Hello David and everyone,
Mary and I will say "Thumbs-Up" too. Keep them coming.
Peter Donahue
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-philly-comp-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-philly-comp-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Robin Frost
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2017 8:55 AM
To: blind-philly-comp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-philly-comp] Re: Quick Update
Hi,
Speaking for myself but I bet others as well the articles are much appreciated
informative and enlightening. Keep them coming and thanks for all your hard
work on behalf of us all.
Blessings to all you love in this world.
Robin
-----Original Message-----
From: David Goldfield
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2017 10:52 PM
To: Philadelphia Computer Users Group for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Subject: [blind-philly-comp] Quick Update
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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You are invited to visit the moderator's Web site at WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
for additional resources and information about assistive technology training
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