[Njabs-talk] NJABS Conference Call Minutes for 101010

[Benjamin Vercellone]

NJABS Conference Call Minutes for September 10, 2010

Members present:

Evelyn Valdez -- President -- will be going to state convention.

Shafeka Hashash - Vice President -- will be going to state convention.

Benjamin Vercellone - Secretary/treasurer -- will be going to state 
convention.

Greg Rivera -- board member -- will be going to state convention.

Melissa Hurff - Board member -- will be going to state convention.

Carlos -- will not be going to state convention.

Danny Romero -- will most likely be going to state convention.

Priscilla Garcis -- will be going to state convention.

8:01 PM: NFB Pledge read by Ben Vercellone.

8:02 PM: Shafeka introduces /James/ Gashel, vice president of business 
development for /K-NFB/ Reading.

He is the spokesperson for Blio and the KNFB Reader.

8:03 PM: Jim begins talking and answering questions.

What is Blio? With EBooks, publishing is becoming digital. We are 
familiar with the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble NOOK. The Kindle 
is fairly accessible now, but not for all books. Amazon produces books 
for a particular device. You pay $139 for the Kindle reading device. If 
you want the Kindle with 3g, you pay $50 more. It has come down in price 
considerably. Along comes Blio. This is reading technology developed by 
K-NFB. Partnership between Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation of 
the Blind. Blio is more than just a kindle. A lot more. It is a new 
system. It is not just a software program. Series of technology that 
brings books to computers and different devices. Launched on windows pc 
already. Will be available on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad by the end 
of this year. After that, it will be launched for Android and Mac. Maybe 
eventually for simbion. That will be out in the future. Blio has a book 
store. There are actually 2 different book stores so far. Many more 
going forward. One is at Blio.com. The other is at Toshiba Bookplace. 
www.bookplace.com <http://www.bookplace.com>. They have the same 
content. There are a growing number of books available. 1000 titles are 
added a day. Blio was launched on September 28, 2010. There were 8000 
books then. Now 15,000 or more. These are books you can buy. There are a 
million free books. They are made available from various sources. Amazon 
also offers free books. Google started scanning books a few years ago. 
There is a partnership Between K-NFB Reading Technology and Baker & 
Taylor. Approximately 90 publishers are providing books for Blio. About 
accessibility: The first version of Blio is not accessible to the Blind. 
There will be a new software upgrade. This will make Blio accessible in 
October. If you download the current one, there will be major 
accessibility challenges. Hope that we can think of it as a soft 
introduction so far. There will be a lot of things it does that it 
doesn't do today. It will be accessible soon. In the next month or 
several months into the future, there will be a lot of new features. 
Imbedded videos. There will be links in books to get more information. 
Hyperlinks. Additional research. Books will not be static documents on 
paper forever. This gives us a chance to provide books in an accessible 
way. First accessibility will be for jaws and NVDA. NVDA is becoming 
fairly robust. Will it work with WindowEyes? Would like it to, but it 
can't yet. Maybe soon with software upgrades. Blio has a sophisticated 
windows presentation format. Blio will be good in the future with text 
books and research materials. Future very exciting. Will books from 
iBooks and other sources be on Blio? We support all file formats. We go 
through a conversion process. Convert any file format. Into XPS. This is 
Microsoft version of PDF. More robust than PDF. In many instances, Blio 
has the same books as iBooks. When you buy a book from apple, you 
display it with apple. You will be able to use Blio to read books, but 
only the books you buy from Blio reader. There is a get books button. 
Many e-book technologies have the same books. Publishers sell to all of 
us. How many books are available in 2 libraries? Up to 15,000 now. 1000 
a day. 2 to 3 hundred thousand in no time at all. Free books are beyond 
their copyright period. Before 1923 mostly. Many classics. Will it work 
with system access? Yes, but for now, there are the same difficulties as 
with WindowEyes. Probable roll out order of windows screen readers 
working with Blio: Jaws, NVDA, system access, window eyes. Maybe there 
will be self voicing soon within Blio. Not sure when that will be. Will 
the books that are not accessible from Amazon have the same issue on 
Blio? Blio has one advantage over Amazon. It is part of our strategy. 
Publishers cannot force us to turn off accessibility. If nothing else, 
it will be accessible with a screen reader. We do have an aggressive 
approach to publishers. Have internal built in text to speech. Blio 
software is free. Not all books are free. If you want high quality TTS 
for reading, there will be a charge. This is for built in TTS. Voices 
are available from different venders. Credit card for high quality 
voices. What about NeoSpeach? Don't know if it will be available at this 
point. We have 90 publishers. 82 have told us there is no restriction to 
enabling audio whatsoever. 2 have refused to enable audio. Maybe 3 who 
said no. 5 with some restrictions. Will be addressing audio rights. They 
want to preserve human read audio voice, and they think text to speech 
is a threat. Human recorded is much better than TTS, even NeoSpeach. Jim 
said Amazon Kindle is not that good, although he does say they are 
improving. He says this is from the pressure from the NFB. Publishers 
are responding. IBooks doesn't have capability for TTS, but you do have 
voiceover. You can read a whole book with voiceover. With technologies 
like these, every book will now be accessible virtually. Do they hope to 
use Blio for text books? Yes. Baker and Taylor is one of the largest 
publishers. Publisher conglomerate. They sell a lot to college 
bookstores. Initial Blio doesn't include text books, but there will be 
support in the near future. Also check out www.Blio.com 
<http://www.blio.com> for more information on Blio.

Jim asked to speak about the K-NFB Reader Mobile for a few minutes. 
Wonderful opportunity to get K-NFB reader now. Up to version 6.4.3. Snap 
a picture to read text in print. Letters, memos, pages out of books. A 
lot of things. Works with 11 different Nokia phones. Will work with the 
E73 Mode soon. This is available free if you get it from T-Mobile with a 
2 year contract. Go to NFB website. T-Mobile link. On the Bottom of the 
first page. Learn more about it. Looks a lot like the blackberry. QWERTY 
keyboard. Powerful phone. This is the fastest phone for the reader. With 
free phone, can have the K-NFB reader for under a thousand dollars. E73 
mode only for T-Mobile. There are other phones, including for AT&T. 
www.knfbreader.com.

Thanks a lot.

8:30.

Shafeka concludes with Jim. His email is jim at knfbreader.com 
<mailto:jim at knfbreader.com>. Hats off to NJABS for having this call.

8:34 PM: Jim left.

Shafeka and Evelyn discussed business.

The fashion show still needs models. Please sign up.

We are still waiting on the grant request for the NFB. Will not tell 
much more until finalized.

The voting via text for the NFB Youth Slam in the Pepsi Refresh project 
is over. Voting stopped on September 30. We do want to thank individuals 
who participated in this.

NFBNJ State Convention is Nov 5 to 7. Friday to Sunday. Contact each 
other for rooming at state convention. The cost is $85 a night plus 
breakfast for up to 3 people a room. Preregistration is $28 including 
banquet. Can look it up on NFBnj.org. We need extremely large student 
representation. There are 12 states represented on our board. Some 
mentioned on the call were Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, and Nebraska. 
There is the Maryland association. Karin Anderson is the NABS national 
rep. Tell all your friends and invite them all. There is both a Fashion 
show and a talent show.

NFB has started another fundraising initiative. Text2Give program, a 
fundraising effort focused on improving education and technology for 
blind Americans and supporting other NFB initiatives. You can give a 10 
dollar donation. Text BLIND to the number 85944. The 10 dollars are put 
on your phone bill.

We want to come up with a great fundraising idea. There is something in 
the state of Iowa. Iowa is giving out a free iPad. If you answer certain 
questions, your name is put into a drawing with certain number of 
points. We can recruit more people. There are different ways of trying 
to tackle fundraising.

We are not having a phone call for November.

8:46 PM approximately:

Attendance was taken.

See beginning.

Talked for a short time about payment for the hotel. There will be a 
hold on your card. When you check in, they will charge it. Won't see it 
till December statement. Call Joe Ruffalo with questions about rooms or 
convention.

8:52 PM: Call ended.

Respectfully submitted,

Benjamin Vercellone

NJABS, Secretary/treasurer.