The Tech Doctor Blog and Podcast

Robert and Allison spend this podcast exploring the major announcements made by Apple at its March 9th, 2015 “Spring Forward” event. The major announcements included a reduction in price of Apple TV and a new HBO Now package. There was a new MacBook with a 12 inch retina display new keyboard and trackpad. It weighs two pounds and has excellent battery life. The MacBook has only one USB...

Robert and Allison spend this podcast talking with Shelly Brisbin. Shelly is the author of iOS Access for All: Your Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch (iOS 8 Edition. When Shelly uses the words access for all and comprehensive guide she means them. Chapters 3 and 4 cover access for people who are dealing with blindness and low vision. Chapter 5 deals with Siri an...

In this Tech Doctor episode, Allison and Robert spend time discussing Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack 3 Mac application with Grant Farr the Rogue Amoeba developer responsible for the Audio Hijack user interface including the excellent VoiceOver support. Audio Hijack 3 is a major redesign of this extremely popular audio capturing application. At first glance, one would suspect that the highly vis...

Robert And Allison spend this hour podcasting with David Woodbridge, Senior Adaptive Technology Specialist at Vision Australia. Most of us know David from his excellent Podcast where he provides concise but thorough demonstrations of how to use our Apple products with VoiceOver. In this podcast, however, we learn that accessible Apple devices have become an integral part of David’s family li...

In this Tech Doctor episode, Allison and Robert have the good fortune of spending the hour with John Panarese the owner of an excellent resource called Mac For The Blind. This website is filled with up-to-date information to assist blind people in learning to get the most from their Apple devices. In addition to the website, John offers training and consultation to individuals and agencies who see...

In this podcast, Robert and Allison explore some interesting questions regarding recent software and hardware releases from Apple. Both iOS 8.0 and Yosemite OS 10.10 required software updates to fix numerous bugs. While buggy software is frustrating, is Apple slipping in this area? It seems that every major operating system developer has to release bug fixes after a major dot zero release. Apple,...

In this Tech Doctor podcast, Allison and Robert briefly discuss the new Apple hardware and software that was announced at two major Apple events in the fall of 2014. They quickly move to the heart of the podcast, however, which is a discussion of Allison’s brand new iPhone 6 Plus. When you listen to the podcast, you just might hear some excitement.

In this podcast, Robert and Allison Speak with Akash Khanolkar. Akash is a junior Information Systems major at Carnegie Mellon University. He is developing an iPhone app called CrowdViz which will allow people who are blind to connect with sighted volunteers for assistance. The app connects people using Apple’s streaming video service called FaceTime. Akash describes his vision of how the se...

In this Tech Doctor episode, Allison and Robert speak with Chelsea Cook. Chelsea is a senior Physics major with minors in Astronomy and Mathematics at Virginia Tech University. Since elementary school, Chelsea has dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Chelsea’s passion for space exploration and her love of astronomy have in no way been dampened by her blindness. In the podcast, Chelsea explains...

In this Tech Doctor podcast, Allison and Robert discuss the September 9th Apple event where the new iPhone, Apple Pay and Apple Watch were presented for the first time. Just in case you can’t tell from listening, Robert and Allison are very excited about these new products.

In this podcast, Allison and Robert speak with Rene Ritchie; writer, podcaster and creative force behind the very successful iMore website. In June of 2014, Rene wrote an article entitled Apple and Accessibility: Pushing back against unacceptable realities . In the podcast, we learn how Rene became interested in accessibility. He explains how Apple’s focus on accessibility is resulting in be...

How many times have you heard the following statement? “The Mac is great for working with email, web browsing and basic word processing. If, however, you want to get real work done, you will have to use Microsoft Office and a Windows Screen Reader.” In his new book, Mastering the Macintosh with VoiceOver, Tim Sniffen teaches VoiceOver users how to work with Apple’s Pages and Numb...

In this Tech Doctor episode, Allison and Robert speak with Janet Ingber about her new book. The book is called “Learning the Mac with VoiceOver: A Step-byStep Guide.” The book is available in hardcopy Braille as well as several electronic formats from the National Braille Press Robert and Allison share the opinion that this is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn to use the...

In this podcast, Allison and Robert have the pleasure of talking with VaShaun Jones the creator of a company called Fedora Outlier. This company is all about teaching you to get the most from your Apple devices. VaShaun was one of the people who helped Apple make the iPhone accessible in 2009. He realized that accessible Apple technology had the potential to change the lives of blind people. For t...

In this podcast, Robert apologizes for failing to slow down the speech synthesizer during the LaunchBar demonstration. Robert And Allison share their opinion that using the iOS auto-update feature is worth the risk of having an app become less accessible after an update. Finally, Robert describes how he recovered from a situation where his iOS backups became corrupted and he needed to manually set...

Allison begins this Tech Doctor episode by responding to some questions that we received via email. Feel free to Email Us your comments and questions as well. Robert then describes two excellent books that have just been published. The first book, written by Shelly Brisbin, is called iOS Access For All. Shelly has done an excellent job covering all that apple has to offer with regard to iOS access...

In this very special podcast, Allison and Robert summarize and react to the things that Apple announced during its 2014 World Wide Developers Conference keynote presentation. This was an extremely exciting keynote filled with surprises. We can’t wait to start enjoying the new software.

Robert and Allison have the pleasure of spending this Tech Doctor episode with Keith Watson. Keith is a creative and talented Apple power user who has taught himself to write sophisticated macros using Apple’s built-in scripting language called Apple Script. Recently, Keith began integrating his apple script macros into an extremely feature-rich Mac utility called Keyboard Maestro. With the...

Allison begins this episode by telling us about the first few days of being back home with her new guide dog. Robert next describes his new podcasting equipment. He explains his reasoning for getting a Mackie ProFX8 mixer. Robert then discusses his decision to switch from a condenser to a dynamic Heil PR 40 broadcast microphone. (If you listen carefully, you will hear the old condenser microphone...

In this podcast, Allison and Robert have the pleasure of speaking with Jean Parker. While in elementary school at the Perkins school for the blind, Jean was introduced to a number of international students and faculty. She realized that she wanted to travel the world and visit the places that she was learning about. As a radio journalist, educator, activist, researcher and Ph. D. candidate, Jean h...

Allison begins this episode by introducing her very special new friend to the Tech Doctor podcast. We spend the remainder of the show reviewing an excellent Applevis blog post Comparing iOS devices with specialized notetakers built by companies who create products specifically for people who are blind. We are excited about this most interesting and worthwhile topic and appreciate the perspective t...

In this Tech Doctor podcast, Allison and Robert begin with a discussion of their experience at the “29th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference” Allison and Robert do not discuss new products but encourage everyone to listen to the vendor interviews done by Serotek and Blind Bargains . While in San Diego, Robert and Allison had the pleasure of spending...

When thinking of all that is most pleasurable in life, the Tech Doctors believe that the making of music is very near the top of the list. Everyone is familiar with a handful of famous blind musicians, but how do the rest of us learn to play an instrument? In this podcast, we talk with Bill Brown who teaches people to play music by ear. Bill’s online music lessons work equally well for both...

In this Tech Doctor podcast, Allison and Robert begin by discussing a blog post where the author has decided to switch from the Mac back to Windows because of concerns about Mac accessibility. They then share their opinions about an article that explains how Google has failed developers by not including all of the standard accessibility hooks in the Android operating system. Next, Robert describes...

In this Tech Doctor episode, Robert and Allison have the pleasure of speaking with Rosemary Mahoney who just published her sixth book. Rosemary is a sighted woman who became interested in really understanding what it is really like to be blind. In the book, Rosemary candidly describes her journey of going from a person who was fearful of blind people to someone who now has significant insight in t...