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Free and Low Cost Assistive Technologies
March 7, 2014
>> WADE: Hi folks we’re going to get started soon, we’re doing an audio check so our captionist can have something to work with, so this is just an audio check.
>> WADE: All right, folks, we’re going to give it about one more minute until we have everybody on here and then we’re going to start our first Friday training today, which will feature Brian Norton and it’s going to be about free and low cast assistive technology, so we’re glad you’re here and looking forward to getting started in just another minute or so when folks continue to join the webinar. All right, everybody.
A. My watch shows just a minute or so after 20:30, so we’re going to go ahead and get started. My name’s Wade Wingler and if you don’t know me, I’m the director of assistive technology here at Easter Seals Crossroads and a lot of times I get to play host to events like this, and I’m really glad that you guys are spending your Friday afternoon with us.
A little bit of housekeeping related to today’s training. On your screen, you should be seeing our website, and this is a special section of our website, in fact, if you go to Easter seals tech.com/first Friday, you’ll sigh that it takes you to a webpage that has the listing of these trainings that we do. So we have the ones that we’ve done so far this year listed and we have today’s training which is March 7th, and we also have the one September for April 1st or the first Friday in April rather which is and we’re going to have screen reader, but what is me to is they recently went from free, it used to cost $1,000 to something that cast nothing if you’re an user of Microsoft office so we’re going to have some guests in April and we’re looking forward to having the folks from G.W.Micro. You can register for our training by clicking on this link right here, and if you want, you can register now, guilt the email that confirms you and you won’t have to worry about the last‑minute registration. You’ll we’re stale working on our May, June and July trainings, but they will also be listed here. We just keep adding the trainings here to the end of this and then you’ll be able to find them. Paragraph additionally, you will find links to surveys for trainings and archives. If you’re keeping track of CRC credits, you need to do two things, first is register for the training, and then second, you into ed to click on the survey and take this very simple, easy survey that lets us know that you participated and answer the question as then we can send those though central office and they can help you with that CRC unit situation.
Also, if you’re interested in seeing the archives from previous training, you can click on any of these archive links here, they all go to the same place, it will ask you for a password. The password isn’t a secret, it’s Indiana, Indiana lower case, once you type Indiana, it takes you to a list of all of our first Friday trainings, so if you want to go back and watch the training about screen readers or Mac accessibility or the I phone or the learning accessibility I can’t apps, we are recording.
A quick bit of housekeeping, I see lots of friends and folks that we see on a regular basis so I know this is repeating for you guys but for the one or two folks who might be new, we are using go to training as our platform today, it works pretty well for lots of reasons, but I need to know that you guys know who you to interact with us, so the very first thing I’m going to ask you to do is on your computer, the go to computer training panel should be on there and you should have a button that is used to raise your hand, so there’s a picture of a hand button, if you will click that, Bill, you are the first to get that one, today, but I would like everybody if you can find the raise your hand button to go ahead and raise your hand so you know how to interact with us that way. If you have questions, we can actually turn on your microphone from here and you can ask questions that way. Or you can also type in the chat room, which should be near the bottom of that control panel, so if you would take a quick second and click where this says type message here and tell us hello or hi or whatever you would like to say to us that’s PG rated anyway, go ahead and type that in there. Jenny Austin, thank you, howdy and there we see other folks that figured out how to do that as well. Good to see you all here this afternoon.
If you have questions throughout the training, you can raise your hand and we can call on you or you can put your question there in the chat room, and people will see what’s in the chat room, but we also have the ability to talk to folks independently in the chat room, below the chat box allows me to talk to folks individually.
Okay. Any questions about how we handle the training or anything like that? If you do, pop it in the chat room there and we’ll address those.
And I don’t see any questions. I am going to let folks know that we’re doing a little cross training today, so my good friend and colleague, Craig Burns is sitting here with me, say he low, Craig.
>> Hello Craig.
>> WADE: He’s a classic when it comes to comedy but he and I have sharing the controls and doing cross training, so Craig can help with those in the future and Brian Norton is going to be doing our training today on free and low‑cost assistive technology, so without further delay, Brian, I’m going to go ahead and flip the screen over to you, if you will unmute, you’re ready to go.
>> BRIAN: Okay.
>> WADE: Do you want it send to your Mac or your windows?
>> BRIAN: To my Windows PC at that point.
>> WADE: Okay.Brian and we’ve got you. Go ahead.
>> BRIAN: All right! Well, thank you everybody for showing up today on what is a gorgeous Friday. Thank goodness for the sunshine and the warm weather, we’ve been rating for it for quite a long time. Anyways, so today, we’re going to talk about no‑cost low‑cost products assistive technology, and I’m really kind of excited to talk about this. This is some stuff that we use often as we work with clients, and we’ll give a couple of examples of that as we get towards the end of our presentation today, just a couple of real life examples of that. It’s important to realize assistive technology and built‑in accessibility is becoming more readily availability in and through mainstream technologies, you can find it in almost any device or any platform that’s out there at this point. Within a Windows PC, even Mac books, IOS devices are on Android devices, assistive technology and general accessibility is becoming more and more of the mainstream. And accessibility, a couple of things to notes when you start talking about lower cost or no‑cost assistive technology products, although they’re built into some of those devices, in some of the low‑cost ones you can download certain things like your computer or whatnot, there’s a couple of caveats to that, a couple of problems that may arise, depending on the product itself, and where it’s come from. A couple of those things to keep in mind as we take a look at no‑cost and low‑cost products would be the availability of tech support is often limited when it comes to low‑cost/no‑cost items, they’re not trying to sell you something for a lot of money, so therefore, the support you may get may be often time limited and again, what it does is what it will do is another thing to keep in mind, updates and fixes aren’t always readily available, sometimes it could be months or longer for the product to be able to do something that you want it to do because it wasn’t a part of the product to begin with. Oftentimes, free stuff, low‑cost stuff doesn’t get updated as regularly as the software that would cost you money, so some things like the more mainstream assistive technology devices. So without further adieu, I just wanted to jump in and start talking about a few things. I’m going to start on the Windows platform and possibly jump over to the Mac platform because as we talked about just a second ago, you can find assistive technology and accessibility built right into the devices these days. Often times what we’re going to show today are the low‑cost/no‑cost options, they’ve got some limitations to what they can do for folks and sometimes the pay for versions offer more functionality and overtimes a greater level of access to the computer than some of the free versions but for some folks that works just great for them.
So if you guys can see me screen, I’m going to kind of open up some of the free stuff that’s built right into Microsoft Windows. If everybody would go or you don’t have to go, I’m going to show you, we’re going to go into the start menu and if you go to your control panel, and when you open up your control panel, you can look for something called ease of access center. And these are some of the accessibility options that are built right into a Windows PC. And many of these things have been around for many, many years. They’ve been around since Windows 98 second edition and maybe a few of them even before that, so it’s been around for many, many years.
As you jump into the ease of access center, you’re going to find lots of different options, they kind of have labeled them an I lot better. If you use Windows XP and you go into your control panel, it’s not under ease of access center, that’s something new within Windows 7 and above, if you go into a Windows XP machine, you will look for a little guy in a wheelchair underneath the control panel and that should open up something that looks similar to what you see here on my screen today.
A couple of things that I use in here just we can’t go through them all, based on the time that we have allotted for today, but just some of the things that we use and that I think are pretty useful tools for folks but again are just built right into the computer system would be this thing under near called use the computer mouse or use the computer without a mouse or keyboard, so if you use and bring that up, you have access to an onscreen keyboard and if I click on that, it will bring up on onscreen keyboard for me. And a lot of times now we’re getting into the age of touch screens, so a lot of the computers out there today that you would purchase have touch screens built into them and with an onscreen keyboard instead of you having to interact with a standard keyboard or a standard mouse that requires lots of Dexterity and fine motor movement, the can use the touch with the onscreen keyboard access.
I’m going to go back a second and jump back into the menu again, another option is ways to make the keyboard easier to use as well. The 3 things in the middle are the ones I’m going to kind of highlight out of this section. 3 things that I use a lot for folks, the first thing would be to turn on sticky keys, and what sticky keys allows you to do is perform key stroke combinations so that could be a shortcut on the computer and/or when you need to maybe you’re typing text into a Word document and you need to make capital letters, anything that requires a combination key stroke you can separate out those key strokes into just single key operation. So for instance, if you wanted to do the open command, which is control O within Microsoft Word or word pad or any of the Microsoft combinations you could simply with sticky keys turned on, press the control key, let go of it and then presence the O key and that would link those two together and that would actually perform the command for you.
A second one under here is turn on toggle keys and I would encourage you guys after today’s training if you’re interested in those, try them out. They’re part of the Windows operating system so it’s kind of hard to break them, but it’s certainly something that you probably want to try if you’re interested once you get in and use a little bit.
The next one is turn on toggle keys, turn on toggle keys lets you hear a tone when the caps lock, num lock or scroll key has been pressed, for persons that have Dexterity fine motor issues, physical disabilities in nature where inputs is your difficulty sometimes without meaning to you may hit the caps lock key and not be able to recognize the little green light or whatever color light is on your keyboard to indicate that the caps lock key has been turned on and then by the time you have the ability to look back up to your screen, you’ve put 13 or 14 different letters in there and they’re all capitalized, and that becomes quite cumbersome and maddening at times, so you can go in and turn on toggle keys to allow for a tone on your computer so it will actually make an auditory tone for you when those things are pressed allowing you to know that those things are turned on and also turned off. Another important one is turn on filter keys. Filter keys is a great little tool for limiting repeated key strokes. If you have, again, fine motor control issues dexterity issues or targeting issues where you have to pick out certain letters on a keyboard and, you know, if you have any kind of spasticity or tremors doing that can be pretty difficult and oftentimes results in you accidentally hitting two keys at a time. And/or maybe pressing a key, the key that you want but not being able to get your hand off that key in time. So you can adjust the key strokes and rate those depending on the person’s abilities, so if I would press G on my keyboard, it wouldn’t put in 10, 13, 14, different Gs as I hold the key down, it would hold that down, anything that it sees as a repeated key stroke, those are pretty useful tools and they’re right inside of the Windows operating system.
I’m going to go back again, and at the very top, you’re going to see a couple of things. You saw that start onscreen keyboard that we brought up earlier but you also have start magnifier, and unfortunately, in the online environment, the magnifier doesn’t convey very well, you won’t be able to see it actually magnifying my screen, per se, over the online medium that we use today. But imagine if you will, programs like zoom text and magic screen magnifier or dolphin, those are all screen magnification softwares that allow a better than a visual impairment to blow up the screen to a size that they are able to see and the start magnifier, the magnifier on a Windows machine is very basic in nature, it doesn’t give you a lot of bells and whistles, it will simply zoom in and zoom out to a comfortable viewing for whatever the person’s needs are, so whatever’s comfortable for them, it will allow you to zoom in and out on different Windows on the computer. It doesn’t come with speech, it doesn’t have a lot of different Windows options, it doesn’t allow you to customize a lot of things well but for magnification system, it would allow you to do pretty well.
Any questions on that so far.? Craig or Wade are going to be monitoring the chat room, please take your time to chat those in there, they will interrupt me and let me know there is a question and we’ll try to get those answered but for now, we’ll just keep going about.
We also wanted to identify things outside of the Windows environment. Soon I have a couple of programs on here that are free, free pieces of technology. The first one is natural reader. I’m going to go ahead and bring that up on my screen. Natural reader is a text to speech program, and so for persons whose have print disabilities, potentially a learning disability of some sort, we’re getting access to printed material or understanding printed material is challenging and they do better when it is read to them, natural reader is a free text to speech program. Again, very limited options, very limited functionality, but for some folk it is does the job. When you open up natural reader, this is the window that comes up it’s a present standardized window, it hasn’t changed much, I’m going to turn it into a floating bar, and it just kind of opens up this little tiny thing that doesn’t take up much of my screen and it lets me float that over potentially a document of some sort, so it kind of always remains on top and is there for me when I need it.
So I went ahead and type up a little thing. This is kind of a paragraph that I use a lot with clients to be able to kind of test certain things out. So I went ahead and typed it into a word pad document here, and the only thing I’m going to do to use natural reader is select it and then I’m going to hit play. (the newsed flag has 13 when red and white strips. It also has a blue field with 50 white stars. The 13 stripes represent the 13 original colonies. The 50 white stars represent the current 50 states.
Okay. And then once it’s done it kind of stops and anything that I select on my computer, this could be in the web, this could be in a Word document, a text document, an email, a PDF file, any of those things natural reader will read to the user anything that has been selected. So pretty useful tool. One of the things that it doesn’t come when we talk about functionality, in a lot of the paid‑for versions in a lots of this software, it will actually give you the bouncing ball effect when you read the word, when you use natural reader it just kind of reads everything and hopefully, you’re following am the best you can but in some of the pay‑for versions it will actual why I will highlight the word “the” as it reads the word the than and then jump to united and then jump to states, so a and so forth, those added features help people follow along a little bit better, but again, depending on what your needs are, natural reader might be a good option for you.
A second thing that a light of the pay‑for versions have but there also have the ability to turn whatever is highlighted into at MP 3 file, so if you want to turn this particular text or maybe a textbook or a chapter of a correct book that may be the school has translated for you into an audio file, you can just simply press the ‑‑ go ahead and select the text, press the MP 3 button and a conversion will happen where it will actually create a MP 3 file that you can take with you on a mobile device that you can play in your car or some place else. It’s an useful tool and again, free. It’s available for download on the Internet, and a pretty good piece of assistive technology, one that I’ve used on several occasions before.
Wade mentioned a couple of between readers next month we’re having window‑wise, version to talk about their product, I’m pretty excited about what they’re offering, a free version of their screen reading software. But you have to own Microsoft office to get the free version, that’s pretty spectacular. Because of the cost savings that you get. The drawback to that is now they’re actually going to charge you for the support that you would receive on the free version, but still, I think it’s still going to be a benefit for consumers and certainly something to consider when looking at screen reading for individuals says it is a full version of window eyes and the only thing the person needs which most folks have is Microsoft office on their computer and they’ll get to talk more about that next week. Or I’m sorry, next month. I’m jumping ahead of myself.
Another one that is a free screen reader and it actually does a very good job is something called NDVA and I’ve got the icon here, it’s free, downloadable from the Internet, I’m going to go ahead and open it up. (Computer voice) documents NDVA desk top.
>> BRIAN: For people who have experience or have seen screen reading before, screen readers all they do is investigative ‑‑ not all they do, they do quite a bit and it’s pretty spectacular what they can provide for folks whatever receives focus on the computer gets read back to the user who is blind or visually impaired, so I went ahead and turned it on, I’m going to let it read a little bit to you by navigating my computer a bit. So time going to open up the start window (computer voice) starts win, blank, XPS viewer, X 9 of 10 ‑‑ word pad W 8 of so. Document word pad. Risk text window. Blank.HELLO space THERE. Hello there.
>> BRIAN: So buy navigating the computer, when I type something it gets repeated to me, as we were moving through the start men new, and it gets to a particular function or line of text in there, it will read it to me and tell me really essentially where I am. There are lots of crew strokes all the program is free, sometimes the training that comes along with one of these frames with be significant because learning a screen reader is a completely different way to operate the computer especially the way computers are set up so visually nowadays with access especially now that you move into the windows 8 environment and some of the newer operating system, the visual aspects of the computer have changed dramatically and using a screen reader can be quite difficult although it’s encouraging that the cost of the actual product is lower, sometimes the Frank remains the same for them to be able to get the access that they need and be able to navigate the computer successfully.
So that’s NVDA. (Computer voice) desk top.
>> BRIAN: I’m going to go ahead and turn that off. And as you can see, I used the mouse to close it out, if I was a true screen reader which I do train people on the careen reader, I know how to do it but I would not sign used the mouse or touch anything, I would have been using key strokes to be able to turn that off. So again, now I’m in word pad right now. Another low vision tool that people often don’t know is there is the zoom in and zoom out feature in Microsoft office applications or any Microsoft application, so this could be in word pad, your email, this could be in Microsoft Word, Excel, all of those different Microsoft applications have something called zoom and the way to operate zoom is instead of a person with low vision going in and changing the font to be maybe 20, 25 font, making it much, much larger, you don’t have to actually change the font to be able to see it a little bit better, if you hold down the control key on your keyboard and just sit there and hold it, and then reach over to your mouse, most mice have a scroll wheel attached to them, and you can simply just scroll up and that’s what I’m doing down here, I wish I could show you my fingers on my mouse but I can’t today, but I’m zooming in and making that text of, much bigger. And then if I scroll it back towards myself, it makes it smaller. Again, this is available in webpages, if you’re using Internet Explorer, so on and so forth, anything that’s Microsoft application, it will allow you to zoom in and zoom out.
I also believe if you do ‑‑ and it’s probably not a good thing to test it out as I talk to folks, but I believe there’s a key stroke to make that happen as well in most applications, to be able to zoom in a make the view larger for yourselves so you can see the text a little bit better. And that’s just what I call Windows zoom, I’m not sure if it’s got an official title or anything to it.
One other application in the Windows environment I want to be able to share with folks is an application called audio notes and audio notes is a pretty good application, I’ll go ahead and say except and I have a demo version I don’t computer to be able to show it to you today, but audio note is a lot like the live scribe pen that so popular today with college students. Audio note is a note recorder so it actually uses the computer’s built‑in microphone and it uses the computer’s platform to be able to type your notes while it’s recording what is going on around the classroom or the computer at that moment, depending on where you’re at. What’s interesting about audio note is it allows you to ‑‑ it doesn’t allow you to handwrite, so you can’t reach on to the computer to handwrite, you have it actually type, so I’m going to co come down most any text, unless you’re using audio pad on an iPad, you can’t write. I’m going to reach up and hit the record button. And of course, okay, that’s fine. So it’s recording me. And I’m going to go ahead and type in hello there. My name is Brian. How are you doing today? And what I can do is I can now type my notes and notice over here on the left‑hand side it’s keeping kind of a tally of where my ‑‑ where I am in the recording as it records stuff. I can then come over here and hit the pause and hit the play button and it would read or actually play back the audio as then goes over and highlights my text. So much like when you’re using the live scribe pen, you could reach that pen up into the notebook and tap on any of your handwritten words and then have it spoken back to you in audio note, same thing a true, you’d be able to take your mouse cursor and jump to the beginning of the sentence that you wrote to be able to hear what was recorded at that moment. And what that really does for folks is allows them to fill in the gaps that might be left over or missing information that they might have missed while they were trying to jot down a note or they were focusing on what the teacher was writing on the board instead of really hearing the professor, lots and lots of different options. The other things it allows you to do is allows you to import photos, which I think ingenious, because we all know if we take notes, if the professor is up there writing everything as it should be, while we try to trans these in on your notebooks, that can be a challenge for us at times to be able it get everything correct or right, wouldn’t it be nice if after class, you could just simply walk up, take a picture of what’s on the board and then put it smack down right in the middle of your notes, and so audio note allows you to do that. There is a Windows based version, a Mac based version of audio note, audio note for the computer environments runs you about $20. If you want to put it on an iPad, it’s much less expensive but once you put it on an Ipad, you have to have an Ipad to be able to run it and iPads are anywhere from 3 to $600 or so depending on what you get with the Ipad, so when you talk about the apps and the stuff that’s available on the Ipad, for free or for very inexpensive options, you always have to remember that you still have to buy the iPad and I guess at that point, to kind of carry that over to the computer side, you still have to have a computer to run audio note as well, so maybe those costs are deferrable between the two. As you still have to have a computer to make those things run. So anyways, that is audio note.
Questions about those? Okay.
>> WADE: Folks remember, to enter into the chat room, in the chat area and we’ll be happy to answer those.
>> BRIAN: Cool. The next thing I want to do, I’m going to save the transfer of the Mac over here for a little bit. The next thing I want to do is bring up a couple of websites that folks can go to find low‑cost/no‑cost assistive technology, I want to bring you to OATS, OATS soft.org they have a repository of different software that they’ve either designed themselves or have made available on their website and what I like about this is if I want to search for something, I can come down here and bus the software based on a person’s needs that it might meet, so I’ll click on that. And it comes in here and you can actually then come down through, if I have trouble viewing the screen, and maybe I don’t want ‑‑ let me go down, I’m sorry, I’m also ‑‑ I’m a Mac user, most of the time, so transferring my skills back over to the PC and back and forth sometimes drives me a little batty, so but if you come in here, you’ll find all sorts of things for persons who are have visually impaired and have difficulty viewing things on their screen. Things from accessible daisy readers which is being able to read text back to a person, all the way to different types of screen readers, different types of magnifiers, lots of different options there for folk to take a look at stuff.
I’m going to bring up, because one that I love is text input projects, there’s always some good stuff in here for folks, for persons who have had difficulty interacting with the mouse, there are programs in here for being able to help you manipulate the buttons a little bit better. Perhaps instead of actually even operating the buttons on your mouse, it would bring up a little menu for ‑‑ that would have a single click option, a double click option, a drag option, and a right click option. And you’d be able to then take your mouse over top of it, hold it over it for a second or two, and then once its been a second or two, it actually click that and then that would become your active mouse option at that point. So if you wanted to close a piece of software, you could then just hover over the single click option and then run up to the X in the top left in chrome’s case or all the way over to the right in a window, Microsoft Office application option to be able to close that window down, so lots of free, interesting pieces of assistive technology out here as well.
The next one is a little different in nature. I’m going to bring you to the chrome tool box, I find this extremely helpful, we here at Easter Seals cross roads have started incorporating that in our training with the folks we work with through voc rehab if their tech lends itself to online training, sometimes we believed that in that online environment and what we’ve found is that even not just in the assistive technology world, but mainstream world as well and education, a lot of things are flowing to web‑based apps, places where you can store documents, places where, you know, you have an online learning management system, instead of you show showing up to class, you letter in the online assignment, so a lot more stuff is moving to the web and chrome is one of those web browsers you might be able to use, there are really three popular ones that I know of, there are lots of other ones, there’s Internet Explorer which comes on most computers, there’s Safari, which will come as a default for the Mac environment, and then there’s also chrome, which can run on both platforms, and I see a lot of people using, there’s also a fourth one called Firefox and that’s also pretty popular as well. The reason I talk about that stuff is chrome toolbox provides you with extensions or add‑ins for your web browser, particularly the chrome web browser, because that’s what it’s named chrome box, or chrome toolbox, it will provide you some add‑ins for their web browser to provide some assistive technology to folks, so if we can keep people in that online environment, in the chrome environment, you have some options. If I come down here under toolbox, I’ll demonstrate two of those for you. The first one, the first thing I want to do is just kind of run down through some of these different sections, if you have reading difficulties, you can click on reading and then it it’s going to bring up a whole list of reading options that you can then download as add‑ins to your chrome browser to be able to provide some accessibility to somebody.
And they do a really good job of giving you some understanding of what they are, not just these basic descriptions but you can click on them and then it kind of brings you into screen shots of what that actually will do on the web, allows you to rate it, too, so you have a working history of what people think about that software. So chrome toolbox is pretty helpful. Another one, we’ll go to vision. Chrome box is a helpful tool that actually reads the web to you, it’s actually kind of like a screen reader for a website. And again, only works within Google or chrome, so but we’re going to show those things to you here in just a second. So I’m going to minimize my control panel for go to meeting so I can see the whole screen, and then I’m going to actually navigate to my documents, because I actually have a Google account. And I store some documents on here, so I can get to them from really anywhere. And I’m going to bring up assistive technology reference guide, something Wade put together years ago but I thought it was so kind of useful that I kept it all these years.
Anyways, so now that I’m in here, notice when I opened up the document, a little toolbar showed up to for me. This little toolbar helped bring up something called read and write for Google, and there is a full cost program out there that’s probably around $600, maybe all the way up to $800, I’m not are really sure at that moment but there’s something called read and write gold and it is much in the same line of what Kurzhals 3000 does when what you need now does, it allows for persons to be able to read text of like what natural reader did earlier that we kind of had showed earlier but what this does is this is just again in the online environment, if I highlight something, and hit the play button, (computer voice) the term assistive technology is used to describe equipment. Services related to that equipment or the industry in which professionals and equipment come together to assist individuals with disabilities. The following definitions address AT in each of these contexts. Equipment.
>> BRIAN: Notice ‑‑ I’m going to hit stop here, notice in this version, you get that bouncing ball effect it’s got some options there for you. The other thing up here you can do ‑‑ you can highlight certain pieces of information, another thing that’s helpful for persons with learning disabilities is being able to go in annotate or mark up the documents or the textbooks that they have and this allows you to have some options with regard to that of being able to go in and highlight the important things that you thought are needed to be able to study and use, there’s also word prediction, a dictionary definitions, a picture dictionary that comes with it, it’s a pretty sophisticated little tool and add‑on to the chrome browser. And it works really, really well. So sometimes we get to look at those as viable options for folks, depending on what they’re doing and if they’re online quite a bit, it could be quite useful to them.
The other one I want to go ahead and get back out of this, I’m going to go back to just the regular Google website. And I’m going to go ahead and come in here and I’m going to activate another extension called chrome VOX. (Computer voice) Brian and then we’re going to go back to the Google. (Computer voice) edit text.
>> BRIAN: And I’m going to go ahead and type in puppies and when I do that, it brings up a bunch of websites with puppies than an I can tab down through and hear now all of the links that are on this page being read to me. (Computer voice) minored list with 11 items list item. Daily puppies, puppies, cute puppy names. Pictures of puppies and more result details. Photos. Dogs certain results, Bill’s pet centers.
>> BRIAN: So if you’re simply on the online environment, again, you can have things read to you as well. Craig, I’m going to see if you guys can’t switch me over to my Mac environment, if you could. Because I’ll spend 5 or so minutes over there as well before.
>> Okay. We’ll do that. I just got a question from sandy, was I tabbing, yes, I was tabbing down through the web browser there, so yeah, if you simply tab down through that web browser, there are other key strokes you can use if you press control alt down arrow, it will go over the regular text on the screen so you can navigate from the very top to the very bottom with some different key strokes using that particular app.
>> BRIAN: Okay. Now I’m flipping over there to now Mac, let me know when you get a chance to see that. I think we’re up and going and I’m going to actually bring up a Word document and.
>> We’ve got it, Brian, we can see it.
>> BRIAN: Okay. We’re going to bring up a blank document there and then I’m going to bring you into the preferences menu. Go ahead and hide my Apple control panel or my go to meeting control panel. So we talked about some of the things that are built into Windows earlier, like built‑in magnifier, built in screen rider or different kinds of options that are available there, Mac also offers those same options as well. Particularly sticky keys, if we come in under our keyboard, we’ve got things that are called key repeat which is essentially filter keys. If you come in, you can get down into sticky keys as well. Let me go back. I needed to go into accessibility, hold on a second, so is it I go into accessibility, let’s try that. And I go to keyboard. I got sticky key the one in they call slow keys it sticky keys is exactly what it is in Windows. Slow keys is exactly what filter keys is in Windows as well. You’ve also got voiceover, voiceover is a full featured screen reader for folks and it’s built into the Mac operating system.
The great thing about software that’s built in is as operating systems are updated oftentimes the accessibility is updated as well, so you’ve got some options there. If I turn on ‑‑ and I’m not sure you’ll be able to hear this but if I try, if I do command F 5. Hmm‑hmm‑hmm. Yeah, it’s not going to come up. I’m going to turn it off for myself.
Okay. It didn’t come up but you could see ‑‑ I guess down in the that bottom window, so in my ‑‑ in my headset that I’m wearing currently, I’m getting the voice feedback but what it’s reading is actually in that black box at the bottom of the screen so as I navigate around my computer, it kind of reads what’s over in that box, so it’s a different ‑‑ kind of a different environment, kind of a different environment than what you might find in a Windows screen reader where you’re kind of navigating around the screen and hearing feedback very similar in nature for what you get with voiceover as well. But that’s completely built in as well.
Let me go ahead and turn that off. If you come into zoom up here, you have a way to zoom in and zoom out. I’m going to go ahead and try to bring that up for us and see if we can get at the time to work but it doesn’t again translating zooming in and zooming out through the online environment, it translate for you. You have some basic options to be able to zoom in and zoom out on what’s on your screen, you can navigate and move with your mouse, or you can gesture control it by zoom ‑‑ being able to zoom in, zoom out or move around your screen as well, so same kind of options that you find ‑‑ that we were able to demonstrate in the Windows environment are also available in the Mac environment as well.
One thing we did not show over in the Windows environment is that Windows also has a very good speech recognition program built into it, as well as does the Apple environment as well. So if I come back out of accessibility, down on the 4th bar there, they’ve got something called dictation and speech. And the dictation piece of what’s built into the Mac is pretty useful as well as what’s built into the Windows environment. So I’m going to bring this up and see if I can’t get it to dictate some text for us.
So it says it’s on. And I’m going to put my cursor into a Word document and hit FN. And now we’re going to try that again. Sometimes you have to hit it once to bring it up and then the next time it will work for you. Testing 1, 2, 3. How are you today? Paragraph the United States flag has 50 white stars and a blue field. It also has 13 red and white stripes that represent the original 13 colonies. And just as this does a pretty got job on the Mac side, the part in Windows also does a very good job as well. I would say at various times, we’ve used all of these technologies with different ‑‑ with the different folks, depending on what their needs are. I had one individual who had the opportunity to actually try both dragon natural speaking which is a full featured and what I would consider a more robust screen ‑‑ or not screen, but voice input program, and he also had the opportunity on his own to get into the Windows speech recognition once it came out and he had updated his computer and he find that the free version was more comfortable for him and allowed him to do more than even the ‑‑ what supposedly is the bigger, better version. So it’s important to note as we work with folks and as we evaluate them, we are very cost conscious in trying to kind of make good decisions, based on what their needs are, what’s out there as far as technology is concerned, and then just matching it up with their needs and their environment and lots of different decisions go into what we recommend and as a the part of that, we do keep in mind no‑cost/low‑cost solutions for folks.
Are there questions? Anything from the folks?
>> It doesn’t look like so far, Brian.
>> BRIAN: Okay. I’m going to have a ‑‑ let’s go ahead and switch me back to my Windows PC. So we’re back to the Windows PV where I have all of my technology available to me.
>> CRAIG: We do have a question, any low cost ebook readers out there by bill Britton?
>> BRIAN: That’s a good question, are you looking ‑‑ it would depend on what type of E book reader you’re looking for. If it’s like a tablet version, you know, you’ve got things like the Kindle reader, you’ve got all different types of tablets, I think Kindle can be installed on just be anything. If you’re looking for an accessible e book reader depending on what your needs are, if you just have a print or a learning disability, possibly as long as you can get the text ‑‑ a lot of times the text that you can get on the these e book readers you can also get for the computer, so maybe there’s some text to speech software maybe natural reader per se, that might be able to work for you. It really just ‑‑ it would kind of depend on what the application of it would be. Yeah. Yeah, the standard Kindle is about 69 bucks, Wade just put that up in the chat room. And then usually, the app for some of your mobile devices are free.
>> CRAIG: I know natural reader for the Ipad is $9.99, I think $10.
>> BRIAN: Okay. And a lot of times just on the ‑‑ just on mobile devices themselves, especially the ‑‑ if you’re going to get an Ipad ‑‑ if I can’t you are going to get a mobile device, and you’re looking for accessibility, in my opinion, the iPad has more inherent accessibility built into this than of those Android device that are out there and the other things. The iPad has a tremendous amount of accessibility built right into it that the apps that are designed for the iPad can take advantage of for persons with disabilities, so text to speech readers, speech to text which is the voice input stuff. Different color options, zooming in options, they’ve actually even now started to include switch access into an iPad or an even all of the IOS devices for that matter, so with pairing a bluetooth switch with the iPad, you can now get scanning capability to be able to navigate and move around and activate and interact with the ‑‑ interact with the iPad, so ‑‑ other questions?
>> CRAIG: It doesn’t look like right now, Brian.
>> BRIAN: Okay. Well, that’s all the content I have for today. I mean, there’s probably a million other things I could have showed you today, those are the products that I kind of wanted to draw your attention to. Thank you for your time today. And I think Wade may go over some of the things that are coming down the pike, I think we’ve got GW micro here next week, right?
>> WADE: We do, we have ‑‑ so I’m looking at our first Fridays that are coming up, and I have ‑‑ I updated those while the training was going on, not that I wasn’t fully focused on your presentation, Brian, but I did take a chance to update the links, so that the first Friday of April we’ll have the folks from GW micro and in May we’re going to have the folks from breaking new ground to talk about assistive technology and accommodations for farmers and ranchers with disabilities, so we have guests coming in and then we’ll get back to use our staff, Brian needed a break degrees. Again, if you are keeping track of CRC stuff, make sure that you come here and fill out the survey for today’s presentation, so you get that, and there is nothing stopping you guys from registering right now for the April and the May training, so when you hang up offer the training or even while I’m still here blabbing, feel free to go ahead and click on those links and gets registered for the training, you’ll get an email to remind you, you can copy that in your calendar and have a reminder to do that. We appreciate you guys being here. I enjoy this wonderful weather, I think spring is almost here, so thanks guys.