AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 31: CSUN Catch Up with Aaron and Tony

Episode Notes

In this episode of AccessWorld, Tony and Aaron catch up after CSUN, where Aaron presented on accessible video gaming and had a chance to hit the exhibit floor. From AI to smart glasses, they breakdown some of the exciting tech launching this year and look forward to what’s on the horizon.

AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). An extension of AccessWorld Magazine, a quarterly publication on digital inclusion and accessibility from AFB, you can check out the current and all 26 years of past issues online for free.

Aaron Preece is editor-in-chief of AccessWorld Magazine and Tony Stephens leads communications for AFB. Together, they enjoy meeting up each episode to talk through the latest trends and breakthroughs in access technology. To learn more about AFB, visit www.afb.org and consider making a tax deductible gift to help support our work creating a world of endless possibilities for people who are blind or have low vision. Learn more at www.afb.org.

AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 31 Transcript:

Introduction: AFB. You're listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. Learn more at www.afb.org.

Tony Stephens: Aw, here comes Peter Cottontail hopping down the bunny trail. Hippity hoppity, AccessWorld is back. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. I am your co host on this lovely spring week after the Easter holiday for a lot of folks that celebrate that day, hopefully everybody got some good chocolate bunnies for those that do celebrate it. But I'm not joined here alone. I'm not by myself. I am here as always, with our fearless co host, Mr. Aaron Preece, editor in chief of AccessWorld magazine. Hello. Happy spring, Aaron.

Aaron Preece: Happy spring. That's. Yeah, yeah.

Tony Stephens: You like my song there at the beginning?

Aaron Preece: I did. I. I was like, oh, that's why he's singing that. It took a second to realize what

Tony Stephens: was I trying to, you know, trying to find some sort of segue, sort of this. I mean, it's just so nice. It's like spring is here. There's my back courtyard is a blanket of cherry blossoms right now. So when I walk out there and I'm trying to keep nougat from. From eating them. Like when he was eating the snow a month ago and now, oh, I'm sure now it's a salad buffet instead of a snow cone.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. Here, there's birds everywhere. Here, there's a family of foxes somewhere in the backyard. And like, it's the. It's been springs exploded where I'm at.

Tony Stephens: Man, this is a long. That was a long winter. Cold and long. Yeah, so. But some of us got out of the cold, you know, bitterness and got to fly out west.

Aaron Preece: Yep. Sunny, semi sunny. Anaheim.

Tony Stephens: Was it? Was it? What was it? I heard there was a heat wave recently. There was it, was it. Had it started yet when you were at CSUN in Anaheim, California?

Aaron Preece: Not. Not really. It was. It was warm, but it was like, I would say 6,070s when I was there, I think. So it wasn't too bad. It was what I. At least what I personally prefer.

Tony Stephens: So I think it was the 30s here on the east coast, so.

Aaron Preece: Oh, yeah, much better.

Tony Stephens: See, that was a couple of weeks ago. I know, I know. We dropped a podcast in between with the AI Report with our new AI research. Folks can check that out at the American foundation for the blinds website@afb.org AiResearch2, the number two for our latest AI research. And you can listen to that episode of the podcast to Find out all about the exciting work that was revealed through their research study on artificial intelligence and focusing on people with disabilities and people without. But we haven't had a chance yet to catch up because that was right after CSUN and still jet lagged. But yeah, how was it? Man, tell me all the. I wish I could have gone. Give me the, give me the four one, one.

Aaron Preece: It was fantastic. I. I haven't been in a few years. I was last there in 2019, I think. So it's. It was as packed as ever. I don't know what the actual official numbers are, but it seemed very busy. It was very. Just whenever I decide to like what session am I going to go to? There are just so many sessions for every time slot. It was hard to decide. And lots of cutting edge type stuff. Lots of like AI discussions on accessibility. I went to one on AI coding which was interesting. And like how accessible is that? Which apparently it's not very. Not very is probably apparently the answer right now.

Tony Stephens: Like the ability to use the app to code or.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, to like vibe code a website or something.

Tony Stephens: Yeah,

Aaron Preece: especially like what do you say to it? Can you, if you say build me a website, is it going to be accessible out of the box? And apparently kind of not. I forget the specific numbers, but they were a lot lower than I was expecting because like when I use AI and I ask it for things where I've got memory on, it remembers that I'm blind. And so it'll all say, can you give me, you know, search the web and present me this information? And so when it presents it to me it'll be like, oh, I'll give you, here's the information and I put it in a screen reader friendly table for you and stuff. So it's if it knows sometimes it can. Or if you say you follow WCAG standard this, this and this, it might do it. But like people aren't really. That's not how people are. Vicod. We might, but no, no, but like

Tony Stephens: a college, a college sophomore in Silicon Valley is not going to say make my cool new website and make it 2.1 AA compliant.

Aaron Preece: And about a month or so ago I used it to write up a program that will let me load a subtitle file into basically load the subtitle file and then it would play through my screen reader. So if I have like Netflix or something like that, like foreign language, I can just, even if I am not on a platform that supports subtitle reading through screen readers, I can launch it and play it and then have my screen reader just hit play at the same time. But the interface wasn't accessible. The native interface, like whatever it used it had to do workarounds to make like adding menus and that kind of thing to make it fully accessible.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: So cool.

Tony Stephens: Well, hopefully a session you did catch was your own.

Aaron Preece: Absolutely. Yeah. So if people remember, a couple episodes ago I did a sort of a preview covering a game called Wicked Quest back then. We've also reviewed that on the blog and just really kind of did a deep dive before CSUN into the different audio features of that game. And basically the premise of my presentation was with a video game, everything because of the name is visual and you have all. And you have to be able to see and react to most things. If you're going to make that accessible to someone that's completely blind, you have to turn all that into audio. And so how do you do that in the first place but also in an intuitive way that you can actually understand and react to it. It's a new frontier in accessibility because we have things for static or more like UI based interfaces where you can find recommendations on how to do things for a traditional interface gaming, who knows with a lot of it because it's. So the interfaces are so different. A puzzle game is very different from an action game. Very different from a like a traditional say like a card game or something like that. So I demonstrated a couple games and I guess we can. I have the slides that we can. We can post potentially and share with people and there's some demo videos and data there.

Tony Stephens: Need to put it up on the side or something. Yeah. So

Aaron Preece: just a, a plug for. One of the games that I demonstrated was a game called Super Liam which it's very kind of if people are familiar with like classic like Mario or Sonic or like those types of like 90s 80s 90s like platforming type games.

Tony Stephens: Mario's back right now.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, that's.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: So this is like it came out in 2004 originally and it is the first ever fully accessible audio like side scrolling platformer like. Like that style. And so I thought it was cool to, to use that and the fact that it's, it's still relevant today and still a lot of the, A lot of the things people are using are based on concepts that. That pioneered and I would say

Tony Stephens: one

Aaron Preece: of the reasons I want to bring it up is that he just. Liam Irvin is the guy that programmed it and he has a YouTube channel and stuff but he just did a re release so if people are interested, he just dropped it this past weekend. He updated it for modern systems and made it added all the modern conveniences you would expect in a game 22 years later. So that's very cool. People should definitely check that out if they're interested.

Tony Stephens: Cool. Very cool. Well, my thing I always love about conferences like CSUN and the consumer conferences in it being ACP is the exhibit floor. Were you able to hit the floor at all?

Aaron Preece: I was, I was able to hit the floor for a couple hours and I focused on checking out a lot of the new multi line braille displays that I hadn't seen before. So I've seen the Monarch a couple times. I've seen the Canute and so there were some new ones out. Orbit Research has a few and I don't off the top of my head I don't remember the names of those but they've got 40 cells with three lines and then they've got a 20 cells with five lines. They had a whole bunch of stuff. There's all kinds of displays and things that Orbit's got. They've got a new. It's like a. Caught my attention. It's a braille display and I think it's called the Flow. And it was a very like sleek looking metal kind of minimalistic braille display. And it's designed not to need power or anything like that. It's explicitly just a display and it connects through USB C to like your phone or your computer and it just outputs like whatever your screen reader showing you. So if you just need braille and you don't need a lot of bells and whistles, it's something you can use there. And it's a very thin, easy to carry device. Like it would be easy to put in a backpack or put.

Tony Stephens: Form factor?

Aaron Preece: Yeah, yeah, super, super slim form factor. Very like I said, very minimalistic. Kind of on purpose to make it user friendly that way. I got to check out the Codex by New Haptics. It's a new one. It's a air powered braille display. So they have like an air pump. It's kind of meant for like a desktop environment but it has four lines of 32 cells. And it's also a. The whole braille display is a touchscreen so you can tap items like when you're going through menus on it and that kind of thing. But you can also. And you can do this on things like the Monarch I believe too where you can touch if you're editing a document or especially if you're doing things like coding or you're doing math or things like that. You can double tap somewhere, double tap a cell and jump your cursor right to that cell. I thought that was very cool because of the way they've designed it. The refresh rate is super quick and everything.

Tony Stephens: That's called the codec.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, it's called the codecs. It looks like. And it's. I think it's available. It looked like it was available on their website. You can get it now. They had some games on it which was kind of cool to see like how quick the refresh rate is and how it can recognize your finger. I did pretty well in whack a mole on the device.

Tony Stephens: Oh, that's cool. Like a tactile whack a mole.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. And they also do music. So you can like see the braille representations, like tactile representations of waveforms in your music. And they have like a music editor and you could go in and like double tap on a specific section of music and jump to it and edit in like their. I think it was like a music on like an onboard music editor or not just audio editor. I guess not necessarily music.

Tony Stephens: I've never tried braille displays, but I always. Now you're making me want to. In wondering if there is an application that can present braille. I remember when I was a young teen, I learned how to read braille music, you know, like sheet music in braille and. But it was never. It never worked for me because I like I played the bass, like upright bass in the electric bass and it's like your hands are doing stuff. Right. I mean it was good to maybe.

Aaron Preece: So you can't really read it at the same time. Yeah, you have to read and memorize

Tony Stephens: you at the same time or something like that. Whereas like if I was a piano player, I could maybe have my left hand playing and my right hand feeling the notes out and kind of picking it out. But I'm wondering just in terms of. And too. It was just like, you know, it's just a lot. And trying to find music and stuff like that. Like I'm wondering if there's an app that can do that with notation like braille music. Like basically let you feel out the. Like a musical staff.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. And do more like tactile graphics to some degree of it. Yeah, yeah.

Tony Stephens: I mean you could do the braille notations as well. I mean obviously. But like. But yeah. I don't know. I just wonder. I'm just wondering about music. Like I'm Trying to think like I have, I have a. A brilliant 40 that's old and it.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. When I plug it in, you know,

Tony Stephens: it's like one of the braille dots. It's like a. Speaking of music, it's like a piano when a key dies then you try

Aaron Preece: to work around it, you know and

Tony Stephens: you're like well I can play any song that doesn't have a G flat and the lower bass register. I'm. Yeah, I feel like that with. It's like yeah, I can do anything unless it needs the. The or of. Or with symbol and. Because then it's like on the third set, you know, so it's like. Because I've had it for like 10 years but I, I've. I'm slow to want to buy a new braille display.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, I know for me personally like when I, because I, I was in school, especially like elementary school when you're kind of learning Braille in the 90s and then in the two, you know, high school in the 2000s and, and all my textbooks were in braille and they're the giant like 15 to 70 volumes of book especially once you got into like science and math in high school. But I'm used to reading on braille paper. I never really. I had a pacmate and I used the braille display on that but I was also using the voice, you know, the built in jaws on that. And so I never really got used to really reading any lengthy anything on a braille display. And then I also personally it was so much harder. By the time you got into late high school, early college, it was so hard to find braille of anything. So I eventually got down to the point where I was only using it for language. I took Latin and I used it for Latin because you need to be able to see every letter to know how to conjugate and all that type of stuff. So I, as I've gotten older I have the brilliant. Like you said, I've got the same exact thing. I've had it for about 10 years, the brilliant bi. And I use it sometimes for various things but my speed has decreased a lot and I'm just not for me my brain was not trained to use the motion of read to the end and then jump back on the same line and press the button. It just doesn't feel intuitive. So I am super excited to see all these new multi line displays for that exact reason because I feel like that'd be much more like a traditional piece of braille paper and I would probably I need to, you know, I can read Braille, but it's definitely pretty slow. But that definitely would incentivize me to use it. And there's more and more options available.

Tony Stephens: Well, that's why, like, with music, you have five lines on a staff, and you could maybe have the whole thing in front of you with the five Braille lines versus. I mean, you mentioned that. A good point. About, like, it's kind of. The old display was. Was more singular, like, very.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: You know, like tunnel vision, almost.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, exactly. And it's just. For me, it was just like such an awkward motion. And I. I feel like there's probably a lot of people, especially younger people that grew up Maybe in the 2000s and 2010s going to school who are maybe more used to that because they. They might have learned more on a Braille display versus on paper. Braille.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: So there's probably a generation that are a lot more comfortable with that style. But for me, just personally. But there's. You know, you've got the Canoe, you've got the Monarch of the dot pad, you've got the Codex, you've got the ones from orbit. The other one that was really cool I saw was called the Cadence. And it is a really interesting device. It's like four. There's like a. You can have a full Cadence with just like a giant Braille tablet, but it's actually four different devices that connect together to form the full tablet. And I think you have about 48 cells, they said, per quarter. And so each device is kind of standalone, and you can get them individually, and they have, like, Braille keys and arrow keys on them and stuff. And they've got a lot of cool, tactile graphics and animation type stuff. There was a Frogger game on it where you could see the car moving. You could see your little Jeep for your green frog, just. And you can. I thought the modular nature of that was very cool. So you can have, like, two of them and then connect it and you have like, a couple lines that are maybe 40 or so or maybe more.

Tony Stephens: You could separate that out by tabs on, like, a window or something.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. And have four different things. Or like, double screen. Yeah. Like people do with, like, half the screens this, half the screens that top and bottom. So that's a really cool device. And you. And then as you add more Cadences together, you get more keys to use. And so that's definitely one to watch, I would say.

Tony Stephens: Good. If you're an octopus.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: Sorry. Well, I know one of the big things. That was the, the, the talk this year. It continues to be are the, the wearables, the smart glasses. Did you get a chance to check any of those out?

Aaron Preece: I didn't see any in the exhibit hall but I did go to a really cool session that our own not affiliated with AccessWorld, but Judy Dixon that that's written for us for a while now that she did a really cool session on taking the, I would say the main smart glasses on the market now. So you've got the Meta glasses and then you have the Echo Vision and the Solos glasses. And she compared them across real world tasks. So she said here's six bottles of wine, look at the row and tell me which of these is this kind of wine to see how well they could do or I dropped this on the floor. It's. It looks like this. Can you help me find it? She was have it like can you tell me if there's a stain on this shirt? Can you help me find the signature line on this form? And Meta did really well. I would say it did the, the best of. Of all of them in this specific trial. But they're, they're updating so quickly. Yeah, this is the, this was the state of things in really early March because she did the, you know, the tests before, right before CSUN deliberately because they do change so quickly. So if, if prompts change or if the AI models get updated because I think Echo Vision and Solos are using I believe like OpenAI or Google or something like that or Meta on their end. So if they update their prompts if they that type of thing is going to change things very quickly. But the takeaway, it seemed like at the moment of like of that snapshot Meta was Meta did a really good job with most of those. So that was a very cool especially to see those in live situations that as a blind person you would actually use. So I, I like that one a lot.

Tony Stephens: I know Meta's been having some, some real progress too by opening up. It's like developer kit. What is it? What are they called?

Aaron Preece: Yeah. So you can do more things on developers.

Tony Stephens: And I know I heard there was an announcement with Aira that they're going to be moving now. You access it through the WhatsApp but it sounds like that's going to become more of a skill like how be my eyes is on Meta. And the guys on Double Tap was listening to them the other day and they were talking about Urion O O R I O N which sounds like a really cool app. From France. That's on Meta, where you can. You can use it to. This is what impressed me was it had sort of real time memory and that, you know, the demonstration they were saying was like, you know, find a bench while you're walking down. And it's like, well, I see a path and don't see a bench. But then as the camera, you know, Sean or Steve on Double Chat was talking about it, but one of them said, you know, as you're walking around, it would go like a few minutes, moments later be like, ding, ding, ding, ding. And you'd be like, there's a bench up on your left. And it's just like. Like the idea that it's not just a prompt, but it's. It's a living assistant, not just a activated assistant. When we do the wake word or something.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, because that's something that's been hard. Yeah. Because before you would have to say, it was always. It had the camera feed, but it only really responded whenever you said something to it. And trying to figure out the best way to handle that. It sounds like a good way to do it too. And, well, like, if I were useful

Tony Stephens: that way, if I'm at Penn Station in New York and there's like, you know, 17, 18 tracks to go down on, and you walk by this big thing that has all the signs, and I'm pulling out be my AI the other day, and I'm trying to take pictures, you know, and it's like, wait, scans. Noisy. But it'd be neat to say, hey, help me find track 17. And then as you're walking, it's like, hey, you're here now. You know, like, I don't know. I feel like we're on the edge of that. My hope is maybe within this year we can get to that point. And it sounds like what Ryan kind of maybe can get to a point where it's just kind of like it's a companion, not just a assistant for the moment.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. And the live video is getting kind of close to that, where you have instant responses, which I always kind of say. The caveat with the instant responses is whenever you are doing, like, the video, you do have to, in some ways look out for hallucinations more often because the speed versus.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: And it seems like that's always improving too.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: Latency versus accuracy.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Keep it up. Get more of these chips out that use A, less water and B, just faster response.

Aaron Preece: Faster. Yeah. I was at. Just at the airport. I could see that being helpful. Where I could, you Know, walking down, like, where's the delta gate? Or like, where's the delta counter? Yeah, tell. And then it would just ping me whenever I walk past the delta counter. That would be so useful.

Tony Stephens: How long is the line at Starbucks? Mm. Tell me when it gets short. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. No, I've been checking out the, the. The Aira their AI real Time calls. Just speaking of smart glasses, I. I'm looking forward to when they get that set up. I don't know if there'll be the AI feature or if it's just going to be the regular caller on AIRA with the meta when they get that on the Meta. But like, I was, I was demoing it the other day, like going through my freezer trying to find something to. To. To eat, you know, for dinner. And it's a. Their voice is incredible. It really fools me to think it's almost a human talking to me where I'm like, wait, did I accidentally hit the wrong button and call a real assistant? But it's the AI assistant and it's just really good where it's like, you know, I'm like, what do you see? And I'm trying to find this in the fridge and it's like, well, here it is. You know, and it just. That. That even is conversational the way that I like, I do my chat GPT assistant. We fall into sometimes a conversation back and forths, you know, and it's exciting to see that built into this. The Aira AI call where you call using the AI is is. And it reminds me of what Suman, who started aira I said a decade ago. I guess it's been maybe a little.

Aaron Preece: Yeah. Back in 20, like 16, 15, 2016.

Tony Stephens: You know, the AI RA AI Real Time Assistant. Right. Like, it was kind of in his vision of what it was going to be. And it's cool that it's getting there. And the cool news is knowing that other developers as well with Meta can start really innovating in this space. Right. And getting stuff into the wearables. Because I still don't like pulling my phone out in public places. Not because I'm afraid someone's going to snag it because I have a giant German shepherd at my feet. But like, just the awkwardness and like standing up, like, people are like, what is that? Why is that person taking a picture all the time?

Aaron Preece: Yeah. Why are they scanning around with their phone? I think the same thing. It's like, I've got my phone up head level.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Yeah, man. Well, cool. I haven't tried the Echo Visions. Have you tried those?

Aaron Preece: I have just tried the Meta so far. I feel like the. The last time I looked at the EchoVision because it's what I want to get for AccessWorld to review those in the solos. Both and I think they were. It was like they did the first iteration and they sent those out to people and then based on like you. You bought them but then also like based on the feedback they were going to innovate is what the. What it looked like to me. So I. They might at this point be on the version of those which is cool. That they're updating with the hardware.

Tony Stephens: It sounds like they had a lot of cool stuff going on this year. That's why I was asking about it.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Excellent. And yeah, I haven't, I haven't. I haven't looked much into the solos other than just hearing about them.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, same.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Any other cool stuff? Any other last takeaways from csun?

Aaron Preece: Those were the main things that stood out to me of like the sessions I attended. And one thing I would say is only kind of back on my gaming topic. I was surprised to see there was a couple other gaming sessions their EA or Activision was there. That was who it was. Activision was there with the rnib. I didn't get a chance to see them but they. I saw they had a gaming session on Accessibility and there was also one of the games I demoed is this kind of action adventure game from a Japanese developer and he was there with his new game talking about how he's working with like a mixed blind inside a team to build that game. So that was super cool.

Tony Stephens: Oh wow. Did you get to say hello or now is it kind of crowded?

Aaron Preece: I got to see one of his team members was in my session and came over and I got to say hi to him but I didn't get to say hi to the actual dev, unfortunately.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, next year. Next year.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, next year.

Tony Stephens: Yeah.

Aaron Preece: That's cool. Lots of cool stuff. Every. Every year there's always more things coming out and that's.

Tony Stephens: Yeah. Well, what else is on the access role plate? What else we got going on?

Aaron Preece: So for we're. Our next issue is going to be up in late May so we're kind of coming up with articles for that. One of the ones I'm going to be doing is using an Android phone day to day. I've got a pixel 10, so I'll be testing that because I've had Android devices that I've used for various things over the years but always kind of as a secondary device where I've always been a primary iOS user but they're always making improvements and I wanted to kind of compare and really live the live the Android life for a little bit and see how that goes and how it works with my different workflows. So I'll have an article on that. Something personally that has been my kind of obsession lately is and I'd like to eventually do an article on this but it probably would be this is a little more of an undertaking so maybe in August or maybe maybe November is I've been looking into 3D printing as a blind person because there's so many things I just want to know what they look like and just make things because they have that physical tactile aspect of things. But so much of 3D printing is get the mod, you know, either build the 3D model or find the 3D model and put it in this program and then you know position or make alterations to it and but it does seem like there is a compared to several years ago it is possible to 3D print as a blind person. I found a surprising number of resources online about that and tells you which like printers are say usable from your computer entirely with a remote app where you're sending files and stuff and doing all the everything from your computer or your or your phone versus using the built in display because of course those aren't going to be at this point they're not going to be accessible but also just like all the mechanical aspects like how do you listen for things going wrong or this issue, that issue. There's a lot of tinkering it sounds like you have to do. So that's been my I'd be curious of listeners if anybody does that kind of thing. You know give us a shout on socials and let us know if are you doing 3D printing whatever however you

Tony Stephens: found it, you know who you need to talk to. So yeah Kelly on our team our extraordinaire social media digital comms extraordinaire on our team her significant other has a 3D printer and coolest Minecraft figures for my boys.

Aaron Preece: Oh that's cool.

Tony Stephens: I was like oh man, you should reach out yeah touch base with kg she can get you set up with maybe him to answer some questions. I loved some of the stuff when we went to check out the DOT Experience which is a museum American printing House is going to open up later this year. Really cool exhibits about just the blindness movement and blindness history and There's a whole section on Helen Keller, which is why we're involved because they're doing a lot with the archives that we have actually housed over there at APH in like a sort of secured, safe location along with the AFB archives in Louisville. And they're creating this really cool museum. But the company they're working with is. Is using like 3D printing to recreate some of the things that are like too fragile from the archives, but they still want them available.

Aaron Preece: Oh, so they're making. Yeah. Could you really scan them?

Tony Stephens: Because it's like, you know, I can go in the archive, the digital archive online at helenkellerarchive.afb.org and check out certain things. But they've done this really cool job where they can print out these 3D. Like they have this scroll from like South Asia that was given to Helen and it's just really fancy and ornate and I would never know. I mean, you know, there's only so much that alt. Alt text can do, right?

Aaron Preece: Yeah, for sure.

Tony Stephens: And, and it's just. It was so cool to put your hands on it and know that you're not going to, you know, actually be ruining the original artifact from the, from the archive. But it was really cool. And, and it's. There's going to be a lot of hands on stuff like that. And I think. I don't know if the final is made with 3D printing, but definitely we were checking out a lot of these prototypes and concepts and stuff when we were visiting the museum when it was under construction last year, they had some really cool stuff. So it's impressive what you can do with it. It means it was like a 3D printer. Well, there, there was a place in Washington D.C. for a while. Give me a second. Local motive. Local, not local motors. They made, they made the ollie. Which was a, which was a. A bus, right. It was a autonomous mini bus. Think of it that way. And it was. I think the only time it really ran was on the. They had one in, in national harbor in Washington where they're. They had an office in a plant development lab there. And then they had one on the Vegas strip. But it was like one of the first autonomous vehicles and it was this minivan and it was really cool. It was wheelchair accessible.

Aaron Preece: It was just.

Tony Stephens: When we talk about autonomous vehicles, they were really nailing it. It was created by a veteran local motors. And I unfortunately don't think they're still around, but they use 3D printing literally to print these vehicles.

Aaron Preece: Oh, that's cool.

Tony Stephens: Industrial 3D printer. Yeah, that was like six feet wide. And they would print like, you know, the frames. It was all like carbon material, but then it uses all these little beads and then they would melt down and recycle. So you could basically take the leftovers, sweep them up and then use them again to make something else. But they made like these entire vehicles using 3D print. And it was brilliant innovation. And the designs came from crowdsourcing. They basically had an online crowdsourcing platform where people could submit their designs and concepts and things. And like he was making like 3D vehicles and electric vehicles and stuff like that. It was really cool. And I haven't seen too much like that with the 3D printing space. But just imagine like if we could have something crank out like a map of a downtown, right?

Aaron Preece: Oh yeah, absolutely. That type of topographical type stuff where you can really feel.

Tony Stephens: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Preece: So. And I didn't, I didn't never realize the amount of different like materials you can 3D print because I've heard of. I feel like I've even seen like metal 3D printing where it extrudes the metal and like you're saying like carbon, probably like carbon fiber carbon, some kind of super durable, one of those types

Tony Stephens: of things melts down, heats up and I guess it would have to superheat metal, but you could probably do metal as well, I would think.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, yeah, I think they're still around. Years ago, Deborah Kendrick did an article on a place over in maybe somewhere in Ohio and they will send you. You can like request 3D models as a blind person of things, if you want to know what things look like and they'll send them to you because it is. There's a lot of. When I was doing my research, there was a lot of applications for like science and math when it came to modeling molecules or modeling like especially like geometry and that sort of thing for accessibility from like a tactile perspective. And you can kind of go beyond like the raised thermoform style, traditional tactile graphics. So that, that seemed like a big push for it, which I could see a benefit in.

Tony Stephens: That would be cool. I imagine 3D printers are more affordable now. Oh yeah, I can only imagine. Yeah. Compared to probably what they were when, you know, I mentioned the Ollie. The little Ollie mobile.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, definitely more, much more affordable and I think a lot more accurate and like just better quality for the, on the, like on the consumer market too is the vibe I get.

Tony Stephens: We need to find a sponsor for AccessWorld that will kindly give as Such one for the Huntington office and. Yes. So you can do in depth reviews. Yeah. Yeah, man. Very cool. The, the. I remember years ago when I was at American Council of the Blind, it's maybe like nine, ten years ago, there was a kid that used Legos to make a braille printer.

Aaron Preece: Oh, that's cool. Because the dots, I could see that dots.

Tony Stephens: But. But then somehow it was. I don't know if it was like 3D printed Legos or if you just used straight up Legos. I think these may be Lego kits where you can design stuff and program and things like that.

Aaron Preece: But like the robotics.

Tony Stephens: He was given an award. Yeah. And he was like 13 and he, he was cited. Just thought he'd do something good. Like we get a lot of calls from high school projects around the country doing some real cool, you know, super

Aaron Preece: cool stuff these days. Yeah.

Tony Stephens: And you know, they, they usually have that question at their class, find a problem and solve it. And he created this like 3D, like sort of braille printer using Legos and it was just really cool. And I hope with 3D printers and all this other stuff out there that we get more of this innovation. And you know, now that things like we talked about Meta earlier, opening up ideas for software developers as well, like, you know, the more people can maybe create easy apps and software development using AI for AI coding, you know, I don't know, good intentions with a lot of these young, young, young folk out there trying development stuff to solve problems for our community.

Aaron Preece: And just as blind people ourselves, we can. I know and I haven't dug too deep into like the really intense like the real vibe coding type of thing. I, I did it through the website and just copied some Python code to get my, my little app running. But I know like a lot of people are making programs with AI and like doing a lot. There's like a lot of video game accessibility mods and stuff like that. Just because if, if you have the passion for a thing that you want to see made accessible or a program you want to see made. Someone just recently recently released a, like a screen recorder for that's, that's accessible. I'm not sure if they 5 coded that or not, but just a lot of being able to prototype and launch stuff that you're just passionate about that you otherwise would have had to have potentially years of coding experience to do, I think is pretty cool.

Tony Stephens: Very cool. Well, man, a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon for sure. Yeah. Well, any other big news going on? Anything else on our list here? What do we got. I don't know.

Aaron Preece: I think that's every. I kind of keep an eye on the news and the one thing that stood out recently is Be My Eyes is setting up a foundation to. It's. I'm not sure on the details. It sounds like it's fairly early and I'm not sure, like the specifics of how this would work, but to make sure that blind people have free access to technologies that will make the world more accessible, because I assume it is based on. Think about like the, like the be my AI and the fact that you can use that for free and you don't have to worry about tokens or whatever through the AI that they're using. So I assume where a lot of these services, as time goes on are going to be like that and the technologies that power them are going to be paid to, especially for the heavier computer vision and that type of stuff. And it might not even be AI, but they're putting together a foundation to try to fund that and make sure people have free access to those technologies. I thought that was pretty cool.

Tony Stephens: It'll be interesting if folks like Mark Zuckerberg at Meta sort of, you know, his vision of the future comes true where it's, it's set up to be, you know, the, the new Oakley Metas that have the, the screen on the lens.

Aaron Preece: Yeah.

Tony Stephens: So it's like the idea is not even have a smartphone anymore, that we

Aaron Preece: should have the glasses to a wearable

Tony Stephens: form factor is kind of the way he's, you know, hoping for the future and it'll be interesting with developers. I mean, obviously that doesn't help us, but a wearable smartphone device like something like that, you know, is it going to move out of our pocket in five years?

Aaron Preece: Yeah, for sure. I. When it comes to a lot of that stuff, I am glad to see that people, these mainstream companies are considering blind accessibility like Meta, whenever they realized how many, how much people that are blind are using the metaglasses, they've made efforts to improve that experience. And I know, like, even outside the AI space, like the fact that the Apple Vision virtual reality headset has voiceover built into it, I'm pretty sure I haven't had a chance. I'd love to try that, but that's the fact that people are proactively adding accessibility for blind people to these things, I think is a very heartening thing to see.

Tony Stephens: It's a lot of excitement going on. It's not a, it's not 1987 when. Well, you don't remember 87, obviously when you're just kind of sitting around going, well I got my Perkins brailer. That's all my cctv. That's my world. Yeah, yeah. But then came Henry Joyce and everything changed. Cool, man. Well, this has been good. It's been great to catch up and find out about Anaheim and just thanks for sharing everything from csun. You know, for our listeners. Like Aaron mentioned, AccessWorld magazine quarterly issue will come out in May. We're going to have a lot of other exciting stuff coming out. I know the research team is working on some additional reports from their AI research. I think one specifically on how AI is impacting the blindness community. In addition to other reports on like autonomous vehicles, transportation, privacy, things like that. Other, other mini reports are going to be putting out as part of this research they've been doing. So there'll be a lot going on in May, but we've got more AccessWorld coming later this month in April. Folks want to find out about AccessWorld, then go to afb.org aw where they can get 26 wonderful years of back issues for free. And be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen or for our listeners on Valley I Radio. Greetings, salutations. Check us out on the podcast world as well. But we're excited as well Aaron to have some listeners and good old fashioned redidio on the little, yeah, the little pocket super cool living room. So yeah, so shout out to everybody listening over Valley Eye radio. So thanks to Liam and everybody up there doing their work for you know, providing radio reading services as well for people and yeah so last final words, words of wisdom.

Aaron Preece: Words of wisdom. My thought is check out the AI study. I know I was there. Lots of just cool stuff in that so stuff that you wouldn't expect and just data I, I just found interesting so I would, I, I thought it was cool. Definitely worth a, a listen to the podcast and check out the, the AI study on the website.

Tony Stephens: I wasn't asking for a self promotion of the organization but thanks for doing that man.

Aaron Preece: Yeah, that's what's on. That was on the top of my mind. So I figured out I, I, I

Tony Stephens: I can't think of anything to top that. So otherwise I would sound selfish if I was like, you know, I don't know, whatever. Thanks everybody for listening. We will check you out on the next episode of AccessWorld.

Tony Stephens: You've been listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American foundation for the Blind produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by CosMonkey, compliments of ArtList.IO. To email our hosts Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org to learn more about the American Foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to www.afb.org.

Outro: AFB