Ebu Access Cast 20

EBU Access Cast

Wellcome to the 20th episode of Ebu Access Cast. We have come to the 20th episode so far, and we would like to thank you for listening to us. We are preparing some nice goodies for you for the future episodes, but new surprise will be coming to you soon. In the mean time, let's check what's going on in this dark times which hovers around the world.

As the Corona pandemics is taking over the Europe and rest of the world, lots of jobs are transfered to teleworking. We made a research to see how it affects the tech giants and assistive tech industry in general and how the whole situation affects the state of accessibility in different environments.

Tech giants will keep paying hourly staff even if they are asked to stay home due to coronavirus

Mr Shadi Abou-Zahra tweeted that schools and universities should not forget to include accessibility in their online courses. Alejandro Moledo also reminds us that all tv providers which broadcast the emergency information must be accessible to all - so with subtitles, sign language, spoken subtitles and audio description.

Pawel from our team discovered Discord, free voice and chat client which has a bunch of nice features, great audio sound and the possibility of having up to 50 users connected for free on the server during the Corona pandemics instead of 10 users. It is available for all major platforms and it offeres a nice accessibility. As the client is equipped with very good audio and video features, some people started to use it for online learning courses.

Due to the prevention of the Corona pandemics many people are transfered to work from their offices to their homes. Since lots of population is not in the offices any more, we still have to maintain our comunication, and it is important that the comunication between each other is safe and encripted. Therefore, we are introducing to you the Signal private messenger, available and accessible for iOS and Android users. Signal offers very nice audio quality of voice calls and audio messages, and what's the most important it offers true end to end encription. For the last few weeks it is recommended messaging client for comunication between European institutions as well.

To know more about the Signal check out its Wikipedia page.

Beginning of March brought up some unexpected news for many users of Android Accessibility Suite, where a thousands of public beta testers from all over the world over night were no longer available to get the newest beta versions. Google never came up with the official explanation what happened and why they pulled out so many beta testers at once. Mario and Pawel speculated that this could be because the newest beta version was not supposed to be public version, and it was supposed to be distributed only to the internal testing team. However, even if such huge mistake could be the truth, we would still like to receive the official announcement from Google accessibility team, so as soon as we get any information about it, we will forward it to you. Until that time, we really find this kind of behaviour from such a huge tech giant absolutely untolerable and disgraceful towards the whole visualy impaired Android community.

Voice Dream Scanner appeared also for Android in the last few weeks, so Pawel who tested the application explained what's different between Android and iOS version, as well as how the application works on Android platform.

YouTube gains channel filter in subscriptions, better playback control

Accessibility

Codejumper is officialy on sale for 999 Dollars.

Twitter Accessibility channel Tweeted a message about alt texts and their correct implementation for Android and iOS users.

If you are the user of new Microsoft Edge, you will find that DevTools accessibility in Microsoft Edge is Improving from each new release.

This is all we got for you for this month. We wish to all of you to stay healthy, and that you watch over each other untill the next month. As always, we are available for all comunication over our email and Twitter channel.