Dear AccessWorld Readers,
With AFB's focus on employment, two years ago, former editor Lee Huffman and I decided to add a new focused AccessWorld issue to our usual lineup. This would be come the August entrepreneurship and personal finance issue. Even with the focus on employment in general in the October issue, we felt that this avenue to employment deserved its own focus as the topics important to such a career path fell outside the usual discussions surrounding employment. For this month, we will specifically be focusing on personal finance. The articles in this issue deal with technological solutions to personal finance tasks that often required face to face interaction. With the pandemic still going strong, it felt very timely to bring you this content.
Regarding entrepreneurship, I wished to bring you a few resources that you may find helpful if you had a particular interest in this career path. In 1936, Congress passed the Randolph-Sheppard Act, which aimed to improve the employment options for people with vision loss. The act did this by making provisions for people with visual impairments to operate vending facilities on federal properties. In short, this means that people with visual impairments can operate facilities from vending machines to snack bars at federal locations. If you want to own your own business but don't know where to start, this may be a great option for many. You can learn more about the Randolph-Sheppard Act here. In addition, the National Federation of the Blind hosts the National Association of Blind Merchants, a group focused specifically on entrepreneurship and the Randolph-Sheppard Act. On their website you can learn more about the act and connect with others who have chosen a similar career path to your own.
I wanted to also take this space to announce a new feature, AccessWorld premium content. If you are signed up for AccessWorld alerts, you may have noticed a special article delivered to your inbox earlier this month. Starting in August, we have begun to send out special premium articles to our subscribers. These articles either are specific tips, tricks, or pieces of information that wouldn't fit in a traditional article, or an article topic that we wish to cover but that wouldn't work as a full article. These pieces will be sent no more than once a month, and after a period of time, these items will be compiled and published in AccessWorld proper for everyone to read. If this sounds interesting to you, you can sign up for the AccessWorld mailing list here.
As usual, we would love to hear your feedback on the new AccessWorld premium content as well as any other questions or comments you would have for us. You can always send me an email using the "Comment on this Article" link at the bottom of every article or send me an email directly.
Sincerely,
Aaron Preece
AccessWorld editor and Chief