Tuesday Topics

20261006 Tuesday Topics - The Importance of Affiliates Tuesday Topics continues its exploration of what makes ACB tick! We look at what may well be an endangered species! Some special-interest affiliates are growing but most state affiliates are not! They either remain where they are or get smaller! We explore why this happens! Obviously as with our discussion of conventions last week much of what...

20260629 Tuesday Topics: The Future of the ACB National Convention This episode of Tuesday Topics explores what the ACB convention could be like in 5 years. Topics discussed includes: Will it be totally remote? Will it be shorter or longer? Will special interest affiliates operate differently? Will we hold elections in a different way? Will our business be done before or after the convention rathe...

20260922 Remembering Terry Pacheco Tuesday Topics focuses on remembering Theresa (Terry) Pacheco who has been active in ACB much longer than Paul Edwards, which is really saying something. Terry died in September, 2026 and in this episode of Tuesday Topics, people who knew and loved Terry share about her life! She was in at the beginning when the Bay State Council was started. Soon after Charlie C...

20260915 Tuesday Topics on diabetes and ACB Diabetics in Action (ACBDA) This episode of Tuesday Topics focuses on diabetes and the work of ACB Diabetics in Action (ACBDA), a Special Interest Affiliate of the American Council of the Blind. Over the past three years, ACBDA has made significant progress on issues that many once considered extremely difficult to address. Insulin pumps, the cost of ins...

20260908 Tuesday Topics revisits Employment of people who are blind or have low vision It was the day after Labor Day in the US and so it's appropriate to talk about the employment of people who are blind or folks with low vision. We explore some history, some recent information and some of our own notions of where things may be heading. Team members have had long careers, including teaching acces...

Occasionally Topics likes to ask questions with no right answers and our first September show does that! All of us are story tellers whether we know it or not! Most, if not all of the folks who listen to this program have visual impairments! We ask the team and you to think back over your life and tell us two stories. We want to know about a particular event where being blind was just plain awful!...

20260825 - Tuesday Topics - All things Internet Radio For the last two episodes of Tuesday Topics, we explored podcasts in great detail. Internet radio is sort of a companion to them. Everybody knows about the ten ACB Media stations but there is a huge number of stations folks can listen to if they choose. Virtually every hybrid device has internet radio access. Some are better than others and we...

20260818 - Tuesday topics, Podcasts Part 2 Topics once more considers podcasts. Last week we described what they are and how they work and explored many of the accessible devices where they can be retrieved. This week we spend some time talking about ACB podcasts: how many people have found them and how we can make them more widely known. Most of our show, however, is devoted to exploring a hit pa...

Within a day or two our podcast will be available which you can access on ACB Link or on any other podcast provider. Many devices make Tuesday Topics available including the Amazon Alexa devices. They take a while, I think, to put our podcasts up but you can say to your device "play Tuesday Topics" and it will. All the Braille Sense devices, the Orbit Speak and player, the Victor Reader...

There is a tradition that all the leaders and members of ACB remember! We once more review the convention. We explore what was good, what was bad and we will, of course, make some suggestions about how everything can be improved next year.

20260707 Tuesday Topics - 2026 ACB Convention - Voting, bylaws, resolutions Explore elements of the upcoming convention. We look at how elections will be handled and explore the bylaw amendments that are proposed. Board members are up for election this year as are Board of Publications members. We will actually be doing elections during the virtual week that precedes our actual St. Louis time. Jus...

On June 30 Tuesday Topics will once more take to the internet waves with what has become a commonplace now. We will have one last scholarship winner and will then turn things over to the team and those present to talk with us about what they are reading during the Summer and what plans are being made as well. We decided that we didn't want to choose a weighty topic as June ended or as our penultim...

Tuesday Topics welcomes more scholarship winners and Amanda Selm, Chair of the scholarship committee. Then Tuesday Topics explores new plans for one of the most valuable activities of ACB! Kenneth Simien Senior brings some folks who are part of the committee that oversees mentoring for ACB. We hear about those who have participated this year and about some changes that are planned for the 26-27 ed...

June 6, 2026 - Tuesday Topics - Scholarships and Gardening with George Holiday Two more scholarship winners join us to brighten up the start of the show and then we welcome George Holiday who shares the how's and why's of gardening. It was a rule at my house that Paul did not have anything to do with plants. Even my early school project to grow radishes was an abject failure. My wives and my child...

Tuesday Topics - Scholarship Winners and Grandparents June 9, 2026 Tuesday Topics once more takes to the internet with a double feature. First, we have some more ACB scholarship winners to get to know. We had our first three and I truly enjoyed exploring in some detail how their experiences had been. Two of our winners had lost their sight relatively recently which makes their success even more am...

On June 2 Tuesday Topics will try another new thing! As we take to the internet we will create a platform for some of our ACB scholarship winners to tell us a little about who they are and what they are doing. Amanda SELM, current chair of the ACB Scholarship Committee, is the prime mover in this process to share scholarship winners with the broader ACB community. During this show we will explore...

At a convention of the Florida Council of the Blind a speaker from Vispero mentioned Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) which  happens on May 21, I think. It occurred to me that this might represent a good topic for us to look at. There are huge differences in accessibility even among developed countries. Some of those countries model what they do on what we do in the United States. Many ha...

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

In the past we have done programs on autonomous vehicles. Recently several folks have had the chance to ride in vehicles with no drivers and we thought it would be fun to ask them about their experience and their impressions. We also want to explore where we are in the process of regularizing their ability to function on a permanent basis. How good are accessibility features? Are there likely to b...

We will be continuing the discussion begun on our latest podcast concerning the state of the blindness nation today and tomorrow. We have essentially finished painting what we think is a fairly accurate picture of how the blindness system has changed over the last couple of decades and what some of the characteristics of the current system are. We have begun to identify components of what we think...

People who are blind have access to more information than they have ever had before! There is more technological choice for this population than there has ever been. Consumer organizations are advocating and so are organizations like the American Foundation for the Blind, the Vision Serve Alliance and the American Printing House for the Blind. What is the vision that advocating organizations have,...

On April 21, from 7 to 9 PM Eastern time, Tuesday Topics will once more take to the internet and other devices with a first look at the ACB convention coming up toward the end of July. We will be hearing about a new program aimed to attract young people to our convention. We will hear about a new and exciting component of the scholarship program and we will hear from our fearless convention leader...

We are excited about this program because we will get the chance to have three guests who we will get to know better. All of them are ladies who have recently begun working for the American Council of the Blind. The first of them that I met was Caitlin Lee who was waiting for a shuttle to the hotel in Washington DC with me at the airport. She is working on finding funds for ACB so we can do the im...

Tuesday Topics continues its exploration of devices available to purchase for less than a thousand dollars. We will look at several sets of ear buds and explore what makes them worth talking about. We will look at telephones. Some of them actually have buttons you can use to dial! We will explore players. These days they are a lot more than just players of music and books and we will explore some...

Everybody knows there is an unprecedented quantity of access technology out there. At CSUN three major new note takers were announced! They are at the forefront of what is new and innovative but most of them cost an arm and a leg and another arm! We thought it might be fun to explore the currently available tech that you can buy for under a thousand dollars! There are note takers, players, keyboar...