SIGHT AND SOUND TECHNOLOGY

PODCAST EPISODE 68

Stuart Lawler: Hello and welcome in to the Sight and Sound Technology podcast. My name is Stuart Lawler. Happy New Year, everybody, and this is Episode number 68.

Music

Stuart Lawler: It does seem a bit strange to be saying Happy New Year at this point, we're well into January but I hope everybody is keeping well and I hope that you have had a good and relaxing Christmas and all the very best for 2023. We're certainly looking forward to it here at Sight and Sound Technology. It's going to be a busy one. Now, coming up on the show today, I'll be speaking with Fraser Fleming and Graham Gunning, who are the founders of a charity in Scotland called Triple Tap Tech. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation I had with those guys a few moments ago. We're going to bring it to you in just a second.

Music

Stuart Lawler: But before we go to Fraser and Graham, podcast@sightandsound.co.uk is the email address and if you'd like to get in touch with us, we always love to hear from you with your feedback. And speaking of feedback, we did get some feedback, I guess, since this podcast started. There would be the occasional email in from people saying, "Is it possible that we can get a transcript, a text transcript of the programme?" And this is particularly useful for people who are deaf/blind or who are hard of hearing and who find it difficult to listen to the show, but it's equally useful, I think, for people who just want to skim through our show or want to find a piece of information very quickly and don’t have time to listen to the show. So, I'm delighted to say that as of this episode, start of a new year, we are launching our text transcripts and text transcripts will be available at the same time as the audio for this show is published. So, you'll find them with the podcast. If you have difficult accessing the text transcripts, then please do get in touch with us, podcast@sightandsound.co.uk, or contact the office on 01604 798070, and we'll be able to help you get them. We'd love to get feedback on the text transcripts. If you think these are useful, please let us know. We do intend to try them out for the next couple of months but they will be available and, as from this episode, you'll be able to read the text transcripts for each of our podcasts.

Stuart Lawler: When you hear about charities offering support and services for free, it's something that always pricks up my ears. A really innovative group in Scotland are doing just that. They provide tech support, they provide drop-in chats over Zoom and they're building a vibrant community that I have to say I knew virtually nothing about until just before Christmas. I'm delighted to have Fraser Fleming and Graham Gunning, who are the founders of Triple Tap Tech, with us today. Fraser and Graham, welcome, guys.

Fraser Fleming: Thank you very much for having us on board.

Stuart Lawler: Great to have you. Listen, Triple Tap Tech, it's kind of a hard one to say if you've had a couple of drinks. Did you guys come up with this after a couple of drinks or how did you get the name, Triple Tap Tech, Fraser?

Fraser Fleming: It's the only name that we could think of at the time that we set up the charity. What it is, is triple tap is a unique gesture that is pretty common across all assistive and accessible software. So, for instance, on the iPhone, if you triple tap the Home button or the power key, that will bring up the accessibility menu. If you're using an Android device and you triple tap the screen with one finger, that will bring up magnifications and there are similar gestures on both Windows and Mac computers as well. So, it's sort of a unique accessibility gesture and we thought it was pretty clever to call the charity after.

Stuart Lawler: It's kind of a funny one, isn't it? I remember telling someone before about the screen curtain on the iPhone, triple tap with three fingers and then there's what they call a quadruple tap with three fingers to copy something to the clipboard. It's kind of tricky to communicate those gestures sometimes, isn't it?

Fraser Fleming: Yes. There's a whole range of gestures, especially when you're using an iPad or Android device. You're got three, four, five finger gestures.

Stuart Lawler: Anyway, it's a great name. We're not going to forget that. Graham, can you tell us, how did it come about? Did you guys meet and feel the need to do something or how did it all come about for you?

Graham Gunning: So, the way it came about was the fact that myself and Fraser, we were both working at a charity beforehand. We met, we both were volunteering. We continued on and we managed to get a couple of jobs out of it and eventually their funding came to an end so we thought that we knew what we were doing, we knew there was a market for it, so we thought we could do it ourselves and see what happens. So, that was four years ago. It's kind of gone from strength to strength since 2018 when we opened up Triple Tap Tech and it has been a whirlwind since then.

Stuart Lawler: Outside of the services, and we'll talk all about what you do in a second, there's a lot to setting up an organisation and running it, and you guys are a charity, aren't you?

Fraser Fleming: Yes.

Stuart Lawler: There's a huge amount of governance and oversight to running a charity. Was that a huge decision to take that on, Fraser?

Fraser Fleming: Yes, it was a big responsibility to take on, especially at the start when both me and Graham, this was something that was all new to us. So, we weren't entirely sure what we were doing and how we were meant to do stuff. But luckily we managed to get a good team on board to help us get through the process of starting up from Scottish Enterprise and getting their advice, we were able to go through it all, the requirements and legal duties that's involved in running a charity.

Stuart Lawler: Clearly the hard work has paid off because you're doing stuff all over Scotland. Can we talk a bit about some of the stuff you are doing and what sort of services people can expect from Triple Tap Tech. Graham, do you want to start us off, and feel free, guys, to jump in if you want to add things?

Graham Gunning: At Triple Tap Tech, we provide help, support, advice and training on all technology for the visually impaired. We have an over the phone service, where you can phone in with any questions you have or any advice you need and we can do that over the phone or through a Zoom call. We also have an office and we're located in Bath Street in Glasgow and we're diagonally across from the King's Theatre in Glasgow. So, people can come in and book in and they'll come in and we can take it from there, whether they've got a new piece of equipment or they've got an old piece of equipment and they just want some advice on accessibility features. We can also do a home visit where we go out to people's homes and we set up any technology that they need to be set up and we'll train them as well.

Stuart Lawler: When I was looking at your website, Fraser, a lot of stuff was free. People who are looking at this, if you're visually impaired, if you need help, contact us, come onto Zoom, all this stuff you're offering for free, which is a huge range of services and I think would be very useful for lots of people who are maybe starting off with technology. What services are free and what are paid for?

Fraser Fleming: We've got three main services that we offer, that Graham referred to earlier on. Our free services are the ones that we can do over the phone or through an additional platform such as Zoom, MS Teams etc. Office visits are also free, so if people are interested, they can come into the office and get one to one training. They can get to test out devices. If we haven't got a device in the office, we can contact the manufacturers and often get a demo unit for them to try out. So, that's all free. The only service that we charge for is the home visit service and the charge for that is very dependent on where the person is located. It's just to cover basic costs such as travel and expenses for it. I don't like having to charge for the home visit service but unfortunately that's the only way that we can actually afford to fund and keep the service running.

Stuart Lawler: Yes, keep the service running and presumably you guys have to live as well.

Fraser Fleming: Both myself and Graham, we do Triple Tap Tech voluntarily, so we don't take any personal income from the charity.

Stuart Lawler: Wow.

Fraser Fleming: That means that everything that comes in to Triple Tap Tech, be it donations, be it funding grants etc., goes towards the running and to the end user of the charity.

Stuart Lawler: Obviously then people are dropping in, you're coming on the Zoom. One of the things I saw on your website last night, I think you have a Zoom session where there's not so much of a focus on anything, you're kind of saying just drop in and chat. You're almost offering this peer support piece as well, Graham. Has that been popular?

Fraser Fleming: Community is a very big part of what we do at Triple Tap Tech and trying to make connections within the visually impaired community, especially throughout Scotland. Considering what we've been through in the past two to three years with lockdown and COVID19 situations, we've seen that quite a lot of people with visual impairments were being isolated and maybe having anxiety about coming out of the house and meeting strange people, new people, that they obviously haven't met before. So, that's the reason why we set up a couple of social groups. We do two main social groups. We do the Triple Tap Chat which is online, so anyone from all across Scotland can join in and even other parts of the UK if they wish to. We also do what we call the Cake, Coffee and Chat, which is a physical meeting that takes place last Friday of every month in our office. So, again, members of the visually impaired community, if they wish, they can travel into the office, if they're from the local area, they can come in and again building up connections, nothing to do with technology. We're there to offer support if they need advice with technology but both myself and Graham, we're registered blind ourselves, so we know exactly what it's like, dealing with visual impairment. So, people can come in and just get to know us, get to know other people and build up a connection.

Stuart Lawler: I want to come to that. I'd love the chat but the cake and coffee sounds good. You guys provide the cake and coffee too?

Fraser Fleming: To be fair, it's the only reason I turn up is for the cake and coffee.

Stuart Lawler: Okay. What are the things that you guys are asked most about, from a support and training perspective? What are the pieces of tech that people are wanting most help with?

Fraser Fleming: Nowadays I'd say the main area that comes in would be your tablets and Smartphones. Nine times out of ten, it's always people who want to find out how their iPhone or their Android phone or Android table and iPad can be used from the visually impaired viewpoint. So, that's where a lot of our work comes in. What a lot of people don't realise is that there are also devices that are specifically designed for people with visual impairment, especially with Smartphones, that might actually work out better than using an iPhone or an Android phone. These phones can be something as simple as the Emporia TALKactive which is available from the RNIB's online store and that's just a very simple phone that does calls and text messages but it's also got a screen reader built in. So, again, what we try to do is offer and customise our advice so that the person gets the right product or the right device for themselves, rather than wasting what could be hundreds or thousands of pounds on getting a device that is just not suitable.

Stuart Lawler: What is the assistive technology industry doing for you? And I ask this being part of the assistive technology industry, but what are the industry saying to you? Are they helping you? Are they making it easy for you? After all, you're a shop window for these products.

Fraser Fleming: We work quite closely with other organisations and charities as well. So, quite often, we'll get referrals coming through from some of the bigger charities dealing with specific subjects, where they might not have the expertise that Graham and myself and the Triple Tap Tech team have. That's a tongue twister. They'll get in contact with us for specific situations where we can go out and again we get a lot of support from the bigger organisations within the assistive technology industry.

Stuart Lawler: As we're chatting here and I'm thinking, all this stuff that you're offering to people, it's an incredible service. I don't know of anywhere else that offers something like this, but I'm wondering, clearly you guys are very nice, affable guys, I can sense already that you would make people feel very much at ease, is there a danger, do you ever think, that people could become too reliant on your service and take up too much of your time, so that you can't get to other new people? There's only two of you. How do you wean people off that?

Fraser Fleming: That's a very good question. Since starting up Triple Tap Tech, we've always said we offer continuous support when it comes to technology because obviously devices are evolving all of the time and even the software on assistive devices are constantly being updated or being modified to some degree. So, there's always going to be questions, if maybe the accessibility settings being knocked out of place or the specific device has a new update, so there are always going to be questions coming through with them. So, we try and always make sure that people know that we're there to help them. What we're doing moving forward, because obviously the years are going on and the number of people we support are growing, we're actually in the process of introducing volunteers into our service. We've got a few of them, up to 50 volunteers based across Scotland, that help with things like training people in the office under supervision or it can be doing what I always call the boring side of Triple Tap Tech, so that's like the admin stuff and calling people up to arrange appointments and things like that. So, we're in the middle of building up our service so that we're able to accommodate more folk.

Stuart Lawler: It's probably a bit of an obvious question but did COVID change the direction of your service? When you guys set up, presumably pre-COVID, you probably had plans to be out and about a bit more. Do you think it has changed your service for the better?

Fraser Fleming: COVID did have an impact on Triple Tap Tech in the way that we provided our service. So, Triple Tap Tech has always been promoted as a face to face service where we're physically showing people how to do X, Y or Z on certain devices. So, when lockdown came about, we had to drastically think about, first of all, if it was even possible to take Triple Tap Tech forward during that situation, and if we were to take Triple Tap Tech forward through that situation, how would we go about that to meet a set criteria. The criteria we set ourselves in order to continue would be, first of all, any training we have to do has to be accessible to somebody with no vision, and the second criteria we set ourselves was that somebody that has no knowledge of technology has to be able to access our service in some way in order to get the correct training and the correct support. So, what we did was during lockdown, we started doing development of the website and I'm very proud to say that before lockdown I didn't know anything about website development but I got my head down and created the Triple Tap Tech website from scratch and made sure that it was fully accessible using a screen reader and different software and different devices. Slowly but surely we built that up into a great resource that's available to anyone throughout, well, the whole world basically. They can come on and access the guides that we have published on it or the product reviews that we've done on the website. It's also a way that people can find out the different ways in which to contact us. So, that was one of the responses to COVID. The second response that we did to COVID was transferring our service from a face to face to a remote service or a distant service. That included having to find different ways to communicate with people and developing our own training techniques and trying to learn newer techniques in how to successfully train people over the phone, especially when it comes to describing what devices do and how to navigate through the device, without actually physically having to be there and showing them on their own device. Those were the two ways that we developed around that. The third thing that we also introduced was our remote clubs and groups. So, again there, we set up gardening chats, we set up the Triple Tech chat, we set up accessible tech talks, all through the COVID period in order to keep people updated and trying to interact with the community that we’re supporting.

Stuart Lawler: The website is fantastic, by the way. I've been listening to some of your podcasts and it's funny, you were just mentioning that you learned to do a website during COVID. It's interesting, people learned to bake bread and play musical instruments, you're the first person I've heard say that they learned to do a website, so that's fantastic.

Fraser Fleming: Graham here also learned braille over the lockdown.

Stuart Lawler: Well done, Graham, congratulations.

Graham Gunning: Thank you very much.

Stuart Lawler: Guys, if people are interested in finding out about Triple Tap Tech and I suspect after this, by the way, there will be a lot of people interested in finding out more about you and the services you offer and I highly recommend that people check out the website, but do you want to give the contact details, Fraser?

Fraser Fleming: The best way to contact us is actually through our website, so go on to tripletaptech.org and that contains all the different ways that you can contact us on there. You can also give us a phone call, if you haven't got access to the internet, on 07805353149 or 0141 353 1567. An alternative way to contact us is also through email, info@tripletaptech.org.

Stuart Lawler: Fraser and Graham, it's a really outstanding service, a great innovation that you guys have come up with. We hope for continued success. We'd love to stay in touch and just hear how it's all going but for the moment, thanks a million for chatting to us on the show today.

Fraser Fleming: Thank you very much for having us.

Stuart Lawler: Many thanks to Fraser and Graham there. I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation. Great to catch up with the guys and see all the great things that they are doing for the people in Scotland, people of Scotland, and if you're in Scotland, why not visit tripletaptech.org and see the range of services for yourselves and get in touch with Fraser and Graham because they're two of the nicest guys I've had the pleasure of meeting. Well, that's just about it for this episode of the podcast but we're back soon. Until then, from Stuart Lawler and everybody at Sight and Sound Technology, take care and thanks for listening. Bye, bye.

Music