Creating Meaningful Dots with PixBlaster: Origins and Opportunities
presenting today um is dan gardner he's the ceo of you plus and we're going to be hearing quite a bit in the next little bit about the products viewplus makes what their mission is what they're striving to accomplish and even some new things that are on the horizon before we finish up today now are any of these things challenges that you deal with any of you sound familiar to you sometimes creating meaningful tactile graphics can be really difficult sometimes just creating tactical graphics at all is difficult but especially meaningful usable ones labeling graphics with contracted and uncontracted braille due to space issues doing just having the ability to do it that's definitely a challenge for a lot of people producing graphics in a timely manner definitely can be difficult you need to get those things out quickly sometimes that's hard to do having access to an embosser to create a graphic uh you know again can be a challenge or so there's many things and we hope today to talk about some ways that viewplus is helping with these things and so to do that we're going to turn it over to dan from view plus dan hey thanks paul hi everyone um yeah i mean these challenges especially i guess going forward today if you have questions or i'm moving too fast or glossing over something that you really are interested in please yeah use the chat and then we'll also leave time at the end for questions but we have some some things built into this presentation to give you time to uh to answer a lot of questions so as much if i'm not covering what you want then please let me know and i was yeah really excited to hear that the students are getting access in a large percentage of places to um you know to to the embosser so and then helping me today is uh william freeman uh from aph so we've we've done the technical things together so now this is the more uh higher level overview uh but uh william's gonna help out too so if there's any uh braille or techie questions that i can't answer he's here also as the pigs blaster expert thanks so yeah because for me i still see a lot of people when they're working on tactile graphics in this challenges phase of just how how does actually simplify the technical content you know or dealing with the fact that braille isn't scalable prevents a special challenge with some apps where you don't you know the print you're trying to get it to work layout you have to know the page layout and a lot of web apps you don't get that it's just all relative and so you can't braille can't be relative it's got to be the right same size every time so and then still seeing a lot of people that are dealing with you know what i call craft projects you know tactile graphics with different fabrics or glitter or yarn things on there that are not really reproducible or editable or like things like swell paper the micro capsule paper or pf i think what those and those are all also have some limitations on including the tactile graphics and good quality braille on there versus true just electronic print content so we're seeing more and more available content that's print ready if you have access to the right kind of printer so we'll go into that yeah would you want to talk a bit about the the partnership between vue plus and aph yeah it's great uh i mean this is we i've been coming to the annual meeting uh force well for probably about five years six years since i took over a viewplus for my dad so and he's been coming before that so yeah we've had a long partnership with aph but this pixblaster one really stepped it up to the next level for us as you know we're very interested in supporting teachers and parents as they're exploring the opportunities with blind kids to learn in stem subjects and find careers there so i mean with our vision of just bringing accessible information to your fingertips that tied in perfectly to what aph was wanting to do with the blaster projects the braille blaster projects so this is based on our our columbia 2 technology which included the power dot as well as the tiger plus graphics and so it does good great quality you know braille literary literary quality braille as well as high quality tactile graphics and you know we worked together finding this thing and then releasing it last summer and thanks to a lot of you getting them it's you know i think it's been a a bright a bright mark in the industry for how these things can work well and get people access to the products that they need so and about vue plus really i mean if for those of you that don't know us i mean you've probably heard of tiger tiger printers i mean that viewplus is the manufacturer it was founded 25 years ago by my parents here in corvallis oregon and we've really my dad was a physics professor who had gone blind at oregon state university and wanted to keep doing physics and couldn't figure out how to access the data that he needed and that was the birth the the the starting point for viewplus so really we are a bunch of hardware and software engineers focused solely on blind access to information so we we we may get distracted from time to time on some other pieces but i mean for the most part this is what we are doing every day all day is thinking about how we could still do this kind of stuff and that was from the very beginning so 25 years later we are still the only high resolution multi-dot height tattoo graphics solution and then you add in braille options and all the ink options um we are you know that's why we are all over the world because we are very unique so so here's a silly question uh why why are tactile graphics important well funny you should ask well it's amazing though i mean it's important but yet it seems like it's uh everyone acknowledges that it's important but yet ever a lot of you know i go into a meeting with a bunch of say blind high school or uh early college blind students and they're all interested in tattoo graphics but most of them have never really had much access to them so you know in stem many topics are best explained with a diagram so in order to examine data and see the trends that you know using tactile graphics makes it possible you know to say see what the rest of us do air quotes um you know but of course like braille it's a learned skill and rather than waiting until crisis mode in high school we're hoping that this this you know pixblaster project will help make it so that there are these printers available early in the elementary school you know for doing tactical coloring books or labeling things around the classroom or you know getting those skills of tactile graphics learned so that by the time things get complicated and math goes beyond what you can do by memory that you'll be able to understand tactile graphics so for us early on well me as a parent i can only imagine what it'd be like having a precocious five-year-old going why why why and then keeping curiosity alive when they're young and they want to know all about space and fire engines and dinosaurs and you know things like that all over the place how could you keep keep a blind kid engaged yeah those are good points um would you want to talk a bit more about kind of the the innovation that bus brings to the the industry yeah i kind of touched on it i guess like it's if you haven't heard of tiger graphics uh or tiger embossers there is we have no printer that's called that i think there was a tiger advantage uh and the tiger pro but uh it's all tiger has always been tactile image graphing printer this is what tiger stood for my dad made it up on a napkin when they were first founding vue plus as a way to explain what it is that we were doing and that one stuck view i think they think of uh we get calls for window window treatments uh other kind of blinds uh things like that so uh viewsonic monitors i don't know there's all sorts of different things but no we are the we are the tiger graphics people uh and that's been since our inception are focused solely on you know providing tactile graphics for scientific exploration of data you know having inc was also an early innovation because again most scientists don't work in a vacuum you need to collaborate and there's likely to be some sighted people that you're going to want to collaborate with so you know providing not for say like i mean there's all this stuff about inclusion but for us it was about scientific collaboration or partnering with peers making it so that people could share the same documents so and then really as we see phones and tablets becoming common having a solution for mobile printing where you can take the text from your phone send it right through um right through the tiger box or in the pix or the pixie in the case of the pixblaster send it right through a device to convert that text into braille on the fly or be able to take images right from your phone and print them on your printer or anything even the innovation that was driven by aph was being able to take uh one of the uh i think they're the daisy books or something or the full books that are available uh and be able to just upload that to the print to the printer and have it just print out an entire book so more and more how to how to produce electronic uh things on demand uh if you have access to the printer at home so uh yeah and it doesn't matter you know getting we're talking about this is support across whether you're on a a mac whether you're on a windows pc whether you're on an android tablet or phone you know an apple when you know phone um you know essentially a lot of things that are maybe just if they're as long as you have a web browser and a network you can figure out how to gets get you know text and braille um out yeah well that's really great stuff um i mean i think the big the one of the best things that uh on the pixblaster is the the multi-height tactile graphics because texture is such an important part of uh you know even the simplest technographic benefits from having texture and it's much easier to make texture when you have the multi-height option as opposed to just a single height where you have to rely on patterns and things like that to try to simulate uh texture yeah i mean thanks for bringing that up because yeah it is i tend to gloss over that because it's something we've always had but i i put it early on we're still the only ones that have anything like that and so i take it for granted because that's what i do every day but uh yeah i mean with with texture fills we're doing some more experimentation with that but the but yeah you have to figure out what what patterns are differentiable from each other are you know there's all these questions about patterns and and you know i guess it's commonplace in more with the swell paper type things to use the patterns because you don't have multi-dot heights so they're kind of come up with that but yeah it's it's also nice to have ways to draw things attention without them being distracting so for example i use the multi-dot height when i do that do tables because i can make a a lighter colored outline for the table so you can find the rows and columns but then it's a lot easier to tell the data is a cell i know there's the braille the braille way of doing tape right right but there's also if you're just quickly doing an excel spreadsheet and you want to print it out you can you can have the columns it doesn't take any fancy formatting it just excel does it for you uh with with the tiger software suite and i just changed the line color of the cells from black to a middle gray and get a nice reminder as to where i am on the on the table itself so i mean i guess in word too but yeah that's a good that's a good use case i hadn't thought of doing that because the the braille way of making tables is just a stand-in uh it's it's not necessarily the best way to do it so being able to make a tactile table uh that would be a handy thing to be able to do yeah i say and you've got you've i don't have a braille certification so i don't know how often i'm breaking all the rules but sometimes you know with braille it doesn't fit in one cell and i mean it doesn't fit in one line and so then it wraps around and then you get lost as to which one you're in or the correlation between the rows and the columns and and so to me having just even a little bit of a guide in there to know am i still in the same cell or do i go to the next one you know something like that so should we turn it over to paul for a poll question i believe we are ready for the next poll all right now we covered this a little bit but i don't know if we've covered the the exact specific answer to this question so if not just do give your best guess um i briefly mentioned it yeah if they watch the ncaa tournament this year they know the answer to this question so vue plus is tied to what university in the pacific northwest is it the university of oregon is oregon state university university of washington or washington state university if you know your oregon cities or if you watch the ncaa tournament like i said and saw which school did of the best of the four of those did the best you can figure out the answer to this question well surprising everybody right they were picked to be last in the pac-12 yeah they made it and if you all have any questions i'm monitoring the chat so i i'll be able to to ask your questions if folks uh want to put them in the chat oh people don't know the difference between the ducks and the beavers [Music] all right no questions so far that uh have been shared in the chat just want to make sure that you guys know that we're going to be dropping some links and resources in the chat during this presentation i've dropped the link into view plus also for the handout that can be found at our aph partner showcase webpage and a reminder that as always these webinars are recorded and we post them uh to our youtube page at a later date give us at least two weeks to get those up and running um and we've had about 44 vote in this poll so let's go ahead and reveal the results so far so vue plus is tied to what university in the pacific northwest 54 say oregon state university 31 say university of oregon and 15 say university of washington no one guessed washington state university so dan what was the correct response to this poll oregon state fighting beavers all right i'm ending the poll and i hand it back to you dan to continue with the webinar so yeah go ahead oh yeah see for those of you not familiar with the pix blaster um you know it's everything you need comes one box this is what was great working with aph was they know the audience which is uh you know for again from this from the original poll is a lot of uh teachers for the visually impaired so bringing everything in one place that you're going to need so the pix blaster with the pixi for you know if you need the wi-fi network the speaker for the voice menus uh is all included versus we leave a lot of that stuff is optional uh with the columbia and the delta it does you know we've already talked about the high quality technographics the power dot braille you know the key thing here is that this is uh not specific this is the software that it works with it comes with the tiger software suite from view plus so you can use our braille translator built into word in excel and our graphics editor the tiger designer as well as pixblaster you know since pixblaster is a brand new well i guess brand new compared to the other braille translation tools out there and from that redesign from the ground up with some really cool stuff for supporting math that we talked about in our technical webinar and then the other key part was this is unique with all the training and videos that are available um to aph and so it is available through the federal quota system yeah um you've talked about the pixie a bit would you want to talk about the pixie a little bit more and what exactly it does and what it brings to the sure yeah i mean this without the pixie it it has a usb port so you can play in a network port so you can plug it into a network uh and you know so it's but the pixie with with the addition of the pixie there so it's an optional piece but if you add it it adds wireless capabilities so then whether if you're at home and don't even have a network at all if you don't have wi-fi at all it can be essentially become like a wi-fi access point so you could still use your phone or tablet to run it so we've done uh additional pieces so with that piece if you or if you are at the school or home or office with a wi-fi network this will then set up on your network and then it acts like a air printer device right so if you pull up your your android or iphone right and you go to share print or wherever they hide it they keep moving it around but if you find the print function in any of your apps and you have air printers on your network they show up on your phone and so you'll see the you'll see actually two different picks blasters show up through the pixie one that's a braille one and one that says tiger one so the braille one will any text you send will get converted to braille and any and on the tiger one any graphics any pictures that you send will get um will get rendered as a graphic and printed on the printer so again no computer required uh at all when you're using that automatic translation um what braille codes this question came from the chat what braille codes does that support everything inside of the pixi is you can access all the options through a web interface so yeah you would pick whether you want ueb whether you want english whether you want spanish it has all of the lib lewis languages that are available are built into the pixi interface so you can translate any language on it so it has even more than we have inside of a tiger software suite because we don't even do fonts for some of the more obscure languages so you can't do it and braille blaster i think only has us based languages at last i looked anyway it had you know ueb had cherokee and spanish banner or something so yeah you with the with that one the on the fly you get the widest range of braille languages available and i glossed over this the pixie interface if you pull that up on there i think i actually have one if i go too so everything that you have uh on there is available as you see in my screen right so yeah so you can go to the formatter settings and default i have is english unified and then grade one grade two but you can pick from any of these languages that you want do you have portuguese the question came through the chat yeah portuguese definitely because we have uh we use a lot of portuguese uh because we have a in brazil we we have do a lot of work in brazil so we have worked with our dealer really closely there to make sure that portuguese is well supported great um do you do you want to talk about some common common stem requests and requirements yeah i mean this was this was came out of i think the first time uh i really you know i've always been trying to see how can i help more what can i do more and was i was invited to go speak at the midwestern braille conference in minneapolis and i was like four years ago now or three years ago and i said well what are the most common requests you get and actually going through like the banner tactile graphics guidelines i could also see these after i kind of knew where to look right was so showing some examples of what i could do and these were all things that took me once i realized what i kind of figured out a process for this most these things even if i did them wrong like the clock i'm showing my naivety i'm just not fixing it so i guess on banana got them supposed to put the numbers on the outside and versus the inside but uh i i did most of these in like less than 90 seconds was my goal so i would say the first time or when i got try to remember how i did it it maybe takes me a few minutes but these were all kind of things that you could do very very quickly between just going into word getting finding an online image through word what used to be called clip art dropping them in overlaying braille over the top of it to cover up the cover up the the work the ink or the the normal the normal letters or on the clock i could actually print that and it would draw those numbers but then have the braille in there as well so either replacing them or or have eating them in there and then the bottom right is showing so i mean i'm showing a thermometer with both celsius and fahrenheit a ruler a clock and then a plot of let's do i do a training class on linear equations and this was just printed directly from excel so with excel we have the translator built in so it will then create a plot or any of the xy graphs or any of the graphs or pie charts it'll translate the text to braille yeah and on the on that clock we actually hear this when we work with students uh sometimes about how they're they think it's cool to see the print characters you know you obviously don't want to rely on print and use print to convey information but a lot of times our our kids that are blind are not encountering print characters and it can be useful to to see them and feel them and know you know know what you're dealing with like what a one or a two or a three physically looks like uh could be of benefit and it's something neat that they don't encounter all the time yeah and again those are things that are really easy within the within the if you have just even in word you want to just have big text uh and have it actually you just tell by default will ignore text and won't tactile it but if you tell the printer driver if there's an option just to emboss standard text it will actually do that so in a lot of cases especially early early childhood education they'll emboss that the big a and the lower a and things like that so they can so that the kids can kind of feel what it feels like and then also have the other a's just again i mean it depends on whether they're kind of i guess in the mainstream classroom or in special class or whatever but again to me it's i don't know what they call it inclusion or just the curiosity thing again right it's just being able to do some things that are it takes two seconds to do something like that in word and print it out and that'll completely work you know again i i use printer with ours because that's all you're doing you don't need any for an embosser requires an emboss button which only comes in special software everybody else everybody else that has something they have to have the emboss button otherwise it won't work for all of our things they're printers any if you have a print but function you can use that software that's the big difference so using illustrator using word using powerpoint using whatever you use and know how to use and braille is just a font so uh you know that that is the i guess the difference and the ease of use that may be confusing to people because it's it's more than just learning duxbury or learning tactile view or learning braille blaster right it's but the whole thing is hopefully you already know how to use something on your phone something on your computer on whatever computer it is and if you can print something on a standard ink printer you can use the pixel i mean i think it's really cool that you can just take a jpeg open it in the photos app that you have on windows and just go file print pick your pix blaster and then it will create a tactile you know as of that image and you know not every image makes a good tactile but it's still a good cool quick way to get some type of tactile feedback to the student and you know some things you know simple images like that i always use the example of the aph logo you know that embosses really well because it's just a simple logo and it can be it's easy to feel even though it is just letters so well and those are some of the amazing ones yeah it's like you think about all those but logos especially school logos and flags a lot of the world they're they're you know the clubs have their own flags their coat of arms things you i get the the seven to ten year old crowd gets when they bring them in on saturday or whatever to these international shows or even the you know even you know the ones here in the us as well like the lego robotics team they never had they didn't even know what the logos were for first for first legos i was a lego coach too so you know i just would bring them over they i've never seen people get any more excited than we print out their their their school flag or their coat of arms for their school or the club logo that they have never seen so yeah i agree i mean it's again it's cool and if you wanted to add things to it right it's again printing the photo app or from your phone but you can also just drag it over into word and if you want to add braille into it then you just pop up you know pop up a text box and drop braille in there uh you know if you type it in as ascii braille or you want to translate it and paste it in as braille or you want to use six key entry i mean we have again we have way more than enough rope to uh to uh help you do whatever you want yeah one of the questions in the chat is how do we modify or clean up a picture yeah and that's i'll cover some of it coming up because the general ways is yeah you drop it into word or into tiger designer and you can kind of remove pieces that aren't that are confusing uh play with contrast uh and brightness to kind of make some things go away i mean the things that's usually the thing i'd say the best way to do it is pick something from the start like cartoon stuff right that have flat colors have don't have millions of colors when a photograph is going to render as a blob most the time you have to kind of just play with it just think of grayscale type things you know it's hard to tell you're not going to the different dot heights are going to be by the intensity of the color so a dark blue and a dark green are going to look exactly the same so there's no differentiation so black is all the way you know the yellows white is nothing and so just kind of think of you know the simpler the color thing or the more i guess like low vision the more contrast there is in the colors those kind of color palettes those kind of cartoon things print really well full color images usually need to go through some kind of filter which is again you can do that in word you can do that inside of tiger designer you can do that inside of illustrator it just you know whatever you're most comfortable with for me i'm not a graphic designer so i tend to use word for most of it just because there's a lot of tools that just built into word and you can google how to do things and find answers because everyone else is doing the same thing so you're not having to use some specialty software that nobody uses right well uh let's turn it over to paul for our next poll question all right and um this one should be pretty easy this is just a true false question so uh the question is pigs blaster it's available through federal quota funds true or false pixblaster is available through federal quota funds that was too easy i guess yeah yeah people are on to us all right and jeff shared in the chat just wanted to to share this out loud that many young and emerging braille readers are curious about print so having the flexibility of creating tactile representations of print or braille characters is terrific you want to get them back and yeah and back for the uh the poll for the if it is if it is false for you it may be false for you in your state that you can you have federal quota in every state in every territory but you may not be permitted to buy certain products by the state rules as i'm finding we've been talking to the eots who are the trustees in each state and some make rules about what kind of technology products versus other things you can do so again you're the the one false you actually may be correct in your state or maybe you're not or maybe you're not in the us or one of the us territories but congress the u.s congress every year i'm learning more and more about it as i study it so it's kind of it's kind of it's really cool program and you said and we're and in certain states we're working to try to figure out where those embossers are going because there's a lot of people like i uh i was talking to a lady well it was the nfb of pennsylvania we were talking to mostly high school and and college-age kids about where their struggles were with stem and what we could do to help but she had seen the announcement on fb and come in and she was many years ago she had a master's in aeronautics as a blind as a blind person but she wasn't in the field but she was really interested in how to access this new technology and was wondering you know was it available could she go to a school or a library and use one of these and i said that's a good question why don't you ask i'm in north texas i'm like i have no idea what they have available in north texas and yeah so i will talk a little bit later about some of the stuff that's going on with the lighthouse in san francisco great so let's go ahead we'll end polling and share that yes the 94 percent of you who said true you are correct pixblaster is available through federal credit funds and hopefully it will be available in your state as well we're seeing a pretty good we're seeing a pretty good uh spread a lot of states are getting it you know so uh and this was alluding to was that i was shocked this has been out since april i just started hearing about it a couple weeks ago and then i've been talking about it on my various webinars but so san francisco lighthouse is launched this program called touching the news so topic topical tactile graphics so getting your hands on pictures making the news so you can go to the lighthouse sf.org ttn because we can put that in the chat too um but yeah so they have a free subscription that will then send you a thing an email saying that yeah a new picture is this or vote on what picture you want to see this week so i haven't updated it since yesterday so i don't know if i voted i voted on one i think there was a space station one i really wanted to do but they had a couple other ones but so so far they have uh what does the nasa mars ingenuity helicopter look like this is what the lady in texas wanted to get access to was this printout um and you know or what are the what are the what's a graph of the coven 19 cases this is now getting a little dated what percentage of the population on covet 19 and then some other vaccine you know so just data on cover 19 so data plots what do emojis look like so this had this one shows the rolling on the floor one but they actually have four different ones because i printed them out here i did it on our ink printer so you could kind of see it but um oh man it doesn't work with the background huh uh anyway so the the uh the mars indignity helicopter the rolling on the floor emoji the and then the other one the antarctic iceberg and antarctica map the big iceberg that broke off in antarctica chunk there's a there's a two pager on that one so i have um you know you can download the what you can get on the subscription list for free at that at the web address and then the cool thing right is they are designed to be printed on a vue plus columbia or delta an aph picks blaster or the irie braille track so these are all the columbia or delta the track tractor feed or the cut sheet printer that we sell and then work with aph and ire to get these out to a different to different groups of people as well as it'll work with the micro capsule paper so swell pf or zychim um and so yeah and they're all laid out in letters uh letter size paper so eight and a half by 11 paper and so i mean that that is phenomenal i mean in terms and they're starting to question you know there's as people are hearing about it they're getting people to subscribe but they're also hearing from a lot of people that they don't have access to a printer so i'm asking like if do you know if people in the community have access locally to a printer at the school at the public library at a community college university or other state agencies and if you do there's people looking for you in your community because except this there's this cool content that's now available that even if they're not using it in their everyday job they would still like to see these things and they're not available any other way this will only work on either a swell paper machine or a uh a printer from vue plus so we're also as part of this webinar we have i have all the printers set up here so you can go and request the samples from vuplus.com news dash samples again i can put that in we can put that in the chat as well but uh let's see if it'll come up here see one of the things like i love that emoji uh graphic just because when you have access to tactile graphics tactile graphics don't have to be a big deal you know like when you're having to order tactile graphics from a printing house or something like that you know you're having to pay for them and then it becomes a big deal so you you you go for the big deal tactile graphics like the the mars rover or the the covet 19 data but when you have a printer in your home or your school that can make tactile graphics you can have those fun interesting tactile graphics like the emoji and like you know things that are neat and uh feed that curiosity like you talked about earlier yeah well and it's also great that it's just uh i mean they're good i mean lighthouse is great right they they contract out and do high quality professional work these are going to be you know probably certified braille brailleists doing it right and they're combining tractor graphics and braille you know versus i'll sometimes just do the tactile graphic because it's just quicker than trying to get the braille to fit on there but they've done the layout they've done it everything and they're very professional and so it's exactly what you kind of say is like why you know just and with with text descriptions as well right so you see the the part of the online part is it's the website as well and it hopefully is accessible and again if it isn't they are definitely open i'm sure it's accessible exactly i mean right it's like the whole thing is made to be completely accessible and made people to be self-sufficient you know you don't need a seeing eye human to use this so uh and that's kind of but but then the question was well yeah how do i get access to to one of these printers and it's like well i you know coveted funds relief funds are available at most states they could go and get one with their with their ex you know with their quota relief funds um or get them through the photo you know this quota system and have them there and a lot of them are sitting in lending libraries in states and again i don't know how who gets access to them and it's a state-by-state thing so the power to the people is go ask um so yeah and that's what i said there's more and more of this stuff and we're working the lighthouse in san francisco is incredible and they're also have this other team apps project which is tactile tactile maps so walking maps and the same problem how do you get an on-demand tactile reading map a walking map where could you walk into is there one at starbucks or is there one at the library or one at the bart station you know how would you get them and it actually works globally but that's another thing where we're working with them and then also you know making it portable across so we're working with them to embed our software development kit so they can again create a fully laid out one for each one of our printers so right now they're only doing them for the the columbia the the columbia delta pixplaster one because those were the most that's mostly what they've been using recently and that's what they that we think most people have access to more commonly than some of our other more expensive printers but we also have our little uh braille uh in braille that so we have a printer for well i resells the version for fifteen hundred dollars in the united states it's two thousand dollars internationally but uh so you can get a personal printer that will also print stuff like touching the news and so yeah that's still expensive um but it's a lot less than four thousand or five thousand or seven thousand or ten thousand dollars but people sometimes spend on printers so actually that that leads into our next uh poll question which is also about uh cost if you want to go to that all right betsy and you can put that up whenever you're ready we'll be talking about touching the news how much is it is a subscription to the touching the news service is it ten dollars per month twenty dollars per month thirty dollars per month or is it free how much is the subscription to touching the news service all right well we we underestimated the the crowd here they're on top of it well i said and if you and if and if you want to order some samples of this we will and you don't have access to the printer although it sounds like a lot of you did have access to it i also they gave me the illustrator versions of these so i said i've converted in them to create print versions that are available uh that work with our other printers as well and so uh you know i at least have four of the examples the full four pages the mars the mars one the uh the emoji one and the antarctica map and iceberg uh two pager so i have those three that i have converted to work so and i can send those out free matter if anybody wants to have the example from all of our different printers including the ones that include inc on them as well so excellent well let's review uh what's come in so far on the polls 53 have voted how much is the cost of a subscription to touching the news 69 say free 25 say 20 per month and only one person said 10 per month nobody guessed 30 per month so what's the correct response it's free but it looks like we could charge 20. no yeah
i'll sign you up there's an audience for this all right gotta go ahead and in that poll so yeah i think that then trans us transitions us in i mean we're getting close so if you have any questions now is a good time because this is sort of the marketing things if you're not familiar with vue plus all of this stuff is on our website but you know we have a wide range from both the personal and broth bosser of the imbraille up to the big uh work 24 7 with the premiere in the elite we do have ink options the spot dot is a color ink printer the premiere and elite with the ink connect black ink option have ink with the delta you get this basically the same printer as the pix blaster and the columbia but it takes a stack feeder uh print of both up to 12 inches wide so the standard 11 half by 11 braille paper or letter size paper or whatever card stock you can buy at the at office depot uh label stock that you get uh from like american thermoform i the i have been pointing over here i have a delta in my office because i it's just so flexible if i'm printing big giant things like maps for shows then i'll tend to use the elite with the ink connect or my columbia2 or pixblaster because of the tractor feed because i can print you know a thousand page box but you know i i have the luxury of having access to all of them but i'd say uh the columbia2 or pixblaster is probably the most common one that's out there uh i always like having at least one or two deltas for those fun things like doing greeting cards things like that doing labels uh just it's nice to have a wider breadth than just tractor feed paper or uh or only braille specialty paper but to be able to use anything that's maybe a little thicker than copy paper so and then a lot of you probably have heard of or seen that the shows the spot dot always gets tons of attention that's definitely our most unique printer with the all-in-one color ink tactile and braille options and if you're smarter balance state you probably have a lot of the maxes laying around as well since that was the the one that was tagged as the unit for supported by the smarter balanced testing for the blind students so the secret to our success right this is the what's under the hood of why it's so quote easy um and if you don't believe me that it's easy you can simulate this you can download the printer driver even for the pix blaster uh any of the printers you can download the printer driver for free install the printer driver and you just set it up if you don't have the printer to set up to print the file we have a youtube video for how to do that and it takes about five minutes install the driver set it up to print the file go into an app or to the photo thing hit print choose the file name it'll generate a print file you can open it up then in the tiger viewer or tiger designer and you can see it with tiger view you can see it that's also free if you do a 30 day free trial or you already have our tiger software suite you can bring it in you can open it up in tiger designer and and uh then edit it edit it from there or make some changes but then you'll get to see yeah that the uh that my text is getting chopped off let's see oops reformatting for the different templates here let's move there we go nothing like on-the-fly editing okay so yeah so what you're seeing is what you're gonna get you know on a windows program this also i said this will work from your phone and we i've now actually built into the tiger box or the pixi that if you don't have a printer it'll also generate the print files so with just that you know so you don't even have to have a windows pc anymore this is i haven't updated the slide i guess but any screen color gets converted to a grayscale with seven different shades based on the intensity of the colors and those are your different dot heights that's where they come from with the braille dot height being special it's one click higher than the than black so then braille stands out above all else and and again we provide the braille screen fonts both ascii and dot versions with the printer driver so when you install it you will get that um and and again so this is where this prn file is what it generates and that's this print ready print to file option that is now available at the download on touching the news yeah would you want to tell us about some of the cool stuff that vue plus is working on now it's funny you should ask uh the uh you know really the the big thing that we're working on is uh in the middle is this idea of texture fills it's been something that's been on my mind for a long time but thanks to no traveling during covid we had the whole team just focused on what more we could do asking out questions to uh during our webinars we've been doing a lot more of virtual stuff and asking what more we could do and so one of the things that came up was just a better way to do texture fill libraries and then thought and mapping them to represent colors and so that really we tried to think about doing all this one brand new tool for doing this and it turned out to be two different audiences right was what we're looking at we have an audience of we really want the blind user to be self-sufficient and and especially heard about elementary school kids that just were not getting access to graphics early so building a drawing tool that's accessible to blind users on a touch screen device that's was our number one piece that's getting ready really close to being ready for some testers to start using it so right now it's been developed by by my dad for blind people so it's not a pretty tool to look at but to be able to draw shapes by description by having a touch screen device but you'll be able to print them out and lay them down on a touchscreen device right this is something that we really expect i don't know if there's anything else like this what operating system is that on said it won't matter it's going to be running on a browser type interface it's on chrome it's on chromium so it'll run on anything the accessibility depends right i mean you have a lot less control with ios than you would with say android or windows pc so but it really should work with we're going to make sure it definitely works like chromebooks something low cost um that is easy to get you know easy to get to so even if we have to send a unit with somebody uh it'll also work on our aveo touchpad that we have our audio tactile system but those ones are so big and fragile you don't want to be shipping them around so yeah that was the ideas it's portable and then so same thing with the another tool that we're trying to merge them into one but it just didn't make sense we want a really simplified tool for teachers and parents to be able to like i said clean up graphics like the question earlier to create a meaningful tactic to take something down get rid of pieces adjust the contrast adjust the number of colors in there so i say cartoonize a picture to make it representative and decide how you want colors to be mapped and automatically if you want map patterns to those colors to give more differentiation than just the dot heights uh as well as so automatically adding pattern fills and also being able to and actually both tools will use that part uh and then be able to quickly add braille labels as well so this was a a three-step tool right i mean it was trying to keep it as simple as possible and again it will also right now it's running on windows but the idea being it's built on a web-based web app type thing so it could be something that could run on anything but they're they're both early i mean that was the goal is to make them a run on anything i mean we're we've just gone through a bunch of stuff with um with duxbury to make sure everything's really nailed down to work perfectly with mac so we've refreshed our mac drivers and you know worked with there uh we used the we used it on the the pixie is running on a raspberry pi so that's linux so oh well this is i better stop talking because i know we gotta wrap up absolutely um so let's hand it over to paul to wrap us up today all right um so what have we discovered today well we've learned about the touching the news service it's a free service it gives you access to some really helpful and useful tactile graphics the pix blaster because come with the tiger software suite for translating print to braille and the pixie device for using it as a wireless embosser and then we've learned that vue plus and actually develops and manufactures a line of embossers used for tactile graphics but also for literary braille so it's not just about graphics it's about anything you want to create that is braille whether it's a combination whether it's literary whether it's graphics all of that is included at the pixblast just in case you're only slightly familiar with it it is as we've discussed available on quota for 3 995 it's available for cash sale as well uh there is a one year warranty does come with the tiger tiger software suite obviously and the pixie all that stuff there's no optional stuff it's all in the box for you to get started uh the videos are online as as has been talked about earlier if you go to the page for the pix blaster on aph there are several videos telling you how to get up and running which is very helpful and if we put that last slide up dan you want to let everybody know how they get in touch with you oh yeah sorry i was putting the link in there for the all right sure yeah if you haven't seen it already viewplus.com phone number well is on at the top right for especially for accessibility we have an 800 number that's up there where it's a toll free number um and if you email me at dan.gardner viewplus.com with any questions comments or anything else i'm more than more than happy to discuss any of this stuff with you
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