Episode Notes
AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. The podcast is an extension of AccessWorld magazine, a quarterly online publication published by AFB and now celebrating its 25th anniversary. To read the most recent issue, or to access for free our entire archive covering the past 25 years, visit afb.org/aw.
Visit afb.org/AISurvey to share your own experience on how you use AI. To check out the ViewPoint application, check out the developers website. And if you come across a hotel who figured out how to have a reasonable solution for elevator touch-screens, let us know. Email communications@afb.org with any other questions or comments and be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast.
Aaron Preece is editor-in-chief of AccessWorld, and Tony Stephens is the Assistant Vice President for Communications at AFB. Together, they enjoy needing out on all things digital inclusion and accessibility each month. Produced and edited by Tony Stephens at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore with digital media support from Kelly Gasque and Breanna Kerr. Theme music is by Cosmonkey, compliments of ArtList.IO.
Consider making a donation today to support AFB’s mission of creating a world of endless possibilities for people who are blind or have low vision.
AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 21 Transcript
Intro:
AFB. You are listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the blind. Learn more at afb.org/aw.
Tony Stephens:
Remember when I was in Greece this past year in Corinth, which is this small town outside like an hour and a half outside Athens. They had one of these elevators that had the door you closed and it was like a gate, and so you
Aaron Preece:
Oh yeah.
Tony Stephens:
Finger through and feel the floor going by. I mean, it was like you could lose a finger, but they had braille in it, which I was very excited, but it was strange and I mean it was Greece I guess so, but it was just odd the way they, I mean it wasn't like Greek braille, it was still somehow tied to Latin characters and regular alphabet they didn't have in Greek, they have different symbols for the omega and the omicron and the delta, that kind of stuff, but it was more western braille, but it was a strange trying to figure out, okay, well maybe that means their term for what they might call a mezzanine or it was
Aaron Preece:
Oh, that's true. It's not going to be an M. The numbers might be the same, but the door open, how they have lobby
Tony Stephens:
Letter name, it was strange just their sort of way that they would call things. So it was all Greek to me. Yuck, yuck, yuck. No, but well, with the touchscreen displays on elevators now, and I'm thinking of this because it's almost conference season. We're going to be heading down some of us to NFB and A CB ACB is in Dallas, NFB is in New Orleans, and I know for the fact actually the hotel that NFB is at in New Orleans on Canal Street, the big Marriott was the first time I ever came across those touchscreen where you call your elevator,
Aaron Preece:
You type in the number for the floor and
Tony Stephens:
Then you have to go somewhere and I'm told that made it accessible. It'll be interesting if anybody, you don't want to come to your hotel and wrestle with, it's a consumer organization that's going to have thousands of blind people protesting your elevators as they're all standing there. But that's a good example of when I was talking about onerous or reasonable accommodations earlier with some of the ways, the different ways that elevators have sort of elaborated these new touchscreens to try to make them a reasonable
Aaron Preece:
Accommodation to add accessibility to them.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Have you had that where you go there and it's like you push a button and you have to wait and listen and some of the workarounds, I'm like, who thought of this? It could be done so much easier consulted.
Aaron Preece:
The one I've seen recently was it was one button and it took me forever to figure it out because the instruction, the person obviously didn't know how it worked. They probably didn't have very many people using it
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Aaron Preece:
At the hotel, but they showed me, they're like, okay, I
Tony Stephens:
Probably excited you were the first one. Find
Aaron Preece:
It. Yeah, this here's the button you press, and so you had to wait for it to go and then you would click the button, it would start scrolling up the blocks of floors, so it'd be like main mezzanine one, two, and then you'd click it and then it would start going one main mezzanine one, two, and you had to press it again on the, so there's just one button and then you press it on the floor that you want because it was like a 20 some story hotel. But what was cool is once you did that and the button was tactile, but it took me forever to figure out that I had to wait. I thought I could just cycle through and cycle through the numbers, but I really had to, it was just like press wait, press wait. And so you can't do it as quickly where I'm used to just cycling through stuff.
Tony Stephens:
Was that one in New York City recently? A major new hip, cool brand from England for this cool new hip hotel and I'm thinking, oh, well they're forward thinking people. They'll find a way to make something cool and progressive and hit to call the elevator that's accessible. It had that where you had to wait, but it was like one, two.
Aaron Preece:
Yep, that's exactly what I was on the 27th
Tony Stephens:
Floor, 27th floor and I just screamed. I was like, oh, somebody kill me. Just I'm going to leap into the elevator chef. It was just like
Aaron Preece:
You could climb the wire faster than that.
Tony Stephens:
I stayed in, we got back from Mexico, which was interesting for the accessibility in Mexico. That was fascinating. Some of the things down there where I was on the fifth floor of a walkup, we had no elevator and you're at 7,000 feet in Mexico City, so you feel the lack of oxygen.
Could get up to that room and back down in the time it would probably take me to get to floor 14 on this elevator in New York, if you're just sitting there seven and it's like, like this is just people, could you please, this is why AFBs professional services exist to consult with people because and others out there doing some of this work, just talk to people that are blind. Focus group, meet with them.
Aaron Preece:
You could do it with literally two buttons, some idea and it would be, yeah. One thing that was cool is when you did use the A button that then the elevators would talk and it would say the elevator and it would base it on your location at the little touch screen that
Tony Stephens:
Nice. Yeah,
Aaron Preece:
Say like the elevator to your back and left and behind you is open because half the time I'm trying to echo locate those things, especially in the bigger hotels
Tony Stephens:
When they do that, that's nice. The intercontinental Los Angeles does that, which is great. Six elevators and you're like,
Aaron Preece:
Which one did, especially if it's loud, you can't necessarily tell. You're like, huh.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. And when there's a lot of people, and it's nice too, it won't call off the floor name about what floor you're at unless you hit the A button and then when you're on it,
Aaron Preece:
Then it tells you the floor. That's cool.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, so that's pretty neat that
Aaron Preece:
Hotel, but only reason we have that is because of a DAI bet you it wouldn't be there without a DA. Yeah,
Tony Stephens:
Go to Hong Kong or something. Mexico was interesting, so back to Mexico real quick. So they have really done a good job of putting in the guides for Keynes, the tactile little tracks to follow.
Aaron Preece:
Oh, gotcha. Like tactile.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Even we went to Pueblo, which the downtown historic Pueblo was built in 1531, so it's pre-ADA by
400 years, but they even put it in there, which was really nice, although at one point it stopped and I'm like, well, this must be where the blind person lives. Blind person downtown Pueblo. No, Pueblo is a huge university town. They have several big universities. It's kind of like the Boston of Mexico, so many big colleges there. But it was just nice. I was just following my kids around, had my cane in the groove and just grooving through these old cobblestone historic streets and they just did that. So I mean they're doing some things right in other countries.
Aaron Preece:
I'd be curious what their legal framework is. They very well might have some kind of ADA a, I don't know.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, they're definitely more the front car, the subway, their metro was every three minutes. Oh my goodness. Sometimes even two. It was so convenient taking the subway compared to when I lived there 25 years ago, and they're only a couple lines. They've opened more up and it's impressive. They even have gondolas, like the vernaculars that go up into the mountains and stuff, so you could fly over the city instead of undergrad.
Aaron Preece:
Oh, that's cool.
Tony Stephens:
But that aside, the front car, the subways is just for women and children and I wonder if it's for people with disabilities maybe could also get access to it, but just for safety. So they're very community value. We're all in it together mentality. So I don't know. I'll have to look that up more about the legal standing for some of this stuff, but maybe there's things that have passed in recent years still a lot that isn't accessible either. I mean, so yeah,
Aaron Preece:
I'm sure it's hit and miss a little bit.
Tony Stephens:
So crosswalk, they have interesting ways to sort of have the audible pedestrian signals in Mexico City where it's almost like a, sounds like a siren. It makes run. Which is good because, and I say this, my dad lived in Mexico City for five years and I used to live down there for a while as well. It's more of a traffic laws are like suggestions in the minds of some people more than
Aaron Preece:
Rule. Gotcha.
Tony Stephens:
So maybe that warning when it would have, it just means you better run safely. Yeah, but here we are getting everybody, well, we've just been chatting away, but
Aaron Preece:
Yeah.
Tony Stephens:
Another episode of AccessWorld 21. Buy this podcast to drink. Right.
I'm going to take a sip of my diet soda right here because that's my vision of choice, but it's great to have everybody back again. Hopefully everybody's summer is doing well. We mentioned about the summer conferences that are coming up. Come by and check us out. We'll have our AFB breakfast at the Dallas Conference for the American Council of the Blind and convention there on Tuesday, July 8th, and then at NFB in Studio D at 1215 at the Mariana Canal Street downtown New Orleans Na Orleans. We are going to have Stephanie Iner and Dr. Ariel Silverman of our Public Policy Research Institute presenting new AI research findings and things tied to that. You can get involved and take a survey anybody, not just people that are blind or low vision, but we are doing a big expansive survey as phase two of our AI study that we've been fortunately received some funding from A couple of key sources, thanks to everyone that's been supporting that in phase one and phase two is broader outreach for the general population on sort of your use of ai. We want to hear from everybody, so if you're cited or not able or is able to wherever you exist in the human ability spectrum, go to afb.org and check out for the link on our AI survey. And yeah, we're sweating through. Luckily the heat is finally broken a little
Aaron Preece:
Finally calmed down. Yeah. Happy birthday to Helen Keller is when we're recording
Tony Stephens:
This. We're recording this on Friday the 27th. It'll drop on the first, but yeah, so we had a little birthday party for Helen today. Lots of good Helen trivia folks know that she worked at a FP for 44 years, well 43 years before her death in 1968 up to the point then, and she was just a rock and an advocate. Yeah, so we're excited for Helen's birthday. If you want to know stuff about Helen, check out the Helen Keller archive at afb.org as well, and that's full of lots of great, it's fully accessible digital archive with description and all kinds of stuff through all the images and videos and writings of Helen.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, super
Tony Stephens:
Fascinating. It's fascinating. It's funny, in the archive all the time, we did that big event for the time capsule recordings back in, what was it, back in March and you can check that out on our YouTube channel, but I'm always learning just new interesting stuff
Aaron Preece:
You'd never think of just the, in some ways the non blindness stuff she was involved with too. She very socially or politically active,
Tony Stephens:
Like the women's suffrage movement we were talking about in 1919, her involvement in that parade in Washington DC on March 3rd and then just her work for labor rights and just all across the board. It was the downtrodden in a sense, right? Her global crusade in the 1940s and fifties that was an ambassador of priest of peace that Truman sort of pushed her and then AFB supported her to go around the world to 33 countries or something like that number and just promote peace around the world and everywhere she went. So yeah, happy birthday, Helen Legacy lives on July. We were talking about reasonable accommodations at the beginning because it sort of stemmed from before we started recording about disability pride month is also, and I guess that question of we're unique in the disability space, not the disability space, but just the space in general where we need to be that protected class that has a dollar sign sometimes attached to it. How hard is that? We were talking about elevators, these things that people need to make accessible under the law and it comes with a dollar sign. That doesn't happen with a lot of other protected groups under civil rights law, so it makes it kind of interesting sometimes the solutions people have. So maybe someday everything will be nice and uniform.
Aaron Preece:
Let's hope so
Tony Stephens:
When AI has its hands on
Aaron Preece:
Everything, take it over.
Tony Stephens:
Exactly. Remember that ai, we love you. If you're listening and make things uniform, please accessible. So yeah, what do we got going on though? You've got some blog posts that have
Aaron Preece:
Been
Tony Stephens:
Dropping out. What's been on your radar, Aaron?
Aaron Preece:
So very soon and potentially by the time this drops, looking back at the recent Apple and Google big conferences, the WDC conference for Apple, our writer Janet Amer covered that again this year. She's kind of our Apple expert here at AccessWorld and then I'm looking into the Google IO conference and the updates that were released or announced there and they mentioned, I forget where I saw it, that I think AI was said 92 times and Gemini was said even more than that during the keynote. So we were talking like, man, we're talking about AI a lot lately, but the whole tech sector is all AI all the time right now and then most, at least at the Google io from what I've seen as far as lots and lots of developments in their AI capabilities and they've got AI for everything. Now you've got video generation with audio now, which I want to mess with since before it was always just video without audio. So who knows what you're actually making, but now you can get that audio aspect, which is really cool. Looking forward to the Google or it's the Android XR, I believe is what it's called and should be releasing I think this year and it's like a Google glasses operating system for glasses style wearables is what it sounded like. And it looks like it's going to have kind of like the meta glasses be accessible and I saw that they're working with ira, I believe with that Android XR on accessibility, so that'd be really
Tony Stephens:
Cool. That would be cool. I remember when I first joined ira, it was the Google, I want to say that was one of the first iterations of IRA was giving a user's Google glass, the pioneer users early on
Aaron Preece:
And they had their own for a while. Their Horizon had their
Tony Stephens:
Own, which were like the sunglasses, but those still had the cable you had to attach. The nice thing about the Google glass was they didn't have a tethered cord. The US?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, I could just wireless or Bluetooth.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. What was nice about 'em, and I think when they upgraded to their own own version at Ira Horizon Horizons, the Horizons, I think
Aaron Preece:
It was called the Horizon.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, sounds right. It was nice except you were tethered to it. I mean that was the only way they could get that kind of video power. You weren't able to push that through Bluetooth yet, but now it's so much more advanced, like we're at a space where it'll be interesting to see how that seamlessly integrates. So yeah,
Aaron Preece:
One thing that I noticed on the Apple side of things that's not accessibility related, but one of a really cool feature is that it will the Do iOS twenty six, one of the call features is that it can detect when you are on hold, it'll pick up the hold music and then it'll let you go do your own thing and whenever the person comes back, AI will tell the person, we're getting the person and then AI will call you and reconnect you with the person, which I thought was very cool. I don't know how often I've been on with hold music for hours or who knows, depending on what it is.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, well no, yeah, it's nice when they make it that smart personal assistant.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah,
Tony Stephens:
This is just more of the less needed parts of our life that we try to use AI for.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah,
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. When it's actually a tool. Well that's cool. And those will be on afp.org/blog?
Aaron Preece:
Yep.
Tony Stephens:
The post
Aaron Preece:
Absolutely. Probably I'm planning to drop 'em both basically the same kind of a double feature, drop 'em at the same time.
Tony Stephens:
Cool. I look forward to checking those out. Yeah, I checked out the IO for Google and Gemini where they need to start calling it GEM A and just spell it AI at the end. They did mention Gemini so much, but it was exciting. And the whole thing with xr, we talked I think briefly when we were reviewing the meta glasses the other month, but I haven't had a chance really to dig in. I listened to some of the WDC for Apple, but not all of it. I'm going to have to get used to the whole new nomenclature for their operating systems being 26 and all that
Aaron Preece:
Changing it up. Yeah, I guess for the year, but it's the year before it's 25, so
Tony Stephens:
I guess it makes sense. But then when I think about it too, I was rummaging through my old box of toys and I have my MacBook from 2005 still that works. It only works if I plug it in. The battery no longer works, but it was the first time I remember I upgraded to 10 to OS 10 for Macintosh and they used to have it like cat names like Lion or Tiger or
Aaron Preece:
Snow Leopard I remember was
Tony Stephens:
The snow leopard with the big. Yeah. And before that it was nine and it was nine for years. So it is a weird sense of time. I feel like we've gone from leap years to real time all of a sudden it was sort of like a 10 was forever. It was 10.1, 10.15, 10.5.
Aaron Preece:
You just changed the big cat that it was associated with
Tony Stephens:
It. Yeah, the big cats and then the national parks, it sounds like they're still going to be doing national parks, which is cool. But yeah, we've gone, I feel like I was a kid that was born in Apple years on February 29th and now suddenly I've reclaimed a February 28th. So every year is going to be a number I guess and that's going to freak me out. I'm going to think I'm barreling towards my demise much faster. The numbers will just cognitively mess my brain up thinking we're moving too fast, too fast. But I guess it makes sense for just Greco calendar lovers out there. But yeah, so we got some exciting stuff for this episode this month you've been checking out Viewpoint.
Aaron Preece:
So new app I discovered the last couple weeks is called Viewpoint from a small blind developer called Nibble Nerds is the name of the company. I
Tony Stephens:
Love that.
Aaron Preece:
And they're game developers, but they develop this screen reader. It's an AI powered screen reader enhancer type of thing and it's screen reader agnostic, so it doesn't matter if you, it is Windows, so it doesn't matter if you're using narrator Jaws. NVD eight works with all of them and it's a keystroke based, very efficient. So it's no real user interface or anything when you're using it for the most part. You're mainly using keystrokes and does multiple things and it is using Gemini for you go into Google AI studio that we mentioned before and I mentioned the blog that I did on using Google AI Studio Gemini 2.5 Pro to describe YouTube videos. So it's using that same Google studio but you go in there and get an API key, which is very, sounds maybe more daunting than it actually is. There's a link on the nibble nerd site and their documentation that will take you right to the page where you get the key, you press generate, hit copy to clipboard and paste it in the box that opens after you install Viewpoint and then you're ready to go.
And so multiple options here for kind of helping you recognize and identify things with ai. So you can, I would say one of the coolest features, and I need to test this out more, I've tested it with some need to find a completely inaccessible program to mess around with is a UI identifier. So it scans the screen, sends it to Gemini and then structures creates a UI that will try to route your mouse to detected UI elements. So I've messed around with it on some apps that I know are accessible and it has been able to basically you scan it and then it says how many elements it found and you can tab and shift tab through them and it reads out the title of them and then when you press enter on them, it auto sends your mouse there and clicks it and then scans again like a second and a half later, half a second later. So that if the screen is then updated again, it's like a smooth transition to the next screen and then it looks for more UI elements. Again, it's AI and it's designed to kind of brute force inaccessible programs. So it's going to be very hit or miss on. I've had good success with it, but again, I'm using, I need to hunt down a good program to test it with. That's inaccessible.
Tony Stephens:
Are the nimble nerds, do they make accessible games? What was their Yes,
Aaron Preece:
They make, I was
Tony Stephens:
Wondering what was their pathway into this.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, it's applic as far as I understand. A couple of blind guys and I might be getting this wrong, but I think that's it. I found this actually on the audio games forum in the off-topic room on audio games is where I discovered this app because they make accessible audio games. I think they've got one that's like some kind of zombie apocalypse. I think it's like a tactical zombie apocalypse. I think people have heard of Tower Defense, I believe it's a tower defense game where you place things that attack and then they've got a really cool game that they're working on. I missed the beta for this when it was out before, but I think it's going to be coming out again soon as they've got a medieval kind of arena gladiator online multiplayer game that they're working on that I'm really excited for. But this is the first software that I've seen from them and I've been very impressed with it.
So ui, very cool. Very similar to a PC version to some degree of what Apple does with their screen recognition, which is really, I've used a great effect with some things on iOS outside of the ui, which I think to me is the most innovative aspect of this. I thought that was very cool. It was something I was completely unexpected to me. But you can also do things like scan and really it's just a really quick way to get results. So you can do OCR and it just does OCR on the entire screen, doesn't try to structure in any way, it just gives you all the text. And so it's usually more accurate than other types of OCR because it is AI based. You can do queries where you basically takes a picture, you ask it a question and then it sends the picture and the question along to Gemini and it'll gives you back a quick response.
And then you can also do PDF accessibility. It takes an image PDF and converts it into a plain text document for you and actually uploads the PDF itself. I've got a test PDF here, I can show how that works versus taking a snapshot. So it's going to try to read the whole pdf. So very cool stuff, very easy to use and very fast. I do a lot of stuff with Gemini or Chad CPT where I'm doing copying images up or doing the live streaming like we showed before with Gemini. This really streamlines that process because it is just a single keystroke. And then the default is Gemini 2.0 versus 2.5 and that is specifically so that it's quicker as what they mentioned. But you can change that in settings if you want to use 2.5. Should we jump in and see how this works?
Tony Stephens:
Yeah,
Aaron Preece:
So share my screen. Alright, so we are screen share. Do you hear? I
Tony Stephens:
Do. And slow that down cowboy.
Aaron Preece:
Oh, that's true. Let me switch this.
Screen Reader:
[Fast screen reader noises]
Tony Stephens:
That slow. I mean you could hover around 40
Screen Reader:
Rate rate 35 rate 40.
Aaron Preece:
There you go. I forget about that. That I've got all reads sped up pretty quick here. Okay, so this again is very simple. So you've got two keystrokes. You've got control shift backslash to cycle between modes and control shift slash to execute the mode and then control shift F four to close the program. And this is version 1.0. So it's the first stable version with everything. Ai, especially experimental stuff, there might be crashes. So for some reason if a keystroke iss not working or if there's any kind of issue, you can go in the task tray. I think it's the task tray. It's where you like your wifi and your speakers and all that is, and it's down there and you can go into manually exit if you run into an issue. So I'll just do a quick OCR to show you that. So let's cycle to OCR
Screen Reader:
Query, PDF reader, ui, OCR.
Aaron Preece:
We're on OCR. I just cycle through control shift and then just hits back till I got there. So now I'm going to press control shift slash
Screen Reader:
Scanning, screen result dialogue, edit, read only, multiline American Foundation for X, American foundation for supply X post attendee zoom X blend plus zero two web zoom slash post two zoom support, English land audio, video participants, chat share, email, screen sharing.
Aaron Preece:
So I'm just in a dialogue. One thing I really like is the sound effects. So you can tell that it's processing makes the camera take picture sound and so you get the, and then it just auto pops up this little dialogue at the text field.
Tony Stephens:
You tell it was created by gamers with the cool sound effects.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, yeah. And then so I can
Screen Reader:
Copy detect to text to clipboard button, close button edit red only close copy the detect to text to clipboard button,
Aaron Preece:
Sorry, dun mirrors barking in her sleep. If you hear dog barking in the background. So there's a copy of text to clipboard button and then you can cancel or you can alter it four out of this little, so this is a separate window which makes it easier to review and that sort of thing.
Tony Stephens:
So this would be great if you have an inaccessible PDF maybe on the screen to just do a real quick read
Aaron Preece:
Just what's on the screen. Yeah, what's showing on the screen. I'll show you the PDF mode next actually. So we'll cycle the PDF
Screen Reader:
Query pdf, PDF reader,
Aaron Preece:
PDF reader. And then, so when I do this, it's going to
Screen Reader:
Open file dialogue, file name, combo box items, view to date grouping expanded image-based based, selected date mod, image-based PDF sample.
Aaron Preece:
So this is an image-based PDF sample. I grabbed off the internet and so I'll just press enter that screen
Screen Reader:
Sharing, meeting controlled window result dialogue, edit, read only. This is an example of an image-based PDF also known as image only pdf. DFS image-based PDFS are typically created through scanning paper in the copy or taken photographs or taken screenshots through a computer. They're images though we humans can see text in the image. The file only consists of the image layer, but not the searchable text layer at through P DFS contain. As a result, we cannot use a computer to search the text. We see the images at text.
Aaron Preece:
So it just keeps going. And this is just a test. Yeah, and it's again in that same kind of window. Again, I think the reason it's a separate mode is so that it actually, I actually went in, as you heard, I went into it was like an open dialogue and it just sent the PDF to Gemini. We get more than what's on the screen. And yeah,
Tony Stephens:
Going back to disability pride, it's like thank you. You're welcome world for OCR. Really, you don't need to really, it's perfectly fine, just enjoy. But when I look back at kind of the old kurzwell days or my Arkansas days, thinking of the elevators where it's like one, two and the, just the usability and interface for OCR R is so nice now when I think even just five, 10 years ago trying to work and you'd always get stumbled on something that's inaccessible and you're just trapped and you're like, okay, I'm going to have to print this out, scan it in. Wait, the OCR. Yeah, when we talk about reasonable accommodations and there's the expression in the aada a laws about equivalent time and manner and just the equivalent time that it's somewhat reasonable, it's completely unreasonable. And now it's just a nice, it's nice. That's cool. Anything else? Any other cool things?
Aaron Preece:
Yep. So real quick, so we can do, I'll do the UI mode and show you how I can print on this dialogue here. I think, let's see if I could do that.
Screen Reader:
UI OCR query, pdf DF UI generating UI snapshot.
Aaron Preece:
So generating UI snapshot,
Screen Reader:
UI ready, 17 elements detected. Audio button video, but participant chat button share, but pause button, annotate button remote can show meeting support menu, English menu, stop check copy the tech close button.
Tony Stephens:
Are you moving through that or is it just reading?
Aaron Preece:
That was me tabbing through. So again, where it's ai, it got a picture of the entire screen. So it also is showing UI elements from Zoom, but you can see the
Screen Reader:
Copy, the text to clipboard link.
Aaron Preece:
So it thinks that's a link, but if I press enter on that,
Screen Reader:
Copy the text, text to clipboard, generate a UI snapshot. UI ready, eight elements detected English menu. The clipboard contains a large portion of text to it, 10 51 characters long.
Aaron Preece:
So it did do it. I used the UI mode to find, even though that's actually accessible, it was just as a demonstration, it does work. And it went there clicked, and now you saw that it went through and actually performed the thing and then it just now did the thing again. Or it just scanned again to show you like, oh, the screen's probably changed. So we're going to give you a new UI snapshot
Potential. One thing I would say is there's, you get a lot of messages with Gemini, but there is a limit. So if you're using this a lot, you may run into the cap per day. I was looking, and I don't know if this is, it's not always the easiest to find, but from what I think I saw you get 200 messages a day for free with Gemini 2.0 and I think two 50 with Gemini, 2.5 through the API. So I think that would apply to this. And that's just with a free account. Real quick, I can do a query and just say, ask it if I'm screensharing and show you what it says.
Screen Reader:
OCR
Aaron Preece:
Query.
Screen Reader:
So query, query, dialogue, enter query, edit blend. CU, ld, D-L-U-C-U, LD space, LSE spacer. Spacer. F question.
Tony Stephens:
So can you tell
Screen Reader:
Copy detect the text to clipboard button? Yes. According to the screenshot, you are screen sharing as it says you're screen sharing.
Aaron Preece:
So he's probably thinking, why are you at,
Tony Stephens:
Can you say, is my video on or something? I mean the awkward,
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. Is my video camera currently screen
Tony Stephens:
Your video cameras on?
Aaron Preece:
So you could do that. If so, this is a dialogue. So let's see if I can ask another a follow up question.
Screen Reader:
Our screen sharing button, our screen sharing button, close button copy, detect the textbook clip or button our screen. Our screen sharing button. Our screen sharing button.
Aaron Preece:
I think I'm also in the UI at the same time. So
Screen Reader:
Screen sharing button
Aaron Preece:
That might've caused issues.
Screen Reader:
Screen sharing button. Yeah, screen sharing button.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, I kind of mixed and matched probably incorrectly since I left some dialogues open. But yeah, so that just shows you it works.
Tony Stephens:
And this is free.
Aaron Preece:
This is free. Yep.
Tony Stephens:
The nibble nerds are given back to the world.
Aaron Preece:
Yep.
Tony Stephens:
Thank you. Nibble nerd. Link to 'em in the description. Yeah,
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, for sure. We can link to their site, to the program. They've got nice documentation and everything.
Tony Stephens:
That's cool, man. People are nice when they do nice things with AI and just make the world a better place.
Aaron Preece:
As soon as I saw this, I was like, man, then that's perfect to show people on the podcast. I was very impressed whenever I downloaded. That's
Tony Stephens:
Cool. It'd be interesting. This is version one in a year and see what it's like for 2.0 or whatever else iteration they're on. And I guess in the notch of AI assistance, Gemini gets a, well, you said there's multiple APIs.
Aaron Preece:
This is specifically, this is Gemini only at the moment. I don't know if there's plans to add other, I think Gemini is particularly good for these because they do, I think, I mean chat g, BT and some of the others I think have APIs, but the AI studio is a very straightforward way to get access to the developer side. This is basically going through the developer side of Gemini, and Gemini is really on the, so that helps a lot. So that's where they are now. I am not sure if they're planning to add other providers essentially, but you can access multiple Gemini models through this.
Tony Stephens:
I wonder if Gemini or not Gemini per se, but AI models in general are ever going to get bored of the fact that any developer could go in and create something like, I'm going to find a soc finder AI app that just finds my favorite socks.
Aaron Preece:
And
Tony Stephens:
The AI intelligent, all omnipotent Bean is sitting there going, this is what I'm stuck doing. It's getting a genie in a bottle and you're just asking them, yeah, order me some Chinese food or something like that. It's like, yeah, find me some fun socks and AI genies like Al.
Aaron Preece:
I always wonder that when I'm like, especially when they first released the image recognition feature. I opened up a video game and I just found every enemy in the game. Not none of 'em were described. And I was like, what's this one? And now what's this one and what's this one? Or I'll be playing a game that's sided or something, a video game without accessibility. I'm like, all right, I changed something. Can you tell me what's changed? And how about now? And how about now? I
Tony Stephens:
Can give you any knowledge in the world.
Aaron Preece:
You just asking me about
Tony Stephens:
This. Why do you want to know when Hungry Hippo came out? I don't know. I'm just curious. All omnipotent ai, but we love you ai. You're our friend for sure into this. Wow, that's cool. Thank you. Nibble
Aaron Preece:
Nerds. Yep, for sure.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. So what else have we got going on? Any other big things happening in July?
Aaron Preece:
Not in July, fall, August. AccessWorld. All AccessWorld will be at the end of August. So still kind of, so the big one is meta glasses. We're be covering for that.
Tony Stephens:
You're finally getting that in the AccessWorld. I know we've talked about it here, but
Aaron Preece:
About it. I've been holding out for the video mode. So that's what I'm, have a kind of how it's been to use it on a real world basis.
Tony Stephens:
We tried to the live translation in Mexico, some with the kids.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, how'd that go?
Tony Stephens:
You know, it's that controlled environment. It's still, when you throw it into the wild and you're trying to get it to work, you're fumbling with it, getting to work when it's just like, no, we just need to ask what train we're trying to catch and we don't need to spend, this person's this nice stranger's, five minutes of his time get this. So anyways, no, but it's still cool. But it'd be great in a quieter setting that you're not just randomly catching strangers and trying
Aaron Preece:
Oh yeah. Because anybody in the background, it's probably picking up too.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah.
Aaron Preece:
So
Tony Stephens:
It's great. It's really good. If you need help from a librarian, that's when it's helpful. So if you're visiting La Biblioteca in Mexico, then boom, take your smart classes. But now I enjoyed reading that article. Yeah. Cool. Oh man. Well, we've got some exciting episodes coming up in the future. Again, we'll be going back to some guests after this sort of summer break as well, and maybe even having some crosspollination with our A FE possibilities. But stay tuned for that episode in our feed and be sure to check out AccessWorld. You can read it anytime, not just when the quarter drops, but you can always go through those back issues as well at afb.org/aw for the latest issue, I want to say episode issue of AccessWorld and all those 25 years. And we're getting the program ready to celebrate our 25th anniversary at the Leadership conference. Registration is
Aaron Preece:
Down for
Tony Stephens:
A-F-B-L-C program's going to be dropping any week now. We've got some great stuff, some things on AI and technology and digital inclusion. As always, a lot of our great friends and partners of AFB will be there, and that's in Arlington, Virginia. I've been informed it's not Crystal City, Virginia. Crystal City is a neighborhood in Arlington. So it's Arlington, Virginia, and right across the Potomac, right next to Reagan National Airport. So yeah, we'll be excited for that. So check it out on our website. You can register now and we will be excitingly celebrating lots during the leadership conference. So yeah, man, enjoy Aaron. Thanks as always.
Aaron Preece:
Yep. And thanks everybody for listening.
Tony Stephens:
For listening. All right. We'll talk to you next month.
Outro:
You've been listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind, produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by CosMonkey, compliments of Art list.io. To email our hosts Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org. To learn more about the American Foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to afb.org.
AFB.
