Introduction
World Blind Herald started evolving when I published edition 1 of what would become the regular feature we call Blindness Briefs on January 4, 2022. We've been publishing the news digest every Tuesday since. Because Blindness Briefs (under the various names we tried for it last year) could get pretty large sometimes, we broke out the stories about science, medicine and preventing blindness and they are now in their own regular feature called Science Briefs. We have also delivered a new featured perspective by a variety of authors when we launched officially on January 4, Louis Braille's birthday, of this year and have been publishing every Tuesday since.
During this time, the team of writers has grown, our list of advisors is one of the most high powered and diverse groups I've seen assembled in the blindness space in a long time and the WBH team is very proud of what we've been able to bring so far.
Some Announcements
Tax Exempt Status
In the next few weeks, we will be announcing that WBH has been accepted by a fiscal sponsor and will be able to accept tax exempt contributions, apply for grants that require such status and be able to raise more money more easily. WBH is run as a non-profit and we're not looking to make money but the more money we raise, the more we can do. Look for this announcement in the very near term future.
WBH 2.0
The WBH web site will be undergoing a major face lift in the coming couple of months. Currently, we have terrific content but the site is entirely text. This is fine for our blind readers but we have a lot of low vision and sighted people coming to WBH and we hope to make it more pleasant an experience for all visitors. It will, of course, be 100% accessible but will also contain features we have been discussing but haven't rolled out yet.
Growing Pains
Even though Blindness Briefs has been published for more than a year, we are still a very new and small organization. In the past month, we experienced a catastrophic failure of a feature provided by our hosting service that mangled a lot of links and caused other problems with the WBH web site. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We are currently in process of moving to a new server and continue to experience some problems with email on the site which means that some of our forms are not working properly. We are working as fast and furiously as we can to get all of this straightened out and appreciate your patience as it gets fixed.
Conclusions
WBH is still a work in progress. We continue to improve and could not have predicted the problems with our host. We will continue to grow and bring our readers the most comprehensive collection of stories related to blindness from the entire globe. We're proud of what we accomplished thus far and we promise that the best is yet to come.