Kevin Shaw

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My Current Startup: MenuVox

Imagine that you’re like me, and live with sight loss. Picture yourself at the table in a busy cafe or restaurant. How do you read the menu?

You don’t read braille. Your server is too busy to read the menu to you. Your OCR apps aren’t cutting it. Scanning a QR code takes you to an inaccessible photo of the menu and the restaurant’s website is a mess. You feel uncomfortable asking for help and so you get “the special” without knowing your favourite meal is available.

My latest startup, Menuvox, solves these problems with a location-based app and service that pushes an accessible restaurant menu right to a diner’s smart phone. 

I got the idea for MenuVox after I found myself alone in a chain restaurant—trying very hard to navigate the restaurant’s website on my mobile phone. It was a mess. I thought, “there has to be a better way to do this.”

MenuVox solves a number of problems with the dine-in experience for those with and without sight:

  • Eliminates the need for braille menus. Braille is expensive to produce and fewer than 1 in 4 in the sight loss community read braille regularly. 
  • Increases dignity and independence for people with sight loss.
  • Improves hygiene and reduces viral and bacterial transmission. Since the menu is on the user’s phone, no need to share menus or print disposable paper menus.
  • Improves the efficiency of serving staff. Less time spent reading the menu aloud to a customer with sight loss is more time spent serving others.
  • Reduces app clutter. One app works in every location that supports MenuVox. No need for multiple restaurant apps on your phone.

Unlike other apps that focus on delivery, discovery, reviews or reservations, MenuVox is focused on the experience of being at the table. The app lets the  user adjust the display settings of their phone to make the text more legible or have their screen reader read the menu aloud. Since the app is location-based, there’s no need to scan QR codes or scroll through a list of nearby restaurants. MenuVox will even work in underground malls and food courts.

MenuVox is poised to launch in 2022.

Interview with Sean David Morton About Sands of Time

While working at CHRY Radio, I had the chance to interview Sean David Morton about his incredible novel Sands of Time. I’ve pulled these out of my archives and am reposting them here. My review of his novel was published in American Free Press. The book review is below.

 

Sands of Time Interview on CHRY Radio

 

My Book Review for Sands of Time

UFO disclosure books are typically boring to the casually interested lei person who wants the thirty thousand foot view of what the government has been hiding for the past 80 years. These are the books your foil-hatted, slightly twitchy distant cousin reads and argues about at Thanksgiving dinner.

 

Sands of Time IS NOT one of these books. This epic series from Sean David Morton brilliantly wraps the true facts of UFO disclosure into vivid, quasi-fictional novels written for the everyday reader.

 

Morton was an acclaimed screen writer and TV producer with groundbreaking stories on international shows like Hard Copy and Unsolved Mysteries. Concurrent to his TV career, Sean made a name for himself as one of America’s most prescient intuitives and most popular guests on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell in the 1990s after discovering a desert hilltop that overlooked the secret Area 51 base in the Nevada desert

Sean accurately predicted major earthquakes and political headlines months in advance—both on the air and in print through his Delphi associates Newsletter—a full colour prophecy magazine with 14,000 readers at its peak. This pedigree attracted thousands to his lectures across America including a fedora-wearing mystery man who inconspicuously hung out and pointed Sean towards researching various shadow government, ET and UFO topics.

 

In 2009, this mystery man bequeathed a stack of journals to Sean via a spooky law firm after he had “moved on” (their words). The handwritten journals were the real deal, revealing this unassuming man to be the head of a nameless, supra-governmental, unaffiliated global organization whose sole mission was to protect the Earth from real extra-terrestrial threats using advanced technology and nearly limitless resources.

 

Morton created his magnum opus as a 

novelized story of this man’s life while mixing in the true history of events that have cemented themselves into the fabric of American UFO culture—all with hard science for the skeptic. 

 

Physicist Dr. Theodore Humphrey, the series’ protagonist, tells the story from his perspective in Books 1 and 2 after his reclusive scientist father disappears into the Barstow desert before he heads to USC and Cal Tech and is then pulled into the shadowy underworld of advanced physics, time research and covert programs over the next 40 years. Ted weaves in details about the Philadelphia Experiment, the Roswell crash, the Montauk Project, Area 51, the Dulce Mesa and Die Glock or the Nazi Bell—all without boring the reader.

 

Morton shifts to third person perspective for the Time Runner books where he moves beyond pop-disclosure material to the hidden history of the ET-imposed Isolation memorandum, the secrets behind true teleportation through both time and space and the race against the calendar to prepare Earth for a coming invasion in this decade. Books 1, 2 and 3 are made more exciting with the spectre of time-traveling Nazi scientists intent on thwarting Dr. Humphrey’s plans.

 

Like a great film director, Morton pulls us into the user-friendly narrative right away and never lets go—no doubt the result of his experience as a skilled screenwriter. The lei reader will enjoy casting a miniseries in their head with rich, nuanced descriptions of settings and characters. Sean gets the little details just right without stooping to the pedantry of Dan Brown. The plot is well-paced with the right mix of action, drama and exposition. Characters, including the villains, are believable, real and complex without resorting to comic book cliche or kitsch. Ted Humphrey and those who work alongside him love, lust, fear, blunder and emote like real human beings with 20th century day jobs. Convincing, varied, light and often humorous dialog keeps the reader interested and engaged throughout.

 

The shocking takeaway is not the revelation humans are working feverishly to stop an alien invasion, the discovery of time travel, Einstein’s grand unified theory or the reverse-engineered alien tech. The truly amazing revelation is that real men and women are engaged in these endeavours as part of their everyday mundane lives in a breakaway society that has been hidden in plain sight for nearly eight decades. This is the story Sean’s shadowy fedora-wearing informant wanted him to tell the world.

 

The crux of the journals can be summed up in one line from Admiral Jacobs—a character from book 1 who lectures Ted before assigning him to dig a crucial equation out of an aging third reich Nazi scientist hidden on a North Atlantic island. “We are not monsters, we are flesh and blood humans fighting for all humanity. If we lose the essence of what we are along the way, then what is the point?”

 

While the UFO conspiracy fanatic will enjoy these books for the detailed history of government cover-ups, it is the perfect gateway series for the casual adventure-seeking reader who wants a reality-based novel to sweep them away and who is willing to consider the possibility that not everything is at it seems. 

 

You can read the Sands of Time series by getting it on Amazon or through the Strange Universe Radio website. As Sean says, “It’s a strange universe and we just work here!”

In Memorium – Sean David Morton

My first encounter with Sean David Morton Was on March 13, 1997. I’d been listening to Coast to Coast AM ever since I withdrew from my first year of broadcasting school. At the time, I was slowly going blind—losing the low vision I’d been blessed with since birth to my congenital eye condition. I’d been waiting for over six months for surgery that could have potentially saved my vision, but a doctor’s strike was keeping me at home, out of school and up all night listening to Coast to Coast Am with Art Bell—the number one rated overnight radio show in North America at that time.

 

By this time, , I had fallen into depression, hopelessness and despair about my own life, the future and the world around me. I had prayed, but it didn’t feel like God was listening to anything I was saying. Then Sean came on the radio—guns blazing about the Phoenix lights, the Area 51 interview with Victor, the prophecies of the Great Pyramid, the Bible, the future and so much more. I was hooked and I didn’t want the ride to end. Back in those days, I had to tune in to Art’s AM affiliate in Cleveland which I could only get at night and if the radio conditions were just right in Toronto.

 

Sean’s message about a plan for humanity and our future restored that hope within me and began to lift me out of the funk I’d been in for months. Within a week, my surgery was scheduled and I began to feel better. About nine months later, I finally lost all of my sight, just before Christmas of 1997—truly the nadir of my existence. Sean was on with Art again soon after giving predictions about the coming year and I took his message of hope for humanity to heart, vowing to push through long enough to see some of the amazing things he was talking about. 

 

I rebuilt my life, returning to school, becoming a DJ and falling in love with sound and radio. Over the next five years, I’d listen to Sean’s radio shows, read his Vajra Chronicles and subscribe to the Delphi Associates Newsletter… many of which I kept in protective plastic sleeves like Spiderman comics. 

 

I never thought I’d get the chance to meet Sean, but I decided to face the unknown and travel down to a seminar in Chicago on my own to meet him in 2002. Attending a Sean David Morton seminar was part tent revival, part X-Files episode and part yoga retreat. We were all on the edge of our seats the entire weekend as Sean dove deep into the topics he couldn’t talk about on the Art Bell show. 

 

Sean, his wife Melissa and I pose together in a Chicago hotel.

 

We met again a couple of years later when I flew down to California to attend another retreat in Santa Barbara. Sean and his adorable wife Melissa took me to a comedy show at the legendary Comedy magic Club on Hermosa Beach before we hung out at his house.

 

Over the years, we stayed in touch while Sean moved his radio show online to Revolution Radio. He was gracious enough to come on and do my radio show several times while I worked at CHRY community radio in Toronto. He was certainly the most interesting person I’d ever met.

 

I’ll cherish our time hanging out and joking around in Montreal and when he came to Toronto to visit. It was truly a glorious honour to break bread with him and have some one on one face time. 

 

After countless years of friendship from both near and far, Sean had one of the deepest impacts on my thinking, my spiritual growth, my attitude and my life. I would not have the hope-filled perspective I do today had it not been for his kindness, wisdom, humour, brilliant insights and all of that Irish folk knowledge he delivered with style and a smile. Even when the chips were down and he was at his lowest points, I stuck by him as a friend and brother ready to help any way I could. 

 

 

May Sean’s long sleep be peaceful.

 

Obituary for Sean David Morton

Sean David Morton, PhD, left this mortal realm on December 18, 2024, after a long, valiant fight against cancer. He was born on October 1, 1958 in Santa Monica, CA. 

 

Sean was a writer most of his life, having won national competitions for writing and poetry while at Woodside High in Woodside, CA. He went on to study in Canada, India, Nepal, Egypt, and England’s Oxford University. He traveled the Middle East while in his teens and attended school in Egypt, Stanford Univ. in CA, and then earned degrees in Political Science and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. He additionally earned advance degrees in Theology and a PhD in Psychology. He lived at a Tibetan Sangha and worked at the children’s orphanage in Dharmsala, India, where he studied with the Dalai Lama, and lived as a novitiate monk at the Black Hat Karma Kagyu monastery in T’ang Boyche, Nepal. He has taught and lectured in Japan, Sweden, Holland, Canada, England, Ireland, and Turkey, and he has spoken at conferences across America and around the world.

 

Sean’s investigations into military Black Ops, Top Secret government programs, the Dulce Mesa, Area 51, and his stunningly accurate predictions of coming events brought him international recognition as America’s premier futurist. He broke the stories on The Phoenix Lights, the Chupacabra, stunning revelations about flights TWA 800, MH 370, and MH 17, the deaths of Princess Diana and JFK, Jr. A pioneer of Remote Viewing (which he also taught), he was called “America’s Prophet” by Coast-to-Coast AM’s Art Bell (where he was the #1 guest – to global audiences of over 26 million). His stunning predictions included 9/11 (predicted in 1994), plus the 1987 Loma Prieta (S.F. Bay Area), Northridge, CA and Kobe, Japan earthquakes. 

 

Sean was also an award-winning independent filmmaker. He wrote and directed documentaries such as UFO Contactees, The Prophecy of the Pyramids, plus he wrote and directed the hit cult comedy movie, Joe Killionaire. He worked as a TV reporter, writer, producer and consultant for Sightings, Hard Copy, Strange Universe, Geraldo, Ancient Aliens and Unsolved Mysteries, in addition to appearing as an expert on countless TV and radio shows. He co-founded the Sci-Fi Channel and UPN/CW with shows like Declassified and Mysteries From Beyond the Other Dominion. 

 

For 17 years Sean published the award-winning Delphi Associates Newsletter and ran The Prophecy Research Institute, to warn the world of all the dire times that still lie ahead. His beloved Strange Universe Radio program was the Internet’s #1 talk show, listened to by millions worldwide. Author of the Vatican spy thrillers The Black Seraph Chronicles, The Dark Prophet, and his Sands of Times series is his third amazing, bestselling five-star reviewed novel series. 

 

Sean worked on a tireless lifelong quest to work for the enlightenment of all sentient beings and bring the light of world media to the Ascension of mankind, never losing sight of the fact that the best way to enlighten is to entertain. His visions, intensity of information, encyclopedic recall and sense of humor brought him sold out crowds, making him the #1 most popular speaker of his time.

 

Sean wrote the groundbreaking and acclaimed 9-book “Sands of Time” series with the final two books to be published soon.

Sean is survived by his wife Melissa (Thomson), brother Gerard Thomas Morton III (Mercedes), and sister Colleen Morton Anderson (Grant). As a last act of service, he has donated his body for research. Celebrations of Life will be held in connection with Expos — dates to be announced..

How Toronto Spawned the Best Mix DJs in the World

I absolutely love a great DJ mix, especially one that seamlessly blends disparate genres into a cohesive mix the creates a vibe. Growing up in Toronto and hearing DJs spin at events and on the radio, it’s my opinion that Toronto DJs are the best in the world when it comes to mixing with diversity and skill—driving a party vibe in the club, at events and on the air.

Toronto’s global status as a DJ powerhouse didn’t happen by chance. The city, a vibrant mix of cultures and histories, mirrors both New York and England in its eclecticism and influence from colonial and cultural tides. Like New York, Toronto has long embraced diversity in music; like England, it has remained a cultural melting pot, with a sound shaped by Caribbean, European, African, and South Asian roots. This mix gave birth to an exceptional set of DJs who could blend genres in a way that transcends typical radio format boundaries and resonates across communities.

Defining the Best: Juggling and Selecting

What sets Toronto’s DJs apart from others is a balanced mastery of both juggling and selecting.

Juggling is the technical prowess—the skill of effortlessly cutting, scratching, beat matching, and transitioning from song to song. Today, this is accomplished with sophisticated DJ software running on a laptop holding thousands of songs. Back in the day however, DJs built their skills with two variable speed record turntables, a DJ mixer and hundreds of records carried around in milk crates..

Selecting is the artistic side of knowing exactly which song to play to get the crowd to feel and respond, whether that’s filling a dance floor or lighting up radio station phone lines. A stellar DJ was skilled at both.

Graph titled 'Ideal DJ Skillset' showing a 2x2 grid with labeled axes. The X-axis is labeled 'Juggling' with a positive sign (+) on the right and a negative sign (-) on the left. The Y-axis is labeled 'Selecting' with a positive sign (+) at the top and a negative sign (-) at the bottom. A green checkmark is placed in the upper right quadrant, representing DJs who excel in both juggling and selecting. The graph has a slight 3D effect with soft shadows, thin black grid lines, and a subtle gradient background.

In a city that values a great party vibe over technical wizardry alone, Toronto leans towards DJs who can mix as well as they can cut.

In this context, mixing is when a DJ beat matches two songs and creates a flowing, smooth transition between them. This is often done over 4 or 8 bars where both songs are playing simultaneously until the crossfade is complete. Sometimes, this overlap can create a remix where the vocals of one song are heard over the instrumental of another.

Cutting is when a DJ will sometimes beat match two songs and rapidly transition from one to the other without an overlap.

While global DJ icons like DJ Jazzy Jeff represent the “cut” style of DJing, Toronto’s party DJs have long emphasized a mixing style that flows from song to song, creating a show that’s inventive, cohesive and immersive.  Unlike pure scratch DJs, who focus on the intricacies of sound manipulation, Toronto DJs blend various genres and beats to keep crowds moving.

The Spirit of Toronto Radio

Toronto’s radio scene in the 80s and 90s played a pivotal role in creating the fertile ground for its DJ scene to emerge. The city’s AM and FM dials were among the most diverse in North America, offering top 100 hits, jazz, dance, community, rock, country, oldies and easy-listening stations. Community radio stations like CHRY, CKLN and CIUT were essential in amplifying styles like hip-hop, reggae, soca, bhangra, Bollywood, jungle, and other genres not heard on their commercial counterparts. Ethnic stations like CHIN FM and CIAO broadened musical and cultural awareness to the average Torontonian in the home of a friend or getting into a cab. The music from these radio shows became cultural threads that wove through neighbourhoods, parties, and public spaces, connecting the city’s diverse groups and building recognition.

The influence of radio brought Toronto’s culturally diverse neighbourhoods together in a way that was rare in North America. Areas like Jane-Finch, North Scarborough, Flemingdon, Malvern, Brampton, Mississauga and Eglinton West became vibrant communities where cultures and music mixed freely at school dances, house parties, family weddings, and festivals. This is where many DJs began their craft, often using home equipment—sometimes building their own speaker boxes. This gave rise to the first mobile sound systems. Basement and rent parties for extended families in various diasporas also allowed DJs to hone their craft. The children of first generation immigrants would often sleep in the coat room as adults played and mixed music in the basement or backyard late into the night.

These children grew up, learning DJ skills at home. This new generation of young DJs pooled their record collections, often made of rare records bought out of town in US cities like Detroit, NYC and Buffalo. This established the first “sound crews” and cross-cultural playlists that shaped Toronto’s unique DJ sound.

Experimentation and Innovation

Club DJs provided the hits and high-energy rhythms that defined nights out. Radio stations often broadcasted these DJ sets live from the clubs, exposing the listener to these club bangers. During the day however, Toronto radio became a playground for innovation. Daytime radio DJs mixed genres that weren’t heard in clubs or mixed together on radio. A lunch time radio set might include genres as disparate as Motown, disco, funk, yacht rock, AM classics, Bollywood, reggae, hip-hop, and soca. DJs like DJ Starting from Scratch, The Juiceman Jonathan Shaw, Jester and DJ Clymaxxx emerged, spinning genre-crossing sets that defined the unique sound of Toronto mix DJs—placing many of them in high esteem among others in their craft.

New Formats, New Audiences

Toronto’s DJ culture went beyond being heard in clubs and on-air. It evolved into a DJ community marked by innovation, with new outlets for new business models and methods of engagement.

This included Scratch Lab—one of Canada’s first DJ schools, Raina Music—an environmental music service providing mixed music for the hospitality sector and Xtendamix—a video remixing service for DJs.

Toronto DJs developed unique business models, and the profession became a mainstay in Toronto’s entertainment sector, branching out into streaming on platforms like Twitch and performing in new spaces. As Toronto DJ culture continues to evolve, the DJs are connecting audiences in fresh and inventive ways. One example is Grocery Store Hits, a Saturday morning mix show on Twitch featuring DJ Jay Online, who dons a Walmart vest to mix and remix soft rock and pop classics that are the staple in grocery stores. Another is Mista Jiggz who has crafted unique remixes for charity fundraisers and other events in the city.

Toronto remains a DJ powerhouse, giving rise to talent who can both juggle and select with remarkable skill, capturing the city’s unique pulse and channeling it into a blend that’s as rich and diverse as the city itself. With each performance, Toronto DJs continue to set a high standard, representing the unique power of music to bring people together across backgrounds, preferences, and generations.

GR

If Screen Readers Were Airlines

Based on an old Internet post from 1995 comparing operating systems to airlines, I revived the analogy to screen readers.

 

JAWS Air

 When you get to the airport, you’re given extra bags to bring with you whether you want them or not. The planes are old, clunky and way bigger than last year’s planes, but at least there’s leg room. You can fly to all of the popular spots, but by bringing your own avionics engineer, you can   get your plane to fly almost anywhere. 
You’re constantly told that turbulence and crashing into the ground in a giant fireball can be avoided if you fly a plane with a faster engine.

Instead of windows, passengers look at screens that show the outside world

 

Window-Eyes Air

Just like JAWS Air, however you must board the plane from the rear. All of the seats face backward. Everyone who flew with them fondly reminisces about how much better Window-eyes Air is when compared to JAWS Air.

 

NVDA Airlines:

A few passengers who were fed up with JAWS Air decide to start their own airline. The planes look like JaWS planes, only smaller. Passengers are generally treated well and the planes fly to lots of great places. The only catch is that it’s recommended you bring your own flight attendant as the one provided has their jaw wired shut after a brawl in the JAWS Air lounge.

After a quick tutorial, yOu install your own flight attendant and the flight is very efficient and comfortable. When you tell your friends about your  great NVDA airlines experience, they ask “You have to do what with the flight attendant?”

 

Narrator Airlines

You see the planes all the time, but don’t know anyone who has flown on one for longer than an hour.
When a JAWS Air plane stalls, you parachute out of your plane, run to the nearest airport, hop on  Narrator Airlines, circle the airport and wait until you see a JAWS Air plane appear on the runway.

 

VoiceOver Airways

The futuristic, spaceship-like  planes are everywhere. Unlike JAWS or NVDA Airlines, VoiceOver Airways flies out of a totally separate, sleek, state-of-the-art airport. The all white planes fly to tons of destinations, but each one must build special all white runways and terminals for VoiceOver Airways planes.
Check-in, boarding, flying, disembarking and baggage claim all go effortlessly and the flight is smooth and comfortable. the in-flight meal is tasty, the flight attendants are all very friendly and the entertainment system is out of this world. You find yourself relaxing and enjoying your flight. For no reason whatsoever, your plane explodes mid-flight. As you fall towards the ground, another airplane suddenly materializes around you and you continue flying as if nothing happened.

 

Talkback Airlines

Passengers run onto the runway, form a giant square around the plane and then hop on. For some reason, the plane flies straight, then right, straight then right until you reach your destination.

 

System access Airlines

Passengers push the airplane, hop on and fly until the airplane stops. They all get out, push the plane again and repeat the process until they get to their destination.

 

ChromeVox Airlines

Like narrator Airlines, you don’t know anyone who has flown with them, but their TV advertising looks cool. The flight attendants all seem very nice, but they ask lots of prying questions about your personal life. While your flight is okay, you can’t help but feel as if you’re being stared at.

Career Trek: Mind Your Own Business

History and concept

During my time working for CNIB as the program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation, I was approached by Accessible Media Inc.. This is a national cable broadcaster in Canada with mandatory carriage on both cable and satellite. AMI TV carries TV shows, movies and original programming with both captioning and described video.

 

AMI asked me whether I’d be interested in hosting a show focused on entrepreneurs with disabilities. I said yes and then, as is typical in television production, nothing happened. In the fall of 2021, I finally got the call that I’d been matched with a production company to produce a pilot episode. This is an episode that often never makes it to air, but gives the network an overall idea of the structure , tone and look of the show. AMI approved the pilot and we began production on season 1. 

 

The concept of the show is quite simple; entrepreneurs with disabilities share their story along with a particular business challenge they’re facing. A panel of mentors advises the entrepreneur and we then follow up to see whether they have taken on the challenge. 

 

We began shooting in early 2022 with 8 entrepreneurs from a wide variety of backgrounds and in every stage of business. Along with hosting, I played a role in casting, writing and structuring the show. My cohost, Purdeep Sangha, shot the follow-up episodes with each entrepreneur. After months of shooting and editing, season 1 went on the air in the summer of 2022 and received positive reviews.

 

The show was renewed for a second season in 2023 and a third season in the same year. Season 4 is scheduled to air in the fall of 2024 on  AMI TV.

 

How I Adapted

I have a background in radio and television production having attended Toronto Metropolitan University and working at CHRY for nearly 8 years, so working in front of TV cameras was not a big adjustment for me. The hardest part of live-to-tape production is knowing your script lines and waiting around for the technical aspects of the production to be taken care of. Our production company has been fantastic to work with and I’ve had the privilege of working with top-tier makeup artists, sound technicians and directors who are all consummate professionals.

I memorized many of my opening and closing scripts, something challenging even for sighted actors to do for 8 episodes at a time. It’s a good idea to use the down time on set to work on your scripts, your vocal warm-ups and your delivery.

 

You can watch this season and prior seasons of Mind Your Own Business on the AMI website and through the fully accessible AMI TV app for both iPhone and Android.

 

Kevin on the Set of Mind Your Own Business in front of a logo for the show.

4 Ways I’d Change the Way Radio is Taught in College

I worked in radio for nearly 8 years at CHRY Radio (now Vibe 105) in Toronto. During that time, I worked with many interns from the local college radio program. Many of them were bright, serious and engaged students who worked hard at mastering the nuances of the medium. Many still work in broadcasting currently and I consider it a privilege to have mentored and worked alongside many of these people.

 

As I spent more time at CHRY, I noticed that our younger interns enjoyed working at the radio station, but didn’t engage with the medium outside of their job. It wasn’t their fault; by the end of the first decade of this century, podcasting, satellite radio, Internet radio and on-demand music streaming had displaced terrestrial radio. It had become the media your parents consumed in the car. The result of this shift was a group of students that were checked out of what they ere at school to study. Students suffered, the industry suffered and the medium suffered because schools hadn’t caught up to the new reality.

 

College radio courses need an overhaul. Here are 4 ways I’d change the way radio is taught in schools to yield more engaged college radio grads that are smarter and more competitive. 

 

1. Teach Musicology and Music Appreciation

In preparing this post, I did some research on four large college radio programs around the Greater Toronto Area. Not a single college teaches basic musicology as part of its media programs. I began realizing this was a problem when I was teaching interns how to edit bars and beats to cut music tracks. Many college students couldn’t identify the downbeat, the backbeat or the post in a song to line up a VoiceOver track. I couldn’t really blame the students; this was a generation that grew up with gutted music programs in public schools, the ubiquity of software like Garage Band and no collective experience of having to learn an instrument in junior high whether they had an aptitude for it or not.

 

Graduate better students by providing one mandatory course in popular musicology where students are trained to recognize and identify basic musical concepts such as tempo, meter, key, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, timbre, texture and form. Students should also know how to recognize and identify the studio techniques that accompany pop music production including: reverb, echo, delay, compression, gating, EQ and so on. Students should be able to apply this musical knowledge to any genre and understand how these elements can be programmed on air to create musical flow. 

 

2. Teach Music History

Out of the four colleges I researched in or near the GTA—Humber College, Seneca College, Durham College and Fanshawe College—only one, Fanshawe, had a music history course for its radio students.

Students today are taught to front sell and back sell their announcing with the ubiquitous music scheduler that serves up a station’s tracks for the day based on rules. Many of the students I worked with were not invested in the music they played out in the commercial world, but came alive when they were the ones responsible for selecting the music for a show at CHRY.

Radio schools can make better graduates by teaching the history of pop music starting with the blues and working their way forward through rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, pop and all of the other genres that exploded onto the airwaves over the past 70 years—including international genres. In addition to the music, students should be exposed to the role of—and advances in—technology, social, commercial and economic factors as well as political factors that affected and changed music  history. Radio itself played an important role in shaping the sounds that were the backdrop to generations of people. Students should complete the course and be able to apply this knowledge to music programming and on air delivery. 

 

3. Teach Entrepreneurship

Today’s media landscape is very different from the one I entered after I left high school in the 90s. While terrestrial radio struggles to stay relevant amidst audience segmentation and a variety of offerings, there are unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth and new ideas for programming both mainstream and alternative content.

Colleges like Fanshawe College teach students how to generate new programming ideas, but I propose going further by developing techniques for pitching sustainable ideas including content for syndication, monetized Internet content, audio architecture and branded content as well as other types of audio programming. Each of these can have a terrestrial broadcast component or blaze new trails. Tied into this, students should be taught how to pitch and the role of sales beyond filling avails with 30s and adjacencies.

 

4. Graduate Smaller Classes

I was shocked to hear radio colleges graduated classes of around 50 to 60 students, depending on the college. Multiply this by the number of colleges offering radio programs across Canada and the US. Then, look at the current job openings in radio.

 

Today’s music radio station can run with less than 10 staff, not including salespeople who are usually out hustling up leads. Combine this reality with diminishing revenues, automation and local management arrangements (LMAs) and a lack of opportunity will make perfect sense. Reducing class size is one way to ensure only the best make it out of radio college and that there are opportunities in the industry. 

 

Having said this, there are opportunities as mentioned in the third point. Students who leave college with the ability to do new things with new media are the ones who will be rewarded in the future while legacy media looks on and wonders how they did it.

Career Trek: Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility touched my life soon after I lost the low vision I’d been using since birth.

I learned JAWS for Windows rather quickly after switching from a Mac to using a Windows-based PC full time. I could use the productivity apps that mattered for university—Word, Excel, e-mail, web-browsing and a calendar.

The real accessibility struggle started when I tried using JAWS with Software Audio Workshop Plus (SAW)—a PC-based multitrack audio editor we used at university. SAW was far from accessible as its controls were not seen by JAWS in its off-screen model (a database of all of the on-screen elements such as buttons and text fields).

JAWS had a powerful scripting language built into it. I attempted teaching myself how to script JAWS to work with SAW, but my high school level programming knowledge made this much more difficult. I did however learn about window classes, control types and functions—all useful building blocks to understanding digital accessibilitY. 

 

Accessibility for  Protools

After using JAWS to successfully start my radio career at CHRY, I went back to Ryerson to focus on digital accessibility in a Master of Arts program for media production. At the time, the coveted holy grail of accessibility in the sight loss community was ProTools—a Mac-based digital audio workstation (DAW)—the gold medal industry standard for working in audio production.

In late 2009, ProTools was totally unusable by a screen reader user with the only accessible buttons being Close, Minimize and Zoom. Blind audio engineer Slau Halatyn started “the ProTools Petition” which received over 1200 signatures. Slau  presented this to Avid on behalf of blind engineers, educators and enthusiasts around the world who saw ProTools as an  equalizer that could give blind people employment opportunities in the audio and music industries.

I was one of the first to test the new accessible ProTools in an academic setting. My thesis—VoiceOver in the Control Room: Usability of ProTools recording software by the blind using a screen reader—focused on examining whether a blind engineer could completely use the program in its entirety without sighted assistance to not only produce audio, but produce something of major label quality that would stand up against a modern pop or rock recording.

My thesis involved recording, editing and mixing a five-piece Toronto rock band, all while keeping notes on the accessibility of each of the main activities within ProTools. During my thesis, I learned even more about accessibility and usability as a whole as well as user experience and software design. 

 

Accessibility for  VOD

After leaving school, I had a sneaking suspicion my future was going to involve digital accessibility a fair bit. I took another basic programming course through iTunes U and picked up even more fundamentals of how computer programs were constructed from the ground up. This gave me enough knowledge to venture into the startup world where I could speak to the accessibility of video-on-demand (VOD) platforms like the one I was building. Building TellMe TV required me to communicate the ideas about accessibility to engineers. Through this process, I developed more familiarity  with concepts like HTML 5, ARIA, mobile accessibility and the world of accessible media players.

 

My work for TellMe TV got the attention of the Ryerson DMZ. Startups there wanted to know how to make their digital offerings and products accessible to the widest variety of users. This led me to develop a TEDx Talk called Design the Inclusive experience which I delivered for Ryerson in 2014 at the Royal Ontario Museum.

 

 

Accessibility for Ontario

My unique knowledge and experience caught the attention of the  Government of Ontario. In 2016, I was invited to sit on a committee to review the information and communications standards for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). This is legislation enacted in 2005 that mandated a fully accessible Ontario by 2025 in key sectors such as customer service, information, communications and education. Standards written in the early 2000s hadn’t caught up with the explosion of mobile technology as well as new types of information systems that were now on the market such as touch-screen kiosks, SMART devices such as thermostats and innovations in web technology. After much consultation and debate, we agreed to an updated standard in 2018. 

Amidst all of this, I was being tapped to review the accessibility of websites, mobile apps and other digital products by various companies, usually after I complained about not being able to use their service. Some of the changes I requested made their way into business planning software, a popular dating site and a local cable provider’s set-top box.

By the time TellMe TV and my work with the Government of Ontario was winding down, I joined CNIB and found myself wearing my accessibility advocacy hat once again as we built Venture Zone Game and CNIB Market. I was also taking an accessibility-first approach to building MenuVox—my latest startup.

 

Accessible Education

My latest accessibility work has been with Edsby—a K-12 learning platform. Edsby needed help in ensuring its web-based app was accessible to students, parents and teachers. Much of this work involved testing and reporting on the operability and perception of web components such as radio buttons, text fields and links. Often, the fixes involved simple changes to making web code more robust. I took a task-based approach to Edsby, mapping out the user journey through various activities and ensuring users could interact with the necessary components along the way. This culminated in a demo video Edsby has running on their site—showing off the accessibility of the platform.

 

Developing My Skill

Today, I work as the digital accessibility lead at Tangerine—one of Canada’s leading digital banks. I work with designers, developers, business analysts and other accessibility professionals to ensure the Tangerine app and website are fully accessible. A part of this work involves improving my knowledge about digital accessibility. Since starting at Tangerine, I’ve enrolled in the excellent digital accessibility courses from Deque (pronounced ‘Dq’) University. I am steadily working towards a certified professional accessibility core competency (CPACC) designation, having completed 3 exams and nearly 3 dozen courses in everything from document accessibility to customer service for people with disabilities. After this, the goal is to receive a designation as an international accessibility professional.

 

How I Adapted

Not every screen reader user can be an accessibility expert. Most screen reader users use their assistive tech to accomplish some other goal such as writing documents or tracking expenses in a spreadsheet. Others, like myself, want to know how the machine works and how we can make better software usable by more people. 

I learned the basics of programming in languages like Python, Java and Swift and understand how the building blocks of programs such as variables, arrays, strings, objects, functions, libraries and so on, fit together to make an application. In addition, I learned the fundamentals of how HTML works as well as how to speak to engineers about the type of behaviour I want specific websites to exhibit.

I also became familiar with the role accessibility plays in agile methodology. This is how most programming shops are set up today. Accessibility is best when it is thought of in the concept and design stage of a program or feature, not bolted on at the end to appease a tiny customer segment and avoid a law suit.

One of the most important things I did was become familiar with my assistive technology. Today’s off-the-shelf software builders often include accessibility as part of their packages, but it’s up to the screen reader user to know how to use this powerful tool at their fingertips. In addition to navigating efficiently and quickly with VoiceOver, I learned how to use its additional features such as hotspots, web spots, activities and custom gestures. In the case of desktop software, I made a point to teach myself the keyboard shortcuts in each program so I spent less time hunting around the screen and more time getting work done.