1. I wanted to wish all of you a happy and blessed Independence Day.
2. I have not forgotten about our phone meetings. Our next meeting is
scheduled for Friday, July 27 at 8:00 PM and is open to any questions or
comments relating to technology.
3. As always, please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have
comments or questions regarding our group. If you have ideas for guest
presenters or if you feel you might want to present a particular product
or service please let me know about it. I would respectfully ask that
any questions of a technical nature about technology be directed
publicly to the list at blind-philly-comp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and not to me
privately. If your question goes to the list other people can respond,
especially since I often don't have the time that I'd like to personally
respond to emails. Also, the fact is that I simply don't know everything
and there are many on this list with expertise on products or apps that
I just don't have.
4. I'd be curious to know if this mailing list is meeting your needs
and, if not, what could be done to have it do so? As an example, are the
articles that I send out of value or would you prefer the list to just
be dedicated to discussion without the articles? If you do like reading
articles, are there topics you'd like to see more of or less of?
5. Depending on which email program you use you may have to perform a
"reply all" if you want your replies to a message to be sent to the
list. A few months back Thunderbird made an annoying change which meant
that pressing ctrl+R to reply to a list message would send your reply to
just the original sender and not to the list. One workaround for this is
to press ctrl+shift+R (for Reply All) which should guarantee that you
reply will go to the list. There is a slightly more technical workaround
which can force Thunderbird to revert to the older and, in my opinion,
more preferred way where just pressing ctrl+R sends a reply from a
mailing list to the entire list, which is, I think, what most people
expect. Off the top of my head I don't remember the exact set of steps I
used to adjust this setting but, if you run into this issue, let me know
and I'll try and post them. I think users of Outlook should be OK but I
can't speak for other email programs.
6. As always, if you know someone who could benefit from this list don't
hesitate to provide them with the information on how to join the list.
To subscribe, the email address is
blind-philly-comp-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
In the subject type
subscribe
and then send the message.
There are just so many mailing lists out there dealing with various
types of assistive technology and, to be frank, I'm wondering if this
list is still relevant. Initially, I started this as a group for people
in or near the Philly area because it was my assumption that a city as
big as Philly needed a support group for visually impaired computer
users. That still may be the case but I'm just trying to ascertain this.
You can be as honest as you want to about this as I don't have an ego
when it comes to this group. If it's meeting people's needs then it will
continue. If it isn't I have no problem in seeing it go away because, as
I said, there are many discussion groups dealing with technology both in
general and lists dedicated to a specific product.
Take care.
--
David Goldfield, Assistive Technology Specialist WWW.David-Goldfield.Com
