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IN TOUCH – It’s all about the apps

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TX:Ìý 19.01.2021Ìý 2040-2100

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PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý MIKE YOUNG

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White

Good evening.Ìý Tonight, a look at some of the technologies helping those of us with visual impairments to live our lives to the fullest extent – everything from locating lost keys to finding your way, from maintaining social distancing to online shopping for clothes.Ìý Mind you, when it comes to clothes choices it can always still go wrong.

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When they turned up they made me look – according to my now grown up sons – like a cross between Popeye the Sailor Man and a kinky milkmaid.

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White

Sounds like a look that couldn’t catch on.Ìý There’ll be more on how best to get the right clothes to suit us a little later in the programme.

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But first, our reporter Fern Lulham is here fresh from an appearance on the ±«Óãtv World Service’s Digital Planet programme.Ìý And Fern, you’ve been telling their global audience about some of the smartphone apps and other assistive technologies that you use in your daily life.

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Lulham

That’s right.Ìý I have taken part, Peter, in a special edition of their programme called Blindness in the Digital Age.Ìý So, they wanted to see how technology in 2021 is helping me and other visually people on a day-to-day basis.Ìý So, their show is aimed at fully sighted people.Ìý So, you may be familiar with some of these apps, there again there are so many out there these days that you may have never heard of any of them.Ìý Starting with an app called Be My Eyes, which, among other things, I usually use to find my keys.Ìý I think we’ve all been there.

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Be My Eyes app

Hello, it’s Anna here can I help you?

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Hi, Anna, my name’s Fern.Ìý I am trying to go out but I can’t find my keys and I’m pretty sure they’re on the table but I’ve felt all around and I can’t feel them at the moment, would you mind having a look for me?

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No problem at all.Ìý

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Be My Eyes is a free app designed to connect sighted volunteers with blind and visually impaired users.Ìý The app uses your phone’s camera to allow the sighted volunteer to see your surroundings and help you with tasks such as finding things, matching clothes, checking your make-up and much more.

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Be My Eyes app

Right, I can see the table and I can see there’s a pile of cork mats there.Ìý If you just go to the left slightly, I think I can see them – I think they’ve fallen down the back and they’re sort of tucked under.Ìý If you just reach your hand out to the left-hand side, feel the corner of the mats.

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Ah, I’ve got them.

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Essentially, you have a pair of eyes at your fingertips, saving you time, energy and stress and allowing you to get on with your day.

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Be My Eyes app

Thank you so much for that, you’re a life saver.

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Alright, okay, no problem, have a good day out.

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Thanks, you have a good day too.

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Once I have finally made it out the door, my next challenge is navigating my way to where I need to be.Ìý Of course, I have Nancy by my side but she hasn’t quite mastered the art of reading road maps or street signs just yet.Ìý Although, saying that, there is now a robotic guide dog in development, which, if all goes well, will have a built-in Sat Nav and be able to not only guide visually impaired people but find the way to specific locations for them in the future too.Ìý For now, though, I use an app called Microsoft Soundscape, which allows me to mark my chosen destination and gives me audio updates about where I am, as I walk.

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Microsoft Soundscape app

Approaching intersection, Gannet Way goes left, Ashford Road continues ahead.

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That’s it.Ìý

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Heading east along Ashford Way.

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Microsoft Soundscape explores the use of innovative audio-based technology to give users a richer understanding of the world around them.Ìý It does this by calling out the names of roads when you approach them, letting you know when you’re coming up to an intersection and announcing points of interest such as schools, parks and bus stops.

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Microsoft Soundscape app

Heading west.Ìý At Alexandra Park.Ìý Restroom.

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That’s it, good girl.

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Once we’ve arrived at the shop Nancy and I both have to concentrate hard.Ìý She has to use all her willpower to resist the temptation to sniff every item and I have to focus on trying to differentiate one product from the next.Ìý Luckily for me I have the help of another app for this called Seeing AI.Ìý

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Seeing AI app

I think this is tea.

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Twinings Green Tea ginger 20 tea bags 40g.

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Yes, that’s it, ginger tea, let’s go.

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Seeing AI has several functions, one of which is a barcode scanner.Ìý This means I can simply hold an item up to my phone’s camera and it will identify the barcode and tell me what the product is.Ìý This is particularly useful when two items are very similar and may even be an identical packaging but come in different flavours or varieties.

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Seeing AI app

Cadbury Whisper bag 110g.

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Ooh Whisper.

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When it comes to clothes, I have always loved matching sets and I’m even the kind of human who likes to coordinate with her guide dog.Ìý But, of course, as I can’t see them, I sometimes need help distinguishing what colour clothes I’m looking at.Ìý For this I use an app named Aipoly Vision.Ìý

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Aipoly Vision app

Now, I’m going to get some socks to match your lovely pink collar.

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Aipoly Vision calls out the colours of items it sees through your smartphone’s camera, allowing me to feel confident in my choice and indulge my love of matching fashion to the max.

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Aipoly Vision app

Dove beige.Ìý

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Well, I don’t really want brown or beige.

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Faded pink.

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Faded pink, that will do.Ìý We can match – ooh won’t we look nice.

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Like most people the pandemic posed new challenges for me.Ìý Social distancing also poses obvious problems for those of us who can’t see well.Ìý However, Apple came up with a solution to this and released a new accessibility feature as part of the iPhone 12 Pro.

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This feature is designed to let visually impaired users know when people are nearby to them, allowing them to maintain a safe distance and generally avoid any unexpected collisions.

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White

And I should add, some of Fern’s report was recorded before the latest lockdown closed many shops.Ìý

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If you want to hear more from that Digital Planet programme, we’ve put a link to it on this programme’s page on our own In Touch website.

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Fern is still with me.Ìý Some of that sounds quite complex, how new to you is all the technology you use?

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Lulham

Well, Peter, I’m a millennial, so I’m not going to lie to you I’ve been using smartphones for half my life, so, downloading apps is pretty familiar for me, I know what I’m doing there.Ìý It does take a little while to get used to them but there is a lot information out there on different apps.Ìý I don’t think you need to know about every app, I think it’s more like if you have a problem – like me with my keys there – you just need to research what might help you, there might be an app for that, you never know.

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White

Some of these apps are free but I take it some come at a cost as well.

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Lulham

Yeah, so all of the apps in my piece there, that I used for Digital Planet, you can download and use for free.Ìý Sometimes when you download apps there are in-app purchases that then pop up and say oh you need to pay money for this but usually you can find all of what you need for under £10, that’s usually the limit.Ìý But I think with everything it’s is it worth it to you for what you’re paying.

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White

Now also joining us for this edition of In Touch is another regular contributor to the programme – Emma Tracey.Ìý Emma, we’ve heard Fern doing some clothes shopping there but there’s an app and a website that you’ve been testing buying clothes for, which you’ve been impressed with.

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Tracey

Yes Peter, I’ve been using something called Stich Fix which involves signing up and doing a lengthy style quiz on a website and then at the end of the process doing a check-out on an app.Ìý And I think a lot of people might suspect that blind people either get their clothes shopping done for them or do it with some help but definitely it’s a very visual job and so I was really surprised to find out that all of that – the website and the app – are fully, fully accessible.Ìý So, the buttons are all labelled, the boxes where you put in information work really well and all the pictures of the clothing are fully described, so in a way that a blind person – a blind from birth person like me – can understand.

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White

Stitch Fix is an accessible fashion subscription service isn’t it, so how much actually does it cost to use and do you have to keep on buying clothes monthly – is it that kind of arrangement?

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Tracey

Stitch Fix is a service where you tell them what you want.Ìý So, you give them all your style, all the things you’ve worn before, your body shape and size.Ìý They ask you quite intimate questions about that, to be honest.Ìý And then a human comes in and picks some clothes, using that and they send you five pieces of clothing in a box and you try them on and you pay for what you keep and you send back what you don’t want.Ìý You can either sign up for one every three months or whatever sort of level of regularity you want but you can also do a one-off fix, as they call it.Ìý The base cost is £10 and that is for that human input but if you buy everything in the box you get a discount which sort of means you get your £10 returned to you.

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White

Now this is something that can be used by anyone.Ìý I’m just intrigued to know why this has been so – designed so suitably for visually impaired people.

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Tracey

Well that’s something that I actually asked Simon Leesley, who’s the Managing Director of Stich Fix UK.Ìý I asked Simon whether the website and app had been deliberately designed with accessibility in mind.

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Leesley

What we’ve heard over the years is many customers with disabilities who have difficulty navigating either an eCommerce site or shopping in store have found a lot of joy in what Stich Fix provides because of the highly personalised nature of the service, which allows them to interact directly with their personal stylist, request items that suit them perfectly.Ìý And where we’ve invested, particularly for blind people, over the years is related to all text.Ìý And so, to help our customers navigate the website we’ve invested heavily in making our website as accessible as possible to the blind community.

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Tracey

From the beginning was it created, the app and the website, with accessibility in mind?

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Leelsey

We’ve always tried to make it as accessible as possible to everybody but we continually take feedback from our customers and we’ve adjusted over the years.Ìý And from a personal experience many, many years ago, I ran our customer experience team down in Austin, Texas and we had a client who was blind, who I engaged with, and she was really the catalyst for helping us think about how we could make their website more and more accessible over the years.

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Tracey

Tell me a bit more about the stylists and how they choose the items for each fix.

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Leesley

Each customer, when they sign up, is matched with a personal stylist, based on their unique style profile.Ìý And we have algorithms that help match you to a stylist based on your style preferences and the style preferences of the stylist.Ìý And so once a stylist has been selected, they read through your profile, they take on any of your specific requests and pick those five items that get sent to you at home.

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Tracey

Is there a possibility for you to have a phone call or an email or like direct communication with your stylist?

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Leesley

We don’t currently offer the ability to talk to a stylist over the phone or by email.Ìý However, we are testing into a new experience that would benefit customers who would like to have that more real time interaction or virtual face-to-face interaction with their stylist.Ìý And so it’s in very early data testing and we are planning to share a lot more on that in the coming months.

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Tracey

How much has Stitch Fix benefited from lockdown, have things changed for you guys?

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Leelsey

You know they definitely have, I mean consumers are actively searching for new ways to shop from home, given a lot of the closures to non-essential retail and those that might not have leveraged online shopping prior to the pandemic are certainly compelled to make the shift to – from instore to online.

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Tracey

Can I just go back to your relationship you’ve built up with the blind person back when you worked for the customer service team?Ìý What kind of things did that person teach you, what did you learn from all those interactions?

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Leesley

You know, over the course of our email exchanges, over the year and a half that I was in that role, I just learnt a lot about the challenges she faced and how we could address those better as a company and serve more of her needs.Ìý And I didn’t realise that reader technology that blind people use to process website and how they would process images and the role that all text played in that and then how they navigate a website.Ìý So, that was a very important learning experience for me and led me to really go push on our engineering team to make those investments in the website.Ìý So, I learned so much from that relationship and it definitely impacted some of the investments we made.

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White

That’s Simon Leesley there from Stitch Fix UK talking to Emma.

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Of course, there are many other options when it comes to buying clothes.Ìý Here’s how two other In Touch listeners do it.Ìý Beth Dawes from North Tyneside and first, Denise Leigh from Stock-on-Trent.

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Leigh

I subscribed very, very early on to online shopping and I soon started to do online clothes shopping because, first of all, I live in quite a rural area, so it was quite difficult to actually get to a clothes outlet and shop, also, it meant I could do it quite independently, depending on the quality of descriptions of the clothes.Ìý I’ve used quite a few outlets – Boohoo and Next I’ve used – nothing too outlandish, I used George quite a bit when Dimitri was tiny – my little boy who’s eight now.Ìý I use New Look quite a lot, purely because the descriptions of the clothes is so good, I mean it’s absolutely brilliant, it’s almost like it was designed with visually impaired people in mind and it will give you a brief description of what you can team the item of clothing with that you’re buying to make a good ensemble.

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Dawes

I came upon some groups on Facebook when I was looking for some clothes for my little girl and joined some independent retailers’ groups who do organic children clothes and discovered they did clothes for adults too.Ìý That’s been really useful because there’s a lot of discussion about sizing, particularly, before they release new clothes and about patterns and talking about people who are different shapes and sizes.Ìý And so, it’s been a really useful way of hearing about how different garments fit and finding the right thing.Ìý So, I kind of went tentatively into tops and then expanded from there, once I’d figured out actually the advice is quite good.

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Leigh

You will return a lot of clothes if you’re buying them online, sometimes because they don’t fit properly and just sometimes because they’re not what you thought you were buying.Ìý And this happened to me early on in lockdown.Ìý I bought a pair of fun trousers and when they turned up they made me look, according to my now grown up sons, like a cross between Popeye the Sailor Man and a kinky milkmaid.Ìý They went back, I mean apart from anything they chaffed uncomfortably.

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White

Bit more information than we really needed there and that was Denise Leigh and Beth Dawes.

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Emma, I mean you were pretty complimentary about it but are there things to watch out for when you’re doing this as a visually impaired person?

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Tracey

Yeah, I think as much communication as you can have with your stylist as possible, with any of these boxes because there are other companies, there’s something called Lucky AirO and then there’s specific clothing.Ìý Like there’s a socks subscription box as well, that you can have and a jewellery one as well.Ìý But anyway, I digress.Ìý The communication with the stylist is really important and actually some of the style cards, where they kind of draw pictures and write about what you can put with what that come in your box, they weren’t in a format that I could read.Ìý I mean I guess I could have taken a scanner app out but Peter, you know yourself, you don’t want to be getting an app out for every single thing that you do.Ìý So, I emailed them and I said – look, I can’t read the style cards – and they immediately sent me all the information by email.Ìý So, I think it’s about giving them as much information as possible about why you didn’t like something.Ìý I had to admit to some lockdown belly on the last one, to say why a top didn’t work, and I’m afraid there’s just been a couple of kilos put on since my last box came and maybe I need a size up.Ìý So, that’s important, I think.

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White

And Fern Lulham, still with us.Ìý I just want a final word from both of you about technology because it can seem like a mountain to climb to learn how to use all these apps, websites, gizmos that we’ve heard.Ìý I mean are we in danger of a really big accessibility gap between those who can take advantage of all these apps and those who can’t – Fern first?

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Lulham

You don’t have to be thrilled about technology to be openminded about it.Ìý And I think as visually impaired people one of our biggest strengths is adapting to the circumstances that we find ourselves in.Ìý So, we all have this choice in life whether to say – oh, it’s too much for me I can’t do it – or whether to say – I’ll give it a go and see how I get on.Ìý And I think we’re really good at doing that and it’s important for us to do it.Ìý And I also think technology’s such a great example of how sighted and non-sighted people can work together to create a positive world for everyone and challenge those negative stereotypes of disability.

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Tracey

I’m 38, so most of my life has been around apps and computers and things.Ìý And I do feel like it has made a massive difference and opened things up so much.Ìý It depends on what you’re into.Ìý I think if you need to buy clothes and you’re stuck in the house it’s very difficult but that app is further along your journey.Ìý So, maybe start with a smart speaker – I think smart speakers are a good start.

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White

Emma Tracey, Fern Lulham – thank you very much indeed.Ìý We are planning an item on what help is available for people who want to get their technology abilities more up to speed.Ìý We know it’s not a one size fits all approach.

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Our email is intouch@bbc.co.uk, listen again to our programmes via our website, that’s bbc.co.uk/intouch.Ìý

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From me, Peter White, my producer Mike Young and studio manager Philip Halliwell.Ìý Goodbye.

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