RantWoman has spent the last 3 days Zooming with the American Council of the Blind Leadership Seminar, #ACBLeadership21. RantWoman's brain is full of sessions aimed at organizational development, messaging, transportation, digital inclusion, Medicare, education and vocational rehab issues.
RantWoman means to check back with the Youtube videos to fine tune what she absorbed. RantWoman may also try to dole out individual topics in less formidable lengths and more RantWoman commentary than the 6-hour daily videos. RantWoman also still means to complete a purchase some merch phone call that did not quite come together in the midst of Braille Note hiccups.
Since RantWoman has not gone anywhere there will not necessarily be the same process events on the way home experience as with air travel. In particular, RantWoman will not have to negotiate both social distancing and sighted guide efforts while changing planes. One of these days MAYBE RantWoman will try the AIRA sighted guide smartphone based audio navigation experience which is free in many airports but not this time.
RantWoman does not have a service dog and therefore will not have to worry about whether she can fill out the Department of Transportation's new PDF documentation
form. The Department of transportation says they have done their job by putting out a PDF. The airlines say it was the Department of Transportation's job to produce accessible forms. Meanwhile, people who use screen readers need a couple more steps of software awareness in order to be able to fill out the form independently; it would be nice to get past fingerpointing and just get it done.
RantWoman also will not have to worry about experiences such as guide dog users getting home after recent in-person conventions for both the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind. Both events drew sponsorships from both Uber and Lyft. In both cases, RantWoman's twitter streams encountered people coming back from the convention complaining that their ride-share driver refused to pick them up with their service dogs.
But fear not. RantWoman has her own stories to tell. RantWoman feels a tad "jet-lagged" from keeping up with an east coast schedule. During the #pandemic, RantWoman has been mostly allowing her body to keep to a slightly later schedule so at some point RantWoman may have to catch up on some sleep.In the meantime, RantWoman needs to procrastinate a little bit about a scheduled group meeting to speak to her Congressman about ACB legislative priorities. RantWoman had a little too much fun writing a how not to lobby skit for the WA Council of the Blind state convention. RantWoman needs to get some snark out of her system. To that end a few moments with themes from the day.
One of the first invited guests: Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R FL, member of The Vision caucus.
RantWoman checked the research above mainly to see whether she could quickly find the nature of Rep. Bilirakis' vision loss. No, bearing in mind that RantWoman has not really strayed past the home page on any of the links above. Plus people with disabilities definitely get to have interests other than talking about their disability.
RantWoman does notice one thing: the video does not include any audio description. RantWoman thinks it's always interesting to set examples about concepts that might not be familiar to many people. RantWoman realizes that "Rep. Bilirakis reading a prepared statement from a notebook" might or might not be a satisfying audio description but it could be a fine place to start.
The session on digital inclusion featured a bit of lively discussion about what constitutes adequate audio description. RantWoman has seen Youtube videos with audio description but has no idea how it would be accomplished for live streaming to Youtube. Speakers could provide short descriptions of themselves and their surroundings as part of introduction. Or if blind people needed more sighted help than RantWoman, how could audio description be added before posting?
The whole leadership seminar was also livestreamed on Facebook. Maybe for an experiment RantWoman will check out what Facebook does in the way of image description. Maybe.
If RantWoman were writing audio description to go with this video, RantWoman might write some or all of the following:
Rep. Gus Bilirakis, a white man with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses is seated at a table reading from a 3-ring binder. He is wearing a white shirt, dark jacket, purple tie, and congressional pin. The table is draped with a navy cloth that shows the seal of the US House of Representatives on the side facing the camera. A Us Flag stands behind the congressman to the right and there is a brown wall cupboard behind him slightly to the right..
In other words, Rep. Bilirakis has a simple Zoom space that includes a number of patriotic symbols. RantWoman is in the camp of people who like to know things like this about people she is Zooming with.
Other miscellaneous comments about the Zoom experience:
RantWoman likes knowing who else is in meetings with her. With regular Zoom meetings, one can view the participants list. With Webinars, one cannot. RantWoman realizes that for people relying only on screen readers, too many audio tracks at once definitely impedes ability to process the main content. Still RantWoman would not mind some way to network.
But until next time...
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