Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from July the 11th, 2023. I'm Steven Jolly. Great to have you with us wherever you're listening perhaps through Virgin Australia radio associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio network, there is also the podcast. If you haven't caught up with the podcast yet, all you need to do is search for the two words. Talking tech and down at can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after
it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Virgin Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast with me someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's talk air fryers to start. We did touch on this last week and you've found out a lot more
about accessibility and other things. We'll start with the Philips 5000 Air Fryer.
This particular air fryer, like most air fryers these days, has got a touch screen. And I got a bit excited about this one because it actually came with an app that you could use to control the air fryer from your smartphone. I thought, Oh, well, that gets away from using the touch screen as it does with my coffee machine. So I thought, I'll talk to 1 or 2 people about it. And those people got quite excited
until they actually got one of them. And it appears that the app, as with quite a lot of apps on the market, is not accessible because they use non-standard controls on the screen. So they use custom controls that people like us who are blind, that use voiceover then can't use those controls and hence can't use the app. I believe that was the case from what reports I
heard from both Android and iOS iPhone. But apparently it does work if you link up the Amazon Alexa skill to the account that you've got two years for the Philips 5000 itself. And then you can say things like start, stop, all that sort of stuff. So I thought, well, if it doesn't really work in the Amazon, Echo is the only way you can use it, then that really is
not accessible. So if you're talking about it last week, I would be very cautious indeed, particularly if you're a blind person requiring voiceover, perhaps not to use that particular air fryer or indeed, if you want to use it and give people feedback on the app that controls it, then certainly feel free to.
But you can't give bad news without some good news and you've found one that is quite usable.
I did. Now I'm going to pronounce this air fryer Tefal And then my wife says it's tefal so I won't get into the spelling of at the moment, but you'll see it in the show notes. I've got a link there to either JB Hi-Fi or the Good Guys.
It's a good old fashioned manual air fryer. And what I mean by that is at the front of this one, you've got a round big knob that you turn to the right as in clockwise, to actually set the time and it makes it click, click, click noise as you're turning it around, it's got a pointer so you can tell we're about in the clock. Face It is. And I've just put a few markers on mine to remember what, you know, 15 minutes is and so on. And of course when you let it go, it has the old
timer function which goes tick, tick, tick, tick. And it goes ding when it's finished and turns the air fryer off and at the top of the air fryer right on top, you've got a big round control with which where you turn it, you can adjust the temperature from zero degrees Celsius up to 200°C. And again, that's got a nice little pointer on that particular one. And the nice thing about it saving is when you turn it, it stops at 200. It doesn't keep rotating around. So
it's got a beginning and an end point. But again, if you wanted to set it to 100 or 150, rather than know full blown 200°C, you can certainly put again markers on the surface of the air fryer itself. I've had mine since last Thursday. I've done recitals in it, I've done fish and chips, I've done prawns and all sorts of things. And my goodness, the difference between cooking on an air fryer and cooking stuff in the oven, not only is it nice and quick, but it's also
makes absolutely beautiful chips. Yeah.
All right, come on. We're getting hungry.
So it really is lovely. And the nice thing I like about it is finally, when you take the basket out, you're not touching anything else that that's hot. So it's one of those things. Steve And I thought, what did I do before my smartphone? And now I'm doing what did I do before my air fryer So check it out. It's fully accessible, as in the buttons are completely. You can search for lots of different airfryer recipes on the internet and have fun. Everything.
Good lesson there. We don't always need whiz bang technology.
No, exactly.
At the end of this month, we're going to have another of your exploring tech webinars from Vision Australia. These take place every couple of months now.
So this one's on Reading Solutions. Now, what I mean by reading Solution, this is not reading books, this is
reading things in your environment. So whether it's the mail post box, whether it's items or print on your jars and packaging in your pantry medicine labels to check your dosage for your medicine or, you know, when you're shopping around and and you want to read the price on things in the shop, then I'm going to go through all the different solutions that you can get your hands on to make this possible from absolutely free apps that you can use on your iPhone or Android phone right
through to electronic video magnifiers, which are electronic devices. That magnifies the quote print in front of you and also gives you different contrast options, highlight options, magnification options, and so on. Optical character recognition or called OCR, which actually reads the print out in speech to you. If you don't have enough vision to quote, read the print. And also looking at wearable devices that I know there's a few on the market at the moment. So that's what
we'll be covering. And I'm actually really looking forward to this one because one of the most frustrating things is just being able to read print on all sorts of different things, not to mention things like touch screens and those sort of things these days. So looking forward to that one. It's on the last Wednesday of July at 7:30 p.m. and that's Sydney time.
And people can get to hear that at other times after the event, can't they?
They can. It'll be on the Vision Australia YouTube channel and also my ESI podcast.
Talking of magnifying, there's an interesting app from Human Wear.
Yeah, look, it's called The Human Way Explore Magnifier and it's a free as in free app that you can run on your iPhone or your Samsung Android phone and it does what it implies. It actually magnifies stuff that the camera is looking at. You can actually zoom in and have a close look at things. You can take a snapshot of a frozen photo of something. So if you want to investigate it more or read more about what's on the screen, you can do that as well.
It's a very simple, straightforward app to use because quite a few times if you go and look, for example, in the magnifier app on your iPhone, which is built in, it's a little bit overwhelming because it's got all these different options, including stuff for blind people about door detection and so on. This is purely a one task function. The thing it does is magnification only. So I think from a here's a video magnifier type point of view,
it's a really great, simple, intuitive app to use. So I must say it's really great that Human was put out this magnifier because I think really think people that are a bit scared of technology are going to find this really easy to use.
For anybody undertaking study. One of the barriers may well be getting hold of the assistive technology that's needed. So Vision Australia has its bursary program and once again calling for expressions of interest for the 2024 people.
Indeed. So it's up and running again. It's a certain amount of money that you can get, as you mentioned, Steve, to buy assistive technology. Now when we buy assistive technology, it's both mainstream and assistive technology hardware or software. So if you're thinking it's not going to cover a laptop, yes, it does cover a laptop. And you might be looking at, you know, scanners and screen reading software and screen magnification software and handheld video magnifiers and all that sort of stuff.
And what normally happens is that you get a short assessment normally done by the adaptive technology helpdesk. They sort of try identify your your main needs for the course that you'll be undertaking. And then towards the end of the year, when the actual applicants that successful have been announced, then you'll get a proper assessment done by our assistive technology services team and they will put a report in and then you'll get your stuff funded and you can
undertake your course for 2024. So it's a really exciting time. You need to get your applications in by the end of October, including that little assessment that you've got to get done by the ATI helpdesk. But all the information is on the website and it's a pretty easy website to remember. It's simply WW W Weisner Street. Org. So the main site forward slash bursary bursary light.
Last year, Elon Musk took over Twitter and the chaos started. Alternatives have been springing up and now matter. Who are the ones responsible for Facebook and Instagram have come up with a solution for some people.
And it's called threads like the name implies free ads. And it's basically a almost like a direct competitor to Twitter, if you like. And I'll say upfront that you do need an Instagram account to use it. So if you don't have that, then you might be able to use threads. I don't have an Instagram account. What's interesting, Stephen, though,
is Mastodon, which is another social media network. Then last time I checked, I don't know if this is accurate, but there was something like 13 million people currently using Mastodon within four days. As we go to air this week, there's actually 100 million people. Yes, 100 million people using threads. And it really does offer similar things to what Twitter does. People that are sort of like, you know, well in the well known in the industry and news and Apple's
on there and all different places are on there. So it's really really interesting and we'll see how it goes. But I believe, Stefan, you actually had a go at the app. Did you find it very accessible?
Yes, I am not an Instagram person, but I did have to join Instagram for this. But Threads is text based and I haven't used it a lot yet, but I haven't found accessibility as a barrier. It seems to work pretty well, but we'll see how that sort of unfolds. So I'm not committing myself yet, but it does seem good and it's very interesting that there are so many users already. So it may be a real competition to Twitter and to others that have been springing up.
It's interesting. Can I say that, you know, with Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook now Threads and so on, I very rarely now read any comment from any content from mainly Twitter and Mastodon. I post to those services, but I very rarely read them now. So all my stuff done, as I mentioned the other week is done by my RSS reader on my iPhone, on my Mac leery. But yeah, I hardly just read. There's just too much nonsense going on on particularly on Twitter at the moment. So I might race
on up to Instagram and give it a go. So I'll report back my thoughts hopefully next week as well.
I very rarely post and I'm very selective about who I follow. So we all do these things different. We don't do it. It's quite interesting. Now, just briefly, you've been investigating a number of products for some time. How's all that going?
Very promisingly. I've been doing three main ones that I've currently been doing are there's a keyboard called the Smart IO one word. It's basically a very similar keyboard to the Revo three keyboard. So if you know about Revo, then you know what this smart IO keyboard looks like? It's basically a numeric keypad custom keyboard for iOS and Android at the moment. I'm currently investigating it, so I won't say one way other than what my opinion is
because I haven't finished the evaluation. You know, I want to do a comparison to Revo number two is the Dot Inc. dot pad that I talked quite. I think it's about six months ago. That's going extremely well, particularly their software, the app that runs on the system. And number three is the any self-teaching Braille device. And at the moment the hardware is really nice. The software is
a bit iffy. So I'm running on a bit of a comparison with the poly, which is the similar unit from the American Printing House for the Blind ABH.
Just before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what we've been covering in this and previous editions of the program.
You can check out my blog site, which is David Would it be a dot podbean pad?
Ben David would be dot Podbean Podbean to write to the program.
You can write to me at Virgin Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge, How it sounds at Vision Australia. Org.
David Dot Woodbridge at Vision Australia. Org This has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.