Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from June the 20th, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have you with us wherever you're listening, perhaps through Vision Australia Radio, associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network, there is also the podcast to get hold of that. All you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and Dan it 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 Vision 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.
Now I suddenly realize too, with all the stuff that's been going on in technology in the last couple of weeks, we haven't had time to catch up with your overseas trip. So a couple of questions I had for you. I believe you went and visited Louis Brough's house, I believe.
Yes, we did. I travelled in May in very early June with my wife and a friend of ours, and we did spend some time in France, in Paris, and one morning we went about 50 K out of Paris to a little place called Cobra Coupe v r a Y. And then we visited the Louis Brown Museum, which is based at the family home where he grew up as a child before going off to the Institute for Blind Children and progressed to become a very famous man. So
that was quite something. Visiting the museum and getting a feel for where the family were, what the rooms were in the house. And our tour guide, Stephan, who was terrific, he's really the curator of the museum there, he took us into the dining room and explained it or family room and said, Now let's sit down here and have a talk. So we sat down at the at the
dining room table and talked about Louis Braille. And then we went over to the museum area and saw some of the very early Braille equipment and other tactile equipment like the the old Taylor Slate. Do you remember the Taylor Slate? I do. I do. So there was a usually a metal slate with little holes in it and little pieces of lead that you put in these holes. And the what we call figures could be put in
in eight different ways because they were octagonal holes. They had eight sides to the holes and they had a bar on one end and two little points on the other end. So that was very interesting. I also saw an abacus and hello to all those people who still have an abacus. I used one at school. I don't know what I did with it, I'm ashamed to say, But marvelous little thing for arithmetic, but very much the old Braille and tactile stuff. And what really impressed me
was the thing about Braille. It really hit home and I hadn't thought about it as much is that though there were tactile systems around, Captain Charles Barbier, for instance, developed a tactile system meant to be for the use of the blind. Braille was so simple that it really was the breakthrough one because it's based on just six dots. Other systems are using dots to try and represent the
printed character. Louis Braille said, Put all that away. Let's just work on basic six dots, which is easier to feel and it's easier to produce Braille both for many people to use or for one person to write for their own personal purposes, because that was a difficulty in the early days with the tactile systems. How do you reproduce it? So a lot of learning, but great memories.
And it was a privilege to be there at the home of and the Museum of the Great Louis Braille, who's made such a difference for so many of us. Born in 1809, died in 1852, so a couple of hundred years ago now.
Yeah, pretty amazing sort of stuff. Did you visit any other museums that had more accessible type up to date stuff in at all?
We did visit a number of museums in London and in Paris, and what I was struck with was the effort that they do go to to be accessible these days. You can often go to places now where you get an audio guide that you download as an app. Some of those in Australia as well as in other parts of the world to varying degrees of accessibility with some of those apps. There's a little work still to go on with them to get them right. A lot of places have devices that you hire. Some of those are
just touch screen ones. So you need someone who can see a bit to be able to help you navigate that. But there are some now and. Use one of them in the Churchill war rooms in London when we had a tour of that. Have the buttons on them So the physical buttons make such a difference, you can actually move around from section to section. ET cetera. And some have gone out of their way to be more descriptive.
So not just the audio guide for, shall we say, mainstream use, but particular added descriptive bits to make it easier for a blind person to know their way around and orientate themselves. Really good stuff. So they were interesting.
Okay. And what about transportation? Because I know we're slowly improving over here in Australia, but how did you find the transport system over there?
We're doing pretty well here. There are some things in the UK which are probably better. They've got a terrific public transport system, particularly the rail system I had a lot of experience with and audible announcements were just automatic. You didn't have to worry about whether they were going to announce the stops or not. The traffic signals, the audible traffic signals, doesn't matter what city you go to,
the traffic signals are the same. They're consistent. Not like ours, where sometimes they're adequately loud and other times they're a bit soft, none of that sort of thing. They were very consistent. And the other thing that impressed me was the very familiar tactile ground surface indicators, you know, those sort of tactile markings as you cross streets, even the famous Abbey Road is just like a normal street. It's got its tactile indicators as you walk off the footpath
as well. So that was pretty good.
It's nice to know this stuff is getting more universal access across the world. These devices, I know in one of my sort of friends went to Japan a month or two ago. She was absolutely amazed that how things were accessible in transportation, in hotels, in restaurants. And it was really funny because she started taking pictures of Braille and tactile markers. Then she suddenly realized that I wouldn't be able to see them, but at least it was
the thought that counts. Yeah. All right. So speaking of overseas, have you been listening to the cricket Ashes in England? At the moment?
I have been tuned in a little bit like every night and losing a bit of sleep. The ABC Listen app is the way to go, isn't it?
Oh, it is. It's absolutely brilliant. I've been using that every night. And yes, like you, I've been thinking, Oh, look, come on, 1:00, 2:00 in the morning is not really going to kill me the next day because it is overseas in England. But no, it's it's really great. And it just even now, in 2023, it still amazes me that here I am sitting in or laying in my nice comfy bed and I can still listen to something that's happening on the opposite side of the world. Crystal clear.
You can hear the crowds, the commentary, the ball being hit, all that sort of really cool stuff. So, you know, you people, they may not follow cricket. It's a five test series. So I'm really looking forward to listening to more tests as we keep moving forward.
And the women's Ashes is going on at about the same time to be able to catch that. So David, let's talk now about the Vision Australia's library and the VA Connect app. We haven't talked about those for a while, but it's a good way of getting access to content, isn't it?
It is, because it's one of these things that I just take for granted and I assume that everybody knows about them. But you're right, we haven't mentioned it for a while, and these are two apps that you run on your smartphone so you can run them on your iOS, your iPhone or iPad or on your Android phone or tablet. And it's a way of getting access to the Vision
Australia Library to access Daisy Books. So talking books, newspapers, magazines and most of the podcast that Vision Australia Radio produces, including Talking Tech, you can basically log into the app, you can search for and subscribe to newspapers, podcasts I've already mentioned, and down they come whenever they're available, like the Sydney Morning Herald or the Age of Melbourne or
Talking Tech every Tuesday and so on. So it's a really great way of having your own personal information service that's curated for people that are blind and low vision. So you don't get all the sort of, I guess the non visual stuff too much. But this is curated for, for blind and low vision people and I just find it a fantastic resource.
Now, talking about your own personal News and information service, explain to us, because some people might not be familiar with this, what an RSS reader is.
So RSS stands for really simple syndication, so if you could imagine you put a link in to access a podcast feed. Well, this is a link to access tech and other type of media type stuff. So what it does is you put this link in. So for example, I subscribed to, let's say the cricket one from overseas and every time any information gets updated in that feed. It means that every time I run my RSS app, like a podcast app, the one that I is is
called Leary RSS Reader, which is Leary pronounced Leary. Every time I run that one, it doesn't update. It scans all the different types of RSS feeds that I've got on that, and I've got about 35 of them at the moment. And because I can go into each category or each topic and it starts at the most recent at the top and keeps going downwards, I can actually
save things for later reading. I can share things out to Mastodon and Twitter, but I always find because I'm getting exactly what I'm after and I can just have it flagged to only give me the unread items. It's a really great way of me keeping up to date with, you know, technology, martial arts, the Formula One, cricket music and all sorts of other things that I that I do outside of work. And I just find it's a
great way. So if you're a bit over Mastodon in Twitter, Leary or any other RSS reader is a really great way to keep up to date with what's going on in the world.
So how do you set yourself up to use one of these RSS readers?
So you download the app. So in this case it's literally for iOS. I'll have to check one that would
be useful for for Android. But remember, there's also Google News, which is also an RSS reader for Android anyway, that you can also use an iOS and you go in there and you can actually either search for tidal keywords or you can go and say, Look, I'll look at the technology section or the lifestyle section, and then out of there you can choose ones that are there, they're trending ones or their top ten, whatever else, and that's the best way to start.
Very good. Well, we wish people luck with getting into that sort of thing. That sounds a bit complex at the start, but once you get into it, it's pretty straightforward. Yeah, it's.
One of those things. It's once it's set up, it's a piece of cake to use. Yeah.
You had another exploring tech webinar back in May.
We did, and it's now up on the YouTube channel. So if you want to see the lovely Sam or the lovely Ramona from Pacific Vision and Human Wear respectively, then you can check out that YouTube channel for Virgin Australia. And by the way, you can also access the Virgin Australia Library on either the Victoria Stream or the Sense player from Pacific Vision. So another way of grabbing content for yourself as well.
Yeah, they both do a great job. Sam Taylor from Pacific Vision and Ramona Mandi from Human Wear. What's RIMM about? I am.
RIMM is remote incident manager, so it's a fully accessible way of you as a support person remotely accessing somebody else's computer, whether it's a mac or a Windows machine. Because up until this point we can use other applications which sort of work. This one means that it's 100% accessible and it's been in beta. I think we mentioned it earlier this year, it's now out of beta, so you can actually fully use it and subscribe to it.
And it's one of the best things that I have in my toolbox, so to speak, for supporting family and friends. If they have trouble with their machines.
Windows and Mac.
Correct? Yep. So you can download both clients and I won't go into how you use it, but you basically send a person a link and then you log in together and then you can share each other's information, you can copy files or that sort of really cool stuff. So a great utility.
Now just before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.
Indeed. So as always, you can check out my show notes on my blog site, which is David would be r dot podbean pad bn com.
David would be dot podbean podbean.com. To write to the program.
You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Dot Woodbridge, a Division 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.