“I called him. I go, "Hey, we figured it out. I'll be able to run my show this Friday without someone." (Mitchell Smedley, on college radio and professional development).
“I said, "You know what? I'm tired of this problem. Let's just hack on this for a couple of days, see if I can get it to go anywhere." (Quin Gillespie, on Paperback and document reading)
Plus upcoming training opportunities and more, on FSCast for December 2025.
OLEG SHEVKUN
Yes, indeed. It is December, and it's FSCast episode 265. And I'm Oleg Shevkun in, shall I say, Vispero Virtual Studios.
There's a lot happening at Vispero this time of the year. We've got our new CEO. We've got many new faces on our executive leadership team. We've got some new developers. And in fact, I'm pretty sure we'll be introducing some of those people on our podcast next year. So keep tuned in for that.
But there are a couple of things happening right now. And yes, of course, one of them is getting ready for Christmas and New Year. The other is our software update. So version 2026 of JAWS, ZoomText and Fusion has been updated and you should have received an update notification. There are quite a few improvements here, but I'd like to draw your attention to just a couple of new features in JAWS.
So one of them is the ability to quickly provide image descriptions on the web. You may remember that we've got our new AI labeler. So when you are on a control and it's not properly labeled, and that could be in web application and elsewhere, you can press insert G and AI will generate and suggest a label for you. In fact, we demonstrated this capability on a recent issue of FSCast. But what if you are on an image? So you're browsing the web and JAWS just says graphic, or it does give an alternative description, but that description is incomplete. For example, you may be on a shopping site and you have a number of graphics, but you'd like to get more information about them. So one of our new features in our December update tackles this exact issue. If you're on the web and JAWS says graphic, and it gives you some number or some sequence of characters that doesn't make sense, or even if it gives you a description, but you feel the description is incomplete, just go ahead and press insert G.
When you do that, JAWS will submit the graphic to our AI services and they will return a more complete description, which will be saved for you. So that when you browse that website and you're on that same page, you'll get that same graphic description. You can just try it by going to freedomscientific.com and pressing G to get to the graphic. And it is the Freedom Scientific logo, and you'll get a very brief description by default. Well, when you're on that graphic, just press insert G and see what happens. You can then go to a news website or a shopping website, and you can explore the graphics on that website with our new labeling capability. And please let us know if those descriptions have been helpful to you.
Now, another thing about this new update I wanted to highlight is the improvement we've made to Picture Smart.
You know that you can always ask Picture Smart a preliminary question. That is, you press INSERT+SPACE, followed by P, followed by ALT with the respective picture smart command. For example, if you're in Windows Explorer and you're focusing on a file containing an image, you can press INSERT+SPACE, P, followed by ALT+F to ask a question about an image in the selected file. Now, in the past, Picture Smart would sometimes return the complete description of the image before answering your question. This has now been corrected and in all circumstances, if you ask a preliminary question, that question will be answered first, and then some additional descriptions might follow. So the point is, if you ask a question, we want to answer that question in the first place.
And finally, I just wanted to say thank you. When a couple of months ago we introduced the new user account experience, many of you spoke up to draw our attention to some issues around that experience.
So you spoke and we listened. As you may already know, the account creation experience has been greatly simplified. To begin with, you no longer have to tell us the year you were born. Instead, we ask you to choose one of three options. You're either younger than 13, or you are between the age of 13 and 18, or as most of us, I guess, you're older than 18. So you just make that choice, and then you have the questions to set up your account, and most of those questions are now optional. We would still appreciate you giving us the information we need to support you better, but we are not asking anything more than we absolutely have to for legal and licensing and other issues. Once again, most of the questions in our account creation experience are now optional. And in fact, since that change was introduced, we see a number of accounts having been created.
Now, once again, that change has been in response to your feedback. So please do keep that feedback coming.
And now we move on to something that's very dear to many of us. For most of us, it's a hobby. For some of us, it's a career. And of course, I'm talking about radio. Some of you may be familiar with our Student of the Month program. Every month, we put up YouTube videos featuring students, mainly from the United States, who are Vispero product users. And back in 2021, one of those students of the month was Mitchell Smedley. Mitchell, hello. Welcome to FSCast Now after four years.
MITCHELL SMEDLEY:
Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Very excited and very grateful to be back talking with you guys again.
OLEG:
So I watched that video, and it seemed like you had two or three passions. One of them was sports, another was journalism, and part of that passion was radio broadcasting. Let's talk of sports for a moment. How has that developed for the last four years?
MITCHELL:
Yeah, so sports has always been a fun thing for me, whether I was playing or watching, rooting. I'm from Philadelphia, so huge Eagles fan, Phillies, Flyers, the whole thing. And Philly fans have a tendency here in the United States. They're known for being the craziest people. So I've always had sports definitely rooted into my blood since the beginning. And when I really developed a passion for broadcasting, for being on TV or radio, and I knew that's kind of the direction I wanted my life to go was being in front of a microphone. Sports became sort of a natural place where I looked and thought, "Well, that'd be fun to be an announcer or to be an analyst."
You look at the people on ESPN talking about quarterbacks they think are good versus quarterbacks they think are bad. But also to be a person on a live game that's talking about what's going on here in the third quarter and what play they should run next or the bottom of the ninth and you're calling it to people at home telling them the count and here comes the pitch. So that was always something I really thought of as that would be cool, but it always seemed impossible because I couldn't see. I couldn't see the ball. I couldn't see the players. So I always figured, "Well, I guess that's just out of the question. I'll have to be the guy the next day who talks about what happened the night before, rather than being in the center of it. And through a series of assistive technologies that came about and some people along the way that really pushed me, and assisted me and cheered me on, it became a reality during my college days.
OLEG:
Tell me more about that. How did that become a reality? When did you first realize, "Hey, listen, I can be not just a spectator and not just talk about it day after, but I could do more than that."
MITCHELL:
So when I was first starting college, I chose a college called Kutztown University. It's a small college in Pennsylvania. And one of the decisions or one of the factors that led into my decision to go there was they had a radio station there called Kutztown University Radio. And I spoke with some of the folks from that station on my visit, familiarizing myself with the campus, and they told me that I could get on air very, very quickly, within a month or two from me starting at the school. And that's exactly what happened. I started, my first on air thing there was a country music show. I called it Redneck Rush Hour, because it was Fridays at 5:00. And-
OLEG:
Wait a minute. How was that even possible? I mean, two months at a college and you're on the air.
MITCHELL:
Yeah. And I was actually slow. I actually took longer to get on than most people, because I was a little bit lazy and trying to figure out all this college stuff. But really what it became was they gave you a few weeks of training. Here's all the equipment we use. They gave you an FCC sort of lesson. Here's the words you can't say. Here's the words you can say. They made you do a couple practice runs. They made you do a quiz on making sure you took in all the information, and then you were allowed on. Just because we had such a close-knit community, there weren't a ton of students, there weren't a ton of people at the radio station. There was always time available. You just picked a time slot you wanted for your show. That's really why I decided to go there, was I figured I could get on quickly and get on often, and have a ton of practice coming out of college, which is exactly what ended up happening.
One thing I didn't foresee happening was a couple of people in the sports department had graduated from the radio station. So they were looking for folks to assist in calling games for our college teams. And the first time I stepped up to do that, a guy there that was kind of heading the sports efforts told me that he needed someone for a baseball game and asked if I knew anything about baseball. I go, "Do I know anything? Yeah, I know a few things about baseball."
So I went with him. I kid you not, it was April and somehow it was still flurrying snow and the wind was whipping, and it was so cold, but we stood in this little tent and we called a baseball game. It was rocky. I couldn't see what was going on. So I had to rely on him and then also utilizing my assistive technology, my screen reader to be online looking at player stats and looking at past results, and seeing how this factored into all that, breaking down, whether it was playoff scenarios or whether it was how a player's been doing in his last 10 games, I had to be on listening to two or three things at the same time. So it was complex, but I got through the game. I wouldn't say it was my best work, but it was my first live sports broadcast.
And that really was a catalyst for me, that then I really developed a love for football over the years, and I said, "That's the next thing I want to do."
And so, I approached the team and decided I wanted to be part of our football broadcasting crew the next season, which would be in the fall. And the guy that brought me along for that baseball game, he said, "No, I don't think that's a good idea. You can't see the field. You don't know anything."
And the problem with that was it became very apparent to everyone that I knew way more about football and our team and our players than he did whatsoever. So he was outvoted. I became part of the football sideline, I became the football sideline reporter, and we went from there, because one of my closest friends who I still now and then do projects with and I'm still very close with, he was our play by play guy, and he was just so great to be an encouragement. And we had real honest conversations, what I could improve on, what he could improve on. He treated me like an equal rather than that commentator who told me, "Yeah, it's just not going to work out. You don't have the ability to see players, so we're not going to do it." And I'm just very thankful that he was out voted and everyone else thought, "You know what? We're going to try it and it's not going to be smooth sailing. We're going to figure it out though."
That's the key, because I was also told when I started at the radio station, I could never run my own show. For the first two or three years of that country show I did, Redneck Rush Hour, someone else had to be running the board, had to be running the playlist of the songs and everything. I wasn't able to do that, because the manager of the station decided he wasn't really going to put any effort into finding an accessible solution.
It wasn't until just before my senior year when I started talking with my brother, said, "Hey, here's the problem. Here's the equipment we use. What do you think?"
And him and I came up with a solution utilizing a screen reader and a program on a computer that would allow me to plug in via just a simple 3.5 millimeter jack into the soundboard, and this program would allow me to run my entire radio show. It's about just finding people that want the solutions that you want, and they can be complicated, they can be simple, but it's about developing a team around you that is all pulling in the same direction.
OLEG:
Two things here. First, can you talk to me about the specifics of your solution? And secondly, on a human level, how did you convince the station leadership and your university leadership, whoever oversees the radio station to make the changes? Because there would be a pushback of saying, "Well, we've never done it this way, and it may impose security risks and so on." So the what and the how?
MITCHELL:
So what it came down to was really a program my brother had utilized before during his college days, even high school, doing live soundboards for plays and stuff like that. It was a program called QLab. I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but that allowed me to put all the audio files I had lined up for the show into a format that was accessible and sort of a table of sorts where I could navigate, select the file I wanted and be able to play pause, do all the things you would normally do on the computer screen for a radio show. And I was lucky enough that we still use a semi-analog soundboard in our radio station where the faders, everything like that, most of the mute buttons and volume buttons, all of that is tactile.
OLEG:
Man, you've got faders, the real faders.
MITCHELL:
Yeah, we still have faders, right? So I know that those are disappearing. So I was lucky in that regard. And I was able to just plug the computer in. It turned out to be a very simple solution. Once I found people that knew a little bit about a little bit and wanted it to succeed, when I asked the station manager, he thought, "Oh, this is going to be a drag. I'm going to have to do hours of research and find a program and teach you the program."
No, my brother taught me the program in five minutes. I'm a quick learner once I get my hands on something and it was mind-blowing just how easy it was to implement, and just the feeling of being free to not have to rely on... I had times where a producer for my show would walk in 90 seconds before it was supposed to start and I'm freaking out like, "Is this show going to go on today?"
And just being able to know that it was all under my control was huge. Now for the sports, it was somewhat complicated. I mean, yeah, I couldn't see the players. I had to develop ways to kind of talk my way into being closer to the team, to be able to hear what coach was saying, where some people usually weren't allowed to walk. I would have to figure out and charm my way into being useful, but the actual process of getting on the air, that was showing people, "Hey, I have this background in sports. I've been a sports enthusiast, a fan, an analyst to some degree for," however many years it was before that where I was talking about sports, doing social media about sports, everything like that. And just people knew me, and they knew that this was something I was passionate about. I wasn't just some amateur walking in there that was like, "Yeah, this sounds fun. I'll do that."
This was something I thought about, but never really thought possible until that spring doing baseball. And I had some people around there that really didn't see the blindness as a barrier. They saw my personality, they saw my sports intellect and they saw those as assets to the broadcast. Anyone that has vision can look at a sports game and see what's going on, but they still need the skills to break that down and to make it appetizing for people to listen to. You still need a good on air personality. You still need someone with intellect to give you the ins and outs. Seeing isn't the whole process. It's the start.
And I utilized our play-by-play guy. His name was Jack. He was fantastic. I used him as my eyes. He was describing what was happening on the field and I had the broadcast in my ear, so I knew when they sent it down to me. So I was listening to him anyways. He told me and everyone else that was listening what was going on. And I utilized that information to understand and synthesize the deeper strategy, the coaching ideologies and all that sort of thing.
OLEG:
Forgive me, Mitchell, if I'm a bit dense here, but I still don't quite get it. And I'm rewinding again. I understand more or less about announcing the sports game and what you were describing here. But going back to this QLab stuff, so you come into a radio studio, you come to a radio station, you've got this accessible alternative, but the whole station is doing it differently and you are bringing in something alien. We're not modifying our system just because of you. Did you get any of that pushback? And if so, how did you respond?
MITCHELL:
I got that for a couple of years -
OLEG:
A couple of years?
MITCHELL:
Yeah, a couple of years of it. The manager of the station who was a staff member. So the whole station was made up of students and the one adult in the room was the most vocally against finding an accessible solution. He started off kind of doing his due diligence. He told me, he's like, "I'm going to try and find a way for you to do a show."
I was like, "Great." So he talks to the IT department, he comes back to me, I go to his office, he's like, "It's just going to be too much. We're going to need this software and that software, and we don't even know if it's going to work. And it just sounds too complex and we have it going, and we have this solution where we'll book people to help you out."
And that was what happened for two years. Look, having a producer wasn't the worst thing in the world. Honestly, it gave me someone to talk to on the air. It was fine, but it just didn't sit with me that there was no effort to try and figure out something that would work. And then, when I got into this conversation with my brother and he said, "Hey, I think I have a program that would solve it so seamlessly, the manager won't have to lift a finger to make it happen." And so, we played around with it and kind of behind the station manager's back, me and another student went in and I just had a headphone jack cord plugged into my computer, plugged it into the tower where the board was connected, and it was me and one other student that went in while the station manager was out on a trip doing something, I forget. And I called him, I go, "Hey, we figured it out. I'll be able to run my show this Friday without someone."
He goes, "What?" He was just shocked. I just did the thing and I didn't disrupt any of the on air thing or anything like that, but there was a way to patch through the board, so that you could hear what would come out of the board if you hypothetically did this thing on air, but it kept what was actually on air going. So I was doing that, and I had proof of concept that this worked. It didn't mess up any of his other programs, any of his other systems. It wasn't even on his station computer, so there was no risk of a new software messing anything up on there. And he just saw how easy it was that he didn't have to do anything, and there it was, the green light.
OLEG:
How did you become the president of that station? And explain to me what that entails, the president of the station versus station manager.
MITCHELL:
So station manager really was the staff member that the university assigned to direct the station and take care of all the logistics of it, talking with the FCC, talking with different parts of the university, higher ups. And he was there to facilitate student engagement and all that sort of thing. Whereas the station president was a student elected by the other students, the other club members in the station. And the station president would talk to different departments around the school in terms of if we wanted to expand our outreach, talking with different dining halls of, "Hey, can we get our station played here?" Talking with different clubs of, "Hey, you guys should come here and we can partner, put your club on the air." We had different things like our women's center would come a couple of times a week and we'd have folks from our station help them record sort of a podcast style thing that we would put on the air, telling people about the resources of the women's center, some stuff like that.
All sorts of different stuff, talking with professors if they wanted to utilize our station for a class project, but it was also internal. The president was coordinating between departments of the station. Okay, our sports guys need this. They have this scheduling conflict that has to do with this other person's radio show at this time. All right, let's get everyone down and see if we can figure out a solution that works for everyone. Coordinating between departments, do we want to start doing this sort of programming more, more news, more sports, more whatever, music, all sorts of different internal coordinations, but also being a face that can go out and attract new members because you have to keep the club alive. You have to keep people interested in radio. So going out, deciding how we're going to do promotional events, how we're going to participate in things like the involvement fairs around the campus, or just being a point of contact when people email the station and are like, "Hey, I'm interested. How do I get involved? What can I do?"
Being the person that not only responds to them, but responds to them in a way that makes them decide, "Yeah, this is a deciding factor for me to commit to this school."
I was very lucky. The president when I started was amazing, and he was the first person I talked to that really got me interested in the station. So there's a lot that goes into it. I got elected, to answer your question, because I was someone that kind of did all these things already. Like I said, I did a ton of stuff around the station before I was president, two sports talk shows, the country show. I was our news coordinator, so I was recording a bunch of pressers for the air. I was going to different press briefings around the campus and I was doing all sorts of these different things, not to mention the live sports broadcasting and all of that.
I was already on our e-board for two years as our parliamentarian, which is the person that if you violated a club rule, you'd get a letter from me saying, "Hey, this is against our policy. Don't do it again or you're going to be out," that sort of thing. So I was in a leadership role. I was participating every way I could in the station. I had the greatest understanding of how the radio station worked and how we could grow. And I think those were the factors that led to my peers deciding I was the best choice for the role at the time.
OLEG:
If I were a listener of this station, would I ever know that the president and the presenter named Mitchell is blind? Would I ever know or would I ever care to know?
MITCHELL:
That's the fun thing about radio. If you want people to know, they can know. You can talk about it. I usually didn't shy away from talking about my disability on air, but if you don't, there's no way for people to know. There's no way that they're going to see your white cane through the radio set. So it was a great thing where it leveled the playing field for a blind person like me, but I grew so comfortable and just it made me who I was, and it was honestly talking about sports and how I watch sports and engage with them. It became impossible not to talk about my disability at times. But I'll tell you one quick story. I was doing my country show with a producer and while we were playing a song, so our mics were not on, but he asked me, he goes, "I'm looking at this car online. Do you ever drive stick, Mitch?"
And I said, "Do I, blind Mitchell, ever drive stick shift?"
And we were laughing and everything. So we go on after the song ends, we go on to do our usual little piece of talking and everything during the show. And I go, "While we were away, while you were listening to whatever song it was, my producer here asked me if I drive stick shift. Now for anyone who's not aware why that's a dumb question, I can't see. I have no driver's license."
And then he comes on, he puts his mic on, he goes, "Well, sometimes I forget." He goes, "The first thing I think of when I think of Mitchell isn't blind. It's funny and crazy and all these other things."
So that was a heartwarming moment of, it was funny, but it also made me realize, wow, just how in my element this is that I can put this impression on people that I'm not just this blind guy that most people see when they first watch me walk into a room. It really gives me a chance and people like me a chance, to unwind and to really be themselves and let their full personality shine through.
OLEG:
So Mitchell, you're out of college now. What is your connection to radio, if any? And let me expound on this question. I'm hearing from a number of blind people who get enthusiastic about radio at some point. And then at some point the question comes up, do I want to make radio into my full-time profession? And if I want that, can I? Will that work? What would you be on that?
MITCHELL:
I think there's an important thing to note here in that some things are blind problems, issues faced by blind people pretty exclusively, and some things are just problems, where blind people are no different, everyone's facing the same issue. And I think the radio industry right now is just a problem for anyone that wants to get into it. It is so bottlenecked. There are so few positions for so many people that want to do it. I definitely would love for radio to be my career. I have the passion for it. I think I have somewhat of a gift for it. I would love to make it my career. The problem is getting a foot in the door. So I'm currently job hunting every single day right now. I'm sending out applications, I'm networking with folks, doing everything I can. Even with my college experience, bigger radio stations want three to five years experience in a large market.
I have experience in a small market. So then I have to talk with those people, "Hey, I have this experience in a small market. Does that work?"
"No, it doesn't."
"Okay."
So it's just trying to find a fit for anyone. Most of these companies, these interviewers, these kind of recruiters have no idea I'm blind. They just see my resume of things I've done in radio and say, "Well, there's hundreds of other applicants that have more experience or better experience, whatever it may be."
So that's the bottleneck that is currently being faced. It's not a blind problem. It's a common problem across so many different companies, big and smaller, if that answers the question.
OLEG:
Does it make sense then to even try for a career in radio with the advances in AI? And I'm sure you've seen those YouTube videos, and you've probably seen those things in action. The buzz is that in five to 10 years, radio personalities are going to be the thing of the past. Well, first of all, do you agree or do you disagree? And second, is there still anything to hope for for somebody who wants a career in radio?
MITCHELL:
Well, I completely disagree with the premise, because I think if that were the case, they would already be gone. Radio personalities wouldn't exist. If you just wanted someone to give you the weather, give you the news, give you a couple songs on your morning commute, that already exists. There's a bunch of services that will do that already. People aren't turning on the radio just for that anymore. People turn on the radio to hear a certain personality. People aren't just listening for the information. That's part of it. There's an entertainment factor to it, and that's not something that AI can create right now. Could it in the future? Maybe, but I think the thirst for human interaction is going to keep these jobs in some capacity around for a while. And if it doesn't look the exact same as it does right now, there's going to be other channels.
There are social media channels, YouTube, TikTok is huge for short form content and for live-streaming in sort of a roundabout way to having your own radio show that borders on TV a little bit more. But there are other channels that I am starting to explore and also just to keep myself in the habit of being in front of a microphone. So I set up a little bit of a backdrop, a home studio where I have just started, I'm like three videos into starting a YouTube and a TikTok channel, just to keep myself engaged and keep myself putting my voice out there, and seeing if people want to listen to it. And I just know that even if it doesn't become a career and I'm hunting for a career right now, if this doesn't become it, I still want to be doing some sort of broadcasting, whether it's broadcast media, social media on the side, because I just enjoy it. I just find it so fun.
OLEG:
What makes a radio personality, in your view, in your experience?
MITCHELL:
In my experience, a personality is someone that can do one of a couple things, and the best ones do both. A good radio personality gets its listeners thinking or gets its listeners laughing. Anyone can come on here and tell you the results of the baseball games the night before. Not just anyone can come on here and get the scores out there, get you thinking about what that could mean going forward, what could happen next, and also make you fall over laughing, because they were hilarious in that two minutes. For me, it comes down to being clear in the information, right? So Getting information out there, getting people thinking and getting people laughing. Those are the three things that make a good one in my opinion.
OLEG:
So I guess the keyword then is personality. Radio is just a field or an area where that personality is seen. I mean, that same personality could be seen in other media, like YouTube or social media, as you mentioned already.
MITCHELL:
Yep. Radio, TV, social media, anything. You have great personalities that used to write in the newspapers and in columns and everything. So it's all about what the actual person brings to the table with their personality rather than the medium it's distributed.
OLEG:
20 years ago, we had to argue for accessibility. Today, well, not always, but mostly, accessibility is taken for granted. If you were writing something or if you were editing something, you wouldn't have to prove to your manager that you can use Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You can just do it. In a niche market, however, there is still the problem where the software and hardware that people are using is not accessible. What steps could we make as developers and what steps could we make as blind people to get accessibility into those places?
MITCHELL:
I think it's a great question. It's a question I'm probably not qualified to answer, but I do have a couple thoughts on. The first thing I'd say as blind people is I think we should be louder in these niche areas. I think we have to make it worth people's while ,because so many times I'm confronted with the question of, "Oh, why would companies make all their stuff accessible? It costs so much money, it would lose the company money."
But I think blind people really bring a lot to the table in our problem solving skills, in our communication skills, in a bunch of areas that would bring value to a company, whether that is as a graphic designer or as a radio personality, whatever it may be. The problem is people don't know that. People view blind people as these people that need a ton of help. They just kind of sit around in the dark all day and maybe listen to music or play the piano. That's kind of a wide perception of blind people. I think the more that we have people out there proving that blind people with jobs that actually contribute to their company are not the exception that those are the norm. The more those become the norm.
And the more that those blind folks in their professions exceed the results of what many cited people are doing, the more we will prove value to various corporations. And I think they'll be forced to unlock this immense talent pool that they could be pulling from, especially in communications jobs. I mean, I've been doing person to person communication, mass communication all the time, figuring out how to best get a message out there through all these barriers. I don't know pictures. I don't know all these different ways that people communicate online now and all of it. And I've been doing that since birth. So it's about figuring out where we provide more value, figuring out where we excel compared to the typical person. And I think the funding, the investigation into how we can make niche markets, that all follows after that.
OLEG:
Mitchell, where do you see yourself in five or 10 years?
MITCHELL:
I think the first step toward that is just me getting my foot in the door somewhere after this job search. I've just been out of college a few months. During that time, I've been picking up various projects that I've just been so busy. I've stayed busy all my life that this is the first time I've really had downtime in my life to... I'm sitting here submitting all these job applications and it's just kind of me and my thoughts for the first time in a long, long time in my life. And so, I've been thinking about this exact question. And I don't know what the career path looks like, but I definitely have confidence. I will find where I'm meant to be or where I'm best fitted, and I will be definitely somewhere in the communications field, whether that is radio or television broadcasting, or whether it's public relations, or whether it's marketing, who knows.
But I'm submitting for all those different jobs. I'll be working my way up through a company somewhere. I hope to still have my sports channel on the side, whether that's on YouTube, whether that's on social media, whether that makes its way to a radio somewhere. And I really want to, in a few years, once I have that financial and career stability, get to start in a family and cultivating just a simple yet rewarding life is really what I'm looking for. I don't need to be the most famous person on the internet, don't need to be the biggest broadcaster ever. If I hit the lottery, my life goal is to host a presidential debate here in the United States, I think would be super, super cool. To be able to have people focus on the right things in a given time would be my true passion and my true calling. So that's a little bit of what the future looks like in my eyes, I guess.
OLEG:
You're a personality. That's for sure.
MITCHELL:
Thank you very much.
OLEG:
Mitchell Smedley, thank you for being with us on FSCast and sharing some of your story. Thanks for being so open about this.
MITCHELL:
I appreciate it. Thank you so much for giving me an excuse to put a microphone in front of my face. It's my favorite thing.
OLEG:
My pleasure.
So last month on FSCast, we talked about our experience in reading books and other materials on a Windows PC. And one of our listeners actually said, "How about Paperback?"
For those of you who don't know, Paperback is... Well, I'm not going to introduce Paperback. Let me introduce the developer of this software, Quin Gillespie. Quinn, hello, and welcome to FSCast.
QUIN GILLESPIE:
Hi, Oleg. Thanks for having me on. Happy to be here.
OLEG:
Now, paperback is not your first and not your only software project. You're a blind software developer, right?
QUIN:
Yep. And it's in fact, not even my first Ebook reader. I tried this project a long time ago when I was in high school, but it definitely didn't go anywhere near as far as Paperback has.
OLEG:
Wait a minute. Why would you attempt an Ebook reader twice? Knowing that there are other products, why would you step into the same water or into the same boat? Not once, but even twice?
QUIN:
The simple answer is because I'm picky. I didn't like the experience of having everything scattered or, oh, okay. Yeah, I get a really good experience of reading a PDF in my web browser, but if I want to read an EPUB, I have to go download an entirely different app, and I can't easily have an EPUB and a PDF open in the same app and easily search through them. And I'm also a hacker, in the oldest and best sense of the word. And I love writing my own tools. You can ask my friends this. I love reinventing things when stuff is not to my satisfaction. And over the summer, I was on a break from college and I said, "You know what? I'm tired of this problem. So let's sit down and let's just hack on this for a couple of days, see if I can get it to go anywhere."
And well, about seven months later, here we are. It's at version 0.6.1 and pretty successful so far, I think.
OLEG:
For those of us who are non-technical, what does writing book reader or a file reader entail? Do you have to find some renderers or some libraries that do the job already, and you add an interface on top? Or do you have to start from ground zero? What do you even do to write a file reading app?
QUIN:
Oh, it's a lot of tedious work. And what you mentioned, having libraries there fore you really depends on mostly on the file format. And this is, in fact, the reason Paperback doesn't support RTF documents yet, but it's going to very soon, is that RTF is a very complicated and hard format. And I didn't want to have to write 3,000 lines of code to parse it myself. So I just hoped that I would eventually find a library to do it, and now I have. But then for something like EPUB, it's just a zip file, essentially. An EPUB book is just a zip file with a bunch of stuff inside of it.
OLEG:
You've got HTML or XML files there.
QUIN:
HTML or XML. You got some images. The table of contents is stored in there. So there are, of course, libraries to do that as well, but I opted to just do that one myself, because I wanted to make sure it was as fast as possible, and it wasn't that complicated. But I guess the overall answer to your question is, that it vastly depends on what features you're trying to add, but it's definitely significant. And one portion that when I started writing this I did not think would be as significant as it was is the UI. I thought that the Parsers would be all of it, but nope, people wanted bookmarks, people want an elements dialogue. There's a table of contents dialogue, which are very cool things, but they just add up. And I'm like, "Oh my goodness, that is a lot of code."
OLEG:
At this point, you're not selling the product, but you're still adding features. What's your motivation? Is it hacking? Is it just for the fun of it or is it something that you're planning to grow into a commercial project?
QUIN:
I enjoy coding things. I'm working as a software developer part-time during my degree. And even when I'm not doing that, I just enjoy writing code. I find it to be really fun. But another part of it is that I'm just a bookworm. I have gigabytes and gigabytes of books. And on my computer, which is where I'm at a lot of the time, I wanted to be able to just read exactly how I wanted. And as for taking it commercial, this is something I've really considered. And it's a very tricky thing, because there have definitely been successful commercial ebook readers in the blindness space such asQRead. And it is very possible that around the 1.0 version, and I'm not sure how the logistics of this would work at all, because the code is open source, so anyone can contribute to it.
It could end up going commercial, or you can pay to get, I don't know, enhanced PDF parsing, or offline OCR, or something like that. But especially pre 1.0, it's really for me just about getting as good of an ebook reader as I can. And a huge helper in that is other people contributing code. Paperback is my baby. I've written, I think, 90 something percent of the code for it, but many of the features that people wanted have gotten added, because someone else decided to look at the code and open a pull request and contribute to it.
OLEG:
So you do get pull requests?
QUIN:
Yes, I do. We don't have too many contributors yet, because Paperback is written using fairly complicated and low level technologies to make it as fast and lightweight as it is, but the community's contributions have been significant so far, which is very valuable.
OLEG:
Now, back to the functionality, one thing that impresses me about Paperback is its uniformity. So you have several formats that are supported, and I'll ask you to name those formats, but the beauty of it is you've got one unified interface. No matter what you're opening, you've got pretty much the same way of interacting with it, and even more, you can open documents in their own tabs, so that you have the multi-tab interface. Is that just something that you envisioned in the first place, that uniformity, or was that suggested by users?
QUIN:
So that is a combination of things. The tab interface was something I really liked from QRead. I didn't like how cluttered QRead's interface and dialogues were, but I really, really liked the tab control, because it just let me fly through documents, and it was absolutely ingenious. So I knew I wanted that. And I also knew... Well, in the first version of Paperback, the only other way to navigate through a document other than just reading through the text control with your normal screen or keyboard review commands was to go by EPUB section, which some EPUBS don't define sections, some EPUBS have them very far apart, and that obviously only works on EPUB. And people very quickly were like, "Hey, you should add headings, you should add lists."
And I remember thinking to myself, "Oh, I don't want to do that. That's going to be really hard to code." And then I sat down over a weekend and coded it, and it was actually not that hard.
OLEG:
So which file formats can I open?
QUIN:
You can do CHM, Word docs, EPUBs, PDFs, TXT, open document, both open document text files and presentations. You can open PowerPoints. It'll just show all of the text of the slides and you can navigate through the slides with the page navigation commands.
OLEG:
And no matter which file type you're opening, as long as it’s a supported file type, you will be able to navigate by headings, lists, whatever elements are defined there.
QUIN:
Yeah. Like you said, the list of possible elements does vary between documents, but it's very nice and friendly, and it'll just tell you if you press P in a document that doesn't have pages. We also support FB2, HTML, and markdown. So we've got lots of formats in here.
OLEG:
One thing I'm noticing about Paperback though is, it's a blindness product, in that you are discarding font information, you're discarding the colors, you're discarding the pictures, the visual elements, but are you getting requests to implement those features?
QUIN:
I've gotten a couple, yeah. And I definitely plan to before the 1.0 version. The only unfortunate thing is I'm 100% blind myself, so they're a bit hard for me to test and I'll need to... I'm keeping a list of the users who ask for it, so I can send them test builds when I finally decide to... I'm not sure how complicated we're going to get with it. I don't know if I'm going to have to ship a bunch of fonts with Paperback to make it do something and increase the app size, that might make me cringe a little bit. I have no idea how any of that works at the moment, but I'll do as much as I'm able to visuals wise without making the app, like you said, much slower and more bloated, because I do want to show images. I want it to be usable as more than just a blindness product, but there is the undeniable fact that I'm a blind developer, so it's going to skew that way initially.
OLEG:
From my personal experience, imagine I sent you this report and I said, "Oh, I got an EPUB file that's not too large of a file. That's just 10 megabytes." And I'm opening it and Paperback slows down and ultimately crashes. Your response is option A, "Just send me the file." Option B, "Well, sorry, we're not designed to work with that huge files." Option C, "Every application crashes sometimes."
QUIN:
I always go with option A.
OLEG:
Send me the file.
QUIN:
Yep. And I have found one EPUB that crashes Paperback, and it's not even anything I can control, because Paperback parses it just fine, but there is so much text that when it tries to get put into the Windows edit control, it just makes the app die.
OLEG:
So the problem then is with the file, with ePub.
QUIN:
Yep. It's a 70 megabyte ePub.
OLEG:
Because one of the things sometimes we hear from developers, they say, "Well, don't use those huge files. Use something smaller, because just give us more controlled environment."
And the user might say, "Hey, listen, I'm not interested in a controlled environment. I'm interested in doing my job." But how do you find the balance between the two things, controlled environment or doing your job?
QUIN:
I'm a perfectionist, so I kind of just don't find the balance. I kind of obsess over fixing little bugs in Paperback when people tell me that stuff breaks. I once got a bug report during dinner. I hadn't even downloaded the file, but I was just brainstorming the entire time I was having my food and doing the dishes afterwards. And then I came up to my room and immediately started fixing it, because it was just nagging at me. That's just how my brain is.
OLEG:
What other projects do you have that our listeners might be interested in?
QUIN:
I think the biggest one that they might be interested in is my little tool called EasyMark. And it's just a little tool that if you work with Markdown a lot, you can either run it from the command line and just give it a file name. Or if you just press enter on it'll pop up an open dialogue and you select a markdown file, and it renders it and pops it up in your web browser, which eliminates an entire class of annoyances for me personally, which was messing up a link in a GitHub ReadMe and pushing it and then going to the website to see that it was broken and then having to make another commit. So you might be noticing a trend here, which is that I write tools to solve my own problems and people seem to like them.
OLEG:
One other thing that I'm noticing with Paperback, and it's probably true with other tools you've developed, is the sheer amount of keyboard commands, the key navigation, in an interface where you could either do something via a window, you navigate with tab key or the menus and so on, or you could do the keyboard commands. It seems like you're leaning towards keyboard commands. I'm getting a pushback from people who are saying, "I cannot remember those commands. I cannot remember that many keyboard shortcuts." Whereas a developer, where do you find the balance?
QUIN:
Yeah, it's definitely a tricky balance. And this is something I hope to at least somewhat remedy with allowing the user to customize and change their key bindings, because currently they're just hard coded in there according to my preferences and what I've gotten used to, and how users have shaped it. But if someone can't get used to, for example, the left and right bracket to navigate between EPUB sections, because their keyboard is in a different locale or they just don't like keyboard shortcuts, you can just go in, eventually you'll be able to just go in there and remove them or change them to whatever you want. And I hope that that is a nice and pragmatic enough solution, because like you said, I am definitely a keyboard wizard. I love using the accelerator keys with alt and everything in dialogues. I love keyboard shortcuts, but I understand not everyone does, and I definitely want to be mindful of that.
OLEG:
So how about Paperback on operating systems other than Windows?
QUIN:
This has already begun actually. I have gotten Paperback to run on my MacBook Air and it actually works. It can load big books and it can navigate, and somebody opened a pull request getting it to build on, I believe Linux or NixOS with FlatPack. So it's still a work in progress, because on those two platforms, there are still broken and incomplete things, but cross-platform Paperback is definitely in the pipeline.
OLEG:
You started working on this project just seven months ago, and there are already several localizations. How do those happen? Do you reach out to people in the locals you're interested in or do you get pull requests from those who want to localize? And what is localization process like? Can you describe that?
QUIN:
So for that, I just really rely on the community, because people were telling me that they wanted to have Paperback's strings be read in their language, because it could read books of any language, but all of the UI and everything would always be in English. So I was like, "Okay, this won't be that hard." I went and I added it and I put out just a little note on Mastodon saying, "Hey, you can translate this now."
And I got a couple poll requests, like you said, a couple users went and did pull requests for their languages. And then I was thinking to myself a few weeks ago, I was like, "I'd really want this to be super broadly accessible in more than just a screen reader sense." And one way of achieving that is with strong localization. So I put up an official page on Paperback's website now showing people how to contribute their translations, and I put out another note on Mastodon. And since then, I've gotten at least one new translation, which is very good.
OLEG:
So where does one go to get Paperback?
QUIN:
The website's pretty simple, just paperback.dev. That'll take you to the homepage. There's a downloads link. You can read the documentation there. It also comes with the program. You can donate to the project either through PayPal or GitHub and you can view the source code or how to translate it.
OLEG:
Quin Gillespie, thank you for talking to us on FSCast, and thanks for all your nice work with Paperback.
QUIN:
Thank you for having me.
So that was Quin Gillespie, the developer of Paperback. I would also like to express my gratitude to one of our listeners, Audrey Van Breederode, as well as to one of our colleagues, Amber Jansen, for responding to our book reader discussion and bringing Paperback to my attention.
And now to talk about what's new and what's coming up in training, we are joined by Elizabeth Whitaker. Hi, Elizabeth, and welcome to FSCast.
ELIZABETH WHITAKER:
Hi, Oleg. It's great to be here as always.
OLEG:
So I'm wondering, our AI training is on the first Thursday of each month, and that happens to be January 1st. Now, I do hope you say it's been moved to another day.
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, we're not going to do a training on January 1st, but we will do that one on January 8th. And as it happens, we are going to be talking about Google's Notebook LM tool. We're going to be talking about ways to use it for research and organization. So it's a very powerful tool. So we hope that you'll join us on Thursday, January 8th at noon Eastern.
OLEG:
My question is, how do you demonstrate that? Because actually Google LM Notebook is supposed to be working with a massive amount of information, so you can upload loads and loads of documents. Can you just briefly talk about how you're able to demonstrate that?
ELIZABETH:
Well, I think the thing to start with, is we're going to talk about what Google Notebook LM is and what you can do with it. We're going to demonstrate just how to upload files. So while we may not be uploading a lot of files in the session itself, we'll probably have some things uploaded already, and just demonstrate how to upload and then what to do from there.
OLEG:
Now, in the past, we used to celebrate Braille Month in January, and that was reflected in our trainings. I'm quite curious to find out what you've got in store this year, especially with the coming of multi-line Braille.
ELIZABETH:
We have two exciting webinars coming up in January to celebrate Braille Literacy Month. So the first is going to take place on Thursday, January 15th at noon Eastern. That's our regular software webinar. And we're going to be talking about Braille and JAWS, and we're going to be giving you tips on how to get the most out of your Braille experience, how to be more productive when using Braille and JAWS. Then on the 20th of January, that's a Tuesday at noon Eastern, we are actually partnering with Dot Inc. So we're going to be talking about the Dot Pad display and how to use it with multi-line braille. So that's going to be very exciting. We're going to be demonstrating that and partnering with them on that webinar.
OLEG:
So once again, that's January 20th?
ELIZABETH:
Yes, at noon Eastern.
OLEG:
Okay. And you do need to register for that, of course, right?
ELIZABETH:
Correct. You need to register for all of those. And you can go to freedomscientific.com/training and look for the heading for upcoming webinars, and you'll be able to register for all of those webinars right there. And then for more information on our AI training, because this is an ongoing series, you can go to freedomscientific.com/learnai, where you'll find information about our upcoming webinars, previous lessons that we've done, as well as resources and practice exercises.
OLEG:
I'm wondering if any of our training materials are available to FSCompanion. Like, when I use FSCompanion to ask a question about one of our products, is it actually consulting any of those training materials?
ELIZABETH:
Yes, we do regularly update that, and we are constantly adding more training content to FSCompanion.
OLEG:
Sounds cool. Is there another webinar you're going to talk about, And I was just too quick to think that's all?
ELIZABETH:
We don't have any other webinars scheduled for January, but of course we will release a recorded training for InsertJ Club members. So if you haven't joined InsertJ Club, you can go to freedomscientific.com/insertjclub. And for those of you who may not be familiar with that, that is something that we developed this year in 2025 to just bring everyone together and engage with you, and learn how you use our products and be able to offer you even more content. So we are continuing that in 2026. We have a lot of exciting things coming up.
OLEG:
That's nice. So thank you, Elizabeth.
And that brings us to the end of this December episode of FSCast, the last episode for 2025. We wish you all a great holiday season, and please do keep your emails coming in. For training right to training@vispero.com. For FSCast, write to FSCast@vispero.com. And we'll see you all in January. Thank you.
ELIZABETH:
Thank you, and happy holidays.