Hosts Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon interview Matt Ater, Senior Vice President of Vispero. The conversation covers Matt's journey into the field of assistive technology, his work with Vispero, and the importance of user experience in developing accessibility tools. Matt also shares the transformative potential of AI in accessibility and the crucial need to involve users with disabilities in the development process to build accessible technologies across various platforms and devices, emphasizing that accessibility should be treated as a fundamental aspect of development, not an afterthought.
OUTLINE:
00:00 Opening Teaser
00:57 Introduction
02:07 Matt's Journey into Accessibility
03:45 About Vispero
06:01 Importance of Working With People With Disabilities
08:06 About The Lighthouse For The Blind
11:44 Induction Into The Kiosk Hall of Fame
17:15 Impact of Gen AI on Accessibility
26:08 Visit to CES Tech Week at Capitol Hill
27:17 About JAWS Picture Smart AI
30:35 Balancing Priorities In Leadership
32:36 Things Sighted People Say To Blind People
38:10 Advice To Newcomers In Accessibility
43:43 Future of Vispero and AI
48:57 Percentage of Websites That Are Accessible
55:35 Wrap Up
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EPISODE LINKS:
Vispero
https://vispero.com
The Lighthouse for the Blind
https://lhblind.org
Kiosk Hall of Fame
https://kioskindustry.org/kiosk-hall-fame/
CES Tech Week at Capitol Hill
https://www.cta.tech/press-releases/ces-on-the-hill-brings-tech-s-biggest-innovators-to-washington
JAWS Picture Smart AI
https://support.freedomscientific.com/About/News/Article/227
Video: Vispero - Empowering Independence
https://youtu.be/XdgVMsB_HNk
Web AIM - Web Accessibility in Mind
https://webaim.org
ArcTouch
https://arctouch.com
Matt Ater on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ater-b7b96a8/
- I have kind of a different type of question for you. What are some dumb things that sighted people say to blind folks?
- Oh boy.
- It could be a long list, Joe, it could be a long list.
- It could be a long list. I'll say this, this is really important. Nobody should be worried about saying, ""What did you watch on TV last night?"" "Did you see that great play at the ball game?" You know, "Look over here." Those are mistakes that people make and we all should just, you know, be friendly and educate. I always laugh, and this is not something somebody said, but I always laugh when someone tries to grab my cane and then pull me along and I'm just at the airport, so I just pull back. I'm like, "Where do you think you're going?" You know, "This is an extension of my body. Leave it alone and we'll all get along just fine, right?"
- Welcome to episode nine of "Accessibility and Gen AI," a podcast that interviews the newsmakers and thought leaders in the world of accessibility and artificial intelligence. I'm Joe Devon and joined by my co-host Eamon McErlean. And today we're excited to have Matt Ater on the pod. Matt is the SVP of Corporate Business Development at Vispero, which is the company behind major accessibility brands such as Freedom Scientific and TPGI. But if you've ever used JAWS, you've seen his work in action. He's also a Kiosk Hall of Famer helping shape how assistive technology shows up in the real world. Matt, welcome to the pod.
- Well, thank you, Joe and Eamon. It's gonna be a lot of fun today. I'm really looking forward to it.
- Likewise, and just to kick things off, why don't we start early on from your journey as a youngster and how you got into the world of accessibility, sorry, of assistive technology. Your first exposure, I believe for my research was VRCBVI, which is a mouthful and I'll let you explain what that is. Before you started studying broadcast communications at University of Alabama, can you describe those experiences?
- Yeah, so it's when I... Before a blind child goes off to college, the state will run you through like a program to educate you on life experiences. Now, I kind of already knew most of them, but, you know, you basically learn computing skills, you know, typing and things like that. But, you know, I'd already been through high school at this point, but they're basically teaching you, can you cook? Can you do your own laundry? Can you use word processing, can you use a cane and get around taking buses and things like that, just to prepare you to be successful at the university. And so, you know, it's basically, think of it as a summer program. And so I had the summer program, prep me off to go off to college, you know, get my four year degree in broadcast and film. And it's funny 'cause I thought I was gonna be a DJ one day and, you know, I still collect microphones and mixers and all of those things. Not a music DJ, but a radio DJ. And when I realized minimum wage wasn't really my lifestyle, I decided to do something different. And very glad I did.
- Definitely you've got the voice for radio as well, Matt. Again, to reiterate what Joe said, thanks so much for spending the time to join us today. For those listeners that are not familiar with the Vispero, would you like just to give an overall, like an overview of, you know, the org structure because it's pretty mass and I think there's four different entities under the parent corporation.
- Yeah, and think of Vispero as more of a holding company or it was never really meant to be a brand because the brands are really contained by the four companies and then within them their own products. And so, you know, Joe had mentioned at the beginning, Freedom Scientific, the makers of JAWS. Eventually they had acquired the company who makes ZoomText. So ZoomText is a product under their family and they also make low-vision hardware and a braille device called the Focus. And then TPGI, formerly The Paciello Group, Interactive Accessibility, we combine those into one to now be called TPG Interactive. And then the other two are mainly hardware companies, depending on where in the world you are. So you have Enhanced Vision, who makes low-vision devices. There are cameras that allow somebody with low-vision to be able to read print. And I know it seems weird today 'cause you could just take your iPhone and do it, but an iPhone, you know, isn't the right size screen for a lot of people. And it's also very difficult to hold the camera still. And cameras designed for an iPhone to take pretty pictures of a scene or your children isn't the same as reading print. And so Enhanced Vision makes low-vision devices. And then Optelec, which is another company that we own, also makes low-vision devices. So think of them as, you know, different brands within that. And they each have their own, you know, sub product brands. You know, for example, Enhanced Vision is Merlin and Optelec is Clearview, Freedom Scientific is Topaz and Ruby. But you know, in the world of low-vision, a lot of it just depended on where somebody would go get their technology. Were they getting it from a school, you know, veterans getting their devices, were they getting it in a certain country around the world? So, you know, we're in 78 countries with our technology being out there to serve the population. And we can't do that with just staff because you gotta be where the people are.
- And like, talking about that like global engagement and that vast array of products that you have, one of the things that I've learned over the years is the importance of engaging with individuals with disabilities as you create new features and new functionality. Can you talk a little bit about that and just the criticality of that?
- Yeah, I think it is so critical and we could talk about it from the software side or the hardware side, but you know, in the world of, you know, the JAWS software, there's, you know, a couple hundred beta testers who are testing our new features on a regular basis. And Ryan Jones, our VP of software was at the National Federation of the Blind Convention last summer, you know, spending time with users to get their feedback. And the same goes with hardware. We would bring in low-vision folks within, you know, Optelec in Barendrecht in the Netherlands to sit down and test out the different devices and tell us where the features that we were doing were the right features. And think of it as, you know, we love the word, you know, in this accessibility industry, UX or user experience. And it's so critical in this space because if you try to build something and you don't know what you're doing, all of a sudden you are throwing something at the community that they can't use. And the great example, and you probably all heard the day when a company would come up to you and say, "Hey, I have this great new idea, I'm gonna put a play button on the top of your browser and it's just gonna read your webpage to you." Well, the problem is that's not an interactive tool. That's not the way a blind person wants to navigate a website. If you did that on a Amazon shopping site or a BestBuy shopping site, it's useless, right? Just to read it from top to bottom.
- Yeah, I think people really met... Until you've experienced watching someone with a screen reader, you just don't get it. And even then you still don't necessarily think about the experience of what it's like to actually try and complete tasks as opposed to in your brain imagining someone who's blind trying to use a screen reader. And speaking about experiences with a community of people with disabilities, The Lighthouse, you were director of technology at The Lighthouse for the Blind. I'm really fascinated to understand more about The Lighthouse, particularly where did the name come from? When did it come about? And what about the weird structure? Because I think there's like lots of them in different states and cities and they don't seem to be owned by the same parent organization. So I'm intrigued by the whole deal, what they do as well.
- Yeah, it's a broad term used and in some states they may not be even called lighthouses. So Lighthouse is a generic term used by blindness organizations. You have different branding and the one that I worked at was called the Columbia Lighthouse being, you know, District of Columbia. There's the Miami Lighthouse, there's one in New York City, they're all over the place. But then you could turn around and go to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and it's a different name, it's not a lighthouse. But the same concepts still exist. And think of them as service organizations working with the state and local communities to train and educate blind people. And so the state agencies in the United States are traditionally called vocation rehabilitation agencies who are given funding by the federal government to make sure that blind people have the skills to be able to go to work or live a good life. And, you know, so it could be cooking classes. The same thing that I did when I went to Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired in Virginia. They're offering those same like services. And then on top of that, they would also provide, in the early days they were, you know, providing manufacturing locations to give people basic skills. And those manufacturing of things were being sold in a contracting mechanism through the federal government to federal agencies, Department of Defense and things like that. So it could be manufacturing silverware for the Army or something like that. In my case, I was running a technology division, so it was very focused on how do I give people the skills to be able to get into the workforce 'cause the whole goal of independence is to get a job, right? So when anybody talks about independence, independence really comes down to can I earn an income to make a paycheck to pay my bills? That's independence in the grand scheme of things. Can I buy the food I want? Can I buy the clothing? Can I go see my parents, you know, on travel. That's what we all come down to from an independence perspective. And a lot of blind people don't have that level of independence because they've not been given the opportunity through employment. And so my program was about training people for employment so that they could go work. And some of the examples of some of the stuff we did was we trained all of the blind and low-vision employees at the IRS and Social Security Administration when they switched to Windows. And so we're talking about everybody who had always been in DOS and now, and I know I say that word and some people are gonna cringe, and go what's DOS? But we took all of these people who had never been in a Windows environment, teach them a GUI, right? The environment that is now different with Windows. And it was the most amazing opportunity because you're training, you know, thousands of people who now need to switch their job to work at these two federal agencies.
- You've been inducted to the Kiosk Hall of Fame and it has such a cool backstory. Can you walk us through that unexpected connection between correctional facilities and kiosk technology that led to...
- Wow, such a trip. Such a trip. I mean the Kiosk hall of Fame is probably for a lot of things of how I got there. But our initial contract for, you know, basically creating a JAWS for kiosk product was the California prisons. And we actually had two contracts going on at the same time. The other one was Carnival Cruise lines. And basically it was when a prisoner was going to be let out of prison, they were allowed to go apply for jobs, they had to go to a kiosk to do it. And California had a rule that any technology had to be accessible for anybody depending on, you know, regardless of their disability or, you know, correction or reason for being in prison. Now, I had the blessing that I, you know, may have helped come up with the technology and I'm amazed you even found the information on this 'cause I didn't know it was out there, but I got to go to the Carnival Cruise ship where my colleague, Ryan Jones, had to go to the prison. So we always laugh about how it was nice for me to be in charge 'cause I got to go, you know, eat at a buffet on a Carnival Cruise ship while he had to, you know, get a TB test to go to a California prison.
- Slight difference.
- Slight difference, I don't know, I mean, some would argue about the buffet side, in the case of this, what I love about, you know, what we've done to open the opportunities for blind and low-vision people and more broadly, people with disabilities to look at self-service technology and say, why isn't it accessible for the rest of us? And it could be anything from a payment device where, and Eamon You probably know this in Europe, when you go to pay your bill, you don't take your credit card and they don't go in the back room and run it and then bring you back your credit card with a slip of paper and you write a tip on it and sign it and stuff like that. They're bringing you the device and they've been doing that for years, okay? And the US is so far behind in that technology, but to think that that's happening now in the United States, why can't a blind person do a payment device? Why can't they put in their own tip? I was at a restaurant recently and they wanted me to put a tip in. I'm like, "Sorry, I'm not gonna do it. I'll hand you some cash, but I'm not gonna put a tip in because I'm not gonna do it on a device that I can't use." And so making those kinds of things accessible so that a blind person could do everything else that everybody else can do, why not, right? Review your bill, know what you're paying. And the same would go with, you know, checking into an airline which has been in, you know, requirement for 15 years. Those kiosk, you know, one out of every four have to be accessible. And so the work we've done in this is just amazing to open that up. And, you know, we've launched an Android version, a Windows version, and later this year we'll have a Linux version of JAWS just for the self-service devices. Because depending on the style, depending on the market, you know, the really big ones are Windows, the kind of more tablet sized ones are Android, and then the self-checkouts that you see at grocery stores and retail are probably Linux. And so you have to be prepared to support all of the styles and formats.
- Oh yeah, that makes sense. A lot of those devices that are like outside are with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and things like that. So that makes sense.
- Yeah, and the cool thing is, it's understand the user experience. That's why I, you know, got in the Kiosk Hall of Fame was we didn't just say, let's just make it talk. We said, let's give the user a good experience and help them through it. Because remember, if I use a computer all day, it's doesn't mean I've ever touched a self-service device that may be a touch screen, it may be a keypad to move forward through the elements. And we had to figure out what's the good user experience. And that's what our team has been amazing at doing, which I think is fantastic for the user and the consumer.
- It's key, it's really key to everything that really following the actual user experience is pivotal. It's funny you mentioned that, you know, as an example, the POS system, that's how I got involved in accessibility back in 2014 at Apple where we built this phenomenal program. We were bringing in individuals from the stores to help us do our UAT, the user acceptance testing for new features and functionality on the Apple POS system called EasyPay. And it was my oversight. I completely didn't think about bringing in individuals with different disabilities. And then one of our team members who was physically impaired at the store, you know, made a complaint and understandably so that they couldn't utilize the system. And that was not even the customers on the employee side. And that's when we, you know, Apples came a long way since then. And then we started bringing in individuals with different disabilities to help us do a UAT from a practical standpoint. Going in now to AI and accessibility, before we ask any deeper questions about, you know, what you're up to at the Vispero, what's your general thoughts? There's been, obviously wouldn't say polarizing, but many different opposite thoughts about the impact that Gen AI will have on accessibility. Just want to get your initial thoughts on the bigger picture.
- So I want to take it from a perspective of what helps the user work and not the other things that may exist in AI that sometimes get distracted, you know, bias and things like that. Because that's not my skill and knowledge area, right? So what I could talk about is that it's amazing what it's offered and you know, the key is that there's great companies building some really great, you know, products out there that we can tap into. And we just have to be smart partners with them to be successful. And I think we've done some really great things with them to drive great solutions for blind and low-vision. And that's really where we're, you know, our first focus is in that area. You know, you can also say it, you know, from an accessibility point of view, we're also looking at how do you tap into similar concepts for accessibility. And there's some features that we've done from accessibility. And so we kind of, we look at them slightly different depending if it's assistive technology or if it's accessibility. And I don't want anybody to think that they're not connected 'cause they totally are. Without one you don't have the other and so on. But I'm amazed at the opportunities that it's done and I, you know, just as a consumer of it, forget the business side of it, you know, being able to walk around with the RayBan meta glasses and to ask it in an airport, you know, what gate I'm at, you know, and it's not doing it off GPS, it's doing it off the camera and it takes a picture and tells me the gate number. I don't need the full description of the concourse. I just want to know gate number because I'm walking, I'm very familiar with the airport, but it doesn't mean I know what gate I'm at. And then if I walk up, I could check, you know, the flight status and stuff like that by taking a picture once again of the board behind the airline desk. That kind of stuff is just, it frees you up so much to be able to do basic functions like that or find a restroom, you know? Yesterday somebody offered to tell me whichever, you know, what restroom I was standing in front of, but I'd already done it with the glasses and that just sped up the whole process of me getting through the airport.
- So you've used the glasses yourself for a while now?
- Oh yeah, yep, I travel with them everywhere, yep. And I'm thrilled with it, you know, do they have things that they needed to do? Sure, but the opportunity, you know, is huge and it could be that, it could be the IRA platform and the features they have within their platform to take a picture with your phone. But, you know, I don't wanna hold my phone up while traveling and walking through an airport. I just wanna wear the glasses and ask questions.
- Is there an easy way to submit your feedback?
- You know, I've never tried. But I mean, they're very collaborative and so I would think that they would want to take feedback.
- It's interesting that you talk about really having this specific use case because, you know, the general AI solutions are often, they might think about people with disabilities, but if you're not really honed in to a specific use case, you're not gonna quite nail it. And so there's an interesting feature that I've seen people, I think there's probably a product around it, or at least some open source projects where they're trying to take a look at the person's face on a virtual call and tell the user, you know, if they're happy or like, for example, people that are neurodiverse might not be able to tell the emotion of the person, or even just anybody may want to know if the person is lying or that kind of thing. But there's a very important use case that, you know, being in the industry, I have so many friends who are blind and whenever we do like a Zoom call or one of these platforms, there's an unwritten communication difference because you have that audio delay. If you interrupt somebody, it costs a lot more on a virtual call as opposed to when they're in front of you. And there's a lot of nonverbal communication where you might be saying something and I might be nodding or disagreeing, or maybe I'll be opening my mouth because I wanna say something. And that's not being communicated that, you know, there's an attempt to sort of interrupt and I'm wondering if there's been any thought to using AI to implement some of those features or if you have other AI ideas that you've got going on.
- So I'll say that I participated back about a year ago at MIT with Perkins and the health center is along with Amazon on where we were actually doing this with the students and we gave them all, you know, they all picked a project and did a hackathon on doing different AI solutions. And one of them was just that, you know, why can't it make a noise for what just happened on the screen or why can't it just be verbalized of what just happened on the screen? And, you know, the concepts were not always just for blind or low-vision, but they could have been for deaf and hard of hearing could they be words that were displayed. Or emojis or things like that. And so I think that the, you know, the innovation that will come behind this will just be amazing. And you see that people with AI coding even creating some of these solutions very quickly. And so I think that's gonna happen. It's just that you gotta pick your priorities. And I think that in the world of, you know, virtual meetings and, you know, right now I could run a screen capture of this and have it described to me and tell me what everybody's wearing and what they look like and what's their background and stuff like that. If I need that, great. I'm also not somebody who likes to go to meetings where everybody describes themselves. I think that's just kind of weird. Where, you know, some people want that, so I don't wanna, you know, condemn anybody for those choices. But that's, you know, my personal feeling is just let's show up and just do what the meeting's there for. So I think it's all a personal thing. And then on the topic of what solutions that may come out of this is every day it feels like there's something new, right Joe? I mean, the live stuff that, you know, even the glasses that I have, you can turn on the live AI mode and it just starts describing stuff and you can ask questions while you're walking around. And that's just pretty cool, right? And that's on glasses that are, you know, Bluetooth to your phone. So it's really using the power of your phone you know, to talk to it. And it doesn't matter if it's glasses or something on your computer or whatever, you know, the fact that AI is changing so rapidly, what we choose to do as a company or what we choose to do as individuals is, you know, thrilling. And last week while I was on Capitol Hill, one of the companies at CES on the Hill, they were partnered with Qualcomm and they created a chip that had the AI stored on the chip so that it didn't have to go out to the net, but it basically would move and compute on the chip and then come back to the computer. And it was doing things like head movements and facial movements to move things around the screen. Now when they originally designed it, you know, it was because the president of this one partner company, you know, had a family member with a disability who just wanted play video games during the pandemic and couldn't. And so he went out and created this with Qualcomm. And it's amazing. That's the kind of ingenuity that we're gonna see. And I think at some point, and we've all heard about this, at some point, it's gotta move to the device for some of this power because if it's always going to the cloud, there's gonna be challenges.
- Yeah, I've played with LM Studio and gotten pretty reasonable responses with the local AI model. So it's pretty cool.
- Matt, we touched upon where you were based DC and you mentioned that you had a recent trip to the Capitol. Would you mind just, to the Hill specifically, would you mind just sharing what that journey was all about?
- Yeah, so it's interesting, so CES does something called Tech Week. And during Tech Week, you know, you hear from different congressmen and senators about what's going on the Hill. And AI was definitely a big component of that. And their opinion is that, you know, Europe is putting the handcuffs on innovation. And whereas the US is pretty open about innovation in this space. Additionally, you know, that week was very focused on trade and tariffs and things like that. But the part that I found most inspiring was definitely the talk and almost, I think we've met with maybe seven to eight congressmen and senators, congresswoman and senators, and they all talked about AI during their sessions.
- Matt, what is Picture Smart AI?
- So with all of this great AI technology that we have out there today, you know, a blind and low-vision person may need to know what's on the screen. And you could do it from just a basic image that maybe you're browsing the web and you land on an image and you wanna know what it is and it doesn't have alt text, but I think those are probably the simple use cases. Whereas what I would find more useful is, for example, I'm in a meeting and there's somebody's presenting and they're doing it on say a spreadsheet. Well, I can ask, you know, basically with Picture Smart AI, I can ask it, you know, what are they showing, what information's there? And then I could start asking additional drill down questions into that data. And so it could be a PowerPoint slide, it could be a Excel spreadsheet, maybe I wanna know the formatting of a page. And so it doesn't matter if it's, you know, I don't want anybody to think it's only images, it's your screen or things on your screen. And those features are just gonna continue to grow. In May, for example, we'll have a feature where you can hit a keystroke and have Picture Smart AI give it a label. So you could land on an element on a webpage and it may not have a label, and you can press the keystroke and it will go get a label and create it for you based on what's on the screen. And, you know, we'll, you know, round one will be you doing it. Round two may be it doing it automatically, and that may be in the next version come July or or August. But the intent being is that there's so much opportunity to tap into what AI can do for the user. And, you know, you could land on a unlabeled button or a zero button or whatever. Somebody's not giving a proper label or a checkbox that, you know, it says to check the box to accept the terms, but it never says checkbox. It does in the wording, but not visually, the element itself has not been given a label. And so this can go through, grab the label, create a label for it so that it is a checkbox and tell you if it's checked or unchecked. And so this is the kind of stuff that will come from the AI components. And in Picture Smart AI, we're using Open AI and Claude, and we by default use one, I'm not sure which ones by default. And then you can ask it questions and it'll give you both or you can drive it to both at the beginning. So there's all kinds of cool things. The important thing is we need to give it in the hands of the user to be able to do it. And then you can provide feedback on whether or not the results were what you were hoping for.
- I have to confess, prior to this podcast today, I had to go ahead and do my research on Vispero and your background, Matt overall. I love the video you have on your website. I believe the young lady's name is Kate, enthusiastic singer and Les with the horses. It's an awesome video, it really is. It's practical, touching and I just loved it. But how do you balance as a leader, that line between ensuring that P&L, your revenue has to continue to move in the right direction versus that moral, like doing the right thing and trying to share the benefits of your products. How do you balance those?
- I don't think it's that hard. You know, I've been in the industry for 31 years. You don't do that just for the sake of, you know, growth and all of those things. They come naturally. You know, an example is that, you know, we went into the kiosk business and the self-service business, that's not at the price of the consumer, right? That's the price of industry to make sure that their technology is accessible. And in the case of our products that are mostly being purchased by a third party buyer, so we're talking, you know, state vocational rehabilitation, federal agencies, countries, you know, in Spain, for example, JAWS ZoomText Fusions available to anybody in the country of Spain at no additional cost to them. You know, those kinds of things happen because of the great relationships that we have with our distribution and we have with those countries and things like that and our customers. The customer will drive, one, the solutions that we need to provide. And yeah, costs go up over time, but at the same time, you know, everything's gone up, right? So we're all gonna be affected by that. But everybody who works in this company believes in it for the mission of it, and that's the reason they do it. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't be doing this kind of work. They'd be off at big consulting firm rather than consulting for web and mobile accessibility. If they want to be a millionaire, they're probably in the wrong business to be in this business.
- That's true. Now, I have kind of a different type of question for you. What are some dumb things that sighted people say to blind folks?
- Oh boy.
- It could be a long list. Joe, it could be a long list.
- It could be a long list. I'll say this, this is really important. Nobody should be worried about saying, "What did you watch on TV last night?" "Did you see that great play at the ball game?" You know, "Look over here." Those are mistakes that people make and we all should just, you know, be friendly and educate. It doesn't mean somebody's not upset about it. You know, I've had the point where people have, you know, made comments about that, you know, I'm low-vision, so therefore if I can get to that spot, then obviously I'm not blind, right? And so people don't get that side of it. I always laugh, and this is not something somebody said, but I always laugh when someone tries to grab my cane and then pull me along and I'm just like, I'm at the airport, so I just pull back, I'm like, "Where do you think you're going? You know, just this is an extension of my body, leave it alone and we'll all get along just fine, right?" But, you know, I think that I've adapted so much that sometimes I don't even pay attention to it. One of my favorite education things for people is don't count steps because you will always miscount steps. You always miss the top one or the bottom one in you're accounting. So just say there are steps. If you start counting, you will miscount, I guarantee.
- People count steps for you and say, "Oh, there's 10 steps."
- 10 steps, or 15 steps or whatever. And they always miss by one, they always do. They always forget the top one or the bottom one. They always forget one. And it's the number of steps you have to take, right? But don't even bother. Just say there are steps, you know? Or the railings on the right side. And those are enough kind of cues for people. And they're not dumb things, they're just unfortunate things, right? But there's always the pointing, which I always find funny because, you know, they point and say, "Over there."
- Over there.
- Oh thank you.
- And I'm sitting there going, "So just so you know, I'm blind. I have no clue where you just pointed." And sometimes I can see a little bit to see the motion went that direction, but I have to remind them that I'm blind to help educate that that's not right for everybody else, right? So, you know, I think there's a lot of people also who are confused that blind people can use regular applications. You know, how does a blind person do X? How do we use PowerPoint? How do we edit an Excel spreadsheet? Just like you do, we just use keystrokes to get there. And you know, there's a lot of people who probably don't even know the keystrokes, you know? I mean, it's amazing how many... And we did an AI tool that I think is really cool called FSCompanion.ai. And it's where you can ask how to use JAWS and ZoomText and Fusion, but it also gives you Windows keystrokes and Office keystrokes and Google Suite keystrokes and so on. Because they're all tied together, right? So if I wanted to know, how do you insert a row in Excel with JAWS, you know, you just ask that question and boom, it comes back with step-by-step instructions on how to do that.
- And it's 100% free, right?
- You can go there right now, FSCompanion.ai, you could do it on your cell phone or you could do it on your computer, it doesn't matter. And it's just really easy to get an answer from it. And if you don't get the right answer, then tell us. I mean, that's the beauty of training AI, right? Is that you wanna tell us when something's wrong, but it's driving a consumer to be a little bit more self-sufficient on basic functions of their computer. Why would you go to Google and type it in, not to pick on Google, and get 15 different ways to do something when this gives you the correct way to do it?
- Yeah, I played with it and it was really, really good. I mean, you guys trained it well. It doesn't really veer very much from, you know, what it knows from what I saw.
- And it's trained on content that we've created over 30 years of JAWS, you know, which is we're in the 30th anniversary. And for 30 years, you know, we've created content. And next I think we're taking all of the transcripts and content from the webinars to put into the LLM to also give more content to the user.
- Nice, yeah. And by the way, you were wondering how I knew about the prison stuff, before every interview I find any video on YouTube or anywhere, and I get the transcript of everything and do some serious research. So with the help of AI, of course,
- I can't wait to have you share where I had a contract with the California prisons. That's amazing, it's so long ago. Most people probably know more of our work, like with McDonald's, for example.
- Yeah, that was mentioned too. But Google has notebook LM and like, you can put in all this research and it'll do a 20 minute podcast for you of the research.
- Yeah, I've heard about that, it's amazing.
- Yeah. So I did that as well.
- For those listeners that are early in their career, primarily from an engineering perspective, any advice on what they should do from an accessibility world in the arena, do and don'ts? You've been doing it for a long time, so any lessons learned?
- Well, I think go watch users. It's amazing what you will learn by spending time with disabled users. And you could go a conference on it. You know that if you go to the National Federation of the Blind or the American Council of the Blind, or the Blind Veterans Affair Association Conference, there's amazing what you will learn by spending time with users and talking to them and, you know, bring users in. Eamon, you mentioned this before about, you know, with Apple, and when you start bringing users in, you get all kinds of good value out of it. And at TPGI, we've done this with a lot of customers where they hire us just to do that. And, you know, we implemented a feature recently, probably a couple years ago in JAWS called JAWS Connect, where you can implement it on your site, but there's no code on your site. We just put inside JAWS a list of domains that are approved. And a user then can provide feedback to the company. And when you start getting feedback from a blind user, you're gonna find out, you know, things like something wasn't in the tab order or you can't even move to that element. I was working with a customer recently and they had 20 applications on the screen, and you could tab through everything except those 20 applications. So, you know, basically the user had no ability to get to the applications. And you know, it wasn't that hard, you know, we basically just said, we need to, you know, give a tab index of zero and it's amazing how fast it fixed the problem. And they just didn't even think of it.
- I, yeah, absolutely agree. Like, it's funny, I'm happy you said that because whenever a wrap up a forum, be it a fireside chat or any type of forum, the one thing I try to mention is especially those members and participants that normally do not interact in the accessibility arena, just please spend a couple hours, half a day with any of your employees with different disabilities. And suffice to say, I would guess that you'll never doubt the need for accessibility thereafter. It'll be pretty evident how important it is when you experience that yourself, you know, so 100% agree.
- Yeah, and you see it in corporations, you see it in federal agencies, you see it in, you know, all kinds of places where companies have done the right thing by, you know, educating their employees around this and having these fireside chats. It could be anything from a small company to a huge company. I mean, Microsoft had just done their big sessions back in March that, you know, where they're talking to not just their employees, but the broader community, but their employees are participating in these discussions. And if they hadn't, we wouldn't have accessible gaming today, right? If they hadn't, we wouldn't have accessible switches for people with physical disabilities. And so those kinds of things, you know, go a long way. And you know, we could talk about Amazon or Meta or any of these companies, and it all plays a part that they have disabled people working for them as well. And, you know, people with disabilities add huge value. And that's where the diversity comes into play because they provide a different viewpoint. And, you know, knowing that fourth of the world has some form of a disability, you know, 25%, you know, why wouldn't a company participate in that sector?
- Yeah, there's some interesting statistics that essentially show that in many parts of the world, like I think in America, the median age is something like 41 or 39, something like that. So essentially you've got about half the population is over 40, and that's when your hearing starts to degrade a little bit in terms of being in a restaurant and the loud noises bother you more. You can't remove those distractions. But also, like font size has to get bigger. The color contrast starts to become an issue. And so it just, it just sort of depends how you slice and dice those numbers. I think it's how do you define disability? Because the number of people that benefit from assistive technology is probably upwards of 50% in one form or another.
- You know, there's an entire computing age group who never used a mouse before until the mid '90s. So they still would prefer, you know... They were using very good point DOS and green screens and all kinds of things. And they were programming in a language that they never used a mouse for anything they did. And they're still working today.
- Yeah, I mean, I still use VI, I like it a lot and I don't know why it's escaping me, but there's another editor that a lot of people like that is terrible, but they got used to it, so they use it and they claim it's better of course.
- Of course.
- Matt, is there anything in your upcoming roadmap, either from a feature or functionality or strategy perspective that you wanna share with us?
- Yeah, I think the AI labeler will be the big change this year. There's more stuff coming, but the AI labeler is a big one. You know, one of the things that I always wanna remind people, you know, we may have a new release in October every year, towards the end of October, but we release features throughout the year. And so even though we may change the number from 25 to 26 and 26 to 27 and so on, you know, the AI labelers coming out here in May and then a new update to it in July. And so we're not like waiting for big new releases. And a lot of this comes to, you know, we're not a boxed company anymore. You know, it's so funny to think that, there was a time when we were all dealing with software delivered in a box, and so your updates didn't come that frequently. You know, even the browsers weren't changing frequently. Microsoft Windows probably didn't change much except for security patches. Office, same thing. The UI stayed the same. Your UI of things like Teams and Google Sheets and things like that are changing so fast and we have to change with them. And the most recent one is that our method of copying and paste was based on a certain feature inside the Chromium browser, which, you know, affects both Chrome and Edge. Well, everything broke with a version 1.35 because of their change. And so we have to put a patch out to support that change. And, you know, most of the time we are lockstep with those changes and we don't miss those changes. This one slipped by and they didn't, you know, we didn't know about it possibly in time, but there's a setting you can change today, but the new version will incorporate, you know, a fix for that change. That was something as basic as copy and paste. How do you select text? How do you copy it with formatting and how do you paste it with formatting? And that component within the Chromium browser changed. And so that, you know, puts a freeze on lots of other things 'cause that affects every user, not just one user.
- Yeah, yeah, and when you mentioned that speed of AI, and is honestly, it's why Joe and I are doing this and trying to develop a set to validate the conformance levels of LLMs. But you know, the truth is accessibility was left behind for many years, it was. And fortunately over the past several years, many companies have invested and caught up. But with the speed that AI is going at, we cannot afford to make that same mistake again. We just can't because it'll be too high a price to pay at the end of the day.
- Yeah, I think most of the user experiences inside the applications are in good shape. You know, I'll go into one or two of them and find a button unlabeled. So I'm excited to see our new feature where I could just label the button. But, you know, you would expect it over time, that's basic HTML. I mean, we're not even talking hard stuff, right, to label a button. But it happens and at some point we have to change accessibility mindset that it's a bug. Because we scare everybody that it's something special. It's a bug in your code. Let's think about it from that perspective. It's special to me that it gets fixed, but like the concept of it's not any more complex than changing code. And so it may be a complex thing because you may have chosen something really odd in what you developed, but, you know, let's see where this, you know, AI drives that change too, to make it easier for people to make the right code.
- Yep, completely, I think we'll only get to where we need to be when it's part of the definition of done and stop being an afterthought. It just has to be part of the DOD, period.
- Yeah, but we also have to consider that nothing's ever done, because websites probably, and content's not stopping. You know, it's one thing for mom and pop shoe store down the street from me that may have a website that they don't change in three years. But, you know, these big companies are innovating so fast that we have to remember that there's gonna be whatever that new widget is tomorrow that we didn't expect for. And someone's gonna have to figure out how do you code that widget properly to meet the accessibility requirements.
- But that's what I mean, like that widget, we are bringing it down to the component and element level right now at ServiceNow. So part of the definition of done for that widget includes accessibility criteria.
- Yes, yep. And when you start seeing more project player, project managers and product managers out there forming accessibility views, it's gonna be easier too, because if it's not in the project plan, it just doesn't happen.
- Great. You know, I read something interesting the other day. So for the audience who may not be aware, there's an organization called WebAIM who comes out with a yearly report on the accessibility of the top million webpages on the web. And it always turns out to be about 96% of the web is not accessible, that it has a whole bunch of bugs in it. And then ArcTouch is also releasing a mobile app accessibility report, SOMA, state of mobile app accessibility report. And in there, the big number is that 72% of the mobile apps that they tested, essentially user journeys, and found that they didn't perform very well. And those numbers sound really bad, but it's interesting that with JAWS, it seems to be that you're essentially fixing a lot of the code underneath when you're encountering like bad HTML. It's a different approach than maybe some other screen readers. What is your experience in terms of, you know, wanting to do a user flow, you want to achieve a task? Are you seeing that you only get to do that on 3% of the sites? Or is it, you know, you have your ways to work around, like, I just want to understand what the day-to-day experience is, like what percentage works and doesn't work?
- I mean, I live in computing, so I live a lot in, you know, Teams and Office and things like that. But when I go out to websites, you know, a lot of it's just clunkiness. It's not always inaccessible. It's just a bad user experience. It doesn't mean that something's not labeled. I'm sure there's unlabeled content out there left and right, but, you know, if I wanna move by heading, I don't want, you know, a thousand headings on the screen, right? I need this to be user, you know, a good user experience by using by headings. I also don't wanna tab all the way through it. But part of it is that we have to communicate to the user what the experience on that element is like. It's one thing for links and buttons and check boxes and radio buttons and things like that. But you know, now we have, you know, the accordion tabs and all kinds of things that are on the page that may be, you know, putting yourself in an application mode, which I think some people would like to get rid of that mode today.
- Can you explain what you mean by that?
- Well, it kind of, it basically turns you more into a desktop application the minute you use it. So you no longer can move through all the texts without exiting that mode. So think it like when you're in Google Docs, you want to type in the body of your document that would be in an application mode because it's not like you can go up to the toolbar without hitting a command. You know, if you press the up arrow, you're at the top of the document. Does that make sense?
- Yeah.
- And so your your ability to move around is just different. Well, if you do that and you create these element types, we have to make sure the user knows how to do it and it knows how to interact with it. That's our problem, not yours as the developer. If you code and choose the proper... Our problem, meaning the screen reader's problem. And I think people have been taking so much from a desktop like Viewpoint and dropping it into a browser that the user experience is just different in a browser application than it is in a desktop application. You know, writing a document in Word or something else and then switching to the online version's, just a slightly different experience because your method of moving between the browser elements and the content section is just different, if that makes sense. And so, you know, we have to continue to make sure the user has a good experience with that. And a lot of that's that challenge of the workflow. I personally think that, you know, the big companies have gotten really smart with this and they're not, you know, doing anything wrong today. But, you know, it just takes the time that you have to go use a project management tool, you know, or a HR tool or a training system that is the online training or whatever, and those aren't accessible because the third party small company hadn't been building that into their tools yet. Then you can't do your job and that becomes a problem. And to be honest, you know, this is not a statement by our company. This isn't a statement by most people, but, you know, I care more about my workplace applications than I do just general websites. Because that allows me to get paid. And if I don't like what's on certain retail site and I can't buy stamps from the post office, I may go to stamps.com or I may go to somewhere else, or, you know, to me, I want that to be accessible, but it's probably not my first priority. But I do want my banking site to work, you know? I need to be able to pay my bills. I need to be able to see what's in the bank. I need to be able to transfer money, you know, those basic things. And so you have to prioritize in my world, you know, pick off the things that matter to you personally. And those are the ones that probably more important than anything else. Can I buy an airline ticket on the mobile app? Can I check into the flight? Can I add it to my wallet? You know, I went to some sporting events, can I pick my seat? You know, basic things for life and enjoyment. And if that site's bad, I may go to a different site. I mean, I could tell you buying tickets for sporting events is not the most accessible experience today.
- That sucks.
- Yeah.
- Do you see that changing a little bit in Europe with the EAA, the European Accessibility Act?
- Well, it will if it's the same types of companies.
- Yes, exactly, you know,
- The question is it is still, you know, the same companies, whether it's StubHub or Ticketmaster? I'm not picking on any of them from an accessibility perspective today. I'm just saying in general. Are those the same ones used in Europe? And then maybe.
- Well we're getting toward the end of our time here, but I want to give you an opportunity to leave us with a final message, thoughts about where AI and accessibility is going, whether it's part of JAWS or what you've got going on at your companies or just in general.
- Yeah, I think AI is gonna change a lot of these products over time. And it's not like we're gonna go build our own OpenAI tool or Gemini or Claude or any of these other ones. What we're gonna do is tap into those products to make our product better and partner with those organizations to ensure that we're giving the user the best experience. And, you know, today that's Picture Smart Face in View, which is allows a blind or low-vision person to tell if their face is in the view if you're looking at the camera. Whether it's FSCompanion or the new Picture Smart AI labeler, those are things today and those are on the software side. And then, you know, on the accessibility side, you know, we've taken our entire knowledge base of how we solve problems with all of our engineers and people who are out, you know, doing audits and a testing. And we've put that into a large language model so you can ask it questions and you can drop that right into like a Teams bot or something like that to make it easier for somebody in a company to get an answer to a question without having to call somebody or Google it. And you get more consistency when, you know, companies when they're building stuff they don't want, again, I'm not picking on Google, but they don't wanna just go search the internet. They want consistency in terms of how they develop their platforms. And then on the hardware side, you know, where do we go tomorrow with what our cameras are doing? You know, do we take a picture and describe it to the user because your eyes get tired throughout the day and you wanna know what your grandchildren look like or the medicine bottle is and stuff like that. Or do we even, you know, you start reading the book under the camera and you're sliding the book left and right to read it. And then you over time does it just say, oh, I know what this book is and does it offer it up to you as a digital copy, which then allows you to scroll and maybe have it read out loud using some kind of, you know, voice. We'll see where that technology goes tomorrow. I don't know, you know, but these are, you know, basic concepts today that, you know, will show up in technology and we're gonna have to see where, you know, it goes tomorrow. I mean there's, you know, people believe that, you know, AI is gonna take over accessibility. And I would argue that, you know, some of that may come in time and we should all invest in and work towards that mission to improve things. But we still have to make sure the user can use this technology. And I'm not gonna have a play button at the top of my screen to just read it from top to bottom. I need to interact with it. And I've been trained a certain way. So when somebody tells me that I'm just gonna ask it to read all my emails, well, what happens when I want to go back a sentence or I heard a number, but what was it? Am I gonna speak out loud to ask it to go back and read that to me again? I mean, you're at work with people in cubicles, you're probably not gonna be doing the voice commands, even though we have them in our products. You're not gonna use them for everything. But there's a lot of value in creation, there's a lot of value in making sure that we can make sure that blind and low-vision people can interact with other AI components and tools and continue to innovate based on what users ask. And every year we have a user event where users submit what they wanna see in our product and we then go develop it. And a year ago it was Picture Smart AI and this year the AI labeler and some other things that are gonna come out are coming from the user community. And I think that's really key.
- Yeah, I mean, those are really impactful products that are coming out. I'm really excited to hear the reaction because you're definitely hitting on some pain points and that was a great way to end this. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you joining, Matt.
- No, this was great and I appreciate both of you. I think it's really important to continue to talk about how the intersection of accessibility and assistive technology and AI, you know, we have the three A's, how do we make sure they all work together in this world.
- Very much appreciate your thoughts, your insight, and your time today, Matt, we really do, thank you.