AI Generated Transcript
The opinions expressed on the ACB Media Network are those of the content providers and should not be viewed as an endorsement of any product or service, nor does it reflect the views of the American Council of the Blind, its elected officials, or its staff. All right, well, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Basics with Bits. I am Jeff Bishop. I’m the president of Blind Information Technology Specialists. And before we get started, I just wanted to remind everyone of the upcoming AI presentations along with Computers for the Blind and the Employee Committee is also doing some work at convention next week. I’m going to be forgetting one. Michael, you’re doing a presentation, right, next week on our new website and talking about that from a leadership perspective. And then, of course, at convention, if you’re coming to Florida, then we will have the Bits Mixer from 4 to 6. tonight at the auction we will be auctioning off a sweet bundle of podcasting gear valued at over 400 so if you want to get in on that by all means step up and bid away. We would love to see how high that goes and then there will be one lucky person who attends the bits mixer who will also potentially win the same package and it’s going to be brought to convention. Santa Claus is coming to the convention and we’ll be bringing it there. It’s actually already in Santa Claus’s bag, ready to come. So we’re doing some fun things at convention this year. So we hope if you have an opportunity to attend the virtual sessions, then that’s great. And if you’re coming to convention, definitely stop by and see us. We’ll have some food. We’ll have some fun playing some music and just having a good time and socializing with all of you. So before we get started, I thought I would introduce the BITS members that are here, that are up on stage. And if any of their BITS members are here, especially if you’re on the leadership team, then feel free to raise your hand and we’ll bring you up here on stage as well. So let me introduce everyone. And then what we’re going to do today is we’re going to talk to you about what’s coming. I think there’s some very, very exciting things. We’ll reminisce a bit about what we’ve done in the past. We’ll tell those stories and share some of the lessons that we learned and some of the great opportunities that we gave people, including myself. I learned a ton over the last few months, so I’m very, very thrilled about that. We’ll talk to you about that. of course we’ll get into exactly what’s coming in the fall of which you do have to be a member to be able to participate in and we are not giving away free memberships this year so if you want to join starting … you can actually start joining in July and it will take effect for the rest of this year plus all of next year. So just keep that in mind if you’re a new member. If you’re an existing member, you can start renewing in October slash November. So we’ll take your money either way. Actually, we’ll count it. So no worries there. All right, let’s introduce everybody. First, our IT extraordinaire, who has all things websites and all things technology and never stays unmuted, does he? Michael Babcock. Hi, buddy. Hey, Jeff. Great fun there. Awesome. Welcome aboard. And our chair of our education committee, the extraordinaire, the amazing woman who does all things, including writing DOS screen readers back in the 80s. And God knows what she’s going to write next, but she’ll probably like to say one thing. I’m also responsible for making sure that Basics with Bits has a presenter every Friday, second Saturday. So if you want to hear about something particular on Basics with Bits, you really should email ACB Community. They’ll email me or whatever. but let us know what you want to hear on Basics with Bits because it’s my job to make sure you hear it. All right, back on mute. Yeah, and I’m using my phone to come up here on Zoom today. And, you know, the silly me, I’m running the iOS beta, and, of course, I’m dealing with all of the contentions that go along with that, including not getting voiceover speech. So that’s just fun. Anyway, I would not advise people to do this. Don’t be brave like me. And Michael. And Michael Doeys and others. Let’s see. Who else we got? We got the marvelous and wonderful mentor of all things Python and all things having to do with Blytons and robotics and mobility. And let’s see. What else, Joel? Buying beer for your parties. Yeah. Stuff like that. Yeah. There you go. I think you’ve way exceeded expectations. Oh, no. Great expectations for you. Welcome aboard, sir. Yeah, thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah, great. Do we have any other BITS members here? We have Marcy, of course, is here, and she is helping a lot of our committees and is all around everywhere. So that’s fun. She’s helping on the convention committee and others. I’m not looking at the list because people keep coming in, but we probably have other representation here. So, all right. Yes, I’m here. It’s Ravonna. I’m here, Lester. Oh, hey. That’s what I thought you were. Yeah, there’s the lady having to do with publications and is responsible for helping corral the troops along with Deborah to put the newsletter together. And so we’re happy about that. We’re real excited about that. And she put together the employee presentation. We’re going to focus in a lot centered around employment and what to do before as you get started and while you’re in a job, especially as it relates to technology. So we’re very, very excited about that panel as well. So you’ll be hearing a lot from us on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And there will be two back to back presentations from BITS. It’s about three hours of content on Saturday. So that’s really, really great. And Brian Hargen will be coming and giving us a presentation on all things AI as it relates to just being more efficient with that from a screen reader perspective. So we’re excited and thrilled to have him come back and participate with us. All right. Yes. Can I ask a second? Yes, sure. David has arrived and I moved him to co-host. All right. Hey, David. Hello. Sorry, I’m a couple minutes late. Oh, that’s not a problem. David is here. I’m sure he’s going to talk with us a little bit about what he’s going to be up to in the fall, but we’ll get there in just a few minutes. I want to sort of take a step back and sort of describe where we were and how we came up to the plan that we did and sort of the culture and the work that we’re thriving to try to complete and driving to complete within BITS itself. So I think everyone has heard about BITS and a lot of the work that we did over the past, nine months, especially with our free memberships. We grew from about 170 or so, 175, 180, something like that. I think the official number was 179 members to over 756 at this point. So we’re pretty happy about that. And the Bits family is thriving and it’s really, really strong. And as a part of that. We really wanted to empower people. We wanted to empower people through learning and by educating them in areas that they wanted to learn more about. So first we partnered with people like NUMA Solutions and Bookshare and the National Library Service and others to be able to make sure that we could provide the free books to students that would be taking courses through us. And so we did that. And then we then we seeked out professionals, both who are professional developers and who were professionals in this space, both from an education standpoint, from a software engineering standpoint, product management experience, all kinds of different levels. We had people from Microsoft. We had people from the American Printing House for the We had people in university sectors. We had general enthusiasts and consultants and people a Python course. Now, Python, for those that you don’t know, Python is a programming language. So the first thing that we needed to do is we needed to get people up to speed on using the terminal and using the command line and using the tools that they would need to use to do my gosh, 17th, I think. Is that right? Yeah, it was the middle of February. Yeah, February 17th, I think, was the first day. And wow, wow. And it’s June 22nd, right? Oh my gosh. And we’re not done. We got one more thing to do. So we started on this track. And if you included admins and, and, uh, instructors and all of the students, we had about 140 people who enrolled in the course, which was a bit overwhelming to be honest with you. And we thought, well, this is either going to work or it’s going to be a disaster and we’re going to horrible. Uh, I will tell you that, that, uh, I think, um, or I should ask everybody, I, I, I think we exceeded expectations, um, in, in what we accomplished, but I’d be interested to see what Debra or Joel or Michael B might think of that. Absolutely. I mean, we had a lot of students doing homework, asking questions, and it was great. Yeah, we had, especially near the beginning us how many i mean it was great but i mean it was just a lot of work a lot a lot a lot of work and you know the reason we don’t have as many people showing up for office hours now is people have learned how to figure out things themselves exactly exactly because that’s very powerful yeah we teach them how to fish and so part of this was giving them the skills that they needed to empower themselves to achieve more um by by teaching them through uh the lens of accessibility so that they understand how to do this from a screen reader perspective, and how to accomplish these goals. And so, so, you know, I think we ended the actual curriculum, we have one more class to teach on Monday. And we’ll probably talk to the admin team about that, because we may need to move that a bit, because we’re still gathering data. But the, the, we ended up with what about 85, 85 students. So that, so it’s, it’s more than 50% of the, of the people stuck with us. And there were all kinds of reasons why people decided to not continue. I mean, there were everything from, you know, career to illness to, you know, whatever the case may be, but that’s okay. That’s pretty typical of college courses. You know, you, you, you have people who sign up for a programming class in a college, even, even in a community college. And by the time the semester ends, you probably have about half of those students left. So that’s about right. And we had some very complex projects for them to do. I mean, some of them were quite involved, especially the projects as we concluded things. There’s one that I have yet to complete that I take me a bit more work to do that had to do with object-oriented programming concepts and things. that one’s going to take a bit of time, including writing a Yahtzee game and writing some code to do things that you would do in a business scenario. We wrote other dice games, and we did all kinds of fun things. There were about, what, 30 or 40 projects there, Debbie? Something like that. Yeah, approximately. And even in the first week, people were writing a calculator. Yeah, yeah. They were really learning how to write programs themselves and take control over their computer, really understand how it worked. Yeah, and the calculator had advanced functionality to be able to store things like memory, things in memory locations so that you could recall them and looking at history. And it was pretty involved. It was pretty exciting. So what did we learn through this process? We learned that we probably don’t know. I don’t know if we want to do 140 people at a time next time. um i think we did learn that that was a bit overwhelming um and the and the um the the who stepped up to help do all that were just amazing uh ken perry uh being the the huge superstar that he was was just amazingly great at it um so we we learned that we learned some techniques that we think we’re going to have to revisit as to how we’re going to approach this And we’re going to talk about that in just a few minutes. And then I think we also learned that we need to make sure that people understand basic things and have more fundamentals first. We tried that. We tried to do that. And I think we got it right for the most part. But I think there was more that we could do to assist people. And so this is why we’re looking at our new slate of training that’s coming up in the fall. And as well as in the spring. So, shall we go over that, Debbie? Sure, sure. All right. So, first of all, let’s start with staying on this development track. And we’ll describe that. And then we’re going to bring David on. And we’re going to talk a lot about what’s coming in reference to the other training that we’re going to offer. That’s more general computing based. That we think a lot of people will be very, very excited about. Can I say one thing? Sure, sure. to be able to gain access to those or something like that. There’s been lots of interest from the community for that, and we’ll see. I don’t know. We haven’t decided that. I think that’s something we have to think about and figure out exactly how we want to go about that. But we’ll cross that bridge. We don’t have the final answers on that, but we’re thinking about it at least. Okay. So we’re going to take some time off because, first of all, we’ve been running like crazy. We’ve been teaching every Monday night for, we took one week off for Memorial Day. Yeah. Memorial Day, we took one week off and we took one week off between the last actual class of instruction while we’re preparing for the last class that we’re going to teach on Visual Studio Code Advanced Principles. And other than that, we’ve been meeting every week and then doing homework and meeting with people and all of that. So we’re going to take a bit of a break, sort of get ourselves ready for what’s coming. And Joel and I are going to be working on the fundamentals of this. really what we want to do is we want to be able to put into the hands of people an understanding of what they need to do to be able to build a very, very basic page, either in WordPress or just on the web itself. And the way that we need to do that is we need to teach people how to use tools. So we need to teach people how to use an editor that’s accessible. and we need an editor that’s going to assist in this process. And then we need to teach people the basics of HTML and the language of that, as well as Markdown. Markdown is a subset. It’s a markup language that’s very, very similar, but it’s actually simpler than HTML. It doesn’t have as many features, of course, but it’s got some very fundamental things that you can use inside of things like WordPress and other environments and including things like drafts if you’re an ios drafts user and uh i think i think um there’s there’s other editors that support it as well uh i’m going to contribute to a wiki it’s very important to know yeah yeah joel go ahead oh hey did you guys did the uh the notes uh from the last meeting the bits education meeting did those yeah we have those you got those okay so that’s that’s all in markdown for whoever right yeah exactly yeah i saw those the result of this next training is going to be that you’re going to know how to make a basic web page plus you’re going to have some insight into why some pages are accessible and others are not yes right so we’ll teach you some basic accessibility principles we’re not going to focus a lot on web accessibility but we’ll call things out as we you know teach them around accessibility principles, but that won’t be the core fundamental purpose of what we’re doing. And so what we’re going to do here is we’re going to teach people to use Visual Studio Code, which is the editor of choice that we are going to promote. And all of this is subject to getting people ready if they want to take our Python course in the spring is kind of where we’re heading here. So instead of spending a couple of weeks like we did last time, we’re actually going to spend a lot more time using the concepts of Markdown and HTML and teach people some concepts and get people really comfortable with the editor. Because then we’re not dealing with that when we’re starting to teach a new language come springtime. So we’re going to use free resources to do this training. We’re probably going to put those resources together in a probably in a more collectively accessible way joel and i haven’t met to discuss that but it won’t probably take too long to to throw it all together um we’re gonna we’re going to give you homework uh we believe in holding people to account that if you’re going to participate we want you to be involved we want you to contribute assignments so that we’re um you know encouraging learning and encouraging participation. We will actually teach you how you can put up your own website through GitHub pages, because that’s going to be the easiest thing to do as opposed to supporting everybody having a WordPress site. We think that’s going to probably be the easiest way to accomplish this, which means you’re going to have to be taught some commands and skills that will require you to publish the content there. But that’s pretty easy to do, and it’s not too difficult at all. So, so that’s what we’re going to be doing in the, in the, in the fall. And then we will open up in the spring a, an opportunity for people to take the Python training course. And actually we’ve already inquired of a number of people and there’s about 30 or 40 people already on the waiting list, wanting to, wanting to participate in that. And we’re probably going to slightly restructure that a little bit too, I think. Perhaps we’ll see. We have time to figure to publish things in an easier way using Markdown, which is actually quite clever and easy to really learn, to really understand how to format a page and format a document that truly is accessible and inclusive. So that’s what we’re doing in those two sessions. Joel, did you want to talk about the HTML stuff at all or even the Python piece? No, I think you really addressed it, the idea of, yeah, you can, once we’ve gone through, once you’ve gone through the VS Code command line in Git slash GitHub, then you should be prepared for the next time we do a Python course, or if at some point we do, you know, maybe you get into more web development. Right, right. Like PHP or… Or, I was thinking JavaScript. Or JavaScript, yeah, yeah, JavaScript, yeah. Yeah, getting, so yeah, it’s really a foundational idea. You get the idea of how to use the tools, and then you can jump off from there to other types of development. Right, okay, so we definitely want to have time to answer everyone’s questions, and we have a lot of people here, which is great. I wanted to now turn to something that I think is extremely exciting that we’re doing. And I think we’re being very ambitious in the work that we’re planning and the things that we’re looking at providing for the community. Hi, David, there you are. We are looking at bringing some great productivity tool training to you on multiple platforms. And to help us with that piece of the training And we’ll back him up, of course, with lots of administrative assistance and even help with office hours when we can and back him up to make sure that every student is successful that wishes to be. I’m going to hand things over to David, and he can sort of introduce sort of where we’re heading in the fall and then maybe a sneak peek at what you’re thinking about for the spring. because we’ve got two audiences here that I think we need to address. And this is something that I think if you were to go out and pay for, either through something like the Carroll Center or something like just standard training. For example, if you did it through LinkedIn membership, I think you’re going to find that the value, if you take advantage of it, far exceeds at significant levels the amount that it costs you to be a member of the organization. So David, and then I’ll help fill in the gaps here. But David, do you want to kick things off Sure. Thank you, Jeff. And good afternoon, everybody, depending on where you are. It’s afternoon for me. So starting in early September, one evening a week, tentatively, and I underline the word tentatively, Monday evenings, because that hasn’t been fully decided yet. I’ll be offering a course in using Windows and Microsoft Office. So specifically Windows 10 or 11, Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. And that will presumably be, you know, along the model of the Python, a couple of hours in evening with demo time and plenty of time for questions. And I’m not going to assume we’re going to go in at a basic level. I’m not going to assume any prior knowledge, except for maybe a couple of things. One, that you are at least a basic JAWS or NVDA user. I’ll be using primarily JAWS, but when there are differences between those, I will mention them. But again, we’ll be starting from the beginning in each of those, so not assuming any previous knowledge. As reference material, so you don’t have to basically try to be taking notes during the whole thing, we’ll use the book that I have put out, the third edition of it, the Windows Screen Reader Primer, all the basics and more, which, by the way, if you don’t have it already, it’s free on the Carroll Center, Carroll.org website, so you can get that anytime you want. And it will be supplemented also by exercises that you can do afterwards. Now, I don’t know about grading them and all of that type of stuff. You know, that’s maybe a bit beyond my bandwidth to follow up in that way. That’s something we’ll talk about as we’re developing this course. But at least some hands-on exercises that you can try out afterwards. Because if you just listen and you just read, you know, that’s one thing. But to absorb it, you really have to, to some extent, sweat through trying to do the step-by-step to get things done. I haven’t put together the syllabus and schedule yet. I mean, I know what’s going to be in it, roughly speaking. But depending on how that plays out, we will probably go to either just before Thanksgiving or just before Christmas. Again, it sort of depends on what it all looks like when I initially put it together. So that, in a nutshell, is what we plan on doing in that area. Again, I think the idea of BITS is to address the needs of people at different levels of computer use and computer interest. Some people are very interested in being programmers, doing all the scripting and all that type of stuff. just want to be able to use computers in a basic way and be either, you know, they’re sort of new and just want to get up there to survival level. But then also, maybe you’ve been using these programs for a while and you’re more at a lower level and you’d up your game a bit. So again, the subtitle of my book is sort of what I’m going to try to follow here and that is you know all the basics and more so there’ll be the basics but there’ll also be more so yeah so i think that’s so that’s what we’re doing in the fall slash however long that a couple of things. One, that may be an overload to do in the fall, but then again, we may simply have different audiences. There may be people who are interested in, you know, they’ve been using Office for a while. They’d like to get to know the Google Workspace a bit, not so much, not interested so much in, you know, revisiting Office and all of that. So that’s something we’re however many weeks we’re talking about. No, no. But it is something that we’re thinking of doing in the, when I say the spring, I mean, I don’t mean necessarily way off in the spring, but, you know, after New Year’s sometime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. January, February, something. I don’t know. We haven’t gotten that far. Okay. So, you know, the other thing, before we start opening it up for questions, because really we want to hear from, we’ve got over 50 people, 55 people here now, and want to make sure that we provide as much opportunity as we can to ask questions. And I already see a couple of hands flying up. If you have questions, raise your hands. Oh, you have hands. Yeah. Okay. Well, we’ll take them in just a minute. So I just want to say that really the education that we’re putting together is totally based on what the members of the organization are wanting. So this means that if you are a member of BITS or you choose to become a member and you want a specific area covered, then we hold, in fact, we’re going to be doing one on I think crazy. Okay. So we hold most months, except for last month, we did not because it was Memorial Day weekend. We hold office hours where the organization comes together and anybody can come and ask any question they want, bring up any idea. It’s a safe place to bring up concerns, constructive feedback, suggestions, all kinds of things where we are wanting to to really meet the needs of every single member and address their, address their concerns. So come to that. It will be, if you’re a member, if you’re a member of bits, you’ll get a link sent out. We’ll make sure that that’s available to you. You’ll be getting some email from me as, as the president of bits here next week, talking about the upcoming convention and opportunities that we want to make sure you’re taking advantage of, especially making sure that your voice is heard on things like constitutional amendments and bylaws and elections and all of those things. So very important that you keep an eye out for that, especially if you’re a BITS member. We’ll tell you more about that. You’ll want to make sure that you’re the website, the new website is up. And so you’re all getting notices about that. In fact, we heard from Jamaica on that. So we’ll reach out to you, Jamaica, and make sure we get you onto the website where the voting opportunities will take place. You’ll have opportunities there to fill out a ballot. And we will keep track of those percentages to make sure that when we are casting the affiliate votes at the convention that we are representing your voice. Because it’s not what our leadership wants. It’s what our members want. Okay. Let’s see. Cindy, why don’t we start with – oh, my gosh. that’s my dad uh okay so why don’t we start with all right and if there’s more keep your hands okay stephanie go ahead and unmute hi stephanie hello so how many how many how many courses are in each training and well it really depends so uh in our python course um we started preliminary training and that went from like February 17th through the beginning of April. And then the Python training went for almost 12 weeks. So with a total of 16 classes. Yeah, 16 classes. And we’re looking at something somewhat similar. We’ll try to publish a syllabus Right now, we’re just wanting to find out who might be interested, and then we’ll start sharing information. That way, what we end up doing is we end up creating an email list for each of the courses, and then people can then interact on that. We also provide ways that the students can interact with the instructors of the course and the administrative staff of the course. We provide documentation and lots of resources to you. So lots and lots of things that we give to you for free. We expect, unless you choose to, we expect to provide all material free of charge to you as much as possible. If there’s other resources that we think you might have interest in, then we will definitely tell you about them and you can purchase them. Or if you have access to other venues, you can locate them on digital platforms. And the classes are recorded. So, you know, we had a woman from Australia. You know, sometimes people can’t make that particular time. But we had people from Germany. We had people from the UAE. We had people all over the world that were attending our courses. So sometimes they listened to the recordings if they were sleeping. Right. And sometimes we would do office hours at four in the morning to try to meet their schedule. So I’ve done that a number of times. So, you know, we try to meet people’s concerns where they are and make sure that they’re getting what they want to get out of the training. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Great. Thank you so much. We hope you consider BITS. Thank you. Hey, you have Penny next. Hello, Ms. Moss. Hey, can you hear me? I can hear you loud and clear. Oh, right. I’m a card-carrying, proud member of BITS. And I’m really excited about the Microsoft Office classes. Um, that cushion is if I have to miss a week or so, or I’m down at the beach with my sister, how can I, can I still get the recordings and make up the class? Yes, absolutely. That’s why we record the recording so that we have a really nice recording to listen and you can download that. And that way you can stay up to date with the class. Oh, that’s great. And the other thing is you were talking about, uh, David was talking about his book. Can that be obtained in Braille? Oh, I don’t know. It is not available in Braille, although, of course, if you downloaded it and you had a refreshable Braille display, you can read it. But it is not available in Braille, unfortunately. Is National Braille Press interested in maybe doing that book? I haven’t asked, but I know the answer would be no, because their books, their technical books are limited to 50, 60 pages just because of the expensive Braille. We’re talking over 500 pages for this one. Oh, yeah. Okay. Never mind. That’s like a Harry Potter book. Yeah. That’s like a Harry Potter book. Okay. Yeah. I actually have a Braille printer, so I’d have to figure out if I want to do all 500 pages. Yeah, there you go. I’m real excited about it, and I will sign up. Great. Thank you, Penny. Thank you for offering that. You’ll hear from us, okay, Penny? Okay, great. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Jeff, did I jump in? Did you want to call on the names? No, no, no. Go ahead. Go do it. Okay. Make my job easier. Go. Hey, I don’t want to jump over the press. Okay, Carla, you’re up. Hey, Carla. Are you coming to the convention? Yes, I am. I hope to see you. I want to get a hug from you. You’re going to get it if I can find you. Okay. Okay. If I can find you. First of all, I would like to thank you so much for your patience, Debbie Hazleton, for patience, and especially David Kingsbury. As you know, we had some problems downloading David and you really helped me. I don’t know what happened, but you were so patient and I’ve been enjoying the book and learning a lot from it. And I just love what’s going on. Now, my question is, I know you talked about Monday nights, but would you consider another night only because every Monday night there’s tech talk and there are lots of interest to bit members. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know. You know, we’re going to have to discuss that as a team. Part of this, remember, is we rely on volunteers to do this. So we have to try to meet them where they are. And so it’s something we’ll talk about and see if we can think about it. And I can’t make any promises right now, but we’ll definitely take it under advisement, okay? Okay. Let me just add, again, I underlined the word tentatively because nothing was decided. But when you do something like this, the challenge is always there’s really no good night. No, there really isn’t. Because if you do Wednesday night, people got stuff on Wednesdays. If you got Tuesday, you know, you got, you know, committees that are meeting. You’ve got Tuesday topics. You’ve got, I mean, we could just keep going on and on like this. So there’s always something that’s going on. You know, the weekends are always interesting, but then we hear from people like, well, you’re in, you know, coaching on our family time. And so that may not work. So I don’t know. The only reason I said this about Monday is because that is a direct something that BITS members would be interested in as well. I get it. I get it. I know. I think what we need to do is we need to ask Mother Nature to provide another day of the week. I think that’s what we need. So if anyone’s got any good connections, give her a call and see if she can slow the planet down a little bit from spinning so fast. We’ll have to go to the Beatles because they did a song called Eight Days a Week. That’s right. Exactly. Yes, exactly. So maybe we can come up with something like that. I don’t know. But Carla, your points are well taken and we will do what we can. But we also have to look at the constraints of who is teaching and, you know, especially for having multiple classes going on at the same time and all of those things. So we’ll look at it. OK, thank you so much. OK, Jamaica. Hey, Jamaica, how are you, my friend? Hello. Well, I am wanting to ask a very important question about the Google classes. Is that going to include Gmail? Because that’s what I’m using now. And I’m just wondering, is that going to include that or not? We have not made the outline for that. If you feel that that’s a requirement, we can discuss it as a team and figure out how to fit that, you know, see where we can fit that in. Jeff, can I jump in here? Yeah. Jamaica, if it would be helpful for you as well, I can send you an email with a very well put together training from Vispero on using Gmail. If you’re a JAWS user and if you want, I can email that to you. I think that would be a good, that would be a good. I will send that over to you right now. A good idea. All right. Thank you. David, let me add one thing also along those lines. The third edition of my book has a chapter on the Google workspace, and there is a section on Google Mail and Gmail. I probably shouldn’t say this rather snidely, but if you use Microsoft Office, my best suggestion is use Outlook. But I’ll be quiet there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear what you’re saying, David, and I personally would tend to agree with you. But hey, you know what? Everybody uses things different and it’s okay. People will use what they wish to use, right? Yeah. But again, you can also read that part of the chapter of my book on Gmail standard view because again, the HTML view is no longer there. Went away. And I know that’s making problems for people. Yep. All right, Cindy, who’s next? Hey, Marcy. Hi, Cindy. Marcy. Hey, Jeff. Hey, David. Hey, Joel. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for putting this presentation together. Really appreciate it. A couple of questions, please. David, I’m very interested in helping with your courses that you offer next fall. So let me know what I need to do to be a part of that. That would be great. Because I had the privilege of learning under David at the Carroll Center, and he’s an excellent instructor. And that book is the reason for it. And also, Jeff, who do I let know about the Markdown courses that I’m interested in? there will be a sign-up form that we will ask people to fill out. And trust me, unless you’re hiding under a rock or living in a cave and choosing not to get on the internet, you’ll hear about it. All right. And Marcy, be careful with what you wish for because you might end up on – I mean, you know, Debra might reach out to you. Okay. Hey, Mike. Mike. Which one? Mike W. he’s the only mic we have today okay well we have Michael too well now I can’t yeah I was wondering if you might ever plan to offer a course on building SharePoint websites as that’s a skill I’m trying to learn for work like how you would take an Excel spreadsheet and then import it into a SharePoint list to build your website or create a list out of it but it’s all kind of new to me so yeah I was thinking that could be a good topic I think that would be a very highly specialized skill that honestly, I don’t know that we would have the reach for it right now. So we’re trying to focus in on things where we can hit a larger audience. I’m not saying that the topic is not worthy of being taught because I understand the critical business need and nature of it. But we will consider that and we will think about how we might be able to put together a class or a something on this. It may not be a full course, but we might be able to do something where we do a presentation or two presentations on the topic or something. So good feedback. We will ponder that, okay? Yeah. And, you know, another good idea on that point is if you know some valuable SharePoint resources that I could consider, could you maybe post those to the bits list? Yeah. Yeah, I can do that. I had to learn SharePoint in my job a few weeks ago, and so I’ve collected a lot of stuff. Yeah, that’d be great, Debbie. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Who’s next? Okay. And it is not Michael Babcock. He’s Mr. Babcock. Okay. Angela. Angela. I just wanted to make a comment. I did get a lot out of the Python class, and you guys did a good job, those who instructed. And I am thinking about the Microsoft Office test ticket. I learned some different skills. I am learning NVDA, screen reader. And for the person that did the screen reader primer, my instructor gave us the website for that. So I’ve got that book too. If you’re wanting also, and I’m not trying to promote one book over another, because honestly, I think as many resources as people can have, the better off you are. If you are, especially if you are an NVDA user, the NVDA store has a series of training books on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and NVDA itself. And they’re very, very, very reasonable in price. I think they’re, what are they, Michael B., what, $19.95 or something? I mean, it’s ridiculously cheap. Yeah, something like that, yeah. And you can even buy them as a bundle. I think there’s some kind of a bundle thing that you can purchase them with. But boy, that also supports NVDA. So if you have the money, first go get David’s book because that’s also free. But also go purchase these books. Even if you’re not an NBDA user, they are really, really good. And they cover the applications in a very systematic way. They’re just amazing resources. along with David’s book, I think if you had that combination of resources, I don’t know that you would not be able to accomplish anything that you would want to do in the office suite for the most part. So. And just a quick tip for people. I know there’s a lot of beginners listening to this and some beginners feel like learning from a book is really difficult because you’re trying to read the book and trying to do the stuff on the computer. And you know what I always do is I take my phone or my Victor Reader Stream or my digital recorder, and I have my screen reader read a chapter of that book while I record it. And then I have something with a play and a stop button, and I can push the play button and listen and try something out. And so I’m not trying to switch between my book and the computer. Absolutely. Cindy, any more hands? Sure. Paige. Paige. Yes, hi. I just need to know, what is the name of that particular book, David’s book? I’ll let David answer that. Again, the name is the Windows Screen Reader Primer, All the Basics and More. And the easiest way to find it, really, is just using your favorite search engine. Just search those words, the Windows Screen Reader Primer, and it will be the first result. I think, and it’s available at the Carroll Center website, carroll.org, at the store, but don’t be scared of the word store. It is free there. You can download it there. So the Windows Screen Reader Primer. Great. And you have that in Word format? Yeah, it is in Word. Sorry, it’s in Word format. Sorry, I’m getting a phone number. Yeah, it’s in those formats. Okay, perfect. Thank you. I’m going to mute myself. I’ve got a call coming. Yeah, thank you. Hey, Jeff. It is 10 minutes up, and that was your last hand. All right. Do we have any other hands that wanted to ask a quick question? Let’s see if any more come up. Let’s see what happens. And if not, we’ll start wrapping up. There’s Penny and Beth. We already heard from Penny, so we’ll take Beth first. Right. Okay, Beth. Good afternoon, Jeff. Hi. Hi. I know a lot of beginners as well and a lot of seniors as well that would probably be interested in being members of BITS, but some of them don’t have email, like you said, if you’re hiding in a rock, hiding under a rock. But a lot of these folks don’t even know the first thing about getting on the Internet. Sure. I know that you would probably be interested in having them as members of BITS, but how would you tell them about it? Because I’m interested in a lot of the SBDA classes as well. I think we could work with them on that and figure out a way where we could get their information. They can either send us a check or we can figure out a way that they can give us a credit card number over the phone. And then we could make arrangements to provide the material to them in an accessible form. We could even potentially, we may have to charge for that simply because it would require us to start mailing things to them as far as CDs and things. Oh yeah, I understand that. But while they might be even interested in getting on the internet, they can get a decent computer and stuff. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Beth, let’s reach out and have a conversation about this more in depth to see how we can assist in moving that forward. I think this is an intriguing thing, and I don’t know that I can answer all these right from the top of my head. I think we’d have to come together and think about it collectively. Yep, yep. So, okay. Gregory. Okay, just before Kenny, Gregory has his hand up. Okay, Gregory. Hello, can you hear me? Uh-huh. Yeah, with the Windows classes, will that include Office 365, the email client? Outlook? Outlook, yes. Is there big changes Yeah, so And I want to make it perfectly clear that I am representing Jeff. I am not representing any corporation of any kind. It’s only what I’ve heard through the press and through reading, you know, just like everybody else does on the Internet. So I just want to start there, okay? Because I don’t, I really don’t want to have someone say, well, Microsoft said, because Microsoft does not. This is just a person’s opinion. I think as far as Outlook is concerned, the classic version of Outlook that you’re working with today, I don’t think that’s going anywhere for quite some time or a very long time, actually. It’s too entrenched in businesses. It’s too entrenched in commercial environments. It’s too entrenched in people’s lives. I mean, it’s going to take a while for that to change. Do I think there will be a change in the future? Probably. So what that is, how it’s going to end up happening, what that looks like for Office users specifically, I can’t tell you. But as far as using Outlook that you’re using today, you’re fine. So I think – Where do I sign up to be a member real quick? You can go to joinbits.org, and that will take you to the Bits website. And then from there, Michael, it’s what – there’s a link on the sidebar to join, right, Michael? There’s a link that says join bits. Okay. So click on that and you’ll, you’ll be taken right there. We should probably figure out how to have that join bits domain forward there. Can we do that, Michael? I will work on that. Helps if I unmute when I say that I will work on something. No, no, no. It’s okay. It’s not a big deal, but it would be cool if we could just have it go right there. But yeah. Okay. Okay, cool. Penny. Yes. Could you just quickly mention, I know the classes, the things we’re having next week, I know it starts Thursday morning, right? Could you just kind of briefly review that? I do, but I don’t have the schedule in front of me. But we’re going to be doing, I don’t know if anyone else has the, Michael B., you don’t have the convention scheduled there, do you? Not right this second, no. All right, I will ramble, and if someone actually has the basic time. It’s in the Bits Bulletin too. It’s in the Bits Bulletin as well. But we are doing, what are we, like six sessions or something? There’s a session on computers for the blind. There’s a session on iOS. And we’re doing a three-day session starting at 11.30 each day, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, on artificial intelligence. Michael Babcock is leading a discussion centered around the use of technology in your affiliate along with the leadership team. And then there’s a discussion that’s sort of sponsored by BITS and the Employment Committee, more so the Employment Committee than BITS is stepping in and assisting. Centered around employment. We’re doing a lot. I mean, there’s literally. Yeah, go ahead. And if you are registered for convention this morning, the convention program was sent out via email. So you can click through that and take a look at all of your programs. If you’re bored and want something to fall asleep to, start reading that when you put your head on the floor. I already did. Oh, good. You’re already sleeping or already? Yeah, I’m registered. Check your email and you should have that program then. Thank you. Okay, very good. Okay, very good. that’s alright I get it um Very good. Thank you. All right. So to find out more about BITS, you can go to joinbits.org, J-O-I-N-B-I-T-S.org. And that’s the quickest way to find us. We would be happy for you to become You know, lots of lots of social activities, lots of weekly chats, lots of weekly events centered around technology and all kinds of stuff. So come and come and be a part of a really fun group, a community of people who have like minded interests of really wanting to empower people to learn more, to achieve whatever they want and whatever they’re doing in their lives. is what it’s all about of really trying to impact people and making a difference for each and every person. We’re truly a family. We’re truly committed to one another and be a part of us. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.