Episode Notes
Happy New Year AccessWorld Fans, and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to AccessWorld Magazine, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
In this special episode, Aaron and Tony put down their eggnog, stoke the fireplace, and reminisce on all the milestones that drove digital inclusion and accessibility in 2024.
AccessWorld is a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. A production of the American Foundation for the Blind, it drops each month. The podcast is a companion of AccessWorld Magazine. Check out the latest issue of Accessworld online, and be sure to visit the archives, which has 25 years of back -issues available completely free!
Aaron Preece is editor-in chief of AccessWorld Magazine. Tony Stephens leads communications for AFB. Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast, and even consider making a tax-deductible gift to help support our work and cover the cost for producing the podcast. AccessWorld is produced by Tony Stephens at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore Maryland with digital media support from Kelly Gasque and Breanna Kerr. For questions or comments, email communications@afb.org.
AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 15 Transcript
Intro (00:00):
AFB, you are listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. Learn more at www.afb.org/aw.
Tony Stephens (00:29):
Greetings everybody and welcome to the first podcast of 2025 for AccessWorld, a podcast of the American Foundation for the Blind. I am Tony Stephens, your co-host along with me, the editor in chief of AccessWorld Magazine. Mr. Aaron Preece. Happy New year, sir.
Aaron Preece (00:45):
Happy New year to you.
Tony Stephens (00:46):
How's it going man? It's going pretty well another year. How about you? I'm good. I'm good.
Aaron Preece (00:52):
Another year down. Yeah.
Tony Stephens (00:53):
We are counting the years down and for the podcast, which is great. This is episode number 15. I guess that's a milestone.
Aaron Preece (01:01):
Yeah, time flies.
Tony Stephens (01:03):
Yeah, we would have a quinceanera for this podcast.
Aaron Preece (01:06):
or the Podcast.
Tony Stephens (01:07):
Yeah. Yeah, it's for number 15. But yeah man, this is an episode today of just Aaron and myself. We are doing a couple things. We're going to be looking back at 2024 of all the things that we had both on the pod but also just in general in tech. Looking back at all the technology that came out, finding out what was under maybe some people's Christmas trees and other holiday extravaganzas people were having and gift giving and fun things like that. And everybody just taking advantage of all the sales at the end of the year and all the new tech, all the great things to make our life more accessible. But we're also going to be talking about some of the breakthroughs that happened this past year as well looking forward. But yeah, man, looking back at this past year, what was going on here at A FB?
(01:53):
I think there's no surprise, at least for us in the office, about probably one of the biggest events that we had that definitely went huge global in terms of digital goes for digital impressions and everything like that, but it was Barbie, so the release of the Barbie doll on July 23rd, the first blind Barbie fashionista doll was very exciting and while I know it doesn't do that much in the world of access technology, there actually was some exciting things working behind the scenes here with a FB and we have our consulting folks and they were working hard not just on the doll with our research team helping in the consultation of the doll, but also all the digital assets that went with it. And Aaron, you've had a chance to work with that team quite a bit over the years. A lot of people probably don't know, but what are some of the values that you and others in the talent lab and our consulting services able to partake in terms of, it's one thing to design a doll, but other things that our team does behind the scenes? Some things share with us just a little bit about some of that stuff that consulting services was doing this past year.
Aaron Preece (03:07):
So for the Barbie in particular, in addition to like you said, designing the doll itself, we also kind of did a holistic accessibility review and QA on the whole sort of experience with all basically the whole multimedia experience around that. So the website describing the doll social media posts, I think there's a video series, if I understand correctly, that it is Audio Described and there's a blind actress playing voice actress playing Blind Barbie in the video series. So there's so many different things, and we might have talked about some of this before, but just the making sure all your images are labeled properly and just website accessibility in general, but also even for your social posts, making sure you have good captions and accessibility there. And it's just so many small details when it comes to -
Tony Stephens (04:05):
It helped because the Barbie was a big thing that we even still on our social threads get tags and things like that of the doll and our research team advised Mattel on different approaches and things to consider while designing the doll and mattel's in. They were the ones actually molding and all the drafting and everything like that, but the consultation really helped on the physical design, but on the consulting side of terms of their digital assets, it was fun. That was the area that fell mainly on our comms plate along with the consulting services branch here at A FB. And it was fun working on some of those projects. It helped make sure that our audience of people that are blind or low vision that we are also equally concerned with and try to represent that they too had a chance to get the full experience of the whole media push last July when it was launched. So yeah, we got down the street from you, a good number of Barbies that'll be handed out at different functions and events and getting 'em in the hands of children over this coming year. So it's exciting.
Aaron Preece (05:08):
Yeah, there's a bunch down in the office here. I went by the other day with someone to help me find something and they go, oh my gosh, there's so many barbies over there. They're stacked up against the wall down here.
Tony Stephens (05:18):
We're working on some opportunities this year to get 'em in the hands of kids around the country, but if you know of any schools or anybody like that is schools for the blind groups with kids let us know they had a fun time.
Aaron Preece (05:34):
Just the design and from a cultural aspect, it's such a large brand, such a universal kind of toy I guess,
(05:44):
And trying to get that right and make sure we do proper representation. And then in a lot of cases, from what I heard, tons of questions came in after the launch and being able to represent the blindness community in that way. And one of our goals we talk about here, trying to change the way the world sees blindness. This was, for me, it seemed like a major step in that direction and just knowing the, hearing some of the sales figures of the doll itself and seeing the impressions on social media, it was a massive impact in sort of the mainstream culture. So in some ways a tight rope to walk there whenever you are sort of serving as a ambassador so to speak, for a minority community that people don't necessarily always encounter in. But I think it was really good opportunity for us and for the blindness community as a whole.
Tony Stephens (06:48):
Yeah, definitely. I very much was humbled during our leadership conference. There was a group of youth from a blind foundation for children that brought some students to the leadership conference in September in Minneapolis and the Joy when they opened up their swag bags for the conference where we had Barbies in them, and it reminds you put a lot of hours in things behind the scenes and it just makes those moments of when things don't seem tangible yet just really, really powerful. Yeah, and it's exciting to think that we have this opportunity now to tell the world through play for kids when we think about what life was like for us with accessible toys as a child, toys of representation, there wasn't a lot out there. I knew I'd never join the military, so GI Joe was cool but didn't speak to me the same way. Yeah -
Aaron Preece (07:47):
For sure.
Tony Stephens (07:49):
So that's the big headline for a FB this year for folks that are checking out our YouTube channel. We have a video up there of Eric Bridges, our CEO looking back that we posted just before the end of the year, and you can check that video out on our YouTube channel where he gives a little bit more context in how moving than powerful that was. But yeah, other things on the tech side, bringing it back to access technology and things like that. What other things popped out with you this year that came out in the broader space? Not stuff that necessarily we had our fingerprints on, but some exciting things with some of the partner orgs we've worked on over the years and technology that they've been rolling out. What else was big on your dashboard this year?
Aaron Preece (08:28):
Yeah, a few things. AI still kind of dominates the tech space in general and that's always going to have implications for people who are blinder. I know this is a very recent development, but both Google and OpenAI release their video recognition model. So you can essentially talk to, I haven't had a chance to try the Gemini version yet through Google, but I've messed a little bit around with the chat GBT version. It's basically like you could just talk to it, you would talk to a person and it can try to describe things to you. It's still hallucinates and where it's a mainstream release and it's not got the prompting. You have to make sure you prompt it well whenever you initially start talking to it or are careful with how you ask it to describe things to you. But it's a major step forward for accessibility I think. And I'd be curious, I know the Google version I think can also do screen share, so that could be potentially very useful for accessibility. So again, AI just dominating the tech space. Also the meta glasses that were released through from using the llama ai, being able to just have access to photo and video through those glasses and also just access to recognition in a more, for me at least, a more usable form where you can just look more natural form than holding up your phone.
(09:55):
So there's still work being done I think there on the recognition, and again, it's a mainstream product, but that was a huge development this year, especially just from the price point glasses that have been thousands of dollars for the last several years. If you would get the specialized versions for people who are blind, I think the meta glasses are between two and 400 something somewhere around there,
Tony Stephens (10:17):
Depending on style of gray band you want.
Aaron Preece (10:19):
Yeah. Also though the A PH has been working on a multi-line tactile braille display. They can do both tactile graphics and braille on the same display using the same cells and the same dots called the Monarch. And that was released this year and I got a chance to look at it at the local NFB of West Virginia conference a couple months ago, and I was very impressed in particular, I was impressed with the ability of the tactical graphics and how you can do things like zoom in on a picture and get more detail as you zoom in to say, the example I used or got to test out was a map of the United States and you could touch your finger somewhere on the map and then use a key to zoom in on that specific area of the map and make it more detailed within and have braille labels and everything. So that's a very, very sleek, very cool piece of technology that I think is mainly aimed at the education market, but I could see it being very useful for people in the employment fields as well, especially scientific fields.
Tony Stephens (11:24):
Yeah, we had Lee Huffman on from a PH former here with AccessWorld at A FB, but now with the American Printing House and he was on in our podcast in February, so check through the podcasts back to that episode if you missed it. And he deep dives in that, but I had that same experience when I finally got to get my hands on it. I mean, it's one thing to hear Lee talk about it last winter, but then to get your hands on it, it's neat to see something that you knew was in prototype for a while, but to physically hold it, that was kind of cool.
(11:53):
Going back to the AI real quick again too, one of the things I love this year, and I guess it kind of came out, I'm trying to think when it actually dropped, if it was the very end of 23, but I finally got to to start using it, and it goes back to that when we talk about AI and kind of this, when you think back to when Facebook back in 2016 first started to do the alt tag imaging, the auto alt tagging, that was kind of like the predecessor of image recognition and then the Seeing AI app came out, but for a while there's been the Be My Eyes app where you have a human volunteer, describe something on your camera, on your phone, similar to AIRA as the paid for service Be My Eyes as a free version of that, that relies on volunteers, but they came out with Be My ai, which is built into the app.
(12:35):
And when I was in Greece not long ago for their film festival, we had a film festival outside Athens back in November. It was cool to show it off to people and it was just a huge tool to be able to just hold it in front of me in a place I'd never been. That was completely alien to me, it felt like. And just being able to use be my AI where I was going and Snap, snap and really help just figure out what the surroundings were like because their idea of laying out of a city is 3000 years old.
Aaron Preece (13:10):
That's true.
Tony Stephens (13:11):
It wasn't the typical grid that I'm used to in New York or Baltimore where I am now. So my AI was exciting as well this past year and I know didn't they work, they're now on meta going back to the meta classes I believe.
Aaron Preece (13:24):
Yeah, at least at the moment. I think it is for their visual interpreter service. I'm not sure if you can do the AI feature through the Be My AI specifically through the meta glasses, but you can for sure use the cameras for their visual interpreter services. And that again, is huge because that's such, at least for me, being able to do hands free and just talk to someone and have them looking from your literal point of view and it just so much more natural to interact that way I think. So that's a huge, huge bonus.
Tony Stephens (14:00):
Yeah. Very cool. Other stuff going on, I'm just kind of going through our list of our podcasts over the year. We started talking about usability and what that means. Back in January, we had Leon in February, we had Roy Samuelson in March talking about audio description. Roy is a renowned audio describer producer performer for audio description, who's actually he and the team that did our documentary film, they did the audio description for a documentary film, a team he put together Possibilities is on the new A FB possibilities podcast, which is the Inform and Connect podcast. It's now rebranded as a FB Possibilities podcast and you can find that as well in your favorite podcast app. But we had Roy on, did you get a chance, any good movies this past year? Any good stuff that just thinking of accessible media and entertainment,
Aaron Preece (14:51):
Nothing out of the ordinary in that respect. One thing I would say though is it does seem like audio description is being extended to other areas of focus. Just a few, like a week ago I was watching the game awards ceremony and it's a stream and they had an audio description stream for that. So all the award winner, the award show itself was being described, but also they show a lot of game trailers and that kind of thing, and you just hear music and crazy sound effects for a lot of those game trailers, maybe a little bit of dialogue. So it was really nice to be able to, and I was watching along with some other people, so being able to understand what was going on and comment on the games that were coming out and Oh, that's cool. That looks interesting. And actually knowing what I was talking about was very cool. And to see that kind of expand into more and more spaces and have that audio description is becoming more and more common.
Tony Stephens (15:49):
What streaming platform was that carried on?
Aaron Preece (15:52):
I watched it on YouTube and there's the video still there. Anybody can watch it if they want to.
Tony Stephens (15:59):
That's cool. Yeah -
Aaron Preece (16:02):
Kudos to them for doing that too.
Tony Stephens (16:03):
For sure. Yeah. Well it's been great. A lot of the live events, because technically live events aren't covered under law.
(16:09):
There's certain things that networks have to do in cable, the top five or 10 cable networks have to do for audio description, but live events isn't one of those, but we had the Olympics this past year in Paris and then the Paralympics and NBC Universal has always did an amazing job with the audio description that they're able to do for those games, which just makes it such an exciting, it's such a global phenomenon that it's nice to feel that sense of access and inclusion thanks to audio description for that. So that was cool. But yeah, going through our calendar again, we had our own research folks on our chief public policy and research officer, Stephanie Inert and Ariel Silverman, our director of research. We're on talking about some of the new research that we did back in the spring for the barriers to digital inclusion.
(16:56):
That's a great study. You can check out on our website, the BDIS phase two, which talked about really how much time we waste with inaccessible websites. It's outrageous. I think it was something like 60 minutes a week is sort of thrown out the door just when we basically dealing with the hurdles we face when we try to surf online or deal with an app that doesn't do what we want it to do because it's not accessible. So that's a powerful thing. So check that out, check that episode out if you haven't yet. And going into the summer months, we had you doing your NVDA tutorial, which is a great free screen reading software for PC users. Thanks again for doing that. Great resource folks can get that as well and find out more about NVDA back in June. And then we had our CEO Eric Bridges on Eric who played a huge role in that bill I was talking about earlier, the communications Video accessibility Act, which gives us audio description but also mobile phones are accessible thanks to that bill. So what would our life be like without our smartphones accessibility? But Eric played a part in that, so he shared some of that. But one of the interesting, probably more interesting interviews I think we had this year, there were two that really rose up that were, my favorite one was Janet ing bar. Talk a little bit about what Janet shared this past August because they've jumped in as well our subject matter for that episode into the AI game. And I've been excited. My new phone.
Aaron Preece (18:27):
So Janet, as anybody reading AccessWorld probably knows Janet covers Mac and I guess Apple the company a lot. So for that particular episode, we were talking about all the updates that were coming to Apple products and that's always, their release window is kind of into the summer, early fall. And so this year with the release of iOS 18, which you can find reviews of both the accessibility features and mainstream features on our blog by Janet and Judy Dixon, apple has partnered with OpenAI, which is to me, and when you think about it is kind of a big deal because OpenAI is a Microsoft product. So for them to be partnering with Apples, that's a really cool, kind of seems more momentous than I realized when I think about it here. But they have partnered with OpenAI to bring what they call Apple intelligence to iPhones. And so you I think have had more of a chance. I still, I'm running an iPhone E 2022, but lots of different features through Siri, through your messages and any kind of writing you're doing, lots of being able to get summaries for things, having it be able to help you with writing and editing and all kinds of other, basically just having a more intelligent personal assistant on your phone from what I understand.
Tony Stephens (19:52):
Yeah, I made the plunge. I was walking to a doctor appointment in October and I had an SE as well. I mean so many of us that are blind love the SE because of the small form factor, small form factor, we don't need the giant screen and it's got the fingerprint button. It's the last one that has that, which is nice. But my phone dropped and gold glass shattered where you try to, you're like, oh, let me feel my phone and see how bad it was. And you're like slicing your finger where it's like that spider, well,
Aaron Preece (20:21):
Oh yeah, that kind of powders a little bit.
Tony Stephens (20:23):
And I made the plunge. I was like, I'm going to have to get a new phone. And I was like, what am I going to get? So I got a 16 pro, I feel guilty about it except for the fact that I've been using it. I mean they've been doing well anyways with just their image recognition. It's great doing photo and video. I mean the idea that I'm shooting video and photos, but communications and media is my gig, but its description built in, which is across the board, not just on the 16 pro but just with their OS is so much more intelligent and describing is the face centered auto focus, things like that. It's got great cameras, but I've been using an app now called Black Magic. They make a bunch of high-end video products and between the Apple just sort of the new OS and how much more accessible it is in descriptive, but the Black Magic camera app is extremely accessible. It's one of the few video apps I've had because I've got others, ones from other manufacturers. I've got my studio here that has tons of toys I buy, and most of the time they're not as accessible as it ends up sort of thing. I need to -
Aaron Preece (21:33):
You never know until you get it.
Tony Stephens (21:34):
Hooked up, you get it. But all the buttons are labeled and it lets me be able to do, my undergrad was in radio, television and film, so I understand all the concepts and know that you shoot at these distances and you get the focus and what FS stops and things like all the different elements and adding in what's called lutes, which are different types of filters and just having people describe what they are. It's letting me work on some video stuff that's exciting. Between that and just the fact that Final Cut is a very accessible app on the computer, my MacBook Pro, there's a sense of independent to be able to create multi, not just audio
(22:17):
I can use. And so yeah, I'm loving the new 16 Pro because it works so well as a workhorse in so many ways. But the Apple intelligence is cool too. In fact, my son just noticed it the other day where it's got this, I guess this neat aura when you activate Sury. It even has this sort of futuristic aura that appears I guess on the screen the way he was describing it. So it's kind of cool. Makes it feel like the technology, we were kind of plateaued I feel like for a few years. I mean there was good cameras, better speed with the iPhone 10 -
Aaron Preece (22:51):
Incremental.
Tony Stephens (22:52):
Yeah, 12, 13. But man, everything just with AI and the technology has just hit a huge upward climb over the past 6, 7, 8 months chat GT four, like you said, I've been finding that extremely useful. I can't wait to check it out. I haven't done it like you said with the video, I want to try that now. It's been a couple months since, so probably a month since I was using Chad GT four, so that's exciting.
Aaron Preece (23:17):
And just in general, the release of Chad GT four O, which is incremental increase on GPT-4, I think. And then they've released, I haven't messed with this personally too much, but they've released a reasoning model and I know one thing I've done a lot of, I'm no programmer, but I've been messing around whenever I want to do something, I'll just ask Chad, GBT, Hey, can you help me design Python script to do such and such? So converting documents or changing files and that kind of thing. And just the level of accessibility of that and even just converting documents. There's an article in, I believe it's the spring Spring AccessWorld back in May where I talk about how you can take say PDFs and it's smart enough to understand how to structure A PDF, either an image PDF or from just A PDF that's not really got full maybe has the text, but it's like a stream of just a whole reformatted stream of text.
(24:21):
Chad g PT can take that and structure it into an accessible format and even output it into the format you want. So that's been huge for me, just so much of my accessibility day to day things I need to make accessible. I do through Chad CBT now. And it's amazing how quickly you adopt technology. You're talking about our smartphones and having accessible smartphones. What would we do without those? And I know I've gone back through the AccessWorld Archives and looked at, if you look at AccessWorld from 2009 and earlier and how different the tech was that we were using. And even there's an article I think from 2007 where it was a day in the life of a blind teenager or something and it's amazing. It's completely alien to what people do now and how different, the same types of things people were doing, but just the technology is so different and the workflows were so different.
Tony Stephens (25:20):
That goes to probably one of my favorite episodes of the podcast you're making me think of this past year was the last one that we did in December with Deborah Kendrick, who is the genesis of AccessWorld came from Tactic, her magazine before that. Then Carl Augusto, our former president, brought her on and started AccessWorld 25 years ago now. Was it 2020?
Aaron Preece (25:47):
I think this year. This will be our, I think we started in January of 2000 was the first issue. So yeah, we'll be hitting 25th anniversary.
Tony Stephens (25:59):
Yeah. But Deborah, thinking back to what you were saying, life before the iPhone, like 2007 when it was Windows Mobile and I had the, what was the active…
Aaron Preece (26:10):
Active Sync.
Tony Stephens (26:12):
Had the screen reader for the Windows mobile devices.
Aaron Preece (26:15):
Oh, talks and mobile speak. Yeah.
Tony Stephens (26:17):
Yeah, mobile speak. Thank you. But the arc when we talk about the Upward climb was big and then fell down a little, but then it's been climbing up recently, but then hearing Deborah talk about what it was like in the 1980s when she started Tactic Magazine and still physically braille the things out on an old Perkins Brailer for the magazine to get set and everything like that. If you haven't had a chance to listen to that episode, check it out. And she also wrote the annual holiday gift guide. You can check that out on the AccessWorld blog, which we put out every year, which talks about some of these products we've been talking about, but other things as well from blind vendors, people that are blind, small business owners. But just hearing her talk about the 40 years, it's one thing to think where we've come in 25 years of AccessWorld, but when Deborah first started writing about technology in the 1980s, the enormous leaps that we've made is
Aaron Preece (27:19):
Pretty just the age of some of the technology that you wouldn't expect to be as old as it is. Things like she was mentioning that she got a refreshable braille display. I think she said it was, the media was tape, but it was a braille braille display back in the mid eighties, the Versa braille. And we were talking about too, the optical character recognition was back. The ark and stone and those sorts of things
Tony Stephens (27:47):
It’s wild.
Aaron Preece (27:49):
We think of as fairly modern, and I guess that is modern, but it's just crazy to think that that technology was available back then, just the braille and type and speak devices and how that was way ahead of its time compared to the mainstream market at the time. So just a lot of cool stuff in that episode in general.
Tony Stephens (28:09):
So much has changed. But when you think about it too, I mean you think about how OCR was created like Ray Kurzweil creating the Kurzweil Reader, which was one of the first optical scanners that could convert to text. And now our phones do it instantaneous. We don't even think about it. But so many people that aren't blind use it. I mean for document, document archiving all the way down on the big picture stuff, but just how many people just snap a quick snapshot, put it in their notes, have it converted and then it's synced up with other things. And just the workflow, the whole world, not just the blind and low vision world uses essentially what this technology was that really helped us get our first books read 45 years ago. It's kind of cool the same way that some of these apps, when we talk about the ALT tagging that Facebook did in 2016 for image recognition, and now that's really driving so much of what Chat GPT four can do.
Aaron Preece (29:18):
Yeah, the tags and recognition aspects.
Tony Stephens (29:19):
It's cool to connect the dots. Little braille pun. No? Hey man, I would be remiss in talking about looking back, we talked about seven years, 20 years, 25 years. 40, 45 years. But you know Louis Braille has his birthday coming up soon in a few days, and this is the 200th anniversary this year of braille, which is pretty exciting.
Aaron Preece (29:51):
That's crazy to think about.
Tony Stephens (29:52):
Yeah. Yeah. 1824 at the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris. So yeah, we'll be doing some stuff around that at A FB, probably some posts and blogs, stuff like that.
Aaron Preece (30:06):
Yeah, for sure. From AccessWorld too, I assume, I believe.
Tony Stephens (30:09):
Yeah. So 200 years of braille. So this is a big year, man.
Aaron Preece (30:13):
Yeah, it is. Yeah.
Tony Stephens (30:14):
Looking ahead more ai, I'm guessing as we look into the future or crystal ball.
Aaron Preece (30:19):
I would think so more and more on onboard ai, I would say we've got Apple Intelligence now that's built, a lot of it is done on your iPhone and not sent to this to a server. There are also now Microsoft, I don't know where these are now, but there are new service PCs that Microsoft's releasing with a bunch of AI features built in and they run on, I think it runs on its own computer chip. And so that can do a lot of processing offline essentially. And on your device, which I know a lot of people I know I'm sometimes careful with what I scan and I use Chat GPT as like an OCR, but sometimes a little, especially going through mail and you never know. You got medical stuff coming in and from a privacy standpoint, you don't necessarily want everything going to the cloud. So I could see this being a major game changer too, having offline -
Aaron Preece (31:16):
Just like the chip technology improves, being able to do a lot of this stuff offline. And then also the diversification of the market where you can run local models for image generation and even text generation. And as that improves, what will we be able to do offline and just how will the market become more or competitive, which I always think will be a good thing. So I could see that happening,
Tony Stephens (31:43):
Especially the way that they can get this technology built in with the breakthroughs. Like Google released its quantum computer was in December, and just where so much of this technology can take us, it's exciting. New Year's resolution for this year?
Aaron Preece (32:01):
Oh.
Tony Stephens (32:03):
I'll tell you mine real quick, while you're pondering yours, I know mine, mine just popped in my head. Literally as I'm thinking about all the tech that could be coming out this year, it's not to impulse buy every piece of technology that I find out comes out. That's my New Year's resolution. My bank account will appreciate that.
Aaron Preece (32:21):
Oh man, I can't think of too much. I'd like to do more with braille. I'd like to improve my braille speed. I've known braille since I was a little kid, but oftentimes it's so much easier to go to the text-to-speech. So I'd like to implement Braille into my life talking about Louis Braille, implement Braille into my life in a deeper way, I would say.
Tony Stephens (32:50):
As much as we can get caught up in the technology, it's nice to kick it old school.
(32:56):
Cool, man. For folks that are interested, our Francis Kessler book on afb.org, which is a published online book that walks through the history of blindness, it's fascinating to find out the history of braille. The braille that Louis invented isn't the braille that we're reading today. AFBs work in the 1920s really at helping create, bringing a lot of different things together, wrestling in and taking what Louis gave the world and making it more concrete. You can check that out on our websites. I think it's what the unseen minority, I think we'll put that link in our show notes as well if you're interested in just the history of braille and everything that exploded in the blindness advocacy world after that and sort of our own independence.
Aaron Preece (33:44):
Yeah.
Tony Stephens (33:44):
Yeah, man.
Aaron Preece (33:45):
I'd also always plug the Helen Keller archive because Helen Keller was involved in a lot of that because what they called the war of the dots or the battle of the dots with all the different New York Point and the different types of braille in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, there are first party sources or primary sources from the Helen Killer Archive. And that's always just been fascinated with all the letters and history that are there and all accessible, all either with OCR and then corrected by humans. A lot of that's accessible primary sources for people. So definitely check that out if you're interested.
Tony Stephens (34:23):
Our fully accessible digital archive that mirrors the physical archive, which is in a bunker in Louisville, Kentucky right now. Not necessarily a bunker, but a secured location. But yeah, so check that out. We'll put these links in the show notes. And happy birthday Louis and happy Birthday AccessWorld. Congratulations, Aaron on 25 years leading the helm. And yeah man, happy New Year to everybody. Hope everyone has a safe and wonderful year. So to check us out online, we'll be having the quarterly episode of AccessWorld coming out in February. When's the next issue?
Aaron Preece (35:00):
Yep, February. That'll be the spring issue.
Tony Stephens (35:02):
Alright. The spring issue. So check that out in February and then follow us online, afb.org/aw. You can get all the back issues of AccessWorld, 25 years worth. And be sure to and subscribe to this podcast and share it. And yeah man, thanks so much. Happy New Year. We will talk again next month.
Aaron Preece (35:23):
Sounds great.
Tony Stephens (35:23):
Awesome. Thanks everybody. Thanks.
Outro (35:35):
You've been listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind, produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by Cosmonkey, compliments of Artlist.io. To email our hosts Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org. To learn more about the American Foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to www.afb.org.
Outro (36:28):
AFB.
