[Pat]: Okay, well thank you all for coming out and spending your own time, and I’m really, really excited to see the accessibility meetup. They’ve been very instrumental in other cities, so I think it’s a really good sign that Chicago has one. I follow you on Twitter, and watch what’s going on, so it’s particularly exciting to have a special session because I was in town. I love coming to Chicago, it’s funny because once I come, my time gets filled up. It’s always good filled up.
Background-wise, I was born very premature. The amount of oxygen that was necessary to save my life caused my blindness, which is not that uncommon during that day and time. However, I was premature enough, probably even today, that would have happened. I had very low vision as a child until I was fourteen. So I went all the way through seventh grade in public went to the school for the blind, and then learned all the blindness skills; braille, had to walk with a cane, basically how to be blind. Part of that, I had really no training in terms of being a low vision person.
Career wise, I spent half of my work career in blindness rehab, teaching folks blindness skills, a lot of that related to tech. I was always using some of the newest tech. In fact, many times I wanted it to fail so, I was kind of the person who tried not to have it fail. So that was kind of fun. And then the last half of my career was disability policy. I got to work in the arena of justice when the American’s with Disabilities Act was signed. It was a fun time, it was a really open time to train about disabilities and then an open time to allow policy to have its impact on disability issues. So that was a lot of fun.
Now, in retirement, since 2008, my husband laughs when I say that because I do a lot in retirement. But I’ve always wanted to work in accessible travel, and I met Eric at Open Doors. I also serve on the National Council on Disabilities, and we met in Chicago and so it occurred to me that I could meet these great people at Open Doors. I had used information on their website, but never met them. So I met them at that meeting and that started a whole relationship. So now I’ver done things with Open Doors for the last six or seven years. And that’s been a lot of fun. They specialize in accessible travel kinds of issues.
Thinking back, just to give you a perspective, I got my first mobile phone about ten years ago. It was just as smart phones were coming out, and I didn’t have a cell phone, but a lot of my blind friends did. And they kept saying “I don’t need this phone to talk or anything because I can use it.” I said “What do you do with that phone?” And they said “I can take calls and I can make calls. What else do I need to do?” Well, they had not concept that cell phones even did more. What you don’t know, you don’t know. I knew they did a lot more and I wanted to participate in the fuller functions.
To give you an idea, you couldn’t go into a phone store and get information about accessibility. It didn’t exist. I tried, I just tried to see what would happen. It was not fun, for any party. You basically had to buy a $500 smart phone, sight unseen, so I had no idea if I liked this phone. $200 piece of software. Hope that you could install it and that you even liked it once you got it. And then the funniest thing is my son was in his 20’s at that time. He walked by and said, “You get a camera phone, what’s wrong with that picture?”
[Laughter]
I said “Well, I had to have a camera phone to be able to run this software. Anyway, it was ok, it was hard to use, not a good UI, but it was so cool to be able to figure out who’s call I missed, even though if I had a voice mail. New and novel; a totally different experience. It started me on a path to understand the potential of smart phones. So I had that phone for about 4-5 years, then a phone came out that ran a piece of software called the Canopy Reader. It’s kind of like a scanner that would read the document to you. The thing is, to get blind people to do that, it’s actually not hard to get sighted people to do it, but to get blind people to do it, we take lousy pictures.
[Laughter]
It’s kind of inherited in the disability. You know, we skew it one way, this way, up, down, any way you can skew it, we skew it. And we don’t know if we’re holding it the right way up, whatever. So the software has to be pretty magical to get anything to print out of what we’re doing. So the Canopy Reader did that. So another expensive cell phone with expensive software, but it worked. I still didn’t like the UI, I didn’t like it hardly at all. But I loved the reader. Well, I had that phone for a year and a half, and it was an ok phone, and then I went to a meeting at what was then the Continental Advisory Committee, and Jared Miller, who now is with the Falcons IT department. So now I talk to him about sports apps, which is fun. He asked at one of our meetings if the Continental iPhone app was accessible? Well, I was the only blind person on the board, I said “I don’t know, because I don’t have an iPhone.” I went home and I felt so bad about that.
So one day, I told my husband “you know what, let’s go to the Apple store.” What I did, I sent him the Apple guidance on making your app accessible, which he probably already had. I said “you know, this is a really bad answer to your question, but, you know, it’s the only one I have.” But anyway, I told my husband “ look, if they can sell this appropriately to me, I might end up buying an iPhone.” Because I knew I could always use the reader on the old phone, even if it wasn’t a phone. So I thought “well, I can do it.” So we did, and indeed, they treated me truly like a customer. They didn’t have to find somebody special that knew the special way to do the Voiceover and all that stuff. The only mistake I made was, Apple stores are notoriously noisy, so it was very hard to hear. So the word in the blindness community is if your going there, to take your earphones with you. Because it really does help in understanding things. But one thing I clearly remember, she said “what do you want to use the phone for?” I thought “boy is that a stupid question.” So I said “a phone.” And of course I’m sure she just laughed, because that’s the tail-tell question that the person has no idea of what all they are buying. So she sold it to me appropriately. Knew VoiceOver, knew how to turn it on, trained me to some extent. I was very happy with it. There definitely is a learning curve. Apple basically had to teach all of us that we could us a flat screen device, because none of us had ever done that. We had also never used a device based on sound alone. We always had something tactile, like keys. So it was a very interesting experience. It was frustrating to learn, but you just have to realize that you are not going to learn it all at one time. Fortunately, there was a couple of books that just came out on using your iPhone with VoiceOver, one of which I got, which was helpful. So I began to explore and to learn, and “wow,” it was amazing.
Most times when people talk about accessibility, they do just one or two things. Things like calendars never get done because they’re hard. Things like maps never get done because they’re hard. Its often times you get part of the device but not the whole banana. Well, Apple being a walled garden, being the maker of the hardware and the OS and the screen reader and the apps, did an absolutely career changing, bar setting approach to accessibility. I never thought I would hold in my hand something that I had been describing for years, called a device that was universally designed. Particularly one that did as much as the iPhone did. They gave us that. We now not only can talk about it, we can demonstrate it. I am still amazed. I certainly learned a lot of the techniques, the way Apple does it.
In case people don’t know, is obviously if I touch something and activate it, I wouldn’t know what I touched until it was already activated. Well, that doesn’t work very well. So they broke it into two steps. When I turn VoiceOver on and I touch an icon, it highlights it, but it is not activated. So it takes a second tap to activate it. Then they did something really cool with typing. Double-tapping each letter when you’re typing is really not too fun; they discovered that didn’t work very well. I have to say that I have no doubt that Apple did an incredible amount of really good user experience testing, as they developed all these accessibility features. They could not have come up with the things that they did without doing that. The other invention that they made was called a rotor. Remember on the iPod when you had the circular menu? Well, the sort of mimicked that with a twist motion. So if I put my thumb and finger down and twist my wrist, with VoiceOver on, it brings up a lot of things that I can adjust, like speech speed, punctuation - how much of that I want spoken. For web browsing, it brings up headers. So the coolest thing is like when I’m using Safari, and it’s kind of hard using Safari on a small screen, but if I somewhat know the makeup of a site, or even if I don’t, I’ll just turn my rotor to headings. Then once you get to headings, you just flick down and it jumps you from one heading to another. It is sweet! And in fact, every time now my son sees me use that, he says “Everybody needs a rotor!” I say “You have it, just turn on VoiceOver.” He doesn’t think that’s so funny, and he doesn’t do it. He keeps complaining that not everybody has a rotor.
And then they threw in some surprise things. Most people who try to learn VoiceOver have trouble with typing. What they did with typing to make it better is to create something called touch typing. What it is is when I bring up the onscreen keyboard, I have touch typing invoked from the rotor. I can run my finger on the keyboard to find the key I want, instead of double-typing; all I have to do is to lift my finger up, and it chooses that key. Instead of typing down, you just go up. Brilliant!
Actually, a number of us are pretty decent typers. When I went to dog training school, which, by the way, down at my feet is Iris, she’s my brand new, first trip from home guide dog. And she’s behaved quite well considering she’s not used to it. Yeah, she’s not used to the long day; she’s only 20 months. To lay still, meeting after meeting, it’s pretty amazing.
[Attendee]: Boring
[Pat]: Yeah, and to smell everybody’s food, that must be the worst part of a guide dog’s life. So I wouldn’t volunteer for it. But, she’s done very well.
So basically, that’s how I type. Most people have trouble with typing and trouble with rotor, as they’re teaching themselves how use VoiceOver. The resident apps are a delight. And they have grown in their accessibility. The phone, the calendar, they done very well. Even when they marked up the calendar, instead if just saying what you’re finger’s on, which is normally what you would think of for how you would mark it up for speech. Instead of saying “fourteen,” they said “Tuesday, May 14th.” “Wow!” Otherwise, I have to try to track to the top to figure out if it’s Tuesday or not. Then, track further to figure out if it’s May or not. They gave me all that. And in fact on the back buttons, I always get in trouble when I tell people “well it says back to whatever” and they say “no, it’s an arrow.”
[Laughter]
[Pat]: So, in a way, I get more, because it’ll say “back to settings.” Well, I even know what I’m going back to. “Wow!” That’s more than you get. The day the map app became accessible, I didn’t get anything else done. I read about it on Twitter. They use vectors. And so suddenly, I can even track a street. You did it by sound. It would tell you the name of the street, and tell you like north, south, Wind River north south. So if I wanted to track that, I would start tracking, it does a little tone. If you’re falling off the track, it changes and makes a lower pitch, so you just track back to where you were tracking. It’s not an ideal map, I’m waiting for haptics. There’s still work being done, material-wise, that may be a screen that will slip over your screen, that would give you raised information. That would be the most ‘bestest’ thing.
And maps, when you try to do braille maps, first of all, there’s never enough room. Second of all, there’s certainly not enough room for words. So it’s ideal to have a tactile and audio map, because then all your informational stuff can be audio, which is awesome. I always forget to, on the Apple map, sometimes they changes what’s in the rotor, just because they’re Apple and they sort of do that stuff, you know. And they don’t necessarily tell you. So I always forget how to zoom in and out. One feature I cannot do is zoom & pinch in and out, because I can’t get perfectly vertical or horizontal. So it thinks I’m doing the rotor command because I’m not lined up perfectly. So, anyways, I have to work around that. They put the zoom in and out in the rotor. And so some people have got even better at geography because they’ll zoom all the way out to get cities, and sort of learn more relational, where the cities are and stuff like that. So yes, it’s a real kick.
In addition to resident apps, there’s a lot of third-party apps available. Being as they are not real expensive like Windows software was, you can afford to just try something, and see. Well, a number of us did that, and people started … what I think originally started almost like a Yelp for accessible apps, its a crowd source thing where blind people could fill out their little form and … cause we all got tired of buying the same app. Because you also have a hard time getting your money back from Apple, because it is not accessible. They do have a process now; it’s still not easy. So, you can look on there and … we put equally inaccessible apps and accessible apps, because again we all don’t want to be inaccessible ones. But it’s grown to be a site that includes a lot more resources.
There’s a lot of podcasts now, there’s all kinds of podcasts now. So it’s really fun to watch all that develop. There’s a number of really good podcasts, there’s great ways to learn how to use VoiceOver, how to use the low vision features, there’s practically anything you would want in that kind of realm.
Third-party apps, the first ones I also have people buy, that I bought, is the money-reading app, because there really isn’t a way to read paper money. Well, that’s kind of important, because when you travel. It’s a very simple app, people can always learn it, it has no buttons, you just start it, there’s a real-time video. You lay your paper bill down, you lay your phone on top of it, then you gradually raise your phone up and it says the denomination. Awesome. Totally Awesome! So, like when I travel, I always sit down at night and go through all my bills and make sure I know what everything is, to an extent. So that’s a great … I think it’s a $3 app. The Treasury Service now has a free one that works pretty much the same. Excellent, excellent app.
There’s been various scanner apps, like the one I told you about. None of them work all that well, particularly with packaging. But now they’ve … you know that app I told you about on the other iPhone, it’s called the Canopy Reader, there’s now an iPhone version. It works extremely well. And it actually gives you an audio indication, an vibratory indication of when you’re holding the phone level. So it makes your pictures better, which makes your scans better. Although the joke was … I was traveling, and I wanted to know which little bottle was what in the bathroom. So I wanted shampoo. I got the fragrance, not the what.
[Laughter]
It was quite crazy. Gosh, I have probably over 200 apps on my phone. Reading apps; Kindle finally made their app accessible. The iPhone reading app is accessible right out of the box. Even the freebie of Winnie the Pooh, they even did really nice descriptions of the pictures. It was a good model for how one should do an accessible book. Kindle … Amazon got sued for the Kindle device. They made something that was an app … actually a Microsoft software to read. The first thing they came out with only read the articles. It’s like, if I can’t open it … then, you know, reading it doesn’t much matter cause I can’t get to it without help. So there was a lot of that stuff going on. Then they made this software, and it gave me headaches. It was actually about a three to five second pause after every sentence. And it didn’t actually change much even when you speak … sped it up. You couldn’t speed it up much for one thing. And even when you did the pause didn’t change. It’s like if I had to read this book in college, I would have dropped out.
There’s a new app that you all might like to hear about. It’s called Be My Eyes. It’s a real-time video, crowd-source assistance app for blind folks. Blind folks always have hundreds of vision questions. “Are these my black pants?” “Does this tie match this?” “What’s the instructions on this package?” You know, on and on and one. “What medicine is this?” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. “What captcha is this?” That’s the classic one. Yeah, we all hate captchas, captchas are absolutely terrible. Audio captchas are equally bad in my view. My threshold is “if I can’t do it in three tries, it’s terrible.” And, I’ve never found one yet on an airline app that I could use. So, they don’t work. Anyway, this has been out for a few months. I noticed that Product Hunt gave them a huge plug. So what a cool thing, for a blindness related app to get plugged at a place like Product Hunt. Wow! So it’s helping them get other kinds of funding. So you can sign up as a volunteer … okay … and I didn’t sign-up as a volunteer, so I don’t know if you get to put in hours or maybe you just answer your phone, if you feel like it, whatever. Anyway, when I request help, then it looks for somebody … and it looks for somebody who speaks the same language my phone is set to. So it gives me English. And then when they answer, I just ask them my question. And the person I got had answered while they were driving, so they said “let me pull over, and I would be happy to help you.” And I had them read some package directions to me, which they did, and they were very happy. So, it’s something that, it’s very easy for people to do. And yet it’s a very needed service. So, I’m very excited about it. Using the real-time video helps a lot.
There was a picture-taking service like that, but people would forget to turn on the light, well duh, you know.
A lot of people don’t see lights so they don’t miss lights, so they don’t do very good about thinking about light. Or even if they … [Iris, down] … So, on the picture taking app, they were forever having to say “Take a different picture” or “turn the light on” or, you know, do the camera more to the left or right. Well, with the video, can’t you just say “move the camera” so you don’t have all this back and forth and wait … you know, all that kind of stuff.
Twitter and Facebook have become more accessible in the last few years, particularly with the mobile apps. And so I have gotten much more interested in Twitter, and if anyone wants to follow me, I’m @PatPound1. I do a lot of re-tweeting of accessibility stuff. So if you want to look at my past stuff, it’s a pretty good collection. Sometimes I retweet just because I want to save it. You know, I don’t have to go find it again. It’s easier to find it in my own stuff.
Radio. Digital radio, I don’t have to hunt for stuff, I can go directly to stuff. For sports, I use it. There’s a few apps that categorize NFL games, and also College games, by radio. Well, radio gives me my audio description, right? So that’s what I want, because, it’s a lot more descriptive than the TV. Then, if I’m watching people with TV, and it’s digital, then we can sometimes sync them. It depends who’s ahead. If the TV is ahead, then you can pause it, and almost get them in sync. So it’s really kind of cool, cause that way I don’t .. find things out.
Games. There’s games galore that actually work. There are some very good developers that have figured out some very cool ways to make games that you wouldn’t even think could be accessible, accessible. So there’s like tons of that kind of example. It’s like all over the place. And a lot of it is on the Yelp site I was talking about, it’s called AppleVis.com. Apple and Vision, shortened, dot com. It’s an awesome site! Totally awesome. I use exercise apps. There are some of them that are descriptive enough to where I can follow what they mean by certain exercises. So that’s pretty cool.
I use all kind of travel apps. I use airlines apps. I use all the hotel finder … all those kind of apps.
Let’s see, what else do I use. One of the most fun things. If you have been on Twitter, we finally got NetFlix to add in audio description … video description. There’s been a project at work at NetFlix for a long time with a petition online and everything. A lot of people have signed it. Absolutely no response from NetFlix. In fact, they got sued and the court said, they didn’t have to … they couldn’t be sued I think that’s what they said. So, Daredevil came along, and we just couldn’t resist. It’s like “you’re using our superhero, and we don’t get to know?” And then some people said “well, don’t you want something more than just Daredevil?” And, well, you don’t want to just know about blind superhero, right? And of course, we said, “right.” I did notice a tweet later that said that Yahoo had been talking with NetFlix. Well, if you didn’t know it, the entity that invented audio description, which is the WGBH PBS station in Boston. Larry Goldberg was the director for years and years and years. He’s a brilliant guy. He now works for Yahoo. It’s like “Oh, SWEET!”
[Laughter]
Keep talking, keep talking, you made my day when I saw this. Go Larry. Yeah, I actually went over to his Facebook page and said yes yes yes yes yes. So now, NetFlix has a little way to go, because their website is still pretty challenging. But I can actually go to their app, I can actually turn on the audio description, and I can actually search for and find the movies I want. Now the bad news is I can’t get to the … they’ve actually added probably more now, a list of 39 tv shows and movies with audio descriptions. See, it’s out there, they just never put it up. It’s not like they had to do it for anything but their own stuff. Most nationally released movies have … you’ll hear it called video description most commonly, NetFlix calls it audio description. Same thing. So they describe what I’m missing. Okay? And in fact in Daredevil, they even describe the technique they use where things are reflected in his sunglasses, they would describe that. Which I thought that was pretty cool, that’s pretty detailed description. The challenge for description is they have to fit it into the pauses. Okay? A lot of time, they want to describe a lot more than they do describe, because they’re limited in terms of that. But yeah, I thought it was a wonderful demonstration of what we can do through Twitter and some other things to have won under NetFlix. And you can then tell that they were about to pop their buttons, they did a bunch of “coming soon” tweets. Well, you don’t do that for bad news, so. Anyway, it definitely kept us interesting. And I actually even watched Daredevil, which I wouldn’t going to do, but I was like “if they did it, I’m going to watch it, and then I'm going to tweet about it, because I want them to know there’s people out there that watched it.
A number of other services are quite accessible, Uber’s app is quite accessible. Instacart, which is a delivery service is quite accessible. The thing that I really wanted to say today is you know, I think when people hear about access to mobile devices, they tend to think about … you know, it’s really good that blind and people with disabilities are getting some of the same conveniences we are. Well, that’s not untrue. But the difference is there are things that the phone enables me to do that weren’t possible for me to do. So it’s way beyond convenience for me. I didn’t have a way to read paper money. I didn’t have another way to get help reading directions on a box for food. You know? It’s given me those opportunities. The other thing that Apple really did in really embracing Universal Design was they … first, they told us we could do a lot of things. But they even have employees who work as floor sales people selling not to just people with disabilities in your stores who are blind. Well, that’s just pretty awesome. That’s really pretty awesome. They’ve maintained the commitment over time.
I use a really nice GPS app. A Russian guy who lives down in Finland, who is probably one of the best developers I have ever encountered. He took the FourSquared data and built a GPS app specifically geared to blind people. It is totally awesome. It tells me the streets, so now I don’t have to count streets and wonder if I got off or not. It tells you a lot of usual GPS stuff. I have these neat, cool headphones; I wanted to bring them but my backpack was too full. They’re a little fragile. So I figured the only way I could bring them is to wear them, and I didn’t want to have to explain them to TSA.
[Laughter]
They go around the back, then they come up hear, they sit right here. They conduct the sound through the cheekbone. Well for me, I get to hear the traffic, through me ears, which I need to hear, without having earphones in my ears, as well as my GPS. It is so sweet! I took them to dog school and they let me use them the second week. It was so wonderful to have a dog do what a dog does and then having all the information mentioned to you. Another thing that Apple has done in the last couple of releases is some really cool things. Remember the rotor? I can dial it to something that says handwriting. I can actually trace letters, maybe I’ve seen before, which I have. So I know what print letters look like. If I want to enter by tracing print letters I can do that. Now actually I’m a faster touch typer than doing that, but guess what else I get to do? You’re going to be jealous. I can’t remember if I told you this, but I don’t think I did. I turn it to handwriting, then maybe I trace an “o.” It gives me all the apps that begin with the letter “o” alphabetized. Sweet! So you don’t have to remember what directory, what page, whatever. Just turn on VoiceOver, go to handwriting, and do it.
Also, braille is written, braille is like six dots, ok? Three down like this on each side, so if you’re looking at it, it’s one two three on your left, four five six on your right. Braille is made up of one or more of those dots. Well, to write braille, we use a big, clunky machine; that’s how I did this paper here. Then we mash down on fingers together. Like if I wanted the top two dots, I would mash down these two fingers. Because this is one and this is four. Apple developed an onscreen braille keyboard, so they took my fingers, they just turned them, because there’s more space. So I turned my rotor to Braille, I pick up my phone, I’m in an edit field, and I just start brailling. Even with the shorthand stuff I was talking about. It translates really, totally awesome. I can also use braille the same way to find apps. So if I braille a “b” and just stop, it lists all the apps that begin with “b.” So I can start my apps that way. Absolutely, totally cool. Maybe I should stop and do a time check, and maybe some questions.
[Audience] It’s 7:02.
[Pat]:* Ok, that’s probably pretty good. So why don’t we do some questions and discussion.
The meeting I was in all day was talking about the kiosk regulations and they were probably sorry that they invited me because I said “take them all out and do mobile.”
[Laughter]
[Audience]: Yeah.
[Pat]:* Which has been my position all along. So they definitely got it. They know that’s my position.
[Audience member]: It’s great to hear, my name is Martin, nice to meet you, Pat. It was wonderful to hear of the great apps out there. What app are you missing, that you’d really like to have?
[Pat]: Well, somebody recent did it. It was regular ‘ol Solitare. There were all these Solitare games and none of them were accessible. Somebody finally did it. So that was really cool. I’ve been playing around with something, I was talking about this earlier. I’m fascinated with the haptics. I probably will get a watch at some point in time. One is, something I could use tonight. What if on the watch … right now, you can set the timer, like, right now, I have to give a four minute speech. But it keeps going, it doesn’t like ding at you at one time. It’s like “ding ding ding ding.” And so you have to be lightening fast to catch it. I mean if you’re using a mic you can sometimes hide it far enough away so the mic doesn’t pic it up. But we all need something to let us know when our time is up when we’re speaking. So, it’s a perfect watch app, in my view. It would probably be an easy watch app to write. So yeah, that’s one we’re missing. The GPS is also going to integrate with indoor iBeacons. So that’s going to be really cool. I’ve also been working with Open Doors and IBM on an Android “can you actually believe I’m going this.” So I did have to tell IBM that people weren’t going to be a separate phone to use their app. So they are doing an iPhone version. So that will be good.
We’ve gotten to actually do some of the airport testing. It was really fun to work on all that and to see the back-end development that I haven’t been that close to with apps. But to get to work with the engineers and all that kind of stuff. So that was pretty cool. Trying to think of other apps that we are missing. Indoor nav, everybody’s just salivating about. I wish I had something that I could drop my own points at. Or even if say a hotel didn’t have iBeacons, if I could somehow drop a point in their wi-fi or whatever, and label it myself. So that way I could have where I’ve actually went, like the front desk, my room, the gym, the restaurant, and you know, by a day or so I would have … oh, I have to tell you this funny thing. I was cleaning out my GPS app, because I had all these personal waypoints that I had marked. Ok, it wasn’t a name of a business, but I had an overwhelming number of certain things marked. Ok, it wasn’t a … So guess what thing I might, I mean a huge number. Probably 90% of what I had labeled which is personal things are these things.
[Audience member]: I don’t know.
[Pat]: I have a guide dog…
[Audience members]: Oh…
[Pat]: What do I need to find? Trash cans! Trash cans are actually harder than the places. Believe it or not. And I think all outdoor trash cans should forced to have iBeacons.
[Laughter]
[Pat]: I labeled a lot of outside stuff, but not in the inside.
Other questions?
[Audience member]: Hi Pat, I'm a developer at Northwestern University in the Chicagoland area. I was really intrigued when you talked about Uber being accessible. We’re working on a mobile app right now for students that are concerned with safety, walking late at night. So we’re going to present them with a map, to kind of specify their destination, and then set a timer about, um, if they don’t reach their destination and cancel their timer, then we notify campus police. So, as a developer, I’m challenged by how to make a map accessible, how somebody can specify their destination on a map. So I’m wondering if you can speak to that.
[Pat]: Well, I wouldn’t say that the Uber map works in particular. But they give you the time estimate. So it’s not as important to see them coming as it is to know when they’re coming. During the period of time when cell phones were coming in and pay phones were disappearing, blind people had big headaches, because if you hadn’t bought a cell phone yet, you would miss your taxi, you would go inside and have trouble finding a pay phone. And your taxi would come and leave you.
[Laughter]
[Pat]: Then you had a real problem, if you had no phone or taxi. I would really look at the access of the Apple map. I am truly intrigued at how well they were able to do that. The other things is that, not last year’s WWDC but the year before, they did a hotel map for their convention, that I salivated over. I wasn’t even there, but I was just listing to the session. They had like a, what do you call the box that you can flick through and it changes … a combo box or something like that. Anyway, for example, if you were at break and you wanted to know where the coffee was, coffee was on the list. So you could turn that option on or off. Which makes a lot of sense. I mean there’s always things you want on, like elevators, stairs, things like that, that you always want. They didn’t have like the walls drawn, but you could get relational things, like you know on the other side of the escalators were certain meeting rooms. That is a huge amount of help, in an inside environment where you have nothing. Initially Uber had trouble, their rating system wasn’t accessible. But now all that is labeled well. Open Doors has worked with them too because, part of their problem was that riders could rate you. Well, if I left any dog hair in the car, and they didn’t like dogs, they probably rated me low. And so they started Uber access, which is UberX I think, I can’t remember exactly what it is called in the app. But, those drivers have had more training on disability and they have agreed to have guide dogs and things like that. There are still problems with some people who don’t want to pick up guide dogs. It used to be true in D.C., I don’t know if it’s still true, I haven’t been there recently. But to catch a regular taxi in D.C. with a guide dog, you had to actually send a person without a dog. A decoy. To actually get in your cab, and not let it go, then you walk out and get in the cab. That’s how bad it was. Because they would just drive off. Some other future things. I’m really watching 3-D printing. I’m so intrigued, I can’t even begin to tell you.
We’re having a lot more pictures developed in 3-D, a lot more museum things. Think of things I can’t touch, but there could be models of. All my life, when I’ve traveled, my husband is a great model finder. You know, we hit the cheap curio places. Because I can get a model of the Willis Tower, the Empire State Building, whatever. Before, so I know what it is like. Because I can’t get that perspective any other way. But think of historical things that you couldn’t touch. That you could make 3-D models of. In schools they are using it. Anytime one school does pictures of a book, they share the files. So now, all the schools can have it and print it. Oh, sweet! I could spend the rest of my life being with just 3-D printing, and be very happy. I don’t even have one, and its just like … following it and all. The whole medical stuff, and mean we’re finding ways to bypass … there’s a really nice summary article recently on the work on vision, so they’re basically bypassing your eye, making your device your eye, your camera, sending signals to your brain. They’ve got it to the point where it’s pretty crude vision, but it is some vision. You could possibly avoid crashing into big objects. You might be able to follow the grass line in the sidewalk. But they know exactly what it is they have to conquer to make it better, and they know they can get there. Wow! It’s like, amazing.
[Audience member]: So are there impacts, to receive those signals? How do they transmit?
[Pat]: I think right now, yes. I think that’s correct now. So it’s such an interesting world. I’m also very fascinated, Elizabeth started me on this realm of user experience testing and having people participate like a regular user and having that be part of what companies do.
[Pat speaking to guide dog]
[Pat]: It has so much strength that am going to do some core testing for Virgin America. I was challenging Elizabeth to give me user experience language so I can change how I talk from testing to user experience. Because I have a background in doing user experience stuff. So I want to try to tap into that and make it be that, even though that’s not exactly what they asked for. Couple of other things.
Since I got to learn what I did, I happened to have lunch with a friend of mine that taught vision-impaired kids at a local school district, and I discovered she had an iPhone. But guess what else I discovered? Even though she taught ... [Speaking to guide dog] ... I discovered she didn’t know how to use VoiceOver. She didn’t know how to use it with her students. So, for three years I did training of fourteen teachers of vision-impared students in that district. Funny thing, this is a district that didn’t buy Apple devices. So, that was pretty bizarre. So, the first year two teachers had Apple devices and didn’t know how to use them. The second year, about half had Apple devices and were learning to use them. The third year all but one had Apple devices and had used them with students. This year, they didn’t even have me train, they found enough … online, and their district is buying iPads for high school students. YES! I felt very subversive in all that, but rightfully so. But you know the parents were contacting the teachers and saying “teach my kid how to use this low-vision magnifyer app. They didn’t even know what it was. Or where it was, or how to use it. So, yes, it’s fun to see all that develop in various ways. The other group I teach is some older people than me who are totally blind and have low hearing. And it is a stitch, and loud, it’s very loud. They can’t use earphone because of the hearing aids. Most of their mistakes are because of lack of hearing. It’s been very challenging, but they love Siri. And their mouths say things like “I don’t want to do any of that Internet.” But then they’ll say “but I found this You Tube song that I like.”
[Laughter]
[Pat]: But they’re using Siri to search or they’re using the You Tube app to search. But they don’t realize that they are on the Internet, and I don’t tell them. Don’t tell them. You know … they’re doing it. So really, they’re wanting what people tell us all the time. We want it to be easier. We want it to meet our needs and we want it to do what we want, without having to know where I am or what I’m on. So yeah, they teach me a lot too. So it’s real fun.
[Audience]: Well, it's 7:16.
[Pat]: Yeah, I'll probably have to run soon, in fact, that's Laurel telling me don't be late, I'm taking the taxi with you, and don't leave me.
And the bad thing about speech on phones, if you go and stick your earphone in, whatever comes in with your text is read right out. Well, I'm happy to answer a couple more questions...
[Audience]: I have a question. There is a ... obviously you're big on Twitter. So am I. There is an app called Easy Chirp. Do you use it? Do you like it? Just so everyone knows, Easy Chirp is a web-based Twitter app that basically allows you to provide alternative text for images that you put into your posts. Do you find it convenient?
[Pat]: I don't use it because I typically use Twitter on my phone. But I love the fact that there's apps that allow you to put alternative text with pictures. And I wish Twitter would do better with that. That's something they need to correct. Particularly now that they let you retweet the things, and have the extra spaces to talk. So yeah, that's a weakness. And like a lot of blind people, we tweet things with images because we don't know what those are. Which is probably a good policy. But yes, it's a very good effort, I just wish ... there's another one that I just love, that I wish was on iOS. And that's the description app. That allows you to describe You Tube videos. You Describe. Yes, You Describe. I think it's a cool effort, I know the guy is a really cool guy. He cracked me up. He said growing up, he always wanted to be a lumberjack.
[Laughter]
[Pat]: I laughed out loud at that tweet. Actually, I could see that guy as a lumberjack. That is what was so funny about it. But it's this great side gig ... Josh Meele ... yeah. He's a cool dude. In fact, when I'm in San Francisco, I'm going to call him up, get together. It would be fun. Yeah, there's just such exciting things happening. But you know, it's as good as the access is. Anybody that can interface with access, like you guys with the meetup, with Global Accessibility Day, whatever you can do to keep the fire lit, and help people understand iOS access is not that hard. The more tools there are for web access, the harder it is, I think, for access. But iOS access is not that hard. And so actually that's why I like working in the mobile area so much. Because I think it's easier to get stuff.
Now the bad news is its easier for it to change. So we all hesitate when there's new updates to apps that we use frequently.
[Audience]: And so do we.
[Pat]: Yeah, but what we do is we figure out who blinks first on AppleVis ... you keep going to see who's knuckled. And what they're going to say about it, before you're going to have to change it. Some of us hold on to old apps because, we figure we're dead if we update them. So we'll see how long they last. 00:53:32,940 --> 00:53:35,520 Yeah, we play that game a lot.
Thank you very much for coming at a non regular scheduled time, I’m impressed. I love Chicago more and more every time I’m here. And I think even Iris likes Chicago. It's a good thing.
[Dennis]: Well, thank you for presenting for us. And sharing your experiences. Thank you.
[Applause]