Podcast Summary:
What technology will help your student succeed—and who can help them learn to use it? In this Tools for School episode, State Services for the Blind assistive technology specialists Jesse Anderson and John Hess introduce the personalized support available to help blind and low vision students prepare for college, employment, and greater independence.
From exploring screen readers, magnification, and braille displays to identifying training needs, these specialists help students build a toolkit around their goals. They explain how counselor referrals lead to technology assessments, equipment recommendations, and opportunities for individual instruction.
Students, parents, and teachers will discover why typing, navigating websites, managing email, and accessing classroom materials matter long before graduation. Along the way, Jesse and John share practical learning resources, encourage students to practice through activities they enjoy, and remind everyone that asking for help is part of becoming independent. Start the conversation now and build confidence for what comes next.
Links of interest:
Tools for School: College Planning, Cool Tech, and Student Connections
College Student Panel – Tools for School 2026
To find out more about the services provided at State Services for the Blind, and what they can do for you, contact Shane DeSantis at shane.desantis@state.mn.us or call Shane at 651-385-5205.
Full Transcript:
{Music}
Jeff: Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson, and we’re continuing our Tools for School series with a conversation about finding the right technology—and building the skills to use it confidently.
In this episode, State Services for the Blind assistive technology specialists Jesse Anderson and John explain how they help students explore their options and prepare for college, work, and everyday independence. From personalized assessments to training and practical tips, you’ll hear how students, parents, and teachers can connect with support along the way.
Let’s join the conversation.
Jesse: Alrighty. As I introduced myself earlier, my name is Jesse Anderson and I work with Pre-ETS Transition students like yourself. If you have not worked with me already, you more than likely will. When your counselor refers you for an assistive technology assessment or evaluation, as they call it, they will send a referral to me and I will reach out to you and we’ll set something up. Typically, what I like to do is, especially if I have met with somebody before, I like to schedule something virtually first because it’s just a lot faster to get set up. Then I can get to know people and I show them some stuff, like some software and all kinds of other assistive technology. And then if we need to do a follow up in-person meeting, then I will have a much better idea of what devices they have available and focused on. So when they’re ready to meet you. And so we often meet at the vision store right next door to us. And we also go around the state as well. So I am also low vision. I’m legally blind myself. So I use a combination of magnification, speech, braille. And that’s why I would like to tell people as well, is that a lot of the technology that, you know, we cover with you guys, both John and I are visually impaired. So we use a lot of this stuff myself. I’ll let John introduce himself here, too.
John: Good morning everyone. I’m John, the assistive technologist. I’m here assisting Jesse. I work with adults, the big ones, the ones that have supposedly grown up already and are looking for employment, work, wacky world of work, that thing, you know? So I do the same thing as Jesse, really, and worked with a team of counselors, take referrals to do a variety of different things. Sometimes it’s a job site assessment, sometimes it’s just assessments at s SB to find out what equipment people need. And then I write up a nice little report and I send it out. And then the counselor does what a counselor does, which we’ve heard about this morning. You know, I help out with the equipment or just supporting activities if necessary. And my job basically is to be available on the technical side. So a person has questions about tech classes, AI computers or software that do things. That’s what I do. Back to Jesse.
Jesse: Yeah, you kind of forgot to mention you are also.
John: The almighty trainer.
John: Oh yeah. There’s that. Well, yeah, I, I
try to teach people something. I also drive a dog. So if you like dogs, dog and you can come over.
Jesse: We’re going to be talking with you during this session and then a session during the afternoon, I promise we’re going to play with a lot more fun toys this afternoon, assuming the technology behaves itself, if any indication. what this morning is going to be determined by, though, we have some fun stuff here.
This morning is really about the fundamentals because yes, there is a lot of fun stuff out there. And it was kind of nice having the peer Ambassadors do the kind of intro because we got to hear what everybody is using currently. I heard a lot of iPads. I heard a lot of phones. I heard a couple Chromebooks. And I did hear a couple of PCs or Macs. Mac laptops. There is a lot of technology out there. And as you leave high school, the counselor has said earlier this morning, you will not have access to that technology provided to you through the school. So we may meet with you if you’re like a freshman, sophomore or junior. We may meet with you during those times, but for sure as well, every senior, we make it a point to meet with people during that senior year because we know people are going to lose access to their technology, that we figure out what they’re currently using, what works for them, what isn’t working for them, looking at what type of degree or plan that they’re going to be doing after high school. So if you’re going for engineering, that might be very different than, let’s say, a music major or for, you know, any number of different things.
So we look at, you know, each person’s needs specifically, but what we want to kind of cover today is how we get started with assistive technology. How do we make sure that we know what technology we need? And do we know? Are we comfortable? Are we confident? Are we proficient with our assistive technology before we start college? Because you don’t have that fallback, you don’t have that vision teacher, the TVI, that IEP, whatever to follow you and help you through these little things. You definitely have the disability services office and you have SSB if you have questions and things like that, but the focus is more on you. It’s all about advocacy independence. So one of the first things to really know about is what type of technologies work best for you. If I’m a low vision user, what works best for me? Do I primarily read visually and I use speech as a backup. Do my eyes get tired after reading a lot visually? And so due to the amount of reading that I’m going to have in college, there’s a lot more reading. And so if somebody hasn’t used as much text to speech, kind of getting used to that, or human narrated audiobooks or a combination so that that way when people might read things shorter things visually and then have longer things read aloud to them, which will save on their vision, on their effort. If you’re totally blind, do you use primarily audio? Do you use Braille? Braille is an excellent thing to have, whether you’re using hard copy Braille, a refreshable Braille display, you have the notetakers like Earl has, and Eric is going to have over there, whether it’s Braille display, whether it’s a note taker.
Those are all important. Like I said, I know there’s a lot of people that were using iPads on my phone, which are awesome, but computers are actually going to be very crucial both in college and employment, especially if you are looking at any type of job in a business setting or an office environment where most businesses will run in a windows environment. So having those skills ahead of time, knowing NVDA, knowing jaws, windows, magnifier, Zoomtext, whatever it is, those are some options that are available for blind or vision. How do you take information in? I already kind of focused on that. But like, do you visually read? Do you audibly read? Do you read Braille? You can read all of them, but maybe you comprehend or you remember things better when reading Braille versus audio and being able to kind of know that about yourself and clearly kind of, you know, if you’re needing to let your disability services office or your instructor know, that’s kind of an important thing. So I’m going to talk about some other kind of just stuff in just some topics that like skills that that SSB recommends students have before they start college. But first, I’m going to let John chime in for a little bit and he’s going to talk a little bit about ways that you can learn technology, because a lot of these tools, assistive technology, mainstream technology, they have ways either built in or really cool things that you can learn them.
John: Yeah. So how do you learn these things? How do you learn about screen readers? How do you learn how your screen reader works? We’re going to talk about Jaws and NVDA are the two main ones. There are other ones, but NVDA and jaws are biggies, so they’re the ones you probably hear the most about. So the first thing I want to encourage is you don’t have to do this by yourself. It’s okay to ask people how many of us kind of want to. I’m going to point to myself here. Okay. You know, we think we know it. We think we can do this. I can sit here and do this by myself. No problem. But as a student, you have a lot more on your plate than just learning one thing. Sometimes you can stress out over this, but you don’t have to stress out over this. You have lots of resources. As if of course, we got my colleague Jesse, the technologist who know about this, and we’re happy to take phone calls, emails, visits, whatever you like to talk to you about all of these different, you know, how do you do something maybe you want to know, well, how do I get to the help menu of NVDA? Give one of us a call.
I’ll talk to you and tell you about it. Send one of us an email, we’ll talk to you and tell you about it. And always don’t be afraid to use the people next to you that your disability services office, just that you can walk over and say, excuse me, give me a minute and show how to do this. So the first thing you want to do with the resources that are available in screen readers that are amazingly helpful is help. Yeah, that’s pretty obvious, I know. Yeah, I address that. I want to talk about two types of help that are available to you. Jaws has a wonderful, wonderful training system that the one thing Freedom Scientific does really, really well, in my opinion, is training. They have an excellent training department. They do a really nice job in offering free tutorial, right? You know, built right into jaws is about ten chapters of different things, starting with how to do things in windows, how to do things in jaws. They put it all together nicely. It’s in what’s called a daisy book. So a daisy book basically is a way of structured navigation. So it’s a book written in a structured navigation format where you can navigate by headings by different levels, and it simply makes it easy to find components of a book instead of just down arrowing down, arrowing down, arrowing.
So they’ve done the Jaws lessons are in headings or in links. I forget how they do it, but it’s very easy to move around the system and find what you want to look for. Jump to particular components of the book and learn this thing. You can do this on your own, and they also have a great internet practice tutorial called Surf’s Up, and you can actually practice with exercises using jaws right on your very computer. And that’s a resource that is very valuable. So how do you learn about that resource? Well, you could call Freedom Scientific. I’ll tell you about it. Or you could call me. Yeah, the resources are right there. And you can learn a good chunk of how to do your screen reader. Hands on instruction is helpful, but if for some reason it takes a while to get somebody to jump into the help menu and learn about your screen reader.
NVDA, of course, the next one around there, they have a thing called NVDA Coach. Now they do have a help menu. They do have a user guide. They do have a command list, but it’s not as robust as having lessons. While NVDA has a thing called NVDA Coach, which simply is structured lessons from anything from using the keyboard to digging into object navigation.
And how would you find out about that resource if you didn’t know about it? We can help you with all that. And say you want to give us a call if you don’t know about it. But anyway, you should be able to learn these screen readers on your own, enough to get you going. And then when your trainer is available, then you can say, well, look what I learned so far. And those are the two things. Of course, there is the web, and once you get proficient at using a computer, you can find probably almost anything there. And of course, we all know you guys will do this, do it to your smartphone, Siri, Gemini. They can help you as well. But the thing is, it’s good to learn to do these without those things. Because when those connections don’t work, that happens. So it’s good to learn how to do things with your computer, with your text screen physically, and make it work that way. Should all your connections give up. You still can do the things you want to do. So that’s not a dream, it’s good. Back to Jesse, there’s one other.
Jesse: A really neat tool that Freedom Scientific or Vispero has. It is called anyone. Take a guess. Anyone know what I might mean? there’s a little website out there called Companion. And that is a really, really kind of a cool website because it’s basically, you know, think about it. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, Gemini, the new Siri, anything like that, but it basically it is just made for their products, whether that’s jaws Zoomtext fusion, but then they also have some information in their system for windows office, your web browsers, email clients like outlook. So like what’s cool about that is when you go to the website, you have that little edit box that you type in and you can just ask in your own words, how do I use picture smart again? Or what are some of the quick navigation tools I should use on the web page? Or how do I set a column typically in Excel? Again, because there are gazillions of commands in a lot of these assistive technologies. I’ve been using this stuff for far too long because I’ve been doing this for decades, and I still don’t remember all the commands. I mean, there’s just so many. So whether it’s the NVDA Coach, the stuff that’s built into Jaws or Zoomtext or anything like that, or things like FS Companion, very, very cool resource. Those are some ways that you can get help. Having multiple ways to do things because as we very eloquently demonstrated this morning. Sometimes technology goes belly up and things don’t go as planned. Maybe you have a laptop. Maybe you have a phone. Maybe you have a Braille display. Oh, I forgot to charge my Braille display. Whoops. I can’t use that right now, but maybe I can do it on my phone. Or maybe I can do it on my computer. So having those backups or maybe, you know, I heard people mention apps like Be My Eyes Seeing AI. And so maybe you’re like, you’re trying to read a label on something or you’re reading a document, you try it with Seeing AI and go, oh, that was okay, but it’s not really doing it quite for me. So maybe I try to Be My Eyes instead for that particular document because they work better. So just knowing what tools you have access to, knowing what types of things you can do, and having those backups is a very important thing. Because trust me, it still happens to me on a daily basis. Something just doesn’t work, right? I’m like, okay, how are we going to work around this?
One of the things that we focus on when doing a technology assessment, whether it’s for students like you guys or adults, you know, like I said, we look at what the person needs. Are they going to college? Are they looking for a job, using a job as an example, and an office job is going to be something different than if somebody was working in a grocery store. Right. Because you’re, you know, in a grocery store, you’re going to be looking at a lot of labels, price tags, products, organizing things. Whereas in an office job, you’re going to be probably sitting around on a computer a lot typing. Exactly. So we look at that kind of stuff again prior to starting college. We look at how comfortable you are with technology. Like I said, a lot of people were using iPads. How many of you who use iPads, how many also use a windows computer?
Shane: It looks like there’s two hands.
Jesse: How many of us out there? So a computer is going to be one of those things that, if you’re new to it, that’s where the what John talked about having these ways to kind of get help as well as, you know, looking like you can look things up on YouTube. I still do that to this day. On Google, knowing the computer. And so like John, I write up a report for your counselor. And in that report, I will put down like, you know, what did we talk about? What did you find helpful? What questions did you have? What things are you new to and might need some extended training on? Because even during an assessment, we’re trying to figure out, hone in on what would work best for you, what would help you the best. And then, you know, we look at long term, you might work with John. You might work with one of our other on staff trainers. We have contracted trainers around the state that kind of work in different areas around the state. So they can work with you one on one in person or virtually, or a combination, whatever works best for you. And so I just have a list of some of the skills that people that are really, really helpful. And what I also like to mention is I’m not trying to be super serious all the time either, because, you know, you got people, oh, you should do this, you should do that. You got to get your schoolwork done, whatever. But the best way I think, to learn some of this technology is to immerse yourself in it, to use it and find something that would relate specifically to you. Find something that is either fun. Find something that is like a practical task that you would want to regularly do. Let’s say if I’m learning the internet, I want to learn how to navigate the internet with jaws or NVDA. I might look at if I like to go shopping, I can go on like Amazon and, you know, learn how to navigate that website. Maybe you have a favorite hobby, maybe you like to listen to music and you want to research some of your favorite bands. Maybe you are a sports fan. I have no maybe Vikings. Maybe you’re interested in another hobby. And so in order to learn all these dry keyboard commands or procedures to, you know, figure out how to get around or navigate the internet or do my email, whatever, find some fun, find some practical use that you want to do. So maybe you want to learn email, maybe you have some relatives out of state, maybe you have some grandparents, cousins, and you could send them some email messages chatting back and forth with them, whether it’s Zoom or whether it’s whatever it is. If you’re learning how to write a document, it’s never too early to start thinking about your resume. Do you, Question? Go ahead.
Student: I was gonna say, I used a California State Services for the blind, has a very interactive NVDA trainer. I would recommend the Ken because at our school, some of the stuff is blocked just because of how we operate. But if you can use maybe both of that NVDA Coach in that California state services for the blind thing, it gives you, hey, I need you to get to this page so that we can learn. And maybe you’re kind of co-oping two skills into one. It’s very engaging as well. It’s very, very engaging.
Jesse: While we’re on the topic of the internet, that is really one of the most important skills that you can learn, whether you’re blind, low vision, whatever. Because I’m sure even in high school, how many of you use some sort of what they call learning management system? Schoology? D G, l blackboard, any number of these things. So every high school, every college uses these nowadays. And this is where in college you’re going to have your syllabus, which is your schedule of what’s going to happen each day, each week throughout the class. You may have discussion boards that you have to participate in with your fellow classmates. You will have your assignments, if any reading materials that you might have to download, like articles or things, that’s where you’re going to submit your assignments. So if they assign you to write a paper or a quiz, a test, your learning management system is where that is going to be. And what is a learning management system? It’s just a website. So if you know how to navigate a complicated website, that is the cool thing. What I will say, because I know there are some accessibility issues sometimes, and what often happens is, is that the website itself maybe isn’t so bad, but what often happens or what often can happen is the content that gets put into them may not be the most accessible, because your instructors may put articles up there or something. And guess what? How many of you have run into a PDF file that you can’t read? How many people have, you know a way to tackle that problem independently? Do you know some tools that we might use to maybe help you read those PDF files? Use graphics. Does anybody know how you might do that? Some tools. That might let you do that?
Student: I am Preston, I typically with the new Siri, I will pull up Siri on my back and I will say read what’s on my screen and it OCR for me.
Jesse: Yep, that is definitely one way. And you have also jaws has a feature called Picture Smart. It also has a thing called convenient OCR, where you can just basically hit a command like Capslock spacebar, and you say you want OCR a document. You can either OCR what’s on the screen, or you can OCR an entire PDF document. And then from there you could copy and paste that into, say, an empty word document. And now you have a text accessible if you’re on mobile. How many people have heard of a little app called voice Dream Reader or Voice Dream Scanner? I Bala it’s all in hand the demo because that is an app that can also, you can use the little share button on your phone, maybe into voice dream reader and grab the text out of it.
Shane: We do have one question in the back, Lori.
Lori: All right, I’m wondering how many of you know how to type.
Jesse: Typing without looking at the keys.
Student: Oh yeah, I do that.
Lori: That’s kind of like the whole basis of navigating the keyboard and typing up papers for college. So if there are resources, if someone wants to refresh their typing skills?
Jesse: Absolutely. There are several different ways to learn to type. And what I tell people. I can give totally sighted people a hard time. Because whether you can see or not, you’re not supposed to look at the keys. Thank you for that, Laurie. There are, in fact, resources for that. There is a free website from American Printing House for the blind. It is called Typer Online. And you just basically go to this website and there are lessons, there are some drills. So you can do like word or phrase or sentence practice. And when you do those specifically, they will give you kind of a summary of here’s your overall speed, here’s your how many mistakes you made. And then based on that, here’s your overall accuracy and your words per minute. So there’s a lot of typing websites out there. It’s just this one is specifically Designed. So like if you’re low vision or you’re using a screen reader, a lot of those mainstream typing websites, you have to really be able to see pretty well to see them because they’re not screen reader accessible. There are also standalone pieces of software that are available. There is a software version of Talking Typer. They know that there is a few people that mentioned they use an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. There is an app version of Talking Typer. It’s very similar to the website, but there’s also another one that we have in our technology lab and that we’ve also recommended to people called talking typing Teacher.
Again, all of them are very similar to what they do. They’re just different ways of doing it. So someone will work with your screen reader. Some will speak by themselves the talking typing teacher. You don’t want the screen reader running at the same time because it does all the voicing itself. So yeah, that’s a good point. Typing is absolutely critical. Actually, the funny thing is I didn’t even look at my little outline here, but that was literally typing. That was my next kind of bullet point here. But like, so other skills like is internet, biggie. Email? Also biggie. Because you may be emailing classmates, instructors and your disability services staff. Whoever SSB so email including sending or opening attachments. Somebody sends you a word document. Maybe you talk to your instructor and you ask them to email you a copy of your PowerPoint presentation. So instead of having to look at the front of the classroom, you can open up that PowerPoint on your device. So stuff like that. backing up your files. So if you do have your papers, you know, you’re writing your paper and something weird happens and your computer, for whatever reason crashes or does something stupid, you know, did you back up your file as a also a very important skill. Writing professional documents. The farther you get in college instructors will require reports papers to be done in a certain way. You’ll hear these little evil words like APA. I don’t think they use MLA much anymore.
Speaker 4: What do you think.
Student: APA is.
Jesse: Yeah, I think college might use APA more. Okay. Yeah. But like basically putting your sources in. That’s the part. Like I had no problem writing the papers in college. I just hated putting all the sources in. That was never fun. And I mean, you know, stuff like that. Again, accessing graphical information or paper documents. A lot of times in college, you know, your syllabus, your schedule will say one thing and instead the instructor, one class will go, oh, well, I saw this really neat article that I’m going to pass out and I want you guys to read it. And then we’re going to talk about it in five minutes as a group. Okay. Well, again, thinking to your toolkit, what do you have if you got a phone and BlueTooth headset, maybe you snap a picture with Seeing AI or Be My Eyes. Maybe if you’re low vision, you whip out your magnifier app on your phone, or if you have a handheld CCTV or something. Even smart glasses, which we’ll talk about later today. Those are some options for doing those. But things come up all the time, whether it’s work, school life. How do you handle like, oh, well, this isn’t accessible to me. How can I access this information as text, graphics, whatever. Again, you know, you got a student next to you or you got a friend next to you. What does this say or what? Asking for help is not a problem. I mean, John and I know this, we talk with each other. So that’s mostly a summary of what we had for this morning.
Student: How is it when someone is always kind of seen, but how did they make sure that typing is useful?
Jesse: And what I will say is, I mean, whether you have full vision, if you have some vision, you have no vision, you could be a farmer and people would have to still use a computer and they got to keep track of their records. They got an email or they got to search for parts online or something. Typing is going to be a skill that everyone that can benefit anybody, regardless of how well you can see as far as like, I mean, accuracy, is that what you’re kind of getting at? So the accuracy thing, I mean, that’s where if you have your typing skills, you’re not looking at the keyboard, maybe you have magnification up on the screen. So as you’re typing, I don’t have to look down at the keyboard, but I’m looking at the screen as I’m typing and I can see the letters that are coming up on the screen. And oh, I made a typo. For me, I often use a combo because like I said, I’m legally blind or legally sighted. If ever I use a combination of windows magnifier quite a bit, but I also have, depending on what I’m doing, especially if I’m doing a lot of text, a lot of typing, I do use Nvidia every day, and so when I type, I have it set to echo every word because every letter would drive me crazy. Whenever I hit a spacebar, whenever I hit a punctuation, it will read the last word to me. And NVDA has this nice little thing where when I type a word. If I make a typo, it kind of does this little buzzer. And so you know that, oh, I might have made a typo there and then I can double check. Oh well, this is somebody’s actual name. No, I didn’t type that incorrectly or oh yeah, I did make this mistake. That’s a way that I can kind of on the fly. I don’t, I just kind of when I’m typing, I just, I zone out and I just have my screen reader knowing and I type what I need to, and I just let the screen reader give me the feedback if I need to. I can glance up at my screen one more.
Student: Like you said, the fact that, you know, you could ask for your professor’s notes if it’s not a textbook curriculum or whatever the case may be. Now, obviously my teacher is like, now they don’t have to. So what’s a good alternative? Because it’s like, okay, they’re going to get all, you know, defensive about, you know, I can’t get those.
Jesse: That’s a perfectly valid question. I would say the vast majority of instructors, if you approach them the first day of class or before class, if you see them and you explain, hey, I’m totally blind or I’m low vision and the easiest way for me to access this, like, would I be able to have, you know, the PowerPoint presentations? And to me, a lot of them would do that. Like if they say no, you could potentially ask the disability services office and see that could be a reasonable accommodation for you. Instructor might go to work with them or like, okay, I guess I will. And if they really still refuse, I mean, that’s where like just you could have something that could, you know, take a picture of a slide theoretically and try to do it that way. That’s where good typing skills could come in handy. Or having an app like, you know, your Voice Memos app or a digital recorder where you could record the class. When I was in college, I just had my laptop and I was typing my notes and I just, you know, really honed in on listening. And I would just ask the instructor, hey, if there’s something visual on the whiteboard or in a presentation, please also speak that.
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Jeff: Our thanks to Jesse and John for sharing their knowledge and reminding us that students don’t have to figure out technology on their own. Whether you’re a student, parent, or teacher, connecting with your SSB counselor can help start a conversation about technology assessments and training.
Stay with Blind Abilities as we continue our Tools for School series, bringing you more voices, resources, and possibilities for the road ahead.
And thank you to State Services for the Blind for bringing students, families, and educators together for Tools for School.
We’ll continue sharing more conversations, demonstrations, and resources from the event in upcoming episodes.
Follow Blind Abilities wherever you get your podcasts to catch the next installment in our Tools for School series.
I’m Jeff Thompson. Thanks for listening.
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Jeff: Be sure to check out and subscribe to the Spectacle newsletter and learn about all the upcoming events and opportunities, and be sure to check out the numerous podcasts on the news for teens page, and you’ll find the links right in the show notes.
To find out more about all the programs at State Services for the Blind, contact Shane.DeSantis@State.Mn.us
That’s Shane dot d-e-s-a-n-t-i-s at state.mn .us.
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Be sure to contact your State Services for the Blind, your Voc Rehab and find out what they can do for you.
Live. work. Read. Succeed.
[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.