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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:
Chief Accessibility Officer with Robert Pearson – AMI (Accessible Media Inc) www.ami.ca | twitter: @a11ymedia | email: robert.pearson@ami.ca
Wrise : Text to Speech App for Mac | AssistiveWare http://buff.ly/1C0nzet
KNFBReader Currently reduced from $99.99 to $49.99 | AppleVis http://buff.ly/1u7rTsb
Kurzweil 1000 Version 14 Improves Learning Experience for Blind and Visually Impaired Users Nasdaq:ABCD http://buff.ly/16gyZ2b
Ray Kurzweil’s Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years | Singularity HUB http://buff.ly/1u7qPVe
An Introduction to Talkback http://buff.ly/1zeI5bq
On the Hill with Audrey Busch www.ataporg.org
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ROBERT PEARSON: Hi, this is Robert Pearson, and I’m the Chief Accessibility Officer of Accessible Media Inc, or AMI, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
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 193 of assistive technology update. It’s scheduled to be released on February 6 of 2015.
Today we spent some time with Robert Pearson who is the chief accessibility officer at AMI; three stories about Ray Kurzweil; and a segment with Audrey Bush talking about what’s happening DC. We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project.
From our friends over at AssistiveWare, the makers of Proloquo2Go and Proloquo4Text, as well as other adaptive programs, there is a new word processor called Wrise. It’s designed to help people who have trouble with reading comprehension and text composition. It works on a Macintosh computer only. It’s currently available at a discount until February 15 in the US for $29. After that the price goes up. But there is a free trial version where you can get the fully functional version for 15 days and have a chance to check it out. It has support for reading, so as people are using this word processor, it will read things out loud and colorcode and had them as a ghost. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to AssistiveWare’s website where you can get a direct link to a free trial or this short-term discount on their new word processor. I’ll have a link in our show notes.
The folks over at Cambium Learning Group have released a new version of Kurzweil 1000, which is the scan and read system for folks were blind or visually impaired. Version 14 has a view new enhancements, and from the press release here, it says it has the option to extract images into PDF files, recognition of PNG files, optical character recognition upgrades, a new scanning mode, improved proofreading mechanisms, the ability to record voice notes, advanced editing capabilities, and enhanced navigation within documents. They are offering it as an upgrade to current users for $125 of, or if you buy the full retail product, it’s $995. Kurzweil has been around for a long time, but then it’s 1000 form for people who are blind or visually impaired and this 3000 form for folks with learning disabilities or other reading challenges. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes and you can figure out more about what’s going on with this upgrade to Kurzweil.
Speaking of Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil is the person that the Kurzweil software is named after. Ray has received 20 honorary doctorates. He’s been awarded honors from three presidents and he’s written seven books. Bill Gates said that Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. I fortunately have been able to share the room a couple of times with Dr. Kurzweil at conferences and things like that. I will say that being in his presence is an interesting and amazing experience.
Ray has made some predictions for the next 25 years. He puts some limitations on the predictions, but in the past he’s been pretty good about that. For example in 1990, he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion. He predicted also in 1990 that computers would be able to answer queries by accessing information wirelessly via the Internet. Even in 2005 he predicted that virtual solutions would be able to realtime language translation in which words spoken in a foreign language would be translated into text that would appear as subtitles to user wearing glasses. These are all predictions that come true in one way or another. For the next 25 years, here are some of the things that Dr. Kurzweil is suggesting.
He says that by the late 2010s, glasses will beam images directly onto the retina. 10 TB of computing power, about the same as the human brain, will only cost about $1000. By the 2020s, most diseases will go away because nanobots will become smarter than current medical technology. He says that normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. And the Turing test can be passable or will be passable at that point. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on the highways. He says that by the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. By the 2040s, nonbiological intelligence will be 1 billion times more capable than biological intelligence. That’s us, folks. He also says that nano tech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air or create any object in the physical world at a whim. He says by 2045, we will multiply our intelligence by a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neural cortex to a synthetic neural cortex in the cloud. These are some very interesting predictions. Normally I would say that science fiction, but Kurzweil has gone this stuff right for years. I’m going to pop a link over to the singularity hub where you can read more about Kurzweil’s prediction and check out what he’s saying and what you think about those things check our show notes.
It seems that I just can’t get away from Ray Kurzweil today. Our friends over at AppleVis have a note here that says that the KNFB Reader has been reduced from $100-$50. The “K” in KNFB Reader stands for Kurzweil, NFB for National Federation of the Blind, of course. It’s an app that will work on your iPhone that allows you to take pictures of stuff like menus and pages and signs and those kinds of things, anything with text on it. It will convert it over to readable text and read it out loud for you. We talked about the KNFB Reader app on the show before peered it works very well. Anna Leon has spent some time on our show talking about it. One of the things I’ve heard is that it’s just expensive pure the fact that the price has been cut in half come at least for now, is pretty impressive. If you’re interested in getting the KNFB Reader for only $49.99 instead of the regular $99.99, check the link in the show notes and we will see if it still live when you click on it. For now the KNFB Reader is half price. Check our show notes.
>> Accessibility tutorial. When explore by touch is turned on, you can touch the screen to learn what apps are under your finger. For example, the current screen contains app icons. Find one of them by touching the screen and sliding your finger around.
>> Okay, so I’m going to start making around.
WADE WINGLER: The two voices you are hearing there, one belongs to Talkback which is Android’s screen reader. The other belongs to Greg Lopez who has done a podcast over at Cool Blind Tech about how to use the talkback screen reader for android. If you’re interested in knowing how you can get your android phone to read out loud things on your screen, typically used by somebody who is blind or visually impaired, and kind of equivalent to what Apple does with voiceover, you need to check out this podcast. Greg spent a lot of time going in detail through the tutorial and the operations of the talkback system for android. If you’re interested in making your android mobile device talk, check out this podcast from Cool Blind Tech.
It’s time for On The Hill with Audrey. Audrey Busch is the director of policy and advocacy for the Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs. In her update, she lets us know how the power of politics is impacting people with disabilities and their use of assistive technology. Learn more about Audrey and her work ATAPorg.org.
AUDREY BUSCH: This is Audrey Busch, policy and advocacy director for the Association of Assistive Technology Act, coming to you with your monthly Washington update.
It’s only February, and things are heating up in Washington. I certainly don’t mean the weather. Following President Obama sixth annual State of the Union address in January, which formally kicks off the budget season in Washington, the president introduced his Fiscal Year 2016 budget request on the first Monday in February. It’s important to remember that the president’s budget proposal is just that, a proposal. It is far from becoming a reality as Congress still has to assemble, deliberate come and passed five separate appropriations bills that may or may not adopt some of the president’s priorities.
In this case, with the GOP Congress in control, many pundits are anticipating that the budget was dead on arrival on the Capitol Hill steps this past Monday. Since only time will tell what the future holds for funding levels for our beloved programs that help people with disabilities, but just focus on what we do know. That is what the president is proposing be spent in Fiscal Year 2016.
The president introduced a $4 trillion budget. This is a budget that gets rid of spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act passed in 2011 and also eliminates the abhorrent sequester which mandates across-the-board cuts to all non-defense and defense discretionary programs, which is waiting in the wings to take effect in Fiscal Year 2016. Somehow the president had to actually pay for this, however, and the budget is accompanied by a payment plan that includes raising capital gains taxes, text incorporate profits stashed abroad come and ending a loophole for inherited wealth.
To name a few of the increases that are folded into the budget that are of interest to the disability community, it includes an increase of finally dollars for the Independent Living Centers. There are also significant proposed investments in Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, IDEA: the preschool program under IDEA, Head Start, Early Head Start, and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which all help to ensure more children with disabilities get the best possible start. As for the Assistive Technology Act, it was level funded at $31 million.
While many of these budget proposals excite invested advocates and stakeholders of the benefiting programs, we should stay tuned for the coming months to see what suggested increases are adopted by the brooding Congress. In the meantime, please continue to stay warm and dry and we will plan to talk to in March.
WADE WINGLER: So I’m somebody who has worked in the field of assistive technology for a little over 20 years, and I don’t know if my audience knows but I’m also currently an MBA student working on my Master’s degree in Business Administration. I have seen twice recently in the news the title Chief Accessibility Officer. Obviously with my interest in those areas, I was very intrigued. I’m excited today because we are going to meet one of these folks. We are going to talk with Robert Pearson who is the newly appointed Chief Accessibility Officer at AMI, or Accessible Media Inc., in Canada. First of all, Robert, thank you so much for being on our show today.
ROBERT PEARSON: Thank you, Wade. I’m happy to be here and talk a little bit more about our role and what we do at AMI.
WADE WINGLER: I’m excited to hear about it. I thought we might start off the conversation with that. Why don’t you tell me, for folks who aren’t aware of AMI, what is AMI? What do you do? And maybe a little bit about your life and career before this new change and roll.
ROBERT PEARSON: Sounds good. We are not as Accessible Media Inc., or AMI. We are a not-for-profit, multimedia broadcasting company based in Canada and broadcasting only to Canada. We have a unique status within the country to be a must carried service, because we, by our broadcast license, serve those who are blind or with low vision to be able to promote their access to media in an accessible way. The Canadian Broadcasting Act is designed for this fact to serve persons with disabilities. This is one of the means by which they do that.
The three services that we operate, one is AMITD. It is unique in its makeup and that it’s 100% video described, or audio described, 24 hours a day. So we have a full lineup of programming, movies, documentaries, original programming, and every moment of it is described. We also have an audio only service which is AMI Audio, which is a new service. It has magazines come authors reading books, as well as more in-depth original programming as well. And then a third service which we just like a few weeks ago called AMI Telé, which is representative of our bilingual population. It’s essentially AMI TV but just in French. It’s described in French 24 hours a day. That’s the broad overview of us. The content that we provide, unfortunately it is available internationally because of our unique nature to serve specifically on the Canadians. However, you can gain some of our programming from our website and through other means. We’ll get into that a little bit later.
In terms of my background, prior to come into this role, I spent some time working with our Canadian federal government, the provincial government in Ontario and based here in Toronto. I’ve also done some work for some financial institutions. All along, it’s had a focus on accessibility. I’ve been working in the field for 16 years. I set it off my time as a developer building websites and have made my way through a variety of different roles to arrive where I am today.
WADE WINGLER: I have to say that, first of all, I’m fascinated and impressed with the content that AMI is producing. I’m sure that a lot of the non-Canadian listeners might be drooling a little bit about what it would be to have access to the content. It’s amazing.
ROBERT PEARSON: That usually the way it is.
WADE WINGLER: Absolutely. Your career so far is impressive as well. I’m excited to learn about this new change, this role of Chief Accessibility Officer. What does that title mean? What are some of the key points in your job description.
ROBERT PEARSON: As an organization focused solely on the provision of accessibility primarily in the sense of media, but also from an ethics the role within the disability community, we felt that there really was a need to form a senior management role focused solely on this topic, relay to solidify our position and show our dedication to adopt accessibility in absolutely everything we do both externally as well as internally and the practices that we follow within the organization. There really has been a very good response from within the community to the formation of such a role. It’s something that is new. As you mentioned at the beginning, there are very few of these role being formed, but I think it’s going to be a trend that we’ll see going forward.
Some of the aspects that I’ll be working on within my role is the continuation of our work on accessibility best practices. We’ve taken some of these from developed mobile best practices and web best practices, but also around audio description. That is our main focus of the services that we provide, that fully described video content. What we’ve done is we’ve worked with the Canadian broadcasting industry to develop best practices for all providers of description across the country. From that we’ve developed postproduction, best practices for description, as well as life best practices for description. These have been adopted by the Canadian regulator similar to the FCC as a requirement for standardizing the delivery of description across the country to ensure it’s consistent for users who may require it.
In terms of other aspects of my work, one of the big ones going to be an internal accessibility audits. As you may know, I just started in my role, so this is just beginning. But what we are going to be doing is doing an assessment of all of the ICTs, Information Communication Technologies, that we use internally and determining their inherent level of accessibility. Have they considered it in their development? Are they considering it in their product lifecycle? And then reaching out to these vendors and offering assistance in this regard to assist with their knowledge of accessibility and the need for it.
There’s a few other aspects as well to the role. It’s fascinating. I just started my role and was presented within days with about 15 different projects of little one offs that people have just been — there really hasn’t been a position to work on them, and now with my role there is a means to address it. We are also working on continuing to participate in legislation. Some may be aware that the province of Ontario has one of the most stringent accessibility regulations really anywhere in the world in terms of, not only web accessibility, but also otherwise. Lastly, one of the big components of my role is that I’m going to be working with an organization called the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, or the IAAP. This is the professional body to form a certification around the practice of accessibility. AMI was a founding member of this organization come and we are going to be continuing to work with them in the development of certification programs and other aspects that they’re going to be focused on as there were continues.
WADE WINGLER: I’ve been following the IAAP just a little bit and I’m fascinated. Maybe I’ll hit you up for another interview on that topic at some point. I think that’s an interesting thing. It sounds like in your role as CAO, you have some internal and external roles that have to do with accessibility. A couple of questions related to that. One — and this is the basis to and me – as a CAO, it’s a C-level position, do you have a full seat at the administered of table?
ROBERT PEARSON: I do indeed. I’m now at the senior management level. I’m reporting directly to the president of the organization who is the CEO as well and then developing my workplan in conjunction with him in terms of exactly what I’m going to be focusing upon. It is very much a division between external and internal. It requires me to be well present in the office doing a number of assignments, also be present externally at a number of conferences and presentations in a variety of other things in that aspect, sponsoring events and things like that.
WADE WINGLER: It sounds exciting. It is very fascinating.
ROBERT PEARSON: I’m excited.
WADE WINGLER: So let me throw a little bucket of cold water on that. What you see as some of the sticky spots that are going to happen? What’s going to be tough about this job?
ROBERT PEARSON: One of the aspects I think of doing the internal accessibility audit is really coming to a realization of the systems we are using and what their inherent levels of accessibility is. One of the sticky points I think from that is going to be working with the external vendors and getting their buy-in to the idea of accessibility and the need for it. One argument to counter that is the idea that accessibility is a business differentiator. If you spend funds or the money to become knowledgeable of flexibility and building it into the processes that you do, it then becomes a differentiator for your business from your nearest competitor who may not have any knowledge or willingness to learn what accessibility is.
WADE WINGLER: You are clearly speaking right to the business student behind the microphone today so that’s awesome. Robert, I know that IBM recently named Francis West as their CAO, and that’s the first time I had heard the term. Why do organizations need someone in that role and what kind of an organization needs that? Obviously AMI is focused very much on disability related issues come and IBM has a long track record of being interested in this. But why and who needs this kind of a person in the role?
ROBERT PEARSON: We know of five instances of the position so far. Francis was the first. Her background has been extensively working in accessibility for many years. She was very much the logical person to fulfill that role. Microsoft has one. This gentleman’s name is Rob Sinclair. He is also the president of the IAAP as well. The others, I believe, are AT&T as well as Yahoo. So certainly within that group we are by far the smallest because AMI is an organization of about 100 people.
But in terms of the types of organizations that need it, I think as it’s a new thing, it’s going to be something that the major organizations look to do first. IBM has been doing accessibility for 100 years so it makes sense that they form this role and be a guide and a trendsetter for the remainder of the industry. Microsoft, offering so many different software packages, a new version of Windows coming out, Windows phone, etc., there is a need to focus on that there. Yahoo, of course a very large organization, has a very vast clientele, as well as AT&T, that they need to be proficient for them. I think it’s setting the trends. So the major organizations do it first and that allows smaller organizations to make the realization that maybe there is a need for this role. Certainly some organizations may be too small to dedicate single resources to accessibility, but it also speaks to the need to adopt accessibility into business practices. If a role cannot be formed, at least perhaps it will proliferate an understanding that there is a need for accessibility within the business process.
WADE WINGLER: That makes a ton of sense. One more nerdy MBA student question as we start to wrap things up here. I’ll put you on the spot. Somebody listening to this is going to want to do this. They’re going to be sitting in front of their board or their CEO, and they’re going to want to be able to state the value statement for having a CAO on board. On-the-fly, what’s the value statement for having a CAO?
ROBERT PEARSON: Accessibility allows you to be compliant to all of your possible audience. So you are working for the widest possible audience. You are not going to be excluding anyone who may be utilizing your services. Having a role such as my own and the others allows for a solidification of that. It allows for accessibility to be at the highest priority throughout the organization, and that’s really where it needs to fall in order to get the attention that it requires.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. I wouldn’t have thrown that question on-the-fly at anybody except for a Chief Accessibility Officer. Robert, if people want to continue the conversation with you or they want to learn more about this, what kind of contact information might you provide?
ROBERT PEARSON: To learn more about accessible media and the work that we do, and also to view some of our original programming as we have a fully accessible media player on our website, I invite you to visit us there. It is AMI.ca, and you can come and use some of our programs. Everything has a description. If you would like to communicate with me directly, one of the easiest means is on Twitter. You can reach me @a11ymedia. That’s my account and I work with that one directly. You can also feel free to email me directly. That email address is robert.pearson@ami.ca
WADE WINGLER: Robert Pearson is the newly appointed Chief Accessibility Officer with Accessible Media Inc., or AMI in Canada and has been our guest today. Robert, thank you so much for sharing the message with us today.
ROBERT PEARSON: Thank you for having me on, Wade. It’s great to speak about it further. All the best.
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.
