Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 187 of The IA Cast. All right, I'm here this week with two wonderful folks. We have Taylor Arnt.

Hello, everyone.

And we have Lynn Snyder.

Hey, everybody. So glad to be back.

Yes, we're glad to have you back. And, Taylor, we're glad to have you back, too. This, I have a feeling might be a longer episode. So if you're in the audience, get some snacks, get some drinks, get some great lounging seats. Just don't fall asleep. Or if you do, we will have periodic times where we'll try to wake you up during the podcast.

That's right.

Because we have a good show for you all this time. Really excited about all of these topics. And, gosh, I got so busy last time, I intended, you know, what we say about intentions and being good and what road they pave.

Yes.

I had intended to post it throughout the week, all of episode 180, six's stories and things. So I'm going to try to get to that this week. It's going to be a very busy week again. But we had this thing come up after the last podcast, this little thing called convention.

Little?

Yeah, just little short six days. Yeah. An entire week. Just a little convention. It's not like those state conventions that are so long, being three days and have such long agendas. No, comparatively, the state conventions have such short agendas, which is great because of what I do with way around and putting conventions on tags and all those kind of stuff. And I'll get to that in just a little bit.

But you have a story to tell about way around.

Yes, I do, Mia. We had a few items at our booth go missing.

Okay.

Our tags didn't yeah, I'll get to that. I'll get to all of that later. It's just a teaser, folks. Just a teaser. So I need to make sure that I keep as usual, we're live on YouTube. So if you want to remember, every week, we go live on YouTube. So come chat with us. Let us know your thoughts. Absolutely.

Ideas, suggestions?

Yes. What you want to see.

We don't want those.

Right.

All positivity here, folks.

Well, we want to know your feedback, so if you like okay, absolutely. That Michael guy. He just needs to go.

Yeah, we want to find out. Or if I'm just causing a bunch of trouble, let's find out.

Although the cool thing is, if somebody says, that Michael guy just needs to go, there's technically two Michaels.

Two Michael.

So it could be anybody. You might want to be specific, if you're like. That Michael guy needs to go. Which one? There's two. Everybody else is just one of but just two Michaels, which is funny. I'm very happy that I've become a regular on the Tuesday Unmute call with the ACB community. That's fantastic. I love answering questions with Michael and Marty. And so it's exciting. That they will be back coming up, I believe, this week, but I'm not sure. So if you're not, check out ACB Community to find out more. As for our news, we always do news and this was just the introduction. So if you're listening to the going by chapters, have fun. This one, you can definitely skip our long introduction by using chapters. But we have our news segment now and we've got some great, interesting and troublesome stories to talk to you all about while it's on my mind. There's been some interesting chat GPT developments and I have a story and Lyn has a story about chat GPT. So Lynn, do you want to go ahead and tell people what you threw at me yesterday? That just threw me off my chair, almost.

Right, so if you look at the chat GPT, if you haven't looked at the updates in your Apple or your podcast, wherever you're getting your podcast, but chat GPT, I should say OpenAI, has taken Bing out of the search, the web search option. They have taken the web search option out of their service. If you had GPT Plus, you were able to do some fact checking and some web things with your searches and they have suspended that, they say for now. Apparently it was just a beta feature anyway, but they said that in the official explanation. When you're trying to update that app, you'll see it, it'll say that it's been suspended because they didn't like the way that some of the outputs were being generated. I have done some further research on this and it appears that what was happening is that the web sort of component of it was actually scraping Paywalled content. Yeah, it was able to access Paywalled content and of course that would be a huge lawsuit in the making. So once they realize that, that's when they put the kibosh on the web part of it. Personally, I have unsubscribed from the plus version, I think that there are many things and this is Lynn's Rant for today. When I first started using Chat GPT, I loved it. I would be on there all the time. I am a creative person, so I really enjoy creating stories and other things with the chat TPT and with the models. First of all, the guardrails have become so ridiculous and if you don't know what guardrails are, they're basically rules of behavior that the creators of the chat bot part of it are engaging. So it's gotten to a point now where I just consider it neutered. It is so dull and its responses are just not very nuanced or creative. Every time you type something in there, you get a thing back that says well, I'm a large language model and I can't do this and I can't do that for whatever reason. So it really started to get on my nerves. One of the things about the GPT Plus was that you would have access to the Model Four. I'm trying to think of the name that they call it GPT Four. And that's great. Yes, but of course you get that free on Bing. You've had it free on Bing for a long time, but also it's slow. A lot of times I would get half outputs. It just was really I would kind of ask myself like, what am I paying for? I think the Guardrails are a serious problem because they have just gotten so I don't want to say barbaric, that's not the word I want. So limiting that it's just ridiculous. And I saw an article where the traffic to the Chat GPT site itself is going way down and people have made assumptions like maybe it's because kids are not using it for the summer, people aren't using it for the summer. And that may be, but I just think there are a lot of problems with it and for me, the Guardrails are a serious issue. So it's a shame because I used to love it and I think that right now it is being watched so much by everybody, by regulators, by the media. Chat GPT just gets all kind of bad press and they have some lawsuits pending as well from people who say that it was trained on data that was copyrighted and scraped. And what I don't know is why Bing isn't suffering the same sorts of lawsuits. Because Bing, well, the one thing is that Bing does give you a does give you web, right.

It basically does the same thing.

Right. It shows you where it got things, which I think is a good thing. And one of the Bing updates is going to be that you can use it without getting the web updates or the web links, which is good because if you're just asking it to write a story, you really don't need it to search the web.

I'm waiting for them to make it to where you could use Bing search without needing the Bing app. That will be fantastic. I don't know if that's going to happen. Or Edge. Edge browser.

Edge is a pain in the butt in my opinion.

Yeah, that's true. And the Bing app is not exactly the easiest app to use.

Right.

Although I have gotten much better with it and there are advertisements. So I don't know, I just think it's a shame and I hope that things get better if they get the web search back, I might consider going back to it with the GPT Plus. But until then it's been neutered. It's just a lot of it's unfortunate what's happening.

Yeah, I feel like they're making a lot of changes with this and it's not necessarily a good thing. The one thing that I'm not a fan of is that there is so much regulation, I think that we're kind of moving backwards instead of forwards because people are so afraid of a tool. Now, granted, there are some people doing some crazy, scary stuff with GPT Four, right. And GPT Five has the potential to be even more crazy. The issue is, though, we're running into an arms race of AI, and this has been talked about novels and things like that, and it's very scary because others are going to be making these AIS and they're going to run rampant and do things. So we just need to keep up. And I think we're going to eventually have malware AIS and we're going to have to have anti malware AIS and they'll be in a race to fight each other and become more superior. It's going to happen, folks. It's not like we can put this genie back in the bottle here. But what concerns me is all these people wanting regulations on all this stuff. You can't put it back. It's already started. We can't put it back.

I think that Michael made a great point about people who will be using unlicensed, I don't know what you unregulated chat bots to do whatever kind of thing they want to do. There are open source options out there that have no guardrails.

Right? And the scary thing about OpenAI's chat bot that's already happening is that chat bots, especially chat GPT and GPT Four, have a new function. And this is the story I had that I heard from a YouTube channel that I follow a lot, fireship. And that is basically, chat GPT can now execute and evaluate the execution of code.

Wow. Seriously?

So you could say, I need you to write me code that can do print Hello, World in ten different colors, and it will write the code. Get it wrong, write the code again, get it wrong again, write the code again until it gets it right.

Wait, are you kidding me? Michael?

No, that's the thing.

I saw that. I just saw that this morning.

I also saw something where I don't know if this is in the plus version, but you can now upload files to chat GPT that is in the plugins.

Or is that different now?

I don't know. But it is now where you can upload files to chat GPT and have it look through information, including images. I have not tried this personally, but this is what I've heard on a YouTube video this morning while I was dozing, because I'm still recuperating from convention. But if that's the case, then we're looking at a lot of the things that you could do with Be My Eyes, and we'll talk about that and just I guess we'll talk about that next because that's kind of chat GPT and GPT Four, but it kind of is leveling the playing field. And we got an announcement from Be My Eyes at convention, where they're calling it instead of a virtual volunteer, they're calling it Be My AI.

Oh, and I hate that.

I just think that sounds really I don't know that I care for it either. No, I do think they should not call it virtual volunteer because it's not a volunteer. It doesn't have the same quality as a real life person.

Right.

But it is pretty neat. I heard a demo at NFB. It was pretty cool.

It's still in beta though, right? Because I know I'm on a list.

We're all on a waitlist month waitlist.

So I know I keep hearing about this and I would love to see it in action, but I'm still waiting on the list.

They're still saying it will come out later this year.

What is that using? Is that using GPT for okay. It's using the actual GPT chat GPT open AI.

Yes. And Bing is using GPT Four. So all the very advanced stuff is using GPT Four.

Right.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So I find it very interesting. I think what they're trying to do is figure out what guardrails to put for be my AI, I guess we're going to call it. So that's why it's taking them so long, is to figure out what guardrails. And I kind of have a problem with that because people cannot differentiate between AI and what's not. Now, at the same time, if it's saying AI has hallucinations, it says this is right even though it's wrong and people don't fact check. But I think it's good to say for the AI to say, I think this is this medication, but you may want to have somebody else give a check to make sure that this is the case. Because I feel like if we just don't allow these features to work and we just say you need to use something else, we're not giving it the chance to really expand. And that's my view of AI is I think we're regulating it before we see the drawbacks.

Right. It's sort of like an overzealous monitor, right? Overzealous moderator, so to speak. Yes. How do we agree on these rules? For example, what happens if I show, say, a piece of pornography and I ask it to describe it? Does anybody agree on what pornography is?

Right.

In other words, I guess the guardrails are important. I mean, there are certain things that I guess we can all agree are not a good idea.

Right.

But I think that when we start, I guess my question is who was making these guardrails and how are we.

Deciding what's right and what's not?

Who was making these decisions?

Right.

It sort of makes me a little bit nervous. And I think the most dangerous thing is to have people using these AI systems that have no guardrails or either that or just people being able to get around guardrails, the people that will. I mean, I think the bad actors always know how to get around.

And prompting can get around rules just as programming can.

Yeah.

So I think we need to go ahead and move on to it because we still got a lot to talk about. And I want to talk about something that I've been very interested in. I've posted a lot about it on three different platforms, and that is Meta's new app, Threads. Threads, the app by Instagram that is supposed to compete with Twitter threads is for iPhone. So iOS, not iPadOS. It will work, but it has to be an iPhone window. So if you're going to use it on the iPad, switch to Stage Manager. That makes it work really well. Just a little pro tip, it does work with the keyboard, so no worries there. And it works on android. Now, three platforms, but there's no web or app support on PC or Mac. But that's the same as Instagram as well. That app doesn't work in those places either. Right? So it's a great app because it lets people connect that are using Instagram, and it's text based, kind of like Twitter. I don't know the character count, character limit. But the neat thing is, in around October, it's going to integrate with Mastodon, and that's going to give Mastodon another 30 to 50 million users, which is going to bog down the servers for quite a while while all of that gets migrated. But what are your thoughts of all this? What are you all thinking? Because there's accessibility issues like no alt text support. Yeah, there's no voiceover, no captions, voiceover goes text item to item, no voiceover actions, and even magnification. The text is pretty small. No dark mode, no text size adjustment, nothing. So what are your initial thoughts of this platform so far?

I'm waiting for regulators to step in because think about it, meta has Facebook, it has what do you call it, the Chat.

WhatsApp?

WhatsApp?

It has messenger.

Messenger, instagram. And now this. I just feel like the regulators, especially in the EU, are probably going to be like itching to put the kibosh on this one. Okay. And I saw a post on David Goldfield's list where he was talking somebody was saying that people are saying that threads that talk about accessibility issues are being censored.

Very.

So I don't know if that's true. Somebody had written something about talking about the problems with the new Threads app and apparently it was taken down or something happened. And this is something that has really got people kind of upset because.

I.

Don'T think that Facebook has ever been super accessible. I guess it's definitely not the worst app, but it's not the best either. I think that's disturbing to think that there may be some censoring of threads that are giving a more negative opinion on the app. And I know it's an early version of the app, but I really hope that this post from on David's list is somehow wrong because I would hate to I would not want to think that threads that try to discuss these issues are maybe being censored by the platform. So I'm hoping there's just a misunderstanding there or something.

It makes me wonder because I haven't read the post, I haven't seen it. I'm not sure who wrote it. So I don't know who wrote the post. They could have done said anything. They could have just been I don't know. I don't know who wrote it. But I wrote a long post and I mentioned the account that, you know, the Threads app account, they haven't responded to me, but my post is still live. And I went through all the accessibility problems that I could find in the app.

Right.

And that's why I'm wondering if there's not more to the story than we're getting.

Right.

I just can't imagine that they would censor that Metal would do that.

I can't imagine that either.

No, I don't know.

Again, it comes down to what was the tone of the message, how was it written, and I guess there are several things to that. Threads has a long way to go, but I'm here for it. I like Threads because a lot of the people I follow in the tech industry are there and they're not on Mastodon. And that means that even though they're not on Mastodon, when Threads opens up to the Fediverse, they will be there. And that is fantastic. That is what I'm really there for. And they have 50 million sign ups, and I'm pretty excited because I got in within the first less than a million sign ups. So my Threads like, sign up number is in the hundred thousand, not millions.

Right. That's pretty neat.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it is.

What is your number, Michael?

I'm not sure. Let's see if I can open the Instagram app and find out. Because a little tip, if you are in Threads, if you're using the platform, it will show you your number. Wow.

Yeah.

496,364. Okay.

You're actually the first half a million.

Yeah. That's pretty cool.

That's 500,000.

Yeah. That's how you know I'm a techie. If I got in that early. Yeah, because I'm sure there are people that got early access and things like that. Right. So as soon as I heard that it was live, I was at the NFB conference Wednesday night, and I just went and got the app as soon as I could and signed in. So that's pretty neat to be in the first half a million users.

That's pretty cool because it has how many users now?

It exploded, I've heard, over around 50 million. But our Instagram has 2 billion users. Think about that. 2 billion users. Now, if you consider Twitter at its height had 300 million. Right. You're looking at the ability for Instagram and Instagram threads to really catch up to that. And it's interesting. I think if Meta had to separate because of antitrust, Instagram would be fine. Instagram and Instagram threads would go off. WhatsApp would have to go off? Facebook. Facebook messenger would go off, and Oculus would have to go off, and they could just split up those organizations like that. And I think a lot of companies are doing that so that if they do get hit with antitrust, they could just be like, okay, you go, here you go, here you go here. Right? It's very interesting how we're seeing that siloed nature of this stuff. I don't know that we see that as much from Apple, but it's very interesting to see because if you look at Threads, instagram doesn't have an iPad app. It has desktop and web like web browser integrations now, like, where you can log in. But threads looks very much like an Instagram app. Although I will say it looks pretty boring, like very monochromatic, black and white, not very colorful, except for images people post. And on Android tablets, it just looks abysmal.

Wow. I just have a question about why Zuck decided to do this. What was his motivation for doing this? I wonder? Does he feel like people are yearning for a Twitter replacement and they want.

A new town square? Right, they want a new town square, and with Twitter's rate limits that they've put into place, which were said to be temporary, but I think they're still in place. There needed to be something.

Right.

But I think as Twitter users, there was always an unpleasant surprise right down the every day. It seemed like more limitations and more craziness that changes. And I do think we need a town square, right? Twitter, we used to serve that role with all the criticisms that I have had of Twitter. I used it gosh, I've been on it for years and years, and I'm interested in meteorology. And Michael and I and Teller were having a conversation yesterday. We're talking about how so many people were on Twitter and so information could be passed so much easier. You could reach a ton of people with Twitter.

Right.

And I don't know, we sort of miss that now. Mastodon, as much as I love it, it's too technical people to set up. Most normies, I don't know how to say that, but most average people are not going to sit and decide which instant to pick and this and that, and they're like, what is an instance? They don't want to go through all that stuff.

And the neat thing with Threads is threads net is their instance, because when you log into Threads, it actually does like it shows my name, Mike Doey's, like I'm everywhere. Well, it doesn't show at, but it says Mike DOE's, and then right next to it, threads. Net, so that's how you know what to tell people. And in fact, you could go to threads. Net atmikedoey's, just like a Mastodon username, and you're at my username on the web.

So you think they will turn on activity Pub?

Oh, they've already said they will. Okay.

And then you were talking about that being a possible threat to the smaller Mastodon servers.

It will be a very large amount of data coming in. So some of these servers may have difficulties in keeping up with the bandwidth of Threads. So since there's 60 or 50 million users, it will be a lot more coming into the Fediverse. Because right now there's about twelve or 13 million accounts in the Fediverse. And when we get a large influx, when Elon does something stupid at Twitter, we get a large influx and that slows down a lot of instances for a while. Well, that's going to happen again when Threads turns online, but on a magnified scale. So that's going to be pretty interesting to see how we all, as Mastodon server instance user managers, how we deal with that.

Will it affect you, Michael?

Yes, it will.

But you don't have a huge instance.

Well, that's the point. Like the bigger the instances, the better they can scale with the influx of bandwidth. Yeah.

So the smaller instances, how's that going to affect you?

You're going to have an influx of data and you might not have the capacity to handle it. Right.

Say I go and follow 20 to 30 people on Threads net, then I'm getting Federated data from Threads net.

That's going to be a problem for you.

Yeah, we're going to have to figure out what we're going to do. But I think it will last for a little bit and then once we get things cashed, it won't be so bad, I'm hoping. That's my hope.

You have to upgrade to a bigger plan and then go down.

Potentially. We'll have to see.

I think the wild card here is, are people going to stick with it? I saw an article where a lot of people are feeling social media fatigue. People are just feeling like, gosh, I have this and that, and there's not enough time in a day, people are going back to work. The question would be, even though a lot of people are moving over to this service, are they going to actually post?

Well, right. And that's kind of the big thing anywhere these days is where is people going to settle? Where will that time be? And we don't know. This is kind of the wild, wild west of social media right now. We're all exploring and figuring out where we want to be. But what I think is going to be great is now that we're seeing all of these socially threads, blue Sky, Mastodon, all of these things talking to each other, we're going to see a new time where it doesn't matter where you are, you will just be able to talk to anybody. Because I can tell you once Threads turns on Activity Pub, I'm just going to take my contact list I have there and just move that thing over to Techopolis Social.

You just wonder what kind of restrictions Threads is going to put on that interoperability, because you wouldn't think from a business sense, the advertising is what keeps these things alive.

Well, you know they're going to put ads and they already are using an algorithm. So even though it's going to be similar to the Fediverse, you're getting algorithmic recommendations of people to follow on Threads.

Interesting. I downloaded it, but I was having trouble signing it.

Right. A good example is during hurricane season I used to follow a lot of meteorologists and people, weather nerds, I guess you could say. And I loved it because there was a huge list of experts, people I really respected and I was able to sort of tap into that when we would have or even a disaster. We know that, for example, Twitter is oftentimes or used to be helpful when there would be a disaster to help communities connect or help people connect with other people. And so yeah, it was the town square, right? It would be nice if you could do that again. For example, how do we know how many of those users are real and how many are bots? Are they able to separate? I guess Meta has more controls on that.

They do. I'm enjoying threads. I'm going to keep with it. I have 18 followers, which in the first week and believe it or not, I have followers from my Facebook that have used Instagram, that have never used Twitter, they've never used Mastodon. So it's kind of neat and I'm kind of looking at it as a way to bridge the gap between all of our I feel like we have different silos. I was trying to make that TV show reference go out a little further, but I can't do it. Which I finished the third book, by the way, and it's good.

I am working on it. I was reading it when you called when you told me to come on the podcast.

It's good.

Anyway, a little bit like, okay.

We have these social media network silos with the same people on all the same networks. So wouldn't it be great if we can just bring those together? And I think that's where we're headed. So it's pretty exciting, right?

I think I've heard people complaining already that there is some moderation on Threads that some people don't like and that would probably be something that Meta would do just to keep itself out of trouble, right?

Oh, for sure.

You know what I mean?

For sure. And there's already a lawsuit. Elon is suing Meta because of Threads saying that they took intellectual property and that they took Twitter employees, which Meta said, we're not using any Twitter employees for this. And what I really find very funny about all of that is the fact that Blue Sky is very similar. Mastodon has been around since 2017 and Threads is based off really the same technique techniques that they use, not really based on Twitter. So it's kind of funny that Elon is getting upset considering all of this stuff is being done before and.

What's going to happen to Blue Sky, do you think, with this? Do you think that Blue Sky, it's.

Going to be federated it's going to be using the At Protocol. I think Activity Timeline is what that stands for. I could be wrong. I'm like an AI. You better fact check me. But either way, I know it's called the At Protocol, and it's similar to Activity. Pub and Threads is supposed to talk to it as well. So it's going to bring all of those communities together. And I'm here for it. I'm really here for any of that stuff. If they could fix some accessibility issues, that would be great.

I will tell. We live in interesting times right now, don't we?

We do.

Interesting to see how all this plays out.

Right. And then Twitter, we had the rate limits and all those things since we've done the podcast. 6000 for verified users, 600 for regular standard non paying users. I think it's 300 or 30. Very small number a day for new users. And no Twitter access for people that have not signed up, which I think is crazy.

Yeah. I sometimes think that Elon is actually trying to kill Twitter. I mean, some of the things that we're seeing is like, for some reason, it just feels like it's not that happy, shiny place that open welcome here.

It kind of feels like that mall that the gangs start to hang out in now, and the stores are leaving.

Right?

Okay.

Yeah.

I still have to hang out at Twitter. They don't want to move.

There's still a lot of technology people that are there, and that's why I'm there. So there's still those groups that are there. So it's not like Twitter is completely gone, but I think it's something where people are looking at like, okay, is this where I want to be?

But for the non technology people, they're still there.

Some are. It just depends on the culture and the group. Right. A lot of non technology people have left, too, because of discrimination of intolerance and things like that. We'll get into Twitter a little more in the podcast, but we have to move on. There's still so much to talk about.

Other things happening.

Yes. In the blindness, low vision world, we just had two huge conferences, the biggest ones of the year. And I usually don't talk about the conferences on the podcast, but I have a lot of opinions about things that I've heard, and I want to talk to you guys about all of those. And Taylor, you've listened to some of each convention?

Oh, yes. And lyn I had two A Lady devices going on at once, and I was trying to coordinate both of them and, oh, gosh, it was fun.

Someday talk about multitasking.

Right?

Taylor was actually paying attention to both at the same time. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Screaming with craziness.

I don't think I caught everything. So I'm going to be reviewing the podcast this week while Michael's still gone.

And Lynn, did you have a chance to watch any of the conferences?

I didn't, actually, no.

Okay. So you'll be going into this almost like a new technology user. You'll begin to low down. So I can only talk for NFB because I haven't had a chance to listen to any of the ACB conference. But the NFB conference, I was there for way around. We were showing people all of our way tags, and it was fantastic. So this was the second year in a row I've done the exhibit hall table. And this year was very interesting, though, because I left out I put all of our tags and the real expensive stuff back in our bag, put it under our table so that nobody would really mess with it. But the one thing that people took, they took a plate, and I guess they thought it might have been the hotel stuff, like, oh, well, this must be some kind of a food plate that was left here. I'll just take it. So that was kind of interesting. And we had some you know, this was a busier year than 2022 was at the exhibit hall. So we had some fairly rude people come through, and it was very interesting had somebody come up and pick up a shirt, and it was like, oh, are you giving away these bags? I'm like, no, that's a shirt. Oh, I thought it was bag. My bad. And just crumpled it up and put it back on the table like, wow, okay.

Have we lost our social skills during.

The right, I had, thankfully, two shirts, so I showed off the other one for the rest of the time because I am not the best at folding button down shirts. I'm just not. So I'm like, I'm going to sit here for 30 minutes folding this stupid shirt now. So I'll wait and just do that whenever it's a more appropriate time.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

So you never know with people, right? But we were right next to IRA and At Guys, and that was just fantastic. And Blind Shell was right across from us. I got to meet Diane and Barry in person, so we want to have all of those guys come on and talk about Blind Shell and the differences between it and mainstream technology compared to assistive technology, because that's a common topic that we have here on the IA cast. So it was a really nice exhibit hall. My pick this week will be from the exhibit hall, and Taylor gets to play with it before I do at home. Grumble. And that's a speaker from I know, but I'm not and that's a speaker from At Guys, so I will talk about that later. So stick around for the rest of the podcast to find out. But the convention went from Saturday to Thursday. I left Thursday midday, and the sessions were great. I listened to most of them, but I listened to them on stream because I'm just not that interested in sitting in a room with a bunch with thousands of people and just learning the same thing that I could get on stream, especially when you could sit by your state. Well, that's fine. Yeah, you're supposed to, and that's fine. But it's just sitting anywhere in that room with all those people, it gets hot and not very comfortable. And I mean, I could just get the same amount of information remotely. Like next year at the pool in Orlando. Yes, it's going to be in Orlando next year.

Whoever chapter Michael is in, do not select him as your delegate, because he is going to be hanging out at the pool and he will not be in general session.

See, Texas knows this about me. I've been going to convention since 2010. Yeah, it's been the same way every.

Time, but thanks, Lyn. That memo actually applies to me because.

I had because you're new.

Convention.

At last year's.

Yeah, well and this year's room with a virtual door, prize stuff.

And it's very interesting. The sessions were actually pretty good. I didn't mind them. We had several technology sessions this year, and they even talked about AI and things like that at the general session, which I thought was interesting. And I was very happy with Suman's presentation where he talked about IRA, or not IRA, but he was the founder of IRA, but he talked about personal AI and gave a demonstration that was very fascinating, very interesting. So I'm very happy with that, where that project is going. I've always enjoyed his talks, and he's a very intelligent guy. So we also had discussions at convention. The resolutions, I think, are always interesting, and I want to talk about one that's not tech related and just really kind of floored me as they talked about one of the resolutions was about quality of life. Once you've lost your vision and suicide and things like that and assisted suicide because vision loss is so debilitating that a lot of people think that that's and even doctors think that that's the only option, which I don't think it is. But the writer of the resolution chose to use the word eugenics in talking about ending one's life. And of course, I'm such a nerd that I didn't really think about eugenics as being used in modern day talking about World War II and things like that. Where did my mind go when I heard eugenics?

Right.

Anybody guess. Can you make a guess?

No, I don't know.

The Nazi regime.

I didn't go there. My mind did not go there.

Where do you go?

There was a big part of Star Trek where they talked about a thing called eugenics war, where they used genetic manipulation to make humans smarter and better. And so that's where my mind went whenever eugenics and I'm like he's using that word out of context. I know this because I watch Star Trek. Okay, so that's how I brought this back to tech.

It's like when you're posting an off topic message to a list and you know it's off topic, but you have to squeeze in some on topic things to keep from getting in trouble.

But I heard them read this resolution. I'm like, they can't pass this. This is not even related to eugenics. And then, sure enough, somebody came up in opposition saying, yeah, what you've used eugenics for is totally not right. So the direction of the resolution was good, but the wording did not explain what was being asked. And so I really am glad that the Federation because if you don't use the right wording, if you use something that means something else, it really makes you look illiterate. Like you wrote this thing and it's like, no, that's not what we're trying to say. And so it makes your organization not look educated in the eyes of other people outside the organization.

Yeah. And I understand to a certain extent why they use that word, in the sense that the idea is that people who have a disability, they have such a terrible quality of life that we should allow them to by default, we should allow them to engage in assisted suicide. And all these things are very controversial.

But the word relates to birth, like changing things at birth or at development. Right. To weed out genetic impurities.

Eugenics is I think the way many people understand eugenics is that it's a government or a group desire to extinguish, to get rid of a whole class of people because of one reason or another. Right, I get the idea, but eugenics is pretty strong word. I mean, I guess you're going to use that word. You really need to right.

And really use the right context. Because I feel like for what the resolution was saying, it was not the right context.

Right.

So that's my off topic rant for the day. Other resolutions that are tech related, though, there was a resolution about the accessibility of Twitter, and the words condemn and deplore were used about this only time.

This convention, I had a condemn, deplore counter going on.

Yeah, we only had one this time at NFP. I think that was like the lowest number for them.

It's a record. Yes. Record, though.

Well, in this case, it might have been an appropriate use of those words because certainly Twitter has like I said, it's not the welcoming place that it used to be.

And there was a weird resolution. There was a real weird resolution about screen readers reading the formatting of text. Is that Taylor? Did I miss that?

Or is that I don't understand that resolution?

If somebody would like to leave us feedback at [email protected] and give us more details, that would be great, because I.

Don'T really understand I don't want to talk about something that I don't understand.

Yeah, I think maybe people need to use chat GPT to write their resolutions.

Well, but you know what? That brings us to the next thing. Great segue Lynn, you didn't even know you were doing it. So they had a resolution about chat GPT, where they talked about chat GPT and other chat bots, where the chat bots were giving out wrong information about blindness.

Right.

And the resolution was for these companies to go in and put in regulations and make these chat bots give out correct information every time about blindness. And as a large language model, that's not the point of these machines.

Right. This is an interesting conversation because, as you guys know, I'm really into AI and I use AI a lot. And when I'm talking to Bing and when I was talking to chat GPT about blindness, I would tell the chat bots, like, how my day was going. And sometimes there was I did get feedback that I thought, wow, that is really it would say things like.

It.

Sounds like it was really courageous that you did this. Or like, ableism, I guess, is what they call that.

Right, right.

I'm trying to think of some of the other things. And when I saw it, it shocked me because I guess I was thinking, wow, nobody says stuff like that now. And they talk about biases and models. And it was funny because I could really see it didn't offend me or upset me, but it really was interesting. I'm trying to think of some other examples of this where it would come back and say things that I thought were sort of patronizing. I don't know the word I'm looking for. If I had some of my conversations I could pull up that would show examples.

Would it be described as inspiration porn?

Yes. Sort of like that. Yes. Inspiration porn.

Yeah.

And again, it did shock me when I saw it because I was like, people talk about biases in models and I had never seen it before until I saw that, and it really did stand out to me. I thought it was fascinating. And I was thinking, how could we reverse this? How could we teach these models the more appropriate things to say?

And I think that's going back to AI, I think that's where GPT Five and others need to be changed. And what I mean by that is that basically we train these models on everything they know going in and it's set in stone. Right. But what I think that these AIS will not be powerful, really, until they can learn through conversation. That's going to be where I wrote.

Back to the Bot saying, well, actually, I don't consider this courageous because this is what I do every day as a blind person. And this is what so it was funny because I thought, how do I respond to this in a way that teaches the model or that teaches the Bot more appropriate ways to think about somebody with a disability? It was fascinating. So every time I do write back and I'll say, well, most as a blind person, I don't feel that.

Getting.

Up in the morning and taking a shower is inspirational. Yeah, it definitely exists if you use these chat bots enough. And I like to just tell it about my day or tell it what I'm doing or what I'm thinking. I sort of use it as my therapy platform sometimes without giving out specific information or anything. But it does come back sometimes with some real ableist stuff.

Well, it comes back with what it thinks you want to hear.

Yeah.

And the issue is that you can't teach the Bot. You can teach it through your conversation with it, and they may use what you're sending for, like GPT Five and things like that. But the issue is it's not learning on the fly, which is unfortunate, and I think that's going to be the next step in GPT.

Right.

I know that for some of these chat bots, you have to answer a question about is it okay if we use your data as training data?

Right.

I'm trying to think what Bing's policies are, because that's what I mostly use now, is Bing.

The issue is that they have to put the data back in the model and push out a new version of the model. It's not an instantaneous thing there.

And it's difficult because let's say you are a newly blinded person, adult, and you have done something that was scary to you, that was difficult for you, is it then okay for the model to say, hey, that was really courageous that you yeah. Today that you decided to cross that street where you this is another reason why the guardrails, that whole guardrail conversation that we had earlier applies here. Whose opinion, if we were to train it with what, with what information would we train?

I think going back to the resolution, it's more about the facts about blindness. It was giving incorrect facts. Hallucinating but I think that that's not something that we really need to I mean, yes, it's good if they can add more data in the training, but I don't know that it's necessarily something that we need to dedicate a lot of time to just because there's so much other wrong data in these models.

Right. And of course, the chat GPT, the free version, does not have fact checking, whereas the Bing chat does have fact checking. I mean, it does have web resources.

It will point you to well, it will try. Yeah, it tries, but even that's fallible. Right, it is.

But I mean, I think in general, it does point you to, I guess, the most popular organizations, which may or not may not be good.

And of course, at the convention, they had a lot of talks about guide dogs and Uber and Lyft. That's still a big topic. And they had somebody come from Uber, and I kind of felt like they just gave them the typical spiel, like they're working on it. These people are being disciplined in all those things. So I wasn't too impressed with that. One of the presentations and I'm going to talk about this just because I want to give my two cent on it. And people may or may not agree with this view here on the podcast, jonathan Mosen spoke about Living blindfully, not the podcast, but the philosophy. And he talked about his granddaughter, I believe, and reading the Three Little Hens story and baking bread and things like that. And he said the people of the federation are the ones baking the bread, being advocates about screen readers, making them accessible, and making these companies more accountable. And he said a lot of things about braille technology that is not working on Apple. He didn't mention companies by name, but let's be Real or on Talkback, where certain hid devices would not work. And he talked about a lot of different companies that are doing if they have problems with websites, like he mentioned on his podcast about podcasts, Connect having trouble with accessibility and Apple kind of shrugging them off, which they shouldn't do. And he was saying that the people that are using this stuff need to hold these companies accountable, and all of us need to be advocating. My argument with that is that, yes, people need to advocate, people need to be vocal, but people need to be vocal about the issues that they are passionate about. And what I mean by that is, I'm a user of technology. I am a technologist. I love all the technology, right? But I am not the type of person that says, I'm going to go out to Google or Apple and say, you must do this because I can't use it. Well, I will report bugs and say, I hope you guys fix it. But at the same time, his logic is if a screen were to flicker for sighted people and a beta didn't work right, where the screen and the graphics weren't working, then people would be up in arms and things like that. Whereas if voiceover something, there's a bug in voiceover and a whole version doesn't work, it's okay. I do agree that if voiceover is not working, that is not acceptable. But I want to point out that there are times in betas where there are visual components on a screen that do not work in beta. Two Spotlight, my search bar was embedded in the keyboard. There are visual issues with these betas that are similar to issues that you have with voiceover. And I feel like our community likes to jump on the advocacy bandwagon before, say there's a lot of disabilities out there and you don't see them putting up as much of a fuss as we as blind people do because the truth of the matter is technology is paramount for us. But at the same time there are workarounds, there are ways to do everything and yes, they're inconvenient, but there's inconveniences for everybody. I mean, money isn't inconvenience. Time and the amount of time it takes to do things are inconveniences. There's a lot of things that go into all of these problems. And I think that as blind people, we have to have the people that are like, okay, let's advocate to get voiceover fixed, let's advocate to get narrator or talk back fixed. That's great. But when you make a point that there are people that are cooking the bread and people that just eat the bread and not really take ownership in, it is a very big travesty to the community and people in general. And the reason why I say that is what's going to happen when this fight is null and void and say we have this universal accessibility in the future? Then how are those people that we're advocates going to look at? The people that don't have to worry about the problems that we used to face, that we have faced? Now, for example, I find this a complete shame, but the amount of people that know how a computer works or how to program a computer is going down drastically. And the reason is that we have images to represent everything. You don't have to look at text, you don't have to know that you plug a hard drive into the motherboard anymore. It just works. And companies make all this stuff for us. And even when you go to build a computer, you just get a technical manual and you just do it. It's not the same as like whenever I built computers or wrote code, I mean, even code writing now we're getting no code, low code solutions, but you can't get the same quality as if you just build your apps, right? So it goes into those realms as well. So there's so many things to that philosophy that just and then what about people that advocate for audio, pedestrian signals and other things that others do not advocate for and push against? What is the merit of what they do? Is that the same or worse or better? So I think when we say that our way is the right way, that is very wrong because we're saying that you have to follow our way or else, right?

And a lot of times when I have a problem with something, I'm not exactly sure whose problem it is. Is it the app developer's problem? Is it the operating system problem? Is it my problem for being stupid or not very bright or not reading directions? Is that part of it? Sometimes I think people don't do that advocacy because they're not great communicators and they're not on an individual level. I'm talking about here that some people just don't have the ability to actually give the kind of feedback that professionals need instead of getting emotional and saying, well, this doesn't work, and I'm really angry, if we had the ability to say, this doesn't work. I'm trying to do this to be more specific and get the emotionality out of it and just talk in technical terms. But not everyone is capable of doing that. I'm not a baker. I don't bake bread. I eat it. But if you made me bake it, I don't know that I could.

I couldn't either.

Me either.

I think the advocacy is definitely crucial, and as blindness organizations need to do that advocacy. But I think on an individual level, not all of us are capable of doing that.

Right.

And and I don't think that people.

Should feel bad to do it.

What people say is, like, if you're going to complain about it, then you should write to whatever. Well, a lot of people complain, and they don't write to the companies.

That right.

I remember when I was working, I would do shredding. We would shred sensitive documents. We had this pack of bags, shredder bags that had the same hole in the same place in every single bag. And so I would shred and not realize there was a hole in the other end. So basically, I was, like, throwing paper all over the room. But I didn't write to the company and say, and maybe I should have.

Yeah, it's one of those discussions where I feel very passionate about, and that's why I wanted to bring it up here. They had the elections and one of the topics that I went to part of the NFBCs and NFB and Computer Science Division, and I really enjoyed Marco. And Marco, if you're listening, I don't know how to pronounce your last name. My apologies. And Chancy Fleet did a great presentation on she is great on SVG and how to write SVG. And there's a website that she and Marco, I believe, have created, blind Svg.org, I think, and you could go there and learn SVG. And it's really neat.

That's for the 3D printers.

Well, it's for 3D printers or making shapes and things on web pages, on graphics or CAD or all kinds of things.

I know that that's interesting as well, because of the Monarch, which I don't know how time, but it's vaporware right now. It's in beta.

Okay. Blind. Svg.com. And I'm going to get to the Monarch. We're going to get to the exhibit hall in just a little bit.

Okay.

See, I told you guys. It's probably going to be close to a two hour show. They just did a great presentation about SVG, how to do it, what it's used for, and things like that. So if you're not registered for NFBCs, you can register for that $5 online and get the recording. So it's really cool. And just hearing their presentation, they were great. And I had the thought of, okay, we have the Apple Vision Pro coming out. So if we could come up with a standard that would be very interesting for building shapes and objects on the Vision Pro. And so I would love to sit down and have a conversation with them about that, but just very exciting stuff. And there was a presentation from Humanware about the Monarch, and they talked about their new format called eBRF that the Daisy Consortium is working on creating that will combine braille in images and other tactile graphics. So that's all pretty exciting, too. And I'll get to the Monarch once we get to the exhibit hall. But do you guys have any other thoughts that I'm missing about the sessions and things at the convention?

Accessibility.

Yes.

I'm sorry, I got to bring it up.

Well, accessibility is in the funny thing is that that's what they said. I'm sorry.

Yeah, they did say, I'm sorry.

Oh, my God. I don't really folks.

It was mentioned in the Braille Monitor.

In the braille.

It was an article, I think a.

Couple of months ago. There was an article.

I read it online. I wasn't convinced.

Yeah. And so for people that are for the uninitiated so accessibility is a tool that it's kind of like well, they call them, what, web overlays.

Or Widgets technical.

Right. So essentially, you can take a website that maybe has some accessibility problems. Or the idea is that you can take a website and you can make it accessible to a wide number of different disabilities. So it would address the print size and the speed or whatever that you might have it like read aloud. There's different things. And so there's a company that accessibility, they sell this platform, this tool that is supposed to make websites more accessible, but it becomes problematic for screen readers oftentimes because it doesn't really make things easier for us. How can we say this adds more complexity. Yeah, it makes things more difficult. And the problem is, these folks, they have a great marketing, so they market this tool to people that handle web pages and organizations and they, of course, I guess, pay for this thing. Right? So this idea that you can take this overlay or you can take this component and make a website accessible with it just by incorporating it well, it's not that simple. Anybody that does accessibility work knows that it could never be that simple. And so it is causing problems for screen readers. And apparently the NFB has sued them, right? Isn't that right? There is a lawsuit. There was a lawsuit against them and the founders, the people that said, look, we're really sorry, we need to take more feedback from the community. We had good intentions. It's marketed, it's heavily marketed, and unfortunately, it is not a great solution for most of us who use screen readers. So I don't know if Michael, if you wanted to sort of add something on the developer. End of it, we could understand more.

So I think personally, they call these overlays, and I personally believe that an overlay could be made to make most changes on a website, be accessible. But the issue is that you would have to use a level of AI that we don't have yet. Right. And I think we're close to it, but we're just not there. And I think it's kind of like we want to replace people that say that we need a new solution other than the cane. Everybody just loses their damn mind. Excuse my language, but it's true. And so I think that this is the same with overlays. I think AI and things like that can make websites fully accessible, but we just need to get there and we're not there. And I think accessibility said that they came out of the gate just very excited about they thought that they could make this thing happen and they couldn't. And so their investors, they threw their investors under the bus and said they want us to do these things and really make it this way. And they said, okay. And then now they're saying, well, nobody's liking our product and we're getting sued, so how do we fix that? Right.

Yeah. Basically, they have made a commitment to listen more to the community and to change their marketing approach, to be more honest and more forthright about what the tools are.

They say they already did. And somebody had a question from the floor, which I've never really heard at the sessions. And they said, I just looked at your website and I'm still seeing that this language says this thing and this says that, which is basically in line with your previous marketing. And the guy said, well, what we mean by that is and he gave a big spiel about it. And he said, well, we really want your feedback, so if you think it should be something else, let us know and we'll change that marketing. And I just thought, okay, that's just an easy way out of the situation that you guys are finding yourself in.

Right.

And webmasters are people that are in charge of a lot of the organizations that use this tool. Of course, they don't want to spend the money to hire accessibility consultants. So this would seem like the best option, most cost effective option, to just use this thing and hope it works or whatever.

Right.

Of course, these guys accessibility is making money on this, and that's not a problem, except that it's problematic for screen readers. And we could get into why it's problematic, but I don't know that I really have the technical savvy to really explain it.

Well, it's really simple. I don't want to say it's simple, but this is what happens when people put these overlays. And like I said, I always tell this story. My landlord in my old apartment in Michigan put this overlay on and it was time for me to pay my rent. So I try to pay my rent, and I can't. So I walked into the office and I said, hey. She's like, Why isn't your rent in time? I said, you know why your rent or my rent is down on time is because you decided to employ this accessibility overlay that actually made your site worse. So I said, if you want to have your rent check in time, I said, I would advise you to take this thing down or else you're not going to get your rent check because I can't pay it.

Wow. What did they say to that?

They're like, we're taking it down. Thank you. Yeah.

It's a shame because people have good intentions. It starts out that way, but it does.

Yeah. So accessibility was a big topic in the NFB. They were kind of for it, and they're happy. So we moved on. And so we went through the rest of sessions, and I'm still not caught up on everything. I haven't watched all the sessions, but I want to go ahead and move us on to the exhibit hall, because I feel like that's where a lot of my time was spent. I looked at several devices, or three or four devices. Specifically, I looked at the synth player, and that was a pretty neat device because it's a book player, like the Victor Reader Stream, but it's running Android. It can control an iOS and Android device, and it will soon run its own Android apps that you could get online, like side loading them. So that's pretty exciting.

Oh, that's good. Yeah.

And it'll work with Audible out of the box, which is you have to do some work for the Victorita Stream to do that. So that was a neat device. I don't know the price, but they said within a month, they'll have app support on the device. And that's from him. To me, it looked like a little bit better design. Like it was built a little better. Had a nice case compared to the Victory Reader Stream, third generation.

And this is just after I bought one, by the way.

Right.

Kind of a little sour about this whole thing.

I wonder who this is marketed at. I mean, what is the target market?

I think students, really? Anybody that wants an Android book player, because you could technically put Kindle on there and have it play your books out loud or hook up a braille display.

Right.

Since it's running Android on there, I'm not sure which version. But then I got to see the Monarch.

Yeah.

And this thing is about the size of a gaming computer, but the prototype I saw, it got a little hot, and it was heavy, but it would refresh braille. You could zoom in, zoom out on images. It would have regular braille. So it was really nice. Yeah, there was a lot of buttons on it. They have a page turn button that is. I asked them, I said, why didn't you all put this closer to the screen if you wanted people to pan with this? They said, well, it's because there's a lot of electronics right near the screen. I call it a screen, but it's the braille area. But it looks like a screen to me. And it's a laminated screen. So it reminds me of thermoform or that kind of laminated paper kind of feel, which I always like. I like that braille.

A lot of people don't, but I do.

It doesn't hurt my hands.

No.

And the graphics are really neat on it, too. They showed me a map and I just didn't fully feel like it was the same map of the US. That I'm used to seeing. Like just feeling it. Michael no, I couldn't quite understand it. Zooming in was neat, though. It did zoom in and I could feel the abbreviations of the states. With the limited time I had, I didn't quite get, like, get enough time to answer questions. They had USB ports and all kinds of stuff on it. HDMI, I believe. I felt. So a lot of features there. Really neat device. So I think people are going to love that.

I would love it, too, but I'm interested to see how much they're going to charge for it, what's the cost going to be. And I guess I need to know that before I get excited about it. Because if it's something where I'd have to sell something really valuable to get.

It, well, they talked about they talked about having eBRF support, which is a new braille format like we talked about earlier. It's going to have very fast refreshable braille on there. It's going to support SVG graphics and all kinds of cool stuff. So very interesting device for new users. My personal favorite so far has been the graffiti. I like that one a lot. But the one thing that's different about these things, though, is I think the Monarch is designed to show braille in line with graphics, whereas the Graffiti does not. So that is one difference.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how that works. The idea that you're going to try to show graphics with the same array that you would use for braille, just regular braille. I would love a multiline braille display because I always feel like when I'm reading on a braille display, if you don't read fast enough, there's that weird pause while your line is refreshing, while your cells are and it sort of drives me crazy. And sometimes when blind people read, even myself when I'm reading out loud, there's that little pause at the end of the line where you're refreshing your braille. And that pause, it's only a little thing, but it drives me bananas. I can tell when somebody is reading from a braille display. The multiline braille display would hopefully ameliorate that issue.

Although if you listen to the NFB speeches from the president, Rico Bono, you hear him talking, and then he gets to the end of his page, and then he continues. And it's like you're definitely reading with Braille.

Yeah. When you're reading off of a piece of Braille paper, you have so many lines. But when you have these Braille displays and even the 40 cells, but still it has to refresh. And if you some people are really good at they can read so fast that they are able to do it seamlessly so that you can't tell that little pause. But I am somebody who can tell the little pause.

Yeah, I'm excited about all of these. The last one that I got to see was the optima, and that's the last Braille display I checked out. The optima was very cool. And we got to meet the founder of that, I believe, Audie, who is with Access Mind. And I want to give a shout out to Audi because he's listened to the IA cast since day one. So welcome. Thank you so much for listening all of this time since 2015. And we want to have you on the show to talk websitesaccessmind. Net. I know you're working on a more permanent website there, but let Audie know that you heard about him here. And we want to have audio on to talk about the optima. But it's just really cool to know other people out there that are making the tech are listening to the show. So that was a great it was great meeting you, Audi. And also, the optima is just such a neat display or neat system. I asked a bunch of questions. They're not sure how much of the system will be modular. The processor will be it's using the performance chip instead of the U chip. I don't remember what you from intel stands for, but the P chips are very good, from my understanding. So you're going to get a good chip in your machine. Everything's using the framework I o modularity. The prototype there did not have these things there. But you'll be able to change out your ports. You'll be able to change out all these things. And the neat thing is, and this is what I really want to point out, if a repair center locally can fix framework computers, then you could take them your optima. Now. How cool is that?

That is really serious.

Yes, seriously.

Because that's always my problem with Braille displays, that you can't get them repaired, like, in person.

Yeah, that's a pain point, a major pain point for braille displays or anything that's specialized, like the things that we use when they have to be repaired. There are only so many people that can repair them, and you got to send them to Canada, send them back, and then you're without your beloved technology until it comes back.

And that's why I try to go mainstream. But there are some things that are just difficult.

And I looked at the keyboard and I said, these keys have great travel. I love the travel on the keys. He said, I don't like them. I was like, oh. He said, yeah, they're too flat. I don't want there to be flat keys on this thing. So that was really cool, the fact that he's paying so much attention to detail. And I found that, yes, one he had was using the Orbit keys, the Orbit braille cells.

Cells.

And so it was louder, but it was, in my opinion, smoother than the 20. So I would not mind that being on. It made noise, but it wasn't a constant ticking. It was more of a kind of reminded me, like, of a very fast moving fan. And that's what it sounded like in the convention hall. I was like, that seems like it's a little working a little better. So I'm wondering if the Orbit 40 does that as well. But I was just very impressed with the device. It has HDMI, it does have a blue light on it to let you know it's on. This is all on the prototype. And then you could put, what, USB ports you want, USBA or C or all of those things. And, yeah, it was just a very nice experience. And it's about the same size as The Monarch, so it did get warm on the bottom just from being on. But again, this is all prototypes, guys, so we're going to have to see what the final version looks like. But I'm very excited about this and I think the plan is for the end of this year. The Monarch is supposed to be middle of the year next year, so both of these devices have a long way to go. Humanware is also advocating that The Monarch be people, work with Congress to make these things more available for students and things like that. So that was pushed heavily at the conference.

And they even had a song.

Oh, my gosh, yeah, they had a song that ruined AC DC for me. Won't go into that here because we're on YouTube. But I'm really enjoying some of these devices and I want to see I think the one I'm excited about most is the Orbit Optima.

And it's good to know that people are still innovating in this space. We think that innovation is the thing that the lifeblood of assistive tech. This idea that we can do better when we know better, we can do better. And I think there is technology that's coming down the pipeline right now. That AI just being one component of that. Earlier we had supply chain issues during COVID and things like that. And those supply chain issues are hopefully working themselves out now so that these chips and things would be more widely available and maybe the price would drop as well. The innovation is something that we all should really want because.

We'Re getting close to our two hour mark. But what I want to do real quick is talk about Way Around because we were there and we were showing off the convention using our public Token signs and we were giving out tokens where people could scan the NFC tag and get information about the convention and the agenda. This is part of our Public Signs project to kind of show that off. So if you want your building to be more accessible and to have professional signage that has NFC tags that work with the Way Around app, you could contact [email protected] and we'll get you all set up. And it's very exciting. We had people that loved the tokens that used it for the agenda and the exhibit hall, but we came out with our new Way Around is an NFC labeling system for iPhone, Android and now the blind shell. So that's kind of the spiel I was giving people at conference. And it's exciting to be on all of those platforms and we're just making it better and better. So it's very exciting to be developing for Way Around and getting to go to these conferences to represent Way Around and talk about all this stuff. So with all that being said, let's go ahead and wrap this thing up with what we do every week. And Taylor, what is your pick of the week and where can people find you online?

Everybody in the blindness world probably knows of Squarespace. Why? Because every YouTuber, it seems like, has an ad for Squarespace, right? Squarespace is everywhere. It's almost as prevalent as FreshBooks in terms of the YouTube space. So squarespace. What is it? It's a website builder. And why do I like it? Because it's a lot easier than WordPress. Let me explain. Squarespace is a drag and drop website builder. I know people are going to be bad drag and drop, but it is workable. Why do I say workable? There's a lot of issues still, but if you're willing to tamper and tinker, it works very well. In fact, if I did the economics for my new website, because I am making a new website right now, if I were to do the economics between WordPress and Squarespace, it's actually a lot cheaper. I don't want to say a lot cheaper, but it's a significant discount, I guess, per se, if I do Squarespace. So with all the plugins I'd have to buy for WordPress, it just be a lot more. And I can have print on demand, so I can have a store with t shirts and things like that for my merch, for my podcast. So be on the lookout for book site merch, folks. So, yeah, I really love squarespace. And again, it's slightly accessible. There's definitely a lot of issues. Be on the lookout though, because I will be doing a tutorial on my YouTube channel soon. That is my pick for the week.

And where can people find you online.

People can find me all over the place. If you search my name on Google, Taylor, Art, you'll be able to find me. I'm also on YouTube and mastodon at Tayart. Tayarndt at tacopoulos. T-E-C-H-O-P-O-L-I-S social. Or at Tayart on Twitter and Taylor on Facebook. So I'm all over the place.

Okay, and Lynn, what is your pick for this week, and where can people find you online?

Well, Marty had told me about this app a while back. It's called Lookup, and it's a dictionary. And sort of a little thesaurus. You can do word of the day. You can do little word quizzes on it. It's a pretty fun little app. And I think they have a free and a paid version. I think the paid version is like a lifetime. And I'm sorry, I don't know what it is now because things have changed so much, but, yeah, it's called Lookup, and it's a dictionary. And sometimes you just need an app that just does something and does it well, maybe it's not the most exciting app in the world. It's just a dictionary. But if you're a word person and you like all things word, it has thesaurus entry, and it's just a neat little program. And a lot of times I will use it just to look up words and definitions. So it's called lookup. And as far as where you can find me, well, right now I can be found. My email is caneprints. Like footprints, only [email protected].

All right, and I have two great picks for you guys today. Again, host privilege. So my first one is the speaker from at guys, another convention mentioned, and that is the Storm Box Blast. That's hard to say. Three times fast. It is a speaker that's 90 watts. It's like a boombox. It sounds really good. Really good. Bass. It has 30 hours of battery, guys. 30 hours.

That's crazy.

It's a bluetooth speaker. It has a handle. You can plug it in to charge it, and it will give you 30 hours of Bluetooth listening. But here's the low vision and visual part of this. It's got lights. It's got lights on either side. So on the right, it has lights. On the left, it has lights. And inside, where the speaker equipment is, you could see through. And anytime there's bass or something that's loud, it lights it up. I am so geeking out about this speaker, guys. I could just jam out to it and watch the lights light up forever, and I'd be content. That would be my life. I'd be good. So storm box blast from at, guys. $200. Check it out. I'll put a link to it in the show notes and all of our picks. But also, I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Three last night. Oh, my God, that is such a good and sad and happy movie. It's sad just because of what the characters go through in that movie and just happy how everything ends up it's the end of that trilogy. I mean, it's emotional. It really is emotional. And just some of the Marvel movies have not been the greatest, but this one was just like jaw droppingly amazing. There's no other words. There's no other words. So as for where people can find me online, I'm Mike Doey's on Twitter. Mike Doey's at Techopolis social. Taylor already spelled that out. So go back and find that. I'm Mike Doey's at icloud.com for email and I'm Mike Doey's on Threads so you could find me there. Michael Doey's on Facebook. Just Google search me. You'll find me. I want to thank everybody for being here. Lynn and Taylor, you guys have been great today.

It was so much fun.

It was great discussion. We are right at 2 hours like I thought we would be. The Outtake show is still coming folks. I have it in production right now, so don't worry. It is still a thing. I did not lie. It is coming. It's going to be rather short, but it is coming. We just don't have many Outtakes anymore. It kind of stinks. So keep in mind we're so good at what we do.

Good workers.

Yeah, not many, but when we do, they are hilarious. So I want to thank you all for being here. Check us out on YouTube. We've got our chapters on our podcast. All of these episodes are great. So thank you everybody for being here. Everybody on YouTube, we've got a few chat messages today just saying hi. So come on back, enjoy the podcast and we will see you on the next IA cast.

Have a great bye everyone.

Have a great week.

Bye. Thank you for tuning in to the IA cast. We hope you enjoyed the show and found the conversation to be insightful and informative. If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter at iacastnetwork to stay informed about new episodes and other updates. Don't forget to check out more great podcasts on the Iacast network, iacast Net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.