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Another device announced at the CSUN conference is now available, and this one won't break the bank. National Braille Press is now shipping their $18 Tactile Caliper, a 12-inch ruler that can be used to accurately measure within 1/16 of an inch.
Here's a short description direct from NBP. "The winner of our 2013 Touch of Genius Prize for Innovation, this mechanical instrument looks like a traditional Vernier Caliper. Whole inches are embossed in braille across the top of the ruler, while fractions are dynamically displayed in braille on a sliding jaw – as you move the jaw, the braille refreshes to the nearest 16th of an inch."
We discussed the Tactile Caliper near the end of this CSUN podcast with CEO Brian McDonald.

You may have read our original post announcing the BrailleNote Touch. Many of you listened to our interview with Greg Stilson about the BrailleNote Touch at CSUN 2016. Perhaps you listened to the free audio tutorial on the BrailleNote Touch.
Now you can order the BrailleNote Touch which is now shipping. As expected, it's available now for $5,495, the same price as the BrailleNote Apex. For now, the Touch is available in a single configuration with 32 braille cells and a braille keyboard. One could use a USB or Bluetooth keyboard if typing in braille was not their thing.

As part of our CSUN coverage, J.J. did an interview with Peter Korn from Amazon. part of that interview featured Amazon's new screen reader called VoiceView for Fire Tablets. Amazon has now launched a preview of VoiceView for Amazon Fire TV.

Google continues to seek people with disabilities for paid research studies over phone phone, in person, or online.
Here's a portion of a recent Email they sent out to CSUN attendees:
"As part of our efforts to make Google products more accessible, we conduct paid research sessions with users with all types of disabilities.  We conduct studies both in-person at our offices in SF and NYC, as well as remotely via video or phone.  Users who are selected for and complete our study sessions are generally compensated at $125 an hour, paid out in gift cards that are redeemable at a wide variety of retailers around the country."
Follow the link on this post to fill out the form to express your interest. This does not guarantee you a spot in any study, but will put your name in a pool for future research.

As I reported as part of our CSUN coverage, Humanware has created a new product called the BrailleNote Touch. While Blind Bargains was able to give you a written overview of what it brings to the table, along with an interview, there is now a free and in-depth resource to give you an audio tour of the BrailleNote Touch.

The next version of NVDA is about to be officially released, and as is customary, you can test new features now with a release candidate. NVDA 2016.2 focuses its improvements on the Microsoft Office suite and also will alert you to incorrectly spelled words as you type by playing a short buzzer sound. This feature can be turned off from NVDA’s Keyboard Preferences. Gramatical errors can also now be indicated while you type, along with some additional formatting features in Microsoft Excel. Follow this link for the complete blog post, and check out the full list of changes below.

Deque Systems,, makers of many accessibility testing tools and designers of a set of courses to teach web accessibility, have announced that they are offering 1 year of free access to all of their training materials for people with disabilities. The blog post announcing the offercited the reasons behind this effort were to help combat the unemployment rate among people with disabilities. While this unemployment rate is high, the demand for professionals who can provide accessibility testing is also very high. The application process for this scholarship asks for a few details.

Google appears to have posted just about every session from Google IO to their YouTube channel including 3 which focus on accessibility. The developer event, which we discussed in detail on Blind Bargains Qast 62, was recently held in San Francisco.

pre-registration is now open for the ACB convention to be held July 1 through 9 in Minneapolis. There is a $15 administrative fee for registration on top of any sort of events that are paid that you may wish to attend. This year, ACB has moved to a new system for registration, so if you have created an account in previous years, that info will no longer be valid. Find out more details by following the source link. Pre-registration runs through June 22. as reported earlier, that pre-registration for the NFB Convention being held in Orlando will close on May 31.

Robinhood is a mobile app that is already disrupting the financial services industry by offering stock trading without service fees. Now, they're one of the first companies to make their trading app accessible to VoiceOver users.

"Not surprisingly, the financial industry has historically been a bad actor when it comes to disability compatible products, and we wanted to change this," Robinhood wrote in a recent blog post. The company partnered with the San Francisco Lighthouse to implement the changes which include providing access to account sign-up, the trading interface, and audible financial graphs.

The new features were released in celebration of Global Accessibility awareness Day, which was held this year on May 19. Robinhood also offers versions for Apple Watch and Android, though we are unable to verify if these also include accessibility features at this time.

Your GPS may tell you that there is a bus stop nearby, but how do you know you're actually standing at the stop and not at a street sign 25 feet away? Thanks to a $750,000 grant from Google, the Perkins School for the Blind has partnered with app developer Raizlabs in an effort to solve this problem.

It's a situation that Raizlabs' Nick Bonatsakis, who is also legally blind, can relate to as he explains in an interview with Boston's WBUR. “I was just walking around in circles,” he recalls. “And had I had something where somebody just said, ‘Look, you know, the entrance to this place is past this mailbox and before this entrance to this other shop,’ that would have been immensely helpful.”

Perkins and Raizlabs aim to offer an app which will provide clues to a traveler in these situations. The app may give clues such as a nearby step, doorway, or grass which could help in someone locating a location like a bus stop in a contextual manner. Those familiar with a location will enter these clues into a database, which will then be available to users of the forthcoming app.

The Perkins School for the Blind was awarded the grant from the Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities program which awarded $20 million in grants to 29 recipients.

The app itself is expected to be released early in 2017.

As J.J. reported previously, the developers of Dictation Bridge are seeking $20,000 to build their product. Now, they have released a Proof-of-Concept, which comes in the form of a NVDA add-on.

Recently, I had the opportunity to test three of the latest voting machines equipped with accessibility features. The Michigan Bureau of Elections held a Mock Election which allowed testers and poll workers to experience each of the machines and tabulate votes for both disabled and non-disabled voters. From my testing of the three machines, it was apparent that the usability of each system ranged from pleasant to downright frustrating. Below are some initial impressions of each machine, presented in the order they were tested.

If you are a student who uses JAWS at school, owning a copy of JAWS or Magic for home use just became a lot easier. Freedom Scientific and the American Printing House for the Blind announced on a FSCast around the time of CSUN that they would be partnering to offer a program that would allow students to get JAWS under the Quota Funds system in the U.S. This is an annual subscription license, which must be renewed each year.

Yesterday, as part of a blog post, Microsoft reminded us that they will end the program which allowed users of the Windows Operating system running version 7 and higher to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. Just over 24 hours after the above blog post went out, Microsoft had another announcement related to the free upgrade program.

As part of a blog post, Microsoft has reminded users that time is running out to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. After July 29, 2016, when upgrades will again be charged, Microsoft will once again be the only major platform charging for upgrades. Windows 10 Home will cost $119, as noted in the blog post. Microsoft boasted in it's post that Windows 10 is now on 300 million devices worldwide. The time to upgrade for free is almost over.

The latest update to Twitterific for iOS includes several improvements for VoiceOver users. With the May 2 update, which is version 5.14.3, there is now support for descriptions of images.

Though there was no official announcement, Apple now has listed several hardware items to assist people with accessing their Apple devices. Doing a search for "accessibility" in the Accessories category now turns up several results.

Friday, Uber Announced that they reached a settlement with the National Federation of the Blind for $225,000, and stated they will make some modifications to their policy to make the consequences for drivers refusing a user with a service animal more clear.

AI-Squared has released a new update to Zoomtext, called version 10.11.3.
The big announcement from this release is that Zoomtext now supports Office 2016. IN previous releases of Zoomtext, there were many issues with respect to the reliability of typing/Cursor Echo, tracking, the Doc Reader, and several issues concerning stability. According to Ai-Squared, improvements in all Microsoft Office 2016 applications with respect to all of the areas just mentioned have occurred.