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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.

If you have used online dating in the past year, researchers at the University of Washington want to hear from you. The 20-minute survey is available for people with or without disabilities, and participants can enter to win a $5 Amazon gift card. The survey letter is below.

Earlier this month, Facebook rolled out it's new Automatic Alt Text description feature on iOS. Today, the Facebook Access team announced on Twitter that this feature is now also available on Android with Facebook version 74 and higher. Users may need to log out and back in again to start seeing posts with the automated alt text being generated, just like some users had to do when the feature was officially released for iOS. Have you been using this feature on iOS before now? Is it working on Android for you? Feel free to leave comments below with your experiences.

Accessible Apps has released a new update to it's Twitter application for Windows, Chicken Nugget. Version 4.0 includes support for Twitter images, the ability to scan text out of images from Tweets, a spell checker, the ability to choose which users to DM, and the ability to translate expanded tweets.

It was widely reported last week that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. The other part of this story however is one that many disability activists have been patiently waiting for. New designs for the $20, as wel as the $5 and $10 bills, will include accessibility features to aid blind and visually impaired users. The United States is one of the last major countries to use inaccessible paper currency, and was forced by a court decision several years ago to change this.

A new video posted to Facebook pairs a popular face with an engineer working on AI and accessibility. Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg spoke with Matt King, a Facebook engineer who happens to also be blind, about Matt's work on the company's AI initiatives including adding descriptive text to images. In the series, titled Live from Facebook HQ, Matt demonstrates the feature with an iOS device and the screen curtain turned on and shows how a blind person might use an iPhone. The 20 minute video has received over 100,000 reactions and tens of thousands of comments since being posted on Facebook.

The team behind Dictation Bridge is now raising money on Indiegogo to bring its voice recognition app to reality. Dictation Bridge will work with Windows Speech Recognition and various versions of Dragon to provide seemless voice recognition to users of the major screen readers including NVDA, Jaws, and Window-Eyes. The end result will be completely free and open-source, with premium technical support options available for a fee. You can go here to read more or to donate. To learn more, listen to our interview with Lucy Greco about Dictation Bridge on Blind Bargains Qast 55

One of the largest and most successful online auctions to benefit a blindness-related nonprofit is back for another year. The Seeing Eye's 8th Annual Auction features hundreds of items and is now open for bids. Items are available for just about any budget, from a $10 gift card to Cold Stone Creamery to a Vintage Gold and Diamond Horse Pendant with Chain valued at $750 currently with a $99 bid. Many assistive technology items are also available. A T Guys is proud to be one of the many companies and individuals who donated to this auction. The auction ends on May 6 at 10 PM EDT. You can go here to view the auction and place bids.

The free, and widely used, screen reader for Windows, NVDA has it's own conference. It has, in fact, had 3 others, but the upcoming agenda has more sessions and social opportunities than any of the NVDA conferences held prior to this one.

If you've been watching audio described programs in Australia from ABC, they'd like to hear what you think. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is seeking feedback for its audio description pilot project on their iview platform. Audio described programs have been available since April 2014, and the 15-month pilot project is scheduled to end soon. TO take the survey, follow the link on this post.

James Scholes, the creator of Codex, announced on Twitter the availability of a newly signed version of the Firefox extension called Webvisum. Webvisum has been a service which, among other things, allows for the solving of captchas on forms and in other places on the web. It works with Firefox for Windows only, and has been free ever since its first release.