Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from February the 27th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, Associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast to catch that. What you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and downer 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 knows all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge. David,
let's start. The report is in. In January we spoke a couple of times about the web Aim Screen Reader survey to get an idea of what people across the world are doing in the screen reader area, and the report is in. What's the comment?
This is the web Aim survey. So it's it's looks at mainly screen readers. I personally wish it looked at absolutely everything, whether you're using a screen reader, screen, magnifier, braille display, which it does also as well. But it seems as Mo most people reply because they're a screen reader user, and it's a fairly large report. Uh, keeping in mind it's worldwide, there's different platforms, different screen readers,
different screen magnifiers, different areas of the world. So it's really hard in some ways to get a really good idea of what's going on. But what I guess I tend to look at a few different things. For example, the Australian numbers were basically improving this time around. Um, but again, you know, most of the respondents were overseas, um, and, you know, some of the stuff that you would expect that would happen. So, you know, jaws was at the
top of the list for screen reader users. And then of course, you had, you know, windows at the top of the list. The Mac was down as usual. Linux was actually up, which I thought was really interesting. Poor old narrator was down at the bottom of the list, almost Nvidia, which I think is absolutely brilliant. That's non-visual desktop access from our guys in Australia that's getting more
and more utilized around the world. But at the end of the day, what it just reminded me about was it's great to have the advances in screen reading technology, but there's still underlying web development issues. And, um, this wasn't in the report as such. But, um, reading in another email that was a bit of a summary of this guy's thoughts. Now, I think the person that wrote this email was a web developer, not 100% sure. And I don't think it was to do with anything to
do a friend of scientific or anything else. But the old things about, you know, links not being labelled, buttons not being labelled, controls not being labelled, um, the dreaded captioning to verify to do off a website, all those
sorts of things were still happening. Now they're not as bad as they used to be, but one of my friends that used to work in assistive technology back in 2004, I think it's scary because he could come back now, 20 years later and be presented with exactly the same web accessibility issues that he, as a sort of person, used to talk about at conferences 20 years ago. So, you know, screen reader and other stuff's improving. Yes, it's getting better overall, but we still have to keep fighting
the same fight. And I would just encourage maybe people next year when we get web ehm, 11th survey to really take notice and answer questions. The survey is only as good as the data that goes into it. It's the old computer adage garbage in, garbage out. So the more people we get inputting into this type of survey, the more these people will actually see what's going on in the world. You know, it's an extremely important survey
to do. So next year. I hope places like Vision Australia, Guide Dogs, BCA, all the organisations, particularly in Australia, will push a lot more to get folks to fill in this survey.
But encouragingly, on a per capita basis, the Australian contribution was about equivalent to all that from the United States going by the population sizes. So not bad, but we can do better indeed. Yeah. You'll have links to the report in the show notes.
I will, yes.
Now a couple of items to tell you from the vision store of Vision Australia. For many years, Vision Australia has been a seller of Apple products that's being discontinued.
Yes it has. So as of February 29th. Will actually stop selling Apple products. It's for a few good, really solid reasons, so we just didn't take this decision lightly. Um, it's for various reasons, including economic ones, because we really don't make hardly any money out of selling Apple products. But besides that, there are a lot of other organizations before we took this on. But now we'll do endorse quotes and so on. So it's not so important as
it used to be, hence why we're stopping it. So we will still, you know of course our at service and at helpdesk. Nothing's changed as far as supporting Apple products across the board. Um but as far as the stores concerned will no longer be selling them and quoting on them.
The Apple online store is a very good way to independently purchase technology from Apple, isn't it?
Indeed, especially the Apple Store app, because you can go in there and really read information about all the different types of products, their specifications, and of course, uh, look at the comparisons between the different devices. So that's always my go to app when I start thinking about upgrading or looking at Apple devices. Is the Apple Store app on my iPhone?
Our product from the Vision Australia Vision store to talk about this week is the humble one.
Indeed, and I've actually got this sitting right in front of me, which is pretty amazing. Surprise, surprise. But basically, this is an eight key device for, uh, controlling and
typing into your Android or to your iPhone. And for those that are browser users, if you can imagine a brow cell one, two, three down the left hand side, four, five, six down the right hand side, of course not dots, but keys, and then a long key at the level of two and three on the left hand side, and a long key on the right hand side along dots five and six or keys five and six. And by combinations of these keys you can fully navigate and type in to your, like I just said, your Android or
your iPhone. And because it uses fairly simple and clever navigation keys, I quite like it. So for example, one of my favorite examples is if you want to go to the right. So let's say in normal voiceover terms you're going to the right. So you're flicking to the right. You hold down seven and press eight. Now if you want to go the other direction, which is flicking to the left, if, if you like, you hold down eight and press seven. So you're still using the same two keys.
You're just holding down down one and pressing the other one and vice versa. And it actually uses a lot of those key combinations. So the same keys, but the reverse result. And of course you can activate Siri from it. Uh, you can stop and start voiceover or talkback talking. You can start and stop playing. You can answer and hang up your phone calls, all sorts of things. And it's
also got an easy mode. So what it does is once you turn this easy mode on, it converts all those eight keys into doing a specific function, uh, which is actually really nice if you just want to use it as a, almost like a quick remote control to do certain things on your iPhone or your Android phone. So I think it's one of those nice little devices because it really is quite tiny, um, to use if
you're an Android or iPhone user. So log in to the website or pop into your local Vision Australia vision store and have a look at the device. The Hable habla one.
How much is it?
It's about $450, which is about right for a custom braille input device keyboard.
We haven't talked for a while about the Vision Australia library service and the app VA connect.
I find we sort of take this for granted a bit, so I'd like to remind people that the Vision Australia library is there for anybody who is blind or low vision and has a print disability. It gives you free access to books, magazines, newspapers and podcasts. And with the VA connect app running on your Android device or your iPhone, you've got access to all that information at your fingertips.
You can log on to the website and you can add things to your bookshelf, take things off, search for all sorts of things, get the The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald every day, so on and so on. So it's a really great resource that I think sometimes underutilized. So that's why I thought it was good bringing it up today.
Tell us about Nvidia Nvidia it's hardware isn't it.
That's correct. So Nvidia is very famous for its chips particularly for gaming. But where it's coming into its own is all about artificial intelligence and the power that particularly PCs need to run AI systems, particularly locally, not just in the cloud. They made a metric ton of money in the last quarter that they reported, made lots and lots of money, and it's all around artificial intelligence. So this led to me to think that this is sort
of the what is it? It's almost like the jumping off period where we need to have powerful machines now and moving into the future to cope with the developments of artificial intelligence and of course, moving towards artificial general AI.
We're seeing a generational change with smartphones as we move more into the AI world.
That's right. So I was looking at over the weekend actually, whether my Z flip three from, you know, several years ago would be able to run things like Gemini, which is not quite ready for Australia yet. And the answer is no, because the the CPU in it, the graphics card, the neural engines or that sort of stuff that you
need to run AI systems is not powerful enough. So again, as with the PC, I think we're sort of having to hit a launching period again to say, as with the iPhone 15 Pro, which has got the A17 Bionic, uh, lots of graphics power, lots of neural engines in it for processing data, all that. So stuff. That's what you need.
So I think moving forward, if anybody now says to me what phone should I buy, I think it's really going to have to be, well, if you want to keep up to date with your smartphone in reference to AI, it has to be a current phone moving forward. Before we could sort of get away with maybe looking at a phone about, you know, three or 4 or 5 years ago. But I have a funny feeling now moving
forward into artificial intelligence. Those days of being a bit slack about our specs of our, you know, our desktop computers or our mobile computers is getting very, very thin indeed.
Google, particularly with their smart speakers, have been spotted making moves towards seamless updates. In other words, changing things without letting you know what's happening. You'll just see the outcome of it.
And I think from looking at it, I think it's not just the Google speakers, but it's across the board. And whilst Google likes it, I have a funny feeling major manufacturers like Samsung don't like it because they don't want things happening in the background that they haven't got control of it because. So normally when I update my Samsung phone, it's just an update. It's nothing happening in
the background. So let's just watch this space and see if Google can convince people like Samsung to say, you know, it's it's cool to have the updates running in the background. Users don't have to think about it, and your systems will always be up to date without having to do anything with it. So let's just see what happens. Maybe this year, next year.
Rice is not included in Apple support documentation for wet iPhones.
No. And this probably includes, um, sort of any phone that you get wet. There's been this urban myth where if you stick your phone in a bag of rice, the rice will basically dehydrate the water out of your smartphone. And the real thing is it's the fact that you wait for it to dry out. It's got nothing to do with the rice. In fact, putting your smartphone in a bag of rice, the rice can go into your ports and damage your smartphone. So at the end of the day, the best idea is to just let the
thing dry out for a couple of days. Plug it back into power. If you get a moisture warning, then you let it keep letting it dry out. If worst comes to the worst, take it to a person that can fix it. But yes, do not put it in a bag of rice. That's a real urban myth.
In terms of water, the Apple Watch is much more resilient.
Yes, the only thing you'll notice from a voiceover point of view, and this is also on the Galaxy Watch that I've got, because the membrane of the speaker doesn't get dried out as much. When you do the tone generation and make the speaker vibrate, it sounds very tinny, but give it about an hour or two, it'll dry out and it'll be back to normal.
Now, before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what you've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.
Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David. Would it be a podbean pad bayan.com?
David would be our podbean pod be a incom to write to the program?
You can write to me at Visit Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge Heart Sounds at Vision Australia.
Org David Woodbridge at Virgin Australia. Org this has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's national adviser on access technology David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolly stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.