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Jeff Thompson:
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Jeff Thompson:
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Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson and with me, from HIMS, is Earl Harrison. How are you doing Earl?
Earl Harrison:
I’m good Jeff. Thanks for having me on.
Jeff Thompson:
Another CSUN.
Earl Harrison:
Another season, another CSUN, and the opportunity to escape from the frozen tundra of Minnesota.
Jeff Thompson:
I hear ya. My daughter’s having a baby so I would have been there, but I gotta be home for this.
Earl Harrison:
Oooo, grandpa for the what, second time? Third time?
Jeff Thompson:
This is the fourth. She just-
Earl Harrison:
Oh my gosh.
Jeff Thompson:
I know, it’s like a machine. But it’s CSUN. How exciting. HIMS. What have you got going, Earl?
Earl Harrison:
I started with HIMS a little bit over a year ago and I actually brought to the company the distribution of a product line called Handy Tech.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh great, yeah.
Earl Harrison:
Handy Tech, actually they’ve renamed the company the Help Tech, and the reason is that “Handy” in German implies telephones. So they were getting all these phone calls from people who were looking for hand sets and things like that. But they kept the name Handy Tech for the braille displays because there was a such a worldwide recognized name and trademark. So HIMS, in addition to the products that they manufacture in the United States, are now the master distributor, and in Canada, for the Handy Tech line of braille displays, which are manufactured in Southern Germany.
Jeff Thompson:
Ah, that’s great.
Earl Harrison:
Some of the remarks that we hear about carrying a competing product, what’s construed to be a competitive product, “Why would you do this?” And the answer is actually very straightforward. First of all, Handy Tech are the only braille displays in the world that have something called “Active Tactile Control,” so they actually sense your fingers on the display and they can do cool things like read a book from beginning to end without the need to ever press buttons. But you can also gather quantitative data about reading behaviors and kind of track that over time. So in the end, what you end up is measurable actionable data that you can bring into, for example, a rehab team meeting or an IEP meeting for students, and say, “This is where this person started out, and this is where they are today with their braille reading.
Earl Harrison:
Nobody has that. They also have the curved cells. The other things that Handy Tech has that HIMS didn’t have was access to the larger braille displays for our corporate customers. So the 80 cell braille displays that are used computer programmers and people in customer service jobs and government agencies and things like that. So HIMS didn’t have an 80 cell option and we now do with the Handy Tech devices.
Jeff Thompson:
Now Earl, when you’re talking about the 80 cell, you’re talking about something that would lay right on the person’s workstation, their desk, and it’s right in front of them, and then their keyboard. It’s just-
Earl Harrison:
Exactly.
Jeff Thompson:
… blends right in.
Earl Harrison:
Exactly. And I mean, you can do things like split up two areas of the screen that have some information. Let’s say we have the contact information on the left side of the display, and maybe credit card information if you’re in customer service. And you’ve gotta read back credit card numbers, or the spelling of names, and things like that, on the right hand side of the display, just as one example.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah. We’ve all been there when we have one device and we’ve gotta get information from one thing and put it into another thing and you’re just kind of stuck.
Earl Harrison:
Yeah. And you know, they have the basic braille which is flat braille. The device is so basic that’s actually part of it’s name. So I call it genius and simplicity because you show this thing to people, and they say, “Well, I’m just so tired of this cockpit of a braille control panel on the front of my braille display.” And you show them to people, and it’s like, “You mean all I need to do is plug this into my computer, braille shows up, I can navigate using the display? You know, that’s all I ever do. If I wanna input, I input from my computer keyboard. Not the display. So I don’t need all this other stuff.” So it offers a real clean option for people. And people actually put their laptop on a desk in front of them and then have the braille display on a slid out keyboard tray down below.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh, that’s sweet.
Earl Harrison:
That’s a nice configuration, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
So you just continue doing what you’ve always been doing, but you have the advantage of reading the display?
Earl Harrison:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jeff Thompson:
Great.
Earl Harrison:
A couple of the things that are happening new with HIMS is the Polaris, which is kind of HIMS flagship product, which is an all-in-one note taker. I tell you, I just personally … I know I’m a bit biased because I work for the company, but I have fallen in love with this thing, because there’s just so many applications that you can use it for. My favorite application, I just posted a video on our YouTube site, is actually how I use the Polaris in performance. What I do is I actually record my live drum tracks onto the Polaris. I mic up some acoustic drums and run a line into a mixing boy, which I then turn around into the Polaris’ line in. And it is amazing. You’ve got digital recording quality, obviously, and it’s just amazing the sound that you get back.
Earl Harrison:
And now, I have what sounds like a live drummer with me in performance. So we had Earl on keyboards, vocals, and drums, and the bass player following along with the live drums. And every song had a beginning and an end and I’m not playing with buttons and drum loops on a drum machine, or anything like that. It’s actually just real live drums that I’ve recorded onto the player. So that’s just one thing.
Earl Harrison:
Of course, you’ve got the DAISY book reader on board so you can download books from BookShare, and you can download to the Bard Mobile App on Android. I think there’s like 200 plus applications that have been identified as actually being accessible. And it’s just an ever-growing list.
Earl Harrison:
The most recent developments by HIMS themselves are really exciting. Under web tools forever there was just one thing called Browser. It was our web browser. It’s like, “Why do we have a folder with one thing in it?” Anyways, they’ve added a second thing to that folder, and it’s called “Google Search.” And now you can go in and have a real streamlined Google Search experience, instead of having to go into the web browser … or go to the Google App. It’s actually integrated into the system for the note taker.
Earl Harrison:
The other thing that they have done that I am super super excited about is Google Drive integration. So now, in the file manager which you can get to from the main menu … it’s the absolute first thing in the main menu … you press F1, which is the keystroke to get to the main menu from anywhere, and then you hear, “file manager,” which basically means that you’re just selecting that folder, the file manager. You open that up and it used to be if you had a SD storage card installed, that you would hear, “flash memory or SC card.” Now there’s a third item called “Google Drive.” So I can go into my flash memory, and go into let’s say my documents folder, copy a file or how many things I want to, back out to that level where the “Google Drive” is, go down to “Drive,” open it, and simply paste those files into Google Drive.
Earl Harrison:
Now I can go and open … Maybe I’ve got Google Drive on my iPhone or on my Windows computer, and it’s all right there for me to access. So that’s super super exciting.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh yeah, the quicker the better, right?
Earl Harrison:
And some of the things we’re really conscientious of, especially how these types of things affect like schools … Our education sales have dramatically increased just in the last year or so, and it’s because we’ve just paid so much attention to things like being able to get access to more secure environments, like in a 5G network connection. That’s something we’ve been able to do for, probably over the year that I’ve worked, and that some of our competitors haven’t been able to do until recently, certificates. The idea of having to download some of these certificates in these ultra-secure environments, like schools, where they’re paranoid and rightly so. You just make it really easy for them to install security certificates and things like that.
Earl Harrison:
In addition to that where school is concerned, we’ve been working with a company called Desmos out of the San Francisco Bay area, and they have helped us develop graphing calculators. You know, people who are involved in the STEM disciplines … science, technology, engineering, and mathematics … can now have access to a graphing calculator from which they can emboss to a braille embosser. Or, let’s say you’re in the math editor and you’re typing in the algebraic equation, and please understand that you’re talking to the worst person when it comes to math on the planet probably … If you’re typing in an algebraic equation and it results in a graph … Say you’re Polaris is connected to a video monitor or you’ve got maybe a teacher or professor or a classmate observing visually via something like TeamViewer or even Zoom, I can actually run a Zoom and basically share my Polaris screen in Zoom.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh really.
Earl Harrison:
I do that all the time. In fact, there’s really hard to reach places, places I just can’t physically get to … I will get online with a TVIA teacher for the visually impaired and then share my screen, and basically you do training over Zoom that way. And they can see exactly what I’m doing. You can do the same thing with TeamViewer. There’s an app called QuickSupport.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh that’s great, especially with the TVIAs. Like in Minnesota, out state, trying to connect up with everybody, you can be right here at home, if [crosstalk] you’re ever at home, or you’re always traveling.
Earl Harrison:
Well it’s huge. With the math stuff, if somebody types in Nemeth Braille or UEB … you’ve got the choice of either/or, most places I think have standardized on Nemeth Mathematics … If the equations result in a graph or intersecting graphs, and if you’ve got somebody observing visually as you’re typing these equations, those graphs appear in real time and in color.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh wow.
Earl Harrison:
And then when you’re finished with the work, you’ve got the option of saving that to a work processor document, then you can just go and take that file that you just put that graph into and copy and paste it onto your Google Drive. Maybe you’re sharing a folder with a professor. That makes it very easy for that professor to pull up your work, make notes on it that you can then review it, after he saves the same documents. So this is revision two of the same work. It allows for a lot of flexibility.
Earl Harrison:
I mean, of course, we’ve always had the scientific calculator as well.
Jeff Thompson:
Well, that’s impressive.
Earl Harrison:
Super super flexible device. Very lightweight. Just really really … HIMS does a really nice job on the hardware as well.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s really neat that you’re getting involved with the universities and colleges so you can get those certificates like you said. Because usually they have their proprietary-type of systems in their schools. And gaining access to that is vital.
Earl Harrison:
And the K-12 students too. I’ve got students using Polaris as young as second grade, second/third grade.
Jeff Thompson:
H woe.
Earl Harrison:
It’s a kick to go into those environments and interact with those kids. I tell you man, it’s a different world than when I was coming up. I don’t wanna sound like the grouchy old man or anything, but wow.
Jeff Thompson:
Well, it’s nice that they get involved in STEM right off the bat.
Earl Harrison:
Yeah, it’s huge. And the other development that we have at this year’s CSUN, that we did not have quite ready last year … In fact, we unveiled the QBrailleXLat the summer shows last year. And we were showing it for the first time at CSUN this year. So what that is, the QBrailleXLis a 40 cell braille display and the best way to describe this display and the concept around it is to imagine a computer desktop keyboard, okay? And you take away all the numbers, the number row, and all the letters, and you keep all of the surrounding QWERTY function keys. Like where those letters and numbers used to be, you plunk down an eighth app braille keyboard and that basically describes the QBrailleXL.
Earl Harrison:
So it’s called QBrailleXL. So “Q” for QWERTY function keys, “Braille” for braille input and output, and the “XL” means 40, which is the number of cells. So it’s the QBrailleXL. What’s really special about this device, it supports up to seven simultaneous connections, one USB and six Bluetooth, which I think is just … Who’s gonna do that? But I’ve done up to four simultaneously, and I’m considered to be a little bit of a geek.
Jeff Thompson:
Now remember, you brought the Polaris into the studio for your drums, so …
Earl Harrison:
Oh yeah, that’s right.
Jeff Thompson:
People are experimenting.
Earl Harrison:
That’s right. So the QBrailleXLis up to seven simultaneous connections. It’s very easy to switch between the different connections. It’s basically just a keystroke. What’s really fun is when I describe … I would say a school for the blind, and they pulled in a lot of people, there had to have been 60 to 70 people in this room. And when I described what I just described to you about taking away the letters and the numbers and putting down a braille keyboard in it’s place, and I said, “Where’s the control key?” And everybody said, “Oh, lower left corner.” “What’s the next key?” You know? “Well, it’s the Fn key.” Then you’ve got the Windows key, then you’ve got the alt key, then you’ve got the space. And then the other side of the space, you’ve got alt, applications key or context menu key, and the control key. These people had never laid hands on the QBraille, but they already knew exactly how it was laid out.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s the same way the keyboard’s laid out.
Earl Harrison:
Exactly. So you’ve got your inverted “T” which are your arrow keys to the right of that right control key, and above that what do you have, Jeff?
Jeff Thompson:
Oh, that’s the six-pack.
Earl Harrison:
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got the six-packs with the delete, the inset, page up, page down, home, end keys. And of course, just like the Mac, what do you have across the top? Function keys, you know, F1 through F12, and on the far left you’ve got the escape key. You’ll be happy to know that in the main menu … There’s a keystroke that you can do to get out to the main menu when you connect it to another device, so it can be used as a note taker, which has a calculator and a calendar and a countdown timer, stopwatch, that kind of thing. But what you can also do in the options is go down and specify that, “I’m going to be using an Apple Macintosh keyboard layout, not a Microsoft Windows keyboard.”
Jeff Thompson:
No, really?
Earl Harrison:
Yeah, yeah. So you’re VO keys are right where you’re gonna expect them, but everybody uses caps lock now I think as the VO key. I do when I’m working on the Mac. But yeah, the change to the keyboard layout. You’ve gotta tell it. What’s really cool about this device, Jeff, is that you can connect it to a computer in something called hybrid mode. If you’re not in hybrid mode, you will use the regular braille commands that Apple has assigned, for example, right? Or in the screen reader that you happen to be using, whether it be JAWS or NVDA, what have you. When you are in hybrid mode, all the translation takes place on the braille display. So I can type in contracted braille and I don’t even have to have a screen reader installed on this computer to do the translation. It’ll just do it.
Earl Harrison:
So if I’m typing on contracted braille on the QBraille, it’s gonna back translate it on the fly. So if you’re composing an email message, you can do it in contracted braille and then the person who receives the email, all they’re gonna get is text, because it does the translation on the fly.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh wow.
Earl Harrison:
Which is amazing. It’s like version one of this thing, the release was so good and it just gets better with every firmware release with HIMS, whether it’s the Polaris or the QBraille … firmware updates are always free.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh that’s great.
Earl Harrison:
It just gets better and better all the time.
Jeff Thompson:
Wow. That’s impressive. So you’re saying I could set that down and not even have a screen reader, and actually use a computer.
Earl Harrison:
You could. I mean as a buying person, you’d need a screen reader, but-
Jeff Thompson:
I mean, yeah.
Earl Harrison:
But yeah. But the point is when you connect it, it just sees a HID keyboard, you know, Human Interface Device keyboard. It doesn’t know that we’re doing-
Jeff Thompson:
[crosstalk] Oh I see. Yeah. That’s really cool, and you’re just getting started with this stuff. Earl, anything with low vision?
Earl Harrison:
Well we do have the GoVision Pro, which is our latest edition to the transportable desktop magnifiers. So by transportable I mean you can collapse it down and put it into a rolly-bag and take it places.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh really.
Earl Harrison:
What’s nice about that is the original GoVision, you could do the near vision and the distance viewing and the stealth viewing. Well they’ve added a secondary camera that’s integrated into the arm for full page OCR. That’s integrated into the arm where the other camera is. It used to be a very much “what you see is what you get,” as far as OCR goes. You know, capturing an image. It only read back what it could actually see. But now you can get full page OCR regardless of the magnification level, and you can actually move the contents around on a screen.
Earl Harrison:
So if you’ve got something that got a little jumbled because it’s in multiple columns or something, and you wanna fix it and save it onto a thumb drive or something, you can actually move content around.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh really.
Earl Harrison:
You’ve got some control. So that’s kind of cool. Other than that, we still have the bread and butter magnifiers, like the LifeStyle, which is a desktop magnifier. And the Candy HD products are still quite popular. So we’ve got the little handheld Candy HD 5, version II … 5 indicates the size of the screen, and we’ve got the 4 inch versions of that as well.
Jeff Thompson:
And that’s something you would hold over your mail or something like that?
Earl Harrison:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Well great.
Earl Harrison:
HIMS is made up of a really diverse group of people. Some of us are musicians, some of us are just real technology junky. Most of us are technology junkies, you know. Some of us are just athletes and world travelers and things like that. And it’s really fun to interact on a weekly basis in staff meetings and things like that, with folks to find out all the interesting new applications that they’re using with their Polaris and their QBraille’s and things like that.
Earl Harrison:
But the point that I wanted to make is that we understand at HIMS, so there’s really no one size fits all solution. So this is why we’ve really assembled what we consider to be the most comprehensive braille offerings ever under one roof in North America. So we’ve got an early education braille learning system, which is kind of like a gaming console. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of the older students at some of the schools for the blind love to abscond with it and just enjoy playing with the thing. So it’s a way that students who are learning braille, whether they’re children or people who go blind later on in life, can learn how to read braille in a fun and interactive way. And Taptilo will actually interact with your smart phone. They’ve got Android and certainly Apple versions of the app for Taptilo. So you can do all kinds of fun and creative things as a teacher to really engage students in the learning of braille.
Earl Harrison:
And of course we’ve got the Handy Tech offerings that we’ve talked about before. And then we’ve got the all-in-one note taker with the Polaris, and of course now the, for some reason never-done-before, the QBrailleXL. I say that because we’ve got some of our competitors coming up to our booth and looking at it and say, you can just hear the wheels turning. It’s like, “Why has this never been done before?” So we’re the first to take this type of configuration, take away and QWERTY keyboard and put a braille keyboard, and still have all the QWERTY function keys surrounding that, and all the other stuff I just talked about.
Earl Harrison:
So we have a lot of choices. Sometimes the most agonizing thing is showing up at an appointment to show braille displays, and you’ve shown three things … maybe a Polaris, and QBraille, and one of the Handy Tech devices … and now the agonizing part is making the decision on which one they want. Because you can only have one.
Jeff Thompson:
Well you know, the QBrailleXLreally makes so much sense, because I’ve used some devices before and there’s always that learning curve of okay, you’ve gotta learn this whole new system and remember how to use it. Like you said, a person gets on there, they know where all those keys are right off the bat. It’s like, “I’m ready to go.”
Earl Harrison:
Yeah. Like on a Mac, you wanna go to the doc, what do you do? Well you press VOD, right?
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah.
Earl Harrison:
To go the doc, and you’re there. It’s the same thing. You set your QBraille up to the Mac keyboard configuration. All those keystrokes that you are familiar with work. So it’s like you already know this stuff. You just now have to apply it in a different way with a braille keyboard instead of a QWERTY keyboard.
Jeff Thompson:
That’s innovation right there. I like that.
Earl Harrison:
I think so.
Jeff Thompson:
I think so. Well Earl, thank you so much for coming onto Blind Abilities and sharing everything from HIMS and the Handy Tech line. It’s exciting to hear the new stuff coming out and I’m excited about it myself.
Earl Harrison:
Well thanks for having me and if you have any questions, you know we’re always available. I’ll leave the telephone number here. It’s an awesome phone number, 512-837-2000. Follow the automated attendant to either support or sales, and then of course, www.hims-inc.com is our web address, H-I-M-S hyphen I-N-C dot com. And once again, thanks for having me on Jeff.
Jeff Thompson:
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