At our ACB convention this year there was a short presentation at our General session from Lee Nasehi, chair of the Vision Serve Alliance. If you didn't hear her presentation, you will get a chance to learn much more about an organization which is in the process of reinventing itself. At its heart, the Alliance is an association of private agencies that serve people who are blind. Lee will tell us about some of the new initiatives that Vision Serve is working on. Also on our panel will be Ellie Dupre, who is Executive Director of Florida Agencies Serving the Blind (FASB). She will describe what that organization is all about and will also tell us about some exciting new initiatives that FASB is working on. At the heart of things, this show is about how private agencies are doing serving people who are blind. What is new? How can ACB and our affiliates help make things better? How do we deal with the looming crisis of serving seniors who are blind? I

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It seems amazing that we are now six months into the pandemic, but we are. When Tuesday Topics first started we did a show that tried to explore some of the ways that people who are blind were affected by covid-19. We looked at positives and negatives. I want us to do that again, six months into the crisis and see if our feelings have changed. How is keeping our distance going? How do other community members react to us when we go out? How are guide dogs doing with the pandemic? How well are apps holding up? Have things gotten better or worse over the last few months? Are you more likely or less likely to go out now than you were a couple of months ago? How do you feel about masks? Do masks affect whether you will go out or not? What about public transit? What about other services? How has education been? What about services from agencies for the blind? Do you feel that you are being discriminated against by what the pandemic has brought? These and other questions will be a part of our open forum on the state of the pandemic! Help us and listeners understand how Covid has affected you!

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Tuesday Topics is now old enough to drink and old enough to vote everywhere. It is fitting, therefore, that we talk a little about voting at ACB and its affiliates. It will happen at 7 PM on Tuesday August 25. If you are going to be participating with us be on our Zoom connection at 6:45 Eastern Daylight Time. We want to take a long view and look back at where ACB came from and how our voting approaches have evolved. My guests are going to be Brian Charlson who has been a long-time leader of ACB. Also Jeff Thom will be back. He is a former chair of the ACB Voting Task Force. Penny Reeder is immediate past President of Guide Dog Users Inc. (GDUI) and will, among other things, tell us about the remote voting system that GDUI has used for several years. We will not only be looking at the past but will try to look into the future to explore options we can use for voting. It seems easy to just say that remote voting should be implemented but, as we shall see, there are lots of issues. We will hear about California's approach and also that of BPI (Blind Pride International) who already use a remote voting system.

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we will be discussing our twentieth topic! Time flies when you are having fun! Thank you so much, Rick as in Morin! You are what makes this little plane fly, sir! This week we are going to discuss getting older which all of us do! However, we will focus on those blind people who are old enough to call themselves seniors. Some of us become seniors having been blind most or all of our lives. Others only get to find out what it's like to be blind after they are seniors themselves. All seniors who are blind share the reality that there are very few services for them compared to those available for people who are going to work. They are also a part of a population that is expected to grow exponentially over the next decade. As people live longer, they are more likely to lose all or some of their vision. How can ACB and its affiliates help seniors get better served? How can we recruit more of those seniors new to blindness? I have three guests on Tuesday Topics. Sandra (Sandy) Troiano has only been blind for ten years and she is barely a senior. Jeff Thom is President of the ACB special interest affiliate dedicated to the needs of this population: the Association on Aging and Vision Loss (AAVL). Terry Pacheco has recently started a series of community calls on aging and how we can adjust to it. I am also a senior! I will be seventy-five this year. Many of you who listen and participate can also take pride that you, too, have reached senior status.

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For long term, happy partnerships which is better; a relationship between two blind people or a relationship between a blind person and a sighted partner? I believe there will be strong opinions on both sides of this question. For the purposes of this debate, two partials equals two blind people. Do join us for our first "great debate".

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Tuesday Topics takes a look at people who have hearing loss as well as vision loss. Deborah Kendrick has written a new book about people who are blind who have hearing loss. She explores the problems multiple disabilities create and also looks at resources that are out there for people who must operate with two disabilities. We will also have a representative from SASI (the Sight and Sound Impaired committee of ACB). They are the group that is responsible for dealing with folks who have hearing loss and blindness at our conventions and elsewhere. Lori Scharff will be their representative and will tekl us what SASI does between conventions and what plans they have for the future.

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My guests on this week's Tuesday Topics have recently lunched a new podcast called "picture this". Brian Charlson, current President of the Bay State Council and immediate past President of Library Users of America and former First Vice-President of ACB, has been an active advocate for audio description since it began. Carl Richardson is Co-Chair of ACB'S audio Description Project Committee. He knows more than most of us ever knew about audio description. Both of them will talk about their podcast and be grilled about other aspects of audio description. What are the current options that are out there? What is in our immediate future where description is concerned? What are the problems we face? How can we solve them? What can ACB and its members do?

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Tuesday Topics is excited to welcome a distinguished duo to discuss the ADA at 30. Chris Bell is a distinguished attorney who was directly involved in writing the ADA and worked for many years for the government and later as a law partner to oversee its implementation and enforcement. He has published several seminal articles on the ADA and is acknowledged to be an expert on this subject Claire Stanley works as an advocacy specialist for the American Council of the Blind and was hardly born when the ADA came into effect. She is a trained attorney and, despite her youth, has a long history of advocacy work. I have spent thirty years trying to make sense of the ADA and, with the three of us available for conversation and questions, by the end of our two hour show, we should know a good deal about where the ADA stands.

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Tuesday Topics is now two hours which should give people lots of time to talk about their likes and dislikes concerning the ACB convention. My co-producer of Tuesday Topics will be featured during the first hour to tell us more about how he herded cats and juggled streams during the convention. Rick Morin was awesome and I want him to tell us more about how he did what he did and I hope he will tell us about some of the scary moments that we didn't notice because he fixed them just in time. It seems ridiculous given the avalanche of information we are getting this week at the convention for me to be suggesting that you plan to listen to something else next week. Nevertheless, Tuesday Topics will be back on the air on Tuesday, July 14th, Bastille day! I thought it might offer us a chance to talk about the convention that has just happened. I don't plan to have a guest. I want ACB folks to talk about the convention. Do you have suggestions for making it better? Were there things you didn't like? Were there things you thought were stupendous? I am not really interested in a love fest though I think that the accomplishments of those who made the convention happen are amazing! We can almost take their effectiveness for granted! What can we learn from this? What would you like to see next year? What about the program document? How was it? How about the codes? Were they distributed appropriately? Should people who registered receive other things? I hope lots of you will turn up to explore some of these questions.

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This is a reminder to everyone to tune in tomorrow when Tuesday Topics will give you a chance to hear what will be broadcast where during the convention. I think that we will be able to tell which elements will be on which ACB Radio channels. The schedule for the virtual tours that will appear on the treasure Trove channel has already been published. But where will the exhibit hall be and what about affiliate meetings? My guest this week on Tuesday Topics will be Janet Dickelman, convention queen. Our show will occur three days before the convention starts and most of the infrastructure should be in place. So Janet should be able to tell us what will appear where and how we can do whatever we need to do during the convention.

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