This has been an ACB community call. Today's Community Unmuted was hosted on Tuesday, October 29, 2024. Hello everyone and welcome back to Unmute. Some announcements here at the top. We wanted to remind everyone we're going to take first questions and then if we still have time, we'll take second questions. So please be respectful and remember there's no dumb questions. And the question of the day today is we have a bunch of new things that were announced this week. And do any of those things make you want to purchase a new device so that you can utilize all these new crazy AI features? I would say for myself, I already got a new phone, so my answer is yes. And in terms of the new stuff.
That came out, I would say I would be getting probably the new Mac.
Mini that was announced today.
That thing looks super awesome.
So in any case, as always, we got Michael Babcock with us. How you doing, Michael? I am doing great, Marty. Always on the go, you know, lots of updates and changes and stuff here. So for those who don't know, on Sunday we had our regular digital bytes, which is Michael trying to remember what we did while I'm walking into my front door. And then we had Andrew our all unmute Android Unmuted if I can talk today, which had Marty and Liz talking all about Android devices. Liz unboxed her Android device. So you want to go give that a listen if you're curious what came in a box of Android devices. And then we also had the Community Unmuted posted on Tuesday, which is the replay of this call. So thank you. Marty and Sheila, do we have any hands today?
Yes, sir. Beth, you may go ahead. Oh yeah, I have a braille display and I, I had a Bible study today and like the. We were studying Jericho and I wrote the wall on each side and the eats kept. It's like it kept following me to the next line and the next line. And every time I wrote a sentence after that period, there was that eat there. And I'm wondering if maybe I had insert on or something.
But so I'm, I'm a little confused on your question. Could you. So when you were using your braille display, is that correct?
Yeah.
Okay. And your focus kept moving?
I think so, yeah. Because the word, that word, it's. It's almost like when I used to type on the Becks, like the computer. Like if I wouldn't insert, I think it would always. That word will always keep moving or the focus. And I don't know what. I never had that happen before. So I don't know what I can do about that.
Yeah, that's kind of what it sounds like is it was set to an insert mode and that was obviously not the anticipated behavior. So not quite sure. And it would be worth trying it again to see if you run into that issue again. Okay.
Okay. Or I did find the Braille menu. Maybe I. Or the Braille manual. Maybe I could look at that in.
Well, reading the manual definitely helps.
Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you.
No problem.
Deborah Jackson.
Hello, Deborah.
Hello. How you doing? I got this issue. Yeah, I'm looking further for the AI, as long as it can help me with my hearing and then be my mind for me, for my hearing too, versus, you know, vision and everything for the technology, you can. Looking forward for the AI. So your question of the day is what I'm saying. So anyway, I updated my phone and I thought it was kind of weird when my phone is down and all I do is diff it up and it answers itself. I just have to. I have to, you know, like tap on it so that I can get it to go on my Bluetooth because I guess it goes on speaker. Okay.
So when you answer your phone, it. Or when you lift up your phone, it automatically answered you. It. Or it automatically switched it to speaker.
Yeah, it do both.
Okay, that is strange. So there is a feature in iOS that allows you to automatically switch your phone to speaker. And I wonder if for some reason that has been enabled. You can go into both the apps settings. So if you go to Settings and then Apps and then you go to phone, you can check for the options that may be enabled there. For example, you may have it set to automatically answer. And I would go check that checkbox to see if that's enabled. If it is, turn it off and that should fix that aspect of it. And then the other thing that you can check is when you answer, there's an option that says auto speakerphone and I believe that's also in the phone section. So you can check there to see if that was enabled too.
Okay. In the phone section. So what you can do to Settings.
App and then Phone.
Setting App and then phone.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, go to Settings and then Apps and then phone. Yep.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate that, Deborah.
Petra.
Hello, Petra.
Yes, hello everyone. In answer to your question, I am interested in AI and I'm right now very interested in what people think of the echo glasses that I'm actually thinking about pre ordering, if anyone has any thought on that.
Is that the echo.
Frames yes, well the interview I heard they were calling them Echo glasses, but yes, I think you're right. Echo Frame. So I have no experience with those by a Giga.
Ah, those ones. Okay. When you were talking about Echo, I. My mind went straight to Amazon and so I have heard of the A Giga. I actually heard about them on Double Tap and then I heard somewhere at a CSUN interview earlier this year, I'm really intrigued by them because they apparently do a lot better at processing images and text and reading that text from top to bottom. So I'm really intrigued by them. That's all the information I personally have on them.
I heard about them on Double Tap also. That's what got me so interested in. And apparently one of the developers actually helped develop the, the Amazon devices as well. So very intriguing. And I actually think I'm going to go ahead and pre order because it sounds like that's the best way to go. And I have my meadow glasses to use in the meantime until I get the new one.
There you go. And the glasses form factor I think is probably what I have found to be the best form factor when it comes to using your smart devices because for example I'd go get some fingerprints done earlier today for a new job and I just wore my Ray Bans with me and was able to connect to AIRA to get guided into the building and I'm just blown away every time I wear glasses because it's an amazing hands free form factor to use.
Sure is. And Marty, what was, what was the item you were interested in? I didn't catch the name of it. Marty got kicked off the call for some reason.
Yeah, Marty disappeared. So. Okay, it's, it's one of those days today apparently.
All right, Sharon. Hello. Hello. Hello. I just upgraded to 18.1 and in the mail app I'm noticing something that's really annoying me. When I read an email and then I back out of it. What used to happen is I'd be on the email and I could delete it. Now the focus isn't there, it's somewhere else on the screen and I don't know if there's a fix for that or if this is something new that Apple is doing.
So how do you back out of a message?
A back button on the top left.
Okay, so someone reported this to us last week and I'm curious if the suggestion I made was helpful for them. So I don't know. But what I can tell you to try because if you instead of using the back button, do A scrub, which means put two fingers on your screen, swipe to the left, right and then left, all in one fluid motion. That should take you back out of the message. And with my testing at least, I can't guarantee it. But with my testing, focus stays on the message that was opened.
Did you say right, left, right or.
Yep. Or left, right, left? Either way. You can do it either way.
Oh, all right, I'll give that a try. I actually reported it to Apple yesterday and he, I, you know, I shared screen with him and he said, oh, this isn't good, so.
Well, good. At least they're aware of it now.
Yeah, thank you very much.
No worries.
Thanks a lot. Bye. All right, Carol.
Hello.
Yes, I have a question. I have the iPhone SE3 and I'm having a problem sharing photos in and videos. I could share it with some people, but with others it will say imessaging needs to be turned on and my imessaging is turned on and my SMS also turned on. So I don't know. I called Apple Accessibility and they, they couldn't figure it out either.
Did they by chance, have you restart your phone?
No.
Have you restarted your phone?
Yes, I have.
Okay. And that's still not working for you?
I actually didn't try it since I restarted it, I have to say because I some. I found another way to share those photos so I didn't try it since that happened.
Gotcha. I would try it now and see if that fixes it and see if you notice any difference. The other thing you can try doing if you haven't yet is try disabling sms. I'm sorry? Try disabling imessage, restart your phone and then re enable imessage and that should force it to re register with the imessage service.
Oh, okay. All right, thank you.
No worries.
Tom.
Hello, Tom.
Hello there, Michael. Yep. I'm the guy that reported that thing with the email last week. I. I haven't been able to get it to work. It's kind of hit and miss. Best. And so from what I just told, I guess if you update, I haven't gone to 18.1 yet, but I'm going to. But the question I had today, I got a new phone. I'm now talking to you on a promax 16 promax. And I'm having a little bit of a problem with Siri sending text messages. It wants to interrupt me. It sometimes will just. It's just crazy. I don't know what, what to do to make it work like it's supposed to Work.
Okay, so. So let's make sure that I'm understanding the issue correctly, and then I should be able to help you with figuring out where to go to get that fixed. Okay, so if you tell our favorite S assistant that you want to send a message, it reads the message back to you, but. But it interrupts itself. Is that correct?
Sometimes it does that. Sometimes it'll. I don't even know if I can explain it. It's just that it's quirky, and I. There was something I tried, and I don't even know what that was. If it did anything, it made it worse, and sometimes it'll just stop.
Perfect. So I'm doing this on my phone with you live. So bear with me a moment while I try that. And of course, I'm having Internet issues right now, too, so hopefully I don't cut out here, but if you go to your settings, and then you go down to accessibility, and then you go down to. Ah. Then you go down to under. It's a ways down. Accessibility. Okay. So you got to flick a ways down. You're going to hear it say general headings.
Okay. General headings. Okay.
If you go past the general heading, then you can locate an option that says Siri. Double tap on Siri. And then there's an option that says require Siri for interruptions. You need to make sure that that is turned on. If it's turned off, then it's going to always be listening without you triggering it with Siri. So if it hears something at that point, then what it's going to do is try to act on that. And I think that'll give you the experience you're looking for. So again, accessibility under the general heading. Locate Siri and then go down to require Siri. Listen, hold on. Require Siri for interruptions is the option. And you want to turn that.
Require Siri for interrupting. Right.
Yep.
Okay. All right. That. I'll give that a try. Now, as for this other thing, could you. Yeah. Tell me again exactly what. What you do for that. You say you have to be inside the email. Maybe that. I don't know if I did that better or not.
So you open a message. Let's say I send you a message that says, hey, you want $1 million? Before you delete it, open the message. And then when you're in that message, instead of double tapping on the back button at the top left corner, do a scrub gesture, which means put two fingers on your screen. Swipe right, left, right, or left, right, left. Either way, you can do it either direction. And that should take you out of the message and then put you back in your inbox. On the list of messages with the most recent message that is highlighted.
That's what I want. I'll try that again. I might not have been doing something right, but when I tried and it didn't, if anything it was like a hit and miss thing. I did find something that was sort of work, but it's a hit and miss thing too. If I after I've closed the message in the usual way, if I put my finger on the like about the center of the screen, sometimes it'll put me right back on the message that I was. I just read or close to it. So that's. That's one thing I that that will. It's what work around but it's still not like being right back on the message that I wanted to deal with. You know, it's. It's better than you know. But you. Because what it would do it push focus on that back button. So then you got to swipe all the way back to where your message was and do what you want to do it deleted or whatever. So.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's. It's overwhelming for sure. Well, thanks, Tom. Give that a try. Change that setting. Of course this will be podcasted. If you forget or drop us an email to feedback at Unmute show, we can send those directions to you in writing. Okay.
Okay, Michael, thanks a lot.
Awesome. Tom, Sheila, who do we got next?
You know, I think Marty might be here, but he is under your name. Marty, is that you?
No, no. Bit to me. I'm on here twice. Oh gee, thanks for confusing me. What are we going to do with two of me?
Oh boy. Bobby.
Hey, Bobby. Bobby, you are muted.
Hey Michael, I'm here now. I got a question. I got a question for you about the Blind Shell Classic 2 because that's the phone I had. I'm wondering want to temporarily turn off the notifications now? Not the mail notifications but you know, the ones that are for text messages. I want to turn them off and I can't figure out how. The only notification turn off I see in the settings is the mail notifications. Now temporarily I could turn them off but how do we turn off the notifications for like text messages or like update notification? I know how to turn off the update notification. Just the ones for receiving text because sometimes, you know, if I'm sleeping at night, I like to leave my phone on. But I like to, you know what I mean, have it Turned off. And when is Blind Shell gonna have the Ray Ban metaglass app? Because is blind. Is it a dead issue? Is the Blind Shell completely dead or are they still gonna work on it?
So I don't have. So first of all, you're not going to like my answers. I don't have an answer for you on the meta Ray Bans. I would drop an email over to the team in Prague via infoindshell.com and ask them, hey, I really want meta Ray Ban support. Is this something you guys can provide? As of right now, I have no announcements for what Blind Shell is doing with the Meta Ray bands. And I don't know that they have any intent. Well, I can't say any intention. I don't know that they have any dedicated plans to bring the app to the Blind Shell. But keep an eye on. On what Blind Shell is doing because that could change at any point. The second thing that I think will be helpful for you is Adrian's podcast that I'm dropping tomorrow. And I say that because Adrian shows you the. Well, actually, and I think I may have done this as well, but Adrian shows you different sound profiles. And unfortunately, you can't just go in and disable the notifications for text messages specifically. However, what you can do is you can go into settings and then go to profiles and then set up a nighttime profile schedule. So automatically at 10pm it will disable all of your notifications and you can either put it in vibrate or make it go silent. And then at 6am, for example, it'll switch back to the normal profile. That would be right now, the only way to be able to accomplish that, because you can't just disable notifications on specific applications.
Aha. But the strange thing is, as I said, I'm able to disable the mail notifications. That I can definitely do. But why can't we disable the ones for text? That's what I'm wondering. I guess you don't know the answer to that one.
Yeah, why is a question I don't have an answer for. Except for send an email to info blindshell.com and ask them.
Yeah, that is a good idea. And yeah, it was great talking to you and just giving you a heads up. It looks like JAWS 2025 will be out this week. So that's all I have for now.
Perfect. Bobby, we appreciate it and thanks for your support. Sheila, who do we got next?
Matthew.
Hey, Matthew.
Hello. Hi, Michael. How you doing?
I'm doing great. And yourself?
Hello, Michael. How you doing? Today we have, we have two. Matthews, Matthew Morin. Hang tight, Matthew. That's okay. Thank you. I didn't see that. It's okay. I. I did. I know. I'm just kidding. So I. To answer your question about the, the 18.1 and the AI stuff, I'm excited about the personal V. I heard a demonstration by Desiree last week. I thought that was pretty awesome. I want to try that on my new phone. And the. Just, just the Apple AI. I did the Enabling Summit about a week or so ago and one of the things I learned about was the AI chips and how it is going to make the AI on your phone more local and private as opposed to being a cloud based. So I'm excited about that. Not, not all my information, not that I don't always use stuff that's improper, but you know, just keep things a little bit more private. An update real quick for you. I found out a couple. About a month ago I advised you, asked you guys for some help with my system tray on Windows 11 and come to find out I was using jaws 22 and there's a. There was an issue with the Windows 11 and the system tray not displaying. Right. And so we've upgraded to 23. It's working.
Right.
I haven't gone to 24, which is what I would prefer, but that's a. I work for Texas Tech University, so that's a license issue with the university as opposed to me, you know, we wanting it. My question that I had for you was about the meeting. I just lost my train of thought. If I remember it, I'll come back at this point. Okay, thanks.
Definitely raise your hand again. I don't know if Zoom is messing up, but I just saw Diane left too. That's interesting.
I did too. Yes.
I did too. Who do we got next? Sheila? We'll just roll with it. Exactly.
Matthew Morin, let's go with you now.
Hello, Matthew.
Hello, Michael. My first time on here. How you doing?
I'm doing great. Yourself?
Good. I have an I. My question is, I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max and I don't know if I did something to it, but I have the action button. I have it set to silent mode, but when I press and hold voiceover doesn't read or doesn't say ring mode or silent mode. And I called Apple Accessibility on it and they were supposed to get back to me about it and they haven't yet. So they got my 16 Pro Max. And when I, when I, I upgraded from the 16 Pro to the Pro Max, so. And it worked when I got it, but then when I restored the iCloud backup to the 16 Pro Max, it stopped doing it. Did I hit something wrong in voiceover or is it just a bug or a defect in the so I use a Siri voice one for voiceover.
So here's I can't tell you exactly what's going on, but I can tell you what I would do to attempt to troubleshoot that. Number one, don't hesitate to give Apple Accessibility a call. Again, it is very possible that anything could have happened and that's why they haven't gotten back to you. So I highly encourage you to reach back out to them. Before you do that though, the first thing I would try is to change your voice. Change your voice to a different voiceover voice and see if then pressing and holding the button gives you the notifications that you're looking for. I don't have a phone with an action button, so I'm just going off of the things I would try in order to see if that would work. Also, I presume you've tried this, but a simple restart of your phone can fix a lot of those issues.
Yes, I've tried that too. Yes.
And if it worked, prior to restoring your phone, part of me wonders if one of your voiceover settings got changed. And unfortunately there isn't currently a way to just reset your voiceover settings. So what you have to do is go into general, go all the way down to backup and reset, choose that and then you can reset your iOS settings. And with that we'll reset your voiceover settings. So you could try that and see if that makes a difference. Do you know if you press and hold the button, the action button, does it actually put you in silent mode? But Voiceover doesn't tell you this.
Yes, it does give me the haptic feedback when you press it. It does ones for ring mode and then it does it a little couple of times for the silent. But if I restore the settings, that won't erase the phone, that will just restore the settings. Right.
Default settings. It'll. It'll restore all settings on your phone. But I think it's a voice related issue. So I would first try by changing voice and see if that makes a difference for you.
Okay, now I gotta go into the rotor languages and do that.
Yeah, or you can go to Settings, Accessibility, Voiceover and then Speech. And then under speech you can pick a different voice there.
Okay, cool. Thank you.
No worries. Matthew, who do we got next?
Sheila Ibrahim.
Hello, Ibrahim.
Hello. So I have this weird issue in WhatsApp. When I want to send a photo from my gallery, it freezes a bit and it probably took me five minutes just to get a photo attach and send. So I don't know if it's all third party apps or is it a bug or is it just me?
I feel like today it's all the difficult questions I don't have exact answers for. So if I'm understanding correctly, you would open a new conversation with me in WhatsApp and then you would tap on the attach button to attach a photo, is that correct?
Yeah, the share media, then photos, and then it freezes a bit in that area.
And have you tried to force quit WhatsApp from the app switcher?
Yes.
Okay, so what I would do with.
That, I've updated to 18.1 as well. And still there.
And it's still there. Okay. I don't share photos that way. Maybe I should. But does it work properly if you do it the other way and go to photos and share the photo to WhatsApp?
I don't share photos.
That might be an easier. Well, not easier, but that might be. Be a less freezing way. That is interesting. So what. What I would recommend doing is next time it happens, vigorously shake your phone in the WhatsApp app. This is called Raid Shake. And what this will do is it will grab the latest logs of WhatsApp. So if something's crashing there or something's hanging up, it'll report this to Meta and it will ask you what happened and you can explain what happened and then hit the submit button. And that will get that to the WhatsApp engineers and they can investigate what's going on. In the interim, I would try sharing from your photos app and see if that works better for you.
Okay.
Thanks, Ibrahim. Thank you. Of course. Sheila. Oh, no. Did we lose Sheila too?
I am here. No, I'm here. Diane. No, I'm here. I'm here.
Oh, and I'm just saying that I'm covering for Diane.
Okay. And we are not on stream.
Yes, I put us back on.
Perfect. Thank you. All right. Yeah, I had muted. I'm sorry because I texted to find out what happened, so. All right, Rich.
Hey, Richard.
Messages.
Rich.
Anyway, there he is.
A quick answer to Bobby's question.
A real simple answer with the blind spot. We're not hearing you, Rich.
You need to. You're very fainty. Like you're. You're going in and out. Go ahead.
Is this any better?
Yeah, a thousand.
Okay. All right.
Bobby's Question.
If he's just wanting to have his.
Phone quiet when he's gonna go to.
Sleep or whatever, just go to the blind shell home screen.
You know the part, the place at.
The very beginning where it answer, where.
It announces the time, hold down the pound key, it'll take him to sound profiles.
Hit the down bar one time, it'll say vibration only and it'll put the whole phone on vibration only and that way it won't wake him up. And if for a text or an.
Email or a phone call or anything.
And then you turn it back on.
The same way when you want to put it back. Yep, that is a great tip there, Rich, and appreciate you sharing that because that's a way you can manually do it. If you need to automatically do that, that's when you can go into the profile and set up the schedule for that to happen as well. So thank you, Rich. Appreciate it. Alrighty, Sheila Pearl. Hello.
All right, I sent you an S to unmute.
I'm willing to blame Zoom because Zoom is wonky today.
Okay. Sending the request made it worse because I was trying to get my watch and that would not allow it. Yeah. Anyway, I was grading cucumber, so I wanted to know if you had heard anything about anything similar to like the Meta ray band, the celeste glasses, things like that that are not glasses. Have you heard about anything like that?
So I'm a little confused what you're looking for. Can you explain to me what you're trying to find?
So something similar to like the Meta ray vans or something that has a camera and uses AI but is not glasses specifically. I don't want to be walking around with glasses on just to use technology.
Gotcha. Like so, yeah, are you looking for something handheld or something headworn?
I head worn would be okay. I'd rather it be like clippable, like clip onto my shirt, clip onto my sleeve, clip onto like the front of the shirt, whatever. Like if it has to specifically be middle of the shirt, that's fine.
Okay. So not horribly. I have an idea of something but I don't have any experience with it and the reviews that I read have not been the best. But there's the rabbit R1 and that is something that you can hang on your shirt.
That's not good.
Okay, so then to answer your question, no, everything else is going to be head worn. It's going to look similar to glasses. There are the ARX headset, but again that's going to have the form factor of glasses.
Okay. So nothing like bone Conducting headphones. I heard that there might be something come out with Meta that would be like headphones instead of glasses. But nothing about actual things.
No, not that I have heard that's actually been produced. If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to raise your hand.
I don't see any reason they can't do that. And there are people who can't wear things on their face too. So thank you anyway.
Yep, no worries, Pearl. Thanks a lot, Sheila. Who do we got next?
Christine.
Hello, Christine.
Hey. So I work a lot with a friend's computer and it's an. It's a iMac 2019. Okay. It could be a 2020, but I really think it's a 19. And it just for about the last few months, even before Sequoia, which it's perfectly compatible with running, it says it started to be very, very slow. And I mean like it takes probably seven minutes for it to boot up. And, and then it's always, especially in Safari, there's often the not responding and if I turn off voiceover and then turn it back on, usually that, you know, has the effect I want for the moment, but everything is just really slow. I've done all the obvious things. There's no, there are no caches, clear history. You know, there's like, I can't think. I've checked the disk and everything is fine. It's not a solid state, which is one of the things that might be. Is there any reason that you can think of that I'm missing that it's running so slowly.
So is your friend a voiceover user?
No, but it runs slowly for her too.
Oh. But it runs slowly for her too.
Oh my goodness. Yeah. I mean, a seven minute boot up is without voiceover. That's just booting up.
It almost sounds like it's hardware issues.
That's what I was getting to. And that's what I was hoping you wouldn't say, but fear that you would.
That's where my mind went to. So you have two solutions to try before having to purchase hardware and try that. So number one, I would download and see if clean my Mac does anything for you.
Okay.
If you haven't tried that, because that can go in and clean up a lot of the preference files that may not be needed. Exactly.
Yeah.
So that's where I would start. You could try a reinstall of the operating system over its current version, which would not lose files, but it would reinstall the operating system and reconfigure it. Those are the two things I would Try before purchasing new hardware. But sadly I wouldn't be surprised just.
Looking at like memory or changing out the hard drive for a solid state or something. Something like that.
And I don't know what you can do with Imax as well. I don't know if that's swappable. You can also reach out to Apple Support and ask them to run diagnosis on it.
Oh, can you do that? Okay.
They can run remote diagnosis.
Awesome. Okay, thank you.
No worries. Hopefully that helps you a little.
Yeah, thanks.
Awesome. Who do we got next?
Ann? Hello, Ann, can you hear me? Yes.
Yes, ma'am.
Hi, everybody. I have a Windows question. Last night I got a message that said that I needed to update Windows and if I didn't do it, it would try to do it for me in the middle of the night, if you've ever gotten that message. So I updated it. Click to update it. And it did. And then it restarted. And then when I went to email, I tried to reply to somebody and it wouldn't do it. It. It wouldn't actually wouldn't. Even if it read the message that was there for me to reply to, it wouldn't reply. And I tried it again and it wouldn't even read the message I was trying to reply to. And I pressed Escape and finally got back into the message I was trying to reply to. And I tried it again and it wouldn't even read anything. And then I had to press Escape again and get back into the message, but it wouldn't let me reply after I updated. Do you know why?
I don't know why. And this is a great opportunity to leverage the Disability Answer Desk because instead of me sitting here guessing what could be going wrong, you could actually reach out to Disability Answer Desk. They can see what's going on and tell you how to fix it. It's really strange that it started happening immediately after update, but I wondered if.
Something has changed though in the update.
Again, I can guess all day long about something that has changed. I have not updated my computer since last night. It's been a couple of days, my Windows machine and I am not encountering this. The other potential issue is this Windows 10 or 1111 11. I wonder if for some reason you ended up on New Outlook.
Oh, good grief.
And that might be the issue. But if I was in your case, Ann, I would jump off here and call Disability Answer Desk. If you have be my eyes on your phone, that'd be the fastest way because then they can just see through your camera.
The only thing about the calling Them is sometimes I have a hard time understanding them.
Okay, so hang up and call again.
Well, that's. Hang up on. It was kind of cruel, but, you.
Know, just say, hey, I'll try again and then call back. Yeah, I can't do anything about people's accents, but that's just part of the nature of doing things.
Yeah. Okay.
Thanks, Anne. Appreciate it.
Okay, thank you, Lori.
Hey, Lori.
Hey, Michael. How's it going?
It's a Tuesday morning.
Yeah, for afternoon for me.
Yes, ma'am.
In my area. Anyway, one of my friends told me that she downloaded the Instacart app. And. But she told me that when she entered her payment information, including her food stamp card number, that they would. They would not accept it. They. They timed her out. They. They just. You know, finally she. She had to call Instacart. I didn't know you could do that. And she talked to somebody, and the same thing happened to them, but finally she got it all straight. So my question is, what can I do to prevent that from happening to me when I enter my payment information into the app?
I don't know, because it sounds, from what you're saying, like the person she called was also having an issue entering the information at first. So it's just possible that they could have been having a tech glitch. A tech glitch that was preventing people from entering payment information. I don't know if that's what's going on, but I can't tell you what to do to prevent that from happening, aside from try it again and reach out to Instacart support if you have any issues.
Okay. And if. If. If there's. If there's time later, I'll come back with a second tech question, but if not, I'll do it next week.
Sounds like a plan. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate it.
Sheila who thanks, Michael, for the call. I really appreciate that. Scott.
Hey, Scott. Okay, thanks.
I believe it was Pearl who was asking about alternatives to glasses. Something wearable. Well, it would seem to be that, you know, if I were looking for.
An alternative to glasses, I'd be. I mean, we got apps for our.
Phones that do a lot of what the glasses do.
I'd be looking for a lanyard for my phone. Yeah. Yep. That. That could be an alternative solution. If Pearl is still listening. Keep that in mind as well, is throw your phone in a lanyard. That'll give you a lot of the AI features, especially with the newer phones, because a lot of that information is processed directly on the device. Yeah, so that's. Thank you, Scott.
All right, thanks.
Appreciate that.
Cam, coffee.
Hello.
Hello. I missed what the question of the day was.
But I kind of did too. But I think it was related to AI. And what are you looking for with the new AI features in iOS 18.1 if your phone supports them?
Well, mine doesn't. I'm on an older phone, but I think when the time comes that I actually have to do this and it's not really an AI, but to be able to record our phone calls. And speaking of phones, there goes my landline. I don't recognize the number. I'll just let it ring. There you go. But the being able to record a phone call when necessary, I just, I don't do it all the time, of course, don't need to, but there are those very rare occasions where you need to. The other thing I like is have voice memos record in stereo. Oh, I'm really going to like that for sure. And I did update to 18.1 and so far I'm not running into a major problem with it, but I had something weird happen in my notification. Pardon me, sinuses folks, notifications normally. And I'm one of these people that gets a ton of notifications and some of them it may be three or four days before I go back and act on them, which normally works just fine. And did was working fine until I went to 18.1 and I had a bunch of notifications saved from this. Well, not safe. They were still in notification center from this past Friday and I had planned to go back and act on those today. Well, after I updated those notifications from Friday are gone. So that's the only weird thing I had happen with the update.
Yeah, yeah. The notifications I find to be a little finicky. Sometimes they disappear when you don't expect them to. Other times they'll stick around forever.
Yes. Oh yeah.
So appreciate that Pam. One, one caveat. I don't know if you have tried it yet, but chances are since your phone supports 18.1, it will support call recording. So when you make a phone call, the very first button on the screen should be record call. And then if you double tap on that, what happens is it'll beep and let you know that it's going to start recording and I think it's three seconds and then countdown, an audible message for you and the called party or calling party and then it will beep and then when you're done, you get a notification on your phone letting you know that the recording is available. You tap on that and it'll drop you right into notes with your recording.
There's Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, obviously I haven't used it yet, and it's one of those things I probably would need to use once a year, if that often. But when you need it, you need it. And when you don't have it, that's.
Not good for sure. And I'm just glad that it's built in and you don't have to do a hacky way to get it to work on the iPhone now.
Gotcha.
Yep. Thanks a lot, Pam. Appreciate it.
And yes, I did restart my phone to see if those notifications would pop.
Back up, and they did not.
I may do that again and see if they come back up. The ones from last Friday.
Yep, best of luck with that. I think they're probably gone, but definitely worth trying again. So. Thanks, Pam.
Yeah, thanks.
Of course, Sheila. Who do we got next?
Matthew.
Hello, Matthew.
Hello.
Hey, I remember my question. I heard. I don't remember it was on this call or somewhere else. I wanted to ask if you know anything about the smart cane.
The We Walked smart cane, I guess.
So I'm not sure what it's called.
Yeah, I don't know much about it, but what you can do is if you go to Double Tap on Air.com and type in Smart cane in the search, you'll get an a podcast episode where they both talk about it and where they interview the founders of the smart cane. And that should give you more information about it and you answer some of your questions.
Double tap, Double. Like the word double D, O, U, B L, E. Yep.
Tap on air dot com.
Double tap on air dot com. All right. Thanks, Michael. Have a great day, man, already.
Thanks a lot.
Story.
Hello? Story.
Hello. Hello.
Yep, you're good. Sorry.
Oh, okay. My question is how do you mute or disable specific app notifications on iPhone 13? And also a throwaway question, is the Glide an AI cane? A smart cane?
So I'm going to send you back to doubletaponair.com for the glide question because they've done some great review of Glide. It is not. I wouldn't call it a smart cane. It is a smart mobility device. It doesn't look anything like a cane and it does have some smarts built into it. So if that's what Matthew was looking for was the glide. Because there are a couple of things. There's the WeWalk Smart Cane, which is specifically a smart cane, and it looks like the traditional smart cane with some Additional or it looks like the traditional cane with some smarts in the handle itself. So that is the wewalk, but the Glide is a totally different device. It has a handle on the top that you hold on to and you push it and it will give you feedback based on your environment. Again, you can go to doubletaponair.com and type in Glide in the search field and you can hear some interviews and demonstrations of it, both that were done with Amos over at Glidance. Related to your app question. If you go into settings on your iPhone 13 and you tap on notifications and you scroll down, there will be a list of all of the applications that are available and you can go in there and modify your notification settings based on each app.
Thank you.
You're welcome. Star you appreciate it.
Oh, no, I don't need the rant. Thank you. All right, do we have Derek?
Hey, Derek.
Hey. This is my first time on this show, so I'm not exactly sure what the parameters on what we can ask on this associated with assistive technology. My question was, after seeing and listening to some demos of the btec, it really got me about computers. I'm not really good with a braille input or the Braille keyboard commands.
I mean, I know it got me.
Thinking that I'm in a lot of.
Situations where I would need to.
I can't, like open my laptop in these situations that I'm in when I'm traveling and I'm using a Bluetooth keyboard. So I was looking for something very, very small that could run Windows and that could all. So that I could run my jaws and still have access to everything that I would need. And I came across this device called, I think it's GDP was the closest thing I could find. Do you guys know of anything that's more portable that's kind of similar to, like, what that would be, where I can still have access to running all these types of things that I'm trying to do, like the Microsoft Suite and still have Internet access. And I'll do that kind of like.
In a more portable type thing so you can look up on Amazon. What I would look up is microcomputers. Micro PCs is what you could search for and you can find a PC that would fit your needs and then check on the power requirements because some of them will run off of a power bank if you need them to. Or you can, because I imagine since you're traveling, that's important to you as well. I don't have any personal experience with using these devices, but I do know a few blind individuals who do use some of the micro PCs as well. You can also look and see if the specs on The Raspberry PI 400 would fit your needs, because that's a computer built into a keyboard. So you would just use the keyboard and just not use the HDMI output to connect it to a display. I do believe The Raspberry PI 400 may have speakers built in or you'll have to use headphones with it.
So would that have just the Bluetooth connectivity or would I have to. Like, what kind of ports would something like that come with?
The Raspberry PI 400 is a keyboard with a computer built into it. I believe it would have Bluetooth. If you want to use your own keyboard separate from it, the micro PCs are going to have Bluetooth and they're going to have usb. They'll also have wifi in a lot of cases as well.
Okay, and so would that also have the inability to plug into an external display? If I needed to, yes.
Oh, wow. Typically via hdmi.
But those keyboards are one set kind of standard keyboard because I have to use an ergonomic keyboard. So I don't know how well it would work, but.
Yeah, yeah, but that's a couple of options. If you looked up the micro PC, you could just look, find one that fits the spec needs that you have and then just Bluetooth your keyboard to it. It may require a physical key. Well, it would require a physical keyboard or mouse to be connected to initiate the Bluetooth pairing process. So you'd want to find a keyboard that supports either USB or USB C if you're going with that micro. That way you can get that your Bluetooth keyboard connected, and then once it's connected, then all you need to do is take the micro PC with you and your keyboard.
Okay. And do you know of anybody that does anything different, like using maybe a Microsoft Surface Pro? I mean, it's a tablet, but, you know, technically it's much smaller and you could still kind of run those types of things on it.
I mean, yeah, I used Surface, Microsoft Surface Pro for some AV work, and that worked pretty smoothly. If that's something you're looking to use, then that would work as well. It does support Bluetooth connectivity, but yeah, that's a couple of options for you. The micro PCs, you're looking at about $200, roughly. The Surface Pro, you're looking at probably about 1500. So it really comes down to your budget also.
Okay, but those would have even those ones within the 200 budget. They would have specs that could run that software.
Yeah. Yep.
Oh, wow. Okay. All right. Thank you.
No worries. Thanks for your jumping on here for the first time, Derek. Hopefully you get some entertainment and education. Sheila, who do we get next?
And you've got about six minutes, Michael.
Oh, thank you. We're keeping track of time.
And can you hear me? Yes, ma'am. Oh, good. I got a phone call, and when I came back, I couldn't find the okay button. Okay. Was it because I had just been on or.
I don't know. Zoom works in mysterious ways, as we've learned today.
And then the AI companion. What is that?
AI companion for Zoom? What that does is it gives a AI summary to the person who is recording the meeting, and they. It'll also do transcripts of meetings automatically as well. You do have the ability, when using AI Companion, if it's properly set up for people to ask questions about a Zoom meeting that maybe they missed, or someone shares a phone number, you could ask the AI companion, hey, what was that phone number? And it will give you those details again. Assuming that's properly configured on the account.
What would happen if you double tapped on it?
It'll give you options. Try it, See what happens for you. Anne?
I probably couldn't get out of it. I just wondered. I don't think I'll be using that. I just wondered.
No worries. Thanks a lot, Ann.
Appreciate it, Pearl.
Hey, Pearl. Oh, she might be graving cucumbers again. There you are.
No, I'm done with that. My watch was being silly, so I had a quick commentary and then I don't think we have time to run into the question, so I'm gonna leave that for the person. There was. Somebody was talking about voice. You said maybe voice. Specific issues. It may be that their voice is corrupted the file. And if you really want that voice, you may want to go ahead and just delete it and reinstall it. I had an issue like that. And reinstalling it. Fixed it. That may help as well. I don't. Do not. Daniel. Daniel had to be reinstalled. Got you. The other thing. Sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just saying thank you because that's why I suggested they try a different voice. Because if it works then properly, then you can start troubleshooting what's going on with your current voice and why that's not working.
Yeah, well, I. When I talked to Apple about that specifically, they said it's probably just corrupted. Delete it and reinstall it. And that fixed the issue, the other thing is, I just want to mention very quickly, a lanyard is not hands free, is still going to need to be aimed. And when you're using a sport cane and a white cane and trying to aim, that's not going to work. So I just wanted to mention that.
There is a lanyard called the slinger that sticks to the back of your phone. And what's nice about that is you can actually adjust it with the clips on the side so hopefully it can aim at the, at the way that you. Or at the level that you need it. So there could be some solutions, but I get that it doesn't work for everyone.
Yeah, you're still going to need to be able to press things on the phone. There's not going to be a hands free option on that. I was looking for a hands free option. Okay, thank you.
Voice control on your phone will give you hands free access.
Yeah. Altima store. No.
Gotcha. Sounds good.
Well, thanks for.
Well, Sheila, I think we're good.
You've got one new hand, so I think it's time to take it. Catherine, I believe that's you. It's 970 ending in 057. Hi, this is Estelle. That's my number. Estelle.
I'm sorry, Estelle.
That's okay. I have the blind shell too. And I'm wondering if there's some way to eliminate in the email, in the emails, the important and the all mail. Because every time I delete something from emails, it goes into trash, it goes into important and it goes into all mail. And to me, I'd like to clean house and get rid of some of that. Is that possible?
I think you can. I presume you're using a Gmail email, correct?
Yes.
Yep. I think you can go into gmail.com and go to your settings and then disable the archiving of messages. Because what Gmail naturally does when you delete a message is it will archive it so you can find it in the future, which is not ideal for everyone. From the blind shell itself, you cannot change that behavior. That is the behavior of Gmail itself. So you would need to go to gmail.com in the Internet browser or on a computer and choose the settings and see if there's a way to disable that.
Okay, thank you very much.
No worries, Estelle. I see we have Bobby and there's nothing right after us, right, Sheila? No, let's take Bobby's question. The last minute and a half. We got. Hey, Bobby.
Maybe Bobby, go ahead. Hello, Michael. I got a question about. Not a question exactly, but someone was saying how their windows was changing. Well, what I want to say is 24H2, I don't know if you're aware of it, it just came out. When did it come out? The beginning of October. October 2nd was the date. So similar things have happened to me but nothing major. What it did was when I did the in place upgrade instead of completely doing it from scratch. It actually what it did was it changed some of the settings back to default. And sometimes that does happen. Not all your settings get changed, but just some of them. And that's all I have to say to just reassuring. I don't remember who said it, but always your settings, some of the settings will go back to the defaults like your browser, your email client. You have to kind of go into the default apps and just look at what changed.
Copy that. And that's why I suggested reaching out to Disability Answer Desk, because there's a lot that you can guess. Bobby, I'm going to cut you off here real quick. We've got about 20 seconds. Thanks a lot for everyone's support. Sheila, Chanel and Diane, we appreciate all of you guys for everything you do. If you have comments, questions or concerns and feedback, send an email to Feedback at Unmute show. And then of course, stay subscribed to Unmute Presents in your favorite podcast app. Thanks, Sheila.