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</style> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <h1 class="title">The Braille Monitor,
October 2026</h1> </div> <h1 id="braille-monitor">BRAILLE MONITOR</h1> <p>The
Flagship Magazine of the Blind People’s Movement</p> <p>Vol. 69, No. 9,
October 2026</p> <p>Chris Danielsen, Editor</p> <p>Published by the National
Federation of the Blind</p> <p>Mark Riccobono, President<br /> 200 East Wells
Street<br /> Baltimore, Maryland 21230<br /> Phone: (410) 659-9314<br /> Email:
<a href="mailto:communications@nfb.org"><u>communications@nfb.org</u></a><br />
On the Web: <a href="https://nfb.org/braille-monitor"><u>https://nfb.org/braille-monitor</u></a></p>
<p>ISSN 0006-8829</p> <h2 id="welcome-to-the-movement">Welcome to the Movement</h2>
<p>The National Federation of the Blind advances the lives of its members and all
blind people in the United States. We know that blindness is not the characteristic
that defines you or your future. Every day we raise the expectations of blind
people, because low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our
dreams. Our collective power, determination, and diversity achieve the aspirations
of all blind people.</p> <p>The National Federation of the Blind is not an
organization speaking for the blind; it is the blind speaking for ourselves.</p>
<p>To find all of our publications, podcasts, and communications, visit <a
href="https://nfb.org/publications">https://nfb.org/publications</a>. For our
latest announcements, visit <a href="https://nfb.org/press-room">https://nfb.org/press-room</a>.</p>
<h2 id="ways-to-access-the-monitor">Ways to Access the Monitor</h2> <p>The
<em>Braille Monitor</em> is available in the format that works best for you:
online, by email, in large print, in Braille, on USB flash drive, through
NFB-NEWSLINE®, and as a podcast by searching “National Federation of
the Blind—<em>Braille Monitor</em>” in your podcast client.</p>
<p>To subscribe to the large-print, Braille, or USB flash drive version, or to
change your format or mailing address, please contact us at 410-659-9314, extension
2344, or <a href="mailto:subscriptions@nfb.org"><u>subscriptions@nfb.org</u></a>.
The USB flash drive version is compatible with digital talking book machines from
the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) and other
computers and devices that can accept flash drives. We request that flash drives
be returned to us in the envelope provided so that we can stretch our funds by
reusing them. If based in the United States, NFB members are invited, and nonmembers
are requested, to cover the subscription cost of $40 per year. All subscriptions
mailed to foreign countries other than Canada are invoiced at $75 USD per year.
Canadian subscriptions are invoiced at $50 USD per year. Checks should be made
payable to the National Federation of the Blind and sent to the NFB,
attention <em>Braille Monitor</em>, 200 East Wells Street, Baltimore, Maryland
21230.</p> <h2 id="contribute-an-article-or-letter">Contribute an Article or
Letter</h2> <p>Article submissions and letters to the editor may be sent to the
National Federation of the Blind, attention Chris Danielsen, 200 East Wells Street,
Baltimore, Maryland 21230 or by email to <a
href="mailto:cdanielsen@nfb.org"><u>cdanielsen@nfb.org</u></a>. You can contact
the editor by phone at 410-659-9314 extension 2330.</p> <h3 id="submission-guidelines">Submission
Guidelines</h3> <p>The<em> Braille Monitor</em> welcomes thoughtful,
civil letters to the editor in response to any of our articles, as well as article
contributions from members, supporters, and friends of the National Federation of
the Blind. We are committed to serving as a forum where blind people, as well as
their families and friends, can tell their stories, reflect on our movement, and
express their views on issues facing our community. Submissions in response to
specific articles must engage the arguments presented in those articles; purely
personal attacks on individual contributors will not be tolerated.</p> <p>Consideration
of submissions will be guided, among other editorial policies, by our
organization’s brand, core values, and strategic priorities, as well as
the Code of Conduct of the National Federation of the Blind. As stated in our Code
of Conduct, the National Federation of the Blind celebrates and embraces diversity,
equity, and inclusion as core values in its mission to achieve equality, opportunity,
and security for the blind. We respect differences of opinion, beliefs, identities,
and other characteristics that demonstrate that blind people are a diverse
cross-section of society.</p> <h3 id="views-and-corrections-note">Views and
Corrections Note</h3> <p>Views expressed in the <em>Braille Monitor </em>are
not necessarily the views of the National Federation of the Blind; pieces that do
reflect organizational policy, such as resolutions passed by the National Convention,
will be noted as such.</p> <p>The <em>Braille Monitor</em> takes its
obligation to present truthful and accurate content to its readers and the public
very seriously. If you believe a correction is needed, please contact the editor.</p>
<h2 id="copyright-and-requests">Copyright and Requests</h2> <p>©2026 National
Federation of the Blind. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under a CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0: <a
href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en</a>.
<a href="http://www.nfb.org">www.nfb.org</a>. To request usage of NFB materials,
please email <a href="mailto:communications@nfb.org">communications@nfb.org</a>.</p>
<p>Vol. 69, No. 9 October 2026</p> <h2 id="contents">Contents</h2> <p>From the
Editor</p> <p>by Chris Danielsen</p> <p>Keep Building Connections: The Federation
Employment Network by the Blind<br /> by Lia Stone</p> <p>It’s Not Over
Until the Blind Secure Equality</p> <p>by John Paré Jr, Jesse Shirek, Justin
Young, and Sanho Steele-Louchart</p> <p>It’s Our Turn Now<br /> by Jonathan
Mosen</p> <p>#NFB24 Flashback: The Dr. Jacobus tenBroek Award</p> <p>by Pam
Allen</p> <p>From the President’s Desk<br /> by Mark Riccobono</p> <p>The
Conundrum of PDF for the Blind</p> <p>by Curtis Chong</p> <p>Access Is Participation:
Jack’s NFB-NEWSLINE® Story</p> <p>by Sarah Weissman</p> <p>[PHOTO
CAPTION: Chris Danielsen]</p> <h2 id="from-the-editor">From the Editor</h2> <p>by
Chris Danielsen</p> <p>I will start this column by humbly apologizing to those of
you who noticed the longer-than-usual wait for our double-stuffed convention issue.
I hope, however, that we made up for that delay by presenting you with an
August/September edition that did credit to our wonderful convention in Austin
this past July. Of course, fully encapsulating any convention in a single issue
is impossible, so we offer more #NFB26 content in the pages that follow. Specifically,
we’ve included the outstanding panel on employment and the power of using
the Federation network to acquire and maintain it, chaired by Lia Stone; the
motivating and upbeat update presented by our advocacy team; and Jonathan
Mosen’s brief report on matters technological. And if you feel that we
still aren’t capturing the full flavor of the event, the good news is that
you can still help by contributing your own observations, experiences, and reports
to future issues.</p> <p>Another apology is due to both our readership and to some
beloved members of our Federation family. We hope that any corrections that need
to be made to the <em>Braille Monitor</em> are relatively minor ones, but sometimes
they are not. We recently realized that our August/September 2024 issue omitted
one of the highlights of that year’s convention: the presentation of the
Jacobus tenBroek Award. The award recipients, and our readers, deserve better,
and so that award presentation is included in this issue as a flashback to
#NFB24.</p> <p>Speaking of convention activities, members often ask how the
resolutions passed by the Convention are implemented. Check out this month’s
“From the President’s Desk” column to learn how President
Riccobono has already acted to advance one of these resolutions and our other
advocacy priorities.</p> <p>We’ve rounded out this issue with two articles
dealing with the ever-urgent topic of equal access to information, and both pieces
are intended to empower blind people to maximize and control that access. Jack
Mendez, who manages the NFB-NEWSLINE® program, spoke with Sarah Weissman
about what it means to him and how it advances the integration of the blind into
society. And Curtis Chong gives us practical tips on how to increase the odds of
being able to read the pesky PDF files that too often elicit our sighs of
exasperation.</p> <p>Having begun with apologies, let me close with gratitude for
your readership and your many contributions to these pages. Please keep them, and
your feedback coming. Email me at <a href="mailto:cdanielsen@nfb.org">cdanielsen@nfb.org</a>
or call me with your ideas and suggestions at 410-659-9314, extension 2330. I am
most eager to hear from you, as this magazine is not truly our voice unless it
includes all of yours.</p> <p>----------</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Lia Stone]</p>
<p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Audrey Farnum, Jenn Han, and J.J. Meddaugh]</p> <h2
id="keep-building-connections-the-federation-employment-network-by-the-blind">Keep
Building Connections: The Federation Employment Network by the Blind</h2> <p>by
Lia Stone, Chair, NFB Employment Committee, Moderator</p> <p>Mark Riccobono: This
next panel is “Keep Building Connections: The Federation Employment Network
by the Blind.” I will introduce our moderator for the panel and she’ll
introduce the rest of the group, but I’m really happy to have this group
with us this morning. Our moderator joined the Federation in 2017 when she attended
her first Federation convention as a student at the Colorado Center for the Blind.
[Cheers] And she says that it was that first convention that led her to meeting
the person who gave her the first opportunity to help build within the organized
blind movement. She’s got a diverse background. Her LinkedIn profile
describes her passion this way: “Blending my love of workforce development,
vocational rehabilitation, and clinical social work into a career.” She is
not afraid, clearly, to make her own path, build her own way to employment, but
more importantly, she’s helping others to do that by giving back through
her service in the National Federation of the Blind.</p> <p>I’d like you
to give a warm welcome to—well, I should add that she’s a woman that
comes from the birthplace of NBA Finals MVP, Jalen Brunson. [Cheers] That was just
a little note about her. So please welcome the Federation’s Employment
Committee MVP from New Jersey, Lia Stone.</p> <p>Lia Stone: Oh, good morning, my
Federation family. And again, I am sorry, Texas, but you do have to share. Knicks
in five! [Scattered cheers] The only people cheering are from New York and New
Jersey, and that’s okay. Anybody in here go to the career fair last night?
[Applause] Anybody make it around to all of our employers from the Alabama Freedom
Center to Wells Fargo? [Cheers] Oh, a few of you. All right, good, good. I appreciate
y’all being so enterprising. So nine years ago, I graduated from Rutgers
with my masters in social work—and okay, some other fans of the Scarlet
Knights here, I hear—and I packed up my life and I headed west to the
Colorado Center for the Blind. [Cheers] About three weeks into my program there,
I came to my first national convention in Orlando at the Rosen Shingle Creek. Was
that anybody else’s first convention? [Cheers] I had never been around so
many blind people before and I was pretty immediately converted, as you can tell.
It was at the New Jersey caucus where I was welcomed with loud, wide-open—did
I mention loud—arms by Joe Ruffalo and the rest of the New Jersey affiliate,
and that’s where I met another first-timer who has since gone on to become
one of my very dearest friends, Carley Mullin. Carley and I got to talking. We
talked so much we missed the next session that we had planned to go to, which
surprises nobody in here who knows us. We kept in touch over the next few months.
I went back to Colorado and Carley went back to Jersey. And fast forward a little
bit, I get a call from Carley saying, “Hey, I am about to start grad school
at Louisiana Tech. I’m leaving my job. And I remembered you’re a
social worker. Do you want my job in the transition program here in Jersey? Because
I can introduce you to the director.” Now I had zero plans to work with
youth. I did have plans to pay my rent, however. And so I said yes, and the rest
is history. Now, since then I have had a lot of different jobs. If you’ve
looked at my LinkedIn profile, it’s a little confusing. I have done work
from public health to clinical social work to tech recruiting to my current role
as a VR counselor, a job that I got because my friends in the Central Jersey
chapter politely, persistently, and persuasively badgered me until I applied.
[Laughter] And that’s what I mean when I talk about the Federation as a
network. We are a group of people that will hold each other to high expectations,
connect each other to opportunities, call you out when you deserve it, and
aggressively peer-pressure you into career advancement. Now I’m really
excited today for this panel because we’ve got three incredible people who
all know what it’s like to have the Federation alter their career trajectory.
So I’m going to stop talking for a few minutes and let them introduce
themselves, starting with Audrey.</p> <p>Audrey Farnum: Good morning. I am Audrey
Farnum. I’m from Oklahoma City, and I am currently serving as the senior
administrative law judge for the Oklahoma Tax Commission. In my role as senior
administrative law judge, I supervise our administrative proceedings section. We
have a staff of four other judges in addition to myself and our clerical staff,
and we handle all of the taxpayer protests in the state of Oklahoma. So whenever
somebody doesn’t like what they have been assessed or an audit, they come
to us and get a hearing. And so that’s what I’ve been doing.
I’ve been at the Tax Commission for twenty-six years. I started out there
as a staff attorney. I got the job through a family connection and sort of intended
just to stay there for a couple of years. And then here I am twenty-six years
later and I’m still there. So I started out working for the judges and kind
of slowly moved up over my career until I was promoted to be an administrative
law judge about four years ago. And then I’ve been the senior in that
division for about a year.</p> <p>Lia Stone: Okay. Jenn?</p> <p>Jenn Han: Good
morning everyone. My name is Jenn Han. So I’m originally from California
and then I moved all the way to Virginia and then I flew across the country again
and now I’m in Seattle, Washington. I obtained my first bachelor’s
degree in molecular cell developmental biology in 2021. I worked in internal
cardiology, inpatient cardiology, as a technician for about a year. Then I decided
I wanted to get my bachelor’s in nursing. And so I went to an accelerated
bachelor’s program. It was supposed to be a fifteen-month program. It ended
up being eighteen months due to some discrimination that I faced. I got my license
as a registered nurse in 2024. [Cheers] Thank you. And I’ve been a practicing
registered nurse ever since. Now I’m getting my double master’s in
nursing leadership and management and business administration, and I currently
work as a nurse manager in the heart of Seattle. So I kind of do a lot. It’s
a bit of a mix. So I work for an urgent care/community medicine and it’s
a bit of administrative, it’s a little bit of clinical (so I do triaging),
a little bit of everything honestly. I wear many hats, but I manage what we call
the back office of the clinical site. And I’m also a 2026 scholarship
finalist.</p> <p>J.J. Meddaugh: Congratulations.</p> <p>Lia Stone: Okay. J.J.</p>
<p>J.J. Meddaugh: Good morning everybody. I have that three-days-of-exhibit-hall
voice, I think, by this point. So thank you so much, Lia. This is a great panel.
Some awesome people that are working in business. My story starts—and I
still live in—the great state of Michigan, born and raised. [Cheers] And
I think from a young age, I realized that I had a lot of interest in trying to
work for myself and be an entrepreneur. I remember in high school going out to
Sam’s Club and buying boxes of candy bars. They were ten dollars and eighty
cents then for thirty-six of them. Some of you vendors probably—it’s
gone up a little bit—and you’d sell them for fifty cents apiece. I
did that to raise money for going to goalball tournaments, and just finding and
discovering at a young age that I really enjoyed both the entrepreneurial side of
making a little money and working for yourself and also being able to meet
people.</p> <p>I remember having a garage sale at my family’s house and
then I started going through the items, the toys from when I was a little kid.
I’m like—eBay had just started—I started looking at things.
Why are we selling this for a quarter? It’s going for eight bucks on eBay.
This is crazy. Went to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and tried a whole
bunch of various things there: web hosting, radio stations, things like that, but
things have not always been perfect. I understood the concept of buy low, sell
high, but not always the market research or the market fit. My dad jokes with me
about this to this day. I bought once a case of print books, seventy-two copies
of <em>The Penny Pincher’s Guide to Saving Money</em> for like ten cents
apiece.</p> <p>Oh, I can make good money. I can sell these for a dollar—if
you can actually find people to buy them. Yeah. Chapter one—I never read
the book—chapter one probably should have said, “What the heck are
you doing buying this stupid book?” [Laughter] I learned what was a good
fit for me and maybe what wasn’t a good fit for me. Like I said, I did web
hosting for a little bit and I realized that was a lot of fun until people—if
your website is up, you kind of expect it to be up twenty-four seven, right?
That’s just kind of a standard thing you would expect. And our entire web
server went down right after a banquet. So everyone else is going off and hanging
out with their friends and I had to spend two hours fixing the stupid website just
to get it back going.</p> <p>So you kind of learn along the way what works for
you and what doesn’t. Shortly after that, me and a friend started the site
called Blind Bargains, [cheers] and we did a lot over the years helping people
find deals and talking about technology. And what that really did, one of the big
benefits of Blind Bargains, is it gave us an audience for when I started A.T.
Guys. [Cheers]</p> <p>Our first Exhibit Hall was in 2010. That year we crammed
four people in a hotel room and we sold the iBill, the money identifier. And many
of you bought them. Thank you. Now what happened the next year? LookTell came out
on the iPhone. So the iBill was a ninety-nine-dollar currency reader at that time
and LookTell was a five- or ten-dollar app. So we had to pretty quickly learn how
to pivot and do other things. Then they started giving them away for free. So that
kind of shot the sales of that all apart. But along the way, coming to NFB
conventions, I met people. A year later in Dallas, I met someone who worked for
what was then called AfterShokz, now Shokz, and got a connection that is still
good to this day selling those amazing headsets. From doing other work, one of
the cool things about being a small business owner is I’m able to work with
others.</p> <p>I’m able to also pick up projects besides just selling tech.
So I’ve worked on everything from accessible kiosks to accessible COVID
testing. We don’t have an accessible COVID testing kiosk yet, but maybe we
can do that later. But literally every single one of those opportunities that has
come up has come through people that I’ve met here at the NFB. There is
not a group of people and a family of people that have given me more opportunities
than this organization.</p> <p>Lia Stone: All right. Thank you. So we know that
in the Federation, blind people with the right tools, skills, and training can
compete on terms of equality with our sighted peers. But when it comes to employment,
and certainly at this point in 2026, whether you are blind or sighted, getting
your foot in the door requires a network and requires people in your corner. So
I’m going to ask each of you to talk about a moment within the Federation
that helped you start on your career trajectory. And we’ll start with
Audrey.</p> <p>Audrey Farnum: I think for me, there wasn’t really one single
moment. I had my job before I met the Federation, but I think meeting the Federation
and getting the encouragement that I’ve received over the years has changed
my attitude and my confidence in myself, which has then helped me to advance in
my career. So I think one of the biggest things for me was my first National
Convention in 2009. Yeah, in Detroit. Remember the circular hotel? [Cheers and
laughter] So that was my first convention and I had been to a training center,
but it was not an NFB training center. And I was really highly motivated to learn
Braille. I became totally blind in my thirties, but I didn’t learn Braille
when I was a child like I should have. So I went to a training center that was
not an NFB training center and I was very highly motivated to learn Braille and
I learned it while I was there. But then at the end of the class, this instructor
said, “Well, you’re learning it as an adult and you’ll never
read fast enough to be able to read a book and you’ll probably just use it
for notes and labels.” That was really discouraging to me—I mean,
honestly, kind of soul-crushing, because being able to read Braille and being able
to read was so important to me. I really wanted that back. And so it was at National
Convention that year and I’m roaming through the Exhibit Hall and I met
Jerry Whittle. [Cheers] Yeah, right?</p> <p>And he talked to me for twenty minutes
and I told him my story and he encouraged me and he gave me so much advice. And
then from that Convention, I got a little Braille display and I started reading
on my own and practicing. And then I met other Federationists who encouraged me.
Now I read Braille and I use it every day at work. [Cheers and applause] I really
think that gaining my Braille literacy because of the encouragement of the
Federation—I don’t think I would have advanced as far as I have in
my career. I was getting by without Braille, but I am so much more efficient and
I’m doing so much better with Braille that I really think it led to my
advancement. I don’t know that I ever would’ve been promoted to
being a judge without that encouragement and without learning Braille. So I think
that’s probably the biggest influence that NFB has had for me.</p> <p>Lia
Stone: Okay. Jenn.</p> <p>Jenn Han: I really resonate with the concept that it
wasn’t a single moment for me. It was an accumulation of moments. So my
first time kind of being introduced to the NFB was in 2017 Youth Slam, which is
coming back, so I’m really excited for that. I think it’s really
important that we do pour into the younger generation to remind them that they
can pursue these careers in STEM, in hard sciences. That was a really important
moment for me. The next really big moment was, I think, in 2023. There were little
moments in between then and 2023, where people knew that I was pursuing the medical
industry, and so I was kind of like the default of like, “Oh, you’re
in medicine, go to Jenn. Let’s refer you.” So it was an accumulation
of people, connections who knew people. And so it’s all about that idea of
you know someone who knows someone. And so I was receiving different contacts of
people within the NFB who wanted to pursue medicine or who were pursuing medicine.
And so I kind of have collected over the years a couple of friends who have become
really, really close to me who are also in the same industry. And in 2023, I faced
a lot in terms of my nursing school when they basically failed me from one of my
clinicals. Yeah, it sucked, to the person booing in the back. They failed me from
one of my clinicals because they said that I was “unsafe” on the
unit. I asked them, “Well, what’s the actual reason?” And
they said, “Oh, you were looking too closely at a computer screen.”</p>
<p>Yeah. And just to keep in mind, we all know that the medical industry is
extremely inaccessible. It was not built with us in mind. And so that’s a
challenge that I’ve had to constantly overcome, not just in my schooling,
but even now as a professional nurse. And so I reached out to a couple of friends
that I knew within the NFB, and honestly, it was something that I’ll always
remember, of being able to confide in them and them being supportive and reaching
out to me and checking in with me and being able to share in those struggles. And
so community matters a lot, and that is something that I will always emphasize:
it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And so that really meant
a lot to me, and that is what got me through my nursing career. And so it’s
not necessarily my specific job now, but it was absolutely setting the trajectory
for my career, because when I sat in the 2017 Youth Slam and I was doing biology
and all these experiments, it really sparked a passion in me of “I can do
this. I can pursue hard sciences. I can get a degree in molecular biology. I can
go to become a professional nurse and I can be a clinical leader.” And so
that was what it was for me.</p> <p>Lia Stone: All right, J.J.</p> <p>J.J. Meddaugh:
So I went to some NFB conventions, a couple in the nineties, and mostly for the
technology, and somehow lost money at Monte Carlo night when I was fifteen.
I’m not sure if that was legal, but it happened. But my first actual
convention that I participated at all was in 2003 in Louisville, when a good friend
of mine still, Lisamaria Martinez, said, “You should come to a convention.
There’s lots of parties.” [Laughter] Okay. There might be some truth
to that. But I started realizing as I was going around that Convention—in
the one or two or three after that—that a lot of the conversations that I
had with people in rooms, in meetings, anywhere in the Exhibit Hall, led to talking
to successful blind adults, talking to successful mentors. I was a college dropout
at that point. I went to Western Michigan.</p> <p>I started in ‘98. I ended
in ‘08. There’s some gap years there, several of them. And talking
to leaders in the NFB who weren’t afraid to call me out for, “Why
are you doing this? Why aren’t you going back to school and finishing
up?” I think that was, to me, some of the beginnings of trying to realize
that I could be doing much more than I was. A couple of leaders in particular—and
there are so many, but I need to give a special shout-out to both Kevan Worley
and Anil Lewis, because those two, along with the late Michael Seay from Tennessee,
were ones that took the time so much and had late-night conversations with a group
of young, dumb people from Michigan and around the country, and would answer our
interesting and probably sometimes inane questions, and question us and let us
question them, and show us that they had a lot of success and also faults as
well.</p> <p>So I think through and through, realizing that there are always people
that have done things that you haven’t done. There are always people that
you can share your experiences with, and just to continually have that dialogue
and talk to other people—that’s what’s really changed me
about the NFB. The slogan I’ve talked to some people about, that I’ve
had for many years, is: “Come for the party, stay for the philosophy.”
Because there’s just so many cool things that you can learn and share with
others here in NFB. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to
touch a little bit more on this with Jenn and Audrey, because nursing and law,
these are both fields that we are certainly capable of, but fields that have
historically and currently been pretty hostile to the blind community entering
it. So I’m wondering—and we’ll start with Jenn—if you
could talk a little bit about how leaning on the collective expertise and the
supports and connections within the Federation helped you dismantle those low
expectations, either while you were in the licensing process or pursuing your
job.</p> <p>Jenn Han: It’s a constant process. It doesn’t end just
because you get your license, and that is the reality of the situation, is that
it’s a constant work in progress. The medical industry is hard, and
I’ve spoken to prospective nursing students who are also blind who are
interested in pursuing the career, and anyone who’s heard me speak previously
knows that I don’t shy away from being brutally honest, because I think
you have to be. There’s power in that and there’s power in truth,
in admitting that this is a really hard industry to pursue, but if you have the
grit to get through it, it’s worth it. And so in terms of dismantling that,
it’s really just about showing up. When I was in my clinical rotations and
even now as I continue to do my career in management and leadership, you can’t
give up just because it gets hard.</p> <p>You’ve worked way too hard for
that. And part of why I’ve been so expressive and vocal and taking up any
and every opportunity to speak on this and share my story is because I think I
struggled way too much and fought way too hard to allow my story to fall through
the cracks. And so I just simply refuse to allow that to happen. [Applause]</p>
<p>So part of it is being visible, not just for yourself and people around you to
inspire them, but for the future generation of students who want to pursue your
industry. It’s about being someone who exemplifies what it looks like to
be in that industry and someone who is approachable and someone who is very willing
to mentor other people and to talk with them and walk with them through it and to
share in the sufferings of what it is to pursue this industry. It doesn’t
have to be exclusive to medicine. It can be any other industry that’s
historically inaccessible, but it’s really just about walking with people
through the hardships and collaborating with them and bouncing ideas off of them.
And then the second part is showing up. If people say you can’t do something,
still show up anyway and do your best to do it, find alternatives.</p> <p>I like
to say, “Don’t allow anyone to put you in a box.” So
that’s me. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: Audrey?</p> <p>Audrey Farnum:
I’m thinking of a couple of situations. I guess for me, it’s more
about the Federation has given me the confidence to just deal with those every
day. And like Jenn said, the hostility, the little moments, they never end. It
can feel like a daily battle almost. I’ve had so many of those incidents.
I’ve had an attorney one time who argued that I couldn’t sign an
order because I was blind. I generally am pretty well supported by my employer,
but there was a time when I had a law degree and several years of experience and
I was making less than my clerical staff. I didn’t grow up in the Federation,
and I grew up as a low-vision kid who was, like a lot of us, not acknowledging
that I was a blind person and trying to fake it. And so I think through that and
all of the things that go with it, that I definitely picked up a lot of internalized
ableism. And so there was a time when I thought, “Well, I’m just
lucky to even have a job because most blind people don’t, and so I
shouldn’t complain about this.”</p> <p>It was really the Federation
and being around all of you who said, “Yes, we deserve equal pay for equal
work. Asking for accommodations is not special treatment. It’s just equal
access.” [Applause] It was just this constantly you guys beating that into
my head where I finally believed it. And so now I got more vocal about my salary,
and that has been corrected quite nicely. [Laughter and applause] I have had my
headbutting incidents with HR over Braille displays and got what I wanted, and it
was because of all of you who encouraged me and told me that I deserved it and
that I mattered and I had value, and I needed you guys to teach me that. [Applause]
So I think that just surviving all of that—there’s just the day-to-day
little things like that. The Federation has given me the strength to do it. Thank
you.</p> <p>Lia Stone: Absolutely. I think certainly relying on the Federation
and our philosophy to give you strength, especially when you are either in an
environment that’s more hostile or the only blind person in your workplace.
I think that’s something a lot of us in here can relate to. I know I
certainly do. J.J., a different question for you as a business owner. Of course,
networking is a lot of what being a small business owner is about. Can you talk
a little bit about how you leveraged your networks within the Federation to build
up your business to the point where it is so successful today?</p> <p>J.J. Meddaugh:
Sure, absolutely. And of course, the obvious ones would be, well, it does help
that we sell products to blind people and there’s an Exhibit Hall here,
which sells products to blind people. So it starts from there. We really appreciate
all your support there and people that bring us new product ideas. We hear—a
lot of the things that we sell now are because one of you said, “I’m
using this and it’s really accessible.” So having conversations with
people and learning what people are using, so it starts there. I think a lot of
it just comes from having conversations, like both of you said, putting yourself
out there. I understand everyone has different levels of comfort with noise and
large crowds and things, but these days there are a lot of different ways that
you can learn from and communicate with other members. So if the loud room
isn’t your scene, you can go on the app. That’s a really good boredom
activity, but you can learn a lot by scrolling through the entire app directory
of all the members.</p> <p>There’s several hundred people that have added
yourselves to that. And you might meet someone in a career that you’re
thinking about going into, or you might learn from them, or maybe you see an
opportunity to talk to someone there. NFB has just really allowed me to expand
out and do things that I didn’t think were possible. And often those things
come from sources you don’t even expect. It was actually a friend of mine
and a mutual friend, Pipi Adams, who told me that Jessica Beecham was looking for
someone to help her run some events over there in the state of Nebraska. [Cheers]</p>
<p>And starting helping with the robotics week led to other things. And now
I’m so fortunate to be the co-admin with Jess running the Work and Gain
Experience in the Summer (WAGES) program in the state of Nebraska with the Nebraska
Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We have an amazing group of fifteen
students, over twenty staff, and amazing agency staff that support blind youth.
And NFB allows me to take the experiences that I’ve learned and bring the
experiences from all of our staff and other students together and teach the next
generation and show them what might be possible. But that only happened because
of networking and from just talking to people in the NFB. A lot of it, I think,
is about making sure people know what you do and having you know what other people
do. I love it when I can find a job posting and then I can think of somebody else
who would be good for that job and send it to them. I know I’ve gotten jobs
that way, and it’s cool to do that for other people as well. So just really
kind of thinking about other people and how you can work with them. And I’ll
just close on this with one other thought. You look at one of these panels, or
maybe you went to Southern Strums or the AI panel or whatever, computer science,
and someone’s up on stage and you’re like, “Man, I could have
done that. Why didn’t they invite me?” Sometimes it’s just
because someone didn’t know that that’s what you did as well. There
are so many musicians in the room, many of whom probably could have been up on
the stage yesterday or Sunday, but maybe some people just don’t know
that’s what you do. So feel free and don’t be shy to share the things
that make you happy and make you passionate, because you never know where they
might come into use and be an added benefit to all of us here at NFB.</p> <p>Lia
Stone: Now, each of you has faced struggles in your journey, right? There is no
path where there are no struggles. I hope that is not breaking news to anybody
listening. There is no career path you can pick where you’re not going to
hit some bumps in the road. That’s life. But the connections that we make
in the Federation can really, I think, help us get through those struggles, those
hurdles. And so I’m going to ask each of you to talk about a challenge that
you have faced in your career to this point and how leaning on the Federation or
Federationists have helped you get through it. So we’ll go backwards, start
with J.J.</p> <p>J.J. Meddaugh: You start with me. Okay. Yeah. I think for
me—and I think some of these other questions, we said the same thing—I
don’t know if I have a specific struggle, but there’s ongoing things
that will come up. It’s really easy as a business owner to get bogged down
in the business, and that’s a common thing you hear. You want to work on
the business, not in the business. And it can be really easy to be sidetracked by
some stupid inaccessible website, or I’ve had state agencies send me
inaccessible PDFs. Agencies for the blind, sending me inaccessible PDFs. But okay,
I still want the money. I still want the order. So choosing your battles and trying
to figure out. But how this leads to NFB, I think though, is a lot of times if I
encounter an inaccessible tool, or there’s a way that I’ve been
doing things for years, somebody else up here will pop up and say, “Hey,
why aren’t you doing it this way? This is so much simpler.” I’m
like, “Oh my gosh. Yeah. Why haven’t I been doing it that way?”
So just having those conversations, finding other business owners, learning from
them, sharing what I know, I think just really kind of helps bridge that gap and
really helps us help others. And it can empower us to then help other people,
whether they’re in NFB or not, to show them the ways that you can, as a
successful blind person, run a successful business.</p> <p>Lia Stone: Yeah. All
right. Jenn?</p> <p>Jenn Han: All right, Lia, are you ready for the list? No, just
kidding. There’s no list. It’s very comprehensive. And in terms of
struggles, a lot of examples come to mind for me, but I kind of want to reiterate
the one that was really the crux of when I was in nursing school. So when I was
taken off of clinical rotations temporarily, I was told to repeat the clinical in
the concurrent class. And so that’s what made the fifteen months turn into
eighteen months. And so I had to join the nursing cohort after me, and my graduation
was pushed back by three months. During that time, I really truly considered
quitting the profession. There were a lot of really difficult things that I had
to face mentally about myself and just being in that space where I said, “Well,
if this is the type of people that I’m going to be working with, I don’t
know if I want to even pursue that anymore.” And keep in mind that this
was years of planning, of considering my profession.</p> <p>And so I was faced
with almost this dilemma of, well, do I quit nursing? Do I find something else?
Do I find an alternative? And I remember I reached out to NFB Legal, because it
was kind of getting to that point. And at the time I was taking my coursework in
California, so they connected me with Tim Elder. And so just a special shout out
to him, because he was the one who kind of walked with me through everything that
was happening. And at the very least—thankfully, I didn’t have to
resort to further action—but at the very least he listened to all of my
ramblings when I was really frustrated with the whole process, and he walked me
through what I needed to do. And so I ended up repeating the clinical. I ended up
taking the classes. He described it as you just have to jump through the hoops in
order to obtain what I needed to, and to fight hard for what I wanted. And so that
was one of the examples.</p> <p>And the other was just the collection of people
who are also in medicine that I’ve kind of acquired through the NFB over
the years, who just listened to me vent, who listened to me go through these
frustrations, and walked with me through it. And honestly, I will say that listening
goes a really, really long way, especially when no one has the answers and
you’re stuck in a situation that no one’s really been through before.
And so the blind presence in medicine is small, but I like to say we’re
small but mighty. And so it meant a lot to me to have that community and to know
that I wasn’t alone in that. And even though our experiences are different
and we have varying degrees of discrimination that each of us has faced, it meant
a lot to be able to share in that and to know that I wasn’t alone in that
and to have a team backing me and supporting me. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: All
right. Audrey?</p> <p>Audrey Farnum: I think a lot of my challenges—of
course, I mean, I deal with inaccessible documents every day still. And just the
support and the tips and tricks that I’ve learned from just even reading
things on the BlindLaw email list and attending the blind lawyers meetings and
hearing how other lawyers are doing things and facing challenges, that’s
just really important to me. And I think the other area is a lot of my challenges
have been honestly in my own head. And there was a time when Jeannie Massay, who
is responsible for me being in the Federation, but also took the time and sat me
down and said, “Look, I’m worried about you. I’m not sure
you’re okay,” and really encouraged me to get some professional
mental health help. And so that was a big influence. She was just—the
kindness and the love that she showed there to encourage me to pay attention to
my mental health. And I’m in a much better place now because of her. And
so that alone has also helped me be able to get through challenging situations
that come up at work. My job is extremely stressful and I handle it a lot better
now just from that simple bit of advice that I got from Jeannie to take care of
myself. And just again, knowing that all of you are here and that you believe in
me, and if I run into trouble, I know like 50,000 people I can call, right? This
is an amazing family and we all support each other. And just knowing that support
is there is really what gets me through all my daily challenges, from the little
ones to the big ones. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: I could not agree with that
last point more. Knowing that we have a family and a network that is 50,000 people
strong, who we can always go to, who we know has our backs, that makes it a lot
easier to deal with the tomfoolery. So we have a lot of people in the audience,
we have a lot of people listening on the live stream who are in different stages
in their career journey. Maybe they’re in an urban environment, maybe
they’re doing this on hard mode and they’re in a rural environment,
and they are wondering, “Well, okay, that’s nice for these people,
but how am I going to have a network? I barely know anybody. I’ve been here
for five minutes. I don’t know how to do this.” So what is a piece
of advice that you have for people listening on how they can cultivate a network
within the Federation?</p> <p>And we’ll start with J.J.</p> <p>J.J. Meddaugh:
So I think it just starts with meeting the people around you. How many people
right now know the person you’re sitting next to? All right, probably. Or
the person you’re sitting in front of. You know who you’re sitting
behind? Okay. Two rows up? Maybe not, right? When you’re coming into general
session, it’s really easy to come in and find your seat, but take a minute
or two and find the person that you haven’t met, maybe in your own affiliate
or maybe in a different affiliate, and try to learn a thing or two about them.
And I think it goes for any of the other meetings as well. It’s really easy
to come in and sit down and take the meeting and then leave, and that’s
fine. But I think trying to find ways—and I understand everyone has different
comfort levels of this—but trying to find those times where it makes sense
to talk to and meet new people.</p> <p>If you go to one of the breakout meetings
and you hear a presenter that really speaks to you, get in touch with them. I
think often it’s thought that, “Oh, these people are in leadership
or they’re busy, they’re not going to have any time for me.”
Oh my gosh, I’ve talked to just about any leader here in the NFB, and it
might take a couple days sometimes—I’m not the best texter, returning
texts to people, I know that—but people are willing to talk to each other
and people are willing to share experiences. So I think don’t ever think
that anyone is beyond reaching out to and talking to and having questions with.
And if you do that, you will find your tribe and you will find the people that
will help you and that you can help them. And there’s so many people,
whether they’re in this room or virtually or anywhere around the country,
that you can work together to change lives. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: Yeah.
All right. Jenn?</p> <p>Jenn Han: Be proactive and be present. So that doesn’t
necessarily have to be in person, that can be virtually. Attend virtual events.
The NFB hosts them all the time. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t
be afraid to reach out to people. You have to start somewhere. That’s kind
of what I like to say. So the more questions you ask and the more willing you are
to just talk to people, you never know who you’ll meet. And so for me, it
was really just about starting somewhere. It doesn’t have to look like a
specific thing. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, but you need to
show up and you need to start. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: Yeah. All right. And
last but not least, Audrey.</p> <p>Audrey Farnum: The best way to make these
connections, especially in your local area, go to a chapter meeting. I mean,
that’s where it all begins. That’s the heart of this organization,
is the chapter meetings. That’s where you start to make those initial bonds.
I think just about every affiliate has an at-large chapter. So if you’re
not near a physical chapter, there’s still a place for you in an at-large
chapter.</p> <p>If you’re here, go to the Presidential Suite. And our
leaders are some of the most open and welcoming people I’ve ever met. I
got to know all of them really early on. Just take the time, go to the Presidential
Suite, introduce yourself to President Riccobono. He loves it. He’s always
open to meeting new people. All of our leaders are. Pam Allen has been so wonderful
to me, Anil Lewis, everybody. I’ve just met so many wonderful people. Our
leaders are so approachable. And reach out to affiliate presidents too. And if
you really are having a hard time finding a connection, talk to your affiliate
president, because they have connections and then they can get you connected to
those connections. So I mean, there’s so many ways to get involved, but
yeah, especially here at this convention, if you’re a first timer, go to
the host affiliate suite, go to the Presidential Suite, say hi to people on the
elevator.</p> <p>If you’re waiting in line for something, start up a
conversation. It’s so easy, and there’s so many just wonderful,
kind, friendly, and open people here. And so just take that little leap of faith
and trust that you’re going to be welcomed with love and kindness, and just
say hi, and you will form those connections. [Applause]</p> <p>Lia Stone: Yep,
absolutely. Well, I thank the three of you so much. For everybody listening who
is unsure, who still doesn’t maybe believe that they can do it and thinks
that we’re all just fearless up here, I will tell you: you cannot be brave
if you’re not scared first. I hope you heed all of our advice up here and
go out and build your network and get to work. Thank you.</p> <p>----------</p>
<p>[PHOTO CAPTION: John Paré]</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Jesse Shirek]</p>
<p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Justin Young]</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Sanho Steele-Louchart]</p>
<h2 id="its-not-over-until-the-blind-secure-equality">It’s Not Over Until
the Blind Secure Equality</h2> <p>by John G. Paré Jr., Jesse Shirek, Justin
Young, and Sanho Steele-Louchart</p> <p>John Paré: Thank you, President
Riccobono, and good afternoon fellow Federationists. Monday, January 26, was a
cold and snowy day in Washington, DC. It was also the first day of our Washington
Seminar, our annual advocacy event on Capitol Hill. There was a thick layer of
ice on top of seven inches of snow, making travel extremely difficult. All area
schools and most businesses were closed. There were a couple of hundred of us
huddled at the Capitol Holiday Inn, which was serving as our central command
center. Despite the frigid temperatures and hazardous conditions, the hotel was
filled with excitement, and our spirits were high.</p> <p>I remember traveling
early the next morning with the NFB of Rhode Island delegation to the Hart Senate
Office Building. We were meeting with Neil Campbell, the chief of staff for Senator
Jack Reed. Senator Reed is the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee.</p> <p>Given our concerns for the Randolph-Sheppard program on military
bases, which you’ll be hearing more about from Jesse, this was a very
important meeting. We met for almost an hour, and the NFB of Rhode Island clearly
connected on all of our issues. At the end of the meeting, Neil commented that
most of his staff was not coming into the office and that we had certainly set
the bar high. This past Washington Seminar is an excellent example of our fortitude,
ability to adapt, and capacity to advocate under all circumstances.</p> <p>And
it’s not just the people who traveled to Washington, DC, that made a
difference. Many members had to scramble to change in-person meetings to virtual,
including our Alaska affiliate, whose flight had been canceled. They were able to
meet with Senator Dan Sullivan virtually and persuaded him to sponsor the Blind
Americans Return to Work Act in the Senate.</p> <p>Also, thanks to the Alaska,
Maryland, and New Hampshire affiliates, our congressional reception was a great
success, with Senators Sullivan, Van Hollen, and Hassan all in attendance. As a
result of our Washington Seminar, we gained a total of forty-six co-sponsors across
our three bills. In addition, we forged stronger relations with our members of
Congress, raised expectations, and strengthened our advocacy skills. I also want
to announce that we have a new hotel for our 2027 Washington Seminar. It is the
Washington Plaza Hotel located at 10 Thomas Circle Northwest.</p> <p>I want to
thank all of our legislative directors and those of you who help organize and
conduct advocacy training. Later this year, we’ll be launching a new
initiative to improve our advocacy with the chairs and ranking members of key
congressional committees. Full committee chairs have substantial discretion to
determine which bills move forward, and by increasing our advocacy with these key
decision-makers, we can maximize the potential that our bills are the ones that
get a hearing and a markup. When we combine this with all of our existing advocacy,
we should be able to improve the chances that one or more of our bills makes it
to the president’s desk.</p> <p>In 2024, we applauded the Department of
Justice for releasing the web and mobile content accessibility final rule for ADA
Title II entities. This final rule was scheduled to go into effect on April 24,
2026, for larger entities and on April 26, 2027, for smaller entities. We thought
that our advocacy on this particular issue was complete, but we were wrong. Shortly
after last year’s National Convention, we learned that the Department of
Justice was considering changes to the final rule. From late 2025 until early
2026, Eve Hill—our general counsel—and I met three times with the
Department of Justice, with the last meeting being with the Assistant Attorney
General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon. We reminded them that the rule was the
culmination of sixteen years of work, and there was absolutely no justification
to change it. Nonetheless, on April 20, just days before the final rule was
scheduled to go into effect, the Department of Justice issued an interim final
rule delaying the final rule for another year for both larger and smaller
entities.</p> <p>Then on May 11, the Department of Health and Human Services—which
had issued a similar digital accessibility rule to the DOJ, but in accordance with
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—also issued an interim final
rule delaying their rule by another year. These interim final rules are outrageous!
These delays are intolerable, and any weakening of the final rules is unconscionable.
The National Federation of the Blind will use every tool in our toolbox to ensure
digital accessibility for all blind Americans. To that end, on May 21, the National
Federation of the Blind sued the Department of Justice and the Department of Health
and Human Services demanding that they retract the interim final rules, and we
intend to be successful!</p> <p>Let’s talk about NFB-NEWSLINE®. Jack
Mendez is our new program manager for the NFB-NEWSLINE service. He’s doing
a great job. NFB-NEWSLINE is the largest and most effective newspaper and information
service available for the blind anywhere in the world. It is available via the
telephone, the web, the Victor Reader Stream, the NLS Digital Talking Book player,
the Amazon Echo, several Braille displays, and the iOS and Android apps. Last
month we added several hundred magazines to NFB-NEWSLINE. These magazines are
currently available on the telephone, the web, and both the iOS and Android apps.
They’ll soon be available on our other access methods. We also expanded
the service to include up to ten back issues of each magazine, meaning that we
have added thousands of magazines to NFB-NEWSLINE.</p> <p>We have 556 newspapers,
plus the Associated Press feed for every state and the District of Columbia. There
are also TV listings for every cable and satellite provider, seven-day weather
forecasts, emergency alerts, and job listings. NFB-NEWSLINE is a universe of
information available through an abundance of access methods. If you do not already
use NFB-NEWSLINE, well, what are you waiting for?</p> <p>The NFB Independence
Market has over 400 items in its catalog, including white canes, Braille and audio
watches, kitchen aids, measuring tools, and games. At last year’s convention,
we announced our new e-commerce service. Last month, we added a variety of UPS
shipping methods in case you need your items right away. And it looks like our
members have stepped up their walking, because we have sold over 4,000 white canes
and over 8,000 cane tips.</p> <p>For all our budding chefs, we now carry the Cobolt
talking air fryer. For all our techies, we now carry the Meta second-generation
smart glasses. And if these glasses don’t make you cool enough, you’ll
probably want to get one of our NFB-logoed shirts. Happy shopping, everyone!</p>
<p>Over the past several years, we have been successful in getting our bills
introduced and building co-sponsor support. However, none have been enacted into
law. There have also been regulatory challenges and setbacks. It is at times like
these that our advocacy is most needed. And while it’s true that there have
been setbacks, there have also been successes. We were successful in our advocacy
to get the two educational exceptions removed from the ADA Title II final website
rule. We helped reverse the reduction-in-force order for the Office of Special
Education and Rehabilitative Services. We have been successful in protecting
funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which helped fund state
libraries for the blind. We have been successful in protecting funding for vocational
rehabilitation and special education, and we helped persuade Congress to extend
the Medicare telehealth expansion until the end of 2027.</p> <p>These are just a
couple of examples, and you’ll be hearing more in a few minutes. The last
couple of years have been challenging, but the National Federation of the Blind
has not given up. Most importantly, we will continue to show up, voice our opinion,
educate policymakers, and demand our rights when our progress seems slow. We will
not be deterred when we are pushed. We will regroup and push back when our rights
are dismissed. We will ensure that our voices are heard. When we are ignored, we
will demand to be recognized. This will not be easy, but the National Federation
of the Blind is up to this job.</p> <p>All right, there’s a lot more
we’d like to tell you about. I want to start with our director of advocacy.
To remind you, he was a former affiliate president. He is a former access technology
instructor. He’s probably got a bunch of those white canes because he’s
a very fast walker, which really is helpful on Capitol Hill because he can get to
meetings faster than anyone I know. He also does an incredibly good job following
our four Ps: polite, professional, persuasive, and persistent. And really of those,
the most important is persuasiveness. Please welcome Jesse Shirek.</p> <p>Jesse
Shirek: Thank you, John. It is an honor and a privilege to direct the advocacy
efforts of the 50,000 members of the National Federation of the Blind. This
September, I’ll celebrate ten years as a Federationist. I know there are
people in this room who’ve been Federationists longer than I’ve been
alive, so ten years may not seem like much. But after ten years of experience, I
keep reflecting on a moment from September of 2016. My wife Sherry and I were
invited to an IEP meeting for a twelve-year-old girl named Destiny. Destiny was
bright, energetic, imaginative, and held big dreams, but she wasn’t getting
the blindness skills she needed. In fact, she wasn’t even comfortable
traveling independently on the street in her own [hometown]. Her parents came to
that meeting with one request. They wanted Destiny to attend a residential school
for the blind to catch up with her peers.</p> <p>The superintendent’s answer
was immediate: “No! There’s no way Destiny is going to a school for
the blind. She’s staying right here.” I remember leaving that meeting
frustrated and angry, and I also remember realizing something important: The
problem wasn’t blindness; it was low expectations. [Applause] That’s
right. As it turned out, Destiny’s family eventually moved to Texas, where
she could get the support she needed, and she’s in this general session
room today. She’s surrounded by the support of our movement.</p> <p>Let me
tell you the part of the story that changed my life. Two days later, Sherry and
I attended our first National Federation of the Blind of North Dakota state
convention. We started telling people about the IEP meeting. One experienced
Federationist listened for a few minutes and asked a question: “Why
didn’t you call us?” The answer’s clear: we didn’t
know. We didn’t know there was a movement of blind advocates who had fought
these battles before, people who understood blindness from lived experience. We
weren’t alone anymore, and neither is Destiny.</p> <p>The reason I tell
you that story is because almost everything I’m going to tell you today
comes back to that lesson. Blind people need nonvisual skills, we need opportunity,
and when our needs are threatened, the National Federation of the Blind shows
up.</p> <p>Earlier this year, we completed training for the third cohort of our
IEP Academy. I love this program. Every time we hold a training, I think about
Destiny. I guarantee there’s another family having the same fight, but the
difference is there are more Federationists with lived experience, more people
who know how to challenge low expectations, and more Federationists willing to
say to parents, “Your child can live the life they want.” That is
strategic advocacy, and we continue fighting.</p> <p>Blindness skills only take
us so far if we cannot afford the tools needed to compete in school, at work, and
in everyday life. That is why the Access Technology Affordability Act, H.R. 1529
and S. 1918, remains one of our top priorities. The good news is that our advocacy
is working. In the 119th Congress, we’ve secured seventy-six House co-sponsors
and eighteen Senate co-sponsors. I want to especially recognize California for
securing eleven House members, Florida for securing ten, and Alaska and Maine for
achieving 100 percent from their congressional delegations in both the House and
Senate. We gained those co-sponsors because Federationists made calls, sent emails,
attended meetings, and built relationships. That strong bipartisan support is
critical as we get this priority included in a year-end vehicle and speeding across
the finish line and onto the president’s desk.</p> <p>Another area where
we’re creating opportunity is autonomous vehicles. For years, we’ve
expressed that blind people should be able to travel independently wherever they
want, whenever we want. The Blind Driver Challenge showed the world what was
possible. Today, we’re working to make sure that Congress creates a federal
framework for autonomous vehicles that includes blind people from the start.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, we engaged both the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on this issue. We also
secured inclusion of the language from the Autonomous Vehicle Accessibility Act
in the House Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act. That’s progress,
but we’re not finished, because the skills that blind people need should
never be limited by transportation barriers.</p> <p>Over the last year, we’ve
also been working with affiliates to build advocacy capacity. One affiliate I want
to recognize is Alabama. Their legislative committee has taken advantage of training
opportunities, participated in our IEP Academy, helped individuals navigate Social
Security challenges, and identified an accessibility issue involving ABLE accounts.
As far as we know, there’s currently no reliable way for a blind person to
independently apply for an ABLE account by making a telephone call to a customer
service representative. When Alabama brought that issue forward, they identified
a problem in their state. More importantly, they uncovered a national issue. Now
we’re working with state government partners across the country to address
it. That’s what Federationists do. We find problems, we solve them, and we
make things better for the next generation of blind Americans.</p> <p>We have also
spent a significant amount of time this year defending programs that matter to
all blind people. When reductions in force threatened key positions in the Office
of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Federationists across the country
took action. The positions affected included experts in special education, vocational
rehabilitation, and the Randolph-Sheppard program. Because our members spoke up,
those positions remain in place today.</p> <p>Sometimes advocacy means creating
something new. Sometimes it means protecting what already works. That brings me
to Randolph-Sheppard. Last year, we learned that the Department of the Army
requested a waiver of the Randolph-Sheppard priority on all military installations.
[Boos from the audience] Boo, that’s right! The request was based on
misinformation, claims that blind vendors were driving up costs and taking advantage
of the system. Those claims are false! [Applause] That’s right. Blind
vendors earn opportunities through training, experience, and hard work. When we
learned what was happening, Federationists responded. We sent letters, we educated
policymakers, and we met with congressional offices. Barbara Manuel, president of
our Alabama affiliate [applause] and a Randolph-Sheppard vendor herself, traveled
to Washington, DC, to tell her story directly. Although the waiver was granted,
the fight is not over. We continue working with Congress because blind entrepreneurs
deserve opportunity, and we will not stand by as our rights are threatened.
Unfortunately, we’ve had to file an Administrative Procedure Act lawsuit
against the Department of Education to defeat this waiver, and we will win!</p>
<p>Before I wrap up, let me tell you about one more item of importance. In May,
we identified an opportunity. We brought our National Federation of the Blind
Seniors Division to Washington, DC. They came to Washington, DC, to advocate to
increase funding for the Older Individuals Who Are Blind program. Unfortunately,
this program has been flat-funded at $33.3 million for the last ten or more years.
This amounts to a little over six dollars per eligible individual. We are going
to continue fighting until we get this increased.</p> <p>Let me circle back to
Destiny. When we reflect on the fact that this organization changes lives, that
this organization makes a difference, we can take confidence that nobody like
Destiny and her family are going to be left behind. We can take confidence that
no blind person will ever be left behind. So let us go out and build our advocacy
capacity. Thank you. [Applause]</p> <p>John Paré: We’re going to keep
moving, and next is Dr. Justin Young. He’s our government affairs specialist.
He has a lot more bills to talk about and different parts of our advocacy. Here
is Dr. Young.</p> <p>Dr. Justin Young: One year ago, while standing on this stage,
Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano shared his goals and
direction for the department he now leads. After speaking at National Convention,
he came to tour our headquarters, where he met with President Riccobono. During
that meeting, he told us he met with Representative Pete Sessions from Texas and
communicated his support for the Blind Americans Return to Work Act. Representative
Sessions then wrote a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith
detailing the commissioner’s support for this legislation. That’s
not just support, that’s leadership, and it brings us one step closer to
real change.</p> <p>Now let us talk about momentum. The Blind Americans Return to
Work Act, H.R. 1175, has forty-nine co-sponsors, thirty-two Democrats and seventeen
Republicans. That is bipartisan progress and it matters. During our congressional
reception at Washington Seminar this year, Senator Dan Sullivan spoke highly about
his meeting with members of our Alaska affiliate. While he engaged directly with
his constituents, that level of engagement demonstrates the power of the advocacy
of the National Federation of the Blind. Senator Sullivan committed to sponsor
the legislation, and we are proud to say he introduced the bill on April 16. This
is how change happens through our voices and our advocacy. But let’s be
clear, we cannot slow down. Like the Access Technology Affordability Act, we are
still working to secure the right legislative vehicle to get this bill across the
finish line. Until we do, every conversation, every meeting, every email to our
representatives and senators counts. We must keep building the bipartisan support
because it’s how we will win, and we are not putting all of our hopes into
one pathway.</p> <p>We now have two paths we can explore. The House of Representatives
Committees on Ways and Means and Rules recently marked up a bill authorizing
demonstration authority to the Social Security Administration Commissioner, helping
to make a program like the Blind Americans Return to Work Act possible. We are
actively pursuing this opportunity because our goal is clear: to eliminate the
earnings cliff once and for all.</p> <p>At the same time, we continue to lead on
another critical front, the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act.
This legislation, sponsored in the House by Representatives Pete Sessions from
Texas and Steny Hoyer from Maryland, would establish a strong enforceable definition
of accessibility, create a technical assistance center, and would hold third-party
developers accountable. During his remarks delivered at the Great Gathering-In
for the 2026 Washington Seminar, Representative Hoyer, a champion of the Americans
with Disabilities Act and equal access to websites, said: “We had a tough
time getting the ADA passed, but the final vote was overwhelming. It was overwhelming
because you educated people as to what the challenges were and the differences
you could make with reasonable accommodations, with inclusion, with opportunity.
We’re going to keep working to foster the same cooperation that made the
ADA possible.” Because of our education and advocacy, the Websites and
Software Applications Accessibility Act has achieved significant bipartisan support
in the House of Representatives.</p> <p>On March 3, 2026, Senator Tammy Duckworth
from Illinois introduced the Senate companion bill for this important legislation.
But again, momentum is not enough. We must turn support into action. We will
continue pushing in both the House and Senate until this becomes law.</p>
<p>Let’s also remember what we accomplished together on Medicare telehealth.
Last year, we passed Resolution 2025-07 calling on Congress to make telehealth
coverage permanent. Lucas Griess, a blind person from Atkinson, Nebraska, a small
town of a little over 1,200 people, which is a little more than half the people
in this room, would have to have someone drive him three hours away to go to his
eye doctors. That’s a six-hour round trip. Everyone in his home who could
drive him works full-time, meaning they would have to take a full day off from
work to take him to his doctor’s appointment. Lucas says, “Having
access to telehealth allows me to take care of my medical appointments remotely
without needing my parents to take time off from work and having to spend six
hours in a car.” Thanks to the National Federation of the Blind and the
advocacy from our membership by making calls, sending emails, and meeting with
members of Congress, we have been able to extend telehealth benefits until December
31, 2027. That is progress, but it is not yet victory. Temporary extensions are
not a solution. People depend on these services every single day and they deserve
certainty. That is why we must continue pushing for passage of the CONNECT for
Health Act so telehealth under Medicare becomes permanent.</p> <p>And finally,
let’s recognize the progress happening at the state level. On May 19, 2026,
Iowa became the tenth state to pass accessible prescription labeling legislation.
That is a major milestone and it reflects years of persistent advocacy. The other
states who have passed accessible prescription labeling laws are California,
Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, and Virginia,
along with Puerto Rico. And we believe that other states will soon join this list.
I want to recognize Hawaii again, where we are seeing forward movement on access
technology and strengthening Braille literacy laws. [Applause] Yes! These two
bills are now awaiting the governor’s signature and we are hopeful they
will soon become law.</p> <p>Taken together, these victories, federal and state,
tell a powerful story. When we organize, when we advocate, and when we refuse to
back down, we create real, lasting change. So the message today is simple. We are
making progress, but we are not done. When we meet with our legislators and our
members of Congress year after year, we build relationships. From these relationships,
we find champions. Our champions join us on the path to progress. We are building
momentum, but we must push harder. And with our continued advocacy, we will succeed.
Thank you.</p> <p>John Paré: All right. Thank you, Justin. You’ve
heard about our federal legislation, some about our state work that we’re
doing, some of the regulatory work that we’re doing. Now let’s hear
about some of the work we’re doing more on the individual meetings and the
advocacy we do there. Here to talk about that is our legal programs coordinator.
Here is Sanho Steele-Louchart.</p> <p>Sanho Steele-Louchart: You’ve heard
quite a bit this week about <em>Texas v. Kennedy</em>. This case was filed in 2024
by seventeen state attorneys general who sought to declare Section 504 of the
Rehabilitation Act unconstitutional. For those who don’t know, Section 504
of the Rehabilitation Act is the part of the federal law which makes it illegal
to discriminate against people with disabilities on the basis of those disabilities
in government programs, activities, and services. We were thrilled in 2025 when
nine states dropped their bids for <em>Texas v. Kennedy</em>. And then in 2026,
a new claim was added. That claim sought to overturn something called the
<em>Olmstead</em> community integration mandate. This is a piece of federal case
law which interprets Section 504 to mean that people with disabilities have the
right to receive services in our local communities. These services are things like
special education, employment, things in the home, et cetera. Everything that you
could imagine in your local community, that’s the <em>Olmstead</em> community
integration mandate.</p> <p>Unfortunately, it is the view of people who are pushing
this claim that we should have to go to specialized facilities, some would say
institutions, in order to receive specialized services. The affiliate presidents
for the states still on the lawsuit have been advocating tirelessly to ensure that
that is not allowed. We are happy to report that as of this June, Indiana, South
Dakota, and Kansas have officially submitted their withdrawals, but the story does
not end there. Unfortunately, on June 18, the Department of Justice issued a
memorandum reversing their own regulations on the community integration mandate
and declaring those regulations invalid and unenforceable. It is hard to overstate
just how unacceptable this is. The National Federation of the Blind is categorically
opposed to any move which would take us toward forced institutionalization. I will
tell you, we are well aware of the situation and we are evaluating our options
carefully.</p> <p>And now for other advocacy. The Jacobus tenBroek Disability
Rights Law Symposium is the largest and oldest disability rights law symposium
anywhere in the world. This year was our nineteenth such symposium, where 220
participants came together for twenty-three presentations at the National Federation
of the Blind headquarters in Baltimore. This year’s plenaries included
sessions like “Big Litigation, Big Results” and “Organizing
Across the Movement: A Year-End Review,” and each session was a deep dive
into our ability to fight back. As one longtime disability rights attorney—you
may recognize his name—Dan Goldstein, said, “I have been to nineteen
out of nineteen of these and I truly believe that this was the best so far.
I’m grateful to the NFB for organizing and putting on something that took
so much work so that we could come and learn from each other at such an important
time.”</p> <p>In addition to organizing and hosting the Disability Rights
Law Symposium, we were honored to consult with fellow attorneys throughout the
nation across the past year. Just a few of our consultations included in Illinois,
where we helped Equip for Equality, that state’s protection and advocacy
organization, as well as the public defender’s office to ensure that blind
people have the right to access court documents, court buildings, and the legal
system generally while involved in a case. In Ohio, we assisted an attorney fighting
for the rights of an employee with multiple disabilities after years of ongoing
and systemic disability discrimination. We trained the National Institute of
Corrections and the departments of corrections throughout the United States on
the rights of blind prisoners so that hopefully we don’t have to keep suing
them one at a time.</p> <p>Regarding our legal intakes over the past year, we
assisted nearly 500 people and families. Since our update at the last Convention,
we assisted in five airline cases, nine prisoners’ rights, twelve vocational
rehabilitation, fourteen high-stakes testing, twenty-two rideshare dog and cane
denials, twenty-six housing issues, thirty-two K-12 and postsecondary education,
forty-six nonlegal questions like where to find regulatory language, et cetera,
seventy-three access to private businesses (including websites), eighty-five
outside referrals for things like wills and estates and property disputes, and
135 employment discrimination cases. We assisted 467 people and families across
the past twelve months with your help.</p> <p>Now regarding education cases, just
a few of those issues that we helped with this year included in Montana: a
deaf-blind, wheelchair-using nine-year-old boy who hadn’t received Braille,
accessible electronic documents, or accessible technology instruction, and against
whom the district had already won two administrative complaints. Yes, you heard
that correctly. Two separate judges agreed with the district that a deaf-blind,
wheelchair-using nine-year-old boy didn’t have the right to accessible
technology, Braille, or even accessible pathways on his school campus. The district
said unfortunately those things were simply impossible.</p> <p>With our help, a
teacher of blind students has been contracted by the district. The paraprofessional
is now fluent in Braille. The student has fourteen hours of Braille a week. The
student has four hours a week of accessible technology instruction. The student
has a Windows laptop, a Chromebook, an iPad, JAWS, Fusion, a Mantis, and more.
The student’s auditory needs are being taken care of and the student is
being given accessible transportation both on and off campus. And what’s
more, all of those sidewalks that would be impossible to fix? Every single one of
them has been fixed.</p> <p>In South Carolina, a blind thirteen-year-old girl had
been denied Braille, tactile graphics, and accessible electronic documents for
years. Here again, the district simply shrugged its collective shoulders and said,
“Sorry, our teacher of blind students says Braille is hard.” And
they said providing Braille and tactile graphics and accessible electronic documents
just couldn’t be done. With our help, the student received Braille instruction,
Braille materials and tactile graphics, accessible electronic documents, an hour
of Braille a week, and the option to switch between modalities at will. The student
received accessible technology and accessible technology instruction. She received
age- and stage-appropriate goals across each domain.</p> <p>And now for another
case that you’ve heard quite a bit about, I’m going to give you more
information. This one’s hard. In Minnesota, a blind eleven-year-old Braille
reader was told earlier this year that he would no longer be receiving services
at certain times of day. His parents objected and because or after they objected,
the district said, “Fine, not only will Silas not be receiving services at
those times, now he won’t be receiving accommodations at all.” See,
he’d been seen looking at a graphic novel for ten minutes between courses
and one time he walked across math class without his cane. They decided that he
had too much vision and, even though they agree that that is subject to change,
that it’s not a good use of their resources to keep giving him accommodations.
The district planned to remove Braille, tactile graphics, accessible electronic
documents, and large print entirely. Never mind the fatigue, never mind the pain,
never mind the difficulty keeping up. The district said that providing accommodations
was simply no longer a possibility. When the parents, both strong advocates in
their own right, took the district to mediation, the mediator seemed to agree with
the district. The mediator heavily implied that the parents’ requests were
unreasonable, and the district was only more emboldened. The district said,
“Well, now, not only will he not receive accommodations in the classroom,
we’re also cutting his Braille instruction and his mobility services to
just a few minutes a month.”</p> <p>It was then that his parents—here
again, both strong leaders in the Federation—reached out to the legal
program for help. It was during that first phone call that Silas said, “Please
fight for me. They’re punishing me for still being able to see.”
Fight we did. We filed due process against the district in administrative court
and we’re happy to report that as of yesterday we won. So about that word
impossible, Silas will now be receiving entire classes in Braille, Braille
instruction, tactile graphics, large print when he wants large print, accessible
technology and accessible technology instruction, orientation and mobility, and
more. Not only will the district be providing every single thing that we demanded,
but they will be providing hours upon hours of it every month.</p> <p>This is just
a sample of what we’ve been doing across the past month, and none of it
would’ve been possible without the support and the love of our Federation
family. Every time we make a call, every time we send a letter, every time we join
someone in a difficult meeting, we are doing the work of the Federation. Please,
as busy as we are, as difficult as this work is to do, it is imperative that we
keep doing that work because it is worth the effort of every single one of us
individually and collectively that we manage to do the impossible. This work is
an honor and a pleasure. John and President Riccobono, and to our Federation
family, that is my report. Thank you.</p> <p>John Paré: Thank you, Sanho. I
want to comment on the theme that you’ve heard so much. It’s the
work that we all do, everyone in this room, everyone listening, even the
people—the 50,000 members, even the ones who can’t get to this
Convention, it’s all of us—that are making the difference. When we
work together, when we individually call, when we send emails, when we do this at
the state level, at the federal level, I know that we’ve been doing a lot
of defense this year—in the last two years. President Riccobono has had to
send out numerous—usually more than several a month, sometimes one a
week—policy letters to defend our rights and to raise expectations for
blind people. We’ve been doing a lot of defense. It’s not as fun as
offense, getting bills to the president’s desk, but it’s just as
important.</p> <p>We can’t go backwards. And as you’ve just heard,
we are not only maintaining, we are going ahead, not as much as we’d like,
but we’re going ahead because we’re working together, we’re
working hard, we’re making those calls. And I know that if we keep doing
this together, we’re going to have a lot more in the report, both on
successful defense and successful offense. That’s our report, President
Ricobono. Thank you.</p> <p>----------</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Jonathan Mosen]</p>
<h2 id="its-our-turn-now">It’s Our Turn Now</h2> <p>by Jonathan Mosen</p>
<p><strong>From the Editor: Jonathan Mosen gave this presentation on the morning
of July 8, 2026, the last general session of the 2026 National Convention. In it,
he refers to presentations given earlier in the week by Mike Calvo of Pneuma
Solutions and Neil Barnett of Microsoft. For more context, readers can consult
the Convention Roundup in the August/September issue of this magazine. Here is
Jonathan’s presentation, beginning with President Riccobono’s
introduction:</strong></p> <p>President Riccobono: Now, we’ve had to make
a couple of changes to our agenda this morning, and I’m proud that we have
an opportunity here to slip in a presentation. We’ve had a lot of talk
about technology, the work that we’re doing to provide leadership on
technology and innovation, and to bring users more into the center of what’s
happening at the major tech companies, the startups across the world. We want to
be not just the consumers, but innovators and leaders. Here for a brief report is
our Executive Director for Accessibility Excellence, Jonathan Mosen.</p> <p>[Applause
and music, excerpt of “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles]</p>
<p>Jonathan Mosen: Hopefully video hasn’t quite killed this radio star yet.
I’m Jonathan Mosen, and I am proud to be blind.</p> <p>When I was five
years old, my friend and I were in the school playground using the seesaw. After
we’d been on it for a while, another kid came up to us and politely asked
if he could have a turn on the seesaw. I told him, “Sure, sometime.
Soon.” [Laughter] I had no intention of getting off that seesaw. And
periodically he’d politely ask if it was his turn yet, and I’d tell
him it would be soon. Finally, the school bell rang, it was time to go back to
class, and I hadn’t given him his turn. Now, this happened a couple more
times until this little boy got wise. And finally, one day he approached us
confidently on that seesaw, and he said, “It’s my turn now.”
My considerably older self does not feel proud of the way that I treated that
kid—the boy who has been my best friend ever since and has even been my
best man, so I guess I can consider myself forgiven.</p> <p>I tell this story as
a preface to talking about the Federation’s technology activities to make
this point: Demanding our turn—our rightful, equal place in society—requires
self-worth. Self-worth is something nobody else can give you. It’s not
within any other person’s gift. No one can take your self-worth from you.
They can undermine it, they can disregard it, they can even disrespect it, but it
is not theirs to take. It is ours to claim, ours to protect, ours to assert, ours
to advance. We march onward relentlessly, building a future where technology
designed for everyone includes us, and access technology designed for blind people
enables us, all built in partnership with us and increasingly by us.</p> <p>Now,
on Monday you heard from President Riccobono in his report about some of the things
that the newly revitalized Accessibility Excellence team has been doing. Neil
Barnett discussed our extensive partnership with Microsoft, so I won’t
revisit those issues. I would, however, like to expand a little on our partnership
with Meta, because it’s an example of exactly what President Riccobono said
in his report: “Our bonds are our strengths.” When Meta partnered
with Be My Eyes on the glasses, we received considerable feedback. You told us
you loved Be My Eyes on the Meta glasses, but you wanted to use other blindness
apps as well. We acted. President Riccobono wrote to Meta, making the case for a
more open platform. We talked with Meta regularly, one of many constructive and
forthright relationships we have built. We told them there’s no other place
on earth where you can get a wider cross section of the blind community—from
the most tech savvy people in the world to people who haven’t yet seen the
need to use this technology at all—than the National Federation of the
Blind’s National Convention. Come to convention, we said, and they did.
You reinforced what President Riccobono and I had been telling them, and then Meta
did something somewhat out of character. They announced the Wearables Device Access
Toolkit, delivering what we asked for: the ability for blindness apps to come to
Meta smart glasses. [Applause]</p> <p>There’s a lesson here. It started
with your feedback. We knew the right people to pass it on to because we built
the relationships. You reinforced it with your message, and now those glasses are
more useful than they were before because of our advocacy. Aira is available on
the glasses now. [Applause] Envision Ally has beta support for the glasses.
We’re seeing newer players like ScribeMe and OOrion, and Microsoft has
announced that Seeing AI is coming soon. [Applause] That is what the organized
blind movement can do when we insist “It’s our turn now.” We
welcome increasing choice in this product category. Agiga is working closely with
the blind community as it develops its EchoVision smart glasses, which are designed
specifically for us at a price that’s competitive with commercial offerings.
Significantly, for those of us who are deafblind, they pair with Bluetooth audio
devices, including some hearing aids and cochlear implants. [Applause] We’ll
soon see a wider selection of glasses available using the new Google XR platform.</p>
<p>Now, good quality screen reading is fundamental to living the life we want.
We’ve enjoyed discussing strategy with NV Access, featuring them on a
dedicated episode of the Federation’s <em>Access On</em> podcast—anybody
listen to that?—and acquainting many Americans with this open-source screen
reader. NV Access and the Federation have compatible philosophies. NVDA is as
successful as it is because so many blind people have a stake in it, since blind
people are building it. There’s no need to wait our turn. Instead, individuals
contribute for the greater good.</p> <p>AI is reshaping every product blind people
touch. As I predicted in New Orleans last year, agentic AI is making its presence
felt. In the coming year, it’ll offer a new way to use a screen reader.
Increasingly, the interaction will resemble the conversation you might have with
a person sitting next to you, describing what’s on the screen, reading this
part or summarizing that part, answering your follow-up questions, assisting to
navigate through an inaccessible roadblock.</p> <p>Vispero is consulting us on
the capabilities and the guardrails of the new JAWS agentic AI, and blind people
who have found the learning curve of traditional screen reading a barrier may
really benefit from this. I’m particularly interested in the lowering of
the barriers to entry for seniors for whom blindness has come later in life and
who may not have vocational aspirations. [Applause] Not all of us, regardless of
our comfort level with screen readers, can use this technology in the way that we
want, because of various obstacles. If we are in a completely inaccessible screen
and the AI agent can click an inaccessible button or adjust an inaccessible date
picker so we can get the job done while we advocate for the issue to be resolved,
that is progress we can all get behind. And just as is the case for everyone, if
AI can speed up certain repetitive or complex tasks and do so reliably, that’s
a productivity win.</p> <p>But this takes me back to the point that President
Riccobono made in his report regarding our concerns about the loss of so much
blind institutional knowledge at Vispero in such a short time: We need experienced,
capable blind people guiding these developments and keeping them proportionate,
so AI isn’t a new shiny precious that hogs too many resources. If that is
allowed to occur, we could miss out on essential advances to core screen-reading
functionality. We need blind people who know that some of us are willing to learn
the keyboard commands. Some of us actually know them rather well already. Let AI
lower the barriers, but not at the expense of efficient keyboard support and robust
Braille support. [Applause] And let us make it abundantly clear that these
conversational AI interfaces are no substitute for quality screen-reader training
based on principles of Structured Discovery. [Light applause]</p> <p>If agentic
AI is changing how we use software, vibe coding is changing who gets to make it.
As Mike Calvo briefly mentioned on Monday, vibe coding means that anyone who has
a clear idea about what they want a piece of software to do and how it should work
can now have AI assist them to build it, even if they’ve never written a
line of code in their life. You describe what you want. You explain what should
happen when the user does this or that. The AI writes the code. You try it out,
you tell the AI what isn’t quite right, and it works with you until the
software does what you intended. For decades, too many software developers and
product managers have told us that it’s not our turn yet, that we should
wait until some unspecified time that never comes. Fellow Federationists, the
blind-powered technology renaissance is on. [Applause] We are done waiting, and
it’s our turn now. We are taking control and making the tools. We are
plugging accessibility gaps we have endured and pleaded with developers about for
years. And the people doing this are people we know. They’re in our community.
They answer feedback. They fix bugs in a matter of days, not quarters.</p> <p>Now,
the prediction markets are having a moment right now. I must confess, I can’t
say that I’ve tried them, so I don’t know whether they’re
accessible or not, but I hope that no one has been betting on an old prediction
that I’ve continued to hear for decades, and I can summarize that prediction
in just four words: Braille is dying out. [Boos] To anyone predicting this, I can
give you a response that’s even more concise. It just takes me three words:
You are wrong. [Applause] We celebrate the degree of innovation and choice that
we see in the Braille market. You can buy standalone Braille displays like we had
in the old days that are thin, keyboardless, and just sit in front of your computer
keyboard. You can buy displays with QWERTY input or with Braille input. You can
buy displays that have basic notetaking and book reading functions, or you can
buy devices that run full Windows. You can buy a device that runs Android or a
device that runs Linux. And we have played our part to finally liberate Braille
from the confines of a single line. Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I can
respond to that prediction in just one word. Braille is dying out? Nonsense!</p>
<p>With choice comes perplexity, particularly since multi-line Braille devices
are so new and there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Both the Monarch
and Dot Pad X are terrific products. Neither is perfect, and I can recite a list
of things that we’d like to see improved, but they are great at what they
do. The thing is, they do different things. To say Monarch and Dot Pad X are the
same because they’re multi-line is like saying that a Windows PC and a Mac
are the same because they both have a screen. There is an article about this topic
in the May <em>Braille Monitor</em>. I encourage you to check it out.</p> <p>Of
particular importance is ensuring that our blind kids get the best device to set
them up for success. If a child needs a stand-alone device with Braille input,
notetaking, math, and book reading functions built in, the ability to grab handouts
that a teacher has put into a Google Drive or OneDrive direct from the device,
then the right device is a Monarch. I hear people expressing concerns about the
price of Monarch, but let’s reflect on that remarkable achievement of
getting a full computer with that many Braille cells—ten whole lines of
thirty-two-cell Braille—at the current price. That is a lot of Braille for
the buck, with a full Braille notetaker in the box. But we are confident that as
the product scales, the manufacturers will continue to pass on price reductions,
as they have been doing already. These devices are investments.</p> <p>Now, a good
investment returns a dividend, and here’s just a part of that dividend.
Savings can be made both in time and dollars through not having to produce and
ship expensive and bulky hard copy Braille books. We can equip the kids with
tactile graphics literacy by getting those graphics under their fingertips at the
earliest possible age, and quickly where there is an immediate need. Kids can
access tactile diagrams either from the repository or drawn in real time by a
teacher or parent. And all those things set children up to pursue careers in STEM
in a way they never could before. They will graduate as highly literate adults,
best equipped to enter the workforce and pay taxes, which will recoup the initial
investment in that Monarch many times over. It is not rocket science, even though
these devices will produce blind rocket scientists. [Laughter and applause] We
must not stand for being told that blind kids aren’t worthy of that
investment. That kind of thinking represents economic and moral failure. It’s
our turn now. [Applause]</p> <p>As I close, creating a world of accessibility
excellence is the responsibility of us all. There is plenty of room for you in
this mission. Many of us in our movement have tech wisdom and knowledge to share.
Please share generously. Whether you’re an expert or someone who wishes
all this was just simpler to use, join our BUILD program—Blind Users
Innovating and Leading Design—where you may be able to help a company make
better products and services. If there’s a tech issue you think the Federation
should do something about, talk about it at a chapter meeting, get in touch with
us, do what some did this year and bring tech-related resolutions to national
convention. Bring them to your state convention. File good-quality bug reports
with companies, and copy us in.</p> <p>Of this I have no doubt: we will maximize
our progress when we, the organized blind, take our turn, coordinated and united
in our purpose. Technology is what it is today because for eighty-five years
we’ve been getting it done. Every day you have my word that we continue to
get it done. We are problem solvers. We are determined. We are resilient. We are
doers. We are the National Federation of the Blind, and it’s our turn now.
Thank you. [Applause]</p> <p>----------</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Pam Allen at the
2024 National Convention banquet.]</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: John and Sandy Halverson]</p>
<h2 id="nfb24-flashback-the-dr.-jacobus-tenbroek-award">#NFB24 Flashback: The Dr.
Jacobus tenBroek Award</h2> <p>Presented by Pam Allen</p> <p><strong>From the
Editor: At the banquet of the 2024 National Convention, the Jacobus tenBroek Award
was presented by master of ceremonies Pam Allen. The recipients were unable to
attend the Convention because one of them had experienced health issues, but they
held a “banquet party” to listen to the event. Prior to the party,
they were sent a box, which President Riccobono told them via email to open at
the party when instructed and not before. Here is the exchange that took place
during the banquet:</strong></p> <p>Pam Allen: Now it is my pleasure to present
a very special award. I want to take a moment to thank the members of our Dr.
Jacobus tenBroek Award Committee: Barbara Loos, Norma Crosby, Ron Brown, and Dr.
Maurer.</p> <p>Dr. Jacobus tenBroek was one of the most influential minds in the
field of civil rights. He was a fearless advocate, a respected attorney, and a
legal genius whose legacy lives on decades after his death. His writings and
teachings on equality were pivotal to the landmark case <em>Brown v. Board of
Education</em>, the Supreme Court decision that desegregated schools in America.</p>
<p>Dr. tenBroek founded the National Federation of the Blind in 1940 and served
as our first President. His work in the blindness field revolutionized how the
blind live in the world. As a testament to the immense and lasting impact his
contributions have had on society, we hold an annual disability law symposium in
his name. The National Federation of the Blind awards this prestigious honor only
when an awardee meets its rigorous criteria, and this year is one such special
occasion. As an organization, it is the highest honor that we bestow.</p> <p>The
recipient must exemplify the characteristics that are synonymous with Dr. tenBroek:
an unwavering commitment to civil rights, a heart for service, a fierce spirit of
advocacy, and a history of contributions that result in transformative change for
blind people.</p> <p>This year’s recipient has truly been in the thick of
everything that defines the National Federation of the Blind as a catalyst for
positive change and for excellence. With commitment, creativity, hard work, and
just plain availability and willingness to serve, this year’s recipient
has helped so many programs by their giving and loving service, including our
Braille Readers Are Leaders contest, our BELL® Academies, and so many
others.</p> <p>Everywhere this year’s recipient has lived—and trust
me, there have been several places—the awardee has participated actively
in local, state, and national chapters, divisions, and affiliates of the National
Federation of the Blind. From east to west, north to south, and finally to Virginia,
this couple has also stepped up and taken on responsibilities that have promoted
the mission of our organization and helped build the National Federation of the
Blind. They epitomize what all of us in this room strive to do every day by living
the lives they want.</p> <p>This couple has been a passionate promoter of Braille
because both of them understand how this foundational skill can open doors to
employment and leadership opportunities. Both individuals joined the National
Federation of the Blind in 1973, and—yes—John and Sandy Halverson…
[Applause]</p> <p>And you can open the box now, Sandy.</p> <p>They have a very
special place in our hearts because they have always been there doing what needs
to be done, whatever that might be, big or small, wherever they are, individually
and as a couple, to help blind people achieve their dreams.</p> <p>Until this
year, John has attended every national convention. How many of us in this room
can say the same thing? Because of health reasons, John, we know you are not able
to be with us, and we know how difficult that is for both of you not to be here
in person. But we know you will be back next year, and we are sending so much love
as you recover.</p> <p>In 1973 John participated in the second NFB Leadership
Seminar. He has served on the National Scholarship Committee and was president of
the Public Employees Division. In the early years, John was active in the national
Student Division, serving as treasurer. He was president of the NFB of Michigan
in the 1970s. After receiving a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan,
he worked for several decades as an economist for the federal government.
John’s knowledge and expertise opened so many doors for others pursuing
careers in economics and related fields. He continues to serve in numerous ways
in our Virginia affiliate.</p> <p>Sandy started attending national conventions in
1977. She has held multiple positions in the NFB throughout the years. Like me,
some of you may have first met Sandy at Washington Seminar, where she and her
great team adeptly coordinated what was formerly known as the Mercury Room.
Professional, efficient, and friendly are terms that people use to describe Sandy.
Many of you might also know and remember that for thirty years, Sandy led us in
song at our national convention banquets, singing songs that reflect our history
and celebrate our successes.</p> <p>Sandy is a true giver. As you heard this week,
she is chair of our SUN Fund Committee, and she holds the position of first vice
president of the National Federation of the Blind of Virginia, where she works
tirelessly as Tracy’s right hand.</p> <p>Sandy learned to read and write
Braille and is known today as one of the fastest Braille readers in the country.
“In all the jobs I have held from the 1970s to the present, Braille literacy
has been a major key to my success,” Sandy explains, and now she works
tirelessly to bring that to all blind people. She also worked as a medical
transcriptionist, and after enrolling in an intense three-year course of study,
she became the first totally blind court reporter in the country.</p> <p>Sandy
and John were pioneers in their fields, and through their work they increased
employment opportunities for blind people. Many who know Sandy know she is an
expert knitter and particularly enjoys knitting delicate lace shawls, which she
does by transcribing the complicated patterns into Braille. And I am told that at
the NFB of Virginia state convention, Sandy’s shawls bring in hundreds of
dollars for the affiliate.</p> <p>As you can tell, John and Sandy Halverson have
dedicated time, skills, and their lives to changing misconceptions about blindness
and making the world better for all of us. They have shared their hopes and dreams
and mentored and encouraged so many Federationists over the years. When one of us
takes a step forward in our personal and professional lives, it moves all of us
forward.</p> <p>John and Sandy, we thank you for leading the way for us on the
road to freedom, opportunity, and equity. We thank you for giving generously and
so lovingly in all you do. We are honored to present the Dr. Jacobus tenBroek
Award to you, and we hope you feel the love and gratitude all the way in Virginia.
Congratulations!</p> <p>Sandy Halverson: Thank you. Thank you very much! Mr.
President (chuckling)… You made me cry. You said, “a box for your
party.” That’s true. You said in your email that a party means
treats. Now, I had no idea what was going to be in this box when John and I opened
it, but we certainly were not expecting this. And, John, help me.</p> <p>It is a
true honor, though, to be recognized for the time that we have spent lovingly—and
we are not done—the time that we spend doing the work of the National
Federation of the Blind. Somebody said earlier this week that no matter what I
give, it is not enough, because I can never give back as much as I have been given.
And I think that’s true.</p> <p>So I’m not sure if John wants to
say anything or not. John? John figures, as I usually do, that I have probably
said enough for both of us. But he will also continue to do as much as he can.</p>
<p>We love being Tracy’s right-hand people. I like telling Tracy—which
he always admits at the board meeting—if he comes up with something crazy,
I’ll say, “Tracy, that’s just crazy, you can’t do
that.” So we have a great, wonderful, loving relationship, not only in
Virginia but everywhere we have lived, and this is truly an honor, even if I
didn’t know what to expect when I opened the box. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Pam Allen: Congratulations! I want to read the words on the plaque that Sandy
and John are receiving, which is in print and Braille. It says:</p> <blockquote>
<p>Jacobus tenBroek Award presented to Sandy and John Halverson for your dedication,
sacrifice, and commitment on behalf of the blind of this nation. Your contribution
is measured not in steps but in miles, not by individual experiences but by your
impact on the lives of the blind of the nation.</p> <p>Whenever we have asked,
you have answered. We call you our colleagues with respect. We call you our friends
with love. July 8, 2024. Congratulations! [Applause]</p> </blockquote> <p>----------</p>
<h2 id="we-need-your-help">We Need Your Help</h2> <p><em>Through the Federation,
I learned that most of what I was taught to believe about blindness was untrue.
Being blind wasn’t something to be ashamed of. Using my cane in public
wasn’t weird. If I wanted to pick up my cane or my [guide] dog and walk
somewhere, I could just do it because the fears of other people didn’t have
to be my fears too.</em> - Julie</p> <p>Blind people across the United States
are making powerful strides in education and leadership, but we need to continue
helping people like Julie. For more than eighty years, the National Federation of
the Blind has worked to transform the dreams of hundreds of thousands of blind
people into reality. With support from individuals like you, we can continue to
provide powerful programs and critical resources now and for decades to come. We
hope you will plan to be a part of our enduring movement by including the National
Federation of the Blind in your charitable giving and in your estate planning. It
is easier than you think.</p> <h3 id="with-your-help-the-nfb-will-continue-to">With
your help, the NFB will continue to:</h3> <ul> <li><p>Give the gift of literacy
through Braille.</p></li> <li><p>Mentor young people.</p></li> <li><p>Promote
independent travel by providing free, long white canes to blind people in
need.</p></li> <li><p>Develop dynamic educational projects and programs to show
blind youth that science and math careers are within their reach.</p></li>
<li><p>Deliver hundreds of accessible newspapers and magazines to provide blind
people the essential information necessary to be actively involved in their
communities.</p></li> <li><p>Offer aids and appliances that help seniors losing
vision maintain their independence.</p></li> </ul> <p>Below are just a few of the
many tax-deductible ways you can show your support of the National Federation of
the Blind.</p> <h3 id="vehicle-donation-program">Vehicle Donation Program</h3>
<p>We accept donated vehicles, including cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, or
recreational vehicles. Just call 855-659-9314 toll-free, and a representative can
make arrangements to pick up your donation. We can also answer any questions you
have.</p> <h3 id="general-donation">General Donation</h3> <p>General donations
help support the ongoing programs of the NFB and the work to help blind people
live the lives they want. You can call 410-659-9314, extension 2430, to give by
phone. Give online with a credit card or through the mail with check or money
order. Visit our online contribution page at: <a
href="https://nfb.org/donate"><u>https://nfb.org/donate</u></a>.</p> <h3
id="pre-authorized-contributions">Pre-Authorized Contributions</h3> <p>Through
the Pre-Authorized Contribution (PAC) program, supporters sustain the efforts of
the National Federation of the Blind by making recurring monthly donations by
direct withdrawal of funds from a checking account or a charge to a credit card.
To enroll, call 877-NFB-2PAC, or fill out our PAC Donation Form <a
href="https://www.nfb.org/pac"><u>https://www.nfb.org/pac</u></a>.</p> <h3
id="plan-to-leave-a-legacy">Plan to Leave a Legacy</h3> <p>The National Federation
of the Blind legacy society, our Dream Makers Circle, honors and recognizes the
generosity and imagination of members and special friends who have chosen to leave
a legacy through a will or other planned giving option. You can join the Dream
Makers Circle in a myriad of ways.</p> <h4 id="percentage-or-fixed-sum-of-assets">Percentage
or Fixed Sum of Assets</h4> <p>You can specify that a percentage or a fixed sum
of your assets or property goes to the National Federation of the Blind in your
will, trust, pension, IRA, life insurance policy, brokerage account, or other
accounts.</p> <h4 id="payable-on-death-pod-account">Payable on Death (POD)
Account</h4> <p>You can name the National Federation of the Blind as the beneficiary
on a Payable on Death (POD) account through your bank. You can turn any checking
or savings account into a POD account. This is one of the simplest ways to leave
a legacy. The account is totally in your control during your lifetime and you can
change the beneficiary or percentage at any time with ease.</p> <h4 id="will-or-trust">Will
or Trust</h4> <p>If you do decide to create or revise your will, consider the
National Federation of the Blind as a partial beneficiary.</p> <p>Visit our Planned
Giving webpage (<a
href="https://www.nfb.org/get-involved/ways-give/planned-giving"><u>https://www.nfb.org/get-involved/ways-give/planned-giving</u></a>)
or call 410-659-9314, extension 2422, for more information.</p> <h3
id="in-2025-our-supporters-helped-the-nfb">In 2025 our supporters helped the
NFB:</h3> <ul> <li><p>Host career fair and employment mentoring events for over
three hundred and fifty job seekers.</p></li> <li><p>Distribute over six thousand
free white canes to blind people across the United States, empowering them to
travel safely and independently throughout their communities.</p></li> <li><p>Deliver
more than five hundred newspapers and magazines to more than 135,000 subscribers
with print disabilities free of charge.</p></li> <li><p>Give over six hundred
Braille-writing slates and styluses free of charge to blind users.</p></li>
<li><p>Mentor 153 blind youth during our Braille Enrichment for Literacy and
Learning® Academy.</p></li> <li><p>Distribute over twenty-three thousand
Braille books to children and adult readers alike.</p></li> <li><p>Award thirty
scholarships each in the amount of $8,000 to blind students.</p></li> </ul> <p>Just
imagine what we will do in 2026, and, with your help, what can be accomplished
for years to come. Together with love, hope, determination, and your support, we
will continue to transform dreams into reality.</p> <p>----------</p> <p>[PHOTO
CAPTION: President Riccobono]</p> <h2 id="from-the-presidents-desk">From the
President’s Desk</h2> <p><strong>From the Editor: Members sometimes ask
what happens once a resolution has been passed by the Convention of the National
Federation of the Blind. Often, the first step for implementation of a resolution
is communicating directly with the entities named in it. Below is a copy of the
letter that President Riccobono recently sent to Anthropic as part of the execution
strategy for Resolution 2026-16. Similar letters were also sent to Google,
Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI regarding their respective AI platforms. Also
included below is President Riccobono’s letter urging United States Senate
action on the Removing Barriers to Work for Disabled Americans Act. For more
context about this legislation, readers may consult the report of our advocacy
team elsewhere in this issue. Here are the letters:</strong></p> <p>August 17,
2026</p> <p>Dario Amodei<br /> Chief Executive Officer<br /> Anthropic<br /> 500
Howard Street<br /> San Francisco, California 94105</p> <p>Dear Mr. Amodei:</p>
<p>The National Federation of the Blind is the transformative membership and
advocacy organization of blind Americans. Since 1940, we have sought to ensure
that all blind people can fully participate in society on the basis of equality.
One of the largest barriers to that goal has been, and continues to be, the low
expectations that most people have of the blind. This is especially evident in
the field of software coding and artificial intelligence (AI) assisted coding.</p>
<p>AI-assisted coding, or vibe coding, is now being used widely to create software
by the coder describing in ordinary language what they would like to build, without
writing a single line of code themselves. This technical revolution presents the
opportunity to turn the internet into a welcoming space for everyone, including
people who are blind or have disabilities preventing access to online spaces. In
order to access these spaces, blind people will use various forms of access.</p>
<p>The most common tool for this is a screen reader, which is software that
translates visual information displayed on the screen into synthesized speech that
a blind person can listen to on a computer or mobile device. The advancement of
these vibe coding platforms represent a significant development for blind programmers,
but only if the interfaces of these AI tools are nonvisually accessible, so that
a blind person can read the suggestions the AI offers, review the changes it
proposes, and operate every control and field with screen reading software.
Furthermore, the code these AI models produce is frequently inaccessible because
the models learn from a web that is overwhelmingly inaccessible.</p> <p>Our
membership felt so strongly about this issue that at our 2026 National Convention
in Austin, Texas, we passed Resolution 2026-16 Regarding the Accessibility of
Artificial Intelligence Tools for Software Creation and the Code They Produce. A
copy of that resolution has been attached for your convenience.</p> <p>In light
of these facts, we are calling upon Anthropic to ensure that the user interface
of your AI-assisted coding tool is fully nonvisually accessible across all platforms
and tested with a variety of commonly used screen reading software. Furthermore,
we must insist that Anthropic train its AI models to produce, by default, only
output that conforms to accepted standards of accessibility, namely the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 Level AA.</p> <p>And finally, we insist that blind
people be meaningfully involved in the scoping, design, and testing of the
accessibility of Anthropic’s tools, because the expertise of blind users
is essential to determining whether a tool or its output is genuinely accessible,
and no solution developed without us can be presumed to serve us. We know that if
these requirements are met, not only will blind people be able to fully realize
the promise that this technology holds, but it will establish a baseline of
accessibility from which all AI-generated software begins rather than an afterthought
a blind person must fight to obtain.</p> <p>We thank you in advance for your
consideration of this matter, and we stand ready to work with you to create
solutions that ensure your product is available and useful to all Americans. If
you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.</p>
<p>Sincerely,<br /> Mark A. Riccobono, President<br /> National Federation of the
Blind</p> <p>CC: Jack Clark, Head of Public Benefit<br /> Rahul Patil, Chief
Technology Officer</p> <p>August 6, 2026</p> <p>The Honorable John Thune<br />
Majority Leader<br /> United States Senate <br /> 511 Dirksen Senate Office
Building<br /> Washington, DC 20510</p> <p>Dear Majority Leader Thune:</p> <p>The
National Federation of the Blind is the transformative membership and advocacy
organization of blind Americans. Since 1940, we have worked tirelessly to promote
programs and incentives that will benefit the blind of the United States. On July
23, a bill that will permit demonstration projects within the Social Security
Disability Insurance (SSDI) program was passed by the House of Representatives
and is currently awaiting consideration in the Senate. </p> <p>The Removing
Barriers to Work for Disabled Americans Act, H.R. 8884 (Senate companion bill S.
4947), will authorize the Social Security Administration to conduct demonstration
projects within the SSDI program. With such projects being permitted, it would
open the door for demonstration programs that would benefit numerous blind and
disabled Americans.</p> <p>One example of a possible demonstration project would
be a two-for-one phaseout of SSDI benefits, which would turn the earnings cliff
into a gradual slope to get more blind and disabled Americans off of SSDI. This
would provide a greater incentive to work and maximize our earning potential,
which would in turn help increase tax revenue, meaning a positive outcome for not
only the blind and disabled employees, but also their employers and the country
as a whole.</p> <p>For these reasons, we urge you to help us accomplish this goal
by scheduling the Removing Barriers to Work for Disabled Americans Act for
consideration on the unanimous consent calendar. I can personally assure you that
we, the National Federation of the Blind, are willing and able to perform the
grassroots advocacy that we are known for in order to help you get this bill
passed. </p> <p>Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.</p>
<p>Sincerely,<br /> Mark A. Riccobono, President</p> <p>----------</p> <p>[PHOTO
CAPTION: Curtis Chong]</p> <h2 id="the-conundrum-of-pdf-for-the-blind">The Conundrum
of PDF for the Blind</h2> <p>by Curtis Chong</p> <h3 id="introduction">Introduction</h3>
<p>The acronym PDF stands for Portable Document Format. The PDF format was created
by a company called Adobe Systems. PDF seems to be the most widely-used format
used to circulate files over the internet. The PDF format is popular and used
almost universally because of its ability to maintain the “look and
feel” of a document regardless of the platform where the document is viewed.
For those of us who rely on screen readers to use the various technologies which
make up a part of our everyday lives, PDF has oftentimes been used as a three-letter
expletive because of the numerous difficulties we oftentimes experience when we
try to read a PDF document.</p> <p>A PDF file can contain real text, pictures of
text, or a combination of both real and scanned text. Screen readers do their best
work if they have real text to process. Anything that looks like text but which
is actually an image of text forces screen reader users to use something called
optical character recognition (OCR) to convert images of text into text that the
screen reader can process. OCR is less than 100 percent accurate; in fact, pictures
of text that come to us from the past often contain images of text which today’s
modern OCR software is unable to recognize with any acceptable accuracy. If a
picture of a bank statement is processed with OCR technology, fives could be
converted to dollar signs or vice versa. Ones and the lower case “I”
could be confused.</p> <p>PDF documents continue to present a significant challenge
for the blind—especially for those of us who rely on screen readers to read
them. Historically, the primary way most of us read these documents was to use
the free Adobe Acrobat software. Today, in addition to Adobe Acrobat, we can use
browsers like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox to open those
pesky PDF files and read them—but only if these files do not contain any
pictures of text.</p> <p>To add to this complexity, we are seeing a growing number
of electronic forms distributed as PDF files which, if we were lucky, we could
fill out using the free Adobe software, but only as long as that software was set
up in the right way. Regarding this type of form, in addition to Adobe Acrobat,
we can also try filling out a PDF form using Mozilla Firefox, which is the only
browser that I know that enables us to even attempt to fill out a PDF form.</p>
<p>One positive aspect of reading PDFs in your browser or filling out PDF forms
in Mozilla Firefox is that unlike Adobe Acrobat, browsers do not require us to
perform up-front configuration. You just have to remember to use CTRL+O to bring
up an open dialog to get the PDF file into the browser. Another plus is that large
PDF documents tend to open more quickly in the browser; using Adobe Acrobat, large
documents with more than 50 pages can often take a few minutes to become visible
to the screen reader.</p> <p>The down side of opening a PDF file in your browser
is that in the browser, the screen reading software you use is not able to perform
any optical character recognition (OCR), the technique we use to scrape readable
text from a scanned image. With screen readers like JAWS and NVDA, however, a
certain amount of optical character recognition can be performed against a PDF
file that contains text images.</p> <p>Adobe software does require some up-front
configuration tasks which, if not performed properly, can increase frustration
with a format which, for screen reader users, has grown quite perplexing if not
distasteful. Since Adobe Acrobat continues to be the “go to” program
to read PDF files in Windows, I thought it would be useful for me to pass along
what I have learned over the years about configuring and using this software. Some
of this article is intended for IT folks who configure desktop computers for blind
end users on the job. The rest is intended for end users like me who need to use
Adobe software every day.</p> <p>The free version of Adobe Acrobat can be downloaded
at <a href="https://get.adobe.com/reader/">https://get.adobe.com/reader/</a>.
Before downloading the software, be sure to uncheck the Install Adobe Express
Photos and the Install McAfee Security Scan Plus checkboxes.</p> <h3
id="configuring-adobe-acrobat-reader-for-accessibility">Configuring Adobe Acrobat
Reader for Accessibility</h3> <p>After Adobe Acrobat has been installed, you need
to perform the following tasks.</p> <p>1. By default, Adobe Acrobat Reader will
be using what it calls the New Acrobat Reader menu. You can tell that you are
using the New Acrobat Reader menu by tapping the ALT key. If nothing happens when
you do this, you are definitely using the New Acrobat Reader menu. If, on the
other hand, the traditional menu bar is displayed, then you are using the traditional
menus which work best with the JAWS screen reader.</p> <p>To bring back the
traditional menu bar in Adobe Acrobat Reader, press the ALT key together with the
letter F. A context menu appears. Arrow up to the Disable New Acrobat Reader item
and press Enter. After a few seconds, you will be prompted to restart the program.
Go ahead and perform the restart. Now, your Adobe Acrobat Reader software is using
the traditional menu bar.</p> <p>2. Now, ensure that you have the most current
version of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. Press ALT+H to enter the Help menu,
and press the letter C to activate the Check for Updates function. If you are told
that there are no updates available, you can be sure that your Adobe Acrobat Reader
software is up to date.</p> <p>3. Now that you have the traditional menu bar in
place, you need to configure Adobe Acrobat Reader for accessibility.</p> <blockquote>
<p>A. First, be sure that you have Adobe Acrobat Reader set up to be the default
program to open PDF files. The easiest way that I have found to do this is to use
File Explorer to focus on a PDF file, bring up the file properties dialog by
pressing ALT+ENTER, then SHIFT+TAB to the “Change...” button and
activate it. In the resulting dialog, change the program that opens the PDF file
to Adobe Acrobat Reader.</p> <p>B. Configure the way in which Adobe Acrobat Reader
reads files. Open any PDF file then press CTRL+SHIFT+5 to enter the Reading Options
for Assistive Technology dialog (If Adobe Acrobat Reader’s modern menu had
still been in effect, this key command would not have worked). The first field in
the dialog determines how much of the document is loaded into memory when it is
opened. Set this to read the entire document. The second field determines the
reading order. My personal default is to read the document from left to right,
top to bottom; but there are times when the reading order needs to be changed.
The third field in this dialog is a checkbox which determines whether these settings
will be applied to all documents opened with Adobe Acrobat Reader. I recommend
checking this box. Finally, activate the Confirm button.</p> <p>C. With a PDF file
open in Adobe Reader, press CTRL+K to enter the Preferences dialog. This takes
you to a dialog with 30 tabs. Press the letter S repeatedly until you are focused
on something called “Security (Enhanced).” Tab once to reach the
“Sandbox Protections Grouping Enable Protected Mode at startup.”
Press space repeatedly to be sure that this checkbox is not checked. Shift tab to
the OK button and activate it.</p> <p>D. With a PDF file open in Adobe Reader,
press CTRL+K to enter the Preferences dialog. Press the letter R to focus on the
Reading tab. Tab about four times to arrive at a checkbox called “Override
the reading order in tagged documents.” Uncheck this box to ensure that
your preferred reading order is always used when a document is untagged but still
enables tags to be recognized and handled when a document is appropriately tagged.
Shift tab two times to focus on the checkbox “Confirm before tagging
documents” and ensure this is not checked.</p> </blockquote> <h3
id="tips-for-working-with-adobe-acrobat-reader-with-a-screen-reader">Tips For
Working With Adobe Acrobat Reader with a Screen Reader</h3> <p>Remember the
CTRL+SHIFT+5 command discussed earlier? There are times when you have to change
the reading order to improve the PDF reading experience. For example, if the PDF
file that is being opened is a form that is supposed to be filled out using the
free Adobe Acrobat Reader, reading the document from left to right, top to bottom
could result in the form fields not being detected by the screen reader. An example
of this type of document is the online voter registration form found in my home
state of Colorado. This form can be found at <a
href="https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/VoterRegFormEnglish.pdf">https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/VoterRegFormEnglish.pdf</a>.
If this PDF file is opened using the left-to-right reading order, none of the
fields that the voter needs to fill in are recognized by the screen reader. Changing
the reading order to “Infer Reading Order From Document” solves this
problem.</p> <p>For very large PDF documents that are more than fifty pages long,
you may find that when the document is opened, there are a few minutes where the
screen reader has gone silent. My advice when this happens is simply to wait it
out.</p> <p>While Acrobat Reader has the ability to find text within an open PDF
file (using the CTRL+F keyboard command), it is not possible for screen reader
users successfully to use this command. I recommend using the JAWS find command
(CTRL+JAWSKEY+F) instead to invoke the first find and the F3 function key to repeat
the search going forward and SHIFT+F3 to search in reverse.</p> <p>To navigate to
a specific page within a PDF document, pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N brings up the Go To
Page dialog. Initially, the edit field which appears shows the current page number.
To move to a new page, type in the page number and press Enter to go there.</p>
<p>Sometimes, you might want to know how many pages are contained within the PDF
document you have opened. The easiest way I have found to do this is to press
CTRL+D to bring up the document properties dialog. Then, if you are using JAWS,
you need to virtualize the window that has just been opened. Press ALT+INSERT+W
to virtualize the window and ESCAPE to close.</p> <h3
id="using-the-jaws-optical-character-recognition-feature-against-a-pdf-file">Using
the JAWS Optical Character Recognition Feature Against a PDF File</h3> <p>There
are situations where PDF documents contain scanned images of text as opposed to
characters that can be detected and read by a screen reading program such as JAWS
for Windows. If a PDF document contains only scanned text, JAWS will indicate this
by saying “Alert: Empty Document” after the file is opened in Adobe
Acrobat. Press INSERT+SPACE then O, then D to tell JAWS to perform optical character
recognition against the open file. JAWS will process the file and bring up the
results in a virtual window of text which you can then copy into whatever document
you need to create.</p> <h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3> <p>While reading PDF
documents is not an ideal experience for screen reader users today, the use of
Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader software combined with the configuration steps
outlined above can improve the quality of the reading and interaction experience.
I will point out here that even under the best of circumstances, however, PDF
forms are oftentimes not as easy for screen reader users to use as compared to
forms that are coded in HTML. Those of us who use and depend on screen reading
technology every day of our lives to get work done prefer not to have to deal with
PDF files at all, but when we must work with them, the information I have provided
here will make the experience less painful.</p> <p>----------</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION:
Sarah Weissman]</p> <p>[PHOTO CAPTION: Jack Mendez]</p> <h2
id="access-is-participation-jacks-nfb-newsline-story">Access Is Participation:
Jack’s NFB-NEWSLINE® Story</h2> <p>by Sarah Weissman</p> <p><strong>From
the Editor: Sarah Weissman is a talented and enthusiastic marketing specialist on
the communications staff of the National Federation of the Blind. Recently, she
interviewed a user about what our NFB-NEWSLINE service has meant for him. The user
is Jack Mendez, who directs the NFB-NEWSLINE program. We felt his thoughts and
her beautiful framing of them should be shared with our readers. Here is the
story:</strong></p> <p>You probably know how isolated or alienated in society many
blind people feel, especially if they are the only blind person in their family
or community. Even a news article or magazine story—or more specifically,
the lack of access to one—can heighten that feeling of isolation.</p>
<p>More than thirty years ago, Jack’s mom would ask him to bring in the
morning paper. Born blind, Jack would step outside, feel for the bundle, and carry
it in. “I noticed the scent of fresh ink,” he says. “The
texture of the pages. On wet days the paper sat inside a plastic sleeve that
crinkled when I lifted it.”</p> <p>Jack remembers listening while his mother
turned the paper’s pages and sipped coffee. “Sometimes she laughed
at a headline or a quote,” he says. “I would ask what she was reading,
and she would share a bit, but I wanted to take part on my own. I wanted to talk
about the news as an equal.”</p> <p>Blind and print-disabled readers face
a simple barrier that affects everything else. If access to timely, local, and
national news depends on another person reading aloud or on time-consuming
workarounds, then real participation is out of reach. “Without direct
access, you miss context, you miss momentum, you miss the joy of following your
own curiosity,” says Jack. You also miss the opportunity to converse and
connect with others over what you’ve read and an equal opportunity to keep
learning about our world.<br /> <br /> “NFB-NEWSLINE® changed the
equation for me,” says Jack. The free service from the National Federation
of the Blind provides hundreds of publications via audio and Braille. More than
just news, we offer content not easily accessible anywhere else, including job
postings, weather, and publications about blindness, and we make it available in
a variety of accessible ways.</p> <p>“Today I read the same publications
as everyone else, at the same time they do,” Jack says. “I can talk
with my family about a local investigation, a city council vote, or the weekend
features section. I can bring a story to the conversation instead of waiting to
hear one. Access turns into confidence. Confidence turns into participation. I
can make informed choices, show up prepared, and share what I have read with
friends and colleagues.”</p> <p>Jack read <em>AppleInsider</em> on NFB-NEWSLINE
before buying a computer. “I followed reviews, performance notes, and buyer
guides without waiting for a sighted helper,” Jack says. He also enjoys
reading <em>Conde Nast Traveler</em>, where he gets travel ideas he shares with
friends and family.</p> <p>“As a kid, I carried the paper in from the porch
and admired the ink and the weight of the bundle,” says Jack. “Today
I carry the news in my pocket, or on a Braille display. The difference is access,
and access changes everything.”</p> <p>On NFB-NEWSLINE:</p> <ul>
<li><p>Subscribers can access more than 600 newspapers and magazines, along with
other resources.</p></li> <li><p>Subscribers can access NFB-NEWSLINE over a
touch-tone phone, web/computer access, the mobile app, Alexa, or several other
devices (such as the NLS digital Talking Book player and the Victor Reader
Stream).</p></li> <li><p>Local content matters. National headlines are vital, and
so is the city council brief that affects your street.</p></li> </ul> <ul>
<li><p>Access is not a luxury. It is the foundation for equal participation in
civic life, school, work, and family conversations.</p></li> </ul> <p>With the
National Federation of the Blind, you get the most authentic voice in blindness.
Our power, diversity, and determination transform society and advance the lives
of blind people.</p> <p>----------</p> <h2 id="nfb-pledge">NFB Pledge</h2> <p>I
pledge to participate actively in the efforts of the National Federation of the
Blind to achieve equality, opportunity, and security for the blind; to support
the policies and programs of the Federation; and to abide by its constitution.</p>
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