Episode Notes
Welcome back to another episode of AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. In this, our second episode, we take a deep dive into the latest update for Apple IOS 17. We’re excited to have AccessWorld frequent contributors Janet Ingber and Judy Dixon, who break down the mainstream updates and new accessibility features for IOS-17 users. Check out their posts on the AFB blog for more information.We also wrap up National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM), with a reminder that inclusion in the workplace continues to be something worth having on our radar year-round. AccessWorld has a wealth of articles in back issues that spotlight employment in the tech field as well as in other careers. So, don’t forget that you can access for free every issue of AccessWorld going back to the year 2000.
We close out the episode with a sneak peak of what’s in the upcoming issue of AccessWorld, which will drop later this month.
AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 2 Transcript
Tony:
You are listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. To learn more, visit www.afb.org/aw.
Aaron:
Welcome to the second episode of our new AccessWorld podcast. This is Aaron Priest, the editor-in-chief of Access World, and I'm joined here by Tony Stevens. Hey, Tony.
Tony:
Hey Aaron. Hello, everybody. This is Tony, Director of Comms with AFB. It's November 1st. We just finished up October, and hopefully our bellies are full of Halloween candy.
Aaron:
I wish.
Tony:
We're obviously recording this previously, so we don't know. Hopefully everyone got good candy. I'm hoping so, but yeah. You probably didn't go trick-or-treating, did you Aaron?
Aaron:
Not me.
Tony:
No, same here. Same here. I'll be lucky to hand out candy anyways. But yeah, October's not just about Halloween, it's about, we're finishing up National Disability Employment Awareness Month, but we want to make sure at AFB that even though it's November 1st, employment does not just, issues don't disappear.
Aaron:
Yeah. So, for AccessWorld, we have always found employment important and we've always pushed for people to be employed, and also one of the things we are interested in is showing that people who are blind or low vision can do a lot of things, can do pretty much anything a sighted person can when it comes to employment. So we always want to showcase that as well. So we've always promoted a lot of employment-related content in AccessWorld.
So in our recent issues, we have several interviews with people who are blind or low vision themselves and about their careers, called our Employment Journey series now with our transition to the quarterly issues. Before it was called Employment Matters. It will help you if you are looking for employment advice, but it also, I think, is a good showcase of what people who are blind or low vision can do, and the kind of tools that they can use to access their jobs and the innovation and problem solving skills that people show.
And I think it's important for people, even if you're not visually impaired, or if you are in the business of hiring people and you want to know what exactly can someone that's blind or low vision do, it's a great way to learn about that, what people can do. All of our issues going back to 2000 are online and free to access. You can go to afb.org/aw/backissues, so afb.org/aw for AccessWorld and then /backissues, and all that content is there.
We have Janet Ingber and Judy Dixon on today. It's that time of year again when iOS or Apple updates their iOS operating systems, and so Judy and Janet have brought us blog posts collecting the updates, both Janet covered the mainstream updates and Judy covered the accessibility updates. Again, those are on our blog, afb.org/blog, and so they are here to talk to us about the updates and all the exciting things going on with iOS 17 today.
Tony:
Very cool. Excellent. So yeah, stay tuned everybody. We'll be right back with Aaron, myself, and Janet and Judy, our two guests.
Aaron:
So Judy and Janet, thank you for joining us. For longtime readers of AccessWorld, you may remember during this time of year, we publish our review of the latest iOS update, and once again, Janet Ingber and Judy Dixon have prepared information on both the mainstream and accessibility updates in iOS 17 that'll be live on AFB's blog by the time you listen to this podcast. And Judy and Janet, thank you for joining us.
Janet:
Thank you.
Judy:
Thank you.
Aaron:
So first we'd like to just kind of get a rundown on what's new with iOS 17. So I guess we will start with the mainstream updates. So I will hand it over to Janet to cover the mainstream updates of iOS 17.
Janet:
Okay, sure. There are some good updates in this iOS version. One of the things that I really like a lot is the ability to share AirTags. I know a lot hasn't been made of it, but I don't know why Apple was kind enough to do this, but it's actually wonderful. I have a AirTag on my dog, along with his license and microchips and everything else, and I was very easily able to make it also be on my husband's Find My section and my daughter's Find My section. That, to me, is a really cool thing.
Another really fun feature is live voicemail. So if you get a phone call and somebody starts leaving you a voicemail, voiceover will read it as it's being dictated. So then you have the choice of either taking the call or not. The other thing you can do is you can leave a video message. What will happen is you'll get a message that the person is not available, and then you'll be walked through how to leave a message.
There is improvements to autocorrect, and there's now something called predictive text. And basically what predictive text does, after learning your writing style and everything, as you're typing in an email or a message or anywhere that text can be entered, what will happen is you will get suggestions of what predictive text thinks you want to say, and all you have to do is double tap on the suggestion. I found it a little annoying in the beginning because stuff was always popping up, but what I did was I just opened a text message and just played with it for a few minutes to get the feel of it, and it's actually pretty good.
Messages has a really nice feature called Check-in. I think this is really great with kids, but it could be with anybody. I mean, if you have these people in your Find My app, that's great. It'll tell you where they are and how far away they are. But what Check-in does is you set this up and they have your exact route. Whoever's following you is able to see your route, and if they can't reach you, then you know where they are, you'll know what their battery level is, all kinds of things. It's not very hard to set up and it can be a very, very useful feature.
What's not in the blog is Apple Fitness+ has some new trainer tips. So each week one of the trainers gives a quick little tip, I mean like a 30- to 60-second tip. The one last week was on doing your plank correctly, and the one today was about how to stay motivated. You can also, if you're somebody that really likes stacks, you can put a bunch of exercises in a stack and it will just play back to back to back. Or Fitness+, by giving them some information, they'll come up with a workout plan for you. So that's another really nice feature. I know I've left some out, and as we're going, if I think of anything and there's time, I will let you know. But it's all in the blog.
Tony:
So this is Tony, Janet. Can I ask just a couple of quick questions?
Janet:
Sure.
Tony:
Because some of it's really interesting, and I've always fancied myself as an avid Apple user, but a couple of these things I haven't really dove into. I go into the Find My app a ton for my kids. I got two boys that have iPhones and I'm constantly nervously figuring out, "Okay, did they make it to school? Did they miss the bus?" Depending on how quickly they're going down the road, I'm like, "Okay, they're either walking to school or they actually got on the bus." So did you say, under messaging, is there a way that I can more easily access the Find My kind of information?
Janet:
What it'll do is you will set up the Check-in and you'll indicate what the route is for your kids, if you're going to set it up, or they will indicate the route, and you'll be notified when they get there. And if there's a problem and something's wrong, if they're not there by a certain time, they will contact them, they can contact you, Apple can contact you. So yeah, it is set up in messages, and it's pretty easy to set up.
Tony:
Oh, nice. And then for the tags, I'm wanting to jump on the tag bandwagon, but maybe for some of the listeners, too, that aren't too familiar with the tags, because I think it's got enormous independent living benefits for people that are blind or have low vision.
Janet:
Oh, yeah.
Tony:
What's the size of the tag? You said you put one on your dog. I've got my guide dog as well. Are they easy to use and get set up similar to just any other device?
Janet:
They're very, very easy to set up, it's step-by-step. A few years ago I did an article on AirTags, but it's very, very easy, and it's about the size maybe of a half dollar.
Tony:
Oh wow.
Janet:
If you are going to put one on your dog, you need to get an AirTag holder, because the tab is just this one little thing, and then you put some kind of holder or something on it.
Judy:
It's like a disc.
Janet:
Yes, it's like a disc, and they're very easy to set up. And what's really cool is when you're inside and you're looking for something that has an AirTag on it, AirTag will give you step-by-step directions. I hid one under my piano and then went looking for it, and it gave me exact directions to get there, even though it was inside the house, but it did that.
It's great for, I have one on my purse, I have one hidden in my purse, so if my purse ever gets stolen, I can track it. I am a huge fan of AirTags, and I'm really happy Apple made the service available so that we could share them. And you can share an AirTag up to five people.
Judy:
Volume on the AirTags is not really high. They're actually quite hard to hear, but the way that the iPhone can direct you to it is really nice.
Tony:
Similar to how the AirPods kind of work, when you lose one of your EarPods?
Janet:
Yeah, sort of. Yes.
Aaron:
I was thinking about that, that I would love to attach one to my AirPods, as often as I lose those.
Judy:
Well, you can find your AirPods, depending on which kind of AirPods you have, you can find your AirPods in Find My.
Aaron:
Oh, will it do the same thing? Because I lose the case all the time is what I lose, so I can't track it by audio.
Tony:
I'm thinking of my kid's keychain.
Aaron:
That's good info to have.
Tony:
[inaudible 00:11:35] Yeah, like a keychain. That's awesome. Very cool. Well, those are some exciting updates. Thanks Janet.
Janet:
Yeah, you're welcome.
Aaron:
Welcome. Question, what stood out to me was the new predictive text. I noticed that they mentioned that they are using a transformer model to predict the text and do the autocorrections and incorrect grammar. I'm curious how big of a difference you've noticed, because that, to me, says that they're using AI for that now, and it's kind of amazing. I'm sure if anybody's messed with ChatGPT and those sort of things, it's uncanny how good that is now. So I'm curious if there's been a significant increase in the quality of that.
Janet:
In the time I've been using it, I've seen some improvement, definitely. And what it says is that as it learns your writing style and everything, its results will be more accurate.
Aaron:
That's very cool.
Janet:
Yeah.
Tony:
Awesome. So shifting over to accessibility, Judy, for more specific down into the weeds on things that are specific to users with disabilities, what are some of the accessibility improvements that you're noticing in the iOS update?
Judy:
There's quite a few. It's very nice this year. There's two new features in the detection modes part of the magnifier app, and they are text detection, which is just kind of an instant read like we have in other apps, but it's very similar to the one that's been in the camera app for the last couple of years. And also there's the point and speak. Point and speak is a potentially good feature. At the moment, it's rather difficult to use, especially for people with no vision. I suspect for low vision users they may have better results, because what you're meant to do is slide your finger around on a touchscreen, a different touchscreen, not the one you're using point and speak, but another device, and it will tell you the words you're passing over, so you can use it on a microwave or a dishwasher or something like that.
The problem is, you touch the touchscreen. And I guess maybe they think you're supposed to do it when you're just really close to it and not actually touching it. I have tried it many times and have been minimally successful, so I keep reading all the articles and all the tips on how to use it, and I have not made much progress. So I'm hoping that it will change or something, but being able to have access to appliances, that's such a major problem that people have these days. And having a better way to do that would be a really, really nice thing.
Tony:
Yeah, for sure.
Aaron:
I'm curious, are there better results on more... I'm not sure what the name for these buttons are, but the old style microwaves where it's like a flat panel but the button's still a physical button that you have to kind of press in, where you can kind of ghost your finger over it? Does it work better there, versus... Because I see what you mean with, if you're using an actual touchscreen, whatever you touch is going to get activated, but if it's, say, a tactile knob on a washer or that type of oven or microwave...
Judy:
It doesn't read those.
Aaron:
Oh, okay. So it has to be an actual lit-up, digital touchscreen.
Judy:
It has to be a lit-up thing, yeah.
Tony:
Would it work on a kiosk? I was at an airport recently.
Judy:
It might. I haven't tried it on something like that.
Tony:
That'd be interesting.
Judy:
It could. That would be interesting, because it might.
Tony:
Yeah. I went to a restaurant, which will be left unnamed, a fast food joint at an airport, and there were no more humans. It was all just touchscreens, and it was "Good luck." And it wasn't any of the ones that had been incorporating... I know McDonald's worked to make their kiosk accessible. This was not McDonald's. But yeah, just a joy. I mean, it's great to think that there are tools other than... Seeing AI can only do so much as an app that can kind of hold up in front and try to read a screen, but that's neat that it's interactive like that.
Judy:
Be My AI does a great job on screens. There's a lot of new features having to do with braille displays. There's a new way to search apps on your phone. If you're on the home screen, any home screen, if you just press enter and start typing the name of the apps or the app or whatever you're looking for, it will create a list of them, and you can arrow up and down and just hit enter and go to the one you want. It's very nice.
And you can have it, they have something now called Sound Curtain, which is similar to Screen Curtain, except it turns off all the sounds on the phone whenever you connect a braille display, if you turn Sound Curtain on. And that's a really nice feature.
Tony:
Is it easy... Is it in the rotor or an easy way, like a three- or four-finger tap?
Judy:
It's not in the rotor. It's something you turn on in voiceover settings, and it will come on, and as soon as you disconnect the braille display, it goes off.
Tony:
Oh, good.
Aaron:
That's helpful.
Tony:
There's not a way to accidentally trip yourself. I know everyone complains about the Screen Curtain, not from our community complaining, but regular consumers who aren't blind or low vision, like "Why does my screen turn black?" Because they did a four-finger or a three-finger tap, or whatever the Screen Curtain tap is. So that's cool. So you can just plug it in and it automatically kicks on. That's nice.
Judy:
There's also a setting now, you can enable Bluetooth on start so that you'll never get into a situation where you don't have Bluetooth on when you want it. That's a nice feature. There's a lot more haptic feedback, and I've heard a lot of complaints about this. There's actually a lot of haptic feedback, and it's all configurable. You can turn off any of the haptic feedback, and in the blog I talk about, if this is a problem for you, that there are ways to turn it off, and I describe how to do that. Because there's probably more haptic feedback than most of us want.
Aaron:
So with the haptic feedback, is there, I'm assuming different strengths and patterns for, say, being on the keyboard versus when you're touching apps, different buttons, that sort of thing? Or is it pretty consistent?
Judy:
There is. When you get sounds, there's also haptics. So my text message sound is kind of a long two-second sound, and the haptic feedback goes the entire time, it goes "Brrrr", and it is a little disconcerting. There are new settings in the voice settings, you have a lot of configuration now. You can configure these voices, setting things like timbre and things like that, and different voices have different kinds of settings. So the vocalizer voices have some kinds of settings and then the other voices have different ones. Some of them don't have too much, some of them have quite a lot.
Tony:
Is that, you find, just going and exploring each voice and figuring out?
Judy:
Yes.
Tony:
Going down the rabbit hole of all the settings for each voice and you can just kind of play around.
Judy:
Yep. You can make your own voice now, using that. I think it's using the ElevenLabs personal, it's called Personal Voice, and you have to read, apparently it takes quite a while, but you have to read several hundred phrases. But once you finish, you have your own voice that you can use. I have not done this, but I understand from people who have that it's pretty complex.
Aaron:
So this voice, is it specifically for a specific type of app to read out specific messages, or can you actually use it as a TTS voice?
Judy:
I believe you can use it.
Aaron:
That's amazing.
Judy:
As I said, I have not done it, but...
Tony:
I don't know if I like myself as much to hear myself all the time.
Judy:
I don't think I do either. It's not something I have been very interested in doing.
Tony:
I guess if you have to read a script, maybe if you're doing an event and you just are curious, "How would I sound reading this script?" or something like that, maybe that would be a speech or something. Or, I mean, why even be speech? I could just hold my phone up by the microphone and just pretend.
Aaron:
Say all.
Tony:
Yeah.
Judy:
There's a new feature called Assistive Access that provides a stripped-down interface for many of the default apps, the built-in apps, and this is designed for people who are a little intimidated by the interface and to give them a simpler thing to use, or people with cognitive disabilities.
Aaron:
I can see where that would be helpful. Having worked with seniors who have just picked up the iPhone and it's really their first smartphone ever, and trying to teach them how a smartphone differs from a traditional phone, but also how to use voiceover, which is an additional complexity, I can see where that would be very beneficial.
Judy:
I do too. I think it can be really... I've talked to so many people who, "Oh, I just can't use a smartphone," and they're just overwhelmed by the complexity of it. You can set the rotor so that it won't change on its own. I find a little confusing, but right now if you set your rotor, let's say you set it to characters, because you like that, and then you go to an app that has action items, it will automatically switch to the action rotor instead of staying on characters.
You can now set it so that it doesn't change. It's going to change rotor with the item, so it doesn't change with item, and it'll stay on whatever you've set it for. The only problem is if you've set it for something that doesn't actually exist in your next app, it has to change, because it can't stay on something that doesn't exist. So I don't know that this is going to work out as well as one might hope. I've always wanted Apple to have a default setting per app, so you could decide in this app, "I want my rotor to default to characters, and in this app I want my rotor to default to vertical navigation," and things like that, but they haven't chosen to do that yet.
Tony:
I can definitely see myself using, though, where... Because I like the way that I have it set up to be able to read things, and as I go from app to app, sometimes it is frustrating to have to be like, "Okay, I got to rotor again and rotor again to get back to where I was with trying to read words and things like that." That definitely has some use, in my day-to-day use, I think, just right out of thinking about it.
Judy:
Yeah, I've used it also, and it has been useful. I find it... It's nice.
Tony:
Excellent. Any thoughts? A question I had in terms of just accessibility, as always, the apps, as they're being developed and developers are wanting to try to integrate in more accessibility tools, and Aaron and I, we were talking about this earlier, resources that Apple has available. Because there is so much. I mean, each iOS update, it seems like there's more and more verbosity, there's more and more opportunities for users to have control over what they're hearing with the text-to-speech, but just making sure developers are developing in ways to maybe think through some of these things.
Any thoughts on resources out there that Apple has, or Aaron, are you familiar with anything, maybe, that Apple has as a direction for developers to know that "Hey, there's this whole world of accessibility that you can leverage in your design too"?
Aaron:
I'm not deeply familiar with this personally, but I did find that there is an extensive chapter in their developer documentation on accessibility in general. There are multiple... It's not just a very quick page or anything, it's multiple different sections. I saw something on adding voiceover accessibility, maximizing your accessibility, the best way to implement it, various types of accessibility, UI accessibility versus other types. It's a pretty extensive chapter, but that is in the developer documentation from Apple themselves. And like I said, it looked pretty extensive from the quick look that I took at it. I'm no developer myself, so didn't have a deep dive into it, but it did look extensive from the look that I took.
Judy:
They also have accessibility sessions at WWDC, so those videos are online, and they stay online for years.
Aaron:
And if you go back to the spring issue of, or the summer issue of AccessWorld, sorry, Janet put together an article on those, and we link to those in the article where you can go back and rewatch a lot of those from this past WWDC.
Tony:
Cool. We can link to that in the podcast description notes. That's good to know. Excellent. Well, it's always wonderful that, Judy, you and Janet are always forging the paths forward to be the first to hit download whenever Apple prompts you for opportunities to updates. Some people are a bit hesitant sometimes, right? So any thoughts as people do? Because with every update on every manufacturer, there's always quirks and things that always get worked out and version 0.01, 0.02, et cetera, that come out as later updates.
Any ways that folks can just, as they come up with things, reach out to Apple to let them know, so that users, so that we can have a way to get feedback in? Because I know Apple's really good about wanting to actually hear from users even after updates are made.
Judy:
Apple Accessibility has a phone number and an email address, and the email address is accessibility@apple.com, and their phone number is (877) 204-3930. And I've called them quite a few times, and they're very helpful. They actually can get on your phone. They can't actually do anything, but they can see it. So you can manipulate your phone and take them to an area where you're confused or you're having trouble, and they can describe it to you or even report problems and things.
I had a situation a few weeks ago where my Apple TV wouldn't come on, and they actually tried to get on it. They actually, this was great. The guy got on my phone and then turned on the camera so he could look at my Apple TV screen, and that worked really well. He couldn't fix it, but he really tried hard and ended up making me an appointment at the Genius Bar.
Janet:
No, it's really good. They can do that also, see inside your watch or your Mac, and they are very knowledgeable. They are extremely nice, and I'm sure they've heard it all before, so whatever problem you have, don't feel embarrassed about calling. It will make your life easier rather than being frustrated with it.
I just want to go back to one thing about updates really quick. I don't have the bravery to try betas, so I don't do betas. And usually what I'll do when an operating system comes out, I'll wait a few days, and yes, exactly, they push through 17.1 or 17.01. So yeah, Apple's good about handling bugs. There's going to be bugs in any operating system, it's just the nature of the beast, and if you are having problems, just have patience. If you need to call Apple for them to help you, do it. That's what they're there for. And they've all been trained in accessibility. They understand everything that your phone can do or your Mac can do, your watch, your TV. So don't be ashamed or embarrassed about calling them.
Aaron:
One thing I would add too with that is, and we've linked to this in several of our articles, is the AppleVis, applevis.com is a site dedicated to voiceover accessibility, in particular blind and low vision accessibility on Apple, any kind of Apple operating system. But one thing that I find very helpful that they do is they have a persistent bug tracker of all the accessibility-related bugs on iOS, on whatever the current iOS version is, because a lot of the times the things that they don't catch in beta are going to be the very niche. When it goes out to the general public, there's going to be those niche things that are probably the kind of bugs that aren't caught, usually.
So it's helpful before you update to go and look at that and see, "Well, are there any bugs that are actually going to affect me?" Because if it's a bug that says, when I'm in the mail app and I'm focused on this button and I do this gesture, this happens instead of this happening, maybe you're not using the mail app that often or you're not going to do that particular sequence of events to get that bug so you can update, but if it's something that affects you directly, you may want to hold off till that particular bug is fixed. I know that has helped me a lot over the years to judge when I want to update to the latest version, for sure.
Judy:
In 17.1, which just came out last week, they've come out with a list of the bugs that were fixed and new bugs that were introduced and bugs that weren't fixed.
Tony:
The never ending game of Whack-a-Mole.
Judy:
Yes.
Janet:
Yes.
Tony:
Very cool. So on a wishlist, we are getting into the holiday season, maybe not this year, but always for future years, any thoughts on daydreaming about what else could maybe be thrown in Apple iOS in the future? Anything that you're really still daydreaming about or wishing for?
Janet:
I can't really think of anything major. I really love Apple Music, and the more they can do with that would be very, very nice.
Tony:
Judy, how about you?
Judy:
Just thinking about that. I also can't think... I'm sure I must have a list, but every year I repress it after the update comes out.
Tony:
Yeah, maybe the last thing I need right now is a dire wish to then give me a reason to go spend more money on stuff.
Awesome. Well, thank you both for taking time to really break down your blog articles. They'll be on the AFB blog for AccessWorld, and then as well, just for being part of our second podcast episode.
Judy:
Thank you very much. This is an exciting podcast.
Janet:
Thank you so much.
Tony:
Thanks again to Janet and Judy for taking time to join us for this episode of AccessWorld. I always think of myself as an avid Apple user. I've been using Apple since 1983 when it was an old IIC computer, but it's always nice. There's new things every turn, Aaron, and some cool stuff. What were the big takeaways for you?
Aaron:
For me, I would say the big takeaways are, from accessibility in particular, the new text recognition, the ability to point at a touchscreen and it recognizes...
Tony:
You could hold it in front of you and it's actually...
Aaron:
Hold it in front of you on a touchscreen and it will recognize what's on this touchscreen in front of you.
Tony:
Yeah, I'm going to check that out for sure.
Aaron:
And for me, I love AI and I'm always interested in seeing developments in AI. So when I saw that the autocorrect feature and the predictive text feature is now using a transformer language model, it seems like, to predict your text, and that's something I've never used before because you always hear horror stories about people correcting to the wrong thing or always having to fix it. So it's something I've never really used before, but something I'll definitely start using just to see how well it works, just based on my experience with other types of AI.
Tony:
Yeah, definitely. And one of the things I love, when Janet was talking about the AirTags, because I've not yet jumped on that ship, but I need to. I just need to make the plunge. Because I love when they come out with something that's for the broader world, but then you realize, you're like, "Oh, this could be really good use for my own sort of independent living lifestyle as someone who's blind."
Aaron:
Oh, for sure. That's definitely something that should have picked up by now, just based on the amount... I mentioned previously that I'd love to stick one to my AirPods, because I don't know how often I set my AirPod case down and don't remember where I put it. So having a way to actually find that, and it seems like it does, Find My will do that too, so that was great information to have.
Tony:
Yeah, very cool. And the one thing that I want to get keyed into is the Be My AI app that we were talking about as well, because I've been using Be My Eyes app for a while, but I keep hearing about the Be My AI, and it sounds like it really is as good as people are saying.
Aaron:
Yes, I have been blown away by the Be My Eyes AI, I think, is it Be My AI, I believe?
Tony:
Yeah.
Aaron:
It's now available to the public. You're not on a waiting list anymore. If you download the Be My Eyes app from the app store, you can click over to that Be My AI tab and you can just get access right now. So what it does is it's using a, I believe it's GPT-4 to recognize images. So it is unreal the detail that it can pick up. You take a picture of a room, like I took a picture of my dog as one of the tests I did sitting in my recliner, and it said that the dog was in the foreground, but it also recognized my laptop next to me on a little stool. It recognized my couch on the corner of the picture. It recognized my door and the things hanging around my door. It described the expression on my dog's face.
So it's incredibly detailed, but what you can also do is you can ask it for more information. So if I wanted more... Say it picked up the laptop in the corner of the picture, "What kind of laptop is that or what's the laptop look like?" It would give me more information on that. And it will also tell you, "Well, I can't quite see it. You need to take a picture that's more centered. It's in the edge or the picture's too dim. I could read more if it was brighter." So it's really amazing.
I've had a lot of use of it, because I'm in a group chat with friends and family and that sort of thing. And everybody's always sending pictures, and they've been good to tell me, they'll describe the picture, but it's really nice now, there's an option in the Apple Share sheet. So anytime you see Share in anything, any kind of picture, if it has a Share button, if you scroll down, there's an option called Recognize with Be My Eyes, and that will send that picture to the system and recognize it for you. And it's again, really accurate. So I'm able to go, "Oh, it looks like you're here, and it looks like the picture has this."
And a lot of people that I've been texting with have been impressed, they're like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you are able to get that level of accuracy." One thing I will say, because it is a GPT language model, they are known to make things up. It's called hallucinating, when, if you say to ChatGPT, "Give me the biography for Pierre Louie that lived in 1880," it will make someone up and give you what it considers in a completely accurate description of this guy's life, even though he never existed. So it is willing to make things up.
I've found it very accurate so far, but when it comes to text, it doesn't really recognize text all that well. So you may want to check if the text is correct, like if you're taking a picture of, say, a digital panel or something, an appliance or something like that, that might be something you want to... If it tells you the left knob is temperature or something, you may want to switch to another app that does that specifically for OCR, like Seeing AI, to double check that just in case, because it will, especially with text where it's not really geared towards, it's not technically using OCR. So that's something to check, and for serious things, you want to make sure you double check on things.
Tony:
But it's not going to accidentally mistake my guide dog for a 1967 VW microbus. It's not going to do that.
Aaron:
No, but it might say that it's a cat if it sees it from the wrong angle, or you've got a wolf in your house. It might be something like that, you might get...
Tony:
Four legs and a tail.
Aaron:
Yep.
Tony:
It's all a cat.
Aaron:
It's something like that. I'm saying that, but that also, it will warn you. There's all kinds of warnings and stuff when you start it up about what it can do, what it can't do, what you should use it for, what you shouldn't use it for. So it'll tell you this too. I just think it's worth mentioning, because I noticed infrequently I'll take a picture of something that I know what it is and I'll be like, "Wait a minute, that's not clear."
Tony:
Well, with [inaudible 00:38:16] AI, it's going to get smarter as it goes along.
Aaron:
Exactly. Hallucination, and this is kind of an AI topic, but that's one thing they've been working on in all these AIs is making sure when you ask it for facts that it's actually giving you facts and not making something up. And that's a continuing issue that people in the AI space are working on. So obviously it's going to get better, for sure.
And it's using the... I would say, I mean, it's probably debatable potentially, but I would say that it's using, since it is going through OpenAI who are kind of the leader in this field, it's really the best AI image recognition you're going to be able to find right now. And it's amazing because it's free. It is entirely free. There's no limits on how many pictures you can take, that sort of thing. So it's a really amazing tool, and it's really already changed the way I do things and the way I'm able to... And it's expanded what I can interact with and the way, even like I said with the pictures people are sending in my text groups, group chats, it allows you to better engage with society, I would say.
So I highly recommend people check it out. Just if you want to download the Be My Eyes app from the iOS App Store and then go to the Be My AI tab, there you go.
Tony:
And this wasn't supposed to be a commercial for Be My Eyes.
Aaron:
Yeah, this is not sponsored by Be My Eyes.
Tony:
It sparked our conversation with Judy and Janet and it was like, I need to make the plunge. I'm going to wait till the weekend, or else I'm going to kill my productivity this week just walking around, holding my phone open.
Aaron:
Taking pictures of things. Yeah, same.
Tony:
Exactly. But cool. And I mean, just exciting as well, in their updates for Judy and Janet. I mean, Apple's even becoming smarter with their recognition and photos and texts and things like that. And then the tracking thing we talked about with scanning stuff, and then just across the board, it's so exciting when you think about how far we've come over the few years.
Aaron:
For sure.
Tony:
Thinking about where we're going. What's up in November for AccessWorld, coming out later this month in AccessWorld? What else is on the plate for AccessWorld?
Aaron:
So this month for AccessWorld, being our November issue, we are going to have a article on shopping for gifts. People who have read Access World might remember our gift, our shopping guides from the past where we take a deep dive into a website or a couple of websites and apps on their accessibility and that sort of thing.
What we're doing a little bit different this year will be describing, essentially doing kind of a survey of what is the landscape like specifically for smaller specialty shops? Where is the accessibility there? Because I would say at this point, if you're going to Walmart or Amazon or Best Buy or any of those other, Barnes & Noble, any of those companies, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to have an accessible experience. There's always outliers, but I would say all the companies I'm aware of that are major household name companies are going to have accessible websites at this point in time.
So we want to look at smaller, because there's a lot of things you can only find at smaller places, and people love to get homemade crafts and that sort of thing. So there's so many stores out there that are smaller businesses, and we're curious what the level of accessibility, knowledge, and implementation is there. So that's what we'll be doing, a survey on many of those collecting and seeing what the landscape's like for that.
Tony:
Worth checking out for small business Saturday, which will be later in the week that AccessWorld will drop. So that's cool.
Aaron:
Yep. And so other articles, there is a new service called Our Ability. So we'll be doing an article on that company, that organization that is connecting people that have various disabilities with companies that are looking specifically to hire people with disabilities. And it uses an AI feature to help match you with... I believe an AI feature to match you with someone that's looking for your specific skillset, so that seems like a promising... It's a new type of service. It looks pretty promising, ran by people with disabilities, so we'll be kind of doing a dive into that and what they're doing.
We'll have the second article of our gaming series, In the summer issue of AccessWorld. I did a deep dive or a survey of gaming accessibility and how it's a very different beast than traditional website and app accessibility, just by the nature of the way games work. So I did a survey in August on game accessibility as a whole, all the different types of accessibility for various disabilities, and some of the things that might be involved in that.
So for this particular issue, I'm doing a deep dive into blindness accessibility information on various different types of games, different types of sound, soundscapes and ways of adapting various types of games, and how to make your UI accessible and that sort of thing. So it's kind of a deep dive into the blindness, specifically the blindness side, because that's my particular area of expertise. So we'll be doing a deep dive into the blindness side of gaming.
Tony:
So thanks, everybody, for listening to the AccessWorld podcast. And last notes to leave on, Aaron?
Aaron:
Happy Thanksgiving.
Tony:
Yeah, happy Thanksgiving everybody, later this month. So when you're on vacation and you're finding something to do, make part of that reading AccessWorld when it drops later this month. So thanks everybody.
You've been listening to the AccessWorld Podcast, a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. For more information about AFB, visit our website at www.afb.org. Your tax-deductible gift can help us create a world of no limits for people who are blind or have low vision. Go to afb.org/donate.
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