· A preview of Vispero's activities at the upcoming conventions;
· A JAWS power tip when opening PDF documents;
· A look at some brand new multi-line braille displays;
· A dive into better understanding of tables;
· And impressions from the crews of a lifetime.
All this—right here on FSCast episode 259.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
Hello and welcome to FSCast episode 259 for June 2025. And you know what? It feels really good to be joined in this virtual studio by Elizabeth Whitaker. Hi Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH WHITAKER:
Hey Oleg. It is great to be back.
OLEG:
Yeah, and Elizabeth, are you packing your bags already?
ELIZABETH:
I need to do that, because we have some upcoming trips.
OLEG:
Tell me about where you're going and what's coming up.
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, so we have two conventions coming up, the American Council of the Blind, ACB National Convention, and we're going to be there on the 6th and 7th. And then on the 8th we're going to leave to go to the National Federation of the Blind, NFB Convention. We're going to be there on the 9th and 10th. And so the ACB Convention is in Dallas and the NFB Convention is in New Orleans. So there will be some presentations there as well as, and this is the second year we've done this, the training suite. So this is where we're going to have an opportunity to showcase some different features, answer training questions, and even showcase a few teasers for upcoming features.
OLEG:
And when you say we, it's a few people from Vispero are coming, right?
ELIZABETH:
Right. So in the training suite it'll be Ryan Jones, Rachel Buchanan, and myself. And I think we have a few other people coming from Vispero as well. So it's going to be a lot of fun. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to meet with all of you who are going to be there.
OLEG:
So is there a calendar of events, or how do people know where to come, where to find you?
ELIZABETH:
We're going to have that information available very soon, so keep checking back, freedomscientific.com. And if you have any questions prior to the event, send us an email to training@vispero.com.
OLEG:
So Elizabeth, I want to ask you a question. Would there be a way for you to have a recording device with you at the summer shows?
ELIZABETH:
I think that might be possible. Yeah.
OLEG:
We're planning our July episode of FSCast right now, and you will be representing Vispero, Freedom Scientific, and you'll be representing FSCast. So would you be willing to record somebody who comes up to you and says, hey Elizabeth, I know you, there's something I'd like to share with FSCast listeners?
ELIZABETH:
Absolutely.
OLEG:
So folks, now you know what to do. Go and find our training suite at the conventions, see what's there and who's there. And please be sure to ask, is it Elizabeth Whitaker there? And if so, come over and say hello for other FSCast listeners.
ELIZABETH:
So I did want to mention also that for Insert J Club members, we will be holding in-person meetups while we're at the conventions and we'll be sending out information about that very soon. So check your email. And if you're not a member, visit freedomscientific.com/insertjclub. That's Insert, I-N-S-E-R-T- J Club, C-L-U-B. And there you can sign up.
OLEG:
And we have already had some club events, and we have some materials that have been made available to Insert J Club members already. So that's pretty cool. Anything else we need to say about the summer shows?
ELIZABETH:
I'm just looking forward to meeting everyone and getting the opportunity to talk to you in person.
ELIZABETH:
So Oleg, I heard we have a JAWS tip for this month.
OLEG:
Yes. And it was sent in by Joseph LaFauci, and we thank Joseph for sending it in. However, it's a pretty big issue. So let me ask you, Elizabeth, how do you open PDF files?
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, so that's a great question, and I know there are always different ways of performing the same tasks. So I'll tell you what I do, and then I'd love to hear Joseph's tip here. I open the files from File Explorer. And then if the file is tagged, it opens right up for me typically. And if it's not, if that dialogue that asks you if you want Adobe Reader to process the file does not come into focus, I typically press F6. And this is a question that we've gotten before about how do you navigate to that dialogue? How do you get it in focus? So I typically press F6, but I'd like to hear more about this tip.
OLEG:
So actually, let me just read the message that Joseph sent in. He says, "In the past I tended to open PDF files by using Windows Explorer to find the file of my choice and then pressing enter on the file name to allow Adobe Reader to open it. These days, the results of this approach are inconsistent. The only method I have found to achieve consistent results in this case is as follows.
Step one, open Adobe Reader directly." So you start by opening the program, not the file and the DOS veterans will probably remember that that's how it was in the DOS days. You opened the WordPerfect for example, directly.
"Step two, select the recent item.
Step three, tap to the “Open File” button and press the ENTER key."
And I have to interrupt here. In my preparation for FSCast, I’ve been doing the same, but just pressing CTRL+O to open the file and it worked. I don't know, it may be different depending on the version of Adobe Reader installed. For me, CTRL+O just does it. If it does not. Yes, you can follow the steps described by Joseph LaFauci.
"Step four, navigate to the desired file and press enter to open it.
Opening a PDF using these steps works consistently for me," says Joseph LaFauci.
So what do you think, Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH:
I think that's a great tip. I'm going to try that myself.
OLEG:
Me too. And with Adobe files, with PDFs, the thing is to have as many tools in the arsenal as possible because some of them may work, some of them may not. And so Joseph described one tool, certainly not the only one, but I'm sure this can come in handy.
And if you have your own power tip of the month, please send it in to Fscast@vispero.com. We cannot promise to publish this in July, because the tip of the month spot for July is already taken. But after that, the slots are open.
ELIZABETH:
So Oleg, I understand you've been doing some traveling yourself.
OLEG:
Yes, actually June was a travel month for me, and one of the events I was privileged to take part in was the Tactile Reading Conference, actually the third international tactile reading conference that took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with about 500 participants from all over the world. I mean from China, the United States, Europe, even Africa, like African countries. And these were professionals in the use of braille, in the teaching of braille, in the use and teaching and development of tactile pictures. I mean there was everything starting from pre-braille up to advanced math in braille, from learning to understand very simple pictures to advanced pictures. And of course there were discussions, there were panels, there were round tables and there were some exhibitors.
ELIZABETH:
So did you make any recordings while you were there? Is there anything you'd like to share?
OLEG:
Oh absolutely I did. And let's take a listen. And by the way, later on this episode, we're going to hear something that you recorded. Can you give us a teaser?
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, so one of our very own colleagues, Isabel Holdsworth, took a really interesting trip to Antarctica.
OLEG:
So keep listening to FSCast to find out more.
Now, I need to make a couple of comments before we hear the next interview.
I should also add that Peter Tucic was working for Humanware at the time this next interview was recorded.
So at the Tactile Reading Conference we met our friend Peter Tucic with HumanWare. actually you are attending to the Monarch today.
PETER TUCIC:
I am. So yeah, we're demonstrating here that the Monarch is working with JAWS. So we have the Monarch working in a multi-line environment in two different modes. We have Wrapped Mode and we have Cropped Mode. So Wrapped Mode is just exactly what it sounds like. All the text is wrapped, you can just read and read and read. And Cropped Mode is where you're able to go into a table and actually understand the spatial content of that table, so seeing how the rows and columns line up, and we can look at a spreadsheet and see the same thing. Those two modes are what we're demonstrating, and that will be something that will be coming to JAWS over the next few months amongst other features. But the two that we're currently showing are cropped mode and wrapped mode.
OLEG:
So how was the reception of the Monarch overall?
PETER:
It's been super positive. Just the ability for us to show tactile graphics with braille labels has been amazing. And I was just talking to somebody from Uganda, I was today talking with somebody from Japan. There are people here from just all over the world who are fascinated and interested, and obviously they wouldn't be here if they weren't. So it makes sense that they're interested, but the amount of excitement that's coming every month with all of the updates, I mean even since we launched the product, we added email, we've improved the multi-line web browser, now we're going into the screen reader territory. We've done a lot with math. We continue to expand. There will be a Periodic Table application coming, and that stuff is extremely exciting. So people are loving it.
OLEG:
So we think of a Monarch as the multi-line graphical braille display, but that's a bit more actually.
PETER:
Yeah, I describe it to people as a tactile array. It's not a braille display in the traditional sense, it's not tactile graphics in a traditional sense. It really is both. The screen, if you will, or the array, really is a tactile series of pins that can produce braille or tactile graphics or both at the same time. So that's where we're really getting something very, very groundbreaking and really pushing the envelope on what a braille device or a tactile device can do.
OLEG:
With a number of dots on this array, is it possible to say what the resolution would be?
PETER:
No. What we measure in the tactile graphics world is what's called DPI, and that would be dots per inch. The Monarch is at a 9.7, I believe, 9.8 DPI. So think of it as a introductory embosser if it were in terms of graphics. Some of your high-quality graphics embossers could go up to 75 or 100 DPI. But this is, what we've been able to come out with and start with is at about a 9.7 or 9.8 BPI.
OLEG:
Have you had a chance to see any of the presentations, or have you been here all the time?
PETER:
I have snuck away to a few presentations, and it's incredible just to see everything that's here. There are people doing pre-braille, all the way up to high level work with multimodal graphics. And so you're going from someone who's not even three or four years old who's never touched braille in their life, all the way up to presentations for people who are adding more than just tactile features to tactile graphics with vibrations or with sounds, with how do we interpret things that we're hearing? Can we hear shapes? I went to a presentation that went through that. What sounds can evoke shapes in our mind? It's just crazy.
OLEG:
So in our March episode we mentioned NewHaptics and their new braille display. And here in Amsterdam, at the Tactile Conference 2025, I met somebody who knows everything about that product. Hello.
SILE O'MODHRAIN:
Hi, my name is Sile O'Modhrain, and I'm one of the co-founders of NewHaptics, which is the company that makes the Codex, which is the pneumatic display.
OLEG:
How did it all start?
SILE:
It was a graduate student and a colleague of mine, Brent Gillespie. Brent is in mechanical engineering and we'd worked together many years ago when we were both graduate students. And then when I moved to Michigan, we decided to pick up on work generally in haptics, but particularly in tactiles. And Brent had the idea for using pneumatics to make dots. And we originally thought that we could actually have the dots as the surface of the display, but they didn't really feel very good, and they were also quite vulnerable to being damaged when you read them. So now we use the dots to push up regular pins that you might have on your existing single line display.
OLEG:
So there are plenty of projects started by graduates and students, and very few of them come to fruition. What sets yours apart? How could that actually come to fruition, getting the funding for development and so on?
SILE:
Well, I think we were motivated from the start. I'm visually impaired myself and I think having a visually impaired person on the team, I feel it helped to keep the work really focused and not go off in too many experimental directions. That was one thing. And the second was that our CEO, Alex was very interested in the whole startup process himself anyway. So we went through the NSF National Science Foundation I-Corps program, which is to help businesses do the right thing when they're starting up. And that was really helpful. And Alex is also very plugged into the sort of startup entrepreneurship community, so he had a lot of resources around him and then we were very lucky to get a lot of grants. So I think a lot of things came together just to make the company focused and successful in getting early funding. And then we hired Thomas Simpson, who used to work at HIMS and he's been a great sort of person to focus our research in terms of end user, outreach, and sort of design in accordance what other end users need. Because although I'm a blind person, I'm only one blind person, and it's really important to get feedback from lots of people.
OLEG:
So where are you at right now with the display and the project?
Sile O'Modhrain:
So yeah, we're ready to launch pretty much. We have some initial orders that we're going to fulfill in the next one or two months, and then we're going to be open for business. If you're interested, go to newhaptics.com and keep an eye out.
OLEG:
Talk about that product, so the name of the product and the way it looks and the way it works.
SILE:
So the product itself is called Codex, and it's a four line 32 cell display, and the surface of the display is completely touch sensitive. It's actually multi-finger touch. And that was really important for me, because I wanted an experience in using braille that's very similar to what you have when you use your iPhone. So that the cursor is under your finger, and to bring the cursor to you, you just double tap where you are. For me, that was a really important thing to have what we call co-located touch input and touch output. And so it feels like sort of standard braille that you might expect from a single-line display, but you have this added ability to route the cursor by just double tapping. And we're hoping to expand this to have a lot more gestures, as well as being able to use just a regular braille input keyboard to use keyboard commands and so on.
OLEG:
How do those pins move? What's the principle behind that?
SILE:
So what we do is we use air to drive bubbles that drive the pins. And the air itself is rooted through a whole system of channels. So that's one reason why the braille display can be quite small, because we have valves that route to rows and columns, and if you want to add a row in a column, you just add an extra valve on the row and an extra valve on the column. So it's easy to scale the size of the display. It's still pretty magical because you can really only see what's going on if you have a microscope, but it's all sort of kind of built into this single substrate I suppose you'd call it, or part inside the display.
OLEG:
But that's a bit puzzling to me. You just said the display is pretty small, but for the air to move you've got to have a compressor.
SILE:
Yeah, that's the larger part. There's a pump which has to move the air. At the moment, it's outside the device. It's kind of like a power block that you have on the floor like you would for a power block for your laptop if it's plugged in.
OLEG:
So currently it's not a portable thing, it's something that you set up on your desk.
SILE:
Exactly. Currently, it's sits on a desk, like a larger 80 cell kind of braille display thing, but it's much narrower than that.
OLEG:
And the pump is going to be under the desk.
SILE:
At the moment. Yeah.
OLEG:
How about noise level? Will that be acceptable for office settings?
SILE:
We hope so. We're definitely working on that. It's getting quieter every week. I go in, they've succeeded, but I keep saying it needs to be quieter. It needs to be quieter. So that's where we are. But I think at the moment you could use it in an office. If 80 people are using it in an office, it might be a problem, but one or two people, it's probably fine.
OLEG:
And it does need to be connected to a power outlet, right?
SILE:
Yes. So it has to be connected to power, but the air supply and the power run on the same cable. So the power goes to the pump and then the pump slash power go to the display.
OLEG:
Now, my understanding is that you're working with Vispero, or at least you're in the process of setting up to work with Vispero on the complete multi-line functionality being supported. Is that correct?
SILE:
That is correct. We currently work with JAWS through a terminal mode. So when you work in something like a Word document, if you move the cursor around, the cursor will move on the display and they sort of keep in touch with each other, but it's a sort of kind of force fit for multi-line formatting. But since JAWS has just brought out multi-line support, we will obviously move over to that as soon as we can.
OLEG:
So that's only a braille display. It doesn't have a standalone functionality, right?
SILE:
It has some standalone functionality, and we're definitely expanding that area. But it's fairly basic. It has a notepad, a book reader, some games, and it has USB port so you can load files onto the device. It's also Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled, so it will actually connect to a laptop or a phone via Bluetooth.
OLEG:
And finally, where do you see your project five years from now?
SILE:
I hope that we will have many more lines, that it will be quiet. That's one thing I'd like to have, quieter, and that we will move hopefully to graphics as well. We focused on braille initially just to give ourselves sort of some unique position in the market because the braille feels really good, but eventually it would be nice to have higher density pin support. We do have the internals there to do it, but we haven't added the extra rows of pins and columns of pins to make it a uniform dot display yet.
OLEG:
Thank you, Sile. It was really nice getting to meet you here in Amsterdam and to hear about your product.
SILE:
Thank you very much.
OLEG:
Now one person I met at the Tactile Reading Conference is Matthew Horspool. We were quite busy, so I didn't have a chance to record even a brief interview with him in Amsterdam, but we got in touch afterwards. So Matthew, hello and welcome again to FSCast.
MATTHEW HORSPOOL:
Oh, thank you Oleg. It's lovely to be here and lovely to be with you on the podcast.
OLEG:
And why am I saying welcome again? Shall we explain?
MATTHEW:
Well, yeah, I did an FSCast a few years ago with Glenn. I can't remember the episode number, but it was a real pleasure to do that one as well. And I was talking then about speech and sound schemes, because at that point I was doing a lot of braille transcription and a tiny bit of braille teaching, but my career has evolved a bit since then and Oleg said it'd be nice to have me back on.
OLEG:
I noticed you're a really passionate person. I attended your presentation and the passion is right there. What is your latest passion?
MATTHEW:
Well, what you saw at the Tactile Reading Conference was tables. As I say, last time I was on FSCast, I was doing lots of braille transcription and a bit of braille teaching. That kind of merged, a very long story, but over the course of the pandemic really, merged into me doing a little bit of assistive technology training to help cover the backlog of training that couldn't get done during COVID. And gradually that changed from being part-time into full-time. And that's now what I'm doing, is lots of braille display training, lots of JAWS training. And one of the things that I see time after time is you have very competent, very confident JAWS users who are going around their system, doing their thing, doing their emails, doing their Word documents, doing their whatever they have to do. And I'll be called in for training and they'll say, "I really need to use whatever and you'll do it." And in the course of that I'll say, "Well, what about doing this in Excel?" "Oh no, I can't use Excel," let's say. "It's just impossible. I can't do it. It's full of tables and rows and columns and I don't understand it." And this was a really common reaction actually, not just about Excel, but about tables on web pages, tables in Word documents, just this general kind of, I do not want to do tables, I don't understand them. And I thought, well, I can put my braille hat on here and go back to my roots. And perhaps if I gave them some tables in braille to look at first, and then gave them the same tables in Excel and in Microsoft Word and whatever other format they needed, perhaps then they'd be able to visualize what was going on in that table and therefore might be able to be less scared and might be able to navigate it a bit more efficiently. So that was really what I was kind of prototyping, if you like, at the Tactile Reading Conference.
OLEG:
So Matthew, are you saying that one of the sources, or one of the reasons for that challenge is the lack of visual understanding for the tables?
MATTHEW:
I think so. I think when we use a screen reader, whether we think about it consciously or not, when we're pressing the arrow keys, we expect the arrow keys to go down. When you're in a list of emails, you press the down arrow key, it goes to the next email in the list, it goes down. When you're in a Word document and you press the down arrow key, it goes down to the next line and it reads the whole line. So when you then go, well, okay, I need to move left or right a bit to move by character or by word or whatever, you know exactly how many characters are on the line because it's read them all. And so you can navigate across.
Well when you're in a table, it doesn't work like that. When you press the down arrow key, okay, it does go to the next line, it goes to the next row most of the time, but it's only going to read that column of that row. And so you don't know. I mean, okay, fine, it's read that, but now do I need to go right, do I need to go left? Do I need to keep going down? And I really strongly think that people don't have that visual concept in their head. And because they can't build that mental model, as it were, of what that table should look like, they don't know how to navigate it, and that's why they get scared.
OLEG:
Now, is that even possible to build for someone who is congenitally blind?
MATTHEW:
I think so, and I think this is where braille and tactile things really come into their own. I think if you're congenitally blind and you can't see anything, then there's no point in giving you a printed table, because you won't see it. But people do know braille, or at least some people know braille. And I think if we think about braille in the broadest sense, actually there are things that come across in braille, which we don't immediately think about. Like, talk to a blind person who knows braille about the importance of putting page numbers in your Word document, and they will understand it, because they will have seen a braille book that doesn't have page numbers in it, and they'll have seen how awkward that is. Talk to a blind person who doesn't use braille or who hasn't learned braille and ask them about page numbers in their Word documents, and they won't understand the significance because they haven't seen a document without page numbers. And I think this is just an extension of the same concept, really. Give somebody a table in braille, and they might then be able to understand what's going on in that table.
And what I did at the Tactile Reading Conference was actually go a step further than that, and not only give them the table in braille in rows and columns, but actually put grid lines around each cell. So each cell had its own border. And therefore even if you were congenitally blind and you couldn't read braille, you wouldn't necessarily be able to get any sense of what the data was in the table. But even without being able to read the braille, you'd be able to get a shape of the grid and which cells are wider and which cells are taller, and so on and so on, because you'd be able to feel the shape of the table.
OLEG:
You had several types of a table presentation on that embossed document that you gave out. Explain if you would, in practical terms, how can understanding the structure of the table or the layout of the table, how can that be helpful in navigating the table? Because I mean, we do have table navigation. Like, in JAWS, we have table layer, so I can activate table layer, INSERT+SPACE T, and I go up, down, left, right, I can read the column, I can read the row. Why do I need any visual understanding on top of that?
MATTHEW:
I think if you're comfortable going into the JAWS table layer and going up, down, left, and right, and if you're comfortable using control alt, left, right, up, and down arrow, then you probably don't actually need any visual layout of a table. You don't need that visual image because I think you've probably already got it, or at the very least, you're happy with what you're doing, and that's absolutely fine. And what I'm doing here is certainly not meant to replace what JAWS is trying to do. What I'm doing here is actually the level below that or the level above that, depending on how you think about it. Somebody gets to a table and actually doesn't have the confidence to press DOWNARROW, or RIGHTARROW, or LEFTARROW, or UPARROWbecause they just don't know what direction they should be going in first.
And I mean, let's say you've got a spreadsheet, and let's say that spreadsheet is a tracker spreadsheet, and it's got 30 columns. I do see this a lot actually in the corporate world. So I really seriously think that you need to be taught some strategies for how to explore that spreadsheet meaningfully, so that you're not just randomly pressing arrow keys and getting lost and not able to map your way back to the start and find a common starting point. So I think actually if we can teach people, okay, this is what your rows look like, this is what your columns look like. When we talk about column headers and row headers, this is what we're talking about. We can then start to extend that concept and say, right, so if you do come across a spreadsheet with 30 columns, let's make sure you're on row one because actually one of the great features of Excel is that it will remember your place on the spreadsheet from time to time. But that means if you are last in cell, I don't know, J136, then you're going to come in on J136. So-
OLEG:
And you arrow around and there's nothing there. It might just happen that you're outside the area where you've got some data, and you go up and down and nothing happens.
MATTHEW:
And even that actually for some blind people is a revelation. I've trained people, they've come in at J136, they've not understood what J136 means. And so as soon as you tell them, actually, do you know what? You're in no man's land now. You need to go up to A1 and start going across to the right, which is what I would always teach people to do at first. It might not work, but go to A1 and then go across a bit. If that's not working, drop down to A2 and do the same thing and keep going till you find a header row. But in order to do that, you've got to understand what a header row is.
OLEG:
So the key word I've heard so far is strategy. You've got to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it and how that relates to exploring the table at hand, but also understanding what's possible in the table. Because I've seen blind people who would say, "I don't understand about those merged cells or split cells." In fact, I've seen a table put together by a blind person where they basically needed one cell to cover several rows and just put one value there. But they would repeat that value like 375, 375, 375 in several rows or several columns. And I'd say, "Why did you do this?" And he says, "Well, because that applies to all columns." And I go, "Can you merge them?" And he goes, "What?" Is that something that rings a bell, it sounds familiar?
MATTHEW:
Yes. Although quite often actually I see this in the opposite direction. Quite often the training that I'm doing is blind people needing to access sighted people's spreadsheets. And so quite often what I'm seeing actually is a blind person looks at a sighted person's spreadsheet, hears merged cells, and immediately switches off and goes, ah, this is just some decorative thing. This is just some sighted person eye candy that I don't need to worry about because it's just merged cells. I can ignore this. It's nothing to do with the data. And actually the sad thing is some sighted people in the way they write spreadsheets, they're probably right actually and sometimes merged cells are just decorative. But we know we need to get across an understanding that merged cells are not always decorative, and that they do serve a purpose.
And so you're right, one of the tables that I showed at the Tactile Reading Conference, I actually showed the same table with its grid lines in two different ways. I showed it exactly as you said with the same value. It was actually a timetable for a choir. So add Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So I showed it once with Sunday restated every time, and I showed it once with Sunday just stated once and all of the grid lines around the other Sundays taken out so that you could see or rather feel what a merged cell actually felt like. And a number of people in that presentation found that quite impactful, as I hoped they would.
OLEG:
Well, I see some training materials in the making. Is that something you're considering?
MATTHEW:
So I really would like to create some training materials to give my clients in the field. Maybe in the future that could expand, and maybe we could talk about doing a course, a four-week course on Zoom or something where you sign up, and then you pay me a small fee for the admin and the printing costs and things, and I just send you in the post a book of tables, and then we walk through them together over a Zoom course. That's something I'm thinking about. I don't have any definite dates or anything for that yet. I don't even know if it's going to happen, but I can certainly see that there's a need there, and I think the resources that I'm working on might help meet that need.
OLEG:
Going back to the Tactile Reading Conference, what were some of the highlights for you?
MATTHEW:
Actually just meeting people from the international braille world. I'm very involved with the International Council on English Braille, and ICEB does some fantastic work in terms of the UEB code and all of that sort of thing. And we know a lot of people in the international braille world already through that. But of course we are limited by the very nature of organization, the International Council on English Braille. So we know lots of people who know English Braille. We don't really know anybody who doesn't know English Braille, or at least I didn't. The number of people who I met from Norway, from Germany, from France, from Spain, and then even further afield, people from China. And I think, was there somebody from Taiwan there? Lots and lots of different people, somebody from Botswana there, and you suddenly realize that what you thought was the international braille world actually is pretty small, and there's a much bigger international braille world out there that I certainly hadn't seen before, and that was really impactful for me.
OLEG:
And talk to me finally about your role in the braille world in the UK.
MATTHEW:
Sure. So in the UK we have an organization called The Braillists Foundation. It's a community organization, a grassroots organization made up of blind people for blind people. And it is just about braille, right? We have the mission of more braille and our role is to, as it says, more braille. So we do a bit of braille teaching, braille for beginners. We do braille masterclasses about all sorts of braille topics including braille technology. So if there's a particular braille topic, maybe a braille with JAWS thing that you'd like us to cover on The Braillists, we might very well be able to do that. And my role really is to just co-ordinate that effort.
So I'm general manager, is what I'm called. I look after putting the masterclasses together, I look after sending the newsletter, just running the ship really. And we have a lot of other volunteers that help us out on that journey. We have a reading group, for example, a book club, and we have lots of volunteers that run that. And so my job there is to put the rota together and just basically make sure that everybody else knows what they're doing so that the ship can continue to run.
OLEG:
And you also have a podcast, do you?
MATTHEW:
We do indeed. It's been on hiatus for a while, but we're just about to get started again actually. So you can find that at braillecast.com.
OLEG:
Well, thank you Matthew for being with us, and we wish you good luck with your trainings and your braille-related work, and hope to hear you again.
MATTHEW:
Awesome. Thanks Oleg for the opportunity. It's been wonderful.
ELIZABETH:
And now I would like to welcome one of my colleagues here at Vispero, Isabel Holdsworth, who is here to talk a little bit about what she does here at Vispero and tell us about an amazing experience she recently had when she took a trip to a very interesting place. Hi, Isabel.
ISABEL HOLDSWORTH:
Hello. How are you doing?
ELIZABETH:
Great. Thank you for joining us for FSCast.
ISABEL:
Looking forward to it.
ELIZABETH:
So I just wanted to start out by talking a little bit about what you do here at Vispero. What's your position and how long have you been here?
ISABEL:
Well, I joined Vispero in, I think it was 2019 as an accessibility tester. So I was testing web apps, PDF documents, that type of thing. And then I kind of moved sideways. I'm now an assistive technology engineer. We work with large companies and organizations to help them plug accessibility gaps in their software, their websites, their applications, their PDF documents. So we write scripts that basically make JAWS work better with code that was not designed or written very well and doesn't work with JAWS out of the box. So we do our best to make it work a lot better, and that helps company employees, and it helps their customers as well.
ELIZABETH:
So when you test an app or a web page, what is the process for assessing what needs to be done there?
ISABEL:
So I used to be a digital accessibility tester, which helps a lot. I'm used to testing apps and websites against a set of criteria. So this is really more about functional testing. As a JAWS user myself, I'll go through the application, I'll find things that don't work, and JAWS has quite a number of tools that allow you to kind of look into the background, find out what's happening underneath in the code and why things aren't working. So I'll do that, and then I'll start to develop an idea of what we need to do to fix it.
ELIZABETH:
Now, you recently took a really interesting trip. Let's talk about that.
ISABEL:
So last year I was chatting with my friend who was having a big birthday this year, and so am I. And I was asking her if she was going to have a party and she said, "No, I would really love to go to Antarctica, but I've got nobody to go with." And I was like, "Ah, you have now." Because I've done a lot of traveling. So I had visited six of the seven continents and I thought I would so love to visit Antarctica, but like her, I thought I would have no one to go with, so I wasn't brave enough to go on my own. So we booked a cruise and we signed my sister up for it as well, and off we went in March this year.
ELIZABETH:
Was this something that you had always wanted to do, somewhere you always wanted to go? Or when it was suggested to you, did you think, oh, well, okay, that sounds really interesting. How did that come about?
ISABEL:
I always wanted to go there, but I thought it was kind of unachievable. I thought nobody else would be crazy enough to go with me, frankly. And there were.
ELIZABETH:
What goes into planning a trip like that? What do you do to prepare?
ISABEL:
You just let your friend do everything basically. So she had identified a few cruise lines that we might use, and she phoned around and asked them would they be willing to bring a blind person on quite an intrepid and dangerous trip. This one company, HX, they were like, "Yeah, let's give it a go. There might be some things that you can't do, but we'll play it by ear and see what you can do when we get there." And that was a really good attitude because some of the other companies were like, "We're not quite sure you can go, but you won't be able to cruise or land or anything." And that wasn't what we wanted. We wanted to do, obviously do everything that everyone else was doing. So there was a lot of other preparation. I had to research how cold it was actually going to be, get the right kind of thermals, gloves, hats, and all of that stuff. And in the event I probably brought three or four times more than I needed.
ELIZABETH:
Where did you leave from then? How difficult was that to set up and plan?
ISABEL:
I live in the west of England. My sister is in Ireland and my friend lives in London. So we all met in London and flew to Buenos Aires from London Heathrow. The first accessibility issues kind of began in London when my friend and I couldn't check in because it was one of these flat screen inaccessible check-in kiosks. So we had to rely on my sister to do that for us. And so we had planned our plane trip quite well, so we had booked seats that were near the galley so we could stand up because it was a 17-hour flight to Buenos Aires. So we booked seats where we could walk around and be near the toilets and things. So that worked quite well. We flew to Buenos Aires, took another flight down to Ushuaia, which is on the South coast of Argentina. It's the southernmost city in the world, and then you board the cruise ship and it takes two days to sail through the Drake Passage it's called. So that's where the Atlantic and the Pacific kind of butt up against each other, and the waves are huge, so you're kind of sort of falling between the left and right walls of the corridor when you're moving around the ship and things. So you're having to grab on, everyone is. So that was quite interesting. So I don't get seasick, but didn't realize well, my sister didn't realize, she was going to be quite ill. So my friend is also blind, so we had brought my sister along as a sighted guide, but she was unable to, so we were bringing her food and things and we were learning our way around the ship at the same time. That was quite interesting. And it was good actually. It pushed us out of our comfort zone.
ELIZABETH:
Wow, that's incredible. So how much research then, when you found out that you were going, when you decided to go, how much research went into your trip?
ISABEL:
I only did enough research to cover logistics. I didn't want to really know what I was going to experience in Antarctica. I didn't want to spoil it. So I researched the things I would need to get there, what I would need to know about the ship, what kind of experiences and excursions we were going to have and whether they were doable as a blind person. And I kind of stopped there. So we knew that we were going to be moving between the ship and these little inflatable zodiac boats that were going to take us cruising and landing. And I was a little bit worried about that because I thought, oh my goodness, this little boat's going to be moving around on the sea, and I'm going to have to just get the timing right to step in and out of it. And it was a bit of an issue, but everyone was struggling with it, not just us. There were a lot of older people on the cruise and they needed help getting in and out of their boats as well. So the sailing stuff were just amazing.
ELIZABETH:
Now, when you choose a cruise line, do you choose according to the tours you're going to get to do, the experiences you're going to get to have? Are there any choices there, or is that just dependent on whichever cruise line that you choose?
ISABEL:
So there were science trips and entertainment trips, and we really wanted to go on a science trip. So our crews had a science lab on board and we took part in some science experiments while we were there. So we've taken out on inflatable boats and we were able to dredge the water and pull up algae and krill and different things in this big net and take it back. And people studied it to see what was in the net, to study how healthy the water is for penguins and whales and everything that lives in it really. And we did a sonar experiment where we dropped this, is it called a sonoscope, I think it was called, down into the water so we could hear the whales singing and things. We got to drop this massive stainless steel, I can't remember the name of it. It's like a big plate thing.
And people were telling us how far down it was because there was a tape measure attached to it and if they could still see it through the water, and that gives an idea of how clear the water is as well. So we were all involved in these experiments and that was very interesting. And there were science lectures every day on the ship, so there was a lot for us to do. It wasn't one of those cruises where you sit in a bar at night and there's a band or a casino or anything. There was none of that stuff really. So it was quite a nerdy trip.
ELIZABETH:
Oh, that's fascinating. You get to learn a lot. And now do you get to choose which experiments that you take part in?
ISABEL:
No, because everybody wanted to be part of the science experiments, so you just got to do whatever was available on the day, and that was fine. They did try and adapt them a little bit for us. They let us be hands-on with dropping things into the water and pulling nets up and things. So that was really good.
ELIZABETH:
Oh, that's great. Did they show you hands-on, physically, this is how you do this or…
ISABEL:
Yes. And I don't know if it was by chance, but there were 16 little boat drivers, and we seemed to get the same driver all the time, and he got to know us. And there was one time he took us out whale watching, and we were the only boat that found any whales, which was very cool. And we were right beside a whale, and it was right up beside our boat and you could have touched it, but we weren't allowed because we don't want to spread disease or anything. But he wasn't supposed to turn his engine off because the engine allows all of that animals and fish around to know that we're there. But he turned it off for about five minutes so that I could hear this whale slapping his tail up and down, blowing through his blowhole and another one singing under the water, and this one kind of diving underneath and popping at the other side of the boat. He was showing off. He was swimming around the boat and there were all these little penguins following him, chirping away. And that was absolutely amazing. And it was really kind of him to think to turn the engine off. And then the first day that I landed, we went up onto the coast of Antarctica, and there were all these little penguins running around our feet and trying to bite our shoelaces and trying to climb up us. And it was really cute, and we were supposed to keep away from them, and I really, really wanted to just bend down and stroke one, but we weren't allowed because there's a lot of avian flu at the minute and they don't want to spread it from between the birds. And so we were supposed to keep five meters away from them, but they weren't having any of that. They just wanted to come up and be friends.
ELIZABETH:
Now, when you take a trip like this, so you're going there on a boat, but do you stay in one place? Are you constantly going to new places? Are you always on the ship? How does this work?
ISABEL:
So you sleep on the ship and it moves at night and you get to go out on a cruise. So basically you're on the ship for, I think it's 10 days. Five of those are taken up by sailing through the Drake Passage and the other five you're in Antarctica. So you sail around a different spot each night and then you cruise every day on the little inflatables, and if possible you land. But there was a few days when the weather was too bad for us to land.
So the last day we were there, we landed in Deception Bay, which is a horseshoe shaped bay. They sail in and it's all lovely and calm, and you get off the boat and you're walking around the beach, and there's this old disused whaling station. And we were walking around that, and all of a sudden the weather changed, and the three of us were kind of holding onto each other trying to fight through this really strong hailing wind and hailstones that were coming horizontally and slapping you in the face. And we were trying to walk back to the boat and some of the drivers staff that were helping us get on and off the boat, they came running up and said, "Get back to the boat, get back to the boat really quickly, you can't mess around." And they kind of hauled us into the boat and took off really quickly. And as it turned out, the weather had changed unexpectedly and we had to get out of that bay before the weather got too bad and we ended up stuck in it. So that was kind of exciting. The waves were coming over the top of this little boat and kind of smashing people in the face, and it was only hitting me on the back of the head, so I was kind of laughing at everyone else.
ELIZABETH:
Well, was there anything that you did not get to do that you would like to if you were able to go again?
ISABEL:
I wasn't allowed to kayak, which I was really disappointed about. The doctor on board decided that it was unsafe for me to climb between the ship and the kayak, even though I'd been climbing into the inflatable boats all week. And we had a Paralympic kayak coach on board. He was one of the staff, and he wanted to take me out, but they wouldn't let me go. That was really frustrating. I still don't understand why. And the kayaking was done in pairs, and one of the women on the ship that we had got friendly with, she wanted to come out with me, but no, they wouldn't let that happen. So that was very frustrating.
But apart from that, that was the one complaint in an absolutely amazing trip. And all of the staff were wonderful. Yeah. When my sister was ill, all of the restaurants were buffet, and the first time my friend and I wandered in there, they didn't quite know what to do, but we cornered someone and asked them for help. And after that, everyone just kind of grabbed us when we came into the restaurant and helped us find a table and got our food for us and stuff.
ELIZABETH:
Oh, that's nice. Yeah, because you would've seen the same staff the whole time you were there.
ISABEL:
Yes.
ELIZABETH:
Was there anything in particular that stood out about the trip? I mean, everything sounds absolutely amazing, all the experiences that you had. Was there anything that just stood out above everything else?
ISABEL:
Oh my goodness. Well, it has to be the Argentinian steak, which was absolutely enormous, and no human being could ever finish one. Or the smell of the penguins. It wasn't nice. You didn't really want to go there just before you were about to have dinner, because it smelled pretty awful.
ELIZABETH:
Was it very specific? Was it something that you would recognize if you were to be around them again?
ISABEL:
I would certainly know it again. Yeah. We brought my little grandchildren to an aquarium after that and it had penguins in it, and I was, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're near the penguins.
ELIZABETH:
Were there any surprises, anything that you didn't expect?
ISABEL:
I didn't expect to be able to find my way around the ship by myself. I didn't expect all of the lovely helpfulness. I knew that the staff would be civil and friendly, because that's what they were paid to do, but I didn't expect them to go to such lengths to be helpful, especially our zodiac driver. He was just amazing. He did lots of explaining what was going on and trying to bring us to places where I would hear things, and oh, he was just wonderful.
ELIZABETH:
Well, is there anything that you would say to someone who's blind, who wants to go to Antarctica?
ISABEL:
I would say there is a bit of frustration. I mean, that's the time in my life that I've most wanted to be able to see. When we were on the ship, we were behind the glass of the windows and people were saying, oh, look at the whales, or look at the dolphins, or look at those little penguins. And I just wanted to look out the window and see them. So it was the most frustrating, most amazing holiday I'm ever going to be on. I would say do it, and don't worry too much about the bad bits, and love the good bits.
ELIZABETH:
Wow. Well, thank you once again for joining us and sharing your experiences. It's great to have you here, and it was wonderful to hear about all that you did.
ISABEL:
Thank you very much for inviting me along.
OLEG:
So this was Isabel Holdsworth on a trip of a lifetime, a cruise in Antarctica.
ELIZABETH:
And it was just exciting getting to hear her experiences and just all of the things that she did while on that cruise.
OLEG:
If you have any feedback about this interview or anything else you've heard on FSCast, please drop us an email to Fscast@vispero.com.
With all the conventions and other events of the summer, do we have any training events or anything that we want to talk about?
ELIZABETH:
We have an upcoming webinar on July 17th at noon Eastern. That is our software webinar for July. We're going to be talking about Google Docs and most notably, some of the most recent changes to Docs.
OLEG:
And there are changes going on all the time. So visit freedomscientific.com/training for more training information.
And I'm afraid that's all we've got time for today.
ELIZABETH:
Thank you for listening, and be sure to join us next month.
OLEG:
Bye.
ELIZABETH:
Bye.