Announcer: Welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast, presented by the National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of Blind Americans. Live the life you want.
Anil Lewis: And welcome to the Nation's Blind Podcast. This is Anil Lewis. I know you guys thought I was Melissa, but I'm not. And unfortunately, Melissa can't join us, but we are joined by the infamous and famous Christopher Danielsen.
Chris Danielsen: Hi. Or just Chris Danielsen is fine, but I know you like to call me Christopher. How are you, Anil?
Anil Lewis: I like calling you Christopher the Danielsen, absolutely. I'm doing great. How about yourself?
Chris Danielsen: I am doing well. I have no real complaints.
Anil Lewis: Excellent. That's a good place to be right about now.
Chris Danielsen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, the holidays are coming; it's mostly a joyous time.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, man.
Chris Danielsen: We'll go with that.
Anil Lewis: Absolutely, absolutely. I have Joy. It's an interesting podcast we have set for our listeners today. We realize that through the Nation's Blind Podcast that some of the most popular podcasts we conduct are around technology. I think that individuals who love the technology Nation's Blind Podcast will find this particular podcast extremely exciting. What do you think, Chris?
Chris Danielsen: I think that's right. And I think the news that we have to share with our listeners on this podcast will be of great delight to fans of technology and all things technologically inclined, and for many other reasons as well. Without further ado, maybe we should let our guest introduce himself because I believe that lots of people will recognize him even before he says his name.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, especially those Mushroom FM fans and Living Blindfully.
Chris Danielsen: See, you're doing the spoiler alert thing.
Anil Lewis: That's not a spoiler alert, I'm just putting it on out there for our listeners, and then-
Jonathan Mosen: I'm not clear when it's my turn to talk.
Anil Lewis: You got to get in where you fit in, young man. Go ahead, introduce yourself to our listeners. Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen: It's Jonathan Mosen. And it's such a pleasure to be on the Nation's Blind Podcast. I never thought I'd be here. And it's just great to be talking with you both.
Chris Danielsen: Well, it's so great to have you, even though in the presence of a master podcast producer and host like yourself, I am quaking in my boots. I'm sure that you will have plenty of feedback about how this could have been better when it's all over with.
Jonathan Mosen: That's all good, all good. I love the Nation's Blind Podcast, and I've been listening since it started.
Anil Lewis: Oh, outstanding.
Chris Danielsen: Oh, excellent, excellent. Well, we appreciate your loyalty, sir.
Anil Lewis: I have to make sure we tell Melissa that she has credit with Jonathan Mosen. Very nice.
Chris Danielsen: Well, of course we knew that because she's also a Mushroom FM host.
Anil Lewis: Oh, that's right, that's right.
Jonathan Mosen: She does a great show. It's called The Song Remembers When, and it comes up on Sunday for the first time on Mushroom FM. And she has these themes. She just doesn't sit there and play records, she has a theme that stitches them all together. And it's a great show.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, I love the one that she did on baseball. Because Melissa's a big baseball fan, and it was interesting all the music she found around baseball. But yeah, her themes are very interesting.
Jonathan Mosen: Melissa and I have a deal going, and is that if I support the Milwaukee Brewers next year when I'm in the United States, she will support the cricket team of my choice and learn about cricket. And I said to her, "It's really tricky teaching Americans about cricket, but I'm up for the challenge."
Anil Lewis: Very nice. You just slipped something in there. You're relocating to the States, are you?
Jonathan Mosen: I am. I'm very honored to have accepted the position of executive director for accessibility excellence at the National Federation of the Blind. At the moment, we are doing all the things you do when you're getting ready to relocate; we are putting our house on the market, we are getting a moving company in, and we are getting the lay of the land in terms of real estate in Baltimore.
It is a significant move, but the National Federation of the Blind has played a huge part in my life since I was a teenager, so I've always had a connection with the NFB. I've attended, I can't remember exactly how many conventions, but it goes into double digits. I read the Monitor every month. I keep tabs on how things are going.
In a way, it feels like I'm just coming home to the NFB and hopefully contributing some of the skills I've managed to acquire over the years to help blind people in the United States. And I think because of the work that I'm doing, ultimately that'll help blind people even wider as well.
Anil Lewis: Well, we're really excited about having you come on board. But before we get into the podcast that we're going to be announcing, could you expand a little bit? Because one of the things I found very interesting in talking with you is, one, your humility given your international status, and two, the fact that you really have a heart for the Federation. Could you share a little bit of that with our listeners?
Jonathan Mosen: Well, in terms of the humility, I do what I do and I do it to the best of my ability. And I've been really honored that people have listened to podcasts and other things that I've done over the years. And we all have something to offer. And I have tried to not only advocate for a better lot for blind people around the world, but also to take information and distill it in a way that is palatable for people. Because there is so much promise in this technology, and not everybody's living and breathing and geeking out over it like I do every day.
They have jobs to do that aren't involved directly in technology and they just want things to work. And it can be frustrating when you know that this stuff is available but it's not behaving the way you want and you don't know why it's not behaving the way you want, so there is that communications role to play in all of this tech stuff.
I had an experience when I was a teenager where I had this epiphany that I was being held back with people telling me I couldn't pursue this career or that option, not because I couldn't do it, but because of other people's perceptions of blindness. And it just so happened that at about that time I got online, this would've been about '86, on the CompuServe Information Service, which is a long forgotten technology by many people if they ever knew it at all.
And through the CompuServe Information Service, which had a disability forum on it and a blindness subsection, I learned about this organization called the National Federation of the Blind and started reading some of the literature, particularly speeches by Dr. Jernigan. And it resonated with me in an incredible powerful way, so later on I became the president of our consumer organization in New Zealand. And I imported as much Federation philosophy as New Zealand would take; we're quite a different culture here.
But it's had a huge, huge influence on my life and, as a result, on the lives of others. If you'd have asked me what my dream job was, it would be working in a capacity like this for the NFB, but I never expected that it would actually come about.
Anil Lewis: Outstanding. I will yield the announcement of the podcast to the podcast aficionado, Christopher the Danielsen.
Chris Danielsen: Well, that's right, because one of the many things that you will be doing with us, Jonathan, and in fact we'll have started doing I believe by the time this is published, but of course people who don't already know about it will learn about it from this episode of the Nation's Blind Podcast, tell us what you are going to be doing in the podcasting realm for the National in your new role, I should say. Not for the National Federation of the Blind, but in your new role in the National Federation of the Blind.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm doing a technology podcast, which will be the NFB's official technology podcast. And it is called Access On.
Anil Lewis: Great name.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I give a bit of background to this. Living Blindfully, my previous podcast, had listeners in 113 countries, and I was just absolutely overjoyed to win a Bolotin Award for Living Blindfully. And President Riccobono and I, when we were discussing this opportunity, talked long and hard about where does Living Blindfully fit in? Because his initial reaction was, "Well, I don't want to be the person who's responsible for the demise of Living Blindfully."
But it was actually me that said to him, "I'm not sure this will work." Because Living Blindfully was a very opinionated podcast. It was me absolutely unleashed. And when you are in that role, you can play a bit of a devil's advocate type function. You might say things that will tease people's opinions out.
Now, if I was to continue to do those things as well as perhaps challenge some of the tech developers in the way that I was challenging them on Living Blindfully, understandably, people would say, "Well, when has he got his NFB hat on and when is he talking personally?" And when you assume an executive director position like this, you can't do that. You have to understand that for the collective good, you have to make a few personal sacrifices in terms of how freely you speak publicly about certain things.
And the reason for that in particular is that the National Federation of the Blind has amazing networks in the tech industry. Even in the period that I've been working from New Zealand as a consultant, we've actually been able to, behind the scenes, solve a lot of accessibility challenges before blind people have been too adversely affected by them. And I'm building great relationships.
If I was to contribute in the podcasting space, and President Riccobono was always clear that was an asset that I could bring to the Federation, it needed to be a bit different. Access On will still be challenging. We will talk to some of the developers of the technology that's coming out. And it's a wonderful golden age to be doing this because we're at the beginning of the AI era; so many potential things that are going to change our lives, and the NFB needs to be there. We need to be strong, we need to be around the table.
But that also means that you get to know people. And I am really confident that Access On will be the definitive technology podcast in the blind community because we will tackle those issues in a detailed way. We've got the resources of the International Braille and Technology Center, so we will do comparisons. It'll be like the consumer reports of blindness technology. We won't be afraid to tackle questions like is iOS or Android the better option for particular use cases?
How is Mac doing compared to Windows? All those what should I buy questions that really trouble people because they know they've only got one shot at this for the next few years. Access On is going to be dynamic, exciting, about an hour a week. And we hope that people will follow that in addition to the Nation's Blind Podcast.
Anil Lewis: Absolutely. We don't see it as competition, we see it as a compliment because we can only do so much with the Nation's Blind Podcast, and there's so much to do with technology. Now, what's interesting to me is in your description of how you operated hosting Living Blindfully, I always found you to be fairly objective.
Of course, you weren't afraid to express your personal opinion about things, but I think that the beauty of what you brought to the table is if you had an opinion, you created space for other individuals with the opposite opinion to have voice on your podcast. I rest assured that that objective nature will still be present in Access On. let's get down to the podcast. What do you think?
Chris Danielsen: Well, wait a minute. Now, I had a question before we get to the podcast, if you don't mind, Anil.
Anil Lewis: No, don't mind at all.
Chris Danielsen: And I want to go ahead and ask this because you mentioned it, but obviously I will understand if you don't have anything to share at this time. But you just said that in your role, we've already been able to make some significant changes or inroads so that things that could have been problems for blind people are not going to be problems. Are you able to share what any of those are?
Jonathan Mosen: I will be a bit general in some examples and very specific than others. There are constantly beta processes going on that we have access to. And because the Federation has the ears of senior people in a lot of these tech companies, because my predecessors, people who are still here at the Federation, are respected for providing clear, honest advice and constructive criticism, we can sometimes bypass the usual processes and get to people to make sure that if we identify serious issues, they will be taken seriously and addressed.
And we've done some troubleshooting with a few of those beta processes, but specifically one example is Meta. We are working with the Facebook team. There's been a lot of change at Facebook in terms of their personnel with respect to accessibility, and that's meant that there's been a little bit of a loss of institutional knowledge. There may have been some communications channels which have been shut down inadvertently.
And we know that people have had increasing difficulty accessing Facebook. Part of that is just that defects have crept in over time, and another part of it is that they have deprecated their Mbasic page, which they say they have done for security reasons. And that was the page that a lot of blind people were using on the desktop to use Facebook. But you can't access their new mobile option via the desktop, so we're working with them on that.
And that is a long-term project. They know that they've got some work to do. They acknowledge that they need to communicate with blind people better. And they also have a vision for what Facebook should be like, which we support. We think they're on the right track. I think the jury is out in terms of how long this is going to take. There are some fixes that we want to see now so that blind people can continue to participate in the public discourse. And we're working with them on a regular basis. The communication keeps flowing. I really appreciate Meta coming to the table.
And we also meet regularly with all of the big tech, with Google, with Microsoft, with Amazon. And they come to us and say, "Okay, what have you got? What is the blind community telling you?" I would encourage members of the Federation to let us know what you're experiencing with these companies because we can perhaps advance these issues in a way that is not possible for everybody.
Anil Lewis: Excellent.
Chris Danielsen: Okay, I appreciate that very much. And I'm sorry for jumping in there, but it just seemed like a logical place to ask that question.
Anil Lewis: Oh, sure. I guess I had a little inside baseball, so I knew that the questions we have in store for Mr. Mosen would've tapped into some of that and some of those others. Jonathan, we'd love to hear in a broader context where you think technology is for blind people. But before we get those thoughts, let's just stop for a commercial break.
(Ad) Melissa Riccobono: Are you considering an end of year contribution? Now is the time. Thanks to a Challenge grant from HumanWare and anonymous donors, during October, November and December, you can double your dollars and help blind people to choose the lives they want. Celebrate by visiting nfb.org/donate, or you can call 410-659-9314, extension 2430. All contributions up to $100,000 will be matched.
Anil Lewis: And we're back. Jonathan, with your vast experience in access technology, give us an environmental scan of where you think the access tech is for blind people today.
Jonathan Mosen: I keep a gratitude journal, Anil. And I think it's really important because when you're in the advocacy game, sometimes it feels like all you're doing is banging your head against a brick wall. And that's not a good way to feel. But actually, if you take a look, we have made a lot of progress, and that poses new challenges. And I think that's why President Riccobono is investing in this new accessibility excellence role, because in the past we knew a lot of the key players. We knew who to contact at Freedom Scientific or in earlier times, GW Micro, whatever, and they were the ones who worked with Microsoft to do a little bit of hackery, and I use that term in the best possible sense of the term, to make sure that we got access.
But now what's happened is that mainstream tech companies have become assistive tech companies too. And they are making decisions about what our screen readers are saying and how we receive information. And it's really important that the NFB is around those tables having discussions to ensure that, first, we're not disregarded, and second, that people aren't making assumptions about what it is that blind people need.
And obviously the big, exciting area is this field of artificial intelligence.
I know that there are some who are pretty worried about it and skeptical about it, but I also think that artificial intelligence has probably had a bigger impact on the lives of blind people than it has on most. When you look at the very rich visual descriptions that we're getting of the world these days, we know that in May of this year, OpenAI demonstrated at their event, and so did Brian Bashan demonstrated at our convention in July, a technology where AI is using real-time video to describe what's going on in the world.
Now, that is a huge opportunity, but it also has to be used responsibly. We have to set expectations around that. When is it appropriate to use it? What safeguards or guardrails do we put in place to make sure that this thing isn't hallucinating and perhaps giving us information that is disadvantageous? That's why we need to be around the table having all these discussions and helping to shape the technology that will shape our lives.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, I realize that a lot of things we discuss here in this podcast are just teasers for things that you'll do in a more robust fashion on Access On. But I was curious when you were saying back in the day it was very blindness specific technology, I do remember JAWS 1.2 for DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, which I know you don't agree was the best word processor ever, but that's a debate for another time.
Jonathan Mosen: Well, we need to tell that story Anil. I went through a process, is this Mosen guy a good fit for the executive leadership team? And I get that; I've been through those processes before. And I suddenly got this, I think this is what Americans call a curveball from Anil asking me some random question about WordPerfect 5.1. I'm thinking, what is this?
Anil Lewis: He gave the wrong answer, but we still hired him. Yeah, I do miss the old days. I felt like I was able to do everything, reveal codes, etC, but I'm glad that we're continuing to evolve. My question related to your statement is are you thinking as we move toward the integration of accessibility into mainstream tech as opposed to having separate blind tech, is that a real positive, or do you think that there are some negatives to that trajectory?
Jonathan Mosen: It's potentially a positive in the sense that I like the fact that even today a blind person can walk up to, I believe, any computer in the world pretty much and make it talk because we've gotten the Radio in Windows, we've got VoiceOver in Mac, we've got ChromeVox in Chrome OS, and on and on it goes. That is a fantastic thing.
I still am the tech support person in my family, and you get together at Christmas time or whatever and they're all there with their laundry list of tech questions. And I would have to install a screen reader, whatever that was, JAWS, Window IS, onto their computer before I could even help them. Now you just put CTRL, Windows, Enter or Command, F5 or whatever and you've got speech. That is a fantastic development. But where we have risks is if those companies are not engaging properly with the blind community and they make assumptions about what blind people hear.
Now, I don't think I'm breaking any confidences because I've mentioned this to Microsoft directly several times, an example of this is at the moment in the current shipping build of Windows, if you press Enter on a Folder in File Explorer, from time to time, it now says, "Working on it," before you get the list of files.
Chris Danielsen: I have noticed this. Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah. And I don't think any blind person would ever have thought that was a good idea. It's just verbiage that slows you down. You know that when you're pushing Enter, it's working on loading the file, and it really doesn't take that long to do. That's the thing that we have to look out for. And there will be some who are saying, "That is such a trivial example," but the thing is productivity is important. Any excess verbiage slows us down in terms of doing our job or getting the information we require. And if you let excess verbiage creep in, it all just starts to add up.
Anil Lewis: Exactly. I think a lot of the developers think that if something talks that that's a plus and not recognizing how blind people are using the tech.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah.
Chris Danielsen: By the same token, you re so right about your other point. I can give a concrete example. In my condo where I live, we have a business center that has some computers and printers that are there for everybody's use. And I don't have a printer in my apartment. I've decided that I don't really need one and I don't have one connected to any of my computers, but I did need to print something.
And I went down to the business center, and those computers are configured such that they don't want us to save anything on them, so because I didn't have a thumb drive with what I wanted to print, I had to retype it. It was just a short thing. But I was able to just do CTRL, Windows, Enter, pull up Narrator, go into Microsoft Word, quickly type and edit my text, and then print it at this computer that I had never touched before in my life. And that was a pretty empowering feeling.
Jonathan Mosen: Yes, it is, it is. It's real progress that we are making. We've got a lot to do. But I think it's also important to point out that these things don't magic themselves into existence. And one of the reasons why we've made so much of this progress is the National Federation of the Blind. These companies have not done this, initially anyway, out of the goodness of their hearts. And we've continued to advocate for positive change, and we'll continue to do that. It's really important that we don't take accessibility for granted. And an example of this from earlier this year is Sonos. And we'd all invested, well, many of us had invested
Chris Danielsen: Thousands.
Jonathan Mosen: Considerably in the Sonos ecosystem because they were so accessible.
Anil Lewis: And Sonos is the speaker, the sound system that blind people were using?
Jonathan Mosen: That's a good point. Sonos is an audio system. They manufacture speakers and other products that allow you to connect audio devices to them. And the beauty of Sonos is that it is a multi-room system. They sync up beautifully. If you've got Sonos all over your living environment, you can group speakers together, you can set alarms so that in the morning NPR or whatever you want to listen to comes on at the right time on the right speakers. It's a beautiful thing except that they broke accessibility overnight.
And that is a really serious concern when you've invested that much money in hardware to find that essentially you've been locked out of the technology that you purchased in good faith. These things are precarious. We should never think that they might not go away. We mustn't take them for granted. And that's why it's so important that the NFB is vigilant and connected to these companies offering assistance.
Anil Lewis: Agreed. And it's important for us to develop those relationships and be respected by those technical partners too. You talked about some discussions we've had with Meta. You just referenced our relationship with Microsoft, which we think is very open.
We also recently, and I had the opportunity to participate in these calls along with you, had a call with Google. And I really respect the fact that you do enter into the room with that reputation, but you do it in a way that also demands respect from our partners because they know that we, as an organization, have something viable to contribute.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah. I endeavor to be constructive and give praise where it's due; everybody. We're dealing with humans, and everybody likes to get acknowledgement for the hard work that they've done. And there is a lot of good stuff going on. When I think about that Google meeting, we lobbied them about having a toll-free number, for example. We said, "This will really help some blind people who don't have unlimited minutes.
And they should be able to call accessibility support on a toll-free number." They delivered that because of the advocacy that we did. There are a whole lot of things like that. It was a good meeting because we talked about all those great things that they've done. They are getting there with head braille support, which will be great for particularly users of HumanWare braille displays who want to use Android with Bluetooth.
And so we point out where things are going great, and that gives us a little bit more credibility and latitude to constructively say where we think there is need for further improvements. And I think the Federation is respected for the way that we conduct ourselves.
Anil Lewis: I agree. And because of that, they actively now reach out to us to proactively solicit our input around certain projects, that's really helpful. When we're invited to participate at the beginning, it works out better for everybody.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I've been involved in advocacy for a very long time, and I did government relations in New Zealand for some years. And one of the things I always found was that you know you've got a really good relationship going when they initiate contact and they say something like, "We're thinking about doing this. How would the blind community react if we did this?"
And whether it's government relations or tech relationships, if you get to that point where you have that level of trust, you know you're on the right track. And we do have that kind of relationship with many organizations.
Anil Lewis: Exactly.
Chris Danielsen: Well, getting back then to the podcast, I know you've given a broad overview, but what can we expect? What can our listeners expect to hear?
Jonathan Mosen: We are going to, where there's content, give you a little bit of a news brief at the top of the podcast talking about breaking tech news this week. And some of them may relate to access tech companies and some will relate to mainstream companies that blind people are using. We're going to summarize that and always put the tech news through a blindness lens.
We will often do feature interviews with representatives of companies who have something new to say because the tech world is changing all the time. We're going to try and introduce a new feature called a Tech Tip, something really cool and useful that might make it easier to use your technology that some people may not know about; just a handy, little hint. And there'll be product demonstrations as well.
We also want to try and replicate, to some degree anyway, what we had on Living Blindfully, which was a phenomenal amount of listener engagement. It was staggering how much stuff we were getting in from people all around the world. Initially, you'll be able to email [email protected]. You can attach an audio clip to that email or you can just write your email down. Eventually, we will also get back up on WhatsApp for Access On so you can contribute that way.
And that, we hope, will take an increasing amount of the podcast, actual discussion, feedback, tips and tricks from listeners. We hope to get to the point where we can encourage listeners to send in demonstrations or recorded tech tips. NFB is a grassroots organization, and we want Access On to reflect that.
Anil Lewis: Excellent. And I'm glad you're highlighting that we want to create content that is of interest to our members, so being led by the concerns and questions of our members is also going to be helpful in determining the content. But also continuing to develop these relationships with these major manufacturers will also inform our members to be prepared for any new innovative tech that's coming up or any potential accessibility concerns that we've become aware of so that you know don't upgrade to the next firmware version of this one because we've noticed that there is some access issues. I'm looking forward to it being a real beneficial tool, not only just for education, but providing information that allows people to still take advantage of access tech.
Jonathan Mosen: The one thing that I'm also committed to with Access On is not wasting people's time. I don't know how you guys feel about this, but sometimes there is just so much banter and, I don't know, in jokes and things going on that it's hard to sit through many podcasts these days. And that's fine if people like that format, what we're trying-
Anil Lewis: We'll save that for the Nation's Blind.
Jonathan Mosen: But it's different if you just have a quick catch up at the beginning, that's a friendly thing to do, but sometimes the whole podcast is just full of that stuff, and it's loose. We want to maintain a good technical standard. You're going to get about an hour a week; that's our objective. It's a pretty ambitious objective. And we're going to try and make sure that we don't waste people's time too much.
Anil Lewis: Excellent.
Chris Danielsen: And I love that it's going to be a forum because I think that's so important. One of the things that I think is so powerful about the Federation is that in technology and in other areas, we're always talking to each other as a community and we're learning from each other. And of course we don't just limit it to members, because the community is always growing; we want new people to become involved all the time.
And so I really love that this is going to be a forum to exchange ideas, including things that people may have discovered, even tech solutions that other blind people may not know about. Not only tips around the platforms that we're all using, but maybe we've discovered a device that works really well for us or discovered an application or an app that maybe the community hadn't heard as much about before but that we're finding useful. And it's one of the things I loved about Living Blindfully, and I'm really looking forward to it being integrated into Access On.
Jonathan Mosen: For sure. It's impossible for one individual to know everything about this space. It's just moving so fast, and it's become a vast space, so we want to tap into the resources of our listeners. I do find that Mastodon is a particularly useful resource for trying to keep up with a lot of this. And we are on Mastodon as well. You can follow [email protected] if you want to keep up with us there.
I'm very much interested in engagement on Mastodon, feedback about what you'd like us to cover, any particular app or getting a particular company on the podcast that interests you. Do make sure that if you're on Mastodon, and I hope you are, because I think the federated form of social media is the future, then follow us, [email protected].
Anil Lewis: Jonathan, you mentioned keeping a podcast crisp and informative. As we move toward closing, do you have any suggestions for other individuals out there who may be interested in setting up a podcast?
Jonathan Mosen: Well, we hope to do a webinar on this sometime next year, Anil, and so I hope people will be ready for that because it's-
Anil Lewis: Look at all these teasers we're putting in place here, very much.
Jonathan Mosen: I see what you did there. That was very well done. But if I were to summarize it, I think there are two ways to come at this topic. One is to say, "I want to start a podcast," and the other is to say, "I have some expertise to contribute or an interest that I want to discuss with people; maybe a podcast is the best vehicle for me to do that." I often think that the second way is the one that tends to work for people because if you decide to get podcasting but you don't really know what it's for, that's tricky.
You don't have that fundamental foundation. If you are going to start a podcast, you have to be clear about who is your audience, what makes your particular podcast stand out. Is it because of the knowledge that you have or your personality or the guests you can bring in? Maybe you have networks. Be really clear about who you're talking to, why you're talking to them, and what your format is.
And what I was always told, because I'm a radio guy from way back, is when you're in front of your microphone, you should try and think like you are having a conversation with one person. Have in your mind that your archetypal listener is right there with you and you're talking to that listener. And I've seen some amazing practitioners of that craft over the years.
Anil Lewis: Very nice, very nice. And we're interested in knowing from our listeners, if you have a podcast, please let us know. We're interested in knowing what the landscape looks like for blind people taking advantage of this particular information medium.
Jonathan Mosen: That'll get 20,000 responses right there.
Anil Lewis: Really? Wow. Is it that pervasive?
Chris Danielsen: Yeah, there are a lot of members of the blind community, blind people and so forth, podcasting. And even a lot of these major tech companies have podcasts. I sometimes feel like I haven't dived into the world of podcasts nearly as much as I should have. I am sure that we will find out about all kinds of content that's out there. And I love that we're going to have a webinar, or that we're planning a webinar at least because I think that will enhance that in the community. It's such a great form of communication for our community.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, I think there's an affinity. It's perhaps a bit of a stereotypical statement, but I do believe it's true in general that there's an affinity between blind people and radio because, for those of us of a certain age, it's the medium that we grew up with and consumed the most. And it's something we can fully consume without any kind of adaptation. And I think there are a lot of blind people who do podcasts well because they just know intuitively how good radio should sound.
And it's amazing to me, when I was a kid, one of the things people told me was a blind person can't work in radio. And that predated the internet when it was possible for me to just jump on Google and find out that that was nonsense. I set up a radio station at the school for the blind, and I invited all the radio people I could think of to come out and watch blind people doing radio. But to do that, I had to apply for a license. We raised all the money. We treated it as a commercial project, so we went out and raised all the funds to hire the equipment and the mask and all that kind of stuff.
But the reason why I say that is that now it's possible with a station like Mushroom FM to broadcast to the world. And we've come an incredible long way that the medium has become democratized. And in a way, that's a blessing and a curse. The good part of this is that anybody can be a publisher, and the bad part of this is that anybody can be a publisher. It is a concern in some respects, but it's also empowering for us.
And I think there are all sorts of communities that each of us belongs to.
And I do believe there is a blind community. We are united by certain challenges, misperceptions, equipment that we use, perhaps some cultural factors around blindness to some degree. And the internet, whether it be internet, radio or podcasting, can bring us together. And I love that. And I have loved seeing other people taking up the mantle, really, that I began with the first blindness internet radio back in 1999. And now there's a whole ecosystem of it, and I think that's wonderful.
Anil Lewis: Wow. Every time I talk to you, I learn something new about you. I'm reaffirmed that this is a wonderful fit for the Federation. And as President Riccobono always says, "Jonathan, welcome home. Glad to have you on board."
Jonathan Mosen: Thank you.
Chris Danielsen: Absolutely, my friend, absolutely, sir. We are so glad. And I love how your journey has come full circle from learning about the Federation all the way there in New Zealand in the 1980s to now really coming home and being a part of our movement. You've long been a federationist at heart. It's just an exciting, exciting development.
Jonathan Mosen: It is. And I had a federationist say to me a couple of days ago, "I'm so pleased to hear your news that you're coming over, you're going to be a part of it, but please don't lose your accent." And I thought, I wonder if that's going to happen.
Anil Lewis: Yeah, you're moving to Baltimore, you'll be saying hun and Baldamore . Yeah, you'll get right in there. That'll be awesome.
Chris Danielsen: And when your technology breaks, you'll say, "My computer went up."
Anil Lewis: Well, I'm looking forward to what's going to happen with Access On. All of our Nation's Blind Podcast listeners will make some space every week, I'm sure. And until the first episode, just remember, you can live the life you want.
Chris Danielsen: Blindness is not what holds you back.
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