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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.
Google Chrome plugins as Assistive Technology | Brian Norton | www.EasterSealsTech.com
Plugins Brian mentioned:
ChromeVox
SnapNReadUniversal – Don Johnston
Ginger
Voice Recognition
ThoughtQ & WordQ
Voice Note 2
Doc hub
Tex Equation Editor
ReadNWrite Gold
App: Daily Art
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——-transcript follows ——
BRIAN NORTON: Hi, my name is Brian Norton, and I’m the director of assistive technology here at Easter Seals Crossroads, and this is your Assistance 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 262 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on June 3 of 2016.
Today’s interview excites me a little bit because I get to hang out with one of my dear friends Brian Norton who is the director of assistive technology here at Easter Seals Crossroads, and we spend some time talking about one of his new — it’s almost a hobby here at work that he is doing here related to Google Chrome plug-ins and how they might be used as assistive technology. We focus on a whole bunch of free and low-cost different things that you can add to the Chrome browser to sort of turn the whole situation into assisted technology.
Also we have an app review from BridgingApps about an app called Daily Art which is exciting stuff.
We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, give us a call on our listener line at 317-721-7124, or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project.
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We are working on a special episode is going to air in just a couple of weeks, and we need your help. We are going to do an entire show about iOS tips and tricks, so if you can make iOS do something that’s cool, we need to hear from you. If you can do something assistive or just a really good general helpful tip about iOS, we would love to hear it. Here’s how you do that: you call our listener line at 317-721-7124 and leave us a 2 to 3 minute message with your favorite iOS tip or trick. We might just include you in that upcoming special episode. Thanks!
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Each week one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an App Worth Mentioning
AMY BARRY: This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is an App Worth Mentioning. Today I am sharing the “Daily Art Free: Daily Dose of Fine Art and Art History” app. Daily Art features a work of art each and every day. You’ll get inspired by beautiful museum-like art masterpieces and read the intriguing stories behind them. Do you want to know why van Gogh cut off his ear? Or who is the lady on Picasso’s portrait? How Jackson Pollock created his paintings? Open Daily Art and find out.
The app shows the piece of art and a short written piece about the author and painting. Users are able to share the artwork directly from the app to a variety of social media apps such as Facebook. This app is wonderful for people who love art and may not be able to visit an actual art museum in person. The app can also be used in therapy sessions as a conversation starter about both the art as well as the written information. The written piece can be used for reading or auditory comprehension. We love that this app provides small pieces of recreation and brain stimulation every day.
Learn something new about art! All you need is two minutes, download your espresso shot of art for free with no ads. It’s just pure art. Enjoy.
The Daily Art app is available at the iTunes and Google Play store and is compatible with iOS and Android devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org
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WADE WINGLER: So this is fun. I’m so excited to have one of my coworkers and dear friends in the studio today because he is sort of our in-house expert when it comes to our topic. Before we talk about our topic today which is Google Chrome plug-ins for assistive technology, first I wantto we introduce you guys to Brian Norton. Brian, hey.
BRIAN NORTON: Hey, how are you.
WADE WINGLER: Good. I’m excited to talk to about this today because you’re excited about this topic and I have a lot to learn. I’m excited to see what you are going to teach us today. Before we get to all that, you sit in the studio lot, right?
BRIAN NORTON: I do. I host a podcast called AT FAQ, which is Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. I’m here every other week recording and we send out our podcast on the following weeks.
WADE WINGLER: The audience is growing for that show like crazy. We are getting lots of questions, lots of feedback. It’s fun to check our email and our twitter stuff every day and say somebody’s listening, asking a question. It’s fun stuff.
BRIAN NORTON: It’s really exciting to get some listener involvement and feedback. It’s growing week by week.
WADE WINGLER: Folks can find it wherever you get your podcast, whether it’s the iTunes store or Google play or also go to ATFAQshow.com and that takes you right to a landing page on the web that tells you about that show. So Brian, you’re not new to Easter Seals Crossroads. You’ve been here for how many years?
BRIAN NORTON: Going on 20 years.
WADE WINGLER: 20 years. And you started off doing employment services – I don’t want to tell your story. You tell us your story. Tell us about your background.
BRIAN NORTON: This was my first job out of college. I came to Easter Seals Crossroads as a job coach where I help people develop resume writing skills, interviewing skills, set up interviews for them with potential employment sites. Once the job was offered and they are on the job site, I worked with them to kind of familiarize themselves with the tasks and help them set up natural supports to be able to help them do that job. I did that for a few years and then moved over into assistive technology. A little kicking and screaming, I might say.
WADE WINGLER: I remember.
BRIAN NORTON: I didn’t have a whole lot of technology background. In fact, at that moment in time I didn’t really know where a keyboard got plugged in, didn’t know where the mouse got plugged in. But obviously I have learned those skills now.
WADE WINGLER: Now that we don’t use keyboards and mice as much as we used to.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s right. I’ve been here quite a while. For the past 18 or so years, I’ve been in assistive technology as a direct service provider, as a manager, and now the director of our program.
WADE WINGLER: You are responsible for our clinical assistive technology operations, the federally funded InData Project. Really, anything that has to do with assistive technology here is your baby.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s right.
WADE WINGLER: Enough about you. Let’s talk about the technology a little bit. It seems to me that assistive technology has kind of been transitioning away from dedicated devices and more into apps, whether they are on tablets or on PCs. One of those ways kind of outside of assistive technology that I see is there’s a lot of software as a service or browser-based apps these days. For example, my banking situation, I am logging it in a web browser most of the time to do banking as opposed to doing into the going into the bank as much they use to. I know we are seeing a lot of browser-based apps. Around here, I’ve heard you talking a lot about Google Chrome and some plug-ins for assistance technology. That’s something you’re pretty pumped about these days.
BRIAN NORTON: Yeah. You go with apps for mobile devices and then you start talking about plug-ins for browsers and these little applets that can go into those computers. As far as accessibility and usability, things like that, those things have come quite a ways. I think the other thing it really offers folks is it is a lot less expensive way to meet some of the needs that you have. I think you’re always going to have the trucks out there on the highway, things like Kurzweil 3000 and some of these other mainstream products that are been around for a long time, screen readers, text-to-speech readers, speech to text, other kinds of things. But you know what? I believe Chrome plug-ins and some of these apps are really kind of displacing them a little bit because they are a lot less expensive, they are just downloads. Most of the time they are free. If not, there is a subscription and that is fairly an expensive for you to get them at a pretty pretty reasonable cost for folks.
WADE WINGLER: Let’s back up and make sure we set the basics for everybody. What’s Google Chrome? People are going to know about this but let’s make sure we cover it.
BRIAN NORTON: Google Chrome is a browser that you can load into Windows, Mac, there’s even a Chrome OS device out there or computer that is based off of Chrome. It’s a browser for the Internet.
WADE WINGLER: So what is a plug-in?
BRIAN NORTON: A plug-in is an app that you can download, and it just because becomes a little bit of an extension. It offers you a surface within the browser itself. So some of the apps we will be talking about today work directly within the browser itself. A toolbar will come up in the browser and allow you to be able to interact with text and interact with what’s in the browser, what’s in that webpage directly from within the program itself.
WADE WINGLER: For me just by way of example, a few of the non-AT plug-ins that I use in Chrome are like I’ve got one for the weather, so that when I’m in my Chrome browser ,which I am a lot, up at the top in the right-hand side where all the buttons are, one of them tells me whether it’s raining outside of what the temperature is. That’s an example of a plug-in. Or I’ve got one that I use for Evernote. So I’m always capturing information. In fact, a lot of our show ideas I capture articles in Evernote, so I had a plug-in that is when I’m in Chrome, if I had a P-stroke or click on the icon, it will actually take a bookmark that webpage and make a note in Evernote so that I can collect that stuff. Those are the kinds of plug-ins were talking about, right?
BRIAN NORTON: Yes.
WADE WINGLER: Good. If I’m looking for plug-ins, where do I find them. You talked little bit about cost, but where do I find them, how much do they cost, how do I know if I have a good one or not?
BRIAN NORTON: Within Google — not Google, but in Chrome, the browser itself, there is something called a Chrome Web Store which has a pretty sophisticated search tool. You could type in the type of plug-in or extension or app you are looking for and it will go ahead and search through a bunch of those available apps for you. So you go within the browser and search for Chrome Web Store, it will bring up that for you, and then you can search for the apps you are looking for.
WADE WINGLER: So in Chrome, you type Chrome Web Store and will take you to a webpage? Which is a lot like the Google Play Store or App Store for iTunes or whatever? Okay. I’m ready for the run down because I know that there are several of them that you have been messing with and you are interested in. Talk to us about some of the plug-ins you think are useful from an assistive technology or accessibility standpoint.
BRIAN NORTON: The first few I want to talk about, we are going to talk about a couple of plug-ins, but I’m also going to send you to a couple of websites that are helpful as well. Because a lot of these apps are actual website in and of themselves. I’m going to start off with ChromeVox. ChromeVox is Google’s built in screen reader. It allows you to have text to speech throughout your browser.
WADE WINGLER: So a screen reader?
BRIAN NORTON: It’s Google’s own screen reader app. That’s a pretty good one. Another one that I will throw out there is one called SnapNReadUniversal. It’s made available to Don Johnston. What it allows you to do is a read accessible and inaccessible text aloud, so when you select text, you can have it read. That could be text within your Google Drive, your email, different websites, PDFs, EPUB documents as well. It will work off-line and online. Essentially what happens is you just select an area of the screen, it will go ahead and scan and take a picture of that, convert it to text and allow it to read to you. It’s a pretty powerful little tool and allows people to get access to that web text that is out there.
WADE WINGLER: That’s kind of cool.
BRIAN NORTON: Yeah, it’s a pretty sophisticated tool. That one is not free. It does require a subscription.
WADE WINGLER: Is it expensive?
BRIAN NORTON: it’s not really all that expensive. That one, SnapNReadUniversal pricing is available. A lot of times these are set up so that school districts can purchase it and make it available to their students. If a school district purchases it, from 1-100 students, it’s about $47 per student annually. If you have 100 or more students, it’s about $35 per student annually. If you want to make it available from K-12 per year, it’s about $750 per site annually. For a school district, depending on the number of students who would get access to that, that cost is pretty reasonable compared to buying individual licenses of some of the more expensive software that is out there. It does some of the similar things.
Another one I will throw out there to is Ginger for Chrome. Ginger is kind of a writing tool for folks. It’s going to be able to help them be able to write better. So it allows you to start writing and allows you to look at the text that you have to be able to help you with spell checking your documents. You can look at grammar, punctuation. It gives you opportunity to change the way you phrase certain text, so it gives you alternative phrases to be able to look at. Again, that’s a plug-in as well. Ginger just like the spice.
WADE WINGLER: Or the Gilligan’s Island character.
BRIAN NORTON: There you go. Within Ginger, they offer a grammar check, sentence rephrasing as we mentioned. There’s also a translation piece so you can translate text into a different language. There is a dictionary available for folks. There is a text reader so you can have things read back to you. So there are quite a few different features that people can take event of to be able to improve their writing skills.
WADE WINGLER: What else do you have?
BRIAN NORTON: A couple of websites I would like to direct people to. There’s one called rewordify.com. Rewordify is a great website for helping simplify text. In my job, I have some pretty heavy textbooks that I look at, and a lot of the language is pretty hard to understand. Essentially what you can do is you can either type or cut and paste text from these more complicated graduate level textbooks, be able to put it in to an edit field within the website, and what it will do is will rewordify it or if I it for you so it’s much easier to understand and much simpler to read for folks that have difficulty reading larger, more located words as well.
WADE WINGLER: So as you are looking for these plug-ins, how do you know if they are good or not? Are there so many out there that you need to choose the best one in a particular category, or are there few enough that you are lucky to find one? Is there some sort of rating system? How do you know when you are searching for these that you may have come across a good or not, other than trying it out?
BRIAN NORTON: Within the Chrome Web Store, there are reviews of apps. You get the number of reviews that have been made, and there is a five-star listing. Folks give their opinion on the particular app and help people give good information, good feedback for folks to look at and better understand how that will be for them.
WADE WINGLER: So it’s user reviews like eBay or App Store or things like that.
BRIAN NORTON: Absolutely.
WADE WINGLER: The ones we’ve talked about today seem to be mostly related to sort of the reading and writing process. Do most of them fall in that category or are there other categories as well?
WADE WINGLER: There are a lot of them in that category. The other ones that I can throw out here as well, voice recognition apps. I have an app that’s called exactly that: Voice Recognition. What it will do is allow you to interface with the microphone on your computer and be able to dictate directly into a websit. The recognition is pretty good. It has a high level of recognition accuracy. Once I’m done dictating, I can save that or copy it and paste it into another document.
WADE WINGLER: These are only going to work in webpages, but a webpage can be a word processor, right? You can be doing voice recognition into a Google doc or something? Is that right?
BRIAN NORTON: The voice recognition app will only let you dictate within the app itself.
WADE WINGLER: Like a clipboard or something.
BRIAN NORTON: Into a clipboard and then you can take that and paste it into your Google doc.
WADE WINGLER: I see.
BRIAN NORTON: It is important to recognize Chrome with Google Docs, you have a full suite of productivity applications. So you have a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentation software.
WADE WINGLER: Forms like a database. You can do tons of stuff with it.
BRIAN NORTON: Another one I like as well is called ThoughtQ. There is also a sister app to that called WordQ. ThoughtQ is a pretty interesting app in that it will allow you to customize your search and give you predictions for your search. So you can start typing words in like “World” and maybe in your prediction site it will pop up the word “War”, and when you select “War” it will give you “One” or “Two”, and you can select “Two”. Once you get past the customized search piece, it will give you lots of different websites to look at, and then it gives you a tabbed browser off to the side of it. In that tabbed browser you can keep a history of the different sites that you’ve looked at. But then also in that browser you can bring up your Google docs, so you have a listing of all of your apps, all the websites you’ve been to. You have a look at your Google docs, so as you do your research you can do that and all in one place. Then you can see what you are writing as well see you can write right alongside all of your sites that you’ve done research on.
WADE WINGLER: That is ThoughtQ?
BRIAN NORTON: ThoughtQ. It is all one word and WordQ.
WADE WINGLER: There is a whole lot going on at that. There’s a lot of stuff going on in your browser, right? A lot of support.
BRIAN NORTON: Lots of support. There is text to speech reading, so I can select anything within ThoughtQ and have it read to me instantly. I can also go back and see a whole listing of all the sites that I’ve searched, different images, different websites, and then again bring them all up into a tabbed browser. I can see those as well so if I need to move and come back, I can come right back to that particular topic and continue to write my paper and do my research.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s cool.
WADE WINGLER: That’s cool. Is that free or is there a cost for that one?
BRIAN NORTON: ThoughtQ is $6.99. You can buy it. You can also try it out for a couple weeks.
WADE WINGLER: Is it $6.99 to buy it or is that per month?
BRIAN NORTON: To buy it.
WADE WINGLER: So it’s a one-time purchase?
BRIAN NORTON: Correct.
WADE WINGLER: Okay. You tell me that it does speech output. Can we do that? I know we’ve got your computer hooked up here. Can you do me an example of how it reads out loud?
BRIAN NORTON: Absolutely. What I’ve done is I’ve brought up a search, and I’ve selected text on my screen. At the very top on the menu bar is a little word bubble, if you will. If you click on that, that’s the speech selection tool.
SPEAKER: The Second World War and World War II redirect here. For other uses, see the Second World War, disambiguation, and World War II. Clockwise from top left Chinese forces in the battle of Wan Gui Ling, especially in 25 binder guns —
BRIAN NORTON: So there is a little sample of the text. Pretty human sounding voice.
WADE WINGLER: It’s British. Is that the default?
BRIAN NORTON: What you heard there is the default voice. You have probably 40 or 50 different voices to choose from.
WADE WINGLER: This is pretty cool stuff but we are about out of time for our show today. Why don’t we do this, Brian: why don’t you tell me some of the other ones, just give me a quick list of the other ones you encourage people to look at and consider and maybe we’ll have you on another time and we’ll go through some more details.
BRIAN NORTON: As far as other apps to keep your eye out for, voice recognition we mentioned Voice Note 2 is a recording app. If you want to record something in the classroom, not only can you record the audio but you can also type and record your typing as well.
Another one is Doc Hub. Doc Hub is a website; it’s not necessarily a plug-in. It will allow you to edit, send, and sign PDF documents online for free. I find that really helpful in school when you’re trying to fill out a worksheet, trying to fill out a form. It’s really simple to be able to email yourself to a Doc Hub email address that they set up for you and be able to fill out or sign those documents.
Another one that I find really useful as well is Tex Equation Editor. It essentially allows you to be able to type in complicated math equations instead of trying to — if you’re trying to put those into a Word document or other kinds of places, this will allow you to be able to edit those, cut and copy them into a document themselves.
There are also many built-in features of just a web browser itself, the ability to change the look of your browser itself, so if you have low vision, being able to put in a particular theme, high contrast theme to be able to see things a little bit better. You can use the Control-Plus, Control-Minus to zoom in and out. That is a pretty good job of scaling the website to a size that you can see. Just lots of built-in accessibility as well that I find a lot of people use. Another one would be Read and Write Gold. Read and Write Gold is a Chrome app that allows you to do a lot of text reading but also be able to provide you with other tools such as looking things up in a dictionary, thesaurus, being able to have text read aloud to you, just several really good, useful tools for folks to get access to the text.
WADE WINGLER: There are clearly a lot of them and probably more coming out all the time. I’m going to reserve the right to tap you on the shoulder and say let’s come back into the studio and do a few more of these as new ones and interesting ones come out. We may even — I haven’t thought about this until now. We may want to make mention of this on ATFAQ and steal one of our questions for an upcoming show and cover some of these on that show too. I know we have different audiences on the shows and it’s always fun to cross pollinate those. Brian, if people want to learn more about you and the show that you host, where would they go?
BRIAN NORTON: To learn more about the show that I host and myself, you can go to ATFAQshow.com. That’s a landing page that will talk about our show a little bit. That’s where I would probably direct most of the folks. I would also say, if you have questions, assistive technology questions and you would like to ask those and maybe have those answered on our show, you can reach us on our listener line at 317-721-7124. Or you can send us an email at tech at Easter Seals crossroads.org. I would love to be able to hear from you and include any assistive technology questions that you have on our show.
WADE WINGLER: or you can Tweet. We’ve seen some hash tech stuff come across the hashtag #ATFAQ is something we monitor and I’ve had some questions come across that way recently.
BRIAN NORTON: That’s great.
WADE WINGLER: Brian Norton is the director of assistive technology here at Easter Seals Crossroads and today has served as our in-house expert on Google Chrome plug-ins for assistive technology. Brian, thank you so much.
BRIAN NORTON: Thank you. Take care.
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, shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. Looking for a transcript or show notes from today’s show? Head on over to www.EasterSealstech.com. Assistive Technology Update is a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. Find more shows like this plus much more over at AccessibilityChannel.com. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
