Hi. Everything is fine with me but I just wanted to write this message
to update you on just a few minor things, FYI.
Some of you may be wondering why I sent out a few test messages. I'm
trying to isolate an issue I'm noticing with my email program regarding
how links are embedded in email messages. Until recently, I could easily
select some words and turn them into a link. This means that, when you
read the message, your screen reader would read the words and either
precede or follow those words with the word "link", just as it does when
visiting a Web site. Of course, pressing enter on that link would load
your Web browser and open that page. My email program, Thunderbird, was
handling this rather nicely until recently. Now, it seems to be
expanding those links. This means that, instead of the text with the
word "link", you now see the text, followed by the complete address,
such as http://www.nvaccess.org, which I don't want. Just like the
annoying issue where messages which I sent were sometimes coming up
blank for some people, the breakdown could be in my email program or my
email provider. I've ruled out that it's not Freelists and so it could
be an issue with Thunderbird, either a setting which needs to be tweeked
or a bug which needs to be fixed. I'm not thrilled about this and, if I
can't figure out what's going on, I may have to switch to Outlook, a
solution I can manage but one which I'd rather not have to resort to as
I prefer the simplicity and the user interface of Thunderbird to
Outlook. I should have it worked out soon. Bottom line: if you see
messages from me with the word "test" in the subject, feel free to
delete them without opening them if you wish.
Some of you may have noticed that I send out a huge batch of articles
over the weekend. When I worked part-time I could send out articles as I
received them during the week, allowing for smaller batches of emails
from me. However, now that I'm working full time I don't have the time
to do that during the week and so I usually get caught up sending stuff
I've discovered during the week and doing it on the weekend, which I
refer to as my Saturday splurge. I try to remember to precede the text
of the subject with the word "article" so that readers should have a
good idea of what's in the message before they open it. This gives you
the chance to decide ahead of time whether the article will be of
relevance or interest to you, giving you the option of trashing it
before opening it. Believe me, I write subject lines in order to give
readers the option to do that so I'm not at all bothered that some of
you don't read everything I send out. I get thousands of articles into
my news reader on my iPhone and I scan them in the same way, skipping
over most of them and only looking at the ones that interest me and,
even then, I don't have the time to scan them all. If anybody is
interested in how I collect this stuff and is wondering if I read
thousands of news sites and blogs every hour, the answer is most
definitely not. I use several news aggregators, which can scour
thousands of sites to deliver articles from those sites which match my
interest. One of the aggregators that I use on iOS is an amazing program
called Lire. I believe it costs around $5.00 but is worth it if you want
to gather news and blog posts from lots of sources. It's easy to use,
very configurable and works amazingly well with VoiceOver.
On the Web, one of the aggregators which I use is Google News, which I
can already use in Lire. If you go to
www.google.com/news
type in a word or topic of interest in the search box, such as a
person'a name, a company, subject, etc. Google News will deliver search
results from over 4000 sources with those keywords. While it doesn't
search blogs it does search sites with news articles. So, now you know
one of my secrets. And here you thought I read thousands of news sites
every day.
When I send articles out on this list, I try to ensure that they are
relevant to the purpose of this list. I try to ensure that most of them
deal with blindness technology. Some deal with technology which is not
blindness-specific but which may be of interest to most or, at least, to
many of you, such as information about certain iOS apps or general
computer security. If the majority of you would prefer to just have
conversation without articles, let me know. I run the list but it's your
list and, if most of you don't read most of the articles, I have no
problem with not sending most of the articles. <smile> I realize I could
set up a second list just for article distribution, which would take
care of those readers who just want questions and answers but managing a
second list is just not a task I feel I can take on right now, due to
time constraints. We can talk about that when I retire. <grin>
Finally, please feel free to send me topics for things you'd like to
talk about on future phone meetings. If any of you would like to be a
guest presenter to talk about a specific topic or to demonstrate a
particular product, let me know and I'd be happy to schedule you. If you
know of someone who might be interested in being a guest presenter,
please feel free to give them my email address
david dot goldfield at outlook dot com
and I'd be happy to schedule them as well.
I'd finally like to wish a Happy Father's Day to any dads who are
subscribers to this list.
All the best.
--
David Goldfield, Assistive Technology Specialist Feel free to visit my
Web site WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
You are invited to visit the moderator's Web site at WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
for additional resources and information about assistive technology training
services.
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