Insights into accessibility – a conversation with musician Andre Louis

C'est un de ces grands tech connectés que

vous

faites. Je ne mettais pas à l'online. Aujourd'hui, c'est la première fois que nous avons rencontré face-to-face. C'est un très accompli de

la musique.

Vous pouvez peut-être voir, mais

il

est aussi blind.

Il

est un tech fanatic. Il est très en train de

trouver

des technologies et des choses. Et nous avons juste invité à

nous

parler de

la

musique. Nous avons

parlé

de

nous parler

de

l

'utilisation, de l'utilisation,

de l

'utilisation de l'utilisation. Nous avons parlé de l'utilisation,

de

l'utilisation,

de

l'utilisation et

d

'utilisation. Et on l

'utilisation

d'un art dans

un appareil à l

'encompassion à

l

'embrée. On pensez

à

propos de

nouvelles

manières de travailler ou de nouvelles manières de penser. Vous savez,

nous

parfois disons de ces

choses-ci à

dire des accessoires.

Quand

nous parlons de l'utilisation, on peut-être un peu intéressé à entendre de l'utilisation.

Qui

vivit dans l'utilisation. Qui vivit dans

l

'utilisation, qui

vivit dans

l'utilisation, qui vivit dans

l'utilisation, d

'utilisation,

qui

se trouvent un peu familiarisant à nous. Mais en

fait,

il est en

tant que

pratiquant dans

une

autre façon. Vous avez besoin de vous abonner à nous un peu, il y aura un peu de temps pour conversation et discussion aussi, donc je vais vous présenter André.

Hi, I'm

André Louis, I'm from London, I came down today and if it hadn't been for my Uber driver digitally, I might have missed this train.

I

went to King's Cross St Pancras and I went to that digital ticket machine and it was the wrong one.

I

had to cross the road and I went to the right one, but I got on the train with seconds to spare today and

it

was a bit, it's a bit daunting. So yeah, but the food was good, the company is great, Jeff is great, Kylie is great, thank you all for having me today.

So

what does digital mean to me? That's a very hard question, but it's also a good opener. Digital is everything.

It's

funny because it's not, but it is, right? So

when

you think of digital, what do you think of? You think of Freeview or Sky or Virgin or your phone in your hand and that's another thing. Please don't leave your phones on silent today because my intention is to get you using them in a different way.

I

know, that's a rare thing in a meeting like this. So phone's off silent, let's make some noise, okay.

I'm

sitting in front of a MacBook Air today. This is piped in to this monitor behind me and my phone, it's a regular iPhone 6S off the shelf

and

it leads me on to my first thought for the day. In 2004, I went to Carphone Warehouse.

Yeah,

I know. I bought a phone, it was 300 pounds, it was an old Nokia 6670, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to use it immediately,

out

of the box.

I

went home and I bought a screen reader for another 150 pounds. The screen reader is the thing that allows me to use the phone. It turns what the phone says into something that I can hear.

Very

costly.

By

today's standards, too costly.

In

2016, I buy an Amazon Fire tablet for 50 pounds. It comes with a screen reader on board.

So

an off-the-shelf component that anybody can use, I can now use.

This

is fantastic. This is phenomenal. This is the digital age we live in.

And

it blows my mind how far we've come in this time.

An

example of how digital can be used, or at least how I use it. My wife was out the other day and she'd forgotten to take pork out of the fridge.

She

called me up

and

she says, I'm very worried

because

if I don't take it out, or if you don't take it out, no dinner.

I

love food.

I

love my wife and I love the way she cooks. So I says, alright, I'll ring you back on FaceTime.

I

rang her back on FaceTime,

turned

it to the back camera, opened the freezer door.

What

shelf is it on? What's it look like?

She

told me I took it out.

From

halfway around the country,

food is

going to happen. This is the kind of world we live in, guys. It's fantastic and it's really a wonderful thing to be

a

part of and to be around to see such change in our lifetime is just crazy.

So

this off-the-shelf iPhone that I got now, which is, as I say, an iPhone 6S, it also has a built-in screen with Apple, where I think, if not the first, then one of the first to do this natively. So no more buying expensive bits of things after you've already bought the phone. But it'd be like me going to, you're right, you go to PC World today, you buy a computer and a monitor, and then you have to spend another £500 buying the cables to go between the computer and the monitor.

It's

rubbish.

It's

not cool. And that's how it was buying a screen reader. We didn't want that. We wanted better access to things and it was always a hard fight for us.

But

now I can unlock this phone. It's an off-the-shelf component. Enable voiceover.

I don't understand.

Of course you wouldn't,

because

it's a demo and demos never go right. Turn on voiceover.

Now,

if I switch back into this QuickTime window over here,

I

now have a phone that I can use, that you can use as well. It's fantastic.

WhatsApp. 17 apps. 25 new items.

And

it's telling me everything that I swipe over on the screen.

Music.

30

apps. 1 new item.

So,

as a technical person in our house, I'm the one that goes, when you see that error message, contact your systems administrator, that's me. And when I see it,

I

just turn around and, right, what do I do now?

It's

bad. So, when my wife has the problem with her phone, I can fix it or try to, because we don't have to install third-party applications or do anything nasty like that. It's all built in and it's really good. Mic is also the same. It had the same screen reader on it called VoiceOver. You can do that with Command-F5 and you'll go for a lovely tutorial, which anyone who's using a Mac might go, I didn't know that was there. Now you do. Android has a built-in screen reader called TalkBack, and Google sort of followed in the footsteps of Apple, who are overshadowed by Apple and still are in a way. They haven't caught up accessibility-wise, but they're trying. Not the word trying.

So, if you have a phone today, and later on, I'm going to get you to all turn on VoiceOver and have a little play with it. You might not have even known it was in the phone to begin with. The long way around is Settings, General Accessibility, VoiceOver. So, it's a bit hidden, almost shamefully so, but it is there and it is accessible once you know where to look. It's an odd thing. Yes, it's going to lock itself in a minute.

You

watch.

So, how

I got here today, for example, I used an app, and the app is called BlindSquare. BlindSquare uses OpenStreetMap data and Foursquare map data to tell me and to plot me a route between my house and wherever I need to be. So, I tracked my route from my house to King's Cross,

and

from there, I then tracked the route to this building here, the Robinson College building, just so I knew I was sort of headed vaguely in the right direction. It wasn't on the way to, like, Tynmouth or Port Talbot or something bizarre like that. If the distance is decreasing in kilometres, then I figure I'm headed the right way, all right? I got on the train, and the guy says, this train divides at Cambridge. I was like, oh, dear. Am I in the wrong part of it? No, it's okay. It was all right. So, I got off, and I met. I'd sent a picture to the lady that was going to meet me. Emailed it.

You know, had I posted it and been pre-digital, then it would have probably gotten here long after this thing had ended. It'd

be

a bit pointless, really. So, I did that and managed to find her out. It was great.

So,

we unlocked this phone. I'm

going to

show you some of the apps that I use on a day-to-day basis, some of the most fantastic things ever. I will show you BlindSquare, for example.

BlindSquare, added. BlindSquare.

First

of all, I do need to slow the speech down in BlindSquare because VoiceOver itself is talking at a slow speed, so you can understand it. But BlindSquare is actually talking quickly. And if I don't, if I shake the phone now, it's going to tell me roughly where I am. Allens Road and Sylvester Road, distance 125 metres.

That's

what it tells me. But you wouldn't hear that, and it's actually a little quiet. So, I'm going to go into the tools. We'll go and slow the speech down.

Oh, no, it's not there, is it?

Up

there.

Settings. And there's a voice slider speed somewhere down here.

Right,

now let's see if we do that trick again.

Give

me a destination.

Much

easier. Much easier. For us.

Oh,

for me too sometimes. If I'm in a busy traffic condition, I will slow it down. But this is what I use. I track my routes with this app, and it's made by a guy in Finland who actually is totally sighted, and he got into this sort of accident, really. He was making an app for, I think, driving in a car. So, you would just set it up, and it would give you points of view. It doesn't do turn by turn, but you can set up that in Google Maps or something. But it does tell you points of interest around you and things like that. So, he decided, oh, let's see if we can turn it into an app for the blind as well. So, he did.

And my

one claim to fame about this app is that I did all the sounds for it. Because as well as a musician, I'm a sound designer. So, I got lucky in that. I got that job. So, four years ago, I started to design it. It came with no sounds at all, and I wrote to the guy and said, you know what, this could be so much more enhanced if we had sounds for everything that you do. So, for example, something as simple as if I tap on this travel and transport button

up here. I'm

going to tap it. What will happen is you'll get a ding when it's actually picked up all the things in here.

That

ding that you just heard means that it's done searching. When you're on GPRS, God forbid you ever do go on GPRS, but, you know, it still happens in parts of, like, Wales. It takes a very long time for anything to happen. And I remember before sounds, we'd be tapping on things, waiting for it. It's like when you press the lift button, isn't it?

And

you're on the ninth floor when you press it. And it doesn't matter how many times you press it. It's not going to come any faster. You still press it anyway.

So,

it's that same kind of thing. So, I hit that, and I said,

like,

Ilka, we need sounds for everything. We need sounds that say I'm working, sounds to say I'm thinking about working. And so, I got to make everything. And it's a really great – it's one of my sort of pride and joys. I didn't write a single line of code. I can't carve my way out of a cardboard box, but I can make sounds for your apps, and I can make them better for it. So, my name is in the credits. It's, like, my exciting bit for the day. So, there's that. Blindscore is a fantastic app, one of the many. Another app – you can see a few apps on my home screen here.

KNFB Reader is an app that is optical character recognition, so I can put a piece of paper under my phone's camera, and I can read it. So, if my wife is away, or I need to read letters – I've even read monitor screens with it before. Windows has crashed. It's in safe mode. Oh, dear. No speech.

Because

in safe mode, of course, there's no sound drivers. That means no audio drivers. No speech for me.

How

do I get out of this? Sometimes I FaceTime if it just doesn't work right. But occasionally, you can actually, you

know,

you can read the screen and be independent.

In

the 80s, Ray Kurzweil made a reading machine that was probably the size of this room

with

a camera and a scanner bed. And it would take a very long time. You'd put a document in it and scan it.

It

would take ages. Now, KNFB will do this in minutes. And if anybody has a piece of paper they want me to try out as a test, I'll put it under the phone, and you'll actually get to hear this thing read out a document. Hopefully, it'll work. Of course, it won't work because, as I said, live demos, and they're always difficult.

But

these are the kind of tools that I get to use on a day-to-day basis and that really make my life as easy as yours, I suppose. Because without such things, I'd still be in almost the dark ages.

I

remember sending my first ever text message, for example, was with

an

infrared adapter

pointed

at an old Nokia phone using PC Suite. If anybody's old enough or have ever used PC Suite, then I know you're cringing right now because it's a horrid bit of software,

and

it hardly ever worked right.

And

I know that if I sneezed or looked at the infrared adapter the wrong way, that message was not going to get sent.

Knock

it out of alignment.

Gone.

I just spent ages typing that. How dare you? Now, I could actually do it any number of ways. I can actually braille on the phone as well. And I'm holding the phone up now.

I'm

facing you guys. You can see there's dots on my phone. The dots actually help me type easier. So if I pull up the search, the spotlight search,

see,

these dots here line up with the keyboard. And on the third row up, there are missing dots where the F and J would be, so you can line up. So I can, say, for example, type notes.

Except typing ass backwards is very difficult.

See,

and I can

then tap on notes and get it up quickly. Of course, I can do it faster if it's facing me, but you know how it is. I know. I know. Excuses, excuses. One of the other great things is

in

iOS, I think, 8 or 9, Apple introduced a mode where I could braille because I can read and write braille. And that is a really quick method of getting stuff into a device like this. It's not something I'd ever want to type emails on. So if I'm not brailling or typing like that, I have a Bluetooth keyboard that I carry around with me, which pairs to my Mac and my phone. And it's also a very useful bit of kit. So I could go

probably down,

new

note.

And

this is funny because it looks like I'm actually about to play a video game.

So

now I've got the phone in landscape.

I'm

not even sure what the screen looks like at this point. But if I do this,

this

is a test. And I'm brailling on the screen. It's really cool. And I know...

You

guys rock. I

have... There

was a time when I hated typing text to anybody. I was very terse. Yes, no, on train, busy. Because I was typing on a keyboard that's very tiny and I have big, fat musician fingers. So I didn't want to do it. And then I got a Bluetooth keyboard and everything got easier. But then you've got to remember to carry it. And if you are going on a sort of light trip just around the corner or to a park or something, the last thing you want to do is carry bunches of stuff.

So

when they introduced Braille input, it was such a fantastic thing that I immediately learned to adopt it and I love it. So now I get quite verbose in messages. Hello, Facebook.

That

brings me on to another point. Facebook is another useful thing.

We're

going to come out of that. Close this.

I'm

going to discuss pictures and how pictures have changed blind people's lives as well.

Two

social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, they have two completely different methods of picture recognition or at least picture identification is the word I'm looking for. Facebook has gone the AI route and you know about Zuckerberg and his AI love. So they have a sort of

an

AI that tries to describe pictures to blind people which rolled out sometime a few months ago. and I think it's recently just hit the website too. But I do all my dealings in the iOS app because the Facebook iOS app is actually quite reasonable. It didn't used to be. Nor did Channel 4, but that's another story. I open

up. What

have

we

got to open

here? That. I

like it when you do that.

I

had already loaded up a notification and of course it's gone because of the network error so I'm going to try and get it back, he says. So if you talk amongst yourselves a minute. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. I know it's far away.

My

wife had posted a picture with me and it and the kids or at least of the kids, I think.

So

if I can find it again, I will show you what I was talking about with the pictures. But I'm having weird issues today. Again, live demos. I hate them. Right.

Are

we going to read?

Ah.

Here we are. Okay, that's off. So we have a photo

and

this is non-human described. So the photo.

Very

cool. I know roughly what it's going to be about. It's cool. You can take a photo of anything. If you tag me in it, I will see it. And the idea is that people like myself can sort of not just get tagged in random things and go, right, so what is that supposed to be?

It

could be anything. It helps us to not have to ask what people perceive as silly questions. Because when you ask somebody, well, what's the photo of? They look at you kind of like, are you stupid? No, I just can't see it.

So

if you could help me by helping, you know, help you by helping me,

it

would be great. So that's a cool thing.

I'm

not sure how they're doing it, actually, how photo recognition is done. It's quite cool, but it's quite unusual. The other method, the Twitter method,

is

here. Oh,

no, that's the wrong app. How did you do that?

Thanks

for that.

So

I did at once point have

Jeff

has attached a photo.

I'm

not sure what client you're using there, Jeff. If you're using Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android, then there is an option in settings which allows you to attach a 400-character description to the photo.

So

when you do that, it is automatically read via alt text to voice-over users like myself, which is really cool. So if you were to do that, I would see that. I now need to come out of here and show you the one I wanted to show you. Sorry,

Andre. Justin, Robin and Willen. A 3D food here you go. Brilliant idea. Didn't know you could do that. Thanks. Attached media. Four old blokes who make a TV comedy show set in space looking sad on last day of recording. The 9th of April. So

he wrote that text, four old blokes in space looking sad on last day of recording. Very cool. And that's how Twitter and Facebook do different things. So with Twitter,

you

actually type in the description yourself. It's not AI-based. Facebook is AI-based and sometimes it can get it wrong. So, you know, I mean, as a human, of course, you could lie too, but why would you want to? I encourage everybody who uses the official Twitter client for iOS or Android to enable this. And when you tweet a photo, if you get time,

just,

you know, type in that text for us because it really, really is helpful.

At

the moment, that's all I have. I would like questions. If you have any, of course it's talked a lot longer and there's a lot where we can go into, but please ask away.

Andre,

that was absolutely amazing. Thank you.

So

any questions?

Yes.

I'm just curious on Twitter, how many, what percentage of photos do people bother to actually put a description in

for?

At the moment, because this feature only rolled out quite recently, very few. And unfortunately, the setting to enable it is not turned on by default. I kind of wish it was. There's a blog on Twitter

to

tell people how to do it, but no one's going to read that.

I

don't even have a link for it because I thought, what's the point? So I would like, I'd like the answers to be a lot more, but I know people don't always have time to do it and I respect that. I do. But it would be really nice to see that be more prevalent in photos. Facebook is just automatic. You haven't got to do it. And I almost wish Twitter would be as well, but then they'd be seen to be copying. So I don't know. Both have their merits, don't they?

I've got a question about reading.

So

when we were meeting earlier, you were talking about the speed that you read for reading e-books and things.

Oh, yeah.

Can you tell us? How fast is it compared to speaking?

Right. So at the moment, my voice is set to this. That's the voice that I usually use. So when I read the same photo text you heard a minute ago, that's what I usually read like on the phone. It's craziness.

It's amazing, huh? I don't even start.

It's weird because if I was asked to actually speak it out loud, I would never be able to do it. But my brain processes it sort of a stream of consciousness thing and it just parses it in some weird way that I don't even know. But it does allow me to retain information and get about daily life.

OK,

I've got a different question entirely. So you spoke about being a musician.

We

haven't actually spoken too much about music. But you give a lot of what you make away for free. Is that right?

Yeah, because I have this oxymoron called legal pirating. The idea behind legal pirating is that if I sold everything that I make, people would just torrent the things and that's just no good for business. So I decided that I'd give away lossy copies of my music. Lossy being a compressed artefact or in MP3s. So by doing that, it gives people not only the ability to hear who I am and I can get some recognition for the work that I do. But if anybody does like it and wants to come and get it and pay for some of the stuff they hear, then it's good word of mouth. So it's

a

sort of ulterior motive, if you will. But it does help to actually boost sales in a strange roundabout way.

All

right. Any final questions, people? I

was just wondering, often getting on to digital things can be quite scary for people who aren't using it all the time. So whether it's getting onto the cloud or getting onto Trello or whatever it is can be a brand new experience. What's your advice for people doing that kind of jump?

Coming

from offline or local

to

cloud back up.

Or

scared. People who are nervous of digital sort of to take the leap into digital.

What

I tell you next isn't going to help.

But

everything made by humans can be hacked by humans.

However, by

that same token,

people

are trying every day to make the things that they make better and more foolproof.

So

despite that,

I

would say go for it.

That

may seem quite strange but I believe very strongly in the axiom that if you don't try you'll never know.

I

wouldn't be here today if I didn't do that, if I didn't pick up Uber on the day that the taxi firms were revolting like toys, kids throwing toys out of a pram. I saw a press release on the news

and

all that's based in the cloud. My data's in the cloud. My PayPal information's in the cloud.

But

my car is outside my house.

Go

for it

and

don't be scared of what might happen. Worry when something does happen.

Fantastic.

So

Andre, thank you so much for sharing the time travelling up to visit us. One more, one more.

Can

we get to hear some of the music?

We can get to hear some of the music. There was some which was due to me playing when we came in but actually it wasn't playing. If you've got some right now you don't mind putting on that work. That'll be fine.

I

don't have, well I have stuff to hand but it's all kind of the short stuff, the intro now.

Do you want to,

Kylie's waving her hands at the back.

The music you heard in

the foyer was actually Andre's music. We're also, we're also buying some that we can use on some of our own videos that we kind of produce just as an outro and intro and things like that.

So

yeah, we'll sort some out to play in the background during sessions.

You did actually make a good point actually, Jeff. Re-music. I spoke to you on the phone about this topic actually. How

the

way that musicians now use the internet has changed. So I do remember ten years ago a guy would come to my house we'd work on the track for half an hour because basically the two and

a

half hours there and back were spent in traffic. Now we live in Dropbox. Again in the cloud he will drop a project in Dropbox I'll put some cords on it and send it back. He'll

be

like turnaround time 15 minutes. That is the way to go because the internet is just killer. And the higher speed we get in our houses the faster we can work. The faster we can work the more money we can potentially all be making.

Very

cool. What a powerful ending. Thank you very much once again.

Thanks guys.