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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Show Notes:
Tap Tap See, Dmitriy Konopatskiy (www.taptapseeapp.com)
Assistive Technology Fund http://bit.ly/K6Kazj
AT Coalition’s “Upcoming Trainings:” http://bit.ly/K6JnhP
Tech predictions for businesses in 2014: mobility, wearables, intelligent assistants, gestural computing, facial recognition | KurzweilAI http://bit.ly/1afzol2
Cast Your Votes Now for the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards of 2013 | AppleVis http://bit.ly/K6I7v3
Here are 89 Life Hacks That Will Make Your New Year So Much Better http://bit.ly/K6HvFS
First Deaf-Blind Student At Harvard Law Pursues Dreams | WUNC http://bit.ly/K6yZqu
Why blind internet users are angry with Google, CAPTCHA http://bit.ly/K6wpAN
App: ProloQuo4Text
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—–transcript follows —–
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Hi, this is Dimitri, and I’m the marketing executive at Tap Tap See, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
[Music]WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 137 of assistive technology update. It’s scheduled to be released on January 10 of 2014. Today, my interview is with Dimitriy Konopatskiy, who is the marketing executive at Tap Tap See. We spent some time talking about that clever app that’s helping folks with image recognition. I have several stories today about blindness and vision impairment including the first deaf blind student at Harvard Law; why blind Internet users are angry with Google and captcha’s; also an assistive technology fund for folks who are blind or visually impaired. I also have information about some free AT coalition webinars and Kurzweil’s tech predictions for 2014. Give us a call on our listener line at 317-721-7124 or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject.
Are you looking for some financial assistance to buy some assistive technology? Will the Association of Blind Citizens operates an assistive technology fund which will cover 50 percent of the retail price of adaptive devices or software. There are limitations: it has to cost at least $200, can’t cost more than $600. There are also some income requirements and an application process. I’m going to stick a link in the show notes. The applications are Duke twice a year on June 30 and December 31, but this might be a great opportunity for you to get some assistance with the funding for some assistive technology that you’ve been keeping an eye on. Check our show notes, will have a link over to the Association of Blind Citizens and information about their assistive technology fund.
Is your personal training calendar full for the upcoming months? What the AT coalition as a series of free webinars that are coming up soon. Everything from AT implementation for IEP students and that K-12 space, to accessible instructional materials simply said, all the way to understanding communication challenges associated with ALS, or opportunities in computing and IT field for folks with disabilities. I’ll pop a link in our show notes over to the AT coalition website and you can learn more about these free webinars that they have coming up over the next few weeks.
The new year is upon us, and there are certainly no lack of prognostication about what’s going to happen in the tech world. From Kurzweil accelerated intelligence, I found an interesting post here, where JP Gounder, the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester research, predicts these things are going to happen in 2014. Customers are going to actively shun businesses that lack mobile applications, so an increase in mobile applications from different vendors. Wearable computing is going to become more important. Google glass is among those kinds of things that are predicted to be useful. Intelligent assistance, things like Watson or Siri, to help make life more useful, interesting and easier. Also gestural computing and facial recognition and stores. For example when you walk into a store, it might know you and help customize your shopping experience. Lots of predictions for the general technology world in 2014 and many of those I think having implications for assistive technology as well. Check out our show notes, will have a link over to the Kurzweil article and you can read a little more detail about these predictions for what’s going to happen with technology in 2014.
Do you use assistive technology applications on the iOS platform? Things like Bard Mobile, Blind Square, Fleksy, InBraille, TapTapSee, Twitterific, or Voice Dream Reader Text to Speech? Those are just some of the apps that are up for nominations for the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards for 2013. Voting closes at midnight on 12 January, but there is still time for you to go there and vote for your favorite app, game, Mac, third party hardware accessory, or the developer of the year. Check out AppleVis.com or our show notes, and you’ll find a link to the nominations and your chance to vote for the Golden Apple Awards of 2013.
We’re always looking for easier ways to get things done, and I saw this kind of cool viral post come across my Facebook not too long ago that has 89 genius solutions to simple problems. A couple of these I’ve seen before, but some of them I haven’t. These aren’t always necessarily completely assistive technology, but I can certainly think of disability related applications for these. The first photograph on this post is how to use a dustpan to let you fill a bucket that won’t fit under the spout of a sink. Basically it is picture of a sink with a dustpan link in it. The water is poured into the pan, part of the dustpan and then through the handle the water flows into the bucket. There’s a picture of somebody using a staple remover to open up their split ring key ring to make it easier to put their case on it. The somebody who’s putting some toilet paper rolls and split them down the sides and then wrapped them around gift wrapping paper rolls to keep them from unraveling in your closet or wherever it is. A picture of a pool noodle put under a bed sheet to keep kids from falling out, and then a back of a closet door that has one of those racks that you hang shoes on, but it’s full of cleaning products. All kinds of cool things from using a can opener to open those plastic packages that are so hard to get into, to even using nail polish on your different keys on your key ring to identify different ones. There are 89 of them; they’re very photographic in nature, but also pretty cool. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to Viral Nova’s website, and you can read more about these life hacks that are some genius solutions to life simple problems.
I really enjoy the show Marketplace, and I listened to it on a pretty regular basis. Recently I was happy to see that Adam Ragasiya did a story about captchas and why blind Internet users are angry with Google’s captcha. If you’re not familiar with captcha, it’s a technology that was started back in the 1990s or so. Captcha stands for completely automated Public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. You’ve probably seen them before. They are the gobbledygook garbled up letters and numbers and words that you have to kind of deciphering when you’re signing up for an account of various kinds or making a purchase are those kinds of things. It’s pretty widely known in the assistive technology world that those technologies can be a barrier for folks who use screen readers. Most of the time a screen reader can’t read that, and therefore that creates a barrier for a screen reader user trying to access a site. Sometimes there is an audio captcha, for example Google has a system that allows you to listen to audio consider using a visual captcha. It’s quoted in this article as being like listening to a radio show with three robots talking over one another with bad reception. So there’s a gentleman from Australia named Wayne Hawkins who actually has started a campaign. He says it’s finally time to kill the captcha. He’s talking about the fact that it’s not as useful as he would like to think from an accessibility standpoint and it certainly creates an accessibility barrier. I’m always glad to see such technology stuff in the main stream, and I’m going to encourage you to check our show notes, head on over to marketplace.org and check out this story about why blind Internet users are angry with Google about the captcha.
From Chapel Hill, North Carolina, there’s a story from public radio about the first deaf blind student at Harvard Law. Haben Girma is a woman who is deaf and blind, and at the age of 15 she had danced, skied, kayaked, and travel to Molly. Now she is going to the Harvard Law school to become a disability rights attorney. A fascinating interview here where Frank Stazio talk to her about her experience with disability rights, advocacy, and her experience at Harvard. She talks about the fact that Harvard law had not had a blind student before, and so they didn’t know how to anticipate all of her needs, but they work very carefully with her to make sure that they understood their accommodations. She’s a heavy braille user; she uses some sort of a braille computer device with refreshable braille; she relies on Duxbury to convert and print documents out in an embossed format. She talks in the article about the technology that she’s using. She also tells some interesting stories about some of the less technical accommodations, but the fact that for the first little while the cafeteria they didn’t have menus in an accessible format, and so she went up and stuck her plate out and they would put some food on it and she wouldn’t know until she set down what she was going to be eating for her meal, and how she eventually works through that process. Haben Girma is a fascinating woman, and I would encourage you to check our show notes. We’ve got a link where you can learn more about the first deaf blind student at Harvard Law who’s pursuing her degree to become a disability rights attorney. Check our show notes.
Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps. Here’s an app worth mentioning.
JULIE SMITH: This is Julie Smith with BridgingApps, and this is an app worth mentioning. Today I want to tell you about an exciting app from Assistiveware ProloQuo4Text. Assistiveware also put out ProloQuo2Go. This app is available in the iTunes store for $64.99. ProloQuo4Text is a text to speech app for alternative communication. The app is textbased and includes word prediction and sentenced prediction. These two features allow much faster communication to the keyboard then simply typing all the words and sentences. The app includes a choice of 85 voices and 15 languages. It is easy to switch languages so a bilingual user can easily communicate and both languages. Messages can be delivered auditorily or through airdrop, twitter, Facebook, email and messaging. The user can also create and save frequently used phrases and sentences. The layout and other features of the app can be customized for an individual user. The app can be used on any of the iOS-based iDevices, and an Internet connection is not needed for communication. We have used this app with a 15-year-old who has autism. He previously used a simple text-to-speech app with a keyboard only. ProloQuo4Text allowed him to communicate at a much faster rate reducing frustration. The app has many helpful features such as highlighting words or even sentences, saving frequently used words and phrases to use as shortcuts, and the ability to pause and play giving the user ultimate control and the rate of text changing to speech. Because it is textbased, this tool would be extremely useful for children and adults who are illiterate including those with diagnoses of autism, cerebral palsy, developmental disabilities, apraxia , ALS MND, strokes, or traumatic brain injury. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
WADE WINGLER: So regular listeners up assistive technology update to know that I spent a lot of time keeping an eye out for apps and what’s happening in the news related to us at the technology. Something that I see over and over and over again to hear people talking about and really has a lot of buzz is an app called Tap Tap See. I am thrilled to be joined via Skype by Dmitriy Konopatskiy who is a marketing executive with Tap Tap See. Dmitriy, are you online?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Yes I am. Thank you for having me today.
WADE WINGLER: Hey, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day and talking with us a little bit about Tap Tap See. I know it’s something that keeps you really really busy and I know I hear a lot about it from all kinds of folks all the time. Tell me a little bit about Tap Tap See and what does.
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Certainly. Tap Tap See is a camera for the blind and visually impaired. It is a mobile app on the iOS. It allows the user to take a picture of any object and have it recognized in seconds. Our users only need the voice over turned on, and as I mentioned and works with iPad, iPhone, iPod. We are currently not on Android system. The way it simply works is that a person double taps the screen, it takes a picture of whatever the desired object is, and then within a few seconds it return and identification to the person.
WADE WINGLER: That’s a very simple description, but for people who have been dealing with, and the world of vision impairment, and object recognition, you just set a whole lot. There’s a whole lot going on there to make that happen. Before we get into the technical aspects of that, can you get my listeners a little bit of an idea of why that’s important? Why do we care about object recognition in a camera app like this?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: You have to think about it like this: it gives a lot of independence to people. For example, we’ve heard amazing testimonies. One gentleman said that he was able to go grocery shopping for the first time in his life with the help of our application without assistance. That was amazing. The gentleman simply said, “I was able to go to the store, snap pictures of the items that are needed, and what I needed to take my money out, I made sure that everything was correct, and I paid. It was an exhilarating feeling of being independent.” So to have an application that, to have a tool such as that is amazing. Now we have the technology to do it, and we have the technology to improve and continually improve.
WADE WINGLER: I’ve been working in the field of assistive technology for a little over 20 years now. I know that when some of the early technology, like Kurzweil, came out of that did document scanning, that was a big deal because it gave people access to printed material. But I had a lot of friends who would say things to me like it’s nice to know what the newspaper says, but it would really be nice to know if when you’re grabbing a can out of the pantry whether you’ve got a can of tuna or a can of cat food. I think we take for granted the fact that document access is usually pretty good, but there are some pretty visual indicators of the world that people need access to, and the fact that Tap Tap See is doing that I think is pretty remarkable.
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Certainly, just to add on to your point, for example identifying can’t and organizing pantries is a big thing that we’ve seen our users do. People I mentioned the fact that they did almost make a sandwich with soup, but the fact that they took a picture of it and they realized it was tuna, it helps them out. That is a huge use case that we’ve heard so far.
WADE WINGLER: From the technical standpoint, I’m interested in knowing how it works. I can imagine that if I were to line up my camera to take a picture of some very common object or a word or logo like that, it might not be too hard to get a computer to match up known images with the picture that I took and match it, but some things require more description. Tell me a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes with the app.
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Our technology is proprietary, and we utilize computer vision along with crowdsourcing. However, our crowdsourcing does not utilize any volunteers, so everybody is highly trained. The way it works is once you take a picture, if the computer fails to identify it, then it will go to one of the crowdsourcing human taggers who will then return the tag. That is also a big reason why our accuracy is so high. A computer fails, then we will always have a fallback.
WADE WINGLER: And not every case, but in some cases, then there is a human being sitting there taking a look at the picture and making some decisions and judgments about the content?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Correct. One of the biggest things is because taking pictures may not be something that is easy or has a little learning curve, so what we do is we advise our users to take about 6 to 12 inches away from the object, and then take a picture. Sometimes they still come out blurry, and that’s where the computer vision may fail, so it may go to the human tiger and he or she would have to figure out what it is.
WADE WINGLER: That’s pretty remarkable, and I think that combination of automated technology plus a human is obviously getting you the results that you’re looking for. Imagine it’s an iOS device. Any kind of technical requirements other than something that will run iOS, iOS 5 and above? What’s the requirements for it?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: iOS 5 and above at the moment. With the iOS seven design being different, it kind of taking advantage of it. There are certain things that are on that that make it better on iOS seven, but iOS 5 and above is fine. It can work on the iPad, on the iPhone, iPod. For the iPad, when you go into the app store, you have to go under iPhone, because I know some of the users have emailed us and said I can’t find it. We do not have a standalone iPad application, but we do have it for the iPhone, so when you go into the App Store, make sure you select iPhone App Store and you’ll be able to find it.
WADE WINGLER: And I’ve noticed this. I think Apple has done something recently with the way they are sorting apps. There are times when I know I’m looking for an app on my iPad is for the iPhone, and I have a little hard time finding myself. That some good advice. So when I go to download its end use it, what’s the cost of the service?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: The application is free when you first downloaded. It gives you a 20 picture file which is absolutely free. Afterwards, when those images run out, then you have a message pop up, and will give you four options to what we offer is a subscription based service. One is a 50 pack package for $4.99; there’s no time limits to take those 50 pictures. Second one is 100 picture package for $7.99; again there is no time to take those pictures, there’s no expiration date. You can spend three months taking them. And then we offer a one month of unlimited pictures for $9.98, or three months of unlimited pictures for $24.99. Every purchase is done through your Apple iTunes account so there’s no credit card unless it’s connected to your iTunes account already. It just going to be you putting in your Apple ID and password confirming the purchase and you’re all done. You’ll be able to see the expiration date or the amount of credits left within the application under the about section.
WADE WINGLER: That’s a good pricing strategy, because I think it allows folks to try it and see it’s going to be useful, and then you can of pay for what you use. If you’re a heavy user, it sounds like you got some options there for unlimited use. I like the way you got that set up.
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Thank you.
WADE WINGLER: So one somebody downloads the app, and even if they are trying to free trial or they subscribed, what is the learning process look like? How long does it take to learn it, and what kind of challenges to folks have?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: The biggest thing is going to be taking pictures. If a person is not familiar with taking pictures in general and of knowing when something is in focus or what is not, and that will take a little time. When we first built the app, we actually sat down with the Braille Institute out here in LA. We have some of the people from there try the application. They gave us a lot of great feedback. The biggest thing that they loved was the fact that our screen was so empty. It wasn’t cluttered. We just have a top bar that has a couple of bugs and then we have the rotor at the bottom with somebody can have the identification right next to them letter by letter. In the case of learning, it’s more about learning how to take a picture. Eight to 12 inches away from a product is good, which is about 20 to 30 centimeters to aside from that, I think it’s pretty simple. We have four buttons: we have the repeat button if a person misses a tag; we have a library button which allows a user to actually save that identified picture into their phone or to share it, also you can access the library on your phone which is the camera roll and upload pictures from your camera roll into the application to have that identified; we also implemented a little beep which lets you know when the picture is in focus, so when you’re taking a picture of an object, you’ll hear a little beep and that lets you know that that object is in focus and is the best time to take a picture.
WADE WINGLER: That sounds pretty good. Are the things that it does that it doesn’t do very well? Are there some limitations are challenges that folks have identified when they are trying to use the app?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: We’re always working on improving the system. We’ve had some users who are just slightly visually impaired, for example people who are colorblind, they’ve used it to identify clothing items and whatnot. The one thing that they said is dark navy blue and black minutes distinguish very well, so we’re trying to work on getting that’s better. The biggest thing that we always say is that the lighting has to be good. The lighting has to be good, and if the picture is in focus, then we should be able to identify any item.
WADE WINGLER: That’s cool. I know that’s technology is always changing and camera technology is getting better and apps are getting faster. What’s in the crystal ball? What’s coming down the road for Tap Tap See?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: As always, our biggest thing is we have to improve accuracy as we continue to go, because it’s just as you mentioned that technology keeps spending and keeps getting better, so we had more keep abilities. We’re always looking to make it faster and more accurate. Right now we’re actually going to be releasing a new update very soon. It is something that many users have requested, and it will allow people to buy credits before accessing their previous credits. So for example if somebody had bought the 50 picture pack, and they are at five credits remaining, they may want to buy into the pack before they run out. This is something that people requested because they said if I’m going on a trip or if I’m in the middle of the store, it takes up too much time. We are implementing that in the next update, and also what we just did is we have a feature when you identify a picture, you can save it into your camera roll. So what we did is now when that picture is saved into your camera roll, it will say the tag with it. So the picture, for example if you take a picture of a cup, and it’s going to save coffee cup, and you say that image, that image will be saved as coffee cup in your camera roll. That was a big thing that people requested. All of our updates have come from requests. We have a lot of fuses that say, hey can you implement this, can you take a look at this? We started to explore its, and all of our updates have come that way.
WADE WINGLER: I think with an application that so personal like that, if you’re not listening to your customers, you’re going to have trouble. You mention somebody who is no longer making sandwiches out of cans of soup. Tell me another story or two about folks who are using Tap Tap See and its impact on their life.
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Well, with the holiday seasons just ending, we actually received a letter from a lady who says, “When my children were little, about 30 years ago, these always think that Santa had a lot of white wrapping paper, not Santa uses your app in the wrapping paper is correct.” Those are very touching stories. The fact that you can bring it into your holidays, bring it into your Christmas and have that help you so much. The gentleman that went out and bought food on his own for the first time. It’s amazing. There’s so many of them, it would take us a long time to go through a lot of them. There are so many touching emails that we get some times where people are just baffled how we do it, and they are so grateful. It really humbles us. It’s a wonderful feeling.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great, and I hear nothing but good stuff about folks who are really making differences in their own life doing that. I’m sure that folks whose into this podcast today are going to be interested in learning more, figuring out how to interact with you, figuring out how to get a copy of Tap Tap See for themselves. Give us the contact information. How would they reach out to you if they have questions or if they wanted to get more information or if they wanted to get the app, where should they start?
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Let’s start off with the basic, the website. You can get more information on the application on our website. The website is taptapseeapp.com. We’re also on Twitter? Very responsive. We have a great community. Whenever anybody has a question, they can just tweet at us. That’s @taptapsee. As well as on Facebook, you can write as a comment or send us a message, will respond to you very quickly. Facebook.com/taptapsee. Outside of that, you can always drop us an email. It’s contact@taptapseeapp.com. Again, feel free to contact us, have your contacts ready? Whatever he would like to let us know or ask is, we’re here for you.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent, Dmitriy Konopatskiy is a marketing executive with Tap Tap See. Thanks again for being with us today.
DMITRIY KONOPATSKIY: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your assistance technology update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
