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Contents
Sometimes, Being a Screen Reader User is a Real Disadvantage. 2
Heidi Unboxes an iPhone 16 Pro. 6
Victory for United Blind Leaders. 32
Steve Tyler Discusses the Blindness Agency Leadership Crisis. 34
Given the Run-around by a Major Electricity Company. 48
NVDA is Making Inferior Copies of JAWS Features. 51
Welcome to 303
[music]
Voiceover: From Wellington, New Zealand, to the world, it’s Living Blindfully – living your best life with blindness or low vision. Here is your host, Jonathan Mosen.
Hello!
In this bonus edition, I don’t have one, but Heidi is one of the first in the world to get one. She’s unboxing her iPhone 16 Pro., victory for United Blind Leaders, and a fascinating discussion with Steve Tyler on the Blindness Agency Leadership Crisis.
Hello, Colorado! Yes, it’s episode 303, and area code 303 in the United States belongs to a humongenormous number of counties in Colorado. I mean, it’s quite incredible. I think if you counted them up, you’d get over 40 different bits of Colorado that this area code covers. So it’s a very economical, environmentally friendly area code because it’s used all over the place in Colorado.
I know that we have plenty of listeners in Colorado, so enjoy this moment. We made it. We just made it to your area code.
Sometimes, Being a Screen Reader User is a Real Disadvantage
Now, this episode is a little bit different from the episode I originally intended to bring you today. We are going to be having a look at a brand new iPhone 16 Pro, but it isn’t mine.
I wondered whether I should bother telling you this story or not. But then, I decided that I should tell it because I think this is an issue that does affect screen reader users from time to time.
Don’t forget that Living Blindfully is still segmented by chapter. So if you want to skip on to the good stuff and maybe come back to the story later, or not bother with it at all, that’s totally fine. But I want to explain to you why I don’t have an iPhone 16 Pro Max Black 512 and 12 gigabyte in my hand here on the 20th of September, which of course is iPhone 16 Pro delivery day.
The process for getting a new iPhone varies a little bit around the world. In some countries such as the United States, you can go through a pre-approval process and breeze through checkout.
We don’t have anything like that in New Zealand. We don’t have Apple stores in New Zealand. And for some time when the iPhone first came out, we couldn’t even get an iPhone on delivery day. We had to wait a week or 2, and then the iPhone came to us. But eventually, we did start getting the iPhone on delivery day, and that was very exciting.
But Apple has a minimal presence here, and my perception is that the number of units that they allocate to New Zealand is very small. So if you don’t get a unit really quickly when the Apple Store opens, you are going to be out of luck. As I say, there is no Apple store.
Carriers seem to have a very small supply as well. You can’t walk into the stores that normally sell this sort of technology and expect to buy one on delivery day. You might get lucky, but it’s highly unlikely.
I have got ordering these iPhones down to a fine art over the years. Before the Apple store closes for the little shutdown that it has just before the iPhones go live, I make sure that I’ve got the unit that I want to buy in a list. They don’t call it a wish list, but that’s effectively what it is. You can choose your color, your capacity, all those things. And then, you can add it to a list.
So as I do every year, I chose the phone. I decided to go for the black 512 gigabyte iPhone 16 Pro Max, and I put it in the little list.
Now, I also purchased a couple of Apple Watches – one for me and one for Bonnie. And I actually ordered and now have had delivered the new MagSafe charger, which will charge the new iPhones at 25 watts.
So I’ve had a bit of experience of ordering with the new Apple Store app over the last week or so, and What I found was that when you add an iPhone to this list, It now appears on the bag tab of the app, which is very efficient. You just go into the bag option at the bottom right, and there is your wish list.
So I thought well, this is going to be easy. I will breeze through.
I eventually got into the Apple Store at about 8 minutes past the hour. That’s typical. It does take a little longer than the top of the hour that they promise.
And when I got in there, I found that my bag tab had no saved items. They were all gone. It had vanished from the user interface.
I don’t do a huge amount of shopping from the Apple Store, (except I make up for it at this time every year when it’s new iPhone time again), so I didn’t know at the time that there is another place that you can go. You can go to the For You tab, you can double tap the My Account button at the top of the screen, and then you can go through and find your list. But I didn’t know that because I hadn’t needed to do it for the 3 other recent items I had purchased.
Heidi, my sighted daughter, confirmed this, by the way. She’s on an iPhone 12, and I decided that I would buy her a new iPhone this year. So I sent her the money. And from home, she ordered a new iPhone. She did exactly what I did because she’s seen me do it in the past. And she was somewhat surprised to note that when she went into the bag tab, it wasn’t there. The difference, of course, is that she’s able to quickly whiz around the screen when you have an unexpected situation like that, whereas a screen reader user is less able to do that.
So not knowing that I could still access my list in another place I’d never been to before, I started from scratch. I went and I found the iPhones. I drilled in. I had to choose that I wanted a Pro model, and then the Pro Max. And then, I had to choose my capacity. And then, it wanted to know if I wanted Apple Care, and on and on.
I got to the bag, and it was showing a delivery date of the 20th. And I breathed a sigh of relief. It had taken me a wee while, but I was reasonably quick and it was still showing that we’d get it for delivery date and I could do the podcast for you.
But then, as I checked out, the delivery date slipped to the 27th. What slowed me down a little bit more as well was that in the Apple Store app, if you get onto the tab strip at the bottom of the screen, and then you try to flick left so that you get to the bottom items, which is where the checkout button and those sorts of important things are located, you can’t do that at the moment. It gets stuck. Focus gets stuck in the tab strip. So as a VoiceOver user, I was being disadvantaged by the fact that the UI had suddenly changed and there were some focus issues. Nevertheless, I paid for it. And sure enough, when I got the email confirmation, it was showing that the delivery date was the 27th.
Now, this probably only took about 4 or 5 minutes. So if I had had that problem in the United States, it wouldn’t have been a problem because there’s so much more supply in the United States. But because we get this tiny little supply here in New Zealand, it was long enough that all the other Kiwis who were not screen reader users got ahead of me, and I couldn’t get an iPhone on the 20th.
I contacted Apple on the Monday morning (because they weren’t taking calls over the weekend). I explained the situation and I said, is there anything that you can do for me? Because I stayed up till midnight. I did what I could. The UI had changed. There was genuinely a focus issue that was affecting my ability to get around the app efficiently. and it just didn’t seem particularly fair, really. Now, it is a first world problem, of course. And had I not been doing this last Living Blindfully podcast where we’re going to be unboxing an iPhone on the show, I would have let it go. But I called Apple because I really did want to do this one more time.
And I think it raises a wider issue, too. This not only affects people who are trying to pre-order iPhones. Maybe if you’re in the United States, and you get in on time, you don’t really identify with this because there are so many more iPhones.
But you may identify with this problem in another context, and that’s ordering concert tickets. When you order concert tickets for a performer who’s really in demand, they can sell out in a very short period, and a screen reader user is incredibly disadvantaged. It’s hard to rehearse ordering concert tickets because you don’t want to go around ordering in concert tickets for concerts you don’t want to go to, just so that you are practiced enough to whiz through the system when that big performance that you really want to go to comes along, so using a concert tickets app or website is not something you do often. And when you’re required to do it, the stakes are high and you’re required to perform as a super duper fast screen reader user. And it’s difficult because a sighted person can just glance at the screen and be more efficient.
So I do wonder whether there might be some sort of provision that might be made in situations like this, because I don’t think I’m unduly tooting my horn when I say I consider myself one of the most proficient screen reader users there is. But it just seems a little rough to be penalized for something that was not within my control, a change of user interface and some accessibility issues with the app.
When I raised this issue with Apple, the woman I spoke with was incredibly nice and helpful. And she said, “Look. The reality is that because this is a product that hasn’t actually been released yet, it’s on pre-order. I’m very limited in terms of what I’m able to do.”
She said, “If you call after the 20th, I’ll have more control because then the product is shipping, and I may be able to expedite it a little bit.”
I explained why the 20th would be super sweet given Living Blindfully, and that I was endeavoring to demonstrate this on a popular podcast. And I said, “I realize that you are limited in what you can do. Is there perhaps a supervisor who might have some more control over the situation?”
And she said that’s perfectly reasonable. I mean, it was a great conversation. She said it was perfectly reasonable. But at the moment, nobody was available, but that someone would call me back. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a lot of experience calling big companies that promise to call you back and they don’t, so I was a bit skeptical. But I said, “Okay, I look forward to the callback.”
And sure enough, the next day, I did get a callback from an incredibly wonderfully nice supervisor. And the first thing she said was, “Wow! I did a search on your website. You are doing some amazing things.” And I thought, oh, thank you very much. It’s very nice to hear that.
She said she had done what she could, but she wasn’t really sure whether anything would come of it. And I just said, thank you for doing all you can.
We had quite a long discussion about exactly what had got me into this problem with the saved list suddenly disappearing from the bag tab, whereas it was there before. She talked about ways to avoid this next year. And I said well, next year, I expect to be in quite a different situation, actually.
It’s probably just going to resolve itself. Now, I didn’t hear anything further. I don’t have the phone, and I figured that might be the case. It was a long shot, but it was a good experience actually talking to Apple and feeling like I mattered as a customer, and that my concerns were being at least taken seriously and were understood, and that there was a bit of empathy there. So even though I didn’t get my phone, I did feel quite good about the experience that I had trying to get these remedied.
So I don’t have my phone. It will come sometime next week. Heidi has hers, so let’s get on with it.
Heidi Unboxes an iPhone 16 Pro
Jonathan: Well, there is no better example of karma than the situation we find ourselves in. If I hadn’t agreed to buy my wonderful daughter an iPhone 16 Pro, we would not be doing this podcast episode today. Isn’t that beautiful, Heidi?
Heidi: It’s beautiful.
Jonathan: [laughs] Yeah, it’s beautiful.
So as we record this, it is, … What are we looking at time-wise? [10:26], and your iPhone has just arrived, so you’ve got it quite early.
Heidi: Yes.
Jonathan: And we’re now going to have fun doing the unboxing.
Heidi: Yes.
Jonathan: Tell me what you got.
Heidi: I got the 16 Pro in the Desert Titanium with the 256 gigabytes of storage.
Jonathan: Excellent!
Alright. So what have we got in the box?
Heidi: I’ve still got my shipping box right now. I haven’t even opened that yet.
Jonathan: Okay. Right. Oh, right. Right. Let’s get on with it, then.
Heidi: Yeah.
So it’s got the cool, like, cardboard pull tab to open it.
Jonathan: I do know you’re not getting any stickers this year. They took the stickers away.
Heidi: Oh. I mean, kind of sad, but I never used them.
Jonathan: What was on the stickers?
Heidi: Apple logos.
Jonathan: Okay.
Heidi: Yeah. Okay, so I’ve got the iPhone box. Oh, it’s quite slim this year. Though I haven’t had a new iPhone in a while. [laughs]
Jonathan: Yeah, I’ve heard it’s a bit minimalist.
Heidi: It’s got the picture of the screen of the phone on the front. And then, it’s got the pull tabs on the back.
Okay. We’ll open the box.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: Oh, it is a very pretty color. It’s like a very pale gold with like pink undertones, so it’s almost in the rose gold family.
Jonathan: Oh, you like it?
Heidi: I do like it. I’m very happy.
Jonathan: Who’s getting your old iphone?
Heidi: Uh, that is to be determined.
Jonathan: Oh, maybe we’ll get your mother back on the iPhone side.
Heidi: [laughs] Yeah.
Okay. And then, we’ve got the protective film on the screen.
Jonathan: Yep.
Heidi: Oh, a nice unblemished screen.
Jonathan: You don’t have an eSIM, right? So you’ll need to transfer the SIM to your new phone.
Heidi: Yeah. But luckily, they still include the SIM removal tool in New Zealand.
Jonathan: Hooray!
Heidi: But they don’t in America, because it’s all eSIM.
Jonathan: No, that’s right. In America, the iPhone you get is actually different hardware, and there is no SIM tray in the US iPhones anymore.
Heidi: I will turn on the phone.
Okay, Apple logo. It’s turning on.
Jonathan: That’s a good start.
Heidi: It is a good start.
Jonathan: Yeah. So you’re not going to put the sim in first?
Heidi: Um no, I’ll probably do that later.
Jonathan: Okay. You never used to be able to activate without a SIM. But I think you can now, once you’re connected to the Wi-Fi.
Heidi: Do you think I should do it?
Jonathan: No, go ahead. Let’s rock this thing.
Heidi: Okay.
Oh. “Hello!” So can I turn on VoiceOver at this stage?
Jonathan: Yes. If you triple click the side button, you can turn on VoiceOver. And this is useful info for blind people who may be setting up their first phone.
VoiceOver: VoiceOver, on.
Alert. VoiceOver gestures.
Heidi: Yeah.
Jonathan: Okay, so now it’s telling you about VoiceOver gestures.
Heidi: Yes.
VoiceOver: To go home, slide one finger up from the bottom edge until you feel the first vibration, and lift your finger.
To use the app switcher, slide up farther from the bottom until you feel a second vibration, and lift your finger.
If you move too far to the left or right, a rumble vibration will indicate the gesture was cancelled.
To use Control Center, slide one finger down from the top edge until you feel the first vibration, and lift your finger.
To use Notification Center, slide down farther from the top until you feel a second vibration, and lift your finger.
Jonathan: Alright. Can we get a bit more volume?
Heidi: Yep.
Jonathan: Okay, cool.
Heidi: Turned it up now.
Jonathan: Yep.
VoiceOver: VoiceOver.
Heidi: Ooh! That’s very loud.
Jonathan: [laughs]
VoiceOver: To go home, …
OK, button.
[VoiceOver setup screen in different languages]
Heidi: [laughs] That’s fun.
VoiceOver: Hello!
Jonathan: Yes, I’m sure it is. [laughs]
Heidi: Okay, sorry. Swipe up to open.
VoiceOver: Setup.
Jonathan: I mean, it’s hard for me to tell because for those who don’t know, we’re doing this remotely. You’re at your house and I’m at mine. But the speakers sound very nice.
Heidi: They do sound very nice.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: Okay, so English.
VoiceOver: Select your country or region, heading.
New Zealan.
Heidi: That’s me.
Jonathan: Yeah.
This is highly handy that you know how to use VoiceOver.
Heidi: Oh, I’m very well trained.
[laughter]
VoiceOver: Appearance.
Setup. Back, button.
Jonathan: Okay. Now, it’s changed to the Karen voice because you chose the New Zealand region. So we started off with Samantha. And now that we’ve chosen New Zealand, it’s gone to Karen.
VoiceOver: Accessibility options, button.
Appearance, Heading. Choose how you would like text and icons to look on iPhone.
Default, Adjustable. Swipe up or down with one finger to adjust the value.
Heidi: Oh, I like default.
VoiceOver: Continue, Button.
Jonathan: What are the other options?
VoiceOver: Default, Adjustable.
Heidi: Default, …
VoiceOver: Medium.
Heidi: Medium, and Large.
Jonathan: Large, okay.
VoiceOver: Continue, button.
Quick start. Heading. In progress.
Looking for nearby devices. Bring your current iPhone or iPad near this iPhone to sign in and set up. If your other iPhone or iPad doesn’t show options for setting up this iPhone, make sure it’s running iOS 11 or later and has Bluetooth turned on. You can also set up this iPhone manually.
Heidi: So I have my other phone here.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: So I’ll bring it nearby.
Oh yeah, and I’ve got a pop-up on my other device, which I should probably turn VoiceOver on, right?
Jonathan: [laughs]
VoiceOver: Setup. Close, button
Set up new iphone, heading.
Heidi: That’s very fast. Should I slow it down?
Jonathan: Uh, not for this bit. That’s fine.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Close, button.
Use your Apple account to set up your new iphone for yourself or a child in your family.
Continue, button.
Heidi: Okay?
Jonathan: Yep.
VoiceOver: Face ID authenticated.
Set up new iPhone.
VoiceOver: Waiting for other iPhone, heading.
Heidi: Okay. So on one, it says waiting for other iPhone. And the other one, …
VoiceOver: Hold your new iPhone up to the camera, heading.
Heidi: Yep, okay. So I will hold my iPhone up to the camera.
VoiceOver: Getting things ready.
Heidi: That was pretty quick.
Jonathan: So was it because, was there a QR code of some kind on the screen of the new iPhone?
Heidi: Yes. So on the screen of the new phone, it’s not a QR code, but it’s like a QR code. And so you just point the camera of the old phone at the screen of the new phone.
Jonathan: Right, yeah.
VoiceOver: Screen dimmed.
Jonathan: And what’s happening now?
VoiceOver: In progress.
Continue on your other iPhone, heading.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Keep this iPhone near your other iPhone while setting up.
Heidi: Okay. So go back to the 12 Pro.
VoiceOver: Getting things ready, heading.
Close, button.
Use your Apple account to set up your new iPhone.
Image.
Set up for me, button.
Heidi: Okay, set up for me?
Jonathan: Yup.
VoiceOver: Set up for me.
Passcode.
Finish on new iPhone, heading.
Heidi: There’s so many things happening.
Jonathan: [laughs]
Heidi: Okay. So I have to enter my…
VoiceOver: Your account is protected by the passcode of your other iPhone. Your passcode is encrypted and cannot be read by Apple. After you enter this passcode, it will also become the passcode for this iPhone.
Heidi: Okay, so I have to enter my current passcode?
Jonathan: I’ll make sure that we edit that out of the recording.
VoiceOver: Enter passcode.
Setting up your iPhone. It may take a few minutes to activate your iPhone.
Heidi: So now, it’s just thinking.
Jonathan: We’ll take a quick commercial break here while it does that.
VoiceOver: Personal data use.
Data and privacy, heading.
This icon appears when an Apple feature asks to use your personal information. Apple collects this information only when needed to enable specific features, secure Apple services, or personalize your experience. Apple believes privacy is a fundamental human right, so every Apple product is designed to minimize the collection and use of your data, use on-device processing whenever possible, and provide transparency and control over your information. Your data on this device is also encrypted and will be permanently removed if you reset to factory settings.
Continue, Button.
Continue In progress, dimmed.
Face ID setup.
Heidi: Oh, Face ID.
Jonathan: You might want to turn VoiceOver off while you do this, actually. Because otherwise, it’s going to turn attention mode off.
Heidi: Right.
VoiceOver: Subscribe to services from Apple.
VoiceOver off.
Heidi: Okay, so I will…
Jonathan: We have covered setting up face ID various times, and you gave us the big hint when the iPhone X came out about thinking like using your nose as the hand on a clock face.
Heidi: Yes, yes I did.
[Face ID setup sound]
Heidi: First scan complete.
Jonathan: I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sighted person set up Face ID before. That’s quite interesting.
Heidi: Oh, yeah. It just makes the fun sound as you move your head around the circle.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: Okay. Use Face ID with a mask. Um, I don’t want to use Face ID with a mask.
Jonathan: Okay.
Heidi: So I will not select that option.
And it says Face ID is now set up, so I’ll turn VoiceOver back on.
Jonathan: Okey dokey.
VoiceOver: VoiceOver on.
Set up. Face ID is now set up, heading.
Jonathan: Oh, it’s back to Samantha.
VoiceOver: Continue, button.
Heidi: Oh, that is interesting.
Jonathan: Oh, because it’s now inherited your phone settings from the iphone 12 because it’s the same speed as well.
Heidi: Ah, yes. Do I need to slow it down?
Jonathan: We might want to slow it down a bit, now that we’re going to be doing some more stuff.
VoiceOver: Containers.
Voices.
Characters.
Words.
Speaking rate. 65, 60, 55, 50.
Heidi: Is that okay?
Jonathan: 55, let’s try that.
VoiceOver: 55%.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: Oh, okay.
VoiceOver: Continue, button.
Jonathan: You even know about the rotor. That’s impressive.
Heidi: I’m very talented.
Jonathan: You are. [laughs] There’s no doubt about this.
Heidi: Well, I need to be able to use VoiceOver and TalkBack, at least in a rudimentary sense, for my job.
Jonathan: Right.
VoiceOver: Screen dimmed.
Face ID has been set up to verify your identity, but does not require you to look at iPhone to authenticate. This can be changed in Face ID and passcode settings.
Heidi: I’ll fix it later.
Jonathan: Yeah, okay.
VoiceOver: Okay, button.
Transfer your data, heading.
You can download your data from your temporary iCloud storage, or transfer directly from your other iPhone.
Download from iCloud. You can start using your iPhone in about 15 minutes. Your data will download later over Wi-Fi.
Transfer from iPhone. Transfer directly so this iPhone will be ready with your data when you finish setting up. Time to transfer, 15-20 minutes.
Heidi: So what do we want to do here?
Jonathan: I think iCloud might be better because it sort of runs in the background, whereas if you transfer from the phone, I don’t think it does run in the background. I think we sort of sit there while it does it.
VoiceOver: Screen dimmed.
Heidi: Yeah. Well, we can do iCloud.
Jonathan: Okay, then.
VoiceOver: Download from iCloud.
In progress.
Jonathan: You’ve got an iCloud backup, right? That’s current?
Heidi: Yes.
Jonathan: And are you running ios 18 on your other phone?
VoiceOver: Terms and conditions.
Heidi: Yes, I am.
Jonathan: That’s good.
Heidi: Yeah.
VoiceOver: Toolbar. Agree, button.
Heidi: I’m just gonna skip the terms and conditions.
Jonathan: Yeah, good on you.
VoiceOver: Heidi Taylor.
Heidi: Oh, it’s got a picture of me.
Jonathan: Well.
Heidi: It’s like the picture from my contact card.
It just seems to be thinking right now.
Jonathan: Okay.
Heidi: I can swipe around.
Jonathan: I should just let people know that we are compressing this so where there are long pauses, we’re just tightening it up just to make it listenable.
VoiceOver: Heidi Taylor.
Heidi: No one wants to listen to us sitting in silence.
Jonathan: You’d be surprised. People like the whole unboxing thing.
Heidi: Okay. [laughs] Alright.
VoiceOver: Back, button.
Make this your new iphone, heading.
Here’s everything set up as you had it on your other iphone.
Learn more, button.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Apps and data.
Ccloud backup, collapsed.
Settings, Siri, screen time, and more, collapsed.
Wallet. 1 item, collapsed.
Connections. Heidi’s Apple Watch, collapsed.
Continue, button.
Heidi: Okay. Well, it said it’s the same, so I probably don’t need to check all the settings.
Jonathan: Yeah, okay.
VoiceOver: Location services, heading.
Heidi: My other one says it’s updating backup.
Jonathan: Ah.
Heidi: Hold on.
VoiceOver: Updating backup, heading.
Close, button.
This iPhone has started a new backup so your new iphone will use up-to-date apps and data. Stay connected to wi-fi and power to make sure the backup can be completed.
Heidi: So it’s trying to update any changes that have happened since it backed up last night, I guess?
Jonathan: I guess. It shouldn’t take too long because those backups are incremental.
Heidi: Yeah. Okay.
VoiceOver: Location services allows maps and other apps and services like Find My to gather and use data indicating your location.
About location services and privacy, button.
Turn on location services, button.
Heidi: Well, I want location services.
VoiceOver: Turn on location services.
Add card.
Security code. Text field. Is editing.
3-digit CVV. Insertion point at start.
Contacting the card issuer.
Adding card, heading.
Jonathan: Now, what we’re doing here is setting up for Apple Pay. So you can use this with your phone to make payments.
VoiceOver: Terms and conditions, heading.
Toolbar. Agree, button.
Setting up card for Apple Pay.
Adding card.
Adding to wallet.
Your card has been added to wallet.
Card added.
Card verification. Choose how to verify your card for Apple Pay.
Selected. BNZ app.
BNZ mobile banking.
Call.
Next, button.
Alert. Complete verification later using the BNZ app. You will receive a reminder to complete verification after iPhone has been set up.
OK, button.
Call BNZ.
Next, button.
iPhone Analytics, heading.
Help Apple improve its products and services by allowing analytics of usage data from your iPhone. You can change your decision later in settings.
About device analytics and privacy, button.
Share with Apple, button.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: App Analytics, heading.
Help app developers improve their apps by choosing to share app activity and crash data with them through Apple. You can change your decision later in settings.
About app analytics and privacy.
Share with app developers, button
Silent mode, heading.
You can toggle silent mode on and off, or check its status in Control Center.
Heidi: Oh, so this is new for me.
Jonathan: Yes, they took the switch away. Do you use silent mode very much?
Heidi: My phone is perpetually on silent mode.
Jonathan: Interesting. That’s right. I think I remember that. You don’t like it making cool sounds?
Heidi: No.
Jonathan: Okay, fine.
Heidi: [laughs]
VoiceOver: Continue, button.
In progress.
Back, button.
Action button, heading.
Press and hold to turn silent mode on and off. You can also customize the action button to open camera, turn on torch, or access a favorite iPhone feature.
Jonathan: Have you given thought to what you’ll use the action button for?
Heidi: No.
Jonathan: That’s fun!
VoiceOver: Customize, button.
Not now, button.
Camera control. Back, button.
Jonathan: Ah, this is interesting. This is the new thing.
VoiceOver: Click camera control to open a camera app, then click again to use camera control and shutter.
Heidi: Yeah, so this is very interesting because it’s the fun new button.
Jonathan: Yeah.
VoiceOver: Continue, button
Heidi: It’s showing me a little animation of how it works.
Jonathan: Ah.
VoiceOver: Emergency SOS, heading.
Jonathan: So that animation wasn’t accessible, was it?
Heidi: No.
Jonathan: So basically, for a blind person, it was a blank screen with a next button.
Heidi: Yeah.
Jonathan: Is there a back button?
VoiceOver: Back, button.
Heidi: Yeah.
Jonathan: Can we just check that one more time?
VoiceOver: Back, button.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Camera control.
Click camera control to open a camera app. Then, click again to use camera control as shutter.
Continue, button.
Emergency SOS, heading.
Jonathan: So at that time, it didn’t come up with the animation, right?
Heidi: No, it didn’t.
Jonathan: Okay, interesting.
VoiceOver: iPhone is ready to help in an emergency.
Press and hold for emergency SOS. Press and hold the side button and either volume button to make an emergency call.
Detection. If iPhone detects a serious car crash, it will automatically try to call emergency services in selected countries.
50%.
Emergency SOS via satellite. When available, iPhone can try to text emergency services via satellite if it can’t connect to a mobile network.
55%.
[laughter]
VoiceOver: Safety features may share your location when your device calls, or you text emergency services. Your emergency contacts may also then be contacted and notified of your location.
See how your data is managed, button.
Personal data use, icon.
Continue, button.
Restore from iCloud, heading. Progress, 0%.
Heidi: Oh well, we’re stuck on a restore from iCloud screen.
Jonathan: Okay. So I guess it didn’t really help that we used iCloud. So we’ll take another commercial break until the restore from iCloud is done.
Although, can you tell me a bit about the camera button now that you actually have it with you, you know? What’s it like?
Heidi: It’s flush with the side of the iPhone instead of like protruding slightly, like the side button or the volume buttons. It’s about the same size as the side button. It’s maybe a third of the way up the phone from the bottom on the same side as the side button.
Jonathan: What’s to stop it from being bumped all the time?
Heidi: I guess nothing more than the other buttons. It has quite a… It has a good clicky feel to it.
Jonathan: Hmm. I can hear that clicking.
Heidi: But that’s as much as I can tell at the moment without being in an app that uses it.
Jonathan: And it sounds like it is actually physically clicking, rather than haptic feedback.
Heidi: Yes.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: From what I’d seen around the internet, …
VoiceOver: Screen dimmed.
Heidi: Excuse you.
It has a 2-stage sort of situation. So a light press is supposed to give the haptic feedback. And then, a full press is supposed to press the whole button. And that’s where the proper click’s coming from.
Jonathan: Right. Okay.
So Heidi, we took a commercial break while all that was going on. And now, your iPhone is rebooting at this point.
Heidi: Yes, it is. So hopefully, the iCloud backup went well.
Oh, here we are. We’re back at the hello screen.
VoiceOver: Setup.
Restore completed, heading.
Jonathan: Oh, that was good.
VoiceOver: Apps and data will continue downloading in the background.
Continue, button.
In progress. Dimmed.
Heidi: It’s thinking.
Jonathan: It’s either syncing or thinking.
Heidi: [laughs]
VoiceOver: You can transfer a phone number from a nearby iPhone, or scan a QR code provided by your service provider.
Jonathan: Ah. So that assumes eSim.
VoiceOver: Transfer from nearby iPhone, button.
Heidi: So this is because I haven’t put my SIM in. So I could probably just do that now, right?
Jonathan: Yeah, you could put your SIM in now, yeah.
Heidi: Okay. I will use the fancy brand new SIM removal tool to pop open the SIM tray.
Jonathan: For those in countries that do have physical SIMs left, can you describe what this process is like?
Heidi: Yes. So at least in New Zealand, I assume everywhere else, the SIM card tray is slightly below the down volume button. There’s a small pinhole, and the SIM removal tool has like a pointy end. You press quite firmly the pointy end of the SIM removal tool into the pinhole, and it should pop open.
So it’s now hanging out of the phone a little bit. And you can then pull it out to put your SIM in. You have to do that on both phones.
Jonathan: And the little pointy triangular edge always goes to the front, doesn’t it? Front right?
Heidi: Front left, in my case.
Jonathan: Okay, yep. And they’re so tiny, those nano sims.
Heidi: They are.
Jonathan: There’s a lot to be said for e-SIMs.
Heidi: Yeah. Okay. So I’ve removed it from my old iPhone, put it in the new sim card tray, and then you just slide it back in. The sim will be towards the screen of the phone, and then just press. And when it’s flush, it should be installed happily.
Jonathan: Yay!
Heidi: Yep, and it’s come up in my status bar, which is something I don’t know how to get to.
Jonathan: You just tap the top of the phone.
VoiceOver: Mobile. 2 of 4 bars. Signal strength. Status bar item.
Heidi: Cool! Okay. So I’ve got…
VoiceOver: Set up mobile, heading.
You can transfer a phone number from a nearby iphone.
Transfer from nearby iPhone, button.
Use QR code, button.
Set up later in settings button.
Heidi: I’ll choose that, since I have a physical sim.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: And it’s now installed.
VoiceOver: Set up later in settings.
In progress.
Welcome to iPhone.
Heidi: Well, thank you.
VoiceOver: Swipe up to get started.
Heidi: I will.
VoiceOver: Home.
Settings. 2 new items.
Jonathan: Okay, cool! So now, we can have a brief play with things.
Heidi: Yes.
Jonathan: Can we have a look at this new camera button and what you can do with that? So if you just sort of swipe it with your finger, does it do anything when you’re in the home screen, or not?
Heidi: No, it doesn’t seem to have any effect here.
Jonathan: Okay.
Heidi: I’m swiping along. Nothing’s happening.
Jonathan: So then what happens? If you press it, I think it will take you into the camera app.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Camera.
Photographic styles. Personalize how you appear in photos with incredible nuance to get the exact look you want. Photographic styles uses advanced scene understanding and adjust specific colors in the scene, so you can express your creativity like never before.
Heidi: So that’s one of the new features on this phone, I believe. Or at least, one that my old phone was not new enough to have.
Jonathan: Right.
VoiceOver: Alert. Use this iPhone when sharing your location?
Heidi: Yes, please.
VoiceOver: You are currently using Heidi’s iPhone to share your location in Find My and Messages.
Not now, button.
Use, button.
Photographic styles.
Try it, button.
Set up later, button.
Heidi: I’ll set it up later.
VoiceOver: Set up later.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Viewfinder. Focus unlocked, image.
Heidi: Okay. So if i go back home, …
VoiceOver: Home.
Settings. 2 new items.
Heidi: and push the camera button again, …
VoiceOver: Tilt right.
Camera.
Take picture, button.
Heidi: Okay. I’m in the camera.
Jonathan: And then, I think if you press the button again, it takes a picture, doesn’t it?
Heidi: Okay. I’ll push it again.
VoiceOver: 1 times.
Jonathan: Oh.
Heidi: It took the picture.
Jonathan: Okay.
Heidi: Hold on.
Jonathan: Does swiping on the camera do anything on the camera button?
VoiceOver: 0 people.
Tilt left.
Level.
Heidi: No, it’s not doing anything.
Jonathan: Okay.
Heidi: At least, while VoiceOver is running, it’s not.
Jonathan: That’s interesting. So try turning VoiceOver off.
Heidi: Yeah.
VoiceOver: VoiceOver off.
Heidi: Okay. So VoiceOver is now off.
Oh. Yeah. Now, little extra controls have popped up. And I’m, by default, in zoom. And as I swipe along, the zoom level changes.
Jonathan: So that does not work when VoiceOver is on?
Heidi: It seems that way. I’ll double check.
Now, I can’t even get VoiceOver to turn back on.
Jonathan: [laughs]
Heidi: Turn VoiceOver on.
Siri: Okay, I’ve turned VoiceOver on.
Heidi: Siri’s very quiet.
Alright. So…
VoiceOver: Camera. 0.0 lux seconds.
2 times.
Heidi: Oh no, it’s working.
VoiceOver: 5.
1 times.
Heidi: I don’t think I was pressing hard enough to begin with.
Jonathan: Okay. So we are getting feedback.
VoiceOver: Alert. Finish setting up iPhone.
Auto macro detected.
Siri is ready to be set up in settings.
Not now, button.
Heidi: Not now. We’re busy.
VoiceOver: Take picture, button.
Jonathan: [laughs]
VoiceOver: Actions available.
Heidi: So if you put a little bit of force into it, … If you just swipe over it, like you’re running your finger along the edge of the phone, nothing’s happening.
Jonathan: So I guess that answers my question about the button being bumped.
VoiceOver: Tilt left.
Heidi: Yeah.
Jonathan: That you require a bit of force, you know, just a little pressure to make it work, which is good news, I think.
Heidi: Yeah.
Jonathan: Yeah.
VoiceOver: 1, 0, 1.6, 3.1 times.
Jonathan: So what is that doing? That’s adjusting the zoom?
Heidi: Yes, I’m currently adjusting the zoom level.
Jonathan: Can you, with your amazing explanatory powers, explain what that means? When you adjust the zoom, what is it actually doing? what are the consequences of doing it?
Heidi: When you zoom to a higher number like 5 times, that’s zooming in so it’s focusing on something either that’s further away (it brings it more into frame), or it makes something that’s close bigger in the frame. And then when you’re zooming out to, say, 1 times, or 0.1, or 0.5 times, that’s the ultra wide camera, and that means that more of your surroundings is now in the picture but it’s further away, I guess. So when you swipe towards the top of the phone, it does the zooming out, so it decreases the zoom level. It zooms in, it increases the zoom level. And when you swipe towards the bottom of the phone, it zooms out.
Jonathan: And then, does something else happen if you press and hold that button?
Heidi: Oh. Press and hold, I’m now recording a video.
Jonathan: Okay. And at some point, they said that with the Apple Intelligence later, you are able to get this visual assistance. And I thought that might have been pressing and holding it, But perhaps you, well, maybe you do that outside the camera app. I can’t remember how you get that visual intelligence that they were talking about. But I don’t think it’s there yet anyway.
Heidi: No, it’s not here yet, so it’s hard to test. [laughs]
Jonathan: Yeah. Okay. So that’s the camera control. So it is accessible.
Heidi: Yes.
Jonathan: One thing I thought we might just look at again, … And I know that we did it when we got the iPhone 15, but there’ll be a lot more people who are getting iPhones this year who’ll be having an action button for the first time. So maybe we could go into the settings and just take a look at all the things you can do with the action button as a refresher.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Mail.
Settings. 2 new items.
Heidi: Yes, settings.
VoiceOver: Settings.
Heidi: Okay.
VoiceOver: Search. Search field.
Dictate, button.
Heidi Taylor. Apple account.
Family, button.
Restore in progress. An estimated 17.1 gigabytes will be downloaded to finish restoring your apps and data.
Jonathan: Wow!
Heidi: That’s a decent amount of data.
Jonathan: Yeah.
VoiceOver: Get help during an emergency. 1, button.
Finish setting up your iPhone. 1, button.
Heidi: Where do I find the action button setting?
Jonathan: If you scroll down, there is actually a feature in Settings called action button.
VoiceOver: Add AppleCare Plus coverage, button. There are 60 days left to add coverage for accidental damage.
Aeroplane mode. Switch button, off.
Wi-Fi.
Bluetooth. On, button.
Mobile, button.
Personal hotspot.
Battery, button.
VPN. Switch.
General, button.
Accessibility, button.
Action button, button.
Heidi: Action button, button.
Jonathan: Yeah. [laughs]
VoiceOver: Selected. Action button.
Silent mode. Adjustable.
Jonathan: Right, that’s the default. So for people coming from an iPhone that had a side switch which toggled between whether the phone was on silent or ringer, then just holding down that button will toggle it. In fact, can you do that? Can you hold down the action button?
VoiceOver: Silent.
Ring mode.
Heidi: Ring mode.
VoiceOver: Silent mode.
Heidi: Silent mode.
Jonathan: Yeah, there you go. So it actually remembered that you were in silent mode from the backup.
Heidi: That’s pretty good.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Heidi: Okay.
Jonathan: Yep.
VoiceOver: Silent mode. Switch between silent and ring for calls and alerts.
Jonathan: So if you flick left, …
VoiceOver: Silent mode. Adjustable.
Jonathan: Yeah. Now, you’re in a picker item, and you can flick up and down to get the different options that the action button can perform.
Heidi: Hmm.
VoiceOver: Focus.
Heidi: Focus.
Jonathan: Right. So if you go in here, you’ll be able to choose any of the focuses that you have set up. I use this a lot because I have a bunch of focuses that trigger based on different scenarios.
For example, when I’m reading a Kindle book, I have quite minimal notifications. When I’m recording this podcast, I have even fewer notifications that will come through. Focuses are absolutely brilliant.
And with this, you can assign a focus to be triggered by the action button. It could be do not disturb. It could be sleep. It could be something that you’ve customized.
VoiceOver: Camera.
Heidi: Camera.
Jonathan: Yup. But you probably don’t need it, now that you’ve got the special button.
Heidi: Yeah, I probably don’t need 2 buttons to open the camera.
Jonathan: Right.
VoiceOver: Torch.
Voice memo.
Recognize music.
Translate.
Controls.
Heidi: So is that anything from the Control Center, essentially?
Jonathan: Yes. I think you can choose any control, and this is with the new iOS 18 Control Center.
Heidi: Oh.
VoiceOver: Shortcut.
Heidi: Oh, a shortcut.
Jonathan: Yeah.
VoiceOver: Accessibility.
Heidi: Oh. So could I use this button instead of triple clicking the side button?
Jonathan: Absolutely, you could.
Heidi: Oh. That seems convenient.
Jonathan: So yeah. So what I’ve done is I use the action button to execute a shortcut, which is that it starts playing the Castro podcast app. And then, I have the double back tap of my phone skips forward 30 seconds, and the triple back tap skips back 30 seconds. So I’ve basically got my own little self-contained standalone podcast app on the phone.
Heidi: That’s really cool.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Shall we do the really exciting thing and get you to record a couple of things in the voice memos app? because the iPhone 16 Pro is boasting a new microphone array. And I don’t know whether we’re going to hear much of a difference in voice memos, or whether it only really makes a difference with videos. But we could try getting you to record maybe a couple of voice memos, one with the default settings which will be in mono, and then we’ll get you to change it to stereo and record another one.
Heidi: Okay.
Jonathan: We paused the recording. Heidi did that.
First of all, let’s hear the default voice memo settings with the app in mono and the new iPhone microphone array.
Heidi: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache.
Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde, and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck which came in very useful, as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors.
The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley. And in their opinion, there was no finer boy anywhere.
VoiceOver: Stop, button.
Jonathan: I don’t really hear much of any difference there. That still sounds like the usual iPhone processing. And I think it’s the processing that makes the iPhone sound like it does. Maybe in certain apps where they permit you to turn the processing off, we might hear a bigger difference, but I don’t hear a significant difference.
Let’s move on to the same passage recorded with voice memos set to stereo.
Heidi: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache.
Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde, and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck which came in very useful, as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors.
The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley. And in their opinion, there was no finer boy anywhere.
Jonathan: And I mean, they were right, weren’t they? There was no finer boy than Dudley Dursley.
Now, I don’t really hear much difference. So just for the sake of completeness, I’m going to ask Heidi to read that passage a third time. This time, recording it as a video, and I will import the sound from that video.
Heidi: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.
Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache.
Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde, and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck which came in very useful, as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors.
The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley. And in their opinion, there was no finer boy anywhere.
Jonathan: So that’s our unboxing of the iPhone 16 Pro. I’m so glad I bought you that, or you wouldn’t be doing it. [laughs] You like it?
Heidi: I do.
Jonathan: Yes.
Heidi: It’s very exciting.
Jonathan: I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun testing its responsiveness. And you’ll notice a huge speed improvement over the 12.
Heidi: Yeah, and a huge battery life improvement, too.
Jonathan: Yeah. The iPhone 16 Pro apparently has really good battery life.
Now, for the 16 Pro Max, apparently, everybody is saying in their reviews it’s just got stunning battery life. So that’s exciting. I’m looking forward to that.
And of course, this is your last appearance on Living Blindfully. So would you like to say a final farewell to the Living Blindfully audience?
Heidi: Well, it’s been great, everyone. And you know, we’ll miss you.
Jonathan: Yes. You never know. We might get you on the NFB Technology podcast from time to time.
Heidi: Oh well, that will be fun.
Jonathan: I get so many listeners over the years who have emailed me to say how much they’ve enjoyed hearing you and your explanations. And so I know you’re very much appreciated, and you’re like a rock star on the show. So thank you for all that you have contributed.
Heidi: You’re very welcome. It’s been fun.
Jonathan: Goodbye!
Heidi: Goodbye!
Victory for United Blind Leaders
We’ve been talking a lot on Living Blindfully in recent times about what I’ve been calling the blindness agency leadership crisis. Too many organizations that provide us with services are not being led by us.
Rightly, it is a situation that would be considered intolerable and repugnant in pretty much any other minority. But somehow, it’s considered acceptable in the disability sector.
I don’t find it acceptable. I know there are qualified blind people out there with chief executive experience that are being passed over. And as we’ll hear in the interview that we’ll play shortly with Steve Tyler who’s talking about this issue, often, blind people have to go outside the sector to gain leadership experience and leadership opportunities.
What’s equally concerning is that few of these agencies have any capacity-building in place for blind people. So blind people who might show some leadership potential aren’t shoulder-tapped, they’re not nurtured, they’re not encouraged to get to the C-suite level. There’s just very little of this going on in what Mark Riccobono, President of the National Federation of the Blind, refers to as the Vision Industrial Complex. It’s a serious business. We’ve got to call it out.
That’s what we’ve been doing in recent times on Living Blindfully, particularly with respect to the Vision Australia situation, where they elected not to go out to the market after their CEO, who did an 11 and a half year stint in the role, resigned. They were just going to make an internal appointment.
A group of blind leaders signed an open letter to the Vision Australia board. I was proud to add my signature to that open letter, so was Mark Riccobono, and Bryan Bashin also was a signatory to it. Many Australians were, too. Next, it was opened up, a change.org petition was put together, and many people felt as strongly about this issue as the original blind leaders did, and they signed in droves.
And then, the movement formed into a loose organization called United Blind Leaders, and I was honored to be asked to speak at their webinar last week. It was well attended, the atmosphere was great, and some very good points were made.
I’m obviously on the United Blind Leaders announcements list. I want to read you what they sent out a couple of days ago, as this podcast goes out.
“We’re thrilled to share some fantastic news in our campaign for blind leadership within Vision Australia.
Following the overwhelming response from the 1,408 blind people and our supporters, the Vision Australia board has revised its position on the CEO recruitment process. Bill Jolley, Chair of the board, has confirmed that Vision Australia will now commission an external search for a new CEO with a clear focus on lived experience of blindness or low vision as a desirable attribute for the role.
The board acknowledges that while Vision Australia would be proud to have a blind or low vision CEO, they also recognize that the necessary skills for the role are not always widely held. The recruitment process will adhere to Vision Australia’s Affirmative Action Policy for people who are blind or have low vision, removing barriers often experienced by blind and no vision applicants.
This is a significant win, and it wouldn’t have been possible without your support.”, the email continues.
“However, this is just the beginning. United Blind Leaders will continue working to ensure that blind and and vision-impaired people are represented at every level of leadership, both within Australia and beyond.
To stay connected and be part of our future campaigns, we invite you to join our mailing list by visiting www.UnitedBlindLeaders.org/join-our-mailing-list.”
If that’s too complex, you can just go to UnitedBlindLeaders.org and follow the links from there.
The email concludes, “We hope you will encourage your networks to do the same by sharing this update with them.
Thank you for standing with us. Together, we are making a real difference.”
Now, that is a wonderful outcome in its own right. I want to congratulate everybody involved in this.
And while I’m sure we wish that Vision Australia had embarked upon an external recruitment process to begin with, I think it is important that we know when the time is right to show some magnanimity. We should acknowledge that it can be difficult for a board to reverse a decision like this. it does take some integrity. So I congratulate and thank the Vision Australia board for not digging in, but for listening to the groundswell of public opinion on this issue and embarking upon a different course of action.
There was obviously a strong feeling about this. The time is now. We must get more blind people involved.
And if you have CEO skills, no matter where in the world you are, (perhaps if you’ve led an organization, maybe it’s a smaller one and you want to step up to the next level, you have experience running an organization that provides a very wide range of services, that has some commercial operations, that works with volunteers, it is a complex role, but there are blind people who can do it), well, put your name in. I mean, Australia is a nice place to be, I’m sure. And you can join the Blind Australians, who I hope will also apply for this role, and that we will see a qualified, capable person who is blind, and therefore brings a unique set of lived experience to the role for the first time in an Australian setting.
I would make a couple of observations about this.
The first thing I would say is that it really saddens me when I see so many people being so disillusioned about their ability to make change that they don’t even try. And I hope examples like this (and we’ve had a few, actually, that we’ve covered on Living Blindfully) will help people to realize that you can make good change. If you keep a cool head, if you campaign for what you know to be right, if you make your case clearly, and you unite with other people, then it’s amazing what you can achieve.
And that’s one of the many reasons why I’m so excited about being part of the Organized Blind Movement through the National Federation of the Blind, because so much of benefit has been achieved through collective action. When used for the right reasons and used wisely, you have more power than you probably realize. So make sure that you use that to make good change in the world, because that’s how we got a lot of the victories that we now take for granted, including a lot of the accessible technology that we now use.
The second thing I would say is that in a community like the blind community, these things can be tough. Sometimes, you find yourself at loggerheads with people that you have known for a very long time. That is never easy, especially in the blind community, which is so small and everybody knows everybody else pretty much.
So for those in Australia who are now moving on from this, I hope that that’s exactly what will happen – that there is a moving on, that there’s a healing, that there’s a realization that people have their roles to play in situations like this.
I’m sure it can be acknowledged that Vision Australia has belatedly done the right thing now. And I hope those involved with Vision Australia will realize that perhaps some years ago, when they were not on the board of Vision Australia, the blind people there would have done the same thing that these brave activists did because we have to move forward with blind people taking charge of our own destiny. So I wish everyone over there well, I wish healing and reconciliation, and I wish everybody moving forward in the interests of providing the best possible services to blind people, led by blind people. Well done.
Steve Tyler Discusses the Blindness Agency Leadership Crisis
To talk more about the Blindness Agency Leadership Crisis, I’m joined by someone who’s been as deeply troubled by the behavior of many blindness organizations as I have.
Steve Tyler is a well-known name in the blindness field. He has helped to develop standards and technologies that we use every day and that we now take for granted. And that also includes being involved with the Daisy Consortium. He is widely respected and consulted by several mainstream tech companies that are now having a much greater impact on our lives. To top it off, he has a background in clinical psychology and an MBA as well.
Steve, it is great to talk to you on the podcast. I appreciate you being here.
Steve: Thanks, Jonathan. It’s a pleasure to be here, and great to catch up with you.
Jonathan: Give me, if you would, a succinct summary of the problem as you see it at the moment.
Steve: Rather than individual organizations (but we can get there) or organizational structures, I worry about the outcomes where we’ve been singularly unsuccessful.
For example, the WebAIM figures say that something around 97.4% of homepages are still inaccessible. I know these are big, you know, the percentage is very high. We’re dealing with very big numbers. So lots of people will deal with perfectly accessible stuff, but 97.4%. And I was there at the beginning of the Web Consortium and the web accessibility initiative. Lots of groundbreaking stuff. But that’s how far we’ve got.
We’ve recently seen a report published in the UK by UK government which starts with the words, “The percentage of people in unemployment in the visually impaired community of employable age and the educational attainment that they have hasn’t changed in 6 decades.”
Jonathan: It’s bizarre, isn’t it? Because when you look at all the technological advancements there have been even in the last 3 decades, you would expect a commensurate improvement in the unemployment rate. And yet, it seems stubbornly stuck.
Steve: The way I tend to describe it, having gone through some of the data they’ve put together, and then I’ve followed up and we’ve done our own research at Leonard Cheshire and elsewhere, which bears out a lot of this stuff. So if I tell you that, I mean it’s in the UK, which is roughly reflective, I’d say, of the so-called economic giants in the world. But roughly speaking, we’re at 24% employment rate in the visually impaired community. I would say if it hadn’t been for the technology developments that we have seen through, it would have been significantly worse, of course. So at least we’ve stood still, I suppose, is the nicest interpretation.
But actually, a lot of this is cultural, societal, that the organizations that represent the community that we’re part of are not addressing those really fundamental issues. I mean, and my working example for that is we did some pretty challenging work around research from a research point of view where we interviewed recruiting managers. And what they said was just around 24% actually said that regardless of if there was a short list of 5 people and one had a disability, that under no circumstances would they entertain the person with a disability, regardless of how strong the candidate was. A further 26 or so percent said well, I would be worried about it. I fully acknowledge that I’m not sure that I understand the challenges and whatever. I kind of would start from the perspective that I think I’m buying myself a bit of a problem, I suppose I’d have to learn about it. But being frank with you, not sure.
Same story. So we did a test with university and college applications. Same replicas of applications that we put in. They were exactly the same, barring one person would have a disability, one wouldn’t.
Around 25% of people with disabilities simply didn’t get a response. Everybody without a disability did get a response.
I think we’ve got serious problems. And I’ve got ideas about why, [laughs] and we can get into those, perhaps.
Jonathan: Hmm. Let’s talk about the why in the sense that obviously, expectations are a big deal, and we would expect the agencies that exist in our name and that provide services to us to be exemplary, wouldn’t we, in terms of good quality employment practices, inclusive employment practices?
Steve: Yeah. And my experience, like you, I’ve been in this business for a very long time. Some would say probably too long.
Jonathan: [laughs]
Steve: But I’ve watched the voluntary sector and the organizations that have a responsibility to interpret need, and then translate that into solutions and outcomes, and services, and so on, and I’ve run a number of those services. I’ve run business to business services, set up consultancies, I’ve done a range of pieces of work to address these kinds of elements.
And as a result, I’ve seen our organizations move. From the beginning of my career, I noticed that there was a clear move that went something like we could learn a thing or two from the business sector. They know how to make money.
We’re not interested in doing that. But at least as custodians of finance and making finance go further, this can’t be a bad thing.
And we very rapidly saw people coming into the sector from the business sector and quite often, the story was I’ve made my money, I’ve done my thing. And you know what? I want to give something back, so that’s why I’m here. I want to give you the benefit of my experience and whatever. Now, they might come from all sorts of places (certainly not the blindness sector) but for many many and varied places – the banking industry, the retail industry, consumer goods, you name it.
And one thing that was really badly missing, of course, was that (I mean very quickly, they’d have to get a handle on it) was what was this sector all about? How does the market work? And there were typical examples that I can point to in a second, which kind of really clearly illustrate that.
Different countries have slightly different agendas, different structures and backgrounds on this stuff. But broadly speaking, there are organizations that are charged with supporting and putting forward solutions that support the needs of blind and partially sighted people.
They became somewhat wedded to the money, in short. And if you look at any of the large organizations today, they want to talk about brand marketing. They want to talk about the number of clicks they got. They want to talk about where they are in terms of recognition, so top of mind recognition in the public mind. They want to talk about fundraising, and boy, are they fierce about that. They want to talk about their volunteers.
And somewhere at the bottom of the list are, oh, yeah, the services, those things, the services that we’re supposed to provide with the money we’ve now got in.
And to give you an illustration of where it leads to is, I’ve been in more conversations than I would care to mention where the conversation goes something like, take a UK example because it’s home turf, and I know it best. 2.2 million people with visual impairment. But blimey! Pretty small numbers, aren’t there, reading Braille? What is it? 25, 30 thousand regular Braille readers? I mean, that’s ridiculous.
And either the conversation goes to, and boy, is it expensive to produce especially hardcopy Braille, but any copy Braille it’s pretty expensive. Or audio. I mean, we could use that money for something else. Do we really need to be doing this stuff? Or well, you’re not doing your job properly. I mean, 25, 30 thousand people? There are 2.2 million out there. Big market. What we need to do is do some proper marketing, proper brand awareness. And neither of those two things work, or are true.
And very quickly, you have to try to get people onto an understanding, or at least in the same book as you are, preferably on the same page as you are, around how the market works, how challenging it is, how slow it is to adopt things.
And if I keep on with the example of Braille, we know that there is a massive synergy between totally blind person who is a Braille reader, Which, broadly speaking, equals much higher opportunity to gain employment, versus totally blind person, no Braille, and very little chance of employment.
Jonathan: Yeah. What happens is that there seems to be empire-building that goes on at some point in this process. Somebody says well, the word blind puts people off. We mustn’t say blind anymore. We’re going to have a war on the word blind, and it’s going to be about sight loss instead.
This market’s too small. We need to redefine the market.
These agencies are buying in to negative perceptions of the word blind, and rather than alter them for the benefit of all of us, they’re trying to change the word to try and get more people in the door. [laughs]
Steve: That’s it. Because it’s driven by that default thinking that says in order to make viable propositions, you need big markets. And that is the default approach, rather than the kind of more subtle things that you and I would want to talk about that says if you build accessibility in at the get-go, actually, it benefits everybody.
And the arguments are well rehearsed. We know this is true. There are massive benefits. Because accessibility often means so much more. I mean, it means well-designed customer journeys. It means taking care of processes properly so that you actually address customer need in an appropriate way.
As a rule, as you know, the commercial sector, from which a lot of senior people now in our industry come from, they want to talk about minimum viable product and reach inadvertently, and again I say this because I think it’s not necessarily deliberate. It’s a mindset that you come with because this has been all of your life. I mean, this is how it works, you know, are very clear measures of success.
Does it make money? Yes, it does. Happy days.I mean yes, it’s got to be a good product, and people will talk about customer service, this being very important, blah blah blah.
But ultimately, there is one single measure. It is, did it please the shareholders? Yes, it did. Well, keep going. Deliver more of it.
Did it not please the shareholders? Well, let’s call it a day.
And we don’t please the shareholders, not in the traditional sense.
And whenever I’ve been looking at business cases, I learned the hard way to find ways in which you could clearly demonstrate that with show and tell, with propositions that people could get a hold of from the place they were in, the business they were in. If we wanted to do accessibility stuff, Quite often, I would find myself learning about what their trigger points were, what the particular business area was that we’re focused on.
I take something like digital TV as a good example. What benefits would come about as a result of accessibility built into digital TV that wouldn’t necessarily be the core requirement that we would want to see there, but would be added value that would tick boxes from a business point of view and that they could recognize from where they currently sat? Those are the kind of tricks i gradually learned to do, I suppose, to push the agenda as we all have, over the past 20 or 30 years.
Not long ago, a specialist product would have been Alexa, for example. Today, Alexa is a mainstream accessible product.
But if we stepped back 15 or 20 years and we had the kind of technology available then to us that is now, it would have been a special box for special people, and we would still have wanted it for the blindness sector.
But as it turns out, The T-shirt was well and truly bought by Amazon, once we clearly demonstrated that accessibility to things like Kindle really mattered. It opened up big numbers around accessibility. That’s how we started with the Alexa story.
And we did develop the synthetic speech that would go on to the Kindle products. And this was linked to the whole business of making e-books accessible, or whatever.
In the end, the pound, shillings, and pence were what won the day because ultimately, what it meant was the 15% at minimum that currently cannot access electronic books would be able to access electronic books. In the UK, that equals 1.2 billion pounds per year. Happy days!
Jonathan: And also, legislation in the United States which says that there are limits on procurement in areas like education. If something’s not accessible, then the school system legally can’t buy something that’s inaccessible when there’s an accessible alternative.
Steve: That’s it. And that’s been really important. NFB have been a steadfast agency in that regard from an advocacy perspective. Probably still, I don’t know.
But certainly, when I started, imagine, people feared the NFB outside. I mean, they punched well above their weight because the promise was we are on your side, not just because we’re on your side, but you are one of us, and we are one of you. We are together. We represent you, and we’re your organization where your views count. And if that means we’re going to go to court to sort this legislation out and make this stuff happen for real, well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And that was a very very important chapter, it seemed to me, that holding firm to the strategy.
I use NFB as an example because many organizations around the world go through business plans and business cycles, and 5-year or 3-year strategic plans, and blah blah blah. And what you find is that often, you come to the end of the 5 years and they’re rewritten with some of the really key requirements kind of just thrown out because they didn’t get anywhere with it, or you’ve got new thinking now, or new people.
NFB never did that. They’ve got a very clear strategy. It is, we are on the side of blind people, and the needs, and wants, and choices they want to have. And I think a lot of agencies don’t do that.
And secondly, it’s prevented some of the developments happening that I think are so important.
So a couple of examples for you. It seems to me, navigation is a great example, navigation and wayfinding. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world. If you’re blind, it’s one of the core issues you have. They can be better or worse, depending on the environment you’re operating in, depending on how much money you’ve got, depending on lots of things. But the end issue is it’s more difficult for a blind person to navigate independently.
And yet, the technology is there. It is there for the taking.
But what we have not done is unified, as agencies, to recognize that yeah, this is one of those core issues that really do need sorting out as a product, and we’re going to get behind it and make it happen. And the things that mitigate against that is that going right back to that sector, organizational framework that we have at the moment, these are, in many respects, they think of themselves and behave rather like businesses, with all that that means. So they don’t want to share. It’s much harder to share.
Anyway, in the UK, in the US, in Canada, in you name it, we have a responsibility to UK, or US, or Canada. That’s our remit. Yes, we could do partnership. But it’s nobody’s responsibility, particularly.
And in any event, it’s all very difficult. We don’t have enough time in there. We’ve got so many things to do structurally, and in lots of other ways where we are. And therefore, a lot of the big stuff simply doesn’t happen.
Jonathan: There’s an interesting history lesson in all of this.
So I think, what distinguishes the National Federation of the Blind in the United States is that they were founded as an advocacy organization. And over the years, they developed a cogent, coherent philosophy of what good quality blindness services look like.
And when they were having difficulty getting some of these agencies to buy in, they said, alright. Well, we’ll set it up ourselves. We’ll set up our own training centers and demonstrate that they work. And obviously, if you see some of the outcomes, the skills of some of the people who go through those training centers, those facts speak for themselves.
This comes back to this core point about blind people being in control. The National Federation of the Blind (and the word of is key here) is fundamentally a grassroots organization led by blind people.
When you go to Commonwealth countries, there’s a lot of disparity. And this interests me because despite the disparity, the mediocrity is the same.
So if you look in New Zealand, …
Steve: [laughs] I need to remember that.
Jonathan: If you look in New Zealand, they’ve had, or we’ve had a consumer organization since 1945.
And by the late 1970s, after considerable struggle, there was a period of very positive dialog which was in place at that time because the chief executive of the blindness organization here had come from the education background. He was a sighted man, but he had been deputy principal of the School for the Blind. He knew the sector, and he was there for 20 years.
There was an enormous amount of progress that was made. A lot of the old sheltered workshop environments were closed down. They moved to a modern philosophy of rehabilitation. And they did that in concert with the blind community because some of those decisions were very tough. There were an increasing number of blind people on the board.
And most significantly, in the New Zealand Blindness Agency, right up until the late 1990s, there was a good number of blind people on the senior leadership team of that agency who were considered world-leading in their fields. Could be IT, could be government relations. Whatever it was, little New Zealand was often seen as exemplary in terms of some of the systems that it was rolling out and the practices.
We got into governance reform. And I was a key person in that process where it was determined that the way to keep the board honest, … You talked about shareholders earlier. And my view was, and remains that the key shareholders are blind people themselves. If you’re not satisfying blind people, you have no mandate to do what you’re doing.
So after considerable struggle and enormous pushback from vested interests, we got it over the line that blind people in New Zealand elect the board. What’s interesting is that blind people tend to vote for other blind people. There are some exceptions, but the majority of the board are blind and they tend to be well-known names. So it does have its downsides.
And yet, despite all of that progress, now, you only have, I think they’ve just appointed one blind person to the executive leadership team after many many years of not having any blind people on the executive leadership team at all.
So all this governance reform and blind people on the board has actually made no difference to the quality of operational services. In fact, I would argue they are considerably worse. They are atrociously disconnected. I don’t think there’s any Western country that’s worse for being a blind person in terms of the quality of services that you receive than New Zealand. And yet, we’ve had all of this governance reform based on self-determination.
Now Australia, they’ve got a consumer organization there. I mean, one might argue it’s about as effective as New Zealand. It’s been pretty effective.
And yet, you know about the current Vision Australia controversy, and there’s been ongoing concern about the quality of services. I mean, even the very name, Vision Australia, it is such an obnoxious name. It’s like calling out undertakers life preservers, or something.
Steve: It’s marketing.
Jonathan: Why the hell would you call a blindness organization Vision Anything?
And Ireland’s done this now. So the National Council of the Blind in Ireland, they’ve become Vision Ireland just recently.
So it’s a trend. And this is what happens. These agencies coalesce with one another and spread their infection globally.
Okay. So you’ve got two countries here in the South Pacific, and they’ve got reasonably robust consumer movements, or at least they did have. New Zealand’s has really dissipated.
But then, you cross over and you’ve got the RNIB situation. That’s another Commonwealth country, obviously. In Britain, there’s never really been a strong independent consumer voice. There’s been a bit of consumerism. There’s the National Federation of the Blind of the UK, but nothing significant.
And then, you look at Canada, and they’ve got the CNIB which is this monolith. It tends to be quite paternalistic in its approach, and they’ve just appointed a sighted person as their chief executive as well.
So you’ve got a whole bunch of quite different characteristics. And yet, the outcome always remains the same whether blind people are significantly on the board or not, whether they control the board or not. We’ve lost control of the operational side of all of these agencies, and they’re providing mediocre services. All of them.
What’s up with that? Why has that happened?
Steve: I think it’s a mix. Membership is one, the genuine meaning of membership, I mean.
And I recognize exactly what you said. If you look at RNIB, the history is remarkably similar. When I started there with a chief executive who was cited, the next level down had a lot of blind and partially sighted people there. And on the board, it was very clear that that’s where they were. And they really did control the processes.
There was a move to become a membership organization, and then a move not to be a membership organization.
Jonathan: I remember this because when we got the governance reform through here in New Zealand, I got contacted by a whole bunch of Brits, wanting to know how I got that done.
Steve: [laughs] Well, yeah. And well, you know, they gave it a go and it was all very difficult. Surprise surprise. Because you actually needed to talk to your constituency and engage with them.
And then, a number of organizations, including RNIB, adopted this, what I’ve always thought of as a bit of a sellout, which is referred to as co-production. In principle, it’s fine as an idea. But what it sort of really means is we’re not really the expert organization. Blind people are the experts. So look, let’s develop things, and make sure that we’ve got blind people involved in that.
Well, we’re back to 101 here, really, and the co-production thing, …
Actually, what I would want from RNIB and other organizations is the ability to interpret need. What you find quite often is, like most consumers, If you ask me, you, and the next guy, what would be your optimal solution to this particular problem? I mean, based on my experience, my knowledge, my thoughts around it, I’m going to come up with all sorts of stuff, which is fine. But actually, organizations like RNIB, CNIB, to me, it’s about interpreting the requirements and turning it into something that will genuinely work. Because you’re hoping that they’ve got the business savviness, the contacts, the knowledge around technology, and the money to put up. Because quite often, you need to do some level of investment, or some level of engagement.
And to your point about rehabilitation, you mentioned rehabilitation earlier in New Zealand. Interesting. Very similar history in the UK. Where sheltered workshops went, it was a bit like throwing out the baby with the bath water because no other possibilities were explored, like genuinely supporting people to go into business for themselves, or creating… I don’t know, cooperative ventures. All of a sudden, it was just like a binary thing. Get rid of a sheltered thing. Not good. And therefore, rehabilitation centers, too specialist, too difficult to run, very small numbers. Get rid of them. But the result, certainly in the uk is, I mean, it really is a regional lottery now. The average waiting time, if you have a diagnosis of blindness, chances are you will wait for a minimum of 9 and a maximum of 15 months before someone comes to visit.
Jonathan: Yeah. Look. I’m a strong proponent of a concentrated dose of residential rehabilitation for many people, particularly those with vocational aspirations. Again, if you look at best practice from the NFB and other agencies in the United States that have now modelled what they do based on the success of the NFB, the outcomes speak for themselves. And I think sometimes, it is necessary to take someone away from their home environment, particularly if they live with somebody else who loves them and has a natural inclination to do everything for them. They’re not going to get those independent skills of blindness that way.
Steve: That’s exactly right, Jonathan. I totally agree.
These days, I get asked to do all kinds of things. But I’ve been to some good schools.
And more recently, one of the heads invited me to come and meet some of the kids there, and he said, “I just feel we should be doing more. And I don’t know what that is. And I’m not sure how to make it better. But I know that I’m not satisfied with how things are. But look, come on, give me a take.”
And it’s really interesting because one of the things that I found very often is, if you talk to the kids, to begin with, they’ll say, “No, it’s all good. Yeah, I’ve got good friends here.”, and They will talk a good game about their experience.
But there comes a point when they will begin to spill the beans and say things like, “I quite often feel like people don’t really understand.”
One of the things that we’ve singularly failed to do, and again, it’s, I think, to do with not focusing on the requirements of the individual, not being customer-centered. It’s building into inclusive education ways in which there is a means by which you can share the experience, or be with people to do some wacky and wild stuff. And just for a short time, dispense with the challenge in inverted commas or the explanations you have to make about blindness, or about your particular sight condition, or your experience, or be with people, or be able to engage with people who have similar experiences. Because at the moment, it’s very difficult for children to do that in education these days. Unless, you stumble into it one way or the other, or you make friends with somebody who happens to have a connection. It’s actually quite hard.
And if you ally that with, I don’t know, white cane training, mobility training of any reasonable description, being a problem, it’s a real challenge. And a lot of that expertise has dissipated from the sector, really.
Jonathan: Yeah. Mentoring is so critical because if you don’t believe intrinsically that you’re capable of leading a good life, contributing to community, having a job, having a family, just the things that many people aspire to, if you just don’t appreciate that any of that’s possible, you won’t try.
Steve: And these things require a deep understanding of blindness, and blind people, and the need. You can do lots of stuff to very rapidly learn what are the top five eye conditions on the planet? And this is what a lot of the focal point tends to be.
But actually, what we’re talking about here, frankly, are things that cost money. They’re not particularly attractive. They’re not marketable as such. How do you sell, if you’re a marketing guru, this concept of the importance of rehabilitation, or loneliness?
We know the data for older people who are blind or partially sighted. There’s really horrific numbers, somewhere in the order of 52% of blind or partially sighted older people simply don’t meet anybody within any given week outside of their household.
Jonathan: Many of these agencies, when they do their programs, when they send their messages out, are not saying look, undoubtedly, it is a significant life adjustment if blindness comes, but it is respectable to be blind. And with our services, you can get there, and you can lead a good life. You don’t often hear messages like that from many of these agencies.
In fact, I believe that most of them are creating a hideous conflict of interest by trying to widen their net as much, And they do that by also focusing on blindness prevention. And I just don’t see how those two things can coexist in the one agency. How can you, on the one hand, say, it’s respectable to be blind. We’re going to provide you with quality services. And then, spend a considerable amount of money saying oh, but don’t get blind.? [laughs]
Steve: And that horrible conflict, the way I kind of tend to think, there are multiple and conflicting messages that an entity like RNIB wants to give.
On the one level, it wants to do fundraising. So that means saying, we need your help, Joe Public. We need to put your hands in your pocket, or for you to leave money to us in your will, or whatever it is. Because, you know, how can we do our job to support these poor blind people? And especially if you’re talking about children, or people that you can utilize on an emotive level, to sell that message.
On the other hand, it’s incumbent on them to say, “Look at this individual. They live a perfectly normal life. Aren’t they amazing?”
Or even a perfectly abnormal, “Look at this paralympian.”
Jonathan: Yes, yes.
Steve: And don’t get me wrong. Paralympian is good, and let’s get those guys on the stage big style, you know.
But equally, you almost fall into this weird place where there is this terrible conflict around the need to make money as they would see it, and to generate that emotive, supportive general public that says, they do fantastic stuff to help those folks, don’t they? We need to give them some cash.
And at the same time, they need to deliver this other thing which is no, actually, it’s all good. Don’t be too worried.
And that business about avoiding sight loss, I agree with you that that is a really classically tricky thing.
But many people don’t understand, Jonathan. There’s so much to this stuff. As a blind person, I have blind friends, partially sighted friends with various degrees of sight. And one of the things I quickly learned when I was younger was, and people wouldn’t describe it in this way necessarily. I think the best people that really recognise it in a way that many don’t, is those whose sight degrades over time. And what they will tell you is, for as long as I can possibly manage, even if my eyesight is completely shit, I am going to hang on for dear life to that little tiny bit of sight, light perception, whatever it is, shadow perception, I have. And broadly speaking, I’m in the sighted camp until that terrible day comes when I have to accept that actually, that doesn’t work anymore.
Jonathan: Right.
Steve: And now, all of a sudden, I am in this very different category. There is this sort of subtlety in the blindness community where if you are totally blind and have no light perception whatsoever, or none that you can sensibly utilize type thing, and you acknowledge that, and you recognize you are blind, that’s one that it’s a very clear grouping of people with relatively clear requirements.
And then, you’ve got people who the sector tries to engage with as this big broad kind of grouping called blind and partially sighted, as we describe it in the UK.
Jonathan: Or people with sight loss. [laughs]
Steve: Or people with sight loss. Sight loss?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Steve: And in many cases, of course, they never had it to lose.
Jonathan: Exactly.
Steve: The whole thing is, it’s the subtlety and the failure to understand customers, or the stories that inform, or that used to inform, back to your very much earlier point where you have genuine engagement by people that really do understand as trustees, or board members, or whatever, at senior level in organizations.
There are lots of compromises you have to make. There are lots of challenges, and it’s not always particularly you, buy yourself, other problems too, I’m sure. But what you do get is an innate understanding.
Bizarrely, it’s the same story that Microsoft would tell you. Microsoft harps on, as many others do, about the importance of representing the culture inside the organization that exists outside. There should be representation. The guy sitting next to you, as a coder, if that guy cannot utilize the code you so painstakingly written, well, chances are a whole bunch of other guys like him are not going to be able to, either.
Jonathan: You know, if we apply commercial concepts to these blindness agencies as they’re wanting to do, one wonders whether those regulators in various countries that determine whether some organization or other is a monopoly should be asked to intervene. Because a lot of these agencies have a long history. In Commonwealth countries, many of them were founded by Christian philanthropy, or some well-intentioned people well over a century ago, and they’ve built up significant cash and property assets, and it’s very hard for competitors to enter. So they probably need to be busted open.
And one interesting thing that’s happened in New Zealand that sadly is now on hold is a concept where individuals become the fund holders. So instead of these agencies going to a government entity and saying this is what we intend to provide, or bidding for a contract where the government, often in a very ill-informed way says this is what we want to purchase from you in terms of blindness services (and blind people aren’t often involved in that process either), you give blind people themselves the money, and they become the budget holders. And that widens the ability for competitors to enter the market because blind people can take their money to whichever organization is going to give them the service that they need.
The only downside of that approach is this whole low expectations thing that often, blind people get bombarded with a lifetime of such low expectations. They may not know what’s possible, and they may not necessarily be informed purchasers.
Steve: I agree, and that low expectations thing is a problem. And although we’ve talked about the challenges of where we are, I really want to see us re-energize a what used to be very powerful movement. Very powerful. In the UK, blindness is classified as a disability, but it has its own set of legislation, too. [laughs]
You know in the 20s and 30s where people really did argue for their rights, and they wanted to be properly recognized and to have fair treatment, that stuff still resides in our legislative processes. And I think it’s true, more generally. We talked about the NFB earlier, and the heyday of times in New Zealand and in australia, and RNIB.
When I started at RNIB, boy, was it a powerhouse for all the stuff that you touched on earlier on. It had blind trustees, it had a very large number of senior blind people in the organization, it had networks that it reached out to right across the world, It used to serve service, the World Blind Union, the European Blind Union. You had names who were well-known and powerful. Lord Colin Lowe, who was its chairman for a long time, and people like him. And it was steeped in, it was seen and genuinely was a powerhouse and a real innovator.
And somehow, we’ve moved from that to what we’re talking about today.
Jonathan: Right. And it’s unusual because if you look at women’s organizations, as Vaughn Bennison said in episode 298 of this show, it would be very rare to see a man in charge of a woman’s organization. Similarly, if there’s an organization providing services to a specific ethnic minority, it would be unusual for someone who is not of that ethnic minority to be running that organisation.
And yet, we do have blind people on boards all around the world in these agencies who have become turncoats and sellouts. And even when there is a credible candidate who is blind, they will not appoint them.
I wonder how we extricate ourselves. What’s the answer here to actually getting quality services back, and ensuring that blind people lead these organizations? Yeah.
Steve: I think we need to recognize the challenge for what it is, that it is a global issue. I’ve been working on, and devoting some time to thinking about how we could create a convening mechanism, how we can bring blind people together to cut across the stuff that’s currently getting in our way.
It’s difficult. We need a new order. We literally need a new chapter, I think.
We’re heading in to very choppy territory, and I don’t think the existing infrastructures, again, barring some notable examples but in general, the existing infrastructures are not doing their job. And I would evidence that by saying I’ve been doing other stuff and moved away to some, I mean, blindness is still part of my remit in a broader sense. But I’ve not been working for RNIB for a while.
Also, we made the amazingly stupid decision, in my view, my personal opinion, to leave Europe in Britain. How to economically screw yourself over in one easy step?
Jonathan: [laughs]
Steve: Anyway, yeah. The best way is not to engage with your neighbors. So we did that.
And as a result, the European Accessibility Act, it moved away from me a bit in terms of this. But I re-engaged with it at the beginning of this year, and I was genuinely astonished. Some of it is going to be fine, I’m sure. So there is some financial regulation in there around accessibility. There’s some stuff around accessibility that you and I would recognize.
But boy, is there some stuff missing – domestic appliance access, white goods access, everyday home accessibility stuff. And my immediate thought was whoever has been managing, I mean, they’re either asleep at the wheel, or are simply not powerful enough, or not talking in the right places, or they don’t have the right mechanisms in place to support their arguments, or I don’t know what it is, but it is appalling. It’s missing so much which I thought would be givens.
Jonathan: All the countries that we’ve talked about, with the exception of the United States, are signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Is there a chance that blind people could form some sort of alliance that goes to the UN and has them make some sort of judgment or comment on the way these blindness agencies continue to snub qualified blind leaders?
Steve: I agree with you. We need something like that, being careful not to, … Because in theory, it’s part, of course, of the current infrastructure. But there is a thing called the World Blind Union…
Jonathan: Well, yeah.
Steve: that has members. I mean, it doesn’t have any clout. It doesn’t have any, because it relies on the very agencies we’re talking about to fund it.
It is a real problem because it’s that leadership thing that you’re talking about that I think is genuinely missing. There needs to be a means by which we can mobilize the community, and/or mobilize its representation through genuine leadership.
And what I found, of course, is a lot of the time, people get despondent. I’ve watched a number of really good potential leaders who are blind leave the very organizations exactly, or not even get a look in, for less than obvious to me reasons.
Jonathan: Yeah, but because their integrity requires them to leave, right?
Steve: Yes, that’s it. Their integrity requires them to leave because they simply cannot function in the environment they find themselves in.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Steve: And they become leaders, but somewhere completely different, which is great for them. It doesn’t do any good for the wider community, other than the fact that they can be pointed at by the organizations they left as examples of success. See, there’s another one. There’s another one who’s become a director of blah who’s blind. This is all good.
Jonathan: And yet somehow, they’re not good enough for the blindness agencies.
Steve: No, they’re not good enough for that. No.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Steve: [laughs]
Jonathan: We could talk for hours about this. But look, I really appreciate you coming on the show, and for the enormous contribution that you have made over the years, and I do hope we get some traction whether that’s the UN, or whoever. We cannot let this go because this is costing opportunity, not just for blind leaders. But because those blind leaders aren’t there, it’s costing opportunity for every blind person who is listening to this podcast.
Steve: Cheers. Thanks for having me.
Given the Run-around by a Major Electricity Company
Let’s go back to the UK, and more from Mark Higgins.
Voice message: This is a story about an energy supplier.
I’m not going to mention the name of the energy supplier because I’m about to diss them in a major way. Suffice to say that they have been supplying Britain with energy for over 200 years, and they are a household name.
Now, I moved house recently, and I moved into my lovely new house which has smart meters. For those people not familiar with smart meter technology, what that means is that the smart meter will in effect send energy usage data to your energy supplier itself. You don’t need to get a sighted person to get down on the floor and look at the back of some inaccessible cupboard, and try and read the very small numbers on the meter to use it. You can submit the meter reading to your energy supplier. You don’t need a sighted person to dig around in the bushes to try and find your gas meter, many of which are outside.
The other advantage of smart meters is that you can monitor your energy usage. So when you get your smart meter installed, they will give you a display which you plug in. It’s got to be fairly close to your smart meter, so plug in near it, and you can have a look, and it will tell you how much energy you’ve used today, how much energy you’ve used this week, this month, etc. And it will also tell you how much you’re using at the moment.
Hopefully, it will have been inferred from that that you can get an accessible in-home display. And in fact, in the UK, due to a partnership with the RNIB, it is a requirement that if you ask for one of these, then your energy supplier, provided they’re participating in the scheme, and most are, if you ask for one of these, they’ve got to give you one.
And they’re very good. They are very good. They have very high quality synthetic speech. It’s Ivona Bryan, in case anyone’s interested. And he’s always been one of my favorite Ivona voices. I use him for Voice Dream. But you get him on the smart meter.
Most energy suppliers in the UK do participate in the scheme, but there are one or two that don’t. The energy supplier I’m talking about very definitely did. It was all over their website.
So when I moved, I was booked in with this energy supplier. I was signed up to, and I rang up their metering team and I said, “Please, can you supply me with an accessible in-home display?”
And this is where the trouble all began. I started this odyssey in March of this year.
And I was initially told that there was no such thing as an accessible in-home display. Completely wrong.
I was then told yes, actually, there is such a thing. But what we want you to do is to go onto Amazon and purchase it. And then, you can connect it.
And I was absolutely shocked by this point. I said look, it’s not available on Amazon. It’s only available to the energy supplier. But the agent I was talking to insisted that it was available on Amazon.
I ended up having to go on to the Amazon website and searching for the product. And I told the agent, look, it simply isn’t there, that it’s not listed on Amazon. And I said to the agent, alright. Please, can you tell me what product to search for, and I will do it now.
And so they tried that. they said search for accessible in-home display, and I did that. And of course, it wasn’t there.
I then got to the stage where I said well, please can you send me the link to the product that you’re looking at?
And then, of course, the agent realized they weren’t really getting anywhere with this wheeze.
And so, oh, you know, you’re absolutely right. Yes, it’s not available on Amazon. They do exist. But the thing is, we’ve had so many requests for them. They’re incredibly popular, so there is a waiting list.
And I thought, what are you talking about? Incredibly popular? We’re not in the country of the blind here. They can’t be that popular.
In any event, I ended up speaking to someone more senior, and they arranged for an engineer to come round on April the 12th and install an accessible in-home display.
On the 12th of April, the engineer turned up. They also took the opportunity to upgrade my smart meters, which was very nice.
But at the end of the visit, I said, “Are you going to show me how to use the accessible in-home display?”
It turned out that they hadn’t brought one. They brought a normal one for sighted people, which is touchscreen-operated, and there’s no way you can make it accessible.
And so I said “Well, why is this? I specifically asked for an accessible one.”
And the engineer said Oh, there’s nothing on the job notes about it. The only thing on the job notes is the word, it has to be accessible, or rather the sentence, it has to be accessible.
And I said, “Well, what did you think that was referring to?”
And he said, oh, I thought it meant that you just had to, I had to be able to get to the meter. Extraordinary.
Anyway, I rang up to complain. And lo and behold, this cycle repeated itself again.
Again, I was told there wasn’t such a thing as an accessible in-home display.
Then I was told there was, and I could look on Amazon and I could find it.
Then, I was told there was, but they didn’t have any at the moment because not many people asked for them.
Then, I was told that there was, but so many people asked for them that they didn’t have any. So, you know, both 3 and 4 there can’t be right, can they?
Anyway, there was lots of dancing around. the upshot is I am no longer with this energy supplier. I am now with Octopus Energy, and they were absolutely brilliant. They even have their own accessibility dedicated email address, which is fantastic. I got my accessible in-home display within a week of being supplied by Octopus Energy. They’re marvellous.
Why am I going into this? For 2 reasons.
One, obviously, it’s a pretty shocking experience from the perspective of a blind person, I think. I haven’t been lied to very often. But I think it’s pretty clear that in this instance, I was lied to. And as a lawyer, I would not say that I thought I’d been lied to very likely.
Sometimes, mistakes can happen. And sometimes, big mistakes. But I have no alternative but to conclude that here, I was lied to.
So if anyone else is on the wrong end of something like this, bear in mind that that’s happened to me, and it’s a relatively well-known, well, it’s a very well-known energy supplier.
The second worry I had was not so much for myself. I can stick up for myself. But these displays I use not just for blind people, but for people with dementia and so on. And really, I worry an awful lot that more vulnerable people than myself are being fobbed off in this way. And if that’s true, It’s pretty shocking.
Jonathan: What an appalling story! It almost sounds like something out of a Monty Python skit with that circularity.
I hope there’ll be consequences. I hope there’s some sort of action you can take with a regulatory authority, or a disability discrimination provision or something like that, because they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
And if they can get away with it with somebody who’s articulate and knows the law, as you say, if somebody’s more vulnerable, less confident advocating, what hope do they have?
NVDA is Making Inferior Copies of JAWS Features
This email says:
“Hello,
I’m hoping I can stay anonymous for this one.”
[laughs] I’ll bet you are.
“I’m genuinely not trying to start some sort of fight over this. I’m just throwing my thoughts out there, and I’m curious if others have similar concerns about this.
NVDA was initially released in 2006 to offer a free alternative to commercial screen reading software. Over time, its functionality has increased drastically, although its Office support still isn’t quite as strong as JAWS’s, nor are its other productivity features.
JAWS, though expensive, offers an enormous feature set, as well as a drastic array of customizable options.
Recently, for example, JAWS has added AI features, OCR, text analyzer, and a lot more.
I can say with absolute confidence that NVDA’s Office support would not meet my needs for employment and my work. I am required to write visually appealing reports and notes.
JAWS’s scripting language has also made an inaccessible work-specific utility 100% accessible.
My concern is that NVDA appears to be copying features, or is lately offering add-ons that offer similar, but less capable and less customizable functionality. In other words, Freedom Scientific doesn’t seem to care about protecting its patents and intellectual property.
Why is this a problem? Because NVDA doesn’t cost anything, it seems to me that workplaces and other organizations, as well as customers/consumers simply interested in obtaining employment might not be using the best product to suit their needs. For example, a state VR agency may very well not purchase JAWS for a client because NVDA or a similar free product is offering a similar, less flexible feature set. This may create a significant obstacle for employment.
NVDA has done a significant amount of good for this community. But I do see this as a huge concern, especially if this trend continues. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that if other products are copying what already exists in a less superior fashion, Freedom Scientific needs to do something about this. There are obstacles to employment as it is for many blind people.”
Thank you very much for anonymously sharing your thoughts on that.
Closing
Well, on that note, I think we’re out of here.
We will have a Living Blindfully episode in the regular Sunday slot as we get ready to wind down. It will be our second to last episode. The last episode of Living Blindfully will be published at the end of September.
So bear in mind, much as some of these topics are interesting, we are not taking any further contributions for Living Blindfully to make sure that we get through all that we have in the can in time.
Thank you so much for listening to this bonus episode, and to Heidi for turning on VoiceOver and unboxing her iPhone 16 Pro with us.
Remember that when you’re out there with your guide dog, you’ve harnessed success. And with your cane, you’re able.
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