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We've just started a new YouTube page to feature some of the assistive technologies available for the low vision and blind community. Please click here and subscribe to catch our latest videos. If you have any suggestions for a video you'd like to see, send us an email or leave a comment below! Source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXgWMMYWRHtckyWRXlYnd8w

In this episode: -News: Healing cornea disease with pig-skin collagen protein. -News: Latest update on Foundation Fighting Blindness quarterly meeting. -Topic of the week: A quick fix for Amazon Alexa's voice quality issue. Including a full review of Apple's voice assistant, Siri. -Mail and comments: Preparing for the next Foundation Fighting Blindness webinar; call for volunteer bloggers Checkout the episode on our Podcast page or click here. Don't forget to subscribe! Source: https://www.blindsanity.com/podcast-1/episode/28429b9d/s02e03-collagen-protein-against-blindness-and-siri-voice-assistant

Our latest podcast episode today talks about a breakthrough in a particular cornea disease. It uses pig skin collagen protein to replace cornea with some dramatic results... including blind individuals regaining 20-20 vision. See source below or click here. You can comment below. Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2333290-cornea-made-from-pig-collagen-gives-people-who-were-blind-20-20-vision/

Real time assistance usually involves real person or agent volunteering or paid to help you in your everyday tasks. You contact someone who will use your phone camera and describe what they see for you. There are two apps currently available. One is free the other has a monthly fee. - Be My Eyes: volunteer based and super efficient . We have a full review of the app in one episode of our podcast. The app evolved dramatically over the past few years. It used to be based on regular volunteering sighted people only. The app now adds agents from multiple organizations who will help you read documents and fill forms. For example if you want to register to vote, there are agents specifivally trained to help you fill the form. Free. - Aira: Free to monthly fee, it works as Be my Eyes but relies on agents instead of volunteers which explai why it is not free. Both are very good apps to use. My personal preference is Be My Eyes just because I used it so many times in the past. and nothing beats free. I have not tried the professional agent part of the app yet. I will update when I do. Do you have your own preference ? If so, share your thoughts below.

New beta came out today and it isn't too full of surprises. -Magnifier is still overheating the phone when in use. Descriptions are more accurate in general but it still needs work. Door recognition is becoming pretty good. -Battery percentage is finally visible on the status bar on the top of your screen at any time. -Screen capture has been upgraded, When you take one, tap on the lower left corner of the phone to decide what to do with it. It could be pretty useful if like me you take a lot of screen captures to enlarge. You can now look at a capture without it to be stored in your photo library. Will add more as I discover new features ... If you find new ones on your own, please share below.

In this week episode : -News: effect of coffee on your eyesight -News: Basic braille on TikTok -Topic of the week: Amazon Alexa -Mail and wwbsite comments. Check it out on our podcast page or download on your favorite podcast app. Source: https://www.blindsanity.com/podcast-1/episode/27542541/s02e02-coffee-alexa-together-at-last

UPDATE: Quip answered our Tweet about the price change. Check out our Twitter feed for ongoing conversation. An additional 2 bucks to the original 5, Quip was actually a pretty neat service for low vision and blind individuals. It offers to ship a new brush head with a battery every three months to keep dental hygiene simple and economical. Yes ... eight dollars isn't much each year but if you just purchase the starter kit at about 30 dollars... the news sucks. Not sure it's worth it at this point .

We are now on TikTok @BlindSanity.com and we will publish a few short descriptive video online about Braille. All you need is a portable Braille slate and its usual accessories, the stylus and the eraser. First series yesterday was dedicated to the description of the equipment. Today, we will focus on the Braille paper and its installation in the braille slate. Then we will see how to remove your work for inspection and hoe to reposition your braille work back on the braille slate. Each video is extremely descriptive for low vision and blind viewers. They are all 1 minute long only. Visit our TikTok page and comment below if you have suggestions.

There is really no need for anyone to physically go to the bank these days. Mobile banking is here to stay and offers the same features compared to any brick and mortar location... including 2 days advance deposit on scheduled direct deposits, check deposit using your phone camera app and much more and all protected under FDIC rules. Most of these banks don't have fees. The app sometime needs some work on the accessibility side... but a simple inversion of your screen can make the app totally useable for people with low vision. For example Ally, Capital One are among the most accessible if you invert your screen when using their apps. On the other side SoFi needs some serious work. Another advantage of these banks is that they offer terrific saving rates compared to traditional banks. let's look at those rates as of today august 3rd 2022. Ally - 1.4 percent APY Discover - 1.5 percent Betterment - 1.6 percent Capital One - 1.4 percent. Tmobile money - 4 percent on first 3000 dollars then 1.5 percent for anything above. I rarely use cash but those banks allow for withdrawal on any ATMs (check with age bank first). Even if the ATM you are using isn't on the bank's own network, your ATM fee will be reimbursed to you automatically. Some ATMs even allow for cash deposit ! Check out with the bank or wander around their apps. Ally for example has a map giving you the closest ATM around based on your current location... including information if the ATM allows for cash or check deposit. Don't waste your money on fees and don't waste your time with Bank of America or Chase offering saving rates of 0.02 percent... For some of us, even an additional 10 or 20 bucks a months can save us some sleep at night. . Plus... no need to walk or use public transportations to get to the bank. Are you using one of these online banks with terrific saving rates ? comment below and share with us.

There are 23 volumes of the Joe Pickett short novel series. I started with volume 23 not really knowing what I was doing. A few things in that latest volume made me want to read the volume 22. That's all it took to get hooked. Easy listening, Great narrator. And relatively short in length at eight to eleven hours long each. So I did what I should have done from the beginning... and started with volume 1. It was a bit slow but it received some awards. Volume 2 got better. Then 'Winterkill', volume 3 of the series got pretty damn close to enter my top 5 favorite Audiobooks of all time list. Now I am on volume 4 'Trophy Kill' this week Audiobook of the Week. A little slower than the previous volume, definitely more gruesome and interestingly enough a bit less predicable than the previous three volumes. For better or for worse I think. There is a quality in Joe Pickett book series that makes listening or reading each volume a guilty pleasure. It isn't high literature and your eyes will roll more than once. It's safe and traditional story telling. if you focus enough, you will probably guess what happens next but what makes the series so great is that each book was not only published once a year but it also follows the Pickett family as it grows older. 4 and 6 year old kids in volume 1 from the Pickett family get a year older in each following volume for example, while the struggle of Joe and his wife MaryBeth to keep it all together becomes more and more difficult. The main character backstory is extremely simple and one dimensional if you look at each volume... but at the volumes pile on, each character slowly becomes more complex. I will not spoil this volume ... especially since the storyline is already fairly predicable at time but lets just say that Joe Pickett meets the X-Files makes for a great listening experience. As I suggested earlier, you should start the series at volume 1 to see each character grow and becomes more complex. but in truth, each volume is really self sufficient meaning you won't need the previous volume to get 99 percent of what each volume has to offer. You will miss on the 1 percent that makes this book series an addictive pleasure to read or listen. Give it a try. You will love it. The real question is price however. If you have to pay for each volume of the series, the whole series will cost you a small fortune and I mentioned earlier it takes a few volumes to realize how great an investment the whole series could be. To be very honest, if I had to pay 20 bucks for the first volume , I am not sure I would have kept going with volume 2. Luckily I didn't have to pay. If you can have access to them for free this is a no brainer. Jump on the book series and start with volume 1. Book details: 'Trophy Kill' Volume 4 of the Joe Pickett novel series Author: C J Box Narrator: David Hartley-Martgolin Length: 10 hours 38 minutes Mystery - Suspens. Contains strong language, gruesome description of death and some violence. Probably not for young listeners. (This version is a commercial audiobook production)

Depending of a few well defined diseases and sometime your genetic makeup, you may be lucky enough to have a therapy working to restore your eyesight. For others, it's not necessarily a possibility. The strategy your doctor will offer may be about preserving what you have left and/or slowing down the progression of your disease. The web is full of miracle products and success stories. Most of them are bogus of course... (a trip to a foreign country to try something unavailable in your own country anyone ?). Some claims are a bit more substantial and based on sciences and published papers. Most of them talk about dietary supplements such as a particular vitamin or other supplements like Omega 3. After multiple doctor visits, I have developed quite the pill regimen. Granted, some of my supplements requires multiple pills to reach the level required by the doctor, I am currently at eight daily pills. Do they work ? Do they play placebo ? The truth is that I have better eyes days than others and it seems that bad days are coming when I forgot my pills. And then there is the odd side effects on medications or lifestyle choices. For example, my eyesight seems to improve dramatically after a heavy handed workout. I also appears to be much more light sensitive when I am under ibuprofen. I am a scientist in my core and I am very aware of bias but when I hear others sharing the same experience using the same supplements, medications or other things as me, I always take a step back. What surprises and often angers me is how these shared experiences moments occur. Pure luck. Medical papers and scientific papers in general are usually published because the research associated to them are expansion on other previous papers. It is cheaper to do research this way. Building on someone else's proven research makes the next one more likely to be positive. What about mixing things up ? What about research about what people actually experience ? I am not going to pretend that I am going to change the world but I am willing to try. Let's share our personal experience and give us a chance to meet others who share the exact same experience. Maybe there is something behind it science has not had a chance to consider. In order to work on this idea, I am going to star a new topic of discussion on our forum page, under Resources submenu and share my experience. I would like to encourage you to share your own. Maybe down the line, we will be able to find a trend or common story. Lets call it experience rooted crowd based research. Let me know what you think in the comment section below.

In this new episode of our brand new season of Blind Sanity podcast out this week : - New season with new episode format. We are keeping each episode to 25 minutes with 3 segments: News, Topic of the Week and your Mail and Comments. - On the News section, learn about accessibility planninf for the 2024 Paris Olympics Games. - This week's deep dive is about Voice Assistance technology. The first part of a month long series about Amazon, Apple and Googlw's audio assistive tech. What it is. what it can do for you. which system is the best for the low vision and blind community? - We finish things up with comments on my opinion piece about White canes. Click here to listen to the episode or subscribe on your favorite podcast app and listen to more than 100 episodes available to date. Source: https://www.blindsanity.com/podcast-1/episode/21c8143e/s2e01-new-season-new-format