All Cool Blind Tech Shows

Rachel is live at ACB 17 interviewing Ruby Russell and Louie Scheel, co-founders of Distinctive Beddings. Listen in as they give us advice on what to do in the bed.

Get intimate with Distinctive Beddings on FaceBook here.

In this informative VIP, James, Jessica, and Nelson bring us some of the top stories from the CBT website. They also give us their Cool Picks for the week, and answer some fan feedback.

Top Stories

Portable Speaker is the First Speaker That Turns Your iPhone Into a Conference System

Rayz Rally is a pocket-sized speaker, together with the Rayz App it makes calling easier & clearer anytime, anywhere.

The clarity of a conference system, in a palm sized portable speaker that’s powered by your iPhone or computer. Plug it in and it works. One smart button handles everything you need. It’s that simple. The only portable speaker on the market that offers conference call quality sound.

New VR Headset to Help Visually Impaired See

With a swipe of your finger this new technology, called Iris Vision, uses Samsung VR headset combined with software uploaded to a Samsung Galaxy phone.

People with low vision are able to get up close and personal to the world around them.

Users see a bubble appear that they can make bigger or smaller. Then within the bubble, a person can zoom in or zoom back out.

The image looks like a giant wide screen TV right in front of the eyes, so it works for so many people with different eye conditions like macular degeneration, glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, and diabetes related eye diseases.

Complete list of Braille Commands for iOS 11: and How to Customize Them.

If you have a braille display with a Perkins style keyboard, you can control your iOS device by entering certain key combinations. I will include a list of these braille keyboard commands. While some of them will work with iOS 10 as well, iOS 11 will allow you to assign keyboard commands where none currently exist, and also change existing keyboard commands.

How To Find Which Apps Are Not Compatible On IPhone And IPad In IOS 11

The CBT team have told you about some of the exciting new features coming to your iPhone or iPad in iOS 11, but there’s one “feature” that many users are going to be upset about: Some of your apps, possibly including apps you use every day, will stop working.

What does this mean for you? It could mean nothing. You may not use any apps that are still 32-bit, meaning the developers have updated their apps to 64-bit, which is Apple’s newest specs. If you’re concerned that an app you love or use often may be affected and you want to make sure you know what you’re getting into before downloading iOS 11, you can check if the apps on your phone are 32-bit.

Cool Picks

MXL 770 Condenser Microphone

As a veteran podcaster, Nelson has always sounded great on the air. Just ask him. He will tell you it is true. But even he can’t believe how good he sounds with this new microphone.

Alexa Dungeon Adventure Skill

Jessica goes old-school gaming with the latest tech. Listen as she demos a Dungeon and Dragons style game on an Amazon Echo device.

Hulu

It doesn’t have audio-description yet, but James just can’t stop binge watching all of the greatest shows on Hulu. How else will he be able to keep up with the Kardashians?

In this episode, James Oates takes us through an unboxing of the Aira glasses. He describes everything that come with the glasses. He also shows us how to set them up and make a call using the Aira app on an iPhone.

Join the CBT Team as they explore this week's latest Cool Picks.

Cool Picks

* Actiview App

* Dolphin EasyReader for iOS

* Plantronics BackBeat Fit Bluetooth Headphones

Join Jessica Rickards for an exclusive spotlight with David Jeppson, executive director of Computers for the blind, a Texas-based organization providing computers to blind and visually impaired individuals across the United States regardless of circumstance. computers for the blind accepts refurbished windows computers and is run by volunteers. This organization is open to volunteer opportunities across the country; from those who wish to give time in their local Texas refurbishment center, to tech support professionals who can provide remote assistance, to those who can contribute financially.

If you are interested in learning more about this organization, feel free to contact them via telephone or email via their website.

If you do a lot of online shopping, Computers for the Blind is also partnered with

Join Jessica, Tomi, and Rachel for another exciting VIP as they explore this week's latest in technology. This week, it's all about movies, and the devices you watch them on. Check out these exciting stories.

Show highlights

* Amazon announces half-price Prime memberships for families in the U.S. Receiving assistance and announces the availability of Audio Description on several Amazon Video titles.

* New accessibility features found in iOS 11 which also include low vision enhancements like Smart Invert

* Actiview comes to an accessible theatre near you with the premier of Cars 3

Cool Picks

* Actiview App

* Dolphin EasyReader for iOS

* Plantronics BackBeat Fit Bluetooth Headphones

Join CBT this week as they talk about their favourite Cool Picks.

Cool Picks

As Joel is the audio master on the CBT team, his pick of choice is the app he uses to do all his audio magic.

Reaper

Since Jessica is the traveling ninja, she wants to tell us all about this new transit app she makes extensive use of.

CityMapper Transit App for iOS, web and Android

While at the gym, Rachel really enjoys a great thriller to keep her energized throughout

her workout. She has chosen

Voicedream Reader

You can read pretty much anything, with a variety of voices or fonts to help consume the content the way you want.

Listen and enjoy!

In this podcast, James Oates takes a look at the new accessibility settings in iOS 11 Beta. Join us as he uncovers some exciting new features for VoiceOver and braille users.

In this Spotlight Interview, James Oates sits down with Stephen Ewell, the executive director of the Consumer Technology Association Foundation. The CTA Foundation, a public, national foundation affiliated with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), was launched in 2012 with the mission to link seniors and people with disabilities with technologies to enhance their lives.

The foundation strategically supports programs that affect these communities and facilitates dialog between industry, consumers, government, advocacy groups and other key stakeholders.

Steve talks about the foundation’s role in featuring accessible products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the foundation’s role in producing the first fully accessible self-driving vehicle, and his trips to CSUN and South by Southwest.

You can follow Stephen Ewell on Twitter here, and you can follow the CTA Foundation on Twitter here.

If there was a word which is to define the era that dominates this early 21st century, it no doubt would be the cloud. Everything has moved to incorporating some cloud-based feature or another. Whilst screen reading has done OCR and other image recognition prior, this too was relegated to locally performed magic, rather than anything that used the cloud to process data. The rise of huge AI clusters which now can process trillions of calculations a second has created a better opportunity for so much more to be off-loaded to these systems.

For Microsoft, this is called Cognitive services and it is a platform any developer can leverage to create AI-generated content for an image.

Once you combine this with a screen reader, things get very interesting. Such has happened in the latest Windows 10 insider build, 16226 Could a screen reader some day suggest labels for controls through an intelligent API which can interpret the icons? Could a computer describe a powerPoint presentation, typically full of rectangles and decorations?

To be clear, Apple is also doing this in iOS 11, though the image processing they use is all on-hardware, not cloud-based. Microsoft is first to announce this to the public, and users will be able to compare it to that of iOS 11 once the public beta of it is released. Narrator is noteable for being able to generate full-sentence descriptions of images, rather than just a few words or phrases which explain its content, as done on iOS and Facebook. The insider program is open to anyone, and submitting feedback is highly encouraged if you venture into this world. As well as having lots of patience, and perhaps not a main computer that you install it on but a virtual machine or spare.

Do you see ways in which you would use this technology for yourself to help understand the web or apps better? Feel free to let us know in the comments.