Ebu Access Cast 07
Jan 23, 2019
Wellcome to the 7th Ebu Access Cast, the first episode for 2019.
We decided to make some changes and refresh our team with new
people. Therefor from now on we have new person who will bring a
girl power into our team. We wish warm wellcome to Tanja Kleut who
is an accessibility specialist at the European parliament, and who
joined Mario and Jakob in this episode.
At the beginning we gave a small round up on the gadgets which each
of us got for the holidays. Jakob got him self a paire of the
Aftershokz
Trekz Air and Mario shared a small tip for all the listeners
how to engage the Equalizer settings on the Aftershokz boan
conduction headsets which dramatically improve the over all sound
of the headset. Mario got him self a new Cubot King Kong
3, very interesting Android smartphone which has military-grade
standards and which is 100% accessible to blind and partially
sighted population. Tanja got her self the Sunu band for which she
herd from our podcast.
This time in the news section we covered quite a lot of
different things.
CES 2019 the biggest Consumer Electronics Show was held just
recently in Las Vegas, and among different things which are being
presented every year, the accessible products have their space as
well. We selected a few for you which we found interesting:
WeWALK 'Smart' Cane For People
With Visual Impairments got the attention this year. Since the
device is very similar to the Sunu band which we previously covered
in our podcast, we said that it would be great to have the smart
ccane tested in the future and compare it with the Sunu band.
VisionCheck, a
paire of new glasses which are able to test your vision at home
were also shown at the CES, so if anybody got the chance to try the
paire, we would like to get the feedback for them.
Google Assistant’s new Interpreter Mode turns Google Home, Smart
Displays into a translation tool. UP untill this point we
couldn't try the feature on our Google home devices because it is
still not available in Europe, so we can't wait to get the feature
available in the future updates of the Google Home app.
The
Paciello Group published their blog post about the CES 2019 and
what they found interesting there, so we are bringing it to you as
the easy read for long winter nights.
Except the CES, a cupple of other accessible tech gadgets cought
our attention as well:
Cash Reader, the
application for money identification just got released in the last
previous weeks, and the app is getting lots of positive feedback
from the visually impaired community for a few particular reasons.
First, the app is covering more than 20 different currencies at
this moment. Also it does not need internet connection to recognise
the bils, it can also announce the ammount of money identified in
silent mode, and all users who want to try the application can test
it for the period of 2 weeks for free and the app will work in full
mode. Currently Cash Reader is available for iOS devices and the
Android version is coming out in the next few weeks.
Breda wins 2019 Access City Award for making the city more
accessible to citizens with disabilities. Nobody from our team
visited Breda, but since we know that we have the listeneres from
the Nederlands we'd like to hear your opinion about it. We also
shortly talked about the accessibility status of our cities, so if
you would like to give us the opinion about the public
accessibility of your city, you are more than wellcome to do it and
we wil publish it in our podcast.
On the January 4th we celebrated the Worlds Braille day. Therefor
we talked about the inportance of knowing Braille and what's going
on in the modern ICT industry regarding various Braille devices,
and what are the trends today regarding the Braille production.
Bristol Braille
Technology: is putting Canute, the world's first multi-line digital
Braille e-reader into the production this year. Canute is
another device which is gaining lot of attention at this moment,
and besides being the first multi-line digital Braille e-reader, it
falls into the category of very affordable devices such as the
Orbit reader 20 which was just launched a few months ago.
For the end of the podcast Tanja shared some accessibility news as
well.
Updated and harmonised EU Standards for public procurement of ICT
products and services are available.24 accessibility recommendations from
accessibility experts
This time we didn't have the time for any recorded tips or tutorials for you because there was a lot of stuff to cover but we will be back with it next month for sure. As always you are free to send us e-mail or drop us a Tweet on our official Twitter page. We are looking forward to be back with you next month.