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ATFAQ021-01-11-16
Show notes:
Panel: Brian Norton, Mark Stewart, Belva Smith, and Wade Wingler
Listener feedback on labeling iOS icons for VoiceOver users
Q1. How do you use Dragon Naturally Speaking with math equations?
Q2. Where do you find fire alarm and door bell alerts for children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing?
Q3. How do I test my web site for accessibility?
Q4. How can I mount and position a keyboard and trackball for a wheelchair user?
Q5. Can VoiceOver read PDF files?
Q6. What kind of TV tools and set top boxes do you use? How accessible are they?
Send your questions: 317-721-7124 | tech@eastersealscrossroads.org | Tweet using #ATFAQ
——-transcript follows ——
WADE WINGLER: Welcome to ATFAQ, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions with your host Brian Norton, Director of Assistive Technology at Easter Seals Crossroads. This is a show in which we address your questions about assistive technology, the hardware, software, tools and gadgets that help people with disabilities lead more independent and fulfilling lives. Have a question you’d like answered on our show? Send a tweet with the hashtag #ATFAQ, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. The world of assistive technology has questions, and we have answers. And now here’s your host, Brian Norton.
BRIAN NORTON: Hello and welcome to ATFAQ episode 21. I want to welcome our panel today. Today we have Belva Smith in the room. She is the guru around here with everything vision related technology. You want to say hey?
BELVA SMITH: Happy new year. From excellent. We also have Mark Stewart, our guru for everything mobility and cognition technology here.
MARK STEWART: Hey, folks. Happy new year.
BRIAN NORTON: We also have Wade who is the Jack of all trades guru.
WADE WINGLER: And fighting a terrible cold so if you hear me sniffing or coughing, you’ll just have to forgive me. I may not talk a whole lot today.
BRIAN NORTON: My name is Brian Norton and I’m the health of our show today. For those new listeners who haven’t had a chance to listen to our show, our show is completely about questions and answers. If you have questions about assistive technology, there are several ways to get us your questions. You can call our listener line at 317-721-7124, you can email us your questions at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or you can send us a tweet at hashtag ATFAQ. Also if you have other folks who are looking for a show like this and you want to share it with them, our show can be found in iTunes at ATFAQshow.com, stitcher or at Easter Seals tech.com as well.
One of the things I just love about our show is was around here and try to answer people’s questions, but often times when we can’t answer a question or don’t have a really good answer for it, we rely on our listening audience to provide feedback. Today we had a great example of that. In our last episode, episode 20, we took a question from Chris who is in Utah. He asked the question about changing app names in iOS so accessibility features like voice over and Siri can locate and access them better. We had a listener of ours, David, call in and chime in. He gave a really great solution for him.
SPEAKER: This is David Ward. I’m an AT instructor from New Vision. This is concerning a current AT frequently asked questions episode Number 20, where there was a question from Chris about the ability to rename an app on an iPhone using voiceover. As a voice over user since the iPhone 3GS, there actually has been a way to do this. I never tried it before. Based on Chris’s question, I made sure it would work. It is a two-finger tap and hold. This will prompt voiceover to pop up a dialogue asking you to rename or give a name to the element. Often with students, I’ve used this rename elements for radio that wasn’t properly labeled, but I did test it. You can rename an app on the home screen. Even if you bring up a task manager, it looks like it will work there too. You can rename something that have a very simple name like library or libraries and give it a new name. That name will stick. I think I even had a student once who reset their phone, and I believe those settings carried over from a previous voiceover configuration. It’s a pretty awesome feature. It’s a two finger double tap and hold. You’ll hear a number of tones and a box will appear on the screen where you can rename. By the way, you may need to play with it a little bit because the nomenclature sometimes implies that it will save button if you are inside an app. You might need to work with it with the naming convention. I hope that helps. I’m probably one of many who have responded to this, but hopefully that will help Chris rename his apps.
BRIAN NORTON: I just want to say thank you to David who give us a call and give a really great answer for that. A couple of things about that answer. One thing to note using voiceover, it does rename something but it actually doesn’t change the name it looks on the screen. If you are a sighted user and you’re trying to rename an app or an icon that’s on your talk on your iOS device, it won’t necessarily change the way it looks. It will actually change how it pronounces something. That’s a great answer.
WADE WINGLER: He’s right. We did have a few other listeners right in or tweet in and say the same kind of thing which maybe think maybe we should have known that. It’s amazing to have that kind of feedback. We appreciate the community.
BELVA SMITH: I’m okay not knowing it. I’m just excited to know that we have a community of listeners that will chime in and give us all that knowledge when we need it. That’s great.
MARK STEWART: That’s great. We try hard, but, man, does technology change fast. Lots of fun.
***
BRIAN NORTON: We will jump right into questions today. The first question is do you have any suggestions or know of a way to customize Dragon for mathematical equations. The person has been using things like spell “x” which is kind of a spelling feature to be able to get things to be able to type out, get those problems to type on the computer. The spell X command, copying and pasting and poking around the keyboard as well. Let me know if you have any questions about getting Dragon customize for mathematical equations.
MARK STEWART: First of all, I do like spell X pick spell X is a really nice add in, helps a lot with medical spelling and things like that. To answer the specific question though, I would jump right to math talk with scientific notebook. It is a purchase, but it’s going to be over-the-top as far as taking care of that and handling lot of complex formulas and what have you. Brian, do you agree with that?
BRIAN NORTON: It’s a great program that you can get. It does take quite a bit of effort to get it installed and working correctly, but once it’s there, you can just simply said all of the mathematical equations and formulas and it does do a fairly good job of recognizing those and putting those out into your document.
MARK STEWART: My thoughts are, not every consumer we work with needs that level of input capability, but we have worked with numerous times. Again, my thought is not to piecemeal around with it, they can be complicated during mathematical equations by voice and having the technology pick it up that well. This particular software focuses kind of solely on addressing that complexity with Dragon. That’s my thought, is to just go for it and go for math talk with scientific notebook. MathTalk.com
WADE WINGLER: I want to back you up because I have been vaguely familiar with math talk, but I don’t really get what it is and what it does. Is it a standalone — tell me about it.
BRIAN NORTON: Math Talk is a separate add-in for Dragon, so it works alongside of Dragon and allows you to learn how to type in mathematical equations. One of the challenges with the program is already with Dragon. You are learning lots of command and you need to learn to say something to be able to get it recognized correctly. The same thing is going to happen with math talk. You are going to have to know what the question is. Instead of just looking at it on the keyboard or some sort of other spelling it in or those kinds of things, you’re going to have to know what the formula is to be able to get it to recognize and know what to put on the screen for you. That’s a bit of a challenge with math talk, not just the insulation which can sometimes be a little cumbersome. You have to cross a lot of T’s and dot a lot of I’s to get it to work correctly alongside or Dragon software, but you do have to then become very familiar with talking to math. You have to know what the formulas are. You have to know how to say them well enough so that the program is going to recognize it correctly.
BELVA SMITH: Two questions. First, how much is it? And then second, is there a training feature like with Dragon where I can say what can I say and will it bring up examples of how I should speak certain formulas? Because I’m assuming, if I need the software, I probably don’t know the correct verbiage to use. I guess the third part would be if I’m going to use the software, I probably do need some professional training to go with it.
BRIAN NORTON: Most likely. We do a lot of this type of software that can go along for folks who struggle with math and doing math with in college.
BELVA SMITH: Is it a college-level software or what I need it as a high schooler?
BRIAN NORTON: It doesn’t necessarily have to be a college-level program. They have different levels and different training modules that you can get into things for pre-algebra, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, statistics. You can go through all of those. There are training modules that people can walk themselves through to get comfortable with it and learn more about it. It is pretty expensive. There is a student version, there is a teacher version which is a little less expensive, but then there are some regular retail prices for those as well.
MARK STEWART: I’m looking at price points –
WADE WINGLER: A range between $300 and $900.
BELVA SMITH: So it is very expensive.
BRIAN NORTON: It really depends. The cost tiers up depending on the version of Dragon you have. You have Dragon premium at about $500, Dragon Pro it’s about $900, but if you are a student or a teacher, ranges and that $300 range.
BELVA SMITH: So it’s important to match it with the version of Dragon that you are using?
BRIAN NORTON: Correct.
MARK STEWART: But there is a lot that goes into those vocabularies. Things might have changed, but I know at one point at a conference, we met the vendors. It’s a little bit like Zoom text. Maybe some more people would be familiar with sort of picturing that small shop, just a group of friends working on the project. I think it’s one or two people who saw this need and started getting really passionate about developing this program. The customer support at least as of a couple of years ago was really strong.
WADE WINGLER: It also seems to be an advanced and specialized tool.
MARK STEWART: I was going to speak to that as well. Belva, you are kind of getting to this question. There are things out there, apps and tools to help kiddos struggling with math to learn math and more of a sequential, broken down way. This is a necessarily that. I think you’re going to have to go into one camp or the other. It’s going to go into the camp of a tool for a highly intellectual, highly trained math professor or math graduate student. Frankly I’ve had a physics PhD student who needed this who had some very significant physical challenges, really needed the benefits of voice recognition software. But how do you use voice-recognition software to do what she does day in and day out? There was no way. We had to bring this in. You could kind of chuckle at me not knowing the physics and the things she was talking about as I was trying to train her how to use the software. She was the one who knew the formulas in the lingo.
BRIAN NORTON: I would say it’s more of a writing tool than a learning tool. You learn to write math, or you can write math with this. You’re not learning math. Although you can sometimes match the two up with another program depending on where you are using it.
MARK STEWART: Even Dragon medical and Dragon legal. It doesn’t teach you law, doesn’t teach you medicine. You’d better know what the words are and how to pronounce them.
WADE WINGLER: It’s parallel in the world Belva lives in. You need to know braille if you’re going to use any braille device. It doesn’t teach you to learn braille perky have to know that part.
MARK STEWART: Let me try this and feel free to tell me what you think of it. There is MathType made by design science, dessci.com. Step back from the voice-recognition aspect for a second. Just picture, for example, Microsoft Word. Now wait a second, how do I write pretty come the key to looking formulas into Microsoft Word? Well, MathType is a program that helps you do that. As I was getting ready for this question, I was wondering whether I should throw it in and now I am. That idea of, if you had Dragon naturally speaking professional, you might be able to create some macros with it where you could take advantage of MathType as well and get it to do its thing. Does that make sense?
BRIAN NORTON: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. With MathType, it’s an on-screen keyboard that sits over top of any edit field that you might go to My present word or other places, and is going to allow you to type using the on-screen keyboard math equations. It has all of your math symbols and formulas and those kinds of things. You simply click on a particular symbol and it will show up just like the letter a would if you type it on a regular keyboard.
BELVA SMITH: So if I had Dragon and I had that MathType, I could probably use my mouse to use that keyboard, right?
BRIAN NORTON: I think what Mark is getting at is, with Dragon professional, you can do some pretty complicated system commands to be able to then give you different voice commands, to be able to press certain buttons on the keyboard to get the symbols put in.
BELVA SMITH: How much is MathType?
WADE WINGLER: It is $100 on the high end. There are some discounts for different pricing.
BELVA SMITH: That’s a lot cheaper alternative.
BRIAN NORTON: It will be a little more come beginner to type things out. It will take things longer especially if you’re not using the professional version. The cost difference would come in. When you use the professional version of Dragon, you’re talking $5- to $600 for that particular version versus $150 to $200 for the premium edition.
BELVA SMITH: But if I’m just trying to get through this class, it might make more sense to save money on this software.
MARK STEWART: This just popped into my head. In Dragon — going back to some basics on the question — I don’t think it fully answers the question. I stick with wanting to jump MathType with scientific notebook. If you go to numbers mode within Dragon, then it’s only going to be listening for numbers and certainly it will do things that plus and minus and times and things like that.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s a great suggestion.
***
BRIAN NORTON: If you haven’t already, take a moment if you will and send us your assistive technology questions. You can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org just like David did earlier in the show. If you also have been listening to us and you have other suggestions, the row them our way. We would love to know what you’re thinking about some of the questions we get.
Our next question for the day starts out with a very cordial, hello, I’m looking for information on visual alerts for hearing impaired children. I’m looking for one device with capacity to handle multiple alerts, things like fire, doorbell, phone, carbon dioxide, etc. It’s for a residential setting. I know we have talked about visual alerts before on the show, so I want to throw that out there. Maybe we can answer that a little bit more for her.
BELVA SMITH: I’m a fan of the silent call signature series because they can do all of that. There is not a lot of whole lot of devices that can do the multiple alerts. There’s a lot of different ones that you can use individually, but with the signature call, depending upon what additional adapters you get with it, it will allow –
WADE WINGLER: The modules?
BELVA SMITH: Yeah. It will allow it to do all of those things. Messages and for this particular listener would be to go to the silent call website. On that website you can get lots of information about the different silent call devices and what they can do, but there is also a phone number on that website where you can call them. I would highly suggest calling them to make sure that you get the correct receiver and adapters to go with it to make sure that you are getting everything that you’re looking for. The one that I have worked with the most is the sidekick 2 receiver. It’s the more expensive one. It’s about $269, but it will do the smoke and carbon dioxide as well as the doorbell, and they can do a strobe as well as a vibration. You can put something under a pillow or a mattress if you need to. That’s where I would start, is with the silent call. You can find those at LS&S Products. I would go directly to the silent call.com site and get my information from them.
WADE WINGLER: Harris communication is another website that tends to have a lot of those.
BRIAN NORTON: If you haven’t already, you can go to our website and look up your local tech act project. All states and provinces have a tech act grant, and a lot of those have a loan library and they would be familiar with this type of technology. You can come to our website to look for your own local resource for that, eastersealstech.com/states. You would be able to find some information about that and be able to inquire from a local resource about some of those things. Maybe they would have a loan library where you can try those out for a little bit and see if they are really doing what you want them to do.
BELVA SMITH: I would say that the folks at silent call our very good about talking you through any kind of set up questions that you might have or providing technical support over the phone. Their support seems to be very good because I’ve had to contact them before with a couple of set up questions.
MARK STEWART: The only thing I can add is maybe a little bit of herbage update. There used to be the category more commonly known as environmental controls. There is computer access, wheelchairs, adaptive driving. The verbiage would now probably more currently be EADL’s, Electronic Aids for Daily Living.
WADE WINGLER: I’ve asked some people recently who are colleagues of mine in the field, what’s the difference between an ECU and an EADL? They usually say letters. It just more modern terminology. Someone in the audience may want to point out that I am wrong on that and say there really is a difference between an environmental control unit and an electronic aid for daily living. I think we are still talking about the same category stuff.
MARK STEWART: Per my memory, Cook and Hussey, this book that many listeners will know about.
WADE WINGLER: Many just cringed.
MARK STEWART: Sort of a comprehensive textbook on assistive technology. In my memory – again for fun someone call in and check me on this – they kind of spoke to it just being a change in the verbiage. They thought that the ADLs was a little tighter, a little more academic and modern, so they just change the terminology and encourage people to.
***
BRIAN NORTON: Our next question is how do I test my website for accessibility? I’m kind of looking across the room at Wade.
WADE WINGLER: Most people just don’t do that.
BRIAN NORTON: Exactly. Sometimes I always wonder what really is accessibility, because when you do things to make them accessible, it doesn’t make them all that usable. I tend to feel like accessibility and usability have to dovetail together at some point. I’m kind of looking at Wade who kind of put our website together. I’m sure we’ll find some great suggestions for that.
WADE WINGLER: I’ve been doing some additional work in this area recently that’s been fun as well. The first thing I would say is there is a lot of ways to go about it. There are sort of the do-it-yourself version and there is sort of the hiring an expert version. There are several firms that are out there that employ people with disabilities who do nothing but checking websites for accessibility. They can apply the standards. W3C, web accessibility initiative standards, are some of the rules or guidelines that are out there that people strive for. Section 508 of the rehab act here in the US is another set of standards that very closely mimics what the W3C says. There is this set of best practices out there that you can shoot for that says stuff like you’re going to have images labeled on your webpage; your forms where you are typing in names and addresses and email addresses and stuff on a website are all going to be labeled so that you know you are typing your first name into the first name slot as opposed to the last name slot or whatever. It even gets down to the nitty-gritty and addresses things like level of color contrast so that you don’t have light great on lighter gray and people are expected to read that. It talks about blink rates to avoid seizures. It talks about captioning of audio content. It talks about having controls inside of the video players so that if you are watching an online video you have access to turn captions on and pause and play and rewind and fast-forward. It goes through a ton of different standards and best practices that are out there. You can hire firms that are out there to do that. Some of the ones that come to mind are deck systems and SSB Bart. There are some groups out there that do a great job of that. And then there is a bunch of do-it-yourself tools that will allow you to physically load up a webpage, either in a browser and hit a button and it will overlay your webpage with red/yellow/green icons to say here is a red icon, here is a place where you obviously have an accessibility problem, or here is a yellow icon in this area may or may not be a problem based on the rules and a way that an automated checking system can work it will say you need to look at this. An example of something that would require manual check is heading levels. You look at a website, a newspaper website, you may have a main headline, and then the headline might be sports. Under the sports headline, you might have five or six different stories, one about the Cubs losing and another about the Colts winning or whatever. Even within the story about the Colts winning – yes we are in Indianapolis here in the Colts didn’t just win – you might have three or four different subheadings before that. On a well constructed webpage, sports would be heading level I and Colts story would be heading level II and subheading with and that would be level III. An automated tool can look and see if that stuff makes sense, are those things organize correctly. That would be where the tool would give you a yellow thing and you have to go check it. And then a lot of these tools will give you a green icon on a spot in your webpage and say good job, it’s in attaboy. You labeled an image here or you put some control labels or things in there to do things well. If you hire a firm to come in and do comprehensive website review, they are going to use tools like that. They’re going to use their judgment, they’re going to educate you about how your website work wells. Or if you’re going to use it yourself using one of these automated tools, you have to learn some things about it, but the tools are getting surprisingly good about helping you do that. Some of them are even web-based. Some of them you just go to the website, plug in your website address and it will do it right there on the screen. Some of them require you to run a specific browser like Firefox and plug in a tool and then you can run it on your website that everybody in the world can see, or you can write it on a corporate intranet, so if there is web content where you can to simply plug in the address to have it look at your internal payroll accounting systems or whatever, anything you can get up in a Firefox browser you can use one of these plug-ins to do that. The one that I use when I’m looking at website content to make sure that our staff is as accessible as possible as the wave tool bar. It’s from Web Aim which is all about web accessible instructional media. If you go to WebAim.org.
BRIAN NORTON: Yeah, WebAim.org/extension.
WADE WINGLER: Or if you go to wave.WebAim.org, I think it takes you to their hub for all that stuff. Those are free tools and really good tools and they are actively developed. It doesn’t take very long to get good at using them. The biggest challenge then is what do you do after that? What if you find something on your website that needs to be repaired? How do you make that happen? Sometimes there are technical questions and procedural questions about how do I change the coding behind the website to make that more accessible. Most of the tools that are out there will allow you to click on them and drill down and say here are the rules and specific role that is violated, or there is a problem here and here is a link to a place where you can get code level examples of how to fix that stuff. You can say to your program or if it is not you, here is the rule that we seem to have a problem with and here are some examples of how it can be done better. The other big challenges and a technical one is should we do it. If it is going to cost money to hire a consultant to do this or take time out of your staff resources, it’s the why. There are laws in the US that say your website has to be accessible to people who use assistive technology. Section 508 is one of those, the ADA has been interpreted that way as well and is becoming increasingly enforced for web accessibility. Those are the three pillars I think you need to be thinking about. What are the tools? How do I get the admission of approval for the money or the time to do it? And then how do I actually fix the things that need to be fixed?
The last thing is use AT. Be a user of assistive technology. Find a user of assistive technology and say turn on your screen reader or your on-screen keyboard and use my website and tell me what is good and bad.
BRIAN NORTON: That just stole my thunder. It’s kind of a new phenomenon where you are funding agencies or businesses popping up or they are actually, what you mentioned, the companies you can hire, the consultants you can hire to come in, they actually have employed people with disabilities who use assistive technology. It speaks to what I mentioned earlier about, although it’s accessible, is it really usable because all of these different types of assistive technology – you may have the greatest explanation of what the picture means, but if you can’t get access to it with your particular tool, your particular assistive technology item, it doesn’t do a whole lot of good.
BELVA SMITH: I was going to say exactly what you said, Wade: look for a friend or someone who is using the technology and ask them to look at it. I also wanted to share usabilitygeek.com. They have a list of 10 three web-based accessible tools, and they also drill down a little bit about what is accessibility and why I need it. It just reiterates a lot of that stuff you were speaking to, Wade. It seems like a pretty informative website especially if you’re looking for free tools.
WADE WINGLER: I’ll also throw in another one, A11Y. A11Y is sort of Internet shorthand for web accessibility. It’s A11Y because it’s A, 11 letters missing, and then the Y. Is the word accessibility but A11Y. you plug that in to twitter or the web and you will find lots of resources. The biggest thing is don’t be afraid to look at this. Anything you do is better than nothing to make your website more accessible. Even if you go in and put labels on images, you are moving the world towards a more accessible Internet. If you get in there and you find you have a mess, don’t just give up, don’t stop. Take advantage of the free resources. Do the do-it-yourself stuff and make progress in that area. Just make it happen.
MARK STEWART: Wade, I think we have an upcoming webinar here at Easter Seals crossroads.
WADE WINGLER: Has that been scheduled yet?
MARK STEWART: You’re supposed to schedule that but I thought I would throw it out there.
WADE WINGLER: We just added an update that we are going to have to do in a previous show. We will be hosting a webinar sometime in 2016 where we have one of our colleagues and experts come in and do several hours of webinar on how to do the nuts and bolts on the stuff. It’s designed more for programmers and developers who are going to get it to code level examples of how to make stuff, but check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com. Brian, I will put it on you to put it in the show notes to put it in our notes for a future show to announce that when we have it scheduled so that people who listen to this Joe regularly will know how to sit in on that webinar. It will be free. We’ve done it in the past and it really good.
***
BRIAN NORTON: So our next question is I am looking for reliable mounting options for a keyboard and a trackball. My client uses a wheelchair and would like to position his input device where he can access them better at his workstation. I know I have had lots of experience with this and Marquez as well and I’m sure we all have around the table about mounting things. Really, mounting different types of assistive technology, you want to get those things into the users personal space where they can get access to them. Is not close enough or positioned correctly, you’ve already diminished the exit that they have for that particular device. There are lots of tools out there to help people better position different things like keyboards, mice, trackballs, all those things. I’ll throw that out.
BELVA SMITH: A lot of times it’s hard to look at a picture and tell if the device is actually going to work in your environment. This is where, look for your tech act and see what type of devices they might have that you can borrow, because it’s got to fit every aspect of the environment to work just right for you. That’s all I’m going to say because I’m looking at Mark.
MARK STEWART: First thing is, as we are visualizing this, I know the person who asked the question knows better. You visualize this and you think lower tech, bigger things, mechanical things. Doesn’t that fall into the low-tech category? Not for mounting. Mounting, as we all know, is a science/art in these fields. There certainly are some topics we can talk about here. One thing I want to say is that you should probably try to contact – one of the most helpful things is to contact the vendor who provided that wheelchair. Hopefully you know who that person is. Hopefully it’s a local standalone durable medical equipment type company that’s been around for a while. In past shows we talked about some of these types of things as far as the people involved in the process with regard to wheelchairs. Those vendors are definitely knowledgeable folks. They will know a lot about mounting on these wheelchairs. Maybe no specific devices or there may be some add-on devices that would work for that wheelchair. Certainly it doesn’t have to be something made by the same company that made the wheelchair. There are other things that tackle the sometimes difficult challenge of connecting themselves to as many wheelchairs as possible, be it manual wheelchairs or power wheelchairs and all the different types of wheelchairs within those categories. But that’s going to be really good advice that’s probably the best thing I can say. Maybe have a chat with that vendor who will help you out a bunch.
But gadgets, one of the things we have a lot of success with and can attach to, something that square of different sizes, a pole that has corners or something that is round so it can to a desk or attached to a wheelchair, is movable in shape in that you can really work with it and get it into a lot of different positions but then lock it down and it will become a rigid, more durable amount. They call themselves a universal mounting arm. We use them a lot.
WADE WINGLER: That is the AbleNet product, right?
MARK STEWART: You can get them at AbleNet. Actually they stick with that name and look very similar, but there are probably two or three different companies. Michal is funny about that amount is, as with a lot of assistive technology, I think it was originally created for hanging camera lights. You can also find them as bojin magic arms. They are the exact same things. I think people in rehab and people in assistive technology years ago got onto them because they are so helpful in getting things just right for somebody. And you can lock them down in the become that rigid format and are really helpful.
WADE WINGLER: It’s also called the Manfratto Magic Arm with super clamps, so if you get one of those you will cut the cost quite a bit.
BELVA SMITH: I think that would work on a workstation or a desk rather than just a wheelchair because I understood the listener to be asking for it to fit into their workspace which may or may not be on to their wheelchair.
BRIAN NORTON: Workstation specifically. That one not only pulls but they’ve got a very flexible mounting point where it will actually grip around Paul’s. You can also make it flat so a trip to a solid service really well. You get lots of different options with that one.
MARK STEWART: That’s really interesting if you’re thinking mounting to the work surface which we do a lot. I was initially thinking mounting it to the wheelchair. They can mount to the wheelchair as well. Perhaps the caller didn’t know the items that’s going to be a big help to put you on to that. I’ll continue on that specific topic a little bit and mentioned some of the products.
We really like the version of that – I’m going back to my initial training days – the knob-type tightener versus the lever. We’ve actually had the lever break off and the knob is much more durable. The other thing I don’t really have an answer for but will throw it out there, I’d love to get feedback. For years and years, the plates you attach to the top, you could get triangles of different sizes, rectangles of different sizes. They were steel, durable. As most of us know listening or talking here, we wanted that durability. That was the top of mount we were going for here, a move it and then lock it down to be sturdy, whereas there are mounts that are much more flexible but they can’t take the abuse when they move around. We like the steel plates. Just within the last couple of years, the plates that we are getting in a plastic. They just aren’t lasting as long.
BELVA SMITH: I wasn’t aware of that.
MARK STEWART: I’ve had some situation where people have that tremors and what have you and I’ve actually done some jury rigging and building of my own stuff to make the mount more durable.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s interesting. Plastic just won’t hold up durability-wise over time.
MARK STEWART: Then the rest of the device is solid steel, but down, and that you have the contact point being plastic. I’ve actually worked with our vendors, people we work with to help purchase these things often for funding sources. They dug in a number of times. I don’t know this for sure, but as far as our investigations on these more recent cases, we never got to the point where we found the old metal plates. They couldn’t get them for me.
BELVA SMITH: I’m sure that’s probably a cost. It’s probably cheaper to do the plastic.
WADE WINGLER: There are lots of good strong plastic these days, but that may not be the case.
MARK STEWART: It didn’t seem that way for me.
BRIAN NORTON: I think it’s the part of the mount that will take the most abuse over time, because that’s the contact point. When people are using a keyboard, they are pressing keys on the keyboard, at the keyboard is locked into that with Velcro on to that contact point and it’s continuously getting jostled and moved. Any kind of fast movement –
MARK STEWART: With respect to this topic of mounting, we are not talking about software or what have you, but this is a big part of what we do. I’ll continue with the universal mounting arm. If you had the metal plates, and if we are reading this person’s question right, for keyboard and mouse use, you could use industrial-strength Velcro. You could attach a larger platform to the universal mounting arm, just have a nice platform for the keyboard and mouse and that might be all you need. With those plastic plates, you’re just not going to be able to attach something else to it.
A couple other things along this topic line, mountain mover, mountnmover.com, they make a bunch of mounts that are high-tech. We have a lot of success with them and really liked them. They have a whole bunch of different kits for bracketing themselves to all kinds of different wheelchairs. They have all kinds of things to mount a number of items, just a keyboard, just an iPad, just an iPhone, two computers, a book, a feeding tray, all kinds of things like that. You can actually interchange some of those platforms on the same amount. It’s really pretty high-technology and something to take a look at.
BELVA SMITH: Mark, if you are aware, what is the return policy for place like that? If I am trying to do this myself and I am looking online and I think that this is going to be the mount that I want, but then I get it home and find out I can’t attach it to my chair or to my desk or whatever, are they pretty good about taking it back in working with me to find the right thing? Or is it one of those, you got it and it’s yours, sorry?
MARK STEWART: The answer is it’s case by case, but they are pretty good about it. They are much bigger than a mom and pop, but they are their own company, in one city, and many times I have called in and have worked with them on the process. Sometimes they’ll just send a replacement part; sometimes I have to send a part back; sometimes I don’t; sometimes something will have to be purchased. It all depends on the specific situation. Actually, as we talked about in the beginning how high-tech this can be, the actual mounting part of it, I probably call into them and work with them and getting the mounting just right and getting the kids to fit just right on an individual’s will chair more times than not. They are there to do that.
BELVA SMITH: Good.
BRIAN NORTON: Just a couple more daunting options I would throw out there for you. In line with the Mount n Mover, really customizable, there is also one, Daisy has a Daisy amount. They do lots of wheelchair types of mounts. In the lines of the universal switch mounting arm, there’s also the slim Armstrong mount, which is to be more rigid, maybe not as flexible, but also a good option. Another mainstream mounting solution I’ve been drawn toward recently is ram mounts. They have all sorts of unique, interesting ways to mount a particular device, not just to a wheelchair but also to a desk and other kinds of things. They also have a series of these really great clamps for mobile devices, for your smartphone or tablet, way to really easily mount those. They are sturdy and durable and work really well.
MARK STEWART: Thanks. Also, the Plexiglas concept. We just don’t know the situation, but that local vendor often will be in the role of making trays for the wheelchair that are custom-made. Usually they can make them in their shop and they look very professional but are made for that individual situation. They rigged them up so they can slip over the chair and sit on there pretty sturdily. That might be a great answer. Maybe you’re just looking for a Plexiglas tray that you can place the keyboard and mouse on and then you take it off and go from there. That’s possibly something that this caller, depending on what their role in background is To make up for the person as well.
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BRIAN NORTON: If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and send us your questions. I’m sure you guys have questions that you want to throw out to our show. You can send us a tweet at hashtag ATFAQ or send us a voicemail. We love to get voicemails. You can give us a call at 317-721-7124. If you do send us a voicemail, we will play it live on the show. That’s always fun. It’s a great way to get those questions out there.
Our next question is, is voiceover able to read PDF files? I did a little research on this. I don’t know if anyone wants to jump in on it. I did a simple answer, yes.
BELVA SMITH: Know.
WADE WINGLER: Maybe so.
BELVA SMITH: All three are correct.
BRIAN NORTON: As long as the PDF is indeed a text PDF, meaning that it’s not just a picture of text, then it will read it. What you will end up doing is open a PDF in the preview window and be able to navigate down there. It should read those. That’s a great way to do it. If you do find that your PDF turns out to be a picture of text, you can convert it by running through a CR program such as Abby find leader, express, or some other types of OCR programs. Want to do that, it will read the PDF as well. It doesn’t translate well pictures and other kind of things, obviously there is no text there many times in pictures to be able to read those. It does read text based PDFs. If it is not a textbased PDF, if it is simply a picture, then you do some scanning and some of OCR and turn it into text so that they can read it.
BELVA SMITH: That’s been my experience with PDFs. They are not like a .doc — you can get a PDF and it can be a picture or a can be text, it could be a form. The short answer is should voiceover be able to read it? Yes, it should. But if it can’t, there are lots of different free tools and solutions. If the user is perhaps using – since they are saying voiceover, I’m going to assume that they are using the Mac OS X. But if they are using Windows and they’ve got a screen reader or an OCR program like open book or Kurzweil, those PDFs can always be sent to the virtual printer to be read. Most of the screen readers now have the ability to perform – I like to call it quick OCR.
BRIAN NORTON: I call it instant OCR.
BELVA SMITH: Instant OCR, yeah — on your PDF files. I’m sure that Mac has lots of different tools that can be used to read those PDFs. There are other ways to do it. There’s always Read Aloud which is part of your Adobe Reader that should be able to read it, as long as it’s not a picture.
MARK STEWART: Where I am going to go here may not be necessary. I’m going to go big picture, some paid programs but programs that will be best in class as far as PDF conversion and what have you, getting the documents ready to be handled. OmniPage from Nuance is definitely a leader in the class, OmniPage and Adobe Acrobat are competitors. At the core of OmniPage is conversion of all kinds of different documents to searchable PDFs, which is what we are talking about, readable PDFs. It’s also just nice software. Again, may not be needed in all cases. There is a lot to it, but if you have a lot of different documents and you want to get them into searchable format and organized and cut a multi-page PDF into individual pages, put it back together, all things like that, that can be really handy. That is software that can do that. Nuance also has a newer, more stripped-down program. Someone call in and correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I believe it’s called Power PDF. I think that is a slimmer version, and I think itself has the conversion capability of being able to change PDFs into searchable PDFs. That might be more along the lines of something that has just what you need without the extra features. With Adobe, the latest is Adobe Acrobat Pro DC that does PDF conversion to searchable PDFs.
WADE WINGLER: The one thing I would throw in on top of Acrobat Pro, it also has an accessibility checker tool built in so that if you are creating a PDF or if you look up a PDF, one of the panes is there called accessibility report, and then you can run a full check. It will analyze a document to make sure that it is fulltext and even to things like those document headers and other kinds of accessibility things. If you are creating PDF files and you want to make sure absolutely sure that they are accessible, Adobe Acrobat Pro has a really good tool to help with that.
MARK STEWART: I wanted to add the information, it is not to get away. Probably where Belva was, was a little bit more on target as far as getting best answer for this specific question. You were talking about just how to get it done kinds of things.
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WADE WINGLER: And now it’s time for the wildcard question.
BRIAN NORTON: Our next question is the wildcard question. We met is at that time already?
BRIAN NORTON: I always think we need a whip sound, a cowboy holler and a whip.
WADE WINGLER: Brian, if you actually listened to the show, you would know that in postproduction I add that exact thing.
BELVA SMITH: I don’t think he’s ever listen to the show.
BRIAN NORTON: I want it live. I need to hear it now.
WADE WINGLER: It is a gunshot and a whip and a hillbilly.
BRIAN NORTON: I like that. Let’s do that.
WADE WINGLER: okay. So this is one of my favorite part of the show. I really enjoy doing this. We just spent some time for the holidays being off. I watched more TV than I once in a while and we got a new subscript into a new thing called Sling TV which is one of those pay by the month and get some extra channels on your TV that comes over the Internet. It’s different than the old Slingbox which did some stuff with your cable. This just give you 20 channels for $20/month. It’s the stuff my wife likes like home and garden TV and travel Channel and food channel and that kind of stuff. It’s really cool. That’s not my exact question. In the pre-show, Belva was talking about new Apple TV. Here’s my question for you guys: we are all busy, we don’t want it to the TV among this crew. More and more often, people are using set-top boxes, or you’re not watching the network TV stuff. You are watching Netflix or Hulu or taking advantage of the Amazon Prime with video and those kinds of things. I spent as much time watching TV on my laptop or my iPad as I do streaming that on my Smart TV. My question for you guys is what are you using? Which one of those mainstream services are you using for TV or video stuff? And a little more specifically, what does that mean for people with disabilities if we are talking about someone with a vision challenge and accessing those things or a mobility challenge? What are you guys watching on your TV these days and pushing it further and thinking about what that means for people with a disability.
I’ll start by saying we’ve got to Apple TV’s and a Samsung Smart TV and all kinds of devices. We have the options to Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and sling and that stuff. We have tons of options. That’s what we are using.
BRIAN NORTON: I’ll jump in here. We subscribe to Dish so we still have our big DVR and we have a package of channels that we get through dish. It seems to be one of the cheaper providers of cable TV that I’ve been able to find. We have been members with them for probably 10 years. I know they talk about TV cutting out when storms come in and all that stuff, but we haven’t had all that much of an issue with that. We do have an Apple TV, and because of my iTunes and an iPhone and a Mac, it all blends together. I also subscribe to Amazon Prime and I also download movies and can see shows through Amazon Prime. Other than the Apple TV, I really don’t have any of the device you’re talking about like the Roku and those things. I get all the content that I need. I cannot wait until there are packages where I can simply choose the tension as I watch because I need ESPN1, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPN Deportes, all those good ESPN sports shows, and then I’m set.
WADE WINGLER: Then you need to look at sling because it has at least two or three ESPN channels. Plus it will keep Leah happy because she can watch HGTV.
BRIAN NORTON: Right. It has to have the Game Show Network too.
WADE WINGLER: That doesn’t. It has kid stuff though. CNN.
BELVA SMITH: Interestingly enough, over the holiday I received a letter in the mail with $10, and it said – this is the third time this has happened to me – your household has been selected to participate in the Nielson —
WADE WINGLER: Nielsen Families.
BELVA SMITH: I was shocked that they still do that, is how can they tell what I am watching anymore? I watched nothing live. I have a TiVo. Every TV that we have, which is a lot, are all smart TVs. We have the Apple TV. We have Netflix and Amazon Prime, what a lot of documentaries. Everything is recorded. In fact, my grandson, if we try to watch TV and a commercial comes on, you’ll say Mammie, it’s not working. He doesn’t even get the concept of commercials.
BRIAN NORTON: Isn’t that funny?
BELVA SMITH: That is what we do at our house, a lot of TiVo, Netflix, and Amazon.
MARK STEWART: For me, Roku, Amazon Prime subscription, Netflix subscription. The TV is a Smart TV, but we rarely use its own functionality. We have cable. Cable for us is Comcast X1, so you can do some recording of TV shows and things like that. That’s it. I’ll still turn on the news and watch regular news, but as far as TV shows — Netflix has a subscription. I tried to go to Netflix. I try to not buy movies.
BELVA SMITH: I don’t purchase movies.
MARK STEWART: I go to Amazon a lot because I can see my Prime and my pay options. When a movie was $3.99, yeah, I’m going to go for that, and of course that adds up. But it’s going up, $5.99, $6.99. That’s the rental price, not the purchase price.
WADE WINGLER: We buy a lot because I have little kids, so we have purchased Blu-ray or DVD copies of Tangled and Frozen.
MARK STEWART: So you buy them to keep and have them.
WADE WINGLER: Yeah, because the kids watch them over and over.
BELVA SMITH: I won’t do that though. I’m all about the freebie.
BRIAN NORTON: My question would be, and I don’t have a whole lot of experience with some of these things and haven’t looked into it much. Obviously You are streaming over the Internet. Is it high-quality streaming? What kind of bandwidth do you need in your house to make that work? I’ve done some things with Amazon Prime, and sometimes it is buffering and you have to wait five minutes for it to catch up and for it to keep back in.
BELVA SMITH: That all depends on how good it is in your home. Honestly is not uncommon for us to be streaming Netflix in two rooms and someone to be surfing the Internet at the same time. On a rare occasion I’ll get buffering. Or sometimes it will buffer and you just turn it off and start over and it’s okay. It’s not to the point – I use to have satellite, never again.
BRIAN NORTON: I love my satellite.
BELVA SMITH: It’s not to that point. My satellite, if it got cloudy outside, I lost my signal.
BRIAN NORTON: Really? Unless it is a big red dot above our house on the radar, we get reception all the time.
BELVA SMITH: It was about 20 years ago when I had my satellite. I would never go back again. Also my satellite blew off my house one night and scared the living daylights out of me.
WADE WINGLER: For us, bandwidth used to be a bigger deal but it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal anymore. There is probably a show we could do on net neutrality and as I going to change based on what those laws are. I will tell you, a couple times they show a show will buffer out for a minute or less and it will be like whatever. I learned in our house anyway, we need to reboot the router probably once a week.
BELVA SMITH: We usually reboot once a week just for good safety.
WADE WINGLER: It doesn’t bug me so much like it used too. It seems to be better.
BELVA SMITH: We are not even paying for the highest speed. We are just paying for regular Internet.
MARK STEWART: Is that the new commercial break? Just 30 seconds of buffering? You have to get to your refrigerator at some point.
BRIAN NORTON: You have to know right when you need to go to get back in time before it starts back up.
WADE WINGLER: What about people with disabilities? We are all fairly able-bodied and no one here is dealing with significant vision challenges or things like that. Obviously being able to watch CNN on your iPhone is an accessibility plus. Having the ability to start shows on one platform, take them to another, make them really large print and put them on whatever size screen you want is a plus. But what about accessibility experience you guys have had with this stuff?
MARK STEWART: One thing I know we touched on briefly in another show, and Wade, you have to remind me and cleaned up the words. You interviewed someone from Comcast on your update show. I think it’s a big deal that Comcast now, you can access things much by voice much better. They had a remote control that you can use to access things by voice. That helps a bunch with accessibility from the cable standpoint.
BELVA SMITH: Actually did two Tech Tips on the accessibility features with Comcast. Yes, with the X1 package, that only will it give you auditory feedback to the information on the screen, but with that new remote — which is free, by the way; you do have to call and ask for it — I can simply ask it to find whatever I want and it will not only search the XFINITY options for watching it but will also search for Amazon and stuff like that as well. As far as the accessibility goes, with the Apple TV and Comcast, for someone who is visually impaired I can speak that it works wonderfully. It has made finding anything on the TV much easier.
WADE WINGLER: You guys just got the new Apple TV recently?
BELVA SMITH: And it is awesome. I got it for Christmas and I can use it to search not only for things on the TV but I can also search the computer. If I have pictures stored and a folder named, I can say open my picture folder from Christmas ’95 and it will go straight to that end up in that folder for me. As far as finding anything on the TV, I can say when will Charlie Brown be on and it will find all the options for what I can watch Charlie Brown, what channels or sources I need to go to, whether it be Amazon or Hulu, or whatever.
BRIAN NORTON: It just makes that a ton easier to get to.
BELVA SMITH: Absolutely. The remote is just nice. That’s all I can say. It feels good in your hand and it’s just nice. You can do your regular gestures for flicking left and right, and to click you just press on it. It’s very simple to use because there is literally only four buttons pure once you learn the location of those four buttons and then the touchpad, you are good as gold. It’s amazing because I can remember when you had to literally get up, walk across the room, flip the room. Better yet, Sunday’s paper came with the weekly TV Guide and you would sit down and I would circle all the shows I was going to watch for the upcoming week.
WADE WINGLER: Thursday night love boat.
BELVA SMITH: Exactly. Now I am just asking the TV, when can I watch something.
BRIAN NORTON: What about things like captioning and other kinds of things that are – we met that is getting better. The 21st Century Communications and video accessibility act is happening too. There are more captions available all the time. We are spoiled.
BELVA SMITH: I can actually set it to your cord by voice command. I can just say record Monday — which I would never do. My TV would probably fall off the table if I said record Monday night football. It would actually just set up the recording for me.
BRIAN NORTON: Thanks everyone for your questions. I want to thank the folks in the studio for helping go through an answer those questions. Here’s how to find our show. You can search as assisted larger questions on iTunes; you can look for us on Stitcher; or visit www.ATFAQshow.com. Send us your questions if you haven’t done so already by calling our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us a tweet at #ATFAQ. Or email us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. We want your questions. In fact, your questions we really don’t have a show, so be a part of it. If you have feedback on the question we talked about today, please call in. We would love to hear from you. We’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks.
WADE WINGLER: See you later.
MARK STEWART: See you folks.
BELVA SMITH: Bye.
WADE WINGLER: Information provided on Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions does not constitute a product endorsement. Our comments are not intended as recommendations, nor is our show evaluative in nature. Assistive Technology FAQ is hosted by Brian Norton; gets editorial support from mark steward and Belva Smith; is produced by me, Wade Wingler; and receives support from Easter Seals Crossroads and the INDATA project. ATFAQ is a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. Find more of our shows at www.accessibilitychannel.com.
