 Hi, this is Encompass Live and it is Wednesday, April 29th. Today we have with us Amy and Sean Burrish. Shane. Shane, I'm sorry. Amy and Shane Burrish. And they are from the... Oh, we're from Spanish. We're from H. People are from the... From the commission for the blind and digitally impaired, which is the state agency. And they're going to talk to us about assistive technologies to the blind and visually impaired. And Dave Ortley, who is the director of talk and booking rail services of the library commission, is also here and he'll also be contributing content. So without any further ado, let me go ahead and turn it over to them. Go ahead. Thank you, Susan. I wanted Amy and Shane to tell us some things about themselves to begin with. So Amy, why don't you go first? Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. I have been blind for my whole life. And so I'm a longtime borrower of books and several formats now over the years from Braille to cassette and record back in the day. And now the digital downloads from the talking book and Braille service. I have a degree in psychology, sociology and criminal justice from Pre-State College. Shane is my husband and we have a three-year-old little boy named Noah. All right. And I'm Shane Burrish. And I also am totally blind and have been since birth. I used to have a little bit of vision growing up, but I've always been a borrower of the talking book and Braille service materials since I was in probably the first grade like Amy. We were reminiscing before this conference started. We go back to the record and flexi disc days and now all the way up through the cassette books and on into the digital download, which we now do. I also went to Peruse State College. I am an educator, so I hold Nebraska certificates in teaching math, special education, and I'm also a certified teacher of what is called blind or visually impaired students. It's just kind of a specification under our specific population of kids. But I work at the Nebraska Commission for the Blind as was said before as a home teacher. We call them orientation counselors, but essentially what that means is if any of you out there know someone who's blind or visually impaired, we can come out and help them to be independent through learning skills or sometimes acquiring equipment and things like that. And Amy also works at the commission. She is a rehabilitation counselor. And so we also work with people who have lost their vision or who are losing their vision in the area of their vocational needs. So helping them to find employment or perhaps retrain if they've been an over the road truck driver and we don't have any techniques that would get a blind person to do that kind of thing. You know, sometimes it's a matter of reach training and those kind of things. But what we're really here today is, and I'll turn it back over to Dave, is to talk to you about some of the ways that blind people can access print and things. Thank you, Shane. We have a number of gadgets that Shane and Amy brought with them to demonstrate and to talk about something called the KNFB reader is first on the list. So why don't you show what that is and we'll talk about it. Sure. The KNFB reader is... Well, at first it stands for Kurzweil, which is Raymond Kurzweil, in partnership with the National Federation of the Blind, which is the oldest and largest consumer group of blind individuals speaking and organizing for themselves. And so it was a partnership that developed this really cool piece of technology. Yes, I don't know if any of the libraries out there, any of the people in the audience have ever had the Kurzweil reading machine. It was big. It was big. It was probably the cabinet. It was like a General Xerox machine. Right. And that was, I believe, invented in like 1974. It cost a fortune to... It certainly did. One of the side benefits of that, it was invented by, as Amy said, Raymond Kurzweil. And that machine is the predecessor to the device that I have in front of me now. But it essentially invented the whole idea of optical character recognition, or OCR, which we use in pretty standard, not only in the blindness field, but in your day-to-day office setting or library setting where you're scanning print and turning it into electronics. So that technology was actually invented in 1974 for that reading machine. And it was the idea that you could take pictures of print and then have a database inside that could turn them into the text that they were and it would know what that was. And then the next step was to then verbalize that through a synthesizer. And you can see that over the years it went through several generations, but it's now down to a piece of software that's put inside of a Nokia phone. So this is really a standard Nokia N82 phone that you can do all the functions of the phone, especially if you put an extra piece of software on which this one does not have. Then you can read all the menus and do your internet browsing and text messaging and all those things. On this current one here, I just currently have the piece of reading software, which is the Kurzweil Technologies inside of it. So I've started the phone, as you may have heard earlier, and now I'm going to boot up this software. Did you want something to photograph? Here's a print. Here would be one on... These are pieces of printed material that Dave's provided. We have no clue what they will be. We haven't seen this before. This is the asset text right here. I'll put it in front of you. I'm going to make sure that I... From living well magazine to give them due for credit. Okay. The first Kurzweil reader I saw was a large piece of furniture. The second one I saw was something that was half-holdable and it was probably like a fair size camera. The one that Shane has was fitting in your pocket. Yeah. Because it's a Nokia phone essentially that's been modified. Yeah. Have we gotten a decent picture of it? Let me move the camera a little bit. Okay. Yeah, I think. Yeah, we have. All right. Yeah. So I'm going to fire this up here. That's our theater model. I'm going to plug this into... Instead of external speakers is all I'm doing. So if we get a better volume out of this thing. Hopefully anyway. All right. So I'm just going to... Does this slide pretty much text Dave? Yes, it is. Okay. It's mostly text. One of the things I am totally blind and one of the things that is really cool about this is that Dave could have handed me this magazine upside down. This software not only converts stuff into text and then into the speech, but it also can correct for all kinds of errors since the person might be totally blind and have the text upside down in those kind of things. We literally just kind of are snapping. We're using the digital camera feature that the phone already has and we're going to snap a photo of this page. Take a picture. And once that flash has gone, I can literally... I'm sent a picture of both articles and labels format. I can allow the reader to go ahead and interpret what it saw. It's told me that I had a two degrees of rotation which would tell me if I had chopped off maybe some of the text in, you know, at the margins. The counselor can assist older adults by answering questions and referring them to service providers for various needs including in-home services, long-term care, funding options, information on Medicaid, whether certified facilities are Medicare part of the... and a number of other items. Go ahead and finish it. Finish out its sentence there. There were just a few errors in there. One of the things that happens is with this little... like your folds or your little bubble in your margin. Also can deal with liability and this is kind of a glossy material too. You have another sample of something, Dave, we can... but you can see for the most part it is fairly error-free, really. This is a book, University of Nebraska, called Passion and Principle. It's the story of John and Jesse Fremont, the Fremont Nebraska fame. I'll click this in front of you. Now it does have a fold in the book. That should be okay. That should be all right. Okay, let's see how that sounds. Yeah, less graphics. Tricky part sometimes. One of the things I do to correct for that error, that rotation error is you will see I'm actually kind of tactually lining the camera up on the book before I go ahead and raise it. And I'm going to go ahead and snap the photo here. Cancel again. Ready. It's still wanting to read the previous photo we took. There we go. It should work now. Take a picture. So while I'm pressing that, I'll kind of explain... The power of this machine, too, is that we can, like Dave said, take this in our pockets somewhere. We can also take pictures of text in any direction. So that could be a plaque on the wall or a sign on a door since it is so mobile. That's what gives it power over like a flatbed scanner that you might also scan this book on. So it... The path of my current is life 1840 to 1844. End of the med set off with it. TL with the middle AD of the stake and only median was at 13,500 on the measured C-HG-L second. Yeah, I didn't do very good with that page. It's 14%. Processing canceled. You can adjust it as you have the time. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter what kind of typeface you're using. Not really. It cannot do handwritten materials. It doesn't need to be text. It can compensate for a lot of fonts. I would say the closer to your standard aerials and things like that. Aerials, time through all my aerials, the more standard book of fonts. Yeah. It does have software, as part of the software inside it, it does try to compensate for colors. So we can also do things like labels on, you know, or packaging in the home, like cake mixes and things like that. You can try to read the directions and things. So it tries to compensate for contrast of different colors of print on different types of, you know, backgrounds and things of that nature. But as, you know, with most things in the OCR of our world, you know, the closer you get it to the standard black on white or white on black and standard fonts, it does do a little bit better. But it's certainly a device that I could see a library having so that a patron could sit down and, you know, browse through a book. You're not going to probably browse the shelves of books with it to find a book. That'd be two times as soon as you can tell how long it takes to recognize the text and things. But a person certainly can sit down with it or like in our own homes, we sort out our mail and throw away all the junk ads we get and stuff before our regroups come. And I know that's later in the presentation when we're going to talk a little bit about that. Now, the first time I saw a model like Black Shades, one of the problems came is that in my office, I wanted to show you this, so I did. And he was just thrilled because he said that I could read my own mail this way. I could read my medical bills and whatever. And this man had dyslexia. He wasn't blind. He had dyslexia, so he had a broader application in the blind hospital. Yeah, they're getting better all the time. Oh, by the way, in case you're saving your pennies, that's $1,599 is the listed price. They don't give it away, but it could be worse. Right, right. And it can be obtained from the National Federation of the Blind, which their website is nfb.org. We also have a company up in Omaha that is a distributor in Nebraska for this device, which is accessibility.net. And the man there is Patrick Fisher, is the owner of that company. So if you need more information about that, you can contact us at the commission, which I know will be giving out that information later for any of those dealers too. So by the way, if you have any questions, just bring them up as they occur to you because we want to keep moving and we'll lose you unless you ask your questions as they arise. Let's talk about the Victor Reader Stream. Okay. Got one of those too, huh, Shane? I do. You want to introduce that to me while I'm kind of switching cords here instead of them? Yeah, sure. The Victor Reader Stream has been next to the KNFB Reader probably one of the coolest inventions to come along in terms of giving us access to printed material and any kind of things in audio format. It's an accessible MP3 player, so a lot of students now have this and take it around their college campuses with a small SD card. You can have your music on there. You can have your textbooks, which you can download from recordings for the blind and dyslexic as well as books that are available for download through the NLS library system, which we'll talk about here in a minute. But I think you're able to see it there. It's a very, again, a very small piece of equipment. You know, back when Shane and I were in college, we had larger tape recorders, even a little handheld they called them handy cassettes at the time. We're still, you know, fairly good size. We had boxes of cassette books and, you know, lots of equipment. It was a lot of fast forwarding and rewinding. If your professors would go to page 200, you know, you'd have to look at a little Braille index that told you what cassette that it was on and pull that out of the box. And then fast forward till you heard a short beep, which meant the beginning of a page, was the beginning of a chapter. You know, so it was a very complicated process. I'm going to crash at the time for you, too, because the class hasn't done its job yet. That's right. And now with just a touch of a button, you can type in the keypad 200. It'll instantly take you to page 200. You can jump really easily by paragraph, by page chapter. So it's a very easy to use, very and less time consuming and you can navigate around in books as well. So it's a very, very cool piece of equipment. All right. Are you wanting me to also talk about the NLS project at this time, Dave, as I showed this? The website? Yes, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. Well, do you mean they barred? Yeah. Well, because I was going to show one of those books, I didn't know how you wanted to organize it. Welcome to the curator. Okay. This device... That's files. We choose by generation VRM. If you were able to hear it, you just heard an example of both types of the speech that this device has. Again, this is a very multi-purpose device. It has aspects of it where a pre-recorded human voice does the law of the descriptions of, you know, as you depress buttons and things like that. It uses an SD card inside of it, which is very, you know, standard today if you use a digital camera or anything like that. You know, it's the size that's about like a postage stamp. The card I have in there now, I believe, is 16 gigs of information, which you can hold quite a bit. It could be like a whole library. It could probably have maybe 50 books or more on that. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe more? Yeah. Maybe more. Because... And so the structure of this device is much like if you look at, you know, a directory on the computer through Windows Explorer or something. So there are pre-recorded sections that a human voice says, like talking books and music, podcasts, text, files, notes, et cetera, et cetera. But then once... So we can both do audio things like your iPod, you know. We can put music and all kinds of file formats on there. We can also do text though, which is what I was getting right now. And so that would be like a document that would come out from Microsoft Word, perhaps, or a person's email or, you know, any kind of electronic document. As long as you make it into a text file, it can be placed inside this Victor stream and read aloud. So that's really important for students today. Sometimes we can get electronic copies of textbooks and then they can be rendered into here and read with the synthesized voice. I'm going to give you a brief example of that right now. And it's going to be... It's a synthesized voice, so it's probably going to be pretty difficult to carry over the audio here, I'm sure. Okay. This was actually the book jacket from the John Gurcham novel Bleachers. And I didn't want to confuse things, but what is really cool is there is an aspect of the National Library Service Talking Book and Braille services, which is called Web Braille. And those are electronic Braille files. We'll probably talk about that later. But this was actually not only a text file that can be put in there, but it was actually a Braille file. And so this machine knows how to take the Braille and make it into speech as well. So what you discovered was synthetic speech, not human voice speech. Right. Now I'll give you, as I go through these folders, I'll go up to the Talking Book section on the Victor stream, where you could put both National Library Service audio books. And then I'll show you another folder where I have some audio books as well that are just, you know, standard from CDs or whatever, or you might get from one of those services, like Overdrive or something. Bookshelf, text files, 33D, books, 3D. Wait for speech confirmation to be up. Notes, forward. So now you're hearing human speech. On the books, 13, books, 1, commentary movie. Okay. Now, what I'm in now is the Talking Book section. This is an audio file that I digitally downloaded from the Library of Congress. The same books that we now get on cassettes and are converting to the digital format. Have you talked about that on these encompassed things before, Dave? We had a demo and we showed them the barred site. Okay. So, yeah, as of now, I was able to download those files and put them into this Victor stream. And then I have some degree of navigation. I'm actually going to go to the next book here because I have a little more navigation in there. How the states got their shapes. Okay. So, because these are, you know, the digital files from the audio books that NLS is doing, they're human voice. And we have all kinds of navigation capabilities very similar to what you would have, like on an audio CD's tracks where you skip from song to song. We call that daisy formatting. I don't recall what that acronym stands for. It's digital or something or other. Yeah. I have it written down. I can dig and find what it is. And so, essentially, like the chapters and the sections and the various paragraphs and things can all be navigated very easily. So, for the first time ever, we're able to really jump through the books much like a sighted person would. And I'll show that. This book that I'm going to give you a sample of is called How the States Got Their Shapes. And it's a text about that very thing. So, there are, you know, it's laid out by states and then sometimes subsections. And so, that'll give you a really good example of how if I wanted to look at, you know, why isn't Nebraska the way it is, I can jump through there very quickly much like you would be able to leave through with the print. And that's something we never had in the audio cassette days. Now, certainly, we could do that with Braille texts that we had, but we've never really been able to do that in the audio world before. That's our young brass. And it went all the way to Canada and west all the way to Pinejump. One, mid-level. Two, the Continental. Nebraska's western border. In 1863, Nebraska's northern border revisited. Now, I'm going by like sections or little subsections. If I go up to another level here, what they call level one, I actually would go by states. Now, go back to Nebraska. And why are Nebraska's northern, southern, and western straight-line borders located where they are? Great questions. Now, I want to give you a brief sample of just so you know the capability of these machines and how the typical person who's fairly experienced with them, like myself or Amy, would use them. I am reading at the natural rate that it would be if you put that file into the player or in other words, the same rate that the person was reading as they read aloud and it was recorded. But we have the capability within this machine to speed up the audio to do the equivalent of a person being able to speed, read and prevent. It's something we do a lot to get our overall reading rate and comprehension of when we're doing particularly materials in school or whatever. What is really awesome about this technology though is being digital, we can speed up the audio and keep the actual tone and pitch of the person's voice the same. In the cassette era, when we would do that, you were obviously turning the wheels of the cassette quicker and it would raise the pitch so we all got used to doing that but people would be like, why are you listening to your books like Mickey Mouse kind of thing? So I want to show you this briefly because you're not going to be able to understand it very well because the average person can't when they first hear this but I want to give you a taste of how I would actually read this book because right now it's very slow to me and it's kind of driving me crazy. So you can see how much more quickly we can cover a book by being able to do that. And students who are blind and learning to speed read like that and you still do some type of change. Absolutely. I remember my parents used to think you're not really doing your homework and that you're not really happy to get through it all. Days each down for digital accessible information system it's the system that covers all of the copyright protected books for the blind program. We would demonstrate Bard live but it's down today because it's left its pilot phase yesterday. Today's the down day. Tomorrow for Bard to reopen it as a permanent site, some enhancements and since October Bard has been attracted and signed up by I think 5700 people who use talking books. I'm 5700 people happy to buy their own players for instance and so they have that much invested in that so I think it's been a real success. It's a great, we're excited. It's going to take off so we'll be even more. Let's talk about Bookshare.org that's one of the sites we have on the market. It was started by Jim Fructerman and Mr. Fructerman was a rocket scientist that's the true story and he left that career and he started working with accessibility software he came up with Arkenstone scanners which was a scan and read system that dominated the field for I don't know maybe a decade perhaps and that was bought by Jim Scientific and with the ProCity he started the Bandit Tech Foundation which is this website and Bookshare is one of his programs under Bandit Tech. I want to talk about Bookshare one of you and we're seeing the site now. Right now, so the books are out there isn't it, but it talks about it a little bit. Do you want to or do you want me to? Okay. Yeah, essentially this is a really awesome concept that in the world of publishing stuff it's really great that I was able to come to fruition because essentially what has gone on here is that using some of the same copyright legislation and things where we're able to get access to things because they're in an accessible format people are able to share content with one another because they have to be signed up and proven that they have physical disability now we're mainly talking about blindness here today but Dave made a great point earlier that I kind of forgot to stress is that a lot of these devices are like the KNFB Reader the VictorStream are oftentimes used by people who just have they're sighted but they have print disabilities and that's a population I think we sometimes forget to acknowledge quite as often as we should for these kind of technologies but anyway essentially Bookshare is like it sounds there are thousands of books that are on the site that can be downloaded and used by the people who are subscribed to the service and again they have to qualify for that but what is really kind of revolutionary about it, particularly at the beginning of its time was that the share part of the Bookshare and that is using scan and read technology people were able to scan in books that they had in their own homes thereby contributing to the overall catalog that was available and it also there is a program by which if you contribute X number of books your subscription fee goes down and so on and so forth but what is really cool is the books are I believe pretty much all available in braille format and they're also available oftentimes in audio or that daisy type format which we showed you how you can navigate them and things so people are able to download the books they can print them out on embosters so that they get actual hard copy braille paper under their fingers they can be put into refreshable braille displays machines that have braille displays and or listen to and so the community has and this project has grown to the extent that they actually I believe they're a non-profit but they actually have a staff that go over the files if I'm in my house and I contribute a file I rate what quality I think it came out after it was recognized by the scanner and things but they have people like Google's files to try and clean them up a little bit it's a tremendous project that gets even more books into our hands now we're looking at a list of books we're seeing things like Black Beauty and some of the classics some of the more recent books are listed also so it includes the classics books, modern books there are 45,000 subscribers to Bookshare I think it's what 25 dollars set up and 50 to 50 dollars a month a year now there's the grants so that all students K through college are covered though yes they've received a grant from the Department of Education so any K through 12 or higher ed student can use the service for free while they're in that stage of their life and when you go down you can have a Braille file or Alstree has a synthetic speech one of those two and the files have gotten quite a bit better, the clean up the accuracy is near perfect now what does it mean I'm looking at a list of a say New York Times best seller and it has its author, the title and then there's an ensemble column and there's nothing is about the column I believe that and I could be wrong on this but I believe that's because we're not logged in as a subscriber so what it is is that allows a person well like many of the people probably listening to this who are live brains or something they could help a person resource whether a book is available on Bookshare but because you have to qualify with a print reading disability those links would appear in that column if you were logged in as a subscriber so the titles that we saw on the most popular list that did have different file formats that you could download will probably be the public domain why? I believe so people have to use a password they have to prove that they're they qualify because of the suitability they do pay the fee and then they have to use an ID and a password don't they so there is concern about the newer books under copyright so it is that they can comply with the shape of copyright provision Bookshare is up and coming it's um Mr. Traptoman is one of the great minds in this whole field of blindness absolutely when we move on to WebRail you mentioned that before we can bring up the NLF site I did want to pull out Railbook Preview see if I can hold it up you may know of talking book topics that is talked about a lot talking the topics lists of brand new books on an audio format from Library of Congress right now would be cassette I assume it will be flash digital cartridges as well as cassette well as counterpart is Railbook Preview the newest books in Rail and I did find so I wanted to see if we could just look up it would be the the NLF WebRail catalog site market to you did okay and that's the final call that should be on the screen NLF WebRail but I'm so used to typing and it will see that I mistyped it there it's easy to find just set your browser on National Library Service and when that page comes up click on search the catalog and that takes you right there anyways two easy steps and it will list all the books including Nebraska's own studio books it was to them that catalog yes try that that should do it alright under keyword I'm going to give you VR Spaced 17 455 there's a new book you see out for a book about global warming called Inconvenient Truth there it is it's in one volume and it yeah it was in two volumes so that book requires two volumes which means two downloads now Amy brought along a PacMate let's bring that into the conversation now and explain what that does and how that feeds them to to Braille PacMate is a essentially like a PDA or a poem pilot that you might use but it also has the capability to you know it has SD card slots that kind of thing so you're able to need all kinds of various materials on here it has a keyboard as you can see similar to a QWERTY laptop keyboard so it looks like that without the screen but it has a Braille display here it comes in 20 cell or 40 cell if you've got the 40 cell which is the equivalent of the size of a paper and you can navigate around here and then read the text on the Braille display and have books in here you can also use the synthesized speech capability that it has drives me insane I prefer to just I've been reading Braille since before kindergarten so I very much prefer the Braille and the speech kind of drives me a little nuts so I turn it off but the pac-mate has a number of applications including Braille display most people buy it because of the Braille display isn't that great yes and the Braille display is also detachable so for instance if the right equipment was there at the computer or went on a page and could maybe bring it into the library and you know connect the Braille display to a computer and have accessibility to some materials that way you can so Braille display is on their own if you were just to purchase a standalone Braille display is you know you're looking at probably I don't know between 6 to I mean 10,000 and this device is under 2400 listed so it's dropped down each piece of technology you know as as it is with most things you know you think back to even a lot of vcr cost you know back in the early 1980s to what they were just in a few years ago with the advent of DVD everything eventually goes down in price as it becomes more common and the same is true with all of these pieces of technology that we're showing you today they do decrease as time goes by now you can compose something a paper or a letter and save it and then you can read it back in Braille is that right? that's correct you can and you can then transfer that download it or send it to your PC most of the time what these pieces of equipment we call them note takers what they're really the best for is writing down brief notes kind of getting maybe the outline of a paper or something but I probably wouldn't do the whole editing and all of the work on here because it does have internet capability on here as well but it's slow and kind of limited so it certainly does not take the place of a PC or laptop or that kind of device but it does give you some more options to begin the work I would probably do the fine-tune editing especially as a student on the computer but it does allow you to do that there's a calculator on here a clock stopwatch and you can listen to books and as well as read them can you download a book from the NLS Web site a Braille book and read it on a Braille display? yes you can and with what we do is we download it into an SD card like we have in the Victor stream now and you can place it in here it has a place for an SD card on the top or something it does yeah the web Braille files that you download are obviously electronic but they're also Braille files meaning they've been ran through a special program that has converted them into the Braille code so if you had a string of text you know it's been translated we call it into the Braille code so those files that are downloaded from the NLS Web Braille can very well immediately be put onto a card and then read one line at a time but still in a hard copy Braille format just as if you actually have the physical books in front of you they can also be though embossed out from the computer so you can actually have that file that you downloaded from the NLS Web Braille you can actually emboss that out onto paper if you have a specialized embosser which is essentially the Braille equivalent of a printer we call it embossing since it's making a tackle marking on the paper but we often don't do that because it's like this book looked up the others to do volume so I'm guessing that would be probably two or three hundred Braille pages we often wouldn't necessarily do that unless we wanted to keep it or something but we would probably prefer to read it on a device like the PacMate electronically and it has this basic issue as well and you can put it more portable this way and the PacMate is just one device there are a couple of others Braille Note which is made by Humanware and then the Braille Sense which is made by a company called GDW Micro and so they're all essentially for those of you who this all seems to have for and to they literally in terms of the guts for the brain of it they literally are PDAs or like your you know eye packs or your palm pilot style devices and so that's what Amy was getting at is you know somebody wouldn't sit down and compose a novel on their eye pack using a stylus so even though this has a keyboard and it's a little bit easier to get information into it it's still for computing power and things it's essentially just a handheld PDA it just looks larger it doesn't have a stylus so we mentioned the Braille Sense the Braille Note and the PacMate they're just kind of like Ford and Chevy you know they're just different brands different versions of similar things with a few different features but you know having been one for our whole lives it's really nice to see now that there is some competition and some choice where they're used to not be as much you kind of had one company one product to work with and now you are able to make choices about what's going to be the best for you so that's very exciting as well. That's one of the changes that we've seen in the last maybe decade. How about in the Newsline and it has a related program called Newsline in your pocket. Newsline has been around since late 1990s we got Newsline in Nebraska in 1999 it was a dream a long time dream of Dr. Kenneth Jernigan who was a long time president of the National Federation of the Blind to make newspapers easily accessible to the blind and for us to be able to read them when we wanted to and be able to navigate around jumping by sections articles paragraphs just as a sighted person would and you skim the paper every day so it started out as a service free to those again that qualify who are blind or visually impaired with a reading disability and you call a toll free number it was helpful if you had a speaker phone and the service is still available and just with the pushing buttons on your touch down phone you're able to jump around papers and navigate through them as I said in Nebraska started in 1999 we had three papers originally USA Today, Washington Post and I think then we got the Lincoln Journal Star very early now we have five Nebraska papers that are available Omaha World Tarot Lincoln Journal Star and Nebraska Associated Press is available and the UPI too but since the days of just using your touch down phone we've again sort of grown with the technological times and you can download papers and put them on your victory stream which I'm going to show you as well as a new cool website feature as well yeah we can as Amy was saying before the advent of news line where you could do the paper over the phone we had these still exist but the only way for a blind person to really get the daily newspaper was through a radio reading service and so that's like it sounds someone would read the paper again this does still exist and it serves a great market and a great purpose but one of the issues with that is that for folks like ourselves who you know are working 8-5 we're often not available when that paper is being read because you had a radio device sorry I interrupted but you had a radio device you had to turn it on you had to be there at that prescribed time when it was scheduled for that reader to read it and then the other thing with that too was that sometimes they would not read the entire paper they would just read selected articles or sessions so you still weren't necessarily getting the whole content and things that you may want to read out of the paper yeah and so that's where the concept of really on demand 24-7 came about and again we're talking about when we're saying phone or now what we have in front of you the website we're talking about synthesized speech again is the actual delivery so a person doesn't have to kind of get used to that synthesized speech so yeah the two new ways to deliver the newspapers and by the way there are 280 papers from across the nation so we highlighted the Nebraska ones but anyone who is on NFB Newsline does or is eligible to read from all the papers from all the other states so there are also some periodicals too like the AARP magazine and a few others but this web interface is really really good because of the for several reasons people say well you know there's a lot of papers now have websites you could go to thejournalstar.com and read that or the Carney hub or the Denver Post or whatever and that is very true even for a blind person we have things called screen readers and we can do that but there's a lot of extraneous stuff as you know on websites and since this content has already been approved by the papers to be delivered to this newsline service the web interface for this is very clean it's literally just the headline and then the article in a really straight text format so people with low vision or like ourselves no vision listening to it we're able to use our screen readers and browse the paper in a very straightforward manner where we oftentimes a lot of people get kind of clogged up in the traditional websites and then the other device or service that's now new on here is NFB newsline in your pocket and what that refers to is a device like again like the Victor stream here that we used earlier basically what that is is that's a piece of software that you install one time on your computer and then you can designate up to six newspapers that are your favorites that you might read from every day and you connect up this Victor stream through a USB cord just like you'd use on a camera or any other device and it literally goes on to the web and grabs your favorite papers and pulls them into the SD card on the Victor stream or there's a couple of other players that will do that as well but anyway I did that before I left my office today I'm going to go back up to this little here I'll go to the Lincoln Heart Star here associated six moving in journals star on life through out 8K criminal 12 26 2009 moving in journals star on life through out 8K criminal 12 2009 I'll slow this down a little bit because I had sped it up to that other book speed speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 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