We've had another good day here at the ACB Mid Year meetings in Washington,
DC. This morning, we finished up the President's meeting. Carla Ruschival,
who is ACB Convention Coordinator, talked with us about what is involved in
good convention planning. She told us not only how important it is to find
a good hotel, have hotels competing with each other for our business and ask
for the things we need, but she also talked about food and beverage costs
and several other things involved in planning a good convention.
Berl Colley talked briefly about the ACB Oral History project, as they are
trying to get interviews with long time members and leaders in ACB so we can
preserve our oral history. Then, Chris Gray talked with us and demonstrated
changes coming in ACB's Membership Database. The Illinois Council of the
Blind is one of the affiliates of ACB which will be beta testing the new web
based database interface which will make it much, much easier to certify
members, get information out to members, map out members to congressional
districts and other things.
After a break, Joel Snyder, ACB's Director for the Audio Description
Project, talked with us about the work he is doing. That man needs to
switch to decaf, I swear; he makes me tired listening to him. Finally, we
had an opportunity to provide feedback on the President's meeting and ask
questions of those ACB officers in attendance -- Mitch Pomerantz, President;
Brenda Dillon, Second Vice President; and Mike Godino, Treasurer.
This afternoon at 1:30, we began ACB's legislative seminar. After
introductions and a few remarks by President Mitch Pomerantz, we heard from
Daniel Goldstein , Managing Partner of Brown, Goldstein and Levy. Mr.
Goldestein has been our lead attorney within the Reading Rights Coalition.
He told about how Amazon.com had introduced the Kindle E-book reader in
February of 2009, which had text to speech on it, but whose controls were
not accessible to people who are blind. Through our settlement activities,
we have gotten Amazon to agree that the next version of the Kindle will have
accessible controls on it, as well as text to speech.We then heard from
Knowledge Ecology International, which is spearheading efforts to get an
international treaty passed that will allow accessible, copyrighted works to
be shared across borders. Right now, for example, copyrighted works put
into accessible formats by National Library Services here in the U.S. cannot
be shared in other countries.
We then, after a break, heard from Donald Kahl and Jennifer Wolfsheimer of
the Equal Rights Center of Washington, DC with whom ACB has collaborated on
several issues. We ended with discussion of some of ACB's legal advocacy
work including our structured settlements for Point of Sale equipment in
Staples, Trader Joes and others. Also, we discussed the settlement with
major league baseball to make areas of its website accessible, and the
social security administration which allows people who are blind to get
notices and other documents from Social Security in accessible formats. Of
significance here is that while the court settlement only requires materials
to be provided in Braille and on data CD, if you need another format like
large print or audio, call SSA and request this as they are required to give
consideration on an individual basis to providing other formats.
That pretty well summarizes our day. Tomorrow promises to be a full day as
we'll discuss various things like H.R.3101, "The 21st Century
Telecommunications and Video Accessibility Act," H.R.734/S.841, "The
Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act," and other things going on.
