Hi, Jan.
You should not at all feel bad at not using mainstream devices to
perform a task. To say you haven't graduated to them makes it seem like
you're still in high school for using a Victor Stream to read a book.
While it's true that I prefer some mainstream devices over blindness
products I definitely acknowledge that blindness-specific products not
only have a place in this space but even have many advantages, as Marco
points out. In fact, devices like the Stream have advantages and even
benefits not found in an iPhone.
If my iPhone or Fire tablet's battery needs to be replaced, I can't just
buy a new battery and replace it, as you can with some of the
specialized book players.
As you know, the Stream allows you to use SD cards. This means that,
even if you fill your SD card up with books, you can purchase as many SD
cards as you want, allowing you to have as many books, magazines and
other files as you feel like saving.
Although this is the case with many Android devices, including the Fire
tablet, iOS devices don't allow this. Once you get an iPhone or iPad,
you're stuck with the amount of storage on the device, with no room for
expansion or other SD cards. There's something very nice about having a
device dedicated to performing the one or two things you really need.
I've also had the experience of watching a TV show or listening to a
podcast with my wife and having various news alerts or phone calls
coming in to interrupt what we're listening to. Marco also compares this
to choices sighted people make regarding how they read books. They could
use a Kindle, which is a dedicated electronic reader, designed just for
reading books and magazines. It has hardly any Internet capabilities. No
apps, no news, no music and no alerts. Just pick it up, open your book
and read, with no other distractions. The Fire tablets allow for the
same reading of content but also have email, music, news and the same
types of alerts and notifications which can be a distraction while
you're just trying to read a book. So, when it comes to reading, sighted
readers have those same choices to make, just as we do. Sorry for the
long response but I don't like to see people feel badly when choosing a
more specialized device over a more mainstream one.
On 7/25/2018 10:48 AM, Jan Lattuca wrote:
David, thanks for your continued vigilance in sharing so many good
things with us. I don't read all of them, of course, for reasons
mentioned in an earlier email; but I really enjoyed this blog. I
found it fascinating and, at times, quite funny; and it made me feel a
little less bad about the fact that I have not yet graduated to
mainstream devices.
Have a great day, all.
Jan
On 7/22/18, David Goldfield <dgoldfield1211@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The following is a very long but, in my opinion, interesting blog postYou are invited to visit the moderator's Web site at WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
regarding the value of blindness-specific products, compared to their
mainstream counterparts. As an example, many people prefer a product
like the Victor Stream as their primary source for reading, while others
prefer an iPhone to perform the same tasks. Some prefer to write on a
specialized product such as a BrailleNote Touch, whereas others prefer a
mainstream option like an iPad. There are pros and cons to each and it's
a debate we'll probably have until the end of time. Marco is visually
impaired and works for Mozilla, the company which produces Firefox and
Thunderbird. He recently wrote a blog post where he began to rediscover
the benefits of specialized blindness products which are dedicated to
performing a specific set of tasks, compared to mainstream products.
Here is the post, followed by the link to access the original post which
contains links for the various products he mentions. He raises some very
valid points and I'd love to know your thoughts on this.
Rediscovering blindness products
In recent months, I have discovered a tendency within myself that longs
for more focused, hassle-free environments or niches, where distractions
are reduced to a minimum, and I can immerse myself in one thing, and one
thing only. And that has lead to rediscovering the merits of some
blindness-specific products.
A bit of history
Products that specifically fulfill the needs of blind users have been
around for a long time, and in earlier years, were often the only means
of accessing certain information or content. These range from everything
like either tactile or talking scales and talking thermometers, and what
not, to sophisticated reading machines such as the Optacon, and braille
displays. Later, as technology advanced, some of these means of access
were replaced by scanners, or as of today, cameras, both stationary and
mobile, combined with computers and optical character recognition software.
And as accessibility has become more mainstream, so have many assistive
technology concepts such as DAISY book reading or GPS navigation. The
greatest example is probably the popularity of audio books. Originally
mostly used by the blind, shipped in big boxes full of cassette tapes
(or even tape spools, narrated by often semi-professional volunteers,
and only available through specialized libraries for the blind, they
have evolved into a mainstream way of consumption through services such
as Audible. They are very popular among sighted consumers, and narrators
are often professional speakers or actors.
Enter the mainstream of smartphones and tablets
While in the early 2000s, cell phones were still mainly made accessible
by specialized software, for example Talks or MobileSpeak for the Nokia
S60 platform, or special devices such as the PAC Mate were created to
bring mainstream operating systems onto special hardware with a screen
reader added, the advance of iPhone and Android devices in the late
2000s brought a revolution for blind and visually impaired people. For
the first time, accessibility was being built into the platform, and no
special software or hardware was needed to operate these devices.
Over the next couple of years, many of the things specialized hardware
did before were transferred, or newly developed, for these platforms. To
name a few:
• DAISY e-book players with interfaces to certain library services for
the blind
• special GPS solutions such as BlindSquare or Sendero
• the KNFB Reader to scan documents with the built-in camera
• VoiceDream Reader to read all kinds of material, including DAISY, MP3
books, epub, Word, PDF and other documents etc.
All these apps fulfill certain needs for blind users that seem to no
longer require the use of special hardware.
Moreover, the cost of these apps is far lower than many of the price
tags for the special hardware such as a DAISY player/recorder,
stand-alone GPS solution, or reading machines.
One thing that didn’t get replaced, and which is still as important
today as it ever was, is a braille display. So smartphones and tablets
usually also support braille displays, mainly via Bluetooth. If one is
able and desires to read braille, there is still no way around
specialized hardware for this purpose.
Problems crept in
All good, or what? Well, I thought so, for a long time, too. I even sold
some blindness-related products such as my first generation Victor
Reader Stream by Humanware because I thought my iPhone and iPad could
now fulfill all my needs. And for the most part, they do, but at a cost.
And that cost is not, in most cases, technical in nature, but rather has
to do with the sheer fact that the device I am running the app on is a
mainstream device. Many of these problems are, in one form or another,
also applicable to people who aren’t blind, but might impact them less
than they do me.
Distractions while reading
Here I am, immersed in a book in my eBook app of choice, and the screen
reader is merrily reading it to me at a comfortable pace. Suddenly, a
notification comes in, for example a Twitter notification, crashing in
like a loud bell, either chiming over my narrative, or even stopping it
in its tracks. When it does what, I have not figured out yet, seems to
be randomly switching. Granted, I can turn Do Not Disturb mode on in
such a way that it even suppresses notifications when the screen is
active. But I have to consciously do that. At other times, I might want
to have Do Not Disturb on while the phone is locked, but get
notifications when it’s on, so I have to go back into the third or
fourth level deep Settings screen to toggle the option.
This is not blindness specific. A person reading in the same app will
get distracted by a banner notification popping up visually just as I am
acoustically.
Another example is listening to music or podcasts. With the mobile
screen reader on, any notification will by default cause the normal
audio source to duck (its volume turned down) so that the screen
reader’s voice can dominantly talk over it. You can then either quickly
silence speech, or pause the audio source. But what if you’re on your
Bluetooth earphones doing something on the opposite side of your room
from where your smartphone is? Suddenly, you have two voices talking to
you at once. I, for one, cannot cope with two vocal sources talking to
me at the same time. I either miss one of them, or don’t catch what is
being said at all any more.
Reading e-books in braille
I don’t know about other blind people, but I found that, having tested
several systems over the years, none of them get continuous reading
right with a braille display. Doesn’t matter which OS, desktop or
mobile, I was using, they all had flaws that made a continuous reading
experience, fully submerging in the contents of a great fantasy or
science fiction novel, a pain in the posterior. One or two of them had
German forward translation of grade 2 all wrong for literature, forcing
upon me capitalized writing, which is uncommon. Others would jump
erratically around when pages were flipped. Others wouldn’t even offer
grade 2 in a language I am speaking at all, and while I can read
computer messages or code in computer braille just fine, I just
downright refuse to do it with literature. It’s just not acceptable.
I also found that most of them did a better job in English than other
languages, like my mother tongue German. And from asking around, i hear
similar things about French or Spanish. But even in English, I heard
several reports from people I talked to that the braille displays
jumping around unpredictably at times causing massive reading
interruptions, is a common theme even in English.
So after extensive testing and research, I can confidently say that all
mainstream solutions thus far have failed to address one major part of
my needs: Continuous literature reading in braille. The fact that there
are several solutions out there that do braille grade 2 translations
well in various languages means that it can be done, it’s just that it
isn’t being done in all of the screen readers I tested.
GPS in pedestrian mode
Yes, there are lots of GPS solutions that try to address the needs of
blind pedestrians, some more costly than others, some on a subscription
model, others not. But all of them fall short in that they usually don’t
integrate well with the maps solution that is on the devices by default,
use their own map material, and some also use additional services for
points of interest, but they all just don’t quite get the precision
right that I’d expect. I was doing a little shootout with my best
friend, both on main and side streets as well as an off-road situation
in a park or forest. He was using a Trekker Breeze from Humanware, I was
using my iPhone with several GPS apps on it. We both set landmarks and
also compared how our devices would behave in situations with street
junctions or other situations. We both went the same routes, so we had
roughly the same GPS coverage. Let me say that, while on streets, routes
were OK with both devices, although even there his intersection
announcements were more precise than mine and my GPS apps would more
often get wrong addresses than his Breeze, it was in the off-road
situation where he really beat the crap out of my apps. The precision
with which the Breeze alerted him of landmarks for turning points in
park pathways and other situations was just mind-boggling.
In addition to these observations, I also noticed that my apps,
regardless of which one I used, were all very verbal and distracting,
trying to give me lots of information I didn’t need at that moment. And
the UIs were all much more complex than on the Trekker, I took longer,
even thogh I was familiar with the apps, to get certain tasks done than
he was. And did I mention that I cannot sort two voices talking at the
same time? With my screen reader on, and much of the apps being
self-voicing anyway, I often found myself in situations where two
different synths were babbeling information I could have found useful,
but couldn’t keep separated because of the two-voices problem.
General inconsistencies and inaccessibility
One other problem that keeps me always on the edge when using mainstream
devices are screen reader inconsistencies and inaccessible apps or
websites. Any update to an app can break accessibility, any update to
the OS can break certain screen reader behavior, or web content I might
need or have to consume at a particular moment can prove to be
inaccessible, requiring me to either fiddle around with screen reader
tricks to kick it into obedience, or simply not being able to get
something done at all. Yes, despite all web accessibility efforts, this
is still more often the case in 2018 than any of us could want.
Reorienting my views and behavior
All of these problems didn’t dawn on me at once, except maybe for the
direct comparison of GPS solutions described above. They crept in, and
over time became more and more annoying, even a stress factor at times.
Reporting bugs in the braille translation to various companies and
projects have not yielded much of improvements, not by me or by other
braille users. And others just cannot really be fixed without some
serious rethinking along the lines of “Hey, the user is reading a book,
so maybe we should be smart enough to not disturb them as much…”
So I thought what could be done to rectify this situation? I want to get
less distracted while doing certain things, or get more precise
directions when walking in my favorite park. I recently lost a lot of
weight and became more mobile physically, so this is something that is
more important to me today than it was a few years ago. But it must be
an enjoyable experience, not one that stresses me out just because of
the cognitive load of trying to compensate for my apps’ lack of
precision. And as I get older, I can tolerate less of these stress
levels than when I was younger. Was burnt out once, don’t need to go
there again for sure!
It was then that a few things happened at once. I was talking to my best
friend, and at some point, he mentioned that his belovid Breeze was
slowly, but surely, coming apart after 7 years of heavy use, and that he
needed something new. Through research, I found the Victor Reader Trek
by Humanware, which combines two devices into one: A Victor Reader
Stream and a Trekker Breeze. Since we’re both in Germany, we’ll still
have to wait a bit until this device is released here, but it’s
definitely something both of us are curious about. The Trek, as it’s
called, can do multiple things well: Audio books from various sources,
podcasts, and other media consumption in controlled, secluded
environment without distractions, and it can do navigation in its
orientation mode. If you’re interested in hearing a bit about it, I
found the Tech Doctor Podcast episode on the Trek that was released a
few weeks before this writing.
The second thing that happened was that I came across the ElBraille, a
Windows 10 PC in docking station format that can connect with two models
of the Freedom Scientific Focus Blue braille displays. I own the 14 cell
version, so I asked a local dealer to give me one to try. It turned out
to not be a fit for me, for various braille-related reasons and more,
but it prompted me to look for other small braille devices that could be
used to read a braille book that had been converted from a digital
source. And because I was a huge fan of the Handy Tech Bookworm in the
1990s and 2000s, an 8 cell braille device that fit in the palm of one
hand and could be used to read for hours and hours, I eventually landed
with the Help Tech Actilino, a 16 cell display with many features
similar to the bookworm. I’ll be getting a device in two or three weeks
to test it for a while, and am very curious if I can use it to submerge
fully in a piece of braille literature without the weight of a full
braille book crushing my ribs. If it is anything close to the Bookworm
experience, I am almost sure I’m gonna love it.
Conclusion
As I have been using many mainstream devices for several years almost
exclusively until now, I have found that often, the sheer richness of
them can cause a cognitive load that gets in the way of enjoying certain
activities that are meant to help you unwind, just get to where you need
to be, or otherwise cause more hassle than should be necessary. It
dawned upon me that after all, some of these blindness specific devices
could again have a place in my life to help me relax more or take some
other stress out of daily activities. After all, these devices are a
very controlled environment, and I could imagine that not having to deal
with the inconsistencies of a screen reader, the inaccessibility of a
website, or the translation goofiness of some braille output could be
refreshing for a change.
I fully realize that this is not an option for everyone, and I want to
clearly state that these are views coming out of my personal experiences
over the past few years. These assistive technology devices still have
quite a high price tag, and especially given the high unemployment rate
among blind people in all parts of the world, and considering that
government funding is not available everywhere, it is more important
than ever that mainstream devices become more accessible with every day.
But people also differ, and time has shown that touch screen devices
aren’t for every person, either. Some people just cannot effectively use
them. So the statement that for some, such special devices are still the
only means of accessing certain content, remains as true today as it was
ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.
Interestingly, I have also noticed this tendency to consciously take
time off from the distractions of the smartphone has become more
prominent around me. My partner, for example, uses a Kindle Oasis for
reading books exclusively. It does not have notification bells and
whistles, but she can zoom the text to a scale that’s comfortable for
her eyes. As she once said: Books on paper can’t be zoomed. So this
tendency to use dedicated devices for immersive tasks is a theme I am
seeing more and more within people across a multitude of abilities.
Time will tell if this will actually work out for me the way I am hoping
it will, but the desire for some simplification and reduction of
overhead is definitely strong within me. 🙂
Disclaimer
The products mentioned here are purely mentioned as the result of my
research. This is not a sponsored blog post, I get no money from any of
the mentioned companies for mentioning their products. I did a lot of
product research and looked at far more options than I mentioned here,
but these were the ones I settled on for wanting to try them out.
https://www.marcozehe.de/2018/07/01/rediscovering-blindness-products/
--
David Goldfield, Assistive Technology Specialist WWW.David-Goldfield.Com
for additional resources and information about assistive technology training
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