(gentle music)
Welcome to Hadley Presents.
I'm your host, Ricky Enger,
inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, we explore the BlindShell Classic,
a smartphone alternative
for those who are blind or low vision,
and joining me is Hadley learning expert, Steve Kelly.
Welcome to the show Steve.
Hey Ricky, how are you?
I am great.
I'm so glad that you could join me
to talk about the BlindShell.
This is a really cool device
and looking forward to diving into all of the things
that it can and can't do.
Before we do that though, for those who aren't familiar
with you yet,
from Get Up and Go
and various other discussion groups
and even a podcast
that you've done on Hadley Presents,
tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.
Well, I'm Ricky.
I'm a learning expert at Hadley
and have been doing that for about a year,
and prior to that I was a vision rehab therapist,
working with clients out in the field for a local agency.
And in addition to what you do for Hadley,
you actually sometimes get lucky enough to receive devices
that you can review.
So for example, in Access World,
you have a couple of articles taking a look at some devices
and one of those just happens to be the BlindShell.
Yeah, I was very fortunate to get a demo
of the BlindShell and really had a lot of fun with that.
So let's talk about what it is.
In the intro, we call this a smartphone alternative,
but you know, that could mean just about anything.
What are we talking about when we say,
a smartphone alternative?
What is the BlindShell?
Well, you know, that's not a bad description.
I would also say it's like a hybrid.
If people remember what the candy bar phones looked like,
you know, half of the phone was the number pad
and the other half of the phone was a display,
and it was probably about the same size as say,
one of the older iPhones, I don't know,
maybe about a quarter of an inch thick.
So it, you know, it's not real heavy,
but I would call it a hybrid
because it's got the dialing pad still on it.
And not only that,
but there's plenty of space between the buttons
and they're labeled in white on black
and in large print.
So for those of us with low vision,
it makes it pretty easy to see.
And the button spacing is one thing
that often does come up for many.
Just having a touch screen is not the thing,
either because of neuropathy
or it just feels like an awkward user interface.
We like to have that tactile feedback.
We like to be able to touch the one and know that it's a one
because it feels familiar, like a keypad.
So having button spacing where you can determine
where you are on the phone,
what button you're touching,
and not try and press one button
and instead press three at once
because they're so close together.
So that's excellent,
as well as having this nice high contrast interface
so that it's very easy to tell what you're touching.
You know, it may sound like a minor thing
and particularly to somebody who's younger,
but I can just tell you from working with clients
who grew up using a phone that had buttons
that you could feel,
it's really, it's a big deal.
I mean, people are still looking for that.
And frankly, I don't think
it's just older folks who are looking for that.
I think a lot of people just do better
with a button that they can feel
and a keypad, you know,
where they can position their fingers
and know where the numbers are.
Exactly.
So this is a phone that can work well
for those who are totally blind
and those who are low vision.
And that would seem to indicate
that there are features for both.
So I'm assuming that the phone does talk.
You know, that was one
of the very first things I noticed,
was that literally, out of the box,
as soon as you press the power button,
which is also the back button,
it begins talking to you
and to me right there, I mean that,
everything about that was accessible.
I just thought from that moment forward,
the phone starts with text to speech, bravo.
Whether, you know,
whether you're gonna use the phone visually or not,
It just told me that right out of the box,
it's accessible and you don't always find that .
That was just great.
That's true.
Oftentimes when you get a phone that is a smartphone
or something else that's off the shelf,
you're looking at starting the accessibility features
by pressing a button or you know,
saying something, dictating it
and you are able to to launch that.
But this happens right away.
So not only does it talk,
but I'm assuming that there are some text features as well
that make it usable for someone with low vision.
What's available for making the display look comfortable?
Yeah, there are quite a few options.
If I remember correctly, we have two text options,
one of which I really didn't like the name of,
it's huge text.
It's about the size of a newspaper headline.
So what happens is you get a few letters on the app
that's describing it.
Like for example, contacts.
When you have it set as huge,
you're not gonna see contacts all on one line.
It's gonna break and wrap to the second line.
But the great thing is, it's nice and large
and it is in high contrast on the phone
and you've got a couple of color options too.
So for me, you know,
I just immediately chose white letters
on a black background, which was nice and easy to see,
but you've probably got more options on this
than you would find on any other flip phone
in terms of changing background and foreground color
and the two text sizes,
while there's not a whole lot of variation,
both are large and the larger text size is pretty good.
And so we've talked about
this not being a smartphone
and that there are smartphones,
and this isn't one of them,
but we haven't really talked about
what differentiates a smartphone from,
I guess you would call it a feature phone.
If you don't know that terminology,
you might think, well,
something that isn't a smartphone,
all I'm gonna be able to do with it is maybe call someone
or call emergency services if I needed to,
and beyond that, there's really not much else there,
but I think that's not an accurate description, right?
What can you do with this phone,
even though it isn't a smartphone?
What it does have is,
it has apps that have been developed
for BlindShell specifically.
And the cool thing is really I do think
that there's somebody really thinking
about usability at BlindShell.
As you go through some
of these tools like object tagging.
Object tagging is just something where, you know,
you can put a code,
there's a sticker of the size of a postage stamp
that you can put on something
and then you can identify it by recording a label on that.
So each time, you know,
the phone sees the code on,
I don't know, say your CDs
or maybe something in the freezer,
it will read that label back to you.
And it's just a really useful tool and it's built right in.
And that's something that you're not going
to find on a smartphone without downloading the app
and perhaps buying the tags to do that.
So it is nice that this kind of thing exists
on a phone developed specifically for those
who are blind or low vision.
What about some of the more basic things?
Can you text with it?
Can you check your email?
What kinds of things can you do?
And are there things that you might have expected
to be there that weren't?
Let me address the first couple of things.
Yeah, you can do pretty much all
of the basic things that you might want to do.
You can certainly text or message.
You've got an app for contacts.
You also have an app for emails,
which I think is great.
One of the really nice features
is the dictation on this phone.
So for example,
if you were doing texting or an email,
you could simply press
and hold the volume up or volume down buttons.
If you do a long press on those,
it begins the dictation.
Dictation is quite good.
You know, there's a notes app as well.
So you could use the dictation on the notes app
and there was actually on the main menu,
a manual and you could click on the manual
and there's the whole user guide is right there
in text to speech.
And I just thought, wow, you know, that is beautiful.
I just love that, you know,
so it's like you can right away go in
and research all of the stuff
that you might wanna know about the phone
and you don't have to hunt it down on a website.
Back to dictation for a moment.
Did you find that you used dictation more often
as you were playing with this phone
and getting familiar with it?
Well, I was never particularly good
at the old style texting.
So if it was something short,
like five or six letters,
I would just go ahead and text it in.
But if it was anything longer,
then I would use the dictation.
Good dictation is something that is of interest
to me to begin with.
So, you know, as soon as I realized
it looked pretty good,
you know, I went right to the notes app
and was able to dictate, you know,
several sentences, nice and clear
and a hundred percent accurate.
You know, I'm sure that I could have dictated something
that wasn't a hundred percent accurate
'cause that's just the nature of these things,
but it was excellent and it was pretty easy.
Let's talk about pricing then,
because that's always a biggie.
You know, sometimes you find a piece of technology
that would really, really benefit you as a blind person
or as someone with low vision
and then you discover, $6,000, what?
What are we looking at?
And this will be US-centric pricing,
although BlindShell is available outside the US as well,
but we'll concentrate just for the,
for the sake of this discussion on US pricing.
What's that like?
I think if you buy it from LS&S
or like AT Guys, it's $349
and from what I understand,
if you buy it from BlindShell, it's 399.
You're, you know,
you're looking at mid $300 for the phone.
And by the way, this is exclusively AT&T
for the moment, right?
Yeah, it's the GSM network.
So it'd be T-Mobile, AT&T,
anybody else who's got the GSM.
So you could walk into one of those stores
and say, "I'm signing up for a plan."
And they go, "Hey, here's this free Android phone."
There isn't anything wrong with Android
and everybody likes free,
but the thing to keep in mind is
that many manufacturers will take what Google has done
with Android and they will change that significantly,
and so what can happen is that the accessibility features
that Android does have,
don't make it onto those lower-end/free phones
that you get with your plan.
There are even some flip phones that exist,
but they certainly don't talk
and they have few, if any low vision features.
So free is not always good in this case, I think.
There was one client in particular,
although there have been several clients over the years,
but you know, she was like this classic case
of going into, you know,
one of the GSM stores
and looking for an accessible phone
because she had recently lost her vision.
And so they handed her the low end Android phone.
You know, don't get me wrong,
I'd fight for my Samsung Android phone
because I really love it.
But one of the things that I discovered working
with this client was
that the TalkBack just didn't work on the phone.
It was broken.
I actually went and checked with another store,
the same model, just to make sure that it wasn't me
and the training process that was broken,
but in fact the TalkBack just did not work.
So we really struggled with that
and the client just was not able to do something
as simple as dialing the phone
without using the Google Assistant.
That was the only way she was able to do it.
So in a lot of ways, you know,
when I see a phone like this,
which is pretty rock solid in terms of the accessibility,
at least the time that I used it,
that person's gonna be able to use and it's gonna work.
It's gotta be a challenge for people
who are either looking for a new phone themselves
or people who are the experts in the field
and they're being asked, what phone should I use?
Should I get a smartphone?
Should I get one of these things,
like the BlindShell?
You know, why might someone gravitate
toward something like the BlindShell
as opposed to an iPhone or an Android phone
because they both are accessible,
but it's a very different user experience.
You're so right,
and I think you bring up a really good point.
A lot of times people want something that will,
they can just make a phone call
while they're out walking.
So in a situation like that,
you know, a flip phone that is accessible is perfect
and it doesn't need all the features of the BlindShell.
But then you have people that want to be able
to do something like,
well, I'd like to check my email
and I'd like to do some texting on it.
And you know, I just discovered, for example,
that BlindShell had added a YouTube app,
which seems to work really, really well.
So, you know, when you start hearing that people want some
of those other features,
that's when you start considering,
okay, so maybe the BlindShell would work for them
or maybe they should go on to a smartphone.
Are there features that immediately come to mind
that you don't see on the BlindShell
that you would need an actual smartphone to access?
The one that comes to my mind right away
is either BARD, or Bookshare, or both of those.
There's currently a book reader
and a media app that's available.
So you could connect the phone to your computer using USB
and you could just download a book
or like an audio book
or just a textbook,
put it on the phone
and use the book reader to read it.
But those are two that I would love to see.
And it really doesn't have a web browser per se.
Although adding YouTube
and internet radio really, you know,
that covers a lot of stuff for people.
It absolutely does.
The one thing that you probably don't see
without a web browser or a specialized app,
you're not gonna see social media, right?
So no Twitter, no Facebook,
if you're hoping to keep up with your children
or your grandchildren on social media,
this is not what you're going to use to do that, right?
So you would go to a PC or perhaps a smartphone.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think for some people that,
those are gonna be deal breakers.
And I think one thing to keep in mind
is that you can have different needs
that don't all get met by the same device.
So for example,
you may wish to browse the web,
you may wish to do some online shopping,
and those are things that you might find better suited
to a computer,
whereas taking the BlindShell with you,
you know that you're able to text,
you know that you're able to call someone,
and you could check your email in a pinch,
and that's really all you care about a phone for.
And so it does nicely fit into that niche, I think.
Yeah, it does.
And you just reminded me too,
of one of the apps that's on the phone that's,
it's kind of interesting,
it's called Localization.
Localization is a GPS app on the BlindShell
where when you're outside,
it really does not work well inside at all,
but when you're outside
and you're able to connect to a satellite,
you press the button and it will tell you
what address is closest to you,
and it was pretty accurate.
And I thought, you know, for the casual walker,
somebody who may not be up to using a GPS on a smartphone,
what an ingenious app.
I mean, sometimes that's all you need
if you've gotten yourself turned around, right,
is to find out this is the address,
you know, now I've got an idea of where I'm at.
Absolutely.
So it's not full fledged GPS,
but it really doesn't need to be.
For a lot of people, I don't think it does.
But you know, again, if somebody really wants direction,
street to street, turn by turn walking directions,
then this is not gonna work for them.
As we kind of come to the end here,
let's say that someone is interested
in getting a BlindShell phone,
and that's available directly from BlindShell
as well as places like AT Guys and LS&S,
that's only a part of the puzzle, right?
So you would still need to have a phone plan
that's not included in purchasing the device itself, right?
Yeah, that's correct.
I mean, you would need to take,
for example, I took my demo to,
I use T-Mobile for mine.
So I took it in to them,
they got me a SIM card,
they added it to my plan,
and you pay the monthly plan.
And I think with this too,
you're gonna need a little bit of data
and which I had on my second plan.
So those are things that you will definitely need.
And that is a question that we may not be able
to answer ourselves, but may come up.
So it's a question that those of you
who are listening might want to ask back
in say like the nineties or so
we had a smartphone plan,
which you had to have data for,
and then there was a feature phone plan
where you had a tiny bit of data,
but it was treated as kind of a different tier.
And so it may be that you're not going to be using a ton
of data with this feature phone.
And so when you go in, ask your provider about
what data plans are available
and if this phone is considered a feature phone,
can you perhaps pay less per month
to get access to talk and messaging.
And you know, in the nineties it was like 300 megs of data
or something like that,
and it's probably changed since then.
But just see if there are tiers
that you don't have to pay
for unlimited data that you'll never use.
You know, I think you have to be
honest with yourself too.
I mean, since the phone will connect at 4G,
you've got pretty good connectivity
with both YouTube, internet radio,
the things where you're gonna have
some streaming services, right?
So if you're really into streaming services
and you're not gonna be near WiFI,
you're gonna be out and about a lot of time,
you are gonna be using a fair amount of data.
On the flip side, you know, it connects nicely
to WiFi, it's pretty easy.
So, you know, if you're gonna be doing
that streaming stuff at home, or at school,
or work where there is a WiFi,
then that'll take care of that data usage for you.
So for those who wish to,
they can check out the show notes
and read your Access article,
which goes into greater detail about what's available
in the menus, an overall description of the phone,
and it also covers some of the things
that we've touched on here.
Do you have any final thoughts, Steve,
that we didn't touch on
that you feel like we should mention before wrapping up?
You know, I was just really impressed with,
again, the overall accessibility.
And you know, sometimes we've had this conversation
before too about accessibility.
Accessibility can be different than usability.
You can have something that's very accessible,
but really it's not usable,
meaning it's just clumsy.
And so you find both with this phone,
which is really something I like.
And as I mentioned before,
it does seem like a pretty solid phone.
The menus were all working.
It wasn't quirky.
And even YouTube, which clearly is going out
to the internet and coming back again,
worked really, really well on this.
And I think is gonna be easy for a relatively new user
for some of these features.
Thank you so much for
spending a little time, Steve,
and telling us about this really cool device.
Oh, it's been a great pleasure.
Thanks Ricky, I enjoyed talking with you today.
Thanks for listening.
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 podcast@hadley.edu,
that's P-O-D-C-A-S-T@hadley.edu.
Or leave us a message at 847-784-2870.
Thanks for listening.
(gentle music)