d I personally like things easy. It's so easy to learn about web accessibility. The information is around us. I always tell people start with the course, the free course on w3.org forward slash wai and it is the introduction to web accessibility and it's free. It will go over the who, what, how, why, give you a real up close and personal look of at people and the struggles that they have trying to access a website. You will be able to witness through videos people that need the website to be accessible and the difference that it makes. I suggest looking on your dashboard of your WordPress site, there are a number of meetups around the country, around the globe that focus on accessibility. Just do a search and you will find them. And they have a number of meetups that focus on accessibility on WordPress. And you can find them through your WordPress dashboard or through your meetup. Obviously, come to WordCamp. We're here, we're working together, we're networking, let's talk web accessibility. And my favorite is the California State University of Northridge, CSUN, has a disability accessibility technology conference once a year in March. Over 5,000 people in attendance over four days and all we talk about is technology, web accessibility and user experience. So if you have an opportunity to be near Anaheim in March, I would suggest don't miss it. And of course, who can forget? We've got the web content accessibility guidelines. When I was first brought to my attention that it was my fault that websites were not accessible. And I certainly was embarrassed and humbled to find that out. I thought I was building great websites. I was really proud of them. But someone that is close to me, who is blind, wasn't able to access these sites, so I would describe them. I thought I was doing a great job. Until someone from Freedom Scientific showed up with a screen reader called JAWS and went to various sites and showed her what these sites sounded like through a screen reader. I was so excited. I said, here, here's one of the sites I built. Please, go there. And he did. And it was horrible. So I thought, well, okay, fine. Here's one I just finished. I'm so proud of this. Please go take your screen reader to this site. So he did. It was even worse. What that screen reader said is it found its way across that webpage was not what I was hoping it was going to do. And I said, ah, your website is really messed up. And he said, no, ma'am, your website is really messed up. I learned that day that I was the person that was causing the issue. And I sought out to find a way to learn. Today, we have a lot more places to get education, but the standards, the web content accessibility standards give us all an even working ground. I would not recommend that you attempt to digest and absorb all of these at the same time. It'd be like having your favorite meal laid out at buffet and you go over there and you say, I'm just gonna have it all, all my food at the same time.  So please do not do that to yourself with the web content accessibility guidelines. Take them, reference them, access them as you need them. And you will find that doing web accessibility becomes easier and easier. However, don't just rely upon WCAG. We have humans that access the web. We need to be concerned about the human, the user experience that's not technical. So there are things that we need to remember to do beyond the technical portion of WCAG. Why would we want to use WordPress for web accessibility? Could it be that the majority of websites around the globe are built on WordPress? Could it be, well, that it's easy to learn? It has a learning curve, but generally easy to learn. Could it be that it is customizable? Could it be that there is a team on make.wordpress.org that is dedicated to the accessibility of WordPress? And yesterday at the contributors day, I had the pleasure of sitting with a number of folks that their passion is web accessibility and making sure that WordPress inside and out is accessible. So is it these four things or is it D? And together now, all of the above. That is for good reasons to use WordPress to build your site. Plus we have all of the support that you get here at WordCamp and beyond. We'd have a lot of AI that is shown up. Some builders are adding AI to their software so that when you build a site, they offer, hey, would you like AI to write your content? Would you like AI to write your alt text for your images? Do you want AI to do your work for you? And there are pros and cons of saying yes. Yes, AI can make our job easier. Yes, AI can write a bunch of content for us. However, I've noticed that when AI writes the content, sometimes it sounds just like everybody else. I'm no longer unique. So my website won't be unique. I also have noticed that my disabled friends have told me about the bias in some AI. I have a friend that asked AI to write content relating to the ease of hiking for a disabled person. What came back, she said, was not only insulting. It was demeaning and it was wrong. I have another friend who is deaf and she asked AI to find her some images of deaf people like her.  My friend does not wear a headset and she does not do ASL. She, excuse me, sign language, she reads people's lips so those images didn't represent her. But then we thought, well let's try with a blind person. That maybe is more common. We asked AI to show us images of blind people. Every single image the person was wearing sunglasses. I have a number of friends that are blind and none of them wear sunglasses. So AI has a bias. It is very important that if you use AI to write your content, to assist you in your work, there must be humans involved and the picture on the screen is a robot and a human shaking hands. So that if you want to use AI, then please go in and edit what has been offered to you to make sure that it is correct, to make sure that it is accessible. It cannot do our job for us. I realize for those of us who remember that movie that came out a long time ago, about the space Odyssey 2000, it was about a robot that was taking charge of everybody's life on the ship and at some point the robot got so smart that it decided to take control. And when the human told the robot to shut down, it said, I can't do that Dave. And unfortunately Dave lost. So we cannot rely only on AI to do our work. We can use them to assist. I have an experience by using AI to do some alt text for an image. And on the screen you see a skunk in the grass. A couple of flowers. And I had the text auto-generated for this. And AI told me that it was a picture containing grass, flowers, animal, mammal, kitten. I don't know about you, but that's not exactly the kitten I want to take home and cuddle. If this image was on a website about kittens, I think the users would probably wonder what kind of kitten. And if it was on a website about skunks, I think the users would probably wonder why a kitten was on a skunk website. So in either case, this alt description does not work. This is where you would need to go in and correct it. Alt text for all of your non-decorative images. And it is so easy in WordPress to do this. You go into your media library. When you upload an image, there is a field that says alternative text. If you did not add that alternative text when you originally uploaded the image, you can go back into your media library and click edit for that image and you will still find that field. You want to put a short description of the alternative text for that image. You don't need to say it's a photo unless that's important to the content. You don't need to say a picture of. You just want to add descriptive text, short, descriptive, end it with a period, not a lot of text, not a lot of talking. This particular image on the screen is a pink ribbon that has pearls on it and it's on a website that is breast cancer awareness and this image was placed in the content when they were giving away pearls as part of a campaign. So the alt description on this particular item is a pink ribbon with embellished with pearls because it fit the content. Another place on the website, they changed the alt text because it didn't fit the content and they wanted it to fit the content, which is appropriate. Now in order to do that, they couldn't do it in the media library, they had to go through a text field where the alt description was and manually change it for that other page because it was important to them that they wanted to make sure that the images fit the content and the alt description also did. AI is also good at doing captions for our video. We can caption live speaking events, we can caption videos. Doing so not only is now a requirement for a lot of videos, but it also relates to the image and brand of your client. If they put videos on their website, how well done those captions are, says a lot about that client and how well you do that for the client, says a lot about the services you offer. Now my name is Sumner, that's S-U-M-N-E-R and many times AI has said my name is Summer with an M, two M's and I must say I'm not a season. It is also said I am Sumter, which I think is a fort somewhere in the south where some war was. There you go, see? That's not me either. It is also called me Thumper, which I know is a rabbit in a Disney movie, but I also know that there's a video game from the 60s or 70s called Thumper. But my favorite is it calls me Thunder. Now I know at times that I do get loud and people have commented when I get excited that I do, but come on, this one's just rude. So AI does its part, but seldom does it get my name correctly and I personally think I have an easy name. So when you think about what AI will do to your client's voice to the words that they speak in their videos, it's important. A few years ago, we had a presidential inauguration in the United States and Amanda Gordon read one of her poems. What she said was a country bruised but whole, benevolent but bold. And those of you in the room can see that that is not what AI said. It said is bruised but whole, whole, benevolence but bold fierce and. Now it is kind of amusing except to someone who really relies upon captioning. So if a deaf person wanted to know what she really said, that was not it. And we have to be careful if that's the way AI is hearing the voices. Some of our clients may not like that either. So in a live presentation, we want to make sure and we are very fortunate that we have a white coat captioning that is doing live transcript today for you. So we have a human that is capturing our words. So we won't have those kind of mistakes. If you are a person that likes to sing along with music and you like the lyrics, well, don't ask AI to give you the words to root off the red nose reindeer. Because what it says on here in the English language I'll say that R-E-A-D can be read and it can be read. So we'll give them that. But when it says red off the rent, those reindeer, I think it's way off base. So here's where you could use AI to begin with, but now hopefully you're seeing that human needs to get in there and make some changes. AI is also what runs the automatic checkers that so many people use to test websites for accessibility. And on the screen I have an image of what looks like a stamp that says test past, but those that can see this image can see that there's some pieces missing from it. The words kind of aren't filled in all the way. It's kind of scratchy. It's just not as crisp as you would expect for something that had just passed. So what that is telling me is that AI is not 100%. In fact, yesterday when I was in the contributors day at the accessibility table, there was a person sitting next to me who shared an article that the government in the UK ran a test on the 10 most popular automatic web accessibility testers. And they wrote a blog report on their results. So what do you think was the highest level of finding, oh wait, let me tell you, they wanted to make sure that it was a fair test. So they created a webpage with 148 errors, intentionally created these errors. They knew what they were and they knew that they should be easy to find. So of all of these 10 automatic accessibility checkers, some names some of you may know and use, what do you think was the highest level of success? Anyone? 70 you said? Thank you, but. 30? Close. That highest level of accuracy was 40%. It got as low as 19%. And these were common errors, errors that they knew would be found in almost every one of their government websites. So they were appalled to find out that AI could not find them. This is why if you use an automatic tester to test your website, you need to include persons with disabilities. The statement that nothing about us without us means that if you're going to build a website that's accessible and you want to make sure that it is, let us test it and tell you. I feel very fortunate that I have a team of people that work with me and many members of that team are persons with disabilities. So they will give me up close personal experience feedback as to whether or not what we created is actually working. So one of my associates is blind and he will test with the JAWS screen reader. And he will give me feedback as if he went to that website for the purpose of buying or using or gaining information from whatever was posted there. And he will tell me how easy was it able to navigate? Did it recognize the code to tell him what was the most important thing on the page, the H1? Did it tell him how many H2s were on the page, all the subheadings? Was he able to get to the various content that he wanted and use the forms? If not, then we need to fix it. Where the AI may have told us it was okay, always good. He will also tell me if the alt text descriptions were sufficient for the content on the page. AI will not tell us that. It will tell us there is text and text description, but not if it's good, if it fits the content of the page. So we must have the human get involved to let us know that we're doing it right and we're on the right path. When we want to include web accessibility in our satchel and in our toolbox, what we're offering our clients, it is very important that what we offer them reduce so with integrity, that we are able to tell them, yes, this site has been tested, looked at, overseen, participated in by persons with disability, the users that are going to access your website. And so now I know that at this point, people go, well, I don't know anybody. Where am I gonna find these people? Well, while you're here at WordCamp, you could kind of meet a few people and we will tell you where we find disabled workers to work on websites with us. Or you could go to a company site called Nobility, that's K-N-O-W-B-I-L-I-T-Y. They have an entire division where they employ persons with disabilities for the purpose of testing and assisting with remediation of websites. So that now you don't have to employ additional people, but you certainly can have additional people be employed because you use their services. This is very important. My company, the majority of our clients are brought to us by attorneys, attorneys who are representing companies who have either received a demand letter or are negotiating a legal settlement because their website was not accessible. So even though it's not on my list of how I present web accessibility, it's how I spend most of my day. I'm a specialist in web accessibility, I do not call myself an expert. I personally believe that an expert has all the answers or a whole lot more than I do. However, because this is what I specialize in, I know where to get an answer.  So I do keep people close at hand that can help me when I need an answer. So I wanna share with you quickly the top three things you may not have thought about that we see most often come across some of these cases. Now, I know when I was talking to someone earlier, he said, oh, it's always color contrast and I am here to say, no, it's not. Although color contrast comes in a lot of the time and it appears that web designers are now paying more attention to it, what comes in more often than anything is the structure of the website. The structure of the website that is not accessible to a person who does not use a mouse. Can someone go through that website using only the tab key on their keyboard? And you can test that very simply. You go to your browser bar where your URL is, go to the end of your URL and hit the tab key on your keyboard and keep hitting it and see where it goes. Does it follow the flow of your website? Does it land where you are expecting it to land? Does it go from left to right, from top to bottom? Sorry, I just hit my microphone. If it does, yay, if it does not, then you need to revisit how you structured your website. Are your headings in order? Do you have proper navigation? We have found in our cases a number of sites that the tab will go to a navigation, but if there's drop down and it goes to the first one on the drop down, you should be able to hit your space bar and have it launch wherever that link is supposed to go. If it doesn't, that needs to be fixed. That is the one we see the most. The other one we also see is if the tab lands on a form and it gets stuck, we call that a keyboard trap. The one that we find the most is when you have those dates that have that carousel and you have to find the date for your month, your date, your year, I don't like those because I am spinning forever to find the year I was born. And at the same time, however, for someone using a keyboard, it can be trapped. They can get stuck there and never get out of that field. So unless you can find a way to fix that on your website, don't put it there. Give the user the opportunity to manually enter that date or the time or whatever it is you were using that carousel for originally. If we find that there is a problem with the keyboard only navigation, that's going to be on every single one of your pages in your website. So it's quite global and serious. If they cannot access your homepage, how are they going to access any of the information within your website? And this is what we find is in a lot of the cases. Sometimes it's easy for us to fix by getting rid of a particular plugin they may be using for a menu and finding another one that's better. Sometimes we have to manually have them rewrite their menu. So it really depends on how they built the site, either way we've got to take it apart to fix it. The other thing we see a lot, the issues with is the headings and design. And what I have on the screen is cement blocks in a path in the grass. I personally suggest that the people that work for me before they start working on a website, they plan it. They know what's the most important information they want to convey, that's our header. What's the second most? What supports that header? What are H2s going to be? And do we have information that supports those subheaders that would be an H3? We plan it in advance and that same plan applies to all pages. If we have not planned out our H1s, H2s, H3s and so forth, I saw a site that came across my desk just before I left for this trip and they had their H1, probably about two thirds the way down the page. On the next page they had eight of them. And when I asked why, and in between these H1s they had a few H6s. And I asked why and the designer said, well it's in the style sheet. If I want that size font and that look, well then that's what the style sheet says. So I'd like to suggest to not be controlled by your style sheet, that do not use it to style and design your website. You can change what those H1s, H2s, fonts and such are in your style sheet, but don't let it control you. You are the one that determines what that styling is and make it consistent. That also brings in the design and the colors you use and the layout. We have a site we're working on right now that every page gives the impression it's a different website. They thought it was cool. It gave me a headache. Be consistent in your design so someone knows they're still on your site. And by doing so you make it easy for the user to get the information they came for and follow the path. Some of you may be aware that there is a report. It's called the Pound Away Report. You can Google it. It was done by a UK company and they found through all of their studies and statistics that over 60% of people will bounce from a website within the first four seconds if it's not accessible. So if you have an e-commerce site and somebody lands because they wanna buy a product but in that first four seconds they can't navigate, they're gone. Your client has a very high bounce rate and a very low sales rate. If you have a site that's informational and they cannot get to where they think they need to be on that site in the first four seconds, they're gone. That's a very high bounce. So if you want people to stay on your site make it a design that makes it easy. Make a path so when they land where do you want them to go? What is the user experience? What do you hope they want to accomplish when they land there? Are they looking for answers and information? Make it easy to find. If they want to buy a product make it easy for them to find the product, find the product description, get it into the cart and check out. Play customer and see what obstacles you may find. This is also another area where it's essential to have a person with a disability test that portion of your site. E-commerce sites are kind of in the target right now because they're so popular and people really need the information. But if they can't buy what they're trying to buy when they get to the site, they're gonna bounce. Make it easy for them to find what they want to buy. Have a person with a disability go to the site, try to buy something and tell you what obstacles they had to overcome to do so. I believe I've spoken fast but I promise that there would be 10 things that I would suggest that you do. Accessibility should be at the top of the list. It should be baked into your website. It should be part of your plan. It should be everything that you do with a website should have accessibility in mind. I do suggest that you go visit thew3.org and take that free class that's so essential. And remember nothing about us without us include persons with disabilities in the work that you do. Double check the use of your AI on your alt text. Make sure that your descriptions fit your content unless it's decorative and then make it so. Make sure that your captions are correct. And a friend of mine called Merrill Evans who is deaf has coined the phrase corruptions because if they're not correct they pretty much that's what they are. So make sure that your captions are correct. Even though I will answer to thunder. It's not my name. Do more than auto checkers. They're great to start but don't let them be the end of what you do. Make sure your structure is correct. Make sure that a person with a keyboard only can access your website. Test it for yourself. Make sure your design is consistent. I suggest that you join the make.wordpress.org and contribute. This is not a place that you go post a question and get help and answers but it is a place that you have knowledge and expertise to be able to share with others as well. It is a place though if you wanna get answers you can go peruse what people have posted and you might find what you're looking for but it's not a help desk but it is an opportunity to contribute to WordPress. So you go into make.wordpress.org and you look at all the available committees and see the one that you'd like to participate in. If you really wanna learn how to do captions I suggest you go to wordpress.tv. Pull up a video or two. There are instructions on the website how to do captions for WordPress TV. There's videos there that have been there for so long that they were never captioned. And so that means that certain people cannot watch those videos. Be part of the contribution and go and help by making those captions. You will learn after doing it a couple of times the easiest way to do it. But there are instructions step by step right there on wordpress.tv to do just that. So of all of this that I had said you too can be a web accessibility superhero. It's not that difficult and it's a whole lot of fun. I met someone last night and he said if you had three takeaways from what you're going to share today what would you like people to remember? And I said well, after pondering I would suggest you commit to web accessibility. Make it important. Secondly, do it ethically. Don't be the person just throws in a plugin or something else and tells the client that's as good as it gets. And please, now that I've told you that the AI is not going to do the job for you don't promise a client 100% and certainly don't guarantee. And third, have fun. Web accessibility can be fun. You're making the internet better for everyone. And you will be a person that is standing apart from the crowd. You will gain new clients and fun clients when they know that what you offer is inclusive. You may not know that certain clients have a disability because some disabilities are not visible. I have a client that they wanted to change the colors on their website and I said you really can't do that because the contrast is really bad. And he said this is what I want. I said okay. So we walked around his office with my laptop asking various people, what do you think of these new colors? Okay, everybody gave their input. We walked into his partner's office and his partner said stop. Don't ask me, I'm colorblind. He didn't even know that his own partner was colorblind. And when I showed him the contrast on the colors he wanted to select his own partner would not have been able to read what was on his website. So he would have disabled his partner and his partner's access to that website. So you will get the opportunity to educate clients in a way that no one else will. Be their advocate as well. Make sure that when you make their website accessible it's because you want them to succeed. The better their website is the more users that it will attract and users that will come back. They will be happy with you. If you put them in a position where they don't get the results that they want they will not be happy with you. But they are according to the web aim report over 95% of the websites could use your help. It's a wonderful opportunity to make a difference. I gave my gratitude at the beginning but I have this slide up here at the end as well because I'm very grateful to be here and be able to talk about web accessibility and I haven't seen a sign come up yet so I'm assuming that I have time for questions if someone has a question. Yes. Do we have a microphone or can you yell loud? Okay. I'm just curious if you're aware what is the most common screen reader at the time that people who are visually impaired are using. Back in the day when I first started building websites you had to buy this very expensive thing and are there tools people are using now that aren't so expensive that are built into OSs? Great question and thank you for asking. And here's where I'm glad that we had live captioning because up here I could not hear what she was saying but I could look at the screen and White Coat made sure they understood you correctly. So she asked about the screen readers. The JAWS was the first one that I was introduced to that was introduced to my family and it is the one that you do pay for. However, NVDA is a free download. You can go to NVDA, you can download it to your computer and by doing so you can test it out for yourself and see what it sounds like. You can go through the adjustments of the sound and the speed. Most of the people that I'm associated with that use a screen reader on a regular basis they have the sound very fast. The voice is speaking very fast faster than I can understand but they do and that's all that is important but you can see the controls that they have for their screen reader. There's also the ones that are built into the accessibility features on your Android and your iPhones because they have been upgraded to include accessibility. You can use those to check out your mobile placement of your website. How is it functioning on mobile devices? You can also get NVDA for mobile. So you can see if a person is using a screen reader separate from the one that's built into the phone or the tablet and like I said it's a no charge unless you wanna give them a donation which is always great and so there's that. I've also been asked from time to time the font that I use on my slides is called Atkison Hyperlegible and Atkison is an organization for the blind and the reason that I choose the font it has the appropriate spacing, the appropriate size and all of the letters are very clear that you can read them. So when you choose a font you want to make sure that as many people as possible can read that font and I've received a lot of comments by using this font that it is readable and it's not harsh on the eyes. Yes sir, awesome question. I don't see that it came on the microphone so I'm gonna attempt to repeat your question, okay? You were asking about carousels and when something changes images from one image to the next or when it changes one text to the next? Okay, carousels can be problematic and the reason that they're problematic is first off according to the WCAG standards we need to be able for the person to stop that carousel. So that someone that needs to see what it's on the screen they have the choice for it to be there longer. Most carousels don't have that feature. Most carousels become decorative images because there's no alt description for the images so a screen reader misses them entirely. Most carousels that I've seen done by plugins are not accessible by keyboard only. So you have a large chunk of your website that your user cannot access. If there's a way that you can take the information in that carousel and put it in your content you will find a greater benefit from it. Also there are times that people move the carousel so fast that no one can really absorb what was there. That's a cognitive issue. Anyone with a cognitive disability is going to bounce. That's also disruptive. If there's somebody that has long COVID right now many of them have a cognitive disability that they cannot tolerate something changing rapidly on a website and they will bounce. So we have a new segment of disability. So why would you want a carousel? What are you wanting to accomplish? Multiple, you want to show multiple images of a facility and the purpose is aesthetic. So you want people to be wowed by these images. Okay, so you don't want them to know what else is on the website. Do you want them to sit there and watch this little movie of changing images? When we choose something on our website let's look at the value. The value to the greatest number of users. And let's just take it out of the equation. Let's say that had nothing to do with accessibility. Is that what you want your users to be focused on when they get there and nothing else? Just look at all these pretty pictures sliding by. Not nothing. Not now when you think about it. In addition to, but where do you usually place the carousel? Isn't it in the hero section? Okay, so when they land on your website that's what they get. If it's not accessible, that's when they leave. So all that great information you wanted to absorb there must be a better way to present it. Of course we get these requests from clients. I remember requests I would get from clients and they would say I want you to take the underline out of those links, it's ugly. And I'd go, no it's not. Because if a client talks to me that way I just kind of mimic it back. But I tell them that it is essential that we have those links underlined for accessibility. And so when a keyboard lands on those it also have additional focus. So no, we're not taking the links out but I'll make your website layout attractive enough that you'll like those underlines on links. So I think clients need us to educate them that yeah that's a great idea, can I make it better? Can I take your idea and make it better so the users on your website do what you want when they get there? You're welcome. Yes ma'am, the captioner did not get your question so I will try to repeat what I think I heard. You are talking about a browser when you launch your computer you open up in Microsoft Edge and you get what looks like a news layout of a lot of different sections. I personally don't use Microsoft Edge so I can't give you personal feedback on that but here's a couple of things I do know. Microsoft is a big company. Microsoft has a very strong dedication to accessibility. Microsoft has also said in several of their presentations that if it's not working now it will be. That if we have created something that has a barrier let us know we will do something about it. They have a real commitment. So I can't answer to it because I personally don't experience it. I don't go to Microsoft Edge but I would say that Microsoft has someone that would know that answer since it's their product. You're welcome, thank you for asking. Did I see another hand? I know we're down to the last few minutes. I don't wanna miss anyone. If you come up with a question afterwards, feel free. My contact information is on the screen. Please send me a tweet, send me an email, follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an excellent place to find persons who are disabled, who are willing to test and work with you on your website. LinkedIn is an excellent place to find individuals that are dedicated to web accessibility and you can network with them. So I encourage you to do that. And if you have a question you may also send me an email I will answer as promptly as I possibly can. But I really appreciate all of you've been here and I appreciate all of your questions.


So this meeting is being recorded and go ahead and begin. Thank you, Jennifer. And Dr. Shabazz is also on his way in, but let's get started. I'm gonna call to order the February 13th meeting of the African Heritage Reparation Assembly pursuant to chapter, sorry, 2.04 p.m. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021, this meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via telephone. Anybody talking? And I am, Dr. Shabazz, can you? You can hear me, but I can't hear you, or does my sound? So I don't know, you can hear us. It says name only, next to your name. I don't know what that means. Sometimes signing out and coming back in can help if that helps. I do want to mention that this meeting is being recorded. So we'll do a sound check while Dr. Shabazz is figuring out his sound situation and I'm gonna start with you, Dr. Rhodes. I've been here and I definitely, I think I can be seen. You can be seen and heard, yes. Ms. Bridges. I can hear you. I'm still trying to figure out my screen, so. Okay. You can be seen right now. Okay. I can't see everybody else, but I can see me and you. Oh, okay. Are you on your iPad? Yes. Okay. It's, I know the iPad has weird functions. I, yeah. Can't find it, even I went through settings, but I'll figure it out. Okay. All right. Hi, Hala. Hello, hello. I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, very well. Thank you. Perfect. And Pamela. I can hear you. Excellent. Hear you too. And Jennifer. I can hear you. Make you do that. You were already, I know we could hear you, but just in case. Okay. How about you, Dr. Shabazz? Any, any better? Okay. So, three, there's four of us. So, do you want to try popping off and then popping back on Dr. Shabazz? No, I'm good now. Oh, you're good. Yes, you are. Okay. Wonderful. Okay. Welcome everyone. And let's see here. I believe that Yvonne will not be available to meet today. And I think Alexis may or may not join us. So, oh, you know what it is? I was looking, I'm looking at, I'm sorry. I'm looking at the agenda here for our upcoming retreat, which let me just see here. All agendas. Just excuse me one second. Okay, wonderful. So, I'd like to just start with a couple announcements. First, I wanted to start by just acknowledging a beautiful event that happened this past week that Ms. Bridges is involved in and would be happy to pass it over to Ms. Bridges if you would like to say anything about it. This was the opening of the Ancestral Bridges exhibit at Amherst College. So this exhibit had already been for the Juneteenth, sort of leading up to Juneteenth. And then through Juneteenth, it was at the Historical Society and now it's been moved to Amherst College through the summer, I think. So Ms. Bridges, do you wanna say anything about it? Sure. We had a great, great turnout. My 96-year-old aunt spoke. I spoke. And with the exhibit and the partnership with Amherst College is phenomenal. And myself, I think maybe at some point we should have Anika here to speak on it at our meeting because it was an amazing event and it's just gonna keep going on and on. I suggest people come and see it who didn't get a chance to see it. It's gonna be at the Robert Frost Library through the summer. And are there particular hours or is it basically open when the library's open? It's open when the library is open. It was an amazing turnout. Very well-received Amherst video, is that what it's called? Amherst media? Amherst media, sorry, Amherst media. I should know that. Tape the whole thing. So it was once they get it together and send my aunt her copy of it. She was an amazing, she was amazing. She got up there and spoke. I had to go after her and I said it was a hard act to follow, but I think that it would be really great if we had Anika come and speak on it when we can do that. That would be wonderful. And we can extend the invite to meet her, scheduling whatever works for her. I think it would be really great to have Anika here and to talk about the exhibit and just everything that surrounds it. It really was beautiful. And I suggest that folks get over there to see it if you haven't. I wonder, will the video of the opening, Ms. Bridges, be available for public viewing once they get it together? I'm pretty sure that would be, but the amazing, which talks about the partnership between Amherst College and ancestral Bridges. It's just phenomenal. It needs to be put out there, but it was like they really did a great job putting it together and partnering with ancestral Bridges. So I'm pretty proud of that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I felt that too. It was really, really beautiful. Okay, well, that's one announcement that I had. And then let's see, Jennifer, could you tell us about or Pamela and or Jennifer, the Black History Month, what's coming up for that? I know we have some events that are coming up that the town is hosting. And I can also pull things up too, unless you have it right there. Oh, do you wanna go ahead, Pamela? Oh, I thought that you would go ahead. So the first event was on February 1st, and Jennifer would have to describe that because I wasn't able to attend that event because of Aaron's health issues. And the final event is happening on the 26th of the month, which is the experience of Black music from, we're trying to be very ambitious, 1619 to present day with examples of song and history under the broader theme of resilience. So. Beautiful. And that will be at the middle school. And that's co-hosted with the Human Rights Commission. Is that right? That's correct. Okay, great. So that is open to all and everyone is welcome. So are there any other announcements that members have before? I'm gonna move us immediately into a first public comment period. And just, I have just a few words that I'll say with that, but would any other members like to? All right. Well, we did have two amazing birthdays happening among this membership this week. So I won't name any names, but I will say happy birthday to the two wonderful members that were celebrating this week. Her pose. Has yours happened yet? Yeah, next year. Irvin and I are both February, February people. I don't know if any other February. Yeah, happy birthday, Melka. Same to you, Irv. Sweet. All right. So we're gonna move into a public comment period. And we, so given the sort of timing of our meetings, we have been basically able to meet about an hour each meeting. So what I would ask is for folks, if you are an Amherst resident, please raise your hand first. And we will take that public comment first. And then we'll just look at the list. We do have several people in the audience today. And then we'll have a second public comment period later in the meeting after we've had discussion and we'll go through that same process. So I'm gonna read the public comment statement quickly. During the public comment period, chair will recognize members of the public. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your name, pronouns and address. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of the chair based upon the number of people who wish to speak. No speaker can cede their time to another speaker. The AHRA will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter generally. Sometimes we are able to answer a question or clarify something, but generally we'll just be listening and listening closely. So if you would like to make a public comment and let's start with Amherst residents first, if you could raise your hand, okay? Not seeing any. So anyone in the audience who would like to make a public comment, please use the raise hand function and we will bring you in. And again, there will be a second period if you'd prefer to comment toward the end of the meeting. Okay, wonderful. So we have, it looks like MRCC. I'm not sure who's bringing folks over today if Jennifer Pamela, welcome. Can you hear us? Yes. All right. Yes, I can. Thank you. So I know thank you for having me today and for having a meeting in regards towards reparations and the work that you guys and Amherst have been doing. My name is Saskia Van James. I am a Cambridge resident. Before Cambridge, I'm a displaced Bostonian. I grew up in the South Shore. I have family in Central Massachusetts and Western Massachusetts. Outside of Massachusetts, everywhere. I am a descendant of enslaved people from chattel slavery within the United States. And I have been working to support reparations for the past several years. My organization was founded in 2017 and we realized that pushing for social equity was not gonna achieve liberation for our people and address the severe economic disparities that exist. And today I have severe concerns in regards to the way we're approaching repairing harms and acknowledging that there's land trauma that's connected with people who are descendants of chattel slavery here within the U.S. and actually acknowledging that through reparations. Now I know on a city and on a municipal and state level, like the trillions of dollars that's owed to us is not feasible. But I do think that there's really practical ways that we can support transitional justice on a super local level. So some of the recommendations I have for you guys, I just wanted to share I know you guys already doing awesome work and I see the agenda for today. But one of what I wanted to say is that I think it's critical for the city of Amherst to take the necessary steps to support recognizing black Americans by their federal legal name as American freedmen so that they can become a protected class and to dismantle, to directly take steps towards dismantling systemic racism. We must acknowledge that when we're identifying people by the color of their skin, we are upholding systemic racism. There's a quote by Bernice King last year. She said, I do not want to be people of color. That love is not the stripping of culture and heritage. That is not love. So we need to acknowledge that there's tribal harm that has occurred and that the needs of the people here who are indigenous to Turtle Island, which is American freedmen. We are indigenous here as well as under the continent of Africa. We were here before the colonizers. We became enslaved also by Native Americans. So we have mixed ancestry here. We have been over here for over 400 years. We are indigenous here as well too. And we deserve to be acknowledged that and for the anti-blackness attached to indigenous to be removed.  And to acknowledge presidents has been set forth by federal law that defines American freedmen as being black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States by decree of the Freedmen's Bureau of 1865. So essentially what we can be pushing for on a local level is just like we have office of immigrants and we have office of Native American affairs. We can also have an office for American freedmen affairs. I would also like for you guys to recognize that there's 12 harm areas that's been produced by the California Task Force. And those 12 areas defined harm areas are enslavement, racial terror, political disenfranchisement, housing segregation, separate and unequal education, racism and environment and infrastructure, pathologizing of black families, control over creative, cultural and intellectual life, stolen labor and hindered opportunity, unjust legal system, mental and physical harm and neglect and then the racial wealth gap. So I asked for the amhars to match what is already being done in other states as far as identifying the 12 areas of harm. Also I asked for you to center the voices of American freedmen, otherwise known as black Americans throughout the entire engagement and consultation campaign as part of transitional justice and recognition of reparations as defined by international law and recognized by the United Nations. Essentially going through a truth and reconciliation process and for that to be guided by the people who have directly experienced harm for we know our communities. We have in-depth outreach to do, this is an intergenerational movement. Our children have to be involved. Our elders have to be involved. All voices matter. All genders, all ages, all sexualities. We are a tribe and we cannot afford to let anybody's voices go unheard in this moment. I wanna thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you being here. Okay. Are there any other hands right now for public comment? Any other folks would like to make public comment? All right. I'm not seeing any. Wonderful. So we are going to move into our agenda and we're gonna start with a survey. We have some great news. Tom Manager Backelman has signed the contract with the Dunahue Institute. So we are ready to move into our work there and really, really appreciate Pamela and Jennifer for your support with that as well. So we have tentatively planned to have a kickoff of our survey work during a retreat on the 22nd in the evening. This retreat will take place in the town room. So Jennifer has reserved the town room, which means that those of us who would like to be there in person for the retreat can do so, but it will be a hybrid meeting. Therefore, Dr. Rhodes and any members of the public who are not able to attend in person can attend in that way virtually. We will not be holding a public comment during our retreat. So it's a special meeting, which means we'll just be getting to work as an assembly, but the public is of course welcome to be there to listen on our work. So this will be sort of a combination of what Alexis had suggested at our last meeting where we discuss our values as individual members as well as what values do we want to move forward with as we begin to write our report and recommendations for the town council. And it will really kick off our survey work. So one of the questions that I have since it's going to be in the evening from six to eight is would we like for that meeting to include anyone from the Dunahue Institute or perhaps is it best for us to have that meeting and then invite the Dunahue to a meeting after that where we'll already have had sort of our discussion and be able to then present that to them so that they can move forward with their work and our shared work really. Does anyone have an opinion on that one way or another? I think we should maybe save our time with the Dunahue Institute for when we've, you know more in that analysis phase and giving us, you know, when that comes back then I don't know for this opportunity at the retreat whether there's much to go over at that point. Agreed. Awesome. Okay. Anyone else, I tend to agree with that too. So that, but if others have, and just to keep in mind that our contract it identifies that we have like two to four sessions with them depending on how we do it. So we want to be really strategic in terms of the times that we're actually meeting with them. So it will be great for us to meet in that retreat setting and then we can be really prepared for our first meeting with them. I have gone ahead and sent the Dunahue Institute, sent Kerry the Rhode Island, the Providence Rhode Island Survey. I had captured that survey and the raw data from that survey earlier on. And so I went ahead and forwarded that to her so she might be, she asked actually if that could be forwarded. I think members of the assembly would also really benefit from seeing that. So I will have Jennifer include that in our packet so that it will be available and I'll send it out to members. Are there any other questions right now in terms of the survey? Questions, comments, concerns? The distribution this was quite comprehensive and I really liked that. It gets to all the great moves that we should be getting to. Awesome, I'm so glad to hear that. I'm actually gonna share the screen right now so that we can look at that together. And I would like to, I sent this out to the committee earlier today but because of open meeting law I had asked for folks not to work in the document. So if you would like to add to this distribution list I can go ahead and do that in real time. Or now that I think this has been put into the public you could certainly send any suggestions to Pamela or Jennifer or myself and we will make sure to add. But we'll just briefly go through this. So first here we have the residents of African heritage. These are the ways that we have right now. Our inclusion portal, a BAM list and our for a mailing list and then our social media. There may be other ways here. So please feel free to, we can just popcorn style as we're going through this. We've got elected officials here and town departments. I'd love for Pamela and Jennifer to give feedback on the town department list if there are other departments that this makes sense to make sure that distribution happens. That would be great. Town committees as well if Jennifer and Pamela have any thoughts on that. We have our PACs, our political action committees. We have our economic development organizations. We've got the media. Here we have our anchor institutions including students, staff, faculty and alumni and then our family, community and civic organizations. I did add a couple today to this list. There's a new alliance called the Amherst Climate Justice Alliance. It's made up of a very, it's a very, very powerful alliance of different organizations coming together around climate justice and also the intersectionality with the work that we're doing as I understand it. And then we have our grassroots groups, independent schools. This was one where I thought I might be missing something, but. What I don't see is the, did you have the regular school district particularly the family outreach center? I have the family outreach of Amherst, but you're not within the school district, yeah. Yes, okay. K to 12, okay, PTOs. But I think there is an outreach unit of the school district or of the schools that may also have a list that can be shared beyond the PTOs. Excellent, okay. That's great to know. I will definitely make sure.  Do you know something about that? Well, I believe the appropriate person might be Dwayne Chambl to send it to. So it's. Because Martha Guevara moved up from there, didn't she? Well, not 100% sure. She was still at the family center, I thought, but they have their own Amherst family center. And also I would say that Mike Morse's regular newsletter that goes out. So the superintendent has a weekly newsletter. All the principals of the schools have a weekly newsletter. I'll clean this up for us. I'm just getting it in there for now. Okay, great. If to live would send the survey link out with to live Sadiq as a long time, you know, part of the bias family as a part of a long time ancestral bridges family, that would probably go a long way, particularly in stimulating some of the African heritage community. Absolutely. And I had a chance to catch up with him briefly at the ancestral bridges exhibit and we've been in communication. So that's a great, yeah, that's a great. That's a great one for us. And then let's see. We also have the faith organizations. I do need to flesh this out a bit to add all of the various places of worship. We have the interfaith network and the JCA reparations committee. Dr. Shabazz is the interfaith network, the group that you're involved in with the folks from across the river there, Bridge for Unity. That's, is that a, that's different, right? That's different from interfaith network. Yeah. There's a little email list that they can send out to, sure. Excellent. Okay. And then I know of the district one neighborhood association. I'm not aware of other neighborhood associations, but I'll definitely check with my colleagues on the council to see if there are others that we could, but we can definitely ask counselors who represent districts to get it out. So I'll just say, you know, district counselors. Great. And so I would imagine that we will, once the survey questions are completed, we'll also have a memo or some sort of letter that goes with it. I do want to speak with Jennifer and Pamela about translation. I think I did say last time that our contract includes the Donahue will be creating a written version of the contract as well. So we'll be able to, maybe we want to add to the list the physical places where we would like for physical distribution. Are there any thoughts on that? Could you go back and scroll back up? I just want to make sure that the bid and the downtown Amherst Foundation are on there. We have, yep, the chamber and the bid and the downtown Amherst Foundation. And that's DAF, right? Right. And then Amherst Cinema Board of Directors, whoever that group is, there's a whole group there. That's a great, yes. Okay. Oops, sorry, I'm not. All right. And they actually, because they just unionized, right? So we might list them under family, community and civic organizations. Are they not here? No, they're not. The union and the terms of Amherst Cinema, I guess all four of them unionized. Or what do you mean all four? All four of? There wasn't a large group of employees of Amherst Cinema that unionized, but they unionized anyway, so. Oh wow, okay, I didn't realize that. Okay. And Jennifer, what is, you, I remember you had given me this one, Cran. What, I thought you had, was that not you? The C-R-A-N, I don't know where that came from. Okay, I'll look into that one. All right, so for- I'm sorry. Please, no, go ahead. Do you need what that acronym stands for or no? Oh, that would be great, Hala. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Citizens for Racial Amity now. Oh, that is what it is. Okay, now I know. All right, I'll remember that. And then, all right, let's do physical distribution spots. We had talked about, definitely, Jennifer, what's your experience with other surveys in terms of, I know the, is the town hall generally one place? So, I would say that maybe have a QR code on a flyer, and so the hotspots would be the Bangs, the Jones Library, like the restaurants. Hopefully the bid also, like the bid chamber office. Yeah, you could do the bid in the chamber office. Can I ask? But I know like Crazy Noodles has a really large board where you can place stuff. So there's a space here in town hall. Great. I know, and I'll get a list of other restaurants that I know have posting boards. Like I know Amherst House of Pizza does, but we can add to that. Okay. What about maybe in some of the faith buildings that we have? There might be an opportunity there. So we'll see about that too. All right, so this is our list for right now. And at this point, we can add to it at any time. And I'm gonna send this over to Carrie as well, just so she can get a sense of where, that was one of the kind of questions that came up, was where was this gonna be, how were we gonna distribute? So if there's nothing else, I'm gonna stop the share here and we can move on. Oh, Ms. Bridges, how are you doing? I see you're covering your eye. How are you feeling? Okay. I'm doing okay. All right, good. Okay, so any other questions before we move on about the survey? Yeah, my brown hand is fading into my door, but... Oh, excuse me, yep. Go ahead, Dr. Svaz. Trying to confirm. So the town doesn't have a any disaggregated list from it's either from its voting rolls or from any other sources. I don't think so. I remember asking, I don't believe that they ask about race on the local census. Yep. So I don't know who else would necessarily have that. And then the aggregated list, which would be a list of ground addresses. I know candidates sometimes pull those lists to send out their postcards and whatnot. That's just of every resident in town. Do we know what that global number is just to have a kind of a ballpark against what we're doing by, I guess, electronic mail? What is our ground list of Amherst residents with ground locations? Oh, I don't know off the top of my head. So, but I can find out and then send everyone an email. Yeah, the universal voting, that would be just in terms of, I guess, either the tax list or the voting list, what's the universe of Amherst would be good to know. I have... I'll go transfer the form. I have the voter list from, I think the most recent voter list for the town that I have that I requested in my role as counselor was September 3rd, 2021. But I believe I requested one even more recently that just I'm not seeing in my Google Drive right now. So I can definitely, but like on this one, there are, oh goodness, how does this, it looks like there are about 16,000 entries, 16,089. Would that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Okay. All I have is from dated November 1, 2021. I have the district eight as it was then called. I don't know if precinct eight, I don't know if they still divide the voting list that way anymore or not, but I had pulled precinct eight and was able to identify one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Well, a small number of entries that I've identified my own residents included who are in precinct eight African heritage people. But anyway, that was just part of an effort I was making from that particular list. But okay, it's just good to have what we know as sort of the universe of residents to then be able to cross-reference with whatever we get in at the end of this process in terms of those who self-identify as Amherst African heritage residents so that we can see vis-a-vis, you know, this population count, here's how many we got in response. So we have some idea of that. That's all. Absolutely. One thing I'm not sure what's on there is the Amherst ending because of their distribution that they have. Yes, they are on. You mean on the list that we had up? Yeah, right. Yeah, they're on there under the media with all the rest of them. You said the Amherst ending, right? Yeah, okay, yeah, we're good with that. There's the recorder. Is that what it, or the reminder? You know, I don't know if the reminder, that's a, let me just see. Here we go. The reminder, that's a good call because that's somewhat new. I have the indie, the Amherst current, which I'm not sure if that's running anymore, the Gazette, Amherst media, Valley Free Radio, WHMP 1063 and 973, The Beat. But the reminder is also good here. Let me add that. Amherst open. Yes, okay, yeah. Excellent. And have a reach that extend beyond our town, but again, we can see what we have. Which one was that, Dr. Schwarz? Think, well, you were just mentioning the reminder and I was just, in some of the others, you listed I think maybe our headquartered outside of the town and maybe have a reach that goes beyond the town, but maybe that's gonna be okay because we do have in there different ways people can identify if they are Amherst residents, that they are of the target population. So we'll hopefully have some number of that identified as such. Yeah, absolutely. And we may capture folks who have moved out of the Amherst community for whatever reasons. And that's really important, I think, to be able to do that. So, and that might be something we wanna talk more about at our retreat because my guess is folks who have moved out, regardless of the reasons that they've moved out would be able to provide us some really, really good feedback. So I do see, oh, there's Hala, okay, wonderful. I thought I saw Hala had fallen off. Hi, Hala. Can you hear us, Hala? I can, I apologize for that. No worries, no worries, okay. All right, great. So moving on, again, is everyone here able to attend the retreat on February 22nd from six to eight? Again, it will be held in the town room for AHRA members who would like to be in person and it will also be available just as we would have a usual meeting via Zoom. So I do see someone's hand is raised in the attendees and just wanted to let you know in case you weren't here earlier. We did have our first public comment period, but we'll be holding another public comment period shortly. So please do leave your hand up if you'd like to speak during that. All right, so the other pieces that I wanted to get to today, I wanted to give you an update on the big payback screening. So I've been working with the Student Senate at Amherst College and they are very, very excited about hosting the big payback and having it be in one of the spaces at Amherst College. We're hoping for that to occur in late March, but more likely early April. So, and that's so that Alderwoman, former Alderwoman Robin Ruth Simmons is going to make a trip here to Amherst and will be part of our panel that we can have either before or after the screening. So once I have some more information, the Senate has identified three possible locations at Amherst College that would work for a large crowd as well as space to have a sort of reception and panel discussion. So as that moves forward, I will keep folks posted, but please let me know if you have any questions about that. And if you haven't seen the big payback, I think I said it's streaming free on PBS right now. So definitely excellent and worth watching. And then in terms of the League of Women Voters event with Dr. Sandy Darity, we, a small group of us, so I think it's Dr. Rhodes and myself are meeting with a small group of the League later this week. And that is a first meeting to discuss how that collaboration might work and how the AHRA may be able to support and collaborate on bringing Dr. Darity here and what that will look like. So I'll also provide more on that. And the Stolen Beam is putting out another series in which they've invited us to be co-sponsors of. And so I will make sure it's, I'll make sure that all of the dates and things like that get to you all. And then there's a press release actually that hasn't gone out yet, but that will go out soon. So that's really exciting. That's again, also in partnership with the library, the Jones Library. Any questions on all of those pieces? Any of those? I wanna thank you for all your work on this, Michelle, and to furthermore, just to suggest that perhaps coming from you on behalf of all of us, if there's agreement, would be to make a special invite to attend the payback, the big payback to the presidents at least of our colleges and our university here in town. So Chancellor Kumbler-Soboswamy, Edward Wingenbach at Hampshire College and Michael Elliott at Amherst College. It would really be important if those three gentlemen would attend. Excellent, yes. I agree, I've noted that. And I know that the student senate president at the college, Cyrus is in close contact with Michael Elliott. And so we'll be able to move those things forward as we sort of put the pieces in place here. And I think it would be really great to think about that for all of the membership, who do we want to, I mean, we want as many folks, right? Like our work is for the entire community and we want as many folks from all different aspects of the community to attend who would like to be there in attendance. And so just thinking about our list that we already have and how all these pieces are gonna come together like is there a way to have an invitation to the big payback also tied in with an invitation to the survey. So just thinking about how we can be efficient and effective in our work as we, because we really are limited on our time at this point. Okay, so Dr. Shabazz, I'm not sure if you have or if Hala has a BAM update. I did want to say that I received an email over the weekend. Let me just see if I can pull it up real quick here. And I will share my screen. Let's see. And I'm curious if anybody has seen this. Let's see, share screen. So somebody sent me this legislation that was filed in January by Senator Liz Miranda. And this is to create, it's not scrolling here. Oh, here we go. This is to create an act establishing a commission to study reparations in Massachusetts. I was surprised I didn't see any news or anything about it. So I'm not, but it did get filed. So I'll send that to everybody so that you all have it. But does anyone know about this? Yeah, so it's been in preparation. And I think they're, I've spoken with Bud Williams in relation to his being listed or supporting similar measure in the general court in the lower chamber. But yes, this is efforts within the, within the state level that I think our one of our speaker in public comment who's based in Boston, Ms. Van James Saskia, Van James mentioned as has been going on, there are efforts to really look at this, some of this even has been in discussed from the, some of the cannabis commission. Relative to some of its efforts or kind of lack of efforts around the justice, reparative justice aspect in regards to cannabis policy and cannabis reform. So yes, this is a major development, I think stimulated in part from California kind of getting ahead of us and being the first out. Now here comes Massachusetts. Yeah, absolutely. And I just as a, from sort of wearing my counselor hat was planning to send an email to Liz Miranda and just thank her for filing it and sort of make a connection with her. So yeah, it'd be interesting to follow that for sure. So was there a BAM update? Hello, Dr. Shabazz that you'd like to share at this point. There is, from my standpoint, there is not, we have been on a bit of a hiatus and need to get back into meeting regularly. So thank you for the encouragement or reminder and accountability. Awesome. And welcome, Alexis. Oh, thank you so much. I'm sorry, I'm like scarfing down food, but thank you. Good. All right, I'm glad you're here. So, and Alexis, I'll catch you up on what you missed in terms of the retreat and just various announcements. I'll catch you up outside of the meeting. Awesome. Okay, so I'm looking at our agenda. If there aren't any other member reports or even if there are, let's do, let's call our second public comment period. And again, I'm gonna ask first that folks who would like to make public comment that our Amherst residents, please raise your hand. And then, or, you know, if you are affiliated with the university or any sort of stakeholder in Amherst, please raise your hand first. Okay, so we have two hands up right now. And I'll just ask that Jennifer will our first speaker in. Yeah, Lauren Mills should be coming in. So I'm letting her in first. Great. And while we're doing that, I wanted to make sure that in our member comment section of the meeting that Dr. Rhodes, if he is willing, will give an update on the CSSJC meeting that we were invited to attend on Friday. I sent you all the meeting recording. It was a really, really rich meeting on many, many levels and recommend that everybody watch it if you get a chance. But Dr. Rhodes will be able to give a little bit of an update, I hope on that. And let's see, I think we have Lauren. Hi, Lauren. I'm gonna try to quickly as I can and hope you can hear me. Yes, just stay close. You were sort of fading in and out. So I think we can hear you. Okay. Yes, I am a resident of Amherst, but I grew up in Boston and I just had a few comments about, you know, my research and, you know, just staying in conversation and in the know-how of, you know, this assembly. I have been looking at the Caribbean Reparations Commission which has a website that has some interesting points that it makes and one of them is the importance of cultural institutions and heritage institutions and also the enhancement of historical knowledge for Black people in this country to further our knowledge of ourselves and to help us to continue our narrative of what reparations means and looks like. I also wanted to comment on, you know, the Caribbean, it has reggae month this month as February. So they see their culture and they infuse their culture in their schools and in their children and their youth and I would encourage this assembly to find a way to get youth involved in the reparations discussion and also want to say happy birthday to Bob Marley and his family, which his birthday was February 6th and also happy birthday to Dr. Shabazz and Dr. Rhodes. I think that's all I wanted to say and just it's really important for Black residents in Amherst to stay abreast and to continue to be part of the narrative of the reparations assembly. Thank you. Thank you, Lauren.  So I'm sure maybe Lauren is already aware of that but I'm going to try to attend, I have another meeting to attend but I'm going to try to listen in to that and that might be of interest to others as well. The other thing that I wanted to say is and this is very early, a seed has been planted and Lauren, I'd love to talk with you more about this but the possibility of the AHRA as one of our ways of reaching the community, having an intergenerational dance and this is something that a community member has brought to me and I think is a really neat idea. So I'm meeting with them on Wednesday for lunch to hear more about that idea. So thank you, Lauren. Watch out if you get devil bridges on the dance floor. It's going to be hot. And Carly Tartakov for that matter. That's who we want. All right, wonderful. So thank you again, Lauren and we have Chiara is coming in. Welcome Chiara, can you hear us? There I am, okay, I can hear you. Good afternoon. I just wanted to first of all say thank you for holding these public comment periods. It's definitely a very essential part of the process and hearing from the public on this issue. I do want to just continue to beat the drum that any sort of data collection that you all are doing in terms of gathering information from the public it must have some level of data disaggregation in terms of ethnicity when you're doing your outreach within Amherst. It's very important to actually identify the population who are descendants of slavery in Amherst in general. It's very important. Especially when we're talking about genocide and actually being able to name and recognize our people whose history is the basis for this reparations claim to begin with. So that's incredibly important. Also with regard to the media apparatuses that you're going to look into to share the message I noticed WIB is on there. That is my family's radio station. So I'll be happy to help to facilitate that connection if need be. Also I wanted to recommend African American Point of View magazine I'm sorry newspaper as well. Their reach definitely extends to Amherst and will definitely reach people in Amherst as well as those who may have moved out of Amherst and to other areas of the part of the Valley. So definitely I wanted to recommend them as well. So I think that's all I wanted to say but just continuing to put the message out there and beating the drum that the actual specificity of Black Americans descendants of US shadow and slave is a very, very important part of this process. Thank you. Thank you so much Kiara. And I understand that Kiara and Dr. Shabazz participated in a program together recently. Is that something that we can walk? Like is that available for viewing or has it been recorded? It is an audio recording. I'm working on the technical aspect of that getting it produced, but yes, that's available. Probably going to YouTube with it, Kiara, is that right? That's right. Excellent. Well, please let us know when that's available so we can check it out. All right, so I am not seeing any other hands. Dr. Rhodes, can I call on you to give us some, a bit of reporting on the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee meeting that occurred. I do see Alexis's hand is up in the attendees. I'm not sure if perhaps she got moved out accidentally. I'm just gonna say that the name says people talk, move. And so she was next to Kiara. And so their names were moving although Alexis wasn't speaking. And so I think I accidentally gave you Jennifer. I forgive you. Dr. Rhodes, we do have one more hand in public comment. Let me ask you, can you wait through that public comment before giving your report or do you need to run? No, I definitely have a little time. Okay, great. So let's take Cash who is coming in through public comment. And so that public comment period is still open. Welcome, can you hear us? Peace, peace, yes. Great. Thank you for letting me speak. First, I wanted to say reparations is very important as the conversation of modern day. So I applaud you all for having this discussion and the things that come from it. Michelle, I was hoping that you could bring the image back up of the bill for Massachusetts. I think it said 2393. I tried to screenshot it quickly, but I like to research that further. Just to understand these bills, who suggested to be a part of the commissions in San Francisco, which is what I wanted to bring up to this group and to those in the sound of my voice. In the city of San Francisco, they have a reparations task force of which is completely black American based on different socioeconomic statuses from a 14 to 24 year old to someone formerly incarcerated, to someone who's been displaced by gentrification, someone affected by, excuse me, someone who lives in public housing, someone who's been educated in finance equity, so on and so forth. I think we should take a look at that same standard for when creating any of these task force in the respective cities and states as well. I wanted to just amplify the financial demands that San Francisco suggested and hope that we mirror those in these respective cities and states as well. In San Francisco's instance, and it's from a 60 page report on page 33 where they speak about economic empowerment, they mentioned a lump sum payment for reparations of which they set it at $5 million, a one-time lump sum, as well as 250 years of income payments tied to the area median income of which some of us argue that should be for 400 years, as well there's debt forgiveness. I can mention the other things trust fund as well as tax credits and other things, but I really wanted to focus on the debt forgiveness because I see that as a win-win strategy that ties together public and private partnership in a way that I think will expedite our claim. Just as one example, any credit card company, any university that black Americans specifically would owe debts to, those debts would be eradicated or paid for by the American government. So I think that it would be in their best interest to see this claim come to fruition. Thank you guys for letting me speak and peace and reparations. Thank you, Cash. And yeah, I'm just, so I wanna just give you my email address quickly. If you send me an email, I can send you the bill. It's Michelle with 1-L-M-I-C-H-E-L-E, Miller, M-I-L-L-E-R, three, six, eight, oh, at gmail.com. So if you have the time and you just send me a quick email, I can send that over to you. And the bill was Senate docket number 2393. It was filed on January 20th, 2023, presented by Liz Miranda. So if you do a Google search of that, you'll also be able to find it, but please do reach out by email if you'd like. So thank you for being here, Cash. And so we're gonna have Dr. Rhodes. And I see that we have, I think, we have one of our co-chairs here from the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee. And if they would like, and this is, I'm putting them on the spot, Allegra, if you'd like to come in, raise your hand. You keep your camera off if you're not in a place. And if you wanna stay in the audience, that's totally fine too. But I wanna welcome you if you'd like to come in. All right. So we'll bring Allegra in and then Dr. Rhodes, why don't you go ahead and share with us about the meeting? It actually was a very good discussion and interaction with that committee. First up is that the topic of Crest came up and its objectives, its mission and looking at where they are now and how close they are to their mission and objectives. And one of the things I indicated was that, it would be good for the committee, CSSJ, and at the end of the six month period in which Crest has been alive to look at how close they are to their mission and to view that through the lens of the data that will be collected and what have been collected. They indicated that they would be having some kind of forum or listening session in March that would address that. I think that'd be a very, very good thing to happen. Crest is a very important part of this time at this point in time and their mission as voted upon and stated needs to be examined in terms of whether they're on mission or whether there are other things that throwing them off track or whatever. So that's one. The other thing was, I think Pat mentioned something about black businesses here and Amherst and my response was that when the bid in the downtown Amherst Foundation in the town were distributing money, a lot of the businesses that were on the list that Pat had were either unhadly, did not exist or went out of business or were bankrupt or that they were not registered with the town nor were they registered with the state. And finally, they were not, they did not apply. One of the things that the observations that I shared was that when I looked at that list, it occurred to me that there was a woeful lack of entrepreneurship skills that have been exhibited. And that is one thing that can be rectified. And I certainly at some point in the very near future would like to bring that forward to AHRA, how AHRA and the CSSJ and the town and the big thing come together to create an entrepreneurship program for not only adults, but also for middle school and high schoolers. Now that entrepreneurship program for middle school and high school is something that is very dear to my heart. I've taught entrepreneurship from third grade through adults. And I also wanted the experience that I had was teaching entrepreneurship to various students, groups about a year after Katrina had and spent three months there teaching entrepreneurship and financial literacy. That is something I think is very dear to my heart. I think that it would be very important to have that available on an Amherst. And I think that in certainly a care occurred if we coordinate with each other. And the last thing was that the CSSJ has some priorities that the town has signed off one and that those things need to be moved forward. And I think that there may be a role for AHRA. I also believe that, and I said that it was, when you're dealing with the large list of priorities that you pick three of them to move forward within a period of time, I think that there may be a role for AHRA. Three of them to move forward within a period of time, gather all of the resources necessary to get those done and get those done and then move for another set of three. Anyway, that's about it. Thanks Dr. Rhodes, that's really helpful. And I ran into Ms. Pat over the weekend and she was really looking forward to talking to you about the idea that the two of you sort of hatched during the meeting and the technical and entrepreneurial work. So, and I wanna thank again Allegra, Clark and D. Shabazz, Dr. D. Shabazz for inviting us to the meeting and for wanting and encouraging us to be in collaboration. I think we have a lot of intersecting mission. So I would love if Allegra, if you could especially tell us about the upcoming listening session but please to share anything that you might want. And I did send out the recording to all of the members here. So for folks who want to listen, it was a really, really powerful and really, really great meeting. Welcome Allegra. Well, thank you. It's nice to see all of you. And again, thank you for all the work that you have been doing in this community. It's really important. And I do hope that we can continue to collaborate. I think that the listening session will be March 25th. I believe the plan is to have it from two to four in the afternoon. And I believe that we decided upon the town room so that we could have a hybrid function for people who might not be able to join in person and Cress will be present to kind of give an overview of how the past six months have gone. And also to hear from the community about what the needs are from the community's perspective. So that is the plan so far. We'd love to have as many of you there as possible. Excellent, yes. And please let us know if we can support that. I'll definitely make sure that I get that out to folks in time, date and everything. And Jennifer, I assume it hasn't been posted yet as a meeting is that it's not posted yet. So there's no link or anything. No, and I'm gonna create a fire this week. Awesome, perfect. Okay. So thank you, Allegra. And if so, I see it's 312. I know Ms. Bridges pushed past her time. And I think some of the rest of us did. No, you're good. Okay. Are there any other member comments before we adjourn the meeting today? And just to be clear, we are set to meet again on, I'm sorry, the 20th we can't meet. That's right, right, Jennifer? We are close on the 20th. Okay. So our retreat is on the 22nd. Which means that some of the preparation for that may have to happen between me and Pamela and Jennifer in advance and anything we need will reach out to you all and ask that you only send it to myself or Jennifer and Pamela. And if you have any questions or comments, just give me a call, send me an email and we'll go from there. Yes, Ms. Bridges. Before we adjourn, I just wanna reiterate about the Ancestral Bridges exhibit. I think it's to learn about the partnership with Ancestral and Amherst College. And it's an amazing thing for the Ancestral, Black Ancestors and Indigenous in Amherst. And you'll learn a lot. So I just wanted to say that again. Yes, and that is happening right now through the summer at Amherst College at the library. And it really is fantastic. For those of you, I think like Alexis was not here when we spoke about it earlier. We would like and Ms. Bridges and I will work with Anika hopefully to get her to come to a meeting so that we can talk about the exhibit and all of the sort of pieces around that. So thank you. It really truly is beautiful. If you have not seen it, definitely check it out. And when the, oh, Alexis actually, maybe we could ask Alexis. The Amherst media production from the opening, Alexis, do you know when that might be available? I wonder if she walked away. All right. Well, we'll figure that piece out and... We can find that out and just head over to the Robert Frost Library and you'll learn a lot there. All right. Thank you, Ms. Bridges. And are there any other comments? I think Dr. Shabazz might have, he jumped off. And so if there's no other comments, then we will adjourn at 316 p.m. Thank you everyone. Really great meeting.


Okay, line seven, unemployment compensation. You should receive a form 1099G showing in box one the total unemployment compensation paid to you in 2022. Report this amount on line seven. So usually it's a pretty straightforward type of thing. If you're a tax preparer, usually you deal more with the questions than with the difficulty of doing the data input, the data input usually being fairly straightforward. The questioning being, hey, look, I lost my job. I got unemployment compensation. Why should I have to include that in income? And it's like, well, because it's compensation, you have to include it in income generally and it is what it is usually. And then the other issue, of course, is gonna be if they got a significant amount of unemployment compensation, oftentimes they didn't withhold on it. So when you're a W-2 employee, you have to fill out that W-4 form. So the employer acts as the tax collector on your behalf, takes your money from you before it even touches your pocket and they give it to the IRS directly. The unemployment isn't required to do the withholding. You can request to do withholdings, but most people don't. So if there's a significant amount of unemployment, then it's possible that that's gonna cause a situation where they have underpaid their taxes due to not having any withholdings. However, also just note that if someone got fired in the middle of the year or laid off or whatever you wanna call it, in the middle of the year, then the withholdings that they had for that part of the year. So if they had withholdings for like three months of the year and then they got laid off after three months, the withholdings for that three months are gonna be very high compared to three months of income because remember, we have a progressive tax system. So it's not like they got taxed at 15%. Evenly, no matter how much they earned, if they were projected to earn $100,000, but they only worked for three months, then the withholdings that were withheld from them are gonna be based on $100,000 salary, the yearly salary, but they didn't earn a year's worth of salary.  And so maybe those two things balance each other out, but that's, again, it's a messy situation to try to predict, but those are kind of some things to just keep in mind. So caution, so if the amounts reported in box one of forms 1099G is incorrect, report online seven only the actual amount of unemployment compensation paid to you in 2022. So in other words, if you got unemployment 1099G, but you didn't actually get unemployment, that's an indication that fraud might have taken place. You would like to, like any incorrect 1099, go back to the issuer of the 1099, correct the problem there if possible, telling them to give a new 1099 to the government, to the IRS, because otherwise the IRS is gonna have an unmatching 1099 from their side to your side, which you don't wanna do is report an incorrect amount on the return. But if your 1099 doesn't match the tax return, the IRS will almost certainly question it, because they're gonna say, hey, I got a 1099 based on this, and you're gonna say, yeah, but it was wrong. And then you're gonna have to go through that. How do you not go through that? You try to go through the issuer of the 1099, tell them to give the IRS an updated 1099 with the correct information on it. So if you made contributions to a government unemployment compensation program or the government paid family leave program, and you aren't itemizing deductions, reduce the amount you report online seven by those contributions. So if you are itemizing deductions, see instructions for form 1099G, if you received an overpayment of unemployment compensation in 2022, and you repaid any of it in 2022, subtract the amount repaid from the total amount you received, enter the result on line seven, also enter repaid and the amount you repaid on the dotted line next to line seven. So we've seen a similar situation in prior presentations in that if the amount on the report, the 1099 is incorrect, then if you report something less than the amount on the 1099, the IRS will probably have a problem and make a correction for you. If you enter an amount greater than the amount on the 1099, the IRS is probably not gonna have a problem with that because now that's gonna result in you paying more taxes. If it was legitimately amount less than the 1099, then you wanna show the math. You wanna say, hey, here's the amount from the 1099, here's me subtracting the amount because I repaid part of it because they overpaid me. And so then the IRS can still tie into the amount on the 1099, but see that you then reduce it and hopefully that'll be enough information to not have them trigger a recalculation or anything. So if in 2022, you've repaid more than $3,000 of unemployment compensation that you included in gross income in an earlier year, you can see repayments in publication 525 for details on how to report the payments. So now the issue is, well, now I had a repayment of unemployment compensation. If it was in the current year, then I could of course just reduce the repayment in the current year, but if it was applied to a prior year, what do you do? Do you amend the tax return or is there some way that you can adjust for it in the current year? If you fall into that situation, again, publication 525, find it on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov, tip. If you received unemployment compensation in 2022, your state may issue an electronic form 1099G instead of being mailed to you. So in other words, if you don't get it in the mail, but you got unemployment compensation, it may be that you just didn't get it because they give it to you in some other formats, such as a digital format. So you wanna make sure that you're reporting your unemployment income and that you could find the form to help you to do so because if you don't report it, you can't just tell the IRS, well, I didn't get the 1099 because the IRS will certainly have gotten the 1099 and that won't fly, right? They're gonna correct your return almost certainly. So check your state's unemployment compensation website for more information.


Hi and welcome to the session, let's work out the following question. The question says find 10th term from each, sorry, it's end of the AP 4914 and so on till 254. So let us see the solution to this question. First we have to find which term is 254, here the first term say A is equal to 4, the common difference that is D is equal to 5. Now we see that Tn that is the nth term is equal to A plus n minus 1 into D or we can say 254 is equal to 4 plus n minus 1 into D that is 5 or 254 minus 4 divided by 5 is equal to n minus 1 or 250 divided by 5 is equal to n minus 1 or n minus 1 is equal to 50 or n is equal to 50 plus 1 that is equal to 51. So 10th term from 51st terms is 51 minus 10 that is 41st term therefore T41 is equal to A plus n minus 1 into D that is equal to 4 plus 41 minus 1 into 5 that is equal to 4 plus 40 into 5 that is equal to 4 plus 200 and that is equal to 204. So our answer to this question is 204. I hope that you understood this solution and enjoyed the session. Have a good day.


I'm Stajrada Nalescu from the Retouch Lab presenting our smart bracelet supporting tactile communication and interaction. There's a need for haptic devices that encode conversational touch in the digital domain, enabling transcription and translation of tactile sign languages or TSLs. Individuals with loss of vision and hearing communicate through TSLs, which exist in rich variations based on geographic location and sensory impairment. The deafblind manual alphabet is an Australian TSL employed in our work. Prior methods for supporting tactile communication via assistive haptics include Braille interfaces, haptic wearables, tactile graphics displays and screen-based accessibility features. Haptic output devices can translate text or speech into tactile patterns actuated onto the hand. We address the additional need of digitally encoding tactile input while leaving the hand free for natural touch interactions. To determine whether TSL gestures can be differentiated by measuring skin acceleration, we place two 42-element sensing arrays over the back and palm of the hand to capture a subset of letters. Each letter yielded distributions of RMS acceleration that reflected its contact location and unique spectrotemporal nature. Furthermore, same letters show high correlations compared to distinct letters, even when considering data from a subset of sensors at the wrist. We then designed a smart bracelet using four sensors at the wrist and investigated its capability to classify TSL letters using common signal processing, feature extraction and classification methods. Three axis accelerations per sensor channel are filtered and processed using principal component analysis, yielding a principal component that is then normalized across all four sensing channels and used to compute features. We extract 96 time domain, frequency domain and spectrotemporal features. Examples include peak-to-peak amplitude, spectral centroid and summary statistics across bandwidths after computing discrete or short-time Fourier transforms. Feature vectors are passed to three common classifiers with the support vector machine yielding the highest classification accuracy. It achieved 93% classification accuracy when including features from all four sensors with the use of features from two sensors maintaining robust performance. Feature work will aim to reduce misclassifications and include diverse datasets from trained TSL signers. We further envision supporting real-time interpretation of TSL where signing can occur as fast as five letters per second. Thank you for your time.