My sister shared me this story and I thought it was so neat that I wanted to share it with all of you. Note, when activating this link, you may need to find an unmute button as for me anyway, the video starts playing on mute.
https://www.today.com/video/artist-sculpts-famous-works-of-art-for-visually-impaired-to-enjoy-202579525608
I’m looking for a new VPN provider and am curious if any of my readers use one that they would recommend. I’ve been extremely happy with my current VPN provider, ExpressVPN, but $116.95 billed every 12 months is frankly more than I want to pay for a VPN service that I only use occasionally. Ideally, the perfect VPN for me would:
When reading various reviews for VPN services, they often contain a number of features that don’t interest me particularly although I guess they would be bonuses:
If you use a VPN service that you like, I would definitely love to learn more. And if you can get some sort of referral credit by sharing an affiliate link, feel free to pass that along as well.
I have been very interested in tactile markings on currency, in part because it seems like this is a thing the US will never have. What I didn’t realize though is just how many different systems and variations exist throughout the world. Fortunately for me, my good friend Tom, aka The Blind Coin Collector, wrote a fantastic post on the subject which summarizes many of the systems that currently exist throughout the world. I know I certainly learned something new and hope you will enjoy his post as much as I did.
This post is primarily created to help blind people who travel to a different country and would like a quick reference on how to recognize the local …
I am a long time reader of the Take Control series of books which cover a wide range of mainly technology topics. The thing I love about the Take Control Books series is that they provide value whether you are new to a particular topic, or whether you consider yourself more advanced. Well written, thoroughly researched, and especially for those of us who can’t see the screen shots, very descriptive, the Take Control Books are definitely worth checking out. Even better, they’re having an awesome 20TH anniversary sale during which all their books are priced at 2003 levels or, put another way, all of their awesome books are priced at $5.00. You can read more about their 20TH anniversary or check out their awesome catalog, but hurry because this sale ends tonight, at 11:59:59 PM, Saskatoon Canada time. Now if you’re like me and you read that last sentence and are thinking “Gosh, I’d love to get a few books, but somehow I’ve forgotten how the time in Saskatoon matches up with my local time zone.”, don’t feel bad because this handy resource will let you view the ending time of this sale in your local time.
I don’t often recommend sales like this on my blog, but I felt I should make an exception in this case because the Take Control series has proven invaluable to me over the years and they may prove similarly for you as well.
Have you ever read any of the Take Control books? Did you decide to purchase any from this sale? Let me know in the comments.
Recently, WordPress introduced a feature to enable blogs hosted on WordPress.com to be directly integrated with the fediverse. This is particularly exciting to me as I think the Fediverse has the potential to really bring people together in ways that “traditional” social media is not able to accomplish. Now if you’re reading this and wondering, “What the heck is the Fediverse?” you’re not alone. I’ll talk more about that and what the integration means to me and what it means for the blog in a future post, for now, I just want to test that things are working.
I’m truly honored to appear in AccessWorld, Summer 2023 edition. Also, n extra thank-you to Steve Kelley for taking an interest in helping to tell my story.
https://www.afb.org/aw/24/6/18363
The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) is a non-profit organization that has been working tirelessly since 1921 to create a world of inclusion, independence, and opportunity for individuals with vision loss. They provide advocacy, resources, and programs to support the blind and visually impaired community.
One of AFB’s flagship publications is AccessWorld, a magazine dedicated to technology and accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired. AccessWorld covers a wide range of topics, including assistive technology, accessible websites and apps, educational resources, employment opportunities, and more.
AccessWorld serves as a source of information and inspiration for the blind and visually impaired community, as well as professionals and advocates in the field. It features in-depth articles, product reviews, and expert opinions to help its readers navigate the ever-evolving landscape of accessible technology.
To learn more, you can visit the AccessWorld website at https://www.afb.org/aw/
WordPress has these daily writing prompts and while I often just ignore them, this one caught my attention. If i had to give up a word that I use frequently, I think that word would be “disability”. Disability is a word that is really hard for me to avoid, especially given my work and given that, well, I have a disability. And yet I feel the word often seems to create division. In many respects it’s a sort of label: Does that person have a disability? Do they identify as having a disability? Are they a person with a disability? Are they disabled? If two people use the word disability, are they even talking about the same thing?
No matter how we phrase it, I find the word, disability, to be very labeling and rarely is that a good thing. This isn’t to say that I have anything against people identifying with their specific “disability”, (I actually think that doing so is a positive thing), but the word “disability” itself has come to encompass so many things that it’s becoming challenging to define. Consider the CDC’s definition of disability:
A disability is any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).
CDC | Disability and Health Overview
Heck, that definition describes a lot of people before they’ve had their first cup of coffee in the morning, doesn’t it? The interesting thing about the CDC’s definition is that it talks about “more difficult to do” and not inability to do. I think that’s great except I don’t think it’s possible to remove the word ability from disability, no matter how it’s defined.
So, if I think of a word that I use too often and would love to get rid of, “disability” is the word that comes to mind for me. And yet if I were to challenge myself to not use the word for a week, or even a day, I’m not entirely sure I could do it.
I don’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but even if I have, I think it’s always good to have a reminder when it comes to making blog and other content more accessible.
I recently heard about this fantastic app, available for both Mac OS and iOS, called Aiko which leverages AI technology to transcribe audio. What sets Aiko apart from similar solutions though include, in part:
I was excited to test out this fascinating technology and so to really put it through it’s paces, in a sub-optimal recording environment, I decided to record some audio using my Apple Watch, while standing outside with lots of traffic and other background noise. What follows is the unedited output of my little experiment. I’m also adding the actual recorded audio, so that you can get a sense of the crummy audio I gave Aiko to work with.
Hello, and thanks for joining me today.
I’m playing with an app called AIKO.
It’s an app that leverages Whisper, which is a technology made by OpenAI, the folks that brought us ChatGPT.
Now unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, I’m sure you’ve heard quite a lot about ChatGPT and the fascinating possibilities it opens up to us.
Anyway, Whisper, and on top of that this AIKO app, allow transcription of audio.
The interesting thing about it is that you can record directly in the AIKO app, or you can import audio, say from a file that was pre-recorded.
For example, you might have a pre-recorded audio file of a lecture or a class.
You would be able to import it into this AIKO app, transcription would happen, and then you would have the output as text.
For my test today, I’m standing outside in front of my house recording on my Apple Watch with traffic going by.
And the reason I’m doing this is because I wanted to come up with a very sub-optimal recording environment, just to better understand how the technology would deal with audio recorded in such an environment.
I’m also trying to speak as naturally as I can without saying words like um and uh, things that I think often get said when speaking.
The interesting thing about AIKO and the way that it transcribes audio is that it supposedly is able to insert punctuation correctly.
I’m not sure if it does anything about paragraphs or not, but as the speaker, I don’t have any way of controlling format.
Once you run a file or recording through AIKO, the output is rendered as text.
However, there are a few things you can do with it.
First, you can of course copy the text into some other application.
The other thing that you can do is have the text be timestamped.
The reason that this can be handy is that you can use that then to create files that can be used as closed captioning for videos.
Anyway, it is kind of loud out here, and so I will go back inside.
I also didn’t want to make this too long because I’m not sure if it’ll work at all or how accurate it’ll be, but my plan is to post this to the blog without editing it.
Stop, stop, stop.
Aiko-generated transcription from my Apple Watch recording.
One final note, the dictation ends with the words “stop stop”. I didn’t actually speak those words, but because I have VoiceOver activated on my Apple Watch, they were picked up in the recording as I located and activated the stop button. This is definitely incredible technology and the price certainly can’t be beat. From an accessibility perspective, I found Aiko to be extremely accessible with VoiceOver on both Mac and IOS and since it is a native app using native controls, I feel confident that it will work with other assistive technologies as well. You can find more information about Aiko, including FAQs, links to app store pages and more here.
Recently, I got to participate on the Parallel podcast talking about, of all things, accessibility and fitness. The reason I phrase it this way is that anyone who knows me probably knows that fitness and I don’t normally go together in the same setence, let alone the same podcast. From the show description:
Starting or maintaining a fitness program is a challenge for anyone. If you have accessibility needs, you might experience barriers related to touchscreen devices, coaching that doesn’t address a hearing or visual disability, or a need for accommodations related to physical limitations. With its Fitness+ service, Apple has taken on some of these issues, and opened up the program to many more people with disabilities, We’ll talk with a Fitness+ user, and someone who has worked on Apple accessibility teams.
https://www.relay.fm/parallel/80
Talking about anything fitness related has always been challenging for me and so I want to particularly thank the ever-awesome Shelly Brisbin for being brave enough to include me. I also want to especially thank Sommer Panage and the other unsung heros that dare to dream of a more accessible world, and work so hard to make that a reality.
Parallel can be found everywhere great podcasts can be found, more info about the episode and how to subscribe to Parallel, which you should totally consider doing whether you listen to this episode or not, can be found on Parallel’s home page.
