2012-10-31-SAMNET
Seminars@Hadley
Surfing the Web with SAMNet
Presented by
Ricky Enger, Serotek
Moderated by
Douglas Walker
October 31, 2012
Douglas Walker
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My mane is Douglas Walker and I am an instructor of assisted technology here at the Hadley School for the Blind. I will be your moderator for today’s seminar. Today’s seminar topic is surfing the web with SAMNET. Your presenter today is Ricky Enger. Ricky is a member of the executive team for the Serotek Corporation. She has a passion for educating people about mainstream and assisted technologies and can be found discussing technology for blind and visually impaired individuals on the SeroTalk podcast each week. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the SeroTalk podcast, they’re pretty amazing and just have wealth of information. You can get to the serotek podcast by going to I will go ahead in a bit and post that in our text chat area so you’ll have that for your records there.
Ricky tells us that in her spare time she enjoys reading, cooking and spending time with her family. I really am thrilled to have Ricky with us today and can’t wait to hear about some of the really cool features of SAMNET or assistant access mobile network. Without further delay, let me welcome today’s presenter, Ricky Enger. Ricky, I’ll hand the microphone over to you.
Ricky Enger
Thank you, Douglas and thank you to everyone who has joined today. I’m very pleased to be here. Today is certainly the Halloween addition. So for those of you listening to the archive you didn’t get subjected to my technical difficulties. Hopefully those are resolved now and this will all go smoothly. If not I hope that you’ll be a little bit patient with me if anything goes horribly, horribly wrong. With that let’s get right into talking about SAMNET or the system access mobile network. I am going to be doing some demonstration of the software today but before I get into exploring the program itself I want to do a little bit of philosophy and sort of history behind Serotek itself and SAMNET which is how I will refer to this program from here on out.
Serotek, we just celebrated our tenth anniversary fairly recently actually, back in February. We’ve been around for a good long while. Initially the company started with a product called “Freedom Box.” Now the aim behind Freedom Box was to allow blind people who were very new to the computer and perhaps had some reservations about technology in general to still be able to participate on the internet and get involved in everything that the digital age had to offer. We knew that blind people wanted to shop. They wanted to voice chat with friends. They wanted to send emails and things like that. But the idea of learning a screen reader, which can sometimes take up to 20 hours train, that was a little daunting to some people but it didn’t mean that they needed to be left out. The idea behind Freedom Box was that you had a machine that you talked to and when you talked to the machine it would be able to perform certain tasks for you.
SAMNET has grown from that initial Freedom Box device which was essentially a box that was sent to you. Now we have this as software that anyone can use and a lot has changed since those early days. But we’ve kept one thing pretty constant and that is what is the mission behind what we’re trying to do. It is to introduce people to computers who may be a little shy at first and easily overwhelmed but we don’t want to keep them there. We don’t want to say “Here are your tasks that you can perform and once you’ve reached the end of these tasks the software is not going to grow with you. We knew that was not the right approach. We wanted to keep something that was simple to use but was also powerful enough to grow with the user and be able to do a lot of the things that a user wants to do as they become more comfortable with using a computer. That’s the idea behind SAMNET.
Now before I start to look at how this works I do want to say one thing. SAMNET is not a screen reader. Serotek does have a system access screen reader that you can use but SAMNET itself is a service. It is a self voicing service that you can use alongside your primary screen reader even if that’s not system access. So if you’re using JAWS or Window Eyes or NVDA or Super Nova, Zoom Text even. If you’re a low vision user you’re still going to be able to access the services of SAMNET and at the same time be able to perform the things that you usually do with your primary screen reader as well. Let’s take a look at SAMNET and what you just heard was the very top of the SAMNET homepage and this is where we will place things that are going on within our community currently whether it be a podcast that Serotek has released or a radio station that we want to feature or a chat that’s taking place, perhaps about the iPhone or the Android operating system. This is an area where we will feature certain content because beyond just being about software, SAMNET is all about community.
We want to bring people together. We want people to be able to learn from what’s already out there and from each other. That’s a theme that you’re going to hear a lot from today’s presentation as I talk about how SAMNET works. It’s all about community. When you’re talking about community the idea is that you are communicating with people who share your interests. One way you might want to do that is through email to your friends and family. That’s going to be the first option on this SAMNEThome screen which is essentially a set of links that you can move through with the tab key or your arrow key. So even if you’re not very comfortable with the keyboard you’re still going to be able to use the service. I have six new messages. I can press enter on that if I wanted to but I’m going to tab once again and here is my email.
Now with the SAMNET service you receive a SAMNET email address. It will be your username @samobile.net but you can also add third party accounts with this. Let’s say you wanted to check Gmail or perhaps you have an email account from Comcast and you don’t like using Outlook. You prefer a SAMNET client. You can add that to this and have your email automatically checked through SAMNET. Let’s take a look at what this interface is like. I’ll press enter here. I can read new mail or I can tab once. When I land on any of these options I can press the enter key to open them and I just want to briefly show a message because I can do something pretty cool here. I can send a text message and this works in the traditional way where you have a to field where you enter the person you’d like to correspond with or you can select them from an address book. Or I can send a voice message. This is extremely handy whether you are not very well versed in the keyboard or whether you simply are just feeling lazy that day and you want to say “I just want to talk to this person. I don’t really want to type a bunch.”
I can add recipients. This is very traditional until you get to the record button. I can record a message quickly and then I would be able to play it back before sending it. Luckily the person that you’re sending this message to does not have to be a SAMNET user. This is just going to attach a file, an mp3 for those of you who are familiar with that file format. If you’re not this is just a standard format that will play on any computer and the recipient of the message is going to receive this as an attachment and they’ll be able to play whatever it is that you’ve said. So there is email. This may be something that a lot of you are already familiar with doing. So let’s move on to something a little more exciting. It’s always going to make sure “Hey, do you really want to cancel that?” and I do.
I’m going to move through some other options on my SAMNET home screen. The great thing about this is that this home screen can be customized to include anything that you want including links to webpages that reside outside SAMNET. Let’s just look at a couple of these. Socializer, we’ll talk about that in a moment. There is voice chat, a user’s forum where we can talk about all things Serotek. You can ask questions about services and you can also get assistance from tech support as well as other users. This is member resources where SAMBET members have built their own blogs or websites and even shared bookmarks. They’ve made those public so you can go in and browse through all of these things. That’s right, remotely control another computer. If you have SAMNET and you know someone else who is a Serotek customer, they can assist your you can assist them remotely or you can train them in how to use a particular program just by connecting to their computer. Both of you will have speech as you do this. It’s like having two keyboards hooked to the same machine. Each of you can perform operations while the other user watchers.
It’s very, very handy both for new users who would like someone to assist them and sort of train them in how the program all works and it’s great for those who have been around for a little while to come in and be able to assist friends and things like that with performing particular tasks. Information, that’s just what it sounds like. You’re going to get all sorts of things under this information category. We’ll explore that in a bit. Entertainment, everybody likes entertainment so I think I’d like to take a look around in this area now. I’ll press enter here. Here is a list of streaming radio stations with all sorts of different genres. Both from the blindness community, such as there will be ACB radio and various other online radio stations produced by and for the blind and you’ll also have other internet radio stations that are mainstream for lack of a better word. So you can look for some great classical music or some hard rock out of LA or whatever it is that you’re into. Accessible games, that’s all sorts of fun.
Each of these are categories that can then be explored simply by pressing the enter key and then tabbing through the available link. I want to take a look at described video programming which is exactly what it sounds like. When you hear that a movie has come out and someone says “It’s a great movie. It has a really good soundtrack and the visual effects are amazing. There’s not a whole lot of dialogue but the movie is great.” In some cases that might mean you choose not to watch it altogether but with SAMNET and through this service you’ll be able to choose from over 2500 described videos both for TV and movies and basically watch what you want. Let’s see what this is like, shall we? Let’s look at movies. As you can see I have a whole list of genres to choose from but I’m going to look around and choose new additions in the past 30 days. This is a great way to see what is new. Sleepy Hallow, very appropriate for Halloween. Prometheus, this has just come out a couple of weeks ago. I’m kind of interested in what this is like. So let’s take a quick listen.
I’m going to get some information about the cast and the rating of the program and so on. Now I could have searched for a trailer on Google Video or I can just play the movie. Let’s do that. That’s just a quick little intro and now here comes the movie. And there you have it. We’re going to choose not to watch Prometheus in its entirety today although perhaps it might be a little more exciting than listening to me this whole time. But hey, once I’m done here you can go sign up for a subscription and check out Prometheus yourself.
Now let’s say that you really wanted to watch this movie but you were not able to sit in front of your computer. Perhaps you have a two and a half our train ride until work. If that’s so, goodness I wouldn’t want to be you. But you’re probably looking for entertainment as you head into work. So rather than listening to this streaming to your PC we can transfer this to a portable book player such as the Victor Reader Stream or the Book Sent, the [Plex Talk Pocket] and the Book Port Plus. That way you can hook that up to your machine and we can see the menu item that will allow you to add this to your synch list which will later be transferred to your book player of choice.
The cool thing is this is not just applicable to movies. You can do this for anything including forum posts or news and other things that we’re going to look at in just a bit as far as how you can customize those things and then transfer that whole bit of content to your portable device. Now that we’re done with movies, what I did was press the applications keys on this option and I see several different options including add to sync list. I also have open new window and so on. We’re not going to transfer anything to my book player today. Instead let’s go back and explore some of the options we have with SAMNET. One thing I want to take a look at is the socializer because again, this is all about community and the ability to reach out to people that we want to speak with as well as meeting new folks.
Let’s talk about that the socializer is. Under the socializer I can add Yahoo, MSN Instant Messenger and AOL accounts to this group and then I can sign in in order to be able to chat with anybody who is on those services. You will need to create an account on MSN or Yahoo or AIM when you’re ready to chat. Or you can just chat with SAMNET members by default. You can add usernames of the friends that you know and you’ll be able to send instant messages back and forth with each other. I also have Facebook and Twitter. Facebook especially is one of those sites that is notorious for changing its layout every single week. It can be something of an accessibility nightmare to navigate through Facebook in order to most a message or to read messages from your friends and family. We’ve taken this in the socializer and made this a very simplistic interface that is going to allow you to update your own status or to read the statuses of your friends and family. I can press enter on Facebook here and it will take me a little while for that to open.
So there was a status update from my friend on Facebook, Brian Harten. It shows when it was updated and what Brian had to say. I can continue moving through this list box with my arrow keys and read the latest updates from all of my friends or I can press the tab key. So first this read me my existing status. I posted an audio file about my experiences with the Android Nexus tablet. That was my last status and now I’m in an edit box where I can type a new status which will then be posted to Facebook for everyone to see. Pretty cool, I didn’t have to navigate through stuff about Farmville and Fishville and Townville and sorts of things that any of you who have been on Facebook understand and probably curse at quite a lot. The same is true for Twitter. While there are great Twitter clients such as The Cube, if you’re just looking to get introduced to Twitter and you want to see what other people are posting and you want to be able to post yourself from a nice, simple interface you can do that from the socializer here.
I’m going to close Facebook. Twitter and Facebook aren’t the only things here. Again, I have some information about what’s going on in theSAMNET community right now. It’s going to show up here in the socializer. There’s the voice chat, the welcome lobby. No one is currently there at the moment but if there were it would show the number of people who are here. If there are other open voice chat rooms those are going to show here as well including the number of people that are currently in the chat room? SPN radio is the SeroTalk podcast network radio where we broadcast our own content 24/7. Here is the SAMNET buzz. There’s the very latest SeroTalk podcast. There are several other podcasts, one of iOS, one on low vision, one on Android. One that is sort of exploring geek culture and one that is recorded live with new guests each month talking about the latest in assisted technology. You’ll be able to check those things out. While you can get all of this information at SeroTalk.com this is an easy way to access it from SAMNET as well.