PODCAST · technology
Parallel
by Relay
Why don’t the worlds of mainstream tech and accessibility tech ever seem to collide? Shelly Brisbin, who keeps one foot in each, wants to know. She and her guests from both worlds chew over the news and trends of the day, mixing in an accessibility perspective. Hosted by Shelly Brisbin.
Episodes
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93: The Last Show
Today, we offer an all-star panel of podcasters and tech pundits with a lot to say about the first 15 years of mobile accessibility from Apple. To my delight, the show veered hard into present and future topics. Also, Parallel says farewell.
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92: Dystopian Skynet Future – Sometime Next Year
What are the takeaways from Global Accessibility Awareness Day #GAAD 2024? We highlight accessibility announcements from Apple and BeMyEyes.
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91: I'm VR Curious
Zoe Knox bought a Vision Pro when they first became available, anticipating that Apple's headset would provide accessibility features. How those features might work with Zoe's low vision? That was a big unknown.
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90: I Want to Pinch and Zoom the World
Apple's Vision Pro headset offers a number of accessibility features. But how well do they serve those with disabilities, and what should we expect from future versions of the product? Now we have some answers.
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89: Low Vision Pro
I spoke with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece for their show, Double Tap. They wanted my thoughts on how Apple's Vision Pro might land with users who have low vision. Steven kindly gave me permission to republish that conversation here.
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88: How Hard Could XCode Be?
How a young entrepreneur turned her own technology need into an app designed for other people with low-vision.
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87: A Fish On Your Washing Machine
What's the significance of Apple's iPhone 15 lineup, from an accessibility point of view?
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86: An Immigrant in the Country of the Blind
Andrew Leland's memoir "The Country of the Blind" tells a story about his ongoing journey into vision loss. It's also a kind of history of blindness, and blindness technology, with stops along the way to unpack the literary deployments of vision loss by other writers. He talked with me about the...
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85: AI Will Not Fix Accessibility
Even before ChatGPT brought AI into the mainstream of collective consciousness, companies touted artificial intelligence as a way to make your web site accessible – a magic bullet that meant web devs could skip the accessibility checks normally done by humans. And technologies like computer…
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84: Now that We've Had Some Time to Process...
My colleagues from the Maccessibility Roundtable join me for a conversation about Apple's Vision Pro and accessibility. We still don't know a lot, but be know more than we did an hour after the WWDC keynote.
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83: AI, AI, IO
Taking a look back at this year's Google I/O events, with an eye toward accessibility. Our favorite followers of the Goog are back! We talk AI, Android, Pixel phones and tablets, and how Google does its spectacle.
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82: Entirely Individualistic Low-Vision Girl
This week, Apple previewed accessibility features coming to the Mac and iOS. It's an annual event, which even sat briefly atop TechMeme. Want to know more about what Apple discussed and how these new features fit in with the existing accessibility suite? We've got you!
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81: Tools and Tips for Mobile App Developers
iOS developer Rob Whitaker returns to Parallel for a chat about APIs and tools developers can use to make their mobile apps more accessible.
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80: When Success Means Buying A Smaller Suit
Starting or maintaining a fitness program is a challenge for anyone. If you have accessibility needs, you might experience barriers related to touchscreen devices, coaching that doesn't address a hearing or visual disability, or a need for accommodations related to physical limitations. With its...
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79: Story Book
Ten iOSes ago, I wrote a book called iOS Access for All. Here's how it has evolved over the years.
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78: So Many Thoughts and Feelings
AppleVis, an excellent community of blind and visually-impaired Apple users, surveyed its members to get their thoughts on how well Apple's platforms provide accessibility. We talk over the survey, and add some impressions of our own.
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77: What is CSS Speech?
What if you could design the experience of listening to Web content in the same way you design the experience of seeing it? That's the premise of the CSS Speech Module, a retired W3C proposal that's now being championed by my guest. She knows a thing or two about CSS and the W3C, as a member of…
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76: Some of My Automations are Fragile
We're talking automation - mostly on macOS, with developer Brett Terpstra and fellow automation fan Darcy Burnard.
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75: A Deep Dive into WCAG 2.2. And Beyond.
The W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – WCAG – is the standard against which Web developers test for accessibility. Like most good standards, WCAG is evolving, with a new release anticipated within a few months. We talk about what the 2.2 candidate includes, and what's next for this...
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74: The Swipey on the Stem
Parallel is back from summer break, and glad to be! We gather to review Apple's latest hardware announcements: do we like them, do we want them, are they accessible? Behold, the iPhones 14, Apple Watch Ultra (and otherwise), and AirPods Pro, 2nd gen.
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73: A Week with Apple's Accessibility Preview
We take a look at new accessibility features coming later this year to Apple platforms.
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72: Building Accessibility Products as a Startup
Creating products intended to serve the needs of people with disabilities requires all the hard work of any software project, along with special challenges for small, bootstrapped startups. We'll talk with a cofounder whose company builds mobile apps for people with vision loss and hearing...
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71: Clicking the Box Offends Me
Whether we're motivated by a creative passion, the need for extra income or something else, taking on work outside the 9-to-5 comes naturally to a lot of people I know. So we're talking about what it means to juggle several "jobs."
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70: Helping Astronauts Maintain Mental Health in Space.. And a Lot More
Mily Mumford researches the impact of space travel on the mental health of astronauts, and how mixed reality could eventually be used to help them cope. That's a lot, but they're also a theater creator and filmmaker. We talk through the multitudes, including a conversation about ableism in the…
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69: Jobs and Disability: Beyond the Interview
People with disabilities experience appallingly high rates of unemployment. But convincing an employer to interview disabled candidates is just the beginning. We talk about how people with all kinds of disabilities can get, keep and thrive in jobs.
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68: Can You Describe It?
Audio description gives people who are blind or visually impaired the information they need to fully enjoy TV, movies and even live events. We're focused mainly on TV, and how which streaming service you use and which platform you use it on, has a lot to do with whether you can get described...
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67: A Character on My Own Show
I, your humble host, sit for an interview about my career, my decision nine years ago to finally write about accessibility, and the book I wrote about Apple's iOS. We also talk about some accessibility problems in iOS 15.
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66: Beyond Gaming: Designing VR Experiences for People with Disabilities
Enjoying a theme park attraction or playing on a playground isn't always an option of you're a wheelchair user or if you're a kid in a hospital. But virtual reality offers all sorts of ways to make experiences accessible. I'll talk about that with someone who's done it.
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65: Accessibility is a Spectrum for Gamers, Too
Talking about gaming accessibility for a variety of users. We cover hardware, how gaming studios address accessibility, and what it's like to advocate for and write about it, too.
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64: What Does It Mean to be a Cyborg?
Lawrence Miller identifies as a cyborg. He, like a lot of us, has many identities. We talk about some of them, about art and about how augmenting one's body with technology is both a functional and a performative experience.
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63: The Standards Can't Tell You Where Delight Is
Christin Hemphill works with companies to build inclusive experiences for customers and employees. That's a fancy way of saying that your bank, your onboarding materials and your VR game should all be accessible to you.
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62: UX Design and Cognitive Disability
Rain Michaels wears many hats. She is the UX designer behind Google’s Action Blocks and the new enhanced Select-to-Speak features on Chrome OS. As if that weren’t enough, she is also one of the maintainers for accessibility on the community-developed Drupal content management system, and she is a...
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61: How to Make Extended Reality an Accessible Reality
Excitement about the ways virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality could change our sensory experience of the world is palpable in some communities. But for people with accessibility needs, the very centrality of sensory experience can seem like a barrier. Designers and developers are...
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60: Tech Inclusion and Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous people often face an array of barriers to economic opportunity. Poverty, oppression and simple lack of access to the Internet service are among them. We'll talk about expanding opportunity through education, career preparation and extension of broadband to indigenous communities in...
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59: Apple Event: Takes Served at a Pleasing Temperature
Three Apple news junkies give the company's fall product announcement event a few days to settle. We weigh in on all the new hardware announcements and what we imagine could come next.
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58: #GAAD: Beyond the Hashtag
Ten years ago, a pair of accessibility advocates decided to bring attention to the need for better accessibility in digital realms. They created Global Accessibility Awareness Day, or #GAAD. The annual event now attracts participation from Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Google and...
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57: Web Accessibility Testing on Mobile
Mobile and desktop accessibility are similar, but different, just as mobile browsers can show the same pages desktop ones can, but with different interfaces and quirks. On this episode, we're talking about how to use mobile tools to test the accessibility of Web sites in iOS. My guest is the…
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56: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Tech
Beyond the checkboxes and status reports that tally the numbers of women, people of color, and (on rare occasions) people with disabilities an organization has hired, are the lived experiences of individuals who seek to thrive in a variety of STEM careers. We discuss these topics and lots more…
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55: I Think I'm Part of a MISSION
NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has a bird's-eye view of exploding stars, black holes and other distant astronomical phenomenon. Part of interpreting the massive amounts of data the telescope collects is creating data visualizations. But how can someone who is blind or visually impaired share in...
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54: Indoor Navigation: We're Working on the Sighted Experience
Tech-assisted navigation means more than using your phone or other GPS-equipped device to find your way outside. Improving indoor navigation has long been a project for people with blindness and low vision, but its importance is growing for venues and tech companies, too.
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53: Nothing is Ruined in Android 12
What's new in Android 12, and in accessibility for Google platforms? I'm visiting with my favorite Google-focused writers for a one-month-past-I/O update from Google world.
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52: The Simone Biles of Text Recognition
Apple laid a bevy of updates on the waiting throng during its 2021 WWDC Keynote event. From iOS to macOS, privacy to Siri, the announcements touched most aspects of the company's operating systems. How much can we talk about in an hour? Let's find out!
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51: Layers of Apple's Accessibility Onion
We take a look at several preview announcements Apple made in late May. Unusually for the company, and for accessibility updates, the focus was on features we'll see later in the year. They include: assistive touch for Apple Watch, eye tracking on iPadOS, vastly improved hearing aid support,...
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50: A Use for My 13th AirTag
Apple AirTags have been in the wild for a few weeks now, and my guests have them. We talk about how and whether the little object-finders are useful, what using them is like, and how they work for blind users.
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49: Voices in the Cloud
In its second-larges acquisition ever, Microsoft is buying Nuance Communications. Variously identified as a cloud AI company and a purveyor of speech-to-text tools like Dragon, Nuance is a leader in voices for screen readers. So. What does it all mean?
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48: The Trouble with Accessibility Overlays
Traditionally, making web sites accessible to all began with coding pages to follow established standards from the W3C. Developers can also go further to support screen reader users, people with low vision, cognitive disabilities, ADHD and more. Now, AI has been applied to this task in the form…
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47: It All Comes Down to Cats
A platform that first entered many people's consciousness as the social network for teens and younger has become a place many creators and viewers find joy, and respite from some of the more toxic aspects of social media. We're talking TikTok.
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46: Welcome to the Clubhouse
Clubhouse is the buzzy, audio-only social network with lots of venture funding and problematic privacy policies. Some call it "talk radio," – not a compliment – some say it could replace podcasts, and some are just trying to have an accessible experience. This episode was recorded inside…
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45: Like a Friend Sitting on My Shoulder
Seeing AI, an app for iOS that provides AI-driven information to users with blindness and visual impairments, debuted to rapturous reviews in 2017. Born during a hacking competition at Microsoft, Seeing AI has been features on the main stage at Build, and is now maintained by a dedicated team...
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44: CES: In These Virtual Times
What's it like to cover the biggest tech trade show of the year when it's virtual? We talk with Daily Tech News Show's Tom Merritt about how he did it, what he saw, and what he hopes for the next time CES rolls around. How big were the TVs, how many phones folded and was the accessibility buzz…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Why don’t the worlds of mainstream tech and accessibility tech ever seem to collide? Shelly Brisbin, who keeps one foot in each, wants to know. She and her guests from both worlds chew over the news and trends of the day, mixing in an accessibility perspective. Hosted by Shelly Brisbin.
HOSTED BY
Relay
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Parallel have?
Parallel currently has 94 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Parallel about?
Why don’t the worlds of mainstream tech and accessibility tech ever seem to collide? Shelly Brisbin, who keeps one foot in each, wants to know. She and her guests from both worlds chew over the news and trends of the day, mixing in an accessibility perspective. Hosted by Shelly Brisbin.
How often does Parallel release new episodes?
Parallel has 94 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Parallel?
You can listen to Parallel on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Parallel?
Parallel is created and hosted by Relay.
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