 I am back in the Touch Graphics booth again this year again talking to my friend Lindsay Yazzalino and she's gonna tell us what advances they've made since we talked last year. How you doing today Lindsay? I'm doing great just enjoying the beginning of the conference. Yeah everybody's fresh now. I know. Coffee in hand. So your company is all about literally Touch Graphics things to allow people without vision to be able to experience things tactically. So tell us what you've got out in front of us today. Yeah okay great. So right now I'm standing in front of our new product it's the it's called the T3 and it's a tablet that you can put different overlays on, tactile overlays and it turns it into an interactive experience. So you can do things like oh sorry you can do things like read tactile maps and get more information by just listening to the feedback. We have games actually right now we have a tactile game that we're showing. So what I'm seeing on top of the tablet is a large square with some airplanes at an airport kind of showing the layout of an airport. Yeah but this is a physical thing that I can touch with my fingers and it's on a tablet. So explain this. This is a game and I love this one because I love flying. So this is a game to build tactile skills. So in this case it's to be able to trace your way through an airport journey. So actually don't me to quickly kind of give an idea show you how it works. Yeah so I'm gonna be doing some tricky maneuvering. You're talking I'm talking and I'm gonna move the mic down to the tablet talking. Yeah okay great. Yeah that works. Alright so hold on. So she's just lifted up the game and put it back down this little piece of paper. Right so I'm playing this overlay sheet on the tablet. It's gonna it's gonna start up. Okay so it's downloading three games. Sheath 35 catching a flight. T3 Airlines is now boarding. Can you navigate the airport to catch your flight? Okay so it's giving us instructions right? Yeah. You can also explore objects that are off the path at any time by pressing on them. Yeah so it's giving instructions on how to play. There are nine steps on this sheet worth nine points. Explore the graphic with both hands. Press on any shape with one finger to hear its description. Swipe to the right to play. Okay so I'm gonna play. Well okay so let me touch stuff. I'm gonna touch with two hands. I'm touching this it's a it's a vacuum form sheet that's like in like like you said is an airport map. So I'm gonna like touch a thing with one finger. Really good. Coffee shop. Oh coffee shop my favorite. Okay so now I'm gonna play the game. I'm gonna swipe away. Step one let's find the entrance to the airport. Across the bottom of the sheet you'll find a gravelly street full of cars and above it a rough concrete sidewalk. Move your finger from left to right over the sidewalk until you find a circle with a dot in it. Press the circle. Okay so I'm feeling I'm feeling this. Oh hey bumpy sidewalk. Okay touching touching touching a but oh okay I see a dotted line and let's see oh there we go there's a dot there's a circle with a bump. Oh ding ding. You've successfully reached the airport. In a few hours you'll be flying to visit a friend in another country. Okay I think we see how this works. That's such an interesting design so I can see obviously colors and shapes and things but you can feel those same colors and shapes to play the game to train yourself. Yeah so the idea is to help people build tactile skills because a lot of times either people who have gone blind or who have gone blind later in life or any point in their life may or even people who've been blind from an early age may not have had training on how to use tactile graphics and so you can give someone a tactile graphic but it's really important for people to know how to actually interpret them and how to like make sense of all that tactile information. So this we're building this to give a yeah give a game gamified provide a gamified way of like teaching people how to interpret. So as a blind user would I buy this whole tablet system with this with these graphical overlays? So yeah so you would buy the the tablet and then we sell each set of materials separately so this game this game book binder we would you would buy separately. And how much is the is the tablet? It's $750. That's actually not bad that Steve Landau jumping in from touch graphics so this is this is very large this is what like 22 inches maybe? Exactly right 22 inch diagonal. You can tell I'm a nerd I knew how big the display was. It's an Android generic Android tablet that they make in the millions for digital signage at McDonald's and other. That's why it's so inexpensive. Right so all we do is import these devices and add a couple of accessories like a mirror under here which allows the camera that's part of the tablet to take a picture of a QR code and that's how it knows which sheet the user has placed on to the tablet. So how does it know that she was pressing the correct red button and that she had found the gravelly road? So the way it works is it's designed so that when you explore with multiple fingers. I mean technically how did the tablet know where you pressed? I mean it's it's a lot like your your iPhone or your any other tablet where it senses you know it's capacitive so you feel the it senses where your finger is. Hang on so it's a touch sensitive display? Yeah it's a regular old touchscreen just like you go to McDonald's I want the Big Mac meal. This works better than the one at McDonald's but yeah it's like a phone. Okay so when you're touching these red dots it's actually transferring the capacitive touch through the paper to the tablet. Okay well are there is there anything else we should see on the table here? You know so the same concept of using low-cost commodity tablets but in larger size can now be used to provide fixed maps in public places so that anybody can come up to it and learn about an environment. So what we're looking at here is it looks like a map to me but I can tell it's got it's got little little dots and like the gravelly walkway again here and I've got buttons I can press and some bail braille. Oh as I just tapped over I'm touching Irwin school. Irwin school transition center. I'll show you how this requires a kind of a special touch to use it properly because we we found out through research that visually impaired users like to explore with two hands in silence they don't want any interruption when they're trying to figure out what in the world this thing is but as soon as you find something that you do want to know you need to be able to basically ask what is that and the way you ask is you just keep your your touching finger in contact with that thing and you simply relift your other fingers. Okay so I was doing it wrong as a sighted person I was looking for things and touching them but if I was blind I would be using both hands finding and I'd go okay I want to know what this building is and now I can lift everything but that one finger and that's when it spoke to you. That is the turns out to be the best gesture for this kind of interaction because you don't have to lift your finger and tap. Lifting your finger loses that tactile connection to the surface. You lose your place and you have to find it again directly on the same spot again sometimes your finger moves a little so this this method which we developed over a long period of research and testing turns out to be the most effective way. So you're saying you actually designed it by by having people involved who were blind? That's crazy talk! Who does that? This whole thing started 25 years ago when I met a blind professor in New York City and she she recruited me to work on these problems and I quit my other job and haven't looked back so it's it really is a product of a close collaboration between developers and users and artists and teachers. Very cool you know we're gonna cut you off here but the company is Touch Graphics what is the website? TouchGraphics.com. All right that would be a good place to find it thank you so much Lindsay and Steve good luck to you this sounds great.