Double Tap

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...

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 k...

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 en...

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 run...

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 hi...

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 B...

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 inbo...

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 chan...

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...

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...

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 Ganes...

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 f...

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 you...

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 manageme...

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 b...

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 a...

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 part...

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 lo...

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 conv...

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 explai...