Double Tap

Why is learning braille as an adult still so hard, and why does a braille display cost more than a laptop? Steven Scott and Shaun Preece dig into braille access and pricing. Then they meet Cazerny Bussey, the musician and founder of Even Though I'm Blind.

John in London wrote in about trying to learn braille as an adult. He found a box of course books he never opened, and braille displays he couldn't afford. Steven argues that mass adoption and patient learning have to go together. He points to Hadley, the Braillists and the Perkins Braille...

Sky Sports is adding audio description and live captions to Premier League football. Then a listener's frustration with Sky Go shows how far the broadcaster still has to go. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece go through your emails and messages on TV accessibility, AI agents, accessible gaming and the smart home.

Gordon from Livingston, Scotland, wrote in about Sky Go. You can't watch live programmes with audio description on your phone, and the TV guide no longer tags any programme as having AD. Steven explains how the new Sky Go app for Sky Glass and Sky Stream...

Google's new Guided Vision feature in Gemini Live was trained with help from Aira and its blind Trusted Testers. Everette Bacon and Lynette Frison of Aira explain how the partnership with Google DeepMind works, what blind users taught the AI, and what it means for Aira's future.

Steven Scott and Shaun Preece open with vibe coding, including homemade Claude voice assistants that answer in about three seconds and people using AI to bring old Echo Show and Meta Portal hardware back to life. Brandon Bracey's BlindRSS reader is now on Android, and Steven unboxes a new 8-inch...

Amazon's new Alexa Tablets drop Fire OS for Android 16, TalkBack and the Google Play Store. Chris Cooke, host of At Your Fingertips, has been testing the Alexa Tablet 8 and tells Steven Scott and Shaun Preece how accessible it really is for blind users.

Chris covers setting the tablet up on her own with the TalkBack shortcut, the widget-heavy home screen, and a touch-tracking problem that means you aren't always where you think you are on the screen. She goes through the accessibility settings, including switch access, voice access, live captions and hearing aid support. She also tests...

Smart glasses for blind people made the national news this week. Anthony Corona of Sunday Edition joins Steven Scott and Shaun Preece to look at Meta Ray-Ban Display, Agiga EchoVision, Glide and the WeWALK Smart Cane 2, and to ask what blind users actually need from them.

Steven was on BBC News talking about smart glasses from a blind person's point of view, pushing back on the idea that they're "creepy." Anthony introduces Sunday Edition, now a family of 10 podcasts, and gives honest advice on starting a show and keeping it going.

On wearables, Anthony says...

Two Austrian accessibility innovators from the Zero Project Technology Forum in Tokyo: Lingvano, the sign language learning app taught entirely by deaf teachers, and Turn-Motion, which uses AI and robotics to make custom carbon fibre leg braces.

Elena Coazzoli and Johanna Steiner of Lingvano explain how the app teaches American, British and Austrian Sign Language, with German Sign Language days away. They describe sign recognition built in-house, which watches you fingerspell and gives feedback on where and how you sign, and why every lesson uses deaf teachers rather than avatars. About a quarter of Lingvano's staff are...

Two Japanese accessibility innovators from the Zero Project Technology Forum in Tokyo: OryLab, whose OriHime robots let homebound disabled people go to work and school, and Miruoto, which turns the sound of sport into words on screen for deaf fans.

Maria Juul, a Dane who has lived in Japan for more than ten years, explains OryLab's mission to eliminate loneliness. Its OriHime robots are always driven by a real person, called a pilot, and she explains why being present in the room creates memories and relationships in a way a video call does not.

Steven...

Steven Scott and Shaun Preece open the Double Tap mailbag to talk about Meta Ray-Ban battery life, password managers, blind employment and the best keyboard for one-handed typing, with straight answers from two blind tech users.

Ryan suggests the Carina C2 battery pack for Shaun's Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which leads to a plea for a simple USB-C port on the arm. Biggles raises privacy concerns about Apple Watch's new conversation recall feature, and the hosts ask whether a saved transcript counts as a recording.

Sventor in Norway explains how he uses Google Password Manager as...

Steven Scott has set up a Claude hotline on an accessible Cisco desk phone. It leads into a frank debate about blind users relying on AI. Also covered: a Meta glasses firmware fix for Aira calls, new Facebook and Double Tap Live updates, and listener views on whether smart glasses will last.

Steven explains how Claude set up a VoIP line on a talking Cisco desk phone. Claude then built a bridge on his Mac, so one button on the phone lets him talk to Claude directly. From there, Steven and Shaun Preece look at Claude connectors...

Apple's HomeView, a new Apple TV 4K and HomePod mini 2 lead the news, then Vispero's Matt Ater and Ryan Jones explain how Vispero Companion in JAWS will change your settings and help you finish tasks when you get stuck.

Steven Scott and Shaun Preece go through Apple's Welcome Home event. The new Apple TV 4K gets the A19 chip and built-in microphones, and the price goes up. HomePod mini 2 is sold on Siri AI, which will not arrive until a later update. The new Siri Remote has Find My built in. HomeView uses Face ID to recognise...

Richard Harlow lost most of his sight to LHON while studying at Emily Carr University. Today he is a blind artist and accessibility advocate, and he's standing for Nanaimo City Council on Vancouver Island. He tells Steven Scott how he rebuilt his art, his career and his confidence, and why disabled people belong in local government.

Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuropathy took Richard's central vision over six months when he was 20. A doctor told him he would never finish art school. He went on to finish a degree at Vancouver Island University, and he now paints large, high-contrast...

In 2015, after twelve surgeries, Brett Halle lost his sight completely. The engineer who spent twenty years building the Mac had to learn to use it with VoiceOver. He explains Radar, why your bug report matters more than you think, and how he treated VoiceOver like a video game.

This is part two of our tribute to Brett Halle, the former Apple engineer and friend of this show, who died on 1 October 2026. It was recorded with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece in July 2024.

Yesterday Brett took us inside Apple. Today the story turns. His retinas began...

Brett Halle sold the Apple II as a student, joined Apple in 1991, and was the first engineer through the door after Apple bought NeXT. He led the Core OS team behind Mac OS X, ran Final Cut, and quietly moved the Mac from PowerPC to Intel. This is part one of a two part tribute, in his own words.

Brett died on 1 October 2026. He was a friend of this show and a daily listener, and the best way we know to remember him is to let you hear him tell his own story. This conversation with Steven...

NASA ran an Artemis webinar built for blind and low vision people, and two of the panelists are blind NASA engineers. Steven Scott talks to Dr. Robert Shelton, Dr. Craig Moore and Christine Malec about the RS-25 rocket engine, how they built careers at NASA, and what would make space missions accessible to blind fans.

Bob Shelton has worked at NASA for almost 40 years and is now lead simulation engineer for the Commercial Crew Program. He describes joining Johnson Space Center as a blind mathematician in 1971. His first boss told him to figure out where he could...

Microsoft's latest Windows event went all in on hybrid intelligence, which means AI that runs on your own PC when it can and in the cloud when it has to. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece break down what the agentic OS, a smarter Windows search and the new Copilot could mean for blind and screen reader users. They also look at the $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra.

Windows will decide where each AI task runs, using small local models or the cloud depending on the job and your privacy. Microsoft named DeepSeek, Perplexity, Hermes Agent and OpenClaw on stage...

Google Gemini's new Guided Vision feature, built with Aira, gives blind and low vision Android users more detailed visual descriptions through Gemini Live. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece put it through real tests, then go through listener emails about Siri, iOS 27, Gemini settings and life on Android.

Steven tries Guided Vision on a Pixel 10 Pro. He uses it to find a mug on his desk and to guide his finger to a button on the RØDECaster Pro II touchscreen. It does well once you hold the camera still, but it isn't truly live yet. The hosts c...

Envision has announced it may wind down. If no partner takes the company on, active development of the Envision and Ally apps stops on December 31, 2026. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece read the Envision founders' statement in full and look at what it means for blind and low vision users, for people who own Ally Solos glasses, and for other smart glasses makers. The episode opens with a tribute to Brett Halle, the Apple engineer who helped build Mac OS X.

Brett Halle died on October 1, 2026. His friend Ray, a fellow blind woodworker, wrote in to share the...

Lumin, the voice-first email app for blind and low vision users, now works with Outlook, Hotmail and MSN accounts and has a new audio reminders feature. Founder Sriram Ganesh announced both on our Double Tap Live special. This replay starts with his live demo, then he takes listener calls and talks about how AI is changing the way accessible products get built.

Sriram asks Lumin to triage his inbox, draft replies and describe a conference photo, all by voice. Then the listener calls start. Gregory, Elizabeth, Amy and a caller from Ontario ask about deleting emails in...

Siri AI on iOS 27, Gemini on Android and NVDA screen reader bugs all get a frank once-over from blind tech fans Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, along with your emails on LiDAR, Mastodon and smart glasses.

Shaun has found two odd NVDA behaviours: sound split getting stuck on after he turns it off, and system audio staying ducked after Narrator closes. He's also looking forward to an NVDA 2026.3 change that tells developers when speech has finished. Steven sorts out his loud iPhone ringer, explains why he'd still hold off on iOS 27, and says Siri AI keeps letting...

Can a blind person get real use from smart glasses with a screen? Steven Scott has bought the Meta Ray-Ban Display and Meta Neural Band. He and Shaun Preece talk through the built-in screen reader, the wrist gestures, WhatsApp, Maps and what is still missing.

Steven expected the in-lens display to be useless to him. He was wrong. The glasses have their own screen reader, and you switch it on from the Meta AI app. Setup walks you through the Neural Band gestures well: rub your thumb along your index finger to swipe, and pinch to double...

Meta smart glasses bugs, privacy worries and region limits fill the Double Tap inbox, and Steven Scott and Shaun Preece work through them with blind listeners. The episode also marks the launch of Double Tap Live, a new 24/7 radio channel at DoubleTapOnAir.com.

Listeners are running into the same Meta AI bug: an "available settings have changed" notice that switches Meta AI off. Callum and Gordon have lost the UK voices, Melissa finds the Meta AI app hard to use with VoiceOver, and Gordon says the microphone fix on his Adventurer glasses only partly works. Brian explains...

Double Tap Live, a new 24/7 radio channel for blind and visually impaired listeners, launches this week. Listener stories also cover Luna night vision glasses, LEGO without sight and Claude Code tips.

Steven Scott and Shaun Preece explain what Double Tap Live is: a round-the-clock channel showcasing podcasts from AMI and beyond, plus a monthly live call-in show. The first one features Sriram Ganesh from Lumin, the voice-first email app. Call 613-481-0144 to take part, or use the same number on WhatsApp.

Alan in Forfar tells how Bricks for the Blind's text instructions brought back...

Passkeys were supposed to replace passwords, so why are they still this hard to use? Steven Scott and Shaun Preece go through a full mailbag on passkeys, password managers, blind employment and the backlash against Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Listener Brandon explains why he's cancelling Microsoft 365: he says Microsoft pushes its own passkey storage over third-party providers. Steven shares his frustrations with 1Password and with Apple's app-specific passwords, and floats the idea of building a self-hosted password manager. He also tells how Seeing AI and an Aira agent helped him bring a silent Asus ProArt laptop back...

Meta's Wearables Device Access Toolkit is out of beta, and Meta chose accessibility apps to show it off. Stéphanie Robieux, co-founder and CEO of OOrion, joins from Meta Connect to explain what this means for blind and low vision people using Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

OOrion finds objects and guides you to them with spatial audio. It now runs on Meta's glasses, so you can look around and ask where your keys are, which gate you're at, or what's in a tin, without holding up a phone. Stéphanie talks about Meta's new discovery platform, the coming "He...

A spinal cord injury took Ishaan Mehta's career in a single afternoon. This is how he rebuilt it, with assistive technology, a list of 50 employers, and a role at LinkedIn he never settled for.

Most of the people on Double Tap were born blind or lost their sight gradually. Ishaan Mehta's disability arrived on 21 October 2016. He had eight and a half years at Vodafone behind him, a project management career and a Six Sigma black belt, when a C5-C6 cervical injury left him quadriplegic with very little movement below the neck.

He talks Steven...

Early dementia screening from a consumer EEG headset, a blunt answer on whether a fully inclusive world is possible, and what India's own accessibility standard means for disabled workers. Steven Scott reports from day two of Zero Project Conference India in Mumbai, the regional edition of the conference that takes over the UN in Vienna every February.

NEMA AI founder Nidhi built AI at Accenture before starting a company that maps the brain using off the shelf Emotiv headsets. Ten or fifteen minutes of recording, two minutes of analysis, and a doctor gets a picture of memory...

Meta Connect 2026 brought Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses with no cameras, Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, a hearing enhancement feature and the Muse AI agent. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece go through each announcement and ask what it means for blind and low vision users.

Steven and Shaun start with privacy. They look at how Mark Zuckerberg answered Joanna Stern's questions about camera glasses, then ask whether audio-only glasses make sense for blind people now that camera access opens up apps like Be My Eyes.

Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 gets slimmer frames, a longer battery and an action button...

Assistive technology innovation from the Zero Project Technology Forum in Mumbai: an audiobook library you reach on any phone, an accessible home pregnancy test app, and AI photo descriptions that know your family by name.

Steven Scott reports from the Zero Project Technology Forum, hosted in Mumbai by the Tech Mahindra Foundation, where ten innovators pitched to around 25 funders and support partners. David Banes, who advises the Zero Project and has 40 years in assistive technology, argues that startups rarely need another year-long incubator. They need a match on the one thing blocking them, whether that is investment...

AirPods 5 open-ear noise cancellation put to the test by blind users, plus Google's new Googlebook Android laptops, the pricing, and the accessibility answers Google still has not given.

Steven Scott bought the AirPods 5 expecting to be unimpressed and came away sold. The headline is the noise cancellation: Apple claims a 50 percent improvement over AirPods 4, and in a room with a laptop and NVDA speaking, the background noise all but vanished. Steven and Shaun Preece work through the open-ear fit that sits in the ear rather than sealing it, the comfort over long listening sessions, and why the...

Finding assistive technology that already exists is still the hardest part of using it. Hector Minto, formerly of Microsoft, explains Kerbcut, his new AI discovery platform for assistive tech products, services and lived experience.

Hector's case is blunt. Around 2.5 billion people need assistive technology today, a figure heading for 3.5 billion by 2050, and a billion still cannot reach solutions that already exist. Products are spread across thousands of manufacturers, services are split between health, education and community organisations, and the accessibility features built into everyday devices go undiscovered. Kerbcut lets you describe a need in your own words...

Google is keeping the Chromebook and adding a pricier Googlebook line running Aluminium OS, built on Android 17 with Gemini baked in at system level. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece work out what that means for screen reader users, and Marc Aflalo finds out how Schlage's ultra wideband locks open the door before you reach for a key.

The Chromebook is not going away. Google is holding that brand at the affordable end, aimed squarely at schools, while the new Googlebooks start around $999 and chase the same buyer who might otherwise pick up a MacBook Air. The bigger...

Discover how Lumin, a voice‑first email app for iPhone, is transforming email management for the blind and low‑vision community. Learn how AI and audio‑only design bring speed, precision, and independence to your inbox.

This episode is supported by Pneuma Solutions. Creators of accessible tools like Remote Incident Manager and Scribe. Find out more at https://pneumasolutions.com/

Shaun Preece sits down with Sriram Ganesh, founder of Lumin, to explore the journey from video game programming to creating a fully voice‑controlled email client.

This episode dives into:
⁃ The development of Lumin a...

NASA is hosting its first webinar built for blind and low vision audiences, and Christine Malec is on the panel. She joins Steven Scott and Shaun Preece to explain what the October 2 session covers, how sonification changed the way she experiences space, and why signing up matters even if astronomy has never felt like your thing.

The two hour Zoom event focuses on the RS-25 engine that powers the Artemis missions. It includes an audio described video of an engine test, which is new territory for NASA, a Q&A with Artemis engineers, two of whom are...

Blind listeners share how they really use Meta Ray-Ban glasses, OOrion, smart locks and braille. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece also take a hard look at Siri AI in iOS 27 and ask whether the iPhone 18 is worth buying.

Gavin in Edinburgh talks about using smart glasses carefully after the privacy stories, and points out how often mainstream coverage mentions blind users. Ross, who is new to sight loss, explains how he uses OOrion on his Meta glasses to warn him about lampposts, parked cars and doorways. Shaun gives an update on OOrion and the connection problems with...

Microsoft has set 7 October for a Windows and Surface event built around local AI, and the rumoured Surface Laptop Ultra with NVIDIA RTX Spark silicon could finally give Windows a proper answer to the MacBook Pro. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece work through what that means for price, build quality and blind users, then turn to the home network tools that keep solving real problems.

The Surface conversation covers more than specs. Shaun makes the case for the Surface Pro form factor, Steven pushes back on using one on a train, and both land on the same...

Should blind and low vision users install iOS 27 right away? Steven Scott and Shaun Preece explain why VoiceOver users might wait a month. Then they open the inbox for listener emails on Meta glasses problems, the best smart glasses for reading, Luna AI, Siri dictation and the high cost of Braille displays.

Steven's yearly advice to hold off on iOS 27 got some pushback online, and the hosts explain the reasoning. If VoiceOver breaks, a blind user loses their screen. They cover reports of tinny speech, why the nerds should test first, and hidden code that could let...

Is the AI industry sounding a real alarm, or is it about money? Tech journalist Will Guyatt joins Steven Scott and Shaun Preece to make sense of the AI pause warnings. Then it's a first look at Siri AI in the iOS 27 beta and a candid chat about Windows, the Mac and screen readers.

Will lays out three theories behind a chaotic news week. AI makers could be alarmed by how quickly their models are moving. Donald Trump wants no brakes in a race with China. Or AI companies short on funding may be delaying their IPOs...

Apple's Surprise and Shine event brought the foldable iPhone Duo, AirPods 5 and a quiet RAM boost for Apple Watch Ultra 4. Steven Scott and Marc Aflalo of YourTechReport pick out what matters, what could have been a press release, and whether the Duo can replace an iPad for someone who travels a lot.

Steven found most of the keynote boring. Marc liked more of it, starting with Live Rewind, which lets your Apple Watch catch the last 15 seconds of a conversation you missed. That raises questions about privacy, where the data lives, and why features like the expressive...

Honda Scenic Audio set out to describe the view from a car window for blind and visually impaired passengers, using computer vision and generative AI. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece revisit their 2024 conversation about the app, built with Perkins School for the Blind, and ask whether poetic AI scenery description is something blind people actually want.

This episode is supported by Pneuma Solutions. Creators of accessible tools like Remote Incident Manager and Scribe. Find out more at https://pneumasolutions.com/

Honda announced Scenic Audio in April 2024 as a beta. You hold your phone to the...

Audio description was built for blind and partially sighted viewers. RNIB brought broadcasters to London to ask whether sighted audiences want it too, and what that would change for the rest of us. Steven Scott reports back from the Audio Is King event, before the show turns to Clipman, an Audacity 4 warning, and the Anthropic resignation that put AI extinction talk on every front page.

RNIB surveyed more than 1,200 sighted people and found roughly 42 percent already knew what audio description is. Steven and Shaun compare that with audiobooks, which stayed a small shelf of expensive CD boxsets...