In this interview, Marc Solomon, sales engineer for Site Cues joins us for a discussion and demonstration of the product. A number of improvements have been made since the program's launch over a year ago, and we hear about a number of sites successfully utilizing the technology. Learn more by visiting the Site Cues web site, or by calling the AISquared main number at ((802) 362-3612.
Be sure to check our audio page for more exhibit hall coverage, and check out our new weekly podcast for news and features about technology and beyond. Blind Bargains audio coverage of CSUN 2015 is generously sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind. Enjoy our Podcasts? You can help us out by taking this very short survey.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Kayde Rieken
Welcome to BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2015 — the biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage — brought to you by the American Foundation for the Blind.
Every parent wonders, Will I do a good job raising my child? If your child is visually impaired, you have that question, too, and many more. FamilyConnect is a website that gives parents of children who are visually impaired a place to connect with each other, share stories and concerns, and find resources on raising their children from birth to adulthood. You aren't in this alone. Get connected at www.FamilyConnect.org.
Now, here's Joe Steinkamp.
Joe Steinkamp: Hey, it is CSUN 30. It's time for Carousel — wait, Logan's Run. I shouldn't be making those references so early. Joe over here with Marc Solomon of AI Squared and Site Cues. How you doing, man?
Marc Solomon: I'm doing great and just want to say hello to all of your listening audience. It's great to be on.
JS: Hey. Hey, I — I have — have you been tagged by us yet? Have you been shoved in front of a microphone, or is this new for you?
MS: In the past.
JS: Oh.
MS: My previous life —
JS: Incarnation?
MS: Yes.
JS: Okay.
MS: With the great GW Micro team. I believe I had an opportunity to speak with you, and now I'm really happy to be a part of the AI Squared team and pushing forward with some great initiatives.
JS: So you're just going to make me make more Renewal and Carousel jokes.
MS: That's exactly right.
JS: Yeah, I — I know. There you go.
MS: (Laughs)
JS: You know, most of our audience will never get those references anyway.
MS: (Laughs)
JS: What they will get is a good idea about what Site Cues is. It's been, what, about a year now. I know I talked to Doug Hacker last year about the technology. How has it been going? What's new? And let's — let's start off with, really, what it is first for some of our listeners who don't know.
MS: You got it. So Site Cues is a software as a service that allows website owners to incorporate a free assistive technology that offers ZoomText-like features. and this really flips the assistive technology model on its head. Instead of expecting an individual to bring the technology to the table, now a website owner can make sure that all the visitors have access to a powerful assistive technology trying to make their content more usable —
JS: Right.
MS: — and make the site more inclusive.
JS: Right. So the general idea is that a — a company would work with Site Cues to be able to have that enabled up in a corner of the screen or by hotkey, and then they could activate that on the website if they didn't already have some assistive technology already installed to be able to read the screen or hear what's on the contents of the screen?
MS: Yes. That's a good question and then a pretty good summary of what Site Cues is about. Site Cues appears on a website as another site feature.
JS: Right.
MS: So it blends right into the existing design —
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: — and we refer to the Site Cues user interface as the badge.
JS: Okay.
MS: And the Site Cues badge appears as just two simple controls — a slider control to increase the zoom —
JS: Right.
MS: — and then a speech button to turn speech on and off.
JS: Okay.
MS: So it's universally designed, so it's easy to recognize and learn how to use; and then, once you discover the badge and interact with it, it
actually expands about 16 times in size. So the idea is, we have lots of user testing to make sure that this user interface was discoverable for individuals that have vision even as poor as 20 over 200.
JS: Yeah.
MS: And that's really, I think, the group of individuals that we think can benefit the most, are individuals that have enough usable vision to get to a website but, once they get there, they're going to want some visual assistance to make the content easier to consume.
JS: And — and by — by visually — it does look and appear, at times, where you find normally, in most websites, the "make it bigger" or "make it smaller" buttons.
MS: Exactly.
JS: Yeah.
MS: We built the — the panel using some of these easily-distinguishable icons that people would just look at and recognize right off the bat.
JS: Right. So those who are trying to use this visually already kind of have an idea, mentally, where that would be — I mean, geography-wise on a — on a — on a website. And it has some of the icons that would universally kind of sort of say, "make it bigger, make it smaller." So it feels comfortable, and it may not even feel like they're using assistive technology.
MS: It should be a tool that anyone can benefit from. That really was our goal. We didn't want to put any labels on it or make people feel as if they're being separated out to use Site Cues.
JS: Right.
MS: So talking about some of the things that are unique and innovative about Site Cues is that, as you increase the zoom on a page —
JS: Right.
MS: — it's not just making that page bigger. It actually has a smart zoom capability that's adding a number of enhancements such as making the mouse pointer larger and easier to see, which is — obviously can be a big issue for folks with — with limited vision — losing track of that mouse pointer.
JS: Sure. Sure.
MS: And —
JS: Or knowing where is clickable or what's just the barbell or arrow key.
MS: To see that — that cursor shape change, exactly.
JS: Mm-hmm.
MS: It's also going to enable auto-panning. So as you move your mouse cursor to the boundary of what's viewable at a zoom level, it's going to bring it into view so you don't have to fight with those scroll bars.
JS: Oh, okay.
MS: That can be really —
JS: Yeah.
MS: — tedious to — to work with.
JS: So does it grab by element, or is it sort of making an assumption on object?
MS: So once you enable a little bit of zoom —
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: — as you mouse around the page, Site Cues will try to intelligently highlight a section that you moved over — an area of interest, so to speak.
JS: Okay.
MS: And at that point, if you press your space bar, it will then bring up what we call the highlight box —
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: — which basically zooms in twice as much, and it should start to read it right away.
JS: Feels —
[A synthesized voice begins reading the text on the page.]
MS: So what's happened is visually, it's brought this important section of content that you selected into the foreground, and it masked out the rest of the background of the page, reducing that visual noise. And we found that this type of enhancement's going to benefit lots of people — folks with low vision, folks with learning challenges or reading challenges — a lot of great benefits there.
JS: Feels like a lot of Reading Zones meets App Reader.
MS: Yes. I think we kind of took the best of what we've done —
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: — with our innovations in screen magnification and screen reading —
JS: Right.
MS: — and tried to put it in a very useable and simple package for folks.
JS: That makes sense. Okay. And it's — it's using assets you already had, using the leverage of technologies that have already been developed, but putting it in a lightweight package that can be used by other people.
MS. Yeah. It definitely took a lot of the brainpower that we've had accumulated, but it uses a completely different technology platform. We're talking about JavaScript and CSS, working with the DOM. So a lot of new-age technologies, web-based technologies, that allow us to create this type of innovation.
JS: That's a very good point because it — it shows that you're not shrugging the roots but using stuff that's modern and will scale with modern technologies. Say somebody goes through a website refresh or what have you.
Its: Exactly. Exactly. And talking about some of the changes since we first sent out Site Cues. We wanted to make sure that Site Cues was usable by anyone.
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: And we knew a big piece of that was keyboard accessibility.
JS: Right.
MS: So we're now proud to announce the latest version of Site Cues has been released, and this is a Section 508-compliant tool.
JS: Ah, so you jumped ahead in my interview questions. All right. Cool.
MS: I — I apologize if I'm stepping on toes.
JS: No, that's fine. I like that.
MS: But the idea was, we want to make sure customers can incorporate Site Cues and have the confidence that it's going to remain compliant.
JS: Right.
MS: So now, at this point, I could utilize all the features of Site Cues from the keyboard.
JS: Okay.
MS: So now, people hopefully will have multiple ways to interact with the product, and there's going to be no barriers to access.
JS: That is wild. Okay.
MS: So if you like, I could maybe give you a quick demo of some of the keyboard features here.
JS: Sure. If you want to talk about that, yeah. And I'm going to turn my microphone so we can get some of the sound here.
MS: So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to press the space bar. And what Site Cues will try to do is, it's going to try to move the highlight to the main content on the page.
JS: Okay.
MS: So if you use good markup, such as landmark roles of main, it'll help us figure out where to go.
JS: Right.
MS: So once again, compliance and usability kind of go together here.
JS: And that's where the consulting part comes in, where you're assisting people, know those benefits for not just Site Cues but, in general, 508.
MS: That's going to benefit anyone using assistive technology, whether it's Site Cues, Window-Eyes, ZoomText, or their tool of preference. Exactly.
JS: Absolutely. Good ambassador. Right.
MS: So I — I've focused — got the highlight on the page, and now I could use the keyboard here. I'm going to hold down the Shift key. This is kind of a new functionality. If I hit Shift and down arrow, it's going to move to the next section and start to read right away.
[Site Cues begins reading the page content.]
MS: I'll go ahead and press Control, which is a pretty universal command to silence speech. We try to keep things consistent. If I wanted to move to the next section of content, another Shift-down arrow. And Shift is thinking of speech.
JS: Right.
MS: Shift to speech. So I'll Shift-down arrow. It's going to try to move to the next area of content there. And you should hear a little knocking sound, which is my visual cue — or an audio cue that something is happening there. Now, once again, Site Cues is not really designed for people that are using screen readers —
JS: Right.
MS: — people with severe visual impairments. But we want to make sure those people would be able to use Site Cues, maybe train or demonstrate how it's used. So once again, we really think that the people who benefit most will probably be folks with low vision; seniors, boomers that have some visual issues; or folks with learning challenges.
JS: Sure.
MS: But overall, we want to make sure anyone can use it.
JS: And not only that — now that the wonderful GW Micro is a part of AI Squared —
MS: Mm-hmm.
JS: — this gives the opportunity for those who are blind on staff to be able to demonstrate that out in the field as well.
MS: Absolutely.
JS: Yeah.
MS: So if you want to navigate by heading, you could hit H. It's going to try to focus a heading on the page.
[Site Cues begins reading the focused headings as Marc navigates to them.]
MS: So now I'm kind of moving through the main sections of the page just by pressing H here. And as it's reading to me, the information's highlighted and enlarged and masks out the rest of the background here.
[Marc continues to navigate by headings, which Site Cues reads.]
MS: You hear we've got a very lifelike sounding speech. I believe that's Ivona.
JS: Right. Okay.
MS: And the text-to-speech is all sent over a secure channel, which is very important in case you're going to be working on a financial website, maybe doing some banking transactions. You want to make sure everything's secure, so we've — definitely have taken security into — into consideration when we implemented Site Cues as well.
JS: So the only things that are kind of sort of missing is, say, what, color filtering and — and maybe X Font and some other technologies? I mean, most —
MS: We're actually able to leverage a lot of the — the font rendering that browsers make available. So as you zoom up —
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: — it's then going to re-render and make that text nice and crisp and clear. So I think that people will be really impressed with the clarity of text as you zoom in.
JS: Wow. It has come a long way in a year. That is crazy. So are there examples on the Site Cues site of — of good sites that have used this effectively so far?
MS: Yes. If you go to SiteCues.com, it is at the — the Customers page.
JS: Uh-huh.
MS: You'll be able to find a variety of our customers that already have enabled Site Cues on their site. For example, the EEOC website, which stands for the Equal Opportunity Employer Commission —
JS: ... Opportunity Employer ... yeah.
MS: — I'm horrible with acronyms, so —
JS: That's — I was in the government. I got it.
MS: Okay. Thank you for — for —
JS: (Laughs) I'll help you.
MS: — having my back there.
JS: I'll pick it — I'll pick it up.
MS: Disability.jobs —
JS: Okay.
MS: There's — there's lots of sites that are now starting to enable their — their pages, and we're just very excited to have these partnerships to make the web, once again, more inclusive and more usable for everyone.
JS: So for — if you're an employer, or if you're someone who's interested in this, how can they take up maybe a trial or maybe learn more about the information?
MS: If you visit SiteCues.com — that's spelled SiteCues.com — SiteCues.com, you'll be able to find an email address and a phone number to reach us. So I'd just encourage you to visit our website, get in touch, and we'd be happy to set up some demonstrations and show you how Site Cues could work on your website.
JS: And that phone number, of course, is (802) 362-3612, the unified number.
MS: That's exactly right. You got us memorized. Thank you for that.
JS: Well, you know, being a ZoomText user of over 15 years — well, all right, more like 20 — (Clears throat) — you tend to memorize that number once or twice, so —
MS: (Laughs) We're lucky to have you as a part of the ZoomText family and the AI Squared family, too.
JS: That's exactly right. And, full disclosure — I am using ZoomText 10.1 from a paid version that I have. So everyone, thank you for your time. I appreciate it, Marc. It was good seeing you.
MS: You as well, Joe. I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference, and thanks for all that you do.
JS: You bet. And Renewal. Carousel. Joe Steinkamp here on the floor of CSUN 30.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
