Dear Deborah,

my name is Adriani, and we organized the NVDACon this year together with Derek, Laura, Austin and Robert.

Let me answer to your email as the chair of NVDACon 2019 and clarify hopefully some of your good points.

First of all, thank you very much for presenting at NVDACon this year. It was a great presentation and alot of people enjoyed it. I have learned some new things and I hope you could help many users with your good material.

As you probably might not have seen during the conference, we have distributed your handout several times, starting about two hours before your presentation. We distributed it through a dropbox link in the chat several times also during the presentation. Though, we cannot make sure that people read it completely. And as you certainly know, many people are more confortable with asking a questoin that might be covered by the handout instead of reading the handout itself. This is unfortunately something that we cannot completely avoid.

As regarding the handout and the audio file of your recording, we understand the concerns of users. If possible, we should upload the recording right after the presentation. But unfortunately it is not as simple. Let me explain:

We asked several times through the year if there are people interested in helping us to edit recordings, moderate the conference, engage voluntarely in this wonderful work. And unfortunately we got only two or three new people on the board. But for audio editing we didn’t get anyone else to help us other than the small team that we had last year. And yet this year we will be faster with uploading stuff on the website. But we have to make sure that it has a certain quality.

We do not prefer to distribute your handout without the recording of your presentation because it is something that belongs together. But be sure that we have recorded every session of the NVDACon and we will upload them as soon as possible.

As far as professionality is concerned, if we want to be professional, we need more people on the board. We are doing this voluntarely and we have also full time jobs which are not related to NVDA. If people want to invest time in helping us to make this conference more professional, then please, join and organize it with us together next year.

Actually, I have also created a youtube channel for the conference. But sadly, there were simply no people to moderate it.

And with two chairs on the board only, it is not possible to manage all this work. For a professional conference we would also need a linked in account etc. People often do not realize how much work sticks behind the whole organisation of the NVDACon.

I am sorry that I probably cannot fully satisfy your concerns but this is what we have at this time. I hope that the community becomes more engaged and helps us next time to bring this event at a higher level.

Last but not least, the conference just ended 4 days ago. I wish sometimes users were more patient when it comes to voluntary work. We cannot compare this with professional online webinars or conferences although I think many users do compare it unfortunately.

Thank you Deborah for your feedback and hopefully see you at the conference next year.

Best regards

Adriani