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The Blind Life Podcast
Accessibyte: Fun and Accessible Learning Tools for the Blind and Visually Impaired - Ep. 47
00:21:48
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- [00:03]
A
Hey, guys, it's Sam with the Blind Life. Welcome back to another episode of the Blind Life podcast. Today I am speaking with Joe Jorgensen, the creator of accessibyte. Now, you may be familiar with accessibyte. It's been around for a while, but if you're not. It's a suite of helpful online tools for education and productivity for the blind and visually impaired. But we're going to dive into it. Let me bring Joe on and we will learn a little bit more about accessibyte. Hey, guys, it's Sam and Rachel, and you're listening to the Blind Life Podcast.
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B
This is the companion podcast to the popular YouTube channel the Blind Life.
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A
Here I share tips and tricks, how.
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B
To'S, interviews with amazing VIPs in the community, and loads of assistive technology reviews.
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A
The goal of the Blind Life is to help you live your best blind life. Hey, Joe, thank you so much for joining me.
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B
Yeah. Hey, Sam, thanks for having me.
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A
So we're going to talk about accessibyte. Now, I probably did a terrible job of explaining what it is, so why don't you explain what it is? And then I'm curious why you created this so many years ago. What was the driving force behind it?
- [01:23]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah. So Access Byte is kind of two things. It's an online platform and also there's some, like, desktop apps as well. But it all comes down to assistive tech that's like super simple and easy to use and very flexible. So the main driving force of all the Access Byte apps is simplicity. There's going to be a lot of younger users, older users, and everybody in between, but kind of everyone benefits when it's a little easier to use. All the accessibility is, like, built in, in the browser, wherever you log in from, and in the desktop apps as well. These apps cover quite a wide range. Typeio is our flagship app. It's a typing tutor. It's a lot of fun. Then we have quick cards for flashcards and studying an app suite called propack, which includes like a dictionary, encyclopedia, calculator, notes to do reader, different smaller apps like that accessed by Arcadia's collection of games. Then we have brailleo, which is a braille typing tutor that works with braille input or just a QWERTY keyboard with simulated braille. Then we have Access Byte Studio, which is our new app that just got released. It's a Windows desktop app, does basically anything you do on the computer. Super simple. Up, down, enter to navigate, or you can just use your outside screen reader. Now, what drove me to build all of this. I have 10 years experience working at the VA in the blind rehab right here outside of Chicago at Heinz va. And during that time I taught a lot of assistive tech and there were some gaps for what I needed with the clients I was working with. And so I just started building stuff and kind of realized I could take my coding skills that I had separate and kind of combine it with this. I built out a really, really rudimentary version of Typio early on. And I presented at the Illinois AER conference. I don't even know how many years ago this was. At this point, probably more than 10. And when I presented people, a couple people in the audience had shared that they had used this application. And I was kind of shocked because it wasn't really publicly available yet. Word of mouth, you know, a colleague started using it, they shared it with somebody, they shared it with somebody from there. And I thought, okay, that's kind of interesting. And I just started asking people what they wanted, what they needed out of this application. It just taking all the ideas from teachers and students and users and trying to put it into a simplified package. So, yeah, that's kind of like the background of accessibyte.
- [03:54]
A
That's great. And I mentioned this before we started recording that I would have loved Type IO when I was learning how to type. I've talked about this on my channel that I never learned typing in school. I don't know, maybe they tried to teach me. I, I was not the best in school growing up, but I. It just never, it never stuck. And so I was a hunt and peck typer typist until well into my adulthood. And I finally one day was like, I gotta learn how to type. This is ridiculous. You know when you're low vision and you have to get your face inches away from the keyboard in order to type? Uh, it's not, it's not the best way. It's not productive at all. Trying to find an accessible typing instruction program or anything was hard. So I, I would have loved Typio and, and checking out the program. It's very visual, it's very fun, interactive, and then everything is spoken out loud to you, which is why it works so well for the blind and visually impaired. So speaking of Type IO, we've got it pulled up here. If you guys are watching this on YouTube, Joe's going to do a quick demonstration. If you are listening to this on the podcast, jump over to the YouTube channel. You can check it out there. But Joe, can you just real quick do like, just a quick Demo of the program.
- [05:17]
B
Yeah, for sure. So what we have on the screen I'm going to talk through because I don't think the voicing is coming through just with like the recording of like the browser that I have open. I'm hearing it on my end, but I don't think it's passing through to you. So what, you know, I'm just talk everybody through everything. When you log into Typio, you just log in from the browser, any browser, any device. I've just got Chrome running here. I'm brought to the Typio main menu where I can choose Typing Pet, basic modes, settings or Exit Typio. Typio has two primary paths. There's the typing pet. It's a lot of younger users or maybe young at heart. And then there's also Type IO Pro, which basic modes. Here is a good example of it. And that's for, you know, like older users. And it replaces the typing pet with vocational typing, like resume materials and professional emails and things along those lines. Something that, you know, a different audience would want. So if I hit the down arrow, it's going to arrow down. We get our nice visuals here. The typing pet option is highlighted here in black. I'm going to hit Enter hello. And I don't know if you've heard the pet sound or not, but they say hello. Oh, good, good. That part came through, I think. Just the speech. So on this end, whatever's down at the bottom in the subtitle bar, it was saying like the typing pet menu, use up, down, enter to navigate. We have typing stars which are the keys we've learned. And then we got coins which are you earn while practicing. And I got a lot of coins, about 7,800 of them because I do a lot of testing on here. So real quick, what I'm going to do, I going to click through and just go to practice because it's going to skip the tutorial for the key and we're just going to go to Journey review. Pick the first lesson. So each time you, you start your journey, if it's a new key, you get a tutorial and then you're brought to the lesson. Here we have our typing pad at the bottom of the screen and our keyboard it's going to show what we're typing. And up at the top we have. It says press a key. I'm going to press a key. And then we have our typing prompt. Right now it's jj. And as I would type that, each letter will be highlighted and it's spoken. I hit Space to go to the next word I hear. Jj, you probably heard a chicken cluck. There's different themes you can buy with your coins that you earn for your pet. And I got the chicken theme on here. We can use our arrow keys to change the text size, make it real big, make it real small. You know, you can change all the voicing, all the colors, all the different options.
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A
Editor Sam here jumping in. Joe was able to provide a separate screen recording of Typio so that you guys could hear the voice output. Typing pet. Hello.
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B
Typing pet menu.
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Use the up and down keys to navigate typing journey.
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Wow.
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Zone medium reach.
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Lesson 21 the R key.
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New key tutorial. Press.
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This lesson will introduce the letter R.
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Press any key to begin space.
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F.
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A
I just wanted to comment on the graphics. So super high contrast large prints. I love that the subtle animations in, in the graphics. So and, and I love the, the idea here of, of kind of turning it into a game and where you, you know, as you progress, you get achievements in the form of coins that you can then use to upgrade your, your theme and that kind of thing. So I can see this being very popular for school age children that are learning how to type.
- [09:00]
B
Oh for sure. You know, a lot of younger users love these typing pets. Like on our website there's a testimonials page and whenever I get like a good quote I ask, hey, can. There's a few of them where they're saying like the typing pets are almost a problem because the kids have so much fun using them. But you know, Type IO started with me working with adults and a lot of them were older. And so it's kind of where the heart of it is. The early build of Type IO and this carries through to this build to Type IO Pro to every app. I wanted it to be engaging and just feel good to use even when there weren't bells and whistles and like the fun parts like typing pets and things. So you know, the, the access byte apps like you said, you know, they're like nice and sharp with like the, the text and everything can be, you know, raised up or brought down. But I just wanted to feel and look clean, simple, friendly because people are going to use tech that they're not, you know, afraid of. So I want this to be very welcoming. I'm going to pull up quick cards real quick because I think it's a really good example of like the other direction of accessibyte where it's real clean and just like tight.
- [10:08]
A
Yeah, while you're doing that, I Love that. These are all browser based too. So you don't have to have a dedicated machine or device. You can do this at school, you can do this at home, you can do this at work, you could go on vacation and take your laptop and have it. How does it work on mobile devices?
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B
Yeah, so it works very good on mobile devices. Especially here with quick cards when it's in like portrait view the buttons at the bottom we have like a previous a flip and next these fit really well. It almost looks like like the face of an iPhone itself. Like the old ones with the home button at the bottom. So here's a good example of, you know, a quick cards deck. Each deck has a bunch of cards with sideace rb. We have the text real clean in the middle. Our big buttons on the bottom. We can use our arrow keys like change the size, get things nice and big. But you'd mentioned mobile on the iPhone or you know, Android phone. You can swipe left or right here. You can tab through this stuff. You can use the on screen keys, you can use the up and down arrows, space bar. It's just real flexible. Whatever the device is, it should adapt to those controls. Yeah.
- [11:19]
A
Can you create your own flashcards?
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B
You can. So you can do it here in the, in the application or there's a teacher dashboard where teachers can log in and it's a lot easier to do stuff from there. They can manage any number of students, customize all the content, share things between teachers, between students, you name it.
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A
Nice.
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B
So we can also take our flashcard decks and turn them into tests here. So I didn't have to create a test or do anything custom like that. I'm just going to hit the down arrow and we see here we have our silence jaws and then we have buttons for the different answers and it's there, it's speaking through, you know, each of the options of the head up or down arrows and it just pulls the different test questions from the other side. Bs of all the different cards that are on here.
- [12:10]
A
And I love that, you know. Yeah, you mentioned that normally all of this would be being read out loud to you, but it's not working through the recording software we're using. But I love that all the accessibility is built into it already. So the user, if they want to turn off voiceover, if they want to turn off jaws and just listen to the built in voice and use the arrows, they can do that. It works well with their accessibility. But you can also turn it off and just use it as it Is.
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B
Oh, for sure. I think that's where accessibyte really shines, is like the included accessibility is a really good bridge to the other accessibility. And that's where Access Byte Studio really comes into play. Just being like a bridge from early tech skills to more advanced tech skills, maybe getting familiar with a really simple format with included accessibility, and then disabling that accessibility and using something more advanced like a screen reader or magnification app in the environment you're already familiar with, and then eventually leaving that environment with those screen reading skills that you built up while in the simpler area. Because, you know, there's always like this catch 22 or this like Chicken and the Egg where you need some computer skills in order to learn your assistive tech, but you need assistive tech skills to learn the computer. And it's a bit of a pickle sometimes. Obviously, you know, we, we work past that, we make it happen. But accessibyte Studio is really aiming to simplify that process.
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A
Yeah. So speaking of accessibyte Studio, now we're taking a look at that. And this was, I guess the reason behind this was to make just the general computing experience easier for those who maybe need that. Does that sound about right?
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B
It does sound about right. So Access Byte Studio, it can take over your desktop. Like when you turn on the computer, it launches and you can shut down the computer from there, or you can do what I'm doing now, which might not show on your screen share, but on my end, I have all these different applications open and Access Byte Studio is just one of them, you know, running alongside everything else that I'm doing. So it is just to make things simpler, whichever way you want to do it, whether that's fitting into your workflow or taking over your workflow. We have a ton of different options here. As we arrow through, we would hear them and our visual focus would go through. I'm just going to scroll through with the mouse because we can do that as well. We got weather news to do, notes, Internet, YouTube, podcast, radio, recorder, calculator, dictionary, Wikipedia manuals, books, contacts, files, help settings and exit, because you need that one. And there's more modules that are being worked on as we speak, like email scanning documents, a few surprise ones too, that we're kind of slowly releasing over the next couple of months.
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A
Why don't you pull up YouTube? Because I'm interested on how you would simplify such a complex application as YouTube.
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B
Yeah, it's a good, a good thing to demonstrate. So just on the main menu here, we can use Our up and down arrows. We can tab, we can use the mouse, but I'm just going to hit Y to jump to YouTube. So we do some first letter navigation. I'm going to hit enter right off the bat. It says type the subject to look up, then press Enter. Let's do the Blind Life. And I hit enter and then we have a list of our different episodes here and we have each one that shows like the little screenshot and then we have the name of it, the date, all this good stuff. So I'm going to hit enter here so we can just go through space, will play, pause and then we can use our arrow keys to move back and forth. So really all we had to do is get to YouTube and hit enter, type the Blind life and hit Enter and then use our down arrow and hit enter to get to the video. Just start playing.
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A
Is this a very simplified, just basic video viewer player? Are you able to subscribe to channels and comment and that sort of thing?
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B
Yeah, that's a really good question. Not yet. So accessibyte Studio, it's only been out a couple months now. It is kind of the worst it's going to be. And all these new features will be added over time. Initially it's just put everything out there, see what people are using the most and then build on it from there. But things like subscribing and commenting, all of that is definitely on the roadmap. Long term.
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A
Yeah, yeah, because that's a good point to bring up. Is that the nice thing about this is adding in new features relatively easy. Do you appreciate feedback from the community with that kind of thing?
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B
Oh, without a doubt. And you know what? I got some karma built up there so I can take whatever comes my way. When I was at the va, I was very critical of what we would implement, what I would work with, because I wanted to work, I wanted to be good. And when people came in, I was always happy to share feedback. I saw that as a very positive thing. And sometimes my colleagues would maybe remind me that not everybody wants that much feedback. So yeah, I welcome it, you know, constructively at least. Don't send me mean emails. I can't take those. But yeah, you know, what makes it into these apps is what people want. I wouldn't be able to build them if they were built any other way. So I welcome it. Feedback, suggestions, what works, what doesn't, all of it.
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A
One thing I also like, you know, is it's customizable. You had talked about making font sizes bigger and that sort of thing. But you can also change the colors, color themes or color schemes. Right. Because not everybody likes the high contrast black on white. Yeah, Some people prefer the yellows.
- [17:51]
B
One of the nice things here with Access Byte Studio is one of the color schemes is just system. And if your Windows desktop is set to light or dark, it's going to follow that. And that's probably what most people are going to be using because it's going to match everything else that's going on.
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A
Yeah, that's great. It's. It's all about giving people options so that they can set it up. That the way that's going to work the best for them?
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B
Oh yeah, definitely. But then each app has its own list of settings as well, kind of buried in here. So you can really customize this application even down to disabling certain apps so they don't show up. And there's a whole lot more planned for which apps are included in here and how some of them interact together. But I got to save some surprises for the future.
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A
Absolutely. Can you tell us real quick a little bit about the accessibyte Arcade and what's involved with that?
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B
Yeah. So accessibyte Arcade is a collection of games that cover different, different skill levels of things. So some could be played with just like one key. Like there's a game called Samurai. There's like an anticipation phase where you wait and then you hear a samurai shout and there's like a visual and you hit any key within like a time frame and you'll slice whatever popped up on the screen. It might be a broccoli or a rock or whatever. So one key within like a real wide time frame. And then there's different games like Echo, which uses up, down, left, right, and you repeat the key order, you echo it, and then all of a sudden, before you know it, you're going through menus, menus that may be layered where you're making decisions and branching from there. So it kind of introduces some like just general mental mapping of technology while keeping things very simple, very light and very fun. And like all of the Access Byte apps, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot coming that I can't speak to. A lot of good updates for Access Byte Arcade.
- [19:45]
A
That's fantastic. Yeah. So even, even when you're, you're playing and having a good time, you don't realize it, but you're learning, you're building these skills that are going to be super useful later on. That's awesome.
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B
Oh, for sure. That's like the Name of the game with like all the Access Byte apps is like compiling these things. You're kind of learning about different things and you don't even know it.
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A
Joe, thank you so much. I appreciate you joining me and telling me a little bit about accessibyte today. How can people learn more about availability, pricing, all of that? Where can people learn?
- [20:14]
B
Go to learn more to the Access Byte website. So it's like accessible but with a B Y T E at the end. There's pricing for all of the different applications on there. Our online apps start at 69.95 for one user and then kind of scale up depending on what sort of package you want and the number of students on like a student school license. And then accessibyte Studio instead of doing like a subscription, we have perpetual SMA licenses. So once you install the application you get to use it forever with a certain amount of support and updates. And the initial price for Access byte studio is 495 and again that's for that perpetual license. And then one year of the SMA, then you can continue the SMA as time goes on. And we are from time to time going to be able to offer short term subscriptions just for people to kind of get in and check it out. Somewhere between like a trial that might be a little too short and between like a full blown license. So there's different options for that that are going to come up here and there too.
- [21:19]
A
Am I correct in thinking that you have a way to do a free trial? Is that right?
- [21:23]
B
Oh yeah, for sure. There's free trials of basically everything on the website.
- [21:27]
A
Well that's great Joe, thank you so much once again for joining me. And if anybody is interested, check out links in the video description down below to learn more or check out links in the show notes. But that is it. Sam and Joe with the Blind life. We will see you next time.