Episode Show Notes
Welcome back to another episode of AFB Possibilities, a podcast from the American Foundation for the Blind. In this episode, Tony Stephens sits down for a conversation with Matt Ater.
Matt is Senior Vice President for Vispero, a leading global assistive technology and digital accessibility company. In this episode, Matt shares his own journey as a blind leader in the digital accessibility space. Together, he and Tony cover the span from the early days of low tech to what exciting opportunities are on the horizon through high tech. Matt's leadership has helped make the world more accessible for people who are blind or have low vision — he's even in the kiosk Hall of Fame. So, we hope you enjoy this conversation.
Be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
AFB Possibilities Podcast, Episode 6 Transcript
Tony Stephens:
Welcome to AFB Possibilities, a podcast from the American Foundation for the Blind. I'm Tony Stevens. In today's episode, we have the opportunity to talk with Matt Ader. Matt is senior vice president with Vispero, a global leader in digital accessibility and assistive technology. Matt has been in the assistive technology space for decades, and here we have a chance to hear about his own journey and rise through the field from the early days of low tech to where we sit around and dream about what could be possible tomorrow. So for now, enjoy this episode and be sure to like and subscribe. So we are here today with Matt Ader, senior vice president for Vispero. But he's much more than that. Matt has been around in the assistive technology biz for decades. I think anybody that has been tied to that field at some point has come across Matt.
So thanks so much for being a part of the podcast today. Greeting Salutations. We are luckily meeting up here in the space at a Marriott in Baltimore, Maryland. You're in town for the NFB event. Is that right? An annual event they hold around the holidays.
Matt Ater:
Yes. And looking forward to seeing our colleagues and friends from NFB tonight at the sponsor celebration.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, at their sponsor celebration. But then you're not too far away from home on the other side of Washington DC, now in Lake Anna, Virginia.
Matt Ater:
Exactly.
Tony Stephens:
Lovely place, kind of off the beaten path. Sort of a beautiful getaway for folks that live in the Washington Metro. They'll know that area. But you're not originally from Washington, are you?
Matt Ater:
No. I grew up in Kansas, a place called Olathe, Kansas. And most people, it's all kind of Johnson County is kind of big. It's Overland Park. It's got a whole
Tony Stephens:
Metro. Is that central near
Matt Ater:
Wichita? No, no, it's right by Kansas City. And it's like the home of places like when Sprint was there was in Oakland Park and now T-Mobile, Hallmark. There's a couple insurance companies based out of there. I grew up in Kansas. I'm a big Royals fan for baseball. People always ask me not to chiefs and I'm like, well, I like college football better than pro football. Well,
Tony Stephens:
I can understand because you left Kansas to go to one of the college football
Matt Ater:
Towns. Yeah. I mean, I did live a year in California. Was
Tony Stephens:
That after high school?
Matt Ater:
No, it was in high school. It was my freshman year of high school. What
Tony Stephens:
Was that about? What'd your mom and dad
Matt Ater:
Do? So my mom, when they got remarried, eventually my stepdad and my mom chose to live in Southern Cal and-
Tony Stephens:
Like LA or San Diego?
Matt Ater:
No, it's Orange County.
Tony Stephens:
Okay.
Matt Ater:
So a place called Placentia. Yeah, Yorba Linda, Placentia kind of area. Did a year there and then moved to Virginia and went to Oakton High School outside of DC right near the Vienna Metro to live with my dad and stuff. So went to high school in that area and then went off to college. Yeah. And you went to- I thought I'd get a degree in broadcasting. You have that
Tony Stephens:
Basic place.
Matt Ater:
As people always
Tony Stephens:
Make fun of mine as well.
Matt Ater:
Exactly. The baritone voice of God. I worked three radio stations. Did you do
Tony Stephens:
College radio?
Matt Ater:
I did.
Tony Stephens:
University of Alabama.
Matt Ater:
I went to University Alabama. Yeah, exactly. Role Tide. I worked for the college radio station. I was the program director for three years. I also worked on the NPR station on overnights on weekends.
Tony Stephens:
Oh. Was it music format or
Matt Ater:
Talking about that? I did scratchy blues. I did 1940s blues.
Tony Stephens:
Oh,
Matt Ater:
Wow. And don't ask me any history on that. And then I also had an overnights at a hundred thousand watt FM station, Good Times, great oldies, the all new cool 102.5. And then I did TV. I did the audio engineering on a TV station for news, which was a lot
Tony Stephens:
Of fun. We had very similar paths. This is funny. I didn't know all that.
Matt Ater:
It was weird because being low vision and you can listen to the audio and try to map it right, but at the same time, it was kind of cool. I cannot tell you the name of this product. Maybe there was 10 of them sold in the United States. It's like one of those low vision devices that never makes it, but it was a little black and white. The next
Tony Stephens:
Big thing to save the blind.
Matt Ater:
Right, right. It was a little black and white TV that was probably five inch by five inch and it had a mouse camera and I stuck the mouse camera on top of the view meter to watch it. And then they put a stand for the TV to sit on so it would be like right at my eye level so I could see it.
Tony Stephens:
So you would just ... Oh,
Matt Ater:
Interesting. To see if it was pegging or not. But because you got four channels of audio, you got two different channels of video coming in with audio. You know how it is. It's very ... Yeah. The good old days of TV.
Tony Stephens:
Before everything would have been nowadays, control rooms are all computerized and you can just Zoom text or zoom in.
Matt Ater:
Exactly. Magnify. But it's funny because you think about that, not to seem old, but like there wasn't ... This is not the computing world that we have today back then. So Doss was still the primary product.
Tony Stephens:
If you were lucky, you had a Kurzweiler at Arkansas to scan stuff.
Matt Ater:
Yeah, which I didn't. And so I was trying to use my vision more.
Tony Stephens:
Tell us a little bit about the vision experience. Were you born
Matt Ater:
Vision or what happened? No. I was born with something called hydrocephalus, water on the brain.
And the water pressure they would put in, they put a shunt in to have the water drain naturally, or not naturally, but yours drains naturally and mine didn't. So they put the shunts in to drain. And the shunt, when I had had several operations to update the shunt or fix it when it broke and stuff. But when I was six, it broke and it was kind of in between neurology appointments for my checkups and the water pressure cut off blood supply to the optic nerves. And so in my left eye, I have hand motion at kind of 10 feet is the way they would say it and it's all peripheral, so it's not the greatest vision. And in my right eye, I have 2600 tunnel that comes a little bit more towards the right corner of the eye.
Tony Stephens:
Now this happened when you were an infant?
Matt Ater:
I was six. You were six. Yeah. So think of the time when you're just learning to do everything in school, right? You're in first grade, in between kindergarten and first grade. And so- When
Tony Stephens:
It's important to be able, when the teacher says, "All right, look up on the board."
Matt Ater:
Right, exactly. And I was using, I think when eventually they realized it and they put a new shunt in and they realized how much vision I had lost, I was using just page magnifiers at this point, so not the greatest stuff. And as you probably know, I mean, depending on if you're in a good school district, you end up with an aide through that process. So I had a full-time aid making sure all my books and stuff were prepared and things of that nature. And the strangest thing, I just have to bring this up. I got a letter maybe five years ago from the daughter of the aid and she sent me stuff that I had sent her that she had kept. Just that small little connection of time and so it's kind of cool. But yeah, so I didn't use any technology probably until second grade.
I started using something called a visual tech and these-
Tony Stephens:
The big Hawkin ones?
Matt Ater:
Wood panel. Yes. Wood panel. Yeah, like something from a 70 to- They should come out with new living room. Somebody told me this yesterday. Why didn't we come out and do wood paneled video magnifiers? They'd be trendy. They wouldn't be. Today, right?
Tony Stephens:
I might do.
Matt Ater:
Yeah, that'd be- I mean, mine looked like a microscope. It was like this big, massive lens.
Tony Stephens:
I was low vision that I was 15 and I think I had one of those in my class.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. So it was monstrous and it was black and white only and it's not transportable. And so I'd have to go to the library to learn, right? Yeah. It's what we all did when you need to use something and there's only one in the school, you would go into the resource room and use it. And so all the way through grade school, used video magnification all the way through middle school, high school, video magnification, no text to speech technology, got to college and I had still no speech technology. I was just using video magnification. I had a video magnification for the computer called DP11+, eventually one called Vista. I know it's pretty funny that these were made by a company called Telesensory.
Tony Stephens:
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that name.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. Wow. And so the videos, what we would call CCTVs back then, now they're called video magnifiers. They were visual tech and V-tech and brands like that. But yeah, the Telesensory was kind of one of the big boys in the industry at the time and they were the ones who made the power braille, which was a braille display. They had one of their scan and read systems was called Oscar, which is always funny because it's the OCR mixed throughout the rest, right? OSCAR and so the O and the C and the R were all capitalized and the rest were lowercase.
Tony Stephens:
Marketing genius for audience-
Matt Ater:
Marketing. ...
Tony Stephens:
For an audience that wouldn't really know.
Matt Ater:
And they also had a product, they tried to build a portable scan and resystem called Domino and it had a little panel that would pop off the side to do the control panels. And the control panel that they made today looks like what we use if we go vote. And I don't know if you have the electronic
Tony Stephens:
Video. Yeah, yeah.
Matt Ater:
With the little round knob that you
Tony Stephens:
Turn. Yeah, the triangle
Matt Ater:
Left,
Tony Stephens:
Right up, down. Yeah.
Matt Ater:
That's what it looks like. I'd be fascinated to see it, but the first time they took it out in the field that someone dropped it and it broke and a million pieces and they realized this is not going to work. And so I didn't use scan and read probably until college. I didn't use ... I'd have to go to the library to use text to speech and I think their screen reader at the time in DOS was called ScreenPower from Telesensory. Eventually started using Jaws and other products. I mean, there was a time after college when I was ... You get a degree in broadcasting, you realize minimum wage isn't the greatest thing in the world.
Tony Stephens:
Minimum wage in rural Idaho at some FM rock station too for two years and then you're in like South Ohio or something, like that lifestyle of like- Right
Matt Ater:
Doesn't sound like great, right? Yeah. It's like minor league b baseball. Exactly. You just ride a bus everywhere. And by the way, I'm not saying ... I sound like ... Look, I was just glad to have a job, but also collecting social security and SDI because it's like you're not making real money at this point to pay your bills. You need other things to survive. And throughout that time, I had other jobs through high school and college to help pay the bills. My first jobs were cleaning at a sporting facility and folding towels and handing out keys. So you start somewhere, right? Yeah. And you learn the importance of work and showing up to work and dressing appropriately and being respectful at work and all the things that you do through even other kinds of jobs, whether it was being a DJ or cleaning a bathroom.
And this hotel room, I would have cleaned back then. I worked at a Marriott one summer, one year, and I cleaned where the cleaning ladies didn't clean, probably not the greatest job in the world, cleaning behind furniture and under furniture or scrubbing the grout before anybody thought you need to wear a mask and gloves.
But those are the manual type jobs that fit me at that point, did telemarketing, all the other kinds of stuff that we do. And the flashback to all of those jobs gives you respect for what people have to do for work, for sure.
Tony Stephens:
Well, what got you into the ... Use little quotes on your side of
Matt Ater:
My head. Is this a tech? Yeah.
Tony Stephens:
Because was it the lighthouse first?
Matt Ater:
My wife, a girlfriend at the time, took the cats, said, "I'm leaving Alabama. You can follow me or not. If you love the cats, you'll follow." Right? So the cats were looking in the back of the window
Tony Stephens:
Going, "Bob,"
Matt Ater:
Where did he go? And so she's rolling out of Alabama and I tried to finish up my job because I had committed to it and then moved back to Virginia, lived in her parents' basement and started substitute teaching. And I'm not kidding. It's the craziest job in the world because I'm at elementary school, middle schools, and high schools.
Tony Stephens:
Did they try to take advantage of the fact that you
Matt Ater:
Had low vision? Well, it's funny. So there was five schools in walking distance to where her parents lived. Oh,
Tony Stephens:
Was this Alexandria or where
Matt Ater:
Was it? No, it was Fairfax, Chantilly.
Tony Stephens:
Okay.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And one time I got a six week project for a lady gone on maternity leave and first grade teacher. I had 24 kids, 17 boys and 17 out of the 24 were on Ritalin. So we had to stop at the nurse's office at lunchtime to get them all their stuff, right?
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
But it was insane. And the poor teacher, because she came back and I had taught all the kids to not raise their hand when they had a question, but they just shout out when they had a question. They knew they couldn't mess with me though, but I'm sure some tried.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
And so it was probably July one year, it was July of 94, and the telesensory rep for the Virginia area had a contract to train IRS employees around the country on technology. And he called me up, he goes, "I need someone to teach someone how to use a video magnifier in San Francisco. It's a two hour job, you get paid 200 bucks."
Tony Stephens:
They knew you knew about it.
Matt Ater:
I had
Tony Stephens:
No clue how to use this video modifier.
Matt Ater:
I knew how to use. They
Tony Stephens:
Assumed you knew about
Matt Ater:
It. Right. Yes. I knew how to work some of them, but not the one this guy sold, right? Yeah.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
But I mean, you go and you turn knobs. One goes, one zooms in, one zooms out. Pretty quick. Right. So at this point- There's
Tony Stephens:
Always one chapter ahead in the end manual of how to use it.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. I mean, there's only five buttons on the front of this thing. It's not that hard to figure out. But I flew out to San Francisco. I did the training, strangest thing. He was supposed to be the one to go. So he hands me his plane ticket with his name on it. And I flew on his plane ticket with his name, and this is post the first Gulf War.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
Okay. So- So there was some
Tony Stephens:
Concern over security.
Matt Ater:
Not good enough because they let me fly on his ticket with no ID because I just said I left my ID at home and here's my business card.
Tony Stephens:
Well, it used to be anybody could go to the gates.
Matt Ater:
I flew on his business card and his ticket to San Francisco and back. I mean, I guess I shouldn't have said this on a recording, but it is what it is. It's 1994.
Tony Stephens:
You didn't say hi name. You
Matt Ater:
Didn't say his name. And so I go and I- We
Tony Stephens:
Can cut that out if you want.
Matt Ater:
No, no, it's all good. So the, because it's a good story. It's funny. You couldn't do that today.
Tony Stephens:
No. Oh, no.
Matt Ater:
So I go out and I show them how to use this and I get paid 200 bucks to do it. I was like, "Holy smokes, the most money I ever made for two hours of work." And clearly this guy didn't want to do this over 4th of July because it was like the July 3rd training. And so I had to stay over the 4th of July and I used my money to go to a baseball game at Candlestick. I showed up in like a tank top and shorts and I froze. I had to buy a sweatshirt. I spent all my earnings. You
Tony Stephens:
Were thinking it was Orange County, Southern California.
Matt Ater:
I had no clue how cold it was in San Francisco on the 4th of July. And I get back, completed one job and he goes, "Hey, I got a two week job. You got to teach someone how to use an Arkanstone in Omaha, Nebraska." Not quite the same quality as San
Tony Stephens:
Francisco. This guy didn't like doing his job, did he?
Matt Ater:
No. If he gave you the same
Tony Stephens:
Ticket.
Matt Ater:
Well, this time it was paid on my ticket and I got there and they were mad that they couldn't install the entire ... They thought they were going to install the computer software for the IRS into this thing. And so they were getting frustrated. I didn't do an ounce of work for two weeks. At this point, I'm like, this is the weirdest job I've ever been on. So I sat in the hotel room where they fought over this computer for two weeks, right?
Yeah. And I did buy a souvenir. I still have today. It's an Omaha Royals baseball hat, which doesn't ... They're now the storm chasers. So fun travels at this point. I've done no work basically for two jobs, but got paid and then hires me for the next, the next. And all of a sudden I am becoming an expert on every screen reader because they have screen power. They have something called Business Vision, which was from Arkansas or excuse me, Arctic Technologies. I had to learn how to sometimes install the ... At this time, we didn't have synthesizers that were running on sound cards. We had to put synthesizers in the machines. So I had to learn how to move the dip switches on the cards and change the IRQs and get this stuff installed because you're opening up computers and the scuzzy slots. Putting in these ... Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, none of that stuff exists today. Yeah, no. You don't do any of that stuff. Maybe you add memory, but you'd probably just buy it with the memory today. And so I'm traveling around the country doing that for two years and then applied for the job. The guy kind of went out of business and didn't pay me. So I had like 15,000 in debt of credit cards from traveling for him. Oh no. It was crazy and I'm getting married in a week. Oh, man.
I applied for the job at the Lighthouse for the Blind in DC.
Tony Stephens:
Washington.
Matt Ater:
Yeah, Columbia Lighthohouse for the Blind in DC for the head of assistive technology and training. And it's ... I think I interviewed ... It was July 19th. I got married on July 20th. I interviewed the day before my wedding. So you left the interview to go to the rehearsal
Tony Stephens:
Probably.
Matt Ater:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we went off to the honeymoon and I think the lady left a voicemail because this isn't ... I'm still not carrying cell phones at this point.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
Left a voicemail that I got the job while I was on the honeymoon. So I came back to work, which is perfect timing because I now had bills
And worked there for five years building up that program. We did some really great stuff and was really proud of what we did. We did all these national training contracts for IRS and Social Security throughout that time as they were rolling out new Windows computing. At this point, at some point they're moving to Windows NT. We were learning how to use Windows exclusively at this point. I was training trainers. And during that time, I had like 40 blind and low vision trainers traveling around the country to train groups of blind people to move to use Windows NT. Wow. And I mean, there was a time when I was, oh my God, flying back and forth between Nashville and Indianapolis on puddle jumpers because I had groups in both cities and the troubles and technology that we were having in each city and stuff like that.
And
Tony Stephens:
This was the late '90s?
Matt Ater:
This is like 97. 97, 98. And did that through 2001. I went to work for a friend named Scott Duncan and Steve Clark. They ran a company called Accessibility.
Tony Stephens:
The sailors Scott Duncan?
Matt Ater:
Yeah.
Tony Stephens:
So that's where you go.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. Yeah. They had left Telesensory, going back to brands again. They both had left Telesensory. Telesensory was kind of falling apart at this point. I don't know if they ... At this point, they had sold off the Braille technology to Blazey. So Blazey was only known for the Braille and Speak at this point, and they sold them the Power Brailles and that technology. So Blazey now had the Power Brailles, the Braille and Speak, and then roughly, I'm not sure the exact year, in that time period, Blazey, Arkanstone, and Henry Joyce all merged into what became Freedom Scientific. And I wasn't working for any of the companies at the time, but dealing with them because I was out training and teaching on all of their technology. So, I knew all the people, Jim Frocterman from Arkansas and Dean Blasey from Blazey Engineering and Ted and Eric and Glen from- From InterJoyce.
Tony Stephens:
From Interjoys. These are all legends in the field of assistive technology
Matt Ater:
For folks in the
Tony Stephens:
Planet. And these are the innovators that really broke new ground in so many ways.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And it's funny, we have ... And I'll talk about it now just because the timing is right, but our office space and our sprint teams on software, they're all named after these people. Oh, that's cool. We have rooms like the Hinter conference room, the Blazy conference room. We even have a Jim Bliss conference room because he was kind of a guy who was big on the low vision magnification. So a lot of these peoples in our Sprint team, we have a Pasiello Sprint team.
Tony Stephens:
For the Pasiello group? For the
Matt Ater:
Passiola
Tony Stephens:
Group. Consulting firm.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. So we believed in continuing the history of that business, because so much of it was wrapped around the people who came before us. And so when I went to go work for Accessibility, they sold within weeks to PulseData and PulseData doesn't probably exist as a brand today. PulseData bought HumanWare, and then eventually they rebranded to HumanWare. And so I ran the federal business for them for maybe a year and a half before running off to run a pretty big contract for a government contractor for the Social Security Administration, did that for five years. Then I just said, "I need to do something
Tony Stephens:
Different."
Matt Ater:
And I ended up running an IT program for a federal agency called FinCEN. And if you know what FinCEN is, that's probably not a good thing because FINSEN stands for Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and so they tracked money laundering. And I remember I worked out of a building in Tyson's Corner that everybody in the Virginia Tyson's area called the toilet bowl building. And they did it because the front of the building has a big, huge thing that looks like a toilet seat in the up position on the front of the building. It's probably an O, okay? But the way it's shaped, it looks like a toilet seat in the up position. So everybody refers to it as the toilet bowl building. And I worked there for three years running IT and it was cool because it was the first ... Since I started doing all this national training and doing this stuff for the lighthouse and then pulse data and then social security, I had not worked outside of accessibility or assisted technology at this point.
And so this was the first, since my DJ career that failed- Since you were
Tony Stephens:
Spinning wax. Yeah.
Matt Ater:
Won't even talk about the failed interviews in DC when I was trying to get jobs, right? Small market, big market, right? Compared to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Rejection letters. Yeah. Yeah. But I did that for three years and it was great experience because you really understood the infrastructure, which allowed me to really take on ... I ran business development for our company for a little bit during that time, because I was working for a government contractor through this. And when I applied for the job at Freedom Scientific, there was really no job open. John Blake, the CEO at the time said ... I asked to meet up with him and we got together and he goes, "Well, what would you want to come do? " And I said, "I'd like to run consulting for you. " And he goes, "We don't have consulting." And I said, "Well, that's your problem." I said, "How do you stay connected to your customer if you don't have an arm that's out working with your customer?" And so I pitched the job to him and started January 1st of 2014.
So that's 12 years ago almost.
Tony Stephens:
And this was, was it still Freedom Scientific?
Matt Ater:
It was Freedom Scientific.
Tony Stephens:
Which eventually became Vispero.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. I mean, as of today, we still keep the brands, but over time we will consolidate brands and that's just normal process in any company to kind of consolidate brands. But the ... Yeah, so I was brought on to be, let's call it the third leg of the stool because you had software, jaws and magic at the time, and then we had hardware, the Freedom Scientific brands, which were Ruby, Focus, Topaz,
Tony Stephens:
Stuff like that. These were the little little braille displays and stuff
Matt Ater:
Like that. The Braille displays, and the focus was the Braille displays, and Ruby was the handheld magnifiers. We had the open book software, and some other scan and read devices. So they said, "Well, consulting can be that third leg of the stool." And at the time it was mostly scripting and training and things of that nature that eventually became web accessibility and things of that nature. In 2017, it kind of really branched into that more, but over that time, we started merging companies. So we had
Optalek and Freedom Scientific merge in 2015. At some point we go some weird branding of VFO Group, terrible naming and eventually changed to Vispero. But in 2016, we acquired AI Squared, so most people know them as Zoomtech. So at this point, we're going to start phasing out magic screen magnification, which was maybe 10% of the US market. And Zoomtex is 90%. It made sense, right? Yeah. And then in 2017, we started really building out that accessibility group in late 2016. I remember it was the day before the election, I was at the White House for some event. I don't remember what it was.
Tony Stephens:
That was an event I was running with Maria Town
Matt Ater:
That
Tony Stephens:
Had accessibility ... Yeah, because I remember that day- This is so funny. ... very well.
Matt Ater:
Okay. We all
Tony Stephens:
Remember the day. Yeah, because it was in the building, the OEOB building, because Palmer, my guide dog at the time, led me ... They made us go through another door because the dogs were going to attack us,
Matt Ater:
Their
Tony Stephens:
German Shepherds. And then Palmer decided to take an offbeaten path, and we ended up behind the White House on the lawn there. That's so
Matt Ater:
Funny.
Tony Stephens:
And we're intercepted quickly. But no, yeah, that's so crazy. I remember that event very
Matt Ater:
Well. Well, I set- We were
Tony Stephens:
Running that for the White House.
Matt Ater:
I walked up to Mike Pacio and I- CCD. It was a CCD event. Yeah. I walked up to Mike Paciola that day and I said, "I'd like to buy your company." Not me personally, but-
Tony Stephens:
No, but yeah.
Matt Ater:
Soon to be Vispero Company wanted to buy TPG, which is the Paso.
Tony Stephens:
He was one of the leading sort of consulting.
Matt Ater:
Exactly. And so-
Tony Stephens:
Fighting the good fight to make the world more accessible.
Matt Ater:
Yep. And so we spent the next five months kind of negotiating and then we closed on my birthday of April of 2017. And at that point, we went from a accessibility team at Freedom Scientific VFO Group from 17 people to all of a sudden like probably 40 people, right? So we started growing this market and later bought Always Accessible, which was David O'Neill's company who had spent many years working with AFB. David O'Neill worked with them on the AFP consulting and a year later bought Interactive Accessibility, Kathy Walben's company, and we merged the Pasiello Group and interactive accessibility and always accessible into something new branded as TPGI. Give me two seconds real quick. Spause or doc, music.
Tony Stephens:
Just making sure we're good.
Matt Ater:
Witchat, voice memos, active.
Tony Stephens:
You don't want to start over. No, we're still recording. Pause button. All right, we're good.
Tony Stephens:
Transcription button.
Matt Ater:
Speech off. All right.
Tony Stephens:
So go back to ... Okay.
Matt Ater:
So at this point we've taken all of these three accessibility companies such as the Pasiello Group, Interactive Accessibility, always accessible and merged them into one and rebranded as TPGI. And at this point, I'm stepping away from running the consulting business into starting the business development segment, which is intended to help us find new customers and new products that would make us fit into the market. And so this is going into 2019 and we start looking at the self-service kiosk space, realizing this is an amazing market, but it's also a market that is so underserved for people with disabilities because you could go anywhere and find self-checkout, kiosks, payment devices.
Tony Stephens:
You want to start ... You could go anywhere.
Matt Ater:
That's fine. You could find these kinds of devices anywhere. And the word kiosk is probably not the greatest ... It's not the word that encompasses everything, but it's kind of closed systems.
Tony Stephens:
It is. And our world has migrated so much there over the past five years.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. I mean, well, and look, let's remember the FCC kind of started pushing this with TVs and DVRs and all of that technology gaming systems that are also DVRs and TVs, right? So the fact that Texas Speech is on these closed systems is not shocking. The problem is that no one ever thought about all the stuff that's in public. And so we started working on the project. We made a version of Jaws for these self-contained devices, as we call Jaws for Kiosk is what we rebranded that product as. It's at this point only windows. And we started working with companies like McDonald's and others to look at opportunities. And I remember that the funny joke is Ryan Jones worked for me at the time and-
Tony Stephens:
He was an awesome accessibility engineer.
Matt Ater:
An amazing guy and still works with the company and senior vice president at Vispero as well. I gave him the California prisons and I took the Carnival Cruise line account. Touche, sir. Touche.
Tony Stephens:
Well played.That's
Matt Ater:
Part of what happens when you're the boss. So he had to go and work on a kiosk solution that allowed prisoners as they're leaving the prison if they're blind to be able to apply for jobs and things of that nature. And I went on the Carnival cruise line and got the buffet and had to make sure that the internet cafe computers would speak. So that's an example of a self-contained. And the idea behind self-contained is that you can't bring your own assistive technology and install it, right? So if you can't add something that gives you the privilege of using that device, then that becomes a self-contained device. And so it was like, it's kind of a fun little area because you're sitting there going, "This is an untapped major accessibility problem coming forward for public spaces." And anything from a library to a grocery store to a restaurant is now impacted or even gym equipment.
You know this. I mean, you've seen where, how does someone use a Peloton?
Tony Stephens:
When I was at ACB, we worked with Peloton on that whole
Matt Ater:
... Yeah. Or the TVs on the backs of seats in an airplane. And how do we also do it independently? And now, I mean, the beauty of the European Accessibility Act, which basically is mandating it across Europe, you have to be able to do it independently according to the rules. It can't be somebody else that does it for you.
Tony Stephens:
So that's an EU law that's been passed?
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And that's going to hopefully change the rules over time here because companies who do something over in Europe aren't going to say, "Oh, let's make a different version in the US." Let's hope that technology shift just comes with it, if that makes sense. So when I look at the next few years in the business development segment, the opportunity was how do we really blow up reaching this new segment? And I was also doing government stuff for us and stuff. And granted now we're rolling into the pandemic and after getting all of that started, I did run our software group for a while. So I had ZoomText Fusion, JAWS underneath me, and that was also a fun time because I really love our software engineers. The innovations that happened during the pandemic were a lot of critical ones. The
Tony Stephens:
Whole world went virtual.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And so it's a small feature, but one of the ones that I loved the most that we added was something called split audio. And everybody in government or everybody at work got sent to work from home and they used to use a desk phone or something else, but now all of their phone calls, all of their meetings are virtual. And that meant that you're listening to your screen reader, in this case Jaws, and Zoom calls in the same ear, right? You're hearing them both ears at the same time.
Tony Stephens:
Jaws is constantly talking over-
Matt Ater:
And it's hard to, like I'm reading a document to keep up with something and somebody else is talking. It's very hard. And if you're in a call center, same problem. And so how do you look up someone's data while they keep jabbering in your ear? And so something as simple as that to say, "Let's let the user put Jaws in one ear and put the call on the other ear." It's such a small ... Someone used to buy for the phone, it was like a Panasonic headset that was converted and it was an extra 400 or 500 bucks to do this and it was hardware. And then you roll over the cable on your chair and it's ripped out and broken and you have to start over and buy a new one. Now it's just any headset hooked to a computer with Jaws could do that.
Tony Stephens:
Left is this, right as that.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And you could pick and choose which ear and you could do it just with one app, but it could even be watching a YouTube video. Maybe it's a training YouTube video. And so little things like that can really make you proud because it made such a difference in people's lives with different features as they're coming. And now that the AI features have all been added, or not like we're done, but the great AI features we've been adding just to improve the lives of people like picture smart, face and view. Talk a
Tony Stephens:
Little bit more about those because I don't know if everybody in the audience may
Matt Ater:
... Yeah. So I love-
Tony Stephens:
What are the hot stuff that Visparo is cranking out right now?
Matt Ater:
Yeah. So Picture Smart, a lot of people think it's just to do any picture, but it's to do the screen or any item on the screen. And so you could be in a Zoom meeting and somebody's talking about charts, but you don't know what's on those charts and they're only talking about pieces of the chart. I can do a keystroke and I'm not going to give you the keystroke because you'll forget it, but I'll give you a keystroke to get all keystrokes in a minute. And so you can press a key and get it to describe it to you. And then if it describes it to you and it's not enough information, you could just keep asking questions. So it says, "This is a chart about the number of blind students that went to the top five colleges." That's all it said. But then you say, "Okay, well fine, what are the top five colleges?" You ask that question right there on the screen
Tony Stephens:
And
Matt Ater:
It comes back and tells you, "Well, University of Alabama had 10 students, the University of Missouri had 20," that kind of thing, right? And you could drill down even further. Maybe the revenue of a specific university is shown. Well, that kind of stuff, or what years? You just start asking questions and it'll come back and give you the answers because it's on the screen.
Tony Stephens:
What model are you all using for this?
Matt Ater:
Claude and OpenAI. The face and view I think came first and it'll tell you if you're looking at the camera. It'll tell you turn your head or maybe the camera needs to be tilted, which I think is amazing because how many times did we not realize that camera was facing on the top from our forehead and so-
Tony Stephens:
Well, they have a lot of security verifications now. When I logged into social security, I had to do a photo verification of my ID to prove that it was me and I hated it because I didn't have this on my phone. I wish I would have because it's one of those circles you have to line your face up in the circle
Matt Ater:
And
Tony Stephens:
It wasn't getting it right. It wasn't getting it right. It wasn't getting it right.
Matt Ater:
Brilliant. Yeah. I think I had the same problem because that's the something ID program.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, something ID.
Matt Ater:
Yeah, I had the same problem on that one.
Tony Stephens:
But I mean, just a brilliant ... Again, innovation that your team are thinking of these like, how can we take AI when everyone's afraid Terminator's going to show up tomorrow, which I mean, it still possibly could. We'll see what 10 years is like from now. But at the same time though, I mean, just that you all have a team. Do you have a team that just sits around trying to think of innovation like this?
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And we've added in this year, several people who have been brought in just to kind of add to innovation even more. So ...
Tony Stephens:
What if we could do this?
Matt Ater:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the next two are good examples of that. We had so much training content that you didn't know where to look. You didn't know where in our documentation. It's just so deep and so long and-
Tony Stephens:
It's not the tapes with Ted Hinter talking to you.
Matt Ater:
Well, it may be in there too.
Tony Stephens:
No, but I just think in 1988 when I first got on Jaws- Yeah,
Matt Ater:
You got the tapes.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, it was like
Matt Ater:
A ... He was great at it and Eric was great at it, but yeah, I mean, you take all of that rich content and you dump it into FS Companion, which allows you to ask any question about how to use Jaws, Zoom, text or Fusion. So you could say, I love this example is, "How do I insert a row in Excel with Jaws?" And it'll take you step by step on how to do that, not from like just Googling it. It tells you which keystroke to press when, what the response should be, excuse me. And then you could drill down even more stuff. And so the fact that it can do all that because it's content that's been created by our training teams and it doesn't do just JAWS stuff and ZoomText and Fusion stuff, but it'll tell you anything to do with a keystroke that has to do with Windows, the browser, Word, Excel, Google Docs, all of that stuff is in there.
And so, and I think, I don't know if they've completed it, but I think it's supposed to bring in all of the transcripts from the webinars as well. So there's so much stuff that's being brought into the FS companion, and then that's exploded this year with two new features, which are AI labeler. So if you land on an item on a webpage and you're not sure what it is because it says unlabeled or doesn't give you context, you can press insert G and it will label it.
So I was on a button on a page and it said unlabeled button zero, I think it's called unlabeled button zero, press the keystroke and it comes back and tells me it's a submit button. And that is like hugely powerful because otherwise, I don't want to call someone and ask them what that is right now. I don't have the time, right? I got to have them remote into my computer and blah, blah, blah, but there may be two or three unlabeled button zeros on the page, so I can go through and label them all. And then the one that just came out in the version 2026 is called Page Explorer and where Picture Smart was great, it was only the screen. Page Explorer is the entire webpage that's the current page on the screen. So
Tony Stephens:
Even what you're not seeing?
Matt Ater:
Yeah, because it's getting the entire page. It doesn't click on and go through all the pages in that domain, it's just that one page.
Tony Stephens:
No, but that one page, the typical scroll down and if it's a really long page.
Matt Ater:
Yep. So I can, it tells you page summary, it tells you what's the important content on the page based on its knowledge of the page. It tells you how to navigate the page. It tells you they have well laid out regions, you can use the letter R, great heading structure, you can use the letter H. So it gives the guidance to the user or you can just ask a question. So you land on va.gov for the Veterans Affairs and you don't want to listen to all this stuff and you just say, "What's their phone number?" Which
Tony Stephens:
Is always at the bottom of the page.
Matt Ater:
It's somewhere on the page or what's the crisis line number because they may have that on the page or is there anything about accessibility? You just ask these questions and if it's on the page, it's going to come back.
Tony Stephens:
Do you have to type response or can
Matt Ater:
You do pages? Oh, you can dictation or type. Okay. Yeah. I did what's the top five stories on the page on mlb.com. And if they're actually summaries on the page, you'll go ahead and summarize them as well. And then links are there so you can click a link and stuff. So the intent being someone with vision can just scan the page and find what they're looking for. You and I, or a lot of people may arrow through the page and take their time tabbing or whatever, but this thing's smarter than that, right? It's finding stuff for you. It uses AI, I
Tony Stephens:
Feel like, to get rid of one of the biggest frustrations of online or just any document, anything for our world that's always linear. And you can type H and try to go to different headings or different frames and
Matt Ater:
Things like that. They didn't do a heading on it.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, exactly. Or just to get through just the fact that even you have to go through heading. What if it's a thing that has a hundred headings, headers on it like Mark-
Matt Ater:
I think mlb.com is an example of like way too many headings.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. You got so many teams and so many
Matt Ater:
Stories. And they're all
Tony Stephens:
Headings. It's heading overdose. So I mean, just brilliant. I mean, it's been awesome. I've always known as Vispero because of Jaws, which I've been using since 88.
Tony Stephens:
Sure.
Tony Stephens:
And it's different iterations from Ted and company all the way up to now with you all. But just knowing about all these other features that again are innovating the same way that Ted and Dean and others innovated 30, 40 years ago, it's exciting to see you all still have that same spirit of innovation.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And we did some really great stuff with American Printing House for the Monarch for Multi-line Braille.
Tony Stephens:
Which is their new sort of flagship, amazing interactive tactile
Matt Ater:
Tablet. And now you can run Jaws and Jaws can connect to that. And you could do things like also split line braille, so you could show some things on one side and some things on the other, so you can do some really cool stuff. Love those features, but our partnerships with people like that, Microsoft, Google, are really critical. And this is really, I think the important note is like people used to think Jaws just gave you a new version every year on Halloween and that's when we would release the new version around that time. And that's what you had to plan for was this Halloween release and all the new features would come in the Halloween release. And for the last, I don't know, six to 10 years, it's not that. We're rolling out updates every eight weeks with new features potentially. I mean, Picture Smart came out in the spring, the AI labeler started in the summer this year.
So features come out throughout the year and at the same time, your software used to come in a box. Yeah. Do you remember that? I mean, if you wanted a new version of Office, you went to Best Buy and bought it or Staples and bought it and you came home with a box and you put CDs- With several
Tony Stephens:
Discs, not just one.
Matt Ater:
I'm going to say CDs for fun because there was a time- Let's
Tony Stephens:
Not show our age that much.
Matt Ater:
Right. We don't want to talk about floppies. And that's the way it came. Well, that's the way Jaws used to come because you didn't get a lot of updates. Well, now we have to do the updates because guess what? Microsoft, Google, everybody is rolling out updates. The browsers, accessibility is not just JAWS on top of Windows. It's all of us working together to make a complete solution, and that accessibility journey starts with major partnerships to be successful. It starts with us knowing that because we're working closely with Microsoft, us knowing that we may have to change something to work better with Teams. They, a couple of months ago, did something that broke the start menu for people. Well, we knew about it, they fixed it. That partnership is so ... And there's no way they do things on purpose. I mean, we all go through bugs.
That's what bugs are for to find something- But
Tony Stephens:
When the bugs are for our community, it's amplified.
Matt Ater:
Oh yeah.
Tony Stephens:
So the fact that you all have that in the same way, I mean AFB, what's great is this world is not as competitive in the sense that Google and Apple and Amazon and you all and Ira, everyone knows each other and can talk to each other. If something's wrong, they'll let other people know and hopefully the next update will be fixed.
Matt Ater:
Well, and we have to work so closely with people like Google because of docs and sheets and all of those programs and meet because we have to be out of the box compatible for users,
But think of often your browser changes and you don't even know it. So if we're not working closely with those guys, it's a mess. And that's why innovation's even harder today than it may have been before, not to say AI isn't going to be the innovation tool because it will, right? There's a lot of great things we can do to partner within those AI systems. But the reason I say innovation's harder is because the maintenance work to stay on top of all the other changes through operating systems and browsers and productivity suites is very timely, time sensitive and critical as well. Let's be honest, Teams has changed drastically in the last five years since COVID. It's changing so much and Zoom does ... Next thing you find out Zoom has chat in it and I didn't know that, right?
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
I'm not talking chat inside the meeting, but it has all kinds of-
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, like all these different ...
Matt Ater:
Yeah,
Tony Stephens:
You go to the dashboard now and there's like a dozen things on it you can do.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. So the world of innovation includes a world of staying on top of all the other things that come and go with all the changes that we have to go through from different versions, the windows and things of that nature. So I think our team is on top of it. I think our team loves it. They love the challenge. We have some really amazing engineers who've been developing with this company for so many years and a lot of new ones that are bringing new ideas and new thoughts and AI ideas and things like that that I think you'll see coming up in the next year that are just going to be fantastic.
Tony Stephens:
I mean, hands down, visperial, you are global leaders in the space of accessibility, not just here, but around the world. And so, and that's part to your leadership, right? And not just you, I know it's a team and you mentioned Ryan and other folks on the team that are just rock stars in our world, that those of us that are nerd out on accessibility and enjoy every time at a conference when you get a chance to hang out and talk about what's new and everything. You wear another hat or you wore, you're still involved, but as past chair, and this is as we're closing things up here, right? So I know your time is valuable and thanks again for taking all this time.
Matt Ater:
No, I love it.
Tony Stephens:
But as past chair of the CTA Foundation, the Consumer Technology Association, which is CES, everyone, every news channel loves all the toys, every January from Vegas. And talk about partnerships. Now you're on the industry. What is it now since
Matt Ater:
You
Tony Stephens:
Left as chair?
Matt Ater:
Yeah, so it's the CTA board of industry leaders. So it's C-suite folks from all around the industry
Tony Stephens:
Who- The whole tech sector pretty much.
Matt Ater:
... who've been invited to participate in this and you have to go through a nominating process and stuff. And I was really proud to be nominated to join because I don't know if they've had ... They've never had a ... As far as I know, nobody's said that they're a disabled person on there. It doesn't mean there haven't been, but it's not they've raised their hand and said ...
Tony Stephens:
Can smile and represent.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And so I think it's been good that to pass and I appreciate how much I've been able to participate at the next level of the organization because it does allow you to spread the word of accessibility broader and trying to get to companies before the crisis, because accessibility portion of our business is a very reactive part of our business. I'm not talking just for us, I'm talking just in general, the industry.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
People wait till they have a problem. They wait till somebody complains. We're always the afterthought, right?
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
It's somebody sued, I mean, somebody complained and then they solve it. Some companies, more proudly McDonald's and some others had already ... They started working on those problems before they came to us and needed us, right? And so that may not be the case with all companies, but a lot of it's reactionary. Let's wait until we have a problem, then we're going to call and ask for help. And so being able to talk to industry leading people, there's a retail council, there's a audio council, a TV council, there's different councils and then now an accessibility council where you ... They're not called council, they're called work groups, but these different work groups allow you to talk to other people in the industry to talk about these kinds of things. And they asked me to come speak on the retail working group to talk about accessibility in the retail space.
I just actually had an article published about the five things you need to think about during the holidays around retail from an accessibility point of view, which was great to be published and things like that. Getting our word to the next level of people, to C-suite people is really critical,
Tony Stephens:
Not
Matt Ater:
All just about assistive technology, but also about accessibility.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Broader access. Yeah. Yeah. What do you feel like in five years, because few people have had a chance to sit around the table with the companies that are innovating and kind of have their hand, their thumb on the scale of the future. What do you think five, 10 years will be like for our world? Will
Matt Ater:
We all have Jordy glasses from Star Trek? I don't think so. Well, it's funny you say that, but we used to have a product called Jordy. So it was a wearable magnification device. Jordy
Tony Stephens:
2.0.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. Well, I think we even had 2.0. We'll do Geority
Tony Stephens:
3.0. Okay. Sounds
Matt Ater:
Good. I mean, look, we're doing it with Metaglasses today. I mean, there was the try with the Google Glass and I think the Meta's taken it to another level because it's, I don't know, a little bit more normal to be wearing sunglasses or glasses than it is to be wearing the open frames. But we're going to ... Look, I'm not a visionary like Ray Kerswell or anything like that.
Tony Stephens:
But if you listen to Ray Kerswell, I mean, it's science fiction.
Matt Ater:
Yeah.
Tony Stephens:
And maybe he's right. He's
Matt Ater:
Writing about a lot of things. Exactly.
Tony Stephens:
But you have a realistic view of just-
Matt Ater:
I do believe ... Somebody asked me the other day, will AI replace a screen reader? Let's do that topic for a second because I think this is kind of ... In our world, that's what we're kind of ... Not Vispero world, but just in general, our industry. Do
Tony Stephens:
You think the industry could do that in five years?
Matt Ater:
No. Yeah. So my question back to anybody who tells me that is, will there be a screen? I mean, do you think ... Let's be honest, we live in a very visual world.
Tony Stephens:
Yep.
Matt Ater:
And let's just sit back and say that everybody you know in your family, and you went to them and said, "Are you ready to give up your screen?" They can't even give up their screen while watching a TV show. They can't give up a screen while eating a meal. Yeah. How are they going to give up a screen? So tell me there will be no screens on computers tomorrow in five years. Not going to happen. So as long as there's a screen, we need some way of accessing that material in the way we want to consume it. And somebody else said to me the other day, our blind employees, they don't need a screen reader. They can use Alexa to read their emails to them. I said, "Is that all they do? " And let's be honest, if you start to read an email and you want to skip a paragraph because you're like, "I don't care about that topic.
I want to move to the next topic." Or, "I want to go back a word."
Tony Stephens:
You don't want to say, "Alexa stop." No, Alexa stopped- Alexa stop.
Matt Ater:
Alexa stop. Right. And I'm not blaming Alexa.
Tony Stephens:
No, we love Alexa.
Matt Ater:
But it doesn't matter. He was the OG in this world. It doesn't matter if it's Alexa, if it's Siri or if it's Google Home- Gym and I. Or anything. Is it going to know when I said I didn't understand that word that was just spoken? Can I speed it up to read at my level? Can I change the voices so quickly on the fly? There's things that we do that we still need a keyboard and a screen reader for. There are things that will, in our technology, that will change to be more AI driven, but those are ways to enhance our lives, not necessarily replace something.
Tony Stephens:
I like that idea of enhance. That's interesting.
Matt Ater:
And enhance in lots of good ways.
Tony Stephens:
Oh yeah. Like Jarvis from Iron Man, the smart home, his virtual AI person from the Iron Man series. That's a great way to think. I never really thought of it that way, but enhance versus replace.
Matt Ater:
And let's use a spreadsheet for a second or 20 documents that you need to read, you need some summaries and you need to know which document has the content in it. AI can do that stuff way faster than me scrolling through 17 tabs of a spreadsheet to find what I'm looking for.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
So that's helping me get the data quicker and maybe even some analyzing of the data.
Tony Stephens:
Theory helps cited people just as well too though.
Matt Ater:
Right.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. And let's get rid of some of the tedious work and build that in and make that helpful to us. But I would even argue that if I want to draft an abstract for a conference, there's nothing saying that I can't give it a title, tell it who else is going to participate with me. Here's a few paragraphs. Here's a few websites to look at. I need it in 250 words and it can do it and then I can fix it. Now, my wife would say that those aren't your words. I'd be like, "Well, I don't know that they're not. They just did it a lot faster for me and then I can fix it. " Right?
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
Sometimes looking at a blank piece of paper is hard. This is the greatest part about a podcast is that there's no blank sheet of paper. We just get together and chat because we've done that before. But yeah, I believe there's what AI is going to do for us, enhance our lives and do a lot of cool things. And our leadership right now has brought in some new folks and they're looking at all the new ways that we can add AI kind of components into our stuff to improve the lives of people, not to replace the technology, but why can't a video magnifier do something for you than just make print bigger?
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
Could Jaws help you do things on a website even faster without even going to the website? Possibly. Why not? These are the kinds of things that we'll be answering, for sure.
Tony Stephens:
So we're still a ways away from our AI over Lord's reading his bedtime stories.
Matt Ater:
Well, you can do that right now. I mean, if you want.
Tony Stephens:
No, I guess so. Yeah.
Matt Ater:
I don't know if you've been on a conversation with one of these AI agents and it's just a little bit weird because they just
Tony Stephens:
Don't- You really freaked my girlfriend out. I had to switch it to a male voice because I had this Manchester English accent voice
Matt Ater:
Email.
Tony Stephens:
And she's like, "No, you have to stop that. Change the voice. It's just freaking me out. " She thought I was cheating on her. So where can people follow you? I know you've got a huge LinkedIn presence.
Matt Ater:
I think LinkedIn's a good one. It's probably the best.
Tony Stephens:
Matt Ader.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. One
Tony Stephens:
Of the various iterations, just type in Vispero.
Matt Ater:
Yeah. I mean, there may be a Mad Ader that's an Olympic swimmer, that's not me.
Tony Stephens:
You don't say.
Matt Ater:
Yeah, guarantee. We
Tony Stephens:
Were broadcast majors.
Matt Ater:
For radio too, not for television. Right, right. So I would ... Yeah, LinkedIn is by far the best. I don't really do the other ones that much. And I think continue to reach out to us. Give us your thoughts on the kinds of things you need in the industry, because we need to hear from our customers. There's a lot to be learned from the people who use our technology every day, and so we want to continue to hear from them.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Matt Ater:
And I personally think it's my favorite thing in the world to talk to people about this kind of stuff. So yeah, I mean, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn for sure.
Tony Stephens:
Awesome. Well, Matt, it's been great knowing you over a decade and even awesome, more so that we could sit down and chat today and just find out so much just about the history of the space that we both sort of evolve around, but really a lot of the exciting things for the future for Vispero. So thanks, man. Appreciate it. It's great. You've been listening to AFB Possibilities, a podcast from the American Foundation for the Blind. To learn more about AFB or help support our work creating a world of endless possibilities for people who are blind or have low vision, visit us at www.afb.org. Be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, and leave us a comment. It really helps us out. AFB is produced and edited by Tony Stevens at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Additional digital media support from Kelly Gask and Breonna Kerr.
For questions or comments, email communications@afb.org.
