Welcome to the sixty-ninth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
Listen to the sixty-ninth episode of the Access On podcast (Browser).
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Timestamps
We celebrate Apple's 50th birthday with an Access On special. On the show this week:
Introduction to the early era of grass roots Apple accessibility 0:00 Panel discussion about the Apple II era 4:55 Demonstration of the Apple IIE with speech 47:26 Conclusion, reflections on the partnership 1:05:29 Closing and contact info 1:11:43
If you would like to download the Apple IIE emulator with Echo speech for Windows computers, download it from Jayson Smith's website.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live life you want.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the Technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. We celebrate Apple's 50th birthday by looking at the original era of Apple accessibility.
Speaker 3:
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things.
They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's one of the most famous ads in history, Think Different from Apple. They recorded two versions of that, and that was the one that they didn't use, which was narrated by Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs. And it seems appropriate to hear Steve's voice saying those inspiring words on Apple's 50th birthday. And indeed, when I hear those words, for me, it connects Apple's technology with our values at the National Federation of the Blind, an organization that has never been prepared to accept the world as it is.
Apple was founded on April 1st, 1976, and today we're celebrating Apple's 50th birthday by looking back at an often overlooked chapter in technology history, the early adoption of the Apple II by Blind People. The first era of Apple accessibility was not led by Apple itself.
It was led by blind people and our allies, innovators, programmers, educators, and users who took a mainstream personal computer and bent it to our needs using plenty of hackery in the most positive sense of the term. Long before companies talked about inclusive design, blind people were already proving the National Federation of the Blind's core truth. As blind people, we know what's best for us.
And as blind people, we must and will lead the way. When the Apple II appeared in 1977, it was revolutionary for its openness and expandability, but it had no built-in accessibility. What followed in the early '80s was an extraordinary grassroots effort.
Blind technologists and allies created an ecosystem of speech, Braille, and software tools that made the Apple II not just usable, but powerful, at least for its time. Central to that story is Raised Dot Computing founded in 1981 by David Holiday and Caryn Navy. Their flagship product, BRAILLE-EDIT, later BRAILLE-EDIT Express, or Becs for short, turned the Apple II into a serious Braille and print production system.
Paired with devices like the VersaBraille, blind users could read, write, edit, and translate documents independently. Speech access came through hardware like the echo speech synthesizer from street electronics. Hard copy Braille became affordable and personal with innovations like the Cranmer Modified Perkins, which was put together by Tim Cranmer, who was a loved and respected NFB member.
This period from the early to late 1980s was a golden era of experimentation, collaboration, and dreaming big about what could be done with 64K of RAM and a floppy drive with discs that were truly floppy. That era eventually came to an end as Apple shifted its focus to the Macintosh without accessibility.
And as the IBM PC and MS-DOS platform gained momentum with emerging screen readers, blind users migrated. But the legacy of the Apple II era is profound.
It laid the foundation for everything that followed and stands as proof that accessibility innovation has always started with blind people ourselves and those who will work with us. Today, we celebrate that legacy with a panel of people who lived it. Someone who has sat where I am today adjacent to the International Braille and Technology Center is Dave Andrews. David's great to have you on the podcast. Welcome.
Dave Andrews:
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Jonathan Mosen:
And Mike May was also an early adopter. And of course, as Mike does, he was pushing the technology to the Max. Welcome back, Mike.
Mike May:
Good to be here. Thanks.
Jonathan Mosen:
To demonstrate that this technology did actually cross over and was not merely the domain of the geeks, someone who proudly declares herself not to be a geek. Bonnie Mosen is here. She used her Apple II in college. So, welcome, Bonnie.
Bonnie Mosen:
Great to be here.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I am also deeply honored to be joined by Caryn Navy, formerly of Raised Dot Computing. I freely admit to being a little bit starstruck about this because as a teenager in New Zealand, trying to get every ounce of functionality from this fascinating Apple device, I couldn't wait to receive the newsletter on cassette from Raised Dot Computing, half a world away. To me, she and her late husband, David, were and remain legends. Caryn, it's just so good to have you here. Thank you so much for doing this.
Caryn Navy:
Oh, thank you so much for inviting me, Jonathan. I'm delighted to be here.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'd like to start with you if I could. Technology is fundamentally about people, and I find the story of how you and David met and how David became interested in blame this technology, delightful. Can you share that with us?
Caryn Navy:
Sure. When David and I were both freshmen at MIT, I was on my way to class one day, and there was some kind of big structure in the middle of the main lobby where I usually walked.
And somebody came and helped me around it. I didn't know who he was, but a couple of days later, maybe even a week later, he came up to me in the hallway and gave me a note, a note in Braille. And it had his name and his dorm room number and his dorm phone number. So, he figured that I wasn't going to introduce myself to him, so he better introduce himself to me.
And he went to the engineering library and took out a book with information about Braille, and he made himself his own kind of Slaton stylist and wrote that note for me. And I was flabbergasted and we talked for a while and then went to have lunch together and the rest is history.
Jonathan Mosen:
So, you obviously had a common interest in engineering things and computing things. And of course, your perspective was your interest in mathematics. You started talking about the concept of a homework machine, is that correct?
Caryn Navy:
That's right. Yeah, that was a while later. I often had to figure out how to turn in my problem sets to professors. Some subjects, I could use a typewriter, that was fine, but for stuff with math notation, that didn't work so well. And I remember one time I asked David to write down my answers for me. And at the bottom of the paper he wrote, he wrote, "Transcribed by a train monkey."
Jonathan Mosen:
So, when did the Apple II come on the horizon as a potential viable device that technology for blind people could be created with?
Caryn Navy:
So, I think David got his Apple II in 1979. Back at MIT, we were just kind of dreaming about a homework machine, but then in 1979, David got his Apple and he had heard about the VersaBraille and convinced me to get one. And then he got interested in connecting the VersaBraille to the Apple and he wrote to telesensory and some stuff like that.
Jonathan Mosen:
You were breaking new ground with BRAILLE-EDIT, of course, because this really hadn't been done before. So, you were designing user interfaces, concepts. How did you determine what that software needed to do and what it could do?
Caryn Navy:
Yeah, so I wasn't really involved at that point. I was busy trying to be a math professor, and some of the early customers were really influential in that area. Harvey Lauer comes to mind.
There's a story that Harvey Lauer, who was this amazing guy who worked for the VA in the Chicago area, had 12 things he wanted to suggest to David, but he knew that David was really new in the field. So, he wrote a letter with six suggestions, and then soon after that wrote another letter with six suggestions because he didn't want to spring 12 things on David all at once.
Jonathan Mosen:
I remember those early days of BRAILLE-EDIT and the commands. And I think if you sat me down in front of an Apple IIe today and I was running BRAILLE-EDIT, I could still produce a document that's pretty nicely formatted. You were instrumental in creating that structure, which consisted of a series of commands preceded by dollar signs. And it's quite similar when you look at it to later technologies like Markdown or HTML. How did that concept emerge?
Caryn Navy:
That's a good question. I think it was probably motivated by the commands on the VersaBraille. The VersaBraille had dollar sign commands.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. So, that came first. Yeah, that makes sense.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah.
Dave Andrews:
That was my thought, but it was also a system that a blind guy had his or her hands in because it was just a blob of text with dollar sign commands and it didn't matter how it was formatted on the page. It just took it and ran with it.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it's interesting, isn't it, how these days people are embracing Markdown. It's almost like what's old is new again. And you see a lot of people creating web documents, all sorts of things in Markdown because they can read those commands and know exactly how a document's going to be formatted based on them. I will open it up in a second, but one final question before we just get into a general discussion for you, Caryn. If you look back, what do you think Raised Dot Computing got especially right during that Apple II era?
Caryn Navy:
I think David just really paid attention to his customers. For example, I think Harvey Lauer came up with the idea of changing pitch to indicate capitalization. The pitch went up one amount for Word that started with a capital and it went up even higher for a word that was all caps and that is still used today.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. We take it for granted now, but somebody had to think of it first and it goes all the way back to BRAILLE-EDIT, which is remarkable. And when you think of the constrained resources that he was working under, 64K initially, I remember when there was some new Apple device or something that went up to 128 and people thought that was just absolutely amazing. But there were features like the ability to do global replacements and it would click away while it was doing those replacements across files, all sorts of very innovative things, just remarkable what got done.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's talk about the Apple to experience with our panel. And I'm just going to go around and get a little background from everybody on how you used this, what you used it for, maybe some enduring memories. Bonnie, because you're the least geeky of all of us, can I start with you? When did BRAILLE-EDIT and the Apple II come into your life and how did that happen?
Bonnie Mosen:
I think it was probably the early '80s, like around 1983 or '84. And I do remember when I was in high school, I mean, high school, I saw my first Apple machine in elementary school and there was a device that you could put on the screen so that a blind person could potentially read the screen. That
Jonathan Mosen:
Would've been the Opticon, right? With the lens...
Bonnie Mosen:
Yeah, lens attachment, I guess it was. Yeah. I never could get it to work right, but it was a good thought before we had speech. But my first education is I had a computer class in high school, School for the Blind in Tennessee.
Our instructor was Mr. Shank, and we had a class on the Apple every day for an hour, so learned to use it and also spent a lot of time playing the games because that was a good way to get familiar with the system. And it's interesting Caryn mentioned the pitch because I had forgotten about that and I do remember how high it would go, particularly if you had the caps lockdown.
Jonathan Mosen:
You used the external box, right, Bonnie. So, we were talking about the echo to speech synthesizer. It's interesting just to observe, by the way, I've been reading a very good book for those interested in Apple's history called Apple The First 50 Years by David Pogue, and it's just come out.
He made the point that there was quite an argument between Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs when the Apple II was being designed. Steve Jobs was not a fan of things like expansion slots. And he liked it to be clean and fully in the control of the company. And it was a pretty rare argument where Steve Wozniak said, "Look, if you're not going to let me do the expansion slots on this thing, you can find someone else to design it."
So, Steve drops back down, but it really was that expansibility, the ability to open up and put cards in there like the echo that made all this viable. But you had the cricket speech synthesizer, which I'm pretty sure... Did that connect through a serial put like an external box, I think?
Bonnie Mosen:
Yes. It was a little small box. It had one knob on it, if I remember correctly, where you could control the volume. But the thing I remember most was the green light. So, it would sit on top of the disc drive. And when I was in college, my roommate was like, "Can you cover that thing up or unplug it?" Because little green light would be going all night, like a little nightlight.
Jonathan Mosen:
How easy did you find it to use?
Bonnie Mosen:
I felt it was very intuitive. I had a really good assistive technology teacher. Caryn was talking about the VA in Chicago. And my teacher that I had at the rehabilitation center was a gentleman named Marshall Pierce, who actually did a lot of his initial training and computers at the VA in Chicago at Hines. And so, he was very into it and really wanting to explore how a computer works. We took a computer apart. I don't believe it was the Apple, I believe it was something else we took apart, just to see how it's internal learning about the... Oh gosh, what are the little chips? The chips worked and what you did with them.
So, kind of getting a little engineering degree there or lesson to really learn how it worked because he felt that you really needed to know that it wasn't just this magic thing that you turned on that it worked, that it had a lot of components that worked together to produce what you were doing and not to be afraid of it.
I'm still always afraid I'm going to do something wrong, but he's like, "You really can't hurt the thing." But I found it pretty easy. I think the commands on it, using the dollar signs, using that sort of thing was very intuitive for me. I do have a funny story about the dollar signs.
I was later in the early '90s when I had or late '80s when I had the Braille 'n Speak, would do my assignments or sometimes send them to the Apple. And for whatever reason, I don't know if it didn't translate over correctly or I didn't look at it and format it, typical lazy college student, but I printed it out to give to my English professor and he goes, "I just want to know what does Dollar Dollar E mean?"
Jonathan Mosen:
All right, Mike, tell me about your introduction to the airport.
Mike May:
Yeah, I think the Apple and the VersaBraille coinciding with my professional career. I worked first for the CIA as I finished graduate school in '78, '79 with a big old Triformations embosser, and that's how I got all of my information. And then I went to work for the Bank of California and was using the VersaBraille and had my first email program on something called Tymnet. And then in that period of time, I went to work for a defense contractor and that's where the VersaBraille had really become instrumental and then the Apple being integrated with that and getting introduced to Raised Dot Computing.
I was customer number 12 and I too remember the list for David that I was really proud of myself if I could send in 10 things and five of them got implemented. And that was really key to how that evolved. It was driven by blind people and those kind of suggestions and his ability to sort through what to add, what not to add, and then providing that wonderful Raised Dot Computing newsletter, that cassette like you, I cherished that.
And when anybody would ask me, "How do you learn about all this stuff in the blindest world?" It was through that newsletter. It wasn't just about his products, it was about everything that was out there and it was such a consolidated resource of technologies.
And I really think of this whole period as being key to my launching my career and after the defense contractor, then it was my startup company, Finial Technology, and it was always just milking everything you could get out of what now would be perceived as something that was clued together, but it felt so powerful to be able to be competitive in a mainstream corporate world with my colleagues and producing documents, reading documents and so forth.
Jonathan Mosen:
It was so collegial. I mean, the Raised Dot Computing newsletter, in a way, it was a sort of a misnomer because sure you got lots about what was new in BRAILLE-EDIT and tips and tricks, but you also got a lot of other information about people doing other things with the Apple and where you could get them from. You could send away for a disk or phone a number for a disk and even products that effectively competed with BRAILLE-EDIT, they would feature them objectively in those newsletters. It was a very different collegiate environment.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah.
Mike May:
Yeah. Still have the DECtalk external synthesizer in my archives and even the recording of somebody used to compose DECtalk choral pieces and I've got a you've got mail file from a DECtalk.
Caryn Navy:
That just reminded me of the play that David wrote between the voices of the DECtalk about who was going to get to read the newsletter. Does anybody remember that?
Bonnie Mosen:
I think actually I do. I just remember when you mentioned that.
Dave Andrews:
Vaguely.
Bonnie Mosen:
Vaguely.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah. That was amazing.
Jonathan Mosen:
And Dave, how did you get into all this?
Dave Andrews:
I got into this. I was working for the New Jersey Library for the Blind in 1982, '83, and we had an Apple IIe with a echo and they used to let me take it home on the weekend.
Jonathan Mosen:
How on earth did you log at home, Dave?
Dave Andrews:
That's what I'm wondering. You could buy a carrying case for it, but it was huge. Yeah. But I live relatively near work. It was like a 10-minute walk. I used to go home for lunch sometimes. So, I would take it home the weekends and I tried learning basic and decided to go into management instead or whatever, but I experimented with it and then I got a VersaBraille and the VersaBraille and BRAILLE-EDIT was a very powerful thing.
And people have talked about community and that's all true. And I may actually have the RDC cassettes in my basement somewhere, but there was community and we were all discovering together because there really, in relative terms, there weren't that many of us.
Jonathan Mosen:
No.
Dave Andrews:
So, I got the verse of Braille. And then one of the things about the technology then, I felt closer to what I was writing or what I was doing than I maybe do now because now we have the graphical user interface in between and all that. And I felt really close to it.
In fact, I saw once somebody, Gayle Yarnall had interfaced a VersaBraille with a Kurzweil reading machine and you could scan a book and then it would pop out in Braille. And I mean, that's really what got me going in technology. That was just such a powerful thing. But then I got a job in Chicago running the radio reading service there.
And those of you who know, I had to write grants among other things and Raised at the time a quarter of a million dollars a year, which was a lot of money. So, I was filling a VersaBraille tape every week and a half, and that's a lot of writing, but you could only do it with the computer. So, that was my start.
Jonathan Mosen:
Caryn, tell us about the VersaBraille. For those who haven't used one, I actually got to see one for the first time in decades. There was one sitting there at Louis Braille's house just out of Paris-
Caryn Navy:
Oh my God.
Jonathan Mosen:
... when I went there and I was really surprised to find the VersaBraille there. It was bigger and clunkier than I remember it being. Give people a picture if you would about what the VersaBraille was like. What did it do and how did it work?
Caryn Navy:
Yeah. Okay. So, I got my VersaBraille in 1980, and it was David who convinced me to get it because he was working for a place that kind of had a database of technology for people with disabilities, and he learned about the VersaBraille and he convinced me to get it. At the time, I was still a graduate student and I used it to write my thesis. It was fairly big and you put a tape inside and it had a Braille keyboard and Braille was somehow encoded on the tape.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, this is a standard cassette tape.
Caryn Navy:
Yes. It had to be a fairly high quality tape, a Maxell tape. And if you put that tape inside a tape recorder, you would hear a lot of beeps and boops.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. But it could also play standard cassettes, which I found out. They had these different overlays for it that you could load in like the audio overlay. I think if we wanted to use BRAILLE-EDIT, we had to load the terminal overlay. Is that what it was called?
Caryn Navy:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. That allowed it to communicate through the serial port.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. I think my one was connected to slot three. So, if I wanted to use the VersaBraille, I had to type PR hash three return and then IN hash three return, and then I could use the VersaBraille for input and output. Unfortunately for me, I was about to take one to class. They were using me as an experiment since I seemed to be thriving with it.
And the teacher walked out the room, so I loaded the audio overlay and played the latest album that I was really into. And the teacher came back in and wanted to confiscate the VersaBraille. I said, "You can't confiscate this VersaBraille. It's worth thousands of dollars."
Could you Braille and contracted Braille into BRAILLE-EDIT? I'm just trying to remember if you could do that or not.
Caryn Navy:
Yes. Yes, you could. After a little while, David wrote a back translator to translate from Braille into print.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's right. Yeah.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's amazing.
Dave Andrews:
The thing he used to like to show was to take war and peace and translate it into Braille and how quick it was.
Caryn Navy:
Right, right. Yeah.
Bonnie Mosen:
How many tapes did that take up? I wonder why.
Dave Andrews:
It was pretty quick. And one of the things the BRAILLE-EDIT and Becs did that not everybody would appreciate is sighted transcribers loved it and it was a really effective tool for them and it really got them in the computer age.
Caryn Navy:
I remember there was even a variant of BRAILLE-EDIT called Betty, and then that became Transcribecs in the Becs era that had special commands for transcribers to use to do formatting, more complex or kind of simpler than the dollar commands.
Jonathan Mosen:
We will hear soon what this sounded like in another section of this podcast, so people can get an appreciation of just how bad the speech was, I guess, but we didn't care at the time. I mean, I never really remembered to how it sounded at the time. But one thing I do remember is the first Apple IIe I had just had a single floppy drive and you could add floppy drives, I think, but initially it just had one five and a quarter inch floppy disk. And I remember that BRAILLE-EDIT was written in such a way that it could accommodate kids like me that only had one drive.
But what it would mean is that you would load something from the BRAILLE-EDIT software by inserting your floppy disk in there and it would wear and carry on like the marvelous toy. And eventually you'd get whatever it is you were seeking, the editor or whatever, but then it would prompt you to insert your data disk because you had to store your file somewhere.
So, you'd have to take out the program disk and insert the data disk. And those disks were actually double-sided. So, it would be possible to write on opposite sides of the disc by turning it over like a cassette tape.
Dave Andrews:
You could also buy a dual disk that had two side by side in one case and you would put it on top of the Apple IIe and it fit. And then on top of it, the monitor would go and it fit two and it all went together in one nice neat.
Bonnie Mosen:
I used the Apple IIe in high school, but then when I went to college, I had an Apple IIc, which was a lot smaller than the E.
Mike May:
And wasn't there a five and a half dish and then a three and a quarter?
Bonnie Mosen:
I think so. Yes. Yeah.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah.
Mike May:
And what happened? I don't remember an Apple one.
Bonnie Mosen:
Yeah, I was wondering what happened to the Apple one.
Dave Andrews:
There was one, but not very many were made and I don't think there was any accessibility.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can read about that in the book that I was referencing earlier about the original Apple one. Yes. Interesting. And there was also an Apple three that didn't really do very well and they called that. I remember one thing so clearly from a Raised Dot Computing newsletter, which was when the Apple IIGS came out and somebody had done this thing for the Raised Dot Computing newsletter where it was playing this really funky music and it kind of had these pseudo drum beats and things, and I just could not believe that a computer could produce that. And I was so excited about that. We'll continue our panel discussion shortly after this word from one of our sponsors.
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Dave Andrews:
Larry Skutchan, who was later with APH, did software and was very good and had a word processor. I think it was called ProWORDS. And Peter Shalley, who passed away quite a few years ago, had a Word processor. And there were other things around. There were games and stuff. I wasn't a big gamer, but...
Jonathan Mosen:
Peter was, I think, a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist, wasn't he? And then eventually, he got into computing in a big way and he developed a company called Shrink Wrapped Computers, which given his professional background was such a cool name for the Shrink Wrapped Computers. And Peter was around for a long time in the computer business. He was a great guy.
Dave Andrews:
There were some databases and other things around too.
Mike May:
Yeah. I was trying to remember a customer management software that was really instrumental to my job since I was a lot on the sales side. It might've just been called contact. And I was also thinking of what Ron Morford had done some stuff, maybe just hardware.
Jonathan Mosen:
Bonnie, it sounds like you and I as probably the youngest in this group will have to talk about all the games that we played and we probably should have been doing other things like homework and stuff like that. So, do you want to talk about some of your favorite games and what they did?
Bonnie Mosen:
Yeah. There's one thing that I remember that we had in high school on the computer called, I think it was called Turtle, and it was like paint. And you could say LT to make... And it would draw. It was a drawing program. So, it was more for people with sight and low vision. But I do remember several of the games, of course, Lunar Lander was being a space nerd. That was my favorite one.
Jonathan Mosen:
What did you have to do?
Bonnie Mosen:
You had to land on the moon and you could crash. I crashed several times. But I would tell you how many feet you were from the moon, 50 feet, and you would control the lunar lander down to land on the moon.
Dave Andrews:
And how much fuel you had, you could run that...
Bonnie Mosen:
And, yep, how much fuel you had. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was Lemonade Stand, which Jonathan was playing the other day.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Lemonade Stand I think was a great game because it taught you math, it taught you economics. It taught you supply and demand because you really learned to take note of the weather report at the beginning of each day in terms of how much lemonade to manufacture. It was a very cool game.
Bonnie Mosen:
I was joking with Jonathan the other day. I wonder if they developed it to train future Randolph Shepherd vendors. I think it was just a fun game, but I also had a couple of things. When I was in college, there was a calculator that you could... It was a disc you could put into the Apple IIc and it would turn the keyboard into a calculator so you could do math problems. And there was another one that would turn it into a musical keyboard.
Jonathan Mosen:
I should also mention that as the self-proclaimed world-blind monopoly champion, Larry Skutchan and others, I think, worked on a fantastic version of Monopoly that took up quite a bit of space and it was menu-driven and it did adhere pretty strictly to the actual monopoly rules.
And I was playing that the other day as well, all in the name of research for this episode. I hope you know. It really does stand up pretty well in this day and age. So, there were a lot of those utilities and things. How did we share those things back then? Because obviously, this predates the internet by a long way, and it also really predates bulletin boards as far as I can recall.
I mean, certainly in the early 1980s, we weren't using FidoNet or bulletin boards really.
Dave Andrews:
Well, by the mid 1980s, the CompuServe had a disabilities forum. And there was some exchange there, and I was in charge of the blindness section and a couple other sections. So, I guess I came to this early on. So, that was part of it. But a lot of it was the news letters that we've talked about RDC and then there was Joe Giovanni and then there was ITRC.
I can't remember exactly. Vito Prasha, Doug Wakefield later on, all these newsletters that had information that helped us all. And then back in the day, closing the gap conference here in the Twin Cities was big in blindness. It isn't anymore. It's all K-12, but that's where a lot of people came together.
Mike May:
Right. It was IRTI was that newsletter.
Dave Andrews:
IRTI. That's it.
Caryn Navy:
All right, yeah.
Bonnie Mosen:
Yeah, I remember that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. Technical innovations bulletin. And I always remember listening to that. And we were quite lucky in the sense that we got all these things in New Zealand. But I do remember Vito saying the phone number for orders only. And it would be very emphatic that the phone 800 number was only for orders and you'd better not call it for anything else because he was paying the bill.
Bonnie Mosen:
It's funny because there's these little pieces that are coming back of things I remember. I can see the hardware in my head completely. I remember the hardware. Even today, the Apple hardware back then was gorgeous. And I still remember what the computer looked like. Now, what I did with the computer, with the commands, don't completely remember.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it really took off, right, Caryn, because even though I guess you didn't perceive that this would be a career for you, eventually Raised Dot Computing was just all consuming. It really developed this momentum.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah. So, as I said, I wasn't really involved in the early years. From '81 through '84, I was working at Bucknell University, and then we moved back to Madison, Wisconsin, where I had gone to grad school, and that's when I joined the company. But of course, I was somewhat involved even before because Ray Stott was taking over our house.
Jonathan Mosen:
When did this era start to wind up? When did the migration start to IBM PCs and people thinking that those pastures were greener?
Caryn Navy:
I would say the late 80s. I remember Barry Schoyer came to visit us at Raised Dot Computing to tell us that we really needed to do something to switch to the PC. We hired a guy named Lee Kaminski who wrote the first edition of Hot Dots, kind of using the source code for Becs.
Jonathan Mosen:
Did you have any contact at all with Apple during this period? Were they interested in the fact that this was opening up this new era of accessibility for blind people?
Caryn Navy:
Yeah. Well, I know David talked about how he went to a conference where Apple was presenting and Steve Jobs was there and David went up to the booth where Steve Jobs was, and he introduced himself. He said, "I'm David Holiday." And Steve Jobs said, "Oh, you're the VersaBraille guy." Wow. Yeah. David got them to send the manuals for various Apple things in machine-readable form so he could put them out in Braille.
Jonathan Mosen:
What was the reaction like to the Macintosh? Because obviously when that came out in 1984, that was a significant new era for Apple. And at that time, we may not have thought that access to a graphical user interface for a blind person was even possible.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah, we didn't really have much to do with it.
Mike May:
Boy, I milked the 2E as long as I could into the early '90s. My first foray into accessible technology from a business standpoint was 1991 in Ashland, Oregon with Bill Ballou. And we formed a company called Customized Computer Systems. And he was putting together PCs, but I was using the Apple IIe and the VersaBraille because that's how I was productive. I hung onto that, I think, as long as I possibly could.
Dave Andrews:
There are parts of me that still miss it. There was a sense of excitement that we don't have anymore.
Bonnie Mosen:
Yeah, yeah. I agree. It was amazing being able to type and hear it, read back to you and not have to rely on a typewriter and actually have it. And then it was kind of exciting.
Caryn Navy:
It was. Yeah.
Bonnie Mosen:
And it's nice now that people can use Apple for the past several years, be able to have Apple computers again if they want them. They choose to use that environment.
Jonathan Mosen:
I think it was interesting for those of us who got into Mac and iPhone in the 2000s era, because in a way it was kind of like coming home, wasn't it? After that long, long break. And finally, many of us cut our teeth on Apple and then we were picking up Apple products again for the first time in decades.
Mike May:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that there have been other incremental advancements that are as dramatic as going from reading books and doing things on a Perkins at a cassette player. I mean, having compressed speech from... I mean, that was a big thing in the '70s. And then what the Apple IIE and the VersaBraille brought along was so incrementally advanced compared to those days.
Jonathan Mosen:
See, it's hard for people, I think, who weren't living through that period to understand that significance because all of us, I'm sure, will remember the period where we were effectively doing double the work of a non-blind person because if you were working on an essay, typically you would brail out that essay on a Perkins and then you would use that copy and type it in on a typewriter and hand in your work. This was just on a manual typewriter and you couldn't proof your work because you couldn't read the output.
And of course, the worst case scenario was when you spent all this time typing the jolly thing up and you handed it in and you found that the ribbon had run out and you didn't even know. So, you had typed...
Bonnie Mosen:
Or you hadn't put paper in the typewriter.
Dave Andrews:
When you had it up, you would also edit. So, you no longer had an accurate version of what you wrote because you couldn't resist that last chance to edit.
Bonnie Mosen:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I mean, you had to be perfect. You had to be just...
Jonathan Mosen:
So, suddenly this technology comes along and you can write something down and read it back. And of course, Braille had always given us that ability to write something down and read it back. But finally, we were manipulating text. We could delete whole chunks of it. We could move whole chunks of it around. That was a revolution at the time. It was just astounding.
Caryn Navy:
Oh yep, indeed. I was just thinking about the anniversary of Apple being on April 1st, and that was reminding me of this feature we had in the Raised Dot Computing newsletter on April 1st every year for the catalog of sensory overload incorporated. It had all kinds of interesting gadgets for the blind.
Jonathan Mosen:
We can look these up, of course, because the newsletters are available still, but are there any gadgets that you can recall?
Caryn Navy:
Yeah, I was just reading through it this morning, you from New Zealand, Jonathan. There was one that made fun of the Maout sensor. It was called the Now What Sensor. When you're at the point of saying, "Now what," it would just sound this alarm.
Jonathan Mosen:
Where can people find those newsletters, Caryn? Because it's wonderful for me. I get a lot of inquiries, I guess, because I've been around so long now, about technology history and that sort of stuff. And it really encourages me to see young people interested in understanding where we've come from. So, it's fantastic that you've preserved this by making the Raised Dot Computing archive available.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah. I know it's on the website, ducksburysystems.org, which is kind of a sister website to duxburysystems.com, but I think you can just Google Raised Dot Computing newsletter.
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's just such a treasure trove of technology history there.
Caryn Navy:
Absolutely. I think the thing that
Bonnie Mosen:
I regret most is not keeping my Apple IIc. It was around for years. I went on to the PC, but then I found out recently that if you have some of these old computers, they're worth a lot of money now.
Jonathan Mosen:
I tell you that all the time when you get me to throw things out, Bonnie.
Bonnie Mosen:
But I wish I knew since some landfill somewhere, I guess, but I kind of wish I'd kept it now.
Jonathan Mosen:
You used your Apple II for a long time, Bonnie, right? You actually went directly from Apple II to Windows.
Bonnie Mosen:
I used my Apple IIc all through grad school. And when Windows first came out, when the first version of Jaws for Windows came out, that's when I started learning it because in my first job, they were using Windows. And then I bought my first PC computer in '97.
Jonathan Mosen:
So, you were using the Apple all the way through to '97?
Bonnie Mosen:
Yep.
Caryn Navy:
Wow.
Jonathan Mosen:
Man, that's really impressive. So, it did well for you.
Bonnie Mosen:
It did really well for me. I mean, I was limited because I couldn't get on the bulletin boards, although someone thought that I could with the Braille 'n Speak, could get on some bulletin, which I didn't, but I didn't have that pleasure, which was maybe a good thing.
Dave Andrews:
You could have with the Apple, but it took some horsing around.
Bonnie Mosen:
Oh, did it?
Mike May:
I feel so lucky to contrast the TSI VersaBraille in the 70s and 50 years later next to it is the APH Monarch.
Jonathan Mosen:
How much did the VersaBraille cost initially?
Bonnie Mosen:
I was just thinking that.
Dave Andrews:
I think it was about 7,000.
Bonnie Mosen:
It was expensive.
Mike May:
I thought it was 7,200.
Jonathan Mosen:
And that's in 1979 dollars, right? So, when you consider how far we've come, that would be probably even a bit more expensive than a monarch is today. And yet that gives you that multi-line graphical experience. I mean, I know that we've got issues still to solve, but wow, we have come a long way and sometimes it just-
Bonnie Mosen:
We've come a long way.
Jonathan Mosen:
... is nice to remember that.
Dave Andrews:
I remember the first time I dropped my VersaBraille and almost died.
Bonnie Mosen:
Did it survive?
Dave Andrews:
But it still worked.
Jonathan Mosen:
It did? Okay. Well, folks, thank you so much for sharing this. We obviously wish Apple a happy 50th birthday, and it's just fun. It is such a great thing to be able to chat with you, Caryn, especially. And thank you for the contribution that you and David made because you were trailblazers. And a lot of the things that we still use, some of those concepts are inherited from all those years ago. So, I really appreciate that.
Caryn Navy:
Yeah. Well, I feel like I was along for the ride, but David was the driving force.
Jonathan Mosen:
What a fun walk down memory lane that was for me. And I hope that if you lived through that period, it brought back memories for you. And if you didn't experience it, you got some sort of clue about what it was like. But we are not done yet because thanks to the marvels of technology, we are going to fire up an Apple II and play a game or two. That's next on Access On.
Speaker 7:
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The real problem is not knowing what you have. That is why Pneuma Solutions is offering a free archive readiness assessment. We analyze your backlog, create a Title II triage plan, and remediate a representative thousand-page sample from your own documents so you can see real results on real files.
Email [email protected]. That's [email protected] with the subject line archive readiness assessment to get started.
Speaker 8:
Do you want to leave a legacy for the next generation? Join the National Federation of the Blind Legacy Society, the Dream Makers Circle. Joining is easy. You can give a portion of a bank or investment account by simply filling out a payable on death form at your bank and indicating the NFB should receive a percentage or a fixed amount upon your passing.
Consider designating the NFB as a partial beneficiary of your life insurance, retirement, or in a trust or will. For more information, call Patty Chang at extension 2422 or email PChang, [email protected].
Jonathan Mosen:
You're with Access On from the National Federation of the Blind, celebrating Apple's 50th birthday. What did it actually sound like when we were using these Apple II computers back in the 1980s? I'm about to show you it will be a new experience for most and we'll bring back memories for some.
And I do want to acknowledge that this part of the episode would not have been possible without the considerable help of Jason Smith. So, thank you, Jason, for all that you've done to make this possible. I really appreciate it. Jason has helped put together an Apple II emulator, and it is running on my Windows PC now, and we're going to put a couple of discs in the virtual drive and show you a few things.
I could do this for hours, and if you are interested in this, I will provide a link in the show notes to an emulator that you can download and put on your PC. So, if you were around during that era, you will be able to see how much you remember, and if you weren't, well, you'll pick it up, I'm sure.
So, we're going to play a couple of games, first of all, and I have a disc in the drive, and I'm going to boot this Apple II computer up virtually now. So, let's do that. I've started the process and it will take a wee while we should get a beep shortly from the Apple.
I'm not going to edit this because it's important that you hear... There we go. How long things took? There's the drive. Takes a wide load off this floppy disk. It will eventually come up.
Speaker 9:
Do you want slow speech?
Jonathan Mosen:
To have a bit of mercy on you, I will say yes, I want slow speech. That is the echo speech synthesizer from street electronics, and I will choose yes for the slow speech.
Speaker 9:
Yes, okay. Speech is set at the slow rate. This is a disk of games and programs in DOS 3.3. Do you want notes about using them? Y or N
Jonathan Mosen:
Just to clarify, when it says DOS, many people will be thinking, "Hang on, I thought DOS ran on PCs." Well, this is the Apple Disc operating system. The full name of the DOS that runs on PCs was MS-DOS. So, this is Apple's disc operating system, and I won't go through the instructions because I do actually remember how to do this. It's amazing how much comes flooding back when you're sitting in front of one of these things, so I'll press N.
Speaker 9:
Ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now we're at the ready prompt. So, when I press return, as it was called back then, and it still is actually on Max.
Speaker 9:
Ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're at the ready prompt. So, how do we find out what's on this disc? Well, we type the word catalog. And I think as a teenager growing up in New Zealand, this was the first time that I really became conscious that Americans spell some words differently from the rest of the English-speaking world, catalog being one of them. So, I'm going to type in catalog the American way.
Speaker 9:
C-A-T-A-L-O-G.
Jonathan Mosen:
You have to be careful not to out type this thing because if you do, it'll start missing character. So, I'll press enter or return actually.
Speaker 9:
Disc low 254,8006 Hello, 3004 text talker, 3048 text talker, 3022 M catcher, 8013 lopes, 8017...,8023..., 8045...,8054 financial tech, 8028..., 8023..., 8071...,8003 Talking...writer, 8002..., 8002 type letters, 8026..., 8027 educational names
Jonathan Mosen:
And I think if I press the space bar, there may be more files on this disc. So, it shows you 18 files at a time. And if you want to see the next lot, you press the space bar. And when we're done, I'll explain what we are hearing here.
Speaker 9:
8029 Life..., 8008 your pick and speak ready
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we're back at the ready prompt. There were a few things of interest that we used to pay heed to when we issued the catalog command. One was the letter at the beginning of each listing in the catalog. If it started with an A, then you could just run that.
That meant that it was an Apple basic, so you could type run a space followed by the name of the file. And as you can hear, that file name could be quite lengthy, so that was a significant difference between this and MS-DOS. Sometimes, you'd find a file with a B before it, and that meant that it was a binary file, so you needed to type B run to run that file.
And at other times, you'd have an I before the file. That meant that the file was an Integer BASIC, a different form of basic from Apple basics.
So, if you wanted to run those files, you would need to run Integer BASIC first, and the Integer BASIC was a binary file. So, you'd have to type B run Integer to get that form of basic. Confused? Well, it made sense to us at the time and we got by with it. All right, so we have quite a few games on this disc that's in the first floppy drive. Just make sure we sit at the ready prompt.
Speaker 9:
Ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
Here we go. And I'm going to play Lemonade Stand first because I think this is such a cool game, pretty advanced for its time. So, I'm going to type run.
Speaker 9:
R-U-N.
Jonathan Mosen:
And then Lemonade.
Speaker 9:
L-E-M-O-N-A-D-E.
Jonathan Mosen:
Stand.
Speaker 9:
S-T-A-N-D.
Jonathan Mosen:
We press return and eventually it will come up after the floppy drive does its thing.
Speaker 9:
Lemonade Stand right, 1979 Palm computer inc. By permission on Mac by Palm computer inc. Modified for use by the law library by Job sheets and 2 API and...Welcome to Lemonsville California, in this county you are in charge of running your own lemonade stand.
You can compete with as many other people as you wish but how much profit you make is up to you. .... will not affect your business . If you make the most money, you are the winner. Are you starting a new game, yes or no? Type your answer...
Jonathan Mosen
If I type Y and press return, that should be enough.
Speaker 9:
How many people will be playing?
Jonathan Mosen:
This is a game where one person can play, so I'll type the number one and then press return.
Speaker 9:
To manage your lemonade stand, you will need to make... 1. How many glasses of lemonade do you wish to make? 2. How many advertising signs to make? The signage post is 15 cents each. 3. What price to charge each glass you make. Each glass will cost 2 cents to make, this may change in the future. Your expenses are the cost of the lemonade and the cost of the signs. Your profits are the difference the income from sales and your expenses.
The sales come from how many of glasses you sell each day and the number of advertising signs you use. Keep track of your assets and you can spend more money when you have. Press space to prompt. This months weather report, sunny on day one, the cost of lemonade is 0.02 cents, lemonade stand 1 asset 2.00 dollars. How many glasses of lemonade to you wish to make?
Jonathan Mosen:
It's a sunny day, and that means that lemonade consumption is likely to be high. So, I want to make a decent number of glasses, I think. Since I only have 2 dollars at this point, let's start with 75 glasses.
Speaker 9:
Seven, Five. How many advertising signs, 1-5 cents each, do you want to make?
Jonathan Mosen:
And we'll go for three advertising signs.
Speaker 9:
Three. What price and cents do you wish to charge for lemonade?
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, that's the question. So, how about we start at 10 cents? That's a good bit of margin there.
Speaker 9:
1-0 would you like to change.
Jonathan Mosen:
I don't think so. And we'll press return.
Speaker 9:
Dollar sign, dollar sign Lemonsville daily financial report dollar sign dollar sign. Day one 5-3 glasses sold Dollar sign .10 per glass income, Dollar sign 5.30 75 glasses made...profit Dollar sign 3.35 Assets Dollar sign 5.35, press space to prompt..
Jonathan Mosen:
Yay capitalism. There you go. We made a decent profit there on day one and you get the idea. We can keep playing this. You can play this for a very long time and we used to save the game and you could come back to the game and I would. I would play this for days and days, building up my lemonade stand business. Thanks to the marbles of digital editing. I'm back at the prompt here.
Speaker 9:
Ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'm just going to show one more game before we move on to, as Steve Jobs might say one more thing. So, let's try this.
Speaker 9:
Welcome to the Appleseed casino, How much money do you have to lose?
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh I don’t know,
Speaker 9:
Five, zero, zero, Please enter your name. J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N.
Jonathan Mosen:
Everything's an upper case with the Apple here.
Speaker 9:
How many decks will you like?
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, should we have three decks? Why not?
Speaker 9:
Three. Shuffling. You have Five, zero, zero Jonathan, How much is your wager?
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's bet it all.
Speaker 9:
Five, zero, zero. First round the dealers first card is the down card, Jonathan’s first card is the three of hearts
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh Dear.
Speaker 9:
Second round dealer’s card is the Queen of diamonds, Jonathan’s second card is the eight of diamonds
Jonathan Mosen:
Wow.
Speaker 9:
The dealer’s face up card is the Queen of diamonds, Jonathan, your cards are the three and eight of diamonds, would you like another card:
Jonathan Mosen:
I most certainly would. I'm hoping to get a 10 of some kind.
Speaker 9:
Two spades, would you like another card Jonathan?
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, that puts me in a very unfortunate position, but I'll have to try.
Speaker 9:
Two clubs, would you like another card Jonathan?
Jonathan Mosen:
I think so.
Speaker 9:
Four spades. Would you like another card Jonathan?
Jonathan Mosen:
No, it's too risky.
Speaker 9:
You have won. Would you like to play a game?
Jonathan Mosen:
I won't, but at least I didn't take the shirt off my back, so I'll call that a win at the Appleseed Casino. So, that's the Blackjack game and there are a bunch of games like this on this particular disc, but we have some other discs as well. And I want to show you one that I loved 40 odd years ago, and this is a music disc. So, we're going to load this disc now. And in the interest of time, I've done that.
Speaker 9:
Ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're at the ready prompt. I'll give you an example first of what the Apple II usually sounded like playing music. So, I've got a binary file here. I'll type B-R-U-N.
Speaker 9:
B-R-U-N.
Jonathan Mosen:
And then William Tell.
Speaker 9:
W-I-L-L-I-A-M T-E-L-L.
Jonathan Mosen:
We'll press return.
Speaker 9:
Ready.
Jonathan Mosen:
Very good. Now we're going to run Integer BASIC because I remember this program so well, and it's so cool to hear it again. So, many decades on. So, we'll type B run.
Speaker 9:
B-R-U-N.
Jonathan Mosen:
And then Integer.
Speaker 9:
I-N-T-E-G-E-R.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we're in the Integer BASIC application and so instead of the standard ready prompt, we know we're in Integer BASIC because when we press return now, we have a greater than prompt as opposed to the ready prompt. Now that Integer BASIC is loaded, I can run this application, or we didn't call them that then. I can run this program called Four Voices.
Speaker 9:
R-U-N F-O-U-R V-O-I-C-E-S. For voice music, ... three deck the halls, four dance of the Reed Flutes, five Lewis on the downbeat, which song would you like to hear?
Jonathan Mosen:
I think we'll do Dance of the Reed Flutes, which is from Tchaikovsky's the Nutcracker. So, I'm going to press four and press return. And you know, we just thought this was so incredible.
Speaker 9:
For output to speaker, press S.
Jonathan Mosen:
I don't know what would happen if I tried to output it to a cassette at this point, so I'll press the letter S for speaker.
Speaker 9:
S. [music plays]
Jonathan Mosen:
And return. It does the whole thing. That's the Dance of the Read Flutes from The Nutcracker using a program called Four Voices Written in Integer BASIC for the Apple II. Sometimes, research for these episodes is just too much fun.
We've chosen to focus on the early days of Apple accessibility that was driven by blind people and our allies and the special for Apple's 50th anniversary, because it's a story that we must preserve and also because there are lessons from that history. But let me close by talking about the modern Apple accessibility era.
When we think about Apple's 50th birthday, it'd be easy to simply stand back and applaud, and we absolutely should applaud. Apple has earned it, but we, and for that matter, Apple must tell the whole story because part of the story of Apple's accessibility legacy is our story, the organized blind movement story.
In June 2003, a company called Alva discontinued outspoken, the only screen reader that existed for the Macintosh, not the best one, the only one. And overnight, the Mac was a closed door to blind people. At almost the same moment, the state of Maine launched an ambitious education program, placing Apple laptops in the hands of seventh and eighth graders in the state.
Blind students watched their sighted classmates get the coolest computers in the world from which they got nothing. It was blind people who advocated, contacted legislators. We made it unmistakably clear to both the state of Maine and to Apple that buying an accessible technology for public schools was not acceptable. Apple heard us.
Apple promised us they were working on something. Most of us, frankly, were justifiably skeptical, but then in April 2005, Mac OS X Tiger shipped with voiceover already inside it at no extra charge for every Mac on earth, the first time in history that a full screen reader was built into an operating system from day one, and we weren't done.
In 2007, Apple unveiled the iPhone, a single sheet of glass, no physical keyboard, no tactile markers. The blind community's reaction was, to put it mildly, not enthusiastic. For two years, the iPhone was a beautiful, powerful, completely inaccessible object, but then something important happened in the academic world.
Researchers at the University of Washington, working directly with blind participants, developed a touch-based screen reader called Slide Rule. Their breakthrough insight was elegantly simple. Let a finger explore the screen and hear what it touches without activating anything. Then use a separate gesture, a double tap to actually do the thing.
An Apple engineer later wrote to those researchers advisor confirming that Apple definitely read through the existing literature before starting. Blind people were in that room.
Blind people's experiences shaped that research. Blind people cracked the code. Meanwhile, as Apple rolled out iTunes you to universities across the country, those universities found themselves subject to federal accessibility law. The NFB of Massachusetts didn't simply file a complaint and hope for the best. We sent a demand letter. We pressured universities to refuse to adopt iTunes you until it was accessible. The Massachusetts Attorney General opened an investigation.
In September 2008, Apple signed a binding voluntary agreement committing to making iTunes and iTunes you fully accessible. Nine months later in June 2009, Phil Schiller spent 36 seconds at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference introducing voiceover for the iPhone 3GS.
Within a year, the National Federation of the Blind presented Apple with a Dr. Jacob Bolotin award for doing what had been called impossible, making a flat sheet of glass accessible to blind people at the same price sighted people paid right out of the box. None of this diminishes Apple's engineers. They are extraordinary.
The people who built voiceover for Mac, who found a way to make a touchscreen sing for a blind person who keeps shipping accessibility features year after year. Many of them, as motivated by personal conviction, as by external pressure, those people deserve enormous credit. And we have given it.
We always will. But for those who didn't live through this period or weren't paying attention, it would be inaccurate to think that Apple has gotten to this point out of the goodness of its heart. We as blind people must proudly tell the story of the role we have played in bringing all of this about.
Apple and the organized blind movement built this world together, sometimes arm and arm, and sometimes when Apple needed to be reminded that we were there. And that's not in gratitude. That's partnership of the honest kind. Partnership isn't one party doing favors for another.
Partnership is two entities who need each other, who make each other better and who hold each other accountable when they fall short. Apple at 50 is remarkable. What they have done for blind people in the last 20 years, building this capable, accessible ecosystem into every device that they ship at no extra charge is without precedent. We should and do celebrate it, and we should remember why it happened.
On the good days, we are partners. On the hard days, we demand our place and our quality. Either way, we are here. We are not going anywhere. And the world Apple helped build for blind people.
A world where a blind students can take the same laptop as her classmates, where a blind business owner can run his business from the same phone as his colleagues, where a blind child can pick up a device and hear it say hello from the very first moment. That world was not given to us. We earned it together, and that is the way it will continue to be, because Apple innovates and we are the National Federation of the Blind. Happy birthday, Apple.
That concludes this episode of Access On, the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon. [email protected].
That's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to Accesson-announce-subscribe at nfbnet.org. That's Accesson-announce-subscribe at nfbnet.org. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, NFB.org or phonics 410-659-9314.
That's 410-659-9314, and be sure to check out the nation's blind podcast right from where you heard this podcast.