ATU730 – LVI America Updates with Kimberly Cline

Hi, this is Kimberly Cline. I’m the Director of Sales for North America for Low Vision International, 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 730 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on May 23rd, 2025. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome back Kimberly Cline, the Director of Sales for USA and Canada from LVI America. She’s here to tell us about some of the great new tools they have available to assist individuals with vision loss. We also welcome back our friends from BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. Please, listeners, don’t forget to reach out to us if you ever have a question. If you have a suggestion for someone we should have on the show, a question about a product or person we’ve had on or about anything technology based, please do reach out.

You can email us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. We always love hearing from you with questions, with comments, with suggestions, either to make the show a little better, things you want to hear about or people we should reach out to. Don’t forget, if you ever do want to reach us, it’s tech@eastersealscrossroads.org for email or to give us a call, it’s (317) 721-7124. Also, if you ever want to know anything about all the other programs of the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads, you can head over to our website at eastersealstech.com where you can check out all the services of the INDATA project, you can find your own state AT Act project, our clinical assistive technology, digital literacy services, and so, so much more. As always, listeners, we thank you so much for listening. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Do you find yourself with a little bit more time on your hands? Or maybe listening to this has you thinking, well, what about this? Well, what about that? Well, if you have questions about assistive technology, we have other podcasts that might just fit your needs. If you happen to have questions about assistive technology, we have Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions or ATFAQ. This show is hosted by Brian Norton and features yours truly, along with Belva Smith, as we all talk about assistive technology with questions that come in from email, phone calls and other means. We also don’t always know the answer, so it’s very important that we have listeners that can help us out with some of those questions because while we like to think every once in a while that we may know everything, we’re proven wrong almost daily on that one. If you’re looking for more podcasts to listen to or if you have questions about assistive technology, make sure to check out Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you get your podcasts.

Listeners, I want to go ahead and thank everyone who attended our INDATA full-day remote training yesterday for mobile device assistive technology. We had a great turnout and a really wonderful show with our partners from BridgingApps from InTrack, and then folks here from the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads. For folks who were not able to attend, please know that we will have all those materials as well as a video of the training uploaded to our archives here very soon. You can access all of those from our website at eastersealstech.com, but I also want to let you know that we have a pretty short turnaround time. We will have our next full-day training on June 26th, 2025, and this will be assistive technology for the K-12 environment. This training is going to be all remote as well, and the link will be up very, very soon so that you can register for that training.

We’ll talk about all kinds of assistive technology that can assist with learning in the K-12 environment as well as universal design for learning. Really just making sure that you have all the information you need to include assistive technology in the IEP process, as well as just in the entire process of learning for students that you may serve. If you’re interested in learning more about assistive technology for the K-12 environment, please do sign up for our next training coming up next month on June 26th, 2025. You can register over at eastersealstech.com. We should have that link up here very, very soon. Next up on the show, please join me in welcoming back BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Google Maps. Google Maps is a free interactive digital map for navigation. It is often used for looking up an address and getting directions from your current location. Locating a place can be achieved by typing in a general topic, such as gas station, a specific address or the name of an establishment such as Starbucks. Establishments usually have details associated with them, such as the phone number, hours of operation, parking availability, menu, website, and general description of services.

An account is not required to use Google Maps. The Street View feature can greatly benefit a user who would like to get a detailed view of a location. This can be extremely helpful for a user who is concerned about accessibility and trauma triggers. When Street View is available, a user can scope out details such as handicapped parking spots, distance to entrances, ramps, sidewalks, stairs, elevators, and other potential accessibility barriers. The popular time section may also benefit users who prefer to avoid crowds as it displays when a place is busiest through an hourly log. Google Maps is currently available for both Android and iOS devices, and it is free to download. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, please join me in welcoming back Kimberly Cline from LVI America. She’s been a regular on Assistive Technology Update since before I was even the host, and we are super excited to have her back to tell us about all the latest and greatest things coming out of LVI America. Kimberly, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah. It’s good to have you back. I realize it’s been well over a year since the last time that you were on the show. For our new listeners or those who maybe have never heard you on the show before, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Sure. Of course. I am Kimberly Cline. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. Been in the industry going on about 35 years. It means I’m old.

You started very young. You started very young [inaudible 00:07:33]-

Yeah. Very, very young, so seen lots of changes in the industry. I’ve been with Low Vision International… I’ve been with them, this will be six years in May, going on seven years, so I’m excited about that. Their particular products are low vision, except today I’m going to talk about a new thing that we’re breaking into I’m excited about. But Low Vision International is headquartered in Sweden, and that’s where the mothership is. We are the American division, and we’ve had LVI America now going on I think our eighth year. We’re excited about that.

Excellent. You have some exciting new things coming out of LVI, so start us off by telling us about the MagniLink Mini?

Sure. We’re really excited about this product. It’s probably been the number one requested product over the years. I would go places and say, “If you could have any magic bullet, what would it be? What would you want for whether it’s a TBI working with kiddos or whether it’s for a job site? What’s missing?” They say, “Well, we love your MagniLink S, Kimberly, the foldable 4.2 pound camera, but we would love something smaller and more lightweight.” I’d be like, “Well, tell me what you need?” “We want something that’s a little over a pound. We want something that’s very small in a small case and can do what the S does, but also be very portable, very lightweight, and be able to set it up in basically less than a minute and have…” Whether they’re using it for school, whether they’re using it for work or for home use, have that set up be that quick and easy.

Pretty much we want to be able to plug it in and have it work. We looked at a bunch of different solutions, and we thought, gosh, why do people want this? Why don’t they just use a hover camera? Just any camera that’s out there, you can go on Amazon and get a camera. We just didn’t quite understand it, but they wanted that power of our software. They needed it combined with our software that still allows them to do OCR, that allows them to fill out forms, that allows them… Now we have AI. That’s a whole new thing, too, that we haven’t talked about. We now have AI in our iPad software. Soon here in Q2, we’ll be releasing it for our Windows-based products as well. They want the power. The problem is when you just get a camera that really isn’t made for someone that has low vision, then there’s not all those goodies that work with it.

It’s like, “Yeah. I’ve got this great camera, and I can use it to do a Zoom presentation or something like that, but it doesn’t have all the other bells and whistles with it.” We heard it. We heard it loud and clear. Behind the scenes we were working on some things, and we ended up coming out with a product called the MagniLink Mini. It is only 1.3 pounds. The dimensions of it are 11.8 by 7.1 by 2.4. That would be the width is 11.8, the depth is 7.1, and the height is 2.4. Think of our camera that you’ve all pretty comfortable or familiar with, like the camera that’s on the tab or the camera that’s on the iTAB. It’s that same 10X optical zoom quality camera, but now take that off, just the camera head off, and now put it on a tripod.

A tripod that’s very lightweight that allows you still to do the camera for distance and also allows you to bring that camera down and do document viewing. Now, the S, if you think of our S camera, that camera can really rotate, can almost just do a 360 on that. This is on a tripod, so you don’t have the range. You can do distance no problem, and you can come down and do document. If you angle out your document a little bit, you’re able to get a full page in it and everything. You are a little bit more limited on the range of the movement of the camera, but you’re just going to have that if you’re on a tripod versus the type of mechanism that the MLS is on. Again, we have found that our iPad products have really taken off.

We knew that we had to have this product working immediately with iPad. Then we said, “Well, our next most popular is, well, and tied right in there, is Windows.” Out of the gate when it releases, we will be going into production here in a few weeks. We plan to have it here in the US in May, late May. It will work with iPad and Windows only. I don’t know if we will be adding Chrome in the future because that is something that people have asked for, but out of the gate it will work with iPad and with Windows. It just plugs right in with a USB-C plug, so-

Nice.

… you plug it in and you have our software and you’re ready to go.

That’s awesome, and super easy to use. Yeah. Portability, it is always just an issue if I have to carry a lot of different things or just depending on my work site or the size of my desk or what I’m trying to do. I know you said it doesn’t quite move around as much as the other one, but it sounds like if I really need something small, it’s still going to be able to do what I really need it to do.

Absolutely. The cool thing is is people are like, “But how does it just work with your software?” I said, “Well, first of all, if you’re using an iPad, doesn’t matter, we’ve got four different types of iPad products. You’re always using that same software. You just go to the app store. You download MagniLink Viewer,” which I’m going to put a plug for it because it’s free. It’s a free app. You can use it on your iPhone and your iPad without our technology. It’s a free app, MagniLink Viewer. But if you’re not plugged into one of our cameras, you’re not being able to do OCR or form filling or take video or pictures. That’s how we’re able to have the app up there. You still can change colors, turn on online masking and marking, change contrast, all the other really cool things that you need to be able to do if you have low vision.

It’s the same software because it doesn’t matter if you’re using our iTAB or an S plugged into an iPad or MagniLink Wi-Fi camera, Magni Wi-Fi. It’s the same exact software, so it’s the same thing here with this. You use that same app, and you just plug into an iPad. It’s super easy. Where it is a little bit different, if you’re using it in Windows, whether you’re using it on a Surface Pro tablet or just a Windows PC, instead of using PC Viewer like you’ve been using with the S, the MagniLink S, you’re actually using our software that we use on the TAB. You use a software called TAB Viewer and you just install that just like normal. The software is going to have that look that it looks like on the iPad where you’ve got the icons at the bottom of the screen, that touch type look, with the big icons at the bottom of the screen.

That is one little twist that’s a little bit different than in the past when we’ve been working with the MLS on PC. But other than that, you’ve got the same power. You’re able to OCR. OCR comes with it. It comes with it for the price. When you purchase it, which by the way, the introductory price for it is 27.95. That does include OCR for iPad and OCR for Windows. That’s just a bundled package, and you get that for… When you purchase it, you get it for both products. Also you can use it with AI. AI is newer since I spoke to you last. AI currently just works on our iPad products. As I mentioned for Q2, we will be releasing it for the next targeted product is our tablet product, our TAB, because we’ve had a lot of requests for it for that particular product.

When we first released AI, we were just doing some basic things with ChatGPT, and we were able to do all the really cool things. You scan in a bill and then you ask it questions like, “Well, where do I send the check? How much do I owe? What’s the address on this?” All those basic types of things. That was cool, and we were glad that we were able to do that. You could scan in a document and have it summarize. Instead of reading down through 15 paragraphs, have it give you a one paragraph synopsis and all that cool stuff. That’s been out for a little bit now, and we now just have done updates in that AI release, and now we do object recognition and we do handwriting recognition. Oh my gosh. It is so incredible.

I did my handwriting. I had a whole bunch of people do their handwriting, which some of them was better than mine, some was worse than mine. It reads it. I don’t understand. It just still boggles my mind. For that, we’re using Gemini, and so now we have the combination of both together, and but the object recognition is also the coolest. You can put money underneath it, and it’s going to tell you, “That’s a $5 bill.” You could ask it questions about that. “Well, who’s the president on here? Who’s this? What that?” All this stuff. They put a bunch of European money, they had Swedish money in there, and they had it say how much it was. Then there was three bills, and they had it added up. Then they asked who was on a specific bill, and they said, “Greta Garbo.” Well, I didn’t even know Greta Garbo was Swedish. Okay.

I didn’t either.

I was like, “Wow. Okay. This is really cool,” but it’ll even do math problems. You can hand write out a math problem and then ask it to calculate that math problem. The cool thing is is it doesn’t just come and tell you, “Hey, the answer is negative 60.” It literally tells you the order of operation and how it figured out that math problem. That was more important to me than the answer because there’s nothing worse than when you’re stuck and you’re trying to figure out something, and you can’t get a hold of your teacher or it’s midnight and you’re working on your homework that you should have done right when you got out of school and you’re missing a step. It literally breaks it down, “Well, I multiply this before I did this because the order of operations says…”

It tells you every little detail of why you do things the way you do them. To me, that is just life-changing for the industry that we’re in. I even had to do some really cool things. I was in Texas a few weeks ago, and I actually had to go buy an evaluator’s house to show him the Mini. He goes, “I want to test something.” He had a famous rendering, it was a drawing on his wall of this really cool… It was in actually New Orleans. I can’t remember if it’s a Catholic cathedral church. I don’t remember the name of it. But anyways, we pointed to it, and it said that it explained what it was. Then we were like, “Well, can you tell us which actual cathedral this is?” It literally could tell us. It wasn’t like the name was on there. It figured it out from the drawing. I’m like, “What?”

Yeah. It’s so cool. You mentioned so many great things, but really, even just being able to read a bill. You’ve been doing this a long time, and I remember used to be, especially with maybe the aging population, if they had something with OCR, listening to a bill is terrible. There’s so many just random numbers on there and getting the right information. Being able just to ask, “Well, how much do I owe and when is it due?” That kind of thing and get it right back is just… It just opens up so many doors.

Yeah. It’s just crazy. I know I just did a… I was in North Carolina last week at a conference, and we had about 100 people in the presentation I was speaking at. I said to people, “I want to take a poll right now just on the fly, lets do this. I want to know how many people are excited about AI?” There were only maybe 40 people that raised their hand. I said, “Okay.” I’m just looking, and I said, “So that leaves about 60 of you.” I said, “I want to know if you’re not excited because you’re afraid of it? If you’re concerned that you don’t know Big Brother’s watching what’s happening, or students are going to use this for the wrong reason. They’re going to cheat or there’s this or that.” Boom, everybody… 60 people raise their hands, and there’s so much legitimate concern.

Sure.

I get that, and I think it’s legitimate. But I also try to get them to see what if we really focus on the good that it does for the low vision and the blind community, let’s just talk about things that we just haven’t been able to accomplish without it. I get it. We are getting ready because now it is so powerful what we have out on the market. We’re getting ready to put teacher controls in where if a student’s taking a test that they just turn that feature off. They can’t use it. I think we need to put safeguards, but just to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just say, “We’re not going to use AI. It’s dangerous. There’s this and there’s that.” I think there’s a lot of people that are being a little short-sighted about it because there are some pretty amazing things that I don’t know that technology without it would ever be able to do. I really…

Like you said, we’ve been around for a while, we’ve wanted handwriting recognition. I think of people I talk to, some of the seniors when I go out and I show them this technology and they love it. They’re just using it for personal reasons, like maybe to read bills, but to read Christmas cards and people use handwriting. But even no matter how big they blow that up, they cannot read that handwriting. They’re not going to be able to. When I put… I tell them, “Bring a handwritten card. Bring it,” and I show them, and it literally starts reading what their loved one said to them. They just start bawling. It’s life altering, and we know it’s not ending there. We’re getting ready to put more in it and add more. I think it’s amazing. I think people… Then I tell people too, “You know what? You’ve probably been using it for a really long time and not really thinking about it.”

It’s almost into everything. I use it. Well, I used it at the beginning of the call. I asked Alexa what the temperature was outside. We keep our grocery list on there. It’s great. When I go to the refrigerator and go, “Shoot. Well, this is the last thing of milk. Let’s add this to this.” It just adds ease to our life, but we have to be wise. When I was at ATIA this year, I don’t remember the name of the company, but there was a company, that’s all they were focused on was putting safeguards around AI. It was different apps and things you could add to it. You would tell the student, “Hey, this is on here. It’s a monitoring device, and if you use AI to create your homework or to create the assignment that you have to do in the next hour, we’re going to know that. It’s going to come and report back to us. Basically we’re warning you don’t cheat, but if you choose to cheat, you’re going to get caught.”

If there’s safeguards and things being made, I think we really need to embrace it because there’s no way we could ever scan a bill or anything… Perfect example, a teacher came up at CSUN and she brought this… I don’t even know what it was called, but it was this math table that I’m fully sighted and I couldn’t really be able to figure it out. Was that thing at the top supposed to go with what was underneath it or was it… It was like a periodic type table type thing. She said, “We’re going to mess up your AI. We’re going to put this underneath, and it’s going to just do a terrible job.” We had a look at it with the being able to look at something and be able to identify it, object recognition, and then we asked it to describe it. It just started describing it perfectly, and she had tears in her eyes. She goes, “This is the stuff low vision and blind kids could never do in math. This is opening up a whole new realm.”

So cool. So cool.

If you can’t tell, I’m a little excited.

No. I completely agree with you. Trust me. I’m not a gloom and doomer, but I always tell people, “I grew up with the Terminator movies and The Matrix, so you always worry that things that go that way.” But there’ll always be bad actors. Kids cheated when things were paper and pen. You know what I mean?

Exactly.

They found out a way. They’re going to find out a way, and some of those kids probably grow up to be very resourceful adults.

Exactly.

But at the same time, you’re right, there’s so many good things it could do. So many tools that can give folks, and so many doors that can open that just technology would’ve taken years to ever get there, if it could, if it even could get to that point.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I could not [inaudible 00:24:48]-

Yeah. AI is here. We’re not going back. We’re going forward with it. Right now, again, iPad software, it works with MagniLink Viewer within everything with our plug in, so it works with an MLS with an iPad, it works with the ITAB as well. Then now it works with the Mini, because that’s plug-in. Our Wi-Fi cam and our Wi-Fi, we don’t support it at this time, but with the plug-in ones we do. Then now we’re starting to work with the TAB, so it’ll work in the Windows environment with our TAB product. Our AI, there is a charge for it because we have to pay as well. It’s a $300 and that’s for a three-year license. That’s available now. We just tell people to do write in with the serial number, and we do a 15-day trial. If somebody wants to check it out for 15 days for free, they just need to send in a serial number and ask that we turn the trial on.

Listeners, unfortunately that is all the time we have for today for our interview with Kimberly Cline from LVI America. Please do come back and join us next week as we are joined once again by Kimberly Cline from LVI America as she talks about some of the other great offerings that they have. Thank you so much for listening today, and we’ll see you back here next week. Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on 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 at INDATA Project.

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. 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.