Humanware Products: Are They for AppleVis Users?

I've not been before, but I think there is a big difference between knowing about all this tech and actually having a good feel. I seem to have opinions of Humanware, WeWalk, Biped and the like but it's totally ignorant because I've never actually laid hands on any of it.

Maybe there are better places to do that. I think Sight and Sound might have a physical shop somewhere don't they? So maybe somewhere like that means you can actually try things out in a less stressful environment.
year.

I once went to Sight Village by train, to Birmingham New street. sat next to a very, very odd fellow who probably uses PIP, DSA or whatever you call it to buy Subway sandwiches (No, Bingo, don't poke that bear again!). Anyway, this geezer asked literally everyone he and I encountered on that journey - the people sitting opposite us, the lady who assisted us when we arrived in Brum, some random in the taxi queue, whether they were going to Sight Village. The exact way he put the question was: 'i suppose you're going to sight Village, aren't you?' now, granted it's very difficult to think of reasons to go to birmingham, but I am sure there are more reasons than that. Going to commiserate with Jess Phillips, for example, who seemed dreadfully upset with holding onto Birmingham Yardly this morning. The exhibition was quite interesting, as I recall, but not half as interesting as my travel companion, whom I have not seen before or, indeed, since.

For the avoidance of doubt, none of the people he asked were going to Sight Village. I doubt any of them knew what it was, and he did not furnish them with a definition..

The sort of people who are not across access tchnology and who benefit from their local blind society technology days, eh? i'm across the bloody offerings all right, but it is sometimes quite fun to fiddle about with a whatever it is and ask awkwad questions like: can you please bring back the good old days when a new paragraph was indicated by indenting two cells?

Wait, they have loads of dogs running around in the sight and sound shop? Well I know where I’m going at the weekend then.

I’m obviously not the typical applevis user but the humanware displays are out for me until they and google get their act together. I blame both companies but things being what they are I can use a display from any other AT company with my main phone. That said their customer support is great and were I mostly an apple guy they might indeed be for me, HIMS has the better hardware though so probably not. I’ll take build quality and better components with mediocre but good enough software over lots of smart features in my braille display.

I don't go that often. I might actuallly miss this years one in London and go either next year or the year after for the glide.

Apart from that; there's not much else brand new that I want to check out.

Oh god the dogs, so many dogs.

@bingo little ah, british humour :) I love it.

I think the meaning of my original comment got a bit lost. I was really wondering what the best way to experience this tech is.

It sounds like quite a few of the UK people on here have gone to Sight Village. I am hoping to at least pay a flying visit this year. Going through the list of exhibitors it's clear to me that most things are in the curious to try it but never going to buy it category. Like Biped, anything Humanware, Envision even things like Orcam. I've also never laid hands on a braille display before. I know companies like Sight and Sound do home visits and I think they have a shop, so I suspect they provide a better environment to try something out quietly than Sight Village but probably with a bit more pressure to buy something.

It's a pity that Glide, Arx and Celeste won't be at Sight Village.

It would be a lot easier on you if you went to a place in your own country.

@Assistive Intelligence, ah but if I wait, I willl probably have a much more improved product with an actual demo I can check out.

I haven't used Braille in any meaningful way since 2009. I've had the occasional bill in Braille but that's all. I've heard all the arguments for braille notetakers etc.. But they still don't convince me. I had a braillelite M20 for university, but after leaving university I wanted to get better at using computers and word processing so I stopped using it. If I want to know how things are spelt, I navigate character by character. If I want to know about formatting, I use a combination of JAWS and Narrator. You can even get word to announce paragraph marks and spacing. I haven't tried this for years though, but I managed to get it to announce all the occurrences of spaces in a word document. I would literally hear 'space' after every word but oh well. As for these bookplayers? You've got to be joking. Why would I want a Victor Reader Stream when I can download all my Audible books onto my iPad and iPhone, and whenever the Audible app is updated, I get the updates. I don't have to worry about Audible suddenly being incompatible with my Stream. As for podcasts, I can choose from a huge amount of podcatchers for my phone and iPad. I use the iCatcher app which lets me search for podcasts by region! I wonder if you can do that with a Victor Reader Stream. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't these Braille notetakers have versions of Android on them? I get the feeling it isn't possible to update the operating system. So you've got a device without the latest version of the operating system it's running. No thanks! Maybe someone can clarify this for me. I'm happy with all my mainstream products and paying the same price everybody else pays. The only thing I upgrade every couple of years is JAWS. Oh yep, I don't have a Braille display and have no intention of getting one.

I refer the Honourable Lady to the reply I gave some moments ago.

It can actually be quite useful, depending on whom you have taking you through a demonstration. I had a good chat with Jonathan Mosan one year, in his Freedomscientific days when the Pacmate Omni (a product which fell short in several respects) was just about to be released. I also generally find the Humanware staff very helpful. Some of the seminars are also well worth an attend, particularly if the hosting company takes questions. On the other hand, I remember being given a very angry, aggressive demonstration of the original BrailleSense, back in 2004 this was (or was it 2005?) by a South Korean representative of Hims. NO hang on wait a minute it must have been 2007 or so - I didn't go in 2005 - or did I? I've forgotten exactly. I think the 'I suppose you're going to sight Village' incident was 2008 and I believe this was the last time I went.

they used to use local sixthformers as guides. I doubt they can do that now, what with...one thing and another.

Now I don't have the best memory in the world but i'm quite sure it was about humans wearing something.... Oh god, what was it, what was it?

I managed to get to Sight Village today and did get to the Humanware stand. I got to at least have a feel on a few braille products that I'm never going to buy like the Mantis and a couple of others I forget the names. I also visited Orbit who obviously make much cheaper ones. I actually found the Orbit braille a little clearer. Bearing in mind I don't really read braille at all well but I found both were easier than print.

(Side-note - that Orbit laptop was quite interesting. It was weirdly thrilling to have a laptop with no screen.)

Anyway back to Humanware, they had a product I'd not heard of before that was essentially a flatbed scanner that used ChatGPT to tell you what something was. The demo wasn't exactly flawless and I must admit I struggled to get why I would want one. Especially for £1800. (Factor in my foggy brain, but it was about that). I'm It was called Hark AI. (And yes I did have to ask for someone with a brain to remind me - ironically I remembered it as Haze)

So many AI devices...

Was this the Optima? The one about which there's been so much chat? Was there any decent refreshment at sight village? When I used to tread the boards of that exhibition you could at least stop for a pint and a decent sandwich for lunch. I bet that's gone now, hasn't it? Incidentally, I have a very clear memory of the subject-matter of this topic. I am a genius.

He has spoken. He is a genius.

Comparitively speaking, I would associate AppleVis posts to having a deep, meaningful conversation. . .

. . . with a person with severe ADHD.

True story. 😇

Yeah the optima is very similar to Framework but for visually impaired people, sounds very interesting and they have the balls to publically say on their website that they, Orbit, unlike other manufacturers don't put already 3 years outdated hardware in a brand new product and update their software once in a while. Which is just so true! I really like this company. If I were to decide my next big purchase I'll honestly hesitate between ipad and orbit reader as I kinda feel the real need for both. But yes seriously this thread went quite off topic and it was about humanware products first at first :)

Well at least mine. I got it last year. Haven't had much occasion to use it, but am impressed with it. I have yet to connect it to my iPhone 14, but I connected it to my first iPhone and it worked all right. It works great with my Mac. Part of the reason I haven't used the eReader much is that I've had an issue with my hearing aids. Well not the hearing aids themselves, but that's a whole topic inandof itself. I'll just say that they, too, are working great. But back to my eReader. It seems Apple's Braille support is quite good.

Yes that was the one. It is based on Foundation I believe. The one thing I wish I'd asked but only occurred to me later was whether it would be updated to use ARM. The laptop was delayed due to what's going on in Israel so I hope when it comes out it doesn't suffer as a consequence. But I do like the idea of it even if I can't really use braille.

Regarding Sight Village, there weren't very many facilities. There was a tea/coffee vending machine selling overpriced drinks and you could buy a quiche or a jacket potato but that was about it. There was a hotel next door that seemed surprised that anyone might want to eat lunch at lunchtime.

Anyway sorry yes I am not helping with the tangent here.

So, um... Humanware. Almost 2 grand for a flatbed scanner anyone?

First orf, the tangential route this discussion has taken is clearly not such a bad thing. Tangents are only useless if folk don't want to talk about what's being talked about - and besides, threads can evolve, can't they?

That's a really poor show regarding refreshment. Beer and a sandwich at the Clarendon suites in Brum was much better. It is hungry work yomping aroudn those exhibitions.

The NLS EReader is, I think, the brailliant BI20X for those of us int the UK. It's a fine piece of kit. for all the mainstream merchants out there, I should report it performed yeoman service yesterday when I had to take notes on a class on commercial dispute resolution delivered by a direct report of mine - and delivered splendidly, I might add. I could have tapped away on mi' iPhone and achieved the same thing, I suppose, but I like to keep these notes confidential. Best way of doing that is storing them entirely offline, in BRF format, on an SD card.

Personally, I have 2 drawbacks to a lot of the Humanware products such as the Streams the Treks, and probably others. 1. The GOD AWFUL cost for devices containing outdated software. 2. The method used to enter data to be searched for. For that price, surely they can get away from having to type B a number of times to actually get an a, b, or c? typing a 3 for d, e, of F, and so on?? I was a credit card terminal troubleshooter for a major credit card issuer, and the telephone keypad entry method was used. Let me tell you this: Entering a business's name, character by character, including punctuation and spaces, is a downright pain in the keester!! I would absolutely hate to have to enter street addresses, city name, street name zip code using this archaic entry method. I will be getting an iPhone 16 pro when they come out. It will be costly. However, it is affordable on my low income from Social Security because I will not be changing cell phone providers, and payments will be low because they offer a 3-year contract. Paying for the phone over 36 instead of 24 makes a huge difference. I have been saving, bit by bit, and expect my Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses some time today. I do have a 20-cell portable refreshable Braille display that I got, free of charge, from the NLS Talking Book program in the United States. I think I'm pretty well set. To think that I have a Pac Mate with a 40-cell Braille display that I do not use due to no available updates to an ancient set of hardware that, at the time, costed $5.400?? The Braille display still works perfectly, and can also be used as a display for my Windows 10 PC, so it isn't a total loss. I quit buying Freedom Scientific's ridiculous Software Maintenance Agreements vor each of their products. They don't nickel and dime us to death; they Dollar us to death, and I refuse. Although I do keep JAWS updated at ablut $95 a year.

Curious why they do not use current android OS but most of them are behind several numbers. If I am mistaking please let me know. Current OS I think is android 15?

I know this has been a topic going back several months ago now, but I just wanted to put my 2 cents in for what it’s worth. The only product by these guys that I see worthwhile is the stellar trek, yes, I could do navigation on my phone, however as someone who travels frequently, it’s actually pretty handy to have a separate device that does the navigation but that is the only product I can see my self getting. It does save a lot of my phones battery life.

I had HW Buddy briefly when I first got my NLS eReader, and the app seemed pretty good but it doesn't appear to be available anymore. Regarding the other app, has anyone else used it and if so, is it any good? It is pretty good in terms of VO performance I guess.

Hey Ekaj, how are you liking the NLS Humanware eReader, is it any better or worse than the Zoomax?