Season 1 #2 – What's Happening on the Hill

Hi, welcome to NFB Newsline. Tennessee presents the show that hooks you up with the best that the National Federation of the Blind of Tennessee has to offer. I am your host, Yvonne Newbert. I'm so glad you could join me for today's episode. What's happening on the Hill? From Washington, DC, back home to Nashville, Tennessee, every year, members of the National Federation of the Blind head to our nation's capital for NFB's Washington seminar. This is where we meet with our members of Congress to gain support for priority legislation on the state level. Our members attend disability day on the Hill, where we work to gain support for state legislation. Sometimes, if we don't have any bills, we go and just introduce the NFB of Tennessee to our legislators. This helps for future endeavors. Joining me today are Nick Potter, who is a member of the Tennessee Seniors division and the Tennessee Valley chapter Craig McFarland, who is a member of the Memphis chapter and James Brown, our state affiliate president. They're going to share with you their experience of Washington seminar and talk about a couple of the federal and state bills that we have been advocating for. Also joining me all the way from NFB headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, is Justin Young. Justin is a member of the NFB government affairs team. Now let's get on with the show. Doctor Nicholas Potter is fairly new to the NFB of Tennessee. He belongs to the Tennessee Valley chapter and also to our seniors division. This was his first year going to Washington seminar.

I'm newly visually impaired in the context of I had an eye stroke in 2019, and I felt that I needed to get involved with some form of advocacy that connects me to the greater visually impaired community. And finally, professionally. I'm a retired director of medical affairs and I have lobbied and politicked on the Hill before for legislation that impacts things other than those for the visually impaired. So I just wanted to see and experience the event and make a difference, or attempt to make a difference and see if this is something that, you know, I can be a valuable contributor to.

Nick chose to present the non visual Medical Device Accessibility act. To say he hit it out of the ballpark is putting it lightly.

The bill has been designed and written to give the Food and Drug Administration, through the Food Drug Cosmetic act of 1976, the statutory authority to ask or require medical device manufacturers who manufacture class two and class three medical devices with digital interfaces to provide a functional audio overlay to those devices such that those people who are blind and visually impaired have the ability and comfort to have the feedback given in an audio output. So for example, you have a pulse oximeter on your finger and you're monitoring blood oxygen saturation. Well, if you have no mechanism to have that display be verbally read back to you, you have no idea what the reading was. And there's a whole host of class two and class three medical devices out there right now that basically have the technology built into them where it's a very easy stretch to add this overlaying functionality. And that's, in essence, what this bill is about. It's basically trying to add parity and inclusivity to the blind and visually impaired community such that they are given access to the same level of technology that everybody else has. And it's not a stretch at all. And I'm not going to get into the minutiae or the details of the bill, but in the context of basically being able to adapt and adopt existing technology. We all know voiceover on an iPhone, the accessibility options on an iPhone work very well. And this is just a mechanism to basically expand for medical purposes. The requirement that these devices, and many of them are at home devices that people use, routinely provide the same ability to critically export information in a format that the visually impaired can interpret.

One of the points or things that was brought up by legislators or, you know, their aides was this may fall under government overreach, dictating to businesses and companies what they have to do. A good response, if someone ever says that, a good response to that is first and foremost when a company puts something out on the market, a medical device, first priority is safety. And if you're blind or visually impaired and you need to use this, you're not safe. So that kind of takes the government overreach talking point, you know, just right out of the picture. Another great part of Washington seminar, before we go on to James and Craig, is the community of it. We were walking down the hall and here comes this other group, and we could hear their canes. And so we knew they were there with us. And we're like, hey, what state are you from? They said, oh, Texas. Who are you? Oh, we're Tennessee. And guess what? Tennessee still has the biggest buckies in the country. And then we, you know, both went our separate ways. But it's that community that, that's a great part of getting involved in not just, you know, Washington, but the NFB as a whole. And speaking of the NFB as a whole, we've got a member who went to Washington with us that he also used to live in Indiana. So he's got the experience of two states Craig, you want to say a few words about your experience in DC?

The experience has been, you know, but typical. I go every year and it's been a good experience. It's been meaningful. We, I don't know if we got Hagerty to get on board, but you almost got him. But we just got Blackmore to do something for us. That was great. It's been a good experience. I noticed that we weren't quite prepared for the overflow. They never had to have an overflow. This year we had 600 people or more come to the Washington seminar and they don't have it. They didn't have a contingency plan for people who were going to be in overflow. That's the only thing that I noticed that was different. I'm glad that we got the hotel straight. We did. Otherwise we would have been with Christina and the rest of them. But, but also one of the other things that we also try to pay attention to is that we know what the legislators are trying to get on board, what we're trying to do, and we have to be persistent with whatever they're trying to do. And this is a rather contentious year to do everything that we're trying to do. But.

How many Washington seminars have you been to?

Sorry? From the pandemic ones. I've been to everyone since 2005.

Oh, you are a long timer. Good going. Way to go.

Yeah, I've been there. We almost got caught in the winter storm and missed the winter storm and avoided a winter storm. So I went through them all.

Craig, you know, thank you for your continued and long time service to this and look forward to next year because we did have a good time. And now. Hello, Justin.

Hi. Good evening.

Good evening. I'm glad you could come. First off, let everybody know just who is this Justin Young guy?

Sure. So my name is Justin Young. I serve as a government affairs specialist with the National Federation of the Blind. Some of the areas that I cover for the federation would be related to non visual access to medical devices, education, transportation issues, employment areas. As it relates to Washington Seminar, the issue that I covered was the Medical Device Non Digital Accessibility act. We had three this year. We had the websites and Software's Accessibility Applications act, the Medical Device non visual Accessibility act, and the Blind Americans Return to Work act. We're doing great on all those. We appreciate the Tennessee affiliates hard efforts to get members of your congressional delegation on our issues. We have a number of other federal issues that we cover that we didn't bring this year to Washington seminar like the Access Technology Affordability act and the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment act which was mentioned a few minutes ago. Senator Marsha Blackburn is on the centered version of the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment act which is bill that would phase out subminimum wage over five year period. There's a number of other members from the Tennessee congressional delegation that are on the variety of the bills that are out there. I've been on staff since January of 2022. Before that I was. I've been a member since 2009 involved in the New York affiliate and now that I live in Maryland, I'm involved in the Maryland affiliate.

What is it that got you interested and got you to the position that you're in now with government affairs?

Well, I've always had a passion for advocacy and making a difference for people with disabilities. Most of my career has been in advocacy work, disability rights work, both at the national, state and local levels. What got me involved with this specific role? I was involved in the New York affiliate doing legislative work for the federation. Got to know John Perret, who's the executive director of advocacy and policy through that role as their state legislative director. When I was in the New York affiliate I did that for a number of years. I became aware of an opening on the team and decided to apply for it. And luckily I, I got it and I get to help out the entire organization, not just one affiliate, which that's the thing I love. I love about the job. I get to meet members of the federation from all 52 affiliates, which I knew some affiliates when I was doing in New York, allegedly. But in this role you get to meet a lot more affiliates and you get to work with them more closely like I worked with you in Tennessee.

How do you go about picking what's priority for Washington seminar?

Can you say that one more time? My phone was talking while you were interrupting phones.

How does our NFB government affairs team pick what our priorities are going to be for Washington seminar?

We come together as a group and we think what needs to be, what needs attention and education of Congress to make them aware of what's going on, what the issue is. We make a recommendation to national board of directors and they vote on which issues we want to bring for Washington Seminar. We work on a number of issues year round. The reason why we only bring about three or so issues for Washington seminar is because we want to make sure that we are targeted, strategic and bills that need more education of Congress. You know, bills that have been around for a while. Most people in Congress are aware of like the Access Technology Affordability act would be a good, a good example of bills that we've been advocating for quite some time that most people in Congress are aware of what it is. So there's money factors to go through, but that's probably the brief answer.

I'm so glad you came. And if you can stick around for a minute, I want our affiliate president, James Brown, to say a little about websites and applications. Okay, you say it, Justin.

You got it right. The websites and software is applications Accessibility act.

Yeah. Making things work for your computer and your phone.

There you go.

Which is so very important to, you know, all of our lives.

So websites, we all know what an important issue this is. The courts are all over the place. Some courts say, you know, there's definitely, you know, websites are under the ADA. Other courts say no. The Supreme Court kind of said yes and kind of said they weren't going to really say for sure. And so what we really need is basically for the federal government to set up some accessibility rules, because right now we have a lot of, you know, drive by lawsuits. Some of them are justified, others are not. And one of the complaints of the judges and the actual companies who need to set up these accessible websites, which we fully depend on, one of the major complaints is there are no real, true guidelines for them to follow, even though they're out there, but they're just not set in stone. And so this particular legislation would create some guidelines or some. Well, actually, they're not guidelines. They would actually have to follow them. So they're real rules. But, you know, as we all know, as blind people, I could go out and research, you know, the best bank for me to use, which has the best accessible app or the best accessible website. I could go through the whole process, set up my account, start using my bank and my accessible apps, and then I could wake up and that application was redesigned, or that website was redesigned. And now I've invested all this time, effort into getting something accessible that I can use and that I depend on to live my everyday life with. And I can wake up tomorrow and they can redesign the website, redesign the app, and all of a sudden, I can't use it anymore. And we've all experienced things like this. And so this is going to set up a system to where it would hold people accountable. They wouldn't be able to just submit any squirrelly kind of application, anything extremely new that would throw us off our game. And one of my opinions, gosh, this particular issue might be at the top of my list, just because our lives are so wrapped around the Internet, the Internet, as the national federation, the blind, we've also known it's probably the biggest issue for us is access to the printed word, and that takes place in a lot of different forms and a lot of different formats. But the Internet and the web and iPhones and, you know, smartphones has created a space where we can have access to the information that the entire world has, that's printed information. But if we don't have that information, we're, we're stuck back, you know, 40, 50 years ago, and it's not very helpful. So issue that's very important to me, and, you know, I think is an issue we've been working on for a while. I can remember we started these, the talk about rules and regulations back around President Obama. I think he initially promised he would get them through, but nothing ever really got working. And now we're taking it to the United States legislature to try and fix the issue.

I'm excited that this year on the state level, we're doing some things, y'all, and it's some good things happening. So, James, would you like to clue everybody in on what's happening in Tennessee?

So we have two issues in the state legislature this year. The first issue, interestingly enough, carries over from last year. I know Justin talked about how usually state legislature general sessions are one year, but this particular year, the state of Tennessee has one that carries over. And so last year, some of you know that we had a resolution which is not binding, but a resolution just pretty much is a more of a should you should do something, not that you shall, which is normally what legislation does the resolution deals with? The idea of a blindness training center in our state, you know, the National Federation of Blind. When I went to my first convention, I won a national scholarship. And you're very busy. This was back in 2007, and they've got you running around all day and you don't really have time to breathe. But around my second or third day, I kind of pulled up to the bar to try and get a quick bite to eat, and I noticed that there was like a blind television producer to my right. It was a blind lawyer to my left, and to the left of him was like a blind scientist who worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. And at that point, I really, you know, because my first impression of the convention was, you know, God didn't make 3000 blind people to be in the same place. But in that particular moment, that second or third day, I realized that the national federation, the blind the members, you know, a lot of them, they have something, and I wanted to figure out what that was. And one of the parts about what, you know, people who are part of the National Federation of Blindness, one of the things that they have is pretty good training, right? They have good blindness skills. So around 2019, the state of Tennessee started devising a plan to phase out our blindness training center, which was Tennessee rehabilitation center in Smyrna. And we didn't know what they were doing at first because they were kind of doing it, you know, under the table, and they got rid of it. And so now there's nowhere in the state where you can get blindness training. And a lot of, you know, as I mentioned, we've got a lot of successful blind people. We've got blind people who climb Mount Everest, and then we've also got blind people who can't walk to their own mailbox. And so one of the differences in those two, again, is blindness training, of course, philosophy, which can come along with that blindness training, and, of course, aptitude. So our resolution is that the Department of, or, division of Vocational Rehabilitation and the Department of Human Services work with the National Federation of the Blind of Tennessee to establish a training center in our state. And that's so, you know, blind people aren't, you know, forced to have, you know, this community based training where people only get one mobility lesson every two weeks, where at a training center, they could get five mobility lessons in a week. It essentially makes the difference between your training being six to nine months to stretching that same training out to two or three years, which is ridiculous. So right now, last year, that resolution went through Senate. It passed. We kind of kept this House resolution in our back pocket, and we are pushing that through. The second issue has to do with voting accessibility in Tennessee. So a lot of work has been done around the country in order to get electronic voting passed. In various states, for example, Colorado, they have an accessible delivery method of the ballot and an accessible return method of the ballot. Here in our state, we have one of the securest ballots in the country. It might be the securest. So the secretary of state takes great pride in that. So we are only able to pass this year an electronic delivery, which means, depending on what your level of vision is, it could be a large print ballot sent to you that you could fill out, then print out and fill it out. However you, however you'd like to do it, sign and then mail in through the regular post office for your return. If you're a screen reader user, that you would, you know, fill that out with your screen reader. You know, pick the person you are, you want to vote for, then print it out, sign it, mail it back. And so a couple of things that this helps with. If you live in a rural area and you, you know, next is going to help in privacy. You know, a lot of times, I know a lot of times where I went to to vote and the voting machine is down, the person doesn't know how to work it, etc. Etc. So I have to depend on someone else and give up my right to privacy in order to vote. So that would get rid of that. And then, of course, there's the idea that when we do get someone to fill out a ballot for us, we never really know if they're filling in the right information. A lot of houses are politically divided nowadays. There's a lot of things going on, and it's good for us to be able to just get that ballot emailed to us. We can fill it out, mail it back in. What we're hoping is in a couple of years, uh, once you know, there, there's a couple of different opinions whether electronic valid return are actually secure. One set of research says it is. And then there's been some other evidence that where people have hacked into it and really messed with the software. And so in a couple years, we're crossing our fingers that that's going to be proven to be safe, reliable, all those good things. And then people who are blind in the state are going to initially going to be able to come in, sweep in and say, hey, you know, this legislation you passed for us was good, but a lot of people aren't really able to take advantage of it the way they could. And we'll be able to become sort of the first in line to access true electronic voting. So that's our hope. And it's kind of funny. I had a conversation with a friend of mine today, and some of the disability advocates who sort of deal with overall disabilities in the community have been getting a lot of calls about this bill saying, hey, we want in on this, too. And so we're kind of getting some jealousy going on in a good way, but that's what's going on. The state legislature, there's a lot of stuff going on in individual communities. I just want to encourage everybody to get involved in your community in some way potentially in the state. And we'd love to have you work with us. And, you know, definitely Yvonne's here, I'm here. Even our national office, Justin, is here to help you. So don't hesitate to ask.

So, Justin, there's an old saying that if you don't take care of your home, then you shouldn't be taking care of everything else or everyone else. And so in Tennessee, of course, we do Washington seminar. Nationally, we've started our own version of Washington seminar. I think we call disability on the bluff or disability on the hill, which is a national. So that takes care of the state. But if chapters want to get involved in more the local politics by advocating and thus like that, I know that when we look at issues, you know, talking points are kind of approved by our national office. When we're up at Washington seminar, do we, if we, if we're pushing for certain legislation locally, what is the rule of thumb on that? Do we have to get that cleared at some point? If it. If it comes from a chapter all the way up, or does it matter? I hope that made sense.

I'm gonna go back to what I've been saying, what we all been saying. It's about the team effort. So something that is going off the local level, the local chapter, is the best to know what's going on. Whatever that issue is being addressed, make sure it's being addressed in the right way. Using Tennessee as the example, you'd want to work with your state legislative committee, because sometimes it may be a topic that has been addressed in another area of the state earlier in the state's history, and you just may not be aware of it. And also they can help in terms of drafting some sort of fact sheet if you want to do it at a local level, you know, helping you provide the resources if it's already there, because if it's already been crafted, you just maybe need to update it, whatever it may be. I would definitely say at the local level, work with the affiliate.

Last year in Houston at national convention, I gave this speech and, you know, did talk about the importance of your chapters getting involved on a local level. Even go, you know, just arrange a field trip, go to your city council meetings, and, you know, it's a great experience. And it not only, you know, lets the local, you know, chapter get a, you know, hand on what's happening. People who come to city council meetings are your people who are going to be engaged and are going to be involved. And you go as your chapter to a city council meeting, you're going to be seen and you're going to be seen in a positive light and in a positive way. So, you know, I strongly encourage getting involved on the local level.

100%. 100%. I definitely agree with that. And whether it be the city council or on a legislature meetings working that network, the more of the members of that specific legislative body knows the, the federation, whether it be state legislature, the county legislature, the city council, the more connections the better. Because when a member of the National Federation of the Blind of Tennessee in Memphis to throw a city, you know, just use that as an example, says, you know, know is has a good working relationship with someone on that city council, says I'm having a problem with this issue. How can we, you know, can we work together to fix this? That, you know, though they'll be a partner, that's legislative work is, is about partnerships as well. And building that partnership, that relationship over time, the more likely that member of whatever legislative body it might be is definitely willing to more willing to work with you because they know the power of the federation. They know that this is our lived experiences and that we are subject matter experts on blindness issues.

Nick, thank you. And Craig and James Brown, thank you. And Justin, of course.

Always happy to be here when I can. Before we close, Yvonne, I just want to say that if you want to share my email information with members of the, of the affiliates so they have more questions that weren't answered here. It's jyoung.org and we're always happy to help where we can.

Thank you all for joining me on another great edition of NFB Newsline.

Tennessee presents.