Watching TV with Vision Loss: What Can Help

Hadley

Watching TV with Vision Loss: What Can Help

Presented by Ricky Enger

Ricky Enger: Watching TV can be a relaxing way to spend your time, but what if you're struggling to figure out what's on, how to find the channel you want, or how to decipher what's happening on screen? In this episode, Steve Kelly joins us as we discuss strategies for enjoying TV after vision loss. I'm Ricky Enger, and this is Hadley Presents. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Kelly: Hey, Ricky. Thanks for having me on.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, it is wonderful to have you back. It's always a good time. For those who don't know, Steve is one of our practical help specialists at Hadley. And also, you have a bunch of letters after your name, don't you?

Steve Kelly: I'm a CVRT, which is certified vision rehab therapist, which just means that I've seen some TVs in my time.

Ricky Enger: Yes. And you've got some technology certification as well. So I think you're well positioned to chat about TV. And I suspect that occasionally you may watch some TV yourself, right?

Steve Kelly: I do, but I'm not a huge TV watcher, but enough to help out and problem solve.

Ricky Enger: There you go. And we do get a lot of questions about helping and problem solving when it comes to TV, because I think a lot of people, they start to have trouble seeing what's on the screen. And what used to be this really great way to relax and unwind is suddenly really frustrating. And I think people, when they get to that point where, "Hey, I'm struggling with the TV," the first reaction is, "Well, I've got to go buy a new TV or I have to get some kind of special equipment." And ultimately, you might end up doing that, but that's not always the first step, right? Are there things that people can do right away if they're listening, maybe some things that they can just go try in their living room?

Steve Kelly: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I'm just reminded back in the day, I used to work with people one-on-one, and I can't tell you, Ricky, how many times I would walk into the home and the TV viewing was the reason that I was there and I would walk in and the chase lounge was 20 feet away and The TV was probably maybe a 20-inch TV and it was right next to a wide open window that had direct sunlight coming in. Everybody has their spaces designed for them, so I recognize that there are usually reasons for this, right? But one of the first things that people can do is to consider moving their favorite chair or something a little bit closer to the TV, and then the lighting plays a huge issue. So anytime you can eliminate some of the direct lighting either with curtains or a sheer blinds, anything like that, that's going to help a lot with the contrast because that just kind of washes out your eyes or washes out the screen. So those are the two big things. It's just moving a little bit closer and then adjusting the lighting a little bit so that makes the screen a little bit easier to see.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, that's helpful. And when it comes to the size of TV, I mean, I remember when a 20 inch was standard and now 80 inches, 55, whatever. I was just curious, is bigger always better or where do you come down on that?

Steve Kelly: It can be, especially if you do have a 20 inch, maybe moving to a 30 or 40 inch TV might make a little bit of sense. But sometimes, and we address this too when we're looking at computer screens, you don't want to find yourself in a situation where the screen is so big that you are craning your neck as it moves around to follow stuff on the TV. I always suggest people go into Staples or Best Buy or any one of the box stores that has TVs and kind of walk down the aisle and take a look. Which TV are you comfortably able to look at from, I don't know, maybe three or four feet away without craning your neck. So that'd give you an idea, I think, of the right size. I can remember walking into a home with, oh my gosh, it must have been a five or six foot TV. I felt like I was in the middle of the ball field or something when it was going on, but by the time I left, my neck hurt because I was constantly moving my head as I watched the TV. So I think you can get too big. The other interesting thing too, Ricky, is I found, especially when Beverly and I are eating dinner or something and we want to watch the news, I'll actually put the news on my iPad or believe it or not, even on my phone and sit it right next to us while we're watching. And sometimes that's very comfortable for me. It's just the iPad is what, 10 or 12 inches. So I think experimenting a little bit with what it is that you're watching the TV on just to see what is most comfortable. But the important thing is be open, be flexible to trying a couple of different things.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, that's a really good idea. And the iPad is certainly easier to move around than your TV or your chair might be. So it's a really good idea.

So when people are struggling to read print, the first thing they think about is let me get a magnifier. There's got to be some equipment to make this a little easier. And so when it comes to watching TV, I think that same thought process happens. Is there some kind of equipment that I can use to see this better? And I think there is. There's a couple of different glasses or devices. There's like the Vision Buddy and the, what is it? The Max glasses, probably a few other things out there. And I'm wondering if you have some thoughts on who those things work for and who they may not work so well for and how do they even work? I'm kind of clueless.

Steve Kelly: It's a great point. We're exploring the magic glasses, right? There's got to be a pair of glasses that will fix this for me. So if you just have kind of like a minor low vision or something like that, you might want to take a look at some of the. They market them as TV viewing glasses. Eschenbach has the Max TVs coil. They may call them the coil binoculars, but essentially they're a pair of glasses that will magnify what you see. But here's the thing, they only magnify about 2X. And to give you an idea of what 2X means, if for example, you were standing 10 feet away from your television set and you walked so that you were five feet away closer, you basically doubled the viewing image and that's your 2X. So for somebody with a slight vision loss, those could be helpful. They're a little bit uncomfortable to wear. They're lightweight, but essentially they have two lenses that move closer together or further apart and magnify the TV. I would definitely try them before you purchase them because. And I think they're both somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to $100 or something. But I think for a lot of people, those are not going to work. Sometimes people will get like a handheld monocular or small telescope and they could use that maybe to read like the little captions at the bottom or something like that. I think in some ways that actually might be more effective, but it's not going to be great to be seeing the whole screen.

Then you did mention the Vision Buddy, which is kind of like an electronic glasses and there's a variety of them out there. I think the Vision Buddy for some folks may make the most sense because you actually end up putting the viewing area on the inside of the glasses. They somehow or another connect. And that's interesting and that's $3,000 solution. Again, definitely something you want to try before you go there. But in each one of these things, I think for the right person, they could be a solution, but they're not a solution for everybody for sure. Try them first.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, that's always good advice where you can try before you buy. One thing that I know a lot of people struggle with is you have these remotes with 40, 50 buttons it seems like, and there are equally as many channels. I mean, you may have literally 100 channels depending on where you are getting your TV provider, whoever that is. So I'm wondering if there are some ways to kind of address this. We don't have the turn the dial between six channels anymore. So one thing I was thinking about is there's a universal remote that I think it has six buttons on it, which sounds really attractive, honestly, less confusion. And what you can do is called the flipper two. And what you can do is you can program or you can ask your favorite techie person to program your 30 channels that you care about and then the buttons that you have are volume up, volume down, channel up, channel down and power off and something else. So that's one way to do it. Are there some other ways that you can think of in terms of figuring out what's on, figuring out some of these TVs have menus where you have to switch the source between the soundbar and the this and the that.

Steve Kelly: All of that is extremely complicated to me. I mean, one of the things that I have done for folks too who didn't want to go to a universal remote, which I do think is a good idea if you can get one that works with your set because it certainly simplifies it, but I've used Puff Paint in the past or Bump Dot sometimes.

If there was a couple of favorite things that people wanted to find, you probably are a little bit more familiar, but I know some of the cable boxes now have some accessibility that might be built in so that you can actually turn on like a screen reader type thing where as you're scrolling through, it will read those things out to you. I'm not sure that everybody's going to be comfortable with something like that, but in those situations that might help.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, those things are great. And I think some of them do also have text enlargement for the menus. So if you have Comcast or Cox or Spectrum, those certainly do have these accessible cable boxes and that's what you could ask your provider for. I want the talking cable box. And that's exactly what happens. You have a screen reader or you can enlarge the screen and it will tell you things like what channel you're on. Some of them have a spoken channel guide that you can scroll through, which is really nice to figure out what's on. And you can access some of the features of that cable box like turning on audio description, which we'll I think talk about in a little bit. There's also TVs themselves now are coming with some of these accessibility features built in. So if you're at the point where you're thinking, I actually do need a new TV, those have some of those features on board. S

o things like Samsung and Hisense and Sony, and they're certainly more than those brands, but those are just off the top of my head ones that I know all of the newer sets have those accessibility features. So that's something worth checking out.

Steve Kelly: And when you call the company, whoever you happen to use, ask for their accessibility department or accessibility support. Sometimes that's the key word to get you to speak to the right person because a lot of times the person answering the phone may have no clue what any of that is about.

Ricky Enger: Yeah, that's a really good point. And if you are struggling to figure out who do I even call to get started with this kind of thing, you can call us at Hadley and we'll be happy to talk you through some of that stuff and just give you the terminology that you might ask about things like that. If you're not on traditional cable TV, you do have the option of some streaming services like YouTube TV, and I think there are some others like Hulu, things like Netflix and all of these streaming services that are outside the traditional set of cable channels. Those can have built-in accessibility as well. And you can get devices like the Apple TV or the Amazon Fire Stick. We have info on how to use those particular devices. So if you're thinking, "Well, I don't have cable, so I can't get an accessible cable box," you do still have some options.

Steve Kelly: Yeah. The Apple TV quickly comes to mind and both of the magnification and voiceover on it were really, really quite good.

Ricky Enger: Yeah. And the Fire Stick is great too, and it's really affordable. It's small. There is Alexa built into that. So sometimes you can just ask, "Alexa, search for whatever movie it is or whatever TV show it is that you're hoping to watch." So I kind of touched on audio description, but didn't even really talk about what it is. So when you get to a point where you're just not figuring out what's happening on the screen, you got the big music sequence and that's all that's happening for you, or you have those text sounds going back and forth, people are typing to each other, but you're not reading whatever that is. So audio description is the thing to use when that happens, and it's fantastic. It works like when there is a break in the dialogue. So it's not going to talk over when an actor is already speaking, but when there is some break, you're going to get a narrator of sorts who is kind of filling in those gaps for you, and it's great. The issue, of course, can be figuring out how do I even turn it on, right?

Steve Kelly: Right. And it seems to be in different places for different services. That's what's so tricky about it.

Ricky Enger: Right. There's no standard, unfortunately. So for cable, for example, you might see this called SAP or secondary audio programming. And for each channel that you turn it on, if they're broadcasting something with audio description, you'll get that. Or you might get Spanish or you might get just another version of what's on the primary channel. So they could be exactly the same. And that's kind of the drawback is how do I know this has audio description? And if it does, how do I turn that on? On the streaming devices or the smart TVs, there are options for turning on audio description for Netflix or for whatever channel you're watching. And again, this is something that we can talk with you about, either talking about what audio description is and maybe at least where to get you started in terms of turning it on, because again, it's not standard, unfortunately. Is this something that you have played around with yourself or do you tend to leave it off at this point?

Steve Kelly: For the most part, I leave it off, although there have been a couple things that I've reviewed in the past, like YouTube TV, where I kind of had to dig in and figure out where it was. And I think the important thing for people to know is number one, that it exists, audio description. And as you mentioned, the secondary audio, the SAP, secondary audio is programming. Those are the two key things so that when you start digging through it, those are like your keywords, what you're looking for. Or if you need to call the accessibility phone number and ask, you want to be sure to ask about that so somebody can guide you to it. But the cool thing is once you have it set up a lot of times, for example, with YouTube TV, and I suspect it's the same for HBO or a lot of the other streaming services, once you have it set up, it's set up and it's going to be on whenever you watch things. Now, not 100% of the programming you watch may have it offered, but a lot of the streaming services now have quite a bit of it. So it could be the case that most of the programming offers it.

Ricky Enger: Yeah. It's certainly a lot more than it used to be. And there's a website that we'll have in our show notes that lists the existing shows and movies that have been released with audio description and then the service that you can find it on, because that's the other weird thing is that it may have been audio described, but as Hulu sells a thing to Netflix and back again, sometimes those audio described tracks don't come along with it. So it can get a little confusing, but it's well worth trying it. If you are finding yourself just saying, "Forget it. I don't want to watch TV because I don't have a clue what's going on." So the thing is though that, as you mentioned before, this can be a shared activity. Sometimes you might have someone sitting next to you and you might want them to describe what's going on, or it might be that they are very much into just experiencing what's happening and they're distracted by it. There are lots of reasons why talking about not only audio description, but the TV setup in general with your friends and family can be a little bit uncomfortable. Do you have experience with this or thoughts about this, how people can approach kind of making this a good space for everyone to get their needs met?

Steve Kelly: Well, I guess in a roundabout way. I mean, I was just thinking about our setup at home and stuff. And so when we're going to watch a movie or something, like Beverly or other folks might be on the couch, which is eight feet away or nine feet away, and there's Steve in his chair, maybe three feet. Close to the TV. Yeah. But at first, it may feel a little bit awkward because I'm the one who's sitting close to the TV, but we've gotten way past that. It was awkward maybe the first time or two or something like that. But the other thing is too, oftentimes, maybe somebody hears better than somebody else. So that might be another thing. I guess what I'm saying is it's important to kind of put the stuff on the table so that people can talk about it. A lot of times, like if we're eating or something like that, we'll have the conversation, "Well, is it easier to use the iPad? Would that be better? Or should I turn the TV on, which is a little bit more in the distance?" But starting to have those conversations and just being aware that everybody's needs are different and it's not just a vision need, it can be a wide variety of things because somebody may be on the phone or whatever, but I think just having that conversation.

Ricky Enger: You're so right about that. And I know it's easier said than done because it can feel awkward. When there were more sighted people in my household, I didn't use audio description because, and I never opened my mouth about this even, I just assumed that everyone was going to find this annoying or distracting because here's this person talking in the middle of the movie. And over time, I was like, "I'm going to try it." And at first I tried it just by myself watching things that I cared about that nobody else really wanted to watch and realized, "Oh, I'm missing a lot more than I thought I was." And so then I said, "Can we turn this on? And if you find it annoying, speak up just so that I know and I'm not sitting here wondering." And what has happened over time is that as friends come over and as my son and I are watching TV, they appreciate having the audio description on because they can get up and get a drink and know what's happening on screen without having to look at it. Or there are sometimes things that they miss visually and the audio description says it and they're like, "Oh, I didn't even notice that."

Steve Kelly: It can all flow with what's happening in the show. It just becomes another dimension or another element to it. But I can see how it was very difficult to have those initial conversations about it or you felt like maybe you were the only one.

Ricky Enger: Absolutely. But having opened my mouth and we tried it and we came to a consensus that really worked for us all. And you still may have someone in your family who does find whatever you're doing distracting or uncomfortable or whatever it is, but you'll never know and you'll never be able to negotiate those things together if you don't have that conversation, right?

Steve Kelly: Yeah. And I do think that there, this is beyond the scope of this podcast, but I do think that there are also a lot of different ways to customize some of this. But the first step is actually acknowledging what's happening, what your needs are, and then looking for some of those solutions.

Ricky Enger: Exactly. And we're here to help with that at Hadley. So I know we've talked about a lot, whether it's glasses or turning on audio description or figuring out smart TVs and streaming and this and that, and your head might be spinning. And if it is, give us a call and we'll try and make that a little better.

Steve Kelly: Well, the important thing is to know, number one, that you do have options. There are options out there. So it doesn't have to be that aggravating or frustrating experience that it might be becoming. There are options out there and we can help winnow those down a little bit for you. We field those calls pretty much every day, people just trying to figure out which way to go with some of this stuff.

Ricky Enger: Exactly. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Steve. It always is. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so happy that you could stop by and just share a little bit of your experiences and your ways to approach things. And I hope this will be informative for people.

Steve Kelly: Yeah. Thanks so much for the invite, Ricky. This has been great.

Ricky Enger: Got something to say? Share your thoughts about this episode of Hadley Presents or make suggestions for future episodes. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at [email protected]. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T at HadleyHelps. Org. Or leave us a message at 847-784-2870. Thanks for listening.