 Well it's that time of the week again it's time for Chit Chat across the pond and this is going to be one of the most unusual interview setups we've ever done. I am still at the CSUN Persons with Disabilities Expo and I'm joined by three co-hosts. There's no pond here except maybe glass of water and I'm going to introduce them one at a time. I have for the very first time gotten to meet Dr. Robert Carter of the Tech Doctor podcast. How are you doing Robert? I'm great Allison it's such a pleasure to finally get to meet you and Steve. Yeah this has been a long time coming. We've been friends for years and been on each other shows and finally getting to meet up is awesome. Yes and at a situation like this where we have so much going on to promote accessibility and to create an environment where disability really becomes much less of an issue and you've been such an advocate in this area that it's really great that you're here so thanks for coming down for the day. Well like I've always said this is one of my favorite shows you guys get the coolest toys. Well I've also got Allison and I lost your name again. Allison Hartley. I asked her four times before we started. I promised I'd forget. Allison Hartley is Robert's co-host on the Tech Doctor podcast right? Yes and I'm also a huge fan of your podcast and it's great to be here. Oh fantastic I didn't know you listened. How awesome is that? All right and a good friend for a long time I actually met back at the podcast Expo 126 years ago Shelly Brisbane. Hi Allison it's fabulous to be here. I like interactive chit-chats across the panel where we can actually look at one another. Yeah that is kind of a funny thing here. So let me explain the setup here so Allison and Robert are both completely blind and Shelly is low vision and what we wanted to talk about was the changes in iOS 7.1 and kind of what that has brought to these guys and what kind of advantages they've seen and actually Steve and I were gone during the upgrade and didn't have internet's well enough to download the upgrade so we don't know what it does for sighted people we're learning what it does for the blind and visually impaired first. So I want to start with Shelly because you're low vision the challenges you face are different what are the kinds of things that are happening in terms of say contrast buttons that sort of thing? Well as probably a lot of people who've used iOS 7 know a big issue for everyone was contrast and the ability to read text. Oh it drives me crazy I can't read anything on this thing. Absolutely and it was a problem for for me it was for everybody else it was just a matter of degree and so 7.0 had a couple of features that would help you there was dynamic type which allowed you to have have larger text there was increased contrast which was just a toggle what they've done an OS 7.1 is actually flesh out increased contrast so there are now three settings that let you customize the for the way you want to work. So so is that is it just high medium and low contrast? No there's one which reduces transparency so in screens where it has that sort of fuzzy that well I call it fuzzy but that the background where it's it's not an opaque background it will actually reduce that somewhat. Okay I personally find that really annoying so I can shut that off now. Yeah but it's a toggle see it's it's not perfect I think they're probably going to do more but at least there's a toggle it's a starting place for us there's also a darkened colors which again goes to making it a little bit easier to see lines and to see it not so much with text that has more to do with background and then finally there's reduced white point which pretty much does what it says so all those sort of blindingly white screens in iOS 7.1 are a little muted when you turn that setting on. So that that does that work system-wide on all apps or does the app developer have to recognize those toggles? No those are system-wide and that's a nice thing from a evangelizing to developers point of view you don't have to do anything it's just I think you're going to see most of the effects on the home screen and in Apple apps but if you're using sort of static standard backgrounds I should say you're going to notice it and I think that the issue for people is going to be finding out which combination of those settings works so you can turn them all on and you might not need all of them on so as a low vision person I spent my first few days with iOS 7.1 going off on on off on and had a lot of fun. I love it. I finally have some settings that I thought I kind of like a combination. Yeah you might want to memorize those. So one of the things that really bugs the daylights out of me in iOS is that they got rid of buttons so like the back button and the done button and all that that's all just text and I find it I find them hard to find because of that. My personal new favorite feature in iOS 7.1 is called button shapes and again it's a toggle and it does two things it highlights some buttons for example the back button which is now just an arrow in text and it creates a highlighted back a background that is highlighted behind the text it doesn't highlight the text itself but it creates a background it's like if you took a highlighter and put it on the background and the other thing it does is it underlines some text links so that if you have an alert with a cancel in an okay button for example those text buttons would be underlined for you and it's just great and I use it all the time. So this is kind of funny when Shelley showed us this by the way these settings under general accessibility and then in the button shapes as soon as she told us about it Steve Robert's wife Vicki and I who are all completely sighted immediately turned those button shapes on and went yay that's so much better let me let me ask Robert a quick question with the uh with the underlying text turning on does that change how it acts in voiceover it does not doesn't change anything in voiceover okay so that has no impact on you you can sit there flip those switches all day and you don't care correct okay great any other uh oh how about the bolding that was fun bold text uh that and that that's an interesting one that's been in 7.0 but what they've done is accentuate the effects of it so when you turn on the bold text toggle the first thing is it'll say we're going to restart your phone so you just wait a minute have a cup of coffee have a sip of coffee I should say it doesn't take that long uh but in addition to what the first thing that you'll notice is that it bolds the text underneath icons on your home screen the second thing you'll notice is that if you pull up the search keyboard or any keyboard it will make the keys stand out from the backgrounds more whether that's light or dark depends on the keyboard uh and then the other thing is in addition to text they've actually added some lines that are it's hard to say to point at them and say well this is actually a new line but there are lines around the borders of icons so they're just a little bit easier to see they pop out from the background a little bit more okay I noticed also like I brought up my email and the subject of every email was a dark very dark bold title now uh yeah I think yeah that must be part of bold text I can't quantify it one way or another but I think I think that's probably a function of that we've been playing with all these settings and like I say there's the different combinations I'm still kind of experimenting with but uh can you can you change the bolding like is it a low medium higher is it just bold or no bold it's just bold or no bold unfortunately but I mean it's not it's not terribly obtrusive I think for most people it'll probably be fine but my sort of overarching theory of low vision accessibility in iOS is that it continues to be a work in progress and I said that when 7.0 came out and when you did increase contrast and then you went to a screen with only one toggle on it I said they're going to put more stuff on that and I think they're still going to do that I think it's and people they take a lot of feedback and they get a lot of feedback certainly from people like me so I don't know whether they'll do say a high medium and low bold probably not I would think it would be more likely that they would do sliders in the contrast realm so that you could oh that'd be none up and down a little bit yeah so um one of the reasons I I think the low vision stuff is really interesting on into the blind stuff is basically as we age if we're lucky enough to age we pretty much all can expect to have lower and lower vision I mean it you don't hear about people going wow I can sure see better than I did 10 years ago uh and and uh if we live long enough we're probably going to be blind so I figure it's good for everybody to learn about this stuff but I want to switch gears a little bit and go to Allison who Allison is really really excited about some bugs that are gone what what's uh blowing your dress there were a couple of bugs that were introduced in iOS 7.0 that drove me absolutely nuts um when you would push the sleep wake button to lock the screen a voiceover as it should would announce screen locked and then every now and then randomly again you would hear screen locked screen locked and I wanted to throw my phone out the window like you got I got it I understand I understand the screen is locked but yeah they fixed that in 7.1 thank god and also another really obtrusive bug that was bugging me was um if you were typing in a text input field whether that would be an i message or closing a tweet and if you were using the on-screen keyboard and you just overshot just a tad and you went up into the content of whatever it is you were typing focus would randomly jump and so you think you were chugging along typing at the end of of your text and it would go just somewhere in the middle and that so it would allow you to keep typing except to change where it was typing it would change where and it would not alert you that it was doing so it would it was that's just mean it was terribly mean I uttered several profanities over that we call those non-girl scout safe words on my show so they fixed that yes yes they have so what is the warning now now it's still it still lets you know that you're in the like in the message area and it still reads out the text when you touch it but focus doesn't change that's the big um that's the big change oh okay so they didn't just warn you they fixed the bug so it doesn't lose focus yes mm-hmm okay very cool any more bugs that are exciting you um not me but Robert has one that he's quite passionate about all right let's uh let's flip over to Robert then what's this bug you're talking about well the bug that I'm talking about is one that sort of got a lot of attention when ios 7.1 was released and people that I heard on twitter kind of panicked a bit it's a bluetooth keyboard bug and they actually tried to fix a problem that was in ios 7.0 when you used a bluetooth keyboard with voiceover turned on you're supposed to be able to tap the control key anytime you want voiceover to shut up and they fixed that just that's the same way on a regular keyboard right yes i'm on a regular keyboard if you're on a mac for example but in ios it was broken in 7.0 it didn't actually shut up voiceover but they fixed that in 7.1 so now the control key does shut up voiceover but unfortunately they broke another piece of it which is that when you tap the control key by itself the bluetooth keyboard stops operating in your edit box so you won't you'll keep typing but you won't you won't have any text being entered are you notified that you're not typing yeah well you can quickly tell that nothing is happening the way it should be because it'll just start saying tab tab tab or some random uh things and it's so that sounds worse than it was before yes it's it's a it's a breakage but the good news is it's not as bad as people first thought people thought this was some random bug that you could not reproduce you couldn't figure out what was happening but what's actually happening is right now it's just the fact that you press control by itself to silence voiceover that causes the bug but if you go ahead then and press control and option together and release those two keys together or release option before you release the control key then the bug will go away and you can continue typing in your edit field so there's a a pretty easy work around to it and they'll eventually fix it they didn't mean for it to happen this way it seems sort of like if you if i was fixing bug a i would have noticed bug b wouldn't you think well a lot of people are critical that that that it wasn't noticed or that it wasn't fixed and you know to be honest i mean i'm not thrilled that it's there but when i really think about it allison i've been using voiceover on ios devices since the iphone 3 gs and every single new version of the operating system has added more and more capabilities for voiceover so you know if apples like any other place are going to make a mistake now and then and i i don't want to be too hard on about that you know they'll fix it and it's i don't want to focus on the just the bug because a lot of progress was made in 7.1 i'm glad you brought that up i'm curious what you think about there was there was some investors thing maybe it was a conference call i forget where a guy was asking tim cook to justify with an roi why they're doing all these green initiatives and his answer was i don't do no stinking roi on that and by the way i don't do it when i make things accessible to the blind either did you guys love that loved it loved it loved it and it really is i think an honest statement about where tim cooks heart is as far as accessibility and the culture of the whole company is driven by that right yes the culture is driven by that and i'm so glad he did it because people have so much wanted to start rumors that now that steve jobs has passed that apple is going to forget about accessibility and i don't even we don't really even know for sure that steve jobs was the one really driving that although he did speak about it occasionally had to keynotes and things but it could have stopped it but maybe it was driven more by somebody else maybe but but the point is it's very clear that tim cook not only is planning to continue it but is very committed to it yeah that is fantastic what about are there any enhancements in uh... 7.1 that excite you yes um that there are actually a few that that are exciting one thing that's really nice now is that a voiceover allows you to use multiple speed synthesizers and it has for a while you can switch for example from american english to austrian english but now for the first time in 7.1 you can have independent speed settings for each of those voices so if you can understand american english at a more rapid speed that's great but you can slow it have it automatically slow down a bit when you switch to australian english what an interesting that there's something i would have never thought of that's fascinating yeah and i think it's it's going to be really useful for people who you know you make it you may decide you're tired of reading in one one version of english or maybe you even want to switch to french or spanish or different language to read something and it's nice to have that those voices a bit more customizable in that way well that's interesting no forgive me for my ignorance here but um do you buy separate voices for ios or you just use what comes with it those voices that that are that come with voiceover and ios are built in oh okay and uh how many voices are built in now i don't know how many are built in you know allison many i i know that there are at least six or seven english voices alone oh wow other languages as well okay okay anything else uh really blowing your dress up there robert well i can't say that i actually wear a dress too often alison but too often but okay i don't can't say that i wear one at all okay no rumors let's clarify these rumors here before they even get started all the esteemed professor professor says what well i i'm i'm i've worn a kilt so i may try to dress something there you go there you go but he's open minded yes i'm being trying to be very open minded about this but really i think what has happened is that that ios 7.1 just continues that iterative process of making voiceover work more smoothly and making it work well with the apps that come on the phone and of course we're always excited when developers do a little bit extra to make their apps completely voiceover friendly and so nothing in particular jumps out at me but i'm just thrilled with the way this process is is evolving continuing to polish the diamond then absolutely moving ever forward yeah there you go well um i'm people who have listened to the show for a long time know that i took a big risk and uh was it a year ago or two years ago steve i uh i did a uh a session at mac world called blindfolded where i worry uh i wear a blindfold and i use the iphone and the mac blindfolded um i was highly successful on the iphone and i crashed and burned in a in a deadly fire on the uh on the mac but you worked your way through it well technically i took the blindfold off is how i worked through it i got i got a document stuck to me like imagine something stuck to the bottom of your shoe and you keep walking around in a circle because you're stuck there i couldn't get this document off the bottom of my foot and i never i never did figure out what caused it i do know what caused it though is i changed something at the last minute right before i walked into the session would you never do right but anyway my point was that um even the two years ago i found a ios seven or i actually would have been ios six back then yeah maybe two years ago anyway it was i found it very easy to learn i found it it into it i mean i wasn't good at it but i understood it i knew what all the pieces were i even i finally even figure out what that silly rotor thing was for right right yeah that may have been ios five or six but you got on that pretty early on and my hats off to you for doing that blindfolded because it really made a great statement about how powerful accessibility is i think it did also help that i crashed and burned a lot of people in the session said that it also showed how hard it was that it wasn't just a drop in the you know easy peasy and so it is difficult to use but you can do it it's more difficult if you can't see the screen because of course this is a os 10 and ios what are they touch screens and icons they're totally designed to be visual well i actually told everybody that they would never make an accessible iphone that was just silly that couldn't be done so i'm a visionary anyway any other last minute things or should we start closing this out jelly got anything else well i i guess i would just echo some of what robert said about the iterative process that apple's going through and i think seven point one i call it the low vision upgrade it's the best upgrade that low vision users have ever had because it provides the most variety of features and as i said before i think what's exciting is that you have the ability to customize the low vision experience for whatever your needs are and everybody who's low vision has slightly different needs and i think that bodes well for all kinds of accessibility including something we didn't talk about it's not new in seven point oh one with the addition of switch control so that folks who can't use their hands to manipulate the the devices can use a head bounded switches or bluetooth switches that they communicate that they can tap in other ways and that's an interface that's just getting more and more robust with each iteration as well so i think there is an incredible amount of additional stuff accessibility can do and it's amazing that these pieces of glass and steel can be made as accessible as they are and that there's such a large ecosystem as you see when you go to the sessions at this conference where people are using ios in incredible numbers of different applications whether it's publishing or education and i you know i'm amazed that i live with this stuff every day so it's it's it's a pretty awesome time to be writing about and and living with the technology that actually works for folks who have different disabilities yeah i'm i'm glad you brought that up uh last week on the show the mac mommy was on talking with alistair jinx about uh teaching people to use ios in the mac and that sort of thing and and she teaches elderly people is kind of her specialty as she goes into people's homes and helps them set up their mac and their ios devices so i think she's probably going to be pretty excited to hear about the shelly just said can she come to my mom's house probably uh fly her out there but anyway that since she goes to their houses to know that this stuff is available and and a lot of us have aging parents who maybe we can help them out with the the low vision things as well and get them more excited to say hey if i turn this switch is that better or worse if i turn this switch better or worse kind of like being at the eye doctor where they say is it better or worse all right well let's start closing this out shelly you have a book coming out tell us about it why yes alice and i certainly do uh i'm almost completed a book called ios access for all your comprehensive guide to accessibility on the ipad iphone and ipod touch and the title you would think that would say it all wouldn't you uh basically it's your how-to guide if you want to know everything to everything to do with how to use accessibility it's not so much it's not very abstract at all it's follow these steps and you'll learn how to use a bluetooth keyboard or a braille display with a voiceover or use vision tools and so i cover all of the different groups of accessibility features in terms of different disability types and then i have a couple of chapters about apps i go into depth as to how to use the accessibility features with apple apps and then also with third party apps and that's about to come out in three weeks or so here and you can find out more at iosaccessbook.com oh fantastic fantastic i will make sure i'll put a link in the show notes to that for people if i if i take a picture of this qr code on the back of your card and i put on my website would that work that probably would work sure all right we'll give a try and allison how can people find you well robert and i co-host the tech doctor podcast and the best way to find us is to head on over to dr-carder.com we talk not only about new innovations in technology but try to get an idea uh and get to know the people behind it a little better we're both in the helping profession in our day jobs so we like to say that we intersect uh the human aspect of technology in our podcast oh fantastic one of my one of my top shows robert we're going to close it out here well allison you know i am a bit biased here but i will have to say that i do study the technology pretty carefully at least the accessible technology and i am absolutely convinced that apple is well more than a country mile ahead of the other big companies in accessibility at this time and i would encourage anyone who who needs accessibility to take a careful look at what apple has to offer because it's a lot right now that's fantastic and how can people find you people can find me by sending an email to techdoctor at dr-carder.com all right thank you very much this was fantastic a great panel i tricked these people into it right i had them uh stuck here during lunch so i tricked them into it i appreciate you guys all for coming thank you