Accessible applications of wearable technologies

Transcript

29 June 2014

Roberta: I’m speaking today with Dr Scott Hollier, Project Manager and Western Australian Manager of Media Access Australia. Welcome Scott.

Scott: Thanks Roberta, it’s great to be back.

Roberta: It’s great to have you here in the studio. So glad you could drop by. We’re here to talk about accessibility, an ongoing subject, and probably will be for some time to come. Now some time ago I spoke with your colleague, Eliza Cussen, regarding wearable technologies, like Google Glass. Scott, who came up with this amazing concept, which of course is no longer a concept? But it would be interesting to know who came up with the idea and why it was born.

Scott: Well as the name suggests, Google Glass is produced by Google, but the concept of using OCR to be able to identify your environment and also things like augmented reality have been around with us for some time. So to explain those in a bit more detail, OCR, Optical Character Recognition is when you can scan text and you can identify what it is or use a similar technology to identify objects. And augmented reality is a way of overlaying computer information in an environment that we can see; so if you wanted to go on say, a virtual treasure hunt you could have a computer image of something overlaid on a real life thing that we can see. So what Google did is they essentially took those things, rolled it all into one device that we can wear as glasses, and it’s extremely clever. We can’t easily buy them as yet as consumers, but certainly in developer circles and on eBay and all sorts of other areas yeah, as you say, it’s not just a dream but available as reality.

Roberta: So when do you think we might be able to have that in Australia?

Scott: Well, it’s a very good question. At the moment if you’re in certain developer circles or Google have had the occasional special offer online, can get hold of those, but yeah, for most of us, I mean it still sort of seen as being a development prototype type of stage, even though there is, you know, quite a lot of people have their hands on one now. So it’s a little bit of a mystery, but looking at eBay, the prices seem to be around the 2,000 mark, which is expensive but considering that it is a fairly revolutionary device, not completely outrageously expensive, and there’s some really interesting applications for people with disabilities.

Roberta: Now, there are projects where big names such as Telstra are involved to help people who are blind or vision impaired; can you tell us something about those and what we can expect?

Scott: Sure, and that’s a really great point to mention because what Telstra have done is that they have looked at Google Glass specifically for its applications for people with disabilities, and they have a great example in a video on their site showing a blind lady who is basically able to go into a supermarket, pick up a packed of peas, and using the OCR facility on Google Glass, it can pick up what’s written on that packet, the screen reader then explains what that text is, and so yeah, essentially a blind person can walk into a supermarket, pick up an object, have the screen reader tell them what that object is, and then they can make a choice to buy it, which is just an incredible thing. As a vision impaired person myself, the concept I could just walk into a grocery store and go shopping and be able to read those labels is remarkable.

Roberta: It certainly is a long way from where some supermarkets used to offer a service for blind people to have a staff member go around with them, and now they can do it by themselves. Like we said before many times, it’s independence that’s really the key, isn’t it?

Scott: Absolutely.

Roberta: Now looking to the future Scott, where do you see access going? Is there potential, say, for Cloud to help?

Scott: Well there is, and one of the really exciting things, we talked before about Windows and Microsoft starting to explore a little bit of Cloud with preferences, but where the dream really lies is there’s a project called GPII, the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure. And this is a project coming out of the US where the idea is that you can walk up to any device and after it’s identified who you are through profile on the Cloud, it then basically goes and reformats the interface of that device to make it accessible. So for example, if I walked up to a ticket machine it would figure out who I am and what my needs were, and it would change the ticket machine to say, be large print, give me some text to speech, and make the font really big. But likewise, you say someone in a wheelchair came up to that same ticket machine, it would then lower all the touch buttons at a lower level so that person could reach them. So the potential is you could go, you could use your TV or mobile device or ticket machine, or anything, and by getting the information and the assisted technology off the Cloud it could format it into exactly what you need, regardless of device. So this is something that I think is really, really exciting. It would require a fair bit of effort to make it actually happen in real life, and a lot of coordination between government and industry, but the concept that you could literally walk up to anything, anywhere, and have it work for you is a really exciting one.

Roberta: Is it very far away, do you think?

Scott: I think it probably is still a little far away, just because there is such a big amount of coordination between different stakeholders to make it happen, but that said, the fact that the project is up and running and this space is being looked at, given our devices don’t have a lot of storage on them and companies are using Cloud more and more as a way to synchronise our information, I think that’s certainly a way to go.

Roberta: Well thank you again for coming into the studio Scott, and I’m sure that we’ll be talking more about this in the future.

Scott: Oh, thanks so much Roberta; greatly appreciated.

Roberta: I’ve been speaking with Dr Scott Hollier, Project Manager and Western Australian Manager for Media Access Australia. And Media Access Australia are supporters of this programme.

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