Welcome back to the 30th episode of the EBU Access Cast, the big THREE ZERO! In a great new development, the team has made it possible for all episodes to be accessible via a dedicated youtube channel!
In this episode, Hlynur makes his debut as a lead host, joined by the always charming Tanja, Mario and Pawel. We covered a lot of current issues... everything from binaural recordings of a volcano in Iceland to an audio version of an IKEA catalogue.
Pawel told us about his new gadget, the Sennheiser Ambeo Smart Headset and we even get to hear some recordings he created for us and let us take a peek into his daily adventures.
Hlynur told us about the Dark Reader Chrome Extension, which enables users to customize the way webpages look, turn light theme pages into dark theme, increase colour contrast etc.
There were some news we covered, like Microsoft's acquisition of Nuance, who are most famous for the much-loved Siri, the Accessibility Mousepad from Iceland, that was based on a design from UK Home Office and has been shared in GitHub for others to use, translate and produce and the ongoing issue with external bluetooth keyboards not working with many special characters if using both Android 11 and Talkback together. We also discussed how a normal user can get in touch and report bugs and errors to the Android staff.
We took a close look at Accessible Overlays, what they are and what they are meant to do and how they are really not working and often making matters worse than fixing them. We also discussed some companies who are offering these overlays as a paid-for service and also how you, as a user, can get rid of them. There are many articles and podcasts who have covered this issue, for example a deep-dive 3 hour podcast of Mosen at large, especially covering it. For those who wish to read more about this, here is a link to an extensive Fact sheet on accessibility overlays.
We also talked about how audio-only media seems to be on the rise with large platforms like Clubhouse growing rapidly and huge companies like IKEA releasing their catalogue as an audio book.
The Sight City 2021 conference, that was supposed to take place in Frankfurt in May, will be hosted as a virtual-only event. We discussed how that might affect the conference as a whole, the number of companies showcasing their products and more.
Finally, Mario shares a piece of his limitless brilliance and expertise, giving us a demo of how you can easily transfer audio from your smartphone to a PC via bluetooth.
We really hope you enjoy this landmark episode and will join us next time. Should you have any questions, remarks or content you would like to contribute, you can reach us by email at ebuaccesscast@euroblind.org or twitter!
As always, you can also explore the transcript of this episode.