Coffee Time with Blind United March 28 2024

Blind United is a community organization aiming to unite blind individuals regardless of their affiliation with other organizations. They believe that everyone deserves equal opportunities and are frustrated with the lack of progress in advocacy efforts due to conflicting voices from different organizations. They encourage unity and use the hashtag #onevoice to promote their movement. While they don't require membership or dues, they accept donations to support their initiatives. The founder, who became blind later in life, emphasizes the need for blind individuals to speak with one voice, like other disability groups, in order to achieve their goals and obtain necessary accommodations. Let's get ready to rumble! Y'all ready for this? Well, good morning everyone and welcome to another concert time with Blondie United. I hope everyone is having a great Thursday morning. We are on the downside of the week so it's almost over with y'all. It's almost Friday. Right, so I got my ride or die with me today. I got Brittany with me so good morning Brittany. Good morning Ed. Do we have any interest groups for today? No, we really don't. I mean, this is the end of the month so it's to be expected. But at the same time, you know, for those listening in and may have an interest group in mind that they would like to start. I mean, here's a great opportunity. You know, there's some empty time available. Normally we would have Mr. Bautista in Let's Talk Spanish today, but he's off doing some training. So he's unavailable this week. But he will definitely be back with us next month. But it's all good. We're going to make it happen anyway. We deserve a break every now and then. Right. But if you want to listen to some of the lessons that Mr. Bautista has done, you can check those out on audio.com, right, Ed? Yeah, audio.com slash Blondie United. Just go into audio.com and just search Blondie United in there and that will bring up all the recordings that we have in there, whether it's Mr. Bautista and his Spanish or whether it's Pedro and his advanced technology or it might even be me with my basic iPhone stuff. So we've got quite a few recordings in there and it will be growing more and more and more as we move forward. Right. That Mr. Bautista's audio recording that he did of the alphabet is very useful because everything is, it sounds out spelled in Spanish, you know. You've got to sound things out. And that's one of the things that he stresses with us. So it's good to review the alphabet and the vowels and all that good stuff. And also while you're in there, if you want, you can download it. That way you have it on your computer or you can actually create a link to that recording to where you need to just, like I said, either download it or you can just grab a link and that way you can run back over there and go straight to it as many times as you want. Right. Right. And Monica said good morning. So good morning, Monica. And so did Audrey. So good morning, Audrey. Okay, Audrey. That's a new one. I haven't heard that name before. Good morning to you. Welcome to Monday night. Audrey. I think, I believe she's been in a few of our interest groups. Okay, okay, okay. Oh, you mean Adir? No, Audrey. Okay. Well, I mean, you know, I'll take your word for it. I don't want a lot of people to keep track of. Right, right, right. Well, I mean, thankfully we are getting pretty popular. So, again, thank you. I apologize if I'm misinterpreting who you may be, but welcome, welcome, and welcome. But, yeah, no, so we, again, we don't have a whole lot going on today. But me and Britt, we're going to talk about another aspect of Blind United's purpose. So, I mean, Blind United is basically what it says. You know, we're all the blind and we are united is what we're trying to do here. Everyone knows in the community that we have, you know, at least two major organizations being the NFB and the ACB. And I don't have anything against either one of them. I actually am NFB, but I'm not anti-ACB. What I am, or we are, I should say, is pro-blind. So, I mean, that means I don't care what organization you belong to, whether you belong to an organization or not. You're blind, right? So, you're part of the community. And I believe that everyone, or we at Blind United believe that everyone, regardless, deserves an opportunity to live a better life. What we've seen as we move forward with this, and it was part of the reason for us to even get it started, was the fact that, you know, I mean, we go to Washington for, as an example, once a year, okay? We take, I don't know, what, we take three, four different bills every year. Sometimes they're the same bill that we took last year. A lot of it, okay, I've been a part of the NFB for, what, the past six years, maybe longer than that. And the bills seem very similar every time y'all go. I mean, it's like they might just change the verbiage a little bit, trying to see if, you know, maybe it's something in the verbiage was, you know, prohibiting folks from signing on and sponsoring our bills or whatever. But the main point I'm trying to make is, so let's just say the NFB go up there, they got three, four bills, they're trying to get into Congress and get, you know, get a vote on, right? Well, within a week, two weeks, no longer than a month, ACB shows up and they got a whole nother slate of bills, you know? So NFB is sitting there and says, okay, well, we need this, that, and the other thing. And then here comes ACB says, well, no, we don't need that. We need this, that, and this over here. And we've got two major organizations and they're speaking with different voices. Well, because they're speaking with different voices, in essence, we're giving Congress a pass. We're allowing them to not do anything because they don't want to piss off one group or the other by going with what they want. So again, in their mind, they may not say it out loud, but in their mind, they're saying, okay, well, when you guys get on the same page, let us know and then we'll get something pushed through. Well, that ain't happening because, I mean, there's a little twinkle of hope in there. I'm seeing where, you know, ACB and NFB are kind of, you know, bridged that gap a little bit in certain states. You know, I'm not going to say it's everywhere. I mean, I would love to see it everywhere, but it's just not there yet. You know? So Blatant United would like to be that catalyst. Blatant United would like to be that organization to where, you know what, it doesn't matter. You know, if you need a certain mobility device, a certain piece of technology, a certain accessibility feature in your city time, whatever, if you need it, just because I don't, doesn't mean I'm going to go against you. I'm going to go with you. We're going to stand with you because whatever you need, we want you to have to accomplish your goals. Just like we would hope that you would stand with us for what we need. I mean, I may need something that you don't need. So that's just part of what we're doing. So we're creating this thing and I would really, really, really appreciate it if people would use it at every opportunity. Hashtag one voice. Hashtag capital O-N-E, capital V-O-I-C-E. Hashtag one voice. And that's just to try to get this movement going, trying to get the word out. I mean, if you think about it, I know I'm talking a lot, Britt. I'm not even giving you an opportunity to get in this conversation. You know what, I appreciate you being passionate and talking about something that you care a lot about. And I know that unity is a big thing for you, hence the name Blind United. So while we do have a comment, Ed, someone, a Facebook user asked, do you need a membership to be a part of NFB or ACB? Wait a minute. Read that one more time. I don't want to misquote. It says, do you need to have a membership to be a part of NFB or ACB? You don't need a membership to be part of us. You do need a membership to be part of them. Does that make sense? So, yeah, I mean, no, we don't have a membership. We don't have dues. We don't have any of that. Everything we do here right now, we do for free. Everything we provide within our 23 interest groups is totally free. So, yeah, you don't need any of that. No, we don't have any join the Blind United plan or anything like that. I mean, it would help. I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, it ain't like we don't have bills, you know, so we do accept donations. But, no, we're not requiring membership here. We're not requiring that you be one or the other as far as ACB or NFB, okay? Again, we don't care. If you're blind, you're part of the community, you know, and that's all this is really about, trying to unite the community, trying to do this in a different way. You know, I mean, I sit back, you know, just a little background. I wasn't born disabled. I wasn't born blind, okay? I became blind later on in life. So this was all new to me when it happened. And, you know, I got emerged into this community, and I started paying attention to different things going on. I started paying attention to different disability groups, you know, like, you know, folks in wheelchairs, you know, the deaf, the deaf-blind, you know, artistic folks, and so on and so forth, right? And what I see is a lot of the other groups, especially like the wheelchair folks and the deaf folks, they speak with one voice. They get everything they need. I mean, you think about when you walk in your buildings and stuff nowadays, I mean, all your doorways are extra wide. They might even have a feature where, you know, you're in your wheelchair and you can reach over and hit a button and open the doors before you get to it, so you can just roll right straight on through, you know? You walk into the bathroom, you got a special stall you can pull into with your wheelchair and, you know, be able to use the facilities, you know, without a whole lot of problem, right? The deaf folks, I mean, look at the TV. They get closed captioning. They got TTY stuff when they're making phone calls. They got all kind of relay services and stuff that you can use as a deaf person. They get what they need. Why? Because they're speaking with one voice. We're not doing that. We're not doing that, and we're not getting the things we need. I mean, you know, I believe there should be an audible signal at every corner. Wherever there's a stoplight, there needs to be an audible signal, okay? I mean, how do we know there's a four-way stop if we go to a certain intersection? There's a four-way stop sign. We don't know. When we go to these same buildings that everybody else has wheelchair access to and all this other kind of stuff, we walk in, if we find the front door, we walk in the front door, oh, well, we have Braille on the elevator buttons and we have Braille on the doors. Okay, where's the elevator? Where's the doors? How do we get there? You know, all these different little things that they don't take into consideration when they think about us, you know. I mean, we go to a menu, you go to a restaurant. Nine times out of ten, we don't have a menu that we can read. They don't have a Braille menu. They may not have a SKU where we can, you know, pull up a menu for those that know enough technology to be able to even use a SKU, right? You know, so, again, there's just a lot of things that's going on within our community that's already out there. There's a lot of stuff that they could be doing that would actually help our community a lot, but they're not doing it. Why? Because we're not speaking with one voice. If we speak with one voice as a community, okay, we can make it happen. I mean, you look at what happens with other stuff. I mean, you know, when voters get tired of a certain thing going on or a certain person in office, whatever, when they band together and they speak with one voice, what do they do? They end up getting rid of that person. That's the power of speaking with one voice. So, again, we want to start this movement within our community. Hashtag, again, one voice with a capital O and a capital B. That way it reads out, one voice, instead of some other kind of thing that don't sound right. Might be misconstrued as something else, right? Thank you for the accessibility tool. And if you do any hashtag, you probably should capitalize it so that screen readers will read it better. So thank you for that. And you're absolutely right. We should speak with one voice. And I want to say that just because, like, okay, let's just say, oh, well, the audible signals, they're only going to benefit blind people. No, they're going to benefit everybody. They're going to benefit the elderly. They might benefit people that are autistic. They might benefit people that just aren't paying attention. You know, universal design doesn't just help the disabled. It helps everyone. It's just like ramps. They don't just help people in wheelchairs. They help people with strollers, people with rolling luggage, people with skateboards. So just, you know, keep that in mind and vote. Voting is very important. I don't think that you guys understand how important your voice is. So be informed, vote. We don't care who you vote for. Just as long as you vote. Yeah. I mean, we've got an election coming up in November. I mean, if you're not registered, please do get registered. Again, we don't care who you vote for. We just want your voice to be heard. You know, do everything you can to make sure that your candidate gets into office, whether it be, you know, on the city, state, or national level. You want to make sure you get the people that's going to do the work you want them to do in office. So just a little side note, Britt. I don't know if that skateboard was a good thing to add to them ramps, baby. I mean, skateboards? Oh, yeah. No, I'm very much afraid of skateboards. As somebody who was a college student, I'm very much afraid of them. But I know that a lot of people love them and many people do use them. So, you know, I guess. No, but, again, I mean, even other folks. I mean, maybe it's a lot of work for somebody to step upstairs. Maybe it was a whole lot of steps, you know. Maybe it would be easier for them to take a ramp than try to climb all them stairs, you know. Like you said, maybe they're in a wheelchair. Maybe they're in a walker. Maybe they've got a rolling suitcase or a rolling briefcase or a rolling book bag, whatever, you know. It just makes sense to have, you know, like you say, universal design. I mean, you know, when you think about designing a building and you think about all the people that are going to be using that building, think about everybody. Think about what everybody needs. Be inclusive in your design. That way everybody has access to the facility and can do what they need to do in that building, you know, whatever type of building it may be. I mean, whether it's a medical building, office building, apartment building, it don't matter. We all need to use it. Right. And those things might be useful for everybody. Like let's just say you're at a subway station or you're getting on the subway and it's announcing all the stops. That might be useful for you if you're autistic or if you're just like, okay, I've never been to New York. I've never been to the Bay Area. I've never been to L.A. So, you know, I mean, all this stuff doesn't just benefit blind people. Right. I mean, you could be dyslexic. You can't really read it. The letters don't look right, you know what I'm saying? So all that stuff helps for everybody. It ain't just one community. It's everybody, you know. I mean, you could be sitting there reading your book or whatever, you know, okay, well, I can read my book and I'm hearing these announcements. I know when I'm getting close. So now I can, you know, read my book without issue. And when I get close to my stop, okay, hold my book up, put it away in my bag, and I'm ready to get off the bus or the train or whatever the case may be, you know. I mean, it's very, very helpful for us. I know it is. But, again, it could be helpful for everybody. I mean, you know. Or even something as simple as braille menus. I mean, yes, okay, braille menus probably will only affect the visually impaired community. But that might help the waiter because think about it this way. You're a waiter and you're spending a lot of time waiting tables, you know, making sure people are good. And if you have a whole bunch of blind people that come in, you've got to stop and read the menu to those people. Or you've got those people asking, well, what do you serve here? You know, time is important. So, I mean, that might be beneficial to your employees to have large print and braille menus. Exactly. Exactly. Or at least a way we can access it online. I mean, you know, again, don't get me wrong. I wish I could, but I'm not a braille user. So braille menus ain't going to do me no good, any good, I should say. But at the same time, I would want them to be available for my folks in my community to have the ability to read braille. So, but me, I would like to, you know, maybe if there was a skew or, I mean, I normally try to look it up before I go places I haven't been. I try to look them up and see if I can access, you know, a menu online. But to be 100% honest, a lot of times, you know where I'm going, Britt. Oh, yeah, I know where you're going. These websites are not necessarily accessible for us. So, I mean, you know, people don't think about us when they do these websites. I mean, they put pictures of a menu or pictures of a food. Of a dish or whatever with no description of what's in the picture. You know, I mean, we're, again, we're non-sighted. We can't just look at the pictures. Oh, man, that steak really looks good. Oh, look at all the butter running out of that baked potato. We can't see all that. We have no idea what's on that plate. We have no idea what's in that photo. You know, so, again, universal design. You know, this is America wants everybody to be inclusive. And we're going to stand and fight for our inclusivity. So, that's kind of what Blind United is really, really, really about. Yep. And if you want to know more about Blind United, you can always email Ed. Here we go. There you go. Now, Brittany has an email now. You want me to give it out? No, not really. Well, we're going to listen to what Brittany has to tell us. How about that? You can visit our website, blindunited.org. That website, again, is blindunited.org. If you have any questions, concerns, comments, or would like to be added to our email list, you can email us at info at blindunited.org. That email address, again, is info at blindunited.org. If you would like to reach us by phone, you can call us at 909-846-8825. That number, again, is 909-846-8825. You can follow us on Instagram at blindunitedinterestgroups. You can follow us on X, formerly known as Twitter, at blindunited22. You can follow us on our Facebook group, which is blindunitedinterestgroups. And you can also join our Facebook page, Blind United. We're going to redo that one. We're going to have Brittany's email in there now. Actually, our emails are coming together. We're going to shift this stuff back over to the info email really, really soon, which we will all have access to. So you can pretty much reach the whole board with that info email. Oh, wow, that sounds fun. You don't know what personality you're going to get. You never know who will answer it. This is true. Yeah, you don't really know. So let me see who just popped in here. Okay, that was our backstage person. Okay, okay. She must have went through a tunnel or something. She's traveling, listening in on her way to work. Yeah, thank you for all the people that have been supporting us, listening to us every day. We really appreciate it. It means a lot to us. It really does. And it would mean even more if you would help out with our new venture, which is over on YouTube. We are streaming on YouTube now. So if you wouldn't mind, please run over there, subscribe, hit that notification bell button. They say there's a bell there. I don't know. I can't see it. But if you hit that notification so that way you'll know whenever we upload some new stuff or whenever we're going live, all that kind of good stuff. It would really, really, really help out. And we would really, really appreciate it over here. But anyway, I guess we'll wrap this thing up about this one voice thing. I mean, again, I just can't express the power in us speaking with one voice. And then with one voice, we're much louder. And the louder we are, the more they can hear us and the more they realize, you know what? These people ain't going away. We need to make something happen. We need to start doing our job and giving them what we need, whether it's in Congress with guidelines and regulations, whether it's, you know, an architect or a developer, you know, and their plans to design a new building, a new, you know, housing development, a new apartment complex, whatever, shopping center, whatever it is. I mean, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to go to a mall and not know where any of the stores are. I mean, we know that these stores are in there, but we don't know where they are. There's no way for us to find them. You know, nine times out of ten, we're either going to walk and go into each store. Is it, you know, is this the coach store? No, no, no. It's about ten doors down. So then you walk in and you might lose count. I don't know, whatever. But, you know, maybe they were wrong. You don't know. Some people just say anything just to get you out of their doorway. You know, so, I mean, a lot of this stuff people don't take into consideration, you know, and that's the thing. I mean, we live in a generation now, politically correct, you know, you want me to use these proper pronouns and you want to use all these different labels to identify and separate us. That's not, to me, is not a good thing. But, you know, categorize us or whatever the case may be. I'm old, so, again, maybe that's just my way of thinking about it. But along with that comes this inclusivity thing. You know, it ain't just about race. It ain't just about nationality. It has a lot to do with disabilities and stuff as well. So, again, hashtag one voice. Hashtag one voice. Right, right. And we have some comments. Daredevil said good morning to everyone. So, good morning, Daredevil. And you guys can check Daredevil out at Sights Unseen on YouTube. Or, what is it, Unseen Adventures? Yeah, Unseen Adventures. Unseen Adventures on YouTube. So, Unseen Adventures for Daredevil. I'm all for supporting other blind YouTubers. So, give him a shout out. His content is pretty cool. And also there's another comment that says that with the technology now, with Be My Eyes and all the different technology, we can adapt to our surroundings. So, that was a comment. That was also. Well, it's not that we can adapt to our surroundings. We can familiarize ourselves with our surroundings. I mean, Be My Eye is a great tool. Don't get me wrong. I love it. I use it all the time. You know, I mean, but, again, I mean, it's a tool that we can use. Well, let's just say an example. Let's use the example of me walking into an office building, right, or, you know, some sort of a building. I can't just walk inside the door and take a picture and say, ask the picture, where is the envelope, right? I can't ask Be My Eye, where is the envelope or the elevator? Well, I think Pedro has said that, like, he can prompt AI to get those types of questions answered. But I think more so. They have to be visible, Britt. What if the elevator is not visible in the snapshot? Yeah. I mean, I guess you would use Be My Eyes, not Be My AI for that, or maybe Aira for that, or maybe. I know a lot of my blind friends. What if you can't afford Aira? Okay. Aira is very expensive. That's true. Okay. Now we're back to. Oh, that is Pedro. Yeah, so, I mean, again, it is a great tool. Be My AI is a great tool. I'm not taking anything away from what it can do. I'm just making a point that it cannot do everything. If it's visible in the photo and you know how to prompt it and get the answers you're looking for, cool. But what if you don't know how to do all that? Again, if you design your building with us in mind, I don't need to use any assistive technology. I can follow maybe some sort of aesthetically tactile flooring that would guide me to the elevator, guide me to the information desk. I know they have those. Yes, Ed. I get your point, but let's go into a business sense. Are we going to spend so much money on getting the flooring done for a group of people, and let's say it's a small business, it's going to be way harder for them. Understand a big business. But when I mean like use Be My Eyes AI, I just don't take one shot in front of me. I take one in the side of me, a little to the left, let's say like 30 degrees to the left in front of me and then 30 degrees to the right, and I will ask my question. I know, and I go into doing this knowing this is not a 100% sure thing. I have my cane always out, and I'm paying mind to my surroundings. So number one, it's just a tool to try to assist you. I have had problems locating elevators and stuff like that and doing the phone door detection. It detects elevators too. It has helped because walking into a building that you do not know and you're like, okay, let me stand here. Let me start listening to my surroundings. But what about you don't have the skills that I have with my ears? Well, that was going to be my next point, Pedro. Number one, what if you don't have the mobility skills that you have? What if you don't have the tech skills that you have to realize that you need to take more than one picture? What if you don't know how to do any of that at all? We need to think more along the lines of the newly blind. Of course, once we get into the community and we go through certain trainings and so on and so forth, we become accustomed to using a lot of this technology. But people that are newly blind, they're stuck. They can't do anything without help. And it shouldn't be that way. I mean, well, let me go here. Let's back up. Let's just go here. If you were in an accident today and you became paralyzed from the waist down and you are now put in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, you don't have to adapt to anything other than rolling in a wheelchair. You got access to that building. You got access to everything you need, right? But it's a learning curve to a wheelchair. But my point being is you're not being denied access. Yeah. Okay. If you lose your hearing for whatever reason, you are not being denied access. If you lose your sight, you are. Think about it. You are losing access. Yes, and you have to look at it in two different ways. If you lose your hearing, you lose the communication part of it. So you're going to have to learn sight language. That's the door that's close to you. Us as blind, yes, our vision is close to us. So it's slightly different. But, yeah, even putting the tactile things on the floor, and if you're newly blind, you don't know what those are. You might not even know what's a cane. You know what I mean? So, yes, there has to be training. There has to be those tactiles. That would be super dope. And it's simply just putting some tape on the floor that has the bumps, basically it. Well, I mean, and, again, I'm trying to, you know, let them know. Like if they think about us in advance, right, and not as an afterthought, then you can make that tactile aesthetic to the design of your building. Yeah, that is so true, Ed, because once we're an afterthought, they're building around what they already built. Exactly. If we were in the beginning thought with everybody else, they will build that around all that, not just then us after. Be like, okay, yeah, this is kind of weird road. It curves weird. But we could put some little pinging sounds, you know what I mean? That's the afterthought, you know. But it will have the blindness and death and mobility in mind, and most do, most cities and places do. We have some comments. One of the comments is be my eyes and be my AIs free. And another comment is educating ourselves and others will go way further than these government solutions. Well, but within the education comes the ability to advocate for government solutions, okay? Well, as an example, and folks get ready, we're going to put on a great one this year. We're going to do a walk a mile, walk a mile in my shoes event in October. But what that means is so we invite folks out, whether they're family members of the blind community or whether they're local politicians, lawmakers, or even national lawmakers. It doesn't matter. We invite them out. They come out. We actually have them do a certain number of challenges where they are maybe putting a sleep shade on and pouring a glass of water. Let me see if you pour a glass of water without seeing what you're doing. That sounds really, really simple. But if you've never done it, you don't know how to do it. Just like most of the other stuff we do. When we first started, of course, we didn't know how to do it either. So it's not like we're poking fun at you. It's just that we're just trying to give you that experience for a brief moment of what we have to live with every day of our lives, right? So within that becomes understanding. I mean, me taking them out, giving them a cane, a quick cane lesson, and then taking them for a walk. They get to experience what it is to try to cross an intersection that does not have an audible signal, all of these things. So now what are we doing? We are educating them, right? We are educating the local politicians or whatever political person that happens to show up, right? Now when we come and we talk to them and say, okay, well we need audible signals on this corner, that corner, and the other corner, they understand why now because they've experienced it. They have firsthand knowledge of what it's like. So, of course, you would think that they would be all with it. Okay, well, let's make that happen. So, again, it's true. It's all about education, but at the same time, education brings about government change. And that's doing advocacy work right there with educating people. You're advocating for the communities, showing people, and then that lets them and gives them a chance to get in our shoes and be like, oh, no, we do need this. And that will make people that are not in our blind community advocate for us too. And, yeah, having those audible sounds in the corners. I know I hear complaints online. I see comments. These things are so loud at night. They're ugly. They're making a community ugly and things like that and that nature, okay? And, mind you, these are in main streets, and people are still like, oh, this makes it all sound nasty at night and this and that. Well, and what they're not realizing, because they're just trying to put a Band-Aid on a problem, and I've seen these as well because some places have them, they don't make noise until you put the walk. Once you hit the walk button, now it activates the system to where you're going to get that audible signal for that cycle. But most of them, the newer ones now, they vibrate for people that are blind and deaf. So I don't know. Again, that's the walk button. But I'm talking about the actual chirp, cuckoo, or whatever. No, the newer ones don't do it. Like the newer ones will just, like, they'll vibrate when it's time to cross. But, see, that doesn't really help, right? I mean, it does help as far as knowing when to cross. But when you have that audible thing on the other side of the street, that gives you a beacon to walk towards. Right. But I noticed that, like, a lot of the new ones, they'll say something like, walk sign is on to cross whatever street, you know? Right. And I can walk right straight towards that voice. As long as I walk right straight for that voice, I'm going to walk right straight across the street. Well, I've seen the ones that vibrate, and I guess you have to hold your hand on it. In this new world with COVID and all that and germs, sometimes you don't want to leave your hand on it. But I've seen those with the audible sound, too. Yeah. Yeah, they're working in contrast together. And most of them that I've seen that way, as an example, right there on Slauson and Alviso, okay? Right down from Wayfinder. That one, once you hit the button, it starts vibrating. It gives you a little chirp to let you know that you've activated it. And then, you know, because you're activating to go, you know, north-south at that light, as an example, right? Once that light turns green for you, you get that audible sound for you to follow and walk right straight across. Yeah, but I notice those things are always around facilities that are catering to blind folks. Well, yeah, because the facilities themselves are advocating with, you know, the local municipalities to have those things around their facility, because there are a lot of blind people going in and out of those facilities. So we're going to take a little pause for the cause right quick and let you guys hear about our social media and stuff again. So be right back. You can visit our website, blindunited.org. That website, again, is blindunited.org. If you have any questions, concerns, comments, or would like to be added to our e-mail list, you can e-mail us at info at blindunited.org. That e-mail address, again, is info at blindunited.org. If you would like to reach us by phone, you can call us at 909-846-8825. That number, again, is 909-846-8825. You can follow us on Instagram at blindunitedinterestgroups. You can follow us on X, formerly known as Twitter, at blindunited22. You can follow us on our Facebook group, which is blindunitedinterestgroups. And you can also join our Facebook page, Blind United. Sorry about that, Pedro. I didn't realize you had access to the Bretons, my brother. Oh, yeah. I set them up when I came in here. Okay. Well, again, I didn't know you was at the house. I was occupied with a thing I had to do, but it went smoothly. It got done in less than seven, ten minutes. So I was like, let me jump on and stuff, you know. Cool, cool, cool. So, anyway, we're going to leave this debate. I mean, about accessibility, I mean, again, if we just had universal design, you know, again, here at Blind United, you know, whether you need a particular type of accessibility or not, I'm going to stand up for you just like I would want you to stand up for me if it was something that I need and you do not. So that's what we're trying to promote at Blind United. So please, please, please use the hashtag as often as possible, hashtag one voice. And, again, use the capital O and the capital V. That way it reads out real well as to what you're saying. And we're going to get this movement going. So, Pedro, both of your clips are actually the same, my brother. I listened to them this morning. Oh, wow. Just pick one of them and we'll talk about it on the other side. All right, let's play this one. So what's next for Apple Watch? Here are three things coming soon. Apple has big plans for the Apple Watch, ranging from new health features to a completely new design. Read on as we recap three things to expect from the upcoming Apple Watch, potentially called the Apple Watch X. Apple is reportedly working on a new Apple Watch design, a refresh that could be dubbed the Apple Watch X. Apple announced the Apple Watch in September 2014, so we are approaching the 10-year anniversary. Mark Gurman has described this as the biggest overhaul yet to the Apple Watch. The new design will reportedly be thinner and use a new magnetic band system. Yes, this means your existing Apple Watch bands won't be compatible with the new Apple Watch X design. New Design Whether the new Apple Watch X debuts in 2024 remains to be seen. It could end up being pushed to 2025 as Apple continues development and finalizes production. Blood Pressure Apple has been working on bringing blood pressure monitoring features to the Apple Watch since the very beginning. According to Bloomberg, however, Apple will finally achieve that goal this year. The next Apple Watch model will reportedly feature a blood pressure sensor for the first time. The key aspect of Apple's first implementation is that it won't show the user their exact systolic and diastolic readings. Instead, the feature will show blood pressure trends over time, similar to how the body temperature feature on the Apple Watch currently works. If the user's blood pressure trends upward, they'll receive a notification alerting them to the change. The feature will also prompt the user to journal about what was happening when their blood pressure spiked. Apple is still working on a system that can give exact blood pressure numbers, but those enhancements remain far off. Sleep Apnea Another upcoming Apple Watch feature is sleep apnea detection. This feature, coming as soon as this year, will work similar to most other Apple Watch health features. It will alert users to the potential of a problem and suggest they go to a doctor for additional testing and a diagnosis. Bloomberg reports that Apple Watch's sleep apnea detection feature will monitor the user's sleeping and breathing to predict if the person has the condition. Currently, detecting sleep apnea requires an overnight sleep study in most cases. If the Apple Watch is able to play a role in that process, it will be a dramatic step forward. Wrap-up It's unclear right now whether the all-new Apple Watch X will launch in 2024 or 2025. That being said, blood pressure monitoring and sleep apnea features are rumored to launch this year. Apple could likely debut those features independent of the Apple Watch X's redesign. On a longer-term timeline, Apple is also still working on blood glucose features for the Apple Watch. This technology, however, isn't expected to debut for years. Now back to the show. Well, I mean, I like the... Well, again, I don't know if I would wear my watch while I'm asleep. I mean, I do have sleep apnea, so I guess to me it almost sounds like whether it's more along the lines of being diagnosed. And I did have to do that sleep study thing, and I found out by doing that, number one, that I did have it. Number two, they only need a good four hours of monitoring to make that determination. So I was able to go in there. You know, for those that don't know, a lot of us in the community, we have this 924 thing going on. So, I mean, they were lucky to get four hours of sleep out of me. But them other features also sound good. I mean, you know, if you've got high blood pressure issues or, you know, I mean, I know, again, they've been wanting to do the blood glucose thing for quite a while. Those features I really do believe, you know, would be really, really good to have in their watch, you know, when it comes to, again, anything where you may want to need to wear your watch at night. I don't know how practical that is. I mean, I don't know very many people that actually wear their watch to bed. Well, for those that wear like the Fitbit, Fitbit lasts like seven days fully charged, some of them. So, a lot of people wear them to bed. I also had wear my Apple Watch to bed. But the thing about that, you have to charge it right before. And when you get up, you charge it again. So, it's not practical to wear it every night. I actually was doing a study on myself about my sleep. So, I wore it for like two, three weeks to see what type of data I got. And you can also download apps for detailing your sleep and giving you metrics when you're like in REM sleep and other things like that, and when you're restless and things like that. If you don't have an Apple Watch, there's also apps that listen to you during the night, and then they make like a chart and let you know little activities. You can even go back and listen to yourself. But with Apple Watch, yes, the battery life gets improved. I could kind of see that. But the difference between an Apple Watch and a Fitbit is that the Fitbit is way lighter than the Apple Watch. And sometimes I didn't like going to sleep with my Apple Watch. It's like whatever, but sometimes you just don't want something on at night. So, they just need to improve the battery. I love my watch, and I love my watch in the sense that it's monitoring my health without me actually doing anything unless I'm about to start a work. And even then, it lets you know if, are you working out? Do you want me to start recording this data? You know, it will start guessing and letting you know. But that's all I have for the Apple Watch. You want me to check the other article just in case? I mean, you check it out. I listened to both of them. They sound the same to me. Title is Apple's WWDC 2024. Invite hiding any Easter eggs? Here's what we know. Apple finally announced WWDC 2024 dates. The developer conference will begin on June 10th. That's the second one I uploaded, and it's about their worldwide developing conferences and what might be coming, what they're going to be showing in this developer conference. This is the conference where I go and check it out and see what is the new features for iOS 18. So let's try to repeat that right quick so we can get it in so we can kind of talk about it. And I think you might like what they're going to do, Ed. Okay. Okay. Maybe I was hitting the wrong buttons this morning. I don't know. It's all right, man. It's all right. Let's do this. Title is Apple's WWDC 2024. Invite hiding any Easter eggs? Here's what we know. Apple finally announced WWDC 2024 dates. The developer conference will begin on June 10th, and the company confirmed that the keynote will be all about artificial intelligence. Still, is the WWDC 2024 invite hiding any secrets? Apple loves to include Easter eggs in its invites, but sometimes people just spend so much time looking for them that they see things that aren't there. Here's what Apple might be hinting at with the WWDC 2024 invite. Apple's WWDC 2024 invite is pretty basic. While previous invites had Memoji and several developers' tools, Apple's Easter eggs must be hidden this time, as it's a black background with the WWDC 24 logo. Does it mean night mode is coming to iOS? Just kidding. From the invite, there's only one possible Easter egg. The colors Apple uses are the same as the company features with Siri. When you call the personal assistant, these are the colors that appear. A WWDC focused on Siri makes sense. Previous reports say the Siri team plans to incorporate large language models to make complex shortcut integrations much more accessible. In addition, Apple is testing its own LLM, called Ajax GPT. Although it seems Cupertino won't unveil a chatbot this year, it might be planning to improve how Siri communicates and understands queries. Reports say Ajax GPT is better than ChatGPT 3.5. Mark your calendars for hashtag WWDC 24, June 10-14. It's going to be absolutely incredible. pic.twitter.com/.yiln5972zd Greg Joswiak, at Greg Jos, March 26, 2024. Besides this Easter egg hint for WWDC 2024, Apple's top executive Greg Joswiak wrote on X, Mark your calendars for hashtag WWDC 24, June 10-14. It's going to be absolutely incredible. As you can see, Joswiak offered one of the most obvious teases that WWDC 2024 will be all about AI with absolutely incredible. Now, if that's not enough, BGR has discussed several reports regarding AI and how Apple is expected to add these features with iOS 18, macOS 15. Now back to the show. Okay, so that's more of a, I guess where they're going to speak to Congress about AI? No, no. This is when they're going to unveil their iOS 18, macOS 15. The newest iOS is coming out this fall. They have a conference that I might want to attend one day in my life, but they have it up here in Cupertino in their park. And they have developers and they have all these booths. It's like a CSUN, but it's all Apple. And you can go to experiences, the new things they're talking about and things like that that they're working on. So on June, they usually unveil their software or sometimes a device or two, but not an iPhone. That's later on in this year. But they let us know what's going on with their iOS. A month or two later, they release it to the beta testers and stuff like that. But what they're talking about in this article is having Siri use chat GPT. And then if you are reading all these articles as I'm reading the news, Apple just bought an AI startup that actually builds things and scans and looks and see what can it better while physically creating these phones in their factories. This is more of a Siri within Siri able to use chat GPT to make sure she – let's say I say, send a message to Ed. And then blah, blah, blah, blah is the message. Send that and also attach this picture or you'll be able to give it multiple commands is what I'm guessing to make certain tasks faster and easier. For example, if I say create an event and I tell it the date and the name's event, it will say I created that event. But if I say add it to mine, like Pedro's and Monica's calendar, it can't do that still. It just adds it to your regular calendar. Okay. So let's say if we talk to Siri and we tell her, okay, that event must go into Pedro's and Monica's calendar. Chat GPT could somehow work together with Siri and make that query happen. Okay. So it's like Siri getting slightly steroids, not all the way yet, because Apple is working on their own AI. Well, I mean, again, I'm all for about AI. Again, I think it's a great tool. I think it's going to be very, very useful, especially within our community, you know, because of its ability to describe things and being able to prompt it and find certain things within certain images and all that other kind of good stuff. But I always say, you know, remember, AI is great, but so is a car. We got to have guardrails on the freeway. We need guardrails with AI. You know, we just can't let it go wherever it wants to go. That is so true. We do need guardrails, and I think we do need guardrails, especially in AI doing things for us physically, you know. Exactly. So if you need guardrails when they're driving or they're in charge of human life, we do need extremely guardrails. Right. An AI system, even a weapons system, in my opinion, should not have the capability to take a human life because what does that become, you know? Right, right. Well, speaking of AI, we will be interviewing a gentleman tomorrow for a product that I believe has AI in it. It does. We will have the gentleman here from Glide. For those that have heard of Glide, do you know what it is? For those that have not, it's a new mobility device that kind of acts like a guide dog, but it's more of a, you know, a robotic device kind of thing. But we're going to hear all about it tomorrow. So come in, check us out, 9 o'clock a.m. Pacific time, PlayStation time, whatever you want to call it. We're going to be here, and we're going to have them on, and we're going to learn everything we can learn about this new technology known as Glide. So with that being said, Pedro, my one more. I have one more comment. For any of those that are listening, are info emails working right now, Ed? Yeah, they can use it. If you have a question, you can email that email, info at GlideUnited.org. Just to be safe, use Ed at GlideUnited.org. Just to be safe. Okay, Ed at GlideUnited.org. And send in a question. I'm going to be picking a few questions from our viewers. If you have a question, drop it in that email, and hopefully we answer your question. All right. Whether it's an email, whether you comment on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever, we'll grab that comment, and then we'll do our best to try to make sure we get all your questions answered. So, Britt, I appreciate you, sweetheart. Pedro, thanks for popping in, my brother, when you finished up with what you had to do. Monica, everybody else that joined in on the stream, we appreciate you. And please, remember, run over there to the StreamYard. Subscribe, hit that notification. YouTube? You mean YouTube? Yeah, yeah, yeah, YouTube. My bad. It's still early. I don't know. I haven't had a second cup of coffee yet. Hit that notification bell. Click on all notifications so you won't miss a live. Right, right, right. We're doing this every day, Monday through Friday. One more thing that was brought up to my attention. My channel, it's UnseenAdventures8 on TikTok or YouTube. Right. Yeah, we forgot the eight part. That's all it was. We got the UnseenAdventures part right, but we forgot the eight at the end. So, not like there's seven and others in front of it. It just makes it want to be different. How about that? You guys have a great day, and we'll see you tomorrow. Remember, hashtag one voice. We'll talk to you tomorrow.