2008-08-02-PACMate
Seminars@Hadley
Features of the PAC Mate Omni™ Accessible Pocket PC
Presented by
Jonathan Mosen – VP, Freedom Scientific
Moderated by
George Abbott
August 2, 2008
George Abbott
Well, hello everybody. I’m George Abbott from the Hadley School for the Blind moderating today’s Seminars at Hadley. I’d like to introduce you today to Jonathan Mosen and we’re very privileged and happy to have Jonathan with us. His topic today is the PAC Mate Omni™ Version 6.1 and it sounds like it has some very wonderful, exciting new features. Jonathan is with us from New Zealand. He’s presenting where it’s early Sunday morning there, 4:00 a.m., and Jonathan has been in this field for many years. He has been very instrumental in starting up the ACB Radio and many of you may recognize him from there. He’s been involved with Human Wares blindness products and he comes to us today as Vice President of Blindness Product Hardware Management for Freedom Scientific. So, Jonathan, it is all yours, and thank you.
Jonathan Mosen
George, thank you so much and thank you to everybody for being here. It’s a real pleasure. I see that there are a number of names that are familiar and quite a few of you who I don’t think I have met before. So, it’s great to see you here. And particularly, I’d just like to say a quick hello to Jim Ellsworth who I see in the list of participants here. Jim works for us at Freedom Scientific and is the friendly voice that you often hear when you get Tech Support Escalations. So, good to hear from him.
I would like to tell you, since is 4:00 a.m., that I’ve been up clubbing and getting all read for this, but the truth is, that as middle age slowly encroaches, I actually had an early night so that I could be bright and early here this morning. I always really enjoy giving these presentations no matter what time of the night they happen to be, because I love my work. What I really enjoy about working here at Freedom Scientific is that to me, it’s not so much that we are making PAC Mates or developing JAWS®, it’s that we are providing tools. They are tools that blind people then take up and run with and do amazing things with and we facilitate ensuring that blind people can play a full part in society. And I feel particularly jazzed and revved up for the next year. When I come back from conventions, like Sign Village and the ACB and NFB conventions, because I meet people and people stop me and say, thanks to PAC Mate Omni™, or the Focus Braille Displays or whatever it might be, I’ve been able to do this more efficiently, better than before, or even I’ve been able to do something that I hadn’t been able to do before. And that is what working in this industry, for me, is all about. So it’s a privilege to be here talking to you about it and it’s a privilege to be involved in it.
I know that they’ll be a mix of people here in terms of experience with the PAC Mate. Some people won’t have a clue what it is and have come here because they’re curious and at the other end of the spectrum we’ll have some power users who want to get every last detail about PAC Mate Omni™ 6.1, the new version of the PAC Mate software. So I appreciate that. I hope that those of you who are power user and who’ve come for all the juicy bits will bear with me while I try and set the scene a little bit regarding PAC Mate Omni™ and then we will go and talk about 6.1 and perhaps look at third-party applications if time permits. It is my intention to take the hour to chat with you, to take you through what we’ve been doing and then I will open it for questions. I find that that works better in a forum like this because sometimes if a question leads us down a particular pathway we may kind of lose the thread and the continuity, so please hold those questions. Maybe if you have a PAC Mate of course write them down on there and you’re ready to read them back. If you don’t, make a note on Notepad or Word or something like that and be ready to give me those questions after the presentation. I’ve let George know that I’m quite happy to stay here for as long as it takes to get through all of your questions.
So, if I may, let me set the scene for you a little bit in terms of the context of PAC Mate Omni™ and how we’ve got to where we are. You know, PAC Mate Omni™ is a blindness-specific device. It was developed specifically for us and in many cases, by us, as I’ve illustrated before. And some people kind of thumb their nose at that. They say mainstream is always better. Why do you need a device like this? And there certainly is a huge dollop of mainstream componentry in the PAC Mate Omni™ which offers many advantages. But we do have unique needs. And the interesting thing is that quite a bit of technology that has been developed for blind people along the way has made its way into the mainstream. So there is this kind of cross pollination that does go one. Sure, we are influenced heavily, of course, by what happens in so-called mainstream technology. We have to be. But equally, sometimes, the sighted world, the mainstream, takes technology that we’ve called our own and uses that, too.
Examples, well, let’s take a look at the original reading machine. Freedom Scientific, of course, has OpenBook®, which is software that give you access to the printed word and gives you great results as well. And then we have our SARA™ hardware device, our scanning and reading appliance, which is ideal for people who don’t have a computer, don’t wish to own one. We must never forget that the vast majority of blind people are seniors and they may not want a computer but they do want to be able to access their mail, reading material, et cetera.
But the original Reading Machine was, of course, developed by Ray Curzwell. That was the forerunner to the scanners that you see on many office desks these days, all around the world. The 33 rpm record – and I’ll bet you there’ll be some in the audience who don’t even know what they are, and that’s really scary. But the 33 rpm record was developed originally for talking books. And then you have the Notetaker. Let’s not forget that in the 1980s, the late 1980s, many, many people, probably many of you listening to this, were using Braille and Speaks. You were using Braille and Speaks long before any sighted person had anything like a PDA. We were taking notes, managing our appointments, getting instant on, doing all of those things, long before most sighted people were doing the same thing. So, sometimes we do lead the trend and the Notetaker is an example of that.
But things move on, and increasingly, portability became critical in the sighted world and technology became more complex and faster-paced. So, in 2000, Freedom Scientific was formed. That was an amalgamation of Arkenstone Henter-Joyce, and of course Blazie Engineering who made the Braille and Speak and Braille Light products. And people got together and though how can we take advantage of all of this talent and knowledge under one roof. And it was ultimately concluded that one way to do this was to use the power of JAWS® on a Windows mobile device.
Now, previously, Windows mobile hadn’t been made accessible at all. We were the first to do that and to break those barriers. So, the PAC Mate was born. The original PAC Mate BNS and TNS in late 2002 early 2003, we started to show the PAC Mate BNS and TNS, and accessible pocket PC for the first time.
The approach that we’ve taken with PAC Mate is that this gives you the best of both worlds. Clearly you do need a device that can interact with blindness-specific features such as reading .brf files, working with Bookshare if you’re in the United States. Laterally, of course, working with Daisy, but then, why not take advantage of all of the power of the Microsoft development team? And not just them, but the many third-party developers who are out there writing really inventive, innovate stuff for these devices.
So, with the proprietary Notetaker devices, they have to write everything that they do. If they want to add email, they have to write the entire email client. Not a simple task, I can tell you from personal experience. They would have to make sure that they factor in a web browser, all of those things, whereas with the approach that we’ve taken, we take advantage of all of the rigorous testing and the development of Microsoft who’ve already developed these features. What we have to concentrate on is making them accessible.
And the big advantage of this approach, apart from giving you robust solutions, is that we can offer you a much greater number of solutions. Some people buy a Notetaker with pretty low expectations because maybe they don’t have a lot of confidence with computers, and they think, okay, well, this is going to be okay for me. My needs are fairly minimal. But they grow in confidence. They get out there on the web. They start looking at the things that sighted people and other blind people are doing with their devices, and they think, man, you know, I paid a lot of money for this. I want to be able to do that, too. And if you are running a proprietary Notetaker device, then you are at the mercy of those who control the development plan.
Alternatively, if you go with a PAC Mate, you have a solution that allows you to install this wide range of applications so you are in control of what the PAC Mate does in addition to those core out-of-the box features. And if a little bit of help is needed on the way, then you have the power of JAWS® scripting. And if you can’t script for JAWS® yourself, then there are people who can and who are willing to lend a hand.
The other advantage of going with the PAC Mate approach, and I think this is particularly important in an education context, is the skills that you acquire. The transferability of the skills. If you are already a JAWS® user, and you come to PAC Mate, particularly if it’s our QWERTY version that you’re coming to, the PAC Mate QX, then you’re probably at least half way there to using it as soon as you put your hands on it. Because the keystrokes are primarily the same and you’ll be familiar with a lot of the commands.
The reverse is true as well. If you’re a youngster in school and you’re being given a PAC Mate then you’re going to be acquiring skills that are going to stand you in very good stead because Windows is for sure the most very dominant operating system that there is. And so if you’re coming to grips with these concepts, they are concepts that will stand you in good stead at college and then more than likely on into the workplace.
So, let’s talk about the various flavors of PAC Mate. There are two. There is a PAC Mate BX which is a really small unit which has just a Perkins style keyboard with a couple of extra dots. Dot 7 and Dot 8 which can also be used as backspace and enter. There’s a row of function keys across the top that give you really easy access to commonly-used applications and then there is a cursor cross for navigation.
Then we have the PAC Mate QX which is kind of like a laptop. And that’s pretty small, too, when you just have the keyboard there. It’s like a keyboard without a screen that happens to talk. That has a standard QWERTY keyboard, arrow keys and some function keys across the top. And I have to say that it is the quietest, most comfortable keyboard that I have ever used on any device. I love typing on the PAC Mate QX and I can get a really good speed with it.
Now, in addition to that, there’s also the Braille Display Options, which can be purchased separately or at the same time as you get a PAC Mate. That’s one of the big advantages of the PAC Mate approach, is that the Braille Displays are detachable. We have a 20 cell and a 40 cell Braille display available. So if the money’s not quite there, you can purchase a PAC Mate and then add the Braille display later. The reverse is true, incidentally. You can go ahead and buy a PAC Mate and Braille Display, 20 cell Braille Display for $1,495 is pretty good value for money. And we’ve worked hard to lower the cost of our Braille displays. The cost of Freedom Scientific Braille Displays has in fact lowered by around 40% over the last 3 or 4 years.
But you can purchase the Braille Display, use it on your PC and then add a PAC Mate later. When the Braille Display attaches to the PAC Mate it’s a very solid, snug fit. And then you unclip them from the bottom of the PAC Mate and you can use the Braille Display with your PC if you wish, because it has a USB port in it, or you can just take the PAC Mate away as a voice only unit. I do this quite a bit sometimes when I know I’m on a very long flight and I’m likely to just listen to a lot of MP3 or Windows media files or AAC files using PS Player for example.
Another nice feature of this approach is that if you need to have the Braille Display cleaned, let’s say, so you send it away for an annual checkup, then you can keep the PAC Mate and continue to reap its benefits. Likewise if you need to send the PAC Mate away, for example, we did offer an upgrade to existing users of PAC Mate who wanted to become PAC Mate Omni™ users, then you can keep the Braille Display and use that with your PC. So, all kinds of ways in which this is really very beneficial and a good approach.
Another one, just finally, of course is that if you start off with a 20 cell display and you find that funding becomes available for a 40 cell display, then you can say, sell the 20 cell on eBay or something like that and just swap them out. So, the PAC Mate unit is your base unit, and you have a 20 or 40 cell Braille Display. You can chop and change. This is particularly useful in a school environment where maybe you might purchase quite a few of the PAC Mate units but maybe a few, fewer, Braille Displays.
In that case you can give a particular student a Braille Display, take the Braille Display off and they still have a PAC Mate that they can use at least for speech purposes and use it as a voice-only Notetaker. Some other flexibility there in the school system perhaps where there may be some budget constraints.
Now I’m going to turn the PAC Mate Omni™ on and I have this connected to my mixer. I’m broadcasting from my studio here in New Zealand, so I’ve got a big console in front of me and connected to one of the channels in that console is the PAC Mate Omni™. I’m going to turn it on now. It normally does make a start-up sound by the way and because I have mine in so many meetings, et cetera, I disable the power on and power off sounds, so I’m turning it on now and we are at the Today screen. I am running, incidentally, the version of PAC Mate 6.1 that we will be shipping. This is 6.1.1074 and we expect that to be available on the website this Monday, US time, as in two days from now.
So we’re at the Today screen. And this is the screen that gives you an overview of what’s happening in your day to come. So let’s have a look at that. I’ll go to the top of the screen. I’m using a PAC Mate BX for this and I’ll talk a bit more about some cool new features we’re adding with the BX – [PAC Mate talks and gives the date and time] whoo – it’s early, isn’t it? And let’s just move through the scree here. I’m just down arrowing. Now, that is eloquent speech, obviously, so, it will sound very familiar to you if you are a JAWS user and users of other assistive technologies, in fact. And that date and time has come up on the Braille Display as well. I can read that in Grade 2 Braille or computer Braille, which is what it is set to by default.
Now we can just move through. And so that is the owner information. It’s always good to install that, because sometimes when you install Windows Mobile applications, they are licensed to a particular owner, so it’s important to take the time to get your owner information right. So, if I had email messages waiting for me to deal with, I have push email turned on, or I have a POP3 account where I’m checking for my mail every so often, or, if I’m in a business environment and I’m connected to a Microsoft Exchange server then this will tell me if there are messages waiting right on this main screen.