 I'm with Gary Bean of New Vision Concepts and he's got some products for people with macular degeneration. How are you doing today? I'm doing quite well. Thank you. All right. I see, I didn't tell you ahead of time this is an audio podcast but some people will see video. But remember to describe everything for people who aren't seeing. I understand. Sort of like they've got macular degeneration maybe. I understand. I can do that. I've done that in interviews before. All right. So, I see a bunch of keyboards. I see a camera. I see a display. What are we doing here? My company, New Vision Concepts writes software and in general it's replacement software. You would stop using programs that you've been using in the past and use programs that I've written because they're easier to see and easier to use. The display that you see here which consists of a camera, a computer and several keyboards is just the vehicle that I use to deliver my software. I buy these hardware items from somewhere else. It's not something that I personally have created but I've chosen them because they're compatible with my software. I've got to say the keyboard on the right, each button is about an inch across. It looks like it'd be really fun to type on. Well, and that keyboard in particular is for people who hunt and peck. If you're a good typist, you want a keyboard where the keys are in the right spot and the keyboard here on the left that's a high contrast color keyboard is the right one. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but you can really read those letters. Those are jumping out of you. They're bright yellow keys with giant black letters on them. Yes, that's right. The keyboard on the far right is the same color scheme but it has physically bigger keys. They're like an inch square and so it's a lot easier for a person with macular degeneration to find the key they want and not miss the key that they want. Yeah, more brilliant. They make fewer mistakes. Exactly. So you've written software that you're running on a PC here and by the way, we asked about it. It's in PowerBasic, right? It is. We're kind of a nerd audience but you've got a camera. I don't quite see what the camera is doing here. All right. At the moment the camera is doing nothing. In general, if I turned the camera's software on, it would display what's under the camera on the screen and you would be able to magnify it to any level that you wanted. You would be able to do OCR to extract the text from whatever the image is. You'd be able to take snapshots. This is kind of interesting. So I've seen the big displays where you've got kind of, well I think of like an old microfiche but most kids today don't know what that is but a flat platform, you put a book down or a magazine and then you, it's projected on the big screen but what you've got here is a tiny little camera mounted on a tiny little arm. That's correct. It does the same function that you just described. So for example, do you want me to demonstrate that? Yes. So if I touch, let me do a quick description first. My EasyReader software, I have 75 different applications. I display a limited number of them on a bar across the bottom of the screen with big icons, roughly an inch square. So of the 75 apps, the ones that are there now are the ones I consider most people would want to use on a regular basis. I'm guessing that's a spreadsheet and a word processor, the first two things. A grid of boxes and a T, did I guess? Bad guess. Oh. The T in this case is TeamViewer. When my low vision customers need help, me being able to see and control their PC is very important. So I have a TeamViewer option. The button on the left is the off button. In every application, all 75 that I write, you touch the lower left hand or upper right hand, upper left hand button to turn off the app. The second button is the one that shows you all of my apps in one screen. Oh, okay. This is all 75, and it's not suitable for low vision people having that much stuff on one screen, which is why I have a bar across the bottom that only has, it's a launch pad for just the most important applications. My customers can still go to that big image and run any application of mine, but typically they operate off this. So they would configure it to the apps they use the most, like their mail program or whatever. And I would help them do that. No, it's probably not their mail program, it's your mail program. My mail program. So let's do, let's start with the camera, since you asked about that. There's a button down here that's supposed to look like a camera. All of my apps are single click. Low vision people struggle sometimes with depth perception, and so double tap is bad. So you click on it once. By the way, this is the one inch icons he's talked about. It's on a touchscreen PC, so he's able to just tap this giant one inch button of a camera. Correct. There's a mouse if you want, and I have keyboard shortcuts as well for people who prefer to go that route. So we don't have this quite a line. Let me take this piece of paper and move it in the right spot. So he's got a piece of paper that's as big as better, low cost is better yet. And he's got the camera facing down at it, and now it's a couple inches tall on the screen. So all he does is take what's there, and it puts it on the screen and magnifies it. If you want to make it bigger, there are several ways you can do it. There are some icons across the top, which say plus or minus, bigger or smaller. Or you can simply touch the screen, and it'll jump up in size as well. Each time you touch it, it gets bigger, and there's a button to press to take it back to no magnification. And at the 90% level, that's what my customers want out of a camera. Yeah, yeah. And again, you only had to ever touch anything once. That's right. That's right. It's the mantra for my product is easy to see and easy to use. And what you're seeing is how easy it is to use. We haven't looked at text much. I'll show you the easy to see here in a second. All of my programs may have multiple rows of icons, meaning there are more commands that are available to you. So rather than have one really big, long toolbar. So everything gets real teeny. And that's exactly right. All of my apps have a button you can press, where a new row of icons appears. So in this case, here's a button to do a snapshot. And here's a button to take the text out of the image and OCR conversion. Here's one. My software can do a real-time conversion of video to two colors. So for example, if I press that button, I can change the color. This is the real time. Each time he's touching it, it's going from it. Right now, he's got a blue background with yellow letters. It was black on white, white on black. That's right. I just cycle through pre-assigned sets of colors. And the user can change those colors if they want. Now, from my understanding, one of the interesting aspects of back to the generation is different people can see different color contrasts better than other. That's exactly right. Out of my customer base, a good number of them like white letters on black background, about another half of them like the yellow letters on blue background. My mother used to use yellow on blue. If you go to one optometrist, every optometrist that I've talked to will tell you a different set of colors as to what they think is the best. But in the end, it's whatever the customer decides that they want. So my camera can do that. But in general, I have found that my customers tend to like the normal colors, whatever the color of the object is, as opposed to the binary color mode that I just showed you. Interesting. OK. But it's available if they do want it. It is available if they want it. People use this. They get mail-in letters from whatever, email bills. Or they put books under the camera, and they read the books while it's under the camera. I'm just astonished at how great this is working with such a small camera. Well, the resolution of this camera is not much different than some of the ones you talked about. 1920 by 1080 is the HD resolution. This particular camera is actually Quad HD, which means it has four 1920 by 1080 quadrants. The good thing about that is is that this camera can zoom in to about 4 to 6x with almost no distortion. The holy grail for cameras is an optical zoom, no distortion at any magnification. But those cameras can cost well over $1,000. So the lower-cost cameras use a digital zoom capability. And those that have this high-resolution sensor give a better magnification without distortion. That makes sense. So let me ask you what you actually sell here. So we've got a touchscreen PC. It looks like it's an HP and a camera and a couple of keyboards. Do you sell a set of all this with including the software? Or they can buy the software. They can get the camera, the computer, the keyboards. There's some speakers back there and my software for $35.50. That's not bad. Not bad at all. And if they have their own computer that they would rather use it on, they can buy just my software for $15.50. Wow. Regardless of how they buy it, they get free lifetime support, free upgrades. And we joke because I'm $70. So lifetime support means my lifetime. That's right. So we want to send you some fruits and vegetables. That is right. That is right. So the camera is a very, there are four things my people tend to want. They like the camera. That's in the top three. They like a book reader. My software can import books from Kindle. And you can read those on screen. No. That's cool. It's very cool. It's one of the major reasons people buy my software. So I'm going to, this is the icon for the book. I'm going to open it up. And here's a book called Golden Prey. It's a Kindle book from John Sanford. And once you have it open, it works very much like a phone might look. You can use your finger to wander through the book to scroll. You can use your fingers to change the font size. Some of my people don't handle the gestures that well. And so for them, I provide icons like a plus or minus that will let them increase and decrease the size. Macadregeneration tends towards people as we get older. And we also lose dexterity and feeling in our fingers. That's true. So those two things going together would make the buttons seem to use. That's right. The finger problem is not from Macadre degeneration. It's just a product of age. And so my people tend not to be able to double click. They have some difficulty scrolling. And so these buttons that are across the top are kind of the best compromise of them all. Yeah. Yeah. This is very interesting. Now, another thing about all of my Easy Reader programs is that it can read the content to you. So for example, if you're in this book and you wanted it to start reading right there, you would press the button. And there's a button across the top that says Play. It starts playing. It underlines. It's lighter off the fireplace mantle. And walk. Do you have a choice of voices? You do. You can have a male or female voice. I've had several people ask me recently about other voices. And I'll probably be adding some to that. Yeah. Most of my customers. Some of the natural language voices are really getting there. Well, zero of my customers have asked for a new voice. Interesting. I have found that the people at this conference are more knowledgeable of what's possible. And so while my 85-year-old client may have no idea of what questions to ask, you folks, people here, have asked me a lot more technical questions. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. But we might not know what they need. We know the tech side. But we might not know what they actually need. Well, that's right. So all of my programs look just like this. If you've got a consistent interface across all of them. We probably have time for one more. All right. This is my email client. This is like the third most important program to my people. It looks very much like the book reader. It's got an icon row across the top. It's got minimal content. Minimal content on every page is a big deal. Macular degeneration people cannot extract information if there's too much stuff on one screen. Microsoft Outlook is a perfect example of the worst application. I use it personally. It's great. But it has so much stuff. And it's so small. And the color sequences are so poor that you need something different. So I wrote a different email client. In my case, this is just a quick outlook. And said, let's do it the opposite of that. Yep. So as an example, if you wanted to read an email, there's a button you press to download your email. Once you have a list of emails, you can view it by just pressing a button. Here's the entire email, which you can scroll just like it was a book. And if you wanted it to play to you, you could pick where you want it to play and press the play button. And read it for you. Wow. This is really, really interesting. So the company is called New Vision Concepts. The software is called Easy Reader. Correct. Where would somebody go to find out more? Well, I have a website, newvisionconcepts.com. In Texas, where I'm located, I have my products on display at some of the low vision centers. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in Texas. And I have one in Tampa Bay, Florida. Where in Texas? Two in Dallas, two in Austin, and one in San Antonio. Very good. Well, thank you very much. It was really nice to meet you, Gary. Well, I appreciate you coming by and asking the questions.