Two Strikes

RantWoman means to write a serious post about themes from the public participation event she attended recently. However, RantWoman first must get her minimal daily rant requirement out of her system. The public participation event offered spectacular opportunities to rant about some of RantWoman's favorite themes:

1. The event involved Powerpoint. RantWoman did not think to request the Powerpoint in advance. RantWoman is not posting links to the Powerpoint as a fig leaf of a gesture in the direction of anonymity. Almost any Powerpoint is a digital inclusion issue. Mentioning the words "digital inclusion" is just a bonus. Here's why:

--RantWoman has to go to all sorts of contortions if she wants to consume Powerpoint at the same time as everyone else. Once in awhile, there are actually points of phrasing or data granularity that RantWoman would really, really appreciate being able to interact in the moment in the same public forum with all the others assembled to interact therewith.

Not having the Powerpoint is of course not the only barrier to such interactions. RantWoman, for instance, occasionally does simultaneous interpreting. However, turning one audio track into another language is still a different task from following two audio tracks, the speaker and rantWoman's screen reader if RantWoman wanted to interact verbally with Powerpoint during a presentation. This same issue arises with group editing activities; how do you do group editing? is on RantWoman's list of high-end computer activities to ask smarter blind people about whenever RantWoman is in the same room with the right people.

--Anyway, most of the time, oh shock and horror, the Powerpoint is not ABSOLUTELY necessary to being able to absorb the content of a presentation. In fact, blind people have been working successfully and extracting meaningful information from oral presentations since long before there was Powerpoint. Still RantWoman finds herself meditating about whether Powerpoint makes it too easy for presenters just to say "this one here" and "that one there" without anything verbal for blind or distracted audience members to hold onto.

--There is another subtlety about the content aspect of the Content leg of the Digital Inclusion triad: one wants content that is relevant. One very aspect of relevant is the right increments, not overload, and assembled to the right specificity without having endlessly to grind through search results. RantWoman expects she will in fact have more opportunities to interact with the Powerpoint from this particular event and RantWoman expects she will eventually download it. But for now, the watchword is Data Overload and RantWoman is going to draft a couple topical questions based on what she heard and not overdo expectations of her participation.


2. The public participation event RantWoman attended far exceeded the capacity even of RantWoman's faith community sometimes to expend enormous quantities of high-value time nattering back and forth about decidedly modest sums of money. RantWoman is going to phrase her observation to that effect in terms of a question about what people expect a particular increment of funds to be spent on; RantWoman here is simpley noting unexpected commonality of problems.

With that, now RantWoman is clear actually to interact with the content of the event.