Hosts Rachel Ramos and David Woodbridge kick off the fall season by turning the spotlight in-house, welcoming HumanWare’s own Low Vision Product Manager, Roger Steinberg, for his first-ever interview appearance. Roger traces his path from eight years as an inclusion classroom teacher, through assistive technology work for the state of Florida, to product roles at Kurzweil Educational Systems and BAUM USA before landing at HumanWare five years ago. He and the hosts dig into what makes low vision product design distinct — simplicity and ease of use as guiding principles behind devices like the Explore line and Reveal 16/16i — and explore where practical, everyday AI could go next, from identifying a specific item on a store shelf to helping someone navigate a PIN pad or find their platform at a train station. In the Hot Topic segment, Rachel and David debate the role of traditional note takers versus modern braille computers like the BrailleNote Evolve for college and university work, and invite listeners to share their own note-taking setups.

This episode’s Partner Corner heads to Sweden, where Patrick Johansson of PolarPrint discusses his long history with HumanWare, the country’s early role in developing the DAISY format, and PolarPrint’s work distributing Stratus players and running a talking-newspaper service with thousands of subscribers across Sweden. Roger returns for Tips and Tricks with a detailed walkthrough of what’s new in Prodigi software version 1.7, including new annotation tools (pencil, highlighter, and eraser with color and width options) for marking up documents, magnifier, and distance captures; two new speech modes — ”on direct touch screen” and ”on alternative access” — for different touch and switch-access needs; guidance on choosing between Prodigi’s built-in speech and third-party screen readers like JAWS and NVDA; a new built-in calculator; and a refreshed set of quick start guides, user guides, and six new YouTube tutorial videos. The episode closes with a full rundown of upcoming HumanWare appearances at conferences across the US, Wales, Germany, and South Africa through mid-October, including the NFB State Convention in Greensboro, NC, Sight Village North Wales, REHACARE in Düsseldorf, and the ICEVI Conference in Johannesburg.

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