EBU Access Cast

The European Blind Union held its 11th general assembly in Rome on October 27-30. Bart was invited to record a special edition of the podcast. He spoke with the outgoing and incoming president of EBU, Wolfgang Angermann, and Rodolfo Cattani, as well as  with its executive director Mokrane Boussaïd who is about to retire. He also interviewed the exhibitors in the tech fair. Companies that we interviewed at Sightcity were not revisited.

It Cares developed an app for the purpose of this event. They used their platform Pharoart that allows clients to quickly build an accessible native Android and iPhone application.

JKJ sells tactile pavings with integrated RFID tags. An electronic stick communicates the information in the tag to the LVE System app on your smart phone.

Letismart is another way to make the white cane smart. A smart city with beacons can help you navigate and interact with smart devices around you.

In Bologna, Ancona and Catania you can visit a tactile museum: Museo Anteros and Museo Tolomeo, and Museo Omero

and Polo tattile Multimediale

The latter also houses a braille transcription center.

Tactile books can also be bought from La Federazione Nazionale delle Istituzioni pro Ciechi

Discover astronomy and learn everything about the earth, moon, sun and other planets with the hand made educational tools of the Associazione Pontina di Astronomia

Dolphin Computer Access produces Supernova (screenreader and magnification software for Windows), Guide Connect (providing access to Windows application through a standardised interface) and Easyreader (a free smartphone app to read Daisy online content from libraries all over the world).

En-Vision America demonstrates the ScripTalk station and ScripTalk app to listen to medical prescriptions, given that your pharmacist encoded the information in a label, glued on the medicine package.

Nattiq Technologies from Dubai builds customised braille products. A braille display and a Windows computer in one box. You provide the specifications and they build it for you.

Harpo demonstrates the new Mountbatten Brailler named Tutor and PIAF for tactile images.

Humanware produces portable magnifiers, Daisy players (with GPS) and braille displays that also can function as a note taker running on Android.

Index Braille sells four types of braille embossers. Their CEO explaines the differences and what software you can use to prepare the files before embossing.

EasyTv is a project that will increase the availability of audio description and captioning by trying to automate the production:

The assembly was held with the generous support of Google.

If you have  any Feedback about this Episode you can contact us on our e-mail or send us

a tweet on our Twitter account. The next Standard Episode of the EBU Access Cast will be back with you in December.

Welcome to the 15th episode of the EBU Access Cast. This month we commented the iOS 13 accessibility improvements and new bugs that came with the new iOS. We are disappointed that the official release brought so many accessibility issues and we hope that Apple will fix them soon.

Microsoft announced Surface Neo and Surface Duo at the Microsoft Surface event. What came as a surprise is that the smaller foldable Surface Duo runs Android, and, the larger device Surface Neo will run a variant of the company's operating system Windows X. In that occasion Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Windows will not be the most important layer - the focus will now be on applications and services. Time will tell how this will reflect the further development of the Windows operating system.

The Microsoft's Seeing AI application has gotten some significant updates over the last months and we are happy that we are now able to choose the OCR language on the short text channel or to create a Siri voice shortcut to open the application on a specific channel. More about the recent updates can be read in the changelog on the Appstore page.

Similarly, Seeing Assistant Home by Transition Technologies S.A. has gotten some notable updates, namely it now introduces an automatic barcode reading mode where for previously assigned codes, the label is read automatically without displaying the HTML window (for iOS and Android) and a text recognition mode was added (iOS exclusive so far). The significant thing with the text recognition is that it boasts three modes depending on how small or big the area containing the text is so it is well-suited for reading text out of tiny LCD screens or CD covers, for example.

The results for the WebAim screen Reader User Survey #8 are published. We are aware that the survay does not represent the choice of all users and that the survey is available only in English and it excludes non-English speaking users. However the survey shows the trends in the usage of screen readers and the results are often used as a reference point by the industry.

JAWS public beta 2020 is available and the full release will be launched at the end of October.

Despite high quality voices many of us prefer to listen Eloquence and have used the voice on the Android operating system. Unfortunately the Eloquence voice has been abandoned and it will not be available anymore on the Google appstore. Code Factory informed the users by e-mail and we are transmitting the entire message here.

Start of quote

Dear Code Factory friends,

We would like to announce the end of life of one of our products: Eloquence for Android.

As you may know, Google now requires that applications using native code (such as ours) provide a 64-bit version of its binaries. Eloquence has a very old code base, and the effort required to port it to 64 bits has been evaluated and unfortunately, the app sales do not justify this investment.

This does not affect our other Android products, such as Vocalizer for Android, for which we already provide a 64 bit version. Also, this does not affect Voices for NVDA (which includes Eloquence) on Windows.

We also want to make it clear that those users who have purchased the application will be able to continue using it, as per Google Play's policies. Also, we will continue to provide support for this application through our Help Desk. However, as of today, no new updates to Eloquence for Android can be published.

Here you can find some more details on Google's policies:

64-bit Requirement:

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/01/get-your-apps-ready-for-64-bit.html

Download purchased apps (even if they are no longer published):

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/113410?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

It's been a great 6 years of development for this application. It's a shame that Eloquence for Android has not reached the amount of interest and sales that we hoped for.

Best wishes,

-- Xavi Martínez

Software developer

End of quote

The European Web Accessibility Directive applies and websites of the public sector bodies need to meet the accessibility standards. If this is not the case in your country, fill out the EDF survey and help them to identify the issues.

A team of IT specialists in Vienna made available the source code and patterns for 3D printing a magnet-based braille keyboard that can be attached at the back of any smartphone.

Voice guidance in Google Maps, built for people with impaired vision  became available for now for users in USA and Japan

APH announced a big update for users of their NearBy Explorer application which will allow the users to use their GPS navigational app with Open Street Maps instead of Navtech Maps which they previously used

If you want to play UNO, you can now do it with the new Braille UNO cards.

As useful gadget of the month, we recommend you the cell phone lanyard holder on which you can attach your phone and use it hands free. The case can be purchased in any shop that sells camera and phone accessories.

At the end of the episode you can hear our demo for the Advanced Braille Keyboard for Android.

If you have any Feedback for us, send us your comments or suggestions via our Twitter page or e-mail and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Welcome to the 14th EBU AccessCast! (September 2019)

After our summer holidays Mario, Tanja, Bart and Pawel are back with you and as always, we have quite a lot to say for this month.

Bart got himself a new pair of Bose frames which represent the alternative to the well-known aftershockz boan conduction headset, and he shared his Short Review on them.

Mario also bought a new tuner for string instruments, called Roadie Bass. The tuner is very accessible for partially sighted community as well as blind musicians, because the end user is able to make all the presets thru an app on the phone, and then sync all the settings with the tuner via bluetooth.

After the settings are synced, all you have to do is turn on the tuner, choose your setting for the particular Instrument, and the robotic part will automatically tune each of the strings on the Instrument in very Short time.

In the news Section we prepared the following for you:

Apple just released a bunch of their new products including new iPhones 11, Applewatch 5, new Ipads and news for gamers as well as new subscriptions for Apple arcade. Applevis made nice recap of the eventwhich you can find on the following page.

The LEGO Group to pilot LEGO® Audio & Braille instructions

To hear more about Matthew Shifrin, main person behind the Lego braille instructions project, watch the following presentation from Ted Talks.

Audio described content plays a big role in the life of blind or partially sighted people. Therefore this time we found 2 different very similar topics launched in different parts of the world which are working thru todays most used Video platform in the world. Sure enough, we are talking about Youtube. You Describe platform collects audio described Youtube videos made by volunteers

In the Nederlands scribit.tv provides a very similar Service as youdescribe platform, available for Dutch blind users.

New OCR and object recognition free Android app called Speak! Started to gain a lot of attention from the community, We are bringing you the demo of the app at the end of the  podcast so if you are the Android user this is definitely a nice app to have on your smartphone since it has many functionalities of the Seeing AI which is for now available only for iOS users.

EBU published a report on 'Most frequent problems experienced by blind and partially sighted persons when travelling by planes which we are sharing with you and we hope that you will share it further.

If you are planning to travel and in the same time you have some kind of disability, than check out the Accessible travelling guide from Lonely Planet.

Last but not least, check out the page about new plans for new European disability strategy which is starting from 2020, and will last for the next 10 years. Therefore you have the time until the October 23rd to write your Opinion what can be improved to make our life better across whole European Union.

At the end Mario prepared for you the demo of the mentioned Speak app which you can listen to. At the end Mario prepared for you the demo of the above-mentioned Speak app which you can listen, and comment. If you have any Feedback for us, send us your suggestions or other questions, via our Twitter page or e-mail and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Welcome to the 13th episode of the EBU Access Cast, this time hosted by Paweł who is joined by Tanja, Mario and Bart to discuss all that happened in July in assistive technologies.

Paweł got himself a new iPod Touch 7th gen and is yet again ready to explore the accessibility of the Apple ecosystem and iOS apps alongside his usual Android phone. Meanwhile Tanja had the chance to speak in front of a large publicity of web developers conference Voxxed Days which took place in Luxembourg. Her presentation was well-received and even met with some social media attention as many of the attendees tweeted about it. Check it out for yourself and watch it here.

BeMyEyes has opened up its specialized help network to users all around the world. Google and Careline are the first two companies to be made available globally, however they are reachable only in English and during the US working hours.

Google is back with plenty of news on their side as they release Chrome 75 to the public, boasting their long-awaited, AI-based image description feature. From the preliminary tests it seems to be working quite well, apart from that, users started noticing that it is now possible to turn accessibility services on their Android devices on and off using Google Assistant.

Germany is launching a state-wide app allowing to request help in case of emergency through text messaging beginning 2020. The app will also share the location so that the operators know where to dispatch the necessary help. The app may be an answer to the upcoming European Accessibility Act, giving those with speech impairments access to the emergency helplines. Read more about it in the original article (in German) here. Listeners are also encouraged to share examples of how accessibility improves in their countries. We will be glad to include them in our next episodes.

Gatwick Airport has received an award for the most accessible airport. The features highlighted were the availability of assistance material in braille, special buttons allowing to call for assistance and their involvement in training their staff and stakeholders in assisting passengers with disabilities. Bologne was another airport highlighted for their outstanding care about accessibility needs. This mention gave the team the opportunity to share their experiences regarding assistance at different airports in Europe.

Apple has applied for a patent within which a solution should be developed allowing the blind to spatially explore maps and learn about their surroundings in this way. The user should be able to experience the road ahead from A to B by just moving the finger across the screen. Apple plans also to introduce accessibility into the 3D representation of the area.

A new version of NVDA, 2019.2 is approaching with a handful of long-awaited features. For one, braille users should be happy to see the Freedom Scientific displays being automatically detected and certain advanced settings of individual displays can be handled from within the settings interface. Another welcome change is the ability to give the Microsoft voices a rate boost and the ability to assign individual keyboard shortcuts to different settings’ profiles.

From 1st July 2019, newly produced electric and hybrid cars are required to include an AVAS system which will alert passersby about the car’s presence. This change is a result of a long-standing EBU Silent Cars campaign which was already mentioned in the previous episodes of the podcast. Tanja interviewed Jessica Schroeder of the DBSV asking about the implications and limitations of this regulation. We also present samples of how AVAS systems might sound like in a Jaguar and Nissan car.

The show is concluded by the demo of the Voice OCR app done by Tanja. The app has recently received a significant update and is now delivering promising results . You can read about the recent changes here.

As always, we encourage you to contact us, either on our Twitter or our email and look forward to connecting with you again in the September episode, as August is the holiday season for the team.

Welcome to the 12 episode of the EBU Access Cast. We decided to refresh the way how our podcast is presented, so from now on every month you will hear somebody different from our team who will be the main host for the episode. In the June episode Tanja took the position of the captain and she is joined by Mario, Bart and Pawel who became our newest team member. This time we are bringing you the accessibility news from the Apple conference WWDC 2019. In its opening Apple announced that technology is the most powerfull when everyone can use it and they showed clearly their commitment by presenting plenty of new accessibility functionalities on Apple devices that we can expect from this autumn. Starting from iOS13 and iPadOs the accessibility menu will be moved from the general settings to the top level settings which clearly shows the importance that Apple gives to accessibility. The feature that received most attention is the full voice control that will be available starting from MacOSCatalina and iOS13. The feature is ment for persons with motor disabilities, but this is another functionality that everyone can benefit from. Read more on the Apple VIS blog and listen to the Apple VIS podcast with Sarah Herrlinger, Director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives at Apple and Dean Hudson, Accessibility Evangelist at Apple. Another functionality that we are looking forward is the automatic recognition of unlabeled buttons in inaccessible apps. Custom gestures, a feature that we know from other screen readers, will be available in VoiceOver and will allow easier access to predefined functions. Liblouis will be supported on all Apple devices and the response time for braille screen typing will be increased for those who type in braille very fast. Low vision users will benefit from hover text functionality that will allow to enlarge the selected area on the screen. The major news for Apple WatchOS 6 is that applications can run independently from the iPhone and it will have its own Appstore. Applications for listening audiobooks, voice memo, calculator and other interesting applications in the health section will be available from the WatchOS6. Check out the keynote on Youtube

Microsoft released the 1903 spring update with several accessibility improvements in Narrator, for the full list check out the Windows 10 help forum

Talking about accessibility and screen readers on Windows, the Vispero Group just launched the June JAWS update and the list of improvements is available on the Freedom Scientific webpage Automatic image recognition is becoming much better and accurate as we move forward, therefore mobile application TapTapSee that most of us used some years ago brings a new, completely AI-based image recognition. The quality of descriptions will be much more accurate and the recognition will be faster. We tested the Clew application that serves for path retracing in the indoor navigation, it is available only for iOS devices and it uses Apple ARKit and camera to understand the surrounding. While the accuracy of the application is very high in the current version, we found out that the next update will provide the functionality to save the recorded path and we hope that the list of features will be extended to help visually impaired persons to orientate more easily in an unknown indoor environment. At the end of our episode listen to the interview that we made with Feelif and discover a new way of experiencing shapes and images by haptics and sound. As always feel free to leave us a comment or suggestion on our Twitter account or by e-mail and we are looking forward to be back with you in July.

Wellcome to the 11th EBU Access Cast. This time we have a special episode on Sight City 2019 and we talk about all interesting tech goodies we saw at the conference. At the beginning of the episode you can listen to the interviews which Mario and Tanja prepared, and than after Mario, Tanja, Bart and our special guest Paweł Masarczyk  who is very known podcaster from Poland in the Tyflopodcast discuss all about the things they saw at the Sight City.

The first interview comes from Vispero group where Jan Blum presented to us what's new with all series of their products such as JAWS, Zoom, Fusion, and also Focus Blue braille displays 5g: 14, 40 and 80 characters. Jan also informed us about Omni reader: scanning and reading device as well as the products from Optelec Germany: video magnifier CCTV device with 16 inch screen.

In the second interview we spoke with Mr Siegfried Kipke, CEO of Help Tech that is for many listeners better known as former Handy Tech which is a very good German manufacturer of braille devices. The products demonstrated in this interview were Actilino, portable and compact braille notetaking device with 16 ergonomic concaved braille cells, unique functions such as detection of the reading positioning, bluetooth connectivity with up to 4 different devices in the same time for transferring files or to use it as a braille display, magnetic USB connection, 16 gb of storage and support for SD cards plus standard lithium batteries which are possible to find in todays smartphones. We also spoke about Active Braille and Active Star braille devices, and we had a chance to see the new Active Braille Plus with 40 cells which has similar functionalities as Actilino, but with aditional 40 braille sells, and new rabber keys which make this unit really very quiet when typing. In addition, it supports Kindle and Kindle Fire HD  devices and the plan is to add the support for the Amazon's Alexa assistant.

Our next visit was at the Kanematsu corporation booth and we spoke with the manager Mr. Tetsuo Takamatsu about their new product called TactPlus. TactPlus  is a product from Japan and it represents the first braille and 3d image printer which uses thermal printing on capsule paper. It has only 5 kg and it has the same size as a standard Inkjet printer. We were standing closely while the printer was working and we couldn’t hear any noise coming out from it. In fact our opinion is that this is the most silent braille printer that we herd so far, and we were very positively surprised by the quality of the embossed graphics and braille text.

Another very good product which we demonstrated in the next interview is BraiBook and it comes from Spain. It is the first portable braille book reader with only 1 braille cell that has a size of a computer mouse. The cell can be refreshed at the desired speed which can be adjusted with a little joystick located on the left side of the device. Mr. Eric Sicard showed us the product and he explained to us that BraiBook supports currently 40 languages which are provided via the open source Liblouis braille translator, and that it also provides the text-to-speech functionality for users who want to read it via TTS through additional headphone jak. With 64 gb of internal memory, users have more than enough space to store thousands of ebooks in various formats such as Epub, PDF or TXT files and read it on the go. In few minutes we were able to get the unit going along and read the text very fast.

The APH booth was very busy with the demonstration of their new products, and one of them which we saw in action was Code Jumper for which we can't wait the official release in Europe. As you will hear from our comments later in the episode, the rest of our team is also very happy with Code Jumper and our opinion is that the product has very bright future in the blindness community. Besides Code Jumper we  also saw BrailleBuzz which is really cool gadget for very young blind students who are just starting to learn braill. Speaking of braille devices, on the APH stand they presented also the Braile Trail, 14 cell braille display which is produced by HumanWare.

Another company which is bringing lot of attention for last few years comes from Korea, and it is possible to see them almost on every assistive technology conference. They are called Dot incorporation, so we went to see what do they have in store for us this time. We were able to see the Dot Watch which was previously mentioned in our episodes, but we were also able to see the brand new low cost braille reader Dot Mini. It has 16 braille cels and built in speaker, Dot Mini represents modern reading unit and portable Braille display for blind people. The unit has also TTS support as well as the support for Daisy format, support for SD cards, USB and Bluetooth.

Besides all the things we mentioned, we saw a bunch of other things for which we didn't have the time to do the interviews such as meteg product: 2 dimentional graphic braille display, Tactonom by Inventivio and Seika braille displays by Nippon Telesoft.

Another cool thing which we mentioned in the later section of the podcast which we saw was the washing machine that has buttons with tactile markings. The buttons are also touch sensitive and by touching them will produce a sound to distinguish the number of the turns in the spin cycle or the desired temperature in a predefined program. The washing machine is designed to be accessible to visually impaired and it is manufactured by Miele. Miele started to make home appliances with universal design in mind since 2007, and on the next link you can read more information about it.

Pawel saw also an interesting product from Italy called FelixPhone, which is bringing another adopted smartphone for blind people, Mediavoice - Speaky Facile, the device which connects thru your smart TV, and Bruno, the reading Machine for low vision and blind people.

Last year the EBU Access Cast was launched on the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Therefore at the end of this episode we tell you why this day is inportant for our community and we are sharing with you a short but very informative article about it.

We hope that this episode was interesting to you and that we were able to bring at least a small piece of many different things which were possible to see and experience on this years Sight City. As always you are free to leave us the comments and the suggestions on our e-mail and Twitter and we're looking forward to be back with you in June.

Welcome to the 10th EBU Access Cast. We are extremely happy that our podcast reached the 10th Episode so far, and we hope that we will keep you interested in the future as well. For you this time Mario, Jakob and Tanja prepared lots of goodies and Bart was very busy with preparing 3 nice interviews which you can listen in the second half of this Episode. But before the interviews, let's check what's new in the news Section.

• New option called accessibility events appeared under accessibility settings in the newest version for Voice Over users on Mac and iOS. While potentially this can be a nice feature which could help developers to detect that the user is using assistive Technologies on their web sites, the option is concerned as a privacy issue for some users.
• Another very nice app called Voice Dream Scanner which is able to do very good and fast OCR recognition recently appeared on the appstore, so Jakob told us his Opinion about it. You can check out more here and listen to a podcast with demonstration of the Voice Dream Scanner.
• New update for NVDA appeared as well from NVAccess, and this time it fixes a few bugs found in the original NVDA 2019.1 version.
• Android Accessibility Suite 7.3 adds Screen Search, more continuous reading options.

Next month many Europeans will vote on the European elections. However when we talk about persons with dissabilities, we have to make sure that the voting system in each countrey is accessible so we can participate in the elections as everyone else. Jakob, Mario, Tanja and Bart share their experiences about it from their perspective, and we are also bringing to you further links in the shownotes about this particular topic:

• EBU Statement on the European elections 2019
• A fundamental right to vote: Removing barriers for people with disabilities
• EDF recommends 10 REASONS TO VOTE IN THE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS to persons with disabilities
• EDF petition European elections for all

Last month in our previous episode, we covered the European Accessibility Act which in the meantime was adopted by the European Council.

Next week, some of us will visit Sight City, the biggest exhibition for assistive tech products in Europe, and we hope to bring you nice interviews from there. Click here to know more about Sight City.

Bart prepared 3 interviews for us this time:

• Interview with Susanna Laurin, recorded at the 11th edition of the Funka Accessibility Days in Stockholm: Susanna Laurin on Twitter:
• Interview with Saqib Shaikh, main person behind Seeing AI app, recorded at an accessibility summit organised by Microsoft in Brussels. Saqib Shaikh on Twitter:
• Interview with Jarnail Chudge, main person behind the Soundscapes app, recorded at an accessibility summit organised by Microsoft in Brussels: Jarnail Chudge on Twitter

We are always happy to receive new contributions and suggestions from you, so if you got any comments or suggestions for us, contact us thru our e-mail link or send us a tweet on the Ebuaccesscast Twitter.

Wellcome to the Ebu Access Cast 09. As you will see March was very busy month for many updates in the assistive tech industry, as well as in the European Union which are very important for visually impaired community. Jakob, Mario and Tanja this time prepared many news, demos and the first guest interview for our podcast, so let's jump straight into the action and check what do we have in store for you this time.

At the beginning all of us shared the news about our new gadgets, which we will show thru the demos during this and the future episodes for you. However, before we show you the stuff from our virtual playground, let's see which news do we have:

Seeing AI got new March update with few very interesting features among which we would recommend  detection of  objects on the pictures. If you stay untill the end of the episode, you will be able to hear how that sounds in the demo section.

It seams that image recognition thru the artificial intelligence is slowly but surely becoming the trend  inside of the assistive tech. Why do we say that? Because Vispero Group prepared new JAWS update for March, and one of its many features is also the possibility of recognising the images. If you haven't updated your version of JAWS for Windows, right now is ideal time to do it.

Spring has come for NVDA users as well because new release 2019.1 just saw the light of day, with almost 50 different improvements since the last official version. Besides many new features added, we would like to point out improved support for MS Office products, especially Office 2016 and Office 365. If you are using one of those products, please test the newest version of NVDA and let us know how do you like it.

Smart devices can be used for many different things, and playing games is definitely one of them. While many sighted people play lots of games on their smart devices, with blind and visually impaired population this is not the case unless the games are designed with accessibility in mind. This time, we bring to you the article about designing and finding the games for Android platform.

 If you are happy owner of Google Home check out the following article about possible games which you can play on it.

Many people with different tipes of dissabilities will be happy to hear that European Accessibility Act is behind the corner. Therefor, we are bringing to you news from the European Parliament about it.

The end of February brought up an very interesting article from European Disability Forum with a detailed study about the state of digital accessibility of public government websites  around Europe. Unfortunately, European Parliament didn't show up as the best student in class this time.

Living in the smart city can be great if you are not a  person with disability. However if you have some kind of special needs, than you might find that smart cities can be nice, but also very lousy. If you are interested to know more about current and future developments and initiatives about smart and accessible cities in Europe, check out the following article:

If you think that you herd everything well than you are very very wrong, because we brought up the first interview for the Ebu Access Cast. We Sat down with Alejandro Moledo from European Disability Forum and talked about the upcoming European Accessibility Act as well as current state of the accessibility of the websites of the European governments. Once more we would like to say a huge thank you for explaining everything to our listeners. We look forward to have you again in the future shows for the upcoming topics.

At the end of this episode Jakob Rosin prepared 2 demos for you, The first is short coverage of KOBOLD VR200 ROBOT vacume cleaner, and second talks about new improvements in Seeing AI.

Do you think you have something to say, well don't be afraid, send us an e-mail or drop us the tweet on our Ebu Access Cast twitter page. We will be back with you in April, but untill than be happy and safe!

Wellcome to the 8th episode of the Ebu Access Cast. This time Mario, Jakob, Bart and Tanja prepared lots of goodies for you from the news section, and we achieved our own personal record in amount of demos prepared for our podcast. We would like to say a huge thank you to Mr. Daniel Montalvo who send to us 2 demos about amazon Echo which we are publishing in this episode, and you can hear also the demo about Google Interpreter at the end of this podcast. But first, let's see what do we have in stock from the news section:

Vispero group prepared for us new January update for Jaws 2019, and here you can see What's new in the newest update:

Mario informed the listeners that NVDA 2019.1 is being in development and which changes can be expected in the official release. If you would like to test the newest NVDA releases head over to their Snapshots page and download your copy. However be prepared that their snapshot releases are being updated on the daily bases and that the code can be sometimes unstable, but that is always the case with beta software packages. We warned you in advance, so if something gets broken on your machine, don't blame us 😊

Google interpreter finally became available around the globe, and therefor Mario and Tanja prepared the demo of it which you can hear right at the end of this episode.

If you don't know what is google interpreter mode check out the following link:

New image recognition extention called Auto Alt Text is out for some time and it supports Google Chrome browser. Tanja and  Jakob tested the extension and they gave us their opinion about it..

EBU started its Silent Cars Campaign a decade ago and pushed for Acoustic Vehicle Alert Systems (AVAS) to protect blind and partially sighted pedestrians from unwanted accidents with electric vehicles (See also the EBU Q&A on AVAS).  While on one hand the electric cars are much better alternative for our echological environment, the absence of the noise in the electric cars makes a huge safety problem for our population. Therefor all of us gave our thumbs up to the this EBU campaign and we express our opinions about it. We are bringing to you a few more articles about the same subject, such as the Ted Talk from Renzo Vitale one of the inventors who made its own electric car sound machines, and another article where new pedestrian noise makers are spotted in new Tesla 3 models.

 Also if you would like to give us your thoughts about the particular subject drop us an e-mail and we will share it in the next episodes.

Unfortunately website inaccessibility can appear everywhere, and so it can be the case with your favorite pop artists.

 Beyonce's Parkwood Entertainment Sued Over Website Accessibility

Microsoft has something really interesting in their store for young blind and partialy sighted kids who would like to get into programing:

 With Code Jumper, experts look to jumpstart computer science interest for kids who are blind

After all the news which we got for you, it is the right time for Demo time, or better to say Demo times, since this time we bring you 3 demos about Amazon Echo and Google Interpreter. We hope tht you liked them as much as we did. We are looking forward to be back with you next month, and don't forget to send us your thoughts about the subjects, as well as new suggestions and possible demos of the products which we didn't cover so far.

Wellcome to the 7th Ebu Access Cast, the first episode for 2019. We decided to make some changes and refresh our team with new people. Therefor from now on we have new person who will bring a girl power into our team. We wish warm wellcome to Tanja Kleut who is an accessibility specialist at the European parliament, and who joined Mario and Jakob in this episode. At the beginning we gave a small round up on the gadgets which each of us got for the holidays. Jakob got him self a paire of the Aftershokz Trekz Air and Mario shared a small tip for all the listeners how to engage the Equalizer settings on the Aftershokz boan conduction headsets which dramatically improve the over all sound of the headset. Mario got him self a new Cubot King Kong 3, very interesting Android smartphone which has military-grade standards and which is 100% accessible to blind and partially sighted population. Tanja got her self the Sunu band for which she herd from our podcast.

This time in the news section we covered quite a lot of different things. CES 2019 the biggest Consumer Electronics Show was held just recently in Las Vegas, and among different things which are being presented every year, the accessible products have their space as well. We selected a few for you which we found interesting: WeWALK 'Smart' Cane For People With Visual Impairments got the attention this year. Since the device is very similar to the Sunu band which we previously covered in our podcast, we said that it would be great to have the smart ccane tested in the future and compare it with the Sunu band. VisionCheck, a paire of new glasses which are able to test your vision at home were also shown at the CES, so if anybody got the chance to try the paire, we would like to get the feedback for them. Google Assistant’s new Interpreter Mode turns Google Home, Smart Displays into a translation tool. UP untill this point we couldn't try the feature on our Google home devices because it is still not available in Europe, so we can't wait to get the feature available in the future updates of the Google Home app. The Paciello Group published their blog post about the CES 2019 and what they found interesting there, so we are bringing it to you as the easy read for long winter nights. Except the CES, a cupple of other accessible tech gadgets cought our attention as well: Cash Reader, the application for money identification just got released in the last previous weeks, and the app is getting lots of positive feedback from the visually impaired community for a few particular reasons. First, the app is covering more than 20 different currencies at this moment. Also it does not need internet connection to recognise the bils, it can also announce the ammount of money identified in silent mode, and all users who want to try the application can test it for the period of 2 weeks for free and the app will work in full mode. Currently Cash Reader is available for iOS devices and the Android version is coming out in the next few weeks. Breda wins 2019 Access City Award for making the city more accessible to citizens with disabilities. Nobody from our team visited Breda, but since we know that we have the listeneres from the Nederlands we'd like to hear your opinion about it. We also shortly talked about the accessibility status of our cities, so if you would like to give us the opinion about the public accessibility of your city, you are more than wellcome to do it and we wil publish it in our podcast. On the January 4th we celebrated the Worlds Braille day. Therefor we talked about the inportance of knowing Braille and what's going on in the modern ICT industry regarding various Braille devices, and what are the trends today regarding the Braille production. Bristol Braille Technology: is putting Canute, the world's first multi-line digital Braille e-reader into the production this year. Canute is another device which is gaining lot of attention at this moment, and besides being the first multi-line digital Braille e-reader, it falls into the category of very affordable devices such as the Orbit reader 20 which was just launched a few months ago. For the end of the podcast Tanja shared some accessibility news as well. Updated and harmonised EU Standards for public procurement of ICT products and services are available.24 accessibility recommendations from accessibility experts

This time we didn't have the time for any recorded tips or tutorials for you because there was a lot of stuff to cover but we will be back with it next month for sure. As always you are free to send us e-mail or drop us a Tweet on our official Twitter page. We are looking forward to be back with you next month.