A11y News is growing: Meet Maria
A wild editor appeared! She was cuter than the red underline, so I caught her.
A11y News started as a one-woman show but has grown a bit over time. While I always received support and input from my network, after a while and one too many spelling mistakes (I still think about you, Gren), I realized that sustainable community growth and exchange required more than I could do on my own. So, I decided to let go of total control over every step of the publishing process and grow the team.
A11y News needed an editor. And I knew just the person for that job.
Meet Maria
Hi,
I really wanted to start this introduction with a fun introduction since Laura‘s goal seems to be to entertain as well as inform and while I most certainly am not able to deliver on the latter, I thought I might be able to manage the former. But the more I tried, the more I realised that it is really hard to find one greeting that would not only appeal but be understood by most of this newsletter’s readers, so I settled on a classic.
Hi.
My name is Maria, and I have been promoted to Laura’s human spell-check for the newsletter. Which means any mistakes you do find, are mine because I didn’t catch them (even though I gotta catch them all 🎶).
You might ask yourself how I came to this (dubious) honour.
Well, Laura and I’ve known each other since her university days. I say her university days because she knew what was good for her and stopped after one bachelor’s degree while I decided to stick around uni a little while longer. Currently, I’m finishing up my second bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and am working as a bookseller. So, there is this certain implication that I read a lot (which I do) and Laura was like, “well… my newsletters are not that long – and they are so informative and fun (!) – I’m sure that if you want to you can fit them into your busy reading schedule”, and I, like the nitwit I am, said, “sure, that sounds like a great idea”. Little did I know she would force me to introduce myself.
But of course, it is unfair to say that this arrangement only has advantages for Laura. Which is not true. The truth is, I would like to open a specialized bookshop in the future, and one idea for the specialization is audiobooks and books for visually impaired people. So, me tagging along here is kind of like a reconnaissance mission where I try to find out as much as I can related to that topic. If any of you want to share anything regarding that – a personal anecdote, a link, an emoji - I would be overjoyed and most grateful; if not, that’s fine as well. Just know that from now on I’ll be lurking in the shadows of any and all of Laura’s newsletters.
It was nice to meet you, and I wish you all the best and a wonderful day/night/whenever you are reading this,
Maria
A very warm welcome, Maria! I already have so many questions that I would love to read more about in the form of (blog) posts and such from you in the future - instead of a short answer here ;)
Just to ask a few of them now:
- Was there ever a lecture at university on disability literature (be it novel but also non-fiction), literature by writers with a disability, or anything like that? So, was disability ever a topic during your time at university?
- When you talk about books for visually impaired people, do you mean books with braille “alongside” the printed story? Or books with tactile elements to feel the story (I can imagine this especially with children's books)?
- Do you know of books like flip books for children, where they can learn sign language from an early age? Could you imagine that this type of book could also be part of your future bookshop, even if it is not aimed at the visually impaired?
Maybe this will give you some food for thought for blogposts and I look forward to reading them at some point. :)