have to pay for. Our books are the things that are going to have to be adjusted. So these two items would go on the books side. We're going to say, okay, we're going to have to fix our books. Our books are going to have to be adjusted for the fact that we're going to have to pay 80,000 or 80. We already took out 80. And we got to pay 15 for the service charges, which they were nice enough to take out of our account already. So we're going to do that by saying it's going to decrease the book balance. I'm going to say the withdrawals are going to be 80. I'll put a negative 80. And then the bank service charges 15, negative 15. I'm going to go over here and highlight these and make these a lighter green saying that we have found those and put those in a particular place. We put those on our book balance to make that adjustment. Now we're going to adjust the rest of the yellow items. So we have this 956. That's going to be a deposit. It's a deposit on our books, not on the bank statement. Why? Probably we made it at the end of the month and it has not yet cleared. If we're concerned about it, then we could check with the bank, meaning this is actually being done for the time period into January 31st. But clearly it's some period after that when we're doing the bank reconciliation sometime after February, in this case. And therefore we could call the bank and say, hey, on the bank statement as of the end of February or sometime after February did this 956, or we can check online, of course, clear. And if it has cleared sometime in February, then that's okay. Then we're saying, okay, that's good. All we need to do then for the January bank reconciliation is to reconcile the fact that it's going to be a timing difference. To do that, we're going to go up to the bank balance up here. And we're going to say that the bank balance needs to be adjusted, meaning that 109, 415 is not entirely accurate. It's not that the bank really got it wrong. It's the fact that it's just a timing difference. They don't know about the fact that this deposit has happened and just hasn't cleared yet. And so they're kind of wrong just from lack of knowledge. And therefore, we're going to make the adjustment here. So this is a deposit that is included in our balance, not included in the bank balance. And therefore it needs to go up. So we're going to put an increase here. I'm going to call it an outstanding deposit. And that's going to be a 956. It might be called a deposit in transit as well. So I'm going to go ahead and highlight that and say we found a home for that. And then a similar process is going to happen for all of these items. These are going to be the checks that were written on our books that have not yet cleared the bank. So these are items that we wrote a check for probably closer to the end of the month that have not yet cleared the bank. Once again, if we're concerned with them, we can call the bank and say, Hey, did they clear after the bank closed? And so then we're okay. And all we have to do is really reconcile them. Same item here. The same idea is that this account, the bank balance account, the bank balance account here is not really right. It's wrong in that it doesn't include these items that we know about that the bank does not know about. It's just a timing difference. They will clear the bank once the bank is aware of them, but they're not there yet. So what we need to do is just add these up, we're going to say all these items are going to be the items that are going to be outstanding checks checks we wrote that haven't cleared the bank. And those are going to be items here that are included in our balance, bringing our balance down, not included in the bank balance. And therefore to reconcile, we will have to decrease the bank balance. So if we were to take the calculator out and just add these up, then of course, it would just be let's do that again, the 11,000 plus the 500 plus the 360 plus the 3539 and the 3630. So it's the 1629 if I did that correctly, hopefully. And we're just we're going to do that, of course, with a formula though, so we're just going to point and click to them. So we're going to go back up here, we are in cell e k 6 e k 6, and we're going to select equal and just point to that 11. And it's a it's a negative. So it's going to be decreasing here. So that's fine. And then we'll say plus this 500. So it's plus a negative. So it's going to and then I'm going to say plus this number plus this number plus this number and enter. So it's going to look like this if I double click on it, that's the formula. Once again, I'll do it one more time. I deleted it. I'm on e k 6. I'm going to select equals point 11,000 plus the 500 plus the 360 plus scrolling down a tad the 3539 plus the 630 and enter. So there's what we have there. So we're going to say then, of course, that we have an adjusted balance then of 109 415 minus the 16 029 plus the 956. And that's going to be our balance. If I did that correctly, and we'll we'll do that with the sum function here. If I sum this up, it'll take this plus the negative or subtract that plus this. So let's use the sum function. We are in e k 10, we're going to say equals SUM double click the sum function and highlight this column. That gives us this number here. And by the way, we found a home for all these. So I'm going to make these a light green. So we've found everything now should be no more red. So or yellow. So there we have that. And we're going to do the same thing over here. And hopefully if we say this minus this minus this, it will be the same number. It'll be that 94 342. Let's see if that's the case. We're going to use the sum function by saying equals SUM double click the sum function and highlight this column. Enter. So there we have it. And they tie out. So now we've matched these out. So we've reconciled the items. We said here are the items that need to be on the bank balance that aren't included. These are the items that are correct on our books that have not yet been included to the bank and need to be in order to reconcile the bank to the books. These are the items on our books where they were on the bank, but not on our books. And there are things that we are wrong on. We need to fix on our books side in order to reconcile. And then we have the reconciling items. I'm going to go ahead and underline these just format these just a bit. We'll say double underline here, double underline there and we'll have a single underline here and a single underline here and there we have that. Now what we're going to need to do at this point then is to adjust these amounts. These two amounts are things that need to be fixed because they're not on our books and they're not a timing difference.  So what we're going to do is actually make a journal entry related to these two items and then our ending balance will be in actuality this 94, 342. We're actually going to add them in essence to the GL down here.


you just have to take the flow of where that community is going unless you have a good reason to step outside that flow so this is more of a general software engineering perspective and not an fprime or a NASA perspective but if the community is going in one direction and you're going the other you're going to have a harder fight and have less of your time spent on the thing you care about the code you care about and more setting up all the stuff that your community already figured out using their other technology it's like trying to convince my mom to use Linux instead of Windows she's so used to using Windows that I can spend all of the time I have on our weekly conversation getting her on Linux or I can just boot and say she's using Windows let's talk about how the dog is and how my family is and all that stuff right so I don't see any specific limitations that would prevent you from using fprime in embedded systems anywhere except for the fact that the knowledge share of the community might already be focusing on some other technology and you'll have to devote a lot more work to adapting the technology and not devote your work to whatever research aspect you care about most then it's your question fantastic yes go ahead that is true I don't have any notion of projects that are non-flight that surpass the hobbyist community where people are using fprime right now our work is done on satellites and robots in space because that's our business and the people will come to us to start partnering us through this open source initiative they're also doing satellites and they heard about us because that's what we do and that's where our focus is I like to use fprime on things like raspberry pies because it's fun and it starts expanding the use cases but I don't have any I can talk about today unfortunately so yeah I know most of you aren't launching satellites I was expecting a good number of people who are like we like playing with raspberry pies if you're deeply hoping to use this in the integrated community it's not a bad product but we don't have any to point at and say look they're also using it on XYZ you know network infrastructure or embedded Linux computer that's running I don't know Cisco systems or something we're not at that point any other questions so why was the longitude fluctuating so the longitude was fluctuating a lot because I had gotten a brand new GPS device I had managed to fry my original test model by carrying it around in a backpack without static shielding so yes put your electronics in anti-static wrap if you're going to wander around for months and so the new GPS unit hadn't been used long enough that it could pinpoint its position that was very close to the first turn on and what I learned using this particular model of GPS is it takes some time to get a 100% definitive lock especially when you're operating the thing indoors and it doesn't have a clear view of the sky so hardware instability over time this particular model does seem to get a more fixed lock but I can't say that 100% for certain because it is a very cheap off Amazon GPS you know for hobbyist projects yeah go ahead could be I wouldn't be surprised because I don't remember exactly where I was testing but it was not outside it with a clear view of the sky it was more like sitting at my desk because that's where my computer was to record the demo because I learned at last scale I presented at a few years ago don't do live demos in front of the audience record them it prevents errors well I'd like to thank you all for the time I'm going to shut off my microphone now and if you have further questions I'm happy to answer a few before I have to run so thank you oh hey okay this actually works okay I think it's probably hold it though I'm kind of hoping that maybe there would be another a second worn one anyway testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 alright there we go this thing is highly directional obviously I think worst case I could just hold it and like hello hello hello hey there hey hey passivy you know we could push the volume up a little bit that I know how to do but oh but it's yeah eventually coming up after it warms up okay there we go alright it is a microphone microphones are awesome we've established that it works yeah yeah we do okay yeah I actually need to boot the machine too is it plugged in 1, 2, 3, okay it's 6 p.m. so let's get started welcome to accidentally accessible mostly FOSS workflow my name is Sarah and my name is Chris and welcome tonight we're going to start by just going over the agenda for our presentation we're going to start by talking about why you should care about accessibility now rather than later when you feel it might be more convenient next we're going to do introductions of ourselves and of the company I'm going to talk about the communication tools that we use at programmer.com I'm going to talk a little bit about our physical infrastructure because I think that's important for giving context for Chris's talk I'm going to discuss the hiring considerations we had when we were thinking about hiring Chris then Chris is going to go over some user interfaces for the blind some of what he uses day to day he's going to talk next about we have some okay so Chris is going to talk about applications that he uses he's going to talk about pain points that he's encountered during his work then best practices for screen readers and then I'm going to wrap up with a little bit of discussion of other disabilities okay why why should you care about disability now rather than some time later if you think about what it takes if you have like an external client that somebody might want to write for themselves to make an accessible client you're probably looking at an API you're probably looking or you're looking at some kind of message protocol if you have these available you can use them for accessibility but you can also use them for many other sorts of integrations then another thing to consider when you make your organization or you make your software or your project more accessible is that you're opening up your pool of potential candidates or contributors if you think about I think the unemployment rate for people who are college educated right now is 2.2% it's incredibly low if you want to be getting the best people you need to make sure that you can cast your net as wide as possible finally inaccessibility it's technical debt I would say it's also social debt for an organization and the United States if you have 15 or more employees you need to make reasonable accommodations to somebody if they're able to do the job if you wait until somebody comes along and you want to hire that could be very disruptive you might have to think about well we've been using this one chat application and we could go ahead and switch to the other chat application it's pretty much as good but that can be a painful process and there's not really going to be good feelings about that on either side so think about it upfront not just necessarily for in your job but also open source projects if you have an accessible chat program you may get people you wouldn't have otherwise since this is a presentation about people and how people interact with technology just going to spend a little bit of time talking explaining where we came from I grew up very interested in computers I have a degree in computer engineering and I got back into Linux when I had a Nokia N800 which unfortunately I don't have, I can show after the presentation but it is a small internet tablet, it's very smart phone like running basically running Debian and this was before the iPhone and this was super cool and as time went on I decided that I wanted to join Programmer because I saw a lot of opportunities to improve the automation Chris Yeah, so I grew up with an interest in technology I didn't really own a computer until the late 90s but I did start working with Unix earlier than that and I used a terminal and a type device and dialed into shell accounts and I learned the operating system by exploring and reading man pages and teaching myself the system and when I actually owned my own first computer I went looking for a new operating system after dealing with a number of frustrations and I settled on Linux primary things that led me to it were that it was free and it was easy to modify but it could be modified if I learned how to do that if I learned how to program at the time Linux was one of the few operating systems for the PC that could be installed completely without site there's still some truth to that today but the landscape has changed at the time one of the few things you could install without site other than Linux was MS-DOS getting away so I went with Linux I eventually got myself a computer science degree and learned how to program so I could modify my operating system and I haven't looked back it's been quite an adventure and that eventually led me to working at Programmer Sara? Okay, so just in case you aren't familiar with the company because I'm going to go back to what Chris does today I'm going to explain a little bit about Programmer so we provide virtual private servers to the general public generally running Linux or BSD though people can install their own operating system we were founded in 2005 by Luke Crawford if you want to stand up Luke anyway so he started with three BSD jails and then he moved to Zen within a year because jails didn't really do a very good job of controlling resource contention we own all of our own equipment we operate our own network we self-host all of our own infrastructure because as Luke says why would you host a hosting company that doesn't host their own things and we don't have our own data centers we just rent racks and for communications as I said we have everything that we have so for email we run postfix and dovecott for chat we just use IRC we use the NC for the bouncer inspire cd for the IRC server voice is just traditional phone or we also use signal documents, plain text, markdown or media wiki so we have customer documentation in media wiki and some internal documentation in media wiki and then for ticketing we just use request tracker which was originally designed for help desk we experimented a little with having multiple ticketing systems that found that maintaining one was generally easier every single one of those tools I just listed is open source and you can run yourself again just to give a little bit of context for our physical infrastructure our serial we use serial consoles for all of our equipment so it's all accessible via text we have a few specific command line utilities for accessing hardware such as IPMI tool and SNMP we some of the equipment has built in web interfaces which we very occasionally need to use because they have some they expose some features that aren't exposed via the serial console and then for server installs we automate them via kickstart which is for the red hat installer or if that if we have something else that we're installing not the red hat installer we'll just do the install over the serial console and then hiring considerations when we were thinking about hiring somebody who was blind we had absolutely no concern with questions we figured Chris would be able to do the job since Chris is primarily working remote I in fact met him for the first time yesterday data center work doesn't really matter graphs when I was thinking about our traffic graphs that we have for networking that was a potential concern of mine and I think it's a problem that we can solve ourselves it's just that we haven't sat down to do it and then really large blog files seem like that would be a little bit more challenging for Chris but I also had complete confidence that this was something that he would be able to solve and now I'm going to turn it over to Chris to talk about some of the user interfaces for the blind okay so I'll start talking kind of generally about the various output methods that are available to a blind person the two most common ones being text to speech and braille text to speech a either a hardware device or a software program takes computer generated text and converts it into synthetic speech at one time this was done entirely in hardware for many years that was the case because the machines of the time were too primitive lacked the resources CPU, RAM, etc to perform the text to speech function over time machines have gotten more powerful and like many things this task is being done more and more in software I myself use a software speech synthesizer called eSpeak and it is freely available on the internet it is open source software hardware devices are still used a lot of people swear by them especially further the quality of the speech but they're becoming less and less common as time goes on when you use text to speech I would say probably at a minimum at the absolute minimum it reads at 100 words per minute some people run it much faster than that I know people that run text to speech at 900 words per minute I myself run at about 450 we've read that human speech daily human speech is about 180 words per minute so most I would say a lot of people who run text to speech run significantly faster than typical human speech a synthesizer usually provides a few knobs you can twiddle when you have to deal with programming for instance the amount of punctuation spoken that is read is adjustable so if you're reading for information or for pleasure typically you would have no you wouldn't want to hear punctuation characters announced you set your punctuation level to none if you're editing a program or a config file or you're reading command output or dealing with anything that has syntax consisting of punctuation characters then you probably want to set your punctuation level to all and have it all announced not all synthesizers speak every word as it should be spoken out of the box they have their quirks so to get around those quirks often times you can program a dictionary to override the pronunciations of words another thing that's important especially when programming is capitalization because UNIX especially is case sensitive identifiers are case sensitive command names, file names what have you so text to speech makes some allowance for that typically a rise in pitch is used to indicate a capital letter so it's yeah it's very flexible the other common well maybe less common output method is braille I would say probably most readers read at about 60 to 80 words per minute maybe 40 to 80 words per minute braille typically is presented using a hardware device called a refreshable braille display they have one row of text of braille cells compared to a screen which has you know what 25 rows by 80 columns well these things have one row and typically they have anywhere from 20 to 80 cells so very minimal display real estate kind of a minimal bandwidth IO channel the other thing about braille displays is they are mechanical devices and they can be quite costly we're starting to see cheaper units on the market these days like the one for $500 that's a 20 cell display but up until recent memory they all cost several thousand dollars I would say typical prices um you know 2000 to 4000 for some of the well of course there's the $500 model 2000 to 4000 for maybe a 40 cell and then for one of the top of the line units so very expensive a braille is less commonly used in the United States than in Europe um probably because European governments are more willing to afford it for their citizens here in the United States we tend to use text to speech more than braille one thing to note is of course if you're deaf blind then braille or some kind of tactile method is your only option if you have no hearing whatsoever speech won't cut it so a third output method is of course haptic feedback and this is used to some extent today like my phone uses haptic feedback it has a vibrating motor and it vibrates for various kinds of notifications and that conveys limited information one thing we kind of stumbled across while we were researching this was the possibility of using haptic feedback to convey text i.e. having a motor vibrate and Morse code there was at least one project we found on the internet where somebody had done something similar i think it's a possibly a fruitful area for research but it's kind of blue sky territory here the advantage is that it could be very cheap you could make this kind of a system with a raspberry pi for under $100 unfortunately probably a very low bandwidth IO channel maybe 20 words per minute maybe a little more but it could be another option for people who are deafblind who only have tactile methods as their only option something that's very commonly used by both blind people and sighted people with hearing is non-spoken audio feedback typically this takes the form of notifications sometimes the term sound icons is used but there are audio notifications of events for instance a message was received or a task has completed or begun there's not very much information you can really convey with this but it's super useful some general definitions there are two strategies if you will for providing accessible software to the blind and these are screen reading and self voicing applications a screen reader is a program that sits between an application whatever it is you're running web browser, email client what have you it sits between that application and either a text to speech system a speech synthesizer or a braille display and the screen reader interprets the output from the application and converts it into something that can be rendered on the synthesizer or the braille display so the term screen reader can be a bit of a misnomer of course if you're talking about VGA in text mode it does in fact read the screen but if you're talking about some of the modern GUI screen readers they don't necessarily read the screen at all in fact what they do is they hook into accessibility APIs provided by the operating system or system messages or events inside of the GUI and they hook into those events and build a model called an off screen model and they read that model, they read from the model rather than actually reading from video memory so screen reader can be a bit of a misnomer the other strategy for building adaptive software is called self voicing applications and here the spoken feedback is part of an application it's built into an application or baked in often times that's done using a plugin some kind of plugin system an application and somebody writes a self voicing plugin or it's done through an application specific scripting language it's a very powerful paradigm but it's not often used I would say screen reading has won the day and there's a pretty good reason for that it takes more work to write self voicing applications you have to add the self voicing to each application individually and it is application specific so extra work duplication of effort the advantage is that the application has more context about the data that it's processing and the task it is performing than an external screen reader ever will and it can thereby a self voicing system can thereby use that context to provide a more fluent and useful spoken feedback I'm going to display some of that here in the demonstration that I'm going to do and alright so the demonstration that I'm going to do today is I want to demonstrate me essentially writing some Python code and I'm not going to write anything complicated just a very trivial hello world program but I'm going to use two systems I'm going to use a self voicing system that I use for writing Python pretty regularly it's a an extension to the emacs editor called emacs speak and I'm also going to show me writing the same segment of Python with a text editor called nano in a screen reader and it will be a pretty good comparison in contrast of the two systems and so without further ado here I'm going to open a file here we go okay just the standard shebang line here okay so I type def main I'm going to write this as a function because it shows it showcases one of the aspects of emacs that I really appreciate and so I type def main open paren and then close paren and when I hit the close paren emacs speak helpfully told me which what parenthesis the closing paren matched and I'll show that again here it says matches def main very useful here I'm going to introduce an extraneous paren here mismatched parenthesis my system oh so helpfully tells me this proves really useful when editing anything with parenthesis works equally well for braces and curly brackets and all kinds of things so I will um backspace over that and let's go to the next line and emacs oh so helpfully indents my line for me and I'll type print hello hello world okay so now when I read the line I just wrote it says indent for print hello world it tells me how many spaces are at the front of the line very useful especially things like the parenthesis matching and the speaking of indentation and so forth I find it is possible to write python without this and without these features but I much prefer this environment um let's see here so for a little demonstration of nano I will log into a new terminal here and fire up nano yeah you don't want to hear the basic help either do I okay okay there's my shebang line again deaf main of course I hear no nothing around the parenz I don't know what matches with what I mean of course I know that because I just wrote it I know what but my screen reader doesn't try to or try to give me any help here let's go on to the next line and okay so I typed print hello world I'll try and read that line here it doesn't tell me how much indentation I have but of course I can get it to do that which I'll do now okay so it says five and it says print hello world I also have my punctuation settings low which I didn't mean to do but it says five telling me that this line starts at column five so that column five with one base numbering is the first column that contains non-white space you can certainly write python this way I've done it many times we'll do it again but like I said I really love my Emax environment there so let's move on and talk about some of the tools I use from day to day so communications tools the nice thing about open source communications protocols is about standard protocols I should say is you bring your own client email of course I live in Emax so I use something that's built into Emax it's called the news it is actually a news reader it's been around for some years it's a news reader for use net and I use that because at the time I needed something that was both a mail reader and a use net client so I've been using the same thing for 15 years I've customized it pretty heavily and once you've invested quite a bit of time into something you kind of stick with it for IRC again I use something built into Emax called ERC IRC client and again I've customized that quite heavily so let's see for voice we tend to use the plain old phone system and we use signal most of that I do with my cell phone I don't actually use any computer based voice stuff as a rule I use my phone for communicating I think smart phones are a real game changer for people who are blind and the reason is if you go out and you buy an iDevice or you buy an android device today it comes with a built-in screen reader it is accessible out of the box and you just need to enable the feature which is pretty easy to do you can do it as a blind person not hard so yeah I can't speak highly enough of smart phones I'd say for documentation we use a lot of media wiki all of our customer facing documentation is on the wiki I like media wiki because it works with links still the old text mode web browser it's been around for 25 years or more actually I think more media wiki still works with that and so a lot of times I will fire up links point links to use emacs client as my editor and I will edit wiki pages in emacs instead of trying to edit in a text field text area that's pretty convenient for me ticketing systems I think ticketing systems are pretty much a problem in open source making them accessible to the blind it's not hard and I've worked with a number of them that are more or less accessible I've used let's see track bugzilla this isn't open source but github's issue tracker I've certainly used and in fact I wrote my own command line utility to act as a client for github's issue tracker and I could do that because github provides a very complete thorough going API I really appreciate that but at work for my work we use RT and the thing I love about RT is it provides multiple user interfaces it does have a web interface I find the web interface quite usable as web interfaces go it's really good what I typically use those email typically when I'm handling support requests I am sending email messages back and forth there is also a command line tool which is fairly complete a command line tool that goes along with RT and I use that too quite heavily for instance making changes to tickets if I need to update the status on a ticket or change some field like the subject or merge it with another ticket I typically use a command line tool for that that comes with RT but I can't speak enough of that software it's proved to be a really good issue tracker for us pain points I've had a few one of the things I work on as part of my job is we provide distribution images of various Linux distros or BSD operating systems that people can install on their VPS because we sell virtual private servers so I typically produce those distribution images these days I do the do the building and testing and so on and so forth a lot of that testing involves comparing data sets because I run images and I install them and do various things with them and make logs and I compare those logs against logs from previous releases so it's a basically a problem of comparing two large data sets and finding differences you know finding differences that will indicate issues with the release at first found it quite a daunting amount of data to deal with some of the differences there's a lot of repetition you know for instance the logs contain things that are not really useful and in fact throw me off like time stamps the time stamps will totally throw off any comparison I do so I wrote scripts for that help me deal with those kinds of problems I take the data and do some massaging of it with these scripts and then I could compare the massage data and that's worked out really well in practice one kind of diff problem that I haven't found a really good solution for and I would love for somebody to point one out to me if it exists but occasionally two files I need to do not just a line by line diff but I need to go intra line as it were I need to find differences with inline like I will give an example the other day I was comparing two files they had remarkably similar lines but they differed by one character and it happened to be a comma that was buried way down in the middle of the line several dozen probably more than 100 characters into the line I couldn't hear the difference it would be really wonderful if I could find a tool that would let me find those differences easier there's a visual diff tool called meld that's pretty good that can find those kinds of things but I haven't found a textual one other problems I've encountered occasionally I get a request where somebody will send me a screenshot support request and there'll be like my vps doesn't work here's what I see on the screen and I sometimes try to run those through OCR I haven't had much luck with that I'm hopeful but I haven't had a lot of luck with that maybe I just point out what the problem is and ask them if they could please send their output in an alternative format and we work our way through it but it's a little unfortunate that screenshots are so much of a problem kind of an example of something that was fairly easily fixed the BIOS on server motherboards I interact with those when I'm configuring a new server for instance and they're provided over a serial console one issue I had was some of these BIOS were printing ornamentation characters with the high bit set and that was really confusing either my terminal or my screen reader or both I could never quite figure out which we fixed a lot of that by just switching everything to the vt100 terminal type and so it's kind of nice when you can just change a simple setting and have things work yeah I think we touched a little bit on graphs any kind of graph data, time series data there's not really a great solution for representing that other than looking at the actual numbers that's probably the best we can do now it would be nice if some of that could be represented like in an audio form we've talked about different ways to do that perhaps using pitch or loudness of audio or beats per minute to represent changes in state for instance but nothing really concrete here and we would love to know if anybody knows of any work in this field I'd like to talk a little bit about overall some best practices either when looking for software that's accessible or when writing it the one thing I'll say is text is usually accessible out of the box it usually is pretty much 99% of the time so most of what I'm going to say here applies to GUI screen readers and to the web I would say the hands down biggest mistake people make accessibility wise is not labeling controls or user interface elements so for instance you'll be going through different elements and find an unlabeled button you have no idea what it does this is easy to fix and it's the most common accessibility faux pas and probably the easiest to fix I'd say if you're writing GUI applications you should look at the higher level toolkits like GTK and QT5 unfortunately GTK will give you accessibility on Linux it's not GTK apps are not accessible on Windows unfortunately that's really sad how it's often hit or miss choosing technology something we've discovered here recently there's a new technology that's being used to write applications called Electron and Electron apps are essentially web applications that are essentially written as web applications and basically they embed a copy of the Chrome web browser into the application unfortunately at least on Linux these aren't accessible yet I hope that will change but that's how accessibility it often seems like it's hit or miss and it's a moving target but for now I have to avoid anything written with Electron which includes for instance the signal desktop app I'd say web accessibility I'd like to talk a little bit about that it's not really my area of expertise but what I will say about it is there are standards here from the W3C there is a W3C web accessibility initiative sometimes called the ARIA standards and I want to make people aware that these things exist we have links to them on our slides I'd also say that in a lot of cases making your application keyboard accessible gets you most of the way there to making something usable by a blind person with a screen reader keyboard accessibility is probably 90% of it probably the ultimate thing to avoid I've seen a lot of web designers essentially re-implement standard HTML widgets slash controls using JavaScript so for instance I've totally seen people re-implement a select box using JavaScript that usually doesn't turn out well not for accessibility so I can't really say don't use JavaScript I can say please try not to abuse JavaScript try to use it wisely and with that I will send the floor back to Sarah OK so I'm going to talk a little bit about other disabilities just because well in this case we happen to hire somebody who is blind but maybe there had been something else so with dyslexia apparently screen readers can help with dyslexia I did not know this until I started looking but OK that's good to know but there's something out there to help people single handed input it looks like you can have you can buy a special keyboard for one handed input it's about $500 I think that there may be some work to do this with software too just have a separate layout for keyboardless input obviously there's voice input but if for some reason that isn't adequate there are mice for feet which apparently are actually geared towards dentists but you could use them for other purposes there's also a device called a sip and puff which you use with your mouth and you could use those to operate a on-screen keyboard or you could use it with there's something called Dasher which I saw many years ago and you can still install it but I'm not sure if it's very usable that's designed for faster text input then with color blindness I think most people do actually think about this but just in case you forgot use something in addition to color to indicate differences and then low vision I would say is actually you handle very differently from blindness in that you should let people set their own color schemes and then there's also typically built in magnifiers to the operating system and just to summarize if you haven't been thinking about it now is a great time to start thinking about accessibility because the things that you might do to allow an accessible client will help you with your other software and the hiring pool is really tight right now there's people are really busy so open up your pool get more contributors have more potential candidates all standard application tools the flavor of the month may not be compatible but there are things out there you will be able to find something that works programming even something that uses significant white space like python completely doable with a screen reader and if it was you have concerns about something other than blindness there are other affordances out there too so I would like to give a special thanks to Allison who is in the audience because I think she may have kind of helped move this through the people running scale to get us here Kate Diebel who pointed out to me that screen readers are also used with dyslexia and then a special thanks to the FOSC accessibility maintainers who are too numerous for us to list here and any questions so okay I'm just going to actually come down here and let people hold the microphone themselves so thank you I guess this question goes mostly for William as someone who is of course blind and using speak up and all that stuff the nowadays if you run into a website that you do well you can't even most of the time email the webmaster because of the javascript for one thing and second of all the who is that I used to use to get the domain owners address they've disabled most of that now it just gives you go daddy or some ridiculous thing that's not even affiliated with who they are so you can't even access it and then if you do they don't respond anymore back in the 90s it was very common you write them oh I can't use your website it says frame one, frame two oh sure use our no frames version they were very good about it now uh-uh so the other thing is PDF files or disaster whether you send them to Robo Braille to convert them where you convert them yourself the layout just isn't good enough oh those are all really excellent points I don't know if you had a question per say but those are those are really awesome points I appreciate you for making them more questions I'm just curious what it's like reading code as opposed to writing your own code if I read code I don't read it from the beginning serially I would maybe read the function signatures and the function names I wouldn't start just reading say the header files I guess I think when I look at a lot of documents it's very common that serially starting from the beginning and going all the way through to the end is not how I process them I wonder if you're just accustomed to processing really or maybe you have a way of skipping to the main point and browsing around the way people who have that choice to yeah I would say reading code linear like that starting at the beginning and ending at the end is definitely the exception not the rule even for me it's a very non-linear process with plenty of jumping around trying to read in an actual code base even for me that's a really hard question to answer solidly it's like you just do it how do you do it lots of jumping around am I very carefully very carefully I mean you know any screen reader or speech system is going to provide you with navigation commands okay I use I use regular expression search quite a bit I also skim I will listen to part of a thing and just kind of skim my way through it sometimes that ends up shooting me in the foot but I do a lot of skimming I do a lot of a lot of regular expression search so on yeah, other questions I just had a question about a program that's on Windows it's a Dragon naturally speaking and I was just wondering if there's it's used for speech attacks this morning if there's anything available on Linux now that you know like Dragon or something the program that you mentioned I think yeah I know speech to text does exist for Linux as a thing there's a thing called the Sphinx Toolkit I can't really claim much experience I think I did like do some of the packaging for that I helped with some of the packaging for it one time for one of the distros but I've never actually used it so I can't say what shape it's in I think you have to train it with samples from your voice or something but it's not really something you need if you're blind because if you're blind a lot of us learn to touch type but it is certainly something you know that would be indispensable for somebody with some kind of other disability that prevents them from using a keyboard blindness certainly in and of itself does not prevent that if I may add to the gentleman's question there's an open source project called Mycroft AI I forget the name of the speech engine speech recognition engine used in it but I've watched it in debug mode and it is just amazing how accurate it is at translating speech to text so you can start there and kind of drill down and you'll find it and that was actually the question I was going to ask you, William have you used Mycroft AI and if so, do you find it useful in any way? I have not tried Mycroft AI I probably should but no I have not I've heard of it and it's one of those things I just heard of recently in fact so I don't know how new it is yes any other questions in my years as a web developer I used to try to champion accessibility and it used to be easier because it's something that could be sold to the people who are coughing up the money for websites to be redesigned that if we made accessibility a priority then really at the same time we were achieving all the goals of SEO if we decided it was accessible to screen readers then at the same time being made accessible to Googlebot and other search bots but we can't really make that argument anymore because now Googlebot and other bots can parse JavaScript and all this dynamic content and I've tried putting the pressure on by talking about legal requirements in the ADA and the WCAG guidelines which spell out the prescriptive recommendations but you know short enough that a developer can sit down and read them in about an hour it's not like it's just TMI but the main problem is that no one wants to pay for it Fortune 500 companies who have enormous budgets for this do not prioritize it I've found maybe two clients in this category ever in my 10 years of developing who had any kind of consideration and these are companies like HP who have 400 page you know style guides if they don't have a document like that they will not even think about it Do you have any specific questions or just a comment I wish I did have you know some sort of you know ray of hope to offer but it's something that I'm worried about and this gentleman was you know expressing his concern about yeah it's a very good point you know I don't really know what to do about it it's part of why I'm actually standing up here on this platform giving this talk because I'm a really shy kind of retiring person but I want people to be aware that you know that accessibility is a thing and that I can do a job that I can do my job and I want people thinking about it and I don't have any answers but I I know exactly the problem you're dealing with because it's part of my lived experience Hi I was really surprised when you gave the demo of yourself coding it how quickly your screen reader was giving you information like it was definitely too quick for me to parse so I'm curious when you first started using screen readers were you able to use that quickly or did you have to get trained up and also just in general do you have any tips for if there are people who are having to use screen reader technology because of failing vision so that they're new to it do you have any tips for figuring out like how best to use it oh man I'm sorry we had this discussion earlier and I never mentioned and I have in several run-throughs of this talk but I've been blind since birth the first computer I used was an Apple IIe back in the early 90s and so I don't remember really how I learned to use this screen reader but it was a very gradual process with lots of just kind of training on the go yeah I've kind of grown into the technology for somebody who's losing their vision I mean there are tutorials out there but I don't know what this date of those are and that's a really good point especially for Linux I think we in the accessibility community and me because I have worked on some of these things some of these projects maybe we should consider doing some kind of tutorial series for people to help onboard them I think there used to be more of that some of that kind of faded away but yeah I learned through experience if that answers your question at all and maybe the next time we're here or the next video you'll see from us will be a tutorial on how you get started with screen readers so with that I believe that we're a little bit over time thank you so much everybody for coming and listening to us talk about accessibility


And then turn it over to Bill Graven. Thank you, Nick. Hi, everyone. I'm Bill Graven from York County Audubon. And on behalf of myself and our board, we're delighted to have this program be presenting this program tonight. I have a quick item to start with. This is a first. We have not done this before. But I have a little promo to include. Each year, for several years now, our former board member, Marie Jordan, who's a wonderful birder and photographer, has been producing a calendar incorporating photos that she's taken of birds locally during the prior year. And then during our usually at our November meeting, she has donated a good number of these calendars to York County Audubon. And we sell them at our November meeting that we would normally hold at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm. But of course, we're not able to do that in person this year. So we came up with a way to do it by mail order. And what we're talking about is this calendar right here. Excuse me a second. This is a desk calendar. Hopefully you can see it. Let me make myself larger so that I can see it. This is it's in a plastic container. And it opens up to form a desk calendar. Has some beautiful images like these ones from 2020. This is an Osprey, some snow geese, and a beautiful Kate May Warbler. So if you're interested, information on how to order this is available on our website, yourcountyaudubon.com. The cost is $10. The proceeds go to your county Audubon, $10 plus postage. Great to put on your desk or dresser or anywhere or as a gift. So if you're interested, please check it out on our website. Thank you very much. And now on to tonight's program. We're delighted to have with us tonight, Zach Kleiver, who will be presenting a program on narwhals, as you know. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya, but grew up in Eastport, Maine, which probably not too many people who were born in Nairobi grew up in Eastport. I think that was a limited group of people, I bet. He's a graduate of College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and has worked for 30 years as a whale watch naturalist, guiding whale and seabird watching tours on the Gulf of Maine and around the world. During that time, he's led over 3,000 trips. So we are delighted to have him here tonight. I will mention also that at the end of the program, we'll be having a Q&A session. So if you have any questions during the course of the program, just click on the Q&A button at the lower center of the screen and type them in at any time. And we'll do our best to get answers at the end. So with that, welcome to everyone. And Zach, delighted to have you here tonight. Okay, well, thank you so much, Bill and Nick. And it's a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much for this opportunity to share my interests and this project that I've been working on for a couple of years now, which my presentation today is based on a book that I am in the process of writing. So if anyone that is listening has any constructive feedback and would like to reach me or any ideas, I'm very open to that and would love to hear from you. The best place to find me is through my business website which is Blue Planet Strategies. If you go to Blue Planet Strategies, you can look up my contact information there. So again, thank you so much and we'll get going here. Okay, well, when Dave Doubleday contacted me from York County Audubon to speak, we had a phone call and then we had some emails and I gave him some options for presentations I could do. And we went back and forth and finally he got back to me and he said, okay, this sounds great, let's hear about your book and we'd like you to speak on November 17th. And then I said, sure, and then I realized, well, that's my mother's birthday. So I would like to dedicate this presentation to her. My mom's name was Joan Karen Dazman. She grew up in California and she was a great inspiration for me to love nature and animals. The presentation today is the Narwhals Tusk, the 10 most remarkable marine mammal adaptations. Number 10 is the Narwhals Tusk. There are over 4,000 religions in the world, most of which provide enlightenment as to how life on earth came into being. Science too gives us an explanation through the mechanism of natural selection, a process of sometimes slow, sometimes fast and punctuated change in random adaptation. However, if you ask what was before God, religion has no final answer. And if you ask what was before the Big Bang, science cannot tell you. We live in a vast and in many ways unknown and mysterious universe. Therefore, it is incredible that we share the earth with an animal that has a tusk on its head. Well, actually not a tusk, but a canine tooth that projects out from the left side of the upper jaw and lip. This tooth forms a spiral helix that is between five and 10 feet long and found on all male narwhals and also 15% of the females. The picture on the left is the throne chair of Denmark made with narwhal tusks in the year 1662 and found today in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Narwhals Tusk is the source of the story of the unicorn. Polar author and photographer Fred Brumer wrote in the narwhal unicorn of the sea. The Vikings hunted the narwhal and also obtained tusks in trade from Arctic natives. They sold these tusks as unicorn horns and said as little as possible about their true origin. Traders carried the tusks to Europe and the Middle East to China and Japan. At the peak of its prestige and popularity, unicorn horn was worth 10 times its weight in gold and for large horns, rulers paid what in today's terms would be millions of dollars. So why would a whale have a tusk-like tooth 10 feet long? The leading theory holds that the tusk defines a male's social rank and helps females in picking a mate that is mature, healthy, and dominant. In fact, males are occasionally observed using their tusks for jousting with two tusks crossed over like swords making loud clacking sounds. Interestingly, about one in every 500 males has two tusks. If one tusk attracts females, then what about two? Do the rare double-tust male narwhals get more dates? Another explanation came in 2016 when drone footage showed narwhals appearing to use their tusks to tap and stun fish, making the fish easier to catch. Also, recent anatomical research suggests that the tusk may have adapted to serve as a dual or additional purpose as a sensory organ. Anatomists have discovered that throughout the tusk outer layer, there are channels that allow seawater to enter a layer of dentine that contains small tubes. These tubes run to the innermost part of the tusk to an area known as the pulp, pictured in the diagram as the large white core around the dark hollow mill. The pulp is full of blood vessels and millions of nerve endings that run down to the base of the narwhals tusk and directly to the brain. In this way, the tusk could be a sensory organ used to identify the amount of salt and other chemicals in the ocean and aid them in understanding their ocean environment. This is my friend and colleague, Kate Lomac McNair who worked with me in Bar Harbor as a naturalist in the early 2000s. She is now an accomplished whale scientist who has worked on projects around the world, has received a master's degree studying blue whales and is completing a PhD. In the summer of 2015, Kate was chosen to be one of 58 scientists that were part of the Peterman expedition to Greenland. They traveled aboard this ship, the Odin, a Swedish research ship and icebreaker. This is a picture from the bridge that shows Kate's observer station from where she was responsible for locating and identifying all marine mammals. Additional research involves seismic data acquisition, multi-beam mapping, ice coring and seismic reflection profiling. The Peterman glacier sits atop Greenland. The research focus was the study of the central role of the Peterman glacier in climate change and to understand more about the potential pathways of relative warmer water influx towards the many outlet glaciers. The Peterman glacier sits at a critical location in the Greenland ice sheet and has decreased by one third in size in recent years. In 2010, a piece broke off Peterman that was 100 square miles that scientists named the Peterman ice island. They followed it for years as it tracked south all the way to Newfoundland. Scientists believe that understanding the history of the Peterman glacier will help in estimating the rate of sea ice loss and sea level rise. Climatologists have shown that during the last 45 years, the summer Arctic sea ice has decreased by more than 40%. Scientists are predicting that at the present rate of loss we could lose all summer Arctic sea ice in the next 30 to 50 years. For Narwhal, the ice is shelter. The ice is home. The shifting ice protects Narwhal families from their two greatest natural threats, human hunters and mammal-eating orca. Narwhal normally moved north with the summer ice to protect its sounds that are nursery areas for their young. With the loss of ice, orcas have been observed following them into the sounds and hunting down whole pods of narwhals. Present population estimates suggest there are 50 to 200,000 narwhals in the Arctic. What will the cumulative impact of the loss of ice be on them? It's an unknown and open question. Having only recently unraveled some of the mystery of the Narwhal's tusk, we are changing the world's climate to a point that may be unraveling the Narwhal's home. Number nine, the flipper of the humpback whale. Humpback whales are a whale watch favorite. They can be curious and playful. They spy hop, slap their tails, lift their tails when diving and they jump called breaching. A great place to see lots of humpback whales is in Alaska. Alaska is so big that most people fly from place to place. They have 16 times the number of planes per capita as the lower 48 states. A few years ago, an Alaskan float plane was taking off from the ocean and just got airborne when a humpback whale jumped out of the water directly in front of it. They just missed each other and it was nearly a mid-air crash between a plane and a whale. There is one adaptation of humpback biology that genuinely sets them apart from all other whale species. No other whale has flippers as long as the humpback proportionally to their body. The average length is nine to 13 feet and the record length is 20 feet for each flipper. These flippers appear to allow the humpback to fly through the ocean on wings. In fact, the scientific name is Magaptra novionglie, mega meaning big, terra meaning winged and novionglie meaning New Englander or big winged New Englander. Their flipper is very similar to your arm. They have many of the same bones including the scapula, humerus, ulna, radius and carpals. They also have four fingers with extra knuckles that both help lengthen the flippers and make them more rigid and not flexible like ours. The leading edge of the flipper has tubercles or bumps. On average, there are between nine to 11 tubercles with the first and fourth being the largest. In 1988, a professor of biology named Frank Fish, I'm not kidding, wandered into a gallery with sculptures of wildlife. Upon seeing the tubercles on the flipper's leading edge of the humpback artwork, he thought it must be a mistake. He was stunned when he was learned that it wasn't. Why would the flipper be shaped like this? Why not a straight leading edge that would help cut through the water and be more hydrodynamic and efficient? I had the pleasure of meeting Frank at a marine mammal conference and talking to them to him. And he told me he put it in a request to the Smithsonian for a humpback whale flipper. A few years later, they called to say a young humpback had washed up on the shore and to bring an electric saw and come get the flipper.  Eventually, he and colleagues produced exact replica models of the flipper and received permission to test them in a Navy wind tunnel in Annapolis, Maryland that is used to test wing design efficiency. During the testing, they discovered the humpback flipper is the most efficient wing design with the least drag ever tested at low wind speeds. Drag was reduced by 32% and lift increased by 8%. The bumps along the leading edge channel the water flow so that it speeds up and creates greater lift, providing an angle of attack 40% steeper than a straight edge. This means the whale can tilt its flippers at a high angle without stalling when banking and turning while chasing fish. Frank's research team immediately took out a patent on the humpback whale flipper. Prototypes of wind turbine blades adding the tubercle type edge have been shown to be up to twice as efficient, more stable, quieter and as durable as conventional blades. Industrial ceiling fans, mimicking the whale flipper are 20% more efficient while circulating airflow better. This flipper design is also being explored for use on boat rudders, submarine propeller blades, water turbines for hydro power, airplane helicopters and surfboard skis. This fascinating field of engineering and science where you take designs inspired from nature and apply them to human causes is called biomimicry. The number eight, the longevity of the bowhead whale. The bowhead whale lives in the Arctic and subarctic oceans. For this reason, it is also known as the Greenland right whale. It can reach a length of 60 feet and weigh over 200,000 pounds. They are called the bowhead whale because of the bowed lower jaw, but really it's the upper jaw along with the skull that is most impressive as together they form a battering ram that allows bowheads to break through thick ice. Inuit claim up to two feet thick. Bowheads are world record holders in many regards. Their tails can be 25 feet wide, which are the widest of any whale. They have the longest baleen of any whale up to 14 feet. They have the thickest blubber of any whale at 17 to 20 inches. And they live longer than any other whale. More on that in a moment. This is my friend and colleague, Sasha Erdle, who worked as a naturalist with me and then went on to work for the Chucks He Sea Environmental Studies Program. This was a long-term research program funded by Shell, Statoil and Tonico Oil to survey the Chucks He Sea environment with hopes of drilling for oil that recently came to an end a few years ago when Shell pulled out. For many years, Sasha would annually fly to Wainwright, Alaska and board a ship to conduct marine mammal and seabird surveys. Wainwright has a population of 550 mostly Eskimo people and every house has a team of sled dogs and Sasha says the dogs bark a lot and are not very friendly. Wainwright have been hunting bowhead for 4,000 years and today are allowed to kill between 25 and 40 annually for food along the North slope of Alaska. A wildlife biologist named Craig George who works for Alaska Wildlife has had a career of studying the bowhead whales, the Eskimos kill. During the 80s and 90s, at least six whales were taken by whalers that were then found with jade or ivory harpoon heads as shrapnel in their body. The last time the Eskimos claim they had used implements to hunt like these were in the 1870s as they had switched to metal harpoons when the Yankees, Yankee whalers arrived. This led George to think the bowhead whales with these artifacts might be incredibly old. Now, some baleen whales can be aged through a waxy ear plug that takes it on annual growth rings like the ring of a tree. However, deciding what counts as a ring or a year can be difficult and for the bowhead, it seems impossible. So George turned to Scripps Institute in California who have the ability to age any mammal using an amino acid group found in the lens of the eye. The lens of the eye is made up of dozens of layers of protein, much like an onion laid down over the mammal's life. By measuring the ratio of right to left-handed amino acids and knowing the rate they have been laid down, scientists can age mammals with accuracy and a small margin of error. Scientists in the early 2000s aged 42 bowhead whales using this amino acid dating and were surprised to find one whale that was 135 years old. They also found one that was 159. And one of the whales was an amazing 172, but that's not the end. One bowhead whale taken in Wainwright, Alaska was aged at 211. This study was completed in 2006, which means that that whale would have been born when George Washington was president of the United States. In July, 2016, I was hired by Sasha and the Chukchi Project to work as a marine mammal observer on a vessel traveling from Gnome, Alaska, up into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. We were sent to conduct multi-beam side scan sonar to find and collect a dozen truck-sized anchors that had been placed in the sea to anchor off drilling rigs testing for oil. It was within sight of Barrow, Alaska, now known as Ute Ka Guvik that I saw my first bowhead whale, a remarkable moment in life for me. During that trip, I would witness ice flows jam-packed with Wallace, hundreds of ice seals, and dozens of gray whales feeding along the Arctic pack ice. You're never really prepared to see a polar bear in the wild, but we did see many magnificent polar bears and some of them up close. This one was photographed one morning a few miles from me from the bridge of another vessel working with us. My first sighting was a big male swimming in the Beaufort Sea. He immediately stopped side scan sonar work as the male came right at us and swam right down the side of the vessel with no fear. This big magnificent male proceeded to climb up on an ice flow. He was truly awesome. He was powerful, determined, and radiating confidence. He paused to smell the air as he was downwind of us. He turned and went away and I watched him through my binoculars as he swam and climbed over ice flows. Within 10 minutes of first sighting him, he was a mile away and a blip on the horizon. In the mornings, I rose early and went out on the deck to scan the ice flows from horizon to horizon. It was here in the silence of the shifting ice and the beautiful pink soft light that I had an epiphany. This, this is the original cold war. Bears have been hunting seals and seals have been fleeing from bears for 150,000 years. Our cold war was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and the respective allies that lasted 44 years, a blip in time. We humans can be so myopic and self-focused. Yet here in the ice, these species are locked in the original and never-ending cold war, graced with remarkable adaptations that give each the opportunity to survive. Number seven, the diving ability of the Southern Elephant Seal and Cuvier's Beak Whale. The South Pole is twice the size of Australia. It has an average ice cover of over one mile thick and has 70% of the world's fresh water. Visiting Antarctica is like going to another planet. It is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth. If you go, you will surely stop and land on sub-antarctic islands or South Georgia and see male Southern Elephant Seals, which are the largest seals on Earth. I have had a chance to encounter Southern Elephant Seals when I worked as a guide on eco tours going to Antarctica. Large elephant seals can reach lengths of 16 feet and weigh over 6,000 pounds. Having a big body means they need to eat a lot and elephant seals spend upwards of 80% of their lives in the ocean diving deep in search of fish and squid. Adaptations that allow them to do so include blood-rich in hemoglobin and muscle-rich in myoglobin, which allow them to store tremendous amounts of air before diving deep. Elephant seals are known to have the highest blood volume of any mammal and with it have a larger proportion of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Their average dives are one to 2,000 feet and typically 20 minutes for females and 60 minutes for males. However, the record is 7,835 feet and two hours. That is the equivalent of five and a half times the size of the Empire State Building. Elephant seals can hold their breath longer than any other non-whale mammal on Earth while they search for the bioluminescent organs of deep sea squid that are their preferred prey. In 2011, a member of the Rare Tribe of Deep Diving Pelagic Whales joined the Guinness Book of World Records. The Cuvier's Beak or Boost Beaked Whale is the most cosmopolitan of the Beaked Whales and grows to 16 to 23 feet and up to 5,000 pounds. Researchers off California track one that go for two hours and 17 minutes and to a depth of 9,816 feet. This year, researchers from Duke tagged a Cuvier's Beaked Whale off North Carolina that stayed underwater for a remarkable three hours and 42 minutes. Cuviers also have the capacity to store oxygen-rich blood and they rely on the marine mammal diving reflex. Reflex works in this way. At a certain point, their flexible ribs collapse around the lungs and force all the air out of the lungs into the head and throat. At this point, they stop the exchange of blood into their lungs, which would lead to nitrogen, narcosis, or the bends. Their heart rate may slow to 8 to 12 beats per minute so they use less oxygen. They also have evolved bradycardiae, an intricate system of veins and arteries that cut off blood flow when stressed for oxygen and send it to where it is most needed, the muscles that get them back up to the surface and to their brain. These incredible physiological adaptations could only have evolved over millions of years of diving and changes in their bodies leading to greater streamlining, thicker bone structure, and a tolerance for withstanding immense pressure. Number six, sperm whale echolocation. The sperm whale has got to be in the discussion for the world's most remarkable animal on earth. The star of Moby Dick is also the largest predator on earth. Their populations, stocks, tribes, pods, and individuals are found in all the world's deep water oceans. They form matriarchal pods with female leaders that both have complex language and culture. The scientific name is feister macrosephalus, meaning blowpipe or blowhole big head.  The earliest human lineage dates back five to seven million years ago. Sperm whales have been on earth in their present shape and form for 22 million years, which means if you arrived here from another planet 15 million years ago looking for intelligent life, you would have found no humans, but you would have found sperm whales. If you wanna see sperm whales, one of the best places to see them is in Kayakora, New Zealand. For 25 years I dreamed of going there as I heard many stories from my whale watching passengers who had been there. In Kayakora, the whale watching companies are Maori owned and operated. And here the mountains are more than a mile high and the Kayakora Canyon, a coastal canyon, is two thirds of a mile deep. In this case, my expectations were surpassed. Sitting atop the sperm whale skull is positioned a large complex of organs filled with a liquid mixture of fats and waxes called spermaceti. A large male could yield 500 gallons of sperm oil which was prized as a lubricant in machinery for oil lamps and to make smokeless candles. The organ complex and oil are an adaptation that aid in the production of powerful and focused clicking sounds which this sperm whale uses for both communication and echolocation. They produce a blast of sound through a pair of large lips found below the entrance to the blowhole in the head that send the sound traveling back through the head case through the oil chamber to reflect off the frontal sac in the front of the skull.  The sperm whale's clicking vocalizations may be as loud as 230 decibels. Making it the loudest sound produced by any animal. This sound is used to stun their prey which include deep sea sharks, squid and giant squid species. Giant and colossal squid can range in size to upwards of 40 to 50 feet in length and may weigh up to 1500 pounds. So one can imagine that some monumental battles have taken place between sperm whales and squid deep in the ocean on dark moonless nights. Number five, the size of a blue whale. Blue whales are the largest animals to ever live on earth. They can be 110 feet in length and weigh as much as three to 400,000 pounds. To give you a sense of scale if we lined up eight to 11 school buses each with 50 high school students that is about the weight of a blue whale. This picture of a blue whale's tail is one I took in Baja, Mexico where I sometimes lead trips to see blue whales during February and March with a company I started called Fluke's. The tail of a blue whale can be 24 feet wide which is the width of a professional soccer net. A blue whale can eat eight to 16,000 pounds of krill in a day. That is more than 40 million krill and they have a tongue that can weigh thousands of pounds and is so big an African elephant would have room to stand on it. Baja and the Sea of Cortez are a phenomenal place to see blue whales in calm, clear water. Seeing a blue whale up close is both mind boggling and completely exhilarating at the same time. Personally, on blessed occasions when I have been close to a blue whale, I feel joy and awe and I feel profoundly connected to an ocean and universe that could create and nourish such an amazing life. The first time I saw the breath of a blue whale I knew it was instantly. No whale has a blow as big, a blow that can be 30 to 40 feet high. Long time renowned whale scientist, Roger Payne had been studying whales for 20 years when he encountered his first blue whale. He said, it was so big compared to other whales it made me feel like I had never even seen a whale before. On my most recent trip to Baja, my guests saw a special sightie, a mother and calf. A baby blue whale weighs 6,000 pounds at birth and is 20 to 27 feet in length. During the first few months of their life they can drink 100 gallons of milk a day and grow 200 pounds a day. We also saw a whale named Nubbin. Nubbin is the oldest known blue whale who was first photographed off California by a sport fisherman in 1970. Already physically mature, which would add at least five to seven years to his life. This suggests he was born between 1963 to 1965 and is in the age of 55 to 57 years. When whales dive, they leave enormous footprints on the surface of the ocean. These are created by the movement of their tail up and down as they dive. The fast moving water being pushed to the surface with each stroke of their tails. Now blue whales are so big that they are constantly shedding skin as they swim. And after a dive, you can go into the footprint and see small flecks of skin floating to the surface. One day when we were with Nubbin, after he dove, we edged the boat over to the footprint and sure enough, I was able to reach down, pick up a small fleck of blue skin from the water and hold a piece of the oldest known living blue whale on earth in my hand. Number four, gray whale migration. In Baja, on the days the wind blows and the sea builds on the Sea of Cortez, we drive across the peninsula, the opposite side, to Magdalena Bay and the sheltered lagoons to go gray whale watching. Gray whales spend the winter months in the lagoons behind barrier islands, mating and giving birth to their young. It was here that whalers discovered them and nearly drove them to extinction through whaling. They called them devil fish because they fought so hard once they were harpooned. When not harpooned, it turns out they are an ocean angel and can be very friendly. Here, you can see one playing at the surface with its mouth open showing its baleen. In the 1970s, a Mexican fisherman named Pacheco Mayarel was out fishing and had a gray whale swim up to his boat with a calf. He was struck with fear and he didn't know what to do. But after a few minutes, he got up his courage and he reached out and touched the whales. He reported back to his friends and soon he was taking paying customers out to go whale watching and started what is now a multi-million dollar industry in Baja. Through the world's great surprise, many mother gray whales are incredibly friendly with their calves. It is truly a special experience to have an animal so beautiful and big take a personal interest in you. On a trip I led, every one of our guests touched a friendly baby gray whale. At one point, the mother was directly under the boat so I reached over and touched her back. It turns out gray whales feel squishy, like a Nerf football. Eventually in the late winter, many mothers start north with calves and toe for the long five to 6,000 mile migration to British Columbia, Alaska and Russia. It was once thought that there were two distinct populations as shown here, but recent photo ID surveys and satellite tagging are now suggesting that many or most of the Russian gray whales are going to Mexico. Gray whales were hunted out of the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of years ago. However, in 2010 and 13, gray whales showed up again. One was seen off of Israel on May 8th, 2010 and then on May 30th off of Spain. Another was seen off the coast of Nambia in 2013. It is very likely that we will see more of this if the ice in the Arctic keeps melting and the Northwest Passage continues to open up late in the year. Traveling from Mexico to Africa or Israel is about 8,000 miles each way. Migration for gray whales is an amazing adaptation that is a compromise which allows their calves to be born in sheltered warm water and allows the adult to travel back to cold water, nutrient rich feeding grounds. Number three, North Atlantic right whale reproduction. I started feeding and watching birds when I was 11 years old. By the time I went to college, I was committed to becoming an ornithologist. However, as a freshman, I signed up for a Bay of Funday whale watch excursion. That day we saw nine right whales including a mother and calf who swam up and along the side of the boat and a couple of right whales that breached continually and completely out of the water. Since then, I have watched right whales for 35 years. I have seen right whales on dozens of whale watching trips off Maine and described their natural history to thousands of people. I worked for 10 years as a right whale observer between the Carolinas and Florida during the winter months which is the mating grounds for most female right whales. And in 2010-11, I assisted Dr. Mo Brown pictured here in the upper left in conducting winter right whale surveys off the coast of Maine. And on one trip, we saw 35 right whales. Those surveys were a search for the unknown mating ground of the right whales. Right whale mating is a chaotic and crazy event. It starts with a female right whale singing. She sings out her song more like a loud moan and male right whales come swimming in from all directions as fast as possible, about seven miles per hour. Eventually, the males circle the female and start bumping and pushing and jousting for position to mate with her. And the female does everything possible to make sure none of them mate. She rolls over on her back and belly and turns. And it's thought that this is a way to make sure that only the most fit, the adult and strong whales are able to mate with her and not older or younger or weaker mates. Although small populations are expected to lose genetic diversity and this population numbers less than 400, through genetic drift and inbreeding, a number of mechanisms exist that may minimize genetic decline. Genetics has been exposing an option based on fertilization patterns biased toward genetically dissimilar gametes. This pattern is not due to pre-copulatory mate choice but rather genetically dissimilar mates. Instead, this results from post-copulatory selection for gametes that are genetically unsimilar. Tim Frazier's lab at the University of St. Mary's in Halifax has shown this to be true for right whales. And that the long-term implementation is that heterozygosity has slowly increased in calves born as opposed to a slight decline that was expected. Therefore, this adaptation represents a natural means that acts at the level of the gametes through which small populations can mitigate the loss of genetic diversity over time. Number two, the social structure of orca. In recent years, there has been much debate and interest in the diversity of orca populations and their social structures. Presently, there are three types of orca, residents that feed on fish, mostly coastal salmon or herring, transients that feed on marine mammals and discovered in 1988, a third group known as the offshores that feed on fish, skates, and sharks. The three types differ in morphology, ecology, behavior, and genetics. In fact, a recent genetic study suggests that transient orcas separated from all other killer whales approximately 750,000 years ago and represent a separate species which researchers are now calling big killer whale in honor of the pioneering researcher, Michael Big. Bob Pittman works for NOAA out of San Diego and on many research cruises to Antarctica came to realize that there were at least four diverse subspecies or what he and colleagues are calling ecotypes. There is a type A that feeds on minke whales, a type B that hunts whettle seals, a type C that feeds on fish, and an offshore type D with a very small eye patch that also feed on fish. Things get more confusing when you add the two North Atlantic ecotypes. As the Antarctic type A is more similar to the North Atlantic type two than the North Atlantic type one is to the North Atlantic type two. Killer whales are exceptional for their complex societies. Only elephants and higher primates live in comparably complex social structures.  These family groups are based on nature lines consisting of the eldest female matriarch and her sons and daughters and the descendants of her daughters. These matrilineal groups are mostly highly stable. Closely related matrilines form loose aggregations called pods usually consisting of one or four matrilines. Clans, the next level of resident social structure are composed of pods with similar dialects and common but older maternal heritage. The final association layer, perhaps more arbitrarily defined, is called a community and is defined as a set of clans that regularly mingle. Now, an interesting example of the supreme intelligence of Orca comes from the Antarctic ice-loving orcas. Researchers wondered where they went when they disappeared for weeks at a time. So they tagged them with small limpid tags on their fins. Scientists tracked them from space and discovered they regularly leave the pack ice of Antarctica for the warm waters of Brazil and Uruguay. They swim in a straight line. Upon arriving, they stay for a few days and then they swim straight back. Scientists believe these represent periodic maintenance migrations. As all the yellow diatoms and algae that have grown and accumulate on their bodies in cold water fall off in the warm spa-like waters off South America. You can think of this as an Orca having its own version of a car wash. In fact, one tagged individual made a non-stop round trip of over 5,000 miles in just 42 days. Scientists now believe there are 10 or 11 ecotypes and there is much debate as to whether these are separate species or subspecies. Like us, Orca have different languages, dialects, food preferences, behavior, and culture. And number one adaptation is to live sustainably with their environment, the world's oceans. In the 1970s, the theory of Gaia was proposed that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on Earth. I was taught to question this and many biologists still approach this with great caution. While geophysical scientists and biologists will continue to debate the Gaia theory, more recently, many marine mammal scientists have shown that when it comes to whales, the link between their populations and productivity in the oceans and improve conditions for life on land is truly miraculous. It's no surprise that whales eat a lot and therefore that whales go to the bathroom a lot and when they do it is often at the surface when west resting or breathing. Scientists call these foculent fecal blooms. Much of their feces comes from the food they have gathered deeper in the ocean and is rich in nitrogen. The ecosystem scientist, Dr. Joe Roman, has calculated that whales provide more nitrogen than all the rivers combined, some 2,300 metric tons per year. This in turn becomes food for phytoplankton. Phytoplankton provide half the oxygen we breathe and are also incredibly important as food for zooplankton, which are then eaten by huge schools of fish and fish populations increase. Roman says the whales presence can increase nutrients and help fisheries and the health of systems wherever they are found. It's counterintuitive, but around the world, scientists are finding that whales increase fish populations and that plant plankton, which give off oxygen and the whales in turn help capture and sequester carbon from man-made climate change. One of every two breaths you breathe comes from ocean plankton. So even for people living far from the ocean, your lives too are fundamentally connected to the health of whales and the oceans and they are able to live their lives in a sustainable way. What a great example for us. Many passengers on whale watching tours I have led have asked me questions about whale intelligence. I believe all whales have an intelligence about the ocean that we couldn't possibly understand. They must understand things about the currents and storms and life in the deep sea that we can't possibly understand. Whales are ancient and wondrous and deserve our admiration, our protection and our respect. They deserve a healthy, vibrant ocean that is not overfished, polluted and marred by man. Their adaptations show us how remarkable life is. If we protect them and their habitat, they will continue to inspire us and reveal their astonishing adaptations. Thank you. Thank you, Zach. That was great. That was really exceptional. We have a few questions. I'd like to just start by again, by mentioning that if anyone's interested in this desk calendar, please take a look at our website for information on that. And we certainly also encourage you to maintain, to join Maine Audubon slash your County Audubon, your membership is what enables us to continue to do all the work that we do. So thank you for that. The first question I'd like to start with is you mentioned, obviously it's so important to protect these mammals and ocean life. Are there any organizations in particular that you would refer people to that you feel are particularly valuable in the work they do? Yes, there are a lot of wonderful organizations that are doing incredible work on behalf of whale conservation. Some groups that come to mind right away would be Oceana, Whale and Dolphin Society, the International Fund for Animal Welfare. I think the New England Aquarium is a fantastic organization. They are really focused on the protection of the right whale. And that's one of our local and important species. I think the Natural Resources Defense Council, another organization that's terrific. And there's so many, there's a lot of local organizations and wonderful groups doing a lot of really great things. Great question, thank you. Yeah, when you get a chance, if you would email me such a list, I'd be happy to post it on our website. Okay, yes. One question we have that seems to perhaps challenge your assertion that the blue whale is the largest species ever. There's a question referring to the megalodon, which is, I believe, a more recently discovered dinosaur. Are you familiar with that and whether that might be larger than a blue whale? Megalodon, I thought megalodon was a shark. Okay, it may well be. Okay, yeah. My understanding about the megalodon, that it can be up to 50 feet in length. So I think it's still, as far as I know, I'm not aware that any were over 100 feet in length, but if somebody has some information that I'm not aware of, I would love to know that would be quite incredible. I think whales and megalodon were together at the same time and a lot of scientists speculate that megalodon probably was a significant predator that whales had to contend with during that time before they went extinct. Great. How about any comments on the actions that are being taken to protect white, white whales in the Gulf of Maine? Is enough being done? Are the right actions being taken? Wow, that's a great question. And so the population had been increasing slowly for the North Atlantic white whale. At one time they were around 300 back in the 1980s and the population was increasing at a slow rate up until about 2010, so for 30 years. But since 2010, the population has been in a steep decline. So it peaked at about 488. That's what scientists believe roughly or around 500. And now it's dropped. The recent estimate that was just released by the science center suggested that the population in 2019 was somewhere around 366. So the number has gone down quickly in 10 years. And we know the two things that have been, the predominant two reasons why white whales have been, populations have been suffering. We know what they are. They're both human-caused. One is ship strikes and one is entanglement in fishing gear. Because of the tremendous number of white whales that have died in recent years, NOAA has undertaken a rule-making process which has been unfolding over the last couple of years. And that rule is about to be released which could have some very significant impacts on the fishing industry. The rule is focused on fishing, addressing the fishing issue because they found that about 60% of the mortality in the last 20 years has come from entanglements and 40% from shipping. So I think that there's a great opportunity for everyone to pay attention to that rule coming out. And there's going to be anywhere from 45 to 90 days to have an opportunity to write a letter or submit a public comment in support of the conservation. And that would be really fantastic for people listening today. I'd be happy to share information when it becomes available. I can send you, Bill, the release of that rule and information about it if people want to weigh in. But that would be an opportunity to help in the recovery. There's a lot of concern that it's dropping so fast and we really need to correct it with some very strong conservation. We have a question from nine-year-old Summer in Kittybunkport who would like to know what is your favorite marine mammal and why and that their favorite is the bottlenose dolphin because they're very playful. Yes, yes. Well, the picture, I don't know if the picture is still up on the screen I have. Those are bottlenose dolphins from Baja and they are incredible there. They just, they leap and leap incredibly high over the water.  So if you like bottlenose dolphins, that's a place you'll want to put on your list to go is Baja. Well, thank you very much for that question. That's a wonderful question. I've struggled with this question a lot because there's so many admirable things about and so many exciting things about all the different whales but I feel, or in recent years, before I went to Alaska, I started to get the sense that the bowhead whale because of all the incredible things, all the record-breaking things and because of the beautiful environment it lives in would be my favorite whale and then when I saw them in the Arctic, I realized it was. I think there's just something, the longevity of the bowhead and the fact that it lives up in the Arctic, in among the ice and the things it's capable of. It was the last of the very large whales species that for me that are more, I mean, there may be one or two other species that are still out there that I haven't seen but I've seen all the large whales and I think the bowhead is my favorite. Well, that leads right into the next question. Someone was asking what type of whale lives the longest again which was the bowhead but when they tested the eye protein to age them, were these tests done on whales that were deceased? That's correct. These were taken from the whalers that after they died they were, Craig George was there with the research team and they were able to collect the eyeballs immediately and put them in a freezer and then send them to the lab in California to have that work done. That's exactly right. And another question on the right whale in the Gulf of Maine, are they being impacted by climate change? Yeah, and this is a part of the, there's so much to say about them. I didn't address this in the earlier question but what's happened in since 2010 is the water in the Gulf of Maine has been warming faster than any place else on earth and the water, a terrific paper was just published by a gentleman named Nick Bigelow at Bigelow, excuse me, Nick record at Bigelow Labs. And the paper really helped us understand what was happening in the Gulf of Maine. In around 2010, a lot of very warm deep water from the Gulf stream started penetrating the northern part of the Gulf of Maine coming in through the Northeast channel and then warming the Gulf of Maine and this resulted in a decrease in productivity of the ocean in the Gulf of Maine. And that resulted in a decrease in the food that right whales eat, which are copepods. Copepods are a small type of zooplank that look kind of like cocoa pops of cereal and right whales feast on them, take thousands of pounds a day. Well, in the place where they normally would spend a lot of time feeding, it was very productive for them up in the Bay of Funday, this year there were virtually no right whale seen there. In the last 10 years, they vacated and they started to move up into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And because they were moving more and searching more for food, they started encountering more ships and more nets and up in Canada they weren't prepared for them. They hadn't put in all the rules that we had developed here over a long period for slowing ships and addressing entanglement. And in 2017, they had 12 right whales die up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that we know of or probably many more that we don't even know of. So climate change is having a big impact. And I did help host, I organized and hosted a workshop at the World Marine Mammal Conference in Barcelona on the effects of climate change on marine mammals back in December. We had 70 participants, we had 15 speakers and we had people from 24 countries. And it was incredible to hear from all over the world how climate is affecting marine mammals. Their ranges are shifting, species in the north are moving north, species in the south, their ranges are extending south. Some species are doing better, some are losing out, massive heat waves are having an enormous impact in Australia, California, the West Coast. It's truly incredible what's happening with climate change globally and it's the way it's changing the world's oceans. So we really do need to address it. And I think there is an opportunity here where we could help so that the change isn't so rapid that we lose species like the narwhal or the polar bear. Do you have a website that people can follow what you're up to? Yes, thank you. My website is blueplanetstrategy.com. I have an ocean science conservation and consulting business with environmental lawyer and his name is Roger Fleming and we work on ocean conservation work. So yes, you can follow us there and reach out and get in touch with me if I can help you with anything or if you have any questions for me and I would love to hear from you. And any update on timetable for publishing your book? Well, I've decided I would really like to do a lot of work on it this winter. And so I'm very hopeful that I'll have it done by the end of this year and it may be published sometime around Christmas or next year, that's my goal. That's great. And one last question. You've seen so many incredible things. Are there, is there something that you dream of seeing that you haven't seen yet? Yes, great question. To go to, there's still a number of places in the world that I haven't been, you know? And I think travel is so enriching and it's so exciting to see marine mammals all over the world. I'd really like to go to Iceland and I'd really like to go to Japan. I think those are two places that are really rich in marine mammals and the beauty ways. Both of them. Thank you so much for your program here tonight. It was absolutely wonderful. Thank you. Make any closing remarks?  That's fantastic. Thank you so much. This is really intriguing. I want to go out on the water right now. Great. Thank you. Thank you to everyone for joining us here tonight. And we will see you again. We will not have a program in December, but we expect to have one in January. Best wishes to everyone. Catherine asked a question really quickly. Will you be able to see a copy of the recording? Yes, we'll put it on the York County Audubon site very soon. Take care, everybody. Thank you, Zach. Thank you.