Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon interview Steven Scott & Shaun Preece of Double Tap - a daily show focused on technology for the blind and visually impaired. They discuss their transition from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to partnering with Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) in Canada to create a unique platform where disabled people tell their own stories. The conversation explores the transformative power of AI, specifically how tools like Claude enable non-coders to build specialized assistive software and hardware. They examine the current state of global accessibility, highlighting the difference between corporate marketing and deep, meaningful inclusion. The discussion concludes with a live demonstration of an accessible radio designed and programmed by Scott using AI.
OUTLINE:
00:00 Opening Teaser
00:34 Introduction
01:08 How Did You Meet and Launch The Show?
08:07 What is AMI (Accessible Media Inc.)?
10:05 How Did Shaun Become Involved with Podcasting?
12:33 What's The Goal of Double Tap?
20:48 Who's The Team Behind Double Tap?
23:42 How Do You Prepare For Each Episode?
27:38 How Has Accessibility Changed Over The Years?
29:35 Why Is It Still Challenging For Some Companies To Understand The Benefits of Accessibility?
31:31 Is Accessibility As Widespread As Some Companies Proclaim?
35:21 Increasing Employment of People with a Disability Could Encourage Accessibility
38:00 How GAAD Is Embraced By Some Companies & Organizations
42:26 Shaun's Idea of Compulsory Disability For The Entire Population
43:23 Steven's Idea For A Netflix Series About A Blind Serial Killer
44:11 How Will AI Affect Accessibility?
46:57 Vibe Coding Is A Lot Easier Than People Think
55:28 How Steven Created An Accessible Radio For Blind People
01:02:09 Wrap Up
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EPISODE LINKS:
Double Tap - Where Blind People Talk Tech
https://doubletaponair.com
Joe Devon & Eamon McErlean on Double Tap - Feb 2, 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtFwb3MPzE
Joe Devon on Double Tap - May 15, 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Nr6bZRzPI
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
https://accessibility.day
Claude
https://claude.com
Mastodon
https://mastodon.social
NEO Home Robot
https://www.1x.tech/discover/neo-home-robot
Steven Scott on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-scott-7640bbbb/
Double Tap on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/doubletaponair/
- I always had this idea of a series for Netflix. Someone will steal this I'm sure and do it now, but I had this idea of a blind serial killer, but he didn't know he was a serial killer. He would just go around and accidentally bump into people and that person might fall on a railway track or--.
- Oh, Steven, that's Mr. Magoo, isn't it?
- The accidental serial killer type of thing.
- And then he'd go home and he'd put his radio on at night and be like, "Oh, that's terrible what happened to that poor person." No idea.
- This is great. I love it. I'd watch that with audio description, of course.
- Welcome to episode 18 of "Accessibility + Gen AI," the podcast where we talk to the people shaping the world of accessibility and artificial intelligence. I'm Joe Devon joined by my co-host Eamon McErlean. And today we're speaking with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece from "Double Tap," the show where blind people talk tech. Steven, Shaun, welcome to the pod.
- It's great to be here. I'm honored.
- Yeah, me too, it's a pleasure. Thank you.
- Well, having been on your show, I always have a lot of fun with you guys. But I would love to understand one thing. How did you meet and how did you wind up starting this show? Just tell us whatever you want about the show and yourselves.
- Wow. Well, that's over to you, Steven.
- That could take an hour so we could be here a bit. Yeah.
- Yeah, exactly. I know. Yeah.
- I'll go make a tea. You carry on, Steven.
- Well, you know, it's a story I've told a few times now and of course to our audience, I've told it many times. Shaun and I met, I was doing another show for RNIB RNIB in the UK is the Royal National Institute of Blind People. And they had a radio station. And on that radio station, they had a show called "Tech Talk," which I had created for the radio station back then. And we started off doing the show and it was a fairly, if I'm honest, it was pretty boring. I was doing some interviews. I was doing some reviews. It wasn't really getting much traction. There wasn't much audience interaction. And I thought, "I need to do something about this." And I thought, you know, "I'm a radio guy. I've come to this with a radio mindset." And, you know, I started off doing talk radio. That was the thing I started off doing back in the day. My boss didn't want me to do talk radio, but I did it anyway because I like talking. And, you know, it was funny, the first show I ever did on radio, you know, it was meant to be a music show. And there were 15 tracks in the hour and I played three of them because I talked all the way through the rest of it. And so, you know, talk radio became my thing. I loved engaging with the audience. I loved getting people on. And I thought, "I need to bring some of that to this." I had kind of taken a very different tack with the show. And I was looking around. I was listening to different podcasts and I was listening to all kinds of stuff. And I heard this voice on a podcast talking about installing Windows 10, most boring topic you can imagine, right? And this guy who's presenting it is just making me laugh out loud. It's like real funny, you know, just real making me laugh. And I'm like, "Who is this guy? I've got to talk to this guy." And so I reached out and managed to get a conversation with him. Shaun wasn't available. No, I'm only kidding. No, it was Shaun.
- And so that was it. We met and we kind of connected, I think, probably in that first conversation. We must have spoken for the best part of an hour and a half just on that first call.
- Yeah, yeah. And we talked and the thing that kind of got us together and the thing that clicked was both of us were at that time, different eye conditions we both have, but both of us were in a position where we were starting to use our white canes more and we were really nervous about doing it. We really felt like, you know, this is something which is deeply personal. It's very difficult, it was very difficult to talk to anyone about 'cause you had to meet someone at that same level at that time. And the issue for me was just feeling confident and comfortable using the cane. And so Shaun was in a very similar situation. We both talked about, you know, we'd both moved into new areas at that time and both of us would get to our street and we would fold our canes up and put them in our bags and then walk down our street to our house 'cause, you know, the neighbors never knew we were visually impaired, you know?
- What would they think?
- Well, walking up to the wrong door for a start usually. You know, it was usually a giveaway. But, you know, we clicked on that. We really clicked on it. And it was at that moment I think, I don't know, in my head, I just thought, "I wanna get to know this guy more. I want him on the show." He got involved on the show and it literally just clicked. And we've been best mates ever since.
- Yeah, absolutely. I'm quite frankly amazed that I read the email. I never read email. So it must have been fate, Steven Scott.
- I know.
- Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the key of it all, isn't it? It's just the conversation is just a conversation between friends, so...
- Yeah.
- It seems to come across.
- Best friends.
- Yeah.
- And he never says that. He says best friends. He just says friends.
- You just said it, you just said it, that's it, Steven. You're committed.
- I'm gonna get that tape wound back and I wanna hear that.
- And how long ago was this? Was it 2017?
- Oh.
- 2015, wasn't it? 2015?
- You're asking me? I have no memory at all. I remember I was using a symbol cane. And the first time I met you, I believe it was in Glasgow or Edinburgh, we went to a conference. I met you and I got out the taxi with my symbol cane and you just said, like, "You can't use that" 'cause I was falling all over the place and it was just terrible. And you threw a long cane at me.
- I actually got one from a colleague at the conference and I threw it at him and I said, "You're gonna learn to use this because you're not walking around all day hanging onto my back, I can't do this."
- And 17 years on, I still am.
- Yeah, exactly, I now buy backpacks with a handle on them and I call it my Shaun handle.
- It's just easier, what can I say?
- And you just hang on to me at the back and just drag him around.
- You are my guide dog. It's great.
- Yeah, that's right.
- And it was love ever since.
- Absolutely, yeah.
- It's a bromance. What can you say?
- So then the show, had you the show going before that, Steven? Or was it just then when Shaun and you met, you decided "Double Tap?"
- Well, so the "Double Tap" story kind of came along a little bit by accident. So Accessible Media Inc. in Canada were looking to broaden their own horizons. They had their own radio station as well in Canada. And they were looking to bring live programming to it. And as well as doing the tech show at RNIB, I was doing a morning show. And the morning show was like a newspaper show. So it was like having volunteers coming in, reading the daily papers. It was a great conversation every day and, you know, lots of opinion and news interviews and stuff. It was right up my street. I loved it. And I was doing that and they wanted to try and not replicate it, but they wanted to understand how we were doing it. And so when they came over, they sat with me for a few days and they basically understood how the show worked and they learned about it. And in amongst all the conversations in between, they said, "So what else do you do, Steven?" And I said, "Well, I do a tech show. It's called "Tech Talk" and I do this thing." and they were like, "Oh, okay." And they took a great interest in it. And we ended up, there was I think a year where "Tech Talk" actually was aired on AMI-audio, as well as in the UK on RNIB Radio. And at the end of that year, the decision was kind of made, "Look, we kind of want our own show. We wanna do something on our own. And we'd love you and Shaun to host that." And so I said, "How much?" No, I didn't, I said, "Sounds good." And yeah, that was it. And "Double Tap" was born. "Double Tap," the name born out of the action, the double tap gesture that you do with your smartphone. Some people thought it's related to a cane, a cane tapping, but no, it was born out of the idea of a double tap as an action. I later learned it's also something to kill zombies and something to do with guns. So if you search for it, you get quite a mix on Google, I'll tell you.
- I'm sure.
- Very cool. AMI itself is kind of an interesting story in terms of what kind of network it is. Radio, TV, but very unique. Can you tell us a bit about that and its relationship to Canada and how it all came about?
- Yeah, I've gotta say, so AMI is an incredible institution and frankly, I think it should be replicated everywhere in the world because what it does, it ultimately allows for disabled people to get involved, to share and to create their own stories. You know, it's a network. It's a TV and radio network essentially. They have three channels in fact. They have AMI-tv. They have AMI-tele, which is the French Canadian version, and they have AMI-audio, which is the channel we're on, the audio channel. And that is broadcast across Canada. It is paid for by the subscriptions of people who have cable subscriptions. So if you have a cable subscription in Canada, I think it's like a dollar of that or even not a dollar of that goes towards AMI's funding. And, you know, that's changed a lot over the years and of course that will continue to evolve because of course, as we know, the number of people cutting that cord and going for streaming-only services has gone up and therefore that is having an impact on the budgets. But all media is in that situation at the minute. But what is fascinating about what AMI does is it is all about handing literally the microphone or the camera to a disabled person and saying, "Okay, it's time to tell your story." But it's done professionally with disabled people at the heart. And I love what they do. I absolutely adore it. I love being part of it because it's such an important mission. And as I say, I just wish other parts of the world had one.
- Oh, it should be global. I've got no doubt about that whatsoever. It'd be just so useful. They do an amazing job.
- Yeah, it makes sense. It's like, it does. It's one of them things that just makes common sense. It really does. So Shaun, yourself, before then, the last 10 years, you've always been physically and mentally abused by Steven on an ongoing basis. Before that you were an audio engineer, correct?
- It was my partner, yes, abusing me before that. And now it's Steven, yes.
- It never stops. It just never stops.
- Well, no, no, actually, I wasn't. I mean, I've been unemployed for the longest time. How I got into this was that it was purely through social media really. There was an app called Zello back in the day. I don't know if anyone remembers that. And it's, you know, just a place to hang out, audio only, walkie-talkie kind of app. And, you know, like a lot of these things, it appeared on AppleVis and then, whew, it's full of blind people in here. This is great. And I spent a lot of time on there and I met a lot of people I'm still friends with today, you know, almost 20 years later. Anyway, we got together and of course this is at the height of the iPhone and everyone being interested in this new accessible thing. And so a few of us got together and we just started... I didn't even hear of podcasts at that point, to be honest. I wasn't really up on it at all. And a friend of mine, Garth, said that, "Yeah, I wanna try making a podcast." I go, "What's that?" Okay. So got together and they asked me to come on. So I came on and we started, you know, just recording and I was just recording using my earbuds on a phone but it just grew and grew from there. And then I really started to get involved in the audio editing part of it. I suppose it was 'cause I sounded so awful and still do, but I sounded so awful I wanted to, what can we do here? Thank you. What can we do here? So I started getting into audio editing, you know, and I started looking into... I started in Audacity. And from then on, I just sort of fell in love with the whole editing process, which is kind of ironic 'cause oh, it's hard work now. But there's something about editing that I really do enjoy. So I sort of fell into it from that. And that's how I got into podcasting. And then I started doing demos and things like that. And of course, as Steven just said, that's how I met up with Steven. So, I mean, you know, not qualified in any sense of the word possibly. But yeah, I really did fall in love with the audio editing. That producing something was something I really did like.
- That's cool. That's cool. And if somebody asked you, "What's the goal of 'Double Tap'?" Like, we kind of understand where it was originated in yourselves and that journey combining together, but is there a bigger picture goal apart from sharing as much knowledge, bringing in people to discuss it and do what Joe and I do or like what's the North Star?
- Well, you know, someone said to me once, you know, "The show is very successful. You have a lot of listeners. You get great interaction. You know, what do you attribute to the success?" And I say, "Low expectations is the honest answer to that." We didn't really have much in the way of expectation, did we? We didn't set out with some big grand mission here. It was really just Shaun and I enjoyed doing the show and when "Double Tap" started, it felt like an opportunity to just do that. And bear in mind when we started it, it was only a weekly show. So we were only there once a week. And it was a really nice get together for both of us. And when I left the RNIB, I left RNIB back in 2021. And this is no joke, guys. I got bored very quickly as I thought I might. I got bored. And I thought, "You know what we should do? We should do this every day." And Shaun said, "Are you insane?" And I said, "Yes, but I wanna do it anyway." And he said, "Okay." So we set up a podcast, right? Nothing to do with "Double Tap." This was just a little podcast we created called "Blind Guy Talks Tech." And put it on an Apple Podcast and wherever else we could put it and started pushing out episodes. And we were getting like 6 to 800 downloads a day. And I'm like, "Wow, how did that happen?" And obviously people who had liked what we did on TikTok together and liked "Double Tap" were coming over and were hunting this out. And, of course, word spreads like wildfire in our community. If something's good, people will talk about it. And if it's bad, they'll talk about it as well.
- Yeah, even more.
- Yeah. Sometimes that helps as well. We get it from both sides, but we decided to do that. And then I remember, we call him Mr. F on the show, he is the big boss man over at AMI. He was in England. We met for drinks and we went to your local, I guess, pub, Shaun, for lunch.
- That's right, yes.
- And we got him jacked up on whiskey. And we said to him, "You know, this 'Double Tap' thing, you know, we do it once a week. We could do it every day." And he said, "Mm, okay. Really?"
- And he said, "How much?"
- Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
- I was shaking my head. Yeah.
- "What are you thinking of here?" And I said, "Well, I think we could do it." There was so much news coming out. And I think AI was beginning at that point to really bite. And it felt like news stories around mainstream technology were just exploding. And we were starting to get a lot more regular updates on technology in the specialist sense. So I thought, "Actually, there's a lot we could talk about. And if we don't restrict ourselves to just talking about assistive technology, and we talk more broadly than that, I mean, driverless cars, for example, right?" Not necessarily you would immediately think of a technology for blind people, but of course it is. AI, all the potential there. And yeah, it kind of supercharged the news coverage or the news capability that we could bring into the show. And we thought, "Well, doing a daily show wouldn't be that challenging." And of course we had a lot of great conversations we were having with people, a lot of great guests. So we just really supercharged it. And then we went on air doing it five days or six days a week, I think we did five to start.
- I think it was five when we started.
- Five probably when we started, yeah. And every year--
- Steven said that wasn't enough.
- Just what about Saturday and Sunday? Just felt like boring. So, you know, what do these people do at the weekend? They're not listening to us. What are they doing with the lives?
- "We rest, Steve and Scott. That's what we're meant to be doing."
- No, I don't care about us. I care about our audience. We can't leave them hanging for two days.
- Oh.
- Aw.
- That old line. I like it so much.
- That was good. The way he feathered that in was good.
- But actually when you're saying that, it isn't actually just about the news, right? Is there enough? 'Cause that's exactly the question I had. Is there enough to talk about every dDay?
- Yeah, that's the first thing I would think of. Like how do you keep it interesting on a daily basis?
- Yeah.
- How does that work? Like Joe and I do it, what? Once every month, month and a half. We find that tough, nevermind every day.
- Well, it does help, like Steven's background in radio. Steven could talk. He could do an entire week on his own anyway. So, I mean, that is a bonus. But there is always something to talk about, but I think it is more than that. I think as the listeners grew with the show and the interaction, 'cause that's key for "Double Tap, I think is the interaction we get from the listeners because, I mean, we can have a couple of shows a week if we wanted. We could have more where it's just, you know, emails and voice messages and feedback. And, you know, ask tech questions or usually it's tech questions to be fair. But it can take us in so many different conversations. And actually, we've had conversations that run across multiple shows, right? And as we're having a conversation, again, I don't wanna push the point, but as we're just almost talking as friends, it's conversations that are going on anyway that we're having off air and sometimes we get confused. Did we talk about this off air or on air? But the conversation, because we're doing it every day, it does feel like it almost goes on, you can continue a conversation, continue a topic. And of course, with the interviews that we get as well now, it is actually a lot easier than I thought it was gonna be because I had exactly the same question. Can we really talk about, you know, is there a new Braille display every day or is there a new, you know, whatever it is? But actually, when you look at it, the conversation, especially technology, technology encompasses so much now. The conversation, it just is ongoing, especially now with AI.
- Well, I mean, a good example was today actually. We recorded a show today, which as you listen to this, would have probably gone out a couple of weeks ago. And we intended to record wraps around an interview that we had done. And it was going to be like 10, 15 minutes of recording time. We started the show, we got into it... So bear in mind, we have like 15 minutes to talk. The show each day is 56 minutes long. It has to be 56 minutes to fit in with the showtime on air because it's a broadcast show, right? It is a podcast, but it's a broadcast show first. And we had 15 minutes to fill. And by minute 22, I realized, well, we've over shot that boundary a little bit. We may as well just keep going. And so we just did, and we didn't discuss it. I mean, we didn't stop and say, "Hmm, should we continue this?" We just kept going, and at one point Shaun, at the end of the show said, "What's that?" 'Cause he, he could hear the outro music coming on. And he's like, "Is that the end of the show?" I'm like, "Yeah, yeah. We just did the whole show." 'Cause sometimes you just get into it. And I think if you allow that natural conversation to happen. In my world, it's about--
- That's the key.
- Yeah, it's about taking a topic and extrapolating it, you know, and really just, you know, stretching it out as far as it can go, but also getting as much out of that as possible. Rinse that sponge as much as you can to get as much out of it. And that's what creates the content.
- You're really selling the show there, Steven.
- Just fill and wring out a topic until there's nothing left to be said.
- He's right though. He can just do radio throughout. You can follow that natural conversation. It can go a long way and end up leading to the place you want it to lead to anyway.
- Well, that's the trick. That is the trick. It's about, you know, you can have a long conversation. We could all do that, right? The four of us could probably do five hours just on AI, right? Where we're at, where we're going, where it's... Even just today where we're at, we could do a five-hour conversation on it. But the challenge is just keeping it in time, keeping it to time. And that's one thing that I loved about growing up in radio was that you learned how to keep things to time, how to maneuver the conversation to where you needed it to get to so that it could get to the natural endpoint. It's not easy to do, but, you know, I've had a lot of years doing it, yeah.
- No, you find it easy, Steven.
- Yeah.
- Before we dive into the AI discussion, like with them daily episodes, what type of team do you have? Do you have a editor, production guy, coordinator, all the above? Do you do a lot of it yourselves? How does that work?
- Well, it's... Hi. So yeah, no, there are some more people involved, some amazing people involved. So Shaun does all the audio editing side of it. So the show for broadcast and for the podcast, Shaun puts that together. We don't edit the show. We genuinely don't edit the show. Now, there is an edit involved in the sense that if we have an interview that we've recorded previously, we would record around that interview and then that's put together. So that's an edit, I suppose. But it's like LEGO bricks at that point, right? It's like an IKEA table. You know, one of the cheap ones.
- Yeah, I do, I do know them.
- Similar quality. And, you know, that is essentially how we do the show. But we're moving towards, and we did this before, but we're gonna go back to 'cause I prefer it. I much prefer live, just totally live. So we play everything live in. We just do the show for an hour. We play the interview in live. And it means we can hear everything, we can react to everything. 'Cause sometimes Shaun might do an interview I don't hear, I might do an interview Shaun doesn't hear, and it doesn't work the same when you don't have that live component where, you know, Shaun can say at the end of it, "Wow, that was interesting" or "I wanna pick up on this topic." So we're gonna get back to that. But when we get to that stage, and we've been there before, we changed direction production wise a while ago, but we get to that point, the show is literally done as soon as we hit stop. You know, once we hit stop, it gets timed perfectly and then it goes off and it basically just gets turned into various audio parts. The video side, I'm doing a lot more of them. We'll talk about the AI side in a minute, but, you know, I'm using AI for a lot of stuff now. And the capability of it is just immense. But we also have an amazing editor in Jordan Steeves who does the video editing side of things. Marc Aflalo, who's the business manager who basically, you know, works on not just the show contracts, but also the sponsorship side of things. We have Laura Kirker, who is our email reader and she is wonderful and she's real, and not AI. We did have to employ AI recently because we get so many emails she couldn't keep up. And Laura's been involved heavily in the production of the new "Harry Potter" series for Audible. So she's really been doing a lot of stuff. So she's not had a huge amount of time. So we tried to do that. And of course we have some other people around to deal with social media and so on. But yeah, there are a few people involved, but the day-to-day show, the production or if you like the idea of the show kind of falls onto me and Shaun and I do the whole thing together.
- You gotta say that's a compliment from Laura, right? Doing "Harry Potter" and doing "Double Tap." There you go.
- That's nice.
- It's not a bad deal, is it?
- That's impressive.
- Yeah.
- Very impressive.
- How much preparation goes into every show? Do you put a lot of research beforehand or you just wing?
- Well...
- 'Cause a daily show, it's tough.
- It is tough. I mean, it's interesting, right? People ask this question and the temptation is to say what you feel the truth is, which is no, we just wing it. But the truth is we do wing it, but we wing the conversation. And I like that, but that is based upon a lot of research beforehand. I'm reading a lot. We're listening to a lot of articles. We're going through, we're prepping maybe stories we want to talk about. But the actual conversation, that's the wing it part. And sometimes we've researched like four or five stories and we never touched the two of them. You know, we only get into a couple and then--
- Conversation didn't go that way.
- Yeah, and we just thought, you know, "Whatever, we mention it in the end." I always start the show with like a note or literally an Apple Notes open, three or four things I really wanna hit that day. And I guarantee you I'll never hit any of them because I always forget to go back to the Apple Note. You know, and then it just sits there and that note gets longer every day until I eventually say, "Right, I actually must go back and do these things." It's like, right, okay, order of business, we must do this. But you know, I think the magic of the show is that we do have the knowledge to talk about what we're talking about. And I'm very precise in that. You know, we're not experts in anything or everything. But we can talk about the things we know, but we do it in such a way that we hope is engaging for people and that they realize that we're reading this article. I mean, there's one we did on one of the shows last week about a smart driving toilet, which, you know, on the face of it is ridiculous. But it was an incredible story. It fascinated me. And by the end of the article, I was really pre-ordering one I was so intrigued by this thing. And it was just because I was reading the notes 'cause I was actually reading the notes as we were doing it. And I'm like, "It does that? It does that as well." It was blowing me away, you know? And I love that discovery. It's the same with interviews. You know, when I do interviews, I do prep more now than I used to, but I'm generally against too much preparation because I think what tends to happen is people get so hung up on the questions they're asking, they don't listen to the answers they're getting. And I'd rather discover it with the audience. So, you know, my line used to be, "Who the hell are you and why do you exist?" And that was usually my starting point. And it usually relaxed people into a kind of yeah, okay, right.
- A soft start.
- Yeah, that right, yeah. Punch them in the face and let's go from there. And actually for a lot of people, it worked really well, especially nervous people because a lot of people come on, they're terrified, they've never done this before. They're really nervous about it. And then suddenly you've just got this, okay. And, you know, we are always saying, you know, "We're the idiots in the room. You guys are the smart people." It's exactly the same right now.
- Yes.
- Things change. But, you know, to me it's just about having that conversation, being real, being honest as much as you want to be about yourself 'cause we do pour a lot of ourselves into the show. And I think that's what gives it the character as well.
- You have the perfect mixture. You do. Because I think yourself and Shaun have this combination of that foundational knowledge, which you mentioned, which is key. And then when you mix that in with being self-deprecating and not being scripted and just going with a flow and have a natural conversation, that's a nice picture. It is. It's a really nice picture. So congrats on the success so far.
- Yeah, thank you. I don't think you should take yourself too seriously. It's as simple as that.
- 100%.
- At the end of the day, what are we doing? We're not changing the world. I'm not writing a UN treaty. You know, I'm doing a show from my back bedroom, you know, in shorts most of the time, but a nice top.
- Oh. Oh, TMI, I didn't need to know that.
- Beautiful image.
- But that's the reality.
- Like we're lying.
- How do you feel accessibility has changed over the years? And I'm curious about this having co-founded GAAD, Global Accessibility Awareness Day for the audience members who may not know. It started out, the entire industry seemed to be pretty depressed. And then over the years, things seemed to get better, but then anytime a report would come out in terms of the state of accessibility, the numbers were not good. And I think at the end of the day the question is: for users of assistive technology, do you feel that things have gotten better or worse or a little of both?
- Wow, the easy questions. The state of accessibility. I think accessibility is constantly changing, to be honest. I'm a little bit worried about the state of accessibility now with certain directions we're seeing governments going. But I think as a whole, I think accessibility awareness has improved a lot. I still remember back in the day ringing companies up and asking about if something is accessible and they simply having no idea what I'm talking about. And that still happens today, to be honest, but at least it feels like accessibility is something kind of known about. When it comes down to the accessibility of things like websites and apps, it's so difficult, isn't it? I don't know... We have this conversation all the time about what is the answer because we have the technology, sounds familiar, we have the technology to make things accessible, but it still seems like we have to constantly remind people and companies that accessibility exists. And every year that goes on, you know, you think, "Well, we're moving forward." But it often does feel like two steps forward, one step back. And I don't know what the answer is. I still say legislation is the only way that you ever make change.
- Why is that? Can somebody explain to me why that is? Like if you take a step back and look at it logically and share with any leaders or any organization building software and say, "Okay, you do this, this, this and this, then it's fully inclusive and fully accessible and these are the benefits." Why has that not really sunk in yet? It amazes me. It really does. It actually annoys me and amazes me both, but I just don't get it.
- No, you're absolutely right.
- I don't get it. I really don't.
- It's numbers, I think. I just think it's as simple as that.
- Priorities. Yeah, yeah.
- I think they look at the numbers of people. I remember someone telling me they had taken a phone they had developed to one of the big UK phone companies to sell, you know, on their network. And he said, "This is a great device. It's built for blind people. It's gonna, you know, enable blind people to use this." Well, it wasn't a smartphone, it was more of a kind of traditional type candy bars type phone with buttons. But it talked, it had large text and all that. And they just kept asking him, "Oh, okay, what's the market share here? What's the market share?" "Well, you know, it's a small market because it's blind people, but very important market, very important." "Yeah, I understand that, but, you know, what is that market share? What are we talking about?" And in the end, they said no. And then he went back six months later with the same product, but sold it as for elderly people and for people who are a little bit more confused about, you know, modern phones and would like something a little bit easier to use. "Oh, what's the market share?" "Bigger number." "Okay, we're interested." And so that I think ultimately is it. I mean, it's one example. It's not that's it, it must only be that. I mean, we've argued the point is the right thing to do. We've argued the point that it's worth it to do it, it will make you money. And it doesn't resonate. It just does not resonate with companies. Never enough. And I think the thing that always irks me around Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and I feel, Joe, for you and Jennison, sometimes it feels a bit of a slap in the face to you two and it really annoys me, but the amount of companies who will proclaim this day and hold it up and say, "Look, well, we do this too and we've done this amazing thing over here." And okay, they may have done one thing, but I sometimes feel it's like I used to work in... You know, I worked in charity, I've worked in other places. I remember the marketing people coming around, you know, almost with a tick list of, "Right, we've got this special day coming up. What have you got to attribute to it?" And then just tick, right? "We've ticked that box." Next.
- For that day, for that day. Yeah.
- Yeah. Just for that day.
- And actually when you dig into that particular announcement, you'll learn that perhaps it isn't quite as widespread as you make out. Or, you know, I remember one company getting very excited because they had a signed movie on their on-demand platform. One. It's like, "How many movies are on your network? And you've got one, but you're hailing that as such?" "But it's Global Accessibility Awareness Day." We've done this thing."
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, that's not enough.
- Honestly, that was my concern when I joined ServiceNow, like five years ago because customers were escalating, right? There's a lot of escalations going on and my concern was joining, I'm like, "Okay, what happens when the customers are not escalating anymore? Does it just die away?" And I'm happy to say ServiceNow are still focusing, meaning training across the board, making sure engineers, mandatory training for all, accessibility training they need to do, making it part of the definition of done. Like, we want to be a real champion and we do recognize that it can be a revenue change and a positive revenue change if you do it properly. And one of the things I always keep saying is, and you touched upon the one thing of the market share and the growth, but the other side of that is the features and functionality that were born from an accessibility perspective. You mentioned the phone, look at the iPhone back in 2017, right? If it wasn't for FingerWorks two years before and Jony I've, walk a mile lady who was using FingerWorks technology, the iPhone would never be the iPhone. Period.
- Yeah.
- So, you know, I think there's multiple ways to look at it, but you're right, I do see way too many companies shouting it from the rooftops for a day or two or a week or two, but then when you look a little bit deeper, it's really not there as much as you--
- Oh, it's all for show. I mean, and look, not all cases of course.
- Ooh, that's a bit, yeah, it's a bit harsh.
- Not every companies of course.
- Absolutely not.
- No. There are some great examples out there. Amazing companies are doing great things. And I'm actually sometimes surprised that, like, for example, Google, I mean, I sometimes think, I know they do announcements and stuff on that day, but I often think, "You guys really should be shouting about this because you've got a lot of great stuff." I'm always shouting on their behalf. Hang on, why are you not doing that? You need to be shouting about this. You know, it is a day for championing but it needs to be real and it can't just be in the same way it's National Burger Day. So, you know, some burger company says, "Look, we do burgers too." That can't be the way we approach this. It's not good enough.
- Can be seen as marketing.
- I've always thought if you could flip the empathy switch. Like I've never met an engineer or designer that spent time with an individual that has a disability, spent real time with them and said, "Oh, now I get it." Right? Now I understand the real need. So to me, that's like the empathy switch or knowledge switch or visibility switch, whatever you wanna call it. I think the best way to market us what we're trying to do is align on what is the best way to flip that switch across the board and really get that message across without having to spend time.
- There is another part to this, which is employment. If you had more people who are blind or disabled more generally in employment, because I genuinely believe, you know, when you go into an office, you know, and I don't mean CEO and I don't mean the C-suite, it doesn't have to, I mean, yes, that's of course the goal and it should be the goal, but I'm talking across every level of a company. If you have people working there who are disabled, that barrier will start to go away from the people who are working around them. That is the best advocacy you can do because ultimately what happens is in the first few weeks of the job, you'll think, "Hmm, can that blind guy do this job? Is he capable of this?" And in one day something will happen where you'll, as the sighted person, for example, might just turn around and say, "Does anyone know how to do?" And the blind guy says, "Oh yeah, I can help you with that." And then suddenly it's clicked. This person's a human being, not a disability, a human being. That's I think--
- And a capable one.
- And yeah, that's the bit that's missing. I bark on about this on the show as much as anyone will let me. Oh, wait, I've got a show, I can, so it's cool. They do let me, but I honestly, I get so annoyed by identity politics. It's such a divisive thing. We've got to stop this. This putting ourselves in boxes and, you know, even in the blind community it happens. You know, are you blind or are you low vision? Now, okay, there's very distinct categories, but there starts off a fight between the two. You see the upset between that community of, "Well, you know, I'm blind and are you blind enough to be, you know, are you low vision enough to be blind or actually you're more in that category." Why are we doing this to ourselves? We're just human beings at the end of the day. If my neighbor's house is on fire, I don't care if he's gay, Black, a woman, I don't care about any of that stuff. I'm going to help him get out of his house because he's a human being.
- Unless it's Shaun, unless it's Shaun, right? And then it's different.
- Unless it's Shaun, which in case.
- Yeah, exactly. And that's only to stop your own house burning down.
- That is exactly right.
- I think we're going to the pub. Going to the pub, yeah.
- No, but you're right. I mean, when it comes down to the what's the answer to true accessibility, there's just so many different angles there, right? Employment and I think also education, you know, people coming up through coding, do they actually even get taught much about accessibility? Is it just all about the UI rather than some sort of separate bolt-on thing? There's just so many different angles and vectors of attack. I don't know what the answer is, but I would flip that back on you two. What do you think? I mean, Joe specifically.
- Yeah, one thing I'd like to just respond to on the GAAD thing, what a lot of people don't realize is for me, at least half of GAAD is hidden. It's not out there for people to see. So while there is plenty of marketing budget around it, for me, most of it is organizations that have accessibility departments use that as sort of a tent pole in order to do training internally and sometimes that's a full day of training, sometimes it's a week and sometimes it's the entire month of May. Like Amazon, for example, has Global Accessibility Awareness Month where they have a full day every day for 30 days of training or the entire month of May essentially of training and those are the places where I feel like a difference is being made.
- Yeah. That's real.
- Yeah. And I just love that aspect of it. What was funny was I once did a talk at an organization, you know, one of these corporations that own every single company in a certain category and it was a lunch and learn, which was my first lunch and learn. So I got to see a whole bunch of people that were eating while you're speaking, which is very awkward. And the people--
- So this would be a comedy act in Vegas, right?
- Yeah, yeah, and the people didn't seem to really care and it was still early on in my journeys, both as a public speaker and doing this, and I got upset, you know, and it kind of showed through and I was like, you know, one of my fears of GAAD was that it would be like the cancer awareness with the pink ribbons. There was a documentary called "Pink Ribbons" where they were showing what is the actual outcome because all these corporations say they care and yet the cancer rates went up. And I was like, "I never wanted to see that to be a marketing thing. It really has to matter." And the most interesting thing was there was one person in the corner that was completely engaged and at the end he raised his hand and he said, "I'm the CEO of the organization and I care about accessibility and the entire organization. We want to be accessible all the way." And that was a big lesson. You just never know who's in the audience.
- That's a big part of it as well. That's a huge part of it, right? You just need someone in the audience, I mean, ideally the CEO, but it could be anyone to light the fire and actually carry that torch. I'm using a lot of metaphors with fire and I don't quite know where I'm going. But, you know, ultimately carrying torches that are on fire is not recommended in an office, I'll admit, but, you know, it is something that I think is important. People do need to really take this on. And, you know, there are some organizations, I know some that have their accessibility champions and so on. Again, that's good if it's meaningful. It's good if it does something and everyone has a different measurement of what that actually is. Again, I'm just always wary that it's done... Having seen it in reality sometimes, I think it can be a bit of a show. That makes me nervous. It always makes me nervous. But, you know, I think ultimately because they're aren't in employment. And, you know, Eamon, you picked up on this as well, you know, it's talking to people because here's the thing, I remember my first ever engagement at the charity. First one of my first meetings actually 15 years ago or 15 years when I started and it was a bunch of excited people in the room saying, "You know, what would be really good if we actually talked to some blind people about this?" And it was just the most amazing... It was like the whole room were just, "Wow. That's a moment right here. We've just had a moment." This is an Oprah--
- But where do we find them?
- Aha, yeah, exactly. Does anyone know a blind person?
- A cackle of blind people.
- We have three, yeah, we got three, yeah, exactly, just yeah.
- Oh, and by the way, we're not gonna pay them, but we'll absolutely, you know, take them of all their ideas.
- Right, 'cause we're helping them, right? So we don't need to pay them, right?
- Of course. That's right. And so, you know, that has become our problem as well and that's the case in a lot of places. I think we just have to be careful. I think, you know, it is about bringing people in, but, you know, again, you have to pay people. You know, if you want expertise and that's what you consider this to be, and it's valuable enough to have the conversation, it's valuable enough for the dollar.
- What do you think about my idea for compulsory disabilities for the whole population at the age of 21? As soon as you hit 21--
- Yeah, compulsory. Can you pick what yours is or how does that work?
- Well, yeah, that's doing the workshopping.
- Settle in for this one, guys.
- Yeah, this could be a while. Yeah.
- I know. It's all about flicking that switch of empathy, right? And it's not until you experience it, and we always talk about, you know, disability. Everyone's gonna come across a disability, be it temporary or permanent at some point in their lifetime. I say just get it out of the way first. Everyone gets a taste of disability and I think disability makes you a better person. There you go. I'll make that happen. Shaun for president. Sorry?
- Are you writing the script for that movie? There's another movie where there's no laws for a day. I don't remember the name of it but this sounds like that.
- Oh, "The Purge."
- "The Purge" Yeah, it's the good purge. This is the good purge. I always had this idea of a series for Netflix. Someone will steal this I'm sure and do it now, but I had this idea of a blind serial killer, but he didn't know he was a serial killer. He would just go around and accidentally bump into people and that person might fall on a railway track or--.
- Oh, Steven, that's Mr. Magoo, isn't it?
- The accidental serial killer type of thing.
- And then he'd go home and he'd put his radio on at night and be like, "Oh, that's terrible what happened to that poor person." No idea.
- This is great. I love it.
- I'd watch that with audio description, of course.
- The blind community would absolutely hate you, Steven Scott, but yeah.
- I know. They already do, so it's fine. I gave up being likable a long time ago.
- Oh, that's good, that's good. So all right, finally on to the topic around this podcast, accessibility and AI. Yeah, of all the discussions you've had with all the guests that you've had on I guess my very general question is what's your opinion on it right now? Are you concerned about it? Do you think it's going to be a catalyst and help expedite conformance overall or like where's your head for that when we talk about accessibility and AI, bigger picture?
- Who wants to go first on that one, Shaun?
- It's so difficult 'cause I've never got a definite answer, a clear answer because I'm both incredibly excited by AI and also terrified at the same time because it's just such a unknown. But you could argue that throughout history when any new technology comes in of a particular level that it has a huge impact on society, right? And there's no doubt that AI is at that level. It's gonna to have far-reaching changes.
- Well, we think that even without accessibility, right? Everybody's concerned about AI, even accessibility aside, right?
- Absolutely right. And of course, I'm thinking about, "Oh, that website isn't very accessible. I can't use that AI model." But, I mean, from a level up from that of general AI, you know, how's it going to affect? Who knows. I mean, you get experts saying that this is an absolutely awful thing. I saw a short movie on one of the social media platforms today actually saying, with, you know, drones taking over the world and, you know, using AI weapons and things like that, and it was a short story warning us about the AI future. But, you know, on the flip side of that, AI has got the potential, that word again, that potential to be life changing in a positive way as well. Now, which way is it gonna go? I think it's gonna be much like the internet, you know, the negatives and the positives of the internet. I think it's gonna be a little bit from column A and column B. But when it comes down to access... Well, Steven, I'll let you answer the accessibility question.
- Well, I mean, I think just on that, I think, yeah, I mean, look, I don't believe it's gonna be, you know, all glorious or we're all dead. I think we're gonna land somewhere in the middle, as often we do. And I think there's a lot of people out there who are hawking themselves on podcasts as doom mongers for, you know, a fee, which works out great for them, but just scares the living bejesus out of everybody about this. And I think there's truth in all of it. There's a kernel of truth in all of it, and it's difficult and I've wrestled with this one, but as a disabled person, I think this is an amazing moment. This is an incredible moment. Now, what I mean by that is in the last eight weeks, I have got into Claude, partly because of you two 'cause Joe said to me in one of the chats we had, "Just try it. Just try this thing, go try coding something, you know, just vibe code." And the last eight weeks has been, you know, like I feel like that image of the ascent of man, you know, I started off as the little, you know, slug coming out of the swamp or whatever, and now I'm, you know, fully grown man. You know, just overnight.
- It's amazing, isn't it?
- It has blown me away. The first thing I did was I created a little add-on for my screen reader called Item Choose, a very simple little thing. And I built this with just conversation. I don't know anything about code, nothing. And I built this thing and it worked. It came up as a box, a dialog box on my screen. I'm like, "How did that even happen?" And it came to life and it worked. Okay, it wasn't perfect right away, but I then realized, okay, I just go back and I iterate with it and I talk with it and I say, "What's wrong?" And then it fixed it. And in that period, it has gone from that to creating all kinds of tools. I was mentioning AI for the show preparation, I mean, for show prep. I mean, I've linked it to my Gmail account, I've linked everything to it basically, given it access to absolutely everything you can think of. It has my Gmail and I can talk to my Gmail now through Claude and I can ask it questions about interviews I've had. It creates amazing show prep notes based on all the history of the emails. It knows when someone was last on the show, gives me information so I can, you know, go in and go, "Huh, I didn't know you were a space engineer, Bobby." And he goes, "Wow, how'd you know that?" And I'm like, "I don't know. It told me." Equally, I will admit, I did ask a question to someone the other day and I confidently asked the question, "Tell me about your new Aura lamp you've developed." And he said, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
- Thank you, AI.
- Good and bad, right? But honestly, I've built an AI video editor, which, you know, is a tool and there are many tools to do this now. And again, it's just harnessing a lot of these things. I think what I've learned in the very short space of time I've been doing this is I've been building a lot of tools, a lot of actual apps that can do things, but then I'm equally realizing that I can just get Claude to do it. It has the capability to do the thing I want to do in it just by telling it to do it. So just give it the files and say, "Here's what I wanna do," and it just goes often does it. It has blown me away the capability of it. Shaun and I are just... I mean, one example last night, lying in bed thinking, you know, one thing that really annoys me about my Dell monitor that I've got is it's got two inputs on it and I have no ability to switch the inputs here at all. I wonder if Claude could build me a little tool that could create a keyboard shortcut and ideally a spoken message for my screen reader so that it can tell me that it switched inputs and it actually does switch them? It built it. I'm lying in bed doing this thing.
- It's great. But will you not agree, Steven, as corny as this sounds, it's all about taking the first step because once you like mention like from the lizard, it's crazy how good and how simple it really is.
- How easy it is.
- Once you take that first step.
- It's the ease. I think that's the bit that blows... You know, we talk to a lot of people.
- The simplicity of it.
- Yeah, we've had audience come on and said, "Look, I really wish you'd stop talking about this 'cause this is not something I can get into." And this is what I love about the show because what we do on the show, it's a community. It really is. And it's a community of amazing people who are smarter than us who come on. And, you know, we get people, one guy who came on and said, "I don't wanna hear anymore about this. I'm sick of it." And then someone else come on and said, "I wanna show you," this particular person. I wanna show you how I use it." And he showed how he used Claude through his Lydia device, his Amazon Echo and suddenly, everyone's like, "Oh, you can do that?" And again, that's the power of the show, being able to bring that message from one blind person to another. Here's how I'm doing this. And instantly it's credible, right? Because blind people helping blind people.
- Yeah.
- And I think that's kind of where it's at for us. This capability is there, but as you say, it's about taking the first step and trying it. I mean, you realize you can literally talk to it. And yes, of course, it's not as simple as just give it a command and off it goes. You've got to work with it, and then, you know, buy the Claude Max plan and then the Claude Max times two plan and then you have a conversation with your wife about where all this money's going every month. But, you know, it is so amazing the capabilities of it, and we are blown away, not just by what we are creating, but the fact that this community around us has just blossomed. I'm on Mastodon and the amount of people who are... I mean, every day now, "I've built a thing, I've built an app, I've built this, I've built that." I can't keep up. And we were saying just today, we were struggling, well, we're not struggling, but we were thinking about would we struggle to do a daily show? We could do two hours a day now because of all this stuff. There's just so much going on.
- But do you think this is the honeymoon period for vibe coding because there's so much going on there. There's gonna come a point where you think, "Hang on, every app has been done as in, you know, we're seeing a lot of NVDA add-ons and that. Do you think this is still almost the gold rush period when it comes to vibe coding? Do you think it will calm down?
- I hope not. I think there's a bit of a honeymoon period. I know I did. I mean, I felt, I mean...
- Oh, I'm still in it.
- Shaun's about four weeks behind me 'cause he got into it a bit later. Again, same thing, right? 'Cause I had to kind of coax you into it a bit. You weren't sure about it.
- Yeah, exactly.
- I said, "Look all this stuff," and you were like, "Yeah." And then you got into it. Tell your story.
- And he's the engineer. That's scary, okay.
- Well, no, exactly. And I was watching Steven do it and I think it's not until you know someone who says, "Actually it is easy" because, I mean, how many people have we spoken to in the past and say, "Oh, you should try it, it's easy." But I've always got in the back of my head, coding means you need this baseline knowledge of code. And I did coding, you know, 30-odd years ago, nearly 40 years ago. Before Windows, I did coding and it's like--
- Dinosaurs walked the Earth.
- Yeah. Before Windows just seems incredible to me now. But it's like, yeah, I've got no idea how this all works. So I can't possibly... I think it's the word code. It just initially--
- It is. It's a scary word.
- It is.
- It is. It is, whilst you might think code people are like, "Nope, I don't do that. I don't code."
- Yeah, I am not a coder. That's right. Yeah. But then when Steven showed me, you know, I've just asked it to make this item chooser and it just did it, and you still take that with a bit of a pinch of salt.
- No one believes me when I said that.
- Yeah.
- And I think the thing was my audience know me so well to know I'm such an idiot that literally people were getting in touch. There was one woman on another podcast and she was talking about listening to me talking about this and she said, "I've been blind for 30 years. He's not been as blind as long as I have. I'm not letting him do this. I'm gonna figure this out." And so she did, she went off and she learned and she loves all her AI projects and she adores what she does now. And I think it's such an amazing moment, I think because not only is it a great tool and for the moment we're all playing, right? We're all playing in the toy box right now.
- Why is it playing?
- But what I mean by that is we're playing, but now I think we're gonna move to a point where we're gonna start to see some potential products that can be sold and then suddenly people are making money and all those people who might be at a work who are blind might suddenly find their way to an income. This is a huge moment. I really think this is the gold rush moment right here. So I think to answer your question, Shaun, I don't think it's that it's in the honeymoon, it may well be in a honeymoon period, but I think that is gonna go to a better place.
- Yeah, I think so. I hope so.
- Steven, can you show us, you had showed me previously an app that you created with a radio. You'd be able to like demo that for us?
- Before you do that, Steven, it goes back to Eamon's point about first steps, right? From a NVDA add-on, which was a quick, you know, the item chooser on the Mac. Can we get that for NVDA, that sort of throwaway question, just sort of pushing how far vibe coding can take us. And then the accessible radio thing you just showed me before, like a few weeks, after a couple of weeks after that, it's like, okay, this thing, the potential is absolutely amazing. This blew me away when you started this.
- Well, this was the thing, right? So I was investigating different ways, 'cause one thing I wanted to do was to... There's just never been an accessible radio for blind people. There've been attempts made over the years, different companies have tried different things, but it's never really worked, not properly. And so I thought, "I wonder if it's possible to do this." And then I read into, I think you've mentioned it or certainly one of our friends had mentioned to me Raspberry Pi and they said, "Oh, you should really get into Raspberry Pi." And that was just like, "Well, I have no idea." But then I thought, "Well, hang on." And it all started by accident and it actually wasn't this. It wasn't this product that I actually started this. I bought a label printer from Amazon, just like a no name label printer that did like six-by-four labels, and my intention was my wife wanted to print out some labels for some boxes she had and I said, "Yeah, that's fine." I said, "That should be okay." But then when I got it, the app that comes with the printer was terrible, just completely inaccessible. You could not easily print from this printer because you had to use the app. And so I had gone to Claude and I thought, "I wonder if there's any way I could do this. This is not going to be possible. This is hardware, this is a different level. I can't do this." So I'm like, okay. So I said to Claude, you know, "I've got this printer. Is there any way you could make it accessible?" And it said, and this was what unlocked at all, "Can you plug it into the computer?" I said, "Sure." So I plugged it in, gave it access and it proceeded to go off and discover all about this printer and figure out all about its software and what it's capable of and blah, blah, blah, and then it built a print driver for it. And then it built the print driver for it.
- Amazing.
- And then made that an AirPrint option 'cause it was on the Mac. So it was then suddenly an AirPrint. Now, this wasn't even possible by this label printer. And then I was able to write a little, I don't know how I did this, but I managed to build this little application, which is within the print driver, which says whenever I type text, 'cause I can't format it, that's the other problem. So I said, you know, whenever I type text into an Apple Note, let's say, or any text field or wherever and I want to print that, I want you to scale it to the size of the label. So you know the size of the label, just make the text fit the label ao it's always full. And it did. It would take anything I would give it now. Anything I throw at it, it'll just print it out as big or as wide as the label can be and I can just portrait or landscape and it works perfectly.
- How long did it take you to do all that?
- About a day.
- And a day, I mean about seven hours, eight hours probably sitting at it really.
- Yeah, it's as numbnuts, like it really is.
- I know. And so that was it. Suddenly I'm like, "Okay, what else can I connect to the computer and make work?"
- Connect everything.
- And so I looked into this project and it was a Raspberry Pi project and it's a company that actually make these radios with Raspberry Pis built in. And when you buy it, there's nothing, there's no software on this at all. Your intention is you would build your own software and you'd put it on there or in Steven Scott land, "Claude, right? Time to fix this." So it plugs in the little radio, right? I plug this thing in, I'll hold it up to the camera so you guys can see it. So that's the radio. I plug this thing in just with a USB on the back and I plug it in and I'm not gonna lie to you guys. I literally wrote the following. "I wanna create some kind of application," that's how I wrote it, "some kind of application that can sit on this radio that can fetch internet radio stations and I can listen to them, I can understand what they are because you'll have spoken text, you know, text to speech will be enabled on this." So I'll be able to hear the station names as I navigate around with the knobs on this radio. The door went, I got up and I went to answer the door. I came back about 10 minutes later and out the speaker of this radio it said, "Hello, Steven, can you hear me?"
- Wow.
- And I'm like, "Uh, okay."
- Sci-fi horror.
- And then I will admit about 10 hours later and I'll just turn it on, I have a little radio which is neatly called the "Double Tap Radio" and if I... You should hear when it comes on, hopefully. I don't know if the batteries are still working in it. I'll admit, I haven't charged this up for a while.
- You haven't charged up.
- No.
- [Narrator] "Double Tap Radio" ready. Resuming Smooth Country.
- [Shaun] Of course.
- Of course it's country music. Always is, isn't it?
- What else would it be?
- And so it just starts playing, it just starts playing the radio. And if I wanna change the station.
- [Narrator] Smooth Radio. Virgin Radio UK.
- And so it goes.
- Wow.
- That's the only talking radio I've ever seen that does that.
- By the way, that scene where you actually asked Claude to do that when you were sitting in your dining room table and then go to the door and the person open the door, that has to be in the movie. That absolutely has to be. The guy ends up dying at some point, but that has to be in the movie. You know?
- Isn't that amazing though? What was capable. And I've never coded, never built anything in my life. I've built some terrible furniture from IKEA. But other than that, you know...
- But wasn't that the changing point though, wasn't it?
- Oh, definitely.
- Even for me, that's when I thought, "Hang on, this thing has got potential. So yeah, it was absolutely amazing. Just being able to connect something to it and just ask in that natural way, "Can we do anything with this?" And that's the first step you were talking about.
- Well, I mean, and again, with the monitor last night, making a monitor menu, which is not an accessible thing. You know, it's driven by a little joystick usually at the back of the monitor you gotta kind of fiddle with and to do. And to make that accessible with a spoken menu system, it just blows me away, the capability. It is true, if you think it, you can build it. You really can. And, you know, this is the beginning. My wife just sent me a link actually before we started talking today. My wife sent me a link to a video. She clearly wants this. A new robot that's coming out next year called NEO, which can do the laundry and the dishes. And it's $20,000 or $499 a month. I think that's what she was picking at there. And I'm thinking, "Yeah, I wanna play with it, but I also wanna, you know, plug it into my Mac and see what I can get it to do.
- But isn't that the one where they actually have remote workers that can see through the eyes of the robot and it's a human actually doing the dishes?
- That's doing actual work.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- It is.
- A lot of these are like that at the minute. Yeah.
- Next-level Aira though, right? Isn't that the natural progression of things?
- Yeah.
- Exactly right. Well, this was fun and and the time passed very quickly but just in order to wrap up, would love to hear from both of you how we can reach you. I think Shaun especially is hard to reach.
- We are working on a live code solution to that.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I don't know if you want people to reach out to you, but at least where they can catch your show and whatever contact info you'd like to share.
- Yeah, well, the show you can find anywhere you find "Double Tap podcast." You search for "Double Tap." On YouTube, you'll find us, @doubletapvideo is the best way to do that. YouTube.com/ and you have to put the @ in for some reason, @doubletapvideo. That'll take you to the YouTube channel and we post episodes every single day. We have five episodes a week. We have two slightly different episodes on the weekend. One is called "Weekend." It's more of a conversational show. We tend to get a bit more in depth on a specific topic, sometimes away from tech. And then on Sunday we have "Mainstream," which is very much our chance to really just, you know, relax into all the weird and wonderful tech stories of the week, the smart toilet, for example. You know, Tim Cook's saying he's gonna up the RAM prices on the Macs this year or whatever, or I don't know if he's just, you know, saying that and then leaving a mess for John Ternus to fix. Who knows? But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, it is a great chance to just catch up with the week's news away from the stories we don't often get a chance to talk about and you can find it, as I say, on your podcast every single day. We do encourage you to listen and of course you can get all the show content at doubletaponair.com 'cause we're on air.
- Oh, clever.
- Well, thank you, both. Honestly, thanks for your time.
- Thanks guys. Really appreciate the time. Yeah, I really enjoyed it, thank you. Anytime.