ATU788 – Scanning Pens with Jack Churchill

Hi, this is Jack Churchill and I’m the co-founder of Scanning Pens, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to 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 individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 788 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on July 3, 2026.

On today’s show, we are very excited to welcome Jack Churchill, co-founder and CEO of Scanning Pens. And he’s here to tell us how these devices can assist with literacy. We also have a brief overview of the new Apple accessibility features coming out soon. We want to take the time to wish a very happy 250th birthday to the great US of A tomorrow on July 4th. Wherever you might be, wherever you might be listening to us, we hope that you’re doing well and we thank you so much for tuning in. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

So listeners, it’s been a bit since Apple announced all of their cool new accessibility features. But we haven’t had the time to discuss them on this show until now. I’m excited about the new accessibility features coming out with the new operating systems and the different Apple products and I wanted to talk about them a little bit before we get into our interview today. As we all know, Apple has built in some pretty great accessibility features from alternative control methods such as voice switch, head and eye movement to VoiceOver Magnifier and some different hearing accommodations. Well, a lot of the new features take advantage of Siri and Apple’s AI. So some cool things, but also some pretty intuitive things that’s really able to assist individuals with accessing the world around them and accessing their phone, their tablet, their computer, and other kinds of things.

So I thought I’d start with just some different things in VoiceOver and Magnifier. So VoiceOver, of course, is the screen reading program built into iPhone, to Mac, to iPad, and all these things is how someone with very low vision or who may be blind is able to access their phone through a bunch of swipes, taps, and other control things. So some different things that it’s using is using Apple Intelligence to get more detailed descriptions of things. So this could be an image on a website, a picture, something like that. Also scans of bills, personal records and stuff.

But what I really like is that it’s intuitive. It’s conversational. So an example, and I’ll put a link to some of these updates down in the show notes so that folks can go check it out. But one of the examples is holding your phone over a bill and just saying, “Hey, how much is due and when is it due?” So instead of having to listen to something read all of that information back to you, you can just get that information that you’re really looking for. It’ll parse that out and read it back to you.

You can also ask follow-up questions. So maybe something like, “How much is this bill for?” Tells you the amount. “When is it due?” It’ll tell you that. And then you could also ask follow-up questions. “How much was it last month? What’s the difference?” All these different kind of things. You can also use the camera view finder and get a detailed response of the world around you. So if I’m holding it up to, I’m just going to say maybe like the sign at the airport. I could say, “Hey, the flight to Vegas, is it on time? What gate and all that?” And it could find all that information, parse it, and tell me. I could hold it over towards the restrooms. “Hey, which one’s the men’s room?” It could say, “It’s on the right, it’s on the left.” And give me just some more information like that.

I can also use some of my voice controls to control some of the features in Magnifier or in VoiceOver. So things like zoom in, turn on flashlight, maybe change the contrast, change the color or something like that. I could use my words instead of having to find and maybe fumble with the controls. So they’re really integrating that Apple intelligence in to make these things a lot more accessible and the world around us a little bit more accessible. They’re also building that Apple Intelligence into Voice Control. So Voice Control on the iPhone, the Mac and the iPad was already, I don’t want to say super hard to use. It was pretty intuitive. You could always bring up numbers and say, “Oh, click 18,” if that’s where you need it. But now instead of having to know the labels or numbers, you just say what you see, is what they call it.

So basically it could be like, “Hey, tap the guide over there. Tap on the purple folder.” These are just the examples that they give. So it’s really using that natural language of how you communicate in order to access your phone. So this not only really increases accessibility, also truly cuts down on the learning curve of really having to learn how to do these things. It’s just turn it on and go. And you learn as you go along. So it really opens up a lot of doors on that.

Accessibility Reader is able to adapt even more and give you all kinds of new ways to be able to read text on the screen and find information that you might be looking for. There’s new ways to generate subtitles for video. This can be for personal videos and other things like that. So it’s able to give you subtitles just right away if something does not have captioning, which can be super, super-duper helpful.

We don’t talk a lot about the Apple Vision Pro, but a really, really cool update that it is getting is that it’s able to control some power wheelchairs by using your eyes. So essentially you have on the Apple Vision Pro and its precision eye tracking system is able to control your power wheelchair. So very, very cool. It says it doesn’t require frequent recalibration, works in a variety of lighting conditions, it’s able to support both Bluetooth and wired connections. So it’s not going to work on everything, but it can work on some different power wheelchairs to allow individuals to be able to drive them using their eyes and an Apple Vision Pro. So super cool that they were able to build that in there and be able to allow that to be able to assist folks. So there’s other things out there.

I believe there’s some extra ways to use your eyes when accessing the Vision Pro, new touch accommodations, new accommodations for hearing aids, larger text available on tvOS, and a bunch of other accessibility features. So we’re really excited. When these come out, we’ll definitely try to play with them, see what they can actually do and how they might be able to help. Another thing that’s really great is that the Sony Access Controller is able to be connected to iOS, macOS and iPadOS allowing you to use the accessible controller on things you might be using or playing on your device. So very, very cool. We’ll put a link to, again, just Apple’s newsroom with some of the information so that you can go and check it out. But I guess listeners, what are you excited about with the new Apple accessibility?

Is there something you use? Something you think still needs to be improved? But anyway, we’re looking forward to checking it all out once it’s available.

Today, listeners, I am excited to welcome Jack Churchill to the show to tell us about Scanning Pens and how they can assist with independent literacy access and so much more. Jack, welcome to the show.

Well, Josh, thank you so much for having me. It’s a real treat to be on.

And it is a treat to have you on. And I can’t wait to get into talking about the tech. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, I am dyslexic and 23 years ago, roughly, I co-founded with a friend of mine from university, the assistive technology company Scanning Pens. We make a small handheld portable device that you roll over words and it instantly reads aloud to you.

Excellent. I guess, Jack, just to start us off, I’m sure this is probably a personal story, but what led you to start Scanning Pens?

Well, I happened to be introduced to a company that made this type of technology and I was really interested in how it instantly gave someone using it that text-to-speech feedback. And I was diagnosed with dyslexia at 14 and all of a sudden I just saw how much this could help someone, either a child or an adult, who’s struggling with reading, just the simplicity of being able to just swipe it over a word or a line of text and have it read to you straight away.

And so it began. We started as a UK distributor for the manufacturer. And over time we grew and expanded and we’ve now sold to more than 100 countries. The US is our second-biggest market after the UK followed by Canada, Australia, Italy, and France where we have people and businesses based in each of those countries. And we’re quite lucky we also have a fantastic reseller network across the world, which also distributes our technology out to schools and individuals and businesses, et cetera, who are looking to find this kind of kit.

Excellent. And Jack, we touched on it a little bit, but let’s talk a little bit about the accommodations about the scanning pens themselves. I know there’s some different kind of versions just in looking through the website. So let’s talk about the scanning pens, how they help, and what the different versions offer.

Yeah. So we started out with a reading pen, which is still our most successful product today. A tool that scans, reads, and has a dictionary on it so it can give you the definition. It also includes data capture, so you can go and capture text. And it includes voice capture as well so you could record a lesson or record a meeting and play it back later. As well as reading pens, we managed to get into the exams or assessment market as you would probably call it. So we approached the main accommodation provider in the UK, and this was probably about 14 years ago now, and we said to them, “We’ve got a piece of technology that you could use in exam halls to help people to read the questions.” And within a couple of years, they’d adopted it and they’d said that anyone taking national exams in the UK could use this technology in their exams. And they did it for two reasons.

One, they wanted people to be independent when they leave school. You can’t take your human reader with you into the workplace. And secondly, schools were complaining that there were so many children who struggled with reading the questions. They might be dyslexic, they might be low literacy, they might have English as an additional language. And so they very quickly found that this was a fantastic solution to have the candidates for the exams back in the main exam room with their peer group and headphones plugged in and they were just swiping over the words they didn’t understand and they could hear them aloud. And it mainly used just to clarify or double-check what they’d been reading. And you see with a lot of these exams, you’re not being tested on your reading ability, you’re being tested on your knowledge of geography or maths. You can be brilliant at math, but if you can’t read that question, you can’t answer it.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Jack, what’s the difference between the exam version and the standard version?

Yeah. So the exam version is locked down for exams so it only reads aloud. It doesn’t do anything else. And the reader pen is, which we have a version 2 and 3 now. The three actually reads in 50 languages and has dictionary definitions. It has a lot of those extra dictionaries because you can connect it to wifi so giving you access to effectively all the languages that are in Google Translate. And so that’s brilliant at making even more people now be able to access their own language or a new language that they happen to be learning.

We do also have one other pen I just mentioned briefly, which is the secure reader 2. Now this is a blue colored device and we’ve created it especially for the workplace and it’s also used in places like corrections. So this pen has the scanning ability, reading aloud plus the dictionary definitions, but it doesn’t have any storage function on.

And so a lot of people who work in local government or defense or healthcare, it’s really important that they don’t scan and store data when they’re in the workplace. So this gives the employer the knowledge that they know their employee is able to do their job without actually storing anything they shouldn’t.

Yeah. It’s funny that you bring that up because now I think of old spy movies from when I was young and somebody taking out a pen and snapping a picture of secret documents and things like that.

You’re exactly right, Josh. You can do a lot of system technology can be done on a cell phone, for example. But a lot of where our technology really thrives is where people perhaps don’t have access to those devices. And if you take a picture of someone’s medical records or a contract with your cell phone, you can get that read aloud. Brilliant. But what’s happened to that image now is it’s stored in the cloud forever on that personal device.

So it’s really important people take care with what they’re capturing and storing, et cetera. And so that’s where we’ve opened up markets in the workplace quite well. And particularly in corrections, you’ve got two million people in corrections in the US, which is a huge number. They say that 70% of them have got low literacy with probably 50% having dyslexia. And I’m so proud that our technology is there to help those people study or to read for pleasure because they’re locked up for much of the day and they don’t have much access to being able to read. So it’s a great solution.

It is a great solution, a great way to help. I know when I first learned about the exam reader, I just thought that was great because, like you said, you can’t bring your aide, your student assistant with you when you get out into the workplace. I’ve known just in my time before such accommodations really existed, a lot of times if you did need that reader or somebody to actually help you with the test, man, they get sick or they have to reschedule or they don’t show up and you can’t take the exam. You have to wait and do it even more, which has caused more stress and pressure. So being able to have that. Or I can do it independently and be able to be successful. And I think you said it best and actually get a good gauge of my skills on the material not on how well I’m able to read the question.

No, I couldn’t agree more with you. And when we talk about exams and tests, et cetera, we’re talking about education in schools, but we’re also talking about in the workplace. We’ve got examples of people in the military or in the fire service. They don’t want to go for the next job role because they know that their literacy is going to hold them back and they don’t want to fail. So there’s a whole load of people who are not going for that promotion because they are worried about the fact that they’re going to struggle with the test. And this is where equipment like text-to-speech on things like reading pens can really make all the difference. If you’ve got an organization and people are stagnant, not moving up through the ranks, that’s a real problem for everyone’s organization. And it’s really bad for the morale of the individuals involved.

Definitely, definitely. And Jack, I know we talked a little bit about individuals with dyslexia and some other things. What other kinds of disabilities, challenges, barriers, or needs could these pens assist with?

So we as a company tend to focus, Scanning Pens as an organization, tends to focus on dyslexia, reading difficulties, but it’s obviously a much wider spectrum than that. So we have plenty of people with ADHD, autism, low vision, even some people with cerebral palsy can use our device. So as long as you can roll the pens over lines of text, it’s like a large highlighter pen. As long as you could hold that device, swipe it over words, and it will read aloud to you. So just like a Sharpie, let’s say. If you can control that, if you can see that line, if you have the fine motor control to bring it across the line of text, then you can get some use out of our device.

Awesome. Awesome. Jack, just looking through the website information, I saw that you actually had a learning hub available there. What kind of information’s available in the learning hub?

So I’d say about five, six years ago we transitioned from being just a box shifter selling consumer electronics to being an education company. So we’ve got educators who work for us both in the US and in the UK and so we want to be there with you from the start on your journey. So before someone orders a device, we want to be there to support you and tell you more about which is the right one to purchase. After you’ve got one, we do 30-day trials for schools. So lots of schools take the pens, try it out with a number of individuals and see how they get on.

So we are there with you on the journey, supporting you, and on our website we offer a whole range of training resources and further instructions, videos to get people up and running as quickly as possible because we know that people want to be doing these things 24 hours of the day. They don’t want you to just be waiting until they can get a meeting booked in with us.

Oh yeah, for sure. Well, that’s good. Yeah, because if folks know how to actually be able to use it. I will definitely say listeners, if you’re looking for something that’s, I don’t want to say easy to use because someone will come back and tell me some of the challenges. But, to be able to just scan across a piece of paper and have things read to you can really help just because there’s not a lot of… They can do a whole heck of a lot more, but if that’s what I need, it’s pretty easy to just get that information pretty quickly. And then Jack, I also noticed that you have a scanning squad. What’s that?

So that’s something we have running on social media that when somebody is loving using our technology, it’s a hashtag that they can share a video or share some photographs with our hashtag so that other people can see what they’ve been using and the success they’ve been having. I find assistive technology is… Some people haven’t even heard of the phrase assistive technology. Most people have heard of phrases like dyslexia and ADHD nowadays, which is great. We’ve definitely moved the story on in the last 20, 25 years. But assistive technology is still a bit of an unknown to perhaps people who have just discovered they’ve got some sort of disability or perhaps to teachers, carers who are new to the profession, let’s say. So it’s really important that we try and share best practice and examples of evidence of how people are using the technology.

I’m always really blown away to see some of those examples where people have used the devices in situations that I hadn’t even imagined they could have done. I visited Arizona to a place in Phoenix where there’s a rescue dog center. And a young lady who’s got quite severe disability, she is using our reading pen. She before was having to go in, knock on her boss’s door after she’d completed every activity. And now she has a printout with her tasks for the day and when she’s completed each task, she goes back to the printout, scans over the line, “Oh, I need to take the dogs for a walk. Oh, I need to clean out the kennels.” And she’s now able to do her job without waiting outside her boss’s office for him or her to come off their phone call or their meetings and to be able to communicate the next job to that person.

And we actually went there with a camera crew and filmed that. And I can share that case study with you because it’s just brilliant to see how someone’s gone from being so reliant on another adult to becoming independent in their workplace. And for me, that’s the magic of assistive technology.

Oh, well, certainly. Independence at the end of the day is what it’s all about. Jack, I got a little bit of time left. Do you have another success story that sticks out with you that you could share with us?

Yeah. One that I talk about a lot is to do with exams and I know in the US you have a lot of computer-based exams so our technology is not relevant. But there are still tons of tests that are being taken by people all across America every week, whether that be internal or formal tests. And what I would say to you is I came across a college and the students had… These two female students had failed their test twice. It was a maths test and it was really, they had to keep taking it until they passed. They both failed twice. And the third time when they had access to text-to-speech on a reading pen, they passed with flying colors. And that’s just a clear example of how print is such a barrier to giving people that accreditation, to get them that award that they so need to get onto the next type of education assessment and then into the workplace.

And so any way we can make it easier, break down barriers, add confidence to these young and older people’s lives, it makes such a difference. Literacy is probably the biggest example of something that will hold you back for your whole life if you can’t make it work for you. So we need to help and advise people to get the best start, as it were.

Most certainly. And like you said a few times, how is it testing my math if I just can’t read the question right and I’m getting wrong because of that? I might know all the different ways to get the correct answer, I just can’t even quite get that question down.

I’ve got actually an example of someone I know who works in defense. He’s a crane operator. He’s probably around 40 and anyway, he uses our pen to decode health and safety documents, to read instructions, and he’s got a really important high pressurized job moving very specialist material in his defense job. And he said he couldn’t do it without having technology like this because he’s not allowed to take his phone onto the base where he’s based at. And so having a device that doesn’t store data just does the job for him and allows him to do the job that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.

Yeah. Well, Jack, how could our listeners find out more about scanning pens and check these accommodations out for themselves?

Yes. So please visit our website www.scanningpens.com and you’ll find all the information there. Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. My name is Jack Churchill. And yeah, we offer free 30-day trials to schools and organizations. And our pens are available in most lending libraries across the United States.

And I will say that we’ve got some of them here in our data project and our atlas project that serve the schools so that folks can get access to those, not just for exams, but also for, like Jack said, for work, for school, for any of those different things. Well, Jack, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us about scanning pens and just the way they’re able to help folks with independently just accessing all the things that they need.

No, thank you, Josh. And well done for all the work you and Easterseals do across the United States. I’ve met some of your colleagues and I know the work you do is remarkable. So thank you.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an assistive technology update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule.

Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.