Welcome to the EBU Access Cast 09. As you will see March was a very busy month for many updates in the assistive tech industry, as well as in the European Union which are very important for visually impaired community. Jakob, Mario and Tanja this time prepared news, demos and the first guest interview for our podcast, so let's jump straight into the action and check what do we have in store for you this time.
At the beginning all of us shared news about our new gadgets, which we will show through demos during this and the future episodes. However, before we show you the stuff from our virtual playground, let's see what news we have:
Seeing AI got new March update with some very interesting features among which we would recommend detection of objects on the pictures. If you stay until the end of the episode, you will be able to hear how that sounds in the demo section.
It seems that image recognition via artificial intelligence is slowly but surely becoming the trend for assistive tech. Why do we say that? Because Vispero Group prepared new JAWS update for March, and one of its many features is also the possibility of recognising images. If you haven't updated your version of JAWS for Windows, right now is the ideal time to do it.
Spring has come for NVDA users as well because new release 2019.1 just saw the light of day, with almost 50 different improvements since the last official version. Besides many new features added, we would like to point out improved support for MS Office products, especially Office 2016 and Office 365. If you are using one of those products, please test the newest version of NVDA and let us know how you like it.
Smart devices can be used for many different things, and playing games is definitely one of them. While many sighted people play lots of games on their smart devices, with blind and visually impaired population this is not the case unless the games are designed with accessibility in mind. This time, we bring to you the article about designing and finding the games for Android platform.
If you are happy owner of Google Home check out the following article about possible games which you can play on it.
Many people with different tipes of dissabilities will be happy to hear that European Accessibility Act is behind the corner. Therefore, we are bringing you news from the European Parliament about it.
The end of February brought an very interesting article from the European Disability Forum with a detailed study about the state of digital accessibility of public government websites around Europe. Unfortunately, the European Parliament didn't show up as the best student in class this time.
Living in a smart city can be great if you are not a person with disability. However if you have some kind of special needs, than you might find that smart cities can be nice, but also very lousy. If you are interested to know more about current and future developments and initiatives about smart and accessible cities in Europe, check out this article.
If you think that is the end than you are very wrong, because we have the first interview for the EBU Access Cast. We sat down with Alejandro Moledo from European Disability Forum and talked about the upcoming European Accessibility Act as well as current state of the accessibility of the websites of the European governments. Once more we would like to say a huge thank you for explaining everything to our listeners. We look forward to have you again in the future shows for the upcoming topics.
At the end of this episode Jakob Rosin prepared 2 demos for you, The first is short coverage of KOBOLD VR200 ROBOT vacuum cleaner, and second talks about new improvements in Seeing AI.