[ Music ] Data Skeptic is a weekly show about data science and skepticism that alternates between interviews and mini-episodes. [ Music ] Chris Hofstadter is an accessibility researcher and advocate, as well as an activist for causes such as improving access to information for blind and vision-impaired people. His background in computer programming enabled him to be the leader of Jaws, a Windows program that allows people with visual impairment to read their screens, either through text-to-speech or a refreshable braille device. He's a managing member of three mouse technologies and a frequent blogger primarily at chrst Hofstadter.com. Chris, welcome to Data Skeptic. It's good to be here, Kyle. Excellent. I'm so glad you're coming on the show. It's a topic that I think is very worthwhile to get out in front of the listeners and a couple of areas we can explore. I thought maybe the first spot we can dig into is topics of accessibility. A broad subject, but could you share your perspective on the state of the world just to get started in terms of how accessible or inaccessible our technological society is to a person who is vision-impaired? The good news is it's more accessible today than ever before. The bad news, the real national institute of the blind, the RNIB in England did a survey and something like 91% of all websites have one too many accessibility problems. Overall, the landscape is pretty bad, but the positive news is it's getting better over time. That appears to be the trends. That's good. Do you think that's a deliberate effort or is the sort of style of modern web development having frameworks and more lightweight semantic type content just in a coincidence making it accessible? Where is the improvement really coming from? There are a couple places the improvement is coming from, and unfortunately it's primarily regulatory. The United Nations Convention on human rights and dignity for people with disabilities does have a technology subsection, so all the signatory nations, at least their government installations and government public facing software, public facing technology needs to be accessible. In the US we have a panoply of different regulations that are really pushing this. Section 5 lead to the Rehabilitation Act requires that all electronic and IT purchases by the US federal government also be fully accessible. It's not the most well-enforced law on the books, but if you can lose out as Amazon did on an enormous deal, Amazon was going to be selling their Kindle Fire tablets to the United States Department of Justice, and they were going to be signing an exclusive deal, so all DOJ employees were going to get Kindle Fire's. Instead, they all have iPad minis because Amazon could not meet the accessibility requirements, so they lost millions of dollars there. The economics of accessibility is always a problem because when you're dealing with blind and vision impaired people, blind specifically, there's only 1.75 million of us in the United States, which is 0.57% of the population. That's fewer than there are Eskimos, and you don't see a whole lot of people going out of their way to make their technology especially inviting to Eskimos. I mean, we're not a market. It's impossible to make money selling directly to that tiny fragment of a population, so the regulatory framework has basically pushed the accessibility forward. So I know a lot of software people, web developers and application developers. I suspect most of them aren't very cognizant of accessibility issues. I don't know if that's necessarily because they're insensitive or just ignorant, maybe, or maybe ignorant's even too strong of a word, but are there resources people can access to help make sure, you know, take that extra simple last step to make sure that what they build has all the right accessibility features? Yes. I mean, there's the right way to do it, which is, of course, every software engineer has that idealistic vision of someday working on a project that starts with a fully specified specification and runs through years of prototyping and user testing and whatnot. But if somebody's starting a new website from day one or a new app from day one, if you design accessibility in from the beginning, it's going to be a whole lot easier than remediation. So obviously, if you're using the principles of universal design and that sort of thing and you started from day one, it's going to be a lot easier than remediation later. But the fact is, you know, there's a bazillion lines of code in the world today, and very little of it was designed with accessibility in mind. Consequently, they need to use various remediation services. There are consulting companies like the ones that I have. There are far bigger and far more broad-minded ones than us. We're just a tiny little group, and I would recommend that most people probably don't fit our proper clientele. But the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, its web accessibility initiative, which is w3c.org/wai, has tons and tons of resources for Internet-related accessibility things. There are websites like Tenon.io that are friend Carl Groves runs that will automatically test your website for accessibility and provide remediation recommendations. DQ Systems, a company that I also like that's in the accessibility field, they have a program called Axe. They just open sourced it under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, the WordPress Foundation and various others are starting to build in that right into the frameworks. Frameworks, however, can be a really good thing or a really bad thing. When the framework designer considered accessibility, you get it for free, and that's terrific. But when they did, it's impossible to redo it without hiring very, very expensive contractors to rebuild the framework for you. So if you want to be accessible, you do need to be cautious which framework you choose. WordPress is probably about the best, but WordPress isn't really enough for many, many people. Drupal is very, very good sometimes and very bad other times, and that's all a function of the fact that Drupal plugins and WordPress plugins and whatnot are written by, you know, aren't controlled by a through essential office and therefore accessibility varies from one author to the next. I imagine that a lot of problems that are introduced are just people who are sort of thoughtless about this, and I'm curious if there have been any major hurdles like the introduction of CAPTCHA or two-factor authentication or maybe well-intentioned processes that have become major issues for... CAPTCHA is without a doubt the most problematic piece of accessibility. It's interesting. WordPress is in the process of, I guess, trying to get almost all the mathematics it has in its articles converted to MathML. If the math is in MathML, there are various screen readers, the NVDA screen reader for Windows, especially voiceover on the Apple products, can now read the math as long as it's in MathML, but to get a WordPress account, you have to get through a CAPTCHA that says if you're blind, click here and, you know, we'll send you an email in a few days. To get a WordPress account and you can't switch to use it MathML by default unless you actually have an account. So you get things... again, that's another place where we've seen a good solid step forward, but the CAPTCHA is still the barrier. I've talked to Jimmy Wales personally about it. He claims his mission is to provide the sum total of all human knowledge to all humans, and I said to Jimmy, well, I guess then blind people aren't human because clearly you chose to build the system that excludes us. But I'm an activist and I say things like that to people's faces. The important thing, though, right now I think is standards compliance. So if you're building an internet site, you want to meet the web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 at the double A level, which is the U.S. federal government requirement now. So if you want the federal government to use your website, that's the web content accessibility guidelines we call them WICAG. Though read like any other standards document, it is not easy material, but fortunately the web accessibility initiative has a quick reference guide. And I know they're actively working on a set of best practices to make it even easier because it's not the easiest stuff to understand. There are about a half dozen though things within the accessibility standard that are really easy to do. That almost any website should never fail to do. And they tend to also be what is most beneficial for the publishers of that website. Things if you know HTML, there's the alt text tag that you can add to any image. That means when a screen reader user like me encounters the image, if you have a description, you know, picture of Kyle Pollock, I'll know it's a picture of you. If you leave out the alt tag, I'll just hear the file name, which if you're on a big commercial website like Amazon, that file name is going to be a random series of digits and letters.jpg. So that's something that's extremely simple. If you're using WordPress or Drupal or any of the popular CMS, there's actually an alt text field every time you add a photo or a graphic and it just puts it there automatically. Otherwise, it's an extra, you know, few characters of typing if you're hand coding your HTML. And that takes nothing. I mean, it's really the simplest thing to do. And the benefit to the web publisher there is a search engine is now going to realize, okay, that's a graphic of Kyle Pollock. I can identify that. So if people searching on graphics, it's going to improve your search engine optimization at some level because the search engine's getting to know something's there rather than a file name. On the other side of it is we're in a world of changing user agents. Blind people aren't the only people who use speech synthesis anymore. I mean, we have things like the version of Siri that you can get on your Audi or whatever fancy car it is. That might be reading your web data to somebody who's driving and therefore can't be looking at the screen and you're going to want them to have that information. Following the accessibility guidelines just by coincidence is going to give you at least an easier transition, if not almost an automatic transition to being more portable, running more easily on a wider variety of different user agents. So is speech synthesis sort of a primary technology of accessibility? I know there's also a refreshable braille displays. Is that basically the two areas that cover things? Yeah, speech synthesis. And here we're speaking only obviously to accessibility for blind people because speech synthesis does nothing for a deaf person. So the US less than 12% of all blind people even read braille and refreshable bale is tremendously expensive. A 40 cell single line display is about $4,000. And that's not covered by any health insurance in the US because none of them are FDA approved. Your listeners in the EU can probably, depending upon country, get it covered by health insurance. The problem is you're dealing with a lot of moving parts just for the dots alone. You're looking at 40 times eight each with a separate solenoid and a separate little read. These are very delicate and they're very difficult to build. So yeah, in the US, it's almost all speech synthesis. Europe is much more mixed. Europe wide, something like 80, 85% of blind people read braille. So braille displays are very popular there. And they're covered by national health care. So it's more likely that somebody have one. I mean, in the United States, something like 70% of all blind people are unemployed. Being able to go out and buy a $4,000 piece of hardware is pretty atypical. Why is there such a big difference in the amount of people that can read it across those two countries? Or continents, I guess? Money, I guess. Braille is expensive, not just refreshable Braille, but if you're printing something on Braille, a book like the King James Bible, for instance, takes something like a dozen 12 inch tall, three ring binders in Braille. It's very large. It's very expensive. A Braille embosser, which is what we call a printer for Braille. A low-end personal one starts at two or $3,000. And again, you're talking tons of moving parts and reliability issues. But the next part is also how to teach Braille. That's also very expensive. There just aren't that many people in the US qualified to teach Braille. Special education is not known for being a rather high-paying career. People who go to college and learn and become a teacher for blind students isn't going to make very much money. And so there's a lot of turnover in the field. Also, just doing things on audio is far, far less expensive. I mean, a speech synthesizer, if you buy a commercial one, is a few bucks and there's a few free ones out there. Most operating systems have one built in now, or at least you have a default one that comes at least if it's not free. It's as in freedom. It's certainly no cost. There's also a difficult question as to determining whether or not Braille literacy is important. Why should somebody go through the process of reading a rather unnatural writing system when we can do so much with speech? That's the single most controversial thing I can possibly say on your podcast. I am entirely agnostic on this issue. The fact is the research does not show that Braille is superior, nor does it show that speech is superior. And the problem is there's just a lack of research. With zero data out there, I'm not willing to commit to either side. But certainly the way economics works in the United States and how school systems get funded, they're going to pick the cheaper option. So, yeah, it's probably money more than anything else. Makes sense. Tell me a bit about what three mouse technology does. We're a tiny workers cooperative, where a dozen people, a few years ago, there was myself and my friend, my Calvo, he's a relatively prominent blind person who runs a technology company called Saratek. He and I were on the phone and we realized we had all these young blind friends who were either just getting out of college or maybe they were in college or maybe they were struggling to get through college or maybe they were in their mid 20s or whatever. With remarkably good programming skills who couldn't find a job in mainstream technology because they couldn't get a resume and it's awful hard to get experience when you can't get experience. We decided to say let's start a consulting company and start showing off what we can do. We threw together about a dozen of the smartest folks we know and we do everything from, we do a lot of website accessibility testing and remediation. So first we'll go through and test your site and tell you where the accessibility is good and bad and then how to, with suggestions on how to fix it, your programmers can go in and do the remediation themselves or, you know, we're available to do that. We write software, most recently the most interesting thing we did was take the Muse headband, which a company called Interax on up in Toronto makes and you can buy them for about 300 bucks at any best buy. They're an EEG headband that are really designed and marketed for meditation and mindfulness. Back at a conference in DC this past June, a friend of ours who works for Apple, suggested to one of our clients, this would be really useful for a person with paralysis. Even if it could just make blinking their eyes turn the page in their book reader. Well, we went out and got one of these headbands and sent it to one of our programmers who's up in the Vancouver area. He's a blind kid. Everyone to me seems like a kid. He's 27. He's a blind adult. He's just, I'm just old enough to think of them all as kids these days. The hardest part of the project was getting the SDK installed because it was not accessible. So we had a site for some install the SDK. Four hours later, Tyler had the Muse headband recognizing eye blinks on the Macintosh and a day after that. Not just could you turn pages in a book reader, but you could run the entire paralysis switch system by using an off the shelf headband. The amazing part of the story is the FDA approved version of this is $20,000. It's not covered by health insurance in the United States. So in about a day and a half of hacking, we were able to repurpose a off the shelf product so that a person with paralysis can save $20,000 or so because by using it. So that's something we're really interested in is the concept of technology transfer, finding mainstream products that we can then repurpose for disability use. So it's kind of who we are and what we do. Very cool. I could see where a lot of hackathons and stuff could be great places for people to work on projects like that as well. Is there a resource people could follow up to learn more about opportunities to get involved and stuff like that? Yeah, you could put the three mile technology link there and people can use the contact form. It's not much of a website, but it does have a contact form. And I'll get back to them. There's a project that I'm involved in starting right now that I can't really speak to publicly yet. But you might call it's going to be a floating disability hackathon. We're looking to do things like micro grants. Somebody has an idea and they need a few hundred bucks. We'll give them a few hundred bucks and see if they can do the idea. So we're going to be pushing that out through hacker spaces like noise bridge in San Francisco and various others. But there is actually an organization that is in the process of being formed. So when you sit hackathon, yeah, that's exactly it. We're going to try to be doing something new and interesting all the time by repurposing things that weren't designed for disability. Excellent. Looking forward to seeing more come out of that. Earlier we talked about how when images are on pages, using alt tags and whatnot and that can be read aloud, is there any other opportunity for blind people to get access to data visualization type work? And it's such a big part of my field. I'm just curious if there's anything like a textured display or any way that graphs could be conveyed in a more accessible way. You're actually talking to the person who first ever made Excel charts and graphs speak and we did that in JAWS about 10 years ago. I expected that because we did it in JAWS and we were the leading product that all of our competing screen readers would jump on the bandwagon. And that by 2004, every brand would have talking charts and graphs. And our solution was Excel only and it wasn't great. It was a first attempt. There was no published research on how best to do it. There was no human factors work. We literally did it as I think this sounds like a good idea. And that's still in JAWS today. But now that we've kind of conquered math with MathML and some of the work design science is done, at least we've conquered math up through Calculus 3. If you want to take topology, you're going to have to learn to read your math and raw LaTeX files. It's just not there yet. But there's a lot of people in the research and standards communities are starting to speak to it. As a fellow whose presentation I saw at the CSUN conference in LA last March, he works on accessibility standards for the Web Accessibility Initiative. And he's proposing extension to the ARIA standard so as to add semantics to SVG. That would be read automatically. And he demoed a version of that at CSUN last March. There's a company they make primarily, they make braille embossers and wrap printers, called U+ up in Oregon, where a guy named John Gardner has been doing an awful lot of research into this space to both mix, tactile and auditory graphics. There's a research project I know going on at University of Florida into the sonification, but I don't know how far their work has come. I haven't seen any functioning bits out of their project yet, so it may or may not be real at all. But it's certainly the next major thing to conquer. Data science, your field. I'm also a big fan of the podcast, which also makes me happy to be honest. I recommend it to people all the time and whatnot. But so many of my friends are Python programmers. I wrote five lines of Python code last week, so I guess I can call myself a Python programmer now too. And I hear so many of these data tools you're using and all of them are inaccessible. The right way to do it would be to design your system in a way that the data and the interface are entirely separate pieces of your software, so then it's a lot easier to basically put another skin on something. But most of the libraries that I've looked up that we've heard mentioned here are usually PiQT as their interface library, and that's 100% inaccessible. PiWX is quite accessible, but you don't find as many people using it anymore. Toga can be made accessible, but you really have to do a lot of work to do so. It's one of those frameworks problems. I know 100 blind people who can write Python code because you just need a text editor, and Emacs or notepad or whatever you like is perfectly fine, and then you could do all everything else at the command line. Or if you're an Emacs, you can do it all in Emacs, which in a more IDE kind of way. But it's awful hard to publish your software because unless you're using PiWX, which is kind of crafty, I guess visually, I'm told they're not the prettiest apps. You really have nowhere to go beyond that. I'm very curious about what the experience of programming is like for you. I can't fathom, and maybe this is I'm not that great of a programmer or something, but I can't fathom how I would be successful if I couldn't see my code. Are there special tools or is it keeping track of things in your head? What's the experience like? Well, yeah, you use a screen reader to read your code back on out to you. Some guys like Braille displays, that's very popular. The nice thing about a Braille display is you can see the indentation, which especially in Python becomes important. Yeah. But you keep a lot in your head. I mean, I go back, I wrote my first programs, 1970, 1971 on a PDP-8 using a teletype. You know, it wasn't even a CRT. I don't know how many people your age have even seen these things. I know a PDP-11, but not an 8. Yeah. But I'm talking about the teletype, which was used to be called a, oh, I don't know what it was called a PDP writer in those days. But it was basically a keyboard with a printer built, a dot matrix printer built in. And you wrote your code and it printed straight to paper. You didn't have even a CRT. So this was your terminal. Even at age 11, I was typing faster than it was printing anyway. So programming for me has always been a concentration thing. Even when I could still see very well, which was 15, 20 years ago, I was a reasonably sighted person. I don't think of programming in a visual sense. I think it's more of this kind of combination of concentration and muscle memory in my fingers or something. But that's just me. I would suspect if you ask that question of a dozen different blind programmers, you're going to get a dozen different answers. I think everyone has their own strategies that you've figured out. Sure, sure. I'd like to go back and hear more about how JAWS made Excel speak and opened up charts. So what's the experience like if I were using that software? In Excel, you hit the F6 key a couple of times until it says you're in the chart because F6 is the key that brings you from section of Excel to Excel. That's a lot of JAWS thing. Actually, one of the beauty of almost all Microsoft apps is they have a real lot of keyboard control built in. Yeah. Apple just never did that. So Voiceover kind of has to -- Voiceover is the screen reader on Macintosh, has to fake it a lot. Whereas a lot of this stuff is just built into Windows programs. But F6 brings the chart into focus. You could choose which axes you want, red. There are a number of options you could choose. Okay. As I hit the right arrow, read me the X and Y values. If there's multiple lines, you could read each line separately. Or you could read them together for comparison sake. We wrote that in the days before accessibility standards and accessibility API existed. Basically how we did it was we just used the VBA programmer, visual basic for applications programmer. We just sucked all the data out of the chart and we're able to just design our own presentation model in our scripting language. So there's a show I like that the BBC puts out also as a podcast called More or Less. The kind of main focus of the show is to talk about the numbers in the news. So when a real dodgy statistic is out there, they'll try and get to the bottom of it. So I really enjoyed that. And they did something kind of clever once, wanted to get your take on it. It was when the whole topic of spurious correlations, that website was put up where they're finding that the amount of death due to strangling is correlated with how much margarine is in the state. All these kind of just weird things. It's basically a statement of, well, as it says, spurious correlations. So what they did was they got a violin player to come in, or I guess two violin players, and kind of play a tone up and down to follow the rise and fall of those two trends. So you could hear how the sound line up. Now, certainly it was a cute and clever way to present it. I'm not sure how practical or useful that is. Do you think there's anything there? Is that something worth exploring? Yeah, certainly. Curve sonification is a really useful way of presenting that information. Especially if the curves A, if you don't have too many curves in the same graph, if you have two, you know, you could have one, yeah, you could probably put one on the cello and the other on the violin and see even here where the cross and things. That would be interesting, but if there were 30 lines on that graph, being able to tell the bassoon from the oboe might be problematic for some people. A million years ago, before I even knew I was going to be totally blind at some point, I knew my vision was deteriorating, but there was a computer called the Atari 800. I was writing little assembly routines to graph equations just because I thought that was cool. Yet doing math on an Atari 800 was really slow, but doing audio on it was really fast because it had a separate audio processor, so you could offload your audio. So I actually did something like that just by increasing and decreasing pitch, just so that there was something happening on the screen while you waited for the next damn dot on the graph to appear. I kind of had that idea sort of instinctively, and I think a lot of other people do too. The problem is how do you do like a real chaos graph? I mean something, you know, with really sharp peaks and valleys. Yeah, a stock ticker maybe. Yeah, yeah, or something like that. You know, if it was just, it would come off, I think, sounding very staticky if there was a lot, if it was really high variation data. So the answer is, you call my friend Cina Barram. He's a human factor specialist at NC State. You sent him a quarter million dollars and you tell him to do the research. And when the paper is published, we'll know what to do. Well, I hope I've got a benefactor listening and we can get down that grant process. I also wanted to ask you your thoughts about accessibility and how that affects and skews statistics. I hope I can take it for granted that any election in the country is accessible. Maybe I'm too optimistic, I don't know, but certainly I would imagine there are other ways in which people fail to get counted because they can engage with the data collection mechanism. You know, how much of a problem do we have along these lines, do you think? Elections are a tightly protected right. I never understand how government purchase has happened because these vendors of voting machines seem to do nothing else and they don't seem to be very smart. But they were all required to build accessibility in. If I go to my voting machine here in my precinct in Florida, I plug in my headphones and everything reads aloud to me. So voting is a pretty solved problem. At least places that I have voting machines. With a paper ballot, I would just ask an elections official to come in with me, I suppose. And help me just read it to me. You can usually tell who I'm going to vote for just by the way I look walking in the door. So there are not too many Donald Trump supporters with my get up. But various petitions, some are entirely accessible, some are entirely inaccessible. Sometimes, because of an accessibility problem, a form will appear to be accessible. But you'll be checking, you know, if it's a series of checkboxes, by default, it's supposed to read label, object type, object state. So this item, checkbox, not checked. But if the HTML's code is the label comes afterward, you'll think the previous label was the label is what you're checking. So it could appear to be perfectly accessible, but entirely wrong as well. So it's in the accessibility standards, it's something called reading order, which is pretty important. Also, again, it helps your search engine optimization because with a more sophisticated search engine, it actually understands the flow of things and can more readily derive information. A website that doesn't have its reading order properly, proper and it's semantic tagging at all. Semantic tagging is a fancy word for saying, use headings at meaningful levels. And use the language tag, you know, if you're going to change from English to Spanish in your writing, use the Spanish tag and then change back to English so that the speech synthesizer knows what language is speaking, things like that. But that also, again, helps your search engines as well. We could clearly talk on and on about technology. Interestingly enough, I think we also connected to skeptics. I'd love to hear how you found your way into that world as well. I think I saw an interview or something with James Randy, and I grew up with James Randy on the Carson Show. Sure, yeah. You know, I always knew about him and I always knew he was debunking. And I think I saw him interviewed and I think I saw something about J. ref and I started looking for podcasts and I found my way to SGU, which seems to be the, what do they call it, the entry level drug for skeptics or something? Sounds right to me, yeah. Everyone seems to get there to find SGU first. From there, I found Skepchik through Rebecca, who was on SGU, and Skepchik's website had a lot of accessibility problems. I sent Rebecca a note saying, "Hey, I'd like to fix this for you." And I write a guest post and I did and she and I became friends. And we started Skeptility, which is the disability-oriented Skepchik sister site. A few years ago, I did pod delusion. It was a really great podcast from the British Humanist Association, but we went dark two or three years ago. The two people, James and Liz, who ran it, I mean, they worked there really, really. I mean, you know what I'd like to put out a weekly podcast? I'd be two of them, did it for five years, so it was time for them to move on. That's quite a wonderful run. And then I started going to the various conferences and things. I've never been to a TAM, but I go to QED in Manchester every year, which is really, really, really great, great conference. It's run by the Merseyside skeptics. It's all volunteer run. There's no green room. So the celebrity, Skepchik, have no place to go hide. A few years ago, there was an overflow panel. And I was in a chair, but my guide dog was on the floor next to me, as he always is. And Richard Dawkins was sitting on the floor on the other side of my dog. If you're a QED, everyone's treated pretty equal, and it's really fun. You get to meet the people. I got to meet Lawrence Kraus and Carrie Poppy and Nate Phelps. I mean, you know, you know, it's just there. It's a really fun event. We went to Skepchikon last year. That was kind of cool. So we do that. And then that's about it for my skeptical activism. I read a lot of blogs. I listen to podcasts and stuff. Excellent. Any recommendations? Well, a big fan of this thing called the data skeptic. I listened to it. I actually listened to it. I listened to all the interviews. I skipped some of the mini episodes because I know that the subject and don't need a refresher, but other podcasts. I'm a big fan of, of course, skeptics with a K, which is Merseyside skeptics. Michael Marshall's be reasonable is got to be the most frustrating podcast in skepticism to listen to. But it's also pretty amazing at the same time because Marsh just, he's this really super nice guy. And he'll get these people with completely bizarre ideas. I mean, the first episode they did was a guy who really believes that we live on a flat earth. And he does these lengthy interviews with him that are entirely respectful and friendly and whatnot. So I'm a, I like that one. That's pretty frustrating. A Skeptoid, of course. I mean, you know, once a week, you know, Brian Dunning gives us 10 or 15 minutes of something really good. I'm really happy to see Brian Dunning's back like five or six weeks in a row. I don't know what happened with him, but he had guests for guest hosts for months and it's really nice to hear him back. Yeah, for sure. Token skeptic Kylie Sturgis podcast. I love Kylie Sturgis. She's as a person. She's a lovely, lovely, just, just, you can ever, you ever run into her anywhere? Go hang out with her. You're already friends. You just haven't met yet. I mean, she's that kind of person. Skeptic zone's good. Now I feel like a God, if I forget any, I'm going to have a friend who's going to be annoyed with me. Oh, I always have the same worry when I'm making a list like this. Yeah. I'm trying to think of who does and does not have a podcast anymore. But anyway, yeah, that's this. I certainly listened to that, but I'm sure conspiracy skeptic. It doesn't publish very often, but it's really good. I enjoy that one. Atheist Nomads. I was on that podcast once. It's really good, but the problem with those guys is they'll record for three hours and then put a two and a half hour podcast out. And as a podcast guest, three hours into it, you're ready to die. I have no idea why they wanted to talk to me for that long. I'm really not that interesting. Well, on top of conferences and all that, I hope we find one we can meet up at in person in the near future. Anything else you think we should touch on before we sign off? Please, if you make a website or an app, try to be accessible. And if you need help, feel free to write to me, and I'll send you the same package of pointers to free materials that I send everybody in. Yeah, and you had mentioned a tool. I'll be sure to put it in the show notes, but just in case anyone's winding up and ready to Google something, can you remind me what that was? There was some system that would... There are two tools that I'm willing to recommend. There's about 50 out there, but there's two. One's called Tenon. One's called Tenon.io, that's T-E-N-O-N-D-I-O. That's by a guy named Carl Groves. He's a really great guy, and that's a really good program. And the other is Axe, like an Axe you chop a tree down with, and it's by a company called DQ Systems, which is spelled D-E-Q-U-E. If you're a computer science major in college, you might remember the DQing algorithm. Pretty Kumar, who runs that company named Turbizness for an outgroup. Very cool. Excellent. Well, yeah, I'll be sure to get all those in the show notes, and I myself am going to go have to check data skeptic.com and hope that I've either got no flags or certainly get them resolved as soon as I can. And yeah, thanks again for being accommodating on the time and me losing my voice. I know you just had a house guest, so glad we were able to sync up. Yeah, Shelley Segal, the amazing singer-songwriter from Australia. She has an album called An Atheist Album. That was the first of the three or four albums she's got now. I think a lot of your listeners would really enjoy it, and you can get on band camp or ever else. I always recommend band camp, because you can download in the lossless format, and the artists keep more than they do for my kids or elsewhere. Excellent. Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks again Chris. This has been a great show. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
