.

Oh my goodness guys, you know what? I am so excited. I’m almost jumping out of my seat. Last week I learned about a device, and you guys haven’t mentioned it yet, I’m not really sure how to say it. It’s spelled S-V as in Victor, A-N-T-T-O. It is a scan pen. So just kind of like the see pen that we have in the library, this is a scan pin that you can scan paper. It also shows a person scanning a computer screen and highlighting the computer screen and it will take that text and read it. The cool thing about it is it has a display on it so you could actually see what [inaudible 00:07:20] and on it. The coolest thing is that it will translate up to 111 different languages.

So can you spell that again for me?

Yeah, it’s S as in Sam, V-A-N-T-T-O.

Okay, interesting. That’s really kind of cool. Yeah, I see it here. Language translator device. Interesting.

So it does the text to speech, it reads the text back to you after scanning. It does translation, not just your paper, but it also shows the people using it on their computer screens and a regular phone screens. But just like the see pen, it has the dictionary scanning and it also boasts to have left-hand scanning. So if you ever-

And I will say too that it also has a score of 9.8 on Amazon, so it does have a very good review, I guess.

Interesting.

I’m so happy I picked one that you guys had not heard of. Yay.

Yay.

That was awesome. Man, I was thinking of a much more complicated way. I’m glad you guys have some better answers than I had. I was kind of thinking, man, if you could just use maybe the Office app, if you have Office 365 as something that you use for your productivity tools at work or home, you could use the Office app to be able to upload it and then use the Microsoft Word translator tool or functionality to be able to change that language and then be able to use read aloud within Word to be able to have it read back to you or the immersive reader to have it read back to you. But man, you guys have a whole lot simpler options than I ever had, so that’s really kind of cool.

So let me tell all about one more, which is called the Scan Marker Air. That is also an OCR digital highlighter and reader. It’s also from Amazon, but it says it can scan and translate in 40 different languages and it does have the text to speech. It is on Amazon right now, $149. So that might also be something worth checking out.

Interesting. Let me throw this out for folks. As you guys are listening, I think it’s important to note when you do this type of language translation, it’s typically doing word for word. So it’s looking at your document and word for word doing a translation of that document. It’s important to realize when you do that, it doesn’t necessarily equate or isn’t necessarily transferable to how that would be in regular language. Because in different languages, verbs come before nouns and nouns come before verbs. It’s just different. And so in context of the conversation, it might look a little bit different if you’re just speaking it versus having it written down on paper. And so keep that in mind. I think that’s just always helpful. It’s like American sign language. American sign language isn’t word for word. And so they have symbols or they have signs for different parts of speech and different things.

And so it looks a little bit different than just simply signing word for word. And so there’s that whole context piece to the whole language translation as well. So keep that in mind as you guys look at these. Hopefully these will be some good solutions for Keith. If you guys have any experience with other language translation software, hardware, the ability to just be able to hold it up over print, take a picture, have it read it into the different language, that would be amazing. We’d love to hear about those. You can get a hold of us on our listener line. That’s (317)721-7124. Or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thanks so much. All right. So our next question is actually a question Belva had given to her. And so Belva, what you got?

So this is a question that I get asked frequently. As we all know, Apple has done away with the home button on their newer phones and tablets. So I have a lot of consumers that are terrified of how they’re going to use their device without the home button. So what they’re doing is they’re choosing to go with the cheaper model devices because it’s the SE version of the iPhone and I believe the tablet as well will still include the home button. However, anybody that has ever worked with me knows that I always try to encourage move forward, not backward. So kind of go with the flow. So what I have done for my clients that have been brave enough to let the home button go, and keeping in mind that most of them are using voiceover, I have gone into the accessibility under the physical and motor control section and turned on the assistive touch feature.

And when you go into assistive touch, you can choose a custom action for a single tap, a double tap, or a long press. I simply use the single tap. And when you choose the single tap, then you have all these different things that can make happen. Home is one of those. So I choose home. And so then for my users that are using voiceover, they can simply locate that button on their screen, it will move around. So don’t expect that if you put it in the bottom left corner, it’s going to always be in the bottom left corner because that is not the case, but you will always be able to find it by swiping the screen and you’ll hear it say assistive touch, and then you tap, boom, goes home just like your home button did. It’s just moving around the screen a little bit. So that’s what I’ve had all my folks doing and I’ve got people everywhere are calling me and asking me what do they do without a home button. So that is what you can do without your home button.

That’s really cool. I’ve actually had that question before for folks, not necessarily because they’re using voiceover, but they’ve broken their screen and the home button no longer works for them and they can’t unlock it or do those types of things. And so assistive touch is a pretty amazing utility, especially even beyond just being able to use the home button for anybody who has difficulty with different gestures or swipes and those types of things. You can really activate quite a few things directly through the assistive youch app. And so you can find that under accessibility, and then under assist. Is it touch accommodations and then assistive touch? Is that right?

No, it’s actually under accessibility settings and then touch.

Touch. Okay.

And then under touch then it becomes assistive touch.

Perfect.

And you’re right, Brian, there’s a whole list of different things that can be done with it.

Yeah. It’s great for folks who have limited range of motion. They can’t do certain things. Maybe they have dexterity issues. Maybe they also have tremors. Just being able to activate the device with the different types of swipes, how you swipe down from the top right hand corner to get your control panel. You can change that and just have it just directly accessible through the assistive touch button that does move. And I will say it, Belva, you mentioned it moves around your screen. You can place that really anywhere you want, but as you drag your finger around the screen, you might pick up on that and drag it to another spot. And so like you said, swiping and getting to it to be able to have it announce itself and then be able to activate, it’s probably a good idea.

I keep it turned on on my phone. I don’t have a home button, I don’t always use it, but there are times when I do use it and I do have to move it sometimes because sometimes it’ll be covering an area of the screen that I need to get to, so I just put my finger on it and drag it down. But I do use it from time to time on my phone, so I just keep it on.

Nope. Great. Great job. Well, I would love to just open this up to our listeners if you have any feedback on that particular question, you can give us a call on our listener line. That’s (317)721-7124. Or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thanks so much. All right. So our next question is an email from Scott. Does anyone know of a good word prediction program for Windows 10 or Windows 11? And so I’ll kind of just open that up for folks.

So for Windows, one that I’ve used for folks a couple times is called Light Key, and it’s a lightkey.io. There’s a free version and then there’s also plans and kind of paid version, but it’ll work pretty well across anything you have open, which is kind of nice because there’s some that integrate into words, some that integrate maybe into Google Chrome and things. This works pretty much anywhere you are on your computer as long as you got it kind of enabled. And it just does word prediction, it is supposed to learn from you as well, so it can gain the knowledge of what you kind of say and what you kind of do, and then it’ll actually do that. It also has kind of the real time spell check kind of thing. So if you spell something kind of wrong, it will actually pop up the correct spelling directly above it so you can click on it and easily do that.

And like I said, it works pretty much through just about anything that you’re using on your computer, including things like Zendesk, Salesforce, and stuff like that. So if you’re using it for work, it may very well be able to do that. But also Microsoft Office, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Messenger, kind of quite a few different things that it can actually work on while you have it on. And as I said, there is a free version that does give you some of the usage. I think it’s kind of only so many keystrokes per month. Then there’s a pro, which I think which is about 40 bucks a month, or you can still get a lifetime license for about 160, 170. So if it’s something that you really and truly use a whole heck of a lot, it may actually be worth the money.

Very cool. I wanted to throw out just a couple things that you have some built-in onscreen keyboard that also has some word predictions. So built in to the ease of access cente. You can find the onscreen keyboard, turn that on, and whether you are typing on your regular keyboard or you’re typing on the onscreen keyboard, it’s going to go ahead and allow you to do word prediction. And if you have a touch screen, you can go ahead and touch those words that you want to be put into your screen or into your text or into your edit box or you can just use the function key or be able to choose it off the list.

I will say if you haven’t played with the built-in onscreen keyboard, it’s pretty cool. It’s got a couple of different features you can do click to select, so if you aren’t able to use a traditional keyboard, you need to be able to use an onscreen keyboard. You can click to select, you can also hover over something for a period of time, a few seconds, those types of things. And then after whatever time period you have chosen, it’s going to go ahead and select whatever’s underneath it so you don’t even have to click on things. If you don’t have that dexterity or fine motor control on your fingers, you can just go ahead and just hover over something. Or if you’re a switch user, you can also do switches. And so that’s just a button of some sort that if you have one repeatable consistent motion, you can blink your eye, wiggle your big toe, move your head side to side, you can use the onscreen keyboard that’s built into Windows to be able to then put text into different text boxes or navigate the computer as well.

Couple other ones that are more pay for and they do cost money, one would be Co-writer. That’s a pretty popular one that does have some built in word prediction as well. Read and Write Gold also has built in word prediction. So two options there. And there’s another one, a couple things for iPad, I wanted to throw this out. I know we’re not talking about iPads or iOS, but you can also look at Keeble and Keydogo. I’m not sure if you’ve looked at those before, but those are some pretty remarkable keyboards for the iOS. Keeble is kind of just kind of a regular keyboard, but you can also look at Keydogo one. That one’s for the iOS devices and they’re more designed for kids, so it’s got some different kids fonts. It makes it look more interesting and applicable to them and where they are for so that they would engage with a little bit more.

Those are both keyboards that are made by Assistive Ware. And so something to think about and to turn on. The other thing I wanted to mention too is there’s something built into Windows, it’s called suggestions in Word. Or I’m sorry, suggestions in Windows. And so you can turn on text suggestions in Windows to quickly complete challenging words or continue working efficiently. And so in order to do that, it’s a little bit different between Windows 10 and Windows 11. So to get to these suggestions that would pop up, you can select the start menu and go to your settings. Or alternatively, if you want, you can do the Windows key to open up directly those settings. Once you’re there, you can go to time and language. Once you’re in time and language, you can select typing, and then in the typing menu you can turn on show text suggestions when typing on the physical keyboard. And so there’s a little toggle there to be able to turn that on. And so then therefore, once you’re typing into really anything on the Windows side of things, you can go ahead and get text suggestions brought up for you. And that’s built directly into your Windows operating system. And again, that’s been in Windows 10 and Windows 11. You can find those through those as well. So in both those different platforms. So I just wanted to kind of throw those out there for folks as well.

Hey Brian, I was looking at that Keeble one, the K-E-E-B-L-E one. That keyboard is pretty handy. It does the word prediction and it has switch control on it. And it’s got our favorite price on it at free 99. Free.

Yeah. Super cheap. And yeah, they’re intuitive. They’re intuitive, they’re time saving. Again, that Keeble and the key, those are both for iOS, it’s not necessarily for Windows, so just keep that in mind. Although I will say in iOS, you can still have Office 365 brought through. So if you’re using something like that for just productivity software, you can still do that on an iPad. And if that’s the particular use case in this situation, we’re not sure if it is or not. Might still work for somebody. I’d love to just open this up for our listeners. If you have any suggestions for a good word prediction program, whether it’s for Windows 10 or 11, love to hear from you. You can give us a call on our listener line. That’s (317)721-7124. Or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thank you so much.

All right. So our next question is an email from Dave. Dave is looking for a program that would allow him to type in his email address and or other things with less keystrokes. Any suggestions? I don’t know. I’ll start this question because we use a couple of tools around here, whether it’s in our clinical program or just from a overall program standpoint. Things like auto text. We were just kind of talking about this a little bit earlier. Belva had brought up before the show started, we were talking about what’s that thing in Microsoft Word where you can type in something and get something completely different. And so auto text or auto correct is kind of what I would refer to as the poor man’s version of word expansion or text expansion. So built into Microsoft Word, you can type in anything and then basically it’s a find and replace.

And so as you type that and you hit your space key, it’s going to go ahead and expand it to whatever you wanted. So for instance, just to give an example, I could type in AD1. So for my address, I’m typing the A, the letter D, and the one altogether, and then once I do that, I hit the space bar and it’s going to expand out to 4740 Kingsway Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46205. And so you can go ahead and set those things up for any of these longer texts that has a lot of characters or symbols that makes it complicated to be able to type. So auto text or auto correct, depending on what version of Word you’re in.

Brian, did you tell him how to find that?

No. Do you want to mention it?

Yeah. Because that was what we were discussing is I was having a difficult time finding it. But if you are using one of the newer versions of Word, you want to open Word and click on file and then move down to options, and under options, look under proofing. And then the very first option there is auto correct options and there’s a button that you can click and type in what it is that you want to replace. So not to totally repeat everything Brian just said, but yeah. If you wanted to type my name and have it replaced with my full name, my work address, my email address, whatever, then you would just type it in and hit the space bar and it would automatically do that for you. I love that feature.

That’s really, really cool. Yeah. I’ve used it a lot for some individuals who have a difficult time with the keyboard and getting to special characters, maybe even the dexterity to do capital letters or other types of symbols that need to have kind of a function key pressed with them. And so having something like auto correct can be really helpful for them to be able to get things to just pop in there instead of having to type it all the way out. A couple other programs that we use here that we’ve recommended for clients in the past, there’s one called phrase expander, phrase expanders for Microsoft, I guess it’s for Windows, but basically you can create all types of snippets or text expansions. So essentially you can create all types of snippets like that where you do an abbreviation and then you can say it what you want with that abbreviation and go and expand those things for you.

It’s pretty popular and pretty useful. It’s got a lot of different tools built into it. You can actually get a little sophisticated as well by creating edit boxes. So for instance, in response to emails, you can go ahead and create basically the backbone of the message that you want to be able to put in there and then leave some blank spaces for you to be able to type in different parts of that. So if maybe one time I’m replying to Josh and the next time I’m replying to Belva, I can leave a blank where the name goes. So I can just type those in later. Phrase expander is really, really great. A Mac version that we use a lot here is called Text Expander, and that’s a super sophisticated program where you can do all sorts of things and so you can automate it really a ton to make it super useful for you.

And it can not only just do small words or small phrases, but I’ve had it type out a whole page of content, a listing of all the different trainings we provide here when someone asks me what can we have you out here for? So I can just do three or four letters and assemble and go ahead and pop that all in there and then edit it down to what makes sense for that particular individual. It’s super, super helpful. That’s text expander. Phrase expander, I think you can purchase outright. I’m not exactly sure of the cost. Text expander is a subscription service, and so I believe for an individual it’s around 40 to $45 per user per year. So definitely something to think about. Something that’s a little less excited, something that’s a little less costly is called Type It In. That’s another one that I’ve heard of through the grapevine with some of the other folks that I work with that seems to be a little less expensive. It’s $25 for a professional license and does some of those same things. There’s also a program from the same company that does Type It In called Paste It In. And so if you’re interested in having this type of software, you might also look at the Paste it In. You might want to check that out too.

And then if you really want to go the poor man’s way, so I had text expander and then didn’t and now do again, but while I didn’t, I went through everything I had in text expander and copy and pasted it into a Word document so that I just had that Word document open and I could go and copy and paste the information. So essentially if you have, like you said Brian, a really long email that maybe when somebody asks about your services or something where you give pretty much the exact same answer every time, you can just keep that saved in a Word document and copy and paste that information over. It’s not perfect. It’s not going to give you the fillable fields or anything like that, but it’s using what you already got. So sometimes that can work in a pinch if you absolutely have to.

Awesome. Excellent. Well, hey, I would love to open this up to our listeners if you have any suggestions for kind of text expansion, basically looking for a way to be able to put a lot of text in, maybe even complicated phrases or words like an email address would be a good example of that just with a couple of keystrokes, let us know what you’ve used in the past or what you’ve had experience with. Would love to hear from you. You can give us a call on our listener line. That’s (317)721-7124. Or you can send an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thanks so much. All right. So our next question is I am visually impaired and looking for an Android app that does what Seeing AI does for the iPhone. I want to be able to read text, recognize currency, et cetera. Do you have any suggestions?

Well, I was in this position just last week as I was with a client who had an Android phone and I was racking my brain, what is it? What is it? What is it that’s like Seeing AI? And it was Envision AI that we ended up using. However, Google Lookout is also very good. I have not used Sullivan Plus, but I can tell you that Envision AI does pretty much do everything that Seeing AI does as far as recognizing currency, the room light, and most importantly, document reading worked very, very well on the I believe we were on a Samsung phone. So I would recommend either the Envision, it’s free, or the Google Lookout. Either one for this particular individual. And I think they’ll find that they’ll get everything they need as far as being compatible or comparable to the Seeing AI. There was a time when I was really looking forward to when they were going to finally make it available for Android, but that just is never going to happen. So I think Envision’s- go ahead.

I was just going to ask you, do you know if Google Lookout, it’s an app that you have to download and install, it’s not pre-installed on the devices, is it?

It is not pre-installed, no.

That’s what I thought. I was using Google Lookout last week. We were doing some training for the library here in our city, and it was a little glitchy for me. We went to Envision AI and that worked out really well for us. But I also have spent some time with Sullivan Plus. That was recommended to us by another one of our coworkers, Anna Liang. She uses that quite a lot for folks, but does quite a few things and I think there’s some added features I thought that were interesting to it. So it does all the things that Seeing AI does. It does the text recognition, image recognition, face recognition, color recognition. It also, though, has a built in magnifier that I thought was kind of interesting. And so instead of having two separate apps, I think a lot of these apps, they’re made for folks who are either fully blind or have very low vision, but this one seemed to kind of cover the gamut of even if you had just slight low vision, you could still use the magnifier to zoom in, zoom out, change the color contrast and do some things like that.

So I thought that was kind of an interesting one. It also does something that’s interesting when it does recognize text, it actually brings a box up that’ll actually put the text on the screen. And so as it reads, it’s kind of doing that. And I know Seeing AI and some of the other ones do that as well, but it’s usually the document recognition that where it does that and not just simply when you’re just hovering over text. This one seemed to do it when you were just hovering over text. And so something to think about. I don’t know. I’ve got them installed so I can’t really tell you what the prices are on those. And you mentioned Envision AI is free, Google Lookout is free.

Yeah. I’m not sure about that Sullivan though.

And I’m not either. I think it’s free too, right? Is that what you said, Tracy?

Yeah, it’s free, but I did not see it. It doesn’t have the currency reader on it.

Yeah. I think that’s the one thing it does not have. So anyways, I’ll have to double check on that. But I do like the magnifier feature just as an added plus, even though a lot of folks are probably just using the built in magnifier that they’ll find on Android or their iOS device. This one’s kind of built into one whole app. And in my world, I always talk about who wants to wear Batman’s tool belt where you can just simply use one tool to do it all. And so if you’re not wanting to kind of switch between different apps, you might check out Sullivan Plus or any of these other ones as well. They’re all pretty good.

So Brian, I’m kind of the opposite of you then, because I always suggest to my consumers when possible to have a backup plan. Because as you just pointed out, you weren’t having good luck with the Google Lookout, and sometimes that’s going to be the case and who knows for what reason. So rather than spending time trying to troubleshoot what you may not be able to figure out, just go to the next option in the toolbox. Though I do heavily rely on certain products or certain apps, I always try to have a backup one just in case.

That’s a good bet. I talk about that a lot with other AT stuff. And now that you mention it, yeah, definitely having other solutions should Sullivan Plus someday you wake up and it’s not working for you, you have another option. For sure. But that’s something to consider for sure. Well, hey, I would love to open this up to our listeners. If you are familiar with other apps like Seeing AI for an Android device, we’d love to hear from you. Love to get a whole collection of those if we could so we can provide that back to this particular person. You can give us a call on our listener line. That’s (317)721-7124. Or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thanks so much. All right. So our next question is I am looking for a text reader for Word documents, PDF files, and webpages on my Windows 10 computer. Any suggestions?

Well, yeah. I’m assuming that this individual must not be using a screen reader but maybe just wants to have a text reader to listen for possible errors that might be in the document or just kind of as a tool for proofreading or whatever. So within Word, you have the option of using the I believe it’s read aloud, right? Yeah.

Yep, yep.

And I do, and it’s free. It’s just part of Word. I do use that frequently to proofread my reports because in my head I may be thinking one thing but type in a whole nother. And then the same thing with the PDFs. You have that same option within the PDFs to use the read aloud. And I’ve always had good luck with read aloud. So that would be my first recommendation. And then you do have the option if you wanted to go a little more, I guess, in depth with your screen reader of using the narrator, which is, again, built into Windows or also the free NBDA. Or what is it? Natural-

Non-visual display access.

There we go. There we go. That is also free. That is also a full blown screen reader with a whole lot of keystrokes to use and remember. Whereas the read aloud, it’s pretty simple and I think it’s got, I don’t know, maybe 10 keystrokes that you might want to try to become familiar with. So that would be my recommendations for this individual. But I would always encourage use what you’ve got, so use what’s built into your program. I think you’ll have a good result with that. Now as far as Mac, I really don’t know other than using the speech. What do they call it on the Mac? It’s not speech. It’s actually voice. Or it’s not voice.

So, Belva, I’ll just build off what you said, ’cause you talked about read aloud in Word and stuff. Well, a lot of times if you’re going for PDFs and webpages, that’s built into Microsoft Edge too. Just a quick right click and it’s right there. And you can set Edge as your PDF program basically. So if you open a PDF, you can open an Edge and read aloud’s right there. Now hopefully it’s able to read it. I have not tested it with PDFs a whole heck of a lot, but my guess is because it does a pretty good job reading most of the texts that I try to have it read, it could probably get it. So if you’re using a Windows machine, and I know that’s in Windows 11 version of Edge, I’m assuming maybe Windows 10 also?

Oh, it is.

It is? Okay. Yeah. And that’s kind of what I figured.

And the cool thing about that too, you don’t have to read the whole thing. If there’s just a paragraph that you want to read, you just highlight that paragraph and right click on it and say read. So sometimes you were forced to read, or back in the day you were forced to read the whole thing, but not the case anymore.

In fact, I think they also come with a skip backward or skip forward. So if you want to jump around, you can jump around a little bit. And so I think we talked about reading aloud is in Edge, Word and the Adobe products, but to Josh’s point, you can set up Edge to be your default PDF reader and that you probably can get away with that a little bit. Also, just wanted to mention Immersive Reader as well.

What’s the difference in that? I thought Immersive Reader and read aloud were the same. So what is the difference?

They’re different. Were you going to mention Josh?

No, go ahead.

Well, so Immersive Reader is much more than just a text reader. So it basically changes the way the screen looks and lets you manipulate that so that you can view it better. So if you have a learning disability, you can change the backgrounds, you can change the text spacing, the line spacing, you can go in and put it into a focused mode where you’re not having to read from top to bottom. It keeps just in the middle of the screen, it’s blacked everything out or blocked everything out. And the text comes into the little open area in the middle, it’s called focused mode. There’s a lot to Immersive Reader. That’s built into Edge and into Word. And so you can use that in both places. So you might want to check that out as well.

And then you guys also mentioned the speech part that’s in Mac. I also have used a program over the years, again, to the point that we bring up all the time, it’s not free, so it’s not probably something that you want to run out and just put a bunch of money into, but you can get a free version or trial it for a little while. It’s a $100. It’s called Natural Reader. And Natural Reader is a great program. The hundred dollars, there’s a cheaper version, there’s a personal version, and then there’s a professional version. One thing that I love about the professional version, and I use this with a lot of the companies I work with, or maybe even the more public access solutions for folks specifically maybe in the library or other places that have people coming in and they need access to materials and want to take those with them, Natural Reader’s a great tool because it can also not only do all the reading, no matter where you are, you can get a tool for Edge, you can get an add-on or extension for Chrome, you can read Word documents, PDF documents, all those types of things.

But what I do love about it is you can, at the end of the day, once you’re done reading it, you can actually convert it to an MP3 and take it with you and download it. It’ll download an MP3, load that to your MP3 player, and then you can listen to it whenever you want to. So you can convert any of your documents, any of your materials, into an electronic format and take those with you wherever you want to go. And so Natural Reader. The professional version’s around $100. It’s not a subscription, you just purchase it outright. Not only does it do all the reading, but it can convert stuff to MP3s as well. Hey, I just want to open this up to our listeners. If you have any feedback regarding an e-text reader for Windows 10 or Windows 11, would love to be able to hear that and be able to provide that back to the person with this question. You can give us a call on our listener line. That’s (317)721-7124. Or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Love to hear from you. Thanks.

And now it’s time for the wild card question.

All right/ so our next question is the wild card question. And this is a question that I thought of today since it’s close to the holidays. And so we’re getting very close to Christmas, just around the corner here. Wanted to take a moment and talk about Christmas shopping. First off, I guess the first question is, have you started your Christmas shopping? And if you haven’t started, how do you go Christmas shopping these days? I think there’s this huge move to online shopping. No one goes to the mall or those kinds of things. Maybe you do or don’t, but love to hear about how you go about shopping. And then as a side note, do you have a holiday tradition that really speaks to you and your family? Just so we can share that with our listeners. So I’ll open that up.

All right, I’ll jump in and go first. I’ve not been a mall shopper, but I have been one to go to the stores. And I used to start my Christmas shopping, especially when the kids were younger, shortly after Halloween, so early November. That was primarily a financial thing so that I could have more money, because I never had one of those Christmas savings accounts, so I just had to kind of fit it in. But I will say, because of Amazon and Covid, I have become a huge Amazon shopper. And recently I have been reminded too that it’s also got a lot to do with customer service. Todd and I went to buy a stove from Menards a couple of weeks ago, and we drove to the store, we went in and found the stove that we wanted, and we found the salesperson and said, yeah, we want to buy the stove.

And she said, oh, well, you’ll have to go online or can you just go online and get it from our app. And I was like, but we’re here in the store in front of you. She pushed us to go ahead and get online and order from online and then come back and pick it up whenever we were ready to pick it up. So I was like, well, what was the point in us driving to the store and going through the traffic and looking for it and all that when we could have just done it online over the weekend? Here we are just 20 something days till Christmas. I took my granddaughter to go to one of her favorite clothing stores to look for some clothes for her, and we spent forever trying to find a parking place. And once we did, it was forever from the door. It was a nightmare.

So once again, I was reminded why shopping online is great. So I have started my Christmas shopping. I’ve done the majority of it. Actually not the majority. At this point, I haven’t bought anything for Christmas from the store except for the one thing from Menards, which we could have done online. And for me, the biggest tradition is the midnight mass and waking up Christmas morning with the kids. But I don’t get to wake up with the kids anymore. I have to sit here like a nice mammy and wait for them to wake up at their home and go, come on over so that we can have our day. But we always do Christmas at my house and it’s always a crazy day and full of food and joy and we enjoy it. So I’m looking forward to Christmas Day as I always do. That’s it for me.

All right, I’ll jump on there real quick. So we do a little bit kind of in person. Belva, I’m kind of with you. There is the although customer service hasn’t been that bad lately, going out to eat is kind of always the bad thing nowadays. It seems like I either get good service or good food, but no place can seem to manage both anymore. I don’t know where that kind of came from, but we run into the same issue. You find what you want, but they don’t have the right size, so you just go online and find it. And sometimes it’s 10 bucks cheaper or five bucks cheaper and it’s like, well, that doesn’t make any sense at all. So yeah. We’ve done most of our shopping online, although we do still do some in person. It seems like the ones online are better thought out.

The ones in person are more kind of impulse gifts, I guess. But we definitely do kind of mix that up. And as far as traditions, man, I hate to say it, over the last few years, a lot of them have kind of fallen by the wayside. We were getting together around Thanksgiving and putting up Christmas trees and stuff. But I mean, this year there’s been so much cold, flu and everything else going around that we weren’t able to do that. And I can tell you, I’m not a hundred percent sure when we’re all getting together for Christmas yet, just because so much. Well, I don’t know, there’s just so many. We have tiny kids that seem to have the sniffles for the better part of 6, 7, 8 months around this time of year, so it just becomes a little bit more challenging. But I think that does for anyone, as you get a little bit older and kind of adults, so I don’t know. A lot of those have kind of went away. So looking forward to hopefully maybe starting some new ones or some different ones as life kind of changes. So who knows?

So for me, for shopping, I have a notes pad on my phone and I have kind of a checklist, so everybody’s name. And then as I buy them a gift, I kind of check them off. I haven’t really started this year. Things a little bit different from this year from others. However, if I’m going shopping, I’ll try to just do as much as I can online. However, it really, really sucks when your gift doesn’t show or when you thought you bought more than what you did. And so when it shows up, it’s kind of underwhelming of you feel like you spend a little bit more than what shows up. So that kind of hurts. I don’t like large crowds. I never have. And it seems like anytime when it gets close to Thanksgiving, I don’t want to go to the store. So what I do is I go early in the morning and I try to get it done.

Kind of like when Chris is at school, I’ll run to the store. And I did that over on Friday. Not Friday. Saturday I went over… What was it? I guess it was Friday. I went over to the store while Chris was at school and I picked him up a pair of pants and some shirts and stuff. And I saw a jacket that might have worked for him. And I was at this place called Going, Going, Gone. If you don’t know what that is, it is like a sporting goods outlet store. So everything in there is really low price. The jackets are really nicely priced. So there was this cool one, I took a picture of it and then when Chris came home at 4:00, I showed it to him. Mind you, I had just went down traffic and it was not easy traffic.

It was like stop and go. I watched the light turn three different times before I was able to go under it. And so I got home, I showed him, he’s like, oh, I want the jacket, I like it. Can you get me the jacket? And I’m like, yeah, first thing tomorrow morning. So I sat there, I had the money, and I was sitting there like, oh, I hope it’s there. I hope it’s there. So the next morning, Saturday morning comes around, it’s 8:30, I run out the door and the store opens at 9:00. The dog comes with me because he has to come with me because he’s just as excited as I am. Anyhow, the jacket was there. That is the amount of stress I can take. That’s it from the shopping. I drove all the way to the store thinking I wasn’t going to get the jacket and that someone already bought every one of them, but it was there. Christmas traditions, we do the Christmas Eve dinner at our house most years. That’s always fun. I was going to joke around and say, oh, our Christmas tradition, about a week before Christmas, we all get in a fight so we don’t have to see each other.

That’s hilarious. Or sad.

I think someone does it on purpose. I think it might be my dad. But no. We have dinner, we try to get together at dinner and then we try to go to someone’s house. My mom used to always have a really big party. However, people change. So anyways, there’s my stuff.

Awesome, awesome. For me, I have not started. Well, I’m sorry. For me, I have started my Christmas shopping. I’m not completely done, but we’re getting pretty close. I did all of it online. I am one of the persons in the world who even before Covid or any of this stuff started happening, I just hate to shop. I hate crowds. I would rather go into the store knowing exactly what I want, where it is, pick it up, bring it to the cash register, check out, go back to my car.

You are a typical man, Brian. You go hunting, not shopping.

That’s right. Yeah, I cannot window shop. Now I can browse online all I want, but from the comfort of my own couch, I’ll do that, but not while I’m in the store. Anyway. So that’s kind of where I go with the shopping part. We’re not quite done. I do most of my shopping online. As far as traditions, our tradition is putting out Christmas decorations way before we ever should, and that’s over the Halloween holiday, we’ll go ahead and put our Christmas decorations up so we can have them out for a long period of time. I’m a firm believer if I’m going to put all that effort in to be able to decorate our house, I don’t want it up for three weeks and have to take it all back down, and so I’m going to try to leave it up as long as I can.

And so we end up doing that way early and then even keeping it up later into January. Because it’s just fun to look out and see lights everywhere. So super, super fun. So that’s us. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate just the information and just the sharing about what your holiday traditions are and your preferences for shopping. As far as our listeners, if you guys have preferences or traditions you’d like to share, you can always give us a call. That’s our listener line at (317)721-7124, or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. We’d love to hear about those. So thank you so much. Want to take a moment as we wrap up the show today just to thank the folks who are here on the call with us. First off, I’ll start with Belva. Belva, thanks for being here. You want to say goodbye?

Yeah, thanks everybody. And I guess I won’t be speaking with you again until after the holiday, so I wish everybody is safe and happy holiday.

Perfect. And Tracy?

Thanks for having me, Brian. And everyone else, have a safe and happy holiday season.

Perfect. And Josh?

All right. I call what they say, have a safe and happy holiday season, and we’ll see you next year.

Perfect. Perfect. Thanks everybody. Have a great one. And we’ll talk to you guys in the new year. And it seems like every week we have at least one blooper. So here you go.

You and teachers pet there, get it.

It’s like enable. Did someone just say I went off the rails?

No.

No, you introduced me, and then you started talking about podcasts. I was like, oh hi. Belva’s going to ask it and answer it for us.

Whoop, there it is. Whoop, there it is.

Whoop, there it is. Information provided on Assistive Technology FAQ 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 and produced by Brian Norton, gets editorial help from Josh Anderson, Belva Smith and Tracy Castillo, receives support from Easter Seals Crossroads in the In Data project. The show transcript is sponsored by INTRAC, the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation. To learn more about INTRAC, go to indianarelay.com. Assistive Technology FAQ is also a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. To find more of our shows, go to accessibilitychannel.com.