Podcast Summary:
We return with another Blind Abilities Musical about that first time you heard the screen speak back to you. How you dug in an learned about accessibility and use it in the workplace. And how the ever changing tech world keeps you on your toes.
After the music ends, Pete Lane, Christina Covington, Lori Thompson and Jeff Thompson jump back into the studio for a lively, reflective, and thoughtful conversation about accessible technology and how it has changed their lives. They reflect on the first time they heard JAWS, VoiceOver, or ZoomText Extra speak, and how those early moments opened doors to independence, speed, confidence, and inclusion. The group talks about learning curves, keyboard shortcuts, workplace productivity, iPhone accessibility, adapting to software updates, and the importance of maintaining strong basic skills when technology changes. Along the way, they share memories of older tools, joke about screen readers, sound speed, and emojis, and compare how Macs, Windows PCs, and iPhones fit into daily life. A strong theme throughout the conversation is curiosity: the willingness to explore, problem-solve, and keep learning. The discussion feels warm, personal, and empowering, showing that technology is most powerful when it helps people participate fully and independently.
Thanks for listening!
Full Transcript:
{Music}
Jeff: Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson, and today in the studio all the way from Florida, we got Pete Lane. Pete, how are you doing?
Pete: Great. Jeffrey, good to be with you again.
Jeff: Yes it is, and it’s great to be with you too. And all the way from Colorado, we have Christina Covington. Christina, how are you doing?
Christina: I’m great. How about you? It is so wonderful to be here. Thank you.
Jeff: Glad to have you. Glad to have you. And from Minnesota, we have Lori Thompson. How are you doing?
Lori: I’m good, thank you.
Pete: Are you also from Friendly Fridley, Minnesota?
Lori: I am from Friendly Fridley, Minnesota.
Pete: Wait a minute. Isn’t Jeff also from Friendly Fridley, Minnesota?
Lori: He is the friendliest fridlier.
Pete: Do you guys live near each other?
Lori: We do live near each other.
Christina: Maybe on the same block?
Jeff: Yes, the exact same block. You unplug one modem. We’re both gone.
Lori: Yeah, exactly. If I don’t pay the Wi-Fi bill, we’re done.
Christina
Lori: Yeah, buddy.
Jeff: Yeah. Thanks for keeping blind abilities alive. Does everyone remember their first time they used VoiceOver or Jaws? Yeah, sure, you might have used zoom or magnification, but at some point, you heard the voice come out of the machine. It’s like, whoa, I do.
Pete: I remember I use Zoom text for a long, long time, many, many years. Eventually I used Zoom text extra, which actually did have speech, but I stuck with that too long. And finally, one of the technology specialists with the organization, with the IRS that I worked for said, Pete, you need to migrate to jaws. And I did. And I was so scared to do it. But within a week, I learned, you know, the basic commands just enough to navigate and take care of probably 90% of what I’d been able to do with Zoom text before that. And it was remarkable. It was like the sun came up, it was a complete difference. And I was able to do things that I could never do before. It was light at the end of the tunnel.
Lori: Probably in a timely manner too, instead of trying to find that arrow and mouse and click and click. Yep. It’s just so nice to be able to do things in the same time frame as your peers or faster.
Pete: Yeah, exactly.
Christina: Exactly. It is such a time saver. I remember for me it was similar to, well, my first time was with ZoomText Extra. I started with ZoomText, but then when I got the ZoomText Xtra, I was just so blown away that I didn’t have to stick my nose right up on the screen to read a few letters at a time, or even just to highlight text in an article and have that article read to me, or a document that was just such a lifesaver at that time. And then, of course, when I switched, when I fully switched over to Screen Reader, that was just an amazing experience. I just felt like so much was opened up to me. I felt so empowered and I felt included, like, hey, I can do this like everyone else. And it was just amazing.
Jeff: I went to training and I sat down at this desk and just just play with this for a little bit. And I hit the key and all of a sudden it said, J, you know, E and I’m spilling my name, you know, and the screen was all black, I guess, I don’t know. And I’m like, huh? I was just so amazed. It was on a DeckTalk. That’s where the voice synthesizer was sitting on top. It was just interesting back then because there were just boxes. There was no pretty designs, right? It was just a box. And then this other box out there, it was talking to me and I was like, wow. And then I figured out how to say all. So then I could read the paragraph you wrote. It was like, wow. And then I hit spell check and then it went 30 minutes.
Pete: Right?
Jeff: Learning how to spell. Like you said, the world opened up to me, I believe.
Christina: I remember, I think I had one of those, it was a DeckTalk. Yeah, maybe a DeckTalk two.
Jeff: Yep.
Christina: And it was this plastic box and it was just a little speaker. And at the time, Window Eyes is what came out of that.
Lori: Yeah.
Jeff: And windows.
Christina: I was just like, wow, this is.
Lori: You know that’s a name from the past, isn’t it?
Pete: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Definitely.
Jeff: I used to use something called Perfect Paul or something.
Pete: Yeah, that was the name of the voice. One of the DeckTalk voices.
Jeff: Then it was game was on. You said a week. Yeah. Christina, you said in a matter of time, you’re just moving along. It’s like, okay, here I go, you know, and once you’re into that, it’s like, I got it. You just wanted to learn more. And back then I had lists, serves, they called them, you know, you didn’t have an email list, you had a listserv, you could go join up and there’s other people talking and you could ask questions, find out stuff for me.
Lori: I knew of jaws, but didn’t know what jaws was until I probably met Jeff and he was using jaws and he was using a pack mate, no, what was that? A humanware a Braille note type thing. And it was talking. So I’m like, wow. But when I went through Adjustment to Blindness Training, I am not technical. Still to this day, I know what to do for work. Okay, but I’m not going to go venture out and do something crazy. And I do feel like for me, the training was kind of I didn’t give it 100%. I’ll be honest, I didn’t give my tech training 100%. But when you’re thrown into a job, you learn real fast how to navigate with jaws. And like I said earlier, just having the ability to do my responsibilities for work and do it in a timely manner and not have to take forever to do something. I mean, I’m probably faster than a sighted person when it comes now to using jaws for a different responsibility on my computer for work. Because I don’t know, I my hearing probably is the speed of light. I don’t know, you know what I mean? You just you train your ears and I don’t have jaws speaking 2000 miles an hour. It’s probably 65, 70%. Maybe your hands work as fast as your ears do. As soon as you hear it, boom. Sometimes my hands work so fast that my, my computer is like, hey, wait a minute. I got to catch up.
Pete: I think I’ve hosed up a computer or two because I was working faster than the computer with jaws. Yeah, you get going so fast and I think you overload it every once in a while.
Lori: Yeah.
Jeff: Can we go back to the sound at the speed of light? I’m just thinking of physics here for a second. Just kidding.
Lori: Okay.
Pete: Yeah. That was speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
Jeff: And we’re talking about sound about 758mph. That’s in normal air and room temperature though.
Pete: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pete: I think it’s 1070ft per second.
Jeff: It’s like watching a church bell ring from a mile away. You can see it’s swing, but the sound gets there later.
Pete: It’s like runners on a track. They watch the smoke come out of the gun, so they get off on time before they hear the shot of the gun.
Jeff: Yeah, when you dig into this stuff and you start out at 50, 60, 70 words, the speed rate that you’re listening to, you get it to a point where you’re listening to it because you don’t have to understand everything. But when you really want to dig into something, you slow it down a little bit. Like, what did they say?
Pete: Yeah, you kind of get into a zone. The way I look at it, you kind of step back and you listen to the whole rather than the pieces of the whole, you know? You don’t need to hear, like you said, every word.
Jeff: I’m a married guy, you know? I understand.
Pete: Are you saying that you don’t listen to her verbatim every time? Oh, you.
Lori: I can say hey, we’re having fried chicken for supper and he’ll come back. What are we having for supper? I just told you dude, it’s fried chicken.
Pete: Well, I do that with my son, who cooks. So it’s not exclusive to women.
Jeff: No.
Lori: You know what I like about JAWS? What if I go into my document folder? I can start typing the name of the file. I name my documents in a formula way, so I just start typing the number or the name. Boom. It’s right there.
Pete: Your own personal way to do it?
Lori: Yes. Control F is my favorite hotkey, which is not even a Jaws key.
Pete: That’s a Microsoft key, isn’t it?
Lori: Yeah. And that’s the thing. Anybody could navigate their computer like we do to a certain point if they knew the window keys, of course.
Pete: Yeah. Same with the Mac. Christina and I are both Mac users on the computer. Yeah.
Jeff: Me too.
Pete: And Jeffrey too.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Lori: In an email, if I need to attach a file. I love the hotkeys for that. I do feel like a PC, a windows computer. I mean, not too many employers are going to buy somebody a Mac, but I could be wrong.
Pete: No, that’s pretty much the general consensus, I think.
Lori: I feel like maybe the the productivity is windows for employment, unless you’re in audio or video or some kind of media or something.
Pete: I’m not sure that’s a product of the PC being better for that than the Mac. I think it’s just that there’s so many more out there and they’ve been out there for so long.
Jeff: Yes, all the databases of the corporations are based off windows. Everything is windows based.
Pete: Yeah. They’re all geared towards windows.
Christina: Yeah, you were talking about hotkeys and shortcuts, and I am a lover.
of keyboard Shortcuts. I think sometimes it can be industry specific as to whether Mac is more dominant or windows is more dominant. Because I know I think I can think of a couple or at least one, where often Mac is kind of the go to, but there are still windows users.
I remember I was very, very new to computers and I think I just had ZoomText at the time. So, you know, point and click was the extent of my, of my knowledge. And this gentleman at the, in the accessibility department at the college taught me about keyboard shortcuts. And a huge majority of them that he taught me were windows based. Oh, but I was in heaven. I was like, this is amazing. I can just type this into my keyboard and voila, I don’t have to find it with the mouse pointer. And like I said, this was before Screen Reader, but I loved it. And even today, I love anytime I can use a shortcut to accomplish a task, whether it’s a screen reader task or software task. There’s such lifesavers. There’s such time savers.
Pete: Oh yeah.
Christina: It’s just so easy. And I just remember the excitement. I ran home and I told my husband all about it. I was like, oh my goodness, I learned this and this and you can do this. And that’s so much better and so much easier. And he was just like, whoa, you’re, you’re very happy.
Jeff: He probably liked that part where it goes tab, tab tab tab tab, tab tab is not a shortcut, Silly.
Pete: To quote a line from a song I heard.
Jeff: Yeah.
Lori: What I love is if I’m in the office, someone will say, well, how did you get to find that? And they’ll stand behind me and they’ll look at my screen and they’re like, I don’t even know where you are, I’m like, good.
Pete: I know.
Lori: They never know where you are when you’re using jaws or voiceover.
Pete: You know they can’t catch you.
Lori: Yeah, exactly. But I have taught sighted people how to do things with a shortcut, you know. But like you said, Christina, it’s window keys. It’s something that they can use. And they’re like, oh my God, I didn’t know I could do that. Yeah, just hit this and this and you know, you’re good to go.
Pete: Well, you know, it’s funny, it seems to me that keyboard shortcuts might be faster for even sighted people than than grabbing a mouse and going, and you know, sliding the mouse up to the right corner and clicking a menu and then clicking another menu. Your hands are on the keyboard anyway. I’ve often wondered why more people don’t use shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts.
Lori: Yeah, I really don’t know why they don’t teach kids at a young age how to use the window hotkeys.
Jeff: Yeah, I think one of the big things that PCs have over the Mac and I’m a Mac user, but I use PC for many years, is the fact that windows programs that you’re using typically for work, you got the windows commands and you got the jaws is working predominantly with that. So there’s a stability there in a sense that things work where I think on the Mac, I don’t can’t remember the last time I opened up pages to do a document. I use TextEdit because it’s just straightforward text, basically. Yeah, just text. And that’s the way I roll, you know? Then I have Microsoft Word for the Mac, but there’s a few things that are a little tough to do on there, like headings is complicated or it used to be. There are certain things that I don’t do that I wish I could do that I used to be able to do on the PC. So the Mac, when you’re adopting something like Microsoft Word into it, you’re adopting it. And I don’t think it gets the full fledge attention. I know Microsoft ain’t paying attention to it.
Pete: Probably not, why would they?
Jeff: But and then you’re relying on Apple’s product to stay abreast of that. I don’t know if it works all the time, but that’s I guess my problems with the Mac is Zoom seems to. Accessibility of Zoom is off and on. It updates and stuff like that. So when these updates come along or Changes come along. It’s like, oh boy, here we go. But like Lori, you were saying for work or something specific that, you’re doing Amadeus pro Pete.
Pete: Yeah.
Jeff: If something changes, like you can’t go up across and hit T for tools, you know, or you have to arrow over now to get your drop down. Once you’re in there, then you can use your single letter command, you know, and go there to that, you know, but when that stuff changes, you figure out what works for your work, your responsibilities that you have to do at work. Like Lori was talking about, you get good at that. And that’s what we all do. I sit around and do what I do and I’m good at it. Now, if someone asked me, how would I do that? I said, I don’t know. It’s all muscle memory after a while. And then when something doesn’t work with muscle memory because they change it, all of a sudden you learn it and you go, oh, I have to do this now. About a week later, it’s all muscle memory again and you’re just cruising again. But you have that tenacity to dig in and figure out what’s wrong, what’s going on. How come is this doing it? And then you keep moving and you just keep doing it.
Lori: Outlook has made a lot of changes this last year with teams and email. I try to keep up on the Freedom scientific podcasts. I will tell you that I still use alt F, you know, once in a while or something that we learned back in the day because it kind of still does work, but there probably is an easier way to do it now, but it does take a while to allow those changes to sink into the brain because, you know, when you’re working eight hours a day and you’re on the computer eight hours a day, I don’t want to learn anything new. I just want to do my job.
Pete: Too busy doing it.
Lori: Yeah.
Pete: Like, stop the world. I want to get off.
Lori: Exactly. So you do have to. So, you know, at night when I lay down, I’ll pop in the Freedom Scientific podcast and scroll through and see what’s new and oh, well, sheesh, that could make my life so much easier.
Pete: So and then you go use it the next day.
Lori: Yeah, and I’m like, oh my gosh, it does work.
Pete: You work it in one thing at a time.
Lori: Exactly.
Pete: Yeah, but that’s it. If you rely on the specifics of what something is doing, then you’re going to be left in the dust. You need to learn the basic rules of operating your PC or your Mac, which you do. You can’t help but do it. You do it every day. And then if the software changes or they add a keystroke or a different way to do it, then at least you’ve got the fundamentals. You’re not left in the dust.
Lori: The iPhone has really just absolutely changed my life. I couldn’t tell you. I know my phone number and I know Jeff’s phone number. I used to know a lot of people’s phone numbers because, you know, you had your Rolodex in your head.
Pete: And you memorized them. We were good at memorizing things.
Lori: I couldn’t tell you whose numbers. Who anymore?
Jeff: 867-5309
Lori: Yeah, yeah. 8675309, yeah.
Jeff: I got it, I got it.
Pete: That’s right.
Lori: Yeah. They’ll say what’s your daughter’s phone number?
Lori: Hold on. Let me get my phone. You can do anything on your phone.
Jeff: Just about. There’s certain things that are a lot easier on your phone. Technically, I’d rather get on my phone than go to websites on my computer.
Pete: Me too.
Jeff: As a matter fact, if I’m on Amazon, the Amazon app on my phone is pretty good. You know, I do not like the Amazon website. Tab tab tab tab.
Pete: I don’t like having to log in to any websites. I just pick up the app and do it.
Christina: Yeah that’s true.
Pete: Log ins a pain in the neck.
Christina: Yeah, I often do find that apps on the iPhone are there just a little more straightforward, often a little more stripped down?
Pete: Yeah.
Christina: I don’t know, it just seems logical to me.
Lori: No clutter.
Christina: Yeah. A lot of times apps are just laid out very logically. I guess somehow work with the way my brain works.
Pete: And so I think we’re acclimated by being iPhone users. I think we’re exposed to more apps than we are websites. I think as a general rule. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.
Christina: That makes sense. I do remember my first accessible phone. I never had an accessible flip phone. So the iPhone four, when it came out, I started using it with voiceover exclusively, and I felt so included and empowered. I started texting people, you know, something that people had been doing for years, and I was like, wow, I can do this. You know, this is so cool and I don’t need anyone else to do it for me. I can do this by myself or I can, you know, I learned these basic voiceover gestures and I can figure it out on my own. Most of the time that was just this, I don’t know, just a world opening experience. And then also, like I said, not feeling like I was on the outside and I didn’t feel like I was on the outside, not quite understanding what this experience is that people were having on their iPhones or texting or anything like that.
Pete: So texting, yeah. First time you could type on the phone.
Christina: Yeah.
Jeff: I think the intuitiveness of what Jobs had in mind, I heard a story that he saw a kid in front of a TV and he reached up and touched it like he should be able to move it. So then he thought, touch.
Pete: Aha!
Jeff: The intuitiveness is kind of a study that he kind of did in a sense. Because remember when you got the iPhone, there was no instructions.
Pete: Yeah. That’s right.
Jeff: No, you just turned it on and you touched and then you turned on voiceover. Then they started having voiceover come turned on already if you wanted or if you don’t want it. That intuitiveness. I don’t know if that’s a word, but your intuition is pretty much right on. And I like how they designed it that way, because you just think of it like if you want to move the screen, that was hard to get a grasp of. When you have something and you want to scroll and you have to push up, but to go down.
Pete: Yeah.
Jeff: But if you’re pushing paper, you’re…
Pete: Exactly you’re pushing paper on the desk. It’s moving up in front of your eyes.
Jeff: Yeah. So there was little things that at first you were just amazed that this is how it works and you can do it. And it was just like, wow, I turned on my friends, actually my uncle’s phone. He got a new one and he didn’t know something about it and I was showing it to him. So I turned on voice over stuff, and then he got a phone call, and then I was leaving and I thought, I can’t leave him with the boy two on. He’ll be very upset when he gets off that phone call and can’t hang up and can’t do anything. So I had to wait around for a little bit and I turned it off for him.
Pete: Yeah.
Lori: Yeah. You know, I’ll go visit my mom and she’s not very technical and I’ll turn on voiceover and I can help her do whatever she needs to do. I never been a go to for anybody for help. Okay. Um, especially when it comes to technology, but, you know, just whatever little minor thing she needs and having that inclusiveness that they have built into this phone and knowing that I don’t know what the percentages of people that use iPhone, but knowing that I can just, hey, go here, turn this on. And now I know I’ve got it set to where all I have to do is the triple click and when I go visit, it’s on and give me it. I’ll take care of it for you. And the other day I was actually doing something with my phone and I didn’t realize that my screen curtain was on. And I went and I showed my phone to my friend and I said, look at that. And she goes, it’s black. I’m like, oh, I’ve been using my phone this whole time incognito. I think that’s kind of cool. You know.
Pete: That is cool.
Lori: Like CIA agents.
Pete: That’s right.
Christina: Lori, you were talking about, you know, how you can just pick up any iPhone and put voiceover on and help someone? And I love being able to do that because again, I’m not required to install something special or, you know, I can just pick it up and help them. Same with, you know, same with the Mac, or maybe even an Apple Watch or an iPad, you know, pretty much most of Apple’s products.
Pete: Yeah.
Lori: Nobody is doing this for me because I can do it independently. And that’s what is just I love it, I love that.
Pete: That what we use to not be able to do.
Lori: Yeah, yeah, I love the time that we’re living in right now.
Jeff: Do you think someone on the Mayflower was sitting up looking at the stars one night and said, I love the time we’re living in. You know?
Pete: Yeah, I bet everybody along the way has said that for some reason.
Christina: Yeah, yeah, probably before. Jeff, you were talking about, you know, having to adapt to changes in technology. And I do think it’s important to have your basic skills right. And then also a curiosity, you know, to keep pressing forward to learn the new way or find an alternative if need be. I, you, you were talking about how sometimes you have to learn the new way and you know, within a week you’ve got it down and I will find that I already forgot how to do the old way.
Jeff: Oh yeah.
Christina: I remember when I got the first iPhone without the home button and, you know, I don’t know, maybe three days later I had to pick up my old iPhone to clear it off and delete everything off of it and send it back to the mobile carrier. And I was like, I was just stumbling. I was like, wait, it’s only been three days. Why did I suddenly sort of forget that there’s this home button here and I have to use that. And it was just so weird. It’s just, it’s interesting how quickly your muscle memory will kick in with a little bit of practice.
Pete: So what I find is that I’m trying to simplify. For instance, I’ve had some storage issues on my phone in recent months. I got a 128 gig iPhone 16 Pro and why I went with 128 instead of I think I could have gone 512 at the time, but I regret it. And now I’m doing a lot of screen recording and things like that, and so my storage is maxing out very quickly. I had to hand my phone to my son Patrick. You know him? Jeff. He’s, uh, he’s pretty apple literate. So first thing he said, why in the world do you have all of these apps on here? I have ten pages of apps. And I looked at it and like probably nine of those eight of those pages, maybe seven of those pages are in the cloud. I haven’t touched them in a long, long time. So he says, why do you keep these on here? First of all, those apps are taking up storage. And second of all, I just don’t use them. So I’ve gone through and I think I’ve deleted over 200 apps in the last probably three months.
Christina: Maintenance is definitely one of those things we have to take time out for, for our tech, you know, clean up our hard drives, clean up our storage on our phone apps. We don’t use all that stuff. And it’s often the last thing I feel like doing. But sometimes we do. We have to set that time aside. Well, I mean, I discovered last night I have 72 tabs open in my Safari on my iPhone.
Jeff: 72?
Christina: I might need to go close some of those.
Jeff: That’s a record.
Lori: And turning off your phone once in a while. I’m really bad about not turning my phone off, but sometimes it’s just like, gosh, what is wrong with this thing? And then I turn it off, turn it back on. Oh, it’s working great. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Pete: Yeah.
Christina: Me too. Me too.
Lori: I love being on the same even playing field of my peers. The world that’s going on around us.
Pete: I agree.
Christina: Very well put. Exactly. That’s exactly how I feel.
Pete: I have a call every week with my high school graduating class that we’ve known each other. And we graduated from high school a long, long time ago…
Jeff: 1870.
(laughter)
Pete: Pretty close. But they’re all cited. And I know I’m more technologically up to date than probably most of them, except 2 or 3 of them, I think. So it’s really nice to be in that situation, to be able to talk technology and be able to talk apps and certain skills that you’ve developed on your on your phone or on your computer intelligently with some of these folks. And they don’t really say anything. But every once in a while, you’ll hear them pause and say, wait a minute, Pete. How do you do that?
Jeff: Well, Pete, you you inspired me in a sense. You reminded me of myself from some of the stories you told me. And Christina, you said it. Curiosity. Pete was in a band one time, and they were all shutting down, and he said, yeah, great. And he started high fiving in front of the tape recorder, but he was high fiving himself. But he knew no one would know. It’s not the whole band high fiving each other. So he just did the sounds. Yeah. And then he contacted me on Blind Abilities when I was doing the. Oh, what was that?
Pete: Uh, audio Audioboom.
Lori: Audioboom. Audioboom. Yeah.
Jeff: And he contacted me and he says, I did this demo and he took his microphone and he put his phone on one side and this other thing, and he balanced it out on his desk to record stuff. I mean, this was very primitive in a sense, and I used it. I cleaned it up and used it, and then I said, you got to get this. You know, finally he got Amadeus Pro, but he was curious because he used to have that little audio bug way back. Musician and stuff like that. And I didn’t have to teach him. I showed him some tools and. Gave him a couple pointers here and there, but he took off with it. You know, that curiosity. With anyone, especially in the workplace, you know, you want to be able to do that. So yeah. Curiosity is the key.
Pete: And I don’t know if we can tell people to do that. I don’t know the. Thinking of the people who are listening. We don’t have the market cornered on curiosity. And I don’t think there’s anything that any one of us can say that will motivate anyone out there to be curious, because it’s like an innate skill, an innate attribute characteristic that you have. But if you’ve got it, you should probably try to develop it because it can only do good for you. I think the more curious you are, the more you’re going to learn and the farther you’re going to get. However you measure distance, you know in your life, in your workplace, all of that. So be curious and don’t stifle it.
Lori: Yes. And I was just going to say, when I started using the computer, I was so afraid I was going to screw something up.
Pete: Yeah.
Lori: But you know what? It’s really hard to screw up a computer. I mean, you can, but it’s not as easy as you think it would be to screw it up.
Christina: I think you’re right, Lori. I think there may be a little safer than they used to be. Maybe. I mean, I don’t know, maybe there was a time when you were mainly using DOS or something that maybe you really could do.
Well, these days I feel pretty safe exploring.
Jeff: I’m not going to acknowledge that I know Dos.
Pete: Oh, no. Dos
Jeff: Dos 3.1.
Lori: You might save something and you might not find it for a while because you don’t know where it went.
Pete: This is true. Somebody will find it.
Lori: Yeah, well, somebody will find it.
Jeff: Actually, windows was actually a facade over dos.
Pete: That’s right.
Jeff: It was a user interface.
Christina: The GUI.
Pete: the GUI.
Jeff: Yeah. There you go. Sorry, Christina.
Christina: Oh, no, I was just saying GUI, you know, it switched to GUI, and I think that made it very, very user friendly for most people. You know, you guys were talking about curiosity and I, I do think that curiosity can be the spark to drive problem solving. I think that’s another way that curiosity can be helpful. Is it sparks that drive for problem solving. Once you have that, you know, you can just really dig in and try to figure out how to move forward in your technology.
Jeff: So why do they have such a negative thing like curiosity killed the cat?
Pete: Yeah.
Jeff: I mean, that just doesn’t go right.
Pete: Stifles people.
Jeff: We’re going to change that.
Pete: Yeah.
Jeff: Get ready people. We’re making new rules.
Pete: That’s right. Long live the cat!
Jeff: Long live the cat!
Lori: I learned something new this week, you know, I always knew how to put, like, a colon and then a right parentheses at the end of something to make a smiley face when you’re saying hi. Good morning, smiley face. Well, if you hit the windows key in the period, it drops down a bunch of emojis that you can choose from on outlook. And it also works in teams. So, you know, I get I get excited about things like that.
Pete: Cool.
Jeff: I just updated my iOS to 26.4 and there’s eight new emojis. They only have four lines of what the new stuff is, and they took up a whole line to say that there’s eight new emojis. And I’m like, okay.
Jeff: Is that? I mean, is that worth an update?
Pete: Yeah. Really?
Jeff: Yeah. And a new screensaver.
Pete: Yeah.
Christina: I love that we can use emojis. I know I can’t see them to appreciate them that way, but I do appreciate them and I like putting smiley faces or whatever on my text messages sometimes in my emails.
Lori: Screaming and cat fear or something.
Pete: Exactly.
Christina: Just to add that extra flare.
Pete: You played right into her hand. She’s a, Lori, she’s a cat lover.
Christina: Yeah.
Jeff: Just write c-a-t emoji.
Pete: Well you know, there’s a little trick when you’re texting a blind person. You can spell something out with emoji after it. And they don’t know.
Christina: We would not know.
Lori: Oh that’s true. Yeah, I never thought about that.
Pete: Like hand pointing upside down and backwards emoji.
Lori: They got emojis for everything.
Christina: I’m still hoping for a hugging emoji. That’s not so much a happy one. You know, like a you know, you’re just wanting to give some send someone a comforting hug.
Lori: Oh, okay. I thought maybe like a strangle type hug.
Jeff: That a neck hug?
Pete: Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah. What would that hug be? That would be a comfort hug.
Pete: Yeah, I bet they’ve got one.
Pete: Yeah.
Jeff: Or a huggy hug.
Pete: Yeah. Warm and fuzzy.
Christina: A huggy hug. I like that.
Jeff: We missed our calling, Pete. Sorry to take your idea, Christina, but…
Christina: Oh, go for it.
(laughter)
{Music}
[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.