Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Iacast and happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day. All right, I'm Michael Doey's, and I'm back with Marty Soba.

Hey, all.

Angie Fisher.

Hello.

And we will have Lynn Snyder joining us again. So we have a very packed podcast for you all today, wouldn't you say, guys?

Absolutely overwhelming.

Lots to talk about.

So much tech news has happened in the last week.

Like three days, say.

Yeah, exactly. But it's been a week.

Happened on Monday.

Yeah, it's been a week since we really published a podcast, so we measure it in a week. So we just have a lot going on.

Yeah.

Next week we'll have the release of Final Cut and Logic, and today, as we're recording this, we get new operating systems. Are you guys excited about those, or is it just kind of okay, another OS. I feel like it's kind of the breath before the storm, that final thing before betas.

It's kind of funny because we beta test. We have this stuff all summer, and then when it goes live, it's like, oh, yeah, everybody gets a noun. Big deal for months, right? I'm ready for 17. I'm just ready for 17. I'm glad for getting, like, security fixes and stuff that's important, but other than.

That, security fixes are definitely important. But I feel like at this point, it's 17. They're just kind of getting the last little bugs worked out in 16, maybe making a few little patches, adding a couple of tiny little features that didn't make it in yet. But for the most part, it was.

A bunch of security fixes this time, so you really should install it if you haven't.

Right.

I'm definitely all eyes on 17 at this point. Just full speed ahead.

And we got a sneak peek at 17. I think that's because we follow the accessibility. Yes, it was a segue because we follow accessibility because of our audience and who we are as people. We got to see some neat features coming in 17, and I'm really excited about these, the first one, and we're going to focus on more than just the vision aspects here. And I want to start with assistive Access, or what I like to call Windows 3.1 on iPhone. It looks like the grid that you would see in Windows 3.1 Windows.

Very simple.

Yeah, very simple. Basically, you have apps that are huge buttons on the screen. You can even type with an emoji only keyboard. So many different things are coming in with assistive access. And what are your thoughts of this?

It's ice free shell for the iPhone.

Yeah.

I think it's a good idea. I mean, a lot of people out there are coming to technology, maybe even when they don't want to. For example, let's say you're dealing with someone who has lost their vision or is losing their vision, and they weren't a techie person before, and they didn't really care about technology, but now they have to care about the technology. So they have to learn about the technology as well as figure out how to use accessibility features. And sometimes that's really daunting. And so I feel like if there is a way to make it easier for people like that, then by all means, I think that's a good idea.

I've talked to a lot of people who have, like, macular degeneration and are elderly, and they're losing their vision that way. And this would be perfect for them because they don't have to learn all the voiceover stuff if they don't want to. I'm not sure how this is. I think it would simplify that whole process a great deal, which is good for those types of people.

One thing I'm really curious about too, we haven't really been able to play with anything because this is just kind of announcements they are making that are going to come in the iOS 17 at the end of the year that'll come out. But when you turn it on, I wonder, can you customize the home screen or the main screen to have any icons that you want there, or do they only give you these six and that's all you have and you can't change it? I'm really curious to see if you can customize it to any order and any apps you want to make it simple or however, like, say like somebody just wants the phone text messages or messages in this case, and then lock in so that they can and like email.

Yeah, right.

All right, so we do have Lynn here with us. Hi, Lynn.

Hello.

So, welcome to this episode. We are just talking about the changes coming in iOS 17 with the new accessibility features. And this assistive access really has me interested. And like Marty just said, I'm very curious to see if we will get the ability to change the apps that are on those main screens. Like, they showed several things, but what's very interesting to me is that they have this new thing where Calls will be a new app that will replace FaceTime and the phone app.

What do you also yeah, that's going to be interesting. That's going to be really interesting. I kind of envision it. Like, if you go into the phone app now, at the bottom on the menu bar, you'll see that you'll have a dress book, you'll have the phone app, you'll have Recent. There's a few things down there. So I wonder if they'll just widen that and they'll give you more options. You'll have messages, you'll have a dress book, you'll have phone.

The only thing that I'm kind of worried about and we have Michael in the in the comments saying this is about time. This will really help trainers.

Yes.

The only thing I worry about is, will people become too reliant on this and will they miss out on the full iOS experience if they just rely on this. It's like going back to devices like the Blind Shell. They're very good devices, but they are slowly adding apps and slowly adding services. But you're missing out on what's fully offered by the rest of the ecosystem of Android since it's running definitely not the latest version of Android. I think people are kind of getting to where they don't have all of the features that they would get with Android. And this happens with a lot of devices, right? Like the Braille Note Touch is locked in at certain versions. The Braille, since Polaris and the BS Six are running certain versions and they aren't updated. Right. So that's just my view. Are people going to be locked out of new features because they like, oh, well, this is simpler, this is all I need.

Right, but if you were to be the devil's advocate, playing devil's advocate, somebody who this would be useful for, somebody who, like I was saying earlier, is coming into technology possibly out of necessity. They're not really a techie person. They're going to want the easiest way to be able to make a call, send a text message, and they're not really going to care so much about all the new features every time something comes out for them. They're going to want simplicity, for the simplest things to get there and be able to get the thing done as quick as possible. They're not going to want to be messing around with every new feature and trying everything out and all of that.

Right. Because I know my mom is 92 and she still likes to use technology, but she is challenged. I mean, when I'm showing her something, I try to find the absolutely the easiest way to do something, and I don't show her any other way because she gets super confused. And I think a lot of people are that way. They just need the bare minimum. And I guess technology should have that option for people who really are technically challenged. But I would hate to see young people just taking the easy way out and not learning. Kind of like what people used to do when they first had the iPhone and they would use those dot screen protector things.

Yes.

And I always thought that was just not a great idea, because what you have to do with the iPhone is you have to learn, try to remember where things are just like you remember where things are in your house.

Or just when you figure something out, then they move it all around on you. So here's another thing to think about. This would be really great if you can customize it for the person. So, say, for example, you give them the phone, text messaging, the address book, right, or maybe email, whatever things they absolutely need and nothing else. For somebody who has memory issues, repetition is good. Without change, they need to just know how to do the same thing over and over and over again, because if they don't do that, they forget. Or if you change it all the time, or if there's too many steps, then it becomes an issue. Are they going to remember how to do all the things just to get a task done that can be done real simply if you just kind of put it right in front of them and only give those options? We'll have to see how it goes.

Yeah, and it was also mentioned in Chat that our YouTube chat is really hopping today, which is great. It's also mentioned that the blindshell can be used for neuropathy or people that need a simpler interface for actual button presses. So I think it just depends on the person. And that's the thing. When we had iPhone and Android, when these things first came out, we didn't have choice. We had two devices or a few Androids and one iPhone at a time. So I think that we have so many options now that we really don't have to worry about, can everybody use the same device? And that's where this really is going to be useful, is if somebody can use a touch screen but doesn't like the complex user interface, great, we have options. If they want a tactile button device, they have that. But I think one of the things that we just need to be cautioned of do people get complacent? Like, all right, I'm used to my assistive access. I don't want to learn any more of the iPhone, or I'm used to my blind shell. I don't want to maybe look at a new, you know, an Android phone that has maybe a tactile keyboard, if one of those exists. Or I don't want to have an iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard and Android with a Bluetooth keyboard. That's just things that we have to really worry about as professionals that work with the blind, what is their limits and what we think that they can do. Because I think all of us work with people that are still learning to adjust to blindness and to disabilities in general. And I think this is just one of those areas where we just need to be understanding that some people will need this for long term, but not everybody will, and how do we gauge that need? Right, right.

Yeah.

And I've understood the concept of some people approach technology or teaching technology as if everyone's created equal and everyone should know this stuff immediately, and no two people learn this in the same way.

Right, exactly.

Those of us who are technically minded, we can tend to be a little bit I don't know what the word is that I want you can be.

A lot more advanced with your instruction.

Yeah, but it's almost like sort of a technical snobbery. Snobbery is not the word, but elitism. Technical elitism. That sort of assumes that everybody should be able to do something because we can.

I've actually seen other instructors do that.

Well. And it's also one of those things that a lot of curriculums at different curriculums curricula, who knows?

Curricula.

Curricula, yeah, one of those. All of them sound fun to say. Teach like a lot of places, teach to one pattern. And yes, there's bad connotations if people get offloaded from that pattern and what I've taught, they did that and I try to always make it be a plus, like, hey, you're getting your tailored training that is made for you. Right. Because some people wouldn't be good at group classes. Some people would and it just depends on the person, what their needs are and meet people where they're but I think so many training centers, so many training facilities work towards employment only and not towards actually rehabilitation. Now that's really where the problems are. They try to put everybody into a cookie cutter mold and it doesn't always work.

The objective becomes closed cases, closed cases, doesn't matter what. And you get people who come out of it going, I have no idea what I just learned.

Right, exactly.

You come back to the same people like months later and they're like, what? Yeah, I've done it.

And when you teach them, you've got to teach them like one or two things and then repetition, they got to practice over and over again. Otherwise yeah, but if you've got people.

Coming from having never touched an iPhone, that's tough. And you only get like 80 hours or a limited number of hours with those people, it's really hard to do because there's so much to cram in there, even if you just keep some voiceover gestures. Whereas this simplified interface is really going to help with that.

Because I know people who are pretty smart people. I mean, I consider them pretty smart.

Oh, sure.

But they just cannot get the iPhone, the touch screen. They try people really, but for some reason it just does not work for them.

I always describe it as learn to see with your ears and your fingers and getting people to transition from watching a screen and looking at it to taking in their information by their that's a huge part of it right there.

Yes.

And there's also this stigma that people don't want to do something because they're scared they're going to break their phone or break their device or whatever the case is, and they're not going to. But this is the fear that they have. So they're scared to do anything because they're like, oh no, I don't want to touch it because I'm going to break it. I don't want to try anything new because I'm going to break it. I don't know how you get rid of that fear, the assistive interface or.

The assistive that might help as well.

You know, the one thing that I think and we need to move on because we've spent one small little aspect of all of our news, and we're just one aspect. The biggest thing that I think that we need to really conquer as people, as blind people, as disabled people, is one concept that is hardest for everybody to conquer, and that's problem solving, critical thinking. A lot of people just do not have the creative bandwidth to think about how to solve a problem. Any problem has a solution, else it would not be a problem. Right. So there's a solution to every problem that you have. And so I think when we think about it in those terms, how do we solve a customer or a client's problem of not being able to use their devices? There's always a solution. We may not want to teach to that solution, but there's a solution. And I think that's the thing that we always need to look at, whether we're learning a new thing, whether we are losing our vision, any of those, or losing the ability to feel all of those things are important. So problem solving and critical thinking skills are really important, especially in a digital age of technology.

Yes.

I haven't thought about that much a lot, have I?

No, not at all.

And then there's the idea of frustration tolerance, which I have just dealt with a few minutes ago with my Mac, trying to do something simple that I just could not make happen. And it was like I told Marty, I said, I'm at my wits end having overload. Yes, finally I figured it out.

You should see me.

One of those things that sometimes you just have to take a breath, turn around, walk away and then come back. And then all of a sudden it's easy peasy.

Yeah, you should see me. Whenever I'm writing computer code, I have what I call code rage. It should do this one thing. Okay, I'll go for a walk and come back and okay, that exactly worked the way it should. All right.

Maybe get a beverage, right?

Water, diet Dr. Pepper. That is the thing.

That is my thing for me would be coffee, coffee, coffee.

Beverage picks on the Iacast. Here we are. There you go, guys.

Two coffees. Coffee bar.

Yes, the Iacast coffee bar, which I will not partake in. All right. I've never cared for coffee. So we've gotten several other things as well. And this one's really interesting to me. Again, not vision related, but just as important. And this is the voice cloning, or what do they call this? The voice feature. The term is escaping me.

What they call me too. Me too.

But basically there's going to be a feature where you could train your phone for 15 minutes and it will learn your voice and be able to talk in FaceTime and phone calls with your voice. Now this I want to have a discussion about because it's very interesting. This is what Eleven Labs and others are doing. But there's a difference and I've read a lot on this. Basically, I believe it's for patients and people with ALS, am I mistaken on that? Who are losing their voice that will not be able to talk in the future. They can teach it their voice and so they'll never their loved ones and people will be able to hear their voices. It's interesting because this will allow them to keep their voice through iOS. And I'm sure it's just going to get better with time. But there's been a lot of concerns over something like this because what if you, I don't know, use the 15 minutes and got the same word choices from podcasts and or others from other people and taught it their voices? You can't do that with this.

It seems like they have put in some security. I mean, they have thought this through. Yes. So they've put some guardrails on it.

So basically the 15 minutes training that you do is different per person, which I think is incredible. The text that you have to read back to it is different per individual. And that way it can't be copied or trained. It's all random. I think that's just amazing.

Amazing.

That is absolutely I think that is really incredible. And then apps will actually have a permission that they have to add to their app. If you're an app developer, you know, there's an info p list file, you have to put all your permissions that your app will use. This will be one of them. So you have to ask for permissions to gain the voice ability. And that's the ability to use the voice. That does not include the data, folks. That is the important thing here. At no point does the voice data get used in other apps. And I think that's incredibly smart.

Something kind of interesting also is let's say that you have a loved one, maybe a parent or something that you know is going to be around for much longer. You could sort of have them train a device and then at some point after they were gone, you could kind of get a reminder of how they sound and all that. That'd be kind of an interesting thing. You just save that device and then later you could pull it out if you were feeling like you just wanted to hear them.

Nobody's really ever said, I'm a very sentimental person, but I just kind of thought about this and it just really will just jerk at your emotions in your heart when you think about this. Just think about maybe if Apple adds the feature where a person can record or take text, like maybe a child or somebody has a bedtime story or just a story from their loved one that they really like and they record it using that voice on the phone and then they save it as an MP3 and they can just have that. That keepsake that's powerful.

That's important. That is super intense and that's like.

Immortalizing the person who is no longer with us.

If you think about that, one of the biggest things is Google is now announcing they're going to be deleting old Gmail accounts. And I'm not segwaying off of Apple, but I wanted to throw this kind of piece of news in here and just think about that. If they're deleting old Gmail accounts, what does that mean for YouTube content and other things that after people pass away? Think about that. All that content is just going to go by the wayside. But if somebody can have a device that has that person's voice and the likeness on that device we're really looking at the future here guys. I think we're looking at the ability for somebody to live on in the person's memories using their device after they've passed. And I think you could keep creating new memories because you can just record new stories or new things. Now what's creepy is that if that person does pass on and you do have their device and you make calls with it, now that's the creepy end of that spectrum. But at the same time there's so much room for good that could come of this that just goes beyond just what they had planned, that it's incredible.

You know, it would be a really good idea. You know how you're talking about they're going to start deleting Gmail accounts after if you haven't been logged in for a period of time. I think two years is what they said if you haven't logged into an account in two years. But if they start doing this on YouTube as well, it would be really cool for them to implement something in the setting somewhere that if anything were to ever happen to the person or the person did pass away or whatever before they were to completely just delete everything. Give as long as it was all set up in the settings in a private way where if something did happen, there would be a person that could be the Alternate Administrative Person and before YouTube was going to do like a big delete of all of their stuff that they could do a data dump and send that person's account of YouTube videos to this administrative person if they so choose.

You can transfer ownership of a YouTube channel between accounts and set that up. But you almost have to do that like a will. Like you almost have to set that up before ownership, right?

Yeah. And YouTube is a special case in my opinion because a lot of things that have been uploaded by people are things that could benefit people forever. I'm thinking about a channel that I really like. That lady's name is Katie Morton. She is a counselor. She does videos on all sorts of mental health topics and I imagine that her videos would be useful to people throughout time because it's wisdom that can apply, whether it's now or 100 years from now. I think it would be a shame to just throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying is. There are like channels with old commercials, old films and things like that that people have found and uploaded and it would really be a shame for that to be lost for everyone.

Right. So going back to what we were talking about, this new voice feature, I feel like is just a game changer for a lot of things. And then there's a game changer, I believe, for those of us that have vision loss. And that is the new Tap to speak feature. Who's excited about this?

Me.

I think everybody is.

It is. OrCham for the iPhone, pretty much.

Without taking a picture.

Yeah, because it's pointed at something and it will identify what it is.

No, not even that. You touch it, you tap something or point at something with your finger and it will identify or read whatever it is.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's huge.

I've been a big fan of that part of just the whole Magnifier features, like the door detection and during the COVID being able to know where I am in space as it relates to people in front of me, like in a line as a guide dog user, that's super important. So this is just one more tool in that little area that's going to be invaluable to me.

And I've heard on other podcasts, people ask, why is this in the Magnifier app? And my response to that is, why not? Well, right. It's a camera based app that is meant for people with low vision and now no vision. So why not put everything in one place?

I like that. It's all there together.

Now.

Could I have Magnifier running? Would I have to, I guess have Magnifier running?

How would that it's an app that you put that gets installed on your phone when you start enabling accessibility features.

Okay.

And you open the Magnifier app and there's already features for non visual users already in there, like the door detection descriptions and things like that, that are already fantastic.

And now when they first started it, Lynn, it would actually look at people and tell you whether or not they were wearing a mask.

Wow, that's awesome.

Yeah.

I use a LiDAR Magnifier because I always figured that it was for partials.

No, not anymore. But you do need a phone with LiDAR.

We have to have LiDAR though. Oh, I have if you have a.

Pro, then you're good.

Cool.

So they did a demo on the website. There's podcasts where you can hear that.

Yeah, it's awesome.

And I'm just a huge fan of that.

Is it possible to drop that in here?

Yeah, I'll try to drop that here in the audio in production. So we should have that.

Yes, because it's really good stuff.

Cook time, pizza power level add 30 seconds. One thing I did wish they would do is audio describe, like, is the microwave like text? Does it have images or what does it have?

They were actually microwave where you had.

Microwave last night washing machine. That's like a true smart microwave, not just something you the dial, the old school dial. Yeah, I'll have to go back and listen to it.

Yeah, because I think when we talk about the smart microwaves and the smart appliances and the problem is that a lot of them have their own apps. I had a scale that had its own app, and the scale worked fine. But when the app was no longer being updated, I couldn't use the scale because I couldn't get it to read. Nothing would read it. And even the ones like the microwaves with Lady A, that's great as long as you have Lady A. But if for some reason Amazon decided to discontinue that, look at all these folks that are going to have these smart appliances that are not going to work, or they're not going to be able to be used anymore.

For example, the Instant Pot, I think, still works with a lady, but I think they're not selling that Instant Pot anymore and the app doesn't work.

That was the WiFi. I think there was a Bluetooth and a WiFi version. I don't know if the WiFi is still available, but I know the Bluetooth isn't.

I don't think either of them are.

I don't think they are.

So that's just another example.

Yes.

Those are some big changes for accessibility. Do you guys have any other mentions that I think there's a few more.

You can speed up, siri. Now you're going to be able to speed up Siri. You can make Siri speak faster.

That is fantastic.

I think that people will love it, and I think people will hate this. And the people who will love it are people who just like to have things sped up. They know how to use their devices and all of that. But the people who hate it are those people who they don't know exactly what they hit, and all of a sudden something's speaking really fast and they.

Can'T understand it to speed up.

So I don't think yeah, you have.

To tell it to speed up.

Probably change it in the settings under Siri.

Hopefully it's not one of those things they have, like, on a rotor where you accidentally hit it all the time and serious so fast that you can't understand it.

They may add it to some voiceover rotor action thing, but it'll most likely be in Settings, or you'll have to tell her to speak faster. Kind of like a lady.

I was in my eye doctor's office. I have prosthesis, so I go to me too. Called an Ocularist, and we were talking about the iPhone, and I showed him. He said, how do you use an iPhone? And I showed him voiceover. We turned it. On in his phone. Well, we got talking and busy, and I forgot oh, no. To turn it off. And so I get a phone call at, like, 08:00 at night. He's like, Lynn, how do you turn this voice over? It was pretty funny, but yeah, so I went through how to get it off, and he's like, he he his phone was rendered essentially unusable by him.

Right.

That was pretty funny.

And that happens a lot. Like, people just don't know how to use certain things, and it doesn't occur to them. I could just say, turn off voiceover to Siri, and that would do it.

I would love to see Siri improved. I feel like Siri has so much.

Potential, but Siri needs a good dose of.

I don't know. I feel like they haven't been really giving it much love in terms of they have not, and I don't understand that.

There's been a lot of issues in iOS 16 with Siri that haven't gotten resolved. So I really hope that's something they're concentrating on to get all those Siri issues resolved in 17.

Well, the problem with Siri, a lot of it happens in the cloud. So as much as we would like Siri to be improved in 17, it won't be. They may roll out a cloud update to make it better.

Yeah. It just seemed like, oh, my gosh, so many companies are announcing stuff. I mean apple. And it's not just apple. It's Amazon. It's just a whole bunch of different google has some accessibility stuff that they've.

Announced they have, and they did that at Google I o. But there's a lot that's come out. And I want to kind of move us on to another thing that happened today, because this is very interesting. There's now an official chat GPT app from OpenAI, and I'm really excited about this because they did something very intriguing. And it's interesting that they brought this out on Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Did anybody get that kind of like, was that coincidence or was it not?

Yeah, I know. I was wondering if there was any.

Connection because well, it does work really good with voiceover.

Yeah.

The other thing that's interesting about this app, and by the time people listen to this, we're calling them now discovercasts I accessibility or IA discovercasts. And what they are is we're going into this completely unknowing. And so I went into the app and I went through all the settings. The only thing I skipped was login, and that was all accessible. And I went and logged in, just kind of cut that out of the edits, and it was completely usable. And one of the neat things that it does do is it vibrates every time there's a letter that's typed by chat GPT.

Yeah.

Feedback.

And I think that's brilliant because I think it's a good thing to keep on because you know that it's working whenever it's vibrating.

Right.

I set it up from scratch. Like I hadn't even signed up for Chat GPT yet, and I didn't do that until I got the app. So when you first launched the app, it really gives you a lot of haptics that then too, if you're a beginner or a new user, when you first launch it at the sign on screen, or sign in screen, or create your account. Yeah, it's really interesting. I messaged the group and I asked I'm like I'd be curious to know what's on the screen, because I just felt like there would have to be something, and sure enough, there is. And I'll let Michael describe that because it's really cool.

So on the initial screen, it's typing the words Chat GPT as if chat GPT is typing the words and it's just being typed over and over again with different color backgrounds. And it's vibrating the screen or vibrating your phone as it types each letter in small vibration units, one unit per letter. And I think that's just a fantastic way to do it. So really happy about it. I think that's a great accessibility feature. The other thing that I did see is when you would get a message back, which how dare OpenAI not know what the IA cast is since it was here since 2015. When you get a message back, it starts speaking the message. Once you get the full thing back, that's really interesting. So you get vibrations.

It reads it like it would an.

Imessage or something, but it doesn't start because the message is actually already on screen as it's typing. So you can flick to it with voiceover, but voiceover will stop reading at the point of insertion. For chat GPT.

With TPT four. Sometimes when it's you can tell when it's really busy that you get half of a message and you'll have to wait a little bit and then the rest of it will come.

It's really weird.

I've seen that several times where you'll get half of the recipe and then you'll have to wait a few seconds and then you get the other half. In a case like that, the haptics.

Would let you know it's working, but.

You know that it's actually getting data, I guess.

So I'm a huge fan of this app. I do not know if there's a specific iPad version yet. I was hoping to know by this episode, but I guess I could go do a quick search and it will tell me.

On the App Store there is an.

Ipad app I thought I saw there.

There was.

Was too. They released both. It was released for both iPhone and iPad.

If you open it up in the App Store and you look at the description it should say this app works on and it'll tell you this device.

Ipad, whatever, and have you checked out. There's a thing on there. I think it says something about talking. Is it dictation?

There is a dictation button, but I.

Am not sure what it does. Supposedly, I was looking at the Frequently Asked questions from the help menu because I was wondering what it does. Apparently, it records what you're saying and it runs it through Whisper.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, I actually did see that also. And I was wondering I didn't get time to be able to really look at that, but I did see that and I was wondering how that worked and what that was all about.

I mean, I couldn't imagine why a blind person might want that. Well, because you could do the same thing with Siri, right?

Yeah.

But can you take any audio file and drop it? And it would do what Whisper does.

No, you cannot do that in that app. It's just to record your voice. It's a dictation button.

Okay. That's something about running something through Whisper.

Maybe if you dictate, it takes the audio from your dictation and it converts it into text so that GPT can understand.

But I can't figure out why you wouldn't just do that with Siri.

Because Siri does not have as good a quality as Whisper.

Okay. Hmm. Because Whisper is a mighty powerful little okay, that's interesting.

At the top of the App Store page, it says, this app is only available on the App Store for iPhone.

Interesting.

Well, there you go.

So very interesting app. You can subscribe to chat GPT plus through the app. And it does use an in app purchase through Apple. And like, whenever I went to my subscription, it says, you're subscribed through the web. Please go to the website to manage this. $20 a month. What's that?

$20.

$20? Yes, just like on the web for the subscription. And Apple's taking 30% of that. And going back to some recent news, sam Altman, the person that runs OpenAI, or one of the founders and leads, was testifying at Congress about the need for regulation of AI. And I find that very interesting. That a company building AI wants it regulated. So that's going to be interesting in so many ways. And we're still kind of developing a podcast to talk about those things, because.

That could be a minefield, right?

Because you ask for regulation, you may get some or you may get too much.

And maybe the idea here is that they want to be in on the ground level. They want to be a part of that regulation rather than waiting for it to happen to them.

But what I think is really the more exciting thing and Double Tap mentioned this, be My Eyes was mentioned yes. During that. And that's fantastic. On the Congress floor, we've got accessibility companies being mentioned to Congress. That's fantastic. It shows that we are making an impact in the mainstream world. And that's just incredible.

If the blindness community can leverage this type of stuff and have it be pushed through, I'm all for it. That's going to be so amazing once. That's a thing for everyone.

Marty and I were talking on our show a little while ago, and we're talking about Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And what I have been thinking for a long time is we have to somehow get people to understand that that accessibility menu is not just meant for a small group of poor people with disabilities, that people use it for everybody. It is for all of us. Because most people who get disabilities are not born with them. They acquire them through their lives, through accident, illness.

That's one of the things that Apple wanted to showcase early on a lot of times, accessibility and Android, even now, has it changed to the root part of the settings app. So previously accessibility was under General and now it's under the main section. And what people don't realize with accessibility, it's not about making everything accessible to people that have disabilities. It's about customization. That is where most of the iOS customization features are, is under accessibility.

And people don't have that stigma of I can't hear well, so what am I going to do? I have to get rid of my iPhone or I can't see well so well, I can no longer use my phone. And I think those days are numbered. I mean, I think we're getting to a point where, be it Android or iOS or whatever, Windows, everybody is jumping on the accessibility bandwagon. And I think that's going to be an awesome thing for all of us, for our whole society, that as you age, you can still be a part of the social sphere, mainstream technology. Yeah. You can still use your device that you love so much.

That helps.

You already.

Going back to hearing related updates. MFI hearing AIDS now will work with macOS.

Macos.

That's change.

That's amazing.

Definitely.

I hope they work better than the AirPods, too. Switching between devices.

Well, AirPods switching between devices is a dumpster fire, in my opinion.

It is.

Yeah, I turn all of that off because me, too.

I don't even mess with it.

If I'm listening to music on my phone in any sound plays on my Mac, forget it, it's switch on or my watch.

How many times have you had that happen? That is so annoying. It's like, Get off my watch, I want to read my book.

Right?

And it does it when you don't want it to. And when you do want it to.

Work, it's like, no, just stay with my phone.

Exactly. But that's really amazing to you. And like I said, I hope it works better than the AirPod switching.

Let's stick with apple. And they've released another new product this week.

There's another thing, speaking of hearing.

Okay.

The ASL Shopper experience is coming to Canada as well.

Spread around. The more places the better.

Yeah, that was another launch.

Anyway, Michael, as you were saying, they.

Are now doing the buds, plus I think they're called and these are new earbuds from Beats from Apple Powerbeats Pro.

Or something like that.

Maybe these are new ones. Yeah, these are not the Power Beats pro. I think I saw Beats Buds Plus or something.

Beats.

They have anyway, we got Studio Buds Plus, I think is what they're called. And they're new earbuds from Beats. I think they have the latest hardware like the AirPods Three and the AirPods Pro Two. Don't know much about them. I just don't buy Beats anymore. They don't fit my ears. So if that's kind of your gig, then Beats are great. But I've noticed they're usually too bass heavy for me, just not my style. I usually wait for the AirPods.

They have adjusted that a little bit. It's not so bass heavy. It's a little bit more of an all around a good sounding earbud. They did come in at a much lower price. They're 169 and they do have ANC and they do have transparency mode.

And how about the VR headset? That has been just.

Being talked about forever.

I really think that with this well, okay, let's back up because that's another news item. They have found references to Xros in code officially.

Which basically is a new operating system specifically for these eyewear, whatever you want to call.

So we think it's pretty imminent. My prediction is, and I could be wrong, because Apple is going to be Apple and do what they want to do, but we might see another test kit like we saw with the M One transition. We had that dark colored Mac Mini that developers got. I got one. I was very happy to get one and play with. Like it was basically an A twelve iPad in a Mac Mini case running macOS, and it ran macOS really well. So I have a feeling we're going to get a transition kit or some kind of XR starter kit. So we'll see.

I had read an article, I want to say it was Mac rumors, but it may not have been there. But they were saying that apparently.

The.

Inside scuttlebutt or whatever is that Tim Cook wasn't really into it. He had some concerns about it. The Execs had some concerns about how it was going, and they had to make compromises on the specs or whatever. And we're trying to get developers to make sure that there were enough apps. They said it will be shown at WWDC, but it seems like there's not within Apple itself, the enthusiasm for it.

Well, the reason is that the tech is not ready. We don't have the tech for Apple to build what they would like to build. But the industry is saying, this is the future, you must go here. And so Apple is like, well, we'll go here. We're just not happy about it, I guess.

Like artificial intelligence, right? Everybody has to do artificial intelligence now. That because that's what everybody's doing.

I think that AI is more realistic of a path for Apple to go down than a headset. But the truth of the matter is with Apple, apple is a hardware company first, a software company second. And that's one thing we need to keep in mind when we talk about Apple, folks, is Apple is hardware first, software second. They make the best software, right? But they make the best software to go with the best hardware. The presentation of the software is just as important as the hardware. But if you notice, no Apple software runs off of Apple hardware unless you do some extreme things that you probably shouldn't be doing with Apple software. But macOS will not run on a PC. It just won't do it. iOS and iPadOS are Apple only devices, software for those devices. And I would I want okay. I could see iPad OS on a Galaxy tab. S eight plus. That would be a really cool experience. But would I want iOS on a Samsung Galaxy a 20 or whatever the heck those lower end phones are called? No.

Right.

I would not want that. The hardware would not amount up to the software. And I want a good experience. That's why I use an iPhone. Right. So again, it comes down to Apple has to hardware before they can software. And I think that's why we're not seeing the AI because they're too busy keeping up with their hardware demands or trying to get people to buy new hardware because that's where they make their money.

And they were saying that Tim Cook would sort of prefer that it be more eyewear rather than headset. Right.

And we're just not there yet. We don't have the tech to build eyewear.

Yeah, I don't know, and I like the idea of VR, but I just don't know if I want to be walking around all day with headphones on. I'm not sure for myself personally what kind of experiences I would want from VR if I were playing games, but like in my everyday life, I'm just not sure why that would be exciting to me personally.

And that's why they call it Xros, because it's augmented reality and virtual reality because it would have cameras to let the person look out to the outside world. What I'm excited about as a low vision user is could this replace my patriot viewpoint? Or glasses that can zoom in for me? If I can have an over the face headset that actually doesn't look terrible, maybe it looks like a blindfold over my face, that'd be great, right? And use it to magnify my world. I could only dream. I really could only dream. And if we get that, I'll put down that money faster than anything else. Yeah.

I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I wear headphones all day and when I get a chance to take them off, I am sort of thankful. It feels good to air out my ears.

I wear air pods all day. And that way I can be listening to things while I'm working. But I want to segue us again. But Amazon has released their own new versions of their earbuds, the Echo buds. They have a new version of those and they're $50. Wow.

What?

I have not okay, I may have to pick some up.

Then somebody needs to get them and check off a latency from latency.

I've never played with them either.

I'm kind of curious about they're bluetooth. They're going to have terrible latency. That's one of those things you accept. I have not found a pair of headsets that have good bluetooth latency. Although AirPods have pretty good latency. It's not pure AirPods are good.

They're better than everything else.

There's still some just the interesting thing.

On those is are they going to have, somehow a lady built into this?

Yes, they do.

They do.

They already do. The previous model did.

Yeah, she's featured front and center. She's very much there.

Interesting.

And then moving away from headphones again, we have a new Echo device that comes in under the price of the Echo dot called the Echo Pop.

And it's half the size I think is a dot. And then they also announced a brand new eight show. That's the one with a display, the smallest one with the eight inch display. And they announced a new one of those.

Well, I also saw that there's one with a five inch display. I think that was the new one they came out with.

Oh, really? A five inch display?

Echo five is what I saw. So that was interesting.

That's pretty small, right?

And it looks like all these things will come out on the 31st, go.

To Best Buy and have a play.

But what I think is I want to go back to the Pop. The pop. So many names. They used to have the Tap, so it was the Tap, the Dot, and the Pop. How many three letter names can you name your devices?

And it used to be sounds like.

A Rice Christmas box, right?

Yeah, the tap pop.

And they discontinued the tap. And it was a fantastic little bluetooth speaker, wasn't it? Oh, yeah, it was super cute. Yeah, it was a great speaker.

It would be interesting to know what Amazon has in mind for these devices because they were originally designed because they wanted to actually use them. They wanted people to go to shop on them. They wanted to make money from them. I had heard some talk that they were really in a quandary. They were trying to figure out what to do with that line of products because it wasn't living up to its.

A lady was costing them so much money per year to maintain. But what I think that they're really pushing now instead of shopping is books, audio, Amazon music podcast, amazon services, all their services. And that's where they're really trying to make the money now, which is what.

Everybody else is doing. Everybody wants you in their ecosystem.

In their ecosystem, right, totally.

But Amazon is doing something different because they actually say they have. And I bet you that Spotify and Apple Music and others are paying them a fee or an amount to have their services on the Echo devices. Because when you look at these devices on their websites now they have branding for all of these services next to Amazon's own services.

You can also put the Echo on your sono speakers if you want to. That's the thing too.

The only big difference is that Amazon doesn't have their own phone. They tried that, didn't really work too good for them with the others. They have their phones, which really helps a lot get people into the ecosystem because it all kind of comes together on the phone or the tablet kind of a thing.

See, everybody thinks that they need to have a phone and I think that's just a bad idea.

How's the Fire tablet working for you?

Well, the Fire tablets are actually fantastic because I think Voice View is great. Although one of the neatest things on the Echo devices and I wonder how much bandwidth this takes to run one of my neatest favorite things is having a lady read your Kindle books. I've always enjoyed I love that too.

Oh man, that is awesome.

Okay, now I've got a question. I've got a challenge for somebody to try. Pay for a month of the Samuel L. Jackson voice on gay lady.

Yes.

And have him read a Kindle book.

Oh my goodness.

And let me know how it goes.

There's probably a lot of added words, I would think.

I'm assuming you did this.

No, I'm genuinely curious. Like how would that go?

I'm curious. You know, I'm going to do it.

I think it's a dollar, right?

I'm going to do it. This is going to be funny. This is going to happen.

Okay. I'm trying to imagine Samuel L. Jackson reading The Lord of the Rings or something.

Something.

Oh wow.

Or like a romance novel.

That could go south real quick.

Oh my God.

You will get this humor on no.

Other podcast or Jane Austin are like the classic thing. Oh yeah, I'll find something. Books are my wheelhouse, so I'll find something. Totally, totally.

Oh wow.

Wouldn't it be cool if you somehow have your friend's voice to read your email?

I don't know that I'd want that.

Or your own voice.

No, I don't like to sound in my own voice.

No, I don't either. I don't know.

I think it would be cool to just see what it would be like.

When I first got this mic, I was like, okay, I'm going to be hearing myself a lot more. At first I was just like, I don't know. And then I'm just like get used to it because that's just what's going to happen.

This microphone is the only microphone where I actually don't mind the sound of my own voice.

Yeah.

And for folks out there who are listening that don't know, we're talking about the Sennheiser profile microphone.

Discovered on YouTube. And here we are.

So there's so many other things that have come out in this one week. What else am I missing? Well, we know Twitter has made a few announcements that I don't think we've talked about. They are going after 30 days. If you don't use your account, they will delete it and anybody else can register it.

These little rules and stipulations just.

Now, they do have a new CEO, and.

That'S under a lot of controversy, too.

Linda Yakuchi or something like that.

I don't even try. I don't even know.

Yeah, she apparently I'm trying to think where she originally came from. She has a lot of marketing experience.

I've heard at one point she was at NBC.

That's right, yeah. NBC Universal. Right. She has her hands full. Whatever she gets paid, she deserves it because that is a talk about a dumpster fire.

She deserves it if she makes good decisions. Right.

And Twitter has not exactly had very many of those lately.

So it just depends. I think it's interesting, as we see more, I think we're going to need to have a full social media discussion because I think that that's going to be very important. Like, where do people go? Should they look at mastodon? Should they look at eventually? Blue sky. Should they look at all these different things? So I think we're going to need to do an updated we've done episodes on social media before, but I think we need to do a new one.

Going over the because it would seem to me that Twitter is sort of like this untamed thing that if you want to get more advertisers on board, ms. Yukuchi, or whatever her name is, really going to have a lot of to make changes to make advertisers more comfortable. Because right now, if it's not my pillow.

Yeah. We're going to have to see a lot from Twitter for it to come back up from where it is. And I think most of the blindness community has moved over to mastodon. So that's very interesting and very telling as well.

Right. And we don't know what's going to happen with the one that's I always forget the name of it, but Blue Sky. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens with that.

Like I've mentioned, the founder and funding the person that funds a lot of it, jack Dorsey, actually has said blue Sky's main server is a temporary measure to see if this works. They want to make it federated like Mastodon. But my question is, why do we need another Mastodon? We already have a great one.

Yeah.

Well, I guess that there are technical challenges for people to get signed up and get on Mastodon.

There would be the same ones with blue sky. Because again, if it's a Federated system, there would not be a main server either. So all of the same challenges and roadblocks would be there. And Mastodon, I guess it's kind of the next thing to talk about. Mastodon is now under pressure because or Mastodon Social, the main server is now under a lot of pressure because they are sending out so much spam from their server. I'm an admin of three servers. I've had to give it actual some thought of should I limit posts from Mastodon Social? I have not made a decision on that. But it's like, at what point do we say we need to really think about this, right?

Isn't that the default? Like when you sign up with certain apps, macedon apps, that is the default server. And that's really the unfortunate thing because people don't understand about instances. If people have to change instances, that's going to be for some people it's going to be a barrier. Yeah, that's a tough one.

They said something that really made a big impact to me on a podcast, I don't remember which one, but they said that Mastodon, when you look at a username, think of an email. Originally people were like, well, where should I sign up for my email address? Google Hotmail MSN. It's the same thing. Where do you go and sign up for Mastodon? It's just like email. What is the difference? What is a difference between a Mastodon username and an email address? There's none.

Right? But I guess if you're just an average person, how would you know which instance to pick? Being a member of the blind community, I knew that there were admins like you that did have servers that were set up, I guess with a blindness focus.

Technically, email service providers have rules too. We don't think about that because email is email, but technically they have rules too. And technically, if you go against those rules and if they find that you're using email for harm or for different things, they can shut down your email as well. You could go to an instance and say, what are the rules here? Mastodon offered a list of instances that you could look at and say, okay, I like this one, I'll pick here, I like that name.

Some are dedicated to certain lifestyles or just stuff like you just search for your thing and go for it.

If you're an administrator, do you want people randomly assigned to your instance or do you want to have some sense of who is coming in?

And you do have control over that. I can say I want people to have to do these things and accept these rules before they come in. Or I could say I need to approve everybody.

That would be so much work.

If you have an instance for say, the blind community, or not necessarily for the blind community, but that. Has an emphasis on that. Most of us know each other. I think I probably know most of the people on on the instance I'm on right now. At least I've heard of most of the people. But if you just have everybody just being randomly assigned to an instance, I don't know. I don't have the answer.

Well, I think that's good because it lets you meet new people. Like, you could look at the local or the Federated timelines and be like, oh, this is interesting. I want to talk more to these people. It's a way to be social and meet people through the instance local timeline. It's like going to the local bar or pub. There's so many ways of looking at it that it could be a lot simpler. Again, it comes back to problem solving. People just want the quickest thing. Why do I have to work and figure this out? Why can't it just be that's true.

I press instant gratification.

Yes, exactly.

Nobody wants to wait for anything. They just want it now. Now. Faster, faster, faster.

And then Twitter had sort of spoiled people to where they didn't really have to think very much. They just went on.

And Facebook was the first I think they were out of the gate a little before Twitter, but I'm not sure. But Facebook has more people than Twitter does or did. Twitter lost a lot, and they're going to lose a lot more. So it's interesting the dynamics of these social networks, and it's going to be an ongoing thing, but I have a lot more views on this that we'll have to continue on another episode. But do we have any more news like we want to talk about? Because we've gone definitely over an hour now for this episode of the Iacast, and it's been great.

We did do the Google email, the Gmails that are going to get deleted the accounts.

Wow, we did talk about that. Yes, there's so much Microsoft we'll talk about this on another episode. Microsoft is doing more for accessibility in Xbox. So those are things that we just haven't even gotten to. There's a lot more content that I.

Think even I wish we could do some kind of gaming accessible gaming cast component, but I don't know how accessible that is for totally blind, totally blind gamers if it's there yet. You know what I mean?

Yeah, there are some games, like there was a mod for Hearthstone access. I don't know if that's still a thing or not, but I would love to see if it is. That was a neat mod because people can play Hearthstone, which is a card game that's fully sighted people play, that anybody could play. All right, I guess that's going to be it for this time. We covered so much content and it's just more stuff that for us to look forward to in the coming months. Beta testers will be able to test some of this stuff coming soon, but.

We got WWDC coming in another couple of few weeks. We'll have a lot there.

That's going to be another huge day of podcasting.

Yes.

Time flies when you're glad for gad.

We live in very okay, I'm remembering that. I am so putting that as the title of this episode. Angie, you've named two episodes since I.

Named the last time.

Last time? You made the last time? Well, actually, no, I named the last one because I changed it up. But Angie did the subscribe responsibly?

Subscribe responsibly.

So this is two for three episodes.

You're on a roll. You're going to be the go to.

Name the word smith. The word smith.

The word smith.

Wordplay.

Angie. The word smith. Yes. So, yeah, glad forget that's going to be the episode title. I love it. Great. All right.

It's a really good time to be in tech. Interesting time on and off through over the years, but it really is interesting. Things just keep getting more and more so.

Yes, and I've said this online the last couple of years, I haven't been very excited about new technology, but this year has been fantastic with the new Macs, all these new things that we're getting new apps for iPad, all this stuff, and we're not even halfway through the year yet, folks.

I have to get an iPad. I really need to revisit that space. I always get them, and I think, oh, yeah, I'm going to really use this thing. And I really love it. It's awesome. They're great. And then I end up not doing anything with it. But I feel like that's going to be changing.

I'm using mine to read Marvel Unlimited right now.

Oh, nice.

Ipad Pro with the best screen you could have on most tablets. And Marvel unlimited.

There you go. That's it.

All right, well, that's going to go ahead and wrap up this episode, but as we always do, marty, do you have a pick for this time, and where can people find you online?

Yeah, I am going to pick what's called Backpack Studio for iPad and iPhone, and it's an audio editor. And the cool thing about it that separates it from any other app or most other apps, I should say, is that it gives you a space to be able to add audio triggers. So if you want to have some special effects in there, like applause or crowds or bells or horns, whatever, you can load up all your triggers in there and you have them right on the fly, right in the app.

And if you have it has a ton of space.

Oh, yeah, it's got a ton.

It's a really cool app.

Yeah. So it's good for editing and podcasting. It works on iPad. So if you need something to put on your iPad, if you just want your Mic and your iPad on the go, that might be a good option.

I need to try that with this mic.

Yeah, there you go. I can tell you it works perfect.

Nice.

If anyone wants to reach out to me, you could email me at feedback at unmute show.

All right, and Lynn, what about you? Do you have a pick for this week?

I had to change mine at the last minute, but I'm going to have to say chat GPT for iOS. Yes.

All right.

S-N-I do now have a public email. It's [email protected]. Like footprints, only cane. [email protected].

All right. My first email address was a Hotmail address back in 1994. Mike [email protected]. You can still email me at that address.

Well, ever since I've gotten signed up and I've started using Bing again, I use all the different chat bots.

Yeah.

And really, any hotmail goes to Outlook.com as well.

That's right.

Hotmail was back when Hotmail started, it was a web page with blue on one side and white on the other. And it was just such a novel thing back in 1994.

Yeah, I still have an AOL account, too, but mail.

I used to use Juno, of all things, guys.

Oh, wow.

I never did Juno, but yeah, it.

Had a neat client.

And then did you use Alta Vista?

I did use Alta Vista. Sure.

Or Eudora.

Eudora. Oh, my gosh, we're aging ourselves here.

I know.

Of email clients.

So speaking of all these things, Angie, do you have a pick?

My Sennheiser profile mic is my pick. I love this mic. It is USBC to USBC. I believe it's called the streaming Edition. It has a boom arm instead of the desktop stand that Michaels does. So it basically has the boom arm and it's attached to that. And then it also comes with a really long USBC to USBC cable. I think it's ten foot of cable. Yeah. I love it. It's great. It's nice to just be hands free and be able to record and set it and forget it, kind of thing. And you can find me online, as usual, at tech enthusiast at Dragonscave Space. That's my mastodon ID.

All right, so my pick this time is going to be Spotify. I know it's not a new thing, but I've recently gotten back into it and I love finding new music through Spotify. They have some really good algorithms based on what you like to say. We think you might like this thing too. And I really like that. Go ahead.

You actually like it? Like their picks are good.

Oh, yeah, that's amazing compared to Apple Music. And I love my Apple Music because it's built into every iPhone.

There are times that when it chooses something for me, I'm like, where did you get that?

Spotlight also has a feature that I really like, and it's cross fading.

Yeah.

So I can set it to like three to 5 seconds. 3 seconds. Still a little short, I'm finding, because there's a lot of gaps between songs if you set that thing to 5 seconds, it just rolls into the next song. Like it's natural, almost like it's a mix, and it's just fantastic.

Nice.

You can't do that in Apple Music. You can do it on Apple Music on the Mac, believe it or not, but you cannot do it on the phone or iPad. So Spotify has this on all the devices, and they just have a very clean experience for albums and those kind of things. It just looks really nice. I looked up the Iacast on there and it just looks really sharp. For our podcast, they try to really make that stuff look good. So I'm always looking at combining things. I just realized something, and it's totally crazy. We had a main discussion that we told people we'd talk about this time that we were going to talk about streaming services today.

We'll have to come back and visit that. Yeah, we're gonna have special and yeah.

We'Re gonna have to do this next week and talk about that because we just had so much news, we couldn't even get to that. And it made me think about that because of Spotify, and there's a lot of news coming out about streaming services. But, wow, this has been such a packed episode. But Spotify has been great for me lately. I have Sirius XM Radio, and I like that because you hear from the DJs and things like that, but you hear the same songs over and over and over again, and they change them occasionally, but it's not like always changing deal. I could always look for new music on Spotify, and I already have Apple Music and Spotify do I want a third music service? And I don't know that I do.

Right?

So that's kind of my thoughts there. I mean, I love the Sirius XM experience. I like the DJs, I like the interactiveness. So it's one of those things that you look at all your subscriptions and you say, what do I really need? And you make a decision. So we'll talk about that next week. But as from where people can find me online, you could find me at Mike DOE's on Twitter. You can email me at mike [email protected]. You can find me on Mastodon at Mikedoey's at Techopolis Social, and you could find me all over the web. And don't forget email [email protected] if you have any thoughts or want to comment on the podcast. And we'll have this up by this weekend. And it's been a great episode of News, so I hope everybody's enjoyed it. I want to thank Marty, Lynn and Angie for being here again. You guys are becoming regulars now because it's been three weeks, three or four weeks that we've had the same group. So this has been excellent. So we'll be back next week with another episode. And I want to thank everybody for being here. And you guys have any final thoughts before we end it?

No.

I hope everybody has an accessible day and a nice weekend.

Yes. Have a good one.

Have a good one, everyone. Thank you all for being here.

Bye 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.

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