Full Transcript for Talking Vision 841 Week Beginning 20th July 2026 (Highlights Program)

minutes. Get the pass from Smithfield to Fairfield about 3025, 30 minutes depending on traffic light. Walk to the train station. Get the train to central. Walk from central to my. Your university. I know without any help. Sometime when I they ask me about help, just talk with them to inspire and carry them. I think this is challenge for blind people. A lot of people. I said to them, I study at the Sydney Uni how you go, how you arrive to that Easy. Take it. Easy will be easy. The second part of challenge looks sitting between young students. Their English better than me, their information of what I have their memory better than from my memory. I think this is a kind of challenge proved to the student. You can do it, challenge it that not just at the uni, also outside. When I talk with the people, challenge any barrier the planet. You can do it. The second word is inspire. Why I wanted to people to inspire me. I don't inspire another. People inspire me. I inspire myself and also give inspiration for others. Third point is trust. Trust is very, very important. If you trust in yourself, you can do it. You will do it. When people are said to me, I try Why are you trying? You can't do it. Just believe in yourself. Nothing is bigger than you. You can do it by. Maybe here. A lot of people. They don't like to say that. My God, there's one person behind me. One thing, one power behind me is God. Give me inspiration. Give me help. Give me, uh, pushing to give a good thing for all. 00:10:32 S3: And that's a perfect note to end on. And before we do say goodbye, Blind Australian of the year Awards nominations are now open, so you can head to Blind Australian of the year.com dot a U. That's Blind Australian of the year. All one word.com.au. 00:10:53 S4: You will I have connect with them and like in Easter or Christmas I sent a card to them and I really I appreciate it. They recognize the journey for all the people. Before you cross it, look something. Some people. They said you were a certificate. Just a paper. You are what I have here in front of me. A lot of award is just. No, no, it's not just. It's recognize what you are doing. My name should be in Guinness book because I am the first man in the world, totally blind. 63 years English language, a PhD in mathematics. No one do it before me and I hope there another blind. They come to do it after me. 00:11:45 S3: I've been speaking today with Arkan Yusuf, teacher, volunteer and contributor to the community in Western Sydney over the past 16 years and now just recently started your PhD as well. So all the best with that Archon. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you so much, Archon. 00:12:13 S4: Thank you, thank you, thank you for you and all the people that are listening. 00:12:24 S2: On Vision Australia Radio, you are listening to Talking Vision. Today we are highlighting some of the great interviews Sam conducted while host of Talking Vision. Now back to Sam. 00:12:32 S3: Aaron Vernon is CEO and co-founder of Split Atom Labs, a Melbourne based gaming developer, which has recently launched the mobile game Land of Livia. Available on iPhone and all Apple devices, the game is designed with accessibility at the forefront for users who are blind or have low vision to jump in, pick up and play a relaxing adventure and to have a chat with us all about the game. It's my great pleasure to welcome Aaron right now. Aaron, welcome to Talking Vision. Thank you very much for your time. 00:13:12 S5: Of course. Thank you for the invite. 00:13:14 S3: No worries at all. Now I'd love to hear more about Split Atom Labs. Tell us all about them. 00:13:21 S5: Yeah, sure. So Split Atom Labs is based in Melbourne and we've been incorporated for coming up on two years. I started the company with my co-founder Matthew, who I met when I was working at meta over in New York. And at that time, tech was kind of going through a little bit of a layoff phase. There's lots of company layoffs happening, and it was quite stressful for, I think, a lot of people working in tech and being a kind of immigrant in a foreign country, I'm like, I don't really need the stress anymore. And so I was thinking about like, what do I do now? Where do I go next? And I had a game that I started building all the way back in 2014 called Land of Olivia, and it had gained a lot of traction with the blind and low vision community, and when I looked more closely at why that was, I realized that there was this large gap around game accessibility and specifically game accessibility for casual games. Games you can kind of pick up and play throughout your day. And so I pitched that to my co-founder and he was, uh, he also kind of agreed that there was this opportunity there. And so we set out on this journey of how do we take the early success I had with the game in the market and grow a company around it and really try to build a more inclusive future for casual gamers? 00:14:33 S3: And had you had much experience in the accessibility side of things while you were working with meta or elsewhere in your work? But before you founded Split Atom Labs, or was this a bit of a new world for you? 00:14:49 S5: So it actually had been building over many years my kind of interest in this field. So when I launched Land of Olivia in 2016, it was just a game that I wanted to exist for myself. And it was designed to be relaxing, not have predatory microtransactions. And it was only in 2018 that I started to get feedback from the people in the Applevis community, which is an online site that many of your listeners are probably aware of. And they were saying like, hey, here are some suggestions about how to make this game more accessible. And so I started to respond to that and learn more and more about accessibility, but also the lived experience of many of these players that the game was attracting. And the more I learned and the more I leveled up, my

own understanding leveled up the experience in the game, the more addicted I became to basically trying to learn more and deliver more value as part of accessible games. And so I think from that point on, I started to immerse myself more and more into the accessibility community and specifically the accessible tech community. I didn't have so much of that exposure through my time at a company called tubules prior to meta and then at meta. Yeah. So I didn't have so much experience there. I saw a lot of opportunity to apply accessible design to the work that I was doing on the augmented reality glasses at meta, and they've obviously since then gone and done amazing things with meta Ray-Ban. But unfortunately, I wasn't personally involved in those. But I am in contact with some of the people on those projects. 00:16:15 S3: What's been the most illuminating thing for you in terms of your experience with accessibility? What's been the most exciting thing you've learned or been involved with? 00:16:27 S5: I think it's insightful, maybe not so much exciting, but definitely the insightful thing is that how complex and layered disability and accessibility is. I think that from the outside, it's easy to see it as a list of checkbox items that must be done, but in reality, it's this amalgamation of many different thoughtful design and accessible design inclusive design elements that go into building these products that then allow a vast array of people with very unique lived experiences to utilize them and get the most out of them. And so I think that deeper understanding of like, how everyone's coming to these products from a different starting place and how do we kind of meet them in the middle to provide the best experience? That's been the most eye opening part of the experience. 00:17:11 S3: Now, of course, it's time to have a chat about the game itself. Land of Livia, tell us about the game. 00:17:18 S5: Yeah. So it's a story driven adventure and it's designed for relaxation. It's available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and it's designed to provide you a break from the real world. A moment to unwind, step away from your busy life, and you take on quests and complete them throughout your day to unlock the next step in the narrative and the journey and the story of the game. And so you start off as a lonely farmhand working for an overbearing boss, trying to figure out why is the rain stopped in your region? And then over time of weeks and months of play, you get deeper into a deep and dark conspiracy of evil that's uh, unfolding around the land of Libya. 00:18:00 S3: What sort of accessibility features can people look forward to experiencing when they download Land of Libya and give it a play? 00:18:10 S5: Yeah, absolutely. So I think first and foremost, our special sauce has always been the way that we approach designing for voiceover, the screen reader technology on, on iPhones. So we support it at a very in-depth level in terms of every time we're building a gameplay feature, every time we're making an update, we're really thinking about how do we optimize that voiceover experience to minimize the number of interactions needed and get people straight into the gameplay and rewards that they're looking for. Um, so this includes things like some AI driven assistance, such as equipping your best items, automatically directing you with one tap to the next location you need to go to, and just minimizing the number of taps and swipes that are needed overall. We've also recently in the last, uh, well, in the big release we did in March, we redid the entire UI so that it supports dynamic types. So adjustable font size right up to the top, accessible font size that Apple provides. And that's on every single screen. Uh, we've introduced the Atkinson hyper legible font from the Braille Institute to provide increased readability for those with low vision. It's got a dark UI across the board to make it easy on the eyes and high contrast. And we've also introduced a lot of sound and custom built haptics to provide an additional layer of user feedback for those that are not able to enjoy what's shown on the screen. And I think, uh, we're all time looking into ways to streamline the experience to make it so that everyone can pick it up and play even those that maybe don't consider themselves gamers, maybe they've never game before. We get a lot of players that are in that position that come to the game and say, hey, this is incredible. I didn't actually think that I could game, that I was a gamer, and yet I'm enjoying this. So that's really what we strive to provide. 00:19:50 S3: It's a wonderful experience. And in this sort of 11 year time period. And as the game has developed and there's been no doubt years and years of processes and changing around and all those sort of things. What have been your sort of influences? What have been games you've looked at and thought this works? This would go really well in something that I'm building. Have you sort of taken bits and pieces from other. What have been your sort of favourite games over the time that you've sort of thought that would really work well? 00:20:25 S5: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think any game designer is going to tell you that the process involves basically consuming and digesting and dissecting as many different games as you can, and then distilling them down and extracting them into what your vision for a game is. And I think for me, the biggest thing that has had an influence on me is actually World of Warcraft. So I was a long time player slash sometimes addict, I would say playing this game, and I would play it to escape the real world and immerse myself into something different where I felt like I had more control over my surroundings, more autonomy, I guess, in some instances. But also the social engagement in that game was pretty incredible. And so what I tried to do when I initially set out to build Land of Libya was distill

that down into how can you make it less addictive, but still have the positive qualities of escapism and the positive qualities of social interaction, and then provide that back to the players. I think there are other some other games like Planescape Torment, that had these really strong, deep narratives that made you think about things in a maybe a unique way, in the same way that you would get from a great novel or a great movie. And that's not an avenue that is as well explored in games. It's increasingly now than it has been in the past, but still, I think underutilized. And so those types of games are the things that I found myself drawn to the most. But then also just casual mobile games like Candy crush, Merge Mansions on the mobile is another one that I play. These are games that you can just pick up and play whenever you want and get that engagement, that escape. And so I try to kind of merge all those together and then streamline it as much as possible to provide kind of the most pure experience that I can. 00:22:02 S3: Fantastic. Yeah. That pick up and play kind of vibe. That's, that's super important. So I think that's definitely something a lot of people, especially these days with everyone, you know, the phones basically joined at the hip and you know, all that sort of thing. So people love to have a new thing to check out on their phone. And speaking of checking out on their phone, what's the best way for them to get hold of Land of Olivia on their Apple device? 00:22:29 S5: Yeah. So the best way it does play best on the phone because you can kind of play it throughout your day. So you can head, you can search for Land of Olivia on the iOS App Store, the first chapter of the game, the prelude is free. So you can play that. It usually takes people around two weeks to get through the prelude. And you know, you can see. Do you like it? Is, is it engaging? Is this something that you want to further invest in? and then you can unlock the full game, which gives you four additional chapters, which takes many, many months to complete. And that is available for 1,999 AUD at the moment. 00:23:04 S3: Are there any plans to roll out on Android in the future, or is that a bit more tricky in terms of different infrastructures and things, as I understand? 00:23:15 S5: Yeah, it's a great point. So I think definitely in a lot of the marketing activities we've done, we've seen a clear demand from people to have the game on Android. So it's definitely something we're excited to pursue. The challenge that we have is that in order to provide the most accessible experience that we can, we build everything natively. So we don't use third party game engines where a lot of. Then the fine grained accessibility can sometimes be out of your control. We build it all natively, which means that in order to bring it to Android, we need to build it natively again, at least the UI component of it. So it is a much bigger lift than it would be for many other games. But that said, it's still something that you know is pretty high up on our list in terms of what we want to get to next. 00:23:54 S3: Well that's exciting. We'll definitely follow that with great interest. And should it roll out on Android at some point in the future, I'd be very happy to have you back. And you can tell us all about the new Android build. I've been speaking today with Aaron Vernon from Split Atom Labs, chatting to me all about the work that Split Atom Labs has done and is continuing to do in the accessibility field, as well as Land of Livia, which is now available on all Apple devices. Aaron, thank you so much for your time today. It was great to catch up with you and have a chat. 00:24:33 S5: Absolutely. Thank you very much, Sam. 00:24:38 S2: Lastly, here is Francis with the reader. 00:24:40 S6: Recommended a bit of a shout out to our Perth and Western Australian listeners today with the book Perth. This is written by David Whish-wilson. It was part of a series of books that authors were invited to write about the cities of their of their birth. So David Whish-wilson in Perth has written of a place of surprising beauty, of sand swept peace and brilliant light. Yet a place with a deeper historical currents are never too far beneath the surface, like the Swan River that flows in two directions at once at certain times, with the freshwater flowing seawards above the salty water flowing in beneath it. Perth strikes perfect harmony with the city's contradictions and eccentricities. We look beyond shiny glass facades and boosterish talk of mining booms to the richness of the natural world and the trailblazers, the rebels, the occasional ghost and the ordinary people that bring Australia's remotest city to life. Let's hear a sample of Perth by David Whish-wilson. It's narrated by Anthony Campbell. 00:25:46 S7: Twice a day, the skin of the Swan River rises in a small ripple as the tidal surge makes its way from the river mouth at Fremantle, through Perth Water and up into the higher reaches of the river near the fast growing suburb of Ellenbrook, just over 20km north east of Perth. In winter, when a layer of brackish water runs off the scarp towards the ocean, the river flows in two directions, with the freshwater flowing seawards above the saline water flowing in beneath it. Today, the diurnal bulge of water that reveals the incoming tide is invisible. It's a Sunday morning, and I'm out on the river in an open kayak with my uncle Scott. My father's youngest brother, Scott, moved from Tasmania to Perth as a teenager in the 1970s. Like so many others, he stayed for the climate and the lifestyle and the opportunity to work. 00:26:43 S6: And that was Perth by David Whish-wilson. If you would like to borrow that book or find out what other books on capital cities around Australia have been written? You can always call the library on 130654656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email the library at library@vision.org. That's library at vision australia.org. 00:27:14 S2: Thank you for listening to Talking Vision. We'll be back next week with more highlights of the wonderful interview Sam completed during his time as host of Talking Vision. 00:27:26 S1: You can contact Vision Australia by phoning us anytime during business hours on 130847466, that's 130847466 or by visiting vision australia.org. That's Vision australia.org.