Announcer:
Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast presented by the National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans. Live the life you want.
Melissa Riccobono:
Hello and welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast. I'm Melissa Riccobono, and I am not here with Anil Lewis, but I am here with someone equally as wonderful, Chris Danielsen. How are you, Chris?
Chris Danielsen:
I'm great, Melissa. How are you today?
Melissa Riccobono:
I am doing well. How are you enjoying this spring weather?
Chris Danielsen:
Oh, I love it so much. It's my favorite time of year. The weather is so nice right now. It's almost perfect. So I'm really excited about that. Are you enjoying it as well?
Melissa Riccobono:
I am. I'm sitting here with the windows open, so if you hear any background traffic noise or anything like that or a breeze coming through, that's because there's a window at my back that is open and it's so beautiful. Now the only thing I have to say is the Orioles are not as doing as well as the weather. And I know Chris, you're a big Orioles fan and, anyway.
Chris Danielsen:
Yeah, it's uh.
Melissa Riccobono:
(Laughs) just had to get that in there. I'm sorry (laughs).
Chris Danielsen:
It's very sad. I was going to mention it myself actually, but then I thought, why spoil the vibe (Melissa laughs)? But since you brought it up, they've still got time to turn it around, but they need to do it soon.
Melissa Riccobono:
They do.
Chris Danielsen:
Anyway. This is not a podcast about weather or baseball.
Melissa Riccobono:
No, no, it's not. It's about May 15th, which is Oriana Riccobono's 15th birthday, by the way. But that's actually not what it's about either. Though, I'd love to give you a whole podcast on Oriana and heaven knows she'd love to give you a podcast on herself (laughs).
Chris Danielsen:
Oh, she certainly got the talent to do it, but no. But May 15th, in addition to being Oriana's birthday, which is very, very important, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. So that's a really great celebration that accessibility professionals put together. And we have some guests on the podcast that can speak to our topic because we want to talk about the role of technology in our lives as blind people. So I'll introduce the first guest, which is one of our instructors from one of our NFB training centers, our National Federation of the Blind training Centers, the Colorado Center for the Blind, which is not the one I graduated from, but that's neither here nor there. Brittany Savage, how are you? Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast.
Brittany Savage:
I'm good. Thank you guys for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Chris Danielsen:
And what do you instruct?
Brittany Savage:
Sure. I'm one of three home management instructors that we have here, and I also teach a sewing class as well.
Chris Danielsen:
Ooo, a sewing class. I need that. I'm terrible at sewing. Go ahead, Melissa. Introduce our other guest.
Melissa Riccobono:
We've also invited our executive director for accessibility excellence and host of our other podcast, the Access On podcast, which I listen to and look forward to every week. This is Jonathan Mosen. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, thank you, Melissa. And I have to say, I feel really bad that the Orioles have tanked since I came to town, and I feel like I'm responsible.
Melissa Riccobono:
No, no, no, no. You're not responsible and I still owe you a good baseball lesson and you owe me a good cricket lesson because I promised you I would follow cricket if you let me teach you about baseball. So we need to get together and do that (laughs).
Jonathan Mosen:
We do.
Chris Danielsen
Well we all need to get together because I want to get in on this.
Melissa Riccobono:
Oh, oh, cool. All right. Brittany, do you like baseball or cricket?
Brittany Savage:
I am a big fan of the Orioles, actually.
Melissa Riccobono:
Really? Well.
Chris Danielsen:
Oh wow. A Colorado Orioles fan.
Brittany Savage:
Well, I'm originally from Virginia and my very first MLB baseball game was the Orioles versus the Astros when I did my summer program in Baltimore. And President Riccobono actually took me to an Orioles game and I got a Nick Markakis bobblehead as the giveaway that day, and I still have him. He sits up on my bookshelf here at work.
Melissa Riccobono:
Oh my goodness.
Chris Danielsen:
Yeah, good old Nick Markakis.
Melissa Riccobono:
Well, let's not get too much further from technology, but I'm really glad we're all baseball fans. That's awesome. And maybe there's technology we can talk about that helps us enjoy baseball games. But the question that I have here for all of you and maybe even Chris and me, so Chris, start thinking about it, what is your favorite technology tool and why? Good question. Brittany, do you have one?
Chris Danielsen:
My favorite technology tool probably has to be the Alexa (laughs). I'm not going to lie.
Melissa Riccobono:
Okay.
Brittany Savage:
She's good for everything.
Melissa Riccobono:
She's good for everything. And what kinds of things do you use her for?
Brittany Savage:
So here at work we use her a lot for timers, looking up recipes, how to use an ingredient. A lot of times we actually just did a chopped CCB chopped where we broke up our classes and we gave them mystery items and they had to use technology. A lot of them used the Alexa or their phone to look up. Some of them had never seen an artichoke and try and figure out what it was and how to cook it and how to use it and things like that.
Melissa Riccobono:
Wow. CCB chopped. That's super cool.
Chris Danielsen:
That's a great idea.
Melissa Riccobono:
Yeah.
Brittany Savage:
It was really fun.
Melissa Riccobono:
Alright, Jonathan, you are a very techie man (laughs). I'm very interested to hear what is currently your favorite technology and why?
Jonathan Mosen:
We had a discussion back in the Living Blindfully days where I said to people, "If you had to pick one piece of technology that you could keep and you had to discard everything, what would you keep?" And for me, the answer would be my iPhone. And that's because it does pretty much everything I need to do. I can be productive on it in terms of writing things, I read all my books with it, I text my kids back in New Zealand with it, all of those things. Now, there are things that I can do more efficiently on my PC, there's no doubt about that. If I want to do some serious composition, I can do that on my PC much more efficiently with my screen reader there and all the shortcut keys and everything like that. But I can write full documents on my iPhone as well. So for me, having an iPhone in my pocket means I'm connected to the world and can do pretty much anything I need to do.
Melissa Riccobono:
Very good one. Chris, how about you? Do you have one?
Chris Danielsen:
Oh gosh, it's really hard to pick. So I'm going to cheat and pick two.
Melissa Riccobono:
Oh, uh oh, (Brittany laughs), we said one Chris, we said one.
Jonathan Mosen:
Recount.
Melissa Riccobono
Go ahead, we'll let you pick two.
Chris Danielsen:
Alright, well one of them was going to be a repeat of somebody else's anyway, so I am going to say that it is my Sonos system. And the reason is because I'm very musically oriented now and it's still my favorite despite the fact that they screwed up their app last year and still haven't gotten it quite back to where it needs to be in my opinion. But nonetheless, I just use it all the time when I'm at home. And for those who don't know, Sonos is just, it's basically smart speakers and you can buy one or more than one and you can get them to work together. And there's just all kinds of cool things that you can do with them. And they work with the Alexa skill as well, so you can use them as Alexa devices as well. So I do that a lot.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's a really good one to pick Chris in the context of Global Accessibility Awareness Day because it does demonstrate how precarious our access can sometimes be. Because literally overnight, and I got some insight information, I actually wrote to the chief executive of Sonos who I've communicated with before and said, "I'm aware that you guys are about to do a complete rewrite of your rap. It's going to be a disaster and a debacle for blind people. Please hold off until we've all had a chance to give you advice about how to fix what's badly broken," and they released anyway. And that's a very serious matter because like you, I've invested quite a bit of dosh (Jonathan and Melissa laugh) in Sonos gear and suddenly overnight all of that hardware that we purchased was temporarily turned into a paperweight.
Chris Danielsen:
Exactly, exactly. And so it is important that we remain vigilant. Now, they are doing better. In fact, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this on the podcast.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing (laughs).
Chris Danielsen:
I got a note from them yesterday saying, we're still working on accessibility and we want participants to tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong and all that kind of stuff. So that's good that they're engaged, but they shouldn't have broken the darn thing in the first place because they knew they had blind customers. I mean, you wrote a book about it for gosh sakes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes, I did.
Chris Danielsen:
So anyway, we don't have to talk about that all the time, but it is important to remember that all of the things that we use that we are using, we have to be vigilant about the continued accessibility.
Jonathan Mosen:
And just briefly, if I could say this is another example of where the National Federation of the Blind adds so much value because the chief executive of Sonos lost his job over that app rewrite debacle...
Melissa Riccobono:
Wow!
Jonathan Mosen:
And they've put a temporary new CEO in place. And I was talking to President Riccobono about this and I said, "I think it would be a good idea if we reached out to the new chief executive of Sonos and said that we are willing to engage constructively about how this app can be made more efficient," because there is a bit of a difference between accessibility and efficiency. Something can be accessible but still be really unwieldy to use. So President Riccobono wrote a letter to the chief executive of Sonos, the new one, and I'd like to think that one of the reasons why they are getting back and reaching out to the blind community to say "How can we do better?" is because of that outreach that the National Federation of the Blind did.
Chris Danielsen:
And just to put a bow on this and quickly move on, but I will say also that accessibility is good for everybody. We were probably part of the reason that the guy lost his job, but the real issue was, well, not the real issue, but the other part of the issue was that everybody hated that app relaunch (Melissa laughs). Every Sonos customer that I know of, hated it. So, (Chris laughs).
Melissa Riccobono:
Yeah, and I mean I think that really gets to the heart and soul of what we want to talk about, not just our favorite technologies and the ways that technology makes our lives easier because it certainly does. If I had to pick incidentally after a lot of soul searching, I guess it would have to be my Braille display just because I use it so much now in my line of work, I'm reading notes from it right now. Now certainly I could have hard copy Braille and that would be fine, but just being able to plug in something to my Braille display and have a document right here in front of me though, I would miss my Victor Reader Stream, which I fall asleep listening to every single night.
So that'd be something to get used to (Melissa laughs). But anyway, we really do want to talk today about how we can use technology in helpful ways, but also not lose sight of the fact that technology sometimes breaks, batteries die, people break the app. And so we still also need to make sure that we have blindness skills along with our technology and we don't depend so much on technology. And by the way, this doesn't just mean us as blind people, but sighted people too. Have you ever driven with somebody and they have no...
Chris Danielsen:
Oh yeah!
Melissa Riccobono:
No earthly idea about anything having to do with the city they're driving in. And it's not because they are brand new to the city, it is because they have driven around only focusing on their GPS. They have no idea how address systems work. They have no idea where the one way streets are, which is a big deal here in Baltimore. And they don't have an idea when they're looking at an address that's on South Charles Street and they're on South Charles and the GPS wants them to turn off of South Charles and you say, "No, please don't do that. My house is on this street," and they do it anyway. And then they figure out, "Oh, your house. Oh, it was on that street? (laughs)" So anyway, I digress. I don't think we are the only people that need this lesson (laughs).
Chris Danielsen:
No, we're not. But I thought it was funny when you said, "Have you ever had this experience?" And I'm like, I have it regularly...
Melissa Riccobono:
Yes!
Chris Danielsen:
With rideshare drivers. And it's so funny because it's so different from the Baltimore cab drivers that I used to use in a lot of ways that they were less reliable. But man, the ones of them who had been doing it for a while, they knew where they were going.
Melissa Riccobono:
They did. And they could read paper maps.
Chris Danielsen:
Right.
Melissa Riccobono:
I mean, I'm not saying paper maps are better, but they could figure it out or you could say "It's up near..." And they'd say, "Oh, right." Or you would just get in the car and they'd say, "Okay, we're going to such and such that's up near this, right? And that." And sometimes if they were your regulars, they'd say, "Oh, I took you up there before, right?" Or "I took you close to there," or whatever. But they definitely remembered more. But Brittany, let's start with you. How do you teach students to use the technology? Because I'm sure that's part of the curriculum at the Colorado Center, and though you're not one of the technology instructors, it sounds like you use technology in home management and maybe technology now is sort of used across the classes at the Colorado Center.
I'd actually be shocked if it wasn't Braille for Braille displays in Braille and technologies in home management, of course technology in technology class and then GPSs and other apps in travel. So how do you teach your students to use this but also help them understand that sometimes there are things that are just more efficient by using low tech solutions or that they still need to know how to do things if their technology is broken?
Brittany Savage:
Sure. So I mean, of course we use tech in home management for certain things and we do have students who come in, some people may have never used voiceover or talk back and they're still learning it. It's their first time. But we have students who are super proficient in it and maybe have known about some apps and used them before they came. So we really work with the student on where they're at and what they're using. We use seeing AI and Be My Eyes a lot, especially in the kitchen for product scanning. Because we do keep a lot of things on hand in the kitchen, in the pantry and in the fridge. And so if we send somebody, "Okay, go find the pasta sauce and there's eight jars in there, how do you know which one is which?" And we do go over like, well, the sausage jar feels different than the marinara jar.
And if you want to be triple sure without having to open it, you can open seeing AI and use the product scanner. You can do Be My Eyes and take a picture. You can call a volunteer, all of those type of things. But we also teach the low tech things as well. Before we had the smartphone and the apps, I was a student ten years ago, so we didn't learn any of this stuff. We learned the rubber band technique where say you are in your own pantry at home and you have a can of let's say corn, a can of peas and a can of green beans. You put one rubber band around, say the corn two around the green beans and the peas just have no rubber band. Or we use the magnetic Dymo tape, which I'm a big fan of, and you can make labels.
And then when you're at the store, you pull it out of your pocket before it goes in the cart, you say, "Hey, can I see that for a second?" And you magnetic your Dymo tape label right to the can. So we do teach those as well as the tech things because like you say, your phone could die, your wifi can go out, you could be in a hurry and you don't have time to say, "Oh man, where did I leave my phone?" And then you're on a 10 minute search to find your phone (Melissa laughs) when you can just reach in and feel, "Okay, this is exactly what I need." So we do all of those kind. We do both.
Chris Danielsen:
And that's really smart. And I like that you mentioned both the rubber band technique and the Braille technique because some people are not Braille users and our centers teach Braille, but until you get proficient enough with it, then that's not the best option for you. But there are other things you can do. You can organize your cabinets. I mean, when I was a student at the Louisiana Center for the Blind, one of the big things was you always put things back where you got them because the kitchen was organized in a certain way and it was helpful to keep things that way because then people could always find them and the instructor could say, "Okay, go get the flour, it should be here." And then if somebody had moved it, you would deal with that. And I'm big on that at my house. I organize my kitchen in certain ways so that I know where and my pantry so that I know where certain things are.
Brittany Savage:
Exactly. And I do that in my own personal life in my house. Things are, I'm a little bit of OCD, they're in alphabetical order. And if you were to go in my fridge, you're like, "Oh, I want to a Coke," I'm like, "Honey, second shelf, second can to the right (Brittanya nd Melissa chuckle)." But that's just me and my own personal thing. But we also use bump dots a lot for labeling things. A lot of medications. I know we teach students that, like you said, we teach Braille here, but if they're not quite at the point where they can read the Braille yet, so maybe a Braille label isn't the best solution. And we have the rubber bands, but we can also do bump dots, like a bump dot on the lid might be the Tylenol if you have one on the side of the bottle, that's the Advil. So we teach that as well. And not just in the kitchen, but just in other parts of life too, like medications and things.
Melissa Riccobono:
Definitely.
Chris Danielsen:
So I found out recently that my prescription provider would provide both Braille labels and script talk labels, which of course are labels that your phone can read. They're NFC tags, I think. And I asked for both because I want all the information that the script talk can give me because it can contain more information than the braille bottle label. But at the same time, when I'm just reaching for my medicine, it's great to be able to just read the Braille and know that I've got the right medicine in my hand. So sometimes you use a combination of a high tech and a low tech solution too.
Melissa Riccobono:
Definitely. So Jonathan, what are your thoughts on this? I know you've instructed in the past and you've kind of made, I don't know about your living, but you're kind of making your living now sort of helping people understand what is out there with technology, but also making it better whenever possible. Do you have thoughts about how to find that balance between the technology that's really amazing and really can help in a lot of ways? And then also not forgetting about the easier low tech solutions along the way?
Jonathan Mosen:
I think I'd make the point I made again that accessibility and efficiency are different things. And I think what we should be striving for is the most efficient outcome in any situation. And sometimes the most efficient outcome isn't always depending on the high tech. For example, you might use AI or a visual interpreter service or whatever when your shopping comes to sort out what the shopping is. But do you necessarily want to call back to that visual interpreter service every time you want to identify an item? So hopefully where you can get to if you have a Dymo labeler or something similar is that when the shopping is sorted, you can put Braille labels on things that you need to identify quickly. Because even if you only know uncontracted Braille sorting through your pantry and say choosing from different teas or different things that you might have in the pantry is going to be so much more efficient by just using your hands on a bit of Braille than it is using any kind of device where you have to find a tag or a barcode or whatever and scan that or hold it in front of the camera and have something identify it.
And the other thing I'd say too is that it's about choosing the right technology for the job as well. One of the saddest things that I've seen as an instructor is when somebody with low vision has convinced themselves or had other people tell them that doing something the blind way is the "abnormal way" and that they need to struggle along as much as possible with the conventional way of doing things. And I have seen people taking say two or three minutes to read a fairly ordinary length email because they're straining at the screen. It's fatiguing, it's difficult, it's just stressful. Whereas they could have read that email using text to speech in all of say twenty or thirty seconds. And then again, Braille comes into the picture here. I use text to speech a lot cranked way up. But there are times when I have to present professionally in front of a group. Like you, Melissa, I use my Braille display regularly for reading scripts and audio production environments.
And there are just some times where I enjoy curling up with a book. I haven't read a hard copy book in many, many years, but I do that on my Braille display. So to have the tools in the toolbox to use in any given occasion is I think key. When we get to travel, it's interesting. So I come at this from a slightly different perspective in the sense that I have a hearing impairment, which has degenerated over time and it has got to the point where it really affects now my spatial awareness. I can't really echo locate anymore. If an elevator goes ping, I can't tell where it's coming from. You still need to use what techniques you can from the classic toolkit of travel instruction and use structured discovery where you can. But at the same time, I think one of the things that we've been really clear about in recent times that there's no one way to be a model blind person.
And if you have other disabilities going on or there are things going on that mean that something like travel for you is not as easy as it would be for some people. I heard the recent episode with Jordyn on and that was amazing. That was good stuff. But there are some people who can't travel that way for legitimate reasons. It's not just a case of the fact that they haven't had the instruction. It may be that there are other mitigating circumstances, then technology really can be an aid and enabler. So it's important to know how to use that technology and not be ashamed of using it if you need it.
Melissa Riccobono:
That is such a good point, Jonathan. And I have to say that since I've been able to know that I have Aira and Be My Eyes in my back pocket, and since I have a good GPS on my phone, it actually has helped me feel more confident to explore my neighborhood because I feel like even if I get turned around, I don't have to wait for some helpful or unhelpful Henry. And why is it that the helpful Henrys are always there when you don't need them and then never around when you do.
Chris Danielsen:
Exactly.
Melissa Riccobono:
I have something in my pocket that gives me the control.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Melissa Riccobono
And even if I've taken a route a lot, sometimes I'll just have the GPS following me on telling me the streets and things just because then it's just one more assurance to me that, yep, I'm still on the right track. Yep, I'm going to get here in this amount of time. And that's really helpful, particularly because I have chronic fatigue and sometimes it's just my memory's not as good. Or I just can't process things in quite the same way. And so just having that extra tool of the GPS just reminding me where I am and kind of giving me that like, "Yep, you're still on the right track," that has been hugely helpful. And I can only imagine how helpful certain things are when you just can't hear as well as you used to be able to hear.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh man. I'll give you a quick example of this because I was recently at an airport with a seriously delayed flight. It was supposed to depart at six and eventually it left at 10:30. So it was really horrible. I just wanted to get home and when the word came through that this plane had been struck by lightning and they had to do a full service and it was going to be a while. Airports are very, very difficult environments for hearing impaired people because there's just so much sound. There's crowd noise, there's things coming out of the PA, it's just a din and it's very difficult to sort it all out. But because I had Aira and it was an Aira access location at Boston Logan, I felt absolutely comfortable and confident about calling an Aira agent and saying, I got a lot of time to kill (Melissa laughs).
Let's go find some food. And you see, so then you get to the food and then the next problem is you're still in a very crowded environment and it's hard to hear somebody telling you what the menu is. So the Aira agent was able to have me take a picture of the menu on the board and he read me the menu and then I was able to confidently go up to the counter and order exactly what I wanted. And that's the thing you see, we shouldn't be ashamed of using this technology when we need to.
Chris Danielsen:
Absolutely. And I do the same thing that Melissa does. I always have my GPS on, and going back to the thing we were talking about earlier, I keep my GPS on when I'm in an Uber or a Lyft because I want to know what the heck they're doing (Jonathan laughs). And that's a way which I didn't really have before. I mean, I could always count turns and stuff like that, but that's a thing that I didn't have before that now lets me know, okay, this is the street that they're probably on. GPS can be wrong sometimes, but this is the street that they're probably on and this is what they're doing. And I also listen to their GPS if it's talking to them, but sometimes it isn't or they've got their earbuds in or whatever. Most of the time the drivers are fine with it. I've had a few go, "I've got it, sir, I know how to get you where you're going."
And I'm like, "No, it's fine. I just like to know where I am," and what I sometimes say to them to get them to calm down is, "Well, what if you have an accident? I need to know where I am so that I can get help for us," or whatever. But most of them don't comment on it. Or if they do, they ask about the technology. And I use it when I walk because sometimes I do get turned around and sometimes I am not sure of the direction that I'm still going or the street whether I'm still on the right street. It is helpful. So I do that too.
Melissa Riccobono:
It is helpful. And it's interesting, Jonathan, particularly the menu. All sighted people have access to that menu up on the board. And so all you were doing is using a different tool. Now, yes, you could have had somebody behind the counter read it that has its pros and cons. Some people are great about it, others are cranky about it. Some people only give you a very bare minimum of what they have. If you can't hear them, of course that's a problem too. But really Aira or any of these apps do level the playing field in a sense because we are able to get the information that is out there for all the sighted in a very different way than we've ever been able to get it before.
Chris Danielsen:
And why shouldn't we? Because it's giving us equal access. I mean, yes, we have our non-visual techniques as blind people, but yet there's so much information that we've just gone without and now we don't have to go without it.
Melissa Riccobono:
Right, and so we're going to stop here for a quick ad, but when we come back, we're going to, actually this is a great segue because we're going to talk about the Meta AI powered RayBan glasses and some thoughts about those. So stay tuned, listen to this ad and we'll be back with you in just a moment on the Nation's Blind Podcast.
Message:
Make a difference with the National Federation of the Blind's Lead and Drive: Give 25 dollars in 25. When you give 25 dollars or more between May 15 and July 11, you're entered into the drawing. Your support helps us continue to lead courageously and drive lasting changes for blind people across America. You could win prizes like round trip transportation for two to the 2026 NFB National Convention, hotel accommodations, registration, banquet tickets, or 2,025 dollars cash. To enter, visit nfb.org/Give25Donate. Call 410-659-9314, extension 2430 or send a check to National Federation of the Blind and mention #Give25 and the fund in the memo. The winner will be announced July 13, 2025. Thank you for your generosity.
Melissa Riccobono:
Welcome back to the Nation's Blind Podcast. Here we are talking about technology and there was an AI news, sorry, a news story, not an AI news story (Melissa laughs). Maybe it was, I don't know. I hope not.
Jonathan Mosen:
It was, it was a real human (Jonathan laughs).
Chris Danielsen:
It wasn't written by AI, but it was about AI (Jonathan laughs).
Melissa Riccobono:
I hope not. Yes. And the headline was "AI Powered Raybans are Life Enhancing For the Blind", and it's by the Wall Street Journal and MSN. And they quoted Jonathan and other blind people's thoughts and experiences using the Meta glasses. And before we get into that, let's skip back to Brittany because we haven't heard from Brittany for a little while. Brittany, have you had a chance to check out the RayBan Meta glasses?
Brittany Savage:
I have gotten to play with a pair. My friend has a pair. I don't have them, but they were really fun too use because we went clothes shopping and they were pretty busy, so we couldn't, an associate was helping us when they could, but they would have to go and check people out. And so we put the glasses on and "I'm like, okay, can you describe the shirt I'm touching" or "Can you tell me what color these pants are?" So I don't have any personally, but I have gotten to play with them and I'm not going to lie, I'm ready to go order me a pair (Melissa laughs).
Chris Danielsen:
Well, I do want to say the reason that Jonathan is quoted in the article is because of the National Federation of the Blind and because they reached out to us, and my primary role now is editing the Braille Monitor, but I still do some of the media stuff. And I say this not to just tout my involvement or the National Federations of the Blind's involvement, but to say that when they started writing the article, they were really going to go at it from an angle of "This technology is changing the lives of blind people. This is the thing that is going to pull blind people out of the darkness (Melissa laughs)." I mean, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was. Yeah. So there was a reason that we tried to give that article a little bit more nuance.
Melissa Riccobono:
Well, and I think it's very interesting because what's quoted from Jonathan is that it's affordable and he's used them a few times to record video of ride share drivers refusing giving him and his wife a ride because she travels with a guy dog. So that's obviously a good use of those glasses. On the other side of the coin, Allison, another blind person, she was quoted and she said that she depended on the Meta glasses for a lot of things, such as getting dressed, doing laundry and reading books to her granddaughter. And however, Aaron Priest, who is blind and editor in chief of American Foundation for the Blind's Access World Magazine, said that the glasses failed to read correctly, the number on the door to his home, so he didn't trust it (Melissa laughs). And then finally, Orlando, a blind man, said that the glasses were life-changing to him because he was fearful of walking alone, but the glasses removed his fear. And so let's just, Brittany, we know now what you kind of think of the Meta glasses, Jonathan, you're quoted in the article, but what do you think of the meta glasses overall?
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, see, this is the thing. When this went around the office, a number of people said, "Can't we just have a product that blind people use and get some value out of without it being called kind of life changing or restoring sight to the blind" or whatever, we can use something and like it. So look, a couple of things about this, I think the RayBan Meta glasses are coming in at a good price point. They have a pretty good AI functionality, but we know that sometimes AI can get things wrong. And that's really what Aaron is seeing when he's talking about some specific use cases. And you do have to be very careful with AI no matter what it's on, whether it's on your computer or in a pair of glasses or on your phone. There are certain cases where AI is wonderful and there are some where it's not.
And one of the things that I noticed over the weekend, for example, I've got one of these power banks, and because I was traveling, I wanted to make sure that my power bank was charged to the max. I asked ChatGPT, "How's my battery charge going?" And it said, "Oh, the power bank's at a hundred percent. It's ready to go." It said in its cheery voice (Melissa laughs). So then I asked Envision, the new ally product they have, and they said the battery was at eighty percent. And then I asked, it just went on and on. I was getting different numbers (Melissa laughs) from these AI products. So my daughter has been in town, which has been wonderful. I flew her and her husband over to Baltimore and they've been helping us get set up. And so in the end, I used a good old pair of human eyeballs and said, "What is actually this battery?"
And she said, "It's eighty-two percent and going up." So it's difficult. AI does mess things up. But that said, I like the fact that you can use visual interpretation hands-free with these glasses. The AI does get a lot right, and it's getting an increasing amount of things, right. The AI is dramatically improving over time, but it still might get some things wrong. What I'm really impressed about with the RayBan Meta glasses is the way that Meta has realized what they have. I don't know how much thought they really gave to blind people when these glasses came out, but blind people discovered them. They could see some really useful use cases there. And now Meta has embraced it, and this is a lot of the work that I do here at the National Federation of the Blind. It's my job to kind of connect the Federation with big tech and little Tech and anyone who wants to do technology for blind people to ensure that we're involved at every stage of the process.
And Meta's coming to convention this year, they're going to have a significant presence at convention. It looks like we're going to be talking to them soon on Access On, and as far as the glasses are concerned, they're actively thinking about "How do we make this better for blind people?" One example is that obviously we need more detailed descriptions. We also want people described because that's visual information that sighted people just naturally have, and we shouldn't be deprived of that either. And the other thing is we want to have a document read completely. We don't want it always summarized. We want to be able to reliably take a piece of paper and say to the glasses, read this thing completely from top to bottom. Don't summarize it, read it in its entirety. And Meta is embracing all of that. They obviously put Be My Eyes on the glasses, so that in that regard, it is a success story in the sense that they've been listening to the organized blind movement and responding with real world changes.
Melissa Riccobono:
Definitely. Chris, do you have Meta glasses? Have you used them?
Chris Danielsen:
I don't. I've had them on for a few minutes just to see what they would feel like, but I haven't really, I've been wanting to buy some and I will eventually, but it's not been as much of a priority as I thought it would be, but it may become more of one. But what's interesting is we asked social media about this question, about the Meta glasses and about this general question of technology. So Misty from Indiana says, "I think it's like how we used to do in school. We used to learn long division and other by hand mathematical skills before we got to use calculators. So we would not only have this knowledge for its own sake, but in case we ever didn't have a calculator around. I would say the same goes for blindness skills. We need to balance learning low tech solutions and become acquainted with how to use the high tech ones, so we may be just as versatile." So for Misty, it's about flexibility. It's about finding the right tool for the right task.
Melissa Riccobono:
I think that's a really good point. And I do think, unfortunately, the way our world is going, if you don't start learning at least some of the higher tech solutions, you really do miss out. I think about people that can't send a text message, and Jonathan talked about texting his kids in New Zealand. I mean, there's so many seniors that would love, I think would love the actual process of texting grandchildren or children. And if they don't have a phone they can use and they don't want to learn texting, I mean it's fine I guess if they don't want to learn it. But if they just don't think they can or they don't take the time, then they're kind of missing out on this way of being connected. That can be really a great thing. And so much of our lives, we need more. I feel like we need as much connection as we can get. So certainly there's nothing wrong with picking up a phone and talking to somebody, but there's also nothing wrong with sending a quick text. Hey, I'm just thinking about you. How are you? And that can really enrich your day.
Jonathan Mosen:
I was just going to say without distracting us too much from the RayBan matters, the buzzword of the moment in AI is multimodal. And one of the things that I'm really excited about is to see this multimodal thing rolling out, particularly in the field of online shopping with a company called Innosearch. And Chris, I know that you've used that and had a good experience with it. You can shop online. They've aggregated over 500,000 retailers on a very accessible website, and you can ask AI about the pictures that are on the site pertaining to the product.
But the thing that excites me about this is that they have now set up a standard telephone number that you phone with any standard telephone and you can talk to this thing and you can actually complete entire online shopping experiences from searching for the products you want to asking about those products to adding one to your cart and checking out all with a phone call. That to me is very exciting because there are a lot of people who become blind later in life as part of the aging process. There's some skepticism about how much they feel they're able to achieve at that stage of their lives, and if they can benefit from online shopping by making a phone call, I think that's exciting. And that's just the beginning. This whole multimodal concept is where it's at right now.
Melissa Riccobono:
I think that's amazing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I remember touchtone telephone systems for all kinds of things. Back in the day, it was CDs actually.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes (laughs).
Melissa Riccobono:
There was something you could call and you could get little samples of the CDs before you bought them and you could put them in your cart. And I don't know that it lasted long because the web came in and took it, but those systems still work. Even in NFB-NEWSLINE®, the system to do your newspapers and magazines over that good old touchtone telephone is still alive and well, even though we have the apps and stuff. So that's great. Chris, you were going to say something too?
Chris Danielsen:
I was going to say I have had some good experiences with Innosearch and one not so good experience, but their customer service resolved it, which was good. They do actually have customer service, and I know you had that experience too, Jonathan, and the great thing is they're making it so that you can talk to it and/or use your touch tone phone. So that's a good thing. What we were talking about from Misty's comment is that the versatility is so important. And actually it was from what you were saying, Melissa, because everybody's going to get a preview of something that's going to come out in the Monitor, but I was reading an article that has been submitted and it's from another instructor at a training center, a travel instructor, and he said "It would be easy for us to be tempted to say, well, at our training centers, we're just not going to let students use some of these technologies because they need to learn to use the nonvisual skills first." Sort of like the approach with guide dogs.
You don't use a guide dog at NFB training centers for the time that you're there, but he said that we don't really have that option and it's not a good option because BLIND people need the technology skills also, if they're going to compete. You need to learn to use your iPhone in some cases to do everyday tasks like unlocking a hotel room door
or running a thermostat. Ecobee thermostat, like I know Jonathan and I have that only has a touchscreen and an iPhone app. So you got to have the skills. And so the trick is integrate the skills but also have that discussion about how you know when to use the technology tool and when a blindness technique is going to be just as good.
Melissa Riccobono:
And also what to do if things all of a sudden become inaccessible or are inaccessible from the beginning.
Chris Danielsen:
Right.
Melissa Riccobono:
Do you have more social media comments there, Chris?
Chris Danielsen:
Well, I've got another one from Lisa and she has an interesting perspective. She says the "Disability community, including the blind community and has been fed and drinks the Kool-Aid, that independence is like the Olympic gold medal. Yes, it's important to be independent, but we don't spend time focusing on interdependency. I believe that interdependency on good blindness skills and adaptive technology is essential. I believe in self-determination and grit. I also believe in common sense. When I was parenting my son some time ago, I used to tell him 'Why work hard when you can work smart?' There is nothing wrong with a little bit of physical or mental elbow grease, but if using a gadget or a workaround will make your life easier, then by all means use technology."
Melissa Riccobono:
That's a really good point. Brittany, do you have things like that that you try to teach your students in the kitchen that "Yeah, you can do it this way, but here's a technology or here's a much easier way that you can do it?"
Brittany Savage:
That's a really good question. Maybe going back to identifying, let's say spices for instance. Say maybe they aren't labeled in a way that they can access it via Braille or something. Maybe they don't maybe have those skills quite yet. Like, okay, well you can open up and smell them. But if it's maybe a spice that they haven't smelled, like, "Okay, well let's pull your phone out. We can scan the barcodes, we can read the labels," things of that nature. That's about all I got coming into my brain.
Melissa Riccobono:
Well, that's okay. I mean, I'm even thinking just about cooking and just all the different ways. I mean, we have an air fryer now, so we sometimes use our air fryer for things that a few years ago I would never have thought of cooking any other way, but in our microwave or we have an Insta Pot and we very much like our Insta Pot. Again, do you have to have those things? No, I can also certainly cook in the oven. I can cook on top of the stove, but some of them, they're kind of the craze for a whole bunch of people, not just blind people. And we should be able to use them and they are gadgets that make really good tasting food in a convenient way. And so we shouldn't be left out of that.
Brittany Savage:
Exactly.
Chris Danielsen:
And with the air fryer in a healthier way, by the way...
Melissa Riccobono:
Yeah!
Chris Danielsen:
In some cases because you're not using grease to fry, you're just using really super heated air that's circulating.
Jonathan Mosen:
Grease is the word.
Chris Danielsen:
Grease is the word (Brittany laughs).
Jonathan Mosen:
I think that the bottom line is that blind people should be empowered and entitled to make the same choices as everybody else. And if sighted people have the choice to go and buy a gadget to make their life easier, then the National Federation of the Blind will keep advocating to make sure that that gadget is a choice that we can make as well. It's really that simple. We want to be involved at the conceptual stage, at the product design stage, at the evaluation stage. Of course here we have our Center of Excellence and Non-visual Accessibility and the International Braille and Technology Center. Look, if there's a need for a gadget that's been identified and it's popular and it's on the market, we want our members to have the choice to use that gadget too.
Melissa Riccobono:
And truly, the things that are done that make gadgets good for us to use, often really help sighted people as well. And that's really where the global accessibility comes in. As Chris said before, if it's good for us, it's generally going to be better for everybody. And I mean we get into medical devices, we get into things in the kitchen, we get into appliances. If appliances are set up so that they have buttons and they beep, a person who maybe doesn't identify as blind but just says, "Well, I can't see quite as well as I used to," they can take advantage of those features and yeah they were built in for the blind, but they're going to benefit everybody. Brittany, did you have something else to say?
Brittany Savage:
No, I was just agreeing with you with the air fryer and how convenient it is. Yes, because obviously we teach the stove and the oven and things, but when you are maybe in hurry, just because we all have life, we have kids, you have to get them to activities, you have to maybe go do soccer after school or whatever it may be, or just in general life, it makes it so much easier because it's quicker in there, it's more convenient. You don't have to stand over it. You can walk away from it and do other things. And most of them are Alexa compatible. So even if it's one, the old ones had to turn dials, which I'm a big fan of now. They're all touchscreen, but most of them also Bluetooth enabled. So you can use an app, you can use an AI device. So it's like the crockpot set it and forget it, which is nice.
Melissa Riccobono:
Definitely. So I'm going to read our last social media post. Rocky for Minnesota said, "I think the key to balancing technology use and independent skills rely on the degree to which an individual can manage their technology. For instance, I have heard many people, particularly from older generations say that technology is taking away our jobs and our ability to live and think critically. In my view, the issue is not artificial intelligence. It is all in the way that we use it. As a college student, I can use AI to check the spelling and grammar of my papers as well as the formatting. And sometimes even to detect whether I have plagiarized, it would be completely unethical for me to use a service like ChatGPT to write my entire paper. As with everything else, it is important to be well balanced. As a deaf-blind person, I rely quite heavily on technology, including my iPhone and computer, yet I recognize that when it comes to certain tasks, technology may be less useful and it is good to know when and when not to use it. It is also important to be realistic." So very interesting thoughts from our followers on social media. Thank you for the feedback.
Chris Danielsen:
I'm really glad that Rocky is an ethical student (Melissa laughs)...
Brittany Savage:
Yes!
Chris Danielsen:
That is not using chat GPT to write his papers because that is a real concern and it is happening. And the problem is with that is not just the cheating aspect of it, but also just the aspect of when you learn how to write, you learn how to think a little bit, I feel like. So I hope that a lot of college students feel like Rocky does and are using ChatGPT and I write and I use ChatGPT to help me sometimes, but I use it in very particular ways that make it a tool to help me do what I'm doing but doesn't replace my own ability to write a composition.
Brittany Savage:
I agree with ChatGPT here. It's great for so many things, especially coming up with recipes. We have a garden here and we tell the students, and it's when we all work in like, "Okay, there's this list of things in the garden. I want you to pick five of those things and make up a recipe using these five things." We want to use the produce that we pull out of the garden. And they're like, "Well, I don't know how to use this, this and this." So they'll put it in ChatGPT, and they'll say, "Give me a recipe using these things," which is really fun and it comes up with fun stuff. But sometimes ChatGPT can be a little wonky with her measurements (Melissa and Brittany laugh) and her recipe directions. And so it's fun to use it with students.
And because of course we go over learning what different measuring cups are, different, measuring spoons, things like that. And we'll go through the recipe. I'm like, "Okay, so let's look at it this way. I'm pretty sure ChatGPT did not mean to say eight cups of tomatoes (Melissa laughs) when we're only using a half a cup of carrots." So going through and doing the conversions ourselves, so we get the basic outline for it, but then we can go through and tweak it. So having that as a fun tool to give you ideas for a recipe, but also having the knowledge and understanding to go in and tweak it and fix it to probably how it should be. And it's a little bit more of a reasonable measurement for a recipe.
Melissa Riccobono:
That is so cool. I've never used ChatGPT that way.
Chris Danielsen:
I know when ChatGPT first came out, there were some incidents, maybe they've fixed this now, but there was some incidents that it was actually making up ingredients (Brittany, Melissa and Chris laugh). Ingredients that didn't exist.
Melissa Riccobono:
Oh, that's funny.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, it has come a long way, but again, it's using the tool for the right purpose, isn't it? And one thing I do want to point out is that these new LMSs have introduced a feature. Gemini has it now ChatGPT, even Elon Musk's Grok has it now as well. And this is called deep research. And I think this has tremendous benefits for blind students or any blind person who's doing some research. I've been using this a lot. And what it does is you give it a very detailed prompt. For example, I've used it to do research on US mobile carriers as I've moved here on different streaming TV services so that I don't have to have cable.
And I was able to give it deep questions like "I want you to do comparisons based on how many channels the streaming service has, accessibility for iOS and on Apple TV and on the PC and whether the service has audio description." And what it did was it went away. And the scary thing about this, you can actually watch its thinking when you switch this deep research mode on, you can go to a status bar at the bottom of the screen and it actually starts to reason. And it says, "Hmm, based on what I just found in this article, I need to change my opinion about this." It goes out onto the web and it produces a detailed report. And I got back a lovely narrative with tables that showed me all the different criteria I'd specified.
Chris Danielsen:
Accessible tables. I got one with accessible tables yesterday.
Jonathan Mosen:
Accessible tables. They were accessible. And I mean that is amazing because that saved me hours and hours and hours of Googling for things and reading different articles and trying to make sense of the contradictions. The deep research thing is amazing.
Melissa Riccobono:
Wow.
Chris Danielsen:
And I used it. We're getting a little far field and we should probably wrap up shortly, but I will say that I used it in the way that you actually suggested on Access On, I had a new tech gadget that I wanted to learn how to use, and so I had it write me a manual and it did a really nice job. So it's kind of amazing. But again, you wouldn't want, I would be really careful if I were a student. I think it has benefits, but I would be really careful if I were a student about having it write a research paper and not editing that research paper myself.
Melissa Riccobono:
Oh no, I wouldn't even have it write it personally. But that's just me. And also I do have to say that I really hope that AI does not completely take over Jonathan's job of doing all the awesome demonstrations and tutorials that he's done over the years.
Chris Danielsen:
Absolutely.
Melissa Riccobono:
I was just listening what to one this morning (Jonathan laughs), actually getting better at some software that I'm using. And so I love that human touch, but that's just me (Melissa laughs). This has been a great conversation. Does anybody have any other thoughts about technology, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, anything else that we should talk about before we wrap up this podcast?
Jonathan Mosen:
I'd just like to very quickly add, I think that in the technology space, there's a lot to be said for concepts of structured discovery because so often, and you were talking about this with Pam and Jordyn in the context of travel, so often I see people being given a list of instructions about "If I press this button, I'm going to get this thing to happen for me, or I tap this thing on my smartphone" or whatever. And then what happens is that an app update comes out and the user interface has changed even just a fraction and it breaks all of those instructions.
So I think it's incumbent upon us to continue to advocate for good quality technology instruction so that people aren't just taught by route to push things to make certain things happen. They actually understand how these screens look, how they're laid out, why things happen the way they do. Because even if you have a basic grounding in those skills, then it's going to set you up to explore by yourself to not get stuck when something changes and to have the confidence to download something new and just try it and know that you can't break it.
Melissa Riccobono:
Amen. And maybe we should have a whole episode about that, or maybe you should have something like that on Access On.
Chris Danielsen:
Absolutely.
Melissa Riccobono:
Especially for kids in school. I cannot stand it when I hear people in IEP meetings say, "Well, we went through lesson one of this and lesson two," and I'm not saying that tutorials are not great. I mean, I just was saying, Jonathan's are wonderful, so I'm really not trying to say that. But for something like JAWS, I think you have to learn the basics. But there are so many ways that are engaging. Let's meet kids where they are. And if they are fascinated by, I don't know, the music artist Livingston, which is big in my house right now, why don't you use JAWS and the internet and help them research facts or articles or whatever else about Livingston?
And that way you don't have to go through this "To do this, press this button. Okay, you did that. Good, now do this." It's much more of "Okay, what will you need to do? Well, you're going to need to get to Google. How do you get to your desktop?" I feel like the structured discovery can be so empowering and I really wish it was used more. And quite honestly, I feel like that's just where education should be for all students. That it really should be much more based on let's look at what you want, where you want to get, and then help you just discover all the different ways and understand the why behind and not just the pushing buttons.
Chris Danielsen:
I agree as well. And it's also going to help you troubleshoot when things do go wrong, when the app changes or when you're finding a new app. I mean, it's really important to understand the theory of voiceover if you use an iPhone so that you understand how to explore an app and how to find stuff. All of that is really important. And I'm always so proud of myself because I'm not nearly as tech savvy (Melissa laughs) as Jonathan, for example, but I'm always proud of myself when I can figure out, "Oh, based on what I know about this technology, this must be what's going on. And if I do this, it'll probably solve it." And it, it's fun to figure those things out. And it is a form of structured discovery.
Melissa Riccobono:
And you're usually not going to break things. People, they don't generally put them out into the world if they're going to be that easily broken (laughs). Well, thank you both. Jonathan Mosen and Brittany Savage. Thank you so much for being with us on the Nation's Blind Podcast. Enjoy Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 15, and please give us more feedback about technology. What are the new latest and greatest. I always love convention because that always gives me a chance to look at different technologies in the exhibit hall if I'm able to get over there, which isn't always the case, but at least I hear about different technologies. So anyway, let us know. Follow us on Facebook and you can give us a call, 410-659-9314 extension 2444. Email podcast@nfb.org and until our next episode, remember, you can live the life you want.
Chris Danielsen:
Blindness is not what holds you back. We'd love your feedback. Email podcast@nfb.org or call 410-659-9315 extension 2444.