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It was an honour to be invited by the President of the National Federation of the Blind to address this year’s Convention in Houston. I took the opportunity to summarise the increasing frustration many of our listeners have expressed over the years about the plethora of very serious assistive technology issues that are not addressed by mainstream companies in a timely manner. I spoke about some other issues too. You’ll hear the address in this week’s episode. It is my hope that this is just the start ofeffective, concerted campaigning to stop the discrimination we are experiencing. You’ll also hear some listener comments about the speech and the serious issues it raises.
In episode 236, I reported on the inaccessibility of Apple’s monetisation options for podcasters and the difficulty getting them to take it seriously. Since then, I’ve seen Apple displaying a little welcome human empathy, only to be followed by them trying one of the oldest tricks in the book to try and make me, and the problem, go away. I’ll bring you up to speed.
Be My Eyes had some interesting announcements at the NFB Convention. We’ll cover those, and I’ll describe a remarkable experience I had at Convention with the artist formerly known as Virtual Volunteer.
There’s more on cooking when blind, and discussion about pursuing a career in accessibility.
I went to Convention with gear we have reviewed on this podcast. The Zoom F3, into which I was able to plug in a couple of quality mics for good-quality interviews, and the little Zoom M2 MicTrak, which is simply a handheld mic that records onto an SD card. It was so cool to have such a high quality recorder with me at all times, without being all wired up. It was amazing the number of people that first asked to see this mic based on the podcast review, and then were coveting it in a scary way. Both these products record in 32-bit float, a technology I would now not want to record in the field without.
I have a lot of great material from Houston to play in the coming weeks, but to start us off, you’ll hear a little travel log Bonnie and I recorded on the M2 MicTrak at different stages of our convention trip.
It’s all in episode 239 of Living Blindfully.