Full Transcription
Brandon:
Smith-Kettlewell is the main research institute in the US for low vision and blindness.
Pete::
From the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, please welcome Brandon Biggs.
Brandon:
Audiom is my project. It’s basically a virtual reality experience of a geographical data, completely in audio. It’s basically like you’re virtually walking through the neighborhood before you actually do it.
Pete:
Developing apps to enhance the lives of the blind and visually impaired.
Brandon:
We add different sounds to represent that data. So like, dishes clinking, people talking for a restaurant, beep, beep, beep for the ATMs. We use different conventions from audio games, like Swamp or Hero’s Call.
Pete:
Bringing his coding talents to Smith-Kettlewell…
Brandon:
JavaScript really enables you to build one application and use it everywhere. It leverages your time just so much more.
Pete:
…and sharing his insights with us.
Brandon:
There’s a lot of people that said college degrees aren’t very useful nowadays. The data really says that a college degree is invaluable. It’s really worth the cost.
Pete:
And now please join Raquel Gomez…
Raqi:
You could explore a virtual city that you haven’t been to, and get a lot more feedback about what’s around you than you would have just spoken directions.
Pete:
…and Jeff Thompson…
Jeff:
What got you interested in doing this type of work?
Pete:
…and their guest, Brandon Biggs.
Brandon:
I use them in my life because I’m a blind person who wants to be able to access the world more accessibly.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson, and in the studio with me is Raquel Gomez. How you doing, Raqi?
Raqi:
I’m doing great, Jeff.
Jeff:
Today, we got someone from your neck of the woods over there from Smith-Kettlewell. You’re familiar with that, right?
Raqi:
Absolutely. Everyone that comes on your show is from my neck of the woods, it seems like lately.
Jeff:
Well, you are like in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and everything. But we have an engineer from Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute. I’d like to welcome Brandon Biggs. How are you doing?
Brandon:
Good, how are you?
Jeff:
Great. Thanks for taking the time to come down to Blind Abilities and being brave enough to sit down with Raqi and myself.
Brandon:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff:
We ran into each other at a convention and he came into the booth and we started talking, and you got some really neat stuff going on over there at Smith-Kettlewell. Why don’t you give us a little introduction on who you are, and what is Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute.
Brandon:
Yeah, so my name is Brandon Biggs, and I’m an engineer here at Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. I’m also an inclusive designer. My master’s was in inclusive design from OCAD University. Basically at Smith-Kettlewell, I’m working on pretty much three projects. One is the Cam IO app, which allows you to digitally annotate 3D objects, iNavigate, which is an indoor wayfinding application and Audiom, which is Google Maps but in audio. Smith-Kettlewell is- I didn’t actually know about it until like, maybe a couple months before I got hired on there. But basically, it’s the main research institute in the US for low vision and blindness. And so there’s several different areas, they do research, and one is for researching different forms of blindness, so like strabismus and different possible treatments for those different types of blindness, and then we’ve got the part that I work in, which is the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center, so that’s basically where we build apps for blind people that help them live fuller lives. That’s where I spend all my time, and the place that I work. We won’t be talking probably about the other areas, just that particular section.
Jeff:
And that’s why Raqi’s here, because she’s all about the navigational components of this and any app that helps better or aid the blind and visually impaired.
Raqi:
He hasn’t heard my mantra yet, but everybody eventually gets subjected to it. I’m just really convinced that there are so many tools already in existence that we can put to work for us to kind of move navigation forward into the next iteration, you know, between all the recognition out there and so many different things to ping something, and use a beacon to locate it or use AI to identify it. I’m just, I’m all about seeing navigation improve in so many different areas, so I get really excited. Jeff has people working on fun stuff like this on the show. It’s something I’m really passionate about.
Jeff:
Yeah. Well, Brandon, why don’t we start out with Audiom?
Brandon:
Yeah, so Audiom is really my project. It’s the one I’m kind of the manager on. It’s basically a virtual reality experience of a geographical data, completely in audio, and you use your headphones as the VR headset. A lot of people don’t realize this, but audio virtual reality has been around for a very, very long time, and everybody who has headphones has a VR headset, and so that’s what we use to render the environment. And so we take data from- right now we’re using Open Street Map data, but we are going to be hopefully soon moving on to Google Maps data or other datasets that are out there and rendering those into audio. And so basically what we do is we do pre-processing of the data, add like a name attribute to that data, and then we add different sounds to represent that data. So like dishes clinking, and people talking for a restaurant, or the sound of an ATM machine, you know, the beep, beep, beep for the ATMs, the cars going down the street for a road, we’ve got all different types of sounds for different objects. And then we use different conventions from audio games. So if you’ve ever played anything like Swamp or Hero’s Call, we use navigation, I call it first person view and grid view. So those are the two main ones that you can navigate through the map. This is for travel maps. So you can navigate through- like by meter at a time or two meters at a time through the whole landscape. And then you can get a lot of information by doing that, like the shape of the object, how things are related in space, it’s basically like you’re virtually walking through the neighborhood before you actually do it. And it’s really cool and allows you to feel a lot more confident going to a new neighborhood or location. What’s really cool is we have two different types of maps, so that’s the travel map, and we also have a heat map that we’re working on. This shows, basically, we’re working on COVID data for right now. So like cases, how many cases are in each state or each county, and so we allow users to jump between different states and go through and explore the shape of those states and how the different hotspots are related to each other geographically. And there’s no real application that can allow you to get that level of detail right now. And so I think we’re doing a lot of really cool things in regards to making that geographical data accessible to non-visual users. That’s basically what Audiom is right now. We’re doing this on the web browser, so you don’t have to install anything. And it’ll work with any platform, including iOS and Android.
Raqi:
That’s amazing. Oh, I’m excited!
Jeff:
So when you’re talking about a map, and you can set up the meters that you’re going to be traveling, is that kind of like a t-map, a tactile map, or something that someone could explore, like you said, before you go visit a neighborhood, you could actually have something in front of you where you’re exploring it.
Brandon:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s basically an auditory version of a t-map.
Raqi:
So it’s virtual mode, but you can move through it auditorially. I’m assuming, so you’re using positional audio, right, to indicate spatially where things are?
Brandon:
Yeah, so when the user navigates around, there’s a couple different types of audio that we’re using. So restaurants and different buildings and businesses, and features is what we call them on the map, some of them will have what we call a looping sound, and this will be in audio in space. And so you can hear, when you’re standing on the street, you can listen and hear that there’s a restaurant to your right ahead of you to your right, and you can hear that you’re standing on a road, you won’t die because this is virtual. On your left, you can also hear that there’s a bank. And you know, you can get that information through the spatial audio. But when you move, you also get information about the objects that you’re walking over. So it’ll say something like entering Fillmore Street and exiting Fillmore Street, the sound of your footsteps, so the sound of your movement will change as you’re going through different textures. So like a building will have a wooden thunk, and the road will have like an asphalt thunk, we’re using a lot of real world sounds to indicate the data, so it’s really easy to understand. It’s not abstract, you know, like a sine tone or a wave, you know, like, dude.
Jeff:
This really sounds interesting, and one experience that I had is when I was in Las Vegas, I went to Fremont Street, and they have really precision sound, like a band can be playing, but as soon as you walk 50 feet away, you could hear another band as you’re coming. It’s kind of like they got it really directionalized. And to me, it was like, how did they do that? How do they get that sound? So it just doesn’t blast everybody, you know, 300 feet from every direction. So they worked at that. And when you’re talking about this virtualization and having the sounds, it reminded me of walking down Fremont Street where you do have precise sounds, and that’s something that you do pick up, like some people smell doughnuts, that’d be hard to do. But you could have-
Brandon:
Getting there, getting there!
Jeff:
-you could have the sounds of, like you said, dishes clinking, yeah, Starbucks when they’re pounding the filters out.
Raqi:
So this is kind of like what some of the apps already do with GPS, right? Where when you’re traveling, and I see this wearing headphones a lot when I travel, I’ll get information, but it’s all spoken information. And I think how much richer it is and how much more quickly and readily you can convey a lot of this information to people through sound, right? Because it’s quicker, people react more rapidly to something that they hear auditorily, within a second they know what that is, once you’ve learned that sound, rather than stopping and listening to a spoken string of text. I mean, it just seems so cool, like you could explore a whole virtual city that you haven’t been to, and get a lot more feedback about what’s around you than you would with just spoken directions about businesses and stuff.
Brandon:
Yeah, and it is a little bit stylized, but it’s stylized in a way that’s really understandable and we’re basically working with the only other researcher who’s done this type of map before, and so we’re working together on this project. And so the amount of research that’s been done in this area is really sparse, I mean, there’s two researchers in the whole world who have done this. Now, there’s been a couple applications from, you know, independent blind developers that have done something similar, and a lot of audio games have used these concepts before, and so I’m just basically taking a lot of the conventions used in other games and pulling them into the real world.
Raqi:
Yeah, I think about the way Apple uses spatial audio now, and some of the ways that you can have such, you know, 360 degree positional audio can tell you so much about your environment and things over your head, even, that might be up at face level to so many obstacles, things you might not even know are up there.
Brandon:
Yeah. All that is made available through the browser, so-
Raqi:
Oh, I’m excited! I’m so excited. If you need any beta testers, you can call the Blind Abilities crew.
Brandon:
Right now, we’re not doing very many studies. But if you’re really interested, you should email Audiom, a-u-d-i-o-m, @ski.org.
Raqi:
I will.
Brandon:
And let me know that you’re interested in participating in any kind of betas, and I’ll be adding you to a list and let you know when we have a platform open for people to start using. Hopefully, that should be soon. It’s development, you never know when things will happen.
Raqi:
Right?
Jeff:
Well, Raqi, it doesn’t stop there. Because he’s also got another area called Cam IO. Could you give us a little bit about that?
Brandon:
Yeah, I just want to mention before going much further, so the Audiom project is funded through a National Institute of Health grant and a [unintelligible] grant, it’s a joint funding project, and also Smith-Kettlewell funds to build that out. And the Cam IO grant is also funded through NIH. Cam IO, the head of that project is James Coughlan. He’s also my boss, and he’s on the Audiom project as well. But James Coughlan is really the one heading up the Cam IO project. And what it is, it’s a computer vision application that allows you to annotate, label in audio, any 3D objects, like a microwave, if you have a microwave that doesn’t have any Braille labels, you can put your camera a little away, like maybe 24 inches away from the microwave face and point the camera towards it, right now you need to put these little pieces of paper on the microwave, and then you have a little stylus in your hand and you can move the stylus around, and if that microwave has been annotated by somebody or by you, then you can get guidance to any of the buttons on that microwave. So it’ll say like, up, up, down, down, forward, forward, forward, back, you know, that kind of thing. And it’ll navigate you in 3D space to that point. We did a study on this last year, and we tried a version without the guidance and the version with the guidance, and there’s no comparison, like, without guidance, trying to find a button on an unlabeled microwave is impossible.
Jeff:
The software that you’re working on, when you do come across some of these glasses that you want to utilize, someone that wants to look at a map, I mean, the shape of United States doesn’t change or Canada or any place in the universe, basically. That doesn’t change-
Brandon:
I think scientists would argue with you. But yeah, for the most part.
Jeff:
It’s still growing, I forgot.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Jeff:
It’s still expanding.
Brandon:
Changing.
Jeff:
Our solar system.
Brandon:
Yeah, what does change is your perspective on those different things. So if you had a different colored or different sized map, that would definitely mess with the perspective, the model that the tool has in its bank. So basically, we don’t have any knowledge of the object, the underlying object. Really, what we have is these little pieces of paper that you kind of attach to the object originally, and you tell it, this is the model that you’re going to be using, and assume that the paper is there, and it sees the stylus and figures out where the point of the stylus is in relationship to those little pieces of paper that are on the dryer or the washer or whatever. That’s basically how the app works. Eventually, hopefully, we’ll use object recognition, you know, recognize this is the object and here’s where you’re at. But at the moment, we’re using these little pieces of paper that are called boards, and attaching those to objects. You could label a ghost, your best friend, like an invisible friend, Ghost. You could label all the different parts of your invisible friend and it would still work.
Jeff:
What got you interested in doing this type of work? I mean, breaking it down, you know, developing applications that would do this stuff.
Brandon:
Yeah. So other than that they’re super cool, and, you know, I use them in my life because I’m a blind person who wants to be able to access the world more accessibly. That was kind of the impetus for me getting into assistive technology in the first place. When I was going through my undergrad class, I took a products and pricing class and that really opened my eyes to- there’s this thing called universal design or inclusive design, and I really wanted to learn more about that. Meanwhile, I was starting a company with my mom called Sonja Biggs Educational Services where we contract out VI program, all the components of a VI program to schools around the country. And so we have TVIs, O&Ms, we do material preparation. And something that I realized when we’re doing these material preparations is that, you know, it’s just ridiculous that maps for example, like the kids aren’t able to use maps in the classroom with the other students just because there’s no way to view those maps. Now, visually, the teachers can’t even create the maps in accessible format, because there’s no tools to do that. Same with graphs, and the teachers would want to do that, they would want to create the tools. But instead, the schools are paying beaucoup bucks to pay the transcribers to make these custom tactile graphics, you know, if that money would be spent on R&D to build a tool that would allow teachers to make inclusive graphs, and it would be a much better use of funds. Anyway, that was kind of one of my main goals for going into inclusive design, so I started a master’s program at OCAD University, and that’s where I got introduced to the problem of maps specifically, and I started working on geographical data and published some papers on how these interfaces from audio games could be used to represent this geographical data. And so now I’ll be going to a PhD program to continue research on this, and I’ve been doing that research at Smith-Kettlewell as well. There’s so many problems in the world that need to be solved. It’s like, you know, you throw a rock and you can hit a problem, inaccessible, something or other, the work is never done, you know, it’s just me seeing all these things that can be done, that should be done, but that aren’t being done, because there’s not enough people to do them. That was really, you know, my driving force into doing research at Smith-Kettlewell, you know, it needs to be done, and you know, I can do it.
Jeff:
Brandon, your mom was selling you as someone that has studied around the world. Why don’t you give us a handful of the different countries that you’ve actually studied in?
Brandon:
I didn’t start traveling the world till I was 23-ish. I was in my undergrad program. I did a study abroad program in Italy. I was originally supposed to be there for a semester, and go to a university in Germany, but the university in Germany said we don’t want to deal with having a blind person, I’m sorry. And so I said, hey, you know, Italian university, would you be willing to have me for another semester? They said, oh, yes, yes, absolutely. You can stay here, we’re just fine. Yeah. So that’s where I stayed for a year and met my now wife there, and came back to the US, finished my undergrad, got married. And then my wife got accepted into a master’s program that did one year in Malta, and one year in the Netherlands. And so we went to Malta for a year and then a year in the Netherlands. And while we were in the Netherlands I started my master’s program, which was the inclusive design program at OCAD University in Toronto, but they don’t discriminate at OCAD based off your geographical location, aka they had remote study options before COVID. They’re very inclusive there. I did a year in the Netherlands and then I went back to Italy and did another year in Italy, and then moved to San Francisco, spent a year in San Francisco, and now we’re staycationing around California, and going to be going to Georgia in the fall.
Jeff:
And Georgia, that’s where you’re working on your PhD?
Brandon:
Yes, we’re going to go to Atlanta, yeah. And I’d be at Georgia Tech.
Jeff:
And by getting your PhD, what do you want to accomplish with that?
Brandon:
I’m basically going to be doing a lot of the similar research that I’m doing at Smith-Kettlewell, related to Audiom. So as I mentioned, there’s not much research that’s been done on representing geographical information in audio. and so what we’re trying to do with this representation of geographical data, the current state of the art is 15, 20 inches over the Grand Canyon, and we’re trying to jump as far as we can into the middle of the Grand Canyon. And we’re hoping that, you know, that will extend the reach of that state of the art a little bit farther. A lot of my work at Georgia Tech will be evaluating what we’re doing, you know, by putting what we’re doing into research. And so basically, how do we do particular things in audio, you know, we’re doing these- it’s executive design decisions by me and the other developers on the Audiom application right now. But we need to actually evaluate those decisions and see if they were the right ones? Can we make it better? And then how do we make it better? That’s what a lot of my work on the PhD will be focusing on.
Raqi:
That’s exciting. I think when you talk about doing the research, because the research needs to be done, I can really relate to that. I know a few, only a few engineers out there, and I think you’re right, there are so many problems to solve. That’s great that you’re working in this space.
Brandon:
Yeah, we need more blind developers.
Raqi:
Yeah, we do.
Brandon:
So if you have any inclination towards building things go to freecodecamp.org. It’s a very accessible online coding academy. They teach JavaScript programming and I think they might even teach some Python but I’m not sure. I know that. Teach JavaScript for sure. And so you can learn for free, in a very accessible manner, coding. So yeah, it’s great, freecodecamp.org
Raqi:
Good resource.
Jeff:
You know, when you’re talking about the different countries that you have been around, and earlier, you mentioned that you can’t throw a stone without hitting something that’s inaccessible, what do you find in common with places around the world and accessibility, or inaccessibility?
Brandon:
I think it’s very similar around the world, I would say that each country has taken on particular aspects of say, like the built environment and really tried to make those accessible, but other places, you know, they don’t have the same philosophy. So, for example, in the US, we’ve got curb cuts, we’ve got those accessible pedestrian signals, a lot of places, our sidewalks are nice and wide. We’ve got, like at the train tracks, you might get, you know, some of those little yellow dots.
Jeff:
Oh, the foot braille.
Brandon:
Yeah, the foot braille, exactly.
Jeff:
Truncated domes.
Brandon:
You know, we also have braille signage on some buildings. You know, when you go to Italy, they have a lot more, like inside the train station, they have more pathways that are tactile pathways that you can use to navigate around the train station. I’ve never had the courage to follow the paths, but I’m sure they lead somewhere important. In Italy, the culture is also a lot more about, you know, let’s make sighted guides available to everybody a lot more easily. Whereas here, you have a paratransit person drive you around. There, you can get like a sighted guide to guide you around, the mode of paratransit is really cool. It’s a lot more walkable there as well. And so here, you know, you have to drive, maybe not San Francisco, but a lot of other cities, you have to drive around to get anywhere. Whereas in Italy, in Milan, especially, you know, you can take the public transportation just about everywhere, they’ve really done a lot in regards to like the foot braille, in regards to making accessible tours of museums and allowing you to touch different things, and you know, making sighted guides available and stuff like that. So you know, that’s really what Italy excels at and a lot of European countries, but the US not so much, like, you don’t necessarily go into the museum and be like, hey, you know, can I touch this? A lot of times, they’re all way behind glass, and they’re like, not at all. So anyway, it’s just different.
Jeff:
You know, a lot of people don’t want to travel, don’t want to go places they haven’t been, but to go to Belgium, Malta, Italy, Canada- Canada? There you are. Just go. I mean, is that what you did?
Brandon:
Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, and there’s a lot of preparation that involves traveling to a new country, especially by yourself as a blind person is very nerve racking, and you do need to depend on a lot of people, when you are traveling to a new country, just because you don’t know the system. For example, crossing the street in Italy, it’s very dangerous to cross the crosswalk. So you have to cross in the middle of the street. Because otherwise, a lot of times, you know, people speed through and do really sharp turns, they don’t see you. When I did O&M in Milan, they told me, you know, for some of these really dangerous streets, you need to cross the middle of the street. That way they can see you when they’re turning.
Jeff:
Before they hit you.
Brandon:
Yeah, exactly, before they hit you. And same with bikes, you know, people do not slow down at the crosswalk, sometimes. You have to realize that, you know, the US is the US and Italy is Italy. And they’re different cultures, and you have to be okay with that. And don’t take your preconceptions of independence into those countries because a lot of times it doesn’t really work. So like, for example, I’m a very fast Walker in the US, I have a very long cane. One of the very few times I’ve actually snapped my cane in half was walking very fast in Italy, because they’ve got these stupid bike racks everywhere. And they’re in like a U-shape, an upside-down U-shape and they’re perfect cane traps. And so if you’re walking fast, and your cane gets stuck in one of those, you don’t notice until your cane breaks.
Jeff:
So what’s your typical tools of the day? What’s your daily drivers for assistive technology, Brandon?
Brandon:
Just pretty much NVDA and voiceover. I do use a text editor called Edsharp, but that’s because I’m old school, I’ll probably be switching over maybe to a more updated text editor eventually. But I’m really low maintenance when it comes to assistive technology, oddly enough. I do use a lot of apps, you know, on my phone, but I try to minimize the amount of assistive technology that I’m using and just use the screen readers but I have everything if I need it. So it’s there. I do use a good OCR application, especially for academic papers, because PDF hasn’t been solved yet. Almost all my academic papers are in PDF, and if they’re badly tagged, then an OCR program is essential. Oh, and I also use Voice Stream Reader.
Raqi:
Isn’t it wonderful?
Brandon:
I wish they had a PC version.
Raqi:
A PC version.
Jeff:
On your journey through education, from high school to college to the workplace, and you’re going back for your PhD, what advice would you give to a transition age student right now who is looking upon their college career and their place in the workforce?
Brandon:
Well, there are probably two different positions. Going into college, a lot of people question should I go into college, there’s a lot of people who have said college degrees aren’t very useful nowadays. One thing I ask you to do is just look at the data, and the data really says that a college degree is invaluable, like it’s really worth the cost, like a bachelor’s degree is really valuable. As a blind person, you can find funding for that bachelor’s degree in a lot of different places, and so applying for scholarships is very much a worthwhile endeavor, and looking for government funding for rehab or other places is very much a worthwhile endeavor if you’re visually impaired. I managed to get my bachelor’s degree fully funded, as well as, you know, funding for my housing as well, and so I didn’t have to pay at all for much of my bachelor’s degree, because I went to a California college, which is probably the least expensive college in the country. I would recommend getting your bachelor’s degree, it doesn’t really matter where just as long as you’re getting a bachelor’s degree that will open up a ton of doors for you. And you know, just be upfront with your weaknesses, also realize where technology’s at, at particular times, you’re not going to walk into a classroom and it’s going to have a perfectly accessible math course, that just doesn’t happen, unfortunately. You do have to work with your accommodations there and prepare, and you do have to do more work than everybody else. But that’s just the case in life, unfortunately. Become an engineer, and you can help solve that problem.
Raqi:
I knew he was going to say that, I knew. When Jeff asked you, I thought, oh, he already answered that question. He’s gonna say come and become an engineer!
Brandon:
If you have your bachelor’s degree in another profession, that doesn’t mean you can’t become an engineer. So I have my bachelor’s degree in music, and I learned programming on my own. And, you know, that’s what I do almost all the time now. So there is definitely advantages to getting your degree in computer science, and they’re probably much better programmers than me, but you know, you can do it if you don’t necessarily have a bachelor’s degree in computer science. For transitioning into the workplace, that’s a completely different beast. What I would recommend there is just contact places, businesses that, you know, you really appreciate, and like, get contacts there and work with them to make their products more accessible, or better. Try to build as much contacts as possible while you’re going through school, and then when you get into the workplace, it’ll be a lot easier to get an interview with a place that, you know, somebody that you know, that’s really how you level the playing field a lot. Every opportunity I’ve gone through in my life has always been somebody that I know, that I met somewhere, that I work with, before they hire me, or I start my own business.
Jeff:
That’s great advice. Network, you got to be able to network with people.
Raqi:
I’m curious how long it took you. You started studying music, but when you decided you were going to just start looking at learning to code, how long do you feel like it took you. Everybody’s different, I realize that but just to kind of give people a sense of it, because I think a lot of people are interested when they’re younger and maybe they delve into it a little bit because they’re curious, or they want to make something work, or they’re interested but they don’t necessarily know where to start.
Brandon:
I think it took me about five years to go through my first introductory course to Python. I built a lot of little teeny-tiny applications. But I started when I was 18, trying to learn Python. As a screen reader user, you’re very familiar with a lot of concepts already in programming, because you’re dealing with, you know, headings, and you deal with a lot of little things in computers already. And you start recognizing patterns and functions and functionality around you. If you do games and stuff like that, you can also see a lot of low level, you know, coding in action. And so I started when I was 18, going through Learn Python the Hard Way, which unfortunately is now paid, but it’s a very good course, if you can get a very accessible version of it. And it took me about five years to get to the end of that course, I repeatedly began and would go through the course multiple times before I actually finally finished when I was about 23. At that point, I, you know, started getting into how do you build apps now, and I built probably my first application, which was a little flashcard game to help me study Italian. Then I started going into JavaScript and learning about, you know, hey, this is a browser technology that can run on every single platform, because anybody who’s ever tried to compile Python into an executable knows that it’s very difficult to compile something for iOS and Python. Nowadays, you can actually do it through the browser, but that’s bleeding edge technology. JavaScript really enables you to build one application and use it everywhere, and so you can build something called progressive web apps. And I’m very big fan of these because it leverages your time just so much more. JavaScript is a horrible language to program in, it’s very inefficient, but it allows you to build one app for every single platform, and it beats learning iOS, Swift, Android, and whatever you’re going to use for the desktop, so like Python on the desktop, so it beats learning three languages and programming three different apps. Once I started learning JavaScript, I pretty much focused exclusively on that, and just really started delving into it and building a bunch of different tools and apps for JavaScript. I’m still learning JavaScript. I’m not an expert at JavaScript by any means, but GitHub’s really useful, if you’re making commits to GitHub, and you’re building apps, you just build an app, doesn’t matter if it already exists. You build it and you’ve got something there, and you’ve, you can actually say, I’ve built this app. It’s a very useful thing to show potential employers and you’ve said, I’ve built this app.
Raqi:
It’s tangible, right? It’s something that’s tangible. You can see the effort that you put into it in a different way than you can with education. It’s there, it’s tangible, you can make it do something. I think that’s really powerful.
Brandon:
Yeah, it’s an amazing feeling.
Jeff:
I received an email today from APH, American Printing House, that they’re sponsoring the National Coding Symposium for high school students and college students, and that’ll be happening May 11th through the 14th. And they’re going to have the likes of accessibility people from Apple, Google, and I’m leaving out a whole bunch of them, but Microsoft, they’re all going to be there. It sounds like a really great experience for someone who’s interested in coding.
Brandon:
I haven’t heard about it, but I’ll look it up. That sounds really cool. May is Accessibility Awareness Month, that might be why a lot of these companies are doing it.
Raqi:
So does it seem like there’s a lot of virtual events happening? It just seems like lately, everything is virtual. So there’s all these conferences and the season has kicked off, and it just seems like there’s one after another one. It’s the season for it.
Brandon:
Yeah, I mean, CTV, AVI, this year was virtual. And that was really cool, I really appreciated that. But I’m a big virtual fan. A lot of people are not virtual. But I think working virtual is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s been incredible for you know, blind individuals, just because you can live anywhere, you don’t need to commute, commuting is a pain is a pain in the behind if you can’t drive, and it also enables you to excel at what you’re good at, which is things in the digital realm.
Jeff:
WHO is the virtual conference that got this started.
Brandon:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff:
Easier to drop into different rooms and find out different things.
Brandon:
And what’s better about the virtual conferences, you know, is there’s not the chaos of, you know, just a bajillion people around you. And it’s much easier to identify who people are. The virtual space has a lot more work to do in order to become something that will actually replace in-person work. In particular, I think we need, for conferences and workspaces, we need to go more into VR and enable the office kind of environment in virtual reality. Because there is something to be said about just walking over to a colleague’s office and saying hi. You know, you can do that in chat, but there’s a whole convention around chat that’s built up and you know, it’s very transactional. Whereas if you’re in like a Zoom call all day long, or whatever, that’s in virtual reality, you know, you don’t have people there, you’re just kind of sitting there and somebody can go knock on your door in VR and just say hi, you know, that kind of thing.
Jeff:
I love the stuff that you’re working on. This is all the stuff that, you know, is going to be the stepping-stones for the apps of tomorrow. I want to thank you for what you’re doing at Smith-Kettlewell, thanks for what you’re doing out there. And thanks for coming on and sharing with us all the neat stuff that you’re exploring and good luck with your PhD and being in Georgia there, have a good education and come back, and well, you’re going to keep on working on this stuff, so that’s really neat too.
Raqi:
Build some tech! Keep building some tech, that’s the most important thing.
Jeff:
Go develop something. Thanks for coming on.
Brandon:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Jeff:
All right.
Raqi:
Thanks for coming on.
Pete:
We’d like to thank Brandon for joining us on Blind Abilities today and for sharing his information regarding the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute and his development on the Audiom project, and for sharing his insights into education and employment. For more information on the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, check out their website at ski.org. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times to you, your family and friends, stay well, stay informed, and stay strong. Thank you so much for listening and have a great day.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
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