587: Tech Talk 587:

Tech Talk on RNIB Connect Radio. Hello and welcome to another Tech Talk from RNIB Connect Radio, Callum Stoneman, back with you again for another week to explore what's going on and what's new and what's trending. in the world of technology from a blind and partially sighted perspective if you want to get in contact with us please do it's your show we'd love to hear from you techtalk at rnib.org.uk is our email address

Voice notes or written emails are always welcome. Coming up this week, Jackie Brown has been hearing about the tactile transport maps making their way to the Canute console. We'll examine some of the new accessibility features you can find in iOS 26, and Hubert, along with Guide Dog Caesar, have been trying out the PitPat, the Activity and Health Tracker. for your dog. That's all coming up this week. Hubert Pavelkovich and Natalie Curran joining me this week. Welcome to both of you.

Let's see what's going on with everyone this week. Natalie, I'll start with you this week. Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed. Jackie's stolen my thunder because I was interested in the tactile maps. on the new display but I'll let her cover it later before I go into what has caught my attention this week we got an email in about how to uninstall and reinstall

Jaws versions and I think Callum you and I were having a bit of a chat about this a weeks ago when I explained how I'd uninstalled mine and I couldn't get the right version to be loaded in the first place. Apparently the trick is to install the new version, close your laptop down, restart it, and then use Windows R to get to the run window.

check you're running the right version and then proceed to uninstall the old one. And that should stop any hiccups or problems happening. So that was a really helpful tip in from Steve. Yeah, Steve not emailed that one in. Thanks, Steve. So yeah.

that's uh that's basically the the steps to do it properly apparently so install the new version of jaws reboot your laptop just to be sure that uh nothing weird is going on there close down the old version when it opens up Windows are JAWS 2025 or one word or whatever year it is so next year it'll be or fairly soon actually be JAWS 2026 that you would type in and then

You can uninstall the old version. I didn't know you could launch it from the run dialog. Well, I knew you could because you can pretty much launch anything from that Windows R dialog, but I didn't know you could just type it in.

that way. So that's really, really useful. So yeah, cheers Steve for that one. Really helpful. What's caught my attention this week is an announcement from Humanware that they've been working with Meta and they've been working to create a suite of features and the one that jumped out to me in particular was follow me and there's a short demo video and what it does is using your glasses

you can say follow me or follow guides and the person you're looking at it will then sort of lock onto and it means that they can walk in front of you. and you can follow behind them and you'll get audio updates saying guide is in view, guide is in view or guide lost and then you can move your head around until guide is found again.

And in some ways it seems a little bit clunky. In other ways, I really like the concept because it means that when you are out and about and you have asked somebody for help, you don't necessarily need to... take that arm or get a bit close if you're feeling maybe a little bit uncomfortable so they might seem very helpful but you'd rather keep a bit of distance for your own personal security.

Or likewise, if it's a really busy area and actually it's just not practical to walk to a side, then you can walk behind them and not worry so much about losing them. And the other thing I really liked is whilst I maybe couldn't see myself using them too often, was this is the first example, certainly that I've come across, of a kind of live video feed insofar as...

You don't need to keep asking the glasses, is my guide there? Is my guide there? Is my guide there? It will update you once you've told it what you're looking for. And I thought that was quite a massive step, actually, in my opinion. that is really cool this is the bonus of that uh because i'm guessing for that they're going to be using this uh development kit from meta where they can make use of the cameras and the microphones and stuff and this is

That's genius, I think, that. This is going to be available when this software development kit comes out, which I think is due to be early next year, or at least the early version of it is. I'm really looking forward to trying this actually. And yeah, I think what's really good is the fact that this has come from Humanware first and then partnered up with Meta second. And what I mean by that is Humanware is a company.

who exclusively work to design and create accessible products for visually impaired or hearing impaired or dual sensory loss individuals. Whereas Meta, as I think we've discussed before, created a cool pair of glasses, and then the accessibility community sort of knocked on the door and said, by the way, have you realised the potential power of what you've just created? And they did then jump on the bandwagon, but they were...

They did it the other way around, whereas HumanWare will have come to this from an accessibility point of view to begin with, which I think is also why I'm particularly excited by it. Oh yeah, it's come from the experts, definitely. Yeah, this.

The other thing that I love about this as well, I mean, yeah, you mentioned sometimes you're not comfortable taking someone's arm, but also the number of times I've asked someone, you know, can you just help me get to this place? Can you just, you know, can you just guide me to here? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, it's this way. and then they just disappear you know so again if you as long as you can invoke it quickly um yeah that's pretty cool i like that huber anything new from you this week

pretty short from me but Apple have been at it where they've released some new devices and although I think it's only been via press release it's nothing major because

It's basically a few devices with the M5 chip. So a new iPad Pro, new MacBook Pro and the new Apple Vision Pro. Nothing to massively write home about apart from everything's basically... faster and better performance which is great i guess um the m5 chip has been rumored for a while um unsurprising but nothing exactly explosive i guess it's good to have um

you know, fast and better performing devices, although the Apple Vision Pro is still extremely expensive. Oof. Yeah. It's interesting, though, that there's updates for the Vision Pro. I mean, they've been rumoured for a long time.

And I've not been convinced, to be honest. I feel like the Vision Pro is still very much like a proof of concept device, which I suppose it still is. But yeah, a new processor, they say it can kind of just... I don't know the exact wording that they used but it can it basically can render visuals a lot faster and a lot clearer but I don't know if it's I mean if you've got the original Vision Pro

I definitely don't think it's worth rushing out to buy this one. I think the price tag does put me off getting it and trying. I think it's still ridiculously expensive for... for the fact that you know i'd love to be able to see what it's like i think it's i'd like to at some point go to the apple store and try it but other than that i just think

It's not very competitively priced where there are other devices that can do something similar-ish that might be more affordable. A quick one from me this week as well.

Be My Eyes have been at it again and announced a few new partners this week. So a couple of big ones for the UK, BT and EE. They're two companies, but they're both kind of... under the same banner if you like because EE is owned by BT they've partnered up with them to get accessible customer service the big one though is Tesco that they've partnered up with which is one of our kind of supermarket

chains here in the UK. So you can get help with their online services from their staff, but also help in store, which is very interesting. I honestly don't know the last time that I went to a supermarket, certainly not on my own.

Because it's just too much of a nightmare to find your way around. I mean, yeah, you can go up to customer service and say, you know, can you help me do my shopping? But I don't know, it's just, it just feels... i mean first off if you can find customer service in the first place nowadays but also i don't know it just feels too awkward to me that just too clunky you've got to wait around or sometimes book in advance

So if you can just go into a shop and call up their staff on Be My Eyes, that's pretty appealing to me. I think it's good to have that option as well, because some people love to go to the supermarket and get that physical experience.

and i think if if there's something to make that easier for people then absolutely fantastic for me i just love the concept of online shopping i just find it easier but i think for me it's always important that people have the choice and that also all the choices that they have are equally accessible to them one way or another so i think having that that addition that collaboration that partnership

is going to make that supermarket experience a little bit less stressful because my problem with this is exactly as you said, where do you find customer service? It's never the easiest to find. Unless you know where it is, it's tricky. It's funny, you guys talk about customer service. I never go to customer service. I follow the sound of tills, like the sound of, you know, the cash registers opening and closing and just go find a member of staff and say, hey, can...

Can somebody give me a hand? You know, if not you, one of your colleagues. But I like the idea of being able to do it in store more independently because whilst I have to stay calm, similarly, I haven't been... inside a physical store shopping myself for a while apart from anything else it's quite hard to carry things when you've got one hand holding a cane is the fact that actually sometimes not often but sometimes if you're getting a delivery

Because somebody else is picking the stuff up for you, you don't necessarily get the nicest version of. So like I had a packet of apples delivered just last week and one of the apples fell apart in my hands. So I'd obviously been eaten through by something or other at some point. And I feel like if I'd been in the store myself, even with someone, they would have pointed that out to me and maybe picked up a different bag.

Plus, you have fun with substitutes as well when you do online shopping. We don't have strawberries, but we'll give you something similar. Here's some baby wipes. Yeah. Honestly. And also, remember, you can do this from the... well using the meta glasses as well so if you you can't ring the service directory directly from the glasses but if you start the call from your phone so go into the service directory find Tesco

ring them up from your phone and then double tap the camera button on your glasses. That does work and that does switch the video call over to the glasses. I don't think many people realise that, but you can do it that way as well and then use your glasses to go around. That's a really good tip, Callum. I might give that a go because actually I'm still having problems with my glasses disconnecting from my phone whenever I am on a call. So the complete opposite of what anybody would want.

So I might try that and see if that actually reconnects. Well, there you go. Have you tried this out? Have you been in store and got assistance virtually from BMIs or even Aira? And how's that gone? Let us know, techtalk at rnib.org.uk. Stick with us for another week. This is Tech Talk.

So with me today is Ed Rogers of Bristol Braille Technology. Hi, Ed. Hello, Jackie. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. A bit of an update about the Canute console and the Canute 360. Where are we at with that just at the moment? Well, the reason we've been talking to people recently about the Canute console in particular is because we have released a new application for it. We release applications for this quite frequently.

But the new console now is a particular application which we have been requesting people test. and you don't necessarily have to have a console to start the testing to do this, and that is a transport mapping application. This takes data from open street maps, which is like Google Maps. You type in an address and then it generates you. You type in an address and then it will give you the street node and you select which form of transport you want.

whether those are buses, trains, trans, ferries, all sorts, and it will then list all the different routes it finds going from that address. and it will draw you a tactile diagram of the connection between all the stops emanating out from that spot and you can then export that as a BRF and that of course you can emboss to paper and share with others.

And we are also asking some people who don't have a Knute console to get in contact with us if they're interested in testing that, because we want to get people's impressions from a much wider group of people, those who are prepared to receive a BRF. received paper braille, but really it started out as an application on the Canoe console, which I appreciate and you probably ought to describe in more detail.

Yeah, if we could go back just a little bit to the Canute console for new listeners who are thinking, what on earth is the Canute console and the Canute 360? So can you just describe it a little bit for us?

The starting point for understanding both of these is that these are unique forms of braille display technology unused in the single line displays or in any other multi-line display which allows us to have a 40 by 40 cells by 9 line display space at approximately the price that you'd get a single line barrel display for. We have two models. The Canute 360 is the one which was released at the end of 2019 and that was the first commercial consumer product that was a multi-line barrel display.

the 40 cells by nine lines it was designed for reading ebooks so that's a about just a bit of a description for people this was about 14 inches left to right about seven inches deep front to back and about an inch and a half thick. This is a desktop device and you put an SD card like the library card from the RNIB onto this and then you could read through those files. and it's 40 cells wide so that it would show the full page without any

jagged line wrapping without spoiling the layout which you get when you go under 40 cells and it's nine lines because that breaks up a 27 line document very nicely into three. That was the Kinect 360 and we are still selling those.

um we have a sister product of that called the canoe console which takes that same display but it mounts it into a workstation meaning the display is raised somewhat and it has a pullout tray underneath of the QWERTY keyboard and it has a flip up 14 inch monitor, the monitor being synchronized to the to the braille display and this rather than being a device for

for reading BRS, although we can still do all of that, is for interactive applications to really supercharge someone's career path or educational path by making access to tables uh to diagrams to charts and so on much more accessible so all the sorts of concentrating on all the sorts of things which are about increasing the speed at which someone can understand and appreciate data

That's what the Knute console is doing with the same basic hardware as the Knute 360. I should perhaps preempt a question about why has it got a visual monitor on there? Well, it's useful, of course, to be able to share what you're doing with sighted colleagues. But the unique thing about this is the monitor is synchronized to the browser with exactly the same information.

So it has 40 characters wide and only has nine lines, meaning that as a sighted person, you can, within a sixteenth of age, it is exactly lined up. You can point to something on a braille display. and know exactly what that is without immediately understanding braille. And as a braille reader, you can create something visually and know that it's laid out precisely as you want it to be visually. And that goes for text documents and diagrams and everything else.

And this, of course, has led to other applications for the console as well. So can you tell us about some of those as well as the travel maps? Yeah, the travel maps was just the latest and that was... kindly sponsored by the National Centre for Accessible Transport. But that was built on the back of a lot of other applications which were primarily

sponsored in a sense by the actual individuals who bought into the console. Because everyone that bought into the console in the early days and anyone who subsequently bought our premium package, we build an application to them based on what they want. And that's where all these applications have come from. So those have included spreadsheet applications where someone gets a resizable table. You look at an Excel file or CSV file.

That's a common format for sharing spreadsheets. You look at your Excel file and then it will be reformatted on the fly as you move around it in order to maximize the amount of data on screen. But basically it's about showing columns of data. That along with diagrams is very powerful, but we also have a charts application that was prompted by someone asking us to be able to see live updates to stock data in order so that they could trade.

in day shares and there's lots of complex things to compare different stocks and how they are rising and falling.

We, of course, have all the normal range of word processing, be able to create word documents and so on. But fundamentally, a lot of this comes down to computer science and to system... administration because that's where the real strength of this lies is in data manipulation so it's great for programming and a lot of these applications have been built with or by the people that bought them because it's so easy to throw together an application for

for example, looking at maps of the solar system or a top-down view of match replay using data taken from videos on the web that would bring you a football match being replayed live. as a top-down view. There's a couple of examples. The real point is, though, if there's a kind of data which has some spatial value to the data, you can probably represent it on the console using the pre-existing

library of functions. So am I right in saying that the console is open source, it's Linux? Yes, the operating system is a... Linux is Debian-based. You can install anything you want on there. Because of the way we've set it up, it's using a screen reader called brltty natively on the Knute console.

That means that you're in the command line and anything that runs in the command line and works visually will work in Braille, which is very, very powerful. Some of the applications that we've got running on there are really just... something which just runs out of the box. And our applications are all open sourced as well and you can download them and they're all written in Python or Bash and we encourage people to build their own.

Not everyone wants to, but it's quite nice to know that you could just commission someone to build you something if you needed to in the future. So where do you see Canute Console going in the future? Have you got anything? exciting on the horizon. I agree that the travel map is phenomenal but I wonder if you have anything else in the pipeline or is it dependent?

mainly on those people that buy them and want them to do, as you say, graphs and maybe spreadsheets or, you know, work with data. It will make a big difference which people... continue to buy them. Because if someone comes along to us and says, I really want this application, it will make the difference between me taking up this job or not. And we will build that. That's how we have.

continue to work all the way from when we were founded in 2011. We've always prototyped live in real time with our community of people who are interested in the development. Just a brief aside. We manufacture this in the United Kingdom. We're based in Bristol. We build it here in our workshop. And that's no mean feat when the price is approximately.

one-tenth of what you would pay per cell for other braille devices or one-fifth in the case of other multi-line devices. For the future, putting aside what people encourage us to do, I expect to be based very much around making a greater use of those tables, charts and those diagrams. So there's so many different uses to put to what has started life.

as a transport diagram but you can and we are going to use it for doing things like UI. There are applications out there where there are a lot of blind people working in in or with design teams and the UI files they're given are quite inaccessible. That was useful. Flow diagrams, very easy to represent them using the same diagram software.

SVGs and other CAD packages are something we are working on and we're working on with the Clovenix Center in Ohio in order to bring CAD packages like Gerber files and 3D modeling. So can you drawing worldwide appeal now? Because, you know, so far it's a fantastic... product and a brilliant venture that you have brought to fruition. But is it across the world now, would you say, in other countries? Is it catching on? Yeah.

Only a minority of our sales are in the United Kingdom. Yeah. The majority have been abroad. A lot have been to North America, but we've also had sales. I think it's to every continent multiple times over. We've had a majority of those, of course, have been the Canute 360 so far because the Canute console, we've been rolling out slowly.

And almost every single device has had some sort of customization done to it, which has just been an amazing pleasure to find out what people want to use this for. But I do want to say, as anyone out there that's got a Canute 360, you can upgrade to a console. We have various different hardware upgrades packages for that. And we will continue to maintain that you can upgrade whenever you want to with the same display. So you can use your display and add on the workstation. What about cost?

What does it cost for a Canute 360 and then the console if you wanted to add that on or if you already have a Canute 360. The Canute360 retail price from us directly is £2,500. If you want to upgrade your Canute360 to a console, that's about £1,600. And the full console for a new buyer is just under £4,000. So that's £4,000 for a console, two and a half.

for a Canute 360. We also have a premium package which comes with double the warranty, a more secure case and most importantly us building a custom application for you and that's an extra £1,000 on top. Do you anticipate using Windows in the future or going down the road of having some kind of screen reader application for, you know, say, for example, NVDA or JAWS? Or are you just staying with what you have at the moment because of its success?

Well, this is something that's very important to us and our UK distributor, Sight & Sound. I should note those prices I gave are for Sight & Sound as well as for Bristol Braille. And anyone listening abroad, if you go to our website, you'll see the various distributors on there for covering different territories.

To answer your question, I would love to have full support from every different screen reader. We have support for BRL TTY, and that works on Windows, Linux, and wherever you can get BRL TTY running. But that is from the command line. The way of getting NVDA support and narrator support will be to make them... support multi-line first of all and once they support multi-line it will already work with the Kine because of the BRL TTY driver we would be very interested in speaking

to JAWS to get support for the Canute on that. But our initial focus has been on BRL TTY and it's worked really nicely so far. So we will next be looking at NVDA. and hoping to get a beta release of a driver out as soon as possible. That really will be something very exciting to see when you reach that stage. Ed, thank you very much for joining us on Tech Talk today. It's really interesting and particularly the new travel maps. We look forward to hearing more about that in the future. Thank you.

as you've probably heard us talk about on the show by now ios 26 is now available bring in with it a number of new features both mainstream and accessibility and there's quite a lot in there for us voiceover users and i want to just take you through

a few of these over the next couple of weeks. The first one that I want to talk about this week is a feature called copied speech. Now, this didn't get much of a... a splash if you like when it came to all the accessibility announcements i don't think this was even mentioned really but i think this is a fantastic feature um very very underrated if you ask me so

What this allows you to do is it's been a feature for a long time where you can copy the last thing that voiceover said to your phone's clipboard. So I believe by default... that is a three finger quadruple tap so you tap four times on the screen with three fingers at least that's what it is for me and i'm pretty sure that is the default and

that works so the last thing that voiceover said it will copy it to your clipboard and you can paste that in or whatever you want to do with it but what this does is gives you a history of those uh those items that you've copied because before you could copy one thing and then if you scrolled a bit and then did that gesture again to copy something that voiceover said it would just wipe out the last thing

that was previously on the clipboard. So kind of how the traditional clipboard works, really. It's just one thing at a time that's on there. Whereas with this, think of it as almost like a clipboard history. Essentially so you can copy multiple bits of information and then scroll through them and access them and Paste them in wherever you want to paste them So I'll show you how this works

This use case that I'm going to give you is not the best example in terms of a practical use case, but it should give you an idea of how it works. And then I'll talk through a couple of ways that I found it. genuinely useful so um one of the things that i like to do to try and find out what's trending in the the tech news when i'm preparing for the show because believe it or not i do prepare for this thing sometimes

I like to have a scroll through AppleVis, which is what we've mentioned before. It's one of the big kind of Apple discussion sites, and there's always something interesting going on. on the forums there or there might be news of a new ios release or now that they've expanded it there might be other news related to assistive technology more generally that ends up there so i like to have a scroll through there i find that quite good

source. So let's just say for this example that I want to have a flick through and make a note of articles or forum posts that I'm interested in and that I want to come back to later. And I'm going to make a note of those article headlines. So the way you would do this, let's say I first want to start off with the date, which is on my lock screen. So I'm going to grab my phone.

So I'm going to do a flick to the left to get the date. Wednesday the 15th of October. Okay, 15th of October. So I'm now going to do that three finger quadruple tap. One, two, three, four. Wednesday the 15th of October copied to clipboard. Okay, so that's copied the date. I'm now going to unlock my phone. And now I've already got it prepared and ready. So I'm on Safari.

with the Apple Viz website open. So I'm just going to navigate by headings for a bit and scroll through a few of these. Welcome to Apple. Getting started. Latest Apple. Advanced iPhone camera means better VO recognition. Heading level three. Link. Okay, that one sounds interesting. So again, I'm going to do that three finger quadruple tap. Advanced iPhone camera means better VO recognition. Copied to clipboard. So it's copied that one. Let's carry on scrolling through.

ios 26.1 beta 3 has released heading level a petition asking apple to consider discounts for people with disabilities heading level three google one price increase heading level three link okay google one price increase sounds interesting so again the that gesture to copy that to the clipboard google one price increase copied to clipboard bridging access to braille Another one that I'm interested in, so let's copy that. I'll just stop that there because it's a bit of a long one.

I think we've got enough there to be going on with. We've got four articles, I think that was. So now I'm going to come out of this and go into the Notes app. Home Safari Notes And I'm going to go to the bottom to create a new note. So now we're in a text field. and obviously i'm doing this in notes but you could do this on any text field that you want really now this option for copied speech is in the rotor so if i was to just do a standard paste

it would paste in the last thing that VoiceOver said, which I think, if I remember rightly, was that bridging access to Braille and in-depth look at Braille access. So it would paste that. But I'm going to do the rotor gesture.

and go over to copied speech misspelled words edit copied speech bridging access to braille an in-depth look at braille access so there's copied speech and you hear the last thing that was copied so what i can do now do a one finger flick up or down so I'm gonna do a one finger swipe down and you will hear a list of all the things that have been copied to the clipboard so far

So I'm going to do that now. Do a one finger flick down. Google one price increase. There's one of them. Flick down again. Advanced iPhone camera means better VO recognition. Down again. Wednesday the 15th of October. And that's the date that we copied first. And then you can clear that. So you can, if you wanted to clear everything off there, you can clear it that way. So the date was the first one.

or was one before the clear so I'm just going to do a flick up Wednesday the 15th of October and now I'm going to double tap Wednesday the 15th of October and it's not been very clear there but i think it should have pasted it into the text field so format note text field is editing wednesday the 15th of october insertion point attend there you go let's put that in return so just to keep it clean i'll do a new line

and then we go back over to copied speech misspelled word edit copied speech bridging access to braille an in-depth look at braille access on ios 26. okay and we can scroll through these the date that we copied first is still there So that's still there. I'm going through them the other way this time, so I'll do a one finger flick up. So let's double tap that one to paste it in.

Advanced iPhone camera means better VO recognition. So that's pasted that in. Again, I've just done a new line. So back over to copied speech. Misspelled edit. Copied speech. Bridging access to Braille. An in-depth look at Braille access on iOS 26 Google One price increase. So again, I could double tap that to paste it in. Or I could double tap the bridging access to Braille. And just because we can.

Let's say we wanted to delete all of these. I'll go up to the cleared copied speech option. Raging at clear all copied speech. And double tap. Cleared copied speech. And it tells you that it's been cleared. and if i was to go back to copied speech in the rota now it the option does show up but the only option there would be to clear all copied speech so this is the way i found this really useful

Because the example that I've given you there is... It's a little bit clunky, to be honest. This isn't really... I mean, you could do it this way if you wanted. This isn't the way that I would usually take notes. Obviously, the way I would normally do it is to put links in.

to the articles but you know hopefully that gives you an idea of how it actually works and one of the things that happened to me the other day where this came in really useful was I had to make a payment to somebody a bank transfer and they sent me their account details so the name on the account the uh but the two biggest things were the account number and the sort code now usually what i do there is i will get the

account number uh get voiceover to read that and then copy it and then go into my banking app and then paste it in and then i would have to go back to messages or emails or whatever it was to then copy over the sort code again using voiceover just because it's easy and then go back to my banking app and paste that in but you've got to be careful because if you're outside of the banking app or at least mine if you're outside of the app for

any more than i think it's 30 seconds or a minute it logs you out for security but then that of course means you've got to start again so what i was able to do here was copy the account number copy the sort code both in one go and then go into my banking app go to copied speech i could find firstly the account number double tap paste that in move over to the sort code field find the sort

sort code again in copied speech paste that in job done it just made it really really nice really easy so you could do that with pretty much anything really be it bank account details phone numbers Anything, anything really where you want to take down multiple bits of information quickly and get them copied and pasted somewhere. It's worth saying that this only works with the voiceover.

copy gesture so if you go to a text field and you do say select all and then copy or you copy something using the copy option in the rotor so you know how you can go to edit and there's an option there that says copy that will not appear in copied speech so it's not grabbing it from the system it's grabbing it from voiceover directly so it will only work

if you do that gesture to copy the last spoken phrase. But even still, I think this is a really useful feature. I think this might just be my favourite new feature in iOS 26. If you have a technology question, why not ask the Tech Talk team? Email now.

Let's have a look at the inbox then and see what's going on. We've had an email in from David. who says, I have an iPhone SE 2nd generation, which I believe was released in around 2020. I'm running the latest version of iOS 18. And it doesn't look like this phone will be able to run iOS 26. I'm aware of many of iOS 26's new features, but I'm quite content with the phone I have. And he's asking if I stay on iOS 18

Will I be prone to the same security vulnerabilities as I would from sticking with Windows 10 instead of Windows 11? Will Apple continue to support and update iOS 18? So, um... A couple of things with this. I think the first thing to mention is that according to Apple's website, at least, the second generation iPhone SE should be able to run iOS 26.

So it might be worth checking your settings on that one. If you go to settings, general, software update, what I've found with these major releases, sometimes it says your iPhone is up to date, but then underneath that, it will say also available. iOS 26 and then you can install it from there. So that might be worth a check. But in terms of security, I've got a couple of thoughts on this, but I'll let one of you two go first because I ramble enough on this thing.

The only thought I had was I also have an iPhone SE from 2020. So I think that's second generation as well for work purposes. And work are really tight on security. You know, we'll get notifications. software isn't up to date and i'm on 18.5 and i've had no such warnings so i'm inclined to think that actually you are probably okay and that most of the updates

that have happened since 18 are probably more enhancements as opposed to security concerns. So, I mean, if you can update, like Callum just said, then brilliant. But I wouldn't personally overstress it. To your question about Windows, iOS and Windows are pretty different beasts when it comes to security. Windows generally is...

a bit more open or quite a lot more open in terms of what apps can do and what can be installed and how those things can run. iOS is very locked down. So for example, if you've got an app on iOS chances are it can't really it can do what it needs to do but it can't really talk to anything else or go off and start you know doing things randomly they're very what they call sandboxed which basically means it's

it's just locked in its own little bit and it can do what it needs to do and nothing more. So as long as you're not going on any websites that might be dodgy or downloading things, clicking on random links, the usual sort of advice. As long as you're not doing that, you should be fine. I mean, obviously it's always good to be as up-to-date as you can, as we've said, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

And usually if there is a really major vulnerability, so they're not going to, generally speaking, no, they're not going to release any more updates for iOS 18. But if it was to come out that something was really critical and really needed fixing. they will sometimes do a kind of out of scope release just to close whatever hole is open. So yeah, try and update if you can, but short answer is you'll probably be fine, to be honest. More than likely you're...

you've got nothing to worry about there. And finally, for now, we've had an email in from Padma, who's got a bit of an interesting one. She says, I have an iPhone 13, and when I charge it, and take it off the charger, it tells me that the charge is 100%. But sometimes when I take it off, it will stop speaking. There will be no speech. And all the usual steps.

of the three finger double tap to toggle speech, turning the phone on and off, those sorts of steps don't seem to bring it back. But then later on, when I go to check it, it will miraculously start speaking again. This happens about once a month and it's quite worrying because I don't have a landline, I only have the iPhone and...

Typically, there's no expert around when this starts happening. She says she has taken it to the Apple store and they couldn't figure out what was going on. Just wondering if any listeners have had the same problem.

can suggest any solutions. Any thoughts on this one? Yeah, I'd say it's a very odd situation, but I did wonder if PASMA might be having a problem with... software updates ironically enough because I haven't had it happen for a long time but I do remember with some of the earlier updates when you did them

VoiceOver didn't necessarily automatically come on. Certainly with some of the bigger ones, I had to get somebody else to go into settings again and switch those settings back on. And I'm wondering if I might have... automatic updates on so when she's plugging her phone into charge overnight it's doing the updates at sort of three four in the morning and then she goes to pick her phone up properly

the voiceover hasn't turned itself back on again. So that's what I think might be causing the issue. With regards to fixing it, my suggestions are check that you haven't got automatic updates on so that you can control when you turn them on and off and you're prepared for it and the other thing i thought you might not have tried is if you've got siri on so

Or if you don't have Siri on, turn it on. And that might be another way. So if you pick up your phone in the morning and it's not talking to you, you could try, hey Siri, turn voiceover on. And that might be another way of... of getting it to to kick back in again but yeah that's my first port of call is check your update settings have you got it automatically on in which case that might be what's causing you the problem yeah that sounds likely to be honest with the

automatic updates another thing you can do i know you mentioned you tried rebooting the phone but um again if you've got siri on you can reboot your device using siri so um If you hold down the button and just say restart this device, it will ask you to confirm. It will say, are you sure you want to restart your device? And then say yes. That will reboot.

the phone and make sure that it's been rebooted properly as well so um so that may help so a couple of suggestions there i hope that helps padma let us know how you get on if you've got any answers to that one or if you've got any other comments or tips or anything that you want to send in, please do.

Recently, during our tech radar feature that we do at the beginning of every episode, I've mentioned that I've purchased that young Caesar the guide dog a little gift. Not sure if it's one he requested, mind you, but it's one I found fascinating, certainly. I'm talking of the PitPat, the fitness tracker for dogs. Yes, indeed, they exist. And as soon as I've discovered it, I thought, why not? Because, you know, it would be quite interesting to see, you know, what happens.

and how much work my yellow pocket rocket actually does. And today I will show you briefly how it works and we'll take a look at the PitPat app, mainly because accessibility... Although it's there, it isn't exactly, uh... Well, perfect, shall we say. But I'll show you what things are fairly easy to do in the app and the things you can enjoy. And hopefully this app can be made more accessible in the future. Right. So there are two variations.

of pit pat that's the two main that's the two main things you need to know first one it's a very basic one which just has the fitness tracking and nothing else so count calorie burn distance exercise minutes that sort of thing the second one is one with a GPS tracker also included. Now, it's worth keeping in mind that there's a difference of £100 pricing between the two. The general standard PitPat costs about £50, whereas, well, the GPS PitPat is £150.

It all depends as to which one you want because young Caesar has an air tank.

I thought a GPS PitPat is unnecessary. So that's the first thing to note there with this one. So what does the PitPat look like? The basic PitPat device is quite small. It's a teeny tiny little box.

much smaller than an engagement ring I'm probably thinking of if you've ever bought a set of bone conduction headphones they often put two kind of foamy memory foam earplugs and they put them in that little tiny plasticky box the pit pad is probably a little bit bigger than that that's the only object i can think of really to compare it to however as simple as that little box uh with

a little battery compartment which from my experience if you need to change the battery which you will have to after about a year

It's one of these kind of rounded flat batteries that goes in watches and liquid level indicators. You might want sighted assistance for that because it isn't the easiest to take out. So it's got that battery compartment. It's got a button on top of the... a little box which is in the shape of a dog's paw which is fantastic and it's got a velcro coming out of either side of it which you basically put around your canine's collar and it's that simple

You put it on the collar and there it is. That's the easy part. And you just leave it on the collar or if you use two different collars like I do for free running and basic. his basic collar you need to then change it from collar to collar but it's not too bad so setting it up it's uh Easiness varies because I kind of set it up without fully knowing how I did it, mainly because the PitPat app in certain areas needs to be used with screen recognition.

and sometimes without so i did manage to set it up but it was a bit tricky at first um because um it was a struggle to find the right option and in the end the only thing that made The option to find my particular PitPat without GPS visible was the use of screen recognition. What I'm going to show you now is the PitPat app and we are actually going to log some of Cesar's activity or I'll tell you how to refresh that.

And we'll take a look at a few different screens and tell you what happens in there. PitPat. Stopping Braille screen input. Opening PitPat. PitPat. Menu. Right, so we are in the PitPat app. um and we will go through a little bit of what it looks like so you've got the menu screen there function that you can go to it's been over two days since you last fetched data from cesar it's a good idea to fetch as often as you can

Okay, fetch now, button. So it's telling me that I've not fetched data for a while now. The way you fetch data is you simply press the fetch button.

on yes i know fetch um you press the fetch button on the app and then you have to press the pit pat button on the device on the caesar scholar in order for it to happen so it says fetch now let's do it straight away okay fetch now pit pat please wait searching okay so it's searching for the pit pat i'm going to now press the button on the pit pat once There we go. I've gotten access to it while Caesar's curled up.

So it's now going to refresh the data. I usually press it every day a few times after each walk to refresh it. The last few days I've been a bit busy, so although he's been walking plenty, I've not done it.

So you've got Caesar here. So there's the summary screen. This summary screen will give you various stats for each day and things like that. The reason I'm not going to go through that screen in... that much detail is because the accessibility on that screen is particularly tricky by tricky i mean you get a lot of numbers and not always is it possible to figure out which number corresponds to Well, to what, really? You don't know which number is minutes done.

pottering minutes minutes done resting or that sort of thing i find that quite tricky on that summary screen so that particular screen i don't use that much the only thing i can sort of understand is how much calories he's burnt and miles because that's towards the bottom of the screen and the label for each of the units is listed after the actual number which is not the consistent case throughout that summary screen. Activity, this is the screen we will show you. Let's take a look.

So fetch new data is the first button you get. We've already done it, so there's no need to, but this is where you need to go. If you want to fetch new data, you press that button and you press the button on Caesar's PitPat or your beloved canine's PitPat and it will fetch the data. So far this month. 15. Today. So he's done 15 minutes of exercise today. 50. Yesterday. 50 minutes yesterday. 65. Monday. 65 minutes on Monday.

and so on and so forth seven sunday 45 saturday it will take you through most days of the week for each month and show you the exercise minute so yeah 15 today not a large amount usually by now he's done 30 or 20 so we'll be needing a bit of a bigger walk but he tends to get 60 minutes most days apart from a weekend where sometimes he might get 45 but it does truly vary but never below 40 minutes it's always above 40.

That's my kind of current target for him. But you can increase the exercise goal if you wish. Equally, you can decrease it. When you set up your pit bat, you actually put information about your dog. including breed and weight and stuff like that and it will actually suggest an exercise goal for you which is based on that sort of information you can either agree with it and keep it or you can change it next section of the app is location

location this is irrelevant if you have the basic pit pad which i have if you've got the gps one then this will show your location details so we will have to skip that food food now this is the interesting part so you can actually put what food your dog has including various details if by scanning a barcode or inputting the information manually

and it would then based on your dog's information recommend the desired amount that your dog should be having of said food now if you have a pet dog that's fair enough if you have a guide dog You're kind of told how much food your dog needs to have. So you may probably not need this part as much, but it's cool that it does it. Wait. Your dogs wait.

That's very self-explanatory, really. You can update your dog's weight. There's a little function then that also gives you a step-by-step guide as to how to check various aspects of your dog's weight by... asking you a few questions and based on your answers it will say whether your dog is underweight and you might need to keep an eye on it or whether your dog's

Kind of the right weight or whether your dog's a bit overweight. It's not like the most accurate, but it takes you step by step and tells you what to look out for. Badges. Badges. Here we go. This is my favourite part, or certainly one of them. Badges. So you can earn badges, and the badges refer to exercise goals and the days you've competed it, and distance badge. Inch life, 13 more days to go.

So 13 more days to go to achieve the next streak for the goal completed. 18 miles to go. 18 miles to go is the distance badge. So how does the distance badge work? This is the fun part because it's actually quite creative. This is where, since I've joined PitPat, Caesar has achieved different distance milestones. So I think, you know, the first one was, since Caesar joined PitPat, he walked a length of Oxford Street.

I think the next one was, you know, since Caesar joined PitPat, he walked at the distance equivalent of Snowden and back down. So that sort of thing. So it's calculating the distance since your PitPat was installed. And that distance gets obviously bigger and bigger, that distance total, and therefore you get bigger equivalents of how much Caesar has walked, in my case. So, for example, the most recent badge I achieved was...

It stated that since Caesar joined PitPat, he walked the equivalent of one lap of Loch Ness. And we are 18 miles away from a next badge, which I'm looking forward to. The 12th of October, 2025. So if I tap on this particular date here, you've got the 12th of October and the 11th of October. These are the last dates that badges were achieved. Now, it just tells you the date. It doesn't tell you which badge you have achieved.

But in order to get that information, you just have to tap on that date because it only will list the dates on which your dog has achieved a badge. Insurance.

Insurance. This is kind of, you can get pet insurance through this app and something like that. I've never tried this particular part because I've mainly bought his pig pad for kind of... curiosity purposes and a bit of basic fitness tracking. Not sure what this exactly is. I think this is a subscription possible. again i've not really looked into it much uh on a pure basis that for me personally for my use case it's not something i use often 13 more days to go and we're back to the badges so

In basics, that's the PitPat app. The two main functions I use are the activity and the badges because the summary screen is not as accessible as I'd like it to be. because you can't always tell, as I mentioned, which number corresponds to what exactly it means. So, I'll show you what I get here, actually, and you'll see what I mean. So we'll tap on summary and let me show you what you get.

So he's walked 111 miles as he joined PitPat. So, yeah, not too bad considering we're recording this on the 15th of October. And he's had this PitPat installed since the 26th of September. Best day. average day in the last seven days monday the 13th of october 2025 65 running playing zero so as you can tell 5 40. There's a lot of numbers here. And it's rather unclear as to which number contributes to what, which is a bit of a shame because I would like to be able to tell that.

But yeah, I've not found a way to do it yet, but I'm hoping that if I can contact the developers of PitPat. we can hopefully get this app made a little bit more accessible because I think it would be fantastic to be able to actually tell what these numbers mean because it adds more to the app and the more you can get out of it.

21, 24, 1014. So I know this is the calorie number that he's burned today so far, which is quite a lot. 5.7. And then 5.7, and these numbers correspond to... Calocularies. Kilocalories and miles. So that's the summary screen. As I've said, not the most accessible, but certain things you can probably tell from it, even if it's not...

Well, even if it's not much, but yeah, it's one of these things. Right, let me show you the tabs. Selected. My dog. Tab. One of two. The pack. Tab. Two of two. Let's show you this. Selected. The pack. Tab. Two of two. There's a bit of a social element here. So this is where you can get some more statistics for Caesar at the leaderboard. Leaderboards. Welcome to our world of dogs. Newest dogs.

So you can actually see people's dogs that have been added. You don't get much details. You only get their name and breed. So no kind of private details as such are released. A doggy pumpkin. Joined three minutes ago. Most popular names. Luna. 1.3%. Bella. 1.0%. Poppy. 0.9%. So there we go, you've got a few different things like that. Leaderboards. Leaderboards. I love a leaderboard. Current goal streak. What's this? Button 1. Bow.

20 days. So we've got someone who's achieved their goal for 20 days. 1. Iggy. 20 days. Another 20 day a dog? 3. Franco. 19 days. 19 days? 3. Rivers. 19 days. 3. Cindy. 19 days. 23. Cesar. 17 days. Cesar is currently 23rd on the leaderboard, but let me tell you, he's achieved, um... his goal every day since he's had his pit bat. So I've got a strong feeling we will be top of that leaderboard very soon.

So there's 1,600 plus dogs on this leaderboard, which is quite exciting. And that, in short, is PitPat. Quite a simple device to set up. Might require a bit of... um screen recognition a bit of fiddling to connect it in the first place i found but it does work you just have to try a bit and

A bit of trial and error I think works because I genuinely can't remember how I actually found the way to connect to the PitPat. I was just exploring various screens with and without screen recognition and eventually... the right option presented itself it's very simple from there on because all you have to do is go on to the app tap activity tap on fetch new data click the pip patch and it fetches the latest data

and you can then take a look at some of the screens in the app. Setting up the app itself is fairly simple. They take you through all steps. First of all, they register your account. And then you give the information about your dog. I've not found anything particularly inaccessible there. Again, sometimes I had to toggle screen recognition on.

but it wasn't something I had to do all the time. So it's worth keeping in mind that in certain sections of the app, screen recognition might help you more. In the summary screen, I didn't find overly that helpful, unfortunately. But in some screens, it does help. So yes, that is PitPat. Let us know what you think. And would you use it?

Or do you have something else that you use to track your dog's fitness? Do that as well. We would love to hear it. It's the usual email address, techtalk at rnib.org.uk.

And that's just about it from us this week. Thank you so much as always for your company. We really appreciate you being with us. If you've got any comments or anything you want to share or you've got a question that we might be able to help out with, let us know, techtalk at rnib.org.uk is the email address you need. We'll be back with you same time next week, but in the meantime, from me, Callum Stoneman, Hubert Bavalkovich, and Natalie Curran. Bye for now Goodbye Bye See you next week