Kia ora koutou Mosen At Largers from a wintery Wellington New Zealand.
Thank you so much for all your positive comments about recent episodes, particularly the Samsung TU8500 review and our post-WWDC recap. The latter was recorded the moment the keynote concluded and I have unearthed a lot more information since then.
If you are interested in all things Apple, I encourage you to take a listen to our analysis before the next episode. I’ll be bringing you a lot more information this weekend, some accessibility-related and some not. I have also been posting a steady string of articles on the Mosen At Large Twitter account. Do feel free to follow and check out the news and views I’m sharing there.
Now that you’ve had a chance to absorb all the WWDC news, what do you think? Are you overwhelmed with excitement? Underwhelmed with…underwhelmedness? What in particular, if anything, are you looking forward to. I love hearing your views so do feel free to chime in, especially if you’ve not been in touch with the show before. New contributors, as well as our regulars, are always a joy.
Social media sure is a mixed blessing isn’t it? It can connect us and unite us during tough times like the global pandemic. It can give us ready access to information. It can help us engage with people we admire and respect. It can also be full of trolls, misinformation, character assassination and inaccessible images. He can’t change everything that’s wrong with social media, but Cole Gleason has come up with a way to make it easier to get image descriptions from tweets when the author doesn’t add text descriptions themselves. It’s pretty cool, and he joins me to explain how it works.
Now, as much as I enjoy talking tech, and most of our listeners enjoy talking tech, I do make an effort not to have this show pigeonholed as being just a tech show, right? Right. This weekend I’d like to talk about the impact on facial vision and echo location of using a face mask during this COVID-19 pandemic, and I’m keen to hear about your use of these techniques in general terms. I’m not sure I use facial vision effectively, but certainly when my hearing was better than it is now, and to a lesser extent even now, I use echo location, even though teachers at the school for the blind actively discouraged it, a move which to me is bordering on criminal. If you have spent time perfecting the craft of echo location or facial vision, what does it help you do? I’ve seen people riding bikes at quite a speed just with the aid of echo location. Do you ever go outside without a cane because your echo location makes one unnecessary?
There is so much more. Remember, the podcast version of Mosen At Large is abridged. To hear the full version, tune into when I record it live, on Mushroom FM at 2 PM Eastern, 7 PM UK on Saturday, that’s Sunday at 6 AM in New Zealand.
To contribute, send an email with an audio attachment or just written down to jonathan at MushroomFM.com, or call the listener line, +18646066736, that’s 1-864-60Mosen.
See you soon for Mosen At Large.