 The alert amongst you will have heard me say Wednesday just now, which is your hint that the show is out super early because we're off to Texas this weekend to stand in the rain and look at clouds where the eclipse was supposed to be. It also means there will be no live show this coming Sunday. We will return to our usual Tom Fulery on Sunday, April 14th, but don't worry, we're keeping our streak alive as we begin to approach the one thousandth episode of the NoCillicast. Most of us are currently abled, so the accessibility tools we're learning about from CSUN's Assistive Tech Conference might not yet apply to you. But if you create content for the web, you probably want as many people as possible to enjoy what you create. This next interview from CSUN is about a free, beautiful, easy to use tool to analyze your web pages to make sure they're accessible to those with different kinds of impairments. When I'm doing web development and I'm kind of pushing my community towards doing this, I like to test my sites for accessibility for the work that I'm doing. And one of the things I've been using is the Wave Accessibility tool, which allows me to do that, gives me feedback on exactly what's right and what's wrong. It's maybe not the cleanest, prettiest thing I've ever used in my life. But I'm here with, and I've forgotten your name one more time, Oliver Emberton from Salktide, who is a free service that's going to help us do a better job of testing our sites for accessibility. Is that correct? That's very correct. Yes. We went out of our way. We've been using Wave for about a decade or so. We went out of our way to look at Wave, to look at AX, to look at all of the major free tools out there, and we took all of the best bits of all of them, and we shamelessly stole them, and we made them better. Okay. And we're giving away for free. Well, that's my language. So in general, what I'm used to being able to do is to just look at my website and see, have I missed any image descriptions? What about contrast is a big one? That one's always really hard for me to fix, because it doesn't ever tell me what to do about it. It just says, nope, it's wrong. And so I guess another number, and it says, nope, it's still wrong. Hot or cold? Hot or cold? Well, I know why that's tricky, because the thing with color is you can suggest colors, but sometimes there's a human judgment component, right? Should you make it lighter? Should you make it darker? Should you rotate all of your oranges around to become reds? It's easier to make contrasting than orange, for example. People don't know that. Right. Just give me a hint. Yeah, yeah. No, fair enough. I mean, we provide contrast tools, as built in there, much like all of these others, right? We give you the color dropper, we'll scan your page, we'll automatically find a text where the contrast is too low, where the contrast is good enough, and we'll tell you things like, this text could be larger, or you could bump the contrast. So choose. Oh, okay. Make design choices that can still achieve the same goal. That's the aim. Okay, okay. So how does this work? Is this a separate app or a plug-in? What is this? Yeah, so right now it's a Chrome extension, so it's completely free. You just Google for silk tide in the Chrome Store, and then you just install it. And it takes, like, one mouse click, and then you have an array of free tools, which includes the color contrast you mentioned, and a whole ton of other stuff, like a screen reader simulator, for example. A screen reader simulator? How does that work? Well, it's kind of what it sounds like on a tin. So we work with screen readers all day long, right? And if you've ever had the experience yourself, you'll know it's really, really difficult to set up a screen reader. Screen readers are a lot of work, right? Typically, many, many hours installing an awkward piece of software. Unless you're on a Mac and it's already there. Well, yeah, I don't like to brag, yeah, that's true. But no, but even then, right? So I do use a Mac, and it's still tricky because you have to go through, like, a learning process. There's, like, an entire wizard. Oh, it's not easy to learn. I didn't say that, but it's at least already there. Yeah, yeah. And I've been using one of those for years, and I still get lost. I still sometimes get trapped somewhere, and I'm like, how do I get out of here? And I reset the whole thing. So what we did is we just built a one-click button inside this tool that just simulates the screen reader inside any web page you're viewing in Chrome. So you just go to the page that you want to test, and you push the button, and now you're using a fake screen reader, which works just like MBDA, except we tell you how to use it down the side of the screen, so you don't need to sit there and do a three-hour course. So you don't need to learn the screen reader. It's already there. An example of where I was using this with XKPassWD in our development process with Helma and Mike Price and some others is we were trying really hard to make sure we had labels on everything so that screen readers would be OK. But I discovered by using a test screen reader that there were like two areas out in the middle of nowhere that were reading things out audibly, and that's not what we wanted. Didn't realize we were causing that, but you'd be able to see that with silk type. Yeah, and that's exactly why you need it, right? Because you can do all of the abstract learning that you like. You can sit there and read the theory, but there's no substitute for actually experiencing it yourself. Exactly, exactly. I mean, imagine if you were making TV back in the day. I remember this. You're making TV for black and white TVs. How old am I? Don't ask. So as late as in the 90s, they were making TV ads, and they had to make sure that they still worked on black and white televisions. Sounds crazy. And you can try and guess what that's like, or you can just find a black and white television. And if you don't do that, you can do all the theory. You can be like, oh, I think this color works, and I think that, no, you just need to try it. There's no substitute for that. The problem has been with screen readers is that's incredibly hard. And we were like, can we make that something you can do in two mouse clicks, which it now is? That's a fantastic idea. So can we take a look at it and see how this works? Absolutely. All right. We're going to do a live demo here. So now the audience is audio and video. Are you going to be able to hold that still enough up in the air? Oh, I see a point. Shall we try this? Yes. So I'm going to talk through what's going on, because there's audio-only listeners as well. OK. So I'm just going to open the extension, which is one click up here. He's got a website open called fakeuniversity.com. Yeah, to protect the guilty, we decided to make a free website, which is deliberately riddled with all manner of accessibility issues. So this opened up a sidebar on the left. It's a silk tide, and it's got a bunch of different options for accessibility checker, color contrast, alt text, screen readers. All right. Yeah, all sorts. So the sort of thing that people will often want to do is they might want to go into, say, focus order. This is one that I like. So if I click on focus order, this shows you the order of parts of the page as you would tab through them. So if you're using assistive tech, you can see how you would step through the different parts. So what we're seeing on screen is a purple line with numbers on it. And so when it gets to each button, it's got the number of their IC8. And then there's a picture of an image. That's nine. And that would have been also useful in what we were doing. We had a banner that was in the order four. So you'd get content, content, content. Here's a picture for no reason. And this would have visually really told it to us. Absolutely. And then in the same way, I'm sure we've all been here where you're like, well, what's the alternative text on this page? If you want to see it, you can click on this. And we'll tell you the alt text, for example, is missing on this image. And we'll tell you what it is on other parts of the page. So these are actually all missing alt text. In fact, this is kind of a bad example. Let me show you a website that does it well. So if I show you the BBC, of course. Oh, BBC. Oh, the Brits got to bring this up. Well, of course I do. I am still technically legally half British. I heard you're a Texan. I am indeed a Texan. And I won't deny it. And I prefer Texas to England. Don't hold it against me. Oh, jeez. Controversy. You're finding it here. Spicy take. Anyway, but what you can see is alternative text on the screen overlaid over these images. So yeah, in every image, we can see what the alt text is. And we're seeing a lot of green on the BBC website. That's right. But one of the things that we found is that when we were looking at websites or testing or improving websites, you want to see the alternative text in context. You want to know what it applies to without doing lots of extra work. So the idea of this is it just makes it really, really obvious. Oh yeah, excellent. So I'm going to come back out of that. Let's go back to the fake university website. And I'm just going to show you the screen reader simulator because this is definitely one of my favorite things. So is this going to be talking out loud? I should move the mic down to the speaker. I'll turn the sound up a little bit. It's going to be hard to judge. We'll see how this goes. So if I click on this... Oh, it's... No. Link. Button toggle navigation. Petty, one choose your future. List with zero items. Paragraph embark on an extraordinary educational journey at fake university where the boundless realm of knowledge seamlessly converges. Okay, I'm going to mute it now because that's going to get annoying very quickly. So we all know what a screen reader is like. The idea of this is that we've made a sidebar that gives you, firstly, immediately obvious controls on how to use this, right? So previous, next, and select. So you can go through here. I can select this button, for example, if I wanted. And then everything that's being spoken out loud is shown here as a transcript. So if you're not able to remember what was just happening, you can read it later on. The idea is, for example, I might be a web developer working on this and I don't have perfect memory for one or I don't want to turn this audio on and listen to the robot voice throughout my day. I can just leave it silently there and read the narration. And then there's a whole ton of stuff because, of course, a real screen reader has things like, you might skip to headings and so on, right? And when you're doing that, you need to know your shortcuts. There are very shortcuts for landmarks, headings, links, form inputs, et cetera. We've simulated all of those and you can run those and see how they behave on your site. Oh, that is really slick. I like this. And it isn't ugly. All right, this is a hard one. You know how I feel about contrast. Let's see the contrast color checker. Okay, so there's a couple of things here. So the color contrast checker, we've got a tool here designed to help do the thing that you would expect, which is, you know, you can pick out any two colors. That's just a silly example, but you can pick out any colors you want, if you wish. So you can do, for example, that. We also have a- Well, hang on one second here. We're apparently, we're getting the hook. Okay, one hour to closing time. Okay, so going back to the color contrast checker, I think that's got the thing I wanted, was that when you go, when he's flipping through, he's able to see and choose different colors right on the fly and see whether it fixes the contrast. I've had to go back into my web design, into the HTML and change it in order to see and then rerun the wave tool. Yeah, so I will be honest, at the moment, we do let you change. Sorry, you can see here the colors. We're highlighting, I don't know if you can see this, this part of the page where the contrast is not good enough. We'll show you what's going on, but we don't currently give you a tool here to preview changing that color. Now that you said it out loud to me and put me on the spot, I'm like, that's a good feature. We should do that. Well, I thought I just saw you do it a second ago. You picked two colors and you said that's not a good example. No, no, no, you're right. Yeah, so that's, sorry, that's something else. That's for like, you can look at any two colors you'd like. So for example, I could go, how does that color contrast with, say, that color? And yeah, that you can. Yeah, so just take that little tool there and stick it over in the other color checker so I can get it right. In the, when we're going back to the, not just color contrast, build this capability you have here over into when I've got to fail. Where I can say, okay, let me pick it, let me darken, darken, darken. Okay, good enough. I got my 4.52 to one contrast ratio. That makes perfect sense. Well, I have been working on this project for a while. I'll be very happy to take this back to the team and say, oh, guys, sort it out. I love it, I love it. All right, this is really fantastic. Is that all the high points there? There is just one more thing I'll show you because it's easily missed. Everything you've seen here works on different devices. So if I wanted, I could have done that on an iPad or I could have done it on, say, an iPhone. And so he's got a simulator running on all of these. That's right. And so even things like the screen reader or things like the focus order will work on all of those devices. Oh my gosh, this is spectacular and it's free. It's 100% free and it always will be. Is that because you're a wonderful human being or you've got a business plan on something else? It could be that or it could be I'm very bad at running a business. You're gonna have to decide for yourself. All right, well, Oliver, this has been fantastic. Again, it's silk tied and you just look it up in the Chrome Store. You can run it on Microsoft Edge or on any Chromium browser, I assume? At the moment, it is literally just Google Chrome but we are working on other browsers as we speak. Not on Edge. Usually everything that works on Chrome works on Edge. Well, actually, okay. It might. It might do, you know what? I don't know. I'll try it. I'll let you know if it doesn't. All right, thank you very much. After I got home, I tried out silk tied with Microsoft Edge and it worked perfectly. So that answered the question. One of the nifty parts of having this as an extension in the browser is it also means you can check your work when you're building your website locally even before you ever push it up to the public. So in Microsoft Edge or in Google Chrome, just go to the place where you look for extensions for your browser and look for silk tied and check out your websites today. I recently read Arnold Schwarzenegger's book Be Useful, Seven Tools for Life. It's such a great book in so many ways. One of the things Arnold really dislikes is how people say he's a self-made man. He argues in the book about this by pointing out how many people helped him get to where he is today. It's really great fun to learn how he set his goals to be a bodybuilder in Austria before the sport really existed there. Then he set his goals to be an Olympian. Then he had a vision to be a movie star, then a comedic movie star, and then the governor of California. And then finally to run the president's council on physical fitness. But it was the very last section of the book that struck me the most. And that was when he started working with the Special Olympics. He talks in this section about the best thing in life which is helping other people. The entire book is written very much in his voice and you can hear his passion for what he has gained by the experience of helping others. I highly recommend the book and this idea has so much relevance for doing the podcast and things I do in my personal life. I get so much energy out of helping other people. 10 years ago, on the 500th anniversary of the no-silicast, I told you about a crazy power outage we had in our neighborhood. The only good thing that came out of it was that we ended up meeting our delightful neighbor Lupe as a result. Steve helped her with her circuit breakers and we've been good friends ever since. After I got to know Lupe, she asked me if I'd help her pick out a new iPhone. Well, you know how much I love to spend other people's money so we toddled off to the Apple store together and we picked out a shiny new iPhone 7 for her. Fast forward to now and Lupe's getting up there in years and unfortunately has macular degeneration which has seriously compromised her vision. She doesn't get out much anymore so her iPhone is really her lifeline more than ever. She suggested to me a while ago that she needed a new iPhone so I went over to visit her to figure out which iPhone to buy for her. My first thought was to see whether she needed voiceover yet but she assured me that she could still see well enough to do what she wanted to do. While email is no longer an option for her, she could still call people, listen to messages and read texts with a magnifying glass. I suggested that if she was gonna get a new iPhone, she might consider one of the big iPhone such as an iPhone 14 or 15 plus. I figured the much bigger screen would make the very large text she needs fit more on the screen and be overall easier to read. She asked to see my phone which is the medium sized iPhone 15 Pro. She compared it to her iPhone 7 and said, well, it was a little bit bigger let me try to slip it into the pocket of my house coat. Well, it just barely fit. It was pretty snug. Then she tried to fit it in this little bandolier purse she throws around her neck when she's moving about and again, it was snug, but it did fit. She declared that a bigger iPhone like the plus was out of the question. I told her, I said, hey, I'll sew a bigger pocket on your house coat and I'll buy you a new purse. But she pointed out, she said, I have three house coats and she just decided this wasn't gonna work. At this point, I didn't know what problem a new phone would solve for her if bigger wasn't an option. Her iPhone 7 was working just fine and it fit those pockets and purse. She didn't need a faster phone nor one with a better camera. Well, the next time I went to visit she brought up this phone thing again and we had essentially the same conversation. I'm not against the idea of buying gadgets someone doesn't need, but I couldn't figure out what problem I was solving by recommending a new phone and what phone should I even recommend? I did notice one problem I could solve. Lupe was really, really cold. She says she has to keep the house cold because having the heat on dries out her eyes. I gotta tell you, even I was cold in her house. So rather than buying her new iPhone I crocheted an Afghan for her. It really was a labor of love and I chose a pattern of cream, gold and purple because purple is her favorite color. The pattern was a dream to crochet. It's super soft and it was a really fun pattern. If you're wondering, it was the seaside ripple Afghan from Mary Maxim. Now, remembering what Arnold said it's helping others that gives us the most fulfillment. I knew that every time she wrapped herself in this blanket not only would she be warmer she'd know I'd been thinking of her when I was making it. So just a few days after I brought her the blanket she called me in distress because she was having battery problems on her iPhone 7. She said it was going from 100% to zero. Now I assumed she was having a charging problem so I dashed over with a new charger block, a fresh lightning cable and a wooden toothpick to pick lint out of the connector port just in case that was the problem because it often is. But I should have listened more closely to exactly what she was saying. She was telling me that she would charge it to 100% so not a charging problem but then it would be at 0% shortly thereafter. I opened up the battery settings on her phone and I gotta tell you I put a screenshot of this battery graph in the show notes to illustrate what she was saying. I've never seen an iPhone battery graph like this before. It looks like an L. It shows the battery level going straight down from 100% to 4% and then it hovers there for a few hours before suddenly tanking to zero. Now remember how I said I couldn't figure out why I should get her a new phone just because her phone was working fine? Yeah, not so much now. Lupe and I went to options on the Apple website to choose an iPhone 14 for her. I still couldn't talk her into the plus size phone and I didn't think there was really any reason to push an iPhone 15 on her. We debated the merits of AppleCare Plus and even though she doesn't leave the house all that much she did like the idea of the version that gives you theft and loss protection. She told me to get her a screen protector so she'd be covered there as well. When I was checking out her charging situation I noticed that the very long cable she uses was frayed near the connector so she asked for a new long charging cable as well. I found a nifty three meter braided USB-A to lightning cable from Belkin for $30 and a couple of things are cool about it. Braided, always good, but has a little rubber strap for coiling the cable that's really nice. It also has a magnetic disk on that strap and then a matching magnet with 3M sticky stuff on the back so you can stick it to something. So she can take the end of the cable and just stick it to this thing that sits on her table all the time and that way the end of the cable doesn't fall on the floor. She really liked that feature. At her age and with her vision turns out chasing down a drop cable on the floor isn't nearly as much fun as it used to be. Now we ran into a few challenges setting up her new iPhone the next day. She didn't have enough storage space and iCloud to run a backup and I didn't have the login info available to clean it up to be able to make room. We did the ad hoc network dance where the old phones scans the swirly graphic on the new phone and then they have this whole little conversation between each other to transfer all of her data. In less than a half an hour all of her apps, data, and wallpaper were there and the accessibility features for enlarge text were all set up on the new phone. It was really cool. While this worked swimmingly we ran into a big snag. The iPhone 7 has a physical SIM and the iPhone 14 has an eSIM. That's really easy to move from a physical SIM to an eSIM. I've done it myself. But the process requires iOS 16 or higher on both phones. iPhone 7 was back on something like, I don't know, I was 14. So I had to make that dreaded call to AT&T. Now you're gonna be shocked to hear this but I have nothing but good things to say about my call with AT&T. While there was a long wait time they offered to call me back in 11 to 13 minutes and they actually called back right at 11 minutes. We were soon connected to Lala and she simply could not have been more helpful. Lala gave careful instructions but not so slow that it drove me nuts. She had kind of a cute way of telling me to look for things in settings. She'd say, gently scroll down to the bottom. Take your time, I'll wait. She was also pretty funny when we were working on actually moving the phone number between the two phones. She said, if we're lucky today I can move it using the IMEI 2 number. I laughed at how she said that like you had to be lucky and I said, boy, it's funny how the more you know about technology the more you realize it's at least 20% witchcraft. She laughed and said, don't you know it? She said, I'm gonna use that line. Anyway, once the phone number transferred she was successful, I was ready to hang up but she insisted on testing a few more things. She told me to turn off wifi and test making a phone call, sending a text message and accessing the internet. Her thoroughness was awesome. I had a few other things to clean up on the phone and she insisted on staying with me until everything was working properly. As I told her, I could not possibly have been happier with the tech support I got from Lala at AT&T. Now, once we had her phone functional I decided to see if she'd be willing to give Face ID a try. I explained that her new iPhone doesn't have a home button but Face ID should be able to unlock her phone even more quickly. I'd been kind of dreading that change from Touch ID but Lupe is smart and a quick learner and was delighted with how well Face ID worked. She's patient with the fact that it doesn't work all the time and doesn't seem to mind typing in her passcode, you know, from time to time. Now, a little update from when I first wrote this I went over to see her today and Face ID has stopped working and I'm not sure why. I tried type turning off requiring attention which I thought that might be it and we actually erased the Face ID reading and had her do it all over again but it's not working ever right now. So I've got to noodle why that would be but I'll get back to her and get it fixed. Now, she also told me to tell her son how much she owed me for the phone and accessories and I had to wonder, what's this guy gonna think of hearing that for me? Hi, I just helped your elderly mother with something. Can I have $1,200? It pretty much couldn't have sounded any dodger if I'd asked for the money and target gift cards, right? Well, luckily she explained to him that it was the nice neighbor who had crocheted her the Afghan so he knew I was legit but it could have all been part of my master plan. Well, a little while after I left her I got a phone call from her asking me how to delete a phone call. I wasn't clear on what she meant so I trotted over and I asked her to describe what she wanted to do in more detail. She explained that her son had called but then she didn't know how to delete the call afterwards. Took me a while to figure out what she meant. She was talking about quitting the app. She used to do this by double clicking the home button and then swiping up. I didn't bother explaining to her that she doesn't need to quit apps but instead I taught her the gesture to swipe in an arc with her thumb from the bottom of the screen. She picked up the gesture pretty quickly. I told her that this was the gesture I had the most trouble adapting to when I moved from touch ID to face ID. I had her practice it four or five times. About the time I left she had the hang of it. I also today taught her to use the gesture to swipe down from the upper right to get to control center and hit the flashlight. And she got it right away. I had her do it two or three times and it was just like, yeah, I know this now. So it's such a delight to work with smart people. It's just so nice. Well, the final process of helping Lupe was to give her Pat Nengler's phone number. You've heard me mentioned Pat a lot of times. She's an Apple certified consultant and one of the most patient and gentle people I know. It's not that I wanted to stop helping Lupe but I'll be out of town for a few days and I was afraid there might be something and maybe I forgot to set up for her and I didn't want her to have to wait nearly a week to get sorted out. I would trust Pat with my own grandchildren. In fact, I've done that and so I trust her to take good care of Lupe while I'm gone. Also, when it came time to do the screen protector, I told her that Steve was better at it than I was and then finally when we actually got the screen protector I said, oh, okay, I can do it for her and she goes, no, no, I trust Steve. I want Steve to do it. So Steve's the one who put on the screen protector. Now Lupe keeps insisting that she must do something for us to pay me back and I told her all I want is for her to be my friend. As Arnold explained, helping people is one of the greatest joys in life. I may let her buy us lunch when we get back but only because it would make her happier. All right, let's head back to CES for some more cool gadgets. A longtime manufacturer favorite I would say of the Apple community is the Satechi line of products and I am here with Chris Martinez to talk about what they've got this year. How you doing today? I'm doing super. So let me show you what we're gonna be announcing. Oh, before you start, I always forget to tell people this. This is an audio podcast and some people will be on video. So use a lot of detail to describe what you're looking at. Absolutely, we'll do so. So first and foremost, we're launching our new Cheeto product portfolio. So Cheeto is the evolution of MagSafe. MagSafe meaning you can magnetize your device to charge it. And charge now at 15 watts without being licensed by Apple. You are skipping ahead of me. Love it though. I wanna make sure the audience knows. That's why this is cool. 100%. So with this device here, you charge your Apple watch on the back, five watts. It's also fast charging. It also provides charging for your AirPods in the front, as well as you said, the new Cheeto module that charges up to 15 watts. This also provides vegan leather, so soft finish touch. Does this articulate where I attached my phone? It does have an articulating arm here. Also, what's unique, it folds completely flat, so allows you to travel. Oh, that's nice. You can see the design, how flat and flush that is. It's like a standard stand-up stand, except it folds flat for travel, man. Exactly. And that's what we're trying to do. Empower the consumer to travel easily while empowering them to power all their different devices. And what's the name for this? This is our new 3-in-1 stand, a foldable stand. And what's the price point on that? That's gonna be 129. And then it's Little Brother, which has a similar design minus the watch module, is at $79.99. Charging two different devices, your AirPods, as well as your device. Also charging at a full 15 watts. And as you can see, also flat folds. It's even thinner. Everybody's in love with this kind of a design now because of standby mode. Absolutely. Everybody loves to have their phone up on the stand. It's the perfect way to charge it and know what time it is. Exactly. And to your point, what we did is we're taking advantage of that. So these are gonna be announced tomorrow, available in about the May timeframe. What we're also gonna be announcing later in the summer is a couple of new variants. So this device is similar, but it also allows you that complete pad version for the consumer to watch. So this is more like, what is that? Like seven inches by four inches and then each of the pads lay flat. Exactly. When you fold it down. It's completely lays flat versus the other vertical design. But this also allows is for consumers to utilize night stand mode for your watch or the articulating arm to also use standby mode. Very nice. It also folds completely flat for travel, has the same vegan leather soft touch, all aluminum design all the way around. So whatever your look is. Now I'm excited about this wallet looking MagSafe stand looking thing. Describe this. So this is our new magnetic wallet that launched with the iPhone 15. In addition to it being available on our site in four different colors. This also has exclusive colors on Apple's website. What this allows us to do, 39.99 is MSRP. But what's unique about this is in addition to it being a wallet, it also has the built in stand. So it allows you to have a stand. Also holds four separate cards, room for four cards inside. And you can see the window here. So you can have your own ID there. Very light design in four unique colors. And so you'll continue to see and it's also vegan leather. So you can see that feel that soft touch. And you'll continue to see newer products and newer designs leveraging that same technology. I really like this idea of MagSafe and a wallet and a stand. It's kind of getting it all done. Exactly. And that's what we're looking to do is have a complete family of products that is empowering the consumer to leverage the magnetic capabilities of their device. Very cool. All right. Got a couple more products down here. I'm going to show you one additional product at least because I know you got to go. This is our new international travel charger. So this is a 145 watts of power that's going to give you the ability to fully charge like your MacBook Pro. So four USB-C PD ports out. What's also unique about this, it allows you to simply remove this... The power adapter. So it's taking the US AC adapter. Exactly. So you can pull the US adapter out and then it comes with all these three different travel adapters for all your international travel. Also comes with a nice little mesh bag to carry everything with you. And this is going to debut at 129. I love it. This is basically a throwback to something that Apple had years ago with our adapters was you could pop the plug off and put the international plugs on and someone from New Zealand would say put the US plug on, which is the international plug to them. So you said it was 140 watts? 145 watts. 145 watts and so... It'll pull up to 140 watts of power? Depending on the combination of things you plugged in. Exactly. Now, wait, there's one more product I'm going to have to show you. I knew he's going to do it. Satechi, which is known for all the different type of products to fully immerse yourself with your desktop. We're launching our new mechanical keyboard. So the new mechanical keyboard is going to be launching. It gives you that nice touch up finish. It's a nice clicky feel. Yep, you can see and feel that. So we're announcing that also in the next day after tomorrow we'll be having a press release. But that really rounds out the overall portfolio that we're going to be having that expands the consumer's ability to both beautify their desk and have a full performance. Very good. Thank you, Chris. This is fantastic. That was a lot of products in a short amount of time. Well, we have a lot more coming too. There you go. Keep an eye on Satechi. Satechi ECHI and where would we go to buy those products? Satechi.net. Very good. Thank you. Well, I am really jonesing for that three in one Qi2 stand, that foldable stand. That looks really cool for travel. And remember, when I was hearing this I didn't completely understand all the things that were cool about Qi2 but this works for your Android phone if it supports Qi2. Hey, got any extra money laying around? Why don't you head over to podfeed.com slash patron and figure out a way that you can help support the show. I mentioned last week that when Steve and I were at CSUN's Assistive Technology Conference we had the great pleasure to meet Chris Cook who works for the Oregon Commission for the Blind. She's a serious tech nerd. So of course we were, you know we were instant friends. She kept reaching into her purse and pulling out gadgets. It was awesome. I asked her to come on the show now to tell us about the visual interpreting surface. I think it's pronounced Ira that she's so wild about and everybody at the table said it's the best thing ever. Welcome to the show, Chris. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Did I pronounce the name of Ira? Is that pronounced correctly? You did, good job. That's right. So it's spelled A-I-R-A for anybody who's looking for it but we're not gonna let you hear about that to start with. I just want a little bit of background on you, Chris. How did you get into being such a tech nerd? Well, I think that I can honestly say that I grew up at a time when there wasn't a lot of really cool tech until I was probably ready for college. And so then I just took it on. So I am totally blind and I grew up with the Perkins Brailler and all those low tech types of things. And when I got to college there were no computers and I did note-taking with the Slayton Stylists and all that kind of good stuff. So then after college I had a good friend who visited one of the national conventions and she saw this wonderful thing from Australia called a Eureka A4 computer. And it had a Braille keyboard and speech output and the thing created and composed music among many other things along with note-taking and a calculator and a little database. And there were some other kinds of apps that it did. But the main thing was that it could transcribe music and print it out. Well, I was just starting a little career as a part-time school music teacher and I could use all the help I could get because it was a private school and they didn't have any money. So they needed whatever I could provide in terms of curriculum. So she said, you've got to see this thing. So I took it on and learned how to use it and that was the beginning of my tech journey because then, of course, I was connecting it to a printer and then I wanted a really a mainstream computer and this was the early 90s by that time. And so I got different computer equipment including a little touchpad that I could control the computer and the speech output and how much it read to me and those were the DOS days. So I just continued on going and kept my old stuff around and my mom used to say, oh yeah, give her a new piece of technology, slide some food under the door and when she figures it out, she'll come out. So that's kind of the story that I built along the way for myself. Sounds like it's in your DNA just to be a tech nerd. It is, it really is. I've had so much fun along the way learning new stuff and trying to be on the cutting edge of things and really enjoying myself along the process. Oh, that's great. And like I said, I could tell we would be friends from the minute you opened your mouth and actually from the minute you reached into your person and said, check this out. Oh yeah. And pulled out a piece of tech. Oh yeah, definitely, definitely. And then of course getting on the iPhone bandwagon six months after it was accessible to us with voiceover, getting a 3GS iPhone that was in very early 2010 that I got my first iPhone. And I remember just sitting down with it one evening and just learning all I could and downloading apps and adding contacts and I was just going like a house of fire. So it was just great. I loved it. No, did you, you're probably still not still on DOS, I'm guessing. No, I wouldn't be doing anything in the world if I was. No, no, I'm dragging my feet about Windows 11 but I do use a Windows PC for work and also an Apple fan girl and have a Mac or two in my collection and also of course iPhones and things. And I have, I did get a little bored last year and decided that I wanted to learn Android because some of the students I teach at the agency where I work were coming in with androids and we just, you know, we'd all in the Apple EcoSphere and we really didn't know Android. So I took it on and so I also have an Android phone that I really love because it has a British voice on it and it has Touch ID and those are two very important things to me, British voices and Touch IDs. What does Touch ID make a difference to you versus Face ID? Oh, Face ID creeps me out. You know, I know probably they know everything about me anyway and there's cameras everywhere but I don't know, it just creeps me out. So I just really love just putting my finger on that little place and knowing that I'm in control of when it unlocks and it's my finger. It just doesn't seem as personal as my face. I don't know. It's just my little weird idiosyncrasy. An emotional reaction to it, right? Oh yeah, very visceral, don't want it. Don't want to have anything to do with Face ID, just don't. I've got it. How do I really feel about it? I want to tell an Android story from CSUN. I won't reveal where the person worked. Actually, no, I think you were with me. There was a guy named Earl that we were talking to and we won't say where he worked and we were talking about, you know how we've been tempted to maybe take on using an Android phone for a month or two months or three months, just immerse yourself and just give it a try, a good, honest try. And he said, doing that is like sucking on a cavity. You keep doing it again to see if it still hurts. Oh no, that's painful. That's terrible. I thought that was the best analogy. Oh man. Oh dear. No, no, I didn't think it was that bad. Okay, okay, a little bit better than that. Oh yeah, yeah. All right, well I dragged in here to talk about Ira. Oh, that's right. I have a feeling we can go on forever. The way you introduced me to the concept of Ira was you were talking about the Envision glasses that you had on that were based on the Google Enterprise platform, I think. Is that right? Yes, that's correct. Okay, but Ira isn't hardware. So why don't you start at the beginning and maybe give us the history of Ira and what it is. Sure, so Ira was founded in 2015 by a couple of college students and they were very much thinking about their friend who was blind and how he wanted access to visual information. And so they were thinking about wearables and glasses and things. And so they founded this little company, I believe, we'll say the San Diego area. And so it started out that they did have glasses. And so what Ira is, is a visual interpreting tech company. And so they provide just that visual interpretation on demand with trained folks that are called agents and then the folks who subscribe to the service are explorers. And so I tried the service out on a demo by one of our clients in 2007. And at that point, they did have these big glasses and you had to hope that someone was available to answer your call because they didn't have very many agents at that time and they were just getting started. So the idea is the agent sees what you see through the glasses and then... Yeah, that's the idea. Okay, okay. And then we were on a video call and so if you're out and about you're likely wearing bone conduction headphones or you could be listening to your phone speaker but that's just a little unwieldy. So at that time, you're making a video call and you're using glasses. And I was so impressed when I was a part of this little demo that one of our clients showed us because after crossing the street a couple of ways which they don't tell you when to cross the street they can read the walk signal for you if you'd like but you're in charge of your street crossing. And then we got to this building and there was no way to enter because they had the door locked and so there was arrows pointing hey enter this other direction. So we did. And then there was water on the floor and so they alerted us to the wet floor environment and different things. And so I was so blown away by the amount of information and the confidence that I got from knowing real time I didn't have to fumble around and go to that locked door and then try to figure out, okay, where's the other entrance? And it's just a real hassle when you get in unknown sort of unpredictable situation. So fast forward a year later one of my colleagues said that she had a very successful time going through the Portland airport because there was free IRA access. So IRA grants free access because companies sign up and pay to have the access given to anybody who is using the service and it's a geo-fenced area. So once you go into that area your phone recognizes because you're connected to the IRA service that you have free access. So there's a way to find out all those free access locations including many airports there's Starbucks, I think AT&T, I believe Bank of America several universities there's just a whole ton of IRA access points. Let me bring it on you for a second here. So we haven't talked about what does IRA cost if you don't have free access? Well, that can be variable. So I would just direct people to the website where they can find out more information about the pricing plans. For instance, there are plans for people who belong to one of the consumer organizations either NFB or I believe ACB as well. And so I hesitate to quote plans to information National Federation of the Blind and American Council of Blind. So... Okay, but I mean, is it a dollar a month, a thousand dollars a month? Is there just any kind of... Just a ballpark? Yeah. I would say you are looking at maybe a dollar a minute. Oh, you pay per minute. Yeah, you buy blocks of minutes. Okay. And so there might be 30 minutes, 50 minutes, 100 minutes, that sort of thing. And the price goes down. The more minutes that are in a block but you're paying more because you're buying more minutes. Think like an old cell phone plan then when we used to care about minutes is... Basically, yes, exactly. Yeah, that's the idea. Okay, so I might use my own minutes to get from the taxi to the front door of the airport but as soon as you get in the airport now I'm not using my own minutes. That's one of the examples, right? That's the idea. Yep. And so then you're switching over to the IRA access offer, the free offer. And then the agent that you call can always switch things over in case they don't happen to you but they should switch over automatically. Okay, okay. So you mentioned that you had a first big adventure. Was it during that demo or is there another story to tell there? Oh, there's another story with that. So what happened is I signed up after I heard my friend go successfully through the airport and I thought I have to have this. And so I had lots of aha moments and lots of cool things happen, successful shopping trips and street crossings and all kinds of things but the very, very best thing that I did was I took a trip with my very best friend who is also blind and we went to Seaside, Oregon. We went to the coast, two blind ladies on vacation by ourselves. It was so fantastic because we didn't depend on anyone else's time, no one else's car, no one else's schedule. It was really fantastic. We took the bus down there and the driver kept wondering, what's going on? These ladies, there's nobody here, nobody's meeting them. We said, we're fine, you sure you know we're fine? Yep, okay, bye. So the bus took off and we just called Ira and said, hey, we wanna go to lunch. So Ira walked us, they're tracking us on the map. So they have access to maps and they're watching us as we travel on the map, on their dashboard. And so they're directing us to the nearest hamburger place and so we're just walking along and they're telling us what streets we're coming up to, what, whether you need to turn or cross. And then of course, not only are they seeing us walking our location on the map, but they're also looking out our phone camera so they can see where we are in real time. So, let's not be a second, so your phone camera, so are you having to hold it up in front of you? I don't know, put it in a carrier on your chest. How are they looking out your phone's camera? Yeah, I've done both. I travel with a guide dog and so it's handy to have hands free, but I've traveled with a guide dog for so long that I'm used to having bags or something else in my other hand, so it works okay for me but it doesn't always work for other people to just hold the phone in one hand. So a lot of people get a holster, lanyard type thing with a pouch and can hang around your neck and then your back facing camera is what is watching the world, so. So they're looking through your phone's camera through the app, but they're talking to you through headphones, I assume, right? It's the best way to do it because then you can hear your environment and a lot of us have gotten bone conduction headphones so that we can hear the environment around us and we're hearing the agent talking with us, so. One of the people at lunch, I think it was Michael Babcock was saying that one of the things he really appreciates about the Ira representatives is that they know when to talk and when not to talk. Like if you're listening to the, at the airport for gates being called, they wouldn't talk during that and as soon as it's done then they would talk to you again. Things like that? Yeah, I would think that they would do that. You can also tell them what level of information you want. Do you want a high level of information? I mean, do you care what the person looks like that's coming toward you or that you need to miss over a round or do you just want them to be quiet and walk with you? I always tell them, hey, let me know if there are any stray dogs that are roaming around because I want to know for my guide dog's sake if there's any other presence of any other animals in the area. So that sort of information, you can communicate with them and tell them what you want to know, so. Do you tell each person when you call or is that in your profile or something? It's probably in my profile somewhere. I haven't filled that out for six years almost so, but I think it's certainly my guide dog in his presence, you know, the fact that's the way I travel. That's in my profile for sure, so. And then do you, so do you use IRA every day, once a month, only on travel? Oh goodness, no, probably every day, at least. I've already used them today, so. Okay. Yeah, I use them around the house. Yeah, sometimes. If I want to know if I got something clean or when does the milk expire, for instance, because those expiration dates are really a pain to find and they're little and they're different places and they're hard to read and this kind of thing. I could use it for that. I'm always looking at condiments and a friend of mine got violently ill. He got food poisoning, like so bad he woke up in the hospital. Like he ate some relish and the next thing he knew was in the hospital. And it was, and so now I'm terrified of all condiments. Oh yeah, yeah. Real serious about, but it's so hard to find those little labels. I know, I know. And I think they're used to looking at them for us. And so this one lady said, the agent said, oh yeah, I buy this kind of sour cream or whatever, I know exactly where this expiration date is. So it really helps their lived experience can help us out. Oh yeah, I definitely use them. I use them for so many things. But just to tell you about, the thing about the big adventure was that when I went to Seaside is that I got to walk on the beach all by myself with my guide dog for about half a mile and we looked for shells on the sand. And they took pictures and they can take pictures of whenever I said, if you see a good photo op, let me know. So I have lots of pictures of my guide dog with the sun shining on his fur and the beautiful waves and the sunshine. It was a gorgeous, clear day that day. And then they can save them and send them to you via email with descriptions or they can also save them in the IRA app. So there's a place for your photos in the IRA app. And is that all working because you're wearing Google Glass or are they taking it with your phone or how does that work? Oh, okay, good question. So they, I found the glasses were a little bit more work than I wanted to deal with because you had to connect them to Wi-Fi, like hotspot kind of a thing. And that was a bit more than I wanted to deal with. So I was then using my phone camera. And since then they have gotten out of the whole glasses thing entirely and just focused on their software and their delivery of that visual interpreting experience. So they no longer use glasses that they make or that they bring in as a part of their service. The services available on the Envision Glasses if you want to use those glasses to be the vehicle for which your video feed is coming through those glasses. But in terms of IRA itself, it's not in the hardware business anymore. Okay, but you do use the IRA service with the Envision Glasses? I have, I'm more likely to use it with my phone because if I just want to do a little something or if I don't have a need to be walking about and hands-free like a lot in my daily work or whatever I'm doing, if I'm not doing a lot of traveling and such then I'm probably not going to use the glasses. I'm going to use the phone. I see, I see. So the experience, you launch the app on the phone and press go and then it connects. So call an IRA agent. Yeah, so there's a button for call an IRA agent and then you are waiting and there's little musical tones to let you know you're in the queue and then so and so answers and they want to know what I want to do today. It's not how can I help you? It's what would you like to do today? And they're very firm about that. They're not like, oh, we're way up here side of people helping you down there, blind people. You know, they're absolutely not that way. So it's all about what would you like to do today? So it's IRA visual interpretation on your terms. What are, what would you like to do? So they work for you. Not they're generously helping. It's they work for you, you're in charge. Oh, absolutely. We're always in charge. We ask them, you know, if they can help us in certain ways. Like I'd like to do this task a certain way. Could you give me the, you know, the what you're seeing? Yeah, so it's absolutely, you know, it's a really awesome, amazing concierge service that I am so blessed to be able to pay for. But even if someone has a plan that is more limited, you still get five minute free phone calls every 12 hours if you have a paid plan. And there's a lot you can do in, in five minutes. If you're organized, you can have your computer up and going, they can look at your screen through the team viewer app. If you have that on your computer, those annoying captures that are the bane of all of our existence. Side of people have trouble with them as well. You know, we can get a capture sorted out. We can, you know, order something online that I'm not sure what it looks like or we can finish a checkout process or to click on something that we couldn't find. You know, there's a lot of things or if you're in your kitchen and you just want to read the back of a box of directions and, you know, if you want to do that or find those expiration dates for those products, you really can do a lot in five minutes if you're organized. That is really, really interesting. I think they must have fantastic training based on the fact that both you and Michael and Marty Sobo, who was also at lunch, all three of you, as you were starting to tell me about it, they're both like, oh man, it's the greatest thing ever. I totally rely on this. I mean, it wasn't like just the nerd liked it. You know, these two guys were just 100% in too. Right, exactly. And they do get, I believe about 100 hours of training. So, and reading a map is one of the qualifications for being able to serve as an agent because people do need to be able to read a map. You need to know your cardinal directions, your North, South, East and West and how to tell people how to get places and, you know, it's an important skill. I love that. I've run into so many people who can't. I remember calling the restaurant and saying, you know, sorry, on the West side or the East side of the street. And she says, they did not know. No, she did. She said, the right side. I said, facing what direction? She says, what do you mean? And I was moving around for quite a while. I said, okay, in California, the ocean is to the West. It's really easy here. Oh no, right. Yeah, so they're very highly trained. They're all individuals though, and you get to know them after a while. If you call a lot, you've been there. You know, it's not like, you know, I think, you know, terribly personal about them, of course, but you get to know their voices and kind of what they've enjoyed. I think about what they've enjoyed, you know, working with me on. And, oh, there's so many ways in which Ira has been a part of my life, everything from, of course, the daily living kind of tasks, but they've also helped me on the tech end of things to set up computers. I recently set up a Mac and voiceover didn't come up talking because I wiped it clean and started from scratch. So for whatever reason it didn't come up. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it didn't. And then I set up other computers. I also publish digital sheet music online. So before I put it up online, they don't have to know anything about music, but if they could tell me if my margins are okay, if they look at the PDFs and I want to know, are the margins okay? Did any of the music run into any of the notes that kind of thing? On the creative end, I once took a three layer strawberry, blueberry, white kind of layered fourth of July, jello, salad kind of dessert to a potluck. And I wanted to smooth out the whipped cream on top. So they helped me do that. I held the phone in one hand and I had the spatula in the other. We were smoothed out whipped cream. And then I wanted to make a flag that was shaped like blueberries, like take blueberries and put them down on top of the whipped cream in the shape of a flag. And so they helped me make sure they were all nice and even and that it was flag shaped. And that was amazing. And then they took pictures of my awesome creation. And of course I still have those. And being able to take pictures, that's another thing and share them with people. I mean, all of the fully sighted people do that. And I'm a part of that community now because not only do I occasionally take my own pictures, but mostly I have them take pictures like my animals. I have two cats and a guide dog. And if they're all snuggling together or something cute's happening, you know, I can quickly grab my phone, call Irene, say, hey, we have a photo up here. Can you please take a picture? And so then, you know, I get, yeah. So do they tell you move a little to the left, move closer, move right? Yeah, oh yeah. Oh, okay. Yep, yep, they do all that. Yeah, they make sure. And then when I'm hanging out with people, I can say, hey, I just had a really cute moment with my cat the other day. Do you want to see my pic? You know, that's what everybody does. And because I have Ira, I can be a part of that same experience and share those same things with people and feel very, you know, typical, normal, you know, every day this is what we do. And it's just fantastic. You know, I've said this before on the show and I do it with tongue and cheek. And yet it's not something that sighted people I think innately understand is that blind people want to do everything that sighted people can do. That sounds really obvious, but I can't tell you how many times people say, well, why would anybody ever want to do that if you can't see? Oh my goodness. Oh, wow. They're not being obnoxious. It's literally never occurred to them that why would you want to do that? Well, because everybody wants to do that, you know? Of course they do. Yeah, it's about sharing your life and your experience and, you know, people resonate with pictures and I know they're cute pictures because I know my animals are super cute and that's one of their favorite things to do, by the way, is take pictures of people's pets. So they love it. Yeah, yeah. Let me turn to the dark side question because I know someone in my community or many of them are wondering right now, what about privacy concerns? You've given somebody access to your phone, your phone's camera, not only outside when you walk in around, but inside your house. How do you reckon that? Yeah, so they signed some pretty strict confidentiality agreements and so what, I don't have any worries about that because I have trust in the service and I also know that their job is on the line if they screw up. And so when people have that kind of, if their job depends on them honoring those privacy statements and agreements that they've signed, then I feel really comfortable with that. And so, yeah. I would think compared to, say, volunteers, for example. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. That would be a different thing, right? Yeah, exactly. And I explain that to my students that I teach to because I let them know about volunteer services like Be My Eyes, that's great and out there for everyone and Ira, that's paid. And I let them know, if you just wanna know about the expiration date on your milk or how long you need to bake your pizza, call Be My Eyes. But if you wanna do something more confidential, like look at your medical report or your bank statement, or I've even, before I found the joys of doing TurboTax with my phone app, I've even had them help me fill in my tax return online. And they're not doing my taxes, but they're filling in information and they're helping me avoid all the upsell that TurboTax is gonna do and try to get me to buy the next level of their product and I don't want that. And it could be really easy to miss that kind of thing. So I trust them, I've never been let down and they've always been there for me in that way. So I have complete confidence that they know what they're doing there with the privacy concern. No, there's some futuristic stuff coming to Ira, right? Mm-hmm. What's happening next? Yeah, so it's really interesting. Ira's name, because everybody says, well, what does that mean, A-I-R-A? First, people are not sure how to say it and that's understandable and you have to train your phone to not say Ira. I think it's got Ira now, I've trained it to do that. But A-I-R-A stands for Artificial Intelligence Remote Assistance. Now, Suman Kanuganti, who is co-founder of this tech company, Ira, back in 2015, I think might have been thinking he's a visionary, so he might have been thinking about this at some point. But artificial intelligence, of course, we hear lots and lots and lots about A-I. And so what is being rolled out now is the ability to either take a picture in real time or access the photo gallery and have Ira's A-I analyze the picture and send you back a description. And you can text the A-I as we can with the service like Be My Eyes has an A-I, so Be My A-I is something similar. But the advantage that someone has if they have an account with Ira is that if they have any doubts about the image or it's more complicated than the A-I is giving them resources to understand or they need a further explanation or they want to confirm something, they can always then call and send the picture to an agent, to one of the Ira agents, and the agent can confirm what the description has given them, what the explanation is of the image. And then if they have another question about it or they really don't feel satisfied with the answer or the level of detail, then you can call an Ira agent as your last step. And then you're using your minutes at that point when you call an Ira agent. And then you can discuss that image or that document, whatever you were looking at with the A-I. Okay, so that triple layer of being able to get something for free from the A-I and then some written assistance and then talk on the phone if you need to. Right, exactly. So I think it gives people another way to access. And I just got it yesterday, so I've been playing with it a little bit and it seemed to return timely results. And I was timing it probably seven or eight seconds. I had the image description and I decided that I was running out of time at the end of my day, so I was gonna play with it some more. But I will be interested to query the agent if I had any questions, but I was satisfied with the results that it returned. Interestingly enough. I did teach this audience that's listening to you right now. I taught them how to use be my eyes and be my A-I in order to add captions. They're amazing in be my A-I. I mean, better than I would write. I used it yesterday to do it, by the way. It's really something. That's really great. That's really great. Interestingly enough, I had a took a picture of a package of food, but I forgot to turn the lights on in my kitchen. So it said, hey, it's either underexposed or there's not enough light. And so I thought, oh man, I think I forgot to turn the lights on. So I went and turned the lights on. And then I was looking at the package and I appreciated not that I needed to know this, but I appreciated that it said it was raw bacon as opposed to cooked bacon. So that's a level of detail that I haven't had before. Because sometimes you might need to know whether something is fully cooked or if it looks like it was fully cooked or like it's still raw. So it was a big old package of bacon and I got to, you know, come from that. What I really appreciate from your descriptions is there's so many things I don't think about. I've been thinking about the big picture. How would I get from the door to my gate at an airport? That's a big problem. But little things like smoothing out whipped cream that would have never occurred to me. That that would be something you wouldn't be able to do. So I forget just the everyday little tiny details. And also the thing about the water on the floor, that really sticks with me because that isn't just turn left, turn right, open the door, you know, straight ahead is the elevator. That's, you're gonna fall if I don't tell you this. That's really different. The other thing I was thinking about was when I was kind of describing it to people from what you told me, I said it's just like having a friend right there with you all the time, but it's better than a friend because the friend isn't chattering away about nonsense. This person has one job and it's to assist you in doing what you are trying to do. So it's really better than having a friend there. It's fantastic, yeah. And yeah, and friends are not gonna think of absolutely everything and they have just a list of things that they normally are gonna communicate to you. And so yeah, it's just fantastic, I love it. I've tried to help people. The one thing I've learned walking my mother taught me in this was never take somebody's arm. You can offer an arm, but then I don't think about everything. It's like when somebody gives me driving directions, they're in the car and they forget that I don't know to turn left. You don't think about everything you know in order to convey it, but these people are trained to do exactly this one thing. This is really interesting to me and I appreciate you're giving us all this info on it. Before we wind up, was there anything else you wanted to make sure you told us about? Wow, I think what I just wanna leave people with is the myriad of options that are out there. And I think just deciding which option is best for which situation, if you need a high level of assistance with something technical or detailed or safety related or something that you think, hey, this would be well served by human interaction, then I would just say if there's a way you can earn a little extra money or find a little place in your budget, it is so worth having that option because there are the AI options, there are the volunteers, but having options, I think that's what a lot of us appreciate is that we do have options and we can use the best tool for the situation. And so just to kind of keep that in mind of, there's a place for all of these services and we hope that people are able to really avail themselves and enjoy all the independence that they offer. Yeah, that's fantastic. So before we close out though, we do need to talk about your podcast. Tell us about what you do in the podcasting space and some sure people are gonna wanna share it. Oh, well, thank you. Thanks for asking. So I've wanted to do a podcast for a long time, but I was really kind of afraid of all the editing. And so finally, Michael and Marty from the Unmute Presents Network came to me and said, hey, would you like to join us and do a podcast? And so at first, these two things came right on the heels of each other. They asked if I would do a podcast once a month and so I chose to do a podcast on Braille. So it's called At Your Fingertips, Braille Then and Now. And I talk about things related, all things Braille, something from the past, like maybe a skill that I learned a long time ago or a tool that was developed a while ago that we still use like the Slayton Stylis or a tool that was then but is still used. And then I talk about something related to what we're doing now or something we're looking ahead to the future. So whether it's a new Braille display or one of my episodes was talking about making or buying greeting cards in Braille and where you do that. And so we talked about all the ways to either make them or buy them and the different advantages of doing each one. And so that drops usually on the first Thursday of the month. And so if people subscribe to the Unmute Presents Network, then they get all the shows on the network and they're seeing great shows over there. I was recently on the Katie Talks Travel show and we were talking about preparing for the CSUN conference and all the concerns I had about all my electronics and gadgets and everything. The other podcast that I'm on that I really have so much fun with is Michael and Marty and I do a podcast called Digital Bites, that's B-Y-T-E-S. And we have a little format for this show. It's kind of a three-pronged approach. We review an app. One of us will review a piece of hardware, whether it's a new pair of headphones or a keyboard or a speaker, something like that. And then the other thing is just a tip and whether it's how to shut voiceover up when it keeps repeating the time every minute or something like that or coming up soon, I'm gonna do an Android tip because we know that we love Apple, but there are some Android folks that are gonna feel really left out if we don't talk about Android sometimes. So I'm gonna be presenting an Android tip soon. So our show is each week and we record our digital bites and it's not real long, but it's useful and we feel like it's helpful for people to have a variety of things to enjoy, whether it's a tip, a piece of hardware or an app that they would enjoy. So those are the two main podcasts that I'm on. Fantastic. I thank you so much for coming on the show. If people wanted to connect with you, is there a social media platform, please say Mastodon. Yes, I will say Mastodon. And I'm Creative Chris, even though I'm really tacky, you should find me at Creative Chris on Mastodon. I think you need to tell us the server too, but I can look that up. Yeah, it is the TweezCake, T-W-E-E-Z-E cake, TweezCake. Just think T-E-S-Cake in your clothes. It is its own thing, it's TweezCake, at TweezCake. Okay, I think we need one more thing, but I'll find it and make sure it's in the show so people don't have to follow the platform. Thank you, thank you. I'm new to Mastodon in the last, say, nine, 10 months or so, so I'm still learning my way around. Yeah, that's where it can find me. And I'm hoping to get the atyourfingertips.tech website up and going as well in the email, but I haven't been too busy working and trying to get everything recorded and all that sort of thing, but I will have that up and going at some point. Very good, very good. Well, I expect we will have you back sometime soon because anytime you wanna talk about a new piece of tech that you found and wanna come on the show, I would love to have you. Oh, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I told you Chris was awesome, right? I did a little more research on exactly what our Mastodon handle is. It's at creativechris at TweezCake.social. And of course there's a link in the show notes. The link to the chapter for this segment is actually a link to the Unmute Presents podcast because her segments at your fingertips Braille, then and now and digital bytes, those are all folded into the same podcast into Unmute Presents with Marty Sobo and Michael Babcock. So you've got the link there and you could just look for Unmute Presents in your podcatcher of choice if you'd like to go directly there. Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at Allison at podfeed.com anytime you like? If you have a question or suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com slash mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, I'm not sure why people do, but they do. You can go to podfeed.com slash YouTube. If you want to join in the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash Slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nocella castaways. You can support the show like I mentioned earlier at podfeed.com slash Patreon or if you're more in favor of a one-time donation, you can go to podfeed.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, which will not be this Sunday, but a week from Sunday, head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic Nocella castaways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.