FSCast #260.
July, 2025
OLEG SHEVKUN:
So, hello and welcome to FSCast episode 260 for July 2025. This is our Vispero's Convention special. There have been two major conventions of consumer organizations of the blind in the United States. One of them is ACB, American Council of the Blind, and the other is NFB, National Federation of the Blind. Vispero has been prominently featured in both of those conventions, and we've got a lot to talk about. And also, we'd like to share about an upcoming JAWS feature, which is currently in development but has already become a major hit at the conventions. So, stay tuned in for more. I must also say that this episode is going to be a bit longer than usual, and even so, some of the things that were originally scheduled to be published in July will have to be postponed until August. This is a full episode. So, without any further ado, we're joined in our virtual studio by Ryan Jones, Vispero's vice president of software and product management. Hello Ryan.
RYAN:
Hi Oleg.
OLEG:
So, how was the convention time?
RYAN:
It was very good. It was a long trip. Both the ACB, American Council of the Blind, and NFB, National Federation of the Blind conventions were back to back and somewhat overlapping as they often do. So, it was 10 days out on the road between both shows, a few days in Dallas for ACB, a few days in New Orleans for NFB. But, I always come away from these energized, because we get to talk to so many different people and so many of our end users, and that's just so valuable that you can't go anywhere else and have so many of our customers and end users in one place as these shows. So, it's tiring long days, but I really do love it.
OLEG:
To give us some history and some perspective, when were your first major conventions, probably as a participant, not necessarily as a company representative?
RYAN:
I think the first NFB I went to was 2010 in Texas, and the first ACB, it wasn't that year, but it was probably the next year or so. So, it's been about 15 years. I wouldn't say that I've been to all of them. I know there's been a couple here and there that I've missed, but I've been to quite a number of them over the last 15 years.
OLEG:
I realize it's not quite cheap, to put it mildly, to go to these conventions, but they are still the highlight for blind people in the United States. Why so? What attracts people? What do you think?
RYAN:
I think it's the camaraderie of being together with many other blind and low vision people. Sometimes it's your friends, people you've known for a long time. Sometimes you're getting to meet new people and learn about their lived experience. So, I think the energy comes from so many people being together and being able to talk about their life stories, their situations, share in the experiences. If you're not around other people who are blind or low vision a lot, you don't get to talk about things that, you can't necessarily talk about with a friend or family member who's not visually impaired. And so, just being able to have that camaraderie, that creates a lot of the energy. And the motivation, people seeing how other people are living, learning things from them, how do they do things? What do they experience in life? Just sharing those things is great. I really love seeing a lot of the kids at the conventions and seeing them out learning mobility skills, young kids with canes or learning to explore their environment or learning about technology. That excites me. I don't get to see that all the time. So, it's just a lot of things, but it's all about being together and having a shared experience.
OLEG:
Now, you and Glen Gordon did a presentation on behalf of Vispero on Sunday morning in a plenary session. How unusual is that? Do you get to do that every year, every two years, every five years?
RYAN:
No, that was actually a big honor for us to be invited to speak at the general session on Sunday at the NFB Convention. Usually a company gets the opportunity to speak every few years, unless there's some major thing happening with that company in the blind and low vision community. And of course, this year it was somewhat tied to the 30th anniversary of JAWS for Windows. And so, President Riccobono and others invited us to speak and share about some of the history of JAWS and where we see ourselves going in the future. So, I was really excited when I got the invitation from him a few months ago. There were 2,600 registered at NFB. I don't know how many were in the room. It was a huge ballroom. You're talking well over a thousand people I'm sure. I don't know if all 2,600 were there, but it was quite a lot of people.
OLEG:
I was listening to Glen Gordon on Zoom, and even I got motivated. What was the reception in the room?
RYAN:
It was very good reception. Ours was the first session that morning on Sunday morning, so it was a full crowd, just a lot of people using our products and a lot of people realizing and remembering and thinking about how these products are changing their lives and have changed their lives in the past. And that's something, again, that I really enjoy when we work with people at the conventions. And we had Rachel and Liz from our training team were both with me.
And when we're talking to people, working with them and showing them things, helping them, and they're recognizing and thinking through how JAWS, for example, has been around with them since they were a kid or since they got their first job or went to school or whatever it was, that's a special moment for us to be able to be a part of that. And I think in the room that morning at general session NFB, people were thinking about that and recognizing the impact that a person like Glen has had on their lives, even if indirectly through this product. For people who don't even know Glen personally, Glen has had an impact on their life and their trajectory of their life through what JAWS has meant to them and the opportunities or doors that JAWS has opened for them.
OLEG:
For quite a few months now, I've been trying to get Glen back into FSCast to do an interview with him, unsuccessful I should say, but he answered pretty much all of the questions I would've asked on that interview. And so, with kind permission of the National Federation of the Blind, we're going to listen to a slightly abbreviated version of Glen's presentation. And for the complete version, you just go to the National Federation of the Blind YouTube Channel, and you can see the whole thing there.
I've done this for 31 years. I started in 1994 and I've learned a bunch of stuff, some of it more painfully than others, and I'm going to share some of those thoughts with you in the next few minutes, and woven into that will be some of the history of JAWS.
I was really lucky, about 10 years before I started working on JAWS, I discovered that I was passionate about something. And if I can offer you one big piece of advice, find something that you're passionate about and pursue it, even if it's not "The best way for you to make a living," if you're really passionate about it and you want to do that thing, regardless of whether or not you're being paid, you're going to get good at it and you're going to be successful at it. That's my experience at least.
And once you're passionate about something, get to know people working in your field, if only to call and ask them, can we have a conversation? I'm interested in this field. What can you share? If I had not gotten to know Ted in 1986 when I got a Total Talk PC from Maryland Computing Services, Ted was the tech support training guy. If I had not gotten to know him and if he had not been so generous in sharing his time with me, I would never be working on JAWS. I was the wrong guy. I knew nothing about screen reading. I was not well-connected with the blindness community even though I'm totally blind. But, because I got to know Ted, we formed a friendship, we formed trust, and I did some side projects for him that allowed him to determine that maybe I would be a reasonable person to take a gamble on when it came to working on JAWS for Windows.
But, whatever you pursue, there are going to be challenges. Things are not going to come easy. And the other thing that I learned first from interacting with my instructors at school where I had to balance advocating for what I needed and communicating to them that I didn't want it any easier than my sighted peers, and that's to learn to be resourceful. You don't need to have all the answers, but you need to figure out how you're going to get them, and don't make your problem totally somebody else's problem. There is an element of doing your research, figuring out what the options are, and then ultimately you may need to ask somebody else to help you. But, if they see you are invested, they will become invested and really want to help too. They will see that you're interested in something and that you've done your homework.
And I bring this up now, because when I first started working on JAWS for Windows, there were no good Windows screen readers. And so, the question was how was I going to use Windows long enough to learn about it to help work on JAWS? And the answer was, I'm willing to share this now. I ordered a free time demo of Slimware Window Bridge, which was the first rather primitive Windows screen reader. I would use it for 15 minutes at a time, because at that point I had to shut it down. There was an operating system called DOS that lots of blind people used, the operating system that we thought nothing could improve upon. Boy, were we wrong. And so, I would use DOS to develop JAWS, I'd go into Windows to read the documentation I needed, go back to DOS, rinse, repeat. And that's how I began to bootstrap myself working on this.
When something feels overwhelming, do two things. This has been what I've learned. Don't procrastinate, because the longer you procrastinate, the more overwhelming it's going to feel. And take small incremental steps to gain confidence, even if they're tiny. I have found over and over again that you feel amazingly accomplished for making the smallest stride forward. And in terms of JAWS, I knew nothing about Microsoft Windows when I started working on it. Well, how's the guy who knows nothing about Windows going to work on Windows? Turns out Ted had a sighted programmer named Chuck Oppermann working for him. Chuck loved everything Microsoft. He worked on Windows. He got the shell of JAWS for Windows working before I even joined the company. The problem is, it would only work for about 15 seconds, and it failed in really monumental ways.
But, because he had created that framework, I could make small changes and small fixes and fix his bugs one by one by one over the first six months. And that allowed me to do two things. I gained confidence and I learned about Windows. And had he not done this, there would've been no way for me to have moved forward as fast as I did. It was a great way to build up skills and gain confidence. The next thing is that we all thrive when we're surrounded by people whose skill set complement those of our own. When Ted founded the company, he was a visionary. He absolutely was. But, the other thing that he did is he put together a brain trust of four of us who each contributed in really different ways and whose skills didn't really overlap all that much. So, Ted was the visionary.
Eric Damery was a great salesperson, and even though he's sighted, completely embodied the blindness experience and was great at training. And we had Jerry Bowman, who's a former Honeywell HR executive, and he ran the company both from a personnel and a management standpoint. And with the four of us in those early days, and then expanding out to hundreds of other people throughout the years, we formed a company of blind people, largely for blind people entirely, and we continue to have people with overlapping and complementing skill sets.
Turns out, by the way, that if you're developing a blindness product, having people who are blind working in the role of developers is a superpower.
And I say that because if one of us who's also a user is a developer, we're going to be more likely to discover problems early on before anybody else sees it. We're not going to discover all of them, but we're going to discover a lot of them and we're going to be able to fix them without going through a couple of other layers of reporting a bug. So, that's one of the superpowers. The other one is if you're blind, you are going to work and help design a product that other blind people have an increased chance of wanting to use and being able to use effectively. So, we were really lucky, because as we became more successful, more blind people were interested in working for us, and one of those is in this room for sure. There may be others that I'm overlooking. I'm speaking of the man from New Zealand with that buffundo voice, the great Jonathan Mosen.
He originally talked to us on Main Menu and other internet properties, and ultimately came in to manage our PAC Made product, helped us refine our braille implementation. He did so many things contributing to the legacy of JAWS, and he by all means was not the only one, but all because we developed a product that people saw a future in and wanted to be part of.
Luck and circumstance often play an important role. And I'll give you a few examples. There was something called Dueling Windows 1996. At that time, there was no real active internet. If you were blind, you had to hear about things firsthand from your friends and relations. And Dueling Windows at the CSUN Conference brought a lot of blindness companies together to demonstrate what we could do in Windows. We worked really hard to be well-prepared for CSUN. We succeeded there. We were the winning entrant, and that really got people talking about JAWS.
We discovered Eloquence. It was the first fully functional software synthesizer, which allowed us to drop the price of JAWS because you didn't need a hardware synthesizer. That was something else that I think at the time was really revolutionary.
And there are more things I could talk about on this line, but I think given the time, I'll just move on and say that I fortunately felt compelled from the very beginning to make myself available to others, even if "It was not my job, if I could help someone, I wanted to be there." And I'll tell you one NFB-related story about that. Anil Lewis and I had a conversation back in 1996 or 1997. He was placing blind people in jobs. They needed a terminal emulator program to work, and he and I talked it through over an hour. That's something that was easy for me to do. I was delighted to do it. I moved on. I completely forgot about it, and he's reminded me of this story time and time again. And so, we never quite know the impact that we can have on other people.
And providing training and support has also been one of our superpowers. We could not have done it without offering full service. Not everybody is a computer mastermind, nor should you have to be. But, you need people who you can reach out to both for one-on-one and more generally to get training resources to become really good at software. And our best advertisers have always been all of you, and thank you, by the way, for all of that.
But, even more important than your praise, has been your criticism, has been your requesting features, that stuff matters much more than saying you like the product. Because, without that kind of feedback, we won't continue to thrive to be our best. We won't think of some of the best ideas. It's that collaboration between you who use the product and those of us who were involved in making it that have really helped.
OLEG:
That was Glen Gordon. And you came up right afterwards, and what was your goal? What were we trying to do?
RYAN:
My goal was just to share about where we're going and sharing about the values that we've had in the past and how those will continue as we go forward. Values of having people who are blind and low vision be a part of our products at all levels, which is something that's been important to us. And I re-emphasize that that's the way that we will operate as we move into the future. So, I took a lot of what Glen said and turned it around and looked at how will we utilize that in the future, feedback from the community about our products. And then, I talked about AI a little bit and how AI is letting us break down some of these barriers that have been in existence for blind and low vision computer users for a long time. And I even talked about some new things that are coming, some new barriers that we're breaking down with AI around the ability to quickly understand what is on a web page that you're on.
So, I looked at the forward facing aspect of things and where are we going as we go into the next 30 years. We did a quick video and it's really showing off some new capabilities of FSCompanion, the tool where you can learn how to do things with JAWS or ZoomText or Fusion and learn how to do things with other applications as well, like Word or Excel. I showed some new capabilities that FSCompanion is gaining to be able to describe to you and summarize what's on the web page that you're on.
So, if you get to a new page and you're trying to understand how is the page laid out, I'm not familiar with the structure, rather than have to explore with the arrow keys or check and see what headings there are and spend your time poking around the page, but trial and error to figure out what's there, FSCompanion will give you an overview. And in a few seconds you can learn how the page is laid out, the main sections of the page, the main purpose of the page, and then you can go a step further and ask it questions about what's on the page. So, if you want to know something very specific on that page, rather than looking for it, trying to find the right place where it is and trying to find that information, you can ask FSCompanion and it will search through the page and give you back a specific answer.
OLEG:
And we've got a lot more to say about this fascinating new feature later in this episode. Now, Glen Gordon being honored with the Kenneth Jernigan Award at the banquet, tell me that story.
RYAN:
That was a highlight to me of the entire trip. I was made aware that this was going to be happening several months ago, and I was asked to keep it a secret so that it would be a surprise to Glen, and that was a hard task. The Kenneth Jernigan Award is a very prestigious award that the NFB doesn't give out lightly.
OLEG:
NFB doesn't give out any awards lightly, quite frankly.
RYAN:
That's very true, yes. And this one especially, they don't give it out every year. I think this was the fifth, only the fifth time that they've given this particular award out, and it's for someone who's not necessarily a member of NFB. So, it has also gone to sighted people who have made a huge influence on the blind and low vision community. So, it's not necessarily an NFB person or member, but it's someone who has made a profound impact on the community with their contributions. And I can't think of anyone more deserving than Glen. And part of the reason is because Glen is an extremely humble person and he will never raise his hand or make any noise or indication that he should ever get anything. In fact, if I had told him that he was getting this award, he probably would not have come, because he doesn't want the attention, but he's certainly deserving of it. And it was just a great moment to see that and be a part of it.
OLEG:
And here's a quick recap of how it went.
CURTIS CHONG:
For the last three decades, our award recipient has been the primary architect behind the innovation JAWS for Windows, that has kept many of us employed and ensured that hundreds of thousands of blind people around the world could gain efficient access to email, word processing, the World Wide Web and other applications used in employment and daily life. It is my privilege therefore to introduce Glen Gordon.
I first became aware of Glen Gordon when he spoke at a Microsoft Accessibility Summit held way back in 1995. What impressed me then was his deep understanding of the cooperative connections that must exist between applications and systems designed for the sighted and screen readers used by the blind. I was also impressed by Glen's ability to speak the language that the nerds at Microsoft use and understand. As evidenced by Freedom Scientific's FSCast podcast, which Glen hosted for a few years, Glen is exceptionally articulate and easy for us mortal human beings to understand.
Glen has spent three decades, you heard him talk today, ensuring that blind people can live and work using computers and systems designed primarily for people who can see. We celebrate not just one man's work, but the ripple effect of his accomplishment in changed lives and expanded opportunities. Glen, it is both to honor you and to convey our heartfelt appreciation for who you are and what you have done that we present you with the Kenneth Jernigan Award, give you this plaque and invite you to the microphone.
Let me present you with this plaque right here. It's right side up. It's in print and in braille. So, it has the NFB logo on the front and it says Kenneth Jernigan Award for your dedication to the highest ideals for your commitment to blind-centered innovation for your leadership and expanding access to information. We, the organized blind movement, confer upon Glen Gordon the Kenneth Jernigan Award. You were ready for every challenge. Your commitment to accessibility excellence is unmatched. You are a friend to the blind the world over. National Federation of the Blind, July 13, 2025.
GLEN:
Thank you, Curtis. I think this was bait and switch. I was just told I was coming to do a presentation. And in fact, I'm not ready for a challenge. The challenge of actually feeling like I'm worth accepting this award. It seems like only yesterday that I was attending a meeting at CSUN where Jim Thatcher and Rich Schwerdtfeger and some of the early screen reading pioneers were speaking. And I was this young kid trying to ask intelligent questions, and now it's 30 years later, where has the time gone? And I just fix bug after bug and help move things forward. But, this came as a complete surprise. Ryan and others managed to hide it well. I should have suspected when my colleague, Carl Wise, who I've worked with for 30 years suddenly appeared this afternoon, but I thought Ryan was just bringing him to have a reunion with me. So, this comes as a complete surprise and a tremendous honor. Thank you very much.
OLEG:
That was Curtis Chong introducing Glen Gordon, and Glen Gordon receiving the Kenneth Jernigan Award. Now, Ryan, back to work. What do we all expect in the next couple of months?
RYAN:
Well, we've got a lot of things we're working on. Of course, multi-line braille support is coming out. That was another big thing that we were talking about at the conventions. Some of our partners in braille were demonstrating this. So, American Printing House for the Blind and HumanWare were demonstrating JAWS working with the Monarch for multi-line braille support. Dot was demonstrating the Dot Pad with JAWS support. So, good things coming there with braille in the next couple of months. And then, of course, the new abilities of FSCompanion. There's just a number of things coming up, some of which we are not even talking about yet, that as we get into the late fall timeframe, will be coming out in the product. So, we have a lot of work, we always do, it's a really busy time of the year. We don't take summers off. Summer is actually a really busy time as we get ready for some updates and new capabilities that we've traditionally released into the fall.
OLEG:
One thing that was emphasized at this year's consumer trade shows was the acronym JAWS, job access with speech, the importance of JAWS in getting a job, keeping a job, growing along with the job. And I understand that's a commitment of ours to serve people in their studies, in their academic career and in their jobs. What are we doing to listen to the needs of those people?
RYAN:
I think that's a good point, and that's something we always try to emphasize, that JAWS is really about empowerment to do the things that you want to do, whether it's an employment, whether it's school, whether it's home. But, the foundation of JAWS was around jobs and helping people have the technology to be employed to work alongside their sighted colleagues. And actually my thought is we should be able to be not just equal to our sighted colleagues, but actually be more efficient than our sighted colleagues. And so, we don't take that lightly in the JAWS product, and we're always trying to do things to help people to be more efficient, more successful, work faster, work smarter to complete tasks, because we know that for people to be successful, you have to stand out in your work and you have to be able to do things in a timely manner.
And so, being at conventions like this and having part of my team there, like I talked about with Rachel and Liz, it just gives us a great way to find out what the pain points of people are and what their needs are. And of course, we do that in a number of ways. We launched recently the InsertJ Club, which we've talked about here on this show. And that's another great way for us to keep in touch directly with our users to learn more what's important to people. And we'll continue to do those things and we'll continue to be out in the community to hear what's happening. And I think that's something that's so valuable for us, and it has a very high importance for us.
OLEG:
Well, Ryan, thank you, and congratulations to you and Glen for a job well done.
RYAN:
Well, thank you, Oleg. It's really about the whole team. We couldn't do this without all the people who are dedicated every day to working on these products. I'm just blessed and fortunate to be able to be out there and talk with people and sometimes be in the front, but it's the entire team that does this, and I have a very honor to work alongside some wonderful individuals.
OLEG:
And now for more details on our AI-related developments, including some of what you've just heard, we're joined by Mohammed Laachir, a product owner with Vispero. Hi Mohammed, and welcome again to FSCast.
MOHAMMED LAACHIR:
Hello, Oleg. And it's very good to be back here again.
OLEG:
Our AI-based features are changing, they are evolving, even with Picture Smart AI. The responses today may be different from what you used to get a year ago, plus we're adding new functionality. So, one of the features we've been talking a lot is FSCompanion, and as of last year, you can use a dictation with FSCompanion. You can just press the dictate button, or press the hotkey assigned for that functionality. You can ask your question, and the edit field will be filled in immediately. So, you just press enter to submit or press the send button, and your question will be submitted to AI.
Now, one thing that is amazing to me about it is, that you can ask the question in a variety of languages, and that will be recognized correctly, that will be transcribed in the language you are asking. Is that something that we did intentionally, or is that a byproduct of using certain technologies?
MOHAMMED:
I think it's both. So, of course, at the moment FSCompanion supports two languages, which is English and Dutch. So, technically the only thing that has to be supported by our transcription software is those two languages right now. But of course, we all know that more languages are going to be added into FSCompanion. And so, we'd be silly to just choose a transcription solution that can only support English and Dutch, not that that exists, I don't think. Any transcription software will support either one language or multiple languages. And if it's multiple languages, there'll probably be more languages than just Dutch. However, the one that we chose supports a lot of languages and it's a happy byproduct, but we also chose it for its accuracy and its capability to be able to support multiple languages.
OLEG:
And let us work through some confusion here. You just said that FSCompanion supports two languages, and yet our listeners are letting us know, and we're aware of this already, that you can ask your questions in a variety of languages. So, what's the difference between supporting a language in FSCompanion and being able to ask a question and receive an answer in a "Unsupported language?"
MOHAMMED:
We don't want to be overly restrictive and block languages that we don't officially support. So, an LLM obviously will speak multiple languages, and so you can ask it questions in those languages. And the LLM by itself, if I ask it a question in French or Spanish or German, it will answer in those languages and correct sentences, grammatically correct and all that good stuff. However, the things that it might get wrong are keystrokes. So, for English and Dutch, we have actually gathered and put in documentation that will tell it exactly what keystrokes to press in what language, because sometimes keystrokes are different in different languages. Now, that's not always the case. I know for example, there are Scandinavian languages where the keystrokes are very, very similar to English. And for those languages, FSCompanion works great, because it tells you what keystrokes to press to get certain things done, and it speaks the correct language, grammatically correct, correct sentences, and it all works very, very well. However, for example, a language like Spanish, at least in JAWS, the keystrokes are very different. And so, it might answer in correct Spanish and you may understand what it's saying, but the keystrokes might be wrong. And that's why we say we don't officially support the languages, because there's no official documentation yet added to FSCompanion in order to get those keystrokes right. I'll also say that sometimes, because of course, it uses probably the English language documentation and then translating to your language, it may get some feature names wrong or menu items. So, these are little mistakes that can creep in there. However, that does not mean that it's not useful in those languages. It just means that we haven't added the documentation yet.
OLEG:
And one beautiful new development with FSCompanion, and I should probably call it an ongoing development rather than new, is the fact that we're ingesting documentation from major software developers like Microsoft and Google. And that means that when you ask a question about Microsoft products or Google products, we're giving better responses that draw on accessibility documentation from those companies. So, normally with a JAWS feature or a product feature, you would think of something that was established at some point, and then it basically stays pretty much the same over the years, not so with AI based features, those develop pretty much on a weekly or even sometimes on a daily basis.
MOHAMMED:
So, FSCompanion will try to be helpful in all situations. And that meant that last year, if you asked it a question about Google products, it would try to answer you as well as it could, and it would be correct a lot of the time, but it might also be wrong sometimes, just because in its general knowledge base, it might not have all the information, the accessibility information about Google products. But just a couple of weeks ago, we actually added Google documentation straight into FSCompanion. And this means that now it's much, much more accurate in what it can tell you about Google products and it will give you all the right information right from their accessibility documentation right there in FSCompanion. And this works across languages. So, for both supported languages, we've got the Google documentation in there, and of course when we add more languages, we will add the Google documentation in those languages as well.
OLEG:
Now, Mohammed, I've got to admit my omission. For the last couple of months we've had a feature in our Early Adopter Program or EAP, called AI-based UI Labeler, and we never talked about this feature on FSCast. What is it and how can people start using that?
MOHAMMED:
So, very early on when we introduced Picture Smart, we found out that people love to use Picture Smart on buttons on the web or other elements that weren't labeled correctly. And they would get a description, and they could ask Picture Smart questions and they would say, what is this button meant for? And Picture Smart could answer. And we thought, what if we make that a little bit easier? What if we can just generate a label that makes sense to screen readers that you typically do see? And we started experimenting with LLMs and seeing if we could prompt them in such a way that they would give us information that pertained to that certain element. And lo and behold, the LLM was able to do that. And so, what we decided to do is to build that right into JAWS. So, now if you enable this early adopter feature, the AI-based UI Labeler, you can use the old graphics label or keystrokes, that's Insert G, and using that, you can actually label all your elements on the web and outside.
However, the labels outside of the web are not stored as of the July update of JAWS and Fusion. The labels on the web are actually stored, so you don't have to hit Insert G every single time you encounter the same button or other elements that is unlabeled or not labeled correctly. And from then on JAWS will actually call it the label that the AI has given it. So, let's say there's a talk to search button, and it has a little microphone icon, and the developer has forgotten to label it. What you'll actually get is a label that says microphone button, or microphone icon. And that will help you at least know what the icon or the picture on the button is. And with the context of the rest of the website, it will give you enough information such as you can start using the button.
We are constantly evolving and trying to improve the prompt for the LLM so that it creates more useful descriptions, and we've already made quite a few strides there. So, this is a good example of what the AI-based UI Labeler can do. In addition to that, and this is actually not an EAP feature, but right in JAWS, we have decided to overhaul our custom label management. Previously, of course, you had INSERT+F2 in the manager list. You had custom label delete and custom label delete all, and it would allow you to delete one or all custom labels on the current page. However, that really was not very clear, and it was kind of an old way of doing things, and so we decided to build a label manager. And it looks a little bit like the Notification History feature, the notification manager, and what it will allow you to do is view all the labels for the current page that you're on, and you can edit them and delete them right from within that dialogue.
So, there's a lot of improvement. We've modernized our label management alongside building this AI capability into JAWS, and we will of course continue to innovate. We'll bring this saving of labels to outside of the web at some point. And of course, there are other ideas that we have to improve this feature even further. And anyone who has good ideas, because I know that, when I hear about stuff like this, my creative juices really start flowing and I get a lot of ideas. So, fscast@vispero.com for anyone with very good ideas, please.
OLEG:
So, how do those two features work together? For example, I'm using the AI-based UI Labeler, and it gives me a wrong label, and that label is saved immediately. I don't have a chance to review that and I later understand that, hey, that's a wrong label, or it might add a word that should not be there. It'll say like search button button, how can I edit that then?
MOHAMMED:
So, you go to that page, and you press INSERT+SPACE followed by ALT+L, and that will open the Label Manager. Alternatively, you can press INSERT+F2 or CAPSLOCK+F2 for the manager list, and right there in the manager list, you can find Label Manager. You can press enter on that, those two ways, and then you can go find the offending label in the labels list, and you can delete it or you can edit it.
OLEG:
Very nice. And how about those older applications, where people still need the older style Graphics Labeler?
MOHAMMED:
So, we have moved the keystroke for the older-style Graphics Labeler. So, if you have the EAP feature enabled, you can press INSERT+ALT+G for the older-style Graphics Labeler.
OLEG:
So, now moving on to FSCompanion Page Summary, where does the idea come from?
MOHAMMED:
Where the general idea comes from, I don't quite remember, and this is because I get so many ideas thrown at me, and they all mingle around, and they all mix in my mind. And at some point everything seems like my idea, but I can't seriously claim that, because I don't actually know where I got the inspiration from exactly. But of course, this is a very obvious way to take AI, because other companies are doing this as well. Microsoft has in their word application, they have Copilot summaries that summarize the document for you. And so, we decided that from a accessibility perspective, getting a page summary just generated by a general AI tool is useful but not as useful as what we could generate, which is a good overview of what the page says, yes, what is in the page, but also what the page looks like, and we can of course give you navigation tips. So, does it have many headings and stuff like that? And so, the idea was probably something that is a amalgamation and a mix of different ideas that people brought up over the year. But then, the actual implementation I think was mostly thought of by the team and me in conjunction with our Product Manager, Roxana, where we decided, okay, what we want is to be unique and to be useful to our users. And so, how can we leverage tech and documentation that we already have in order to do that? And FSCompanion is a perfect source, because it can tell you how to do things with JAWS. And so, using it to generate both a page summary and navigation tips seems to me like the perfect solution for a problem that is unique to our users. Because, sighted users will just scroll around and look at the page and get the overview, and now you can too with FS companion.
OLEG:
I'm going to have to correct you on this one. This feature, unlike the ones that we described previously, is not in the product yet. So, you will be able to sometime in the fall, not right now because we need to bring it to as high level as we possibly can at this point. When it is available, so what you'll be able to do is you press a keystroke and your JAWS or Fusion will be clicking for a few seconds, and then it'll give you some information about the page, and there'll be three areas. First it'll give you some structure information. It will explain the structure of the page in very broad terms, then it will give you some content information, and that's what that page is about.
And finally, it'll give you pretty detailed navigation tips, how you can navigate this, where you have headings, where you have lists, where you have tabs and so on. And all of those navigation tips will be based on JAWS specific navigation. So, you will be able to glean all the information you need from that summary. Am I missing something, or is that pretty much what it's going to be?
MOHAMMED:
No, this is right. So, this feature will become available somewhere in the fall. And exactly, that structure that you're describing will be available, at least at the moment that's how we think of this. Again, if you have any other ideas, fscast@vispero.com, we'd love to hear from you, because this is very much a collaboration. Like I said, it's an amalgamation of different ideas thrown at us, some from customers, some from team members. And so, if you have good ideas, we'd love to hear them.
OLEG:
So, what if I have a huge page, but I am actually looking for something very specific, will that feature allow me to do so?
MOHAMMED:
Absolutely. Because it's FSCompanion based, there's chat, because JAWS will just open FSCompanion with all the information already there. And so, all the normal FSCompanion functionality that we love will be available to you. You can dictate your question, you can type it in and send it off, and it'll extract information for you, absolutely. So, if you ask it, there's a company phone number in there, please get me the company phone number, it will go and get it for you.
OLEG:
And another nice way of using that, for example, you are in a Google document or on some very specific web application that FSCompanion knows about, and the page summary will describe that page for you of course, and it'll give you some specific navigation, but you can ask follow-up questions like, how do I do this and this in my Google document? And it'll have your context to answer the question. So, its answers are going to be much more specific and much more relevant to exactly what you are doing.
So, what is the target user group for FSCompanion page summary? Are you thinking primarily of beginner users or intermediate or advanced? Who's it for?
MOHAMMED:
I think this could be useful for everyone and anyone. Of course, if you are training or a beginner with JAWS, then getting those navigation tips might be really crucial, because repetition is very good for training and learning, and you may not always have someone at hand to repeat all the commands you may be using on a specific page or to find out what commands are useful on a new page that you may be visiting. And so, there, the page summary feature from FSCompanion can be very, very useful.
For advanced users, if you are navigating or going to a very complicated website for the first time, you may be able to save a lot of time, because the LLM FSCompanion is able to actually glance at the page for you and tell you, this is what the page is, this is what it's about. Here are some navigation tips. Keep in mind there are many regions here. Keep in mind there's a good heading structure. And so, you don't have to go experiment around what happens if I press H, and how well will it work if I press B? Is everything labeled correctly, all that good stuff. All of that is given to you by FSCompanion.
OLEG:
And finally, in the past we used to focus a lot on the annual JAWS release and around September or October, our customers would ask, okay, what are some new features? And we would roll out lots and lots of new features. Now, all those new capabilities are distributed pretty much evenly throughout the product's life cycle. So, please check back with JAWS and Fusion and ZoomText with all that's happening in AI in page summary and other new features, because your favorite new feature may come up in May and July and September and October pretty much anytime throughout the product cycle. And that's a very, very crucial change for all of us to be aware of.
So, thank you Mohammed for doing what you are doing, and thank you for really staying on top of this AI world. You and your team are doing a fantastic job there.
MOHAMMED:
Thank you, Oleg. And with AI, even if development stops right now, the labs say we're going to do no more work, you've got enough. Even then I think we've got years and years of development ahead of us to fully realize what these models can do right now. Take on top of that the improvements that the labs are still making, and there's a lot of very, very good stuff ahead of us. We've got things here internally that are extremely interesting and that hopefully you'll see later down the line, hopefully even next year. And once they come out and we roll out all the things that we are planning to, I think everybody will be amazed. We've already seen amazing features in picture descriptions, this Labeler, the FSCompanion and the page summary, but there is so much more possible even with what we have now, let alone with what's coming. So, please stay tuned and keep in mind that yes, with every update there's a possibility of some new groundbreaking capability coming online.
OLEG:
So, ladies and gentlemen, you've been waiting, and the wait is now over. Please welcome Elizabeth Whitaker to our virtual studio. Hi Elizabeth. And it's so good to chat with you about conventions and some other things.
ELIZABETH WHITAKER:
Hi Oleg. It's great to be here and get to talk about them.
OLEG:
When was your first convention? Probably not as an employee of Vispero or anything, but just as a participant.
ELIZABETH:
Well, my first ACB Convention was way back in 1998, and then my first NFB Convention was in 2016.
OLEG:
Why is it that people go to those things or rather, why do you go to those things, other than working for Vispero?
ELIZABETH:
It's a great way to talk to other people, get to know them, find out what's going on in technology with different companies, because you have all of the booths that you get to go to. There's a lot of information. You get to learn what each organization is doing, and it's just a great way to interact with others and network.
OLEG:
What is your role on the Vispero team this year?
ELIZABETH:
Well, this year in Vispero, so since I managed the training team at the conventions, we actually were able to, and this is the second year that Vispero has done this, to host a training suite where we got to show off some of our newest AI features and answer training questions from users.
OLEG:
Which of our new functionalities generated most buzz there at the conventions?
ELIZABETH:
I would say the three main ones, and I'm not sure that one was more than the others, maybe so. But, we talked a lot about Picture Smart AI, of course, FSCompanion. We got to introduce those to a lot of people and really show them what those two features do. But the main one, I would say, probably because it’s so new that it's not out quite yet, is the page summary feature. And that one was really impressive to people. They had a lot of great feedback, a lot of ideas about how they would like to see it work and what they would like to see it do in the future. So, I think that one was probably the one that got the most attention, I would say.
OLEG:
On this episode, we've talked quite a lot about page summary. Give me some use cases that you've come across yourself and that you've seen or heard others to propose.
ELIZABETH:
One of the use cases that I discovered, and I thought this was a really nice one, was if you have, for example, a calendar of events and you are navigating the table and you're able to navigate the table, but it's really difficult to discern which events are on which days and really locate the information you need quickly, I found that with page summary, I was able to ask it various questions, chat with it, ask it to show me a list of all the events, or I could narrow it down and say, show me just the events on Saturday, and it would list them.
And then, I could ask it for specific information about an event, where is it going to be, what time, and so forth, and it would give me all of that information. So, that was a very powerful one that I found. Another one that we found was when you have an article and there are lots of ads that you have to navigate through, you can ask it to show you the text of the article, and you can chat with it until you get that information that you're looking for.
OLEG:
Elizabeth, I'm still amazed at how our lives have been changed by AI in the last couple of years. One thing though is that mastering those tools requires an effort, and I'm hearing that you in the training department are attempting to address that very issue. Talk about that one.
ELIZABETH:
Absolutely. So, on August 7th, which is a Thursday, at noon Eastern, we are starting an AI training series. So, this is going to take place on the first Thursday of every month. You can actually go tofreedomscientific.com/training, look for our upcoming webinars page and register for it right now. But, we're going to start out by talking about AI, what it is, what it can do for you, and we're going to create some scenario-based training that will show people different ways to use AI, and then talk about some of our AI tools, all of our AI tools and others that are out there, because we know there are a lot of tools that people are using.
So, this is going to be a series that's going to take place over a long period of time. It's going to be ongoing, and that will give us the opportunity to talk about trends as they emerge and what's going on with AI. And then, we're also going to give people some ways to practice between webinars. What are some scenarios, we want some feedback? What are they doing with AI and how can we help them going forward?
OLEG:
Would you say it's mainly targeted towards beginner users? Or if I've got some experience with AI, will I be able to glean anything from those sessions as well?
ELIZABETH:
We are creating training that will be available to everyone. So it's going to be appropriate whether you're just beginning or whether you've been using AI for quite some time, there's going to be something there for everyone.
OLEG:
So, I get it. The program for the next couple of months would be to wait for the release of FS companion page summary, but also to join in with your training sessions, the AI training, and possibly something else, right?
ELIZABETH:
Yes. Actually, in August we have our regular software webinars, which take place the third Thursday of the month. So, on August 21st at noon Eastern, that's also a Thursday, of course, we are talking about tips for navigating PDFs with JAWS. We're expounding upon our previous webinars that we've done on PDFs, and we're giving you even more tips and information about how to navigate PDFs.
OLEG:
And also in August, actually the last Wednesday of August, we're planning to release the next episode of FSCast, because this one is really, really overflowing and our time is up, and we need to round it up for today. You can send us an email at fscast@vispero.com. Or for training issues, write to training@vispero.com. Elizabeth, great to see you, and hope to see you again next month here on FSCast.
ELIZABETH:
Looking forward to it.
OLEG:
And thanks everyone, and hope you enjoy this last month of summer. Bye.
ELIZABETH:
Bye.