Hello.

And this guy, Jan Bloom.

Hello.

And our guest host, Brian Dalton.

Hello.

Talk about the a to z of life.

Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen, and you are very welcome to episode 92 of Blind guys Chat. We hope you are well. We hope you're warm, because we've had some weather troubles in Ireland in the last couple of days, but we'll come back to that in a minute. But I want to introduce our guest host for this show, Mr. Brian Dalton, is joining us from Whitehall in Dublin. Brian was born in 1892. He's well known as being responsible for the invention of butter, which is fantastic. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to have toast. He's a native of Papua New guinea in Argentina, and we are joined by the only blind skydiver trainer. Certified skydiver trainer. Now, his license was taken off him some years ago because it was deemed that having a buddy attached to him and waiting until that buddy screamed to pull the parachute was not deemed to be very safe. So he's now living in Micronesia as the mayor of Kingstown. And we really do welcome you, Brian. You've had a very accomplished life.

Thank you so much. Thanks for that wonderful introduction.

Welcome, Mr. Brian.

Great to be here. 1892. Feels like that sometimes. .

You have still a strong voice. Hey, Mr. Ryan.

Just about. Just about. For somebody of my age, I think.

Those american president candidates, they are a little bit less.

His money, to be serious for a moment. You're living in Whitehall in Dublin, not too far away from us, and you're an accessibility tester, and you're low vision or blind.

What is it? Totally blind. From birth or.

From birth? Yeah. Never saw a thing in my life. Never.

And you touched the braille cells?

Yeah, I've been using braille all my life. I remember when I was a kid, I was about six, and I got my artificial eyes, and I didn't like them at all. In fact, they were a killer to put in and out. And I remember going to the doctor, and these things cost a few quid. They didn't come cheap. And I said to the doctor, are these eyes going to make me see? And he said, sadly, not, brian. And I said, well, you can have them back then.

I don't want them.

They're all yours. That's what I says to him. And he looked at me and he looked at my dad, and he goes, like, is this okay with you? And my dad was, well, it's up to know. They're Brian's eyes. So, yeah, if he doesn't want them, he doesn't want.

Yeah.

And are you wearing glasses, then?

No. No glasses at all. No glasses.

Well, there's an interesting little segue here, because I did get in contact with somebody recently, this week about. Because in the last podcast, we were talking about dreams and whether people who are blind from birth, do they see images in their dreams. And this person who is blind from birth told me that they don't see in their dreams. They do have dreams, but they don't see in their dreams. Brian, if you don't mind, can we ask you the same question?

You can, and lots of people do. It's a really interesting question. So you're absolutely right. I don't see, but I can hear sounds in my dreams. I can hear voices in relation to people that I would have obviously met in real life. I can feel situations, so I could be. I remember one time I started taking melatonin. First actually, because I had an awful habit of being wide awake at crazy o'clock in the nighttime and then being wrecked in the afternoon. And it was only quite recently that I came across Moss non 24. So I started taking melatonin, and it worked wonders. But the first night I took it, I had this crazy dream that I was in a fast car being driven by my mom, and she was going like a bad out of hell. And I could feel the sensation of the car moving. And I said, mom, slow down, slow down. I use some choice language, which I won't.

Yeah, I know, but your words were.

Certainly there, and I am a decent boy. Thanks. But I could feel the sensation of the car moving really fast. And then I woke up. So I don't know whether she stopped or we crashed.

Sure.

Your wife trying to move you out of the bedroom?

She probably was, yeah, she probably was.

Okay. She probably was. Just for matter of interest, does your mother drive?

She does not drive. No, she doesn't.

Your mother is driving. She doesn't drive.

She doesn't drive. But what she did say to me was after, when I was saying it to her, she goes, it's funny you should say that, because my brother was giving her a lift to work, and they were trying to make a particular bus, and he's a bit of a speed demon, so he was tearing after this bus, trying to make the bus.

Tell us, were you dreaming on Saturday night or over the weekend about the snow that had arrived in Dublin and caught everyone by surprise on Friday morning?

How many centimeter was it?

We had a bit now. Yeah, it was fair bit.

Yeah. My wife's seen it, Dublin down.

And I was like, what's going on? Is everything okay? And she goes, snow. Snow. And then two kids got wind of it then and sure really broke loose then.

You got two kids, Brian?

I got two kids, yeah.

No.

What are the age?

What is the age?

They're nine, nearly ten.

They love snow then.

Absolutely love it. They never normally want to leave early for school. But on Friday it was a different story. Different cattle of fish.

Yeah. The kids were out at half seven in the morning.

Really?

Yeah. Basically what happened, Jan, was there was weather reports for, I think Wednesday, Thursday, saying that there was going to be possibly snow in the north of the country, up in Donegal and Fermana and those type of maybe down to cavern. And in Dublin there was going to be a lot of rain and flooding. So there was a yellow rain warning put out. But later into the Thursday night, by that I mean after midnight, the Met office saw that there was a huge dump of snow heading for Dublin. But of course everybody was in their bed then.

Yeah.

So when they woke up and starts to go out to work, this is like, what the hell? Where did this come from? The weather guys are kind of saying, oh, well, we did say there were possibly bits of sleet, but mostly rain. For goodness sake. This was huge. And it's funny because blood and I and Larry were traveling down to Cork on Friday. And once we got past out of the motorway that the main motorway here, the M 50, that kind of surrounds Dublin, it's kind of a ring road. And once we got off that, which was a nightmare because it was just chuck a block, there was no snow on the way down, all the way down to cork. And it never arrived down to the south. And it was gone by Saturday evening when we arrived home. But as usual, people were probably out buying sliced pans of bread and milk just in case this might last longer than two days. Yeah.

I want Christmas song.

Hey, guys. But I offer you my zip line because we have 15 degrees here.

Really?

Well, yeah, actually it's the opposite.

It's really mild out. Very mild. It is really also not 15 degrees. No, that'd be great.

Yeah.

It is marvelous here. It was you wonderful.

Yeah, it was actually like that here about two weeks ago, I remember. Was it Sunday? Two weeks. Took the kids to the park and it was like really nice.

Really gorgeous.

And my brother in law, he is now in Austria or even. Yeah, I think Austria for skiing. And then there is snow, but there was too much wind. So all the lifts were closed so he could not go up. Sorry, Maurice. Sorry.

I remember I used to go skiing as a kid on a biscuit tin lid out and now it happened.

Yeah.

Brian, tell me more about your job because as an accessibility tester, what do you test? Do you test hardware or products or software? What do you do?

Bit of everything to be honest with. It's, it's software. So testing websites and mobile apps and then hardware devices as well. Some of these credit card machines, these point of sale devices which struggle for accessibility, certainly lacking in accessibility, which is awful as a user. But hopefully this new legislation, the European Accessibility act, is going to have some teeth behind it for web accessibility.

Are you using then jaws for that or jaws inspect for example?

Yeah, jaws mainly jaws. Been using jaws since the. Remember when I was in college in the. Saw a guy in one of the banks here in Ireland and he introduced me to Jaws. I went, I need to buy this, I need it now. Which I hadn't got the money. So I approached my local bank with not much money, if nothing, as a poor student. And I wanted a loan of, I think it was 1500 pounds or whatever it was at the time, close enough to buy the software. So I convinced my mom to go guarantor because I needed a guarantor to sign the loan. So the loan got approved. I ordered jaws from the states actually because you couldn't get it here in Ireland. And I got it from a guy in the states and I brought out an envelope of five of the old floppy.

Have those still? You have them also with the floppy disk?

That's right. When I got my first job I brought them in jaws and the pc was down on the ground underneath the desk and the. It was lovely. Yeah, the big towers. And she had to go down on her knees and feed these floppy disks in and out of this pc, get jaws installed. And when I was finishing up in my company years later, I said to her, my God, I was probably the only person I brought to her knees. Where was I to install the software?

And you didn't ask her to marry you?

No, not married. I could. Oh, she also, her husband worked for the same company.

And did you get also the training cassettes from Eric Demery? And I remember those, yeah, it did.

Now I test for, I'm a beta tester for Visparo so I'm part of the.

Oh, you're also beta tester for.

Yeah, yeah, nice.

Yeah, this kind of falls in nicely. Jan, you got a slave. Delicately. But I said no. Yeah.

You are such a nice guy. Or. And I'm too rude for that one. No, I like vacuum cleaner. Robot roomba. Roomba. So it's not the Roomba, and it's really nice. We call it. Or Rosalie called it the Paco. Paco and I connected it also to our Google home system. So now I can ask Google, hey, Google, start Paco. And then up he or she goes. It can vacuum and also mop. So it's really doing both. Yeah.

All over your House.

All over my house, yeah. But I'm very disappointed, Brian.

Why is that?

He cannot do the stairs. It's so lousy. Come on, you have to be with him.

And then he does the first step, and then you lift him up.

I do the old fashioned way with the old fashioned vacuum cleaner. But even when I bring it upstairs, he is not falling down the steps either.

So that's falling the stairs. But he no stop at the top step.

No, it will identify the edges and then it will stop. It is a 30 centimeter circle white thing, and it's going. Well, it's lower than ten centimeter. And it's a little bit awkward to say, but in our sleeping know, you don't spend much time under your. Well, but this room. Yeah, Chantal is always under the. No, no, I don't say so. We put in in our sleeping room, and it could clean and mop everywhere under the bed. And it is wonderful. I can really recommend it.

And do you have to program it around like that when you start. No.

Out of the box, it will start identifying the room. And then, of course, it will master it better and better. And it can refind the docking station easily or easily. Well, it's going better every day. The app, I must say, it's accessible out of the box. It is really incredible.

Yeah, really good.

I'm surprised. And then I can also command it via my Google. So I can also say, hey, google, pause Parco. Or you can stop it, and then you can also bring Parco to the dock now. And then it will return to the docking station.

I'd be happy to test that for you.

Yeah.

And if you want to send it over, if you want to put it through its paces and give it a.

Full work, it is accessible out of the box. Brian, if you need a second opinion.

On it, just let us know.

Yeah.

And to be honest, it is 229 euro, so it is not so expensive as well.

What about dog hairs and that? What does Chantel think about?

Excellent. It has never been as clean as you know. It is wonderful. It is absolutely.

Watch yourself there. Now. You could be walking on tinnights.

Maybe Yan did the hoovering.

Maybe.

I do it at home. I'm the Hoover.

Yeah, me too. I was also hoovering.

There's usually kind of a review, let's put it that way. And it's usually. Yeah, thanks for doing the hoovering. That's good. Which really means you've missed this bot. This bot? This bot. This bot.

Oh, really?

Yeah. But it's reviewed well. Okay. An honest review, but now also very diplomatic.

Yeah. Well, you should try the roomba. And I see that some of my colleagues are using it already for years. And it's really via my neighbor Frank. He is also a listener of the show, of course. So welcome, Frank. Welcome, Frank. Yeah, he introduced me to it and it was a warm welcome.

Anybody got one of those? These rumbas are similar. They're like. Would be nice in terms of apps and accessibility. Yeah, I'd love to.

You can email [email protected], or tweet us at blind guys chat if you've any comments or questions.

I want to throw someone for the bus, to be honest.

Dear Lord, Stewart.

No, I did not hear. No, it is our not even blind Gordon. No. Who else do we have as the listener?

Is it Mohammed?

Yeah, it's Mo. We offered him such a nice place to start his career as a guest host. You know what, what I heard recently, he is now also guest host of the fs cast for Freedom Scientific. Glenn was saying, well, we need to have a younger guy for this topic. And guess what? It was about gaming.

It was about.

Mr.

So he was just using us, was he?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so, too.

It's not really a better gig because this is the ultimate podcast.

But he is also joined. Well, we will see him also later this show when he is having the interview with Christopher Patno from Google. That's also a nice. He is doing still work for us, but still, I was a little bit disappointed, to be honest.

Very disappointing. Yeah, we have to get him back on and hold a tribunal perhaps.

Exactly.

Committee meetings. I'm going to lead into Christopher Patno because this is a great interview with a lovely guy. But before I do, I'm going to ask Brian a question and he can think about it while he's listening to Christopher's interview. Brian, you're a guy who's into Braille. That's great. We love Braille here. So I'm going to ask you my kind of loaded question, which is, do you prefer or would you prefer a braille display? A refreshable braille display, using which I presume you have at the moment a traditional Perkins keyboard, the six keys and seven and eight to the extreme left and extreme right. Or would you prefer to work with a query keyboard? So I'll come back to that one after Christopher. So I'm going to play in Christopher. Now time for our guest. We have a very special man on the line at the moment. Mr. Christopher Patno is a senior program manager in Google. He's also the head of accessibility and disability inclusion for Europe and Africa and Asia. Is that I get right, Chris?

Well, I don't want the promotion to senior manager. I've got a headache as it is.

Oh, well, sorry about that. But you want the money.

Well, yeah, but the headache is probably not worth it. The region is EMEa. It's Africa, Middle east and Europe.

So you've been to like Jan to Africa many times then, have you?

Several times, yeah. It's a place I'm beginning to learn.

And did you hear about Jan in Africa? Because apparently he's very well known. Everybody in Africa knows him, or so he tells us.

Anyway, there's posters of him all over, but they're wanted.

Oh, I think this is the end of the interview already, guys.

Sorry, I have to go.

I go to holiday in Morocco and there are rumors about him.

I was once for the know in the EBU, but that was years ago. But they're still talking. Oh my.

No.

But it was the reason why I was visiting the Google discovery. Yeah, the ADC accessibility Discovery center in London where Christopher is working. And I was really impressed also with the nice setup and also how good actually Google is now creating awareness actually for the general disability and accessibility questions. How did you fall in this disability field? Because it's not where you started your career?

No, I'm the accidental googler, let alone accidental disability person. So just quick. 32nd cv. I studied classical music in school out in California. I wanted to be an opera singer.

Can we close with a nice song.

Actually then yeah, maybe you can sing a sales on the show.

I wasn't very good is the problem. In my mid twenty s, I realized I was making more money waiting on tables than I was singing and thought it probably meant something. Okay. But I was born and raised in Cupertino, California, and my second job in tech was at Apple, where I spent ten years there. I worked on the first ipod, the first iTunes. I'm really dating myself now. The G four towers. The G five towers. Final cut studio and then spent a couple of years at Sony Ericsson making phones, even a year at Disney making games.

Yeah.

And about twelve years ago, I joined Google. So it's been a really cool, really meaningful career. But I didn't discover accessibility until I was here at Google. Oh, I was the lead technical program manager for Google Pay Music, what's now YouTube music. We had a test engineer, blind test engineer, come in to one of our meetings and she turned on voiceover and I heard button. What is that?

What's that?

Exactly. That's what I asked too. Yeah, that was really early in. Google's taking it seriously. And I asked her what it was and she said, well, this is Google play music for someone who's blind. I said, well, that's stupid. How do they use it? She says, they don't. That's why here I could see that. So within a couple of months, I volunteered to take on accessibility and then I took on accessibility for the Google Play suite of products and even hired her as a program manager to join my team to teach me what I needed to know. And I'm glad to say she's actually still leading accessibility for the Google Play suite. So she's still there fighting the fight. Seven years ago, I joined the central accessibility team and my first job was to help make accessibility teams around the company. And that was really cool and really interesting and learned a lot about talking to leaders and how to convince people to do things they don't necessarily think is important.

And how do you do that then, Chris? How do you knock on those doors? Because we all experience what it can be when it is accessible or not. What is your magic trick?

My magic trick is not a single magic trick. What it is, it's a series of. Think of it as like cooking, and every person likes different kind of food, but all food has similar kinds of things. So sometimes you die. A little bit of the compliance regulation stuff. Sometimes you add a dash of lawyers, sometimes you talk about FOMO, like what the competition is doing. And what I learned is different leaders are motivated by different things. And if you can work with their team for you to understand what is motivating to that leader, you can create a much more compelling pitch. Okay, politics over time, it's manipulation for good. Yeah, right, exactly. Or politics actually sounds worse, but it's actually probably nicer sounding than the manipulation. The idea is we're trying to have them realize that this isn't anything new and it isn't anything hard. And in fact, often it's something you could align accessibility work to work already going on. If they care about sustainability, if they care about ESG or DEI, it's very easy to align this work towards it. So building up this language that is relevant to that leader was something that we learned how to do for our leaders. And it's important because you're never going to be done, because leaders come and go and managers come and go, and you have to have this talk regularly. Even when the culture supports it, you still need to remind them sometimes, especially when they're new to the organization. Yeah.

Is that also one of the reasons that you have started this ADC in London, for example, to create awareness at the public? Do you invite also leaders there?

Absolutely. To finish the CV, which is now way longer than 30 seconds. In the middle of COVID I realized the European Accessibility act is something that we haven't started, really been engaged with. So I volunteered to, I pitched my job, I asked my boss, send me to Europe and I'll get us ready for the EAA. She said yes. Her boss said yes, her boss said yes. And I moved to the middle of 2021, and the ADC was the first thing that I started working on. So the ADC to me, is sort of a physical manifestation of the mantra, nothing about us without us. So half the space is dedicated to research, half the spaces get dedicated to tech. On the research side, this is where we bring the community in and ask those questions like what's working and what's not working? Because if you don't ask the community, if you don't ask someone who's living in the world that wasn't designed with them in mind, you're never going to understand what the real problems are. Because as an empathetic human being, I like to think I understand. But empathy can only get you part way. You really need that partnership with someone who has the experience in terms of the disconnect in society, whether it's technology or the built environment, but also a deep understanding of the tools. And in that collaboration together, can you really build those technologies that make a big difference? So that's sort of the research side, that's understanding. We bring people in, we have the conversations, we do research there, we do user testing, all that kind of stuff.

And is that only the Google stuff that you test there? Or is it also that other companies can bring in their products to have.

A severe test from Google because of liability and ip? We only really do that kind of research for Google products. But we will have sort of workshops and we had a workshop on inclusive music. So music production and performance. No products were created or tested there, but it's a place where we can come and have conversations. So it's not just about Google stuff. The research section is really about having that conversation about inclusion. But in terms of what Google does, this is where we did the announcement for lookout when we added the generative AI, the visual q a. Also, it's where we did the research in terms of, is this actually meeting the need? When we partnered with RNIB to build our magnifier, Robin Spinks had the great, you know, Pixel's got a great camera. Wouldn't it be cool if we made a magnifier based off it? Well, we did, thanks to him and his passionate support. And we did a lot of research in the ADC to support the building of that application.

Were the users very responsive to that, or is that something you said that worked well, but not maybe as well as something else? So let's try go down a different route.

That always the case? Yeah, it works well, but not well enough. It's important that we be able to joke about it, because we're never going to be done. No, technology isn't perfect. People's needs are complicated and sometimes they change, even in the same day, level on over their life. So technology is never going to be perfect. And one of the things that I try to lecture on is that you don't make perfection. The goal when it comes to building for accessibility, you create a culture and process of improvement. The really cool guided frame where we just had the Super bowl commercial on it, these are things that came out of conversations with the community, and we're continuing to invest and improve them.

I think you need to explain to Mo and Oren what you did with this advertisement.

Oh, yes. American football isn't super popular out here. I understand. So there's this.

Yeah, we understand.

You play for about 20 seconds, and then they're all need to.

Commercial break from Google was quite nice with the pixel, with the frame.

So the Super bowl is where you actually. I think you have more breaks than game because they can make so much money off of it. But what's really cool is we built a commercial that sort of tells the story of a person who's blind and the use of cameras and sort of tells the story of their life through this process of taking images of themselves when they're single, when they're starting to date, when they moved into a house together. But what was really neat is we used a blind director to help tell the story in the ad himself was blind. Stevie Wonder did the voiceover at the beginning, and even the person who read the audio description on that version of the ad, she herself was blind. So we really tried to sort of embed that. Nothing about us without us in front of and behind the camera.

My field is kind of audio description and accessibility. What's the demand for audio description on a service like YouTube at the moment? Are you working on that or is that just up to the content providers to look at providing that? Or is that an area you're delving more and more into?

That's a really good question. And this is an important aspect of communication. What YouTube supports now is the ability for a creator to add different kinds of audio tracks. So before this time you would have a video and the audio would be sort of like one blob.

Yeah.

What you can do now is you can have a video blob and then like ten audio blobs. And one of those audio blobs can be an ad track, so we technically can support it. And here to that culture of improvement, the user experience isn't as great as we would want. So we're in the process of trying to make it better. For example, there's no keyboard shortcuts to turn on the audio track the way there is a shortcut to turn on captions. And it would be really great to be able to search for products that have audio description.

Absolutely.

In my personal opinion, and I probably get in trouble for this, I don't call it audio description, I call it multi track audio, which can do ad. Once you can do things like making it easy to turn on and easy to find, then I think we would have a real ad service.

So this is pretty cool. But one of the questions then I would ask is how do you communicate this to the creators? Because I guess it's similar to you going inside internally into the teams of Google and trying to evangelize accessibility with them. How do you evangelize it outside of Google? So to the creators on YouTube, or app creators for that matter, on Android?

Not as well as we should. But I don't think Google's alone in this, in all honesty. I think there's an opportunity in tech to make things significantly better, but it's not just on the developer side. If you take a look at Android or iOS, there's lots of really amazing features in each of them and a lot of people don't know they even exist.

Yeah.

So I think the awareness part is an issue that for all of us to try to work on not just for the developers, but also the community itself. If you don't know how to use a tool or that it exists, it can't help you. Even if it's there. We all have an obligation to work on the awareness and share what we know.

Absolutely. That is very true.

No, that's true.

That's really true. And undocumented features are, well, commonly known as real bugs. That is what mo knows as well. If you don't know them, then it's non existing.

Yeah, I mean, I do product development and it's exactly the same thing. Right. So yes, we built this great thing, but now we need to tell people about it. That's very true.

And it's hard. It's really hard because people can't hear unless they're ready to listen. And so many of us are just trying to survive. So if someone tells you the greatest thing in the world is this feature, and you weren't paying attention, it's not going to help you. So we need to figure out how to be just annoying enough that people hear, but not so annoying that we get annoyed that we get ignored.

Exactly.

Since you have the ultimate task or the pleasure of traveling a lot through the Africa and Middle east and also Europe, do you see also difference, generally speaking, between the approach of disability inclusion in Africa, Middle east and Europe?

Oh, absolutely. The interesting thing is language and culture. In certain parts of Africa, there's still this belief, there's still this stigma that you've been literally cursed or your family has done something wrong, and the fact that someone has a disability is a result of that. So the stigma to it, language. If you go into the Middle east, people with disabilities are often called peoples of determination, and that can be really offensive to people in a different context. What I am really sensing is there are more and more people talking about inclusion and accessibility than the ten years that I've been doing this. Okay. You're seeing more and more happening. It's not fast enough. And with AI coming, there's some really exciting opportunities, but rather with the next generation of AI. This whole Llm thing.

What is that, Chris? Because now I'm lost. Llm thing, what is that?

Large language models. It's like the chat, GPT, Gemini, that kind of stuff. It's the current next generation. Okay. But AI and accessibility has been going on for a very long time. In 2008, Google started using AI in YouTube for captions. In the automatic captions, we've had OCR forever in products. Text to speech, speech to text. AI has been around for a very long time when it comes to accessibility. These large language models are really exciting, but we have to tread carefully to make sure that bias, there's no bias, or as little bias as we can make sure that people are properly represented and part of the process.

In terms of accessibility, what is the accomplishment you're most proud of, be it yours or Google's?

Well, probably being on this podcast, surely.

But after this podcast.

Okay, first that podcast.

Too late.

If I have to say. This is the sub we were talking a moment ago, that these ADCs are particularly interesting and particularly proud of them. The ability to. I've seen thousands of people come into our center in London with questions of what is accessibility? Why are you doing it and how can we do it better?

Where do you have them, Chris? Those ADCs, are they only in.

So right now the only one that we have that's publicly available is in London. But we're in the process of building more across Europe. So I would imagine in the next handful of should, if everything goes well, you should see a couple more available in Europe over the next few months.

Okay, great.

What's the reaction so far, even in London? Like, you're getting people in off the street, you're obviously notifying them through the RNIB or different groups that you want to speak to a particular group about accessibility. Is the response very good when people arrive? And are they thrilled to see that a big company like Google is working on accessibility constantly and wants to engage with users?

Yes. But I have to say, we don't ask anyone to come. I've never asked. Other than maybe the first couple of weeks in December of 2022, we haven't asked for a single person to come. This has all been word of mouth.

Oh, wow.

We haven't even done an ad. It's all been organic, it's been business people. Heck, we had the UK shadow government in here a couple of months ago. It's been remarkable. Everyone from Kirstalmer down to local borough fifth. Really?

Wow, that's amazing.

It's really meaningful seeing how many people want to come through.

So listeners from our podcast can also Google. Yeah, that sounds a little bit strange, but they can go on the Internet, browse and search. And how do they make an appointment? Do they need to make an appointment or something? How do they do that?

Chris? Yes. You have to make an appointment on a weekly basis. We have at least one tour where anyone can come in for free. Doesn't cost you anything. You don't even need a relationship with someone at Google, you just email us at [email protected]. So ADC, like accessibility, DiscoveryCenter, [email protected]. Okay.

And 10% of all bookings fees goes to blind guys chat.

Yeah, booking for money. Yeah, it's free.

But when I was there, Chris, the Google thing, ADC, what I really surprised to me was the game section. And since Mo is also a gamer, perhaps you can also explain a little bit. And also, do you play games yourself, for example? And what's your favorite game?

Let me tell you what we're doing with the games. So we partnered with a really lovely charity called everyone can up in Manchester. And they use video games to assess kids with disabilities. And I use video games to upskill them because it's a lot more fun to play a game than it is to do your exercises. Yeah. So we got a chance to meet with them. I really liked what they were doing, and I asked them to build us three stations that they use in their shop that demonstrate the use of assistive technology. So one of the games, it's a game called Dirt five, bought off Steam. It's the same game everybody gets. It's not some disabled version of it. Instead of using your controller, we're remapping the buttons onto the screen and using a toby eye tracker to go from side to side. So when you look to the left, the car turns to the left. When you look to the right, the car turns to the right. This kid's good.

Oh my.

Only now, like a year later, am I finally able to keep up with him. It's really impressive.

That's impressive.

Yes. I'm really bad at video games, clearly. But what's really neat to me is that I get to tell this story. Listen, here's this kid who has quite profound CP, but he's learning not just how to play a game, which is fun, he's learning how to use a mouse. Okay, so this is him learning how to use excel. This is him learning how to use Photoshop. So this is him learning to use a computer just like anybody else. And he's still kicking my butt. Another game station we have is called Ding Dong XL. Not the greatest name, but it's a really fun game using a single head switch, the one that gets the most excitement, like with your Thalmer. It was FIFA 2022, where you use a chin, joystick and finger switches as you trying to shoot a goal against the goalie. And it's brilliant watching people struggle and play and realize the assisted technology is just another how. It's how you do it. It's not the end result. It's the method.

This makes me think a little of Brill, because Brill, I used to be able to see a little, and I used to be able to read. And once I started to learn and to read Braille, it felt like reading in a way that text to speech never has to me. So that really illustrates that indeed, the braille is just another how. But what you're really doing is reading.

Yes.

And I was also very happy to see the braille awareness also when I was there at ADC, Hans and all the people there, they like braille, and they are really embracing it, guys. It was fun to see. Also, what do you have? Also the Lego bricks.

With the Lego bricks, we have the braille Legos. And we also, because our office is at King's Cross, so we're leaning in on the Harry Potter, where we have a copy of the Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone, the philosopher's stone in print. Then I also pull it out in Braille, like, all five volumes of it. Oh, really? And gets to show people, this is a book and it's meant to be touched. Now it's starting to get flattened, so we need to get another copy. Yeah, but it's really cool watching. Oh, my God. How do you know what page it is? Look over here. That's a number. Wow. And then I realized I was showing to the wrong space because I was in the US.

Yeah, I learned the hard way. That's true.

Mo, to answer your question, this is one of the things I'm most proud.

Of, and it is something to be proud of, for sure.

Thank you. Very kind.

Yeah, you should be very proud of what you're doing. Showing somebody braille that has nothing really to do with Google, with the company as such. You're opening your mind to all the possibilities and all the available technology. And even though I would say braille hard copy, there is technology involved there, of course, to print out the braille. But it's a fairly simple form of technology. But so many people get so much joy out of reading braille like we do. It's brilliant that you're doing this. It's really.

The space isn't just for blueblindness. We have a station on dexterity and cognition, so we show off different ways of communication, like an AAC board, I'm sorry, an AAC app on Chrome. So we're even using third party tools. We have a station on hearing, where we talk about captioning and the relevant captioning tools. And then, of course, we show the different kind of magnifiers, text to speech reading, and we always end with that guided frame. So it's really neat watching these people listen to their phone, tell them what to do. If you haven't seen the app, it gives you spoken, real time verbal guidance on how to move the phone so you can take a good selfie or photograph. And it's cleverly done. And we're on a second generation of it, and I expect us to continue to develop it moving forward.

Will we see, do you think, sign language available on videos, let's say, in YouTube? Do you see an avatar coming into the frame at any point?

Someday? Right now, if you have. YouTube doesn't have the support for this, but there are some. I just came back from zero project. I've seen a couple of companies talk about the ability to make avatars based on pre programmed content for governmental purposes or for education and that kind of stuff. This exists today. I saw one company where you can literally highlight some words. You right click and then it'll on the fly, generate the animation necessary to assign it. So we're getting close, but we're not at a point now where you can, at scale, provide real time sign language interpretation.

Yeah, well, I think one of the big problems with sign language, from conversations that I've had with people from the deaf societies, is that the avatars. See, the issue with the avatars is that it's facial expression, because a lot of the signage is told not only through hand gestures, but also through the face. And some of them aren't wild about the idea that you could have an avatar which might be able to sign the hand movement, but not necessarily the facial expressions. So that's probably what's holding this back, this project back a little. But it will come, there's no doubt.

Getting good data that represents all of that is difficult. Another thing that you need to remember is that it's also locally relevant. There are local variations of sign, so even in English, you want east coast sign, West Coast Sign, and they're different, and there's like black ASL. So there's many variations in terms of sign and getting enough quality sign with enough age, gender, race, all of these things matter. So it puts together a really robust model. It's not solved now, but it's interesting and exciting watching the research come through.

What are you most excited about that is coming in the future in terms of accessibility?

I think we're in the early days of this new large language model stuff. So taking this away from just Google, I'm really excited. If you take a look at what meta has with their glasses and how they've recently connected it to their llama large language model where you can send a picture of what you're looking at and it'll provide you a description. I think that's really neat. Real time today you have to send a picture. But imagine a couple of years from now, the models are small enough and strong enough that they can run on your device so they can run in real time. And then you could have imagine just going browsing guys, just walking down the street just to see what's there, going through the store and having it tell you what's there that's going to be possible. So this is what's really exciting to me for the future, but it has to be based on the needs of today. So for example, wouldn't it be cool to never have to worry about a PDF again? Yeah, absolutely. No, that's true. It's the baby steps. But these new AI tools can help here too. So what I'm excited about is that we get to help ourselves today moving forward, and also the Sci-Fi stuff of the future. It's all relevant, it's all important, and if we're lucky, it's all just a matter of time.

It's pretty cool because I've been using the be my eyes app for a little while now with the ability to take pictures and it describing, and it feels like having a human sighted human sitting next to you, who takes quite a bit of time, of course, to look at your photos before starting to describe them, and who may sometimes hallucinate. So you may be taking a little bit of acid there, but still they are.

No, it's true.

I mean, it feels that way. It feels like a friend. You can just ask, hey, what am I seeing now? And by and large they'll be right. And the more seamless that gets, the.

Better it will feel. Exactly. So then imagine having a real world screen reader, because at some point as you walk down the street, the AI is going to know what you want and what you like. So it'll tell you what all the coffee shops are, where the bars walking down the street, that is the future. I don't know. We know how to do little bits and pieces of it. So that's the exciting part of the future. But again, we have to stay in the present and live in the world that we're in. And we can use these to make pdfs easier and make sure websites are more accessible because platforms are picking up these features that will tell you, that can create for you an alt text if someone didn't bother to do it. Because you think of the web aim. Web aim is like the top 1 million websites. There's like 1.1 billion websites in the whole world. Absolutely.

There's a whole lot of web out.

There that really needs help. And that's why platforms can use AI to help make up some of these differences.

Chris, I love your way of talking about inclusiveness, accessibility. You're so passionate and you feel the energy, but it's getting already all over. Well, we promised you. Well, you have multiple appointments in a day and we are happy that you can share this time of year with us. And I don't know, guys, because, mo, you closed already nicely with this. Well, what can we expect in the future? Well, we all walk together then. And then we walk on the street and then we say, the AI will tell. Hey, there is Christopher Patna walking.

Hey.

He has done some nice posting on LinkedIn, or I hate what he said.

Let's trip him.

But Chris, many thanks for your time, for your passion. We hope to see you soon, and many thanks for this nice interview.

Yeah, thank you.

You're very welcome. Until next time. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you very much.

I have to say, he's a great guy and for such a huge responsibility. He has a great sense of humor and he really gets accessibility.

It's amazing. And also, I must say, mo was also quite nice in this interview. He had good questions, especially. And also, in the end, we will wear those glasses and then we will see when he's walking over the end, over the street, and then we shout, hey, mo.

He's a great guy. I hope that at some point there might be an ADC and accessibility discovery center, perhaps in Dublin, because Google had an office here in Dublin. So that'd be great to see at some stage if they're thinking about it. Brian, I'm going to come back to you because I did ask you a question before we went into Christopher. You did keyboards on braille displays, QwErTy or Perkins, what do you prefer?

I have to say quirty, and I've been thinking about this for a while. So I've had a braille display since about 2017 now, and my braille writing speed would not be good. I must say, I love reading braille. When I read braille, when I'm trying to remember how to spell a word, I'll picture it in braille. I've been reading braille since the age of four, just not today or yesterday, but there we go. But I heard all about this mantis for months and months and months, and I joined the email list, and before Christmas, I got to lay my fingers on a mantis, and I was like, touching gold. Yeah, I did. I was actually, like, touching gold. Normally, I would have gone, I don't know. It's gone through my fingers far too quick for me to even know. But, yeah, because I've always been like, I don't know if I want a keyboard on a braille display or if I just want a braille display. But anyway, I touched the mantis and I went, I want one of those straight away. Lovely to type on. Quirky keyboard. I could zip along at the rate of knots really, really quick. And the bluetooth, apparently. So I use two laptops when I'm working generally, and you can switch, apparently really quickly between one and the other. And the whole setup of the mantis is just lovely.

What about the braille? The braille itself, the braille cell.

The braille is beautiful, really smooth. It's just lovely to touch. And the keyboard as well. Lovely to type on, because I was saying to the owner of the mantis, who's saying, like, do you use this as your regular keyboard, or would you still have a standard keyboard? And he said, no, this is my main keyboard now. I use it every day. It's on my desk in front of me, and I type away, and then I've got the braille display right underneath the spacebar.

I would still prefer, and this is where Jan and I differ, I would still prefer to have a mantis type device, which was also a computer. And I know access mines are developing this new optima whenever it comes out. We don't know that would be an option.

Yeah, for sure.

But you make a very good argument, which is that updating it could be a problem because it's presumably going to be built when you buy it. You're going to buy, if you can afford to, the highest spec computer, then in my organization, the IT department would have to be across it to make sure they're happy with it. And then I suppose the minute you buy it, it's obsolete as usual.

Yeah, exactly. I had the old pack mates before.

Oh, right, yes.

Okay. But you had it with the Quetti or the braille first.

I had the QWERTY keyboard.

Oh, yeah. That's also, that Quetti keyboard was absolutely.

Very good as well. Lovely. I used it to death. Like it bit the dust. I used it so much. But then I remember hearing about the l braille and I kind of went, I don't think I want one of those again for the same as what you were saying, jan updating it and stuff. And I went for a well specked laptop with a braille display.

No, that's also still also.

But it is a user. It's a preference.

It's really true. It really know. We are lucky, Brian, in this case, because we have a choice. Affordable. Of course it's not affordable for you to purchase it yourself. And that's sometimes also what we discovered or in Africa. Then you see people suffering when they do their whole university or secondary or schools with only their know. And then it's amazing how people do that.

Can do.

Yeah.

But anyway, we'll move on because Brian wants to use my soapbox for a minute.

Yep.

You want to talk about ad audio description in cinema?

Yeah. Our lack of. So yesterday I went along, I had a couple of hours free on a Saturday and went along with the trouble and strife for the wife to go and see the new Bob Marley movie. I went to Jamaica in 2009.

Oh, wow.

And I went to see where he grew up and where he lived and his whole estate, all that kind of stuff. So I wanted to go along and see it and I went with the trouble and strife. So she's visually impaired. So there was a lot of text up on the screen around about the period that the movie was set because there was a lot of unrest in Jamaica around that time. So you're talking middle 70s, kind of late seventy s. And there was a lot of text which obviously I couldn't get because I couldn't see a thing and she couldn't get because it was just too fast. And I was thinking, I love devices which are seamless. So the iPhone, for example, when that got released, that just grabbed me straight away, the fact that it had accessibility built in. And I'd just love to be able to go into a cinema without booking audio description without pretelling them. I'm going to be here like six days in advance and all this kind of stuff. Just go in and get the audio description just like somebody else would get it through their eyes. So I would get it through maybe my airpods or something like that. So then I would have the text because I came away from the movie. It was a great movie, by the way, great music, loved it, but I didn't learn anything from it because I missed so much information that was on screen. I was thinking, I just love something seamless that I could just go in, sit there like anyone else and get all the.

Yeah, you see, my understanding still is that there is audio description on every movie that comes out of Hollywood. The problem is distribution rights. So you have to do a deal. And I still think it's wrong. You have to do a deal with the audio describer or the audio description company. And if they decide, well, they don't want to sell the audio description to Europe, for instance, they don't have to, they own the content. Because audio description would be considered to be new content with that particular movie. But I think it should be written in context that whoever is doing the audio description, the original audio description for that particular movie, must also deliver as part of the overall delivery the audio description file as well. And certainly if you want to play that on a broadcaster in a cinema in Europe or any other part of the world, that audio description should be available now. You could still change it and you could still get somebody in your own country to do the audio description.

But that's how it was about 20 years ago, because I remember going up to a cinema in Belfast and I did an interview for an audio magazine at the time and they were telling me the same thing, or, and that the track is there, it's there with every movie. The cinemas just don't use it. And there is a cinema in Dublin that you can book headsets and all this stuff. But with the last one I went to do, the headset, wouldn't.

Say.

But is then the system used in ear catch also in Dublin, or is it different?

It hasn't caught on. Ear catch has not caught on in any shape or form in Ireland, which is a pity because it was demonstrated many, many years ago what is now vision Ireland, what was then the National Council for the Blind. But it just didn't catch on in terms of films and it would be fantastic. But again, you still have the rights problems.

That's true.

The provider, the audio description provider to agree to sell the audio description to ear catch. But imagine how easy it would be. I mean, you use ear catch or have used.

Here to watch television series, but also I used it in the theater with Aida Lion King. It was so marvelous. It was so nice.

That's exactly.

You are then so into it and you see more than your sighted people next to you because since you are so focused and you hear everything, then afterwards the third party or the third part, that is even much better because you are really having a voice also in the discussion afterwards, because you can really say, hey, this happened and that happened and did you see that? And you did not miss anything. That's really cool.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's like when books were released and like years ago, you'd get the audio version, like weeks after the main book was released and how good it is now compared to what it was, that you get an audio version and as you say, and you can talk to your friends over a coffee or whatever it is about whatever book.

Yeah, it was really amazing.

Well, anyway, we shall keep advocating for more description available everywhere, please. Thank you very much, distributors. Shall we bring in cloda?

Yeah. Here comes the boss.

That's the first time.

Yeah.

I'm really happy about that.

You're the boss.

Yeah.

How was the hoovering standard? Was it all right?

Yeah.

What's the story? Spill the beans, go on.

It doesn't happen with that kind of regularity. And in fairness to Oren, he does.

Do a good job.

No, he does. Did I set a cat among the pigeons? Did I?

No.

In fairness, it's just a QC check and he asks me for the QC check.

I think you have to be honest with. We have to be honest with everybody. You do give me good review and you do tell me where I've missed. And the simple reason I miss is because either I'm too lazy or.

You're not a robot.

No, you're not a robot. Hey, Google. Go Oren.

Ask Oren.

And also, I suppose there are some.

Stop him now.

Do you know what? Rumba.

Anyway, let's move on. Emails.

Hello, blind guys. I'm what you guys call a sighty. Is that a politically correct term or is it a blind guy's chatism?

I don't know if we are so honorable already.

I love that. That's great, isn't it?

Yeah, blind chick.

This could be word of the year, you know, the way the.

Chatism.

It's good. I listen occasionally, mostly because of my dad. He has vision issues. I want to know if you or your listeners could help advise me about practical things. I could buy him to help him around the house and in particular in the kitchen. I'm just looking for physical things to help him. Anything he could share would be great. Thanks, Dara. So what I'm thinking is, I mean, there's lots we can say, but I'm wondering if people might write in and have suggestions for Dara's dad. Or Dara, I should say, because we had one of those liquid alarm things. It's a little yellow yolk you hang on the side of your cup and then you pour the water from the kettle and it makes. No, we don't actually. It's magnetic. No, you don't use it, but you don't need it because we have the one cup kettle, which I think is.

The best trick of all. They're brilliant.

Do you use that, Brian?

Do all the time, yeah, because I'm a late tea drinker, so I didn't start drinking tea till ten or twelve years ago, and I didn't fancy the idea of lifting a kettle and stuff. I went for the cup. Yeah, I love it.

I'm kind of clumsy, so I was very.

I would recommend something else, but I don't know the name of. But I've read recently that there are air fryers now and I think there have been other podcasts on it. Perhaps on the Vision Ireland. The cobalt one, is it cobalt?

I got.

Oh, really? Do you have one?

Okay, I do have one. It's good. It's really, really good. Now it takes a while just to get used to the touch, because all the buttons are touch, but it is very audible, it's very verbose. It's really, really good.

And what do you cook in it? Do you have some nice recipes?

Potato waffles.

We do the french fries. Yeah, we do the french fries. And what I use also in the kitchen is a light meter. We have a coffee machine and that goes also with an led. And when you turn the dial, then it will lighten up the choices. And so we put a bump on, on the one cup of coffee or the two cup of coffee or the espresso or whatever, and then you hold your finger on that place. So you have the light meter on that spot and then you turn the dial and then the frequency is getting higher when the light is there. So that's really also awesome. Yeah.

Wow. Very good.

And there's non technical to give us.

A demo of that.

Of course. I need to move down out of this studio. High fancy studio kitchen.

Not this very minute.

Yeah, I can try. Yeah, it's really cool.

We are out of time.

I'm so sorry, folks.

But Brian, we really enjoyed having you.

It's good to have you.

Pleasure. Yeah, exactly.

We forgot to mention, just as we are hearing the music coming out, you have your own radio show, which is on Team FM.

Friday 07:00 welcome to the weekend.

You have really a dj voice.

That's really true.

We need to talk about that one. Yeah, we need to talk that next time.

Thanks for mailing.

Next time.

Okay.

Bye bye.

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