So good morning everybody it's the bewitching hour 10 o'clock and we usually kind of dilly-dally a little bit because we always have late comers. So I wanted to say hello to my friends who I haven't seen for a while who are here today. Nice to see you Amy and Lynn and Tim and we have some people today who we also don't know who they are or how they found out about us. We'd like to ask that everybody rename themselves with either their chapter and in this case it may be chapter could be chapter plus state if you're from another state and so the way that you do that is you just drag your mouse cursor over your video picture thumbnail and in the right hand corner you should get three dots that show up and those three dots are called meatballs. Click on the meatballs and you can rename yourself so you can add additional information. Well I'm going to go ahead and start today. First of all for those of you who don't know me my name is Anne Thomas and I am the president of the Diabla Valley chapter. I'd like to introduce our other board members and our internet technology support person. So when I say your name would you please say hi so that your image will highlight so people can know who you are. So Zoher Chibba is our vice president. Hi welcome to the Diabla Valley meeting. Jill McFadden is our secretary. Good morning. And Alan Katsura is our all-around tech support person and Alan I don't think you have audio. Good morning everyone. Thanks. So the first thing that we're going to do is we have some housekeeping to take care of and there are some Zoom directions for everybody and we're going to talk about preferences that we have and what we would like for you to do during this meeting. So by this time we assume that almost everybody knows how to turn on their closed captions but if by some chance that you're really new to this and you're still feeling uncomfortable if you look at the bottom of your screen you'll see a tool control panel menu bar and it's black and in that sort of three quarters of the way moving toward the right you'll see a CC icon. So you click on that icon to activate the captions. Now when you click on that icon a new window is going to open up a small window slightly above that and what you need to do is click on view subtitles. You can also increase the size of the subtitles the captions by clicking in in that same list subtitle settings and what happens is another window opens up and there's a slider bar and you can determine which size you would like for the captions to be. You can also choose to view the captions in a full transcript and sometimes that's really helpful for us because you know it can take us a few minutes to realize that oh I didn't understand that one word that somebody said and by that time the captions that are below the screen have already vanished. So if you have the full view transcript on the side you can easily scroll to see whatever that word was. The chat is available for you to use today. You can reach out to help somebody else and the chat is in the toolbox as well. Now sometimes the chat gets in the way of other things that are on your screen or you'd like to have it be in another location. There is if you look at the little image that says chat in the box on the right you'll see a downward facing carrot and arrow. When you click on that you'll receive an option that says pop out and when you select pop out you can move that chat box anywhere you want on your screen. You can also change the font size in that chat as all of us are New Year's passing some of us are having more difficulty seeing things that are smaller so you have the opportunity of increasing the font size in the chat. If you have a Mac you press command plus or command minus. If it's a PC you press control plus or control minus. Obviously when it's control plus it's making it bigger adding plus. When it's control minus it's taking away so it's making it smaller. So as I mentioned feel free to use the chat to talk to other people. We ask that you identify your name in the chat and the way that you do that is you renamed yourself so we would see it and you can ask technical questions. We've also left enabled that you could send a private message to somebody. I know sometimes when I see somebody who's participating in a in a meeting that I'm in I like to say hello to them so I'll send them a private message just saying oh good morning or nice to see you and you may choose to do that as well. When it comes time for Q&A we'd like to ask that people raise their hands. Today we have a moderate amount of people in this meeting it might not be as difficult but it still is helpful because what happens is a hand. Alan can you raise your hand so somebody could see what it looks like on a thumbnail? See the little hand in the window? It shows up that there's a hand there and also in the participants window it orders the way that people raise their hands so that you can call on people in the order that they decided to ask their questions so that's really helpful to us as hosts and to have these meetings it requires more than just one person. So today I'm the presenter and three of our board members are working in the background and other positions so one person admits people to the meeting one person moderates what goes on in the chat in case there are technical questions that somebody is stuck about somebody can help them and usually someone moderates the Q&A. This is a feature we want to make sure that everybody knows about. So the presenters view what I'm looking at when I'm giving a presentation is completely different than yours. I don't get to see this double screen but everybody else if they are in the presenter view and you can change the view in the upper right hand corner of your screen you'll see the presenter plus the presentation side by side and if you look in the middle where that red circle is there are two lines that go up and down if you click on those two lines you can drag those screens. So when I'm an attendee I like to see who's talking but sometimes I like the presentation bigger so I can drag that to the right I'm still seeing the presenter but the presentation then is larger so you're able to set this up to suit your own needs. We'd like to ask that everybody speak a little slower than normal it helps all of us understand it also helps our wonderful captioner Cory Dosty create more accurate captions because it's much easier to type when people are speaking soft slower. If you have an external microphone we'd like to remind you that if you use an external microphone the audio clarity is improved for everyone so you might be thinking that oh I'm hearing this okay but you're not necessarily thinking about what how everybody else hears and I can give you an example so I'm using an external microphone now microphone off to the side and I'm assuming that all of you can really hear the difference and now I'm bringing it back and speaking directly to the microphone So Alan Kasur and I have been very busy doing tech workshops for HLAA for leaders in HLAA about how to use Zoom both how to do your settings and also how to host a Zoom meeting and it dawned on me that I hear many of you say I don't use the internet very much I don't use the chapter website I'm not really comfortable with how to do that and so it dawned on me that we're missing a huge opportunity on being able to help you learn how to do those if you're don't not really fond of them turns out Alan Kasur and I love technology so for us it's really a joy and we get excited about new things but we know lots of people really are like oh they find it frustrating painful and hopefully some of the things that you'll learn today will be helpful to you like to have a big shout out to Alan Kasura he designed our website and our website was designed specifically for ease of use of people who were not super computer savvy so we tried to make everything so that it's much more visible than really highly hidden there are pieces in the menu bar the tabs that make it easy to identify the topic and I'm very grateful to Alan for doing that for us and our website has lasted for a really long time and it still is really very usable so thanks again okay so this is what our website looks like and what we're going to do is this is just a slide and I'm going to actually go online and actually go to our website and bring it up so that I'm able to show you exactly the things that are on our website and I can point them out to you so I'm going to stop sharing this screen and I'm going to share our actual website so this is what our website looks like and right now you are at the home screen oh and I see here that actually I'm still logged in as an administrator so I'm going to log out let's see that if that works now it doesn't really matter okay so okay hang on one second okay here we are so as you see here these pieces are called tabs and there's drop-down information on each of these tabs every month we update the home page so that the home page has what our next meeting is so we decided that in laying out this website that the most important thing was that it was easy for people to find the meetings because that's where almost all of us have received the most benefit from meeting and talking with other people who are in the same situation that we are and having difficulties and for those of you who who haven't been participating in our meetings in a while I want to share the really great news with all of you that I got a CI in December and I am over the moon excited about it thinking about I want a second one anyway so if it weren't for HLAA I probably would be nowhere near having my implant or having felt as comfortable about getting it as I did so on here you'll see right here we require registration to join our meetings to keep out lurkers and people who are going to interfere you click right there and you can register we also have a YouTube channel and we have started uploading some of the recordings for our meeting you can subscribe right here so every time you run your cursor over something that's usually in a different color see how the line appears underneath here see how a line appears underneath subscribe that means that that place is hot and so I could put the whole URL there and URL means the address of the website but you know they're so long they're ugly and confusing so I can type here and behind the scenes I put the URL and you just need to know these things are hot and it means there's something else there so we have additional information our our website does not have very long scrolls some scrolls we have wonderful reasons about why to join our chapter and other information right here we also on this side run it's called an RSS feed it's directly from HLAA and all of the news information that they post is automatically posted right here so if you're thinking about wow you know I really wonder what's going on at the national level with HLAA maybe you haven't subscribed to the HLAA e-news all you have to do is come to our website and these are the latest things you can see here and Tim Browning I think is here today thanks Tim this is the latest post from Tim Browning it was 331-21 so this and you look at all of the different pieces here you can see the dates for them we'd like to remind everybody that how important hearing loops are when we come back to meeting in person we had we put up a new tab as soon as COVID-19 started here's some health care tips on COVID-19 so what happens with the drop-down menu is you just click on that piece and something that I need to communicate to everybody that I think is difficult for people who may be within our age group and that's that we grew up in a flat one-dimensional world in how we gathered information so we were accustomed to books we were accustomed to encyclopedias and all of those what you see what's absolutely in front of you is really all that's available to you and it's a paradigm shift in thinking to transition to the technological world that we live in today because everything is layered so everything that you're looking at has information behind information behind information so the tab is only the front piece so when you click on that tab you're being directed to other information behind and I think that that's kind of a difficult transition to make but if you can make that transition oh my gosh the internet the world of is just huge so this is the piece that's on happens to be on health care and COVID masks and things like that you can see right here that it's 41 pages this one it has a pop out up here you click on the pop out and you have a whole other presentation so when you click on the presentation this was a presentation given by Chad Ruffin and Tina Childress at the beginning of the pandemic okay so let's go back to our home page and so we went a page forward and their arrows here so see there when I take my hand and bring it up over the home page and it turns blue I can click on that and go back to the home page or I can go right up here and click on home but I'm going to click this so you can see that and the delay is just because of the internet it's this morning okay so we're back to our home page we have recently added a new calendar feature we previously we previously had a calendar feature that was just a table now we've added a really wonderful calendar feature and I'll show you that in a minute so we still have maintained the table for people who might want to look at that and when we host outreach events when we are going back to meeting in person we update the events that we're having in outreach we have traditionally engaged in at least five outreach events in the community a year so our new monthly calendar there you go okay so this lists so for April 3rd today this is our meeting you can click on the meeting here and it takes you to additional information the same kind of events calendar is now posted on the HLA California website and the HLA California website is listing all of the meetings all over California everybody's invited to any of them so at any any time you'd like if you would like to find out what's going on anywhere else in California and later I'll tell you about the HLA website which is listing events all over the United States everybody as well if someone decides to list on the calendar everybody's welcome so there are the pandemic in that sense has offered us just an unbelievable opportunity it turns out that the HLA a north bay of California chapter has been hosting on two Thursdays a month I think it is right now hope meetings which are hearing other people's experiences and many of us have participated in them please feel free to join that so these things are just for you to find out what's going on now the advocacy information tabs are tabs that can really benefit all of you I'm going to come back to that but I'd like to point out just that we have a membership tab let's say you get a notice from us that your membership is due all you have to do is go to our website click on the membership tab and you can renew your membership we also take donations online you can also sign up for our amazon smile page and about us it's just information that's here for the broader community so yearly we apply for grants from the colonists the lions the lafayette community foundation and other organizations and they're looking to verify who you are and by having this about section here they get to have a quick overview of who we are and who our chapter is if you have not read or don't know about the founder of hlaa we have a section in the about us about rocky stone and his story is really really phenomenal if you have not read about him or know very much about that I really recommend that just for entertainment and to feel grateful to go ahead and click on that link we also happen to have a members only section of our website we've not been very successful in getting all of you to participate in that but when you click on the members only section it takes you to a whole another web page that we have linked to this and what we were originally hoping was that we could have an active chapter chat forum you can also we have membership cards you can download your personal membership card from there and when you click on the the way to sign in is just with your normal email address that you use to communicate with us now these two pieces here are things that I really wish all of you were very actively becoming educated about so as a whole people with hearing loss are really reticent to speak out about their civil rights as a person with disability and we spent a lot of time and effort really flushing this out for you so this explains to you about the ADA and civil rights and the reason that this hasn't been changed is because they've been delinquent about coming out with the new logo I've been looking every month and in the last slide we have I found one that I copied but they haven't released it for general usage so this outlines what the history of the ADA was defines what effective communication is from them so see here when you click on that it gets the line underneath it and it's a different color that means that that's hot so that takes you actually directly to the actual document so you don't have to hunt all over the internet to find that we spent time and effort to put these things for you to make it easy these are frequently asked questions for the ADA it's a 31 page booklet it's how to file a complaint revisions about service animals frequently asked questions for communication access and knowing your rights for service members who are returning and after uh overseas duties the ADA basically is divided into three sections that are called titles and title one deals with employment and this takes you to that section title two is state and local government county state and local government so they're required to provide accommodations for us in all of their programs and services so in California historically our local governments have all kinds of workshops and things that are provided as part of the parks and recs department all of those are required to be accessible to us so if you didn't know that you wouldn't know to ask and if they don't have that to activate your resiliency bone and keep asking for because it's required and title number three is for public accommodations so that's like hotels all kinds of venues that would be entertainment that you might want to go to and things like that so as you can see this is very informative to you and very easy to use so in this section there's civil rights we have a section on communicating with your legislator how to find out and in there it's how to find out who that is you just click on links and it's all set up we have a communication access program there's the BART accessibility task force and because of all of us we have hearing loops on BART all of the agent booths at BART now have hearing loops that's because of us but weren't for us none of that would have happened there were and this was left over from 2020 they were captioned performances that we had advocated for and whenever there's something that's like that we posted on the website and this is an app smart 911 and in some parts of our county we have it some we don't I really recommend that everybody really sign up for it and what you're allowed to do in that app is you're allowed to provide information that could be of high value if somebody needed to come to you an emergency so I definitely want to know any of our first responders to know that I have profound hearing loss and I could be the middle of the night we could have an earthquake could be all kinds of things I could fall down walking outside of my house to get the newspaper in the morning before I put any of my hearing devices on if somebody if I hurt myself and first responders needed to come I wouldn't be able to understand them so smart 911 connects with 911 service and the information that I have revealed is available to all of the first responders this information under info under the information tab we have multiple brochures that were created to help all of us learn what is required in emergencies for us and so an emergent this is an emergency prepared brochure we have a smoke and carbon monoxide detector brochure we have some videos in here and this is a glossary of terminology for people that you know like any industry we have special words and you need to know what those words are so we're really hoping that you take advantage of what these pieces are we have a press room that had hla news our chapter has won many many awards for our outreach and advocacy work and at one time we did have a newsletter but I think that I did the newsletter for eight years and I just couldn't find anybody to replace me so now we just basically do e-news but the newsletters that we previously did some much of the information is still valuable and those newsletters are here we also have the last newsletter from hearing loss california which was summer 2020 and the californian is going to an online version too it just is very very expensive to send print documentation so that's pretty much our page so now I'd like to show you and before I move on I think that we probably have time does anybody have any questions about our website oh great okay so that means that I was able to explain that in a pretty simple way okay let's hope that this is the hla eight nope okay so now this is the hla website and the hla website is very very dense and by dense I mean the information is layered layered layered layered and so I want to point out to you some sections that could be very helpful to you um the first thing that I'd like for everybody to know is hla has an e-news and it comes out I think every two weeks every three weeks something and here's a very easy way to sign up for that I really recommend that you do that if you don't do that you can see most of the information on the hot link for the rss rss feed on our side so if you think oh well wonder what's going on over there you can always come to our website to see that um I'm not encouraging you to look at the become a member of hla a because every person who's a member of our chapter our membership dues structure is one that includes hla a but this is a brand new feature and thank you tim browning my hero for making this happen so we have begun having a communication tool called groups i o and I encourage you to join them and these are replaced the old yahoo groups but with many many more features and one of the features is that it can have an events calendar and so all of us all over the united states have been listing our events on this calendar and hla a put a link on their website so if you click on this calendar what comes what's going to come up now is the hla a actual calendar of events so that we're having virtual meetings we're having uh webinars and there are some leadership components that are also there so if you see right here the chapter development workshop that was last thursday that's the one that Alan could serve and I were the presenters and we had one the week before um we have one coming up that's going to be a q and a for that and we have three more so that's also going to be that's also part of these presentations so you could you can do an hla a hearing thing every day if you wanted to find the hl a chapters that are meeting online all you do is click on this tab and here is our events calendar wow i mean this we've never had this before i am so excited you can tell by my voice i am so excited that we have this capability so you can see here seven o'clock seven thirty ten ten ten thirty today there were events so ours is a ten o'clock event and we're encouraging people to put the event is about first rather than their chapter to make it easier for people to skim the calendars so if i take my cursor and put it over this seven a.m you can see that it was the Indianapolis chapter is hosting it it was from seven to nine a.m it's a google virtual meeting and the name of the presentation was the americans with disabilities act and matt norris is the presenter okay so that's that one this one is the treasure coast chapter in florida and they're doing hearing loss and the significant other so every single one of these it's very easy for you to go gee i'm in the hla a oh i'm feeling lonely i want i want to see my buds i want to maybe meet some new people who who i didn't know who live in other parts of the country it's all here for you now the hla a tabs which run across the top you can see hearing help program events each one of those is very dense see all of these words that are on here each one of those takes you to some other place now i look this morning and i was playing with my phone a little bit too to see what actually showed up for the hla a website and on my phone this section right here seems to be more obvious and you can see here that get information hearing loss basics technology check out your hearing here you can see the latest magazine so i think that this section right here generally makes it a little easier for you to find which you're looking for so if you wanted to find a chapter this list this is a map and list all the chapters in the united states you could look for professionals so i'm just going to click on this one so you can see what that's like and this takes you directly to a page that's immediately about just basic information about hearing loss and these are on the side here all of these are additional links hla a has partnered with the mayo clinic and there's a forum for hearing loss with the mayo clinic if you wanted to participate in that you click on this you register for the account and obviously all of you know that i'm registered for everything right so theoretically if you didn't want everything dumped into your regular email account i would suggest that you make a gmail account just for some things so you could theoretically create a gmail account just for your mayo clinic forum because it's pretty active and so that means all the information would go in there so it's not cluttering your regular personal email account so this is you can see very it's very dense and deep and when you look here all of these things that are purple when you drag your hand over it they have an arrow at the end here there's additional information behind those arrows so this is why am i losing my hearing you click on that and there's a definition of and a short paragraph about the the reason most people lose their hearing why should what should i do if i have trouble hearing well of course the first thing i would say is come to an hla a chapter meeting right um so it just talks about other things now this page right here actually does not list everything that's available under hearing help so after you as you become more comfortable with the sections i'd recommend that you start then looking in this hearing help tab because as you can see every single thing that's in purple on here is a whole another topic just like the page that we looked at here with those purple additional information pieces behind it so these are hearing loss basics this is technology so hearing aids there's a whole huge pace about that over the counter devices cochlear implants assistive listening technology financial aid and things like this state telephone programs and they're different communities so we happen to have a virtual veterans group virtual veterans chapter and so you can see over there in communities it's there now if you decide okay so what kinds of programs are there in events okay so we have advocacy and this whole place here is about knowing your rights so after you read and become familiar with the things that are on our website you might want to go and say well gee what's what does hla a have i want to find out more so then you could click on that um most of you know that i'm also a member of the get in the hla get in the hearing loop committee and so this is all about get in the hearing loop and over the last two years we've created extensive documentation for you it's called a get in the hearing loop toolkit and it's on our website it is also on the hla a get in the hearing loop groups io all of these items are part of the toolkit the whole thing was created to try and provide the tools that you need to advocate in your community you can download the checklist here and the checklist lists all of the documents so you might choose to read one at a time use the checklist after you've read it and you're educated and familiar with that you could check that up oh i've done that i know how to do that and then continue on because as you see this is an extensive body of information we have postcards that we've used in our chapter and they were created to be able to leave for venues we all know that lots of venues have hearing loops have accessibility and they don't have any advertising board so this card says here here has directions on the back that's here for you to download and have printed if you would like to do that we even have a basic powerpoint presentation with notes so you don't even have to create a powerpoint if you wanted to give one to some city government it's right here for you so as you can see this is a really valuable resource to you and if you're not going there to look or if nobody explains where these things are you might be really missing some things that are important to you these are some the middle columnism archives from the convention do you haven't been to an hla convention whenever we meet back in person it's really something that's wonderful and i imagine our next one when we meet together is going to be just over the top this year we're having another virtual um convention and last year i was um thinking well how are we going to be able to do this and i have to tell you the virtual convention was so heartwarming to me and the virtual walks for hearing that we're going to have again in the spring it really brought me to tears lots of times the number of people and companies that supported us and haven't hearing the communication of their stories so as that as we approach those events i hope all of you participate so here's a piece on the walk for hearing whoops so that's what happens a walk for here i didn't bring my cursor down low enough so the walk for hearing how to become a sponsor there are in chat which is a technology webinars here schedule of past recordings this is for state and and chapter leaders and there are some i know in our group today that there are some other um chapter leaders from other chapters here and here's where all of the information is if you were looking for a chapter logo it's in the chapter leaders resources so it defines what a leader is it gives you communication tools that everybody should be subscribed to so you know what's going on how to start a chapter your annual requirements legal and governments issues finances publicity and promotion and i have done a lot of work with hla and at the convention um trying to upgrade our advertising and promotion for the chapters a presentation that i gave at the 2012 hla convention is listed right here hla recently came out with a guideline for writing style how we refer to things using people first language you need to find an hla logo the logos are all right here there's some other information here on creating an identity um and the chapter development workshops that we've been hosting are all listed right here so let's say you didn't attend the chapter workshop you can come back and watch it anytime you want some of them have additional documentation um i think i gave the first one oh no here oh alan here's our last um workshop so both of the two workshops that alan and i just recently gave are now posted so if you want to learn more about how to um use zoom either to set it up and in the background and we had additional documentation with that too so here are the zoom uh recommendations and we have another piece that belongs right here that didn't get uploaded so you can come back and look at all of those things this is all just for you if it weren't for you this information wouldn't really there wouldn't be a need to have this information here so if you'd like to find hla brochures and literature just go to news and media you can look up previous issues of the hla magazine i don't know if you're like me but i have magazines in the garage i have magazines everywhere sometimes the one i want is i'm thinking by saving them right that it's going to make it easy to find but in actuality that may not be the case i can come right here and find an issue let's say one of you decides that you'd like to submit an article to the hla in magazine you can do that it's right here you submit an article oopsie you submit an article here's the latest hearing life e-news this is some other information here and this is about hla if you were interested in hla's financial statement their latest 990 is listed here you have who is the staff of hla who are the board of directors here's a history of rocky stone the history of hla in position papers so as you can see these are really helpful resources for all of us and i hope that by giving this overview that it made it easier for all of you to potentially go back and take a look at some of those pieces to help you become better informed as an advocate better informed about how to take care of yourself and information that could be valuable for you as a person with hearing loss so we're going to open up our meeting right now to q&a and we'd like to ask that people raise their hand and the way that you raise your hand is look at the bottom of your screen the toolbar that runs across the bottom and where it says reactions there are more things in there other than raise your hand and you can use those two but the first one when you when you look at that says raise your hand and when you do that jill you had your hand up a moment ago can you go ahead and raise your hand again oh i i was doing this yeah see oh thanks um so jill gave a different reaction she indicated that she thumbs up for the presentation so she liked it can you do just raise your hand yep okay so see jill raised her hand so it's easier for the moderators to figure out alan raised his hand who has a question to call on them and also in the participants window we see a hand and the hand is listed in the order that a person raised their hand okay so now we're open to q&a so who has a question oh come on somebody has to i i couldn't have done that good of a job ah jim hi good morning everyone um and thank you first for a very very good overview this is a lot of information uh to cover so um i hope everyone if you feel a little overwhelmed just give yourself a little time and explore and i i was wondering from a chapter perspective um you know you can navigate the website but it's only as good at the content how are you guys um keeping all this content updated on your um own chapter website you know the latest information on legislation latest bills and resources because that's a challenge we're having with our lothandwood chapter how do we what what processes can we do to get it updated so when people do come to the website and navigate like you showed they're getting good information um tim which particular sections are you talking about like some of the information um like on the advocacy information about the ADA I watch personally what's going on with the ADA and I'm subscribed to things that are happening their lawsuits that are happening but there hasn't been a whole lot of changes to the ADA since um the standards were updated in 2014 and then the documents were all updated so until there's another major change for the whole pieces about the ADA that's not going to change much because the ADA standards were modified in 2010 and then they had to update all of the um additional documentation that they had to go with that and once that was updated there's not a real need to update that again until the standards are changed again so that piece stays pretty much the same and you know what I'm going to go back to our website to see to um ask oops wrong screen sorry okay so see tim in here most of the information is static okay so the BART accessibility task force all of those and with a pandemic we hadn't had much activity right um the information pieces most of those pieces are pretty static too so there is not a real there so those pieces can stay fixed which relieves the pressure from Alan and I who maintain the site from always having to be on top of that and this RSS feed from HLIA that's automatically updated so that's current on the calendar I update the calendar um so what sections would are you having problems with um you know I think it's more behind the scenes in terms of how are you it sounds like you and Al and are handling the content so on the LA chapter side of things our resources section that it's pretty old pretty dated and so we need to make an effort to get out there and find out more about the lion's club or more about either publications we can advertise our chapter meetings with or I'm just making these things up but are you and Alan mainly handling this and do you have a process in place to coordinate updates to the website or do you get volunteers or what do you do good work I don't know our chapter basically Alan and me me so we have an extensive glossary and Alan did all of this and the pieces in the glossary they're all hot so if you really wanted this we would be open to sharing it with you because you know Alan and I really would like everybody to be able to have the most accurate information that they possibly can have and there's no point in reinventing the wheel if we've already done it yeah so and each one of these have things behind it and this is just the glossary let's see what's in I think our emergency preparedness is only our brochure yeah so I don't see I don't know if you knew that this was here knew these things were here so in our advocacy outreach efforts the questions that people asked us at the outreach event and also um questions that our chapter members asked us at our meetings were the driving force to creating brochures to make it easier for people to skim information um our smoke and carbon monox oh so this is an area that all of us are lax on I mean everybody who has anything over a mild hearing loss needs to have appropriate smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and so this was a very easy way to distribute that information so this hasn't changed okay so the um I think we also have oh I see something that's missing here but it'll we'll take care of it later so organizations most of the organizations stay the same parents dogs deaf and disabled telecommunication and these are all hot links okay yeah I guess I was I was just very impressed with how much rich information you have on this site so I get part of me just want to kind of steal some of this for the la site so our members can benefit and then you know other chapters as well but so nicely done though thanks okay so Tim can you lower your hand yep so Jill is our moderator she okay Lynn Lynn unmute yourself Lynn sorry yeah I first I wanted to thank you for all of this information um I can't wait till I have more of my own time to go back and click on more things and see more of what you have here um I wanted to comment that um this morning I was already on another hla a zoom I was on the Sarasota Florida zoom when they had a speaker on hearing loss and family and significant others my husband feels that there's not enough information for spouses of people with hearing loss and he was interested in hearing what they were going to say it was a really good presentation although I don't think it answered his questions but I do look at the calendar the IO calendar and I participate in a lot of different hla a chapter events just to get more information and I highly recommend that other people do that as well because some of them are really well done most of them are really well done and it's interesting to after a while you get to know the leaders of the different groups and even though we're looking at them on the computer I feel like I know a lot of them and um I think that the more of that that goes on the smaller hla a will feel so I don't have a question I just had these comments thanks Lynn and listen okay so we're all with friends here right so can you see how your face isn't fully in your screen can you move the direction of there you go that's where you need to be can you see the difference yes so much easier to lip read thank you very much okay can you lower your hand I oh yeah okay so who else has something that they that they'd like to ask so I know an area that has been problematic for some people is when they've used our website to renew their membership so we use PayPal as the company that handles the processing and you don't have to have a PayPal account to use that so please feel free I'm chatting some more because nobody's asking another question so I'm going to show you some things that the wrong piece again okay so here's the membership okay so we have everything right in front of your face right here about what to do if you would like to use an online form you would like to use PayPal you just go ahead and do that if you decide that you would like to that you don't want to do that and it's more convenient for you but of course you know PayPal takes out a little percentage so we get a little less money so if you would decide to print your registration and mail it we provided the link here so when you click on this there is a membership form you can just check which level of membership how much you're including fold it up put it in an envelope with your check and send it to us so everything is right there so I'm going to click on this and this takes you straight to PayPal it's a secure connection you'd say if it's new or it's a renewal your name if it's a couple who the other person is the level of membership you're joining if you are also including an additional donation you click if you want a receipt you submit it and you're taken to another page that you input your credit card information pretty simple and pretty straightforward and as all of you can imagine the logistics of running a chapter there are all of these things that can be really labor intensive and for many of us we run on with skeleton crews so having this be an automated feature where everybody when you check this that you get a receipt and we have another software program that we basically have that really handles membership so all of the uh and invitations and reminders that you receive Alan and I set up all of these things behind the scenes so those are automatically generated and you could set it up starting three months out two months out one month out one week and you're delinquent so we don't physically have to do that work because we wouldn't have enough time so just really no other questions does anybody have a suggestion from another meeting no suggestions okay so there's a meeting that I want everybody to think about attending and it's not our meeting the meeting is um going to be hosted by HLA North Bay of California and I think it's their April meeting and Ronnie Adler who is the I think she's the director it's not a director but she's the person who oh I should look in my magazine I don't know what her I can't remember her exact title ah it's a manager so she's a national walk for hearing manager and we really owe her a huge debt because she's so committed to the walk for hearing and the money that's been raised for HLA and getting our name out there so she's going to tell her story as the meeting presenter for the North Bay of California presentation coming up and since the walk for hearing is going to the Bay Area Walk for Hearing is going to be in June you might find it really inspiring to hear her stories so I highly recommend that you think about attending that and because I think it's so important all for sure send out an e-news with their event listed um with an easy to register link now if by some chance um you decide okay well where else can that be you can always go to the HLA California website and there's a calendar on their website and it lists all of the chapters who are hoping virtual meetings in California are listed on there and the North Bay chapter should be listed so the San Diego chapter happens to be really hosting more support group type chapters and invented the best name it's called chatter so you could you could attend their chatter meeting and chatter away with other people now today all of you are here we're trying to get you to chat a little and ask a question so if if all of you were in in the San Diego chapter oh maybe maybe char is much better about getting people to chat than I am um the Los Angeles chapter has meetings that Tim it's the third Saturday of the month I know before before Saturday oh fourth Saturday of the month and their meeting that they had uh their last meeting that was a week ago was over the top fabulous I heard a person um describe the process of hearing both from a mental component a physical component and also an intellectual component about how all of these pieces go together in a way that I had never heard expressed before so Tim did you record that and is that recording going to be available to people uh yes we did and it's actually on our website so if you go to our website you will see the YouTube recording right there um do you have a does does the LA chapter have a YouTube channel we have a brand new one but we're still in the process of working through it so I saw your YouTube subscribe earlier on your chapter site so we're gonna I steal something from there but we're just getting started so we have been slowly working on that and thank god for you Alan um I don't know what we would have on there if it weren't for you um it's not the easiest thing in the world to get the captions with the video so I think that we have three or four posted we may end up posting some other ones that were earlier but we're just hoping to keep moving forward okay well listen if nobody has any more questions does anybody have any news something that's happening I have a question Ann yeah maybe I it's either you or Tim can answer it what was the date of that meeting that you heard that was so wonderful Saturday the LA chapter yeah it was um last saturday the 21st I put the link in chat there's a link in the chat right now that takes you directly to the page that summarizes the meeting okay so um click on that and you'll um you'll see the presentation and uh and the video um Nancy the presenter was wonderful and she she kindly gave us the presentation so you also can look at the PowerPoint so everything is on there for you thank you now this is another question when somebody posts a link in a chat I don't know how to use it um Jill yeah so the link is hot but what happens is we close the meeting and if you didn't copy the link you don't have access to the link unless you save the chat so I click on it right now so what I would suggest you do is to highlight it and since I know you have a Mac yeah just open up your notes or text edit and just paste it in there and so when the meeting ends you have it okay okay so for people who have PCs um I think that you prob oh Tim what could you save that you because you do PCs right what could you save that easily in on a PC or Alan one of you can you answer that you could save the chat and then go back into your document zoom file to the meeting date save the whole chat yes you do have that option well I just highlighted it and tried to edit and copy and it didn't work you could just actually just click on it from the chat and it will open the window up but it'll take you away from this meeting oh okay gotcha but you have it on your screen if you want to look at it later or you could bookmark it or whatever you want to do all right so I'd like to talk at the moment about the fact that zoom has a desktop app both for Macs and PCs and if you're in a meeting like this and if you did what Alan was suggesting Jill did that would open up a web browser with the address and because I know that many of you are not tech savvy I know that one of the things that happens then is all of a sudden you're taking someplace else and you're going oh how do I get back to where I was so Jill's laughing because she knows okay so you have the zoom desktop app you can just click on that in the in the bottom bar on a mac it's called a dock and and windows I don't know what it's called but it's there as well so if you also know to look down in windows you'll see which things are open and you can just click back on the zoom window and it'll bring you back to the meeting okay for so Tim and Alan you know that my number one forte is Macs and I've learned about PCs did I answer that correctly for PCs just shake your head up and down yeah okay okay so Bob's Astro you're mute okay I just noticed the view here we have a Pamela mute HRA and find out why she is joined us Bob actually I've been carrying on the conversation with Pamela throughout this meeting so she asked some questions and we've been communicating back and forth through the direct or private chat okay so Pamela if you would like to say hello we would like to welcome you we hope you join us in the future we're a friendly group of people we're here to support each other so if you want to say hi if you want to introduce yourself just raise your hand otherwise we'll let you look for a while longer wait a minute I'm trying hey Lynn wait wait wait mute yourself Lynn unmute yourself I'm unmuted can you hear me now you can I can't what I was trying to do she said raise my hand I couldn't I got hosed up but I got back in I'm in Colorado so I'm but I'm originally from Mill Valley so and I'm going to plan to move back to California so he was Allen was helping me figure out where I should join well of course I'd like you to join us yeah but please feel free to join whichever chapter you'd like or more so a couple months ago the East Bay chapter sent out requests for membership I personally joined the East Bay chapter as well um anybody any local chapters if they asked me to join I would join just just I do have something to say I've had hearing aids over a decade and I just didn't really get much in the way of resource information do do um hearing centers do they have that was I just in a not good place do do do providers know about all these resources I mean I should have been told about you immediately you know this organization and others so Pamela it is like this white this huge elephant in the room I have advocated and advocated and advocated with all of our local um audiologists hearing aid providers hospitals cochlear implant centers and I can honestly tell you everybody's reticent I don't understand it I understand that in running their business time is money and it's difficult to run businesses today but it wouldn't be difficult for them to hand somebody um our brochure right and say oh well you know you might like this group they provide additional support that you might need and so my comment is that if audiologists and hearing healthcare providers and ENTs and everybody was doing their job there wouldn't be a need for HLAA well and then the schools that train them they should learn this in school well we have actively I wear many hats in our HLAA family and um work with lots of people on the national level who give presentations at professional events Julia Sturkins who is a retired audiologist who is our get-in-the-hearing-loop advocate gives presentations to like the California Academy of Audiology all over the United States and they still are dawdling they still dawdle I don't get it so I'm really happy that you found us well and I'm very grateful every single person who's here was here because they were just like you and some of us have a thirst for knowledge like I do and I was born with a sponge on my forehead for things and so I am always gathering gaining more new information without my link to HLAA I would think I would have been devastated my hearing was a progressive hearing loss I went from mild to moderate hearing loss to profound loss I'm now a cochlear implant recipient without HLAA I would have had no support I wouldn't have known anything so welcome thank you can I ask you one quick question yeah we have time I know about dogs for better lives the in center Oregon that um trains hearing-assisted dogs are there other places that do that in California uh how do I get find them so you go to our website okay to the tab um which tab is that actually Amy one of the things that I wanted to say for a new person is that um if you could go to other places like the uh I've been part of the east bay uh hearing loss association for number of years if you go to their various zoom meetings I think you have a sense of the the kind of feeling there is in the group I hope we get out of uh having to do everything by zoom in a few months because one of the things that I found very inviting about the hearing loss association in the east bay is that there was a very warm sense of welcome and belonging and I think that's harder to get on zoom uh so I would recommend that you visit the different readings that are within driving distance of where you you can go and especially when we have uh person to person meetings I think you'll get a sense of what what what group you feel comfortable with and thank you long to more than one group you can go even in person you can go to different groups meetings okay sounds like a plan um and on your website I would find more about dogs where um Alan do you remember where the dogs things this is an under organizations and it's called hearing dogs oh assistance dogs right okay so it's under oh it's under organizations and then hearing dogs assistance dogs canine companions san simian foundation and canine for independence is in santa rosa okay thank you so much I really appreciate I'll I'll be back this is once a month your meetings month I'll be back first saturday okay thank you everybody okay Lynn did you have a question yeah I uh comment um a while ago you were talking about how to save information off of the screen and I just wanted to add that I use a mac and whenever there's something on the screen I want to save I do a screenshot which is a shift command three and whatever was on the screen shows up in the corner of my um screen and I could go back and look at it later was that shift command three yes okay thank you and I don't know what you do on a pc Alan or Tim you want to address that it depends on how you have things set up by default there is on the keyboard or print screen key it doesn't work probably quite as nice as a mac in that once you capture the screen I think you still have to save it someplace um my computer set up is set up a little bit different so I don't remember remember exactly how it works but it does take advantage of the print screen key on the keyboard so for those of you who have max so Lynn told you the keyboard shortcut and when you do that it takes the full screen if you go into your apps there is an app called screenshot if you use the screenshot app you have more options as to what you can do you can drag a box for what you would like to take the shot of you can also do a recording you you can also do timed so it does a countdown you know like when you're taking the family picture and you want everybody to be smiling at the same time so you put you know like five seconds so the camera that automatically takes the shot it has that feature as well this is Pam I can't figure out how to raise my hand I'm sorry but um I'm used to doing this with customer service and I have an hp laptop so I just highlighted the whole chat hit control c and then pasted it into an email and emailed it to myself that's how I got lost when you were trying to talk to me before because I lost you but that's Pam I'd like to before I'd like to walk you through how you raise your hand so see the little icon in the black piece at the bottom of your screen that says reaction that's where I am but I see it sums up and things like that the first one there is raise your hand and it's in its language it says clap no no so you see clap thumbs up the heart then the next row down is a green check a knot backwards and forwards and then the bottom one is raise hand do you see that no no I mine goes you need to upgrade your version of zoom oh I I've only used them a couple of times so I believe you yeah so that so this um they changed it used to be in participants and they moved it here and it's been like that maybe two and a half months so just update your zoom and it'll be there next okay thank you uh-huh um and we want to let you know you can also save the chat so when you have the chat open um the three dots running like this that are called meatballs when you click on that one of the options the top option is save the chat and it saves to your computer okay I see it but the reason I was suggesting to Jill something is for me personally sometimes the chat is so long if it's an hours meeting you know might be kind of hard to find that one piece that you were looking for okay and I it was the screen print seemed to that would take a long time if you wanted a lot okay I found the save chat thank you okay Lynn and good morning and good morning this is Steve hi Steve one other thing on what Lynn just suggested if you have a Mac you can go shift command for and as you started to say you can create a box and you can just you don't have to do the whole screen you just pick what you want but as soon as you let your fingers go it will do it so if you um you may have to redo it if you just want a specific part so I use the screenshot all the time so in the directions that we have at the beginning of the zoom meetings all of those were screenshots that were taken of the zoom setting so I set up a fake zoom meeting so that I can take the screenshot of the icon so that you can all see it and I just have it in my dock and so having it in my dock I can I have access to all of the features when I click on it anything else Amy Mass I wanted to say hello to you I haven't seen you in since lip reading how are you doing are you still here unmute yourself Amy unmute yourself um I'm managing it's been up and down I guess with the pandemic but I'm in a senior residence now and there are a lot of good people to talk to you just even walking to the elevator so I don't feel isolated at all um I'm still struggling whenever I get a chance and I know you're speaking I try to listen because if you even get like five percent of what you're getting it's adding to my very difficult uh getting working on computer things so I'll follow you around and Amy I am always here Alan and I are always here if you would like a one-to-one about how to do something just email us we're happy to help you thank you very much I may take you up on that okay so we need to thank oh oh I know when I did something special but then sometimes I forget about it here okay so there's the Q&A and Bob Zastrow always has muffins for our in-person meeting so obviously we can't get the muffin that way so here is Bob Zastrow's muffin to you thank you Bob and you know this weekend is a special holiday weekend for so many people and so I have rather than an Easter greeting I have a spring greeting to all of you and this is the first animated piece I've put in a PowerPoint so I wish all of you a very very happy weekend and thanks for joining us Corey Dosty as always we're forever grateful to you for the fabulous captions that you provide us yeah hi everybody thank you everyone have a good weekend