Breaking In Windows by COOL BLIND TECH

Not a month has gone by since We posted an article on Narrator including AI-driven image tags and Microsoft is back at it yet again, though with an older project which finally has made public fruition. Introduced at Build 2016, this project had a goal of bringing powerful image recognition technology which could be used to augment every day life, especially when combined with the power of the cloud.

Today, The app is available in the iOS app store in the United States, Canada, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore, for free.

In a post to the Microsoft Accessibility blog, Microsoft explains it in this fashion .

The app uses artificial intelligence and the camera on your iPhone to perform a number of useful functions.

* Reading documents, including spoken hints to capture all corners of a document so that you capture the full page. It then recognizes the structure of the document, such as headings, paragraphs and lists, allowing you to rapidly skip through the document using voiceover.

* Identifying a product based on its barcode. Move the phone’s camera over the product; beeps indicate how close the barcode is – the faster the beeps, the closer you are – until the full barcode is detected. It then snaps a photo and reads the name of the product.

* Recognizing people based on their face, and providing a description of their visual appearance, such as their gender, facial expression and other identifying characteristics.

* Recognizing images within other apps – just tap Share, and Recognize with Seeing AI.

In our experience, the app is able to even read computer screens in the short-text channel mode, and does so instantly as you move your arm towards and away from text. Reading coupons in a newspaper is more intuitive than having to wait for a picture to be snapped, and bar codes are often recognized in under 30 seconds thanks to the way it guides the user to it. Face recognition works well and can be taught to recall faces of loved ones after you take 3 pictures of them. Easily, this app rivals more expensive solutions and will become a must-have tool within any vision-impaired iOS user's arsenal. The incredible power of Seeing AI lies in not just the cloud, but also at being able to perform this recognition offline and in real-time. Turning airplane mode on during a page scan still kept up with scrolling printed text, however features such as bar code and face/scene detection will require one.

Join Jessica to understand just how intuitive the app really is in this podcast and see for yourself what Seeing AI can do, as not even ten thousand words could give it full justification. She walks through the app, from the quick start guide to the various channels in great detail.

The official tutorials for the app, comprised of 9 videos, can be found at this link of a YouTube playlist.

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.

There are many twitter clients that are available for Windows, but very few are designed to work with screen readers. In this podcast, Leonid demonstrates the interface, as well as several useful features on TWBlue, a free, open source twitter client.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

In this podcast, I demonstrate how to use Reaper to import a piece of audio, select a portion of it, and export it to GoldWave in order to make a ringtone for the iPhone. Those wishing to make tones for Android may follow these steps, but no exporting to GoldWave is necessary. Just save it in Reaper and transfer it to your phone. Have fun!

If you're wishing to get Reaper and GoldWave, look no further:

Here's Reaper

Here's GoldWave

In November of 2016, Jenny Lay-Flurrie revealed to Cool Blind Tech, in an exclusive announcement, that braille support was coming to Narrator. Now the feature has rolled out in Windows 10 insiders build 15025. It is still in beta, but James Oates has decided to give us an early look at this new feature.

He also shows us the new mono-audio feature that has been added to Narrator.

In this episode, James Oates demonstrates how to setup Windows Calendar on a PC running Windows 10 Anniversary Update. He shows us how to create an event and send out a calendar invite. He reviews the keyboard shortcuts available in Windows Calendar, and he creates an event using Cortana. During this demonstration, James uses Narrator with ETI Eloquence for Windows. Eloquence is an add-on that can be purchased here.

We're always excited to see good quality audio games, particularly ones with high bars in sound and game play hit the market. One fault many games suffer from is replay-ability - can I still do cool post-game action and have things feel more random in the story after I'm done? Or have I just wasted $39 of my money for a week's worth of distractions, anticipation, and nervous fits over not being able to complete my game?

When playing Manamon, these were some of the factors that lead us to consider it a great choice for an Audio game. It's at least a year's worth of development effort which culminates in an action-packed adventure featuring a Pokemon-style environment with similar concepts. For example, trainers are tamers, but just like Pokemon, you have starter characters and types. You complete quests on a journey to uncover the hidden operations of the Shadow Kingdom, and battle to become more and more powerful through levelling up your Manamon and turn-based fighting opponents.

We recommend two resources for your journey, friend.

The main Manamon game page for downloading and ordering,

and The Audiogames.net forum topic where you can find a turn-by-turn walkthrough of the game, if you get a little stuck in a puzzle. I wouldn't completely spoil the fun with it, though - but in-game clues are sometimes less obvious. Good luck on your travels, and may Ziognioss be with you.

In this episode of the REAPER series, Alex shows you how to switch and combine takes in an audio track to make one cohesive track. We listen to some seriously underwhelming takes, and some really cool and intricate ones.

Takes are sections of audio that are recorded, most likely multiple times and are able to be combined to make a "perfect" section of music.

Next, he discusses automation. Automation is a way to alter plugin or track parameters by creating an envelope that automatically gets triggered when the project is played. For example, increase a track's volume for a guitar solo or vocal line.

In the example Alex increases and decreases the volume of his solo/lead guitar track to emphasize various parts where needed.

Alex then shows us track templates and their conveniences.

In this episode, James Oates introduces us to the built in Windows Mail client, which is a part of Windows 10 Anniversary Update. He shows us how to configure multiple accounts, create a signature line for our outgoing mail, how to create and send a message, how to reply to a message, how to activate a link within a message, how to quickly navigate a webpage using Microsoft Edge, how to search for a message, how to find all of your mail folders, how to use mail filters, how to format text in a message, and how to create and send a message using Cortana. Throughout this podcast, James uses Narrator, the built-in screen reader from Microsoft. He also shows us most of the handy keyboard shortcuts for Windows Mail.

Welcome back.

Here, Alex walks us through editing presets by hand using Notepad. Since basically everything that's good isn't accessible in the music world, you gotta do silly and time-consuming workarounds. Depending on what kind of tone maniac and audio aficionado you are, you might decide to go through this.