20260707 Tuesday Topics - 2026 ACB Convention - Voting, bylaws, resolutions

Explore elements of the upcoming convention. We look at how elections will be handled and explore the bylaw amendments that are proposed. Board members are up for election this year as are Board of Publications members. We will actually be doing elections during the virtual week that precedes our actual St. Louis time. Just how all of this will work is important. What changes are we making in our Constitution? When do we do resolutions and how does that work? What do the convention rules we will adopt on our first virtual day look like? How will the nominating committee function and when will it happen? These are just some of the questions we explore!

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On June 30 Tuesday Topics will once more take to the internet waves with what has become a commonplace now. We will have one last scholarship winner and will then turn things over to the team and those present to talk with us about what they are reading during the Summer and what plans are being made as well. We decided that we didn't want to choose a weighty topic as June ended or as our penultimate show before our break for convention season. Instead we decided to explore a couple of Summer characteristics. First of all we know that folks who come to Tuesday Topics read during the Summer. Do you choose a special kind of book for Summer reading? Do you read more or less during the Summer? Can you tell us about a book you are reading now that you think others should read?

We also want to get a sense of what your Summer is looking like! Are you going on vacation? Are there games or concerts that are on your schedule? Is the ACB convention at the center of your Summer planning? Our team will tell you about our Summer and then we will ask those of you who are present to tell us about yours. We don't want to know what you aren't doing so be prepared to share your plans and books!

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Tuesday Topics welcomes more scholarship winners and Amanda Selm, Chair of the scholarship committee. Then Tuesday Topics explores new plans for one of the most valuable activities of ACB! Kenneth Simien Senior brings some folks who are part of the committee that oversees mentoring for ACB. We hear about those who have participated this year and about some changes that are planned for the 26-27 edition. The program recruits mentors called guides and mentees called explorers to work together for almost a year! In addition to meeting with each other, a range of joint activities are hosted by the committee. Three members of our team have participated in this program in the past as mentors so we look forward to hearing about this year and changes that lie beyond. 

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June 6, 2026 - Tuesday Topics - Scholarships and Gardening with George Holiday

Two more scholarship winners join us to brighten up the start of the show and then we welcome George Holiday who shares the how's and why's of gardening. It was a rule at my house that Paul did not have anything to do with plants. Even my early school project to grow radishes was an abject failure. My wives and my children are avid gardeners and are pretty successful at it so, luckily, it does not appear that my inability is genetic!. Unlike me, George is renowned for the quality of his garden! It is so extraordinary people ask to hold weddings there. What special skills does a blind person need to be a good gardener? What makes a person want to invest so much time and effort to making vegetables and plants happy? Does gardening require training? If so, are there books or magazines or podcasts that can help? !

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Tuesday Topics - Scholarship Winners and Grandparents

June 9, 2026

Tuesday Topics once more takes to the internet with a double feature. First, we have some more ACB scholarship winners to get to know. We had our first three and I truly enjoyed exploring in some detail how their experiences had been. Two of our winners had lost their sight relatively recently which makes their success even more amazing. A few weeks ago we promised to explore grandparents. After we talked with our winners that is what we do! Have your grandparents been important in your lives? Did they find it hard to adjust to your blindness? Did they have a special role you want to tell us about?

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On June 2 Tuesday Topics will try another new thing! As we take to the internet we will create a platform for some of our ACB scholarship winners to tell us a little about who they are and what they are doing. Amanda SELM, current chair of the ACB Scholarship Committee, is the prime mover in this process to share scholarship winners with the broader ACB community. During this show we will explore the lives of the winners who join us and we will also talk about the scholarship process with Amanda and perhaps other members of the scholarship committee. I am looking forward to understanding the process as well as those who have been chosen to be a part of ACB'S convention as scholarship winners!

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At a convention of the Florida Council of the Blind a speaker from Vispero mentioned Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) which  happens on May 21, I think. It occurred to me that this might represent a good topic for us to look at. There are huge differences in accessibility even among developed countries. Some of those countries model what they do on what we do in the United States. Many have very different models. No country that I am aware of has a comprehensive accessibility infrastructure that is better than the one that operates here.

While we will talk a little about laws, I am more interested in what the consequences of inadequate accessibility are. How is braille affected? What are the consequences for mobility? Does poor accessibility affect employment? What should we do about it? What is being done now?

While blindness is an extremely low-incidence disability in this country, there are places where the proportion of blind people is larger. Nevertheless, there are many more people with other disabilities than there are people with vision loss virtually everywhere. In countries in the developing world are asked to make room in their laws and infrastructure and spending for accessibility, there often is simply neither the will nor the money to make it happen! Many countries still rely on charities rather than the government for much of what is done for people with disabilities! What this means is that there can be huge differences in terms of what is done from country to country. We will explore some of what is real about inaccessibility and what we can do to try to narrow the gap between what we take for granted and what other countries lack!

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It is graduation season and we wonder how that goes for people who are blind. When you graduated from high school or college was that a good experience? Were you treated in a special way as a person with visual impairment? Was the experience memorable for you? Were there problems?

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In the past we have done programs on autonomous vehicles. Recently several folks have had the chance to ride in vehicles with no drivers and we thought it would be fun to ask them about their experience and their impressions. We also want to explore where we are in the process of regularizing their ability to function on a permanent basis. How good are accessibility features? Are there likely to be issues for people who are blind when insurance is needed? When are states likely to approve autonomous vehicles permanently? Who are the basic players in the field? What should ACB be doing?

We hear about autonomous vehicles fairly often. We do not often enough get a chance to hear a full account of the experience. We will welcome three folks who have taken rides in autonomous vehicles and will share their impressions. We will also explore where we are in terms of making these vehicles permanently a part of our lives!

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We will be continuing the discussion begun on our latest podcast concerning

the state of the blindness nation today and tomorrow. We have essentially finished painting what we think is a fairly accurate picture of how the blindness

system has changed over the last couple of decades and what some of the characteristics of the current system are.

We have begun to identify components of what we think might be a set of values that we should adopt moving forward. There is still a lot to say! If we

are to come up with priorities for the next decade we need to add to our list of absolutely necessary services and then try to do the much harder job of

staring ahead into an uncertain future. What will the constraints on services be like a decade from now? How much of the loss of Federal autonomy will

continue after this administration is over? What kind of success will people who are blind have selling a new paradigm of services to a country that may

not want to hear a word we say? What can or should we do to optimize outcomes ten years from now?

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