The cool thing about ATIA is that you can sometimes get an early look at an upcoming product before it arrives at the summer shows. Jeff Gardner, CEO of IRIE-AT, gave J.J. a look at a prototype video magnifier called the Read Easy Evolve. Hear a description of the unit and then a live demo from the Exhibit Hall floor. The conversation then moves toward Braille as Jeff gives an overview of the Braille Buddy embosser and provides some information about accessible phones. And that is just scratching the surface of the products being displayed at ATIA. To learn more about the products mentioned in this interview, and so much more, head over to the IRIE-A.T. website
ATIA 2019 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit www.afb.org/aw.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
From beautiful Orlando, Florida, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of ATIA 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology; book reviews; and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free monthly online technology magazine. www.AFB.org/AW.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: ATIA 2019, in the Exhibit Hall with Jeff Gardner, CEO of Irie-AT. Irie sells lots of assistive technology. And we found a new prototype reading machine, app update to the ReadEasy. And we’re going to talk about that and some other stuff here on the podcast.
Jeff, welcome.
JEFF GARDNER: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
JM: So tell me what we’re looking at here.
JG: Well, this is the brand new product from VisionAid International. It’s the new version of what was previously the ReadEasy Move 2. This is the ReadEasy Evolve.
JM: And it has evolved.
JG: It has. It has evolved. It’s not only different looking, but different shaped, and has buttons moved around to more convenient locations. It has a whole lot of improvements for low-vision use as well as just expanded use for basic reading.
JM: So here’s the one unique thing, the first thing you showed me. Not only do we have a camera sticking out in the front -- you know, 90-degree angle -- it is above an 11x17 piece of text. That is big in itself, and we’ll test it out in a second. The camera folds down. But it also pulls out.
JG: Uh-huh.
JM: “Camera disconnected.” And I can actually put it in this front slot, or – trying to do this one-handed here – back slot.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Camera connected forA4 capture.
JM: So what does that all mean? Why would I do that?
JG: So you need the camera up higher if you’re going to do a 1x17 tabloid-sized document. Or I can -- you can do up to A3 if you live by that standard.
JM: Uh-huh.
JG: And you don’t need to decide, obviously, for letter size. So it just – you move it to what you need. And there’s also a little handy guide on the machine itself that –
JM: Oh, yeah. It flips.
JG: -- the thing that flips out and shows you -- like, gives you a way you can feel and see to position the paper correctly if you’re using tabloid, or you flip it in and then you just have to guide – put your letter sheet so it is to the edge of the –
JM: It’s just a little –
JG: -- of your sheet.
JM: -- piece of plastic on a hinge, and it folds either – so it’s facing you horizontally along the page, or it folds back --
JG: Uh-huh.
JM: -- to get out of the way.
JG: Uh-huh.
JM: And then on the top, under – kind of underneath where the camera’s hanging out, there are several buttons. Why don’t you tell us what we have there?
JG: You have your capture buttons; your pause and play buttons, moving back and forth in text; as well as just some command buttons; and then a power button right on the top corner. That’s one of the changes we made -- was to put the – or the company made – was to put the power button in a much more obvious location in a much more tactile way.
JM: And these are all very tactile. The power button’s a filled-in circle; you have, kind of, arrows over here; you have different-facing arrows; you have – every one is a distinct shape, kind of like your book players and things like that.
JG: Uh-huh.
JM: You also could use a keypad to control this?
JG: Yeah. There’s an optional Bluetooth keypad that comes with it. And you have a whole bunch of different options on that so that you can do, you know, multipage scanning and all the different things that you want to try to do on there, as well as a lot of new features for low-vision use. This is – you know, I’m kind of used to readers being pretty much just for reading. And, you know, some of them kind of give you some live mag, but it’s more of an afterthought. This is, maybe, the highlight feature.
You know, I was first excited about this product because it can do tabloid size, and it’s from a company that does extremely accurate scanning. But then, to add the low-vision features that they did is amazing. So, you know, if I want to use a magnifiers I’m always hearing about, you know, oh. It's positioned – it’s got to have the right tray so I can move things around right and all that stuff. And this just takes all of it out. It’s got a 5K camera, but when you capture, that image is bold and clear and beautiful. And it repositions it, it corrects the size, and adjusts it so it’s perfect on the screen. So low-vision people, if they have the touch screen, can just touch and it starts reading. Wherever they touch, they can pan around, zoom, do whatever they want, change colors. So it’s a really easy way to use it as a magnifier, as well as just for simple reading.
JM: So let me pull this camera back out, because we have a newspaper underneath. Oops. Sorry. I’m –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Camera disconnected.
JM: -- yeah. Hold it down.
JG: I’ll hold it down for you.
JM: Here we go. Yeah. You can help me put it in. There we go.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Camera connected for A3 capture.
JG: All right. Now, we’re going to localize some of those things. It said A3 capture; it’ll say tabloid or something.
JM: Yeah. Well, we don’t call it that. I want to hold –
JG: Then I’m going to hit the green button on top of it.
JM: All right.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Capturing.
JG: And now, they apologize. This is a prototype. They have -- the released versions take it – this -- a step further in terms of speed.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Recognizing.
JG: That took, what? Three – maybe three seconds?
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: 2017. Www – W.
JG: So it should be well under –
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Linn Benton edition. Discover this hidden treasure. Thompson’s Mills is even older than Oregon itself. By Deb Allen, boomer and senior news. The Oregon have hidden treasure --
JG: Okay. That stopped talking because I realized I was talking over it at the same time.
JM: We want to hear about this hidden treasure in Oregon. So that’s just a newspaper that’s sitting in front of us here.
JG: Yeah. Yeah. So that was an entire 11 by 17 newspaper article that I can go through and I can read just by voice, or I can do voice and sight, if I have that available with me.
JM: Should I try this?
JG: You’re going to pull out something and throw it under there?
JM: Well, I was – actually, that doesn’t come off the thing. Hold on. Let’s – I’m going to try my badge.
JG: All right.
JM: I don’t know what they –
JG: Let me move the newspaper out of the way.
JM: You always got to bring in – do something that’s not the company demo.
JG: That does come out, doesn’t it? Here. Let me try to get it out of there, because there’s like, the cord and other stuff in the way.
JM: Oh. Is – oh. Okay. So it’s – okay. There we go.
JG: It comes out. There we go.
JM: We’ll take it out.
JG: It’s out of there.
JM: That’s fair.
JG: All right. Put it sideways and stuff. Don’t, you know. Give it a test.
JM: Should I – okay. Okay. So do you want to keep it going? We have two pieces. Should I do this top one or the bottom? Let’s see here.
JG: Well, one’s upside down, so you’re only going to get one.
JM: Okay. So –
JG: Do you want to get both of them? Put them both in there.
JM: Sure. Okay.
JG: Put one sideways though. Or put one diagonal. Just really screwed up.
JM: Okay.
JG: Okay?
JM: All right.
JG: You ready?
JM: Yeah. Go for it.
JG: Oh. Actually, why don’t we do the tabloid side?
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Camera resuming.
JM: Oh. We should bring it down. I see what you’re saying.
JG: It doesn’t matter. I mean, we can do it over a larger space. The 5K camera, we’re still going to get an accurate scan. And this is like, 2.0 font though.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: No text.
JG: I don’t know.
JM: Yeah. Let’s. Should we bring it –
JG: Yeah. Let’s move it down. Let’s bring it down.
JM: Move it a little closer.
JG: Yeah.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: Camera connected for A4 capture.
JG: Okay.
JM: Because, yeah. That’s the idea. When you’re 11x17, it’s way higher. So let’s try again.
COMPUTERIZED VOICE: ATIA/2019. Tuesday, January 29, 8 a.m. 4 p.m., 12 p.m. 1 p.m.
JG: Oh. See –
JM: So it’s – it’s reading – like, what it’s doing, it’s reading down the column.
JG: Yeah.
JM: But it is reading everything from the badge. It just –
JG: Yeah.
JM: -- it didn’t catch on that the time – it thought it was a table.
JG: Yeah. And this is seriously like – I wear reading glasses to read, but there’s – I would even have difficulty reading it with those.
JM: Got to throw you something hard, you know, but --
JG: So --
JM: But still –
JG: Yeah. I mean – and also, you have different options too. You don’t have to have it read, you know, with columns recognized. You can have it –
JM: Okay. So I could turn that off?
JG: Yeah. You could have it read across –
JM: And that’s what you would do with that?
JG: -- for a spreadsheet or something like that.
JM: Perfect. So you could fix that if you needed to.
JG: Yeah. And there’s all – there’s profiles and stuff that you could put in there, so you could, you know – if you’re doing a lot of one type of scanning or a lot of something else, you can set those up so it would –
JM: And it’s a very clear voice.
JG: Yeah. There’s all kinds of voice packages you can get for it, and they include, like, all the voices. So, you know, if you – somebody has a Spanish student or, you know, you need another language, it’s just there. You can just use it, and it recognizes it. It'll recognize multiple languages at the same time. It’s – the scanning technology on this is amazing.
JM: And we should also mention this is still a prototype, so it’s still going to be improved a bit before final release, or –
JG: Yeah. Well, it’s actually been released in the UK.
JM: Okay.
JG: It’s a prototype because we had to get here and get to ATIA and everything else, so we’re a couple weeks behind the curve just in getting a machine over here and all that stuff.
JM: Yeah.
JG: But I can stick a USB in it and update it, and it’ll be like the other version as soon as I can download the right files.
JM: Great. So when will it be released, and how much will it cost?
JG: It is 2 thousand dollars. With the keypad, it’s, I think, 2400. Because I – yeah. It’s a $400 keypad.
JM: That’s very competitive in this space. And how much does it weigh?
JG: I actually don’t know that. I – just like, a pound or two.
JM: I was going to say, is it a portable or – yeah.
JG: Yeah. I mean, it’s like, you can pick it up with a finger.
JM: Because you could bring it – does it run on batteries?
JG: Yeah. There’s a battery option for this one.
JM: Okay.
JG: We didn’t have that in the past, but we do have that now on this one.
JM: So you could run it on a battery if you’d like?
JG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This one’s plugged in now, but we can definitely run on a battery.
JM: Can you plug it into a monitor if you wanted to?
JG: Yeah. You – that’s – I mean, that’s where you’re getting all these great low-vision features.
JM: Right.
JG: If you have the keypad –
JM: Otherwise –
JG: -- then it recognizes that you can connect to a monitor to use it, and it’ll let you connect to a monitor, and then you have just an amazing low-vision magnifying tool as well.
JM: But it’s also an optional feature; right? If you’re totally blind, you don’t need to connect to a monitor at all.
JG: Yeah. If you – yeah. Unless you want to do, you know, multipage and, like, really get into the menus and that kind of stuff, there would be a use for a totally blind person to have the keypad as well.
JM: Right. Oh, no. The keypad, yes. I’m referring to the monitor though.
JG: Yeah. The monitor, you – that would obviously be a useless part of the equation.
JM: Awesome. Well, this isn’t the only thing that you’ve released lately. A couple of months ago, you announced a new Braille embosser.
JG: Yeah. Yeah. We’re trying to make things available to people that, you know, don’t have funding, which is pretty much everybody. And, you know, you need a Braille printer at home, you shouldn’t necessarily have to bail out three grand, four grand to do that. So we’ve got a product called the Irie Braille Buddy, which is fourteen ninety-five, just under 1500 bucks.
JM: So to be transparent, this is a re-branded ViewPlus embosser, but you’ve made it your own. You’ve made it cheaper.
JG: Yeah. We – I mean, we – all the products from Irie are all OEM products.
JM: Sure.
JG: You know, we have some tweaks here and there, and, you know, we throw in some free software sometimes and that sort of thing.
JM: Yeah.
JG: But yeah. These are OEM from ViewPlus.
JM: And – well, I mean, to tweak it and make it cheaper as well –
JG: Yeah.
JM: But what are the – describe for the people who might not be as familiar, what all the main features of the Braille Buddy are.
JG: Well, I mean, it produces Braille, which is a key feature for –
JM: It’s a good feature for a Braille embosser.
JG: -- for a Braille embosser. It’s 25CPS, so it’s not, you know, lightning fast –
JM: Yeah. Single-sided.
JG: -- but it’s – yeah. And single-sided. So it’s your basic Braille machine, but it will do graphics, and being a ViewPlus machine, it will also work with all Windows stuff, so you can, you know, literally go into any Windows application, change the font, and get Braille out of it. So it’s a very versatile little machine
JM: And it does tractor, as well as it has a slot near the top where you can put in a single sheet of paper if you wanted to just bust out some print notes or –
JG: Right. Yeah. It’s mainly tractor-fed, but if you had a cut sheet you needed to put into it, you can do that. Individual sheets on top. There’s just a little flip switch, and then it’ll feed in the cut sheet.
JM: And I lifted it up. It’s not that heavy.
JG: No. It’s – I mean, it’s made to be portable. There’s an optional case that rolls with it, so a lot of TBIs are traveling around, or people have need to use things in multiple locations. Well, it’s easy to do that with this one.
JM: What is it, under 10 pounds, I believe?
JG: I don’t actually know. Can I shout at somebody in the podcast?
JM: Sure.
JG: Hey, John. How much does the Braille Buddy weigh?
JOHN: I think it’s like, 8 pounds.
JG: About 8 pounds.
JOHN: Yeah.
JG: Sound right?
JM: There we go.
JOHN: You could say 10 to be on the safe side, but I think the idea was it was under 10 pounds. Yeah. It’s like 8.9 or something like that.
JG: Why would we know? It’s only our product.
JM: Very light, though. And you said fourteen ninety-five and available now?
JG: Yeah.
JOHN: Yes, it is.
JM: One more thing we want to mention: We did a lot of podcasts last year on the KAPSYS SmartVision phone. You still have that available as well?
JG: Yeah. We do.
JM: You want to give the people again a brief overview of how that’s going, or just – you know –
JG: Well, it would be nice if more people would know about it, I guess. You know, we’re told by so many people, this is really a gift for the blind community, in terms of having a phone that’s physically built from the ground up just for visual impairment. And I think even, really, in this country, what we’ve seen is totally blind people are the people that really love this phone. But obviously, you know, that’s not the best funded market and people don’t always have money for these kinds of things, and that’s making it difficult on sales of that product. And it’s kind of a shame because, you know, it’s something that we’re willing to do as a service, but we’re not willing to lose as much money as we have to, to get through FCC, to get the U.S. hardware, all those things we have to really make a new device.
So we’re hopeful that people kind of, you know, take a closer look at it, and, you know, consider it on their Christmas list or whatever because I – you know, for so many people that just aren’t effectively using iPhones or other options that are out there, which really is just iPhone, it’s a vital piece of equipment for people.
JM: And to refresh, it’s a combination touch screen and keypad phone. It has a numeric keypad and a lot of different functions and apps that are built in and running Android behind them as well.
JG: Right. Yeah. Running on Android. You just buy a voice or physical keypad or touch screen if you prefer to do that.
JM: Awesome. Starts at $599; right?
JG: Yeah. Five ninety-nine, and then if you want to add the GPS, book creator and reader and the OCR function, it’s eight eighty-nine.
JM: Awesome.
JG: And they’re all on sale now?
JM: Hey. Sales are always good. We love them on Blind Bargains.
Well, if people want to get more information on any of this stuff, what’s the best way to do that?
JG: Well, they could call or write Irie. And our phone number is (888) 308-0059. Or they can Email us at sales@irie-at.com, or come visit our website at www.irie-at.com.
JM: Thanks, Jeff. We really appreciate it.
JG: Thank you. I appreciate the time.
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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.
