RYAN JONES:
Good evening, and welcome to the 2024 Next Big Thing contest live event. My name is Ryan Jones, and I'm the vice president of Software at Vispero. The Next Big Thing competition is all about finding and celebrating those transformative ideas that have the power to break down barriers and open new opportunities for people who are blind or have low vision.
Tonight, you'll hear from three incredible finalists who are redefining what's possible, from cutting edge tools to practical solutions to everyday challenges. These ideas reflect the heart of our mission to make the digital world more accessible to everyone.
And now without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce our emcee for the evening, a trusted colleague, a great friend, and the senior vice president Vispero, Matt Ater. Matt, the floor is yours.
MATT ATER:
Well, thank you, Ryan. This is awesome. What a fun event we're going to have tonight. As Ryan mentioned, amazing turnout to get us involved in this great event tonight. And so it's a great opportunity to make sure we get everybody involved. And I love the fact that we've done this.
So we're going to hear from finalists tonight. We're going to hear of the solutions that they've created, and at one of these contestants are going to get $1,000 prize for building the Next Big Thing. And the cool part about this is that we're also going to do a drawing for you, the people who actually get involved in the Next Big Thing.
So in addition to our judges, we're going to make sure that we get a poll from all of you. So let's get started. I'd like to thank our first round judges for who helped us get to this point. It’s been an amazing effort that these folks have to go through every day to make sure that our tools and solutions come to you every day, but they also participated in making sure that we selected the right people to come to the stage tonight and participate in this event.
Elizabeth Holdsworth, one of the assistive technology engineers, Roxana Fischer is product manager for software, Mohammed Laachir, product owner, and Sriram Ramanathan, who is in charge of our cloud and innovation solutions here at Vispero. Thank you to that team. It has been a huge effort to be able to do this, and they really put up some time to make sure this was a successful solutions.
So now let's check out our finalists tonight. Robin Christopherson, Linda Coccovizzo and David Kingsbury. So thank you our team to selecting these finalists and I can't wait. It's so exciting to see what they come up with and find out how this benefits you as the consumers.
Before we check into what solutions they've come up with, let's meet our judges.
MANDY VAN CLEAVE:
Hi. My name is Mandy Van Cleave and I'm an assistive technology training team lead for TPGI.
BRETT LEWIS:
Hi. I'm Brett Lewis and I'm a senior software engineer working on JAWS.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
Hello. My name is Oleg Shevkun and I'm a test engineer for Freedom Scientific, or Vispero.
ARUSHI MITTAL:
My name is Arushi Mittal, and currently I'm taking a gap year before pursuing a degree in computer science at Purdue University. I am visually impaired myself, and so I had to go through a lot of challenges. A lot of times there were things that weren't accessible for me at school. Without assistive technology, I wouldn't have made it to my first coding class, and I wouldn't have been able to pursue the field of CS. It's given me a lot of opportunities to be able to access the computer in a way that just wasn't really possible before.
BRETT:
Growing up, needing assistive technology, getting experience about what doesn't work generally. And then I managed to get a job working for Freedom Scientific back like 20 years ago as a developer on JAWS. So really the last 20 years of my life has been focused around accessibility and how to implement accessibility.
OLEG:
When I evaluate the Next Big Thing submissions, one of the questions I'm asking myself is this. Does this solve a real problem for real people? And it doesn't have to be a solution for the whole world. It needs to be a clearly specified group of people and a very clearly specified problem or issue.
BRETT:
I think the criteria for me, and one of the important things is: does this have broad impact?
MANDY:
I'm looking for a feature where I can think of several users who would benefit from the availability of the feature. One that I would be excited to share.
ARUSHI:
In what circumstances can that feature or product or idea be used, and how well it could be used for different contexts, whether it's in an educational or professional setting.
OLEG:
But the best ideas are those that give you a wow factor.
ARUSHI:
I'm very thankful and grateful that there are people out there who are working to come up with innovative ideas that can help so many people in the future.
BRETT:
Freedom Scientific, or Vispero, has a long history of doing screen reader development, but we by no means have a monopoly on where the future will go and what the future should be. We need that kind of fresh insight to a lot of these problems, and I'm really looking forward to what the contestants to the Next Big Thing can bring.
MANDY:
Thank you for entering the Next Big Thing contest. I know from experience that it takes courage and skill to enter and make it to the final round.
MATT:
Well, what an amazing group of judges. It's so cool. I appreciate all of you for taking the effort to do this tonight and you're going to be, wow, because you guys haven't even seen this stuff yet, which is totally cool. You're going to have to make a decision in about 11 minutes, not 11 minutes from now, but 11 minutes once you hear everything.
You're going to have a chance to talk to all of our finalists and ask some great questions to help drive you to these opportunities to pick the Next Big Thing.
So let's check out. We have Robin Christopherson. It's so great to hear you and see you again from over the pond, and I really appreciate your submission and love to hear more about what you're thinking about. And it's called Smart Screen Review, and Robin, I'm turning it over to you.
ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Brilliant. Thank you, Matt. Hi, guys. So yeah, Smart Screen Review is what I'm calling it. We've all tackled or tussled with inaccessibility in software and on websites almost on a daily basis. Some software might be almost accessible, but there's just that one button that you can't tab to. Or when you do, you can't press space or enter on it.
It seems to need to use the mouse or maybe it just says button and it's not labeled. Maybe there's some text in that window that you just can't get to with the JAWS cursor or by virtualizing the window, whatever you try, you just can't read it. Maybe on a web page there's some controls that you're pretty sure will need to use a mouse because they're just not working from the keyboard whatever you try.
I'm sure that's familiar territory for everyone who's a JAWS user on this call. So my idea is what I call Smart Screen Review. And basically with a keystroke, imagine that JAWS could take a snapshot of the screen and at the same time recognize all the text that was on the screen and place it in that snapshot in exactly the place that it was on the screen underneath.
And then you can use keystrokes to review the screen, every bit of text on the screen, top to bottom, row by row, line by line, word by word, even character by character if you want to. And you will be reviewing the text everything that was on that screen, that pesky pop-up that you couldn't get rid of in the bottom corner because you can't alt tab to it, but it keeps announcing its presence, et cetera.
So you can review everything, and this is the really clever bit. When you get to the thing that you want to read, you can read it, but if you want to get to the thing to click, then you can do a keystroke that will send a click to the application.
And at that very point on the screen where that button is, it will then send that mouse click there and you've clicked that inaccessible button or dropped down that pesky combo box. And then you can go off Smart Screen Review mode by hitting escape if you want to, and you're back in the normal operation, or there's a setting where when you send a mouse click, it then retakes the snapshot, redoes the OCR, and then you can see the updated text.
So you can install that software with that inaccessible installer screen by screen without even having to drop out of Smart Screen Review mode, or you can just hit escape at any time to go back to normal operation.
So yeah, it's not actually my idea. So hands up here, what I'm describing is something that already exists on the Mac. It's called VOCR. It's a free utility that allows you to do exactly what I've described. It's really powerful. I've used it so many times on the Mac to be able to use inaccessible software. I'm looking at you, Logitech, and pesky controls on web pages that just don't seem to be working.
So yeah, VOCR on the Mac, I've stolen it blatantly to make it the Next Big Thing for JAWS 2025 on Windows.
MATT:
Well, thank you, Robin. What an excellent idea and I think this is great. Awesome to hear such a great idea in terms of even if you saw it from the Mac, hey, look, it's great to bring ideas to Windows where we can make solutions better for everybody.
So I think it's time to hear from some of our judges and hear some of the things they may have to ask you. And so, Mandy, it's all yours.
MANDY:
Good evening, Robin. Congratulations for making it to the finalists and thank you for entering. The question I have about your idea is it's actually about the feature that you're already using on the Mac. Are there applications that it works particularly well or not particularly well with?
ROBIN:
I think the beauty of it, of this approach is that you don't actually interact with the webpage or the software in any way except for sending mouse clicks. So if it's a really feisty piece of software that once you've moved the mouse ever so slightly, then that pop-up goes away or whatever it might be.
You're not actually interacting with it at all. You're interacting with this snapshot where AI has recognized all the text, and by the way, even text that isn't real text. So it could be that pesky unlabeled button that does actually say install, but only in pictures of a word.
So yeah, you're one step removed. So you just send keystrokes and it updates the text each time. It keeps the focus where you were before so you don't get lost, you don't have to start at the top of the screen again and it's just a really nice way of working, and because it's that one step removed, you're literally just seeing the whole screen any time, so it works for everything. There's nothing badly behaved enough for it not to work with as long as it can grab that text. Now maybe in the future you might want to also have it recognize icons for a play, fast-forward and rewind, which aren't labeled and it just recognizes those images and puts them as text, that sort of thing. But certainly just relying on the text being grabbed and placed exactly where it is on the actual screen works really, really well for that Mac utility. And I haven't found an instance where it hasn't come up, whether to read the text that I want to read, or click that control that I wanted to click.
MATT:
Excellent. Well, thank you very much. And Mandy, we're going to jump in to hear from Oleg, if that's cool? So Oleg, some of your thoughts in terms of and questions you may have for Robin.
OLEG:
Yes. Hello, and thank you for this one, Robin. That's a great idea. It was great to hear the presentation. I'm going to ask a question, which may be a bit of a tough one. But anyway, so you said you stole this from... Oh, okay. You borrowed this from the Mac. Is there anything that in your wildest dreams you would wish this feature could do that the Mac does not currently?
And an easier question, if this feature was available in JAWS, what would be the first computer game you'd play with it?
ROBIN:
Two really, really hard questions. Like I said before, I think that we don't necessarily need to stop with text. AI would allow us to recognize other controls that are maybe inaccessible, unlabeled, et cetera. So that would be my stretch goal is if we could not just use OCR to recognize all the text on the screen and make it clickable where there's a control underneath, but to recognize images and maybe have those described perhaps in the snapshot view, although I appreciate that Picture Smart does a brilliant job with that already.
Which game would I play? I love pinball games. I just loved those as a teenager when I had some vision, so I'm not sure how it would work with that but that's the first thing I'd try.
OLEG:
It would need no latency though to be able to play that.
ROBIN:
Yeah.
OLEG:
Thanks.
MATT:
Thank you, Oleg. And it's time for Brett and some of the questions you may have Brett.
BRETT:
Hi, Robin. I liked your idea. I think it's great. It was probably one of the only things that I really liked about the Mac when I was forced to use it with the OCR utility, so I glad someone suggested bringing it over. What other applications have you thought about for this besides, I mean you mentioned in passing like an installer, are there more day-to-day applications where you find this… I mean, you mentioned pop-ups and so on, but are there other cases that you've thought of that you really wish you could get access to this kind of information?
ROBIN:
I've mentioned the main ones that are frustrating, particularly those toaster pop-ups that from third-party providers, they might be in the alt-tab order, but when you do alt-tab to them, it then loses focus so you can never actually pin it down. So to be able to do Smart Screen Review, just go down to the bottom right corner, find the close button or whatever you want to action in that pop-up, and then just send that mouse click would be really, really good. On websites, I'm sure we're all familiar with controls that just don't seem to work from the keyboard. So something like that as well I can see on a daily basis. I'm very fortunate though that the websites that I have to frequent for work are all pretty good. I'm not actually a kind of a leisure surfer because I find it such a frustrating experience even with the brilliant capabilities that JAWS has on websites, I guess because I'm doing it 9:00 to 5:00 for work as well.
MATT:
Well, thank you, Brett. And our special judge, Arushi, are you available to join and ask Robin some questions?
ARUSHI:
Yes. Thank you for your submission. I love the idea. And my question would be how you could see this feature helping students who are maybe learning JAWS or who are newer to it and want to be able to learn how to navigate websites or other applications? How would you say that this would be able to benefit new learners?
ROBIN:
I think that the fact that you'll get the whole screen and that you'll be able to read from top to bottom all the text that's on that screen in the places where it actually is on the screen will give so much information about where things are visually on the screen. Now that's not always necessary, but it can be really useful as well.
So if you have to review slides, for example, to have the spatial awareness of where those things are, but just things like menu bars are at their top, the task bar in Windows is at the bottom. The idea of when a dialog box pops up, it obscures some of the text in a Word document behind it, for example, whatever it might be.
So I think that can be quite helpful information for people to appreciate as well. So just giving you a spatial awareness of what happens on your computer screen can be quite enlightening as well. And I think the fact that if it can be done this way, the focus remains roughly where it was before you do the snapshot to go into Smart Screen Review mode, then you'll be in the vicinity of the thing you wanted to read or interact with. And you don't have to start reviewing at the top of the screen downwards if you don't want to, but it's there, the whole screen is there for you. You're not going to break anything. You don't have to send a mouse click, you can just review and then hit escape to make it go away. It's a safe place to review screen contents and get an idea of all the different things that are typically on our screens.
MATT:
Well, thank you, Arushi, and thank you to Robin on that submission.
MATT:
And let's jump into our next one, Linda Coccovizzo, and she has a new feature called Custom Tandem Codes. Linda, if you're there that'd be great and we'll have you present your solution. Thank you.
LINDA CCOCCOVIZZO:
Thank you, Matt. I've been an assistive technology instructor for a couple of years, and I work with quite an array of students from young children to adults. And one of the really cool features and JAWS that I use on a daily basis, sometimes probably about six days a week is Tandem. And I use that so that I can hear what's happening on my student's screen, but also so I can read and braille what's happening on my student's screen. And it's a super handy feature to have and if they get into a spot, if I need to offer some technical assistance, I can control what's happening on their screen.
So one of the biggest issues with that wonderful feature, Tandem, is establishing a connection, and just to establish a connection for my students to allow me to access their computer is complicated, in that I get a code when I ask to be the controlling computer that I have to give to my students.
And in many situations, some of my students are in classes where there's a lot of activity going on, or they're in their households where there's stuff going on or they're just not able to hear all that well. And they need to be able to hear me say the code, because my code is going to be the two letters, three numbers and the two letters, and there's going to be Ds and Ts and Ps and Bs and Vs and all those things and they don't hear them right. And so especially for the young ones and the new learners at the situation where they get very frustrated. And by the time we can establish a connection, they are frustrated and it just takes a little while to bring them back around from that. So having the ability for me to create a code that I can give to my students that they can use just to have that profile set up with my name, and they can just arrow to my name or they can use first letter navigation and press enter and just connect would be fantastic. So I think it would be really cool if we could do that. And also if you had students or people you needed to assist who are deaf-blind, they would be able to read that code on their braille displays to make that connection and to create that profile. So I just say let's keep things going like we planned’em and simplify, establishing a connection to Tandem.
MATT:
Awesome, Linda. And I want to thank you for what you do. I think the education of our users is such a key thing today, and so thank you for doing what you do today. So let's jump in and get Mandy's questions and thoughts. Mandy, all yours.
MANDY:
Hey, Linda, thanks for entering and congratulations for becoming a finalist. I can completely relate to this. It's time that is taken away from the lesson just to get that connection made. And you had mentioned the possibility of a combo box where they could choose a name with first letter navigation, that reminds me of back when ZoomText used Bomgar for technical support, and we could choose Michael or Bretton or James in the list.
And I'm thinking of some similar features where we can set our own code in Tandem Direct, but that's not quite the same. You probably aren't even on the same network as the students in most cases. Are you working with students at many schools?
LINDA:
Yes. Many different locations around the country and sometimes out of the country.
MANDY:
That does complicate things quite a bit.
MATT:
Well, thank you, Mandy. And Oleg, you're up next.
OLEG:
I really enjoyed that presentation as well. It's going to be hard for us to make a choice and make a pick. The question is this, so are you suggesting that the code could be unique to the student and it could be used again and again in multiple connections with that same student? What if somebody else is using that code already?
LINDA:
That's a good question. I would think the connection would be between the two people. So my thought was if I had a code that I would share, that would just be my code. And then if I needed to change that code, I would have control over changing it and then repassing it around to my students. But as long as my connection was open and my student was reaching out to connect to me, but that is a good question in regards to the code. So there may have to be a way of specifying that that code belongs to me and I think the code would belong to the controlling computer.
MATT:
Thank you, Oleg. And let's bring in Brett if we can.
BRETT:
Linda, this is a nice idea. I like this one too. Today, I was trying to come up with something pithy and memorable to say about innovation and I didn't really get anywhere, but one of the quotes your idea made me think of, and that was something about innovation being putting ideas together that the ideas themselves may not be so unique, but the combination of them form something new. And so when I started thinking about your idea for all this, my next question was, oh, well, could we have a history of all the people you've connected with and use those as maybe a way to log and reconnect over time, or could you use favorites or maybe have a set of connections that you could pin into a list? Something like that. So apart from just having a code that you could associate with a previous link where you think about ways of reordering them or allowing several different connections that you choose from, I mean, I know you mentioned combo boxes, for example.
LINDA:
Right. So then that would be my idea. I have some students who connect to maybe four or five of us within a day or at least within a week. And so just being able to use that first letter navigation to make that choice and the code could be just tied to the name or like you said, it would be a recent history thing that those would be the ones they would have in there that they could create the profiles for.
BRETT:
Very cool. I like the idea. So thanks.
MATT:
Thank you, Brett. And Arushi, you are up next to ask Linda your questions.
ARUSHI:
Hi. Thank you for your submission. I think the idea is really cool, especially as being student recently. I definitely see how that could be very useful. And my question is, how would you say the best or the most effective or efficient way would be in terms of replacing that code?
So for example, would you say that it would be easiest to have the code tied to the name or have a link that you could share and send to the student? I'm just wondering what format would you say would be the most efficient for sharing and continued use?
LINDA:
I like the idea of a link, if it were possible, that way they could just open up your email or whatever you sent to them with that link and they could just basically press enter and then they could have the option of connecting or creating a profile if the profile hasn't been connected or just saying, "Are you sure you want to connect to Linda?" And then on my end, I might hear, "Joe is trying to connect to you via Tandem, accept or deny," or whatever the word might be. So you would definitely be sure you are connecting to the right person and that you are accepting the connection from the right person.
MATT:
Thank you, Arushi. And thank you, Linda.
And our final candidate tonight for his idea is David Kingsbury. And I want to thank David for all the great books and things he's written around accessibility and JAWS. So for those of you who don't know, he's a great writer, and he has some excellent materials out there on these subjects. So separate from the discussion of the Next Big Thing, make sure you get a chance to go check out some of his stuff because I think it's amazing. And David's new solution is actually called JAWS Settings Enhancements. And David, if you could tell us all about your feature.
DAVID KINGSBURY:
Well, thank you very much and good evening everybody. And a shameless plug, the fourth edition of my book, the Window Screen Reader Primer, will come out next spring. And I always get great ideas from my students.
I think we can all agree that one of the most powerful characteristics or features of JAWS is the wide array of customizations you can make to enhance your experience as a screen reader user. And these are centralized in two places: Settings Center and Quick Settings.
One thing that I've noticed in my almost now 10 years as an instructor is that Settings Center and quick settings intimidate some of my students, not just beginners but even some people who have been using JAWS for quite a while. There are so many changes that you can make that people ask, "Well, where do I begin? What are the most useful settings that I can change?" And they're also intimidated because they may think, "What if I make a settings change and it breaks my computer or I don't like it, or something like that. Can I remember how to get back in there to change it back to its original state?"
And I have two ideas. One, to make settings center more user-friendly, and another one to I think enhance productivity and efficiency, in general.
So the first idea, which I think is fairly simple is, in the Settings Center dialogue, the tree view that is in there, to introduce a new category right at the top of the tree view there that one could call Most Popular Settings. And in there you'd find maybe about 10 or a dozen or so of the settings that people most commonly change. Things such as punctuation level, typing echo, sounds for entering and exiting forms mode, speaking dollars like real human beings, and a number of other things.
And I know as an instructor, this would make my job easier, and of course, it would make it much easier for people to learn because right there you'd have that dozen or so set of settings, right there you could go down the list and say, "This is what this one is, here's how you change it." And I think it would be less intimidating. And it would also be a great way for people to get their feet wet in setting centers so they could go and explore some of the other perhaps less common, but still very useful settings that one could change.
My second idea, to some extent related, and a bit like Robin, I have to admit to theft here on a large scale. This time from NVDA. And the idea would be to create what are called, we'll call them Settings Profiles for JAWS. But NVDA has had something called Configuration Profiles for a while. And what this would allow you to do would be to create a profile for a particular task that you may be doing. For example, you're proofreading a Word document and you would set the settings to get a good amount of verbosity for when fonts change, when paragraph formatting changes, a number of other things, maybe you could link that to a different voice. Another task that people do commonly is simply to read casually.
In that case, you want all of your punctuation off, maybe you don't even want headings announced, a number of other things like that. I was going through a very verbose PowerPoint this weekend, and say, "Boy, wouldn't it be nice to have a profile where I didn't have to hear headings and bullets and all of that, I just want to hear the text in that PowerPoint?"
Another example, and we could go down the list quite a bit, but when people are doing testing for web accessibility, they often need to make a number of changes just to be in the right frame to do testing, but then they don't want to keep all of those on when they're just going back to doing normal web browsing.
So I could think of a whole bunch of different profiles, settings profiles that one could create. And similar to voice profiles, just a quick key to get a list of those profiles so you could quickly switch back to your normal configuration.
And I think if these two changes were introduced, the first one would certainly improve the usability of setting center, making it more likely that more people will take advantage of all the great customizations that you can do. And the second one I think would just make people more productive because they could quickly switch back and forth from casual reading mode to proofreading to who knows what customizations people could think of.
So again, thank you very much for inviting me to present my idea, and I've heard the other two, so you judges, you have your work cut out for you. Thank you.
MATT:
Well, thank you David. And it's my turn to bring some of the judges back in to ask some questions. Mandy, you're up first.
MANDY:
Welcome, David. Thank you for your idea and congratulations on making it as a finalist, like I've said to everyone tonight. This reminded me of some features we already have. It's so useful in the JAWS help and the ZoomText help to have that favorites tab where you can just favorite a help option. And then in the setting center we have the search and we have Last Changed Settings all the way at the bottom. But it sounds to me like that doesn't quite cut it for you, because especially if you have to know the exact keywords to locate in the search, and it's a lot to navigate through the tree views to find one particular setting. So I could see how something like setting, like you said, the most popular or even if you wanted to as an instructor create some favorites there, that would be a very helpful feature. And definitely on those profile configurations you could have a lot more customizations. I was just working on configurations in ZoomText Infusion and found how handy that was for those options.
MATT:
Excellent. Thank you, Mandy. And Oleg, you're up.
OLEG:
Yes. Hello and thank you, David, for this idea. Actually, it makes our work as judges even more complicated because you really presented two ideas here and we probably need two sets of scoring to work with that. The first idea, as Mandy has said quite rightly so, that you could add favorites.
I mean, my objection was, "Okay, who's going to decide on what the most frequently used setting is and how..." Whether it is applicable to the particular user, like you said. Oh, speaking dollars, changing the way we speak dollars. I've never changed that quite frankly. So to me that really doesn't matter, but favorites might be a good one.
And the other one about profiles, it would be interesting to implement this in such a way that it would not overload setting center, which is overloaded already, and that's going to be a formidable challenge, but we like formidable challenges. So thank you, David.
MATT:
Excellent. Thank you, Oleg. And Brett, you are up next.
BRETT:
All right. David, this is a nice idea. Settings in general are one of the veins of my existence, so any way we can improve it I think would be awesome. My question involves mostly, I mean, I think the real challenge with setting up some of these configuration profiles might be the same problem we have with people setting up profiles, in general, or changing our configurations, in general. And I was wondering if you thought about should we ship a set of pre-configured profiles for a certain number of tasks, and then let you maybe copy them or edit them or do that kind of thing. So some that we say, "Hey, maybe this is best for proofing all of the texts that you see on the screen or whatever." And then letting people go from there as a basis. Is this something you've thought about?
DAVID:
I thought about it a bit. I think that would be a really great idea as long as people could customize your customizations a bit, because people may not be able to think of or may not realize some of the changes that you can make. For example, if you're proofreading, one thing that I do is I change how capitalization is spoken. A lot of people don't know about that one. So I think that could be a great idea to pre-ship, as you say. That might be easier from a back-end programming point of view from your side for all I know. So that could be good, but as long as people maybe have the possibility to maybe add some things to those profiles that you create as well as subtract a few things. So that might be the better way to go.
BRETT:
Thanks. This is interesting.
RYAN:
Thank you, Brett. And Arushi, you are our final judge to ask questions to David.
ARUSHI:
Hi. So thank you for your idea and I think that it's really interesting, especially as someone who recently was working with y'all as a student. And my question would also be a little bit similar, but I guess it would just be how would you feel that this different voice profiles or different profiles with how content is spoken or just these JAWS profiles, in general, how do you feel that that could be made easier to understand for learners who are just starting out or students, whether that's in elementary, middle, or high school who maybe want to try out some profiles?
DAVID:
Well, again, I think pre-shipping some of them might be a good idea. Highlighting to people, there'll be time when you are proofreading Word documents and there'll be other times when you simply want to casually read. Now I haven't been a student, there may be even things that matter for math and science that I'm not aware of. So pre-shipping, some things like that. And I'll put it back on you guys. You really do such excellent training, so many free webinars and the like that I'm sure you could put out the educational materials to make these things used and understood.
MATT:
Excellent. Well, thank you, Arushi. Thank you, David, for your submissions. And now we're going to have those judges run off to their own little Zoom room and do their deliberations in the boardroom. And then we'll come back and hear from them in a few minutes. But what we have coming up now is you guys have a poll to take.
We want your vote. And this is really, really, really important because your vote counts. One fifth of the total vote comes from you as the participants and the attendees in the Next Big Thing. And I will be quiet while you guys think.
MATT.
We got a winner is what I understand. So let's bring Ryan back in if we could. Ryan, our VP of Software here at Vispero and Freedom Scientific. And Ryan, I think you guys have found a winner. Let's hear about it.
RYAN:
We had a great time in the virtual room. We had some virtual snacks, some virtual sandwiches and some great discussion. So before I get to the winner of the Next Big Thing though, I do want to announce the recipient of our $100 Amazon gift card, Andrew Zeeman. Andrew, congratulations. You are the recipient of a $100 Amazon gift card and we will be reaching out to you with that information. So congratulations, Andrew.
Now to the moment we've all been waiting for, we had great deliberation, great ideas. I enjoyed listening to all of them. The judges enjoyed them. We had great discussion. It was not an easy selection by any stretch, but alas, one winner had to be chosen. And the winner of the 2024 Next Big Thing contest and the recipient of a $1,000 Amazon gift card is Robin Christopherson with his idea of Smart Screen Review.
Robin, congratulations and thank you to Linda and David. Wonderful ideas. I'd love to see us actually work on all of these things. And so don't be shocked if you see all of these things come into our products over the next year or so because they're all really good ideas and really great enhancement. So with that being said, Matt, it was a good evening, wasn't it? We had a good time.
MATT:
I think it was amazing. And again, congratulations, Robin. I think it's so awesome to see some of these great features come into the market. And if you look at just a year ago, we had Picture Smart AI and what that's become today is amazing. So looking forward to seeing this one come to market as well.
And so thank you, Robin, for this participation and winning. It's amazing that we again get another great year. And Robin, any thoughts or comments before we finish up the night?
ROBIN:
I am speechless. Thank you guys. Thanks for your deliberations. Thanks for setting up this contest in the first place. And thanks for JAWS. I've been using it since JAWS for DOS, so it's made a world of difference in my life. So thank you guys.
RYAN:
Awesome.
MATT:
Thank you, Robin. And I'll tell you, as you think about the number of years you've used it, next year is a big year, right? Right, Ryan? Next year.
RYAN:
Yeah, man. It's the 30th birthday. 30th birthday of JAWS for Windows. It's going to be a big year. We have a lot of stuff we're going to do, so keep watching for all that. It's going to be a fun year for us in 2025.
MATT:
Well, thanks to everybody. Thanks to our judges. Thanks to our participants. Thanks to the audience for their participation. And this concludes the evening of the Next Big Thing. And stay tuned to all the cool stuff coming out of Freedom Scientific and JAWS, and all the kinds of things we're doing around Sharkvember as you've seen, and all the cool tips and things that have come out this month. I want you to continue to pay attention to what we're doing and share your thoughts and feelings. And we really appreciate everybody tonight. So thank you. And this concludes our evening. Thank you very much.
RYAN:
Thank you all. Good night.