The Tech-VI announcement list celebrates its sixth anniversary today. It began on October 10, 2020. My reasons for starting it actually began in the 1990s, when I was working for Blazie Engineering. I was keeping up with blindness assistive technology even then. I had been a technology enthusiast since the 1970s when I was exposed to products as low tech as talking clocks and 4-track tape recorders and as high-tech as the Optacon, the Speech Plus Calculator and the Kurzweil Reading Machine. In addition to selling their own products, Blazie Engineering became a one-stop shop for various blindness products, including DOS and Windows screen readers, Braille translation software, speech synthesizers and Braille embossers. I was keeping up with updates to some of those products and forwarding them to my co-workers at the company. How many of them cared enough to read all of those emails I’ll never know but they never asked me to stop so I kept emailing them updates.
In 1998, I began working at AbiliTech, where I was providing technology training to blind children and adults. Most of my co-workers were doing the same type of work and I continued to keep up with various types of blindness technology. I once again took it upon myself to send out regular updates to my teammates on products like JAWS, Connect Outloud, Kurzweil 1000 and other products.
In the late 1990s, Amy Ruell ran a wonderful list called Amy’s Filters and Forwards. Amy was subscribed to many mailing lists and she used that list to forward relevant announcements to her subscribers. Those messages were related to blindness and blindness technology. At one point, Amy began charging a small annual fee for the service, which I gladly paid. I even considered reaching out to her to ask if she’d like assistance in collecting announcements for the list in exchange for me being a part of the business. As she and I had never made contact at that time and she would have likely had no idea of who I was, I decided against it.
In 2002, I moved to Associated Services for the Blind, now VisionLink, where I ran their computer training program. During my 14 years working at that agency, I continued to send my co-workers updates on all types of software. Nobody asked me to stop doing it. I never received a visit from HR, warning me to stop spamming the fourth floor staff.
Even when I moved to Comcast in 2016, I continued to send some updates to members of my team related to Web accessibility and software that we used.
I was also sending various updates to other mailing lists. For the most part, they were received positively but I eventually wondered if it was time for this type of service to have its own dedicated list. I knew about and had great respect for Top Tech Tidbits and I had probably been reading their newsletters since they first started. However, what I wanted to do is to carry on the work started in Amy’s Filters and Forwards, where announcements would be sent individually as separate emails, rather than combining them into a weekly newsletter. I briefly thought about charging an annual fee for the service. I decided against it for several reasons and I stand by that decision. I didn’t know if enough people would be interested in subscribing to a list where they might receive a substantial amount of emails on certain days dealing with blindness technology but the only way to find out was to try it. This is how the Tech-VI list was born six years ago on October 10.
One thing that I had to decide on was the name for the list. I wanted a name that would indicate that this was a blindness technology list. My original name was VI-Tech. I was quite happy with that name and would have chosen it but at the time there was a discussion list called BlindTech. I didn’t want people to confuse the two and so I felt that I had to come up with another name. I reversed the name and came up with Tech-VI. In all honesty, I didn’t care for the name at all. It felt very unnatural but, for whatever reason, I went with Tech-VI for the list’s name.
As of today, we have 1955 subscribers and the subscriber count continues to grow. I am still amazed, pleased and humbled that so many of you trust me to provide you with this information and I take that trust very seriously.
At this point, I’d like to offer a few reminders.
1. Please remember that I do not write most of the emails that I distribute. They come from a variety of sources and I always try to ensure that the original source link is provided in the message. If I have my own comments to offer regarding a specific post, I always place it at the top of the message, prefaced with the line “From the Tech-VI list owner.”
2. If the message is something that I wrote, I will clearly put my name in the subject field, such as “From David Goldfield’s Blog.”
3. While this list is and always will be free of cost, I am setting up services for those who wish to send monetary donations. Donations will never be required or even requested but they will always be appreciated. You’ll be able to donate using either Ko-fi or PayPal. I’ll alert all of you once that has been set up.
4. While this list has a focus on blindness technology, I am not available to provide free email support or free training. If you’d like to discuss paid training opportunities, feel free to visit my training page on my Web site. You can also email me with inquiries at info@DavidGoldfield.com. I am also open to discussing possible employment opportunities where my skill set can be utilized; serious offers only, please. Feel free to email me at info@DavidGoldfield.com.
5. If you’d like to browse the Tech-VI archive going back to the very first message from October 10 of 2020, you can do so via this link.
6. Feel free to let others know about the Tech-VI list. I don’t have the time or resources to engage in promotion or advertising. The subscription address is tech-vi+subscribe@groups.io.
7. Finally, I would like to thank all of you who have chosen to subscribe to this list, whether you just joined this week or you’ve been with me for the past six years. Your loyalty and trust are so appreciated. Also, if you are inclined to do so, I will always appreciate your prayers for me and for my family.
I wish you God’s blessings and peace.