January 20, 2025 • 14 mins
This week, while Damo continues his annual leave, Stephen chats with Jim Pipczak, Access Technology Lead with Vision Australia, based in Melbourne.
To access the program, presented by Stephen Jolley and Damo McMorrow you can go to varadio.org/talkingtech
To write to the show use damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:08):
Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition, available from
January the 21st, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have
you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated
stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for the two words talking tech.
(00:30):
And it can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon
just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask
your Siri device or smart speaker to play. Vision Australia
radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. Well,
Damo McMorrow continues his annual leave. I believe he'll be
back with us next week. I'm speaking with another from
(00:53):
the Access Technology team at Vision Australia and today it's
Access Technology lead, Jim Piepszak from Melbourne. Welcome, Jim.
S2 (01:03):
Thanks, Steve. Good to talk to you again.
S1 (01:06):
Tell us a little about yourself. Um, what's your role, actually,
in the Access Technology team?
S2 (01:13):
Our lead team helps all of the adaptive technology specialists
with advice and helps out, especially when they first start
with us. Most of the adaptive technology specialists really have
no access technology experience. There's very few that do. So
(01:34):
part of our job is is a really good induction,
teaching him all the the bits and pieces that they
need to know. And then it's the ongoing support. In
the beginning we'll go out with them, you know, to
see clients, see how they're going. Give them some advice
along the way. And at any time they can give
(01:54):
us a call and ask us questions. And we also
get together at times and get the all of the
specialists together as as many at a time as possible.
And so it's an ongoing support Their system is basically
what our team's involved in.
S1 (02:12):
They may not have had much experience when they first start.
You've had decades of experience. Tell us about yourself. You
have low vision, don't you?
S2 (02:21):
I'm partially sighted. Legally blind. Yep. About 3% sight. I've
got an interest in sight condition. Mine was from birth,
and I've got scarring on the back of the eye,
so I use my peripheral vision. Technically, I should have
a dead spot in the middle of my eye, but
I don't see it. Probably because, you know, the brain's
(02:43):
a really clever thing, and it fills in that little
gap that would normally be seen so that I walk
into a room and my eyes move around and I
get the entire picture, so I don't get to see
the dead spot at all. Interestingly, sometimes I walk down
the street and somebody just pops out of nowhere because
obviously they were in that spot and my eyes hadn't
(03:05):
moved as yet. But apart from that, I use my
peripheral vision. I use, you know, a screen reader on
the computer. I use a lot of the things that
I talk about all the time when I'm doing group talks.
S1 (03:17):
Now, you said you use a screen reader. Do you
look at text on a screen as well?
S2 (03:21):
I can see that there's text there, but I can't
necessarily read it unless I'm up close and unless I
enlarge it. So but it means that I can follow
along with what the screen reader is reading, and that's
definitely an advantage. Yeah, you can see where the images are,
where the text would be. Um, I've also got enough
sight to be able to use the mouse cursor. I
(03:44):
tend to have the mouse speak anything that's under it.
So by, uh, moving the mouse around the screen, I
can actually sort of skip scan text.
S1 (03:54):
Yeah.
S2 (03:54):
Very interesting. Start on the first paragraph and that's not interesting.
I'll just go to the next one. So yeah that's
a real advantage as well.
S1 (04:03):
So you walked in the door of Vision Australia 30
years ago. What brought you there. What were you doing
before you started this sort of work with the organisation?
S2 (04:12):
Back then I was working for VicRoads as a switchboard operator.
VicRoads had 6000 extensions when I first started. They had
one of those flick folders where, you know, there was
6000 names on this thing that you had to spin
around and find what it was, which wasn't all that
easy to do because the text was pretty small and
(04:35):
there was eight switchboard operators, you know, all the others
were cited.
S1 (04:39):
So you mean telephone switchboard operators for the modern generation
who mightn't know that concept?
S2 (04:45):
It was one of those switchboard situations where the moment
you open the switchboard in the morning until we close
at 5:00 with eight people answering calls, there was always
20 calls waiting to be answered. And, you know, that's
how busy it was. So looking up an extension was
pretty vital. But to their credit, they they put computers
(05:07):
in with an interesting system. And so we had a
database of all the extensions. And to their credit they
actually hired someone to make the system talk. Took him
three months to do it. I could then look up
a name and it would actually tell me what it was,
tell me what the extension was, and it made things
(05:27):
so much quicker. We're talking 37, 38 years ago. That
was my first introduction to a computer.
S1 (05:37):
Then you joined what was then the Royal Victorian Institute
for the blind became Vision Australia. Years later, in 1994,
what were you doing just prior to joining the organisation?
Why did you join?
S2 (05:49):
Luckily, I started picking up books and reading about the
computers and the speech, and on my rostered days off,
I was actually selling the system to other government departments
and installing it. David Blythe, who a lot of listeners
might know of David Blythe, was one of the managers
(06:10):
at the Beeb at the time, and he he approached
me and offered me a position as an adaptive technology
consultant because he wanted somebody who had a vision impairment
doing the job. He thought that was would be a
really good need, and that wasn't around at the time.
And there were very few. Adaptive technology consultants around the
(06:33):
country at that time. And there was really the vibe
had the vast majority of them. There's another one in Sydney.
There weren't many. So those early years, when David offered
me the position, I jumped at it. It was just
something new for me and and being able to get
in and actually help other people. That's what I really
(06:54):
wanted to do. I love that, you know, getting together
with people and showing them, you know, what's available, showing
them what's around.
S1 (07:02):
I seem to remember one of the main issues of
the day was this business of using the DOS or
text environment, and then computerization moved to the graphic user
interface as it was described with the graphic icons on
the screen. There was that. And what other things were
you really thinking about at the time?
S2 (07:24):
DOS was easy. I actually thought that was a really
easy system for screen readers and other programs. Windows came
in and that was a whole new world. We were
lucky that people like Joyce now Freedom Scientific got into that.
Windows Arctic was around then. It was extremely expensive equipment
(07:48):
back then. The other problem was, of course, being able
to read a document. Just something you're given. So, you know,
OCR devices at the time, it was reading a bill,
reading a letter, all that sort of thing. They were
the the real challenges of the time.
S1 (08:07):
And even computerized PDF was impossible. And it was a
bad word amongst the blindness and low vision community back
in the mid to late 90s, wasn't it?
S2 (08:16):
Very much, yeah. It was very difficult to to try
and read those sort of documents. Yeah. We've come a long,
long way in that period of time.
S1 (08:26):
So what have been some of the highlights for you
over that time while you've been with Vision Australia?
S2 (08:31):
It's those periods where something came in that really changed
the something like there were mobile phones, you know, you
Nokia mobile phones, but all you could do is make
a call and receive a call. Right up until the
Symbian operating system came in and talks was released. So
there was a program for the mobile phone called talks,
(08:52):
and it spoke everything you could. All of a sudden
you could read your text messages, you could, you know,
go into your contacts and, and have hundreds of contacts
and they'd all be read out to you. And then
came a program for those phones called K-nfb reader. And
that was a program where you could take a photo
(09:15):
of a document and it would read it to you.
And yeah, for something that was, They're so small, so
pocket sized. You could read a document, you read a
sign on a wall. It was surprisingly accurate.
S1 (09:30):
What was your impression around late 2009 when you first
saw an iPhone?
S2 (09:36):
Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I can still remember the
the talk that Steve Jobs gave when he introduced the
the iPhone. He spoke for an hour about everything it
can do. And at the end he said, oh yeah.
And it can make phone calls. Yeah. And of course,
the very first iPhone didn't have the accessibility built into it.
(09:59):
But when they brought in VoiceOver, the world just changed. Yeah.
That was your computer in your pocket.
S1 (10:06):
Mhm. Well let's look forward now thinking about the present
and what's ahead over the next few years. What are
you going to be playing with.
S2 (10:14):
Yeah. Artificial intelligence of course is the big thing at
the moment. And what it can do now there's, there's
all sorts of equipment around, but the interesting stuff is
Rayban glasses, for instance. It's not meant for people with
a vision impairment. It just happens to work for us.
(10:35):
I think it was a real accident that the artificial
intelligence that they put in there, uh, actually works for, um,
you know, for people with a vision impairment. All of
a sudden, people started saying, hey, we can do this
and we can do that. And the people that actually, uh,
(10:56):
puts in all of the intelligence into the glasses started
to think, well, this does more than what we thought
it was going to do, because.
S1 (11:03):
Originally it was just thought of as a solution for
people who wanted to be able to take videos, listen
to their music, etc., hands.
S2 (11:11):
Free. Exactly. And, you know, it was like I said,
it was more of an accident that the, uh, the AI, uh,
component to it actually did a lot more people might
be familiar with an app called Be My eyes. They
now have be my eyes built into those glasses. And
the really interesting thing was all of the engineers, all
(11:33):
of the software engineers, they can choose what they want
to work on. The vast majority wanted to work on
that component, because it had that something that was completely
different from what they're used to, and they really liked
the idea of being able to, you know, help out
a whole stack of vision impaired people.
S1 (11:51):
So I was thinking about these devices, like the meta
glasses and some of the what we would call mobility
devices that are going to be around. How do you
think people are going to do things differently, things they
couldn't do before? How is it going to change people's lives?
S2 (12:05):
Well, that's the interesting thing. You really don't know. You
can go around, you can do things, and then somebody
will do things out of the box. Then everybody else
realizes they can do that too. So it's a bit
like when the iPhone was introduced. I don't believe that
Apple really knew what it was going to end up.
And that's with all of these new devices that are
going to be coming out, all of the new the
(12:26):
new mobility devices that'll have the artificial intelligence built into it.
It'll be able to tell you when when something's coming
up that you're going to bump into or going to
need to move left or right. It's going to give
you all sorts of information that is going to be
absolutely amazing. But I don't know that we really know
(12:48):
what the end result is going to be until, you know,
everyone gets it in their hands and are able to
start playing with it.
S1 (12:55):
And the word gets out very quickly now, doesn't it?
Because we can easily listen to a webinar that's taking
place in another part of the world. There's old fashioned
email lists and other forms of social media that get
the information out to blind and low vision people that
couldn't have been done decades ago.
S2 (13:14):
Yeah, well, when I started, there were bulletin boards. There
was no such thing as Google around. And, you know,
Google has made all the difference. So YouTube, we can
see all of those videos and, and look at the
technology and see what it's going to going to do,
how to how to use it. It is amazing. Absolutely amazing.
S1 (13:33):
Jim, it's been terrific speaking with you today. Good luck
with your work as it continues with Vision Australia. And
I hope we can talk again sometime on talking tech.
S2 (13:42):
Same here. Thank you.
S1 (13:44):
I've been speaking with Jim Piepszak, who is an Access
technology lead with Vision Australia based in Melbourne. Before we go,
a reminder that you can find details of this and
previous editions of the program by going to VA radio,
Talking Tech, VA Radio, Talking Tech, and to write to
the program, all you need to do is write to
(14:07):
Damo at Vision Australia, Damo at Vision Australia. This has
been talking tech. My guest has been Jim Piepszak. Vision Australia,
access technology lead. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk
more tech next week.
S3 (14:26):
See you.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition, available from
January the 21st, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have
you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated
stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for the two words talking tech.
(00:30):
And it can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon
just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask
your Siri device or smart speaker to play. Vision Australia
radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. Well,
Damo McMorrow continues his annual leave. I believe he'll be
back with us next week. I'm speaking with another from
(00:53):
the Access Technology team at Vision Australia and today it's
Access Technology lead, Jim Piepszak from Melbourne. Welcome, Jim.
S2 (01:03):
Thanks, Steve. Good to talk to you again.
S1 (01:06):
Tell us a little about yourself. Um, what's your role, actually,
in the Access Technology team?
S2 (01:13):
Our lead team helps all of the adaptive technology specialists
with advice and helps out, especially when they first start
with us. Most of the adaptive technology specialists really have
no access technology experience. There's very few that do. So
(01:34):
part of our job is is a really good induction,
teaching him all the the bits and pieces that they
need to know. And then it's the ongoing support. In
the beginning we'll go out with them, you know, to
see clients, see how they're going. Give them some advice
along the way. And at any time they can give
(01:54):
us a call and ask us questions. And we also
get together at times and get the all of the
specialists together as as many at a time as possible.
And so it's an ongoing support Their system is basically
what our team's involved in.
S1 (02:12):
They may not have had much experience when they first start.
You've had decades of experience. Tell us about yourself. You
have low vision, don't you?
S2 (02:21):
I'm partially sighted. Legally blind. Yep. About 3% sight. I've
got an interest in sight condition. Mine was from birth,
and I've got scarring on the back of the eye,
so I use my peripheral vision. Technically, I should have
a dead spot in the middle of my eye, but
I don't see it. Probably because, you know, the brain's
(02:43):
a really clever thing, and it fills in that little
gap that would normally be seen so that I walk
into a room and my eyes move around and I
get the entire picture, so I don't get to see
the dead spot at all. Interestingly, sometimes I walk down
the street and somebody just pops out of nowhere because
obviously they were in that spot and my eyes hadn't
(03:05):
moved as yet. But apart from that, I use my
peripheral vision. I use, you know, a screen reader on
the computer. I use a lot of the things that
I talk about all the time when I'm doing group talks.
S1 (03:17):
Now, you said you use a screen reader. Do you
look at text on a screen as well?
S2 (03:21):
I can see that there's text there, but I can't
necessarily read it unless I'm up close and unless I
enlarge it. So but it means that I can follow
along with what the screen reader is reading, and that's
definitely an advantage. Yeah, you can see where the images are,
where the text would be. Um, I've also got enough
sight to be able to use the mouse cursor. I
(03:44):
tend to have the mouse speak anything that's under it.
So by, uh, moving the mouse around the screen, I
can actually sort of skip scan text.
S1 (03:54):
Yeah.
S2 (03:54):
Very interesting. Start on the first paragraph and that's not interesting.
I'll just go to the next one. So yeah that's
a real advantage as well.
S1 (04:03):
So you walked in the door of Vision Australia 30
years ago. What brought you there. What were you doing
before you started this sort of work with the organisation?
S2 (04:12):
Back then I was working for VicRoads as a switchboard operator.
VicRoads had 6000 extensions when I first started. They had
one of those flick folders where, you know, there was
6000 names on this thing that you had to spin
around and find what it was, which wasn't all that
easy to do because the text was pretty small and
(04:35):
there was eight switchboard operators, you know, all the others
were cited.
S1 (04:39):
So you mean telephone switchboard operators for the modern generation
who mightn't know that concept?
S2 (04:45):
It was one of those switchboard situations where the moment
you open the switchboard in the morning until we close
at 5:00 with eight people answering calls, there was always
20 calls waiting to be answered. And, you know, that's
how busy it was. So looking up an extension was
pretty vital. But to their credit, they they put computers
(05:07):
in with an interesting system. And so we had a
database of all the extensions. And to their credit they
actually hired someone to make the system talk. Took him
three months to do it. I could then look up
a name and it would actually tell me what it was,
tell me what the extension was, and it made things
(05:27):
so much quicker. We're talking 37, 38 years ago. That
was my first introduction to a computer.
S1 (05:37):
Then you joined what was then the Royal Victorian Institute
for the blind became Vision Australia. Years later, in 1994,
what were you doing just prior to joining the organisation?
Why did you join?
S2 (05:49):
Luckily, I started picking up books and reading about the
computers and the speech, and on my rostered days off,
I was actually selling the system to other government departments
and installing it. David Blythe, who a lot of listeners
might know of David Blythe, was one of the managers
(06:10):
at the Beeb at the time, and he he approached
me and offered me a position as an adaptive technology
consultant because he wanted somebody who had a vision impairment
doing the job. He thought that was would be a
really good need, and that wasn't around at the time.
And there were very few. Adaptive technology consultants around the
(06:33):
country at that time. And there was really the vibe
had the vast majority of them. There's another one in Sydney.
There weren't many. So those early years, when David offered
me the position, I jumped at it. It was just
something new for me and and being able to get
in and actually help other people. That's what I really
(06:54):
wanted to do. I love that, you know, getting together
with people and showing them, you know, what's available, showing
them what's around.
S1 (07:02):
I seem to remember one of the main issues of
the day was this business of using the DOS or
text environment, and then computerization moved to the graphic user
interface as it was described with the graphic icons on
the screen. There was that. And what other things were
you really thinking about at the time?
S2 (07:24):
DOS was easy. I actually thought that was a really
easy system for screen readers and other programs. Windows came
in and that was a whole new world. We were
lucky that people like Joyce now Freedom Scientific got into that.
Windows Arctic was around then. It was extremely expensive equipment
(07:48):
back then. The other problem was, of course, being able
to read a document. Just something you're given. So, you know,
OCR devices at the time, it was reading a bill,
reading a letter, all that sort of thing. They were
the the real challenges of the time.
S1 (08:07):
And even computerized PDF was impossible. And it was a
bad word amongst the blindness and low vision community back
in the mid to late 90s, wasn't it?
S2 (08:16):
Very much, yeah. It was very difficult to to try
and read those sort of documents. Yeah. We've come a long,
long way in that period of time.
S1 (08:26):
So what have been some of the highlights for you
over that time while you've been with Vision Australia?
S2 (08:31):
It's those periods where something came in that really changed
the something like there were mobile phones, you know, you
Nokia mobile phones, but all you could do is make
a call and receive a call. Right up until the
Symbian operating system came in and talks was released. So
there was a program for the mobile phone called talks,
(08:52):
and it spoke everything you could. All of a sudden
you could read your text messages, you could, you know,
go into your contacts and, and have hundreds of contacts
and they'd all be read out to you. And then
came a program for those phones called K-nfb reader. And
that was a program where you could take a photo
(09:15):
of a document and it would read it to you.
And yeah, for something that was, They're so small, so
pocket sized. You could read a document, you read a
sign on a wall. It was surprisingly accurate.
S1 (09:30):
What was your impression around late 2009 when you first
saw an iPhone?
S2 (09:36):
Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I can still remember the
the talk that Steve Jobs gave when he introduced the
the iPhone. He spoke for an hour about everything it
can do. And at the end he said, oh yeah.
And it can make phone calls. Yeah. And of course,
the very first iPhone didn't have the accessibility built into it.
(09:59):
But when they brought in VoiceOver, the world just changed. Yeah.
That was your computer in your pocket.
S1 (10:06):
Mhm. Well let's look forward now thinking about the present
and what's ahead over the next few years. What are
you going to be playing with.
S2 (10:14):
Yeah. Artificial intelligence of course is the big thing at
the moment. And what it can do now there's, there's
all sorts of equipment around, but the interesting stuff is
Rayban glasses, for instance. It's not meant for people with
a vision impairment. It just happens to work for us.
(10:35):
I think it was a real accident that the artificial
intelligence that they put in there, uh, actually works for, um,
you know, for people with a vision impairment. All of
a sudden, people started saying, hey, we can do this
and we can do that. And the people that actually, uh,
(10:56):
puts in all of the intelligence into the glasses started
to think, well, this does more than what we thought
it was going to do, because.
S1 (11:03):
Originally it was just thought of as a solution for
people who wanted to be able to take videos, listen
to their music, etc., hands.
S2 (11:11):
Free. Exactly. And, you know, it was like I said,
it was more of an accident that the, uh, the AI, uh,
component to it actually did a lot more people might
be familiar with an app called Be My eyes. They
now have be my eyes built into those glasses. And
the really interesting thing was all of the engineers, all
(11:33):
of the software engineers, they can choose what they want
to work on. The vast majority wanted to work on
that component, because it had that something that was completely
different from what they're used to, and they really liked
the idea of being able to, you know, help out
a whole stack of vision impaired people.
S1 (11:51):
So I was thinking about these devices, like the meta
glasses and some of the what we would call mobility
devices that are going to be around. How do you
think people are going to do things differently, things they
couldn't do before? How is it going to change people's lives?
S2 (12:05):
Well, that's the interesting thing. You really don't know. You
can go around, you can do things, and then somebody
will do things out of the box. Then everybody else
realizes they can do that too. So it's a bit
like when the iPhone was introduced. I don't believe that
Apple really knew what it was going to end up.
And that's with all of these new devices that are
going to be coming out, all of the new the
(12:26):
new mobility devices that'll have the artificial intelligence built into it.
It'll be able to tell you when when something's coming
up that you're going to bump into or going to
need to move left or right. It's going to give
you all sorts of information that is going to be
absolutely amazing. But I don't know that we really know
(12:48):
what the end result is going to be until, you know,
everyone gets it in their hands and are able to
start playing with it.
S1 (12:55):
And the word gets out very quickly now, doesn't it?
Because we can easily listen to a webinar that's taking
place in another part of the world. There's old fashioned
email lists and other forms of social media that get
the information out to blind and low vision people that
couldn't have been done decades ago.
S2 (13:14):
Yeah, well, when I started, there were bulletin boards. There
was no such thing as Google around. And, you know,
Google has made all the difference. So YouTube, we can
see all of those videos and, and look at the
technology and see what it's going to going to do,
how to how to use it. It is amazing. Absolutely amazing.
S1 (13:33):
Jim, it's been terrific speaking with you today. Good luck
with your work as it continues with Vision Australia. And
I hope we can talk again sometime on talking tech.
S2 (13:42):
Same here. Thank you.
S1 (13:44):
I've been speaking with Jim Piepszak, who is an Access
technology lead with Vision Australia based in Melbourne. Before we go,
a reminder that you can find details of this and
previous editions of the program by going to VA radio,
Talking Tech, VA Radio, Talking Tech, and to write to
the program, all you need to do is write to
(14:07):
Damo at Vision Australia, Damo at Vision Australia. This has
been talking tech. My guest has been Jim Piepszak. Vision Australia,
access technology lead. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk
more tech next week.
S3 (14:26):
See you.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.