The BBQ Crew last caught up with Marty Schultz, Founder of Blindfold Games and Co-Founder of Objective Ed, at CSUNATC19 where he receive the Touch of Genius award From the National Braille Press for his work in providing new game based tools for Education. The accolades don't stop there, as Joe learns in this interview, the company was awarded a Microsoft AI For Accessibility grant for using Speech Recognition to teach Braille Literacy. Tune in to hear how Objective Ed is using a Refreshable Braille Display, speech and the Microsoft Cloud to build out skills. Plus, you get to learn about a Wayfinding game in a Medieval town. To learn more, and possibly be accepted for one of the company's upcoming pilot projects, visit the official Objective Ed website
ATIA 2020 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
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Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
From beautiful, and sunny? -- cloudy Orlando, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of ATIA 2020, 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. Back on the floor of ATIA, and I had an opportunity to catch Marty as lunch has just ended. So he’s ready and raring to go, which is good because I was really excited to hear what the next chapter is for Objective Ed. I was telling him before we started recording that I really enjoyed writing the show notes up last year because of the conversations about where you’re taking your company. And so what’s new, Marty?
MARTY SCHULTZ: Well, we have a lot of new things. We actually finished building out our first set of games. We’re now starting to pilot them in a lot of different school districts, and we have a couple of new inventions that we brought to market. I think that when I spoke to you last, we had just finished up the technology and Braille sheets.
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: That’s when you take a sheet of Braille and you put it on the iPad, and we build games around that to teach early Braille literacy. Well, we were given a grant by Microsoft to use artificial intelligence to teach advanced Braille literacy. So we submitted for the AI for Accessibility grant from Microsoft last May, and they notified us at the end of the summer that they were granting us this award. And with that, we’ve built – we are using speech recognition to help increase Braille literacy.
JS: Wow.
MS: And the way the system works is you hook our system up to an iPad which is then hooked up to a refreshable Braille Display. The teacher comes up with her own curriculum. We take the first sentence out of a teacher’s lesson, and we send it to the Braille Display. The child reads the words on the Braille Display, speaking aloud as she’s reading. We pick up the audio that she’s reading using the Microsoft speech recognition servers. We translate that back to text. We then compare the text of what she said to the original sentence that we sent to the Braille Display.
If they’re identical, that means that the child decoded it and read those words correctly. If the child – if there’s a mismatch, we know which word they got wrong, and they can give them remedial lessons based on their mistake.
So what we’re trying to do is help kids improve their Braille literacy between visits of their Braille teacher. So we’re pretty excited about that.
JS: I love that you have always added the flexibility of the local classroom. It’s always come down to the local area. It’s not a rigid or a finite way of doing things, and you’ve expressed that through many of our interviews, and I like that that comes through even with what you’re talking about with this new product.
MS: Thanks. I mean, we view our products to be usable in all settings, whether it’s in the classroom – a one-on-one session with – between the child and the TVI, whether it’s in the general education classroom, or even using it at home. And the idea is that we know how well the child is doing, we can show those type of skill acquisition and charts and graphs at the website for the TVI to use. And then, finally, we put it all in the context of a game so the kid enjoys playing it.
JS: How has the feedback been in the field? I know that’s something you’ve been looking for for a long time. And what gravity has that laid on you for moving forward with projects?
MS: We get a lot of positive reinforcement from TVIs, from ONMs, from assistive technology specialists all saying how wonderful our stuff is and all wanting to sign up for pilots. So now, we’re basically trying to figure out who we want to pilot with and get that going so we can do as good a job as we can in supporting the schools and the teachers.
JS: Sounds like there’s more customers than there is Marty.
MS: Well, fortunately, we have a good crew. My two business partners, Bob and Luke, are back in our booth, and they’re really good at building up the company while I’m kind of out in the field helping people get familiar with what we created.
JS: What else is going on? Anything that we didn’t touch on so far?
MS: We’re just finishing up a wayfinding game. This is where we put a child who’s learning wayfinding skills in a medieval town, and they hear horse-drawn carts going back and forth, either one way or two ways. And in the simplest case, they simply have to walk around the block, either all the way to the left or all the way to the right. And then the game gets more complex as the child gets better, where they have to cross the street where it’s safe, not get run over by a horse-drawn cart, and eventually, you get to little mini quests such as hear ten gold coins, go up to the cobbler, get some shoes, take the shoes across the street where it’s safe, and walk over to the butchery and get something there. And we made it take place in a medieval town so the child doesn’t immediately assume they have all the skills to walk around in the real world.
JS: Unless they had parents that took them to a renaissance festival.
MS: Exactly.
JS: Right? Yeah. There you go.
MS: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: Do you ever plant Easter eggs from your previous work into this work? Is there a –
MS: We will in the future.
Q -- chicken somewhere –
MS: We will in the future. Actually, the games are all tied together with what we call motivational games.
JS: Yeah.
MS: You know, the more the child does a game, they can actually have their little avatars dressed up and do dances and have music and things like that. So across all the games, we have a common theme of these motivational avatars that the kids can take and build and create a lot of fun with.
JS: That is fantastic. Oh man, I could talk to you for a long time, but where can people learn more about what you’re doing and maybe even subject themselves into the position of being able to get into these pilots?
MS: Sure. They should visit us at Objectiveed.com, or they can Email me at Marty@objectiveed.com.
JS: Marty, thank you for taking time to speak with us today. It’s always a pleasure.
MS: Thanks a lot, Joe.
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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.
