Why I Write A Blog

Introduction

I wrote my first blog article in January 2006. It was mostly just an announcement that I was starting a blog called BlindConfidential and a few ideas about what I would write about. I wrote two or three BlindConfidential articles per week fairly consistently until 2011 when I decided to take some time off from blogging but would return to it in 2013 with ChrisHofstader.com.

BC was a different blog from ChrisHofstader.com, the second blog I would write and the one you're reading now. It was far less formal, rarely contained a link to a source and the topics I elected to write about were chosen, researched, edited, spell checked and published all on the same morning. I did not have the informal editorial team I now use on almost every article that's not specifically about myself, the articles were written without an outline and didn't contain headings to break them up and I often wrote satirical fiction based on the access technology industry and some of the people working in the field.

In 2013, Mia Lipner would convince me to start blogging again but to do so in a much more formal manner, to publish less often, to write more well researched and organized articles and to continue writing the occasional article about subjects I find interesting but that are unrelated to blindness. I took Mia's advice and made ChrisHofstader.com into a better blog and it attracted far more readers even though I published far fewer articles. Due to a health problem I took more than two years off of blogging but started again in earnest in December of 2021 and launched my news digest (published every Tuesday on this blog) on January 4 of this year.

When I first started blogging 16 years ago, I did so with the intention of revealing a lot of the dirty little secrets of the AT industry. I wanted to write about ideas for new features in screen readers. I wanted to apply objective measures to product reviews. I wanted to write about the weird culture of the access technology industry. I wanted to write about ADA and other legal protections for people with disabilities. And, I wanted to write some fun stuff satirizing the AT business, rock and roll, sports, politics, religion and anything else I find interesting. In these sixteen years I've written about all of these subjects and others in the more than 500 articles I've published to date.

Because I did my very best to tell the truth in my blogs and would always publish a correction when a factual error was shown to me, a lot of what I wrote was fairly controversial. This caused me to lose some friends who, when their work or employer were criticized, they couldn't handle it and removed me from their lives. Excepting very few occasions, I never criticized these people as individuals, I just wrote critically about the products they made and the windfall profits enjoyed selling niche products to a tiny market earned by their employers. If you can't accept valid criticism or laugh at yourself sometimes, you've got something wrong with you.

Writing the blogs also caused me some legal hassles including nine separate lawsuit threats from Freedom Scientific and one from another whom I won't mention as I don't want another registered letter from a lawyer. I have never backed down. As above, I was publishing the truth and never changed an article unless an actual factual problem was brought to my attention.

Writing these blogs has caused me quite a bit of hassle but, overall, it has been a very rewarding experience and this article will discuss the more joyful aspects of having done all of this writing over all of these years.

As this is purely a personal essay, it will not contain links to sources as I'm the primary source on this piece. This article will also be nearly 100% opinion so you probably won't find any factual errors in this one.

Letters From Strangers

I frequently receive phone calls and/or emails from friends about an article I've written telling me that they liked it a lot. I've also gotten my share of hate mail but the complimentary ones vastly outnumber those who want to toss some hate my way. Getting a sweet note or phone call from a friend is really nice but the emails I get from complete strangers through the contact form are often the ones I find most touching.

Since returning to blogging in December, I've received a lot of notes from friends and strangers alike thanking me for starting to write again, many telling me that they missed hearing the truth. None, however, made me more emotional than the one I've excerpted below (I only removed text that would identify the author):

"Yours is a great blog, inspiring many blind and poorly sighted people to fight, find work and be successful in life. I take this opportunity to thank you because, also thanks to your words which I used to read often, I have never given up and have a full time, rewarding career. Yours, believe me, has been a blog which did help me when I thought all was lost, and I want to take the opportunity of your replying to my comment to say how much you have really helped."

I had never heard of this person before but this note brought tears to my eyes as, while it wasn't the first email of this sort I've received, it was the first I got since returning to blogging in December.

The Young People

Before I took more than two years away from blogging, I frequently received emails from young blind people asking for my advice about one topic or another. They would tell me that it was the truthful and pull no punches approach to my articles that led them to trust me although I was a stranger. I would write a response to every one of these emails and often they would turn into a correspondence that would last for a while and cover a whole lot of subjects.

Some of these young people would become good friends of mine and remain so until today; from others, I'd never hear from them again and I can only hope whatever advice I gave them was helpful.

Helping out the young people is very rewarding and I hope to do more of it in the future.

Mentoring

Some of the many young blind people who would write to me would ask if I could help them as a mentor. I would always write back to these people saying that I would try but only if they followed my list of conditions which involved working very hard. I would hear from most of these people only once as, upon seeing my conditions, they ran away. What those who disappeared really wanted to ask was "Can you find me a high paying job?" and not actually, "Will you help out as a mentor." I hope these people have found other solutions and are now successful somewhere.

The people who accepted the conditions and worked with me as their mentor are my pride and joy. I call them "my kids" and most of them are still good friends of mine. I'm not going to mention names but some of those whom I mentored are now among the most successful blind people in technology so my advice and coaching must be pretty good.

New Friends

A lot of the people whom I've met through the blog have created a lot of long distance friendships for me. I have pen pals on every continent but Antartica and we always have a lot of fun when we get together at a conference or because we happen by coincidence to be in the same city at the same time.

It's nice having friends nearly everywhere I go.

The Haters

In a peculiar side of my personality, I found that I enjoyed some of the nastiest comments and emails I would receive from those who so vehemently disagreed with me that they had to make the discussion personal. Some were just so nasty that I couldn't do anything but laugh at them and, sometimes, I'd write them a super polite response thanking them for writing to me and for expressing their opinion so well. I'd never get a response to one of my replies though, I guess these people aren't interested in discussion but just want to yell loudly like a small child tossing a tantrum.

I did find that the haters were difficult for me to understand. I once was spammed with hundreds of emails from the same person because I wrote, based entirely in objective measures that anyone could have repeated the tests used, that that iOS (at that time) was considerably more accessible than were Android devices. I got a lot of hate from Android users who seemed to have some peculiar deep personal attachment to their phone or tablet and simply couldn't stand hearing their favorite toy criticized. This made no sense to me, we have an LG television and I don't feel any antipathy toward people who have an Amazon television even if (correctly at this point) that their television is more accessible than is mine. We drive a Toyota, I've no ill feelings towards my friend who drives a Tesla even though his car is way cooler than is ours. I've never seen a person fly into a rage because another prefers Fender guitars over those from Gibson. When I wrote those articles, Android brand loyalty had, among a certain subsection of the blind population, turned into something more like a cult or religion than a group of people who would even listen to test results based entirely in objective measures.

Some blind Android users, typically from Europe, did write to me saying they agreed with my assessment but couldn't afford an iPhone so had to settle for something less expensive.

Even though they hated me, I found the Android enthusiasts entertaining for their passion if nothing else and am happy I got to hear from them.

As I've written here recently more than once, I've been out of the blindness technology loop for a few years at this point. During that time, I did no product evaluations but just used what I own with which I'm mostly satisfied. I have heard from a number of highly reliable sources though that Google has made great progress with accessibility on Android, that Amazon Fire tablets have improved a lot and that Samsung has been doing some interesting things with accessibility lately as well. So, while the iOS accessibility was objectively much better when I wrote those articles, it may not still be true today.

Introducing People

I have a pretty incredible contact list when it comes to the blindness field. Over the years, I've been able to introduce a lot of these people to each other, sometimes with terrific results. I've helped people get jobs this way but, mostly, I've helped people become friends and grow our little community of blind nerds.

Prompting Discussion

These blogs have provoked a lot of different discussions about a variety of issues around blindness and access technology. When I first started blogging, few if any blindness related blogs were willing to be critical of the AT industry. One friend of mine who used to write a pretty good blog told me that he wouldn't criticize AT companies or their products because he didn't want to discourage the developers. Criticism leads people to work harder; the lack thereof allows them to ease along and ignore innovation. The AT industry needed a critic and I was the only one silly enough to accept the role.

I don't know if the articles had much effect on the products but they certainly caused users to ask more questions of the manufacturers.

Influence

I honestly don't know how much influence this blog has had on the world of blindness. I know some people who made purchasing decisions based on my articles and were happy with their choices. I know people who've found their way, directly or indirectly, into jobs because of this blog. I've known people who decided to make a career change because of something they read here and are now earning a much better salary than they had been previously.

I think, however, that the most influential articles I wrote were those I did a number of years ago about ADA trolling. These articles prompted discussion all over the place. They led people like Karl Groves to do serious work on this matter. They all received tens of thousands of hits and, all of these years later, I still get emails from small sometimes tiny businesses asking me for help as they didn't even know accessibility was a thing, they hired some local to build their web site, they can't afford to redo their site, they can't afford a lawyer and they may be forced out of business by an unethical drive by attorney. Starting this conversation was one of my prouder moments that came from writing this blog.

The year in which I published he ADA Trolling articles, I attended CSUN and felt a bit like a celebrity. A number of people asked to have their photo taken with me, a few asked me to autograph their conference badge and a ton of people wanted to talk to me about the issue. All of this attention made me feel a bit weird and I haven't attended a CSUN since.

Conclusions

In spite of some of the hassles and lost friendships by people who probably weren't real friends in the first place, writing my blogs has been a very rewarding experience for me. I'm also very much enjoying editing Gonz Blinko's Blind News Digest which I publish every Tuesday.

I'm happy that I always published accurate articles from which readers might learn something rather than the blind blogs who fear making waves. I'm happy that I've provoked discussion about a lot of areas in blindness, mostly technology though. I'm happy that I stirred up controversy in a field that seems averse to it and caused some headaches for some of the bad actors in this field.

In conclusion, I'm happy I've been writing my blogs for all of these years and all that they've given me.

–End