TRANSCRIPT
Tech Tea Time: Vispero
2/6/25

>>Jeff: Well, thanks, Donna. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for having a drink with us today. Non-alcoholic, right? Tea time. Water, soda, those kind of things. It's great to be here. Really appreciate that. Sorry about my camera. We were trying to do a little… tech support here on the beginning of the call. And for some reason It's not cooperating with us today. I guess we're all just just listening, but I've got a lot of great information, or at least I hope you'll think so to share. And I want to make sure once we're finished up that we follow up too. I'll send out an email with some links to what we went over to make sure that you're able to access that. Later on. And of course, if there are questions or things that you need me for after. I want to make sure you have my contact information as well so that you can You can utilize that at any The good news in Texas is that we work very closely with Crystal Vision. Many of you know Bobby Lakey, I'm sure. Bobby had my position here. And Vesparo wasn't called Vesparo then, and I'll give you that quick little backstory in a second. But he was here for 15 years and then has been with Crystal Vision now for, geez, how long? Seven years. Full time. So I know many of you know him just from his time in and he lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of course and gets all around the state and he knows these products as well as I do. We are very thankful that all of you in Texas have that resource. And he will be, Crystal Vision will be represented at TAER as well We also might be there. We're working on that right now. But either There will be plenty of Vespero Freedom Scientific representation there. So that's another place for you to ask questions. What I want to do today is go through a few hardware products about three of them just to give you guys a background of what those are and how they're used in the classroom. And then I want to talk about software as well. So JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion. We've got some exciting new features there that I want to make sure you're all familiar with. And know about. And again, once we show some of this stuff, it definitely might leave you with some questions and that's why, again, I want to make sure that you all can follow up We do have a training page that I'm going to spend some time showing you as well because there's webinars on there where you can either sign up for upcoming webinars Or visit our archived webinar page where there are all kinds of them pretty much on any product we have. And software features as well. So these are great for you guys to be able to go back and reference And if you sign up for upcoming webinars, of course, you can receive the ACV REP credit. For joining those two. So when you're working on that certification by all means, this is a place where you can come to receive that.

>>Donna: Jeff, this is Donna. Sorry to interrupt. We are ready and clear for you to share your screen when you are ready.

>>Jeff: So go ahead, Donna. Yep. Got it. Thank you. And I'll do that momentarily. And just like Donna just did, guys, I want to make sure you all know If you have a question at any time, feel free to place it in the chat there and Donna will interrupt me and ask. Because I don't want anybody thinking that you got to wait until the end. And by then you might forget your question. So every time I'm doing a presentation like this, I always want to make sure that you know You can ask at any time. So when you place those in the chat, we'll try to get to those as quickly as we can. And just if you can, try to keep them on, you know, kind of on par with what we're talking about at the time. And of course, at the end. We'll try to leave some time for that. Now, I'm assuming, Donna, I forgot to ask, do we go till four? Your time? Is it an hour? Is that what we're doing?

>>Donna: Just slightly shy of four so we can give out the ever needed code at the very end and tell them what's coming up next.

>>Jeff: Got it. Okay. So we're going to the top of the hour, basically, right before that. All right. Good, good, good. All right. So I am going to share my screen because I've got a couple slides, a few slides here that I want to mention. And actually, you know what? One thing before I do that. Just to give you guys a background on Visparo. Because we've had a few name changes over the years. So it was VFO before. It's been freedom scientific before that. So many of these companies have been around for years and years, and you're going to be familiar with them. You may just not quite realize They're all under the Vespero umbrella. But Vespero is the family of companies or the umbrella company that represents Freedom Scientific, Optoelect. And enhanced vision. We also have another company under us called the Pass Yellow Group. And they work with accessibility for websites. They do something called JAWS Kiosk. So accessibility and public facing places, lots of things like that. So we're a large company absolutely And I am the sales director for Texas and many Midwestern states. About 13 states in And I've been with the sparrow two different times. I first came in 2000. And I was here for about nine years. So up until 2009. Then I was gone and worked for a couple other places for about seven years. And came back to the sparrow in 2018 When Bobby, when Bobby Lakey moved over to crystal vision. So I took his place and I've been back at Vespero now for seven years and again represent the central part of the country. Including Texas. So those are my… Those are my credentials there. So, all right, let me share my screen. And that way you guys are going to get an idea of what we're doing here. And for now, I'm just going to share the screen. Because I think pretty much everything that we're going to do here today You're not going to need JAWS to be talking for you to be able to hear. But I think you're going to get a very good idea on what we're showing here based on what you'll be able to see on the screen, unless there's somebody like myself. Who's vision impaired and can benefit from hearing jaws as well. And if that's the case, just let us know in the chat and we'll do just that. Okay, so let me go over here. To my little PowerPoint presentation here. We've got a few slides. Um… So we're going to start out by talking about some of the video magnification devices that we have at Visparo. And I'm going to highlight just a couple of them here for you. This is the Compact 10 that you're looking at here right now. Basically, we have… electronic video magnifiers that start at 4.3 inch. So of course, very portable that you can hold in your hand. All the way up to a 27 inch desktop CCTV or video magnifier Everything in between. So I'm going to highlight just a few of these that are very popular and used in the classroom. Setting for school So this compact 10 Let me just give you a bit of an idea here on what this looks like. So this is a close-up here of the unit itself. So this is a 10 inch It's a portable video magnifier, so something that you would be able to carry around. It comes with a nice leather case. But you can utilize this for reading of course things on the on the board. You can also be looking at documents with this. And what is really nice about this unit itself is it's got a special camera that I'll show you here in just a second. Where the case does have a carrying strap as well. That's a very good question. She just put that in the chat and absolutely So you would be able to carry this and use the strap and have it on your shoulder and that kind of thing. So you're looking at the features and benefits of this unit right here. One of the things that I like about this is that you actually too can take a picture of what it is that you're looking at And then you can magnify it or change the color background if you need to. Or you can save the image. So, for example, if you were too far back in class and you couldn't see the board very well, you could take a snapshot using this device and then be able to get the magnification size that you need and the color to be able to study What is on the board. Same thing as well. We've seen some folks utilize this where they will take a snapshot of a page, for example, from a book And if they need to go read in front of the class, for example. They could use their Compact 10 in order to do that because it's all touchscreen. There's just two buttons on this one actually the power button and then a button for OCR to be able to actually scan and read as well. So this thing does have voice capability it talks So if you wanted to scan a document and have it read back to you, you can certainly do that. But back on what I was mentioning just before that, if you also, if you wanted to just take a snapshot of say a page in a book. And magnify it to your liking or change the color background. And then take your machine up front to read in class. You wouldn't even have to bring your book. And all you have to do to change the size of the magnification here is just pinch. To Zoom. So just like you would on your phone, if your students are using those who are familiar. Same holds true here. For being able to change the magnification size. So it's a very convenient device. To be used for sure. This is desktop mode. So somebody's sitting at a table here just using this on the desktop. Certainly for reading and reading for for looking at anything around the room, that kind of thing. Let me show you this right here, though.

[Jeff Bazer] 15:13:27
So here is some of the features of the unit, but you should also be able to see now There's an arm camera that comes right over the top of that and it extends out on the right side. So just like a conventional CCTV would be Now you have the ability to write. Underneath that camera as well. And of course, he could be me doing anything under there. But I mean, in a classroom setting, we think about being able, if you needed to sign something or if you were working on a quiz or something like that. See it on the screen and be able to write underneath that camera. This is also the same camera that we would use for full page OCR. So any kind of study material that you wanted to scan and have read back to you or saved on the device. This is full page OCR with that camera extended on the right side. So what happens is that arm When you're done with that, you can just swing it back over to the left and it folds right into the machine on top. You'd never even know it's there. Unless you uh you know you you took it out. So it is phenomenal how that is integrated into this unit. The other thing to let you know is we also have this device in the Ruby. 10. So if you've used a Ruby in the past, either the Ruby five inch with the Ruby XL HD, the Ruby 7 Or if you've gotten the Juno from APH and using that with your students. This device I'm showing you now, the compact tin. Is also available exact same features and that same camera arm It extends out to the right side here. That's available in a Ruby. And the big difference between this And the ruby is, of course, the Ruby has more buttons. So if you're familiar with the Ruby, you know about the buttons that are on that for being able to change the magnification, change the color. Freeze an image, all those kind of things. On the compact 10 here, you would use the touchscreen to do all those things and get into the menu. On the Ruby, there's dedicated buttons for a lot of that. Capability. So we have capability we have this available in both of those units available What we learned very quickly once this came out was that A lot of folks who had utilized the Ruby for years and years really wanted the same capability, particularly with the camera out on the right side. And being able to write underneath that. So that's the compact 10 and the Ruby 10. The price point on this is 1900 with speech. So if you want this to have the OCR capability have it be able to be read back to you. That's the price point there, 1900 and then it's $1,980 for the ruby tin. Just a little bit more on that due to the button capability. Okay. Let's move on here because I want to show you guys several things. This is a product that you definitely might be familiar with. This is called the Clearview Go. You may have seen this in the Merlin Mini. As well, this is a foldable device. You can fold this down like a laptop for carrying. And again, there's a strap on this case. So that's good, right? There's a handle. And then strap on the case as well to be able to move this around portably from class to class. I didn't mention on the last unit or on this one yet, these all have battery capability as well. So about five hours with battery capability. So not quite a full school day But pretty darn close. And actually, you know, if you had this turned off when you were moving around class to class. Very likely you would get a full school day out of this, even if you used it You know, throughout the day in several classes. So this Clearview Go. Or Merlin Mini. And again, remember, all these are available from Crystal Vision. There are a few that are available through APH because you might have seen this as the Jupiter. This is the same unit as the jupiter except It's this screen that I'm showing you here is a little bit bigger. The Jupiter is a 13 inch this Clearview Go that you're looking at right now is a 15, a 15.3 inch. That's the only difference between these devices. So the Jupiter would be something you'd get through APH. If you wanted a little bit larger screen. The Clearview Go and the Merlin Mini, that is something you could get through Crystal Vision. Okay, let me show you here. These are all of the capabilities of this device right here. You see the five hour battery You can freeze and zoom. Here's the camera talking about that. Let's see how much does it weigh? Just under 10 pounds. It says approximately 10 there, but I think it's nine, eight actually. But these are…

>>Donna: Jeff, Terry has another great question. So I had to just jump in here.

>>Jeff: Sure. Yeah, that's fine.

>>Donna: Said that Jupiter is difficult to unfold. How is the Clearview go in its ease of folding and unfolding.

>>Jeff: So here's the user controls on this. Let's go here to show you this So there you're going to see it in three different positions and you'll see it folded down there as well. Can you see that? I have to say, Donna and Terry. It does fold Much like the Jupiter does it's pretty much the exact same units, just got a little smaller little smaller screen on the jupiter I think what happened, you know, it takes a little practice actually because the monitor, of course, goes right down flat. On the… what would be the xy table. There's not an XY table, but you know the panel there on the bottom But once you do that and once you actually rotate it to fold it down, I've found that it It works fairly well. Is that a good thing? Unfolding with a student takes lots of muscle. Well, I hope that's okay. It's definitely a unit that has a lot of different positioning for sure. One thing you might notice on that camera and one thing Terry, you've probably seen before, since it sounds like you've worked with it fairly close. Is the camera, you know, how you move it with the dial there on the right side up and down the page. And then, of course, that has distance capability as well. So you can just remove the lens cap there from the back and now you're into the distance capability with the Jupiter slash Clearview Go. Now, the difference with this Of course, you could aim this at the board and get a get a Clear image of it and then be able to magnify that, change the color background But unlikely. Compact gen well you you can. You can freeze the image Here on the unit as well. So I guess it does. It's got all the same capability as the Compaq 10 does as far as what you can do with the image and how you can save it. The only difference is it does not have OCR on here. So there's no speech. That is part of the Jupiter or the Clearview Go at this point. That'd be great if there was, wouldn't it? I think there's a new feature coming for that that we're going to show though at CSUN. So if anybody's coming to CSUN here in about a month or a month If you'll be at TAER, we might be able to tell you a little bit more about that. I haven't seen it yet, but somebody told me something's coming. Regarding this device. All right.

>>Donna: And that was just me, Jeff, chatting with Terry, letting her know that from experience, yeah, the littles have a little bit of struggle with it. But if we go any looser, it gets really floppy. The screen tends to like sink So having it tight is important.

>>Jeff: Absolutely. And I think if you gave us a support call on that. Then we would be able to assist you in letting you know how to tighten that back up. Have you guys had experience doing that or tried to do that? Where you've been able to then tighten it back up and it's been like new. Again, if it's gotten loose, good. Okay, I hope so.

>>Donna: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

>>Jeff: All right, guys. Well, we're looking at the focus braille displays here now. This is, let's see, I want the slide Oh, I think it was that last one. Is this the one? This is the one here where you can see them all, right?

>>Donna: Yes, sir.

>>Jeff: There we go from left to right. Yep. Okay. So we have three different sizes of our focus line of refreshable braille displays. Now these have been around in one way, shape or form for years and years and years back to the early 2000s. So we are on The fifth generation of our focus braille display now. And we know these are utilized all over the state of Texas. There's lots of these out there. A couple of nice things with these. So you've got the 14, which is a tiny braille display that everybody says is very cute. Because… It is pretty easy actually to slide that in your bag. And be able to utilize that anywhere. Good for texting on your phone as well, because of course you can connect to your iPhone or Android using those. The 40 cell is our most popular for sure and the one that would probably be best for the classroom because of course that's a regular line. Of Braille, right? In a Braille book. So that's the one, of course, that we sell the most But these are great, you know, very good working integrating with JAWS, literally plug and play. If you just use your USB cable that's supplied with the device, connect to your laptop, that's it. Joss sees it and you're ready to rock and roll. And of course, you can connect via Bluetooth as well if you want to do it that way, either with your laptop or with your iPhone, if that's what it is you're working with. The other thing about these is there is some basic note-taking capability before you ever connect to anything. So if your student wants to be taking notes with this in the classroom. They can save them in text on the display. There's an integrated micro SD card that is supplied with the device For storage capability, and you can save your files right there. And the other thing that this has is a book reader. So if you want to be able to read books from Bookshare. Or from web braille, you know, bard You can do that. It has to be in BRF format. And that's what those books, that's the format you get. When you download from Bookshare or from NLS. And you can then copy those right onto the card on the Braille display And be able to read those before you would ever have to connect to a computer. Or anything else. Okay, so that's the focus line of refreshable displays. Very rugged. These are all aluminum. You might notice that there by taking a look, or if your students are utilizing these or you've seen these before. It's a military grade aluminum, by the way. There's some rubberized bumpers on the left and the right side there. Got a USB-C port, so you don't have to worry about plugging the charging port or the USB port in right or wrong. So a lot of nice things. With the Gen 5.

[Jeff Bazer] 15:25:33
Focus line of displays. Anybody have a question regarding these displays the displays portable video magnifiers, compacts you know that we showed before the clear view go merlin mini the comments have been great Questions have been good. Thank you. Before we leave this, I just want to make sure there's no other questions before we move on. Looking pretty good, Donna, aren't we?

>>Donna: We are

>>Jeff: Okay, good. Let's talk about software just a little bit here. There's a couple things that I want to show you guys, and I mentioned I wanted to talk about training before we're done here as well. So our latest version of our latest version JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion version 2025. That's been out since October. And one of the nice things is that I know that most of you, as far as software goes, likely purchase through APH because we've got the license there and You can use quota funds for that. And of course, that's perfectly fine. If your school wants to get a multi-user license where it would be available all over campus or your district, you can talk to Crystal Vision about that and We can supply you with what we call a multi-user license to Be able to do that. Oh, Linda had a question. Say that again. What did she say? Can it read files.

>>Donna: Yes, EPUB files.

>>Jeff: Oh, EPUB files on the Focus. No, not natively. So that would be something that you would you would want to have on your computer, on your PC, you could then open them And then we would be able to read those. Absolutely. Epubs are a lot like daisy files and we would be able to, you know, you would be able to see them or feel them in braille But not on the display before you connect it to your phone or your PC. In order to obtain those. Epub files.

>>Donna: Great question.

>>Jeff: No, very good. Yep, absolutely. Those are the kind of questions that we want to make sure we answer. And clarify for all of you guys. So back on software. So we mentioned a couple different ways to purchase that One of the nice things that's very good about the APH license is that is set up as a timed License. So when you buy that, it's good for a year. I think it's $200 for the year and that gives you two But the good thing about that is that you are always current. So you always have the latest and greatest version. And that's one of the things that over the years, you know, at Vesparo and Freedom Scientific, we've always tried to preach is that You know, you want to stay current. And now it's more important than it's ever been before due to all the Windows updates and security things that are coming down and And Microsoft 365 and Google. The Google suite of applications and that kind of thing. And there's new things that are going on all the time. And if you're using things here like zoom or teams for communication. If your student had to use that. These things are changing so rapidly now that you absolutely want to make sure you're current with your assistive technology software. And the good thing about that license from APH is that you always will be. You'll always be eligible. For the latest and greatest. Let me just explain. So if you bought this, let's say in August or September, you know, at the beginning of the year. And then we came out with our latest version. We usually do that every October. Even though you didn't have that. When you first bought the license. You would be eligible for it because it would be available during the timed license period of what you purchased. So I hope that makes sense. So when you buy The license from APH, you have it for one year, which means any kind of upgrades or updates that we come out with during that time Your student gets. Okay, so keep that in mind because we'll let you know There's actually a notification center that is installed in JAWS infusion So you'll get a pop-up when a new version is available unless you turn that off. Another way to know is to look on the website or maybe if you listen to our podcast and that kind of thing, we'll be talking about it. Will tell you, hey, there's a new update. Here's why you want to go get it. Kind of thing. That's important to know and very important to keep up to date with that. One of the features that I want to highlight and show you guys today is something called Picture Smart AI. I was talking with Donna a little bit earlier today and she mentioned she's played with this a little bit and hopefully a number of you have also done the same thing because this is incredibly powerful. So what it is, just give you a little bit of background here before we actually fire it up and start playing with it. This is like OCR on steroids, sort of. I think that might be an accurate way to describe it. Basically, what you can do is you can take an image, a picture. And you can have it described with AI. We use two large language models in order to do this. We use ChatGPT and then we use Claude. That's what it's called. Which is part of Anthropic. We used to use Gemini from Google, but what we ran into with that was a few things around privacy. And I want to make sure and talk about this with you all So that everybody understands that there might be a concern from time to time from the district that you're in or from parents about Hey, if we're putting all this information into JAWS and into that ai Is it private? Is it safe? Or are we sending it out to the cloud where everybody can see it? And the answer is with the two AI, large language models that we're using We do not save or store that information and we don't share it either. Because you all are paying customers of JAWS, Zoom Text Fusion. We are as well with these large language models that we use with AI. And so the agreement that we have says that We at Freedom Scientific. And the folks at the companies who make these models that we're using Neither of us will share those or store them. So you can be rest assured that any information that you put in here to the The PictureSmart AI is private and that it will not be shared and stored and utilized with other folks. And I think that's important to know because You know, with the AI now and all of its capability, it's very convenient. It's very exciting. It's a game changer in a lot of But I know that one of the big concerns is around privacy as well. And if you want any further clarification on that, we actually have on our website a statement that speaks to privacy and basically exactly what I just mentioned to you. So how does this work exactly? If you've played with this and utilized it, you've seen the power of it. But what is phenomenal is you can take a PDF file, for example, or a JPEG or many different kinds of things both either live on the web as you're looking around, maybe on Facebook or on Amazon or Google, you know. Much more important sites for classroom use where there's images on the screen that you need described. You can also There you go. So Donna's got it right there. A link to information about it. Thank you, Donna, for that. But this is incredible, guys, because even if you have a folder of pictures as well, so you're not even online and you want to use those. You can do it that way as well. You can even use this with video. So if you're online looking at a video and you need that described, now we can't do it in real time yet. This is not described video live on demand, but you can pause the video at any time, basically take a screenshot And you're going to get a very accurate description of exactly what's happening in that video along with any text that's on the video that it'll read to you as well. Okay, so let's look at a practical example of how this might work. I'm just going over to here to my picture smart folder here where I've got a few different examples Let's go down here to the periodic table. Okay. So here it is, periodic table of the elements. This is a JPEG file So if we were to open this with right here. Let me do this here. I hope this is going to work. I did this before so It's coming up in photos there and hopefully you can see that. That's a medium-sized image of the periodic table. But here's the thing. If I open this right now, Jaws says absolutely nothing other than reading me the title. Of the file but it won't say anything as far as what is in this picture. So if the picture was not labeled the periodic table of elements, I wouldn't even know that. I would have no clue whatsoever of what was in this picture until We run the PictureSmart AI to get a description of what's going on here. I'm going to do that now. So the keystroke that we use in order to do this, we got to get into our layered keystroke command structure. If you're familiar with JAWS and Fusion, you've played with this a little bit, and I'm going to show you before we're done A place where you can go get these keystrokes if you don't know what they are. But for now, I'll tell you, it's the insert key with the space bar And when you press that you do get an ascending tone to tell you, yep, that's exactly what you've done. I'm going to press a P for picture smart. And then I'm going to actually have this scan the screen. So I'm going to hit shift S. Picturesmart is in progress is what I'm hearing right now. It is scanning the file And now… Donna, did this come up on the screen? So are you seeing, if I'm scrolling down here, are you seeing the text? Describing exactly what's on this file. Okay, very good.

>>Donna: Yes, sir.

>>Jeff: Look at all the information that we have here related to what this is. It tells me the categories of elements. It tells me that this is color coded. All this information on this JPEG file is now here in my hot little hands to be able to know. So if I needed to know something as specific as A various category of these elements. Let me see here. Nonmetals. Okay. I could go down here to the bottom to this link here. Where it says ask chat GPT questions. And I could then say, what are the nonmetals? Tell me the nonmetals. So here I am in a little box to be able to type Which elements? Oh, did I do that right? Okay. R. Non… metals. All right. That's what I typed. Which elements are nonmetals? Enter. So now I'm asking Here we go. Hydrogen, nitrogen, here they are. They're colored in blue. Can everybody see that? Can you see that there, Donna? Did that come up? Okay.

>>Donna: Yes, sir. And I am like… geeking out at the moment this is Really awesome.

>>Jeff: All right. It's pretty incredible. It is very powerful. It's a great way to get a very accurate description of exactly what's being looked at. And it can be as simple as just a picture that you want described Or it can be something more like this. Where you have an entire table of elements and you want to find a specific element and you want to know what the what the symbol is and what color category it's in. It's going to tell us all of that. As we see here. And if we want to drill down on specific elements, all we have to do is Go down to that link, ask chat GPT that question. And it will give us the answer, spit it back out to us. So a ton of different ways that you can use this. Think of a chart that was put up on the whiteboard, for example. If you got an electronic copy of that, ran picture smart on it. Boom, this information should then be available to your students. Any kind of graphic that is not otherwise available to them utilizing their screen reader Now it is with Picture Smart, with AI. So this picture smart capability has been in the product here for, geez, quite a while, about six years. But never to the point of the the description that AI affords us now. What it would do before is it would act like conventional OCR would So it would scan it, it would read the text. It would give us a description of a picture of But nothing specific. Nothing to the point of specificity that we've got here with PictureSmart AI now and You could not ask follow-up questions to drill in And come to anything. That you wanted more specifics on. So that's what it'll do with the periodic table. And I just use that because I thought that would be a An example of something that might be done in a science room you know all the time and a great way to be able to get this into a much more accessible Form. What else do I have here? Let's see. I just want to make sure So if it was a PDF file, for example, if you ran into a PDF somewhere on your PC and you needed that described much the same way Let me try this here real fast. Here's a Perkins receipt. I got to do an expense report every time I travel on the road, of course. What happens When we first have a PDF that is a picture Down here on the bottom, you've probably heard JAWS if you've worked on this with your students say unlabeled graphic graphic Graphic, graphic, graphic. Well, a graphic is no good. That just lets us know it's a picture. And so you can see that it's a picture on the screen and you can see the text. But with JAWS, we can't. Until, again, we run PictureSmart to be able to do that. So I'll go through insert spacebar. Hitting a P, going to do shift S again for the screen. And the reason I'm doing shift And the letter S is so that it will use both large language models. It'll do Claude and chat gpt Because a lot of times we get some different results. But look how detailed this is. You see what?

>>Donna: Wow. It said CB hash, but it actually says corned beef hash on the scan. That is pretty awesome.

>>Jeff: Right. Yep. And it has everything itemized, shows us the total This thing's pretty phenomenal. I wish I could just turn this into accounting and say, here you go, guys. See, deal with this. Now I don't have to spell it all out, but we're not quite to that point yet. Incredible detail here that you can see Now to know what's in this PDF file. All right, anybody have a question on those two examples or on anything else that we've shown so far with… Picture smart AI.

>>Donna: While we're waiting for possible typing, I will say I am so excited to play with this one. I've played with FS Companion a lot. But I have not played with the the picture smart as much.

>>Jeff: Got it. You've played with FS Companion, you said. Well, I'll tell you what, why don't we pull that up here real fast?

>>Donna: Love FS Companion.

[Donna Clemens] 15:42:35
We just had a question come in.

>>Jeff: Terry wants to know, does it come with Jaws infusion? Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. It certainly does, Terry. It's a very good question. It's included. There is not an extra cost for this feature at all. It is built in. Part of any of those programs. Very good question. So Donna, do you want to just because you've played with this and you know about it a little bit. Do you want to talk briefly about FS Companion and how it's helped you and then I can kind of fill in the gaps when you're when you're done?

>>Donna: Well, sure. Recently, I taught, oh no it's okay. I'm kind of used to it.

[Jeff Bazer] 15:43:11
Am I putting you on the spot, Donna? I'm sorry.

>>Donna: Recently, I did a a weekend class with a weekend class teachers and students. And, you know, I am not a daily user of JAWS. And even though I have my cheat sheets and I've used them for quite a long time, there are times when I forget. What a command is. And so during our session When I would get put on the spot of, well, how do I do this? And then I'd be like, huh, I don't remember that. That key command, we were able to use as FS companion right then and there and show how we would then use it in our lesson with our student when they don't remember and really empowering them to use it.

>>Jeff: Excellent. That's very good. I wanted Donna to talk about that because I thought she'd do a lot better job than I did about giving you a background and really just telling you about how this works from a classroom standpoint. So here we are on the FS Companion. This is a web page and you can get to this in a couple of different ways. You can go to fscompanion dot AI if you want to from your phone, from your computer, from your iPad, from anywhere. Why did we do that? Well, exactly what Donna just mentioned is that She doesn't use JAWS or Fusion regularly, but her students she's working with do. But wouldn't it be nice if she had her own device that she could look up all this information on And then be able to share with whoever it is she's working with. So she could tell her student, hey, I want you to go to this site. I want you to punch this in or just kind of give the instruction as they're working along. So something very important to write down if you don't have JAWS or Fusion installed on your machine that you're using. Fscompanion.ai. And Donna, thank you for putting that in the chat. You can also get there through the help the help menu In JAWS and Fusion, if you go to web resources, there's a link there to FS Companion. And then the other thing that you can do is in the layered command structure that I was talking about just a moment ago. If you hit insert space bar and you press f1 that's going to take you there as well. To FS Companion. Now, I just typed in here Thank you. So this is basically all it is is a web page. But it is tied into, again, another AI tool that we've developed We actually did this with the University of Florida. We had a lot of help from them. Initially on working with them to do this. But essentially what we have is a web page that you can interact with to ask any question you want about how to use JAWS and Fusion with all kinds of different things. And ZoomText as well now. So I just typed in, how do I use JAWS with Google Docs? That's just one question. And if I press Enter. On here let's see what we're going to get. Hopefully you guys can all see this. There we go. Is that page, is this large enough so you can all see the text?

>>Donna: Yes

>>Jeff: That has come up there. Got it. Okay. So here we are with basically a step-by-step set of instructions on how to get started Using CHAWS with Google Docs. And keystrokes to boot, right? This is like you went out and hired a trainer So good stuff here, guys. And again, of course, just like with Picture Smart AI that we were showing a little while ago, there's a link at the bottom of the screen To drill down and ask more questions. So if you need more specifics than what you see here, you can do just that. I'm going to ask a further question anytime you want to. There's a button here to end This conversation and start over. So you say, all right, well, thank you for that information on Google Docs. Now I have to also use this with Microsoft Word. How do I do that? So you can start over, just type it in there again, and you'll get another entire list of instructions on how to start using this with Word. And it doesn't have to be just how do I start using? If a little while ago we were talking about the keystroke for turning off notifications in Zoom. I think we'd be able to type that in here and it would probably let So anything that you can't remember. Okay, so Amy's got a question about can we use FS Companion with Picture Smart? Technically, sure you could, but there's no graphics here that need to be described, right? This is all text. It's being read now by jaws. So this is not a situation, at least right here on this page, where we need to use Picture smart AI at this point. That's really only for things that are not accessible, are not otherwise accessible. Like an image, a picture, a video where you want a background described that kind of thing. As far as regular conventional text goes JAWS and Fusion are still going to work like they always have and be able to read that with no problem. I hope that answers your question, Amy. I hope that was specific enough to kind of make Makes sense. Let's put it that way. So a couple of great tools, though, that have come out to really speed up the process. For accessibility of images and again You want to try this with Amazon, for example, if you're just kind of messing around, you know how everybody on Facebook, I mean, God, there's just photos galore. On there. Somebody went on a vacation. There's 50 photos they put up there when they got back. Well, you could have each and every one of them described If you wanted to, all you have to do is just when you're using JAWS Infusion, make sure you're on the graphic, you're on the picture. You'll hear Jaws say graphic. And then you can go through the keystrokes and be able to have that graphic scanned and described. Just like we did with the PDF and with the JPEG for the periodic table. And if you need specifics. On that, excuse me, if you type that into fs companion How do I scan picture on Amazon or on a web page with picture smart ai You'll get the instruction, but if you need further specifics or if you need somebody to walk you through it, you can always send me an email, call me. Or maybe I'm speaking out of school here, but you could probably ask Donna. As well. And she would… she'd have the answer. You know what's great about texas I'll tell you what's great about you guys in Texas. There's so many resources available, you know, and so many folks that that you're working with who really know how to do this stuff.

>>Donna: I would try to have the answer or find the answer.

>>Jeff: And it works out really, really well. Good question, Terry. Can you just purchase Picture Smart? No, you can't do that. This is something that's built into JAWS and Fusion, and that's not something that we have. Separately at this time. Good question. Oh, there was another one. I missed it. What's that one, Donna?

>>Donna: Let's see, Katima wants to know if the picture works with multiple page PDFs. The picture smart.

>>Jeff: Yes, you could do that. Now, it depends on, it's got to be able to see it on the screen. Okay, so think of it that way. If it's not something that you can see on the screen at at a given time, then it isn't going to work to be able to be described. So if you had a lengthy PDF, four or five pages that was not all able to fit, you'd have to scroll down to what it was which part you wanted to run and be described. But if it's on the screen and you can put those in full screen, of course, right? So you can have the PDF in full screen or a video that you're looking at, things like that. You know, you're going to be able to do that. Of course. No, you're welcome. Okay, we're getting closer to the top. I want to show you guys before we're finished up, I do want to go to the training page here. Because there are so many resources available there and I want you all to be able to access this. So here we go to If there's anything you remember from our webinar today. If you forget everything else. Remember this, freedomscientific.com. Training. And remember the FScompanion.ai. Those two things. Okay. At the most or at the least, at the very least. So here we are, FreedomScientific.com slash training, everything training related. With software and hardware, everything from our company is all available right here. Good job. Thank you, Donna, very much. So let's take a look at this, what we've got going on here. So there's fusion, there's ZoomText, there's JAWS, here's Braille hardware at the top. So if you go Any of these links right here, you're just going to get further training resources on software programs and information on our Braille hardware. Things like manuals and Different documentation that supports what these products do. You can download all of the daisy training if you want to for JAWS and Fusion. That's available there. All kinds of stuff. We're in a bit of a hurry here and I want to make sure that you've got this information down here. So here's our webinars. Upcoming webinars to sign up Look at the schedule. You can just go to this link right here, see a schedule of upcoming webinars. And remember. Acv REP credits available. For every one of these. Right below it, webinars on Demand. Missed a live webinar. Let me just go in here to give you a look at these. There's 90 headings here that Jaws tells me. Each one of these webinars are divided by heading Let's take a look at these here. It was Braille Literacy Month in January, so we've got a few things having to do with that. Here's new features of JAW, Zoom Text, Fusion from November, because that's when the that previous version came out or I'm sorry, version 2025 But they're all right here. We've got some of them broken out into various categories like for Zoom and Teams and for the Google suite of applications and for I think office as well, or Microsoft 365. But they're all here. And I'm going to tell you, if you can't find something you're looking for, just let us know. Send me a note. Give me a call. And just ask. Check here first because here is the entire list. And we've been doing these since even before COVID. Some of these, you know, the old, old ones are 2019 but Anything that's still relevant we leave up here, like, you know, specific training around the you know jaws using ZoomText itself. You know, that's going to be for somebody who's starting out new. And even if it was done a few years ago, it's going to still going to be here. But for everything else. One of the ones that has gotten a lot of play lately has been gmail because We used to have the basic HTML for Gmail. I wish Google would have never taken that away. Of course they did. So now you got to use the standard view. And while it's still usable and while it works just fine, there's more keystrokes and things that you have to go through now in order to use it. But I still love Gmail. What else do we have here? Oh, here's one on the Onyx OCR. So that's one of our video magnifiers. It's got distance camera and OCR. That's all right here. Webinar Wednesday. Let's talk teams. I'm just scrolling down a few of these. Got a lot of things around Teams and Zoom and Google Drive and Here's one on the compact 10, right? We showed that a little while ago. You want to get drill down and learn a lot more about the Compact 10, this webinar right here to do that. Now, are you going to get ACVREP credits on the archived webinars? No, I'm sorry. I wish you could. But we can't do that, at least at this point, because we have no way to know if you popped in and watched five minutes or watched at all right But that's where these all are and definitely take a look. I know we're at 56 here right now. Let me just show you a couple more things on this page here real fast. Let me go down here. There's teaching resources here. Go in here and take a look at this. If you're going to have to work with your student on teaching how to use Joss Fusion Zoom Text. We've got teaching resources right there. You can start at the beginning. Work your way through. Surf's up. If you're not familiar with this and you have to teach your student how to use the internet. This is what you need. This is an entire curriculum how to use the internet with JAWS and Fusion. It's called Surf's Up. You can do it all online or you can download it, put it on a zip drive so that you can take it with you anywhere you go. And work with your students in a closed environment so they can't go out and go to Google or Facebook or Amazon when you're trying to teach them how to use the internet. You could just use these pages or practice pages all the way through. Okay. Lots more on this page. There's a student of the month down here where your student could win $500 Amazon certificate. And become the student of the month. Pretty good stuff. So just a ton of information here on the training page. All right, guys, thank you so much for coming in here today and taking a listen And I want to make sure that you contact us again in the future if you have any other questions. Comments and I will send Donna, if it would be helpful, an email with links just like what you were putting in the chat today for what we covered.

>>Donna: Absolutely. And it looks like we have a couple more questions. Tanya asks, what age student is appropriate for SurfSU?

>>Jeff: I'll tell you what, I've seen first and second graders using JAWS and they're whizzes at this thing they you know some We'll just grasp it right away. And anytime you're teaching anything about the internet. I would use Surf's Up.

>>Donna: And, you know, Jeff beat me to it today because I was just about to send this to Tanya. So, yeah. And Linda asked picture smart. If the picture smart is a piece of art, if the picture is a piece of art, would it be detailed like string art with colors of blue, red, purple?

>>Jeff: Oh.

>>Donna: In the shape of a heart that's just an example she told.

>>Jeff: That's an excellent question. Thank you for asking that because you know what? You can scan with a pearl camera as well, pictures that you have in person you know that that you have there to have described with Picture smart. So you could do it that way. Or if you had a picture on your phone and you just transferred that that picture So it has to be electronic to begin with But I mean, on demand, you could take a picture right there And then have it described with PictureSmart exactly like what we did so You could. You could take a picture of the art on the wall or wherever it was, have it described Immediately. Then try this as well with video.

>>Donna: Awesome. Thank you, everyone, for your questions.

>>Jeff: Take your favorite video that you like to watch or your favorite person online, just stop the video at some point put it in full screen, run the picture smart command And watch as it describes that video to you. That's incredible stuff.