Blind Bargains Qast 175 featured a discussion about the recent Indoor Navigation Symposium, hosted by the American Printing House for the Blind. This kind of event is designed to bring together experts in their respective fields in order to foster collaboration. Craig Meador, president of APH, and Jose Gaztambide, CEO of the newly formed Access Explorer, offer J.J. an opportunity to learn more about how APH is looking to create more partnerships in key areas moving forward. Products like the newly announced Jupiter, the Braille Trail and the new direction for Access Explorer are highlighted as being examples of how APH will drive innovation for future products and services. To learn more about the products mentioned, and so much more, visit the APH website
This Podcast is Sponsored by the American Printing House!
APH designs innovative learning solutions for people who are blind or visually impaired. They believe in the power of breaking down barriers and creating a future that belongs to everyone. Visit APH on the web to learn more about their products and services.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 2019. This Blind Bargains special coverage from CSUN 2019 is sponsored by the American Printing House. APH designs innovative learning solutions for people who are blind or visually impaired. They believe in the power of breaking down barriers and creating a future that belongs to everyone. Visit aph.org to learn more about their products and services.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: Here at CSUN 2019, and we are thrilled to be talking with Craig Meador, the president of the American Printing House for the Blind and Jose Gaztambide, the new CEO of a new company called Access Explorer. Guys, welcome to our podcast.
CRAIG MEADOR: Thank you very much to you, J.J.
JOSE GAZTAMBIDE: Thank you so much.
JM: And we’ll talk to Craig here first to – tell us a little bit about – you know, some of your current initiatives that you are working on at APH and the direction that you’re trying to take the company.
CM: Well, that’s a loaded question. Kind of the -- so if you – if we track back three years, when I became president, what we wanted to do at that time was really, start to begin to expand the reach of APH. And that isn’t necessarily more products; it’s being more intentional with the products we are developing. But even beyond products, the one thing we really wanted to do is expand our ability to partner with other companies, other agencies, other service organizations because our – we had some pretty ambitious goals, and we, you know – I mean, at its heart, we believe that the work that we do at APH -- if you look at its base level, the products, we believe those products are good for kids not only in the United States, but anywhere in the world.
So the other thing we recognized too is we didn’t have – we were not the center of the universe. I think APH has always done a good job of that, but it was a good reminder of that. There is brilliance walking amongst us; there’s brilliance everywhere you go. And for us to try to replicate that would be very time-consuming and would be near impossible. So what we needed to do is find those brilliant minds throughout the country, throughout the world, and start having conversations about, how can we partner with them to, in essence, take in some of their great ideas, their products, and make those part of the APH family? Because at the end of the day, we want students and adults to have access to those products as well.
JM: So you have a number of examples of – already – companies that you have partnered with on some of the initiatives. What are some of the partnerships that you are already creating?
CM: Well, some of the – so for example, I think one of our first partners out of the – in the -- early in my tenure was with – at that time, was VFO, which is now the Sparrow. And we – they came to us with some ideas of, what can we partner on, which wasn’t something that was always done at APH. We had had some – a number of partners, but they came in and said, what can we do? What do we have that you would like to be part of the APH family?
And so we started asking for some innovative ideas of the JAWS license. Being a former educator, that was always a frustration to me, is that we would always get a student set up with services, and then that student would then, overnight, over the weekend, be gone from that district. And part of my role in Washington State was outreach coordinator and State consultant, and so I would see this student end up 200 miles away, and now he’s in a new school district; right? And you start this whole process of getting this student set up with services, and sometimes that takes anywhere between a week – and a school is well prepared, but it might take as much as nine weeks to get this student the services they need. And oftentimes, accessible technology was a big piece of that because it takes a long time for districts to process paperwork and get materials, software, into the hands of the student so they can use that. So in essence, that student would be sitting in classes for weeks on end with no access to technology and no access to do their work independently.
So when the Sparrow came in and said, how about if we do this? We’ll create a license that follows the student. The student can travel anywhere in the United States, but that license stays with the students. What they did is they cut the expense to the district, and the beautiful thing about that is it didn’t penalize the student over issues they had no control over. So access went with the student; which was a beautiful idea. And that made sense to us at APH. And we said, yes. That’s something we want to partner with. We got approval through the Department of ED, it became a quota product, a quota license, if you will. And then, we began to build our partnership through a number of other products.
So we’ve added quite a few of their family line to ours, making those modifications as necessary to make them unique to APH. But along the way, we’ve also been able to do the same thing with Humanware, and we – the MATT Connect has been a huge success for us, has been great for our students, and a well-received product on the quota line. We’re happy to say we have a Braille device coming out, a notetaker, designed more for small hands, the Braille Trail, which your listeners will probably recognize as a Brailliant 14. Well, we’ve done some adaptations to make it unique to APH. So we’re excited about that.
We’ve also continued to partner with some other agencies. We had a number of agencies that aren’t so much in the product space, but are in the service space such as Pearson and ETS, and that’s more on the testing side of things. But then, we have several other partners that you wouldn’t think of: a number of prisons we partner with to produce low-cost Braille for students in the form of textbooks and a lot of other service agencies as well. I mean, the list, when we count up our current partner list, it’s well into – I think it was well above 50-some different partners that we intersect with on a yearly basis over a product or service.
JM: So when it comes to partnerships in creating new products, does it generally start with someone at APH having an idea for a new product or is it more often that the company will come to you or is it some of both?
CM: It’s some of both. About 89 percent of all APH products start as an idea of somebody who is a practitioner in the field, whether they’re a rehab counselor, or they’re a teacher of the visually impaired or a parent. Sometimes, students. They come in with an idea, and they’ll pitch an idea to us, and we’re like, that has merit. And then we go to work, trying to blend their creative mind with our process and come out with a product.
What we’ve also done is we’re getting more into the habit of finding companies, a lot of small start-ups that have a great idea, that one singular idea that is just -- we think could be game-changing for a student. And then -- so we’re finding a way – we’re kind of fast tracking the process to get that product into the quota product line. And that’s our goal there is – so if we see something that’s already made and ready to go to production, we’ll jump all over that if it makes sense. But, you know, there – for every one of those we find, we’re probably in the process of developing five others.
JM: Speaking of partnerships, there was a big example of that last week. I was fortunate enough to attend, along with about 50 other people, an indoor navigation symposium. What did you learn from that, and how did that event go?
CM: Surprisingly – well, it went – the event, it went amazing. This was one of those things that’s like, we had an idea -- and this all started at a breakfast meeting at the M-Enabling conference last June, June 2018, where about six different companies that were doing indoor navigation, we met over breakfast, and we said, folks, we’re duplicating efforts, we’re creating redundancies; can’t we work together, develop a set of standards that would help move this idea of accessibility for all? You know, that recognition that the world is incredibly large. It’s – one company can’t do it all, and it would be foolish to try. In fact, you could have a thousand companies, and you can’t do it all. So there’s a lot of challenges out there, but there are some commonalities.
So after that meeting, we all said, we need to do this again, but we need to do it as a more formal opportunity. Well, months went by and months went by, and then, I think it was in November; right? We had -- a group at APH got together and said, we really need to get serious about this, and we found a little piece of time in March where we could pull that together, sandwiched it between the AFB conference and CSUN and the Mobility Matters conference at Portland State. We said, these are the dates, and we put it out there, invitation only. We wanted the minds that were working in that space already, as well as some people who carried a lot of influence in the field such as the NFB, the ACB, AFB, and we wanted their take and we put out the invitations. We had no idea if anybody would show up. It was kind of late notice, we were overwhelmed by the response. And in the week of the conference, again, you don’t know – we know people are coming, we don’t know when they’re arriving and to our – I shouldn’t say our surprise because people were excited about it -- but I was thoroughly pleased and elated that so many – everyone that said they were coming came. Discussion was really rich, and out of that, there were a lot of commonalities. You know, at its heart, everyone is serving the same mission. Whether you are for profit or nonprofit, you are in this for the right reasons, and that is -- is you want to have impact. You want it to have impact on making the world more accessible. You want it to have impact because you wanted to, you know, use the old cliché, level the playing field or create opportunity, which sounds trite, but it’s so true. I mean, that – at its core, everyone had that same mission. Little different philosophies. You know, we had input from companies located in Israel and Norway and France, U.K., Japan, as well as the United States. And it was really confirming to see that everybody was after the same idea, maybe approaching it a little differently, but there’s hope. I mean, I came away saying, this is doable. And from that, I think the big push was is we need to develop standards.
Now, the good news is once again, those bright minds had figured that out. So a good example is CTA, a foundation that supports the Consumer Electronics show, had already begun working on some indoor navigation standards, and this was a follow-up to work that was done a few years back by G3ICT, which -- it started a white paper on indoor navigation wayfinding standards. And so, you know, this was this nexus of all these ideas floating around and getting everyone together in the same space and everyone agreeing that standards are important and we need to be working together and we need to firm up the standards and establish those. And I think my feel – judging the feel of the group is that this isn’t going to be a one-off. Our goal is we’re going to do this again, and we’ll keep doing it as long as there’s a need.
JM: And I certainly look forward to attending more of these in the future.
That transitions us nicely to Jose, who’s been waiting patiently.
CM: I have a tendency to talk a bit, so –
JM: Talking about Access Explorer. So Access Explorer was spun off from Nearby Explorer. So APH, of course, having hands in navigation, indoor, outdoor, for a while with Nearby Explorer and now, Access explorer.
Jose, I know you’re still pretty brand new to this position, but go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you see for Access Explorer.
JG: Yeah. Absolutely. So my name is Jose Gaztambide, and the proud new CEO of Access Explorer, spinning off from the American Printing House for the Blind. I think it was a recognition that this space is very much in its nascency. And for it to achieve the scale that we need it to, not just across Louisville, not just across the country, but across the world, it really requires an agile entrepreneurial effort and a separate organization that is solely focused on indoor navigation and on indoor mapping. And so I think that was a lot of the impetus on behalf of the board of the American Printing House for the Blind to create this new entity with the dual mission motive and a profit motive, really kind of creating a self-enforcing loop. If we do a great job with the mission motive and if we are able to make indoor navigation easier and more accessible and more accurate for the blind and the visually impaired, the profit will follow. And the profit will allow us to reach more people and to map more spaces and to make the technology better. And so that’s kind of the hypothesis and the thinking behind Access Explorer, A, as a spinoff of APH but still maintaining that strong relationship and also as a separate, for-profit entity.
JM: That’s great, Jose. We look forward to hearing more from you in the near future.
JG: Thank you, J.J.
JM: Thank you so much, both of you. Craig, if people want to get more information about APH, of course, aph.org.
CM: Yeah.
JM: How else can they –
CM: Well, they could always bother you, and then you could refer them to me. No. No. We won’t do that. We won’t create an – basically, come to the website, and by the way, website is going – undergoing some major changes, so we’ll be rolling out a new website here in the next month. We’re excited about that, and hopefully, that will deliver even a greater level of service to people who access APH. But most of the information, they can find through APH or they could drop us a line. And if people still do that sort of thing, contact us by Email, as well as join us on Facebook and many of the other social media platforms.
JM: Thank you so much, Craig and Jose. We really appreciate it. We really appreciate APH sponsoring this podcast.
CM: All right. Thank you, J.J.
JG: Thank you, J.J.
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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.
