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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:
Wade Wingler, Brian Norton and Nikol Prieto
Items Mentioned on this week’s show – this IS NOT an endorsement for these products, just some links so that you can check them out for yourself:
Tozo Earbuds: https://www.amazon.com/TOZO-Bluetooth-Wireless-Headphones-Waterproof/dp/B07J2Z5DBM
AirPods Pro: https://www.apple.com/airpods/
Echo Buds: https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Buds/dp/B07F6VM1S3
Bose Audio Sunglasses: https://www.amazon.com/Bose-Frames-Audio-Sunglasses/dp/B07YNJN4V7
Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/switch/
Leapfrog Starter Kit: https://store.leapfrog.com/en-us/store/p/leapstart/_/A-prod80-21600E
Artie the Coding Robot: https://www.amazon.com/Educational-Insights-Artie-Coding-Robot/dp/B07MG8GBCX
Chromebook: https://www.google.com/chromebook/
Zot Art Supplies: http://zotartz.com/art/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-Catalog.pdf
GoDogGo Ball Thrower: https://www.godoggoinc.com
Jiusion Endoscope: https://www.amazon.com/Jiusion-Magnification-Endoscope-Microscope-Compatible/dp/B06WD843Z
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—————————Transcript Starts Here —————————–
>> Happy Holidays from the Assistive Technology Center at Easterseals Crossroads. This is your Assistive Technology Update.
[Music.]
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Hello, everyone, and Happy Holidays. Welcome to Part 2 of our annual Holiday Gift Giving Guide.
I do just want to mention that everything that we do mention on this show is not an endorsement for those actual products. Please make sure to go out and check them out for yourself before making any sort of purchase. These are just cool things that we found that we felt we wanted to talk about that may be able to help folks with disabilities or maybe just anyone out there.
And as you can kind of tell from our banter and the way that we’re talking, we don’t get to see each other that much to actually sit down and talk. So thanks so much for joining us. And let’s go ahead and get on with Part 2 of the annual Holiday Gift Giving Guide for 2019.
[Music.]
Guys, everybody here has little ones or maybe not quite so little anymore. But what was a favorite gift that you got when you were a kid?
>> BRIAN NORTON: Oh, man, can I start this one, Josh?
>> JOSH ANDERSON: You sure can, Brian.
>> BRIAN NORTON: You know, my favorite gift, I remember it to this day, was a Fisher-Price boat that came with a fisherman and a plastic shark. I thought I was in Kid Heaven with that. It was the coolest thing. And I still remember it to this day. Again, a Fisher-Price plastic boat. I mean, today I look back to it, it’s not technology, it’s not anything like that, but, man, was I super excited to get that. So yeah, Fisher-Price boat with a plastic shark that went with it.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Nice.
Speaker: Pretty cool.
>> WADE WINGLER: You know that’s sort of funny because that’s kind of related to me. I have to tell you a little bit about my life story. I was born a poor child. I was literally raised on a farm in rural Indiana, and my dad was self-employed. So some years for Christmas, we didn’t really get a whole lot. Some years we did. It depended on what his work was like. In fact, one year I remember we didn’t have walls in our living room. The stockings were hung on these studs where Dad was trying to build more walls in the living room. I mean, we really did have some lean years.
But one year when dad was doing well financially, I told him I want this. And I pointed to the back of the J.C. Penney catalog. This would have been probably mid 1970s. And on the back of the J.C. Penney catalog, they had the Fisher-Price collection of all the things that Fisher-Price made that year, so probably had 50 or 60, in a little kid’s eyes, it was a million little plastic toys of all kind. And my dad was so proud and he told that story until he was an older man and would say, “One year I was able to do that.” And when I woke up on Christmas morning, they had set up the toys so it looked just like the back of the catalog. All the toys positioned just like the catalog. He bought me every single one. And we played with those plastic toys forever because they never go away. They don’t degrade. You can’t recycle them. And I think if you go dig up our old yard in Coatesville, Indiana, in the farm outside of town, you’d probably find some of those plastic toys in the yard. They just live on forever. I remember that as a kid getting everything on the back page of the catalog.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: That’s really neat. I think my favorite gift would have been getting a cat. They surprised me with a kitten. And the reason why that was so exciting to me is because for a year I was told no, that I wasn’t going to get one. Pretty exciting.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Always the nice surprise with that.
I mean, really, I would have to say as a teenager, I got a stereo with the big speakers. Back in those days, you know now.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Bigger is better then, yes.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Now the stereo is the size of a coffee mug. But back then, you had to have a giant cabinet because you had to have a tape player and an equalizer and the tuner. And all this stuff. I think I had the tuner for, I don’t know, 15, 20 years after that. I mean, I finally got rid of it about 10 years ago with the equalizer and stuff. The tape deck didn’t really work really great after that. The little thing that went around and played five different CDs. You know, the CD carousel.
>> WADE WINGLER: Five disc changer.
>> BRIAN NORTON: You’re not talking about the one you carried around like a boom box? You meant like a real stereo.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: No. Like a stereo cabinet kind of thing. Our house was, I don’t know, 900 square feet maybe, and I had one bedroom. And these two giant things with two subwoofers in them each. I don’t know why my mom got me that gift, or whether she really regretted that a heck of a lot. That was just a great one. Always since then I’ve always loved music, and it’s been really great.
[Music.]
Guys, speaking about the little ones, you know, what are some great gifts for kids and maybe even, you know, the fur babies, the pets also? What are some really good gifts for them? Wade?
>> WADE WINGLER: You know, I’ve got a few in this section, and I’m kind of going to do a good news/bad news on the first one that I have.
Last Christmas, we got my family the Nintendo Switch. So my kids were six and seven at that point. And we know that, as a family, we love Mario Kart. We are relentless when we play Mario Kart. I will let my kids win anything except Mario Kart and I win Mario Kart.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: And I’m always Luigi, too. Every game I’m always Luigi. Always have been.
>> WADE WINGLER: But we love the Nintendo Switch. It’s about a $300 device. It’s not an insignificant investment. Games run anywhere from 20 to a hundred bucks, but usually about 40 to 50 bucks seems to be the sweet spot for most of those.
The thing about it is it’s nice because you can hook it to a large screen TV and have a big version of the game. You can also grab the console take it with you. Got a – what, about a 7-inch, 8-inch screen, I suppose. You can play the games on the go, as well, and you can link them from one to the other. I like a lot of the technical accessibility of it and how you can connect it to things.
But the Nintendo Switch also has the reputation of not being very accessible in terms of assistive technology, as well.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Oh, really?
>> WADE WINGLER: And it’s something that Nintendo has been criticized about a little bit. And in fact, our friends over at AbleGamers has a blog post on their website about some of the accessibility features, or lack thereof, on some of those things.
If you’re interested in a Nintendo Switch, it does do some pretty cool things, but know that there might be some limitations for people who have limited mobility or hand issues, also vision. Sometimes It’s hard to zoom in on things.
I did find an article on geek.com where they talk about a mod where you can actually do a pretty easy modification on an Xbox accessible controller. So Microsoft has their accessible Xbox controller. You can actually make that work on a Nintendo Switch, but it’s sort of a do-it-yourself project that you have to do a little bit of work to do there.
We love the gaming console. It really is good. But there are some accessibility things that I wish were better. And I hope that maybe somebody at Nintendo will hear this and say, “Oh, yeah, maybe we should pay a little more attention to the accessibility.”
The next thing that I have here is from LeapFrog. We have used LeapFrog products for a long time, and they’re really good to help young learners with literacy and just general education kind of things.
The one that caught my eye this year is called the LeapFrog LeapStart Go system. Runs about $35 or so, and it’s a pen that you can use with the LeapFrog books. They’ve got something like 400 different books for kids aged between 4 and 8 years old.
And this pen is unique because it’s kind of a big chunky pen, and it works specifically with those books; but it’s got a little LED screen on the top that allows you to like see little movies or zoom in. So it’s an educational thing. Or if you’re looking at a physiology book and learning about anatomy and those kind of things from a kid’s perspective, it will like zoom in on the lung tissue or the heart or whatever. Or if it’s a video about the planets, it might show a video of the solar system and the different planets in motion like that.
It’s a pen that you can point to different pages of the book and it will speak out loud and tell you something about that part of the book but then also show you these little videos related to that. So I thought that was pretty cool.
And LeapFrogs, we have had a lot of experience with those in our family. And they tend to last a long time. And they have a pretty good battery life and stuff as well. And they’re the sort of books that everybody can kind of — if somebody is saying, “Hey, we’re going to buy the starter kit with the pen and starter book.” Then you tell some family members, “Hey, these are nice books.” Then maybe the child ends up with multiple books.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Definitely. That makes it interactive, too. Gives you a little bit more than just reading the same book over and over. You kind of got these other pieces and parts to it.
>> WADE WINGLER: Yeah, it’s a different experience when your kid crawls up in your lap to have a book read to you. But they control the reading experience. They can make it read out loud. It’s kind of interactive and a nice thing.
And the last one I have here is called the Educational Insights Artie 3000, Coding Robot. So we hear about STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. We also hear about STEAM, which is the same thing but with Art thrown in; right? So this Artie Robot is about $65. He’s available on Amazon, as well. And he’s endorsed by Mensa for Kids. So I think if you buy this for your kids, they’re geniuses, maybe. Or maybe it’s only for geniuses, I’m not sure.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: I didn’t know there was Mensa for Kids. Maybe I qualify for that one.
>> WADE WINGLER: There’s probably a reason you don’t know about it.
>> >> BRIAN NORTON: I qualify.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: It’s like Teen Jeopardy. I feel really smart for a little while, but wait.
>> WADE WINGLER: Your daughter might qualify. She seems really smart when I see her. She’s little yet.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Really?
>> BRIAN NORTON: The only thing I qualified for is Mints for kids. Not Mensa. Mints for kids.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: It’s not the Mensa room, Brian. A big difference.
[Laughter]
>> WADE WINGLER: Oh, that’s funny for certain.
So, anyway, the thing about Artie is it’s a coding robot, but it does art. So basically it uses that plug-and-play/drag different components of the programming language in to make a shape. And then you put markers inside this robot and it runs around on a sheet of paper and it actually draws something. So one of the examples they have is an ice cream program. And so you use different coding language so the kids are learning the concepts of coding. And they’re putting it on their computer or their tablet. And then it speaks directly to the robot. You don’t even have to have Internet access for it. And then it downloads that into the robot. You pop a marker into the robot, and he rides around and draws an ice cream cone. It’s art, it’s programming and a really cool robot. If you look on Amazon, you’ll see a picture of it. He’s a cute little guy.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: He’s cute.
>> WADE WINGLER: And it teaches kids coding and it does art at the same time. I think it’s engaging and fun kind of stuff. That’s the Artie 3000, around $65.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Nice. Very nice.
Nikol, I know a lot of kids are using Chromebooks for school or maybe people might be thinking about getting those for folks for Christmas because they’re usually cheaper than a computer. But you’re going to talk about some of the really cool accessibility features and kind of accessibility things we could do.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: I thought that was really cool. The Chromebooks, like you said, we talk so much about Apple products, and they can be really expensive. And the Chromebooks, you can get a very nice laptop starting around 450 and then they go up. So very reasonable. They run on the Chrome operating system, Chrome browser is one of my favorite browsers to use. So it’s got — they’ve got 12 hours of battery life. They do automatic updates. So the Chromebook just in general is a really nice laptop.
But what’s exciting about the Chromebook is all the free accessibility features that are being built in. A lot of neat stuff. I was just going to mention a few of them. And then I would suggest that any of the listeners go out and check the accessibility add-ons through there and see what’s on there.
One of them is Read Aloud, which is their text-to-speech feature. So that’s really cool.
They have a Screen Shader that’s going to change the color of the screen to a real soothing orange color. And that’s going to decrease some eye strain and some fatigue.
They’ve got Volume Master. And that’s going to boost the volume output. It says by 600 percent. So that is quite a boost.
>> WADE WINGLER: Yes.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: The Turn Off Lights feature. I thought that was kind of neat. If you’re watching YouTube, it turns off all of the ads and everything around it so everything is black around the screen.
>> WADE WINGLER: Oh, that’s nice.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Yeah. So it looks like you’re watching, probably like you’re watching a movie in a cinema. Although that’s great for entertainment, it’s also great for I have my daughter do Khan Academy videos, and I think that will keep her from being distracted by ads and other things around there.
They have the Read and Write add-on which is really cool. It offers text-to-speech speech, it has dictionaries on there, and then it has speech to text.
>> Nice.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Very cool.
And then one of the last ones I’ll mention is Block Site, and it blocks websites to block any distracting or harmful websites. So if you want your kid to just focus on one site that you have them and you need to walk away and do some other things without policing them, you can kind of lock them in on that site.
>> WADE WINGLER: Nice. Very cool.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Very nice.
Brian, you found something to do with art kind of like Wade mentioned earlier, as well; right?
>> BRIAN NORTON: Yeah, absolutely.
Recently here at Easterseals we were asked, as part of our Assistive Technology Department, we were asked to go present at a conference. It was about arts and inclusion was their focus. But it’s a part of the Indiana Commission for the Arts here in Indiana. And we did this whole presentation, and I found some interesting things out there. Art tools for children with disabilities. I found a place called Zot Art. Z-O-T-A-R-T-Z.com. And they do a bunch of adaptive art tools for children with disabilities. They have all sorts of really cool things, things that can be attached to a wheelchair so that they can do sidewalk chalk. They can do painting. They have things that will actually squirt the paint up on the wall if you want to do that kind of thing. It’s really lots of really neat, cool tools for kids to be able to really get into the arts, the visual arts at that. So if they need to paint or draw or do other kinds of things, they have all sorts of things there for that.
And then, Josh, I’m going to go ahead and just mention another thing. You mentioned fur babies at the onset of this question, and I have a dog, a 98-pound Golden Retriever. His name is Cody. And I know a lot of my friends, they have dogs, as well. But they’re helper dogs. And so they are doing different things with them and working with the individual day in and day out. But who doesn’t want to have a little fun when it’s time to relax and do something different?
And one of the things that I found, it’s called GoDogGo. It’s a fetch machine. And so essentially what you can do is you can — it’s like a bucket on top of a baseball launcher. But it’s really not as fast or doesn’t do fast pitch or those kind of things. It has a nice safety arc. You can just kind of stick a bunch of these tennis balls in there. You have a remote control, and you can hit and launch one and your dog can go fetch it. All he has to do is bring it back to the bucket. Drop the ball in the bucket, and it’s continuously ready for the next one.
You know, I think about all of these service dogs and what they do. And folks are looking for ways to entertain those dogs when they’re not in the mode of service. This would be a great way to kind of be able to go outside, have a little fun with them. Maybe not at Christmas because it’s going to be quite cold.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Well, some people actually live in a little better climate.
>> BRIAN NORTON: You got a point there, absolutely.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Plus that’s a great way to exercise your dog and not even have to go outside.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Absolutely. And many of them like the snow, those crazy dogs.
>> >> BRIAN NORTON: You can also torment the people in the house, too. You can set them outside their door and just start shooting them when they come out their doors. It’s really kind of a fun tool.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: I’ve never been so glad not to live in Brian’s neighborhood as I am right now.
[Laughter]
I found something that goes along with the STEM stuff that Wade was talking about. I can’t even pronounce the name. J-I-U-S-I-O-N. Jiusion, perhaps. But it’s a magnification endoscope. So really what it is is it’s a microscope that connects to your computer, or your Android device, your Mac. It doesn’t work with IOS. So it won’t with an iPad or an iPhone. But it’s a digital microscope. And it can go up to 1,000 times magnification.
So if you think, especially for young kids, you know, I can even still remember being a little kid and just exploring stuff and seeing it. But if I could go find something cool outside and magnify it 1,000 times, I’d do that all day long.
And it’s only like $22 on Amazon. So it’s very inexpensive. Says it will connect to these, like I said, pretty much anything except for IOS devices. With thousand times magnification, the pictures they show on there is people look at circuit boards and things like that, but really kind of figuring out how things work.
I used to take things apart constantly as a kid. I didn’t really put them back together very well very often. But usually, luckily, it was kind of old things. But just to figure out how things work and kind of see stuff, pretty inexpensive and can really open up a whole new world to kids.
[Music.]
>> JOSH ANDERSON: The holiday music in the background, but do you guys have a favorite Christmas song or holiday season song? Nikol.
[Laughter]
>> NIKOL PRIETO: I really just drew a blank.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: She’s thinking of Halloween songs.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: It was cute when kids would do Rudolph and Jingle Bells. I miss their little kid voices singing Christmas Carols.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: I know. I know. Yeah. There’s nothing like a kid with a little bit of a speech impediment. My mom has a tape of me singing Frosty the No Man. It actually disappeared. She still to this day thinks I destroyed it. Wade, what about you?
NIKOL: The No Man. That’s adorable. Yeah, I miss those days.
>> WADE WINGLER: My favorite Christmas song is The Christmas Song, also known as Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. It’s got to be the Nat King Cole version. That’s the one I like the best. And I listen to it probably at least once a month year round just to remind me that Christmas is going to be coming again.
And my kids in the last few years, my youngest are now seven and eight, and they love a movie, it’s an animated movie called Prep & Landing. These crazy little elves who are getting ready for Santa to come or whatever. And it plays The Christmas Song, the Nat King Cole version, and all you have to do is put on that song and my kids go crazy because they know it’s Christmastime and they love that movie. And all the magic starts happening, so. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: And Wade sings the Christmas hymns.
>> WADE WINGLER: And all your listeners go away.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: The whole thing about you winning number one podcasts a few episodes ago that just ended when I started singing.
>> BRIAN NORTON: We could do a whole musical if we wanted to for this podcast.
[Laughter]
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Throw it out, guys.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: With puppets.
[Laughter]
Brian, what about you?
>> BRIAN NORTON: You know, I love kind of upbeat ones. One of my favorites, I’m a fan of the ‘80s. And so Wham had one. It was last Christmas. I do like that one. There’s a movie coming out with that name.
That’s why it’s in my head. That’s why it initially popped into my head because they have a movie coming out that it’s named after the song. But, yeah, and I love that song. Love it a lot.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: And for some reason, Jingle Bell Rock. I don’t know if it’s my favorite song, but that song gets stuck in my head and will not leave until about January 15th. I’ll hear it on the radio here sometime in the next few weeks and it won’t go away. I’ll just find myself humming it, whistling it, and it just sticks in there forever.
>> WADE WINGLER: It’s a good one.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Love it.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: So, kind of talking about music and stuff, there’s some new kind of headphone/earphone tech out there that can really not just be assistive but also just kind of be cool. Let’s talk about some of those things. Wade, you had one.
>> WADE WINGLER: I do. You know, as I walk around the mall or the community in general, I see everybody with earbuds all the time, and it’s sort of like 10 years ago everybody had a little Bluetooth thing over one ear. Now people are walking around, I’m seeing Apple AirPods, I think. is that what they are? The new ones. People are using them for everything. And so I thought well, maybe I need to try something like that.
But I went and did some shopping and realized those things are more expensive than I wanted to pay. In general, the Apple brand was pretty pricey. They were running a 100, 150, sometimes $200. So I went online and did some research and found a set called the TOZO, T-O-Z-O, T10 Bluetooth earbuds. And these things are $30. So they’re a lot less expensive. They come in this great little case that’s a charging case. So you charge the case, and then the case charges these two little earbuds that fit inside your ear. And it’ll — they’ll last for about two hours on a charge, and that case can charge them four times. So you charge the case for a few hours, and then you’ve got four two-hour segments of earbuds that you can use.
And they have the microphone. You can do them with phone calls. You know, you can do Siri dictation, those kind of things with them, as well. The sound is really, really good. And they have amazing ratings on the Amazon store. So they’re the TOZO T10 Bluetooth wireless earbuds. And right now, anyway, they’re running for $30. And I suspect they’ll probably do that through the holidays. They’re really good. I love them.
>> JOSH ANDERSON. Nice. Well, Nikol, since he just badmouthed the AirPods, do you want to tell us about those?
>> NIKOL PRIETO: They are pricey, but they do have a really cool feature that they can take advantage of.
Brian was talking about all the accessibility features in Apple, and one of the new ones is a Live Listen feature. So your AirPods can be turned into a hearing aid.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Oh, nice.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Yeah, it’s really cool.
So you can pair that with your iPhone and then use your iPhone to amplify all the sound around you. So it’s a really cool feature for even just people who are in a really busy place with a lot of background noise and they need to have the amplified information around them. So just pair it with your iPhone. And then you go into your settings and, into the control center, and customize controls. And then go into the hearing. Tap the green plus button next to that. Go to the home screen. Swipe up your control center and hit that ear icon and then the tap Live Listen. When you have that on, you’re using your phone as an amplified system.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Nice. And if you look at that feature, that kind of brings the price down a little bit. I know like personal listening devices, those can be 300, that’s like $1500.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Absolutely.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: That can make a huge difference on there.
And I know probably later we’ll talk about Amazon devices, just because they’re big. They’re big gifts and stuff. But I found the Echo Earbuds.
>> WADE WINGLER: Really?
>> JOSH ANDERSON: They’re Echo Earbuds. They’re wireless earbuds. Immersive sound, active noise canceling, all that stuff. And Alexa. Now granted, they’re connecting to a phone to do that. But you can say, “Alexa, play my music.” I just turned on everyone’s device. I got to remember to quit doing that. You can say, “Amazon device thingy, please play music.” You know, I’m sure it can probably play Audible, do all those kind of things, as well. You can basically take the Amazon Echo device with you, but in your earbuds. And of course it’s got the microphone and all those kind of things, too.
They’re a little bit more expensive. They’re kind of right between the two, what you guys talked about, they’re about $130. But Amazon usually runs some pretty good deals once you get into the Christmas season. You might be able to get them cheaper for that.
>> BRIAN NORTON: They look a lot like the TOZO ones, they fit in your ear?
>> JOSH ANDERSON: They do. And they got pretty good battery. Also have the chargeable case and everything. I think everything is kind of going that way, I’ve really noticed. Because you got to think trying to plug in those little earbuds would be really hard.
[Laughter]
Little tiny plug, trying to get it in there. You’re going break it and it will cost a ton. Also sweat resistant. Secure fit and everything else. So very cool.
But then I also found if you don’t want the earbuds, some people just hate having those things in there.
>> WADE WINGLER: My wife.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: They hate having them in there. I know when they had the Bluetooth headset thing, I thought it was the dumbest looking thing in the world. No offense to anyone whoever wore them.
>> BRIAN NORTON: People still do.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: I know. I always hated it was one ear. I used to be a waiter. You’d come up to somebody and they’d be sitting there talking to themselves. They turn around and realize they’re on a phone call and all I want to do is see if they need a drink refill. But I found Bose Frames Audio Sunglasses.
>> Really.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: They look like Ray-Ban sunglasses, but they actually have, the speaker’s built into them, built in Bose speakers that produce really good sound. Connect Bluetooth to a cellphone or anything like that, and they’ll actually sit there and play. Now, they’re speakers. They don’t actually go inside your ear. They fit over your ears like normal sunglasses. But it says that the sound is funneled into your ears. So unless somebody is right up against you, they’re not going to hear what you’re listening to.
>> BRIAN NORTON: That’s really cool.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: It’s really cool. They’re not quite like the bone conductive headphones that I know came out a few years ago and I know that a lot of folks use. But you can still hear everything around you. So you are actually able to still interact with the world around you, but have that really good sound kind of coming through without actually having to completely cover your ear, over the ears, or have something shoved in.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Traffic. You’re not walking into traffic safety.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: You’re kind of paying attention.
I can’t remember where I was the other day, but I watched almost three people fall down the stairs because they were looking at their phone. And they walked right up to that top step.
Oh, I was at a Colts game and going around the stadium. And they made it right up to that step, and I was just watching saying, “Here they go.” They just happened, at the last second, to kind of look up and catch them.
>> WADE WINGLER: I can’t tell you the number of people I see driving down the road with one eye on the screen of their phone and one eye looking out the windshield. They’re just driving. You’re reading your what? Your Facebook?
>> JOSH ANDERSON: And sometimes I think both those eyes are on the cell phone.
>> NIKOL PRIETO: Yeah, no, it’s scary.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Especially in my program, we do a heck of a lot of driving.
>> WADE WINGLER: Yeah, you guys do.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: And you know if I’m driving for like two hours I will have the same car pass me eight times and I will pass them eight times. Every time I pass them they’re looking at their phone. They do 100 to get by me again, and they’re looking at their phone. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.
We got way off topic there.
>> BRIAN NORTON: It’s Christmas. We’re having holiday banter. The roads will be busy. You have to watch out for those. Safety first, you guys.
>> JOSH ANDERSON: The weather outside is frightful.
>> WADE WINGLER: But the fire?
>> JOSH ANDERSON: Folks, that’s all the time we have for Part 2 of our Holiday Gift Giving Guide. Be sure to turn in next week for the thrilling conclusion of the Holiday Gift Giving Guide 2019.
>> Do you have a question about Assistive Technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If you do, call our Listener Line at 317-721-7124. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATA Project or check us out on Facebook.
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The views expressed by our guests are not necessarily that of this host or the INDATA Project. This has been your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in Indianapolis, Indiana. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
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