I wish we still had this stuff...

S1 (Speaker 1)

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from October 24th, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have you with us. Listening may be through Vision Australia, Radio, Associated Stations of Australia or perhaps the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. All you need to do to get that is to search for the two words talking tech and downer can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast... Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast.

With me, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge David. There is the old and the new devices have their life cycle and eventually it gets around to the time of their passing. We're losing the Sunoo band we are.

01:04

S2

And just to remind people it was a wearable sonar device that you wore on your wrist, and then it had this little sort of pointy thing, which was the sonar sensor itself. And, you know, it's been around for about six years or so, but I got an email from the actual company themselves last week, and they said that due to capital funding and all that sort of stuff, then they're having to stop operations so that soon a band is no longer available. What that led me then to think about was how technology has come and gone over the last, well, basically for me about 50 years. So I thought, well, why not have a bit of a reflection back into the past and maybe what's currently available still and how it's held on a bit.

S1

So let's look at some of these devices that have been in our lives. And some of them still can be. I think one of the big breakthroughs was speech technology, synthesised speech. Tell us about deck Talk and their accessible device.

S2

The original deck talk. This was sort of like late 70s or early 80s, but this thing was huge. It was a big box with very clear speech. So it was called the Deck Talk Classic. And then we had the Deck Talk Express, which was a smaller one. And then when, when sort of PC started to grow up a bit, we had windows 3.11 that sort of morphed into the Accessible Deck Talk software. 

But that to me is always been the classic voice of a speech synthesizer. Very clear speech. You used to hear it quite a lot on those telephony systems that, you know, would answer the phone and, you know, you'd get the press one for this, press two for that. So deck talk in one way. The other was around for a long time, but I think it's been the last 15 years or so as we've gone more into software synthesizers, maybe a bit longer than that.

S1

So now many of us would remember attic vision and their attic speech?

S2

Yeah, that was the DOS screen reader. So that was back in the old DOS 3.3 etcetera days. But they had a really cool device, which was the Arctic Transport, which was an external synthesizer, and back then it plugged into its serial port. It feels really funny to talk about serial ports now, but the cool thing about it was that you could do a bit of a tricky command in DOS, and you could upload or download what you want to call it, the Screen reader Arctic Business Vision from the transport or from the hardware itself. So no matter where you went onto a, you know, a DOS PC, you had access to your screen reader. 

And I thought that was just a really nifty thing. And you could imagine some sort of things these days that if you did have an external synthesizer, wouldn't it be cool to have a current windows screen reader that you could just do that with if you needed to?

S1

Now let's move into the Braille area, the Elva Braille Courier.

S2

This is the one that I really wish was available today. So if you can imagine a little 20. So Braille display with a Perkins style keyboard on one side and the other side, there was a little tiny little Atari computer. So if a screen and a keyboard and it was a two way communication device for a deaf blind person, so the hearing person would sit on the side where the the little Atari computer was, and then the other person on the other side of the table where the braille display and the Perkins style keyboard was. Now, keep in mind that this is all one device, and it was just absolutely amazing. And even that device today would have its place. But again, it's it's long gone for the last 20 years or so.

04:45

S1

The device that came into my life in 1989 and made quite an impression because I'm still talking about it. Braille and speak.

S2

Same here. I got my first Braille and speaker, I think, in 1990, and it was just one of those little things that all it did was text editing. So you turned it on, you took notes, you could save it, you could have multiple different files, and you turned it off. And that was. The end of it. It was a simple Braille input keyboard, spacebar speech output. It just did what it was designed to do. And again, as I kept saying today, just to have a little brown speak next to me, which would still be relevant today, would be absolutely amazing.

S1

Tell me about the business memo.

S2

The business memo was one of these mainstream devices. Because remember now when you look at the vision store, you've got not only assistive technology devices but mainstream devices. And this was a simple nine button mainstream business memo. So it was basically a digital recorder. You had a button for next, a button for previous, a button for play pause and a button for record. And that's all it was. It used to record up to a whopping eight minutes of information. And then when you went through it, a memo by memo, you could also delete the current memo, or you could delete all memos. 

But it was a size back in those days, seven of those little transistor radios. So it wasn't very big. Then the bottom of it, you had this nice little round speaker, but like I said, you just had these number of buttons on it. And that's all it did was just take little memos for yourself.

S1

Let's talk about software now. Drag and dictate.

S2

I remember using a version of Dragon in the early 90s that again, of course, we're talking about, you know, having control over the computer. And back then it was in DOS and there was a version of vocalize, which was a screen reader for DOS back then that was particularly modified to work with Dragon. So when you're giving it commands or you're dictating, and now if you bring that into the into the future now Naturallyspeaking, which is still Dragon, is still around. 

And of course, people that use jaws will be very familiar with the Jason and Jay dictate software that sits between Jaws, the screen reader for Windows and Dragon Naturally Speaking, so it's still around and still extremely good for voice hands free operation of your computer.

S1

Do you remember the Freedom Box?

S2

The good old freedom box. A bit of a funny joke with this one. Originally when it came out it was called the Freedom Box, and then they had to change it because Freedom Scientific didn't like the name Freedom Box because it's too close to the product. But literally what it was was a plug in USB stick that came up with its own talking interface for browsing the internet and so on. And you didn't have to install anything on the computer. You just plug in the USB stick and off you went. And it's those sort of things again, I wish today. So things like the dolphin Guide software, that would be really cool if you could do a similar thing. Plug a USB stick in. Hey presto! You've got a very simple menu driven interface for doing things like web browsing, contacts, that sort of cool stuff.

S1

I don't remember I pad on wheels.

S2

I've been trying to find out the exact name for this thing, so hopefully next week when I pester the person at Apple, I'll be able to find the name of it. But if you can imagine a device that has got a couple of wheels on the bottom, and then you've got a long pole sticking up in the top of that pole, you've got an iPad. And what the iPad is doing, it's controlling this wheeled trolley, if you like, that's connected remotely via the internet. Or I think back then it was like, you know, 4G or 3G. So a person remotely could control the iPad to say, turn left, turn right, that sort of stuff. And it would actually move the motors on those wheels. So you could actually literally walk around when I played to fit where I was walking with the iPad and it was in Melbourne, this person was in Sydney, and we strolled through a whole shopping centre with me, talking to the person via FaceTime on the iPad, and they could see exactly what the camera was seeing on the iPad, and we just had a chit chat. So I was literally like having a sighted guide through an iPad sitting on this sort of like dolly wheelie type system.

09:06

S1

We've got to talk about mobile phones.

S2

Yeah. And I caused when we went from, you know, traditional Nokia Symbian type phones with talks on them. I can remember there was sort of a huge, oh no, what's happening to us. Like we went from windows to windows or like when we went from text based mobile phones to graphics phones like the iPhone and Android phones. Everybody thought it was going to be the end of the world. But to some extent, I love the old talk software on the old Nokia, particularly the new two, because it had such a lovely keyboard and of course because it was strongly menu sort of DOS menu driven. It was such an easy find to use. So in some ways, again, I know the Blind Show Classic two comes close to it, but it would be really nice if we could have that sort of similar interface back again that we when we had the first Nokia phones around.

S1

Two devices from right back in the 70s, we should touch on the optical and also the sonic glasses.

S2

These are two, two devices that I absolutely wish we had around today. So the optical people didn't know what the object was. You literally had a little handheld camera that was connected via cable to the optical hardware. You put your finger on a vibrating pad, and then as you push the camera across the page, the print would come up in vibrating letters on the optical vibrating little pad that you had had your finger on, and it literally meant that you could read any type of print. So it was absolutely amazing. 

And then the sonic glass, which again I wish was around today, there was a guy I'll name him because he probably is listening. Andrew Downey, who was an absolute amazing user of this technology. The sonic glasses basically was a star system, and when it hit different objects, it would have different sounds. So a sound of a brick wall versus a person versus like clean air had all different sounds. And people that got very good at using these devices could literally tell you what the sonic glasses were hearing or seeing. And again, you know, the fact that the cinnamon's gone, I almost feel like saying, can somebody resurrect the sonic glasses? Because that would be really, really cool.

S1

Let's look now at some products that have their genesis a long time ago, but they still exist, like the jaws for windows from For Now or Freedom Scientific.

S2

When you think about we had jaws for DOS in what was at the late 80s, I think, and that's now still going strong with job access for speech for windows now, I think that's amazing that, you know, the company was able to transition absolutely perfectly between the DOS and the windows environment. And of course, it's still going strong. It's the major screen reader on the planet these days.

S1

And what about Key Soft, which goes back to the mid 80s?

S2

I have to chuckle when every time I talk about keys soft because I had to shape a PC plus to keep a laptop back in the 90s that had a dedicated keynote gold speech card in it. And. Even today, when I think about the monarch, which is the graphics tablet that we've talked about, that's got key soft in it. And when you even think about the the bra note touch, that's got key soft in it. So again, you know, 30 years since it came out roughly a little bit more than that. It's still around in one version of another. And it's almost like well if you knew how to use case off back in that day, you'll know how to use it.

S1

Now zoom text.

S2

Zoom text again, one of those long lasting screen magnification software. So back in the again, the 80s, we had zoom text for DOS. And then we had zoom text for windows. And then back then it wasn't actually owned by, which is now the Whisperer or Freedom Scientific Group. And of course, we now we have the combination of Jaws and Zoom text, which is called fusion. So again, from its humble beginnings as a DOS screen magnifier. It's still around today.

S1

And a device you can put your hand on and Braille comes out on paper, the Perkins Brailler.

S2

And that's been around for a good long, long, long while. I actually have one sitting here on my desk, because sometimes I just want to jot a note down quickly. I don't want to get out my smartphone or my laptop or anything else, and I've always got a piece of paper in my Perkins Brailler so I can take notes. So when people say, you know, the time has gone off, good old, old fashioned manual typewriters, I just point to my Perkins and say, for us blind folks, it's still there and extremely relevant today.

S1

Well, there's a lot we've talked about there. We still could talk about a lot more. I'm sure it's brought back memories for many.

S2

And then you'll find the full list in our show notes, as usual, before.

S1

We go, a reminder of where we have details of what you've been talking about, David, in this and previous editions of the program.

S2

As usual, you can check out my blog site, which is David. Would it be Podbean Podbean.

S1

Com David would be our Podbean pod be a incom to write to the program?

S2

You can write to me at Division Australia where I work, which is David Dot Woodbridge how it sounds at Vision Australia-dot-org.

14:09

S1

David Dot Woodbridge at Vision Australia-dot-org. This has been talking tech - with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge I'm Stephen Jolley stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.