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02] This is an ACB Community Call presented by American Council of the Blind.

[0:10] Music.

[0:18] This Unmute Presents Community Call was hosted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023. Welcome everybody to another Tuesday.
I hope everyone had a great holiday and everyone had fun and had a healthy, happy holiday.
Want to remind everyone that, make sure that you respect everyone the same way that you would want to be respected with your questions and give everyone the same opportunities as you would want.
We’re going to go firsthand through.
And then if we have enough time, we’ll take people’s second questions. So you can go ahead and raise your hands and get that going.
Uh, it’d be interesting to hear if anyone got any new gadgets over the holidays or maybe any new gadget services.

[1:08] Also, I want to introduce you to Michael Babcock and he has a couple of announcements for us as well. Hey Michael.
Hey Marty. Are you saying people don’t know me? You’re introducing me. Anyways, I’m introducing you. Yeah.
Yeah. I don’t know who I am. So I got some new gadgets that I can fill people’s ears with if we don’t get any hands But a couple of the announcement well, I got one new one, but it looks like we do have a hand But I will go through the announcements real quick We did publish a couple of podcast episodes to the unmute presents on.

[1:39] ACB community feed and and there was a little bit of confusion with that this morning So if you want to get all of the content that we publish including the content on Thursdays more longer form content and Sundays
more shorter form content in your favorite podcast app just search for unmute presents and you’ll find one that says unmute presents on ACB community
that is the only podcast feed that we have our podcasts or our unmute present shows are also published to the ACB community podcast feed so I think that’s That’s where some confusion may have arisen earlier today, but just search for Unmute,
Presents and you’ll find Unmute Presents on the ACB community with Marty Sobo and Michael Babcock as the hosts.
Speaking of that podcast on Sunday, I published a,
Different style. I’m not sure that I’m sold on that style. So if anyone listened to it, I’d love some feedback on it But a different type of of Sunday type of content, which was talking about day one journaling My intention was hey, let’s start New Year’s out with a brief overview of the day one journaling app for those who may be,
Interested in journaling and documenting their their life and experiences This usually lasts for about three to five months for me and then I lose track of itSo I’ll be fully fully transparent about that though be kind of cool to get a a.

[3:06] 365 day journaling streak so, you know, we’ll see what happens with that and then on Thursday We published a episode where Demos Demosy Marty and I talk about our audio,
setups and what we’re doing for audio and how we’ve been,
Configuring our devices and then of course we have last week’s call with Michael Dois that was published last Tuesday in the podcast feed.
Just a couple more things real quick and then we’ll get into it.
The next Tuesday, the 10th, we will have a individual from Raz Mobility to come talk to us about the Mini Vision 2 phone, which I’ve been playing with it over the last couple of days and I kinda like this phone.
It’s kind of cool. Doesn’t have a lot of the added features that some of the other devices have, but it is a very durable form factor and the buttons are big.So I’ll hint at that.
And if you want more information about the Mini Vision 2, feel free to join us next Tuesday. And as I said, RAS Mobility will be here.
That’s all the announcements I have. Sheila, do we have any hands?
You do, Cindy.

[4:15] You may unmute. Hello, Cindy. Hey, Cindy, how’s it going? Good. Michael, I got my charger card for my headphones. Now I have a question. You said it was going to work out of both ears,
but it’s not. Is there any way to fix that? So what do you mean? You’re not getting audio out of both ears? Right. And are you using it wired or wirelessly? I’m using Bluetooth,
yeah. Okay, so you’re using Bluetooth. And what are you playing content on? Is it your phone?
Yeah, my phone. Okay. And it’s like music that’s only playing out of one ear? No, it’s everything music, shows, movies, whatever it is. So and voiceovers only coming out of one ear as well?
Um, I haven’t used voiceover yet, but okay. Okay. Well not okay. Um, it sounds like there may be a balance Setting and accessibility that we may need to change.

[5:18] That is that is unique because it should be playing out of both ears and I promise you it’s not as as problematic as it seems to have been so.

[5:28] Give me a call. I will be in tomorrow morning starting at 7 a.m AM our time. So give me a call and we can help troubleshoot it.
And if we need to, we can get a replacement headset out to you because, uh, it should be playing out of both channels out.
Is it playing out of only the left or right channel?

[5:46] The left one. Okay. Yeah. Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll do some further troubleshooting. Okay. All right. Thanks. Perfect. Cindy. Thank you for coming in. We appreciate it. Who is next? Uh, there, uh, no, Belinda. Sheila.

[5:59] Beth, you may unmute. Hey, Beth, how are you doing?
Hi, happy new year. Happy new year to you. Oh, I have a question.
Yeah, I play on my computer. I have Groove Music, that’s a Windows.
It plays my music maybe for about sometimes a half hour, sometimes an hour, sometimes a little more. Then it says like groove.
It says groove music can’t cannot play send feedback and you have to send feedback to Microsoft I guess to Microsoft but I don’t know how to do that because I you know, they,
I guess they act like you have to have an account with Microsoft.

[6:48] But so you gotta Like should I call the help desk or run it? So you can call?
Microsoft accessibility with that What it sounds to me like though is Groove Music is getting to a file in your music list that it can’t play the file back. It doesn’t have the ability to play that file format.
Do you know if it’s happening with the same file every time?
I don’t know. It doesn’t say like a certain file. It just says Groove.
Yeah. So, so here’s what I would try doing. Next time it happens. Are you a JAWS user? NVDA user? using zoom?
Um, I use, um, system access. Okay.
I don’t know what it is in system access in NVDA and in JAWS. There is a option to read the entire screen with JAWS key or NVDA key plus B
for box, and that reads the whole dialogue box, that message that tells you the file cannot be played should have the name of the file that cannot be played,
in that message itself, even if System Access isn’t reading it out outright.
So what I would do is A, reach out to Microsoft Accessibility. If that’s the path you want to go down or B, see if you can get the name of the file that it’s having problems playing and either remove it from your groove music library or from your music playback list.
Because as I said, it sounds like it’s trying to play a format it can’t play.
Oh, okay. Yep. Yeah.

[8:18] Because it stops playing everything. Exactly. Yeah, so hopefully one of those will help you there, Beth.
Okay. Okay, thanks. Thank you. If anybody has any tech questions, raise your hand. We’d also love to hear if you got any new gadgets over the holidays or any gadget services, anything like that.

[8:36] So who do we got next? Rick, you may unmute. Hey Rick, how you doing?

[8:43] Rick Troiano, you can unmute, sir. While we’re waiting for that, Belinda, do we have any hands in Clubhouse?
We do not at the moment. Okay.
There we go. Okay. There you go. You got it. Good job. Okay. How you doing? Can everybody hear me okay? Yep, we can hear you.
Okay, great. Here’s what’s going on.

[9:06] I have an iPhone 13. I’m all updated, downloaded, all that kind of stuff. When I go to access the bar, and I say to Siri, open bar, Siri gives me all kinds of weird stuff,
like stuff about space or it will just say hello or it just it’s it’s really acting weird and it’s,
only on bard it’s only when i can go to access a bard uh in this update series had some issues with iOS 16.2 on the phone.

[9:59] Whatever they have done, they kind of screwed up some stuff in the background. Well, they sure did.
Yeah, you’re not the only one. A lot of people have been having serious problems with this update. So hopefully in the next update, they’ll resolve some of these issues.

[10:16] Sometimes it doesn’t always recognize the app you’re trying to open. What I would suggest is try restarting your phone. Do you ever restart your phone, like shut it off, turn it back on again? Do you ever do that?
About twice a day. Oh really? So you’re actually shutting it off, powering it down, turning it back on again. Powering it down, turning it back on, yeah.
And you’re not getting any other luck with it working. It just does the same thing. It doesn’t recognize BARD.
It doesn’t recognize BARD. I have to do it like three or four times, or I say something else and then I go back to Bard and it’ll recognize Bard.
Until they fix it, you might want to move the Bard icon to somewhere that you can access it easily to get it open with a double click. I know that’s not a perfect solution, but you might just be,
battling a losing battle if you just continue to try and get Siri to open Bard.
Yeah, I didn’t think about that because I have like 14 pages. So yeah, maybe I’ll move it to my My home page something that could also help you as well without having to move your apps around to that
I do in I’ve never had good luck with Siri. I mean every once in a while she works well for me, but if you didn’t know.

[11:39] Directly above your dock. There’s that page changer where it’ll say like page one page two page three If you double tap on that now, it’ll bring up your spotlight search.
And then you can just put in B A R and towards the top of your screen, you should be able to find right there.
So you could also do it. You can also do from your home screen, a three finger swipe down and you’ll get that same search box. Yep.
Okay, the gotcha with the home screen why I don’t typically recommend that too much is you can’t be too high on your screen Or you’ll bring down your notification center. So.

[12:16] Okay. Yeah, either way three fingers swipe down from about the middle of the screen or one finger double tap on that page Which will bring you into spotlight Which is where you can search type in bar or just a couple of letters and then it will find your or a Bard right there towards the top of the screen.
One last tip for Braille screen input users and I appreciate Herbie for bringing this to my attention because I was not aware of the fact that you could do this but if you switch to Braille screen input on your rotor,
you can actually start typing B-A-R right there and then it’ll say Bard Mobile and you can two finger flick to the right to activate Bard as well.
So hopefully that helps you in the interim.
It doesn’t solve the problem but it gives you a few other solutions.
And that search function will work on any app. So you could just hit that search box, type in anything you want and open anything from right there. So that just might be faster if you have a lot of pages of apps.
Yeah. All right. Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
All right. I will. All right. Who do we got next? Scott.

[13:21] Hello, Scott. All right. I have a possible answer for this as a follow-up. All right, Scott. Let’s hear it.
The actual name of the app is Bard Mobile. I usually have pretty good success telling Siri, open Bard Mobile.
Oh, yeah. That might be a good…
Yeah, if he’s just saying Bard, he’s not saying the full name, maybe it’s confusing. That’s probably out. I’m sure it’s my guess, my immediate guess anyway.

[13:50] Because if you give the exact name of the app, then it might, I think, usually now some…
Now here lately though I’ve noticed that especially with 16.2 I’ve noticed that sometimes if,
If you say the exact name, it won’t… Or if you say the name of the app and what you think may be the exact name, it probably is. It’ll sometimes say something like, I will need to do something or I will… I couldn’t find…
Or the closest thing I found to it, like it thinks you’re looking up a location or something, some sort. you know, it’ll do something unexpected. Even if you say open this or that, it’ll still come.
Siri seems to be a little more, a little harder to hear lately. Maybe it’s, you know, if you realize how old it is, it’s like 12 years old, I think. She is the oldest smart assistant.

[14:51] Yeah, Scott, if you didn’t know in this new current update, you can now just tell Siri to restart your device and it will restart it. You don’t have to go into the menus and all of that.
So for those of you who need to restart, you can ask Siri to do it now.

[15:09] But I, but I did, but of course, as far as getting the barred app, you know, to, to get it to open the barred app, it might be helpful to say open barredmobile. So yeah, that’s a good tip.
Try that and, and let’s see if that works for you. Thanks, Scott.
All right. Linda, do we have any questions in clubhouse? We do. We have Kim. All right. Hey, Kim, how’s it going?
Going good. Can you hear me? We can hear you loud and clear.
Oh, okay, because my button said mute and I thought.
Does that mean I’m unmuted? Just a tip for the person who’s having trouble with BARD, I still haven’t updated yet. I’m on 15.7 and every time I think about it, I hear about a new
problem. But what I do, there are some apps that I just never close and BARD is one of them. So all All I have to do is go to my app switcher to get to Bard.
But there’s like four or five apps that I just never close if that’s any help.

[16:15] Well, thank you. Now, I will make everybody aware, and I’m not sure everyone experiences this.
This could be an intermittent thing, but in current 16.2, which you haven’t updated to yet, so you’re lucky, when you’re on a phone call, the app switcher doesn’t always work.
So if you’re on a call and you go into the app switcher, you get stuck and you’re not able to switch through the apps using the app switcher. So just be cognizant of that when you’re- I didn’t even know you could do that.
Yep, you can do that. Yep, you can do that. Yep, yep.

[16:50] I’m gonna stay here until I absolutely have to update, I think.
At some point you will, but if it’s working for you, then do what makes you feel the most comfortable. There’s no reason to mess it up if it’s working for you.
Okay. Thanks.
Thanks. Have a great day.
You too. Anybody else in Clubhouse? Not at the moment.
All right. Back to Zoom. All right. Pam. Hey, Pam. How’s it going?
Doing well. If we can just get through this weather situation today and not have a tornado, I’ll be happy. All right. Hopefully that’ll happen for you.
What?
I wanted to suggest to the one having problems with getting the Bard app to open. Now, I will confess I very rarely ever use Siri and I’ve always been that way.
I just I use her when I have to, when I’m in a big hurry, whatever, or if I don’t know where to look up something.
But something I have heard other people say, And it makes sense to me and it they say it works and that is when you open.

[18:05] Bring up Siri. Don’t just Immediately plunge in and say open such-and-such.

[18:13] Wait a second or two because,
Sometimes if you jump right in in, Siri will not hear the first word or a couple of words that you said. So you bring up Siri,
you’re still holding the button down, and you wait a couple of seconds and then say open whatever.
Because if you don’t, Siri might say, well, what do you want to know about such and such? So you might want to try that as well.
And I can only suggest that because I’ve heard other people say that it worked for them. Yeah, especially if you’re using Bluetooth headphones of any kind.
You definitely want to wait that one second in the beginning because a lot of the Bluetooth headphones have what’s called latency, which is a little bit of a delay.
So if you jump right in and you hit the Siri button and just start talking, It might not catch the first few words that you say. So you might want to start Siri,wait a second or two, and then speak.

[19:21] Got it. Thanks. Thank you. Do you have someone else? Go ahead. Sorry, Bill.
Triple G. Greg, you can go ahead.
Hey, Greg. How’s it going? Hey. Hi, Michael. Hi, Marty. How are you? Hey, hey. Happy New Year to you.
Happy New Year to you. Two quick ones. One, have you heard of a monster microphone? And if so, are they any good?
Got one for Christmas. And then the other real quick one is, and you’ve probably addressed this before, and this is probably an iPhone update issue.
Every time I dictate something on the iPhone, like say I put in something like, Sheila is so cool on my iPhone.
It messages who I ever send that message to. It messages like twice or even three times sometimes.
So it double dictates or triple dictates. Sheila is so cool.

[20:19] And I’m just wondering if that’s a bug fix that I can fix with updating or if anyone’s heard of that. So I think Sheila’s just tapped your phone so she can re-emphasize it.
Especially if it’s only when you say that line.
No, no, it’s when I say anything. Have you have you updated to whatever the current is? What do you know what operating system you’re on right now?Which one?
I’m on 16, the first version of 16. Yeah.
Yeah. You might want to try and bump up to 16.2. If you’re on just the first version of 16, there’s been a lot of bug fixes.
It’s not perfect at 16.2, but it does actually fix a lot of stuff. Another thing I can suggest is if you’re going to text someone and you’re having issues doing it totally through Siri, I would say go into your messages and go to the body of the message,
of the person that you want to send a message to and dictate that way into it. So for example,
you would go to Sheila, you know, in your list of messages, then go down to the message box, and then you can dictate the message that way. And hopefully that will solve that problem. It works better that way than trying to do the whole entire thing through Siri.

[21:41] Okay, okay. And by the way, Sheila, you’re really cool. Any words on Monster?
I was just looking at this microphone. It looks like a dynamic microphone, which means it’s going to pick up your voice if you’re close to it like this, or if you back up a little bit.
So it’s a good microphone. It looks like I have no personal experience with this microphone, But from everything I was able to see on it, it looks kinda kinda handy. It’s it’s for karaoke. Is that correct?

[22:14] I guess so or for just talking on the community. I’ll try it out.
The only issue is I don’t think it has a headset with it, so I’d have to plug in.
Most of them don’t. Is that particular microphone USB only or is it USB and XLR or only XLR? Do you know what it is?
USB and XLR, I do believe. Yeah. I would look on the bottom or maybe on the side of the microphone and see if there’s a headphone plug-in on there.
If there is, then what you do is you get a regular headphones that have that kind of plug that sometimes they have a small version, sometimes they have a larger version, but on that one,
it sounds like probably, my guess would be a small version. What you do is you take your headphones,
you plug it into the microphone, then you take the microphone, plug it into the computer via USB, because I’m assuming, which is dumb of me, by the way, don’t ever assume that you don’t have an an interface unless you do.
But if you don’t, then you plug the mic directly into the computer.
Then what you do is you can monitor your headset through the microphone.
Your volume, your mix, and all of that stuff. You can mess around with that once you get it plugged in and see.
If you do have an interface, then of course you plug the microphone into the interface, interface into the computer, headphones into the interface, and then go from there.
Okay, okay.

[23:37] And if I have questions, I’ll just bug Michael someday. Yeah, let us know and we’ll do it every weekend to help you out.
I would say if it doesn’t work right out of the gate when you plug it in, you might need to go into your system settings and maybe change a couple thingsin your audio output so that it’s actually going out to the right place. That might be the only other thing you have to do.
Okay, thank you. Happy New Year.

[23:59] Happy New Year to you, good luck. let us know how that microphone works out for you.
I yeah people will be hearing it tomorrow night on open mic. So yeah, all right sounds good Thank you. Yep,
All right. You ready for zoom? Yes, we are gala. Hey dala. How you doing? Hey guys, okay So I have a question maybe some maybe somebody can help me,
Okay, is there any Gadgets that would work on the tv?
For that place to describe to you what it actually complex.

[24:32] It’s kind of like the movie theater. Okay, there’s a couple of things here. So first of all, do you do streaming or is this just on your regular TV?
It’s on a Maruko like Disney Plus and Netflix and stuff like that.
Okay, so not every single movie has all of the closed caption or closed caption and description and all that, you have to make sure that you have it turned on,
and also that whatever show or movie that you’re watching has that available to you.
Also, are you using a Roku box? Is that what you said you were using to have all your apps and stuff on there?
Yes, sir. You might want to go into the Roku settings itself and see if there’s a couple of things that you can turn on.
I know Roku also has the voice option where you can use your voice on the remote control to be able to open apps or look for different things on there and use your voice if that’s easier for you.
So a lot of those settings are actually in the Roku settings itself. And then you would just have to make sure that the show that you’re watching offers,
the extra descriptive translation and stuff.
Awesome. And just so you know, not every show has that. So.
Okay. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. That, that works. Yeah. Yeah. No problem at all.

[25:59] Okay. Bye. Yep.

[26:02] Right. We have Herbie here in Clubhouse. Hey Herbie, how’s it going? You’re supposed to be on vacation.
No, that’s not till next week. Oh, okay.
I’m flattered you want to send me off that much sooner. Wouldn’t you rather have two weeks than only one week?
No, I’d rather actually have none because I am too much needed around here. But that’s neither here nor there.
You never know, I might still try to be on the call next week I’ll actually get to join in at 10 in the morning instead of at noon.
So there you go. I hope you’ll be in your time zone, Marty. Yeah.
One thing to mention though is Greg, if your microphone does not have a headphone jack, you can still use your current, or even if it does, you can still use your current headphones
that you have plugged into the computer. All you need to do is once your mic is plugged into a USB port, leave your USB headphones plugged in and in the control panel, go to sounds and go to the recording tab and set your default mic to the monster mic.
That’s all you need to do.
You’ll still have your regular headset for your input and your monster mic for your output and you’ll be a roaring success.
I think the only thing you can’t monitor yourself when you do it that way though. First of all, you can and if you really want to monitor yourself, which is that is a really personal preference thing, I find most people actually don’t like to do that.

[27:30] Including myself. But if you want to, there are two ways. One, again, if the mic has a headphone jack, then you can do it that way.

[27:38] But the other way is on the microphone properties, if you go to the properties button and you go to the listen tab, you can check the box and route it through your headset.
There is a latency, but it will let you hear yourself if that’s what you really want to do.
But I do find that most people because I have this discussion a lot when helping people with station playlists You know, I mentioned there’s something about them having to hear themselves through the mic and then most people with my experience I really don’t want to hear myself.

[28:12] That really comes down to a personal preference thing and it also comes down to do you even have a regular set of Corded headphones too for that matter that would even plug into the mic
So there’s multiple ways to solve that problem, but thank you her because I appreciate that because yeah, it you can you can have different inputs and outputs on both windows and Mac depending on whatever pie. Yep.
So, yep. So really boils down to personal preference and what you want and what equipment we have access to and stuff like that.

[28:45] So and it’s painful because I’m actually having to give windows advice today, but to see, know, top goes. But, yep.

[28:55] Thanks, Harvey. Della, I want to go back to you and your your message because the irony so I was looking on,
Roku’s accessibility website and they post a picture of the button you need to press four times to enable accessibility Which seems to be a little?

[29:18] Overhanded I guess or a little out of touch because a picture doesn’t help However, I did do some further research and there’s a star button which is directly.

[29:29] Below into the right of the up down left and right navigation pad So it’s going to be on that row of buttons below that navigation pad on the far far right hand side if you press that fairly quickly and.

[29:44] In steadily four times Then your TV will start speaking to you and it will tell you you know What elements you have highlighted on the screen and how you can?
Interact with those devices. It is the screen reader for Roku is what it’s called used to be called accessibility guide and that’ll allow you to go in and when you’ve went into something like Disney plus and Disney plus is great about this.
I would say most of their titles have audio description. You can always go to ADP dot ACB dot org to search a specific title to see if the audio description is available.
But once you’ve started playing a piece of content that has that audio description, if If it doesn’t immediately start playing, press that center OK button, choose the languages option and then you can choose English, AD or different language AD if you need that,
other language with audio description and it’s available.
So hopefully that’ll help you with jumping in and using the screen reader on your Roku device and getting started. Again it’s that button on the far right below the up down left and right pad.
You press it four times and it will start talking to you.

[31:00] And my mom goes, yeah, no problem. And on those remotes are is it the same on every Roku remote? Or is it just a specific model? Do they all keep them the same? How does that work on the,
road? Okay, unless your device is super old, the Roku remote are pretty much the same. So you just,
press that button and you should four times and you should be good to go. How old is your Roku that you have? Oh, goodness gracious, probably seven years old. Oh, wow. Okay. They last but you You should be good to go if you have any problems.
There is a Roku accessibility webpage that isn’t the most accessible.
Gotta appreciate that. But it definitely is available if you need any further assistance or reach back out to us, okay, Dahlia?

[31:44] I really appreciate it. Thank you all. No problem, good luck. Thanks for joining us.
Do we have any other hands anywhere? Cause I’m not seeing any. No, not here.
All right, and Belinda?
Perfect. So Marty, I’ve been playing with automation lately. Oh boy, here we go.
We do have one here, just hang on a second and I’ll get to them.
And I’ve got one here too now. Let’s take zoom while Belinda’s getting her hand on class. Teresa, go ahead.
Hey Teresa, how you doing?
Okay, I have a question. Okay. It kind of has to do with the e-reader from the NLS issued out.
And I was, the other day I downloaded a book from, from Bard in Braille and it’s got several volumes, but it started at the second volume instead of, you know, the first, you know,
like volume two of 10 volumes.
I said, wait a minute, what’s going on here? That was kind of strange.
I don’t know if I need to go back in and delete it and then try again or what.

[32:50] Yep. I would just go delete the book that you downloaded and then try to redownload it and hopefully then Start with volume one if it doesn’t then get the BR number,
For that book or the title and reach out to your local library and let them know that it’s skipping volume one,
Okay, you know because I haven’t even gone into it. I hate to think how many other volumes got skipped.

[33:15] Besides just number one. Yeah, it could just be a computer glitch too. You should be good to go I have not seen that happen. But for me the first thing I would do if that happened is to.

[33:26] Delete the book and then redownload and see if that fixes it. Okay, I’ll do that then.

[33:34] No problem Certainly, all right. We have Ray here in Clubhouse. Hey Ray, how you doing?

[33:43] Good morning Marty Michael Belinda and Sheila have a question recommendation if you have one about that playing DVDs on a Windows 10 and also using JAWS.

[33:55] You have a DVD player right now on your machine or you don’t have one We are or not. We have one, but I’m not sure which one we’re using but it’s a little difficult to use but Something that’s more accessible and easier to,
Maneuver and navigate so you do have a DVD reader in your computer though, correct?

[34:16] Okay, so what I use on Windows is VLC,
It’s by a company called video land. It’s a nonprofit organization Organization if you just search for video land or VLC you’ll find it and then when you go in there,
You can go into the menu option and choose open DVD and open the DVD and start playing it from there,
Your spacebar will work as your play pause,
Your previous and next chapter will be your arrow keys and then to turn the volume up or down You just use up and down arrow keys. Okay. Well, thank you so much I’ll give that a try and great show and everybody have a happy new year,
You too, thank you very much.
Thank you. All right, you’ve got another hand in here, Tim, you can unmute.
Hey Tim, how you doing? Happy New Year.
Oh, happy New Year guys. Wait for my computer to stop talking to me. Okay. Um.

[35:12] I have a problem with CIU’s theory. I’m very low vision,
but I also have Parkinson’s and I can’t do voiceover because I can’t do the gestures.
I mean, I’ve tried and the gestures just don’t work for me because I think my banger say too much.
Yeah. So what I will say right out of the gate here is you are a perfect candidate to use a voice control and voice control allows you to use your whole phone with your voice. So you can open apps, close apps, do whatever you need to do, dictate all of that.
So you should definitely take a look at voice control and that’ll help you a lot be able to use your phone more than you are now.
Oh, I’ve never heard of voice control. Yes, built into your phone. It’s for people just like you who maybe can’t use their hands as good as they would like.

[36:18] And even if you’re someone who has low vision or no vision and you need to use voice over, you can audio, which means with your voice, do the voice over gestures so that you can hear what’s on the screen.
So for example, if you’re on your home screen and you have voice control turned on, you can say, you know, swipe right and it will then say Safari, swipe right.
It’ll say mail, you know, swipe left. It’ll go back to Safari again.
Open mail. It’ll do all of those things for you.
So and it does work with voiceover and you can use the voiceover gestures auditorily and it will do all the things you need it to do.
Okay, now of course, well I use the Bluetooth headset and I use Siri to make all my phone calls and texts and all that stuff.
But the problem I keep getting is my stupid phone. I’ll ask, I’ll say, call so and so and it will say which one, you know,
or it says, or I ask it something.
It’ll say, here’s what I found on the web.

[37:33] And of course, I can’t see anything on my phone.

[37:37] How do I get Siri not to, I’ve tried to convince Siri that I’m blind and not to do that.
And it just keeps, it just keeps doing that. So a couple of things I’ll say here.
One is you wanna try and put as much information for a person into one contact.
So for example, Jim Smith, you wanna put the home phone number in there and also put mobile phone number in there.
And there’s, you could label both of those with the little dropdown menu. And then when you go to call Jim Smith, you can say, call Jim Smith home, or you can say call Jim Smith mobile.
But let’s say you maybe have a couple names that are similar.

[38:27] There is in your contacts also a space for a nickname that you could put whatever kind of nickname you wanna put in there.
So for example, maybe Jim Smith is your best friend and his name is Jim Smith, that maybe you call him Bubba or something like that.
You could put Bubba in the nickname and then you could just say call Bubba home or call Bubba mobile and it will do that.
Okay. You might need a little help with that from someone just to help you get it going the first time, you know, with the moving some of your contacts around and things like that if you have trouble with it.
But once you get it sorted out, it’d be much easier. And it’s called voice control.
Yeah, it’s called voice control in the accessibility settings. Okay, that’s just about okay.
Yeah, you can actually tell Siri to enable voice control now, too. Yeah.

[39:27] You should be able to use voice control no problem with an iPhone 11.

[39:36] Okay Also, but is there any way to stop Siri from saying, you know which one or I mean like like the other day I was trying to get it to call Best Buy.
It’s the same call Best Buy in South Charleston.
Yeah you’re gonna have something that broad you’re gonna have a little bit of issue with because for example when you say call Best Buy there’s so many of them. You might want to try and narrow down your search to the location where you are so for example, where do you live like what’s the city you live in.
I live in Cross Plains, West Virginia, third world state West Virginia.
So you would want to say call Best Buy.

[40:22] In and put your city, you know, I do that. And I say, Well, the one that’s here is in South Charleston. If you wait, if you if you do wait a couple of seconds, it will list a list of them. And she’ll start from the top and say, there’s this one,
do you want to call this one? And you can say no, it’ll go to the next one. And then you say yes on the one it wants you
wanted to call. Okay. Yeah, well, it just usually just shows me that when I touch on those and nothing happens. Yeah. If you
wait for her, she’ll talk you through it. It’s just that you’ve got to be a little bit patient. What’s that? I think that might be broken in one of the later versions. I know exactly what you’re talking about. But I also know he’s talking about to where serial just pop up on the screen and give you the list. And she,
now that I think about it hasn’t actually been reading that list to me. That may not be working properly right now.
Okay. Well, it won’t, it won’t read the list to me.

[41:26] Yeah. It’s supposed to, it’s supposed to. And hopefully that’s one of the things that they can fix in the near future.
This is one of the incidences where, where I would definitely recommend reaching out to Apple accessibility and letting them know the challenges that you’re facing, including the fact that Siri is displaying results on the phone, but you can’t interact with those results.
And it would be helpful for her to prompt you for which one you’d like to call and actually ask you by name or list them off.
Because I think I have observed what you’re saying.
I live in a small enough area that most of the time when I tell Siri to call business, it’ll call it right away.
But I do remember what Marty was saying, where Siri would say, which one? We have Walmart here and Walmart here. And then you could tell it which one. And it hasn’t been doing that.
Yeah, I tried to tell them to call best buy.

[42:18] In South Charleston, which is where the best buy is. So it’s not ideal, but a solution for that in the interim could be to add that specific best buy once you know their phone number to your contacts, and then you should be able to call,
best buy and it will call the one that’s in your contacts.
Okay, well, like I said, I just got a new television. But I’ve talked to, I finally got them and talked to them and they sorted out the problem.
Well, good. I’m glad to hear that.
And, uh, good luck with, with Siri. Hopefully some improvements will come in the near future. I hope so.
That thing drives me crazy. Yeah. Siri is having some problems right now and everyone’s experiencing different issues. So you just got to be a little bit patient.
Hopefully they’ll get the Siri issue resolved sooner than later.
That’s the hope.
And experiment with voice control. Okay, thank you. Yeah, good luck to you.
Okay, thanks. All right, we have a race in Clubhouse. All right. Triple D is back up.
Hello, Greg. Hey, Greg. Hello. Hello.

[43:28] I have a quick question just about TV. Michael, what was the thing you said to do on Roku-enabled TVs?
Does it work even if you don’t have Roku built in?
Then I just wanted to get your opinion on a TV that they saw, did at convention last summer, the Hisense X class TV.

[43:57] I don’t know who makes it. I think it was. I think it’s a Best Buy. Hisense I think is a Best Buy brand. Yeah, yeah.

[44:05] So I wanted to know if you have experienced that and if that’s going to give me any, as far as having a built-in screen reader or audio description, if that’s going to give me any advantages. So thanks.
One thing, Greg, I will tell you right away is that if you’re going to use an external box like Apple TV or like a Roku or something like that, then the actual TV you get isn’t
going to make a huge bit of difference because you’re not actually going to use the interface inside the TV that comes with it.
You’re going to be using whatever box you decide to buy, whether it’s, like I said, Roku or Apple. what you’re going to be using, not what’s actually in the TV.
Now, if you really want to get Roku, what a lot of people do is they actually get a TCL TV that actually has Roku built into the
TV. That’s what they use is the Roku software. And then you don’t need to buy an external box, you just get the TV. And then you get the Roku remote. And you just use Roku directly within the TV. If you’re going to use anything else, Apple or,
any of the other ones, then it’s just gonna be about which box you buy.
And then the TV itself is really gonna be about what size you want and the kind of quality of picture you can see the picture at all.

[45:27] And Hisense does also bundle Roku software. I just looked it up with some of their TVs.
So that I don’t specifically have any details about that particular model. You mentioned Greg, maybe worth searching Hisense on acbmedia.org to see if there was a podcasted version of that specific session in order to answer your question about enabling accessibility.
And then I want to come back and talk on audio description for a moment for people as well.

[45:57] So in order to enable accessibility, what used to be called accessibility mode, I believe, but the voice screen reader, you quadruple press the button that’s on the right-hand side of the row of buttons that’s directly below the navigation pad.
So you have an up, down, left, and right with an OK in it. If you slide your finger down the remote from the down key, you’ll find a row of buttons And then slide your finger all the way to the right and that button will be the button you press four times to enable text to speech.
It’s a toggle. So pressing it four times again will disable it. And I haven’t done this on a Roku in a while.
I believe the first time you do it, it’s going to give you some basic directions for navigating with the Roku interface.
Now when I wanted to come back and talk on with audio description, and I think this is important for a lot of people. It doesn’t matter in I would say 98% of the cases
what you’re using to get the streamed content. If the streamed content allows you to change the language then it’s worth looking in the languages menu to
see if audio description is available. So on my Apple TV remote I believe if I remember right we haven’t set in the settings on Apple TV to always playaudio description when available, but I believe you can get to the languages menu by pressing.

[47:22] The up arrow or the up direction on the direction pad while playing video content.
And then you have like subtitles and then audio languages and different apps do it differently. There’s a little bit of confusion with that, but as long as you can get into the languages settings, then you should be able to choose English or proper language for your needs,
that’s AD or audio description in order to get that to start playing in your device.
So hopefully that helps a little, Triple G.
Did we lose him? It looks like, all right, Sheila, do we have any other hands in Zoom?
Yes, Theresa.
Hey, Theresa. We are not hearing you, Theresa. Theresa, you can unmute.

[48:02] Yep. You’re still muted, dear.

[48:05] Okay, this is Teresa. I’m glad I’m following Triple G because I saw that TV last summer and it had built-in
apps and the remote, when you operated it, it talked.
And I put my hands on it.
Oh, okay. Did you like it? Was it easy to use?

[48:31] Yeah, it was. I didn’t and I even put my name in a drawing but unfortunately I didn’t win.

[48:37] But he said you could find it at Walmart. Yeah, I believe Hisense is a Walmart brand.

[48:44] You just have to find out if you want that exact model.

[48:49] Otherwise, so two things you would if that particular TV that you saw last summer has something specific that no other TV that’s a Hisense has,
you’d have to get that model and try and find that model in Best Buy. If all of the high sense TVs have whatever feature that you’re looking for in it, then you would just have to find out how do
you turn it on, on whichever high sense TV you end up deciding to buy, if you’re going to use their software and not use like an external box like Roku or Apple TV or any of those.

[49:22] Right, but the way he talked, it was like you didn’t need all the, you know, the external boxes, you know, because it had built in apps. I don’t know if these are for the apps or for the streaming
services, or what? Well, every TV, every smart TV has apps built into it. The issue is not every TV’s.

[49:44] Software, which is the system that you would navigate around to find all the apps, click on them and do all that stuff. Not all of the systems in there, the software is great, you know, that’s That’s why a lot of people choose to go with Roku or Apple TV or something else,
just because they don’t always keep up on the software.
It changes year to year depending on the model of the TV. It’s harder to figure it out.
When you go with something that’s really popular like Roku, Apple TV, stuff like that, then you’re gonna be able to keep up more. They’re gonna keep the software updated.
You will get more people knowing how to use those devices because there’s more of them out there.
So, and they also implement more of the accessibility features and things like that.
So that’s why a lot of people prefer that. And if they switch and they get a new TV, they can still keep their same box. They either get a new Roku or take the same old Roku and just plug it into their new TV.
So it’s really kind of a preference to be honest with you.
And it’s kind of funny that Triple G should bring that up because I remember the gentleman that showed it to me, he was talking about how the Macy’s parade would be described and also.

[51:09] The Roses parade and I was following that yesterday and of course I couldn’t hear the description. I mean, I couldn’t hear any audio description. I mean, I could hear what they were
saying when the flows came by, I like to watch the parade, kind of because I have a heart for marching bands. I was in my high school marching band, so I always have a special place in my heart for marching bands. That’s a side note, but anyway.

[51:38] Well, Teresa, we appreciate that. And yeah, it looks like you should be able to find some more details. You can do a search for TVs on ACB media to get more details about that. And yeah, so thank you for reaching out.
Appreciate it.
And Markle and Marty, you’ve got five minutes, guys. Okay, thank you. And I’ll mute, and I’m sorry.
No problem. Thanks for coming. And yeah, we’re at 55 after, so Marty, it looks like we’re clearing hands in Zoom. Is there any hands in Clubhouse?Otherwise, Marty will wrap it up for us. Oh, we’re good.

[52:11] Perfect. All right. Well, thanks everybody for another Tuesday here in Unmute Presents. If you want to get ahold of us, you can email us at unmute presents at gmail.com.
If you have questions, comments, if there’s anything you would like to see or hear about, let us know.
And don’t forget about one week from today, next Tuesday, we’re going to be having Raz Mobility here to talk about their phones.
So that should be a fun event. And Michael, you want to go through the podcast one last time and let everyone know how they can reach out and get those?
Yeah, so if you go and subscribe to unmute presents on your favorite podcast app You can get access to Sunday’s day one content that posted.

[52:56] Thursday’s audio setup that posted and last Tuesday’s repeat of the unmute presents photography session to This call will be in the podcast feed probably in about half hour 45 minutes from when the call ends and then this coming Thursday,
Marty and I are doing a part two of our audio setups And I’m not going to commit to anything on Sunday, but I think I have an idea and we may have a guest presenter,
showing loopback and how he’s using loopback with some of the audio setups that,
Marty and I are working with so definitely get tuned in if you’re interested in that type of content and You can reach out to us at unmute presents at gmail.com. That’s all I have,
I’d like to thank Sheila and Bell for helping us out today. We so appreciate all of your assistance Again, if you want to get a hold of us on mutepresents.gml.com and everybody have a great and we’ll see you in the community.

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