 questions to people on the talk. Now, I know some people are going to say, Max, maybe you get a pass because you've won. And I've had that discussion. And I think that, while there may be some times, I get a little better result than other people would because of wine. But instead, I think it's more that I have a unique story. I'm a former carnival owner. I'm an amusing equipment broker. I'm a totally blind guy who doesn't understand the dangers of traveling by himself anywhere in the world if the opportunity comes along. I like to tell people I'm not smart enough to be scared and some days, some days people correct me on that and some days they don't. But I keep doing the next thing. And the next thing for me this week was word camp here in New York. The next thing after this is word camp in Pittsburgh. And after that, I really don't know what the next thing is because a lot of times people ask me that, my least favorite question. They ask me, what's next? What do you mean next? I always tell them, I don't really know what I'm going to do next because I've found it's best if I don't put limits on God. I find that oftentimes his dreams are bigger than mine and sometimes his obstacles are bigger than mine. And I like to tell people he may give you a gift that says batteries included or some assembly required, but he will help you assemble it. Now I think I'm a little short on time. I think I'm getting close, but I think if it's okay with y'all we'll go ahead and do some questions now. And please don't anybody raise their hand. Just go to the mic and we'll take whoever gets there first. Either we have to subscribe to audio, we didn't even plan it. First of all I want to thank you because I'm working on a website for my brother who was blind. He was an artist and a sculptor. He died in March and so I have been working trying to put it up to end. All of my brothers and sisters who want his art to be seen by people. Then here's the man who gives eyesight and has 17% fertility. Yeah. And it was like he described it as looking at things through a straw. And it was that he did it incredible. I want to thank you for encouraging me to get his website up to mine. Right. One thing, yeah, one thing to remember about a website like that is when you're dealing with something where you're going to have a lot of images, a lot of art to describe and make sure it's rendered properly. Nothing wrong with posting one item, you know, one series. A lot of people, if they get in the middle of a project like that and they're like well when I get it all done then I'll have it go live. But a lot of people are going to come back to the website or going to find the website for the first time after you've started that process. Meanwhile you're getting indexed in Google and other search engines and people are starting to find out about the site. They're starting to bookmark the site. They're starting to talk about the site. And then by the time you get everything up there those people who liked it are going to come back and look at the things they didn't see yet. Good. And small showing in Diego, that's our hometown. So that's on the home page. So as you go through a little bit of this stuff and then I'm working on the metropolitan series. Good. So each time when things are finished, that's kind of cool. That's great. You're... Well I will say this, you're unusual because a lot of people still wouldn't be doing it in that process. You know, people get funny ideas in their heads when they're building a site like that. And I would say reach out to the people at the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind because they are very big on supporting projects like that. Yeah, the man you want to talk to is William Butler. You're welcome. Thank you. Okay. One of the ways I promote my podcast is by appearing on other people's radio shows and podcasts. Because I find that they often have audiences I don't have and that many of their fans are royal supporters of their work and will support my site, visit the site, and share the site because their friend, the person that they listen to and like, has suggested they listen to me because I came on their show. That's one of the top things I do beyond that, the usual social media stuff which I hate. I especially hate Facebook because in my opinion, it changes way too often for its own good. And I've said this before, I'm going to say it again, if I ever meet Dr. Bergen as free, he's going down. And I don't care who tells him because really that site changes so much, so often, and most of the time for very little reason. See, even the sight of people are clear with me on that. Hi Max, it's Bud Kraus and you know, you and I have had a chance to chat yesterday. I'm going to say something that I normally don't see in public, but I'm visually impaired and I don't see very well and you know that. And so it's hard for me to even admit to that or see it publicly because, but anyway, so thank you for coming. And I want you to, I took a trip this year around the United States and I went on 19 days around the country you know, going on Amtrak. And it was difficult for a visually impaired person to do a trip like that. So you mentioned travel and do you want to talk? I know this is not a WordPress question but I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about some of the challenges and difficulties you have navigating airports and stuff like that. So whatever comes to your mind, please go ahead and share. All right, well as you know, I'm a big fan of Amtrak mainly because they allowed me to take my first real trip two years ago. And in my opinion, if you're blind and you're going to be traveling to cities and you're traveling there for conferences or speaking events usually via Amtrak you're going to end up closer to the event than you will if you take the plane. That's for the most part. And I find for me for me personally, I find it harder to get from the train or the plane station to the venue or the hotel than I do to get from city to city. So I prefer to end up as close to where I want to go as possible. For example, last week when I went to Philadelphia there were some problems and I didn't end up doing it but I could have taken a local train from the from the Philadelphia Amtrak station to win a couple of blocks of the hotel where I was going to be staying. Somebody who flew into the airport in the same city paid almost $50 to Uber. If they paid that to Uber they would have probably paid over a hundred due to tax. So me as a blind person traveling especially traveling solo without a wife girlfriend or paid assistant I try to look at things in the overall way because traveling by train is more expensive than traveling by plane but only if you can drive. If you can afford you know if you're in a position to drive a rental car when you get to town then you have an advantage over me when it comes to making the schedule. So me I would prefer to take the train it's going to be a little longer it's going to be a little more expensive. I also find the staff on the train more attentive and friendlier than I have found the staff on airplanes and the final thing is I'm six foot four and a half inches tall 270 pounds. I do not like cramming my butt into airplane seats but once you get to the place where you're going there's a there's a new app that's being tested in the San Francisco airport that allows you to connect your your smartphone to a system of beacons that will allow you to navigate the entire airport. There's that same system as supposed to be in the process of being installed at Penn Station and Union Station here at Grand Central here in New York and the reason they're doing it is because TPS doesn't work so well indoors but they've found out that this beacon system can work and the interesting thing is the tests that they've done on it in California the sighted people are liking it even better than the blind people because they can go from wherever they are in the airport to wherever they need to go including you know reservation desks baggage pickup and even finding the restroom much more easily. So they've been testing it there for a couple years now and I don't know why it hasn't gone more mainstream yet but that's I should mention that I'm kind of a low-tech person I have blind friends as I mentioned earlier I'm not the only blind blogger or podcaster but I have blind friends who are much more adept at the tech side of it and they use their TPS more than I do. I was having a discussion with somebody earlier this morning about the whole idea of independence versus interdependence and I know there are a lot of blind people who are very passionate about their independence and I tend to be on the other end of the scale and think that life is better the more that you interact with people and the more you allow people to be part of your story so I'm not what you call a real out-there blind person when it comes to traveling I would much rather get get from here to there with a with a friendly word a smile a handshake and asking nicely as opposed to depending on the tech because folks can break down you can be disappointed by people and tech equally. Hi Max thank you so much um I appreciated your sharing your first website with us that was very inspiring because it was it helped me because I'm one of the affectionists who gets stopped by well if it's not perfect you know it doesn't it doesn't exist um but I'm just wondering how did you negotiate your first podcast like what did you do in terms of equipment and and that okay well my first radio show was done over the phone my first podcast as far as recording it we recorded it using Skype and my friend Frederick recorded it on his end since then I have switched to using Zoom because Zoom has a built-in recording feature that Skype never offered you had to purchase a third-party app to record your Skype conversations and to me I'm one of the in-the-moment kind of people when I'm having an interview I have to be focused on the conversation not worrying about whether or not I'm being recorded or being broadcast or my sound level is good you know I'm kind of a press record press stop kind of person and I like the fact that Zoom has keyboard commands for everything like the woman who gave the accessibility talk was mentioning her yesterday they have keyboard commands for everything and in many cases they have spoken word commands and like I say that record function where I can depend on it recording and just focus on the conversation is great and of all the people I pay every month to keep myself online the only person I don't complain about is Zoom I don't mind that 16 bucks change us in them every month because it gives me so much peace of mind and return for it and when you figure that after you record it if you want you can give somebody say you can give an editor or you can give an assistant the link to where you recorded it they can download it and post it for you you can give that link to the person who's on the interview with you and they can download it to their website and have it in their library for future use the scheduling of meetings on Zoom used to be a little quirky but it's gotten much better and like WordPress they have a sincere total commitment to accessibility so that's another reason one thing I should mention to anybody who saw the talks on accessibility or who have been wondering about accessibility in general as a group blind people are very loyal audience very loyal consumers we will even overpay if we feel like the person providing the service or selling the product has real concern about our needs and desires so when you go out of your way to make your site available to somebody who's blind or other people with disabilities you're making it you're making it available for people that if they like you they're going to stay with you they're going to tell other people to come see you that's just the way we are as a group because there are so few people in the world who go out of their way to make us feel welcome especially online did I answer your question all right thank you hi I don't know if you already answered this because I came a little bit late um but you can you recommend um when we are um because I'm the kind of person who do content what would be uh some ideas for uh for a site you know like the how long you think is is good for a content or how how short what kind of site do you have uh well the moment I'm designing one because I'm a freelance journalist so I write a lot so I don't know how much is too much or if I'm describing it in a certain way all right when it comes to blog content um there really is no set length that's going to work some people do very well with 500 word posts some people do very well with 2 000 word posts what it's about is finding a consistent link that you're comfortable producing on a regular basis I mean if if you can't sustain 2 500 word posts then don't write 20 but if you can sustain that then that'll become part of your brand that'll become part of the reason why people visit your site while they read your work just remember that if you're going to write long posts you need to break it up with headers links photos videos paragraph breaks blank space just break it up really good if you're going to write long posts and then one other thing about length I have a good friend named Ryan Vidal he's known as the blogger from Paradise and he used to write really long posts over 2 000 sometimes over 5 000 words and he finally decided that the smart thing to do was to stop writing long posts and start writing e-books so at some point you have to ask yourself are you giving people so much of yourself that you really should be charging them in the form of an e-book or you should be creating an e-book and exchange it for email addresses or something along those lines so just ask yourself what can you do on a weekly basis how many posts can you write how many words would those posts be and what is sustainable and when you take that in taking into account whatever your current schedule is and then leave some leave some extra time for fun or for things to not go the way you expected them to go my doctor one of my doctors says max when you feel like working work your butt off and you don't feel like it rest do something fun or sleep yeah I like him he's a good doctor he doesn't yell he doesn't yell about yell at me about anything he's one of those guys who thinks that a positive approach to life is very important to stay healthy did I answer your question yes thank you very much hope that helps I know figuring out the interval the interval between posts and the length of posts is a hard thing to do and the one thing I would say that I'm totally against this daily posting unless you're just going to write really short posts any one question sure I would say think about the importance of the image what is the image trying to convey and what are you hoping to get out of the image because if that image is attached to a link and the goal is to get me to buy something from you then I want a lot of alt text if that image is your header image and I'm going to see it often I really don't want or need as much alt text now I say that's a good place to start as far as descriptions um I think that since there are varying levels of vision acuity you should include colors but I would avoid vague terms like hunk chunk lot you know try to use specific terms even amounts weights distances if they're if they apply to the pictures that you described so I would say that I personally I like a I like a good amount of alt text especially if it's a complicated image or like I say if the image is tied to you want me to buy something from me now one thing I did just did just I did just remember and I hope nobody's doing it Facebook has recently started doing image recognition where they will tell the screen readers what the image is now there are three problems with that one sometimes Facebook can't discern the image at all it will tell you no text available true it will describe the image and the description is nowhere near specific enough um my favorite one recently was it said one person eating a plate of Mexican food it didn't tell me are we talking tacos or tamales or enchiladas or and I would have liked to have known that because you know to me there's a difference to me there's a difference and the third problem with it is because I'm afraid I'm really afraid that webmasters and blog owners are going to start dropping the alt tag because especially when they post the social media because they feel like they can depend on Facebook and other social media platforms to to bail them out on that I am really afraid of that happening and with the new image recognition on the iPhone and the other iOS devices I'm kind of worried about it happening there too and one other thing about all that about alt tags that I don't know that anybody just talked about this week the best thing about alt tag is not only does it help the blind but it also helps the certain and find your photo so don't forget that alt tag isn't just a penalty it isn't just a burden you do for people like me it's something you do so google and yahoo and those people can find your website and send people to it and I find once I put it that way to most website owners they're like it can drive traffic we're gonna do it I've seen people who do hour-long podcasts or two hour-long radio shows that you just find I've seen I've seen people who do 15 minute podcasts that are great I've seen I've heard a podcast that go an hour and they they start tracking their stats and they notice nobody's listening past the first 15 minutes it a lot of it depends on the the personality of the host and the guest the subject matter the audience and one of the things you can do is you can try different links you can follow your your stats on whatever podcasting platform you're using and you can see what is it to people like you can also use your email list to reach out to people and go we've been thinking that an hour might be too long or that every five days a week is too often or that once a month might be good enough and you ask them what what do they need what do they want my show lasts about an hour depending on the guest because some guests are great guests like me that answer questions far beyond the question that was asked and fill time for host which is one of the reasons why I keep getting booked I think and there are other guests who every answer is three words or less and you spend the whole time wondering when is this going to end so it depends a lot on the guest the host and I would say that in general unless you're doing a radio broadcast which is you know I know most of the radio is online radio now and it's archive so you can listen to on demand but in my opinion if you're doing something that's going out live then you can go longer and out longer than an hour and have it work for you but I don't know of a whole lot of shows radio or podcasts that go more than 60 minutes so I would say that's probably the top end of the ideal well I I recently stopped posting my audio because it was getting to be too much of an aggravation to go through the steps of getting my audio out on a podcasting platform I've since decided that I'm going to hire a virtual assistant to do that for me and so we're going to get it back out on I use a platform called automatic which is a pretty respectable free platform I get a lot of grief for this but I use the video camera and the microphone built into my laptop or built into the iphone or the ipad in most cases the video and audio quality is just fine especially for podcasting the real question is is lighting keeping your image and the image of your guests in focus sound quality based on the equipment you do have because I've recorded some great shows using a plantronics 2468 which is by no means top of the line equipment I recently won a audio technica ATR 2100 and I'm actually looking forward to recording my first podcast with a real microphone and I can't tell you how many times last week I would tell somebody they'd ask me well how do you record your show and I'm like the built-in equipment they would look at me like man there's something wrong with you I felt you know I don't usually feel awkward or less than other people I usually feel like if they're farther along in their journey that's fine if they do think different than me that's fine but it's one of the few areas where I felt like you know they're basically saying max we can't believe you're trying to do a good podcast and get yourself out there and you're using the built-in microphone off of a five-year-old magnet so I would say if you can afford the equipment that's fine but there's no reason to have it especially when you're starting out you know there I'm sure many of you all have seen sitcom episodes where parents have that conversation with their kids about them wanting to play soccer or learn the guitar and the like let's find out if you like it before we spend any real money I would say do the same thing with your podcast and find out if you like it or you're going to be able to sustain it before you invest any money in expensive equipment because you can get started you can develop an audience with the equipment you probably already own the real key is if you're going to do video look into your life if you're not sure that you know what looks good as far as lighting goes then have somebody look at it for you record a sample video and post it on your social media and go hey if I did this in this lighting what would you think and of course I really should have done that myself but I didn't I was so happy that I was in focus I didn't care if the lights were on or not because that is one of the things I worry about one of my recent most fun podcast interviews I was interviewing a blind author who's just as blind as I am so we basically just said if we're in focus fine if we're not in focus fine we're just going to go ahead and have our interview and and the funny thing is very again people were like we're so impressed that two blind people would use a visual medium like we're like uh like close to the youtube so um I would say the the other thing is check your audio and make sure because people will people can turn your volume down but they cannot turn your volume up beyond a certain point and I can't tell you how many times I have quit a video because it was either too soft or it was too loud and there wasn't obvious way for me to turn the volume down I mean sometimes as a blind person you get stuck in that loop trying to hear through the music and try to find those quiet spots in a rock tune so you can find that button to turn it off yeah that's all okay so I'm down to she's telling me I'm down to two minutes right yeah okay oh quickly max hello um thank you for being here today um I just wanted to say that starting out in blogs or social media you know trying to establish oneself is sometimes that I'm exhausted it's more you know fear is added to it but exhaustion is also there um so when you started out you said you started out with your website which is pretty good if I started on self and then from there you sort of uh from there I started yeah I added the blog and then social media and then I would say do what I recently did evaluate everything you're doing for your blog and find out things that you're doing because other people say you should there could be things in there that you're doing that don't serve your purpose at all and that are wearing you out that's that was my problem with the audio from my interview right so right I want to be a lifestyle blogger and then people say oh go to youtube and then you have your Instagram account and uh podcast right well I wasn't on six social media networks all at once I started with Facebook and then moved to LinkedIn and then to Twitter and that's the way you have to do it you have to find one thing and do it well for a while and then see if you have time to do other things I hope you could put me on your show one day thank you well go to go to the blind blogger.net and send me an email and remind me who you are and we will uh we'll see if maybe knowing that you could be a guest on my show we'll get to the point where you either post your blog or post work more often from it. So Zuley Rodriguez have worked press uh press camp 10-18 thank you yeah okay I appreciate it um I hope that I hope that in my own way I have inspired some of y'all to either post for the first time or post more often or share more openly and while I don't feel good I'm going to try to end this the way I the way I thought about it in my mind before I came up here I want y'all to listen to these next words and think about them as you leave or as you hear the next speaker too many times we stand aside and let the water slip away to what we put off to tomorrow has finally come today so don't stand upon the shoreline and say you're satisfied choose the chance to rap it dare to dance the time that's all you're gonna get today because that's all my voice will yeah