Blind Bargains

#NFB18 Audio: Buzz And Blast Your Braille With APH


Dave Wilkinson, Director of Sales for APH, is no stranger to the BBQ microphones. Over the years Dave has spoken to us about voice assistants, travel and he has even invented a Blind friendly holiday. Heck, he has even been The Human Clock for us at last year s BBQ Game Show Chancy caught up with Dave on the NFB Exhibit Hall floor to talk about many things that involved Braille. Braille Blaster Begins the list of products and we end on auditory friendly tennis. To learn more about all the items mentioned in this interview head on over to the APH
website.

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Transcript

We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.

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Transcribed by Grecia Ramirez

Direct from Orlando, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of NFB 2018, brought to you by Google.
Our friends at Google are working hard to create great technology products for everyone. They’re inviting you to participate in Google user research studies, where you can help shape the future of accessible products and features and get rewarded for it. Check out our tweet for the sign-up link, at blind bargains, or head to google.com slash user research.
Now, here’s Chancey Fleet.
CHANCEY FLEET: Hi. I’m here with Dave Wilkinson. He’s the director of sales at the American Printing House for the Blind. We –
DAVE WILKINSON: We’ve never had one before.
CF: Congratulations. And you can check them out at aph.org. And Dave, I wanted to talk to you specifically a little bit about BrailleBlaster. Fora long time, it’s been difficult for folks to find an easy way to translate from print to braille without spending hundreds of dollars. And this is something new that appeared around the same time, I think, as the new CEO; correct?
DW: BrailleBlaster came out several months ago. It was a little bit after the new CEO, but it’s relatively close. And by the way, you can download it at brailleblaster.org, B-r-a-i-l-l-e, B-l-a-s-t-e-r, dot org. And basically, it’s a free way of translating text from print to braille. We’re supporting text files, we will soon be supporting Word files. We also support EPUB and Daisy files. And you can translate the files from print to braille, and you can emboss them.
CF: Pretty straightforward. And does it work with different lines of embossers?
DW: It does. It’ll work with virtually any embosser is my understanding. In my office, we only have – I think it’s an Enabling Embosser that it works with. But my understanding is that it’ll work with quite a lot of embossers.
CF: Excellent. And what operating systems does it work with?
DW: It is the Windows operating system. So at the moment, you’re going to want to have a PC. If you’ve got a mac, you’re going to want to put Windows on it using Boot Camp or something else. And maybe we’ll expand into other operating systems in the future, but Windows is the most current, you know– not the most current. The most widely utilized operating system, so it made sense to start there.
CF: Okay. Sounds good. And are there any other new products this year that you’d want to highlight?
DW: We have a lot of new stuff that we’re talking about this year. Probably the one that’s getting the most, sort of, sizzle is the Canute, which is a nine-line braille display. It’s 40 cells across. It’s meant to be a stand-alone book reader. We think it’ll probably be selling some time around CSUN next March, somewhere in there. It is not a portable device. It’s going to sit on your desk, and at this point, it doesn’t hook up to your computer, it’s meant to just be, like, a multiline book reader. But the pricing is looking good. It’s going to be really – it’s going to be quite affordable, probably somewhere in the 2 thousand-dollar range. So that’s been getting a lot of attention.
And sort of at the other end of things, we have a device called the Braille Buzz, which is coming soon, probably September, somewhere in there, which is like a toy for a three, four, five-year-old that’s designed to teach the child what different dots on the keyboard do. It has phonetic sounds for different letters. So you hit W, you know, it says W makes the sound of “wuh”, and then it sings “Pop Goes the Weasel.” So it’s just designed to be fun and cute. It looks like a little bumblebee.
CF: Excellent.
DW: We have, on the incredibly low-tech side of things, our deaf-blind communicator, which is a series of braille and print letters and numbers so the deaf-blind person can point to different letters and numbers to communicate with the sighted person.
We just took responsibility for a number of services at AFB, including AFB Press, AFB CareerConnect, and AFB FamilyConnect. Our new role with AFB CareerConnect will be participating in the NFB Job Fair on Saturday night, so that’s something I’m pretty excited about.
So there’s a lot going on at APH. I was brought on as the director of sales to dramatically enhance non-quota sales, to try to broaden our offerings to include people beyond just K through 12 to make learning more of a life-long experience. And so it’s been quite a challenge and quite a responsibility, and I’m having a really good time with it.
CF: Well, glad to see everything you’re working on, and especially happy to see a free alternative for braille translation. Dave, thank you so much for your time.
DW: Hey, if I could throw one more thing in.
CF: Oh. Of course.
DW: If I could throw one more thing in, and if I recorded it, I have to do it.
CF: All right.
DW: We have a product called 30-Love Tennis. It’s an accessible tennis game that has tennis balls, and you can hear them moving as they’re going through the air.
CF: Wait, how does that work?
DW: It’s really cool. It’s got a tennis ball that’s got this little rattling guy inside, so as you’re hitting it, you hear the tennis ball going, “wee,” as it rattles through the air and comes at you. And then, you get really good at whacking it with your racket so it goes back the other way.
And here’s the reason I wanted to mention it. Next year, I really want to have a tennis tournament at both of the conventions –
CF: Awesome.
DW: -- so that we’d have like, 8 or 16 people, and we’d have, you know, we’d have semifinals, the whole bit and have an accessible blind tennis tournament.
CF: That sounds like a really great idea.
DW: That’d be awesome.
CF: I’m excited already. Something to look forward to in 2019.
DW: Absolutely. So –
CF: Okay. I think you’ve saved the best for last there.
DW: I know.
CF: And what does that retail for?
DW: It retails for 130 bucks.
CF: That’s not bad.
DW: And if anyone wants any information about APH products, you can email me at Dave Wilkinson, D-a-v-e, W-i-l-k-i-n-s-o-n, at aph.org.
CF: All right. Thank you so much.
DW: Thank you.
CF: Bye.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.


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