Double Tap

In 2015, after twelve surgeries, Brett Halle lost his sight completely. The engineer who spent twenty years building the Mac had to learn to use it with VoiceOver. He explains Radar, why your bug report matters more than you think, and how he treated VoiceOver like a video game.
This is part two of our tribute to Brett Halle, the former Apple engineer and friend of this show, who died on 1 October 2026. It was recorded with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece in July 2024.
Yesterday Brett took us inside Apple. Today the story turns. His retinas began detaching, surgery followed surgery, and by 2015 he was totally blind. He was running engineering at Livescribe at the time and says he was simply too busy doing his job to deal with it. Retirement in 2017 was when he set about learning, as he puts it, how to be blind properly. Blindness became another problem to work around.
He is thoughtful about accessibility inside Apple: where responsibility sits, why spreading it across every team can thin it out, and how far ahead the company plans. Then he opens up Radar, the bug system Apple engineers live out of. If it is not in Radar, it does not exist. His plea is direct: report the bug anyway. Never assume somebody else has already sent it, because the particular way you hit it might be the thing that unlocks the fix.
On learning VoiceOver he is honest. For two weeks he wanted to throw his iPhone out of the nearest window. What changed was treating the software as a puzzle, giving himself time to play and explore, the way you would approach a video game. His method is the one a blind person uses in a new hotel room: walk the perimeter, find the edges, build the map.
He had warm words for this community, calling us creative and smart and worth building for. The last word is his.
Chapters
0:00 - Remembering Brett Halle, part two
0:57 - Losing his sight in 2015
2:05 - Too busy to be blind
3:58 - Accessibility at Apple and where responsibility sits
5:42 - Why Apple switched on to accessibility
10:20 - Radar, the heart of Apple engineering
13:18 - Why your bug report matters
16:23 - Learning VoiceOver
19:47 - Walking the perimeter
22:31 - A creative community and building the best product

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About Double Tap
Hosted by the insightful duo, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, Double Tap is a treasure trove of information for anyone who's blind or partially sighted and has a passion for tech. Steven and Shaun not only demystify tech, but they also regularly feature interviews and welcome guests from the community, fostering an interactive and engaging environment. Tune in every day of the week, and you'll discover how technology can seamlessly integrate into your life, enhancing daily tasks and experiences, even if your sight is limited.
"Double Tap" is a registered trademark of Double Tap Productions Inc.

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Brett Halle sold the Apple II as a student, joined Apple in 1991, and was the first engineer through the door after Apple bought NeXT. He led the Core OS team behind Mac OS X, ran Final Cut, and quietly moved the Mac from PowerPC to Intel. This is part one of a two part tribute, in his own words.
Brett died on 1 October 2026. He was a friend of this show and a daily listener, and the best way we know to remember him is to let you hear him tell his own story. This conversation with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece was first broadcast in July 2024.
He starts at the beginning: a hardware engineer at the Byte Shop of Long Beach, selling the Apple II when it was brand new. By 1991 he was inside Apple, writing memos asking why the company kept reinventing the wheel. When Apple went looking for a new operating system he sat on the team that weighed NeXT against BeOS, Microsoft, IBM and Sun, and he explains clearly why NeXT won.
Then comes the meeting where Steve Jobs stood up, said he was willing to bet the company, looked at the engineers and told them not to mess it up. Brett was in the room. He describes Apple weeks from bankruptcy, the layoffs, the arrival of the iMac, and a secret building down the road where his team moved the entire Mac platform to Intel while almost nobody at Apple knew.
He is candid about Steve. Intense, demanding, frequently right, and the surest way to get fired was to tell him what you thought he wanted to hear. A year at Apple, Brett says, was worth seven anywhere else, and he would not have traded it. He closes on Final Cut Pro, built to push the hardware and to put a half million dollar edit suite within reach of anyone.
Part two follows tomorrow.
Chapters
0:00 - Remembering Brett Halle
1:04 - Long Beach, the Byte Shop and the Apple II
4:02 - Joining Apple and choosing NeXT
6:46 - Bringing up the microkernel on PowerPC
9:53 - Steve Jobs bets the company
11:29 - Bankruptcy, the layoffs and the iMac
13:59 - The secret building and the move to Intel
16:37 - Working for Steve Jobs
22:22 - Final Cut, FireWire and high definition

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About Double Tap
Hosted by the insightful duo, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, Double Tap is a treasure trove of information for anyone who's blind or partially sighted and has a passion for tech. Steven and Shaun not only demystify tech, but they also regularly feature interviews and welcome guests from the community, fostering an interactive and engaging environment. Tune in every day of the week, and you'll discover how technology can seamlessly integrate into your life, enhancing daily tasks and experiences, even if your sight is limited.
"Double Tap" is a registered trademark of Double Tap Productions Inc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

NASA ran an Artemis webinar built for blind and low vision people, and two of the panelists are blind NASA engineers. Steven Scott talks to Dr. Robert Shelton, Dr. Craig Moore and Christine Malec about the RS-25 rocket engine, how they built careers at NASA, and what would make space missions accessible to blind fans.
Bob Shelton has worked at NASA for almost 40 years and is now lead simulation engineer for the Commercial Crew Program. He describes joining Johnson Space Center as a blind mathematician in 1971. His first boss told him to figure out where he could make the biggest impact. Craig Moore, a chemist turned materials engineer at Marshall, explains what changed in the RS-25 between the Space Shuttle and Artemis, including 3D printed parts.
The panel also covers how AI tools like Gemini make maths PDFs readable, with equations converted to LaTeX. Christine explains why science descriptions should include the science as well as what's on screen, and how sonification turns telescope data into sound. She also wants NASA to release the astronauts' own conversations about what they saw from the far side of the Moon.
The webinar drew 800 sign-ups and over 220 live attendees, with questions ranging from digital twins to how blind people could live in space. In the feedback, Eleanor's request to Gemini goes amusingly wrong, Leander asks about alert and ringer volume in iOS 27, and Glendon James shares his thoughts on modernising braille and on the inaccessible websites blind people still have to fight with.
Chapters
0:00 – Intro
2:52 – Meet the panel and why NASA made the webinar
8:09 – Bob Shelton's path into NASA as a blind mathematician
13:22 – Inside the RS-25 rocket engine
18:47 – AI, LaTeX and accessible maths
21:43 – Audio description and sonification
27:01 – Careers at NASA and advice for blind students
33:12 – Following Artemis missions without sight
37:05 – Webinar questions and turnout
43:35 – Listener feedback: Gemini, iPhone volume and braille
Relevant Links
NASA Artemis webinar for the blind and low vision community: https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-hosts-virtual-artemis-webinar-for-blind-low-vision-community/
NASA Artemis program: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/
Chandra X-ray Observatory: https://chandra.harvard.edu/
Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/
Smooth Scotland: https://www.smoothradio.com/scotland/

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About Double Tap
Hosted by the insightful duo, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, Double Tap is a treasure trove of information for anyone who's blind or partially sighted and has a passion for tech. Steven and Shaun not only demystify tech, but they also regularly feature interviews and welcome guests from the community, fostering an interactive and engaging environment. Tune in every day of the week, and you'll discover how technology can seamlessly integrate into your life, enhancing daily tasks and experiences, even if your sight is limited.
"Double Tap" is a registered trademark of Double Tap Productions Inc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Microsoft's latest Windows event went all in on hybrid intelligence, which means AI that runs on your own PC when it can and in the cloud when it has to. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece break down what the agentic OS, a smarter Windows search and the new Copilot could mean for blind and screen reader users. They also look at the $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra.
Windows will decide where each AI task runs, using small local models or the cloud depending on the job and your privacy. Microsoft named DeepSeek, Perplexity, Hermes Agent and OpenClaw on stage, and showed a guided setup for agents that needs no terminal or config files. Steven and Shaun explain agents in plain terms: picture a thermostat that keeps working toward your goal without waiting to be told.
The new search lets you type what you want, such as changing the volume or a setting. That raises an old question: why are Windows settings still so hard to read with a screen reader? The new Copilot can work with your files on your machine, and Autopilot chains tasks together, like bundling tax documents and drafting the email to your accountant.
On the hardware side, the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra runs on NVIDIA RTX Spark with up to 128GB of unified memory. Along with the Surface Dev Box, it starts a wider conversation about data centres, more efficient models and why private, on-device AI matters for NDAs, transcription and business data.
Steven's tip is to ask your AI assistant which local models your computer can actually run. The hosts also ask whether leaning on AI costs us skills, and remember the time an accidental prompt injection deleted 21 minutes of a show.
Chapters
0:00 – Intro
0:56 – Microsoft's Windows event and hybrid intelligence
9:28 – What an agentic OS really means
16:01 – New Windows search and settings accessibility
21:18 – The new Copilot and Autopilot
30:47 – Surface Laptop Ultra and NVIDIA RTX Spark
37:31 – Which local AI models can your computer run?
41:40 – Coming up: the NASA accessibility webinar
43:15 – Copilot+ PCs, the Dev Box and data centres
52:50 – Prompt injection mishap and wrap-up
Relevant Links
Surface Laptop Ultra: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-laptop-ultra
NASA Artemis Webinar for the Blind and Low-Vision Community: https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-hosts-virtual-artemis-webinar-for-blind-low-vision-community/
Double Tap: https://doubletaponair.com/

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About Double Tap
Hosted by the insightful duo, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, Double Tap is a treasure trove of information for anyone who's blind or partially sighted and has a passion for tech. Steven and Shaun not only demystify tech, but they also regularly feature interviews and welcome guests from the community, fostering an interactive and engaging environment. Tune in every day of the week, and you'll discover how technology can seamlessly integrate into your life, enhancing daily tasks and experiences, even if your sight is limited.
"Double Tap" is a registered trademark of Double Tap Productions Inc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Google Gemini's new Guided Vision feature, built with Aira, gives blind and low vision Android users more detailed visual descriptions through Gemini Live. Steven Scott and Shaun Preece put it through real tests, then go through listener emails about Siri, iOS 27, Gemini settings and life on Android.
Steven tries Guided Vision on a Pixel 10 Pro. He uses it to find a mug on his desk and to guide his finger to a button on the RØDECaster Pro II touchscreen. It does well once you hold the camera still, but it isn't truly live yet. The hosts compare it with Be My AI and Google Lookout, and ask why it's tucked away in settings and not on iOS.
James from Missouri finds Siri on iOS 27 still sticks around after opening apps and puts reminder alerts in the notes field. That leads into a debate about on-device AI and privacy, and why Apple's image descriptions refuse some content for adults who have already verified their age.
Tom in Colorado and Connor in Sydney reply to Negative Julian's Gemini problems. Connor's fix is to turn the old Google Assistant features, Hey Google included, back on in the Gemini settings. Richard in Louisiana is losing his sight and describes juggling Bixby, Gemini, Meta and Alexa on a Samsung phone while learning TalkBack.
Chapters
0:00 – Intro and Steven's cold
1:24 – Google Gemini Guided Vision, built with Aira
5:40 – Testing Guided Vision: the mug test and a touchscreen
12:29 – Live AI expectations, Be My AI and finding the feature
18:34 – Guided Vision, Google glasses and Meta glasses
21:24 – James on Siri in iOS 27, reminders and opening apps
25:01 – Siri AI, privacy and dictation
34:09 – Censored image descriptions and the right to access
43:22 – Tom and Connor on Gemini settings for Negative Julian
49:08 – Richard on Android, Bixby and learning TalkBack
Tried Guided Vision or another live camera tool on Android? Tell us how it went. Email us, and like and subscribe for daily tech news and conversation from blind people.
Relevant Links
Guided Vision in Gemini Live: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/guided-vision-gemini-live/
Aira: https://aira.io/
Be My Eyes: https://www.bemyeyes.com/
RØDECaster Pro II: https://rode.com/en-us/products/rodecaster-pro-ii
AccessCaster: https://github.com/ShaunPreece/AccessCaster

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Subscribe to the Podcast:
Apple: https://www.doubletaponair.com/apple
Spotify: https://www.doubletaponair.com/spotify
RSS: https://www.doubletaponair.com/podcast
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About Double Tap
Hosted by the insightful duo, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, Double Tap is a treasure trove of information for anyone who's blind or partially sighted and has a passion for tech. Steven and Shaun not only demystify tech, but they also regularly feature interviews and welcome guests from the community, fostering an interactive and engaging environment. Tune in every day of the week, and you'll discover how technology can seamlessly integrate into your life, enhancing daily tasks and experiences, even if your sight is limited.
"Double Tap" is a registered trademark of Double Tap Productions Inc.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.