EbuAccessCast24 transcript - a podcast by European Blind Union

Introduction

 

(Intro jingle)

(Voice over)

This programme is financially supported by the fundings from the European Commission.

You are listening to the EBU Access Cast. The first official podcast from European Blind Union about assistive technology for blind and partially sighted people.

And here are the hosts.

 

(Mario) Welcome to the 24th episode of the EBU Access Cast. This is the last episode before our summer break.

My name is Mario Perčinić. I'm coming from Luxembourg. With me today, well, some old and some new faces. I have Paweł Masarczyk from Poland. Hello man.

(Paweł) And that's the old face amongst us. Hello. Hello.

(Mario) Yes, hehe. And we have some new faces because as some of you probably know, and saw on Twitter, we published the ad to look for new people who would like to contribute in our podcast and we have to say huge thanks to everybody who submitted their vacancies to us.

It was really nice to see all of those vacancies and talk to you, all of you, and some of the people are already here today, so… And you will see some more faces in September as well. But except Paweł and me today, we have not one, but two people from Barcelona, Spain.They are Xavier Cisscar.

(Xavier) Hello. I am one of the new faces, as you say. Very nice to be here with you. Very pleased.

(Mario) And David Cisscar as well.

(David) Hello. Hello. Hello. How are you? And greetings to all the people listening this podcast, let see how we can contribute to give another perspective.

(Mario) Yeah, absolutely. That's why we published actually all of the things that we are looking for new contributors, because we would like to expand our team with the new people from new countries so we can bring some new approach to the show and yeah… So welcome to the show, guys.

(Xavier) Thank you very much.

(Mario) Yeah. May I ask you to shortly introduce yourself? What are you doing in your life?

(Xavier) Well, I have been working much time of my life in the printing house in Barcelona from ONCE.

Now I am in a school library working with kids always related to braille. So I am a braillist. Actually, I could define myself as a braillist and I like accessibility and technology and I work in a group as a volunteer called SucDePoma. It began eight years ago and we collaborate with each other to teach people who wants to know things about… Mainly it began with Apple, but now we're expanding because Apple is the way, not the aim. So, well, we have a podcast, we have a Web page, we have meetings and we have a yearly event called Avalon, where we share experiences, talks and everything. So that's my mainly my life.

(Mario) That's nice.

And David, what are you doing? Well, I suppose you're the sound guy?

(David) I am, yes, I do. I actually am working at a bank here in Barcelona, but my work has not very much to do with banking stuff so I am the communication secretary at a trade union in that company. So I'm always dealing with content management and placing mails and well, all that stuff. Also, making videos in campaigns and well, communication stuff. I have a degree in the communication, audio visual communication and well… I have been working also in radio and doing a programme for more than 20 years in the local station here in Barcelona and well, lots of other things, music, theatre or whatever comes along.

(Mario) Excellent. So David will be responsible for our overall sound in the podcast. So, yeah, if we sound bad throw the feedback back to David, hahahaha.

(David) Yes, yes, do that, please, hahahaha.

(Mario) All right. Welcome guys onboard. So let's check out what we have in the news for this month. This is as I said earlier, this is the last podcast before summer. So before we jump in the news section please stay with us until the end we are having the premiere in our podcast. Today we will show you for the first time in Europe demo of the washing machine Miele WDD 131 Guideline. It’s special washing machine for the blind designed by Miele and Tanja will do the demo for us because she purchased the machine. So stay with us until the and and listen the demo please.

Let’s see what did we prepare…

 

Accessibility in the news

(Voice over)

And now… Accessibility in the news.

 

New Apple accessibility features coming this autumn

(Mario) So the first news comes from Apple, no surprise. As WWDC just got finished last month lots of things were shown which were new. Of course, one of many things which were shown were the news in accessibility. So besides many, many things, which they shown, we could see that some new things have got introduced in the iOS 14 beta. For example, VoiceOver got these Back Tap feature, which I see that many people will use it. And also the possibility of recognising the objects and the possibility of sound recognition for people who are deaf or nearly deaf, or it could be also good for deaf blind people as well. And. Yeah. Lots of other things. I think we have some people here who installed some betas on their devices. So how do you do with this version of iOS 14. Do you find it interesting? And what's your opinion?

(Paweł) Well. Well, I would say for a beta it's pretty stable actually.

(Mario) Really?

(Paweł) Yeah, no major crashes that I expected. I don’t know about you.

(Xavier) It's pretty stable and it doesn't crash, but I am finding that the beta is not responding the same in each device because I'm talking to my colleagues and everyone gets different things in different devices. So I'm not very happy about that. It's stable but it's different in each device.

(Paweł) Aha, yeah. For instance, me on the iPod Touch 7th gen, I don't have the access to all the features they promised. I believe all the AI related stuff. So recognising of inaccessible controls or the scanning of a screen to search for something that could be clickable in case the app is completely inaccessible. The back tap. All of that is not available to me on the iPod. And I think it only works from iPhone X up. That's what I read. And even on the iPhone X, I had already reports that some people can't access all of these features. So it's really strange.

(Xavier) But do you think that the Back tap is a AI feature?

(Paweł) No, not really. But I sort of mixed it in the middle with that. But there must be some hardware component that is needed for that and these older devices don't have it.

(Xavier) Because I have installed the second public beta in an iPhone 8 Plus and I can't access to the back tap also. So I don't know because the 8 Plus is not so old.

(Paweł) Yeah. The SE also don’t have it. and the new SE 2020 neither. So it must be some hardware component that it's only available in the newer.

(Xavier) Yeah because the SE 20 is like 8 Plus. No?

(Mario) Yeah.

(Xavier) I don’t know. And there are some even accessibility bugs also because I have installed the beta and for example in the accessibility settings you've got edit box to search and when I see when I write text to search the results, I'm not spoken by a VoiceOver so I get button 1 of 6, button 2 of 6, button 3 of 6 so I can't identify which are the results I'm getting. So I have two enter in each of the results without knowing where I'm going to. So it's not that it's unstable, but, of course, it's a beta and it has to be still to get better.

(Mario) Yeah.

(Paweł) Yeah. By all means. I also believe there is still this longstanding bug that people are longing for it to be fixed, that it's not always when you press the power button that you hear the time announced.

(Xavier) Oh yeah that’s…

(Paweł) For some devices it's still there. It used to work as expected. In iOS 13 something got broken and it's still not fixed. I used the lift to activate,like , when I grab my phone, it awakes so then I can hear the time, but those who activated manually with the power, actually, have a problem there. And I know it's not been fixed for a long time.

(Mario) Uh. That's not nice.

(Xavier) I had too many expectations with the app library because this is a thing that came from Android and the implementation they have done in iOS 14 it's not a good implementation because in Android you've got a plain library, you can organise in folders and as you want. And here, they automatically distribute applications in folders and for example, I got a utility folder with 45 applications and that's not very useful because they join applications that have nothing to do with each other. Something like an app library would be very easy to access for blind people, actually. Many times it would be more useful than all the screens spread over the home screen in the phone. But the implementation they have done is not very useful, actually.

(Mario) Ok.

(Paweł) I saw There are some editing options there. You can actually somehow move the things, but I don't know how advanced that would be and to what degree you can customise this experience.

(Xavier) Not so not a high degree of customisation, actually. So it's not that I have been experimenting with that. It's not a good implementation, I think. That’s my opinion.

(Mario) Well, we'll see. I mean, I suppose that some things might… It's always the case with, you know, betas and stable releases. Maybe some things come and go so well.

Yeah…

(Xavier) Yeah.

(Paweł) Hopefully.

(Mario) What about the VoiceOver recognition new features. What's your opinion about it? Have you tested in? What do you think?

(Xavier) I think that it's got much better than it did in iOS 13. But of course, this will grow up as experience goes on. It's better, it tells you more objects, more things. But it's a very difficult thing, actually. So for me, it's still difficult to… Because I haven't had many experiences which I haven't had much time to look at.

(Mario) OK, yeah. What gets me worried is the fact that now they're saying that the new VoiceOver will be able to recognise the other elements of the UI, such as the sliders, buttons and tables and stuff like that. So what gets me worried is the fact that if this thing proves to be working let's say 70% OK I'm afraid that we might see the fallback of the developers stop taking care about the accessibility standards because they will think, oh, if this thing can recognise the stuff by itself, by AI, why should I care about the overall accessibility development? And I think this is not a proper way to go.

(Xavier) That's the eternal balance between design and screen readers because JAWS and NVDA do many intelligent things with tables, for example, in the Web.

(Mario) Sure.

(Xavier) And we think they are a responsibility of the designers, that tables are well designed and it's not true. It's that screen readers read it in an intelligent way. So it's not true, it’s that designers don't do their work, So it's the same thing actually. Designers have to work better.

(Mario) Yeah.

(Xavier) But it doesn't mean that screen readers don’t work to help us in a better experience in navigations in Inter

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