[Ohio-Talk] Thoughts on Zoom

[Eric Duffy]

I am not writing this for the purpose of a debate or a prolonged discussion. In fact, although I don’t moderate this list, my guess is that if we go in that direction the president will end the thread after a reasonable time.

I write this because I think it is important for the membership to understand why decisions are made when we can bring clarity to a situation, and I think we can do it here. Change can always be hard for individuals and organizations. I remember when we began to move away from the cassette edition of the Buckeye Bulletin. The Board of Directors said that we would continue to record the newsletter on cassette  for as long as it was practical to do it. But there came a time when cassettes were harder to buy and our duplicator was breaking down. Deborah Kendrick then recorded one edition of the newsletter on CD. There were problems with that, the chief of which was the amount of time it took. But we said that we would make it possible for everyone who wanted it to have access to the Buckeye Bulletin. Tom Anderson was our poster child for this. Tom made it clear that he was not a computer user, and that he was not going to read the Bulletin by Email. The obvious solution was to put the newsletter on the Ohio information channel of NFB-NEWSLINE. Thus we have been doing that for years. 
What does all of that have to do with Zoom? Everything! We don’t make major changes in this organization without considering the needs of as many members as possible. We research, test, and research and test again. We do what we can to provide help and resources to help those who need it when adjusting to the change. The national organization began using Zoom when I was Director of Access Technology. We tested other platforms and found Zoom to be the most stable and non-visually accessible. We used Zoom for our Bell planning meetings in Ohio last summer. I used Zoom when trying to stream the state convention in 2018. There were problems with that, so we invested in hardware and used a brand new streaming system last convention.

President Payne spent hours becoming familiar with Zoom and others of us did the same before we began to use it on a regular basis. We have offered training for those who wanted it. We made resources available. We have done all we can to make it clear that you can still use your phone and that all you have to do is get used to calling a different phone number and entering a different access code. 

Our national convention will be a virtual convention. This will allow more people to participate than ever before. How this will all come together, I am not sure. Which platforms will be used? I am not certain. Fortunately the responsibility for making such decisions is well beyond my pay grade. But I feel fairly safe in saying that Freeconferencecall.com <http://freeconferencecall.com/> won’t be one of those platforms.

Services such as free conference call are getting harder for some people to get into either because of changes phone carriers have made or because of changes the services have made. What we do know right now is that Zoom is accessible in every way we need it to be.

If you need help please reach out to president Payne or to other affiliate leaders. We are here to support you.

Eric