It would be so cool if you could click a button and run one batch scan on a big old G Drive full of documents to check them for accessibility issues would it not? Well oddly enough Jeff Mills, one of the Co-Founders of Grackle, tells Joe that the company is working towards this very thing in an upcoming release of the product. And he notes that the new unlimited plan is active now. To learn more about this plan, and see more about the product in beta, visit the Grackle Docs website
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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
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Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 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 Joe Steincamp.
Joe Steincamp: Hey, everyone. Joe Steincamp. I just stepped over a couple of feet -- over to Grackle and to talk about GrackleDocs here at CSUN. And Jeff is with me. We’re going to talk about some new stuff? New stuff for GrackleDocs?
JEFF MILLS: Hi, Joe. No. Nice to meet you.
JS: Huh?
JM: Yeah. From last year, when we were here --
JS: Uh-huh.
JM: -- we had a nice suite of products, the add-on to Google suite on Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
JS: You got it.
JM: And we’ve extended that out, so there’s actually more checks per Docs, Sheets, and Slides. But the real revelation for this year is that for education and nonprofit, we’ve dramatically reduced the pricing of what we do. So you can have an unlimited license for what we have for as many users in your domain as you possibly have.
JS: Okay.
JM: All for $500 a year.
JS: Oh, my.
JM: Absolutely unlimited.
JS: Oh, my.
JM: Yeah.
JS: Not that weird version of unlimited –
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: -- you know, like you get from the cell phone company.
JM: No. Absolutely not.
JS: You’re talking about real unlimited.
JM: It really is. So we have – one of our biggest customers, 25 thousand users.
JS: Right.
JM: And they have many users using it every day. And -- yeah. Go have at it. And from that, you can do as many accessibility checks per day –
JS: Wow.
JM: -- as many remediations per day --
JS: Okay.
JM: -- and you can output to as many PDFs and HTML, accessible every day as well.
JS: That’s huge.
JM: Yeah. It’s great. And we’re – this year, we’re signing up pretty much a customer per day.
JS: Okay. Wow.
JM: So it’s doing really well. So the education system in North America is really taking it to their heart, and we know that about a third of all colleges, universities, and school districts have Google.
JS: Correct.
JM: And in fact, there’s more than that now. But we know they’re there. So we’re hitting all of their education space really hard. And we’re kind of knocking them down one by one. It’s great.
JS: I love that. And then, so many of those are incorporated it through in containers and Blackboard –
JM: Yes.
JS: -- or in Canvas.
JM: Yeah.
JS: And so a lot of that is really important because many a times, it’s something designed in G Drive, shared –
JM: Right.
JS: -- and then they just want to output it right to the course materials.
JM: Absolutely. So we’re seeing that all the time. And it’s people every day – the way we’ve designed GrackleDocs is for it to be a tutorial.
JS: Uh-huh.
JM: So once you actually run the add-on a couple of times, you’re into accessibility without even knowing about it.
JS: Wow.
JM: So people do it, and it teaches you, and then you’ve done it. It’s like, actually, I’m with it now. I can do this out on my own.
JS: Built into the process. And also, for those people who have trouble switching from -- like, the university decides, okay. We’re doing A today. No. We’re doing B this year.
JM: Absolutely. Yeah.
JS: Right. So it carries it over and does a lot of that training so they don’t have to do a ton of training over and over and over again within staff.
JM: Absolutely. Within that $500, you’re getting free accessibility training as well as getting accessible output.
JS: Wow. That is crazy. So what else is going on at GrackleDocs that we might not have covered yet?
JM: Yeah. The thing that we started working on last year – now, this is a bigger project – and it’s a way to scan your Google Drive completely --
JS: Oh.
JM: -- and scan it for accessibility. So we will go in through, look at it and look at Docs, Sheets, Slides, and PDFs --
JS: Uh-huh.
JM: -- and give you an administrative report that will tell you what’s right and wrong throughout your drive. So we’re still working on this, because this is big work.
JS: Yeah. And it also could be – you created that in 2012. That was the style of the time; right?
JM: Right. Right. Absolutely.
JS: Exactly.
JM: Yeah. So what we have now -- and speaking to our, now, vast customers, they’re saying that they have, kind of, shared drives that they put lots of things into –
JS: Sure. Historic drives.
JM: -- and the administrator – yeah. The administrator wants to know what’s accessible and not. And historically, what you have to do is open it up --
JS: Yeah.
JM: -- either visually or look something like GrackleDocs and see if it’s working or not. Now, what we’re going to do is say, right. Okay. Just press the Scan button, and those thousand documents – we’ll look into it for you and give you a report.
JS: You just took a ton of work away from a bunch of people taking a – internships or teachers’ aids or –
JM: We’re making it easier for people –
JS: Yeah.
JM: -- so you can do other stuff that’s less complex.
JS: More coffee runs, less document conversion.
JM: Absolutely.
JS: I get it. I get it.
JM: Yeah. That’s it.
JS: That makes sense. Wow. That is crazy, and I can only imagine the user data that you’re going to get through all of this, because there were some -- really crazy markup language, say, seven years ago.
JM: Right.
JS: And people are going to have, like, tremendous drives of shared files. That’s going to be fascinating.
JM: Oh, there is. There are millions of documents that are sitting there --
JS: Yeah.
JM: -- just because there are millions of people creating them.
JS: Yeah.
JM: And every person creates a few per week, even. As small as possible.
JS: Sure.
JM: So these things just sit around forever –
JS: Yeah.
JM: -- and they’re not accessible. So this is a way just to make it all done.
JS: I can see that very honestly, doing some college courses for people this year, yeah. I can say that. That’s awesome.
Well, Jeff. That’s amazing stuff. Where is the best way that people can keep up with what’s going on with Grackle?
JM: The website’s the best place. So www.grackledocs.com.
JS: Okay.
JM: And if you want to Email us, there’s info@grackledocs.com. But I’d imagine everyone wants to buy it today, so go to sales@grackledocs.com straight away. But you can buy starting from the web.
JS: Okay.
JM: But if you need to do a purchase order thing, then we can do it that way as well, but we made it as accessible to buy as it is to use.
JS: Okay. Well, Jeff, thank you for your time. Sounds like the Exhibit Hall’s getting busy, so I won’t hold you. All the best this -- new Anaheim Exhibit Hall in the process, so welcome aboard. And thanks for stopping by Blind Bargains.
JM: Excellent. Thanks a lot, Joe. Good to meet you.
JS: All right.
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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.
