Episode Notes
Happy New Year and welcome back to another episode of AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility.
In this episode, Tony and Aaron kick off 2024 by sharing their resolutions on improving their braille. Tony shares how he's an old dog still trying to master UEB. Aaron offers guidance in a previous article that breaks down the transition to UEB. We then take a deep dive into distinguishing the difference between accessibility and usability. While accessibility is a critical piece of making the internet accessible for all, usability takes us that extra step toward assuring we can be fully inclusive with our digital content. Check out this previous AFB Tech Notes post on the value of usability.
Aaron also breaks down accessible gaming for the blind, sharing some insight taken from the most recent issue of AccessWorld. You can check out the latest issue, published each quarter, along with all the back-issues by visiting: www.afb.org/aw.
AccessWorld is produced by the American Foundation for the blind (AFB. For questions or comments, email communications@afb.org. You can support our work by liking and subscribing to the podcast, and even consider making a donation today by visiting www.afb.org.
AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 4 Transcript
Tony Stephens:
You're 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.
Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. I am your co-host Tony Stephens, with the American Foundation for the Blind. And joining me with AFB as well is-
Aaron Preece:
I'm you're editor Aaron Preece. Happy to be here.
Tony Stephens:
Thanks. And that's editor in chief for AccessWorld Magazine, a quarterly publication published by the American Foundation for the Blind. That you can reach by going to afb.org/aw. So Aaron, we have made it. It is 2024. Another leap year. We'll get one more day this year than last year, exciting. But, how's the year starting out for you in these first few minutes?
Aaron Preece:
So far so good. Been a pretty chill end of 2023. And as you said, just getting started in 2024. So how about you?
Tony Stephens:
Nice, yeah. It was good. It was good. The holidays were nice. Took my kids down to Atlanta to see some relatives, cousins we had not seen since before the pandemic. Hadn't been down there to see some family in five years, so that was nice. And yeah man, it was good. Atlanta's a foodie town. It's super eats. And we should do a whole episode some day on menus and things like that-
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, accessibility.
Tony Stephens:
That's still one of the big headaches is the menu world, right? Because everything too is QR code now when you go out in restaurants.
Aaron Preece:
It's been great since last 10 years or so, more and more people are putting their menus online. But then you go on your phone and you assume you can access the menu, and it's a PNG or it's an inaccessibly PDF. So you're still stuck, even if you're-
Tony Stephens:
Oh, I know.
Aaron Preece:
Even in 2023, 2024.
Tony Stephens:
It's like we're 95% there, and then they just scan in an image. Instead of even when you scan it, hit the little PDF button and make accessible. Anyways, but yeah, so no. I'm probably a few pounds more, so my new years resolution is probably going to lose a little weight. I need to be thinking of a new years resolution's probably work focused too. I know you've got a good one in terms of the world we live in. What's your new years resolution?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, when it comes to work focused, there's a lot when it comes to personal. But when it comes to work focused, I was thinking to improve my brail reading skills this year. It's something I learned when I was younger, and I used for a long time throughout school, throughout K-12, and then just fell off. and it was so much easier in college to get textbooks and that sort of thing in audio versus in brail, as you might imagine with hundreds and hundreds of, not hundreds necessarily, but dozens and dozens of volumes per textbook and that sort of thing. So, it was infeasible to do that. So just found myself drifting away from that. Especially in reading, it's not at a level where, it's functional from a work standpoint. But, as much as you can do the screen reader, and you can do a lot. So, as AccessWorld editor, I'm editing our magazine, and there's a lot I can do with the screen reader and other tools where I can turn on all the punctuation. I can do find and replace for common issues, any spell checking is obviously covered. All that sort of thing. But there's still just some things that a screen reader can't do.
And I come up with a lot of different work-arounds for those. But it would be nice, I would like to get back to using brail more often, because it gives you a much more of a direct picture. And it's a valuable skill that I'm glad that I have and that I'm looking to improve. And I think it'll improve my work flow.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. I need to be better at that myself. I've got a Humanware I need to resurrect. I still struggle with, I'm not completely, sometimes I wonder how good is my brail versus was it a UEB change when brail, for folks that don't know brail-
Aaron Preece:
Yes. That's true.
Tony Stephens:
... a few years ago, to more of a universal language. So folks who don't know brail, there's certain, think of it like hotkeys or shortcuts or little things like that, or nuance things, ways you might try to do some of the new symbols that's all in the digital world we live in. Sometimes I'm like, "Ah, I'm really slipping on brail." I'm like, "Oh no, wait, that's a UEB change. That was one of the changes they made." And that's what it was. So, I'm still lapsing in that a little. But, yeah, there's got to be some good out there resources. I'll have to look up and see if Perkin's library or anybody like that, which is a great resource for brail information-
Aaron Preece:
I will actually say, we did a, if you're looking to know what's changed essentially from grade two. I don't know about you, but that's what I learned when I was growing up was the grade two brail that's been around for decades.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, yeah.
Aaron Preece:
But Jamie Paul's in AccessWorld, that we can link in the description I assume, did an article in AccessWorld about all the changes in UEB from grade two to UEB. So it's a really informative article and covers all the things you need to know. So, anybody looking for that, we can pop it in the description and-
Tony Stephens:
As I'm resurrecting my Humanware, I will resurrect that link and try to put it in the show notes.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. Or you can google UEB AccessWorld and it probably is the first link. Sometimes that's how I search AccessWorld is I go to the Google, and that's how-
Tony Stephens:
Nice that our SEO is optimized, so yeah. Well tell me about, we were batting around the bush what to chat about starting the new year. I'm excited. There's been so much energy around AFB's new strategic plan. Folks that are interest in American Foundation for the Blind went through a very in depth process of redoing our five year plan, set up by a series of goals. And three of those are programmatic, and the five goals, one if around fundraising, the other is around staff development and making our staff the best that they can be. But three are programmatic. And one of them ties into what's been called the talent lab, formally AFB Tech. But that world of our consulting. The folks that come under that umbrella, they've been fantastic. The interns, the apprentices. It's like a learning hospital, but all things accessibility. We're creating accessibility evangelists.
One other thing I've been hearing that crew over in our talent lab space evangelizing on, which I'm really getting behind now and really, really loving with the way that AFB's consulting work is really been helping steer this. We've got a real good job out there of folks having their accessibility testers and all that. And I know you've done reports and things like that on how accurate are they and things over the years. Conversations around the accessibility testing world. But it's the conversation of usability, not just accessibility, but usability as well, and how that's just as important, if not more important when we're talking about making the world more inclusive, right? When we're talking about making more inclusion for people that are blind or have low vision or other sensory disabilities. And with the web being a huge gateway of opportunity for that, but sometimes being a hindrance as well.
It's one thing to make you check the box. You can have what's called a V-pap, which is this thing that says, "Yeah, yeah, we're accessible. No, we promise." And then at the same time though you can take it a few steps further and talk about usability. So, Aaron, I think that'd be a great way, kick of this new year as we're kicking off the strategic plan. And really emphasizing more in a way that AFB's work is going to be working to engage stakeholders and people in the community. It's not just about accessibility, but it's about usability as well. You, I know, have a lot of focus in this, and a lot of work in this over the years. Talk to us a little about what exactly does that mean when I say usability? What does that mean? What's the difference between that and when we just say accessible?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. So, this is interesting. And when we just talked about covering this topic here, I did some digging to see what people are saying about this. And what's interesting is usability in particular is specifically the ability for a user to complete a specific task efficiently essentially. And that's the key term there is efficiently, effortlessly if you want to use that term potentially. So it's about the user experience when it comes to usability. So it also is not disability specific, so it's any... There are disability related tools that are also usable, make things more usable for anyone. So you think close captions. If you're in a sports bar and there's a game on TV, having the close captions so you can see what people are saying. It's helpful for anyone, not just someone who's hard of hearing.
So, when you're focusing on usability, you're focusing on how the user's going to use the product or the website. And essentially how easy is it to use, how pleasant is it to use, that sort of thing. So that is disability agnostic. When you cover accessibility, that's specifically the specific elements that are required to make something accessible for people who have disabilities. So it's really accessibility is a binary. It's either, can I use this, can I not?
Tony Stephens:
Are there steps or is there a ramp to get in?
Aaron Preece:
Yes.
Tony Stephens:
In that sense, it's the very much, yeah, can you, yeah.
Aaron Preece:
But where is that? And then the usability aspect is, but where is that ramp placed? Is it right next to the stairs so I can get there easily? Or is it on the other side of the building? So that's when you want to consider usability. So, when you're thinking about website accessibility, you can find, web content accessibility guidelines are phenomenal. There's a reason they're used as the gold standard. And you can go through those and check off the check-boxes and look at your code, see if you've got something wrong and fix it. Or you can use an automated tool to check for it. And that's going to tell you the binary of, does my image have Alt text or does it not have Alt text? But then when you come to the usability side of things, does my image have valuable Alt text? Is it giving the person the information that they need in the Alt text?
So that's to where our consulting department comes in and our AFB talent lab. When I started at AFB 10 years ago full-time, that was my job was I was the usability specialist essentially. So we would have a team of two, every time we would review someone's website, we had an engineer looking at the code and going through the WCAG web content accessibility guidelines. And is your heading's just text with different font, or are they actually labeled as headings? Is your button labeled or is it not labeled? Is your search box visible to a screen reader or is it not? It's just that binary. And then my job was to go in and look at your page and say, "Well, how easy is it to find the information that I'm looking for? If I'm performing this specific task, how efficient is it for me to do that, and how cumbersome is it?" And that's where usability comes in, especially even I think a common one is with headings.
Say if you're looking at a product or a listing of products. You search for products on some shopping site. You're going to want some way of navigating those products quickly. You don't want to have to arrow down through the product name, the rating, the price, for every single product. You want to be able to jump through those very quickly to find what you're looking for. If you just have links for all those things, if your product name is a link, the price is a link, you're rating is a link, if it's clothing or something, maybe the color and sizes are all links. That's going to be really cumbersome to navigate even if it's not officially inaccessible. You say put product images there, where he image is labeled with the name of the product, then I can use my graphic shortcut with my screen reader to jump from product to product, to product, to find what I'm looking for much more quickly. Or you can use headings or what-have-you.
Tony Stephens:
I like that.
Aaron Preece:
So that's there-
Tony Stephens:
It's pretty much like, we talked accessibility being the ramp versus the stairs, right? It's, can you get in, access the door?
Aaron Preece:
Yes.
Tony Stephens:
But it's almost like the way that, think of the stores that are really good at organizing the inside of the store so you can find stuff, right? Versus every now and then you'll go to one of these value shops, the Dollar Store's or something, where it seems like everything is just thrown in bins and you have to literally, like a thrift store, the secondhand thrift store where everything is just in these bins you got to dig through and find stuff. It really is, going back to that idea that the wheelchair, and I know we use this all the time at nauseum probably, the curb cut helps a lot of people. Just organizing your space, your website in a way, I imagine from a programmer's perspective too makes it a lot easier for everybody if you just think through the user experience and the aspect of it that can be more accessible for users using screen readers. But it's just keeping a neater house.
Aaron Preece:
Exactly. And that's a perfect example of why usability's going to separate it from accessibility is specifically not directly related to disabilities. Because, like you said, if there's a bunch of bins with, or like on your website, if your website's not organized, if you either in a physical space or in a web context, by organizing, we found over and over and over again by making something accessible, and especially considering accessibility but also considering the user experience when you're making those accessibility changes or when you're developing from scratch or from the beginning and considering accessibility and usability as you're going through. Keeping in mind both of those things does make for, having an accessible and usable site makes for a better overall experience for everybody.
Just like your example of the store where there's a lot of things just in all the bins. If you have those in isles instead, people can more easily find things. But that also probably is easier for if I know I'm using say a Seeing AI to scan isles, I can find the isle that I want, that I know I'm looking, I know I'm close to what I'm looking for, that sort of thing. It helps-
Tony Stephens:
... partitioned, if it's well-defined, if there's way that you could easily go from section and know that you're in a whole new section, and not a random like, you're like, "Oh, wait a second, I was just in men's pants and now I'm in children's shoes. How did that happen?" Yeah, just again, just organizing. And it's interesting. Sometimes people will try to aesthetically organize but not make it end up being accessible with some websites you run into, which is a frustration. Where they may think it's quote, usable, just because maybe they have it set up in a certain way where it's like, oh, well here's this great icon that says men and another icon that says women. But it's not flowing the real way. It's almost just putting up giant posters or something like that and saying, "Over here, over here." But it's not communicating as well maybe to the audiences it should. No, that's cool.
What are some of the great examples of usability online that you've experienced? Not to talk about any of the stores that you did. You did the recent issue of AccessWorld, you talked about the holiday shopping experiences. And I know in our last episode of AccessWorld the podcast, you talked a little bit about the websites are mostly accessible now for all the big box store chains. But the details parse out on that usability and could get greater description about what the images are, showing a sweater. Tell me-
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, what that sweater looks like, versus-
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, what does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it embody? Anything jump to mind from that issue and that article about who's getting it right? That maybe some folks are interested in usability could go like, "Oh, I get it, yeah. That's a perfect example of a usable website." Not to advertise nobody of course.
Aaron Preece:
Pretty much all of the sites in that article are-
Tony Stephens:
Were they pretty usable for-
Aaron Preece:
... they're pretty usable. And they all made sure there was a way, they either had graphics for their, like I mentioned specifically the graphics for products. There were usually headings to, so if you got filters, that's another thing is some of them, and this is where in that article the focus was specifically on the binary, can I shop here essentially? If I remember correctly, they were all pretty good about say at the top of the search results, you've got a bunch of filters for, because this is clothing, so sizes and gender and styles and all that thing. If I remember correctly, they were all pretty good about separating those filters out so you don't have to arrow pass them or navigate past them slowly. You could jump right to the search results. So there're different heading levels, so you might have heading level one to start your search results, and then you have a heading level two that has your filters. And then under that filter you might have a heading level three that lists out relevance, most recently added, most popular, price high to low, that thing. Then another heading level three for your gender and type of clothing. And then maybe another heading level three for something else. But then you have a second heading level two to start your products.
So, if you don't want to go through it all, if you're navigating by headings, screen readers have this shortcut where you can navigate by specific heading levels. So once you get a feel for what, you go to that, you go down, okay there's the heading level one, there's the heading level two. Okay now there's heading level threes, and because the sites been designed properly, if you make that assumption especially, you could just jump to the next heading level two, instead of going through all those heading level threes. And then now you're at all your products, and then under that you've got heading level threes to mark each product title. If that makes sense? So just good organization that then leads to making things easier when you're navigating, makes it more efficient to navigate.
Tony Stephens:
No, totally. There's a travel website I love going to for getting hotels that does that, where it's so nice that it's easy to find the actual hotels, and not have to deal with, I don't care how good the parking is at that hotel for obvious reasons. Yeah, it's nice that, and they do that where they separate by heading one, heading two, heading three. For folks that don't know, yeah, that's that stuff that blind and users that use screen reading technology, they're keyed into that stuff, and it helps. And I imagine from just the programming aspect, it's nice to have, again, nice, clean areas of code that you look at and you're like, "Oh, this is this whole section. This is this section on the screen." Conceptualize just by looking at something, almost like architectural plans, instead of just HTML code.
Aaron Preece:
Exactly.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Cool. Well, folks want to learn more about some of those websites to get examples of what's usable, they can check out afb.org/aw for the most recent issue. And there's the article on the holiday websites for holiday shoppers. Maybe you need to return some of that stuff, you got 30 days after the holiday Christmas, if you got any Christmas gifts that needed returning. Those websites you can check out. But it gives you a good sense too of usability.
Speaking of just holidays and coming out of the Christmas season, of course our big gift giving here was all around the PlayStation. You had an article as well this time again on accessible gaming in the last episode. I'm sure everybody's been getting into their games that people got over holiday break, if they got them at some point as a gift maybe. But yeah, what's up with, can you share a little bit about that article as well? Because I always find the stuff you do on gaming. It's so exciting to be able to talk about. What was in this past issue in terms of accessible gaming?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. And I'm always excited too to be, I'm glad that gaming accessibility is now on the map, it's part of the landscape now, and that we're seeing a lot of good strides in that area. But for this specific issue, the article is on accessibility in video gaming for people with severe low vision or blindness. So, most of the time you're going to see accessibility features geared towards people with a mild, different types... If it's vision related, it's going to be for people with things like color blindness or mild low vision. So increasing fonts, maybe messing with some of the contrasting colors. It's rare to find a game that you could play entirely as a completely blind person or someone with sever enough low vision. This is actually what I said, so severe enough low vision that no amount of magnification or what-have-you is going to help you. So I focused on the different tools you can use to make various different games accessible, from an abstracted level. And there's also examples of that in there of specific games and how they provide navigation assistance, or lets you know what's around you.
How they can let you know distance to objects, and if there's an action sequence, how you can use sound to indicate things that a lot of things just don't have sound. Some objects on the ground or walls and that sort of thing. So I cover that. And then there're also UI design and the importance of including speech for all your UI elements and just all your texts. And then ways that you design your UI. Say, like making sure that you give hints, I don't know. If you use the Apple TV or any of those, you might notice that they, and I guess IOS does this, where you select an item and then it will tell you, gives you a hint on how to interact with that item. So in a gaming situation when every game is different, your control scheme is going to be different every time.
So, in some games I might use the arrow keys and enter key to interact with my menus. But in another game I might be using WASD for my navigation, for my movement in the menus. And I might be using space for activating IM's or just another key on the keyboard, like Z or X or something. So, having that information listed in your item, so if you say new game, press enter to select, something like that. It's also important when you're in a settings menu and you don't necessarily know how someone's set up their menu. If I'm on volume, do I have to press enter on that volume option then I can adjust it? Do I use the up and down arrows to adjust it, or the left right arrows? Is it just a slider that I can use the arrows to adjust right in the settings menu? All kinds of things like that.
And with UI in particular, it's important with the web we all are using our screen reader, so we've set them up how we want. We've got the speech rate that we want, the voice that we want, all that sort of thing. And we're comfortable with the control scheme, all that sort of thing. With a game, hopefully, if it's on the PC or something, you might be able to use your screen reader with it and use all your familiar commands and have your familiar experience. But, a lot of the time you might be essentially integrating a custom screen reader, especially on a console. I know the PlayStation and the Xbox both have builtin screen readers for the interfaces. But when you get into a game, that game's going to essentially have its own screen reader.
So things that you might not even think about, but when I'm reading text or when I'm arrowing through menus or navigating through menus, if I'm on an option and that options being read currently, and then I move to another option or I make a change, I want that option, that text to be cut off. I don't want it to keep speaking. I want it to cut that off and then move to the next text, whatever I move to for efficiency's sake. And that's just not something that you, because a screen reader does that automatically. So it might not be something you think of when you're designing your accessibility, especially if it's something you're new to. So I make a point of covering those things.
One thing I was excited about that's not quite related to the article, but something on our blog, I list some tools in there for some common ways of making games accessible or things you could look into when it comes to the actual technical side of things. Because the article's from a design perspective, from a higher level design perspective. But I try to link some technical tools to how do you actually go about doing this, versus, well these are nice ways of providing accessibility. But how do I actually do it? So for UI in particular, Unity is pretty much the number one game development engine. And there is a plugin called the Unity Accessibility Plugin. So I talked about that in that article. And then right after I published the issue, a day later, I discovered a game had just been released that used the Unity Accessibility Plugin for it's accessibility. And I'm pretty sure the developer made the game accessible within a couple weeks at most-
Tony Stephens:
Incredible.
Aaron Preece:
So, that is on our blog. I did a piece on that. And there's also a video demonstrating the game, so you can see how he's designed the UI. It's on PC, so it's showing you how I'm using Nvidia. But there's a piece on that just to show you to, this is how you can design your UI. Because it's a card game, so it's a little easier to make accessible because you make your UI accessible and there you go, you're all set, compared to something with a lot of vertical movement or what-have-you, that might be a lot more complicated to make accessible. But I was really excited about that, to see that yes, this tool's still being used. It is efficient and it works. It does make for accessible games. So that was exciting to see that. I wanted to make sure people know that that article's there on the blog.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Check that out. And that's on the AFB blog?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. AFB blog. The game's called A Condry, and it's on the AFB blog.
Tony Stephens:
Very cool. It's exciting. I was talking very recently to some folks, it's a way finding out haptic nav, not sure if you're familiar with them or not. But it's really cool the way they're integrating in haptic technology for navigating streets and stuff like that. And it's making me think in terms of gaming and stuff like that, what you can do. Because my kids got PlayStation's, and those controllers are so haptic as it is. And I know I loved what you talked about with the sound and demonstrated with some of the videos with sound, using a Soundscape as well for navigation. But just the convergence of all this technology towards really making a whole more immersive space.
I know Madison Square Garden's been working on some cool stuff for real live sport with basketball. It's exciting when we have these things that cross our plate at AFB. That some day they're all going to intersect together and make some really cool experiences, that are really inclusive and really immersive. And so it's exciting to think we're just now on the cusp. I'd like to think where we'll be in five years, just with where digital intelligence is going, AI is going with scene recognitian. The ability to wrestle some of these technologies, it's fun.
Aaron Preece:
That's true. So, there are a lot of possibilities to use things that we use in other contexts in gaming or vice versa. I don't know if you've ever messed with the Soundscape, I think they rebranded with something else. But the Soundscape app.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah, Microsoft.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. It's essentially augmented reality. The tools you could use to make the world more accessible in augmented reality could be used in games or vice versa. You could think about the way someone adapts navigation in their game and apply that to the real world using GPS. I remember when I first used Soundscape, I was like, "Oh my gosh, it feels like I'm playing an audio game."
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. It's-
Aaron Preece:
The way it was calling out things in 3D.
Tony Stephens:
So fun, yeah.
Aaron Preece:
Because that's another thing too, is in this article, in the gaming article in the November issue, one of the things I demonstrated and talk about is combining your audio with text, so you're not just using audio indicators for things. You're also using text. So if I turn to face something, it's going to call out, it's going to maybe make a sound to let me know where that is, like in front of me. But it might also tell me what that is. It might just have a quick snippet of text to tell me what that is, what I'm looking at.
And for navigation too, there's some games that have very one-to-one maps, and they're honestly great tools for O and M almost. And the way you learn those maps probably translates to the real world when you're learning your O and M. And the way it calls out what street your on, essentially it's a GPS in the game. So as you're walking, it will tell you essentially what zone or what-have-you, you're in.
Tony Stephens:
I've noticed with the Apple IOS update, it's given me on my Transit app, it's telling me what street I'm facing in coordinate direction almost. It's almost like a built-in navigation like the Soundscape, right?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah.
Tony Stephens:
Move around. And even with Apple, when you say start tracking, it'll even play tone as you get closer to the turn. Yeah, all this stuff is converging. It's really exciting.
Aaron Preece:
Most definitely.
Tony Stephens:
Aaron, as we're looking just to close up things here, predictions for 2024? Anything you want to see this year or get excited? If you had a crystal ball right now, what you think will happen December 31st, what our life will maybe have changed this coming year?
Aaron Preece:
There's a couple things I'm excited for. I am excited to see what happens with the APH's Monarch multi-line brail display. That's exciting specifically because the way it merges, it's got 10 lines of brail I believe, but it also does tactile graphics. And what's cool about it is it can combine tactile graphics with brail, so you could have a tactile image and then you have brail in the same image like you would with printed tactile graphics. So there's a lot of possibilities for sure for education, but also just in work and just in life in general, the things that you could potentially do with that.
I've talked about it a lot too, but I think AI is the speed at which it is improving, who knows where we'll be next year with AI. Because at the beginning of this year-
Tony Stephens:
ChatGPT-
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. ChatGPT and we had just started doing image creation had just been released a few months before the start of 2023. And now by the GPT4 image recognitian is now available, and that for me has been, we've talked about it a lot, the Be My Eyes GPT4 image recognitian and how crazy that is. And that's only going to get better and more probably faster and more efficient, that sort of thing. So who knows where we'll be in a year?
Because I think just with the AI in general, I remember a while back, this is not accessibility related necessarily, but OpenAI created a tool called MuseNet. And basically they scanned in a bunch of midi files in text essentially, and trained the model on that. So you could generate midi with-
Tony Stephens:
Midi the musical code?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, the midi music.
Tony Stephens:
Keyboards and stuff like that, yeah.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. So, I just ran across, I believe it came out earlier this year, an AI service that can generate entire songs, lyrics, digital AI created vocalists into everything. And just the sheer difference just in that, and that's just an example of how fast this stuff improves. The fact that you have songs that sound like real songs, that's just, it's wild how quick-
Tony Stephens:
It's not Sinatra, it's not the Beetles, but it is good and frighteningly close, and it's only going to accelerate, yeah.
Aaron Preece:
Yeah, for sure.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Well, it'd be interesting. We will put a pushpin in and visit this again in a year and see how much our world has-
Aaron Preece:
See where we changed.
Tony Stephens:
If Aaron and Tony are not AI voices themselves, I'll talk to you next year. So, we could be replaced, who knows. Oh man. Awesome. Well Aaron, thanks so much for joining again for another episode of AccessWorld. Folks want to be able to dive into some of the back issues, they can go to afb.org/aw is it slash backissue?
Aaron Preece:
Yeah. Slash backissues.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Slash backissues of over 20 years of content from AccessWorld. Check us out. Coming out quarterly. When's the next issue coming out Aaron?
Aaron Preece:
Next issue will be in February, that'll be our winter issue. And that'll have a bit of a low vision focus.
Tony Stephens:
Awesome. So maybe we can get a sneak peak for our next podcast episode that'll drop in February. But in the mean time, everybody check it out. And if you want to make a donation to the American Foundation for the Blind, for all of our work, helping us expand possibilities for people who are blind or have low vision around the world, and around these grand United States, feel free to visit afb.org/donate. Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast. And Aaron, happy new years man.
Aaron Preece:
Same to you and everybody out there.
Tony Stephens:
Yeah. Year of Olympics, one more day this year to add. And I'm just glad that the days are finally starting to get a little bit longer and a little bit-
Aaron Preece:
For sure.
Tony Stephens:
Awesome. All right, thanks everybody for listening. Take care. Happy new year, and be safe.
You've been listening to the AccessWorld podcast, a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. For more information about AFB, visit out 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.
