Podcast Summary:
In this Blind Abilities episode, Jeff Thompson talks with Jeff Bishop, president of BITS—Blind Information Technology Specialists—an all-volunteer organization empowering blind and low-vision individuals through accessible technology, community, and hands-on learning. Bishop outlines BITS’ rapid growth, affordable memberships, and expanding reach across platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, email lists, and mentoring channels. BITS offers high-impact training, including Python programming, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, NVDA, and AI immersion courses—all with fully accessible materials and strong completion rates. Their partnerships with APH, Bookshare, NLS, Microsoft, and others ensure free resources and meaningful industry feedback opportunities, including paid participation in Microsoft’s Project Empower. With free Remote Incident Manager (RIM) support, active mentoring, and a welcoming culture, BITS serves beginners and experts alike. As the group considers rebranding the “S” in BITS to Solutions, the mission remains clear: meeting people where they are and helping them thrive in their digital lives.
Full Transcript:
Jeff Bishop: We started this journey in when I became president, of ensuring that we were meeting people where they were and listening to what the members wanted. We’re actually doing a Black Friday sale this year during the week of Thanksgiving, so the 26th through December 2nd. We developed a partnership with Microsoft, where we have recruited a number of BITS members to provide feedback to Microsoft on impactful scenarios to be able to help drive product innovation and change. No one else is going to teach you, your screen reader. You have to do that yourself. We can give you guidance and assistance, but you need to become an expert of your tools.
Jeff Thompson: Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Geoff Thompson. Today in the studio we have Jeff Bishop and he is the president of BITS, which stands for Blind Information Technology Specialists. And rumor has it that the s in BITS is up for grabs. Yeah, I’m going to go with support. Jeff, welcome to Blind Abilities.
Jeff Bishop: Thank you so much, Jeff. Glad to be here.
Jeff Thompson: Well, it’s great to have you here, Jeff. BITS I’ve noticed has been growing and growing. I remember when you became president, you opened it up for free membership. Now the membership is, what, $20 annually, which is very affordable. And all I hear is positive good news about BITS. It’s growing and growing.
Jeff Bishop: Yeah it is. And we’re actually doing a Black Friday sale this year during the week of Thanksgiving. So the 26th through December 2nd, where if people want to take advantage of our life membership, then we’re going to offer that 50% off so people can join as a life member for $100 as opposed to 200. And we think that’s going to be a pretty tremendous response to that. And we’ve grown from when I became president, we had about 179 members, and right now we have just over 920 or so at this point. And we peaked at about 1150 when we gave away the free memberships. And so these 920 20 represent paid memberships, so we’re pretty proud of that. Although numbers is really not the game here, it’s about bringing quality and empowering people to achieve whatever they want in their digital lives. And that’s why we’re there. We’re honored to serve, and we’re all volunteers and we’re trying to make a difference.
Jeff Thompson: Well, I think you’re making a big difference because the people that I hang out with in my networks, my chats, my neck of the woods, they’re all joining BITS. And some have even become part of the volunteer team that helps do demonstrations, productions of sorts, and working with partnerships that you and your team have developed. And it all started with that simple process of just going to BITS hyphen, ACB, org or join BITS. It’s right there.
Jeff Bishop: That’s right. Yeah. Join basically takes you to the same spot, but we wanted to have a way of marketing that to people to make it a little bit easier for people to locate us.
Jeff Thompson: And these changes all started when you became president.
Jeff Bishop: We started this journey in when I became president of ensuring that we were meeting people where they were and listening to what the members wanted. And one of the things that we heard from people is, you know, we want to be able to have more skills on the devices that we use every day, whether that be our iPhones or our Macs or our PCs or our devices, whatever the case may be. We even talked about home networking and all that kind of stuff too. So we started by taking a really bold initiative where we offered a Python training course. Now, for those of you that don’t know what Python is, Python is a programming language. It’s an it’s a language that’s meant to be simple, easy to learn, and allows people to start becoming creators.
Jeff Thompson: You just lost half your audience. I’m kidding.
Jeff Bishop: No, it’s okay. I’ll try to simplify this. So what we did was we offered to to people who have never written a line of code in their life, the opportunity to learn. So we took on about 150 blind or low vision students. We partnered with people like Ken Perry from the American printing House. We partnered with Bookshare. We partnered with the National Library Service so that we made all of the content free of charge, free of charge. In other words, the textbook, all of the learning, the quizzes, the you know, everything, all of the instruction free of charge, charge, charge. We even partnered with Microsoft and GitHub because we use that platform to structure how we distributed material and had people submit assignments. And that was just the beginning. You know, that that class lasted about six months and it was very successful. We had about 95 people complete the course to completion, which is really good. If you think about a college course that is above the average of people who stick, you know, throughout a programming course. So we felt pretty good about that.
Jeff Bishop: And then we took on Microsoft Office in the fall, where we had 450 students, and we partnered with the Carroll Center and taught a course where we taught everything from outlook, Word and Excel, and we even touched on PowerPoint and windows basics, the whole bit. And people really, really enjoyed that. The really cool thing about us as well is we’re not just there to teach, we’re there to empower people. So what we did was we invited Microsoft to the table, and they brought some product managers to a meeting that we had that lasted about two, 2.5 hours, and we allowed our BITS class members to be able to give feedback directly to Microsoft. And I can tell you with a surety that a lot of that feedback has made a significant difference in what Microsoft has done in products going forward. So we’re really, really excited about that. It’s something that we’re, you know, we strongly believe in we think that it’s important that we’re giving back to the industry, as well as teaching people how to utilize that technology.
Jeff Thompson: Mhm. Now, I know jazz is probably one of the largest shelter that for screen readers. In the past it’s been there. It’s kind of the main staple. But I saw you guys did an Nvda workshop and that seemed quite successful.
Jeff Bishop: We did, we did. We had lots and lots of people join us on that. And in fact, that just ended about a week or so ago, and it was a five week course. And we taught everything from the basics all the way through object navigation. And the cool thing about that is that all of our course material, everything from Python to Nvda to Google Suite, because we’re just finishing that up as well. We will make available to all its members who join us as part of being a part of the BITS family. So we even last summer did a three day immersion into artificial intelligence, where we focused on teaching AI skills. It turned out to be about 24 hours of actual teaching content, because we had stuff outside of the ACB convention as well. That was tremendous as well. And we brought people to the table from the industry as well to assist us in that training. And people really love that. That was that was fun. We took a challenge from one of the class participants, and they wanted to see how AI could build something that they could use on their iPhone, this being a calculator that they could store calculated values based on names.
Jeff Bishop: So for example, if you calculated your mortgage, you wanted to store that and be able to use that as a number that you would calculate within the future. So at the end of the AI course, we actually did that and in a half an hour had something that this person could then use on their iPhone on that they were pretty excited about. So we were pretty happy about that as well. So again, it’s all about meeting people where they are trying to make a difference and not to mention our chats, our mentoring groups, the free Rim service that we provide for any member who needs assistance on their computer. We made a $6,000 purchase to make sure that we had that ability for all of the members to be able to utilize, so we’re putting our money where our mouth is and making sure that that we are providing technology and services to be able to meet the needs of the people that we serve.
Jeff Thompson: Will you tell people a little bit about Rim and what it is?
Jeff Bishop: Yeah. Remote incident manager it’s a product from Numa solutions. It’s a tool that allows you to connect remotely to anyone’s computer. You can think of it like Jaws, tandem or Quick Assist from Microsoft. The beauty of Rim is that you can be on a mac and connect to a windows machine. You can be on windows and connect to a mac, and as long as you’re working with one of our certified people who can assist you, who we trust, and that they’re going to treat your machine correctly, then it costs you nothing. Not only that, but members of BITS also get double the amount of rim time that they can personally use on their devices. You normally get 30 minutes a day, but as a BITS member you get 60. It’s just another way where we’re partnering with people and partnering with organizations to be able to give back to people, to be able to do things with their digital lifestyles.
Jeff Thompson: You’re also partnering with NLS National Library Services.
Jeff Bishop: Yeah we are. We did that as part of our Python course, and we needed a way to prove that people were blind or low vision because we were going to be giving them access to bookshare resources so that they could obtain material for the Python course itself. And so we partnered with quite a number of people to make that happen, including Perkins, because Perkins helped us in validating people’s memberships in NLS. So yeah, that was pivotal to the success of that program, allowing people who needed access to training material. You know, the book we used is pretty expensive. It’s about a $5,060 book if you were to go buy it. So we needed to make sure that, you know, that wasn’t a limiting factor to giving people the resources that they needed.
Jeff Thompson: I really like the cost of a $20 a year membership or lifetime good Friday coming up near Thanksgiving, around $100, down from 200. A lot of us who are blind aren’t looking like this isn’t a two year trip. This is lifetime itself. So having this access to BITS, which I believe is the largest support group in a sense that if you have a question, no matter what level you’re at and blind abilities, a lot of our listeners are ages 14 to 21. They’re presets. Yeah, yeah, vocational rehabs, pre-employment transition services students. They’re embarking upon high school to college, to the workplace. And when they come across a question, you know, either they use IRA or something to get some visual question, but when they’re working with their hardware and stuff. Bit seems like a great spot for those people who are using their equipment and want to get over a hurdle, or for someone who’s just beginning, and it’s a safe place that you’re not going to jump in and someone’s trying to figure out, you know, some coding or something. But you might come up with a simple question.
Jeff Bishop: That’s right. We do it every day. We’re everywhere. We’re on WhatsApp and Facebook, and of course, have lots and lots of email lists that center around different topics. We have a very vibrant team that manages all of that, and people can also leave us a voicemail as well. And we’ll call them back. And we have a whole mentoring team at archive.org that if you want to send an email there, then then we’ll respond to that. We’ve got quite a number of people who respond to those messages, and if we need to, we’ll we’ll set up a Rim session or do whatever we need to do to safely support you. We’re not going to do things that go beyond the scope that put your data at risk. That’s critical. For example, upgrading systems from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This is an area that we’ve run into a few times. We feel there’s a little bit of risk in that, and so we feel that we’re going to direct you to resources that can safely do that for you. We ensure that you’re not going to potentially lose any data in that process, or make sure that your hardware is up to date. We’ll give people pointers and things. But yeah, we’re there to meet people, you know, wherever they are and whatever they’re doing in their digital lifestyles. So it’s really great.
Jeff Thompson: What do you say to someone who might be intimidated by the word specialist? Like they think they’re going into something that this is college course 401, not 101?
Jeff Bishop: Yeah. You know, this is a this is a topic that our board has been talking about. In fact, we’re putting it on the ballot coming up at our annual meeting in December where we are going to be asking the members, we did a survey. We believe in surveys and reaching out and finding out what our members want, what our members are thinking, and the majority of the people. It wasn’t because we had so many choices that, you know, it wasn’t a 51% percent representation, but the majority of the people by far selected solutions as being the name that they would like to see the S stand for, and we agree. We understood from a historical context why that word was chosen because of the historical nature of. It used to be called bidpai, and it used to be a bunch of, you know, software developers and software professionals. But we’ve moved BITS into an organization that’s not that. It’s really an organization that is for everyone. So we needed to make sure that and we’re trying to make sure that our name represents who we are. And so the s we’re going to try to see if we can get voted in. It’s going to take two thirds of the membership to vote that in. But we think we’re going to be changing. At least I hope we are going to be changing the name from specialists to solutions. And what, you know, what we’ll probably do is keep specialists as the official name so that we don’t have to do a bunch of legal paperwork, but we’ll represent ourselves in logos and things under the brand of solutions if the membership approves it. You know, we’re a membership driven organization. And so the members have the final say in that.
Jeff Thompson: You won’t have to change the coffee cups.
Jeff Bishop: Nope. Nope. The BITS remains.
Jeff Thompson: Solutions are good. Jeff, can you tell us a little bit about your partnership with Microsoft and Project Empower?
Jeff Bishop: We believe that we as members of BITS, it’s important that we are giving back to the industry who has given us so much. Right. If you if you look at people like Glenn Gordon who just left Freedom scientific, right. Yeah. I’m very, very sad day for the industry. I’m happy for him that he’s going to be moving on and doing other things. And he’s told us that he’s going to be doing things in the accessibility space. In fact, he’s partnering with BITS on some things, so we’re pretty excited about that. Again, we wanted to make sure that our members were giving back to the industry that gives back to them. So we developed a partnership with Microsoft, where we have recruited a number of BITS members to provide feedback to Microsoft on impactful scenarios, to be able to help drive product innovation and change. And the cool thing about this is that these people are going to be paid. So we think it’s important that people who are doing great work be paid for the time that they’re taking to do that. So we are doing that. We are ensuring that the people are being paid fairly and for their time and their efforts.
Jeff Bishop: And that’s what it’s all about. It’s about providing an opportunity for people to, you know, it’s not a ton of money, but it’s enough. You know, you can go out to dinner, you know, a couple of times a month or something. So that’s what Project Empower is. And it’s, it’s really just a way of trying to give back to the industry who has again, given us so much. So that’s another perk that you as a business member could become involved with if you, uh, have the skill set to be able to assist us with that. And you know what? We look for people in all aspects of, you know, their computing lifestyle. We have people who are very beginning users because Microsoft needs that representation. And we have people who have been working in the industry for 40 years who are, you know, deeply experts in what they do. So it’s not about being an expert. It’s about being willing to serve and being willing to learn and being willing to help. And that’s what it’s all about.
Jeff Thompson: You know, I remember when Microsoft acquired, I believe it was window Eyes.
Jeff Bishop: Yes, I remember that. Yeah.
Jeff Thompson: And their narrator became more prominent. Yeah. It’s grown.
Jeff Bishop: It has. I used to work on the narrator team. I’m not now, I don’t work at Microsoft any longer, but I worked on that team, and. Yeah, I mean, you’ve seen narrator take a large jump in features and capabilities, and I think it’s going to continue to do so. There’s some exciting things that are that are happening in that space, so everyone should keep an eye on that. It’s an interesting product. But, you know, I think it’s also good that we have choices, right? They’re all tools in our toolbox. And we should all try to be experts at all of them so that if there’s one that might be able to do something that can help us, then we can pick it up and utilize that. And I and I’m a firm believer in that. And that’s one of the things that we try to instill in people. I work at the University of Arizona, and I instill that into students as well to tell them, hey, you know, no one else is going to teach you. Your screen reader. You have to do that yourself. We can give you guidance and assistance, but you need to become an expert of your tools and just like a carpenter does. And that’s critically important.
Jeff Thompson: I work with a lot of agencies, TVIs and districts, I should say, and I’ve seen a trend lately, which is new to me, that they’re opting towards NVDA over the cost of buying another software or screen reader because districts are limited. You know, it depends on which district you’re in. I should say you can be one house away, but in different district one will get the full thing of JAWS and the other will get NVDA. But it seems like NVDA is coming closer to, I don’t know, left hand. Right hand. Which one are you using? Some people are using both. Some people use one or the other, but it seems interesting to see that schools and districts are moving towards NVDA.
Jeff Bishop: Yeah, I think, you know, people should utilize whatever tools they think are best for specific individuals. And if Nvda works for a student and let them use that. And if JAWS does, and that’s fine too, right? It’s all about meeting people where they are. And I know that’s pretty repetitive, but it’s true, right? You got to allow people to utilize what they are most comfortable with, to be able to do what they want to do with on their devices. So that’s really what it’s all about.
Jeff Thompson: Like you said, having more tools in your toolbox gives you a better opportunity to succeed.
Jeff Bishop: Yeah.
Jeff Thompson: Awesome. Well, Jeff Bishop, thank you so much for coming on the blind abilities and sharing with our listeners about BITS B I ts blind information technology. Solutions. We’ll see how the vote comes out.
Jeff Bishop:Yeah.
Jeff Thompson: Jeff, the intention of this podcast is to bring awareness to BITS and try and drive more people to the website. How can they find out more about BITS?
Jeff Bishop: You can find more about BITS at org. You can sign up there. It’s very, very simple. You simply fill out a form you can pay with stripe, which doesn’t require an account. You can just put in your credit card and become a member. We have different levels of membership so you can join as a student if you’re an ACB life member already. Not that we do too much with ACB, but that’s not our primary focus, although we support the ACB community, of course. So those prices are all available. You can even become just a friend of BITS where you can get on our announce list and learn more about what we’re up to just by filling out a form on our website. If you have specific questions of me, you can email president at. Org, president at BITS BITS. Org and I’d be happy to get back to you and address any concerns that you may have.
Jeff Thompson: Once again, thank you Jeff.
Jeff Bishop: Thank you so much Jeff.
[Music] [Transition noise] –
When we share-
What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities