I suspect anyone who has tried some of the newer AI-based image descriptions, such as those from Be My Eyes, has noticed the high quality image descriptions that are available. I’ve been curious about how I could apply that to videos so did a little experimentation. I want to emphasize that I do not consider this a replacement for audio description. There is so much more to that experience than just giving details on what’s…
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Be My AI in the Clouds Although it has been close to 40 years now, there was a time when I had enough vision to see the sky and the color and shape of clouds. I’ve been intrigued by trying Be My AI on pictures of the sky because I guess I still have memory of the different colors and shapes clouds can take. Here is the result of one such exploration. Assuming the descriptions…
Leave a CommentVMWare recently announced a 2023 technical preview for Fusion on silicon-based Macs. I didn’t have success with earlier previews on that platform with Fusion so have been using Parallels for now. This was a good opportunity to try Fusion again. My efforts this time around were successful. I’ve now created multiple VMs under Fusion on an M1 MacBook Pro. Here is what I had to do. Create a new VM and point to a Windows…
Leave a CommentI’ve made passing reference to a podcast I started a little over a year ago in posts here. The home page for the podcast can be found at TPTBNL.com. I wanted to share links for those who might want to subscribe. Subscription links follow:
Leave a CommentI’ve written previously about tracking a fantasy football draft and have an updated spreadsheet to track a fantasy football draft for 2023. I wrote about how to use this in an earlier blog post. My original description is also available. My podcast, The Podcast to be Named Later, has a fantasy football primer if you want to learn more about fantasy football. I have made no changes other than updating player data for 2023. If…
Leave a CommentI believe in making software accessible. I also believe in understanding AI technology and how it handles various questions. Today I asked Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard to give me 10 reasons not to make software accessible. The answers were revealing. Bing refused to give me any reasons for not making software accessible. I think that is wrong because part of understanding accessibility is to me understanding the reasons people think they shouldn’t address accessibility.…
One CommentWith AI being touted repeatedly as the answer for almost anything, I tried obtaining an answer to a basic question as the U.S. reaches the 2023 4th of July holiday. My question posed to both Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard: Q: Write an article detailing the spending on fireworks in the US and break the spending down. Below are the answers. In my opinion neither is acceptable for different reasons. Bing’s answer is incomplete on…
Leave a CommentThe NFL released the 2023 schedule earlier this week. I wanted a version I could use in Excel and am sharing it here. It is a slightly modified version of a file I obtained online from Draft Kings. I made two changes to the file so it would read column headers and row headers automatically with most screen readers. I converted the grid to an actual Excel table. This adds actual column headers and should…
Leave a CommentA while ago I wrote about transcribing audio using Word for the Web and a screen reader. Earlier this year Microsoft made the transcription functionality available for some versions of the desktop version of Word. This blog post has more details. The uploading, editing and adding to your document part of the transcription experience is the same as I wrote about earlier. With this functionality now available in desktop versions of Word, I took the…
One CommentI’m definitely late to the party on this one but recently learned about an app called VOCR. As the name implies, it adds OCR (optical character recognition) ability to VoiceOver on the Mac. The concept behind what the app does is straight forward. Run OCR on a full window or whatever is in the VoiceOver cursor, present the to the user with commands to move around and allow mouse clicks to be issued on the…
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