Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from July the 4th, 2020 3rd July already I'm Steven Jolly. Great to have you with us listening maybe through Virgin Australia radio associated Stations of Australia or perhaps the Community Radio network, there is also the podcast. If you haven't caught up with that yet, the way to find the podcast is just to search for the two words talking tech.
The usual way you get your podcasts 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 can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's
National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's start by talking about the catalogue, the new catalogs that are now available from the Vision Store of Vision Australia, Indeed.
So there are actually three, if you like, updated ones in the last, let's say 2 to 3 months, which, you know, sometimes people get a bit bored about hearing about catalogs, but these have been updated. So if you're looking at specific different types of products. So there's three catalogs at the moment, magnifiers, assistive technology and daily living.
And just to give your brain a bit of a reminder about those different categories, magnifier is everything from manual magnifiers, as in you could all visual type ones that you hold over the page manually to electronic video magnifiers, which were effectively looking for a camera to say stuff magnified color contrast or that sort of cool stuff. Assistive technology is everything to do with computers and smartphones and smartphone stands,
and daily living is almost practically everything else. So things like lighting, stuff to use in the kitchen, stuff to use in the bathroom, talking clocks, talking watches, all that sort of stuff. And what you'll see is a bit of a test run on one of them. So you'll see in this technology one, it says assistive technology zip file.
And what that is, it's a daisy format catalogue. So rather than having to listen to a whole MP3 file or read for the Braille file, the Bref file or reading the PDF file, we're trying a daisy format to see if people like the daisy format. So that's the assistive technology, one or the other two, the magnifiers and the daily living ones are just straight pdf file accessible, an MP3 file and a brief profile.
Shop dot vision australia.org/catalogs. But that's in the show notes. Indeed. Very good. Now navigation apps of the quite a number of navigation apps around has been soundscape from Microsoft but Microsoft has ceased support of this app. Now that we're into July, it has now made it open source so developers can work with it. And we're seeing other apps similar to soundscape popping up like mushrooms.
David That's a good way to put it, actually. Yeah, there is. So there was one that's been around for a little bit of a while now that we haven't talked about because it's been in beta and it still is in beta and that's called open scape. Again, it's based on the soundscape, open source code. And the reason why I haven't mentioned it was because sometimes it's very hard to get into these beta programs and it's all fiddly through Testflight, which is the program we use for
testing apps on iOS. So I haven't mentioned that one, but just keep an eye on that because it may appear on the App Store sooner than later, but the open source software for Soundscape that has appeared on the App Store and you can download it now is one called Voice Vista, and that's Viki Vista. And it basically is soundscape minus, I believe, a few bells and whistles. I've tried it and it does work like soundscape. You
won't see all the whiz bang features. For example, I believe there was a few comments on Apple that said Street View was in there where you can sort of virtually walk through a neighborhood or where you want to travel to and get to know the environment and what's around you. But for all intents and purposes, so to speak, it's soundscape. So give it a go. It's free, it's open source, give feedback to the developer, give it some
stars on the App Store. But it's just nice to see the fact that some developers are indeed picking up the open source code for soundscape and making it available again.
It'll be interesting to see what comes out over the coming months with the children of soundscape children. Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah. Mr. Musk Mr. Elon Musk has been making announcements again about Twitter. And you're only allowed to look at 600 tweets a day instead of 6000, which the paying customers can have access to. 600 is still not bad, David.
No, it's not. And look, the most the tweets that I read per day is maybe 2 or 300 tweets per day. But I think Elon, every now and again, he tends to get a bee in his bonnet about different things. So it gets all excited and makes these silly rules up. That is supposed to stop things happening.
And of course what he's worried about at the moment is these artificial intelligence, what they call screen scrapers, where it basically tries to go through like a whole Twitter feed and basically scrape all the information of it and dump it into some sort of database and then rehash it and then spit it back out again. So that's
what he's supposedly trying to stop. I can honestly say that these days, and this is in some ways to do with Mastodon as well, they're not really great sources of news anymore because I find the news that I pick up hasn't really anything to do with Twitter and Mastodon anymore. I get my news from other sources. I do double check Twitter. I do double check Mastodon, but they're sort of turning into the the Twitter and mastodon social media stuff of the old days, even where, you know,
back in 2011 and that sort of stuff. And even on Facebook, it was like I had a great cup of coffee this morning or I agree strongly with that comment or I don't think people should have done this. And to some ways, that's what both of these social media platforms are turning into. So I'm getting less and less enthusiastic about using either platform these days.
People still use them maybe to follow what journalists or other people of interest to saying, but not much more.
No. And I say, if you're after following journalists, I think you're much better using Twitter if you want to do that one. I'm finding particularly my one that I that I use for the incident that I use on Mastodon, which is Dragons cave dot space. That's spacey. It's just a full of opinion after opinion after opinion. And I'm getting a little bit tired of it these days. So yeah,
I do use Twitter. Like I said, I only read about 2 to 300 tweets per day versus my other way of reading news, which is basically news what's called a news aggregator, which sort of gets news from all different sources. I think I'm on that sort of stuff. I'm reading to probably till about 900 to 1000 articles a day.
A lot more than most people. You talked the other day about Leary Leary and there are other News Feed aggregators there are.
So think about what platform you're using. And they're normally cross-platform anyway. So you've got things like Microsoft News, you've got Google News, you've got Apple News. We've already mentioned Leary. So inside of these, you can then say, okay, well, I want to follow information coming out about cricket or I want to follow information about the F1 or I want to follow information from the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age or specific Apple News. Specific Microsoft News. Specific
Google News. I want General Tech News, Artificial intelligence or that sort of stuff. And you can get all that just coming straight into your inbox. I use Apple News and I use Leary as well, but every morning I run it and it says Updating feed and you hear it go, one, two, three, four, up to about 36 a mine. And you literally just go down category by category.
So I opened up Sydney Morning Herald for the day, read the news stories because that's the only thing that I've got selected as part of my filter and I can share it. Then out to my friends, other tech people, to Mastodon, to Twitter. I save stuff for the show, for talking tech and so on, and it's just really convenient rather than having to sort of pop into Mastodon, pop into Twitter, pop under different websites all the time. I just use one aggregator that does everything for me.
Let's move now to Smart home apps. There are apps for lots of devices on our Smart devices now on our smartphones. ET cetera.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I thought, well, it really has got to the day and age where, you know, we're sort of a bit over the echoes and the Google nests and the homepods of the universe. And I thought what we should really should be focusing on these days is appliances in your home that are
actually app driven. And I was having a browse through a bit of my content research over the last couple of weeks and I thought it's probably a good idea to remind people what's available Now, some of these things I have not tried myself yet, so I've still got to look at them. But just to give you some samples of some highlights, there is an Airfryer, which is called the Philips 5000 and will have the correct model
number and everything else in the show notes. But it's an air fryer that's controlled by the Philips app, which means the things quote and I say quote, accessible quotes. Just to remind people that I haven't I haven't checked it yet, but. That's where you can completely control the temperature, how long things are cooking for the recipes you might want to apply to a particular cooking event or that sort of cool stuff. So I thought that's a really
interesting one to keep an eye on. I'm probably going to be having a look at the air fry this week, so hopefully I'll let you know next week. The other one that caught my attention, Steve, was a dishwasher that's also app accessible. So you run the app and then you can completely control your dishwasher so you can have, you know, the eco cycle. You can just do dirty pots and pans, all the different cycles because at the
moment with my dishwasher, I just press start. It just goes through the normal watch and I press the end function. And I know these days with electricity bills going up, I thought, I just want to be more effective about using my power, hence why I'm looking at the air fryer rather than using my oven to cook all the time. And the same thing to do if the dishwasher. So if I can get away with not having to run my dishwasher for 90 minutes when I don't have to.
It's just another way of cutting down costs. So they were sort of the two main ones that popped out at me. And in this list, I've also got things like a dryers mentioned, washing machine, TV, a kettle, and of course our well-known sensible air conditioning. One for your split system to control your air conditioner. And the other one that I use all the time, which is for my coffee machine to control my prima donna, one for my cups of coffee in the morning. So there's probably
about 10 or 11 there. You know, things are slightly getting better. There's more apps coming online that the problem with this stuff, though, Steve I find the apps that work with these appliances, it always ends up being the most expensive model. I just can't see why we can't have economical hardware that doesn't cost that much, that that's also our driven.
And it's often an accident that it's accessible and the accessibility can fall away with an update.
Absolutely. Which I found with I think it was last year when I might have been complaining on the on talking tech about the the app not working properly on my iPhone for my coffee machine and I had to use Android and then I had to go back and use the iPhone again. So yes, because remember, quite a lot of these products are touchscreen. So like the air fryer, that's a touchscreen one. I'm not too sure about the dishwasher. That's another I'm going to have a look at in
the shop. And you're right, you're sort of riding by the seat of your pants hoping fingers crossed that they don't go, Well, let's bring out a brand new interface for this app and make it all whiz bang and everything else. And of course, for our screen reader users on our smartphones, it becomes inaccessible.
Yeah, that can happen. So David, what's your advice to someone who's looking to use an app that is available with a device?
My first suggestion is to go and check on the Internet. People tweet people mastodon people talk to other blind and low vision people and see what they use and get their recommendations. First, do not buy a product that says it's got an app, if you like, sight unseen, because I can guarantee most of the time you might be
somewhat disappointed. So the ones that people use are fine, the ones that people don't use but they've heard about, that's the ones that you always check first to make 100% sure that it's going to work for you.
Just 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 programme.
Indeed. So as always, you can check out my show notes on my blog site, which is David, would it be a dot Podbean pad B and David.
Would be dot Podbean pod A in to write to the program.
You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Dot Woodbridge 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.