This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: The afternoon session will now come to order. Let's have a door prize.
BENNETT: I'm glad we're up for those, the virtuals and the regular people. The people that are here. And the first one is 50 dollars for the next three people that I tell you who they are. If they send an email to [email protected] and use the code word "Braille Monitor" they will get 50 bucks. Okay, Katie Pinkney of Nevada. Benjamin Danielfur, Maryland.
Turn the page here. And the last one is Vicki Daniels, California. And now here is Kenia.
KENIA: We will be giving away 100 dollars in cash to the in-person winner. And that is going to Katrisa Cruz from Selma, Alabama.
Is she here, Katrisa? It doesn't sound like she's here. I hope that our next person is here. They are a scholarship finalist! Gonzalez from Puerto Rico! Thelma.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Wave. Wave high.
KENIA: We got her. Thank you.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: We're going to Marilyn Green for a PAC update.
MARILYN: Thank you, Mr. President. I am here to say that things just got interesting. Arizona, Colorado has snuck up on you! It is a tie!
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: A tie!
MARILYN: Yeah, it's a tie for the Rat. And I talked to the Rat, and he says he doesn't want to be split up. So you need to get back there to the PAC table, Arizona and Colorado. But not too far behind are my friends many South Carolina! Go back there and try to beat them. I don't want to split the Rat three ways, but I'll do it if I have to. It got interesting, for if divisions, for the Mule, we still have the seniors in first place.
Students you're moving up, but you are still far behind. You need ten more people to get back there and tell us at the PAC table that they want their contributions to go top NABS. And then you're killing it right now. Get to the PAC table. Then for the PAC a derm, Nevada, you might be going home with the PAC a derm.
But it's not too late, Vermont, you still got a chance. And then right behind Vermont is Michigan! So you can go back there to the PAC table right now, my friends, my PAC mates and I will be there until 3:00. So you have a little less than an hour. But if you are in line, we will take you, get back there to the PAC table. And Mr. President, if I can give the winners of the gift cards
MARK RICCOBONO: You can. But are you out of AfterShokz headphones?
MARILYN: We still have a few more pairs.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: What a great incentive.
MARILYN: 10 dollars or more per month to start or increase your PAC. I hear people moving. Get back there quickly. Get back there.
So for the gift cards, we have... I know there is a few of these people who should be in the room. Richard Payne from Ohio! Yes!
Candace Chapman, Mississippi.
Then we also have Cattrell Art Gallery from Arkansas. And I'm singing along... We also have James Milligan from Nevada. And one more...
Dietrich Heron from... there ya go, sounds like he's here. And people love to hear me sing. So let's do it again.
¶ get on the PAC Plan ¶
¶ Sign up today ¶
¶ We need your contributions rights away ¶
¶ Funding our movement ¶
¶ It must be done ¶
¶ So all our battles will be won! ¶
Get back there to the PAC table!
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Thank you very mump. PAC table closes at 3:00. If I could have your attention, please, I would now like to move to or Bolotin Awards!
This is the 17th, and Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards presentation. We have the chairman of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards Committee. He is the president of the National Federation of the Blind of Utah. He has served as a board member and secretary of the National Federation of the Blind, and he is our incoming Second Vice President Elect. Here's Everette Bacon!
(Music playing)
¶ don't wait for luck ¶
¶ Dedicate yourself and you can find yourself ¶
¶ Standing in the Hall of Fame ¶
¶And the world's gonna know your name ¶ ¶
¶And the world's gonna know your name ¶
EVERETTE: Thank you for that. I'm glad you did not give me the bacon song or something like that as my walk-up music.
So I'm glad. Probably get that next year now. Okay. It's always exciting to be able to do the Bolotin Awards. It's one of the highlights of the general sessions. We really look forward to it. It's something we work hard on throughout the year, and I'm so excited to be able to be here. This is our 17th year giving out this award.
So we usually put together a video. And so I'm going to have that video cued up now and be able to play for you. So you get to sneak peek at the winners and a little bit about them. And then I'll go into our committee members, and then you get to meet all of the award winners. So Will, if you'll start the video, please.
(Music)
AD: During the following presentation, names and logos of organizations appear on screen as they are mentioned, and pictures of individuals appear as they speak. Federationists and guests. The National Federation of the Blind is proud to introduce the recipients of our 17th annual Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards.
Made possible in part by the generous support of the Alfred and Rosalind Perlman Trust and the Santa Barbara Foundation.
These individuals and organizations have broken down barriers faced by blind people in innovative ways. Changed negative perceptions of blindness and blind people and pushed past existing boundaries to motivate blind people to achieve new heights.
The two individual winners are Deborah Kendrick, a blind writer whose body of work has informed and represented the blind and people with disabilities, including a syndicated newspaper column. The purpose of it as the purpose of probably all of the writing that I've done in one way, or another is to connect people to people and let people understand in a visceral way that those of us who are blind or have other disabilities are more the same than we are different from others. The only real condition that matters is the human condition.
Donna Posont, who leads the innovative Blind Birding and Beyond program at the Environmental Interpretive Center of the University of Michigan, Dearborn. When I started out, I wanted to learn nature as a blind person, and then I wanted to learn it in a way so that I could understand how to share it with other blind people. And through that, I see how much it helps improve skills of blindness, like when children or adults learn how to identify a bird by hearing their sound. They get excited and they gain confidence.
And when we go through the woods and we walk the trails and we show them that they don't have to use sighted guide, they can follow the edge of the trail and they can hear the sound and the wind, they can hear where the birds are. And they gain a lot of confidence from that because they often don't have that opportunity to walk trails and walk in the woods.
And it makes it better when they're walking out on the sidewalks in the city because they gain that level of confidence for using their cane.
Our two organizational winners are Handid Braille Services for providing quality Braille transcription in multiple languages. Here's founder Don Winiecki.
DON: The company as a nonprofit, has grown quite a bit and without really planning for it, I've become a provider of non-English Braille as well as English Braille, Unified English Braille, and I specialize in Braille for languages that don't use the Latin symbol system in their print alphabet. So like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Farsi, and on and on, and I do a bunch of that stuff now, as well as the more common non-English languages like Spanish and French and German.
We hear over and over again nothing about us without us. And I'm very sensitive to that idea. I don't want to claim that I'm doing things for other people in a sense that I'm trying to take care of them, no. I'm doing things for people so that they can achieve more. And being a background part of that is such a rewarding thought. And the acknowledgment that the NFB provides is just for the ratification of that. Living Blindfully, a global podcast about living your best life with blindness and low vision. Here's producer and host Jonathan Mosen.
JONATHAN: I interview a lot of movers and shakers for the podcast, and I take a long time before each interview to do my research.
And I ask the questions that I think listeners want me to ask. So I aim to be fair but also fearless.
Another element of the show is that we have listeners who contribute from all over the world, and I'm proud that in an era where people do a lot of yelling at each other online, we've maintained a climate of respectful but robust debate. To convey just how much receiving a Bolotin Award means to me, I have to be a bit vulnerable.
Growing up as a blind teenager in New Zealand back in the eighties, I had so many big dreams and I was confident that they were realistic dreams. But I quickly discovered that my biggest problem wasn't my blindness. It was other people's limiting perceptions of it.
I actually became very depressed about this. When I was 17, so that's in 1986. I got a 1200 baud modem, and I started logging on to bulletin boards using technology called Fido Net.
And ultimately I got onto an online service called the CompuServe Information Service, and it was from being online that I learned about the Federation, and it changed my life. Actually, if I'm being absolutely honest, I think knowing that there were other people out there who felt about blindness, the way I feel about blindness saved my life. So to be recognized by the Federation with one of its most prestigious awards means more to me than I have the words to express.
And it's an honor I never expected. These winners each will receive a trophy and a monetary prize to advance their work to help blind people live the lives we want. Now the National Federation of the Blind proudly presents them with their Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards.
(Applause)
EVERETTE: All right, are you excited? Yeah, these are some outstanding winners, and we are excited to give them their award. First and foremost, I want to thank the members of the committee who serve this year. Mrs. Mary Ellen Jernigan, who has been serving on the committee since it started and has been guiding all of us. Thank you, Mrs. Jernigan.
Thank you to Donald Porterfield of Arizona. Thank you to Steve Jacobson of Minnesota. Thank you to Dr. Natalie Shaheen of Illinois, and last but not least, Jessica Beecham of Colorado. Thank you for serving on the committee. I also want to thank members of the National Federation of the Blind staff who have been so supportive. Evet, Chris Danielsen, Beth and Suzanne, they're all wonderful supporters and making sure these awards are given out.
And also thank you to President Riccobono for having the faith in me to chair this committee. Thank you. All right, moving right along, let's get to the informing about the award winners. You haven't heard their monetary prize. I know you want to know that, right. Okay! So we have two individual awards. The first individual award is Deborah Kendrick.
Deborah was nominated by Judy Dickson. When personal computers were a new American phenomenon in the 1980s, she created a Braille only magazine called "Tactic." This would enjoy worldwide readership and garnered numerous awards. From the Society of Technical Communication and others.
That publication was acquired by the American Foundation for the Blind and you may know it now as Access World. Deborah serves as senior editor and continues to contribute articles to this day. I am excited to give the award of 5,000 dollars to Deborah Kendrick. We're going to have Deborah Kendrick say a few words.
(Applause)
DEBORAH: When I was 16 I met my first blind grown-up. He was a vocational rehabilitation counselor, and he held the key, in other words, the money, to my college education. He said a blind girl couldn't be a writer. This is cool. I'm getting a little pro tactile up here. Years later with a pile of awards for both journalism and advocacy organizations as evidence that I was not only a writer, but a writer who got it right, I learned about Kenneth Jernigan, who was also discouraged from pursuing his chosen career. In my jobs books and elsewhere, I have told stories of people who are blind or have other disabilities about the work they do. Many, too many, have told me that a blind boy -- that they were first told that a blind boy or a blind girl could not do what they wanted to do. And they did it anyway.
(Applause)
Then in 2007 I read the book "The Blind Doctor." I learned about Dr. Jacob Bolotin, who not only did it anyway, became a doctor against the odds of his environment and swarms of naysayers, but became a truly gifted healer and dedicated physician. To be deemed worthy to be among those honored as following his example is both humbling and exhilarating.
One day several months ago when a child asked me how many words I had written, I started playing with numbers in my head.
Now, I have no idea how many words I have written, but I added up articles and books and columns and I figured that I have published about 2 million.
(Applause)
So that's a lot of stories, true stories, and there are many more stories to tell, yours and mine. Thank you so much for this honor and for the encouragement it gives me to keep writing.
EVERETTE: Thank you, Deborah, what a wonderful award winner and wonderful story. Moving to the next one, Donna Posont.
(Cheers and applause)
Michigan is excited, Donna. So these are some words from Donna herself in her application. "Through the years, I have had the pleasure of witnessing some people who have always wanted to walk with a sighted guide turn into scientists taking off down the path using their cane.
There have been -- taking off down the path using their cane. There have been some afraid to touch new things, then all of a sudden eventually they would be shaping bird beaks and using homemade Play Doh in its cooking to shape into objects.
Those who were afraid of speaking in front of others would eventually learn to write Braille and have notes and increase their confidence to share information. Donna is also a recipient, if you don't know anything about Donna, Donna has created a nature society in Michigan. She works with a university there and is doing such wonderful things to learn about birds and nature and so many things about our wilderness that we didn't get a chance to use or become a part of as blind people. So it is my honor, I'm excited to give Donna Posont an award of 5,000 dollars.
(Cheers and applause)
(sound of bird chirping)
DONNA: Hey, for those that don't know, that's the beautiful state bird of my beloved Michigan.
(Applause)
Many of you have heard me say "it's not about the birds." And I will explain a little how I came to that through my journey. Fifty years ago this summer, I graduated from high school. And I took off to college to get a degree in biology. About a week into that, I realized I had no skills and no way to learn biology. I had no skills of blindness, and I couldn't do it.
So I was redirected into social work. Nothing against social work, but I graduated in '77 and moved to Philadelphia and worked at the Epsil School for the Blind. It was there that I met the National Federation of the Blind, or more likely they got ahold of me. Through the years I worked in the vending program in three different states, and I served as vice president of the Blind Merchants Division, until I married the president of the Merchants Division, and I moved to Michigan where I have lived ever since.
There we raised five children, and that indeed was the greatest joy of my life. And you know what is so amazing about them that really makes them stand out. They gave me 12 grand churns. They gave me 12 grandchildren.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you grandma!
DONNA: In 2008 I decided to once again purr skew my dream and I went to the University of Michigan Dearborn. I didn't know what you wanted to call it, but I wanted to learn about nature so I could share it with others who were blind. It wasn't about me so much anymore. I wanted to learn it, but I wanted to make it accessible to other blind people. Because through working at camps and so forth, I realized they often had be denied the opportunity to learn about the birds and the trees and the insects and the frogs, and I wanted to change that.
So during that time I started a program called Birding by Ear and Beyond where we learned to identify birds by their sounds and then we learned all at the birds. And in 2015 I graduated from the University of Michigan Dearborn with a degree in environmental studies. And just to show I could do it; I got a minor in biology.
At that time the director Dr. David Susko asked if I wanted to come on the staff and do what I had been loving to do for money and get paid to do the Birding by Ear and Beyond program. So that's what I have been doing ever since. COVID gave us a little slowdown, but we're back in business now. It's not about if birds. It's about sharing with blind people and helping them gain the confidence they need to travel the trails of life.
(Applause)
EVERETTE: I'm really excited about our next awards; they are our organizational awards. We had two individual awards. Now we have two organizational awards. This next award was nominated -- well, let me tell you the name. Handid Braille services. Don Winiecki. Don Winiecki was nominated or recommended by Tasnim Ashali.
As a gift for the blind Muslims of Ramadan, 2024, Don volunteered to produce a screen reader accessible version of a new translation of the Qur'an in both English and Arabic. Which is pretty exciting. So we are honored to give Handid Braille services an award of 15,000 dollars.
(Applause)
DON: Give me a minute here.
(Cheers and applause)
DONALD: Hello Federation Family.
Get through it. I've been a member of the Federation since 2016 when I joined the Treasure Valley Chapter in Idaho. Transformational is a word... It's a word that comes out a lot when people talk about how the Federation has affected them. That word works for me too.
Transcribing text into Braille allows me to contribute to a world that I would want to live in. A world I want all of us to live in.
I never imagined I would come to specialize in producing Braille for languages other than English. Much less languages that don't use the alphabet or familiar with. It was a chance meeting with a director of the NLS at this convention in this venue a number of years ago that pointed out the terrific gap there was in producing Braille for multiple languages. I and my nonprofit company now have clients on six of the seven continents.
(Applause)
I regularly produce Braille in Arabic and Chinese and simplified and traditional Hindi, Indonesia, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, French, German, Vietnamese, Navajo, and others. Lots of Unified English Braille too. And sometimes even eBay. As we know, Braille is a code and not a language. However, languages and their unique orthography are codes that allow one intricate concept.
I allow beauty and quality to pull me into learn how to learn Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and more, so that I could put that in Braille.
I type Arabic at a rate faster I'm told than most native speakers. Learning to read these languages has changed my life. The knowledge that I am producing materials enabling independence is transformational. And there's more. To help spread this independence, I'm starting work on developing Braille instruction for adults in the same languages I transcribe today.
(Applause)
But I've got to tell you, it is immeasurably more meaningful to me that the National Federation of the Blind recognizes this and ratifies what I do with the Bolotin Award. There is no collection of individuals more able to assess the value of what I do than you. My Federation Family. Thank you.
(Applause)
EVERETTE: All right, we have one last award to give, last but certainly not least. Our last or second organizational award, I'm excited to give to Living Blindfully Jonathan Mosen. An example of the podcast remaining true to its values is that Living Blindfully boasts a commitment that everyone working on the podcast will be blind. The podcast now employs a transcriber and an audio editor both of whom are blind themselves. Living Blindfully is clear about its audience. It is not seeking to explain blindness to sighted people, or to hold back on the important issues. Living Blindfully is unashamedly our place, our issues. I'm excited to give an award of 15,000 dollars to my friend, Jonathan Mosen, Living Blindfully.
(Applause)
JONATHAN: So at this point I'm waiting to wake up and I've been dreaming this. This is incredibly special. So thank you so much to the Bolotin committee and the National Federation of the Blind in general for this award. You know, usually media ignores us, and when it doesn't, we often wish it did. Because it frequently underestimates us, it misrepresents us, and far too often it would have people believe that you mustn't say that dreaded B word. Blind. I was observing yesterday that living visually impaired doesn't have the same ring to it, you know, does it?
(Laughter)
So Living Blindfully seeks to give you an oasis from all that. Now, in humbly accepting this award on behalf of the members of our Living Blindfully team, I want to mention them by name. It include Hannah May Aldesza who produces our transcripts to that in particular deafblind aren't excluded from the conversation, because so often deafblind people are excluded from the conversation and It's not right. And accessibility has benefits because it means that we also in that process build an extensive searchable repository of information and opinion on the issues of the day.
And also Derek Lang, our gifted and -- got some Derek fans out there. Okay, yeah. Our gifted and brilliant audio engineer speeds up the production of the show but editing some of the interviews. And, of course, my wife Bonnie, who is here with us today to see Living Blindfully get this awe ward. I love you so much.
And finally I accept on behalf of our listeners in over 113 countries now. Some of whom -- good to know some are out there, and your thoughts on the issues that we cover and the things that matter to us. So thank you so much again for recognizing Living Blindfully and I'll conclude mu acceptance with the way I conclude every episode. Remember that when you are out there with your guide dog, you've harnessed success, and with your cane, you're able.
EVERETTE: Congratulations to the winners. As President Riccobono pointed out, when I said my friend, he's everybody's friend, that's for sure. I'm just lucky to be one of them. Let's do one big round of applause for all of these winners. Let's do it. Every year we give these awards out. This is the 17th year offing the this. Which is pretty exciting. We're going to have 18 in Louisiana next year. Year 18, if you want to know what we're looking for, we're looking for these types of dream makers that do innovative things in the field of blindness.
This is your chance to apply. If you did apply and didn't win this year, we keep all your applications, we review old applications each year.
But if you want to apply again, we definitely encourage that. Go to NFB.org /Bolotin.
Also awards and presentations, you can find them there and you can apply. We will open up the application process again on January 1st, 2025, and we will have that open until April 15th, 2025. These are awesome awards. We definitely want to hear what is going on out there in the fields of blindness. Thank you, Mr. President, this is my report.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: How about a door prize for our Bolotin Award winners? Fantastic!
BENNETT: We've got the virtual people that are looking forward to some money. We've got 25 dollars for each three people who send a message within the next half hour to [email protected]. And use the code words "Washington Seminar." The first name is Barbara Lomax of Massachusetts.
Corrine Perth of Connecticut. And finally, Yolanda Thompson of Colorado. Here is an in person.
KENIA: In person participants we are giving away a mystery gift card that we believe is in the amount if of 25 dollars, but that is for you to find out. And then a snack pack and most excitingly a Rubik's cube! And that is going to Terese Fleming Toga from Orlando, Florida. It doesn't sound like she's here. What about Roxanne Tores from Tucson, Arizona? We got her. Thank you.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Okay, excellent. I could say so many great things about each of the Bolotin Award winners. There's not time for that, but when Jonathan was talking, he mentioned the content of the podcast being very relevant to the day. And I -- there is no other media format out there for which Federation members will write to me and say, you know, on the Living Blindfully podcast, Jonathan wants to know about this. You should tell him what the Federation is doing. This happens all the time. And since we are where the action is in the United States, we often help out and tell him what we're doing. And on the world stage as well.
So we appreciate all these winners and the work that they are doing. This next presentation is very important one. We had planned to do it a little later in the day, but the individual needs to -- has many demands on their time, so we're happy we can get this in. This is "Closing the Door On Discrimination: Championing the Blind in Society Through Civil Rights Protections At the Department of Justice."
This speaker today is the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. department of justice. In this role she leads the Justice Department's broad federal civil rights enforcement work on behalf of all Americans, assistant attorney general is a lifelong civil rights champion, as a lawyer, she has worked very hard on a number of fronts to ensure that all people have their equal rights protected, and she's helped to expand those rights in many places.
I could read to you her extensive biography. I have to say it made me wonder, maybe I need to work a little harder. Her accomplishments are incredible in terms of what she has done to knock down the barriers, eliminate discrimination, and close the door on discriminatory practices. And so the blind have benefited from her work.
(Applause)
Absolutely. She speaks and writes widely about issues of race and law and justice, you can find her name in all sorts of places, and she is now one of the primary people at the Department of Justice working on using that government tool to expand the equal participation of blind people in society, as well as many others. Her work directly impacts us. How do we know? Well, amongst her notable qualifications, most recently she was the lead champion for getting website regulations under Title II out the door.
(Applause)
So I'm really pleased to welcome to our stage for the first time but hopefully not the last time ever, in her capacity at the United States Department of Justice, please welcome the assistant attorney general, Kristen Clarke.
KRISTEN CLARKE: Good afternoon. It is great to be here. I want to first start by thanking President Riccobono for that very gracious introduction and for the honor of being with you all today. I want to note at the outset, again, my name is Kristen Clarke, I'm the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice. I'm a 5' 4 " Black woman wearing a navy suit.
And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge my colleagues who are with me. The extraordinary Jennifer Mathis, a long-time disability advocate, and Adam Lewis, a trial attorney at the Justice Department as well.
(Applause)
And just also want to take a point of personal privilege to acknowledge how exciting it is to share a stage today with Judge David Tatel.
(Applause)
Whose career encompasses a wide range of civil rights issues and whose personal experiences and extraordinary contributions on the bench model courage and perseverance for this community. I'm so thrilled to be here with you today during the National Federation of the Blind's National Convention to speak about the work of the U.S. Department of Justice and talk about how we are working to vindicate the rights of blind people and of other people with disabilities.
The Federation's National Convention is a marquis event for the disability rights and civil rights community every year.
But this year in particular we have some especially noteworthy achievements to celebrate. Even as we recommit ourselves to the work that still lies ahead.
Two years ago the participants at this convention adopted a resolution urging the federal government to take action to ensure the accessibility of websites and mobile applications. That resolution explained why the need for federal action was so critical. It noted how essential the Internet has become in the lives of most Americans, citing, for example, that 85% of American adults visit the Internet at least once a day, and that the digital economy alone accounts for nearly 10% of the United States gross domestic product. The resolution explained that despite the importance of digital spaces, they too often are inaccessible to blind people and others with disabilities.
It cited studies which have found that accessibility barriers existed in more than 97% of websites, and it noted that these barriers prevented blind people and others with disabilities from fully participating in the mainstream of American economic cultural and political life.
Four months earlier in March '22, 181 disability rights and civil rights organizations, and that included you all, the NFB, the American Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind and the National Disability Rights Network, sent the Justice Department a letter urging us to finalize a rule on web and mobile application accessibility.
We also heard loud and clear the disability community's call for a web rule at our quarterly meetings with national disability groups.
At the Civil Rights Division, we listened. We too had been grappling with the need for a technical standard about that ADA's web accessibility requirements as we sought to enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act's protections in the digital world.
We also knew this problem was growing increasingly acute as the Internet became a more pervasive and essential part of all of our lives.
So in fall of 2022, we announced that we would be issuing proposed regulations under Title II of the ADA, setting forth specific requirements for web and mobile app accessibility for state and local government entities. And then in the summer of 2023 we did exactly that.
I am not going to recount every administrative and bureaucratic hurdle that we encountered during the rulemaking process for you here today. If I did that, we probably would have to add another two or three days to this convention and start distributing espressos and energy drinks.
What I will say, though, is that no part of the federal rulemaking process is easy. And web accessibility is a particularly difficult field to promulgate regulations in because the slow-moving rulemaking process is not a natural fit with the rapidly evolving digital landscape.
We overcame these challenges because we had a team of tireless individuals working day and night on this, especially in our disability rights section. They were committed to getting the job done. And doing it in the best way possible.
These folks devoted weeks, months, and in some cases years of their life to analyzing and thinking through every wrinkle of the proposed regulation. They also were deeply committed to hearing from people with disabilities and to ensuring that the rule was genuinely responsive to the concerns that prompted the call for action. We received public comments from a wide variety of stakeholders that included advocacy groups, state and local government entities, trade groups, and people with disabilities. Some of the public comments hammered home why the need for the rule was so critical.
One commenter noted that the COVID 19 pandemic had reinforced just how dependent we are as individuals. A nation and humanity on becoming and staying connected to and with each other and our government via the Internet. Our education, physical and mental health, sense of self, safety, security, life, liberties and pursuit of happiness will increasingly be determined by whether or not we have ready, ubiquitous access to all digital content.
(Applause)
That same comment noted that if people with disabilities are effectively barred from accessing websites and apps and exercising the personal agency that comes from doing so, their lives, opportunities and futures will be even more limited, segregate and marginalized.
Another commenter emphasized that, quote, as blind and visually impaired adults, we live just as independent, productive and self sufficient as anyone would. We use websites and mobile applications with screen readers on our computers and smart devices to complete any number of daily tasks, including banking, budgeting, shopping, scheduling rides, tracking health records, such as vitals, glucose, water intake, and medication management, researching, school assignments, career exploration, filling out paperwork and staying connected to loved ones. Our privacy, confidentiality and livelihoods depend on full unrestricted accessibility of any website and mobile app available to anyone else.
(Applause)
Our team read every single one of these comments and we adjusted the final rule to respond to those comments and to balance the concerns of the diverse group of stakeholders that weighed in. And at the same time they worked to navigate the substantive and logistical hurdles that are part of every federal rulemaking process. Some of our team members who had been part of the 2010 rulemaking process knew all too well that a final rule was not guaranteed until it was signed by attorney general Merrick Garland and codified in the Federal
Register. And it was just with great joy that we crossed that finish line earlier this year on Wednesday, April 24th, the Federal Register published the department's final rule under Title II of the ADA. This landmark and historic rule will help ensure that the web content and mobile apps have state and local governments are accessible to people with disabilities. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this rule. Although the ADA has always required public entities to ensure that people with disabilities can access owl of an entity's services and programs and activities, the initial ADA regulation didn't include any specific standards for web accessibility, because the web was at its infancy when the ADA was passed.
And as the resolution made clear and as we heard so often over the years from so many members of the public, the lack of a technical standard in this area created widespread barriers for people with disabilities to access state and local government websites and apps.
The impact of these barriers has only grown as state and local governments have moved more of their services, programs and activities online. It's now commonplace to use websites and apps to apply for government benefits, register to vote, access course materials, renew government issued ID, file taxes, pay fines, obtain up to date health and safety resources, request copies of vital records, access mass transit schedules and so much more.
When people with disabilities are excluded from state and local government websites and mobile apps, it can be hard or impossible for them to access these and other critical services. We believe -- I will say we know this rule will help correct that injustice. And we'll advance...
(Applause)
... and advance the ADA's promise of full and equal participation in society for people with disabilities. It's a huge step forward towards an America where people with disabilities are fully included in all spaces, regardless of whether the space is physical or digital.
(Applause)
Now, I talked at length about that web rule, it's an historic milestone, but the web rule is just part of the work that we do every day in this space. Web accessibility has been a priority for many years even before enactment of the rule, the Justice Department had long maintained that the ADA applied to web content, and we repeatedly used our enforcement authority to ensure that people with disabilities had access to goods, services, programs, and activities that governments were making available online.
In recent years in particular, we have pursued enforcement actions in other critical areas, including voting, education, and healthcare.
In the area of voting, just last month, we secured settlement agreements with several counties in Texas whose election websites were inaccessible for people with vision or manual disabilities.
(Applause)
A timely issue.
These election websites provide essential information about how to vote about registering to vote, identification requirements, early voting, and specific information for people with disabilities. Under the settlement agreements, these counties agreed to make all future and existing online content accessible. And they will adopt new policies and training for personnel, hire independent auditors to evaluate the accessibility of their sites and solicit feedback from the community. Just one day after announcing those agreements in Texas, we issued findings that Alaska -- where is Alaska?
All right! That Alaska violated the ADA by maintaining an inaccessible elections website. As in Texas we found that voters with disabilities faced barriers to obtaining key information on Alaska's election websites, including voter registration forms, candidate statements, voting dates and polling site locations. This work is motivated by a simple principle. People with disabilities must be able to exercise their voice in our democracy.
(Applause)
Now, public education in the U.S. is another area where the importance of the Internet is ever increasing. Many public schools at all levels now offer programs and instruction online. Many public colleges and universities resolution lie heavily on websites and other online technologies in the application process for prospective students, for housing eligibility and on campus living assignments, for course registration and course content, and for a wide variety of administrative and logistical functions in which students must participate. And sadly, in many public and elementary and secondary school settings, teachers and administrators communicate via the web with parents and students about grades, assignments, schedule changes and safety alerts, sadly on platforms that are not accessible.
When these online tools and content are inaccessible, it denies students and parents with disabilities an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from educational programming. We are working to address this injustice.
(Applause)
In 2022 we secured a consent decree with the University of California at Berkeley to resolve allegations that the school violated Title II by failing to make online content accessible to people with hearing, vision and manual disabilities. The decree requires UC Berkeley to make the vast majority of its existing online content accessible, including a large collection of online courses, videos and podcasts, and to make all of its future online content accessible going forward.
The school is also revising its policies, training relevant personnel, conducting accessibility testing, hiring an independent auditor and more.
We followed that decree and amplified its impact by joining with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to issue a dear colleague letter in May of last year, reminding every college and university and postsecondary institution in our country about their obligations under the ADA and under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. And we do this work because blind people and people with disabilities deserve full and equal access to educational opportunity in our country, period.
(Applause)
Now, healthcare is another area of American life that is increasingly moving online. It's also an area where accessibility barriers can be a matter of life and death. In 2021 and 2022 in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic we reached settlement agreements with CVS, right aide, Kroger and Hy Vee and Meijer to eliminate barriers that prevented people with disabilities from effective live using those company websites to book COVID 19 vaccine appointments. CVS, which is country's largest retail family with 10,000 locations had a COVID 19 registration portal that people using screen readers could not access. At the beginning of the scheduling process, the portal did not read aloud the types of vaccine appointments offered and on the page where users were meant to pick an appointment time, screen reader users were told that all available times were checked even when they made no selection.
At a time when the pandemic was raging across our country and many people with disabilities had underlying conditions placing them at higher risk of COVID infection or complication, it's not hard to understand how barriers to vaccination like these were tremendously harmful. Together with the Department of Health and human services, in 2022 we issued guidance on non discrimination in telehealth to explain the protections that laws like the ADA, Section 504 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with the Affordable Care Act, we explained how those laws apply to people who are blind or low vision. The guidance is designed to help healthcare providers understand their obligations and empower patients by insuring they know their rights under federal law.
In America we deserve a healthcare system that treats people who are blind and have low vision with the full dignity and respect they deserve.
(Applause)
Most recently in January of this year we secured a settlement which serviced Oklahoma to resolve findings that the state agency's mobile ID application was inaccessible. If app required users to take pictures of the front and back of their IDs and take pictures of themselves by connecting dots that appear on the screen using only head and eye movements.
Both tasks were difficult or impossible for blind people to complete because they receive no verbal feedback. In 2022 we reached an agreement with the Champaign Urbana mass transit district in Illinois to resolve allegation that is the district's website and mobile apps which allow users to plan trips and check arrival times and find fair information were inaccessible to users with vision and manual impairments, just a snapshot of some to have broader work that we're doing to ensure that state and local governments make sure their websites and app are accessible.
(Applause)
So lastly, I have focused thus far on our enforcement work related to web accessibility, but I would be remiss if I didn't note that this is just a part of the Justice Department's broader work to vindicate the rights of people who are blind or have low vision. One area where we are deeply engaged, which coincidentally was also the subject of a resolution at the 2022 NFB National Convention, is in protecting the rights of blind people in our nation's jails and prisons.
The NFB's 22 resolution on this topic rightly noted that blind people held in jails and prisons throughout the country faced disparate and discriminatory treatment that included being denied accommodations and effective communication and being denied equal access to training and work programs.
Last November we secured a settlement agreement with Arizona State Prison System to address findings that state prisons discriminated against people who are blind or low vision. We found that Arizona prisons which house more than 35,000 people failed to reasonably modify their policies or provide auxiliary aids and services such as Braille materials and displays, audio recordings and screen reader software to ensure that people who are blind or low vision could communicate effectively while incarcerated.
(Applause)
Thank you. And where is Arizona?
(Cheering)
All right! The state also failed to provide accessible processes to request accommodations or file disability related complaints. They also overrelied on other incarcerated people to help those who are blind or low vision without properly training or supervising those providing help. Under our agreement, Arizona is adopting system wide reforms to address our findings and to correct and prevent future discrimination.
(Applause)
We are also engaged in robust efforts to address physical accessibility issues affecting people who are blind or low vision. Most notably in 2022 -- in 2021, we intervened in a lawsuit in Chicago, the third largest city in the United States. Where is Illinois? All right! Alleging that the city failed to provide people who are blind, low vision or deafblind with equal access to pedestrian signal information at intersections.
While Chicago currently provides sighted pedestrians visual crossing signals at nearly 2800 intersections, we found that fewer than 1% of those were equipped with accessible pedestrian signals for people who are blind or low vision. We can't tolerate this in our country today.
In March of last year, the federal court granted summary judgment in our favor and held Chicago liable for violating the ADA and Section 504.
Now, we know that our work on all these fronts is far from done, and we appreciate the importance of addressing the intersectionality of disability and race, gender, sexuality and classes people who experience overlapping forms of discrimination face unique challenges and we bring that lens to the work every day. And with regard to web access we know that despite enactment of our Title II web rule there's still much to do to educate the public entities and other members of public about the rules and requirements and vigorously enforce the law so that increased clarity it provides results in increased compliance.
We also know that Title II is just one piece of the web accessibility puzzle and that many folks in this room an advocating for regulations under Title III that will apply to the...
(Cheers and applause)
... to the digital spaces of public accommodations. We appreciate the eagerness and we appreciate your continued advocacy. But the publication of the web rule marked the culmination of years of hard work both inside and outside of government, but I would be remiss if I close today without thanking you. I want to thank the people in this room who pushed for and contributed to the development of this rule. Your advocacy, your voice has shown the power and agency of the disability community, and I'm confident that we will continue to work with you to open new chapters in the road ahead.
Today I close by asking that we just take a moment to pause and to reflect on the great work that we have done together, and to celebrate the huge steps that we have taken in recent years on our march towards a more just and accessible world. The U.S. Department of Justice looks forward to continuing that march alongside all of you, and we will keep marching with you until we achieve an America where every person who is blind or low vision can live free from discrimination with equal access to opportunity, and the full capacity to achieve their dreams. Thank you!
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Thank you so much. Keep up the good work. Aren't you glad she's on our side? Thank you very much, Ms. Clarke, for being here. We appreciate you acknowledging that we're not satisfied too much yet, but we do want to celebrate the great progress that you have helped us make. So let's give another round of applause for that. We look forward to keeping working with you and the great team of disability rights advocates that are part of the Department of Justice. So thank you for that. Good friends of the National Federation of the Blind. I guess they don't deserve a door prize. Okay, I'll keep moving, keep moving...
BENNETT: We have them right here!
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Okay, you woke up there, Bennett.
BENNETT: The next three people on the... The next three virtual participants get 40 dollars if they send a message to [email protected] with the code word "independence." And the three are Robert Hart of Virginia, Carol Braithwaite from Alabama and Michele Denforth of Nebraska. Kenia.
KENIA: Our in-person participant will be receiving a 507 dollars gift card as well as one -- a 50 dollar gift card as well as one of the Hawaii chocolate and Skittles snack bags, and that is Dopeda Rodriguez from Littleton, Colorado. Got her, thank you.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Many more door prizes I'm sure. This next item is to build on some of the earlier conversations. It's leveraging collective wisdom. And it is an update on the work that is being built to be blind centered, a blind centered platform to integrate human and artificial intelligence.
This company first attended this convention in 2015, has been here ever since. It's sponsored a lot of great activities, some concerts, special promotions, and it has extended to the members of the National Federation of the Blind. Its deepest discount for its services because it recognizes how important the partnership of the National Federation of the Blind is. Our presenter is the chief executive. He has been with Aira maybe not quite from the beginning, but very close. He has a long, strong history of working in the technology sector and with start-ups. I think that I first met him in his different capacity with Aira, but I think I first met him at the consumer electronics show a number of years ago.
He was in the background helping this company get started, but now he is at the helm, making sure that it continues to be a blind centered company. He is a great friend of the National Federation of the Blind, please welcome Troy Otillio!
(Music playing)
¶ but I ain't got wings ¶
¶ Coming down ¶
¶ Is the hardest thing ¶
TROY: I wanted to see how quiet you guys can get. It's what the fifth day I've been here? I'm sure some of you might have been here before. But good afternoon, National Federation of the Blind, on this final and longest day of the year, as Mark started the day, I am Troy Otillio, the humble and proud leader and CEO of Aira, the Premiere provider of professional visual interpreting. Mark, thanks for the intro, too. You read part of what I was going to say.
So this is going to be great I'm grateful to have 15 minutes to share my perspective on visual interpreting on Aira and how critical the National Federation of the Blind has been and will be in the successful creation of professional remote visual interpreting, a relatively new category of accessibility technology. I first want to give thanks to President Mark Riccobono for ongoing support. He already talked about it, but he is a great mentor, I think we all know that. And he's been...
(Applause)
Yes! He's been a great mentor to Aira, whether that was Suman or leaders that came and now myself as the leader of Aira. In 2020 as he mentioned, I transitioned from chief operating officer to CEO at a difficult time. Some of you know we weren't looking too good, we had lost our funding and frankly set to go out of business, and it was dismal. Yet in 2020 we were determined to find a path.
And I know this is going to sound corny, but it's true. When you work with folks, you can't help but notice the perseverance and creativity that takes place to live your lives and to overcome obstacles they put in your way, and we had a big obstacle. I think it becomes the heart and soul of Aira to overcome obstacles, and both to innovate, but sometimes just grit and hard work. But it also relies on people. And Mark was there from the beginning. And when we had to restart.
And I am also privileged to meet with Mark once a month, and I added up, Mark, it's been 52 months since Aira was restarted and Mark has been there providing unending wisdom. We don't always agree, but I always listen. He's laughing. It's true. But it is true that those conversations that I gain understanding and the company gains understanding. The point I want to make, and what you said Mark, I want to thank you, this group, the National Federation of the Blind, for being the core support and the soul of Aira. So that's point one. Thank you.
(Applause)
The second point is professional visual interpreting and Aira is a growing concern. I still get questions, hey, tri, how is Aira doing? We're doing great. And we're building a service and a company that our goal is one you can trust. So hanging around and now growing, that's part of trust. So this July, in fact, we will all celebrate the 34th anniversary of the ADA. I think that's pretty great. Mark already gave away a bit of a stat, but before we meet again next year, we're going to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Aira will be ten years old, I think that's freakin' fantastic.
So I'm proud and confident to say Aira will be here for many decades. It's also remarkable we're here in Florida at the Rosen. We're not as the shingle where we launched, but here in Florida. Is that luck? I don't know what the universe is saying, but I have gained inspiration and knowledge from you all and I want you to know that Aira is a growing concern. I'll share some to have details you may have picked up on at our talk or maybe came by the booth. And we'll talk a little bit about AI of course. Everyone wants to know about AI.
First I want to talk about the fact that we are a growing concern, and that gives us an ability to invest. And I want to talk about where we have invested. These are some things you may know; you may not know. And as we're successful, we are reinvesting, we're not putting money in the bank. We are reinvesting to build bigger and better experiences. And we fundamentally believe -- and if you came by our booth, if you have read our cards, if you have seen our brochures, we lead with access is a human right. We believe...
(Applause)
And that goes beyond -- you know, I think a lot of people say it, but we do believe it. And because of the sessions we have, what we see, we see all the obstacles. If you think about Aira as sometimes an accessibility tool of last resort. And so we think the planet can do better. We think our job is not to solve all problems. When maybe there is no other solution. And in 2020 we evaluated our strategy and decided that we are not going to build Aira on the financial backs of individuals. We believe access is a human right, and there has to be a better way. And that's when we switch B2B company. Yes, we still have subscriptions, we appreciate that business, but our goal is to lower the cost of this service and make it more affordable and make it ultimately as free as possible.
So our success is being funded not by subscribers, not by investors, but instead by access partners who seek to improve outcomes for the blind community, which is pretty awesome. I get to meet some of the companies and leaders there that see that vision and share that view.
So let's examine how those investments are being made. First off it's the quality of the team. Last year we were fortunate to hire Everette Bacon as the first member of our executive team.
(Applause)
And Everette has been with Aira in the sense and first to sign up and helped gain state and public access in Utah. I don't have enough time to share the impact Everette has made in the last year, but results speak for themselves. But I want to take this moment to recognize Everette as being a true strategic executive at Aira and thank you all for letting him participate.
(Applause)
So while we have several blind members of our staff in 2023 I'm relieved actually and excited that we've added four more folks who are blind low vision across our staff across product research, marketing and customer care. Aira's growing part of the investments is to bring the community even closer.
And we created a new role called a visual interpreter. You might hear that more. I know we all say agent, but visual interpreter is a new role, it has a job description, and it is an employee position. So I think that speaks to the quality that you demand and speaks to the quality that partners demand and we are excited to be able to invest in visual interpreters as employees. As we move forward we're going to be hiring more. So please stay tuned for job postings. And I'm sure Everette will help make you all aware.
But we're looking for the very best. It's not just the best. It's a size. In 2020 we only had a few engineers. I don't know if you came by a booth, but you would have met five, four are brand new, and we now boast a team of almost 20 developers, designers and researchers, and with that we can build more. Social media marketing, if you haven't checked out pages lately, you will notice that Mary Hulking had joined us, and she has made a huge difference. A lot of praise around Everette, but I want to thank him for finding her, she's an outstanding talent and bringing new awareness not just to the community but to our partners, and I think worldwide to what it means to be blind and what some of the fun and also challenging situations are with or without. If you haven't checked out our social media, there is some great stuff there.
So the ore thing I was going to share, Troy, how is partner development going, what happened? Overall we have 250 access partners. Not all are like a Starbucks. A lot are employers, a lot of them in a sense hidden, but since the last year I have been here, we have added 40 new partners. We added states. State of Colorado is awesome, because not only...
(Cheering)
Hey, there ya go! Not only did we add a law but to go further and add visual interpreting to support the fa facilities, parks and employees. They are an example of true leadership tore visual interpreting and a state to be contended with. And since last summer we added visual interpreting as a job accommodation or VR tool for over 500 individuals across 50 organizations. That's pretty amazing. So we have been investing in our technology. You have seen announcements around adding more glasses back. You have seen investments in AI. You have seen investments in providing Aira just not on the phone, but everywhere including the desktop and in the future we look forward to investing more even in K 12 or other areas where visual interpreting can make a difference.
And we see a future, I see a future where it's not hundreds of access partners, it's thousands. And this is only going to happen with your support and your advocacy, whether it's just making a call or whether it's posting online or just telling a friend, the word spreads and so does our ability to bring visual interpreting in more places. So I thank you in advance for that.
(Applause)
So what about the future, what about AI? What does it mean for Aira? We're a technology company. I'm a technologist at the core. I can't help it, it's just how I'm built. We're a data driven company; we look at data. We also listen. And we're an innovative product company. And Aira as you know stands for artificial intelligence remote assistance. We attempted to bring AI into play, but it didn't meet the quality goals. It wasn't effective until, you know, larger companies took this on.
And there is no doubt that AI plays a role. It's great to see all accessibility vendors, Aira, JAWS, Be My Eyes, using the foundational AI from Open AI and other large vendors, AI that's built on public data. It is truly remarkable and getting better. We are proud that our free AI includes some extra features, including something called verification.
So if you don't know, we offer free image chat and we are improving it all the time, and recently added the ability for you to control the very best. Some of you want a lot of information, some want a little. We'll add more controls. But what we're really proud about is free verification.
So how do you know when you get a response back from AI that it's accurate? How do you know if it's missing something? With Aira you can ask an agent, a trained professional interpreter to give their thoughts and professional opinion on that response, and we learned that one third of all image description is coming out of Open AI over the course of the last -- well, since we launched maybe at CSUN, have some issue that the professional visual interpreter feels the need to tell you about. Some of them are material. But a solid 30% are not fully accurate or contain all the information.
So we're there to make a trusted experience and we're there to integrate humans in that experience, including our visual interpreters. So I think that free verification is pretty amazing.
(Applause)
Yes, thank you. And AI, including verification, will remain free, and we are committed to improve the usability and effectiveness. So we think that is great. But we see a future beyond that. And so I wanted to introduce what we're calling Build AI.
(Cheering)
Some people know about it! We seek to build the first AI exclusively built with and for the blind community. We seek to build an AI that is integrated and combined with human visual interpreters. We believe you should have a choice and that the value of human connection cannot be replaced with pure automation or AI. And while we're approaching almost 10 million sessions -- can you believe that? 10 years, 10 sessions. Pretty exciting. None of those are going to be used. We believe that it is your right and your choice to contribute the data and experience we share together.
So as of July 4th, here at NFB, here at the National Federation of the Blind convention, we announced that Build AI is fully operational
(Applause)
There are sessions being delivered right now, I looked, I have a dashboard, I'm a data nerd, and the there are people right now helping build that AI. And we believe that building AI should come with benefits. If you opt into the program, I'm not going into details, but it is opt in program, if you opt in you will have access to a 10 minute free call every 30 minutes. What do you think about that? To do anything and everything but together we're building this AI.
And we seek to build this experience with you and with the input from people like National Federation of the Blind. We're building with a third party who shares our vision and we did select them in part because they are someone who is willing to listen and go further than just build a traditional AI, they truly want to open a new use case just for this community. That's pretty exciting. They want to avoid bias and reassess assumption us. We don't know how long the effort is going to take, but whether you opt in or not, this experience will be delivered to all.
So we don't look to exclude those for whatever reason don't want to build AI, don't want to share sessions, totally fine, but we do seek to deliver it to all. So as a technologist and problem solver, I can't tell you how excited I am and how excited my teams are. And I invite you to join the many hundreds that have already signed up, download the app, sign up for free, opt in for free, opt out if you want, but we look to build something and who knows what will show up next year.
Okay, a few thoughts as I close. I think the message I wanted to give you is first off, it's true, this community, this room, the people I have talked to already, the people my team has talked to throughout the year is an inspiration and part of the Aira core. I can't emphasize that enough.
And it just truly is. I can tell you I was at the airport -- I was not at the airport. I was at the hotel yesterday, and my team was about to leave. Are they sitting at the bar having drinks? They could have. No, they're working on Aira. They got so many ideas, they were testing Meta glasses, they were talking. They get what I get from this conference, I get the passion and excitement, not just about what we've done but truly about what we're going to do.
So National Federation of the Blind is an inspiration and core of Aira. Everette our VIP of blindness initiatives is leading working with us. I expect more from Everette and those who follow. We are adding more experiences, new devices, consider building AI with us, try our new wearables, Meta airx or other things, leverage our growing image AI. Tell us what to deliver.
In closing Aira believers we earn your trust every day with every call, with every interaction, we listen, engage, innovative. And we believe we can build a new blind first AI experience to unlock efficiency independence where alternatives are not available. I thank you National Federation of the Blind and Mark here on my left nor trusting and helping Aira grow together. We are better than ever. Thank you all!
Where do you find the opt in experience? If you go to the More tab or Access AI tab, you will find a way to opt into either the glasses or the AI experience, or at the top of your app, if you haven't. So we'll find you if you don't find us. Thank you so much.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: All right. Fantastic.
BENNETT: Door prize?
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Sure.
BENNETT: We've got a virtual
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: I mean, the right side of the room wants it. The left is kind of...
BENNETT: We've got 50 dollars each nor the next three, and the last three that have a list for now of the virtual folks, and if they go to and send an email to [email protected] with the code word of "white cane," they will get 50 bucks. And here they are. Donna Ring from Maryland. Barbara Pierce from Ohio.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: All right, Barbara!
BENNETT: And Shirley Colbert from Louisiana.
KENIA: Our in-person participant will be receiving 50 dollars -- no, 60 dollars in cash and a 25 Visa gift card. And that is going to Fazil Kahn from Washington, D.C. Not here? Okay. What about Laura Roberts from Wichita, Kansas? What about Shaylander Yatoff from Bangler, California?
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: They're asking what the Kansas name was.
KENIA: That was Laura Roberts.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Not here.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: There ya go. Thanks for the verification. What was the next one you gave, just to be sure?
KENIA: Shaylander Yatoff. What about Angie Castro from Madison, Wisconsin? I hear the affiliate. I don't know if I hear Angie. Angie, if you're here, wave aggressively. I guess no one is here today.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: She's sitting on the floor.
KENIA: She's here, thank you.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: All right, we've got two more great presentations, and I'm sure there are more door prizes, but before we do that, I want to go to the chairman of convention arrangements. I have to say what an awesome convention. It's been smooth, food has been good.
(Applause)
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: This item is "From Blind Centered to Inclusion Leader." I don't need to tell you about Accessible Pharmacy, do I? Of course not. They were one of our Bolotin Award winners, right? And that means we already know the quality of their work. How many people use Accessible Pharmacy? Yeah!
So I would encourage all of you to learn about the work that they are doing. This gentleman is the co founder of Accessible Pharmacy, and in his role as CEO, he works to make sure that Accessible Pharmacy is occupying a space that really nobody else has decided to innovate on. This company has decided to lean into making sure that blind people just don't have access to good quality information around the management of their health, but they have full and equal access. And more than that, they are hungry to know what blind people want, because they're eager to figure it out.
We're looking forward to our continued work to build a relationship with accessible pharmacy. And so for the first time to give a presentation to this convention, but I hope not the last, please welcome Andy Burstein!
(Music playing)
¶... loving you ¶
¶ No pill is going to kill my ¶
¶ I got a bad case of loving you ¶
Oh, oh ¶
ANDY: I was really curious to hear what music would lead me into this. Interesting. Hello, everyone! I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you for that generous and warm introduction. Thank you, everyone, for hanging around to hear what I have to say. I greatly appreciate all of you. I also don't take for granted being in person with everyone post pandemic and being able to connect with people in person. As opposed to just on Zoom.
And thank you to everyone who stopped by the booth in the Exhibit Hall. It was nice to meet a lot of you who I only spoke with on the telephone or on Zoom. That being said, I want to give a special shout out to the team from Pennsylvania.
(Cheering)
It's nice to connect with everyone here in the beautiful sunny cool temperature Orlando. Most importantly want to thank those who are patients of ours. It means a lot to us. We're very grateful. Those who are aware and following us, because of the growth that we have had with our patients, we actually outgrew ourselves this spring.
So it's been a little stressful, but the good news is we're in a process of expansion. And because of the expansion, by the end of the year we'll be operating in all 50 states as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico. We'll be hiring more people from the blind and low vision community. We'll be connecting with more prescription assistance programs, expanding some educational outreach and more. So thank you, everyone.
I also want to compliment and congratulate this year's recipients of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards. I want to thank all of you who attended some of our educational programs online. And at last year's blind health expo, we had over 10,000 attendees. We're going to do it again this December, it's virtual, I hope you can join us. I'm going to real quickly speak about three things. These are things that we as a company are following. We talked about a lot of things today. I'm going to speak about how they intersect with healthcare. So the first is artificial intelligence.
We all hear about artificial intelligence, it's awesome, you read about it every day and hear about it every day, seems to be a new cool story about artificial intelligence. I have no idea how it works. But it's really like science fiction, and the healthcare segue here is in speaking with a friend of mine who is a cardiologist, he made a fascinating comment to me, which was... If you could hang around five more years, stay alive five more years, artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly that you actually will add another five years to your life on the back end.
So think about that, like how fascinating that is for all of us to be living in a time of this incredible technology.
I was going to do a demonstration of Be My Eyes, and then Bryan demonstrated the more advanced technology. I was playing with the current version; we were part of the beta testing team. It blows me away just to hear what they are doing is ten years beyond what currently exists. I encourage everyone who doesn't use Be My Eyes, use it. We help patients do home COVID tests and pregnancy tests, pill identification, label understanding, training individuals how to use small medical devices, measuring liquid measurements, everything you can imagine using Be My Eyes for when it comes to pharmacy, that's where we intersect ourselves.
What other examples of AI touch healthcare? I'll hand a few out to you. By the way, this technology is literally right around the corner.
Medical imaging, using AI for medical imaging, right now an x ray or CAT scan or mammogram, imagine being able to be more precise. Imagine for AI and a mammogram being able to diagnose a woman with breast cancer before it actually appears on the mammogram screen.
(Applause)
Imagine robot assisted surgery. This really exists already and it's only going to get better, so surgeries are more precise and faster. And people in developing countries, people in rural communities who don't have access to specialists, to have a general practitioner or healthcare provider do procedures but with the help of AI.
For drug discovery, right now one of the reasons drugs are so expensive, it costs a lot of money to take medication to market to discover the drug, to do the research and trials. Imagine expediting that tenfold and reducing the costs that bring medications to the market.
Imagine virtual health assistance in everyone's home. Imagine the concept is, Alexa, who lives in our homes, and merge her together with a nurse who lives in your house, who is able to help you navigate the world of healthcare and recovery, of diabetes, etc. Speaking of diabetes, we were the beneficiaries of a small grant from the CDC to have people from our team teach online pre diabetes education classes and soon to be diabetes education classes. It's been incredible. In fact, the first person who went through the training with us is here. President Lynn Hites from the state of Pennsylvania. If you have questions about the program, you can check with her.
What else? Second thing that is really important... this is a mouthful but it's taken about a year to get it to roll off my tongue. Medical Device Nonvisual Accessibility Act. I can't even begin to emphasize how much of game changer this is and how the NFB is going to be responsible for dragging it over the finish line. And there are so many populations who benefit from this, and the blind community is actually taking the lead to make this happen for the rest of society.
And what do I mean by that? One of the most obvious and prominent and game changing technologies that already exist or are the continuous glucose monitors, that help individuals manage their glucose. Well, you know, everyone here understands the obvious benefits to the blind community, but we have a patient who has no arms who may benefit from that service. We have patients with cognitive and intellectual disabilities who benefit from those services. We have patients who are terrified of pricking their fingers an. The blind community is leading the way to make that stuff accessible.
And simple technologies, things like thermometers, scales, you know, but there's bigger devices like home dialysis equipment that will be accessible. Home CPAP machines that will be accessible.
(Cheering)
That's right! One final thing, a personal experience that I had that really helped me understand something, which I had hand surgery about three weeks ago. Anyone that stopped by my booth you got an earful about my hand surgery, right? I was about to go under anesthesia and speak with the nurse practitioner and my surgeon and were reviewing all these documents with me. I said, is there a way you can email this to me because there's no way I'm going to remember any of this stuff after anesthesia, right?
And then I took a moment. I said to the surgeon -- to qualify, a surgeon from an Ivy League university, Ivy League University Hospital. Out of curiosity, do you know how people who are blind read emails? and she paused and said, I have no idea. So I got on my soapbox, really just me in the exam room on the bed, and explained to her quickly, like, hey, this is how an individual who is blind uses the Internet. If you want to email me those documents I'll give you feedback about whether they're accessible or not. She got so excited. Would you be willing when you come back for your follow up to speak a few minutes with my team so we can figure out how we could be more accessible to the blind community?
(Applause)
And what is amazing is that it occurred to me, during the course of the year, just by accident, I interact with about 50 healthcare providers, okay. So my veterinarian and the team there, my dentist. I hopefully don't have to go back to surgeon again, but my surgeons, general practitioner, my cardiologist. I touch about 50 healthcare providers. I'm going to make it my personal business to very casually give a little tip. And not shove them to accessibility but just guide them towards accessibility and encourage them to be more accessible.
And if we all take a step to do that, and we think, like, hey, next time we're all at our doctor or veterinarian or dentist, if we say, I've got a tip for you, and give them a little tip, there are 4,000 people here I believe collectively and we're all seeing 50 doctors, that's 200,000 times that we are introducing accessibility to the healthcare community.
So it's little steps like that that can make a change in how we all experience healthcare and healthcare can be more equitable and accessible. My final thought, it's often said that laughter is the best form of medicine. So I'm going to share a quick pharmacist joke.
A woman goes into the pharmacy, and she makes her way all the way to the back and gets to counter. She tells the pharmacist what she needs, and the pharmacist hands her a bottle of liquid medication. She takes the liquid bottle and all of a sudden she busts into a dance. She's stomping up and down and wiggling her hips and shaking her arms and bopping her head and the pharmacist is perplexed, so he leans over and says, is everything all right?
And the woman says, yes, the instructions said shake well before using. So that being said, hope everyone has a great time for the rest of the convention, and has fun tonight. Thank you again, everyone. I greatly appreciate you all. Be well.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Someone said, "shake it." We look forward to doing more work with you, Andy, and check out Accessible Pharmacy if you haven't already. It's a great service and they are very well committed to being blind centered. Okay, we need a door prize. We have one more great presentation, so don't go away.
KENIA: This door prize is 60 dollars in cash, and that goes to Rosa Walker of Des Moines, Iowa. What about Becky Tucker from Clarksville, Tennessee? Susan Farber from Houston, Texas.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Jump up and cheer, because we're going to go fast. Susan is here. Thank you.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Speaking of what we do, we tell our stories. And this final item for today, except for the door prizes and the banquet, is "Telling Our Stories: A Conversation About Blindness, Justice, and Shattering Misconceptions from the Federal Bench." I'm pretty excited about this. Two aspects of it, we've invited one of our own emerging leaders to guide this conversation that is going to happen here. This is our friend and colleague, a blind lawyer, Deepa Goraya, who has been known around this convention.
(Applause)
To guide this conversation and the conversation is with a gentleman who we have long wanted to get at this convention, but in the past, he's had work to do. Serving as a federal judge. Judge David Tatel did serve on the United States court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit from 1994 to 2023.
Prior to that he had an extensive career of doing civil rights work in private practice and in government. If you want to read extensively about his history, you should get his new book that is out. And I'm sure he will talk about that. Among his many positions, he was director of the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health, education and welfare during the Carter administration, and he was responsible, as we discussed yesterday, for helping to get the Section 504 regulations outs under the Rehabilitation Act.
We should say that in 1977 we did sue him in his capacity as director, and I'm told that he found it a little helpful, because our pressure, along with other people with disabilities, of course, we talked about that yesterday, helped to push the administration to know that it was important.
And I think if you -- I'm sure, I'm confident you will find in this conversation, and if you read his book, that he is a true champion for civil rights. He's honest about his experience, as someone that has come to understand his own blindness in a new way. And you will get to know that he is multifaceted, besides believing in the American justice system, he is dedicated to his family. By the way, he is here with his wife Edie. They have four children and eight grandchildren.
So we are glad to have them here at this convention. Many of the things you might learn about him, I appreciate that he is a baseball fan.
So with that in mind, I welcome Deepa to stage, and we thought we would give this introduction to Judge David Tatel.
(Music playing)
¶ I'm ready to play today ¶
¶ Put me in coach ¶
¶ I'm ready to play
today ¶
¶ Look at me ¶
¶ I can be center field ¶
SPEAKER: Thank you, President Riccobono. Good afternoon, Federation Family, I'm Deepa Goraya and here with Judge Tatel. Good afternoon Judge Tatel. I wanted to start out by asking you about your book. I'm in the middle of reading your book. It's called "Vision," and ice on Audible and also on Amazon, and there is a QR code that gives 20% off to NFB members. So I highly recommend it. And Judge Tatel, I wanted to ask starting out, is this your first NFB convention by the way?
DAVID: Yes. And I'm very pleased, I'm very -- Edie and I are just totally delighted to be here.
DEEPA: Great to have you here. I wanted to start out by asking you, you know, you were -- you started to lose your sight as you became an adult, and in your book you talk about how you're not known as the blind judge, but you regret not making that known. You talk about that inner struggle?
JUDGE TATEL: Deepa, you went right to the heart of the book awfully fast.
DEEPA: We only have 20 minutes.
JUDGE TATEL: I'm going to answer your question, but I want to thank President Riccobono for this wonderful opportunity to talk about my book. He already introduced my wife Edie, but I want to introduce her again. Much of this book is about Edie and me together. And our lives together.
And I also want to introduce my guide dog Vixen, who is right here next to me. So as I said, Deepa, Deepa went right to the heart of the book. I was diagnosed with RP when I was 15 years old in 1957. I had, like other people with RP, I had trouble seeing at night up until then, and no one knew what it was. This was a very long time ago. Was finally diagnosed at the National Institutes of Health. I was 15 years old, and I tell the story in the book that I didn't want to talk about it. I look back on that... that was 60 years ago. I can almost look back at 15-year-old David Tatel as if he's someone else.
And I ask myself, why did he do what he did? Well, he was 15, he wanted to be like his friends. Kids want to be like their friends. I developed all kinds of techniques for covering up my growing visual disability, techniques that expanded as my sight declined more.
I went to college and law school. I was functioning as a sighted person, although problems at night were growing, my peripheral vision was decline, and I was struggling to find other ways to deal with it without having to discuss it. Finally when I was 35 and director of the lawyers committee for civil rights under law, the same job by the way that Kristen Clarke had years later, I finally -- I couldn't really function anymore sighted and I learned to use Braille and using readers.
So that's the background. In 1994, when President Clinton nominated me to the D.C. Circuit, I was using a cane, but I was still -- it wasn't much of a subject of conversation for me. And I wanted to be on the D.C. Circuit. It was the thrill of a life, but I wanted to be known as a judge who happened to be blind, not as a blind judge. And I... And I would say that I've been in the court for 30 years until I retired, I had written over 700 opinions. And I like to think... I hope people think that I succeeded in those years improving, that I was a judge who just happened to be blind.
(Applause)
And if I could say one more thing, Deepa, because it brings me to the point I want to make. Which is that people ask, well, why did you write this book? It's not a book I really wanted to write. I was convinced bid people who I care about that my story could be inspirational. Not just to blind people, but to sighted people who hire blind people.
And I hope that the story the book tells will demonstrate to the world, to both blind and to be honest mostly sighted people, that blind people can function at the very highest levels, and that the David Tatel who served on the D.C. Circuit for 30 years was a judge who just happened to be blind. So that's my story.
DEEPA: Thanks for that. Going along with that, do you think your career would have been any different had you disclosed your blindness sooner and have you experienced any discrimination in the workplace because of your blindness?
JUDGE TATEL: Sorry to laugh, but Deepa probably read this book more carefully than anybody so far. Deepa, I actually don't know the answer to that question. And I think -- I would really be interested to know what people think who read the book. When I was struggling with increasing deterioration of eyesight, it was a very different world than it is today. Not as different as it should be, but still very different from it is today.
I worried -- this was in the 1970s, a long time ago, when I was beginning to practice law, through law school and beginning to practice law.
I worried that my employment opportunities would be limited if people knew I had ha visual disability. It was that clear to me at that time.
And I actually don't think, as look back on the experience that 30-year-old David Tatel was unjustified in thinking that.
(Applause)
So Deepa, I don't know... I do know this... I do know that as hard as I worked to downplay my growing -- my declining vision, people who knew me and who worked with me, they knew. I mean, it was... as I wrote this book, I interviewed some old friends, quite a few of them, and I asked them, you know the old famous question, what did they know and when did they know it? And they were aware of my declining sight long before I was prepared to talk about it.
So I guess the bottom line is I still don't know the answer to the question. I do know this... I didn't have... I talk in the book about how important role models were to me. Lawyers who were the kind of lawyer -- kind of civil rights lawyer I wanted to be when I grew up. They were very important to me, because they gave me, you know, a symbol of what I wanted, but they were also helpful in my career.
What I did not have when I was 30 years old was any role models who were blind. None.
There were no blind appeals court judges that I knew of. There were no partners in law firms who were blind that I knew of. So I didn't have that kind of a role model. And one of the reasons -- I think why I wrote this book is that I hope that people who are at the same stage of vision loss today that I was 50 years ago will see my story and my career as a role model for them.
DEEPA: Thanks for that. A lot of us do experience this inner struggle where we try to figure out how much to expose blindness and when or in the workplace and not in the workplace, and those of us who have low vision or not in that stage where we're ready to make our blindness visible, the book really highlights that struggle, and I recommend people read that to understand that and know you're not alone in your struggle.
In the book you talk about being a parent of 4 children and how your parent kind of took your blindness in stride and did stuff, but that came naturally to them, like describing things, going on hikes with you. Was wondering if you could talk about your experiences as a blind parent and if you -- how that was, if you encountered any struggles with that.
JUDGE TATEL: By the time our first child Rebecca was four or five years old. And aware of things around her, I at that point -- I wasn't using a cane, but, you know, I was... I was learning to use recorded books and I was beginning to function more visibly as someone with a visual disability. I mention that only because all four of our children, their only experience was with a dad who had limited vision.
And so we, at the beginning of -- we have four fabulous kids. They're all parents. One is even a grandparent now. They're four fabulous human beings and great parents. And we asked them at the beginning of the process, we sent them a questionnaire that Edie and I wrote, a dozen questions on I, and they all responded with written memos, which are just total treasures to us. And we learned a lot from them.
And I quote in the book in different places their observations about growing up with a blind dad. And there's lots of them throughout. I'll just mention two of them.
One of them said... I didn't know she went out with some friends; parents drove somewhere, and she came back, and she said to her siblings, I didn't know that dads drove. I didn't know that dads drove cars. Because in our house, Edie drove the car. And Emily, our youngest tells a story that still moves both of us so much she said one of her friends asked her, what's it like to have a blind dad? And she said, you know, it's just like having any other dad. He loves us just the same way any other dad does. She said, I felt loved, and it didn't make any difference to me.
From my side of it, being a parent, I was more dependent -- well, two things I want to say. One is at the same time they were -- we were having children, and it was a time when parents read to their children, I was learning to use talking books at the Library of Congress, and I learned to listen to books with the children. And that was magic. All four of the children grew up reading bedtime stories with me with talking books. I loved it and they loved it.
And I don't think I lost anything as a dad with limited sight because of the wonderful books. And I did it with my grandchildren too it's gone one after the other. And the other thing I will say is, you know, I was... I was more dependent on my children than sighted dads are, both for just moving around. It was natural in our family for the children to take an arm when I needed it. And I never even had to ask
By the way, which has gone on to the next generation. Even the littlest grandchildren still do that in the Tatel family. And the book is full of stories about that, probably the most dramatic example of a dad depending on his children is my years of skiing in Colorado with the bold program and probably a lot of you know about bold in Colorado.
But the end, last four or five years of skiing, two of my children became my guides, and talk about a dramatic example of parents relying on their children, me skiing down the Big Burn led by my teenage daughter and son was about as dramatic example you can find of anything.
(Applause)
DEEPA: I'm learning how to ski myself.
JUDGE TATEL: We'll talk about that afterwards.
DEEPA: I want to get to an important question before we run out of time. A big one. What problems do you see stemming from the chevron decision that came out a few days ago, the Supreme Court for disability rights and how can the blindness movement come together to combat these problems?
JUDGE TATEL: Do we need to say what chevron is? Do you want to do it?
DEEPA: No, you go ahead.
JUDGE TATEL: Deepa asked an important question for our country as a whole, but also for the disability community. Chevron is the doctrine, named four Supreme Court opinion, it's not a gas station. It's a major Supreme Court opinion, Chevron versus the Natural Resources Defense Council from I think sometime in the 1980s, a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court.
Which said that when a court like mine reviews a regulation issued by an agency -- let's make this specific to the issue that everyone is concerned about. Let's take, for example, the regulations issued by federal agencies under Section 504 and the ADA, all right? I mean, those are the regulations we all care about in this room. What Chevron says is that when the agency issues those regulations, or when it announces interpretations of them, that the courts -- and they're challenged in court, which they always are, right?
The Court has though ask two questions. The first is does the statute that is 504, the ADA, whatever the statute is, does the statute clearly make the regulation invalid? In other words, has the agency exceeded its authority under the statute? And if so, the Court has no choice but to vacate it. But those are very rare cases.
The second part of Chevron is, if the statute is unclear, if it's ambiguous because it uses general language, then the courts have to defer to the agency's reasonable interpretation of the statute, okay? So let's take, for example, the disability laws, right? They're very general statutes. They speak in very general terms. Thou shalt not discriminate on the basis of a disability. That's what it says. And the agencies, the agencies, in my case EEOC or Justice Department, interpret that general language by issuing specific regulations saying exactly what that means in practice. What exactly the schools and universities have to do to accommodate blind students?
What do they have to do in terms of Braille? What do they have to do in terms of readers? What exactly is their obligation? They flush out the statutory language. When those get challenged in court, since obviously statute language says you can't discriminate based on disability, does it clearly prohibit the agency from saying, you know, you have to -- you know, schools have to provide readers for the blind, the question is, is that reasonable interpretation of the statute? And one of the reasons why I think the agencies force these laws have been so successful, not as successful as they should be yet, but still successful, is because the courts have deferred to the agencies under those. That's what happened for the past 40 years. These agencies, these regulations that flesh out the general language to have disability laws have survived legal challenge because the courts have deferred to them.
The Supreme Court last week overruled Chevron. That's no longer the law. So now the question will be, judges like me who have these cases, will have nothing to go on but the general language of the statute. We'll have the agency's interpretation, but we'll have no obligation to, quote, defer to it. We can read it as we would a brief, but it has no binding effect on us. My worry is there will be a huge amount of litigation in the next few years challenging agency regulations, not just from the disability field but throughout, and the court will strike down lots of these, because the language is so general.
The courts will say -- I'm talking about conservative courts. Their view will be that unless Congress specifically authorizes something, the agencies can't do it. And this is very dangerous right now, because it's bad enough without Chevron, but our federal courts are becoming increasingly hostile to federal agencies and the regulations they issue, and I think it's going to be a huge battle for civil rights advocates, whether under Title 6 or the disability laws to defend the progress made with all of these regulations.
I think this is a serious turning point. It's going to be a major challenge for the lawyers working in the disability community to what has been accomplished and keep agencies aggressively enforcing disability laws in the future. It's a serious problem.
DEEPA: Do you have any ideas on what we can do as organized blind movement or other disability groups, you know, combating these?
JUDGE TATEL: These cases are going to require -- this isn't the first time in my career we face a challenge from hostile courts. We faced it before. This is actually the worst, I think. It's going to require superb lawyering. I'm looking at this from the point of view of a lawyer. There are so many things that groups like NFB can do in terms of organizing and bringing attention to the problem and raising money.
But the fact is the battle is going to be fought out in the courts and it's going to require superb lawyering. So simple answer is, Deepa, people should go to law school. People should learn to litigate.
DEEPA: More lawyers, yep.
JUDGE TATEL: And NFB and other groups should develop the toughest most aggressive legal groups you can. Because they're going to be badly need ed. Can I say one more thing? One more thing I will adhere. And this may sound naive, but, you know, our government has three branches of government, not just one It's not just the courts. It's Congress and the president. And although it seems like an uphill battle, both of the agencies, both of those branches can be a check on the courts.
And so one thing we should be focusing on is Congress. We should be getting Congress to write legislation that is specific enough to support what the agency is doing. So it's very clear that when the agencies issue strong disability regulations, it's supported by the law.
Same thing when it comes to presidential elections. You should be voting for presidents that understand what their obligations are to faithfully enforce the law. Then there is the entire 50 state government system and state and local governments, which aren't affected by these regressive Supreme Court cases. A huge amount could be done at the state and local level in terms -- right
So that takes organizing state by state. It takes raising money. It takes electing good members of state legislatures. It takes supporting legislative activities of those bodies, it takes working with the governor's office, mayor's office, city council. Huge amount can be done to protect civil rights at the state and local level in this country.
(Applause)
DEEPA: More advocates, legal and otherwise. I don't know how much time we have left, but I have a couple more questions.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: No time left, but we do need -- there are many questions we could ask, so I hope this won't be the last opportunity, but I do think Judge Tatel, we should ask you to give a minute or a minute and a half to what role the National Federation of the Blind has played in your success, because I know you have had many intersections with the Federation over the years, and particularly one service can be but there might be others.
JUDGE TATEL: I think the point you made right at beginning -- when I became OCR director, it was beginning of Carter administration, which if you remember your history followed the Nixon Ford administration, and the Nixon Ford administration had done everything it could to close town the civil rights programs and had done nothing to -- they hadn't -- they even refused to issue the Section 504 regulations, and the civil rights groups, including the National Federation of the Blind sued HEW OCR.
So when I became the director, I became the defendant in the lawsuit brought by the NFB to force HEW OCR to issue the regulations and enforce the law. The reason that is so important is that it's a great example of how advocates on the outside could work with advocates on the inside to do things that neither could do alone. I could not have gotten the 504 regulations issued or the policy interpretations we issued under them. I couldn't have got that done without the pressure of NFB and the other civil rights groups.
Because when I would make the case in the Carter administration for issuing these regulations and get pushback, my answer would say, well, you can push back all you want, but there is a federal judge supervising what we're doing, and he's going to rule against us if we don't issue the regulations.
So it was a great example, as I said, of how powerful advocacy groups like NFB can shape how government agencies work, particularly if your allies take jobs in the administration. It's a great combination.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Thank you for being an ally, Judge Tatel. We do need to say, though, that you are one of the most avid users of NFB NEWSLINE. I know that is a daily tool that you have used, and ice talked about in the book, and Judge Tatel probably many questions we would love to ask. We're pleased that you and Edie will be at the banquet tonight.
But I want to point out an important moment here, speaking of NEWSLINE, in his book, Judge Tatel recognizes a number of people. One of them is one of our staff who works on NFB NEWSLINE. This will be his final convention as a staff member as he is retiring later this week. So we should give a round of applause to Bob Watson.
(Applause).
So Judge Tatel, there are many other topics that would be great to talk with you about. We're going to give you the last word, okay? We will give you the last word. Let me say one more thing. Which is before you leave the stage, I just want to say, you know, the National Federation of the Blind has taken on many things, and you talk about some of those intersections in your book. One of the things that we did you discuss in your book accessible currency, and we undertook in 2009 a little bit before that, to get the first ever U.S. coin to have real readable Braille on it, the bicentennial silver dollar. So before you leave the stage we are going to give you a Louis Braille bicentennial silver dollar. You get the last word, Judge Tatel.
JUDGE TATEL: In addition to thanking you for this wonderful opportunity, I want to say... and Edie will vouch for this, I probably spend three hours a day search day a week with NEWSLINE. From the very beginning. And I don't know how many times over the past many years I have sent emails to Bob Watson and Scott White. For all I know all those emails to Bob, maybe one of the reasons he's retiring, just to get away from them.
But NEWSLINE is the best example I can think of, just phenomenal program that allows blind people to function totally independently. I love it.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Thank you for being here. I encourage you to read the book. and we look forward to having you at the banquet and look forward to the continued relationship to get your wisdom as we do our advocacy with the courts, and as we get out to vote to make sure we are represented in all the halls of power. Door prizes let's go. If your name comes up, you better jump up and cheer, because we're going to move to the next.
KENIA: You don't want to miss the last one. This is second to last one. We are giving away 135 dollars that goes to Zabriel De Cintron from San Hermann, Puerto Rico. What about Virginia Elliot from Bakersfield, California? What about Dan Nixon from Littleton, Colorado?
We got him, thank you.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: That's just one. You got one more? You got one more, right? So the information table says that they have banquet tickets for Sharon Cherry and Malik Studevan. If you think that you might have banquet tickets miss, there are banquet tickets at the information desk right outside this room. You got one more?
KENIA: The last one is the one we'll give at the very end.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: At what?
KENIA: We only have one more prize.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: This is the very end. Give it away, man! We got to go get gussied up for the banquet.
KENIA: I'm sorry. It's been a long week. Okay, so we're giving away 250 dollars.
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: There we go! Told you it would be worth waiting for.
KENIA: I hear you, Marilyn. Sharon Scott from Lansing, Michigan. Not here? Thomas McKeethoian from Waldorf, Maryland? What about Carolina Doris from Watertown, Massachusetts?
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: Give the name. Karen what?
KENIA: Carolina Doris from water town, Massachusetts? No? What about Ryan Strumpf from Minneapolis, Minnesota?
PRESIDENT RICCOBONO: He's in the back. With we've got him. We will stand adjourned until 7:00.