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  • Inside the American Council of the Blind: My Conversation with Michael Babcock

    Inside the American Council of the Blind: My Conversation with Michael Babcock
    2026/09/19
    Hello again, I hope you have had a good week. On this episode, I caught up with an old friend, Michael Babcock, who is now the Membership Engagement Specialist for the American Council of the Blind. Michael has been blind since birth and has spent 26 years working with assistive technology, dating back to when he was 10 or 11 years old and first started troubleshooting his way around the internet. We hadn't recorded together in about a decade, so this conversation was overdue in more ways than one. On With The Show Watch On Youtube Listen On Podcast Players Teaching as a Way of Learning Michael's approach to assistive technology has always been hands-on. He described a habit that's shaped his whole career: whenever he figured out how to solve a technical challenge, he'd immediately go teach someone else how to do it — not just to help them, but because teaching something forces you to understand it more deeply. He was talking and teaching about accessibility, in his words, "before I knew accessibility was a thing." He doesn't have formal professional training in the field, but he considers his lived experience more valuable than credentials the kind of knowledge that only comes from actually hitting a barrier yourself, like reaching the final step of booking an expensive flight only to find the credit card field won't accept keyboard navigation. How ACB Is Structured Michael walked through how ACB is organized: local chapters feed into state and regional affiliates, which feed into the national organization. ACB currently has around 62 or 63 affiliates nationwide, including 45 state affiliates and 18 special-interest affiliates built around specific communities groups like ACB Teachers, ACB Radio Amateurs, ACB Diabetics in Action, ACB Families, the Randolph-Sheppard Vendors of America, and the Independent Visually Impaired Entrepreneurs affiliate. If someone reaches out looking for a local connection and there isn't a chapter in their state, ACB will help match them to a special-interest group instead, based on what they're already interested in or used to do before losing their vision. ACB Community: Daily Connection Born Out of COVID One of the most valuable resources Michael described is ACB Community, a program that grew directly out of the isolation of March 2020, when blind and visually impaired individuals suddenly lost the informal support of neighbors, caregivers, and everyday outings all at once. What started as one or two calls a week on a conference line has grown into something remarkable: since 2020, ACB Community has held more than 29,000 events, averaging around 100 events a week, running from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Eastern, seven days a week. Membership isn't required to participate anyone can join an event, and anyone can propose to host one, as long as the content stays family-friendly. Events range from Braille instruction and technology discussions to cooking shows, religious services, and even a weekly community karaoke night. ACB relies on around 150 volunteers to keep things running smoothly, including trained hosts who moderate conversations and make sure everyone is treated respectfully. Michael also walked through the structure of ACB Community's daily schedule email in detail and I made a point of flagging why that mattered beyond ACB Community itself. The email uses clear heading levels, consistent formatting, larger bolded headings, and specific font and color choices drawn from ACB's own low-vision guidelines. That's not just good practice for an email blast it's a direct, practical example of the same heading structure and formatting principles that make websites navigable for screen reader and screen magnifier users. Advocacy Made Accessible ACB's advocacy work happens on two fronts. Accessibility consulting and compliance services, led by Colby Garrison, work directly with organizations to identify and fix accessibility barriers in their websites, apps, and tools. Separately, ACB's advocacy platform lets anyone member or not contact their legislators about federal legislation using a "Speak For" tool. The letters come pre-written, so all a person has to do is fill in their information, review the message, and hit submit. Michael said he's used the tool over a dozen times himself and regularly gets real, substantive follow-up responses from lawmakers' offices, not just form replies. Free Wills and Audio-Described Entertainment Two other ACB programs stood out. ACB covers the cost of a fully accessible online will-writing tool, available to anyone regardless of membership. And the Audio Description Project, accessible at ADP.acb.org, functions like a searchable, accessible programming guide for audio-described content across streaming platforms, cable, and over-the-air TV tracking more than 14,000 described titles. ACB also hosts an annual awards gala recognizing outstanding work in audio description. AI, Just Try It Michael shared a story from ACB's national ...
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    51 分
  • Digital Accessibility as a Right: My Conversation with Mellissa Green

    Digital Accessibility as a Right: My Conversation with Mellissa Green
    2026/09/17
    Hello again, I hope you are having a good week so far. On this episode, I sat down with Mellissa Green, a digital accessibility advocate and host of the podcast Uniquely Abled: Disrupting Disability. Mellissa was born with retinopathy of prematurity and has been blind since birth. We swapped a lot of stories from our early years navigating assistive technology, and talked candidly about what it takes to break into digital accessibility work without a traditional professional background in it. On With The Show Watch On Youtube Listen On Podcast Players A Trip Down Assistive Technology Memory Lane Mellissa and I spent a good chunk of the conversation reminiscing about the technology we grew up with from four-track cassette tape recorders and Perkins Braille typewriters to dedicated notetakers like the Keynote and the Braille'n Speak, back when getting anything printed off of them was its own ordeal. Mellissa didn't get access to JAWS until after she graduated high school, since it hadn't been released yet when she started using computers. Before that, she used an early computer simply to transcribe her Braille homework for teachers. Breaking Into Accessibility Without a Traditional Background One of the most honest parts of our conversation was Mellissa's description of trying to break into digital accessibility work. When her family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, she learned that some universities were looking for people with digital accessibility skills — but she felt she only had her lived experience to offer, not formal training. I pushed back on that framing hard: lived experience navigating assistive technology every single day is not a lesser qualification. It's knowledge no textbook can teach. Mellissa eventually took training through a program called Abler, which taught her the formal system for auditing websites things like how to write specific, actionable feedback to a web developer instead of just flagging that "a button isn't labeled." She learned to identify exactly which button, and to specify exactly what the label should say instead. The Trouble With Accessibility Overlays We got into a conversation about accessibility overlays those widgets that promise to make a website accessible at the click of a button. Mellissa has run into them on her own web host, and while she's had more success with them than I generally have (my experience is usually an echo and a slower browser), we agreed that overlays are, at best, a starting point rather than a real substitute for addressing accessibility at the back-end level where it actually counts. Where "A Blue Green Galaxy" Comes From I was curious about the story behind her website's name, the same way people are often curious about "The Blind Blogger." Turns out there isn't a deep hidden meaning Mellissa simply likes the colors blue and green, and writes interplanetary culinary thrillers and other science fiction on the side, which inspired the "galaxy" theme. Speaking Through Toastmasters Mellissa is a member of VIP Online Toastmasters, a group specifically for people who are blind or visually impaired. She recently gave a talk there on audio description, drawing on conversations she'd had with people actually working in the field, including audio describer Roy Samuelson and Joel Snyder of the Audio Description Project. One detail from Samuelson stuck with her: the audio description field itself needs more diversity, with more people of color and more women doing the describing. Uniquely Abled, Not Disabled Mellissa explained the philosophy behind her podcast's name: rather than framing disability as something someone simply "has," the idea is that everyone has unique abilities some people are born with a disability, some acquire one later in life, and some experience a temporary one. Recognizing that spectrum is part of what her training helped clarify for her, beyond what she already understood from lived experience alone. Accessibility Is a Right, Not a Privilege Mellissa closed with the philosophy that shapes her whole approach to this work: accessibility isn't a privilege reserved for people with disabilities, it's a right that benefits everyone. She used a clear example someone who doesn't speak English needs an accessible, translatable website just as much as someone using a screen reader does. Her advice to businesses and developers was direct: if you want as many people as possible to use your product or shop your site, you need to put yourself in the position of the many different kinds of people who might visit it. About Mellissa Mellissa Green is a digital accessibility advocate who was born with retinopathy of prematurity and has been blind since birth. She hosts the podcast Uniquely Abled: Disrupting Disability and is an active member of VIP Online Toastmasters, a Toastmasters group for people who are blind or visually impaired. Mellissa believes accessibility is a right, not a privilege, and works to help websites and ...
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    46 分
  • Visible and Invisible Disability: with Jennifer Chassman Browne and Dr. Arielle Dance

    Visible and Invisible Disability: with Jennifer Chassman Browne and Dr. Arielle Dance
    2026/09/12
    On this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with two remarkable women: Jennifer Chassman Browne, a lifelong educator and author currently finishing her book See Us Know Us: Profiles of Disability, and Dr. Arielle Dance, an award-winning children's book author, poet, and disability advocate. Both women are contributors to Jennifer's book project, and our conversation ranged from the very different experiences of visible versus invisible disability to storytelling as a tool for advocacy, to what real allyship actually looks like. ON With The Show Watch On Youtube Listen On Podcast Players When a Disability Becomes Visible Later in Life Jennifer was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at six years old, at a time when almost no support systems existed for children with the condition. For most of her life, she was able to keep it largely hidden — managing medications, braces, and doctor's appointments privately while the outside world saw only her professional accomplishments as an educator and school leader. That changed in her 40s, when her disability became physically visible. She described the shift starkly: the same people who once reflected back her competence and expertise now approach her first by asking if she needs help — as if her capability had changed overnight, when nothing about her had changed at all except what people could see. Finding Community Through Access Needs Dr. Dance's path looked different. Diagnosed with endometriosis at 15 and living with an evolving list of chronic conditions including fibromyalgia and past blood clots, she described herself as someone whose disability is invisible to most people who meet her — she still dances, still shows up, and still "looks fine" to the outside eye. Her real entry into the disability community came in college, when a lack of air conditioning in her dorm (a serious issue for her as an asthmatic) landed her in disability housing. That single accommodation opened the door to a whole community of students who taught her she could request the things she needed — extensions, extra time, whatever her situation required — language and permission she'd never had before. Jennifer, by contrast, grew up without that kind of community at all, and didn't find one until she sought it out as an adult. Both women agreed on something important: disability isn't only about diagnosis, it's about encountering a world that wasn't built to include you — physically, procedurally, or socially. Storytelling as Advocacy Jennifer explained that See Us Know Us grew directly out of her disability advocacy and DEI training work, where she noticed something consistent. People connected far more with personal stories than with statistics or policy arguments. The book combines narrative biographies, professional portrait photography, and original poems built from deep, focused conversations about each contributor's lived experience with disability — a three-part structure designed to help readers see the whole person, not just a diagnosis. Dr. Dance's own writing is similarly personal. She's working on a novel and an essay anthology inspired by her grandmother, who died of breast cancer at 34 — before Dr. Dance ever had the chance to meet her. She also writes for the disability advocacy organization Diversability, where she works to amplify stories from across the disability community, including many experiences she'd never encountered before joining that work. The Fight to Keep — and Expand — Access Dr. Dance was direct about the current moment: much of her advocacy work right ˆnow is focused on protecting hard-won gains from Section 504, the ADA, and the Olmstead decision, rather than only pushing forward. She pointed to real threats to in-home support services and the qualifying thresholds tied to them — support that many people depend on simply to get out of bed, get dressed, or show up for remote work. On the employment side, she talked about how outdated job requirements — like a "must be able to lift 50 pounds" line dating back to 1953 — can disqualify capable candidates for tasks that rarely come up and could easily be handled by someone else on a team. She also advocates for giving every candidate interview questions in advance, framing it not as an accommodation but as basic fairness: you wouldn't ask someone to take a test without telling them what's on it. Dr. Dance also shared advocacy work from her role at the American Cancer Society, where her employee group recently helped push out research on delayed cancer screenings for disabled patients — often due to inaccessible equipment like mammography machines that can't accommodate a wheelchair, or providers who simply lack the equipment to perform an exam safely. Accommodations That Already Help Everyone One of the most memorable moments of our conversation was Jennifer describing a training session where she asked a room full of people whether they used closed captions ...
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    1 時間 12 分
  • Neuroinclusive Leadership: My Conversation with Ron Sosa

    Neuroinclusive Leadership: My Conversation with Ron Sosa
    2026/09/08
    Hello again, I hope your week is getting off to a good start. On this episode of The Accessibility Advantage, I sat down with Ron Sosa, a neuroinclusive leadership coach, author, speaker, and Executive Director of the Uncharted Veterinary Conference. Ron and I talked about invisible disability, masking, and what it actually takes to build workplaces that don't burn people out for being wired differently and we ended up in a genuinely open, back-and-forth conversation rather than a straight interview. On With The Show Watch On Youtube Listen On Podcast Players Turning a Layoff Into an Opportunity Ron opened up about being recently laid off, and how that unexpected transition actually accelerated a plan he'd already had to move into his leadership coaching work full-time. He credited a conversation with a psychotherapist about "post-traumatic growth" the idea that adversity can either become something you wallow in, or fuel that pushes you forward. Ron's clearly chosen the latter, and it colored the whole conversation with a grounded, forward-looking energy. Recognizing the Signs Early and Having Them Dismissed Ron traced his own neurodivergence back to early childhood: sensory overwhelm from sock seams, an intense need for food certainty, and a year spent nonverbal around age four. A court-mandated family therapist actually diagnosed him as autistic when he was three years old but his father rejected the diagnosis and sought another opinion instead. Ron didn't learn about that early diagnosis until adulthood, after he'd already been independently diagnosed again and had to "come out" to his father a second time, only to be told, "Oh yeah, you got that when you were three." Growing up, he was the kid who couldn't sit still, made noise, and got moved to the front of the classroom to keep him from talking to his neighbors the kinds of behaviors he said get caught much more readily today, but back then were just written off. The Cost of Masking and Over-Adapting Ron walked through a four-part framework he's developed around what he calls the "internal world" of a neurodivergent person: chronic self-monitoring, over-adaptation, self-criticism, and physical tension carried in the body. He pointed out that even high-achieving, high-performing employees can be carrying all four and that businesses tend to only intervene when someone is underperforming, never when someone is over-functioning to the point of eventual burnout. That pattern, he said, shows up constantly with neurodivergent professionals: rising quickly into leadership, then quietly stepping back down or leaving altogether once the role becomes unsustainable only to repeat the exact same cycle somewhere else, because the underlying support never changed. Why "Reasonable Accommodation" Isn't Always Safe to Ask For One of the more sobering parts of our conversation was Ron's honesty about disclosure. He generally doesn't disclose a diagnosis in interviews or at work instead, he advocates for specific needs directly ("I don't always have the best memory for names, so a quick reminder helps me") without naming the disability behind them. He was clear that this isn't about hiding; it's about not knowing in advance whether disclosure will be safe, or whether an employer will actually treat it as a reasonable accommodation instead of a liability. We also got our first-ever live comment during a recording, from a viewer named Jared, who asked Ron directly about when to disclose a disability in a job interview. Ron's answer advocate for the need, not necessarily the diagnosis was one of the clearest, most practical pieces of advice in the whole conversation. Where Hiring Breaks Down We spent real time on how inaccessible the hiring process itself often is inaccessible applications, inaccessible onboarding documents, and a mountain of unwritten workplace rules nobody actually teaches new hires. Ron shared a simple practice from when he co-owned a veterinary business: telling candidates exactly what to wear to the interview, because leaving that unstated and then judging someone for "getting it wrong" isn't fair to anyone, neurodivergent or not. He also pushed back hard on requirements like mandatory eye contact in interviews, asking the real question underneath it: what does success actually look like for this role, and can that be achieved without eye contact? In most cases, the honest answer is yes which means the requirement was never really about the job to begin with. Invisible vs. Visible Disability Ron and I talked candidly about how differently the world reacts to visible versus invisible disability. As a blind man with a white cane, I don't get shunned for my disability the way people with invisible neurodivergent conditions sometimes are when they disclose. We also swapped stories about the strange assumptions people make like when I look directly at someone's voice out of habit and they insist I must be faking blindness, or when Ron pauses ...
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    1 時間
  • Lauren Harris Is Accessibility A Strategy Or A Tactic

    Lauren Harris Is Accessibility A Strategy Or A Tactic
    2026/08/22
    Hello again, I hope you are having an enjoyable weekend wherever you are watching, listening, or reading from. On this episode of The Accessibility Advantage, I sat down with Lauren Harris, co-founder of Reliable PR & Marketing. Lauren and I found a lot of common ground I didn't expect going in not just between marketing and accessibility, but in how both fields are being reshaped by AI in ways most business owners haven't caught up to yet. And I found the thread of strategy over tactics applies to so much more of our lives than business or marketing. On With The Show Watch On Youtube Listen On Your Favorite Player From Journalism to a Marketing Agency Built From a Class Project Lauren didn't set out to build a marketing agency. She studied English and journalism, but found herself constantly telling stories that the people involved didn't want told a hard way to make friends. She pivoted into marketing because she wanted a way to actually help people, and the idea for Reliable PR & Marketing was born, almost by accident, as a fake business she had to build from scratch for a class project during her master's program at Northeastern. After graduating and staying home with her daughter for a few years, Lauren picked up a few freelance social media clients on the side to scratch the itch. It wasn't enough. Her husband, watching her light up doing the work, quit his job as a social worker to go all-in on the business with her. Today Reliable PR has a team and a growing client roster built, as she put it, on remembering that most "marketing problems" are actually strategy problems wearing a marketing costume. Strategy vs. Tactics One of the clearest things Lauren laid out: tactics are the actions the post, the rebrand, the website update. Strategy is the intention behind stringing those tactics together the understanding of who you're serving, what they need, and why you're doing any of it in the first place. You can execute every tactic on your checklist and still see zero growth if the strategy underneath it is missing or wrong. Why AI Is Making Accessibility Matter More, Not Less This is where the conversation really connected our two worlds. Lauren pointed out that before the internet, most of your customers already knew you, or knew someone who did. Now your website, your social posts, and your reviews all have to speak clearly to total strangers who may never get the chance to ask you a follow-up question. That's not just a marketing challenge it's an accessibility challenge, and the stakes for getting it right (or wrong) are higher than ever. She also raised something I hadn't fully connected before: social media content is Google-indexed right alongside your website, and AI platforms are increasingly the ones summarizing your business to potential customers before those customers ever reach you directly. If your content isn't clear, accurate, and accessible, you're not just losing human visitors you're training the AI itself to represent you poorly. The Risk of Letting AI Speak for Your Brand Lauren didn't pull punches on AI's biggest blind spot: it tends to agree with you. If you're getting positive feedback on something, AI will often validate it right back to you even when your actual audience is frustrated and you don't know why. She compared handing your brand voice over to AI to riding in a self-driving car: if something goes wrong, you're still the one who answers for it, not the tool. Her background in PR crisis communication made this point land hard for me. If you didn't come up with the words yourself, you may not fully understand what you meant when someone misinterprets them and you lose the instinct that comes from writing something yourself, that little internal pause that catches a phrase before it goes out wrong. ADHD as a "Debilitating Superpower" Lauren wasn't sure at first whether her ADHD, diagnosed at 19, even counted as a disability when she filled out my guest questionnaire. But she described it in a way I think a lot of listeners will recognize: it's a superpower that drains your life force while you're using it. It fuels a constant stream of genuinely good ideas, but it also makes the unglamorous work of finishing any one of them and waiting for the small wins to compound into big ones the hardest part. She talked about working with founders who share that same wiring, and the strategies that help: building things fully in the background before ever launching them, so the decision to "go live" isn't tied up with fear of failure, and surrounding yourself with people who share your passion but execute differently than you do so they can pick up where you tend to stall out. About Lauren Lauren Harris is the founder of Reliable PR & Marketing, a Bakersfield-based PR and marketing agency she and her husband built from scratch starting in 2021 with no funding, no loans, no investors. Since then, the agency has worked with more than 50 founders across 12+ industries, earned 60+ ...
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    56 分
  • Seeing Accessibility As An Investment Rather Than An Expense With Scott Wintheiser

    Seeing Accessibility As An Investment Rather Than An Expense With Scott Wintheiser
    2026/08/19
    Hello again, everybody. I hope this finds you well, wherever in the world you happen to be listening or reading from. On this episode of The Accessibility Advantage, I sat down with Scott Wintheiser, CEO and Founding Partner of Lightburn, a Milwaukee-based digital CX agency he co-founded in 1998. Scott has more than 28 years in digital and e-commerce, has founded and sold multiple businesses along the way, and even had a documentary screened at Sundance. These days, Lightburn's team of 20-plus works mostly with mid-size manufacturers, helping them handle everything from web design and development to CMS strategy and e-commerce. I went into this conversation with one question on my mind: is accessibility an investment or an expense? I don't like to guess where my guests will land before we talk, but given Scott's background building the internet since before most of today's tools existed, I figured he'd have a strong answer either way. On With The Show Building the tools before there were words for them Scott and his brother started Lightburn in 1998, back when the internet itself was still rudimentary and accessibility tools, both on computers and online, were nowhere close to where they are now. Because content management systems and e-commerce platforms either didn't exist yet or cost more than a small client could ever afford, Scott's team just built their own, custom to each client, long before "CMS" was a household term. That resonated with me. I built my first website back in 2007 with no money for a web master and none of the site-building tools we lean on today, so I spent hours chasing the cursor around blank pages teaching myself HTML. My color choices were so bad in those early days that, as I told Scott, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder could have argued over them. Scott's team was solving the same kind of problem from the builder's side: how do you serve people well when the tools to do it simply aren't there yet? Accessibility isn't an investment or an expense — it's just part of the job When I asked Scott the investment-versus-expense question directly, his answer surprised me a little. He said he doesn't really see it as either one. At Lightburn, accessibility has been baked into their process for at least 15 years, to the point where it's simply a non-negotiable part of building a website, not a line item anyone debates. He put it plainly: building a new site to be accessible doesn't really add anything to the process anymore. It might mean a few extra hours of testing, much of which can now be automated, but that's it. Retrofitting an old site is a different story and can be a real investment. But for anything built from scratch today, skipping accessibility takes more effort than including it, because the tools you're already using are constantly flagging issues like poor color contrast or unreadable font sizes along the way. AI, "zero-click" search, and why accessible content matters more than ever This is the part of the conversation I keep thinking about. Scott explained that as search shifts toward AI overviews, where an AI engine hands the user a single answer instead of a list of links to choose from, businesses now have two audiences for their websites: human beings and AI engines. If your content isn't visible to the AI, you're not part of the conversation at all. To become visible to AI systems, a business needs a large amount of well-organized, clearly structured content on its site. And here's the part that matters for our community: that same well-structured, machine-parsable content is also accessibility-friendly content. It's not why most businesses are rushing to build it out, Scott said, but it's a genuine side benefit. The push toward AI visibility and the push toward digital accessibility are, in large part, the same push. He also walked me through what's called "zero-click" search: increasingly, people take an AI's recommendation, say, the best running shoe for a given condition, without ever visiting the manufacturer's website. For a business to earn that recommendation, it has to give the AI enough accurate, well-structured information to work with. Leave gaps, and the AI will fill them in on its own, sometimes in ways that don't serve your brand at all. What a chatbot told me about the limits of AI-driven accessibility testing I shared a moment from a conversation I'd had with Claude while working on a page for my own site. After going back and forth about accessibility, it told me it could tell me whether a page met WCAG or other published criteria, but that it couldn't get me from technical compliance to genuine user experience the way someone who actually lives with the technology every day could. Scott agreed that's likely to remain true, at least for a while, which we both found reassuring for different reasons. For him, it means the tools his team uses will keep getting better at catching what a publisher overlooks. For me, it means people like me still ...
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    48 分
  • Authentic Accessibility & Inclusion: My Conversation with Daniel Hodges

    Authentic Accessibility & Inclusion: My Conversation with Daniel Hodges
    2026/08/09
    Hello again, I hope you are having a peaceful enjoyable weekend wherever you may live. For the first time in a while I'm writing to share a new episode of my podcast The Accessibility Advantage After over two months of physical therapy to treat a bumm shoulder, I'm feeling up to sharing some of the great conversations I've been having. Because you know that even when I don't feel up to writing or blogging I'm not going to stop talking, singing, or telling stories. On this episode, I sat down with Daniel Hodges, JD, MHA — a lawyer, disability advocate, and the President and Co-Founder of Peaces of Me Foundation. Daniel started the nonprofit while he was still in law school, and it's become one of the most thoughtful voices I've come across on what "authentic" accessibility and inclusion actually look like in practice. On With The Show A childhood defined by low expectations, not by vision loss Daniel was born with retinitis pigmentosa, leaving him with no usable vision in one eye and very limited vision in the other. He also lives with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that wasn't diagnosed until his 30s. But as Daniel told it, the hardest part of his early life wasn't the physical reality of his conditions — it was the social and systemic response to them. He grew up without access to Braille, a white cane, or assistive technology. Professionals told his family that his future was limited to menial work, with no college, no career, no marriage, and no kids on the table. The lack of support was so severe that he missed grades seven through eleven entirely, only reaching a school for the blind — where he finally learned Braille and cane travel — in what should have been his senior year of high school. That story reframes a point I care about deeply on this show: so much of what gets labeled "the struggle" of disability isn't inherent to the disability itself. It's the product of missing resources, missing inclusion, and missing opportunity. Redefining what "inspirational" means We spent a good chunk of the conversation on a tension a lot of us in the disability community feel: the discomfort around being called "inspirational." Daniel's take stuck with me — inspiration without action is just entertainment. If someone's story moves you but never changes what you do, it hasn't really done its job. We talked about people like Katie Ledecky, who disclosed her own diagnosis of POTS (a condition also connected to Ehlers-Danlos), and the backlash she got from some corners of the disability community for daring to describe a struggle "on par" with others. Daniel's view: that reaction misses the point entirely. Success stories from people with disabilities — famous or not — show what's possible with the right support, not that anyone's hardship is disqualified from being real. Rejected by law school after law school: the power of wanting something badly enough Daniel's path to becoming a lawyer wasn't a straight line, either. He was turned down by Washington University in St. Louis and Case Western, and waitlisted at Mizzou, before landing at the University of Baltimore. When the opportunity came together, he flew out, scoped out the area, and — having spent less than a week in Maryland in his entire life — found an apartment online, packed a friend's car, and moved to start his new life there. Along the way, he also fought for custody of his daughter during her battle with pediatric cancer, after a hospital doubted that a blind parent could raise a child. That thread connected directly to my own story of building the Midway Marketplace and, eventually, my brand as The Blind Blogger after the family carnival business closed. Neither of us got where we are by wanting things in a passive, "it'd be nice" kind of way. We both talked about the difference between wanting something enough to sacrifice comfort for it, and wanting it in theory. Why Peaces of Me exists Daniel co-founded Peaces of Me in the summer of 2019 with his cousin Christie, after conversations about the gaps both of them had experienced — his own fight for medical advocacy and custody, and her family's struggle to find resources after her daughter was born with a limb difference. They realized the problem wasn't unique to one diagnosis or one disability; it was systemic. Peaces of Me operates on three pillars: Community education that goes beyond simple awareness and actually teaches people something. Professional training that helps people apply that knowledge within their own sphere of influence. Connections to relevant resources so people know where to go to put what they've learned into practice. Daniel described it as a flywheel: the more people who go through that journey, the more their knowledge and perspective feed back into the community, raising the baseline of awareness for everyone else. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Peaces of Me is building a peer-to-peer library that connects people to ...
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    1 時間 3 分
  • Melih Oztalay Accessibility Is Smart Marketing

    Melih Oztalay Accessibility Is Smart Marketing
    2026/02/09
    Hello again, I hope your week is getting off to a great start. I know mine is because I'm blessed to be speaking with Melih Oztalay owner of Smart Finds Marketing on the latest episode of my podcast The Accessibility Advantage. He shared some of his journey as a business owner and marketing expert. He talked about building accessibility into the user experience. He touched on his expectations for the impact of the EAA, European Accessibility Act, on future US adoption of accessibility best practices. He made a passionate case for word press as an accessible platform with tools to create accessible content and for which lots of developers are familiar with. We talked a little about compound accessibility and how business owners can be assured the tools they are using are helping them create user friendly content that is also accessible. He finished with some great advice to business owners about building and maintaining their websites. If you want to hire me to improve accessibility in your organization, or if you want to come on the show and share your accessibility experience; then Please complete this short form. Afterwards, you will receive a link to book a short chat with me. On With The Show Recommended Companies My hosting is provided by Blubrry. They provide free hosting for me and a few other hosts who have a disability. I book most of my guests through Podmatch where I am their advisor for accessibility. And I love Less Annoying CRM for their commitment to accessibility that has lead to a cRM that people actually want to use. About Melih Today, my work sits at the intersection of AI, SEO, conversion optimization, and accessibility. I help companies build marketing systems that are resilient, human-centered, and ready for how people—and machines—actually consume information. My focus isn’t chasing trends; it’s helping businesses adapt intelligently without losing sight of the people they serve. My path into marketing wasn’t linear—and that’s probably what shaped how I think about it today. I’ve been in business and marketing for nearly four decades. Over that time, I’ve seen multiple waves of “the next big thing” come and go: early web, search engines, social media, mobile, automation—and now AI. Each wave created opportunity, but also confusion, shortcuts, and a lot of broken systems. What stayed consistent was this: businesses that focused on clarity, structure, and people—not just tools—were the ones that lasted. Accessibility entered the picture for me not as a compliance checkbox, but as a practical business realization. I kept seeing websites that technically worked but failed real humans—people with vision challenges, cognitive overload, motor limitations, or simply different ways of processing information. When we fixed those issues, something interesting happened: Conversion improved, engagement improved, SEO improved. The business performed better. That’s when it clicked that accessibility isn’t a niche concern—it’s foundational. It’s about designing digital experiences that work for more people, more consistently. In short, accessibility is in every business owner's best interest. Connect With Melih Website: https://smartfindsmarketing.com Linked In: www.linkedin.com/company/smartfinds-marketing Facebook: www.facebook.com/smartfinds Instagram: www.instagram.com/SmartFindsmarketing Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/smartfinds Youtube: www.youtube.com/@MelihOztalay Sharing Is Caring When I bring someone on my podcast, it is because I want to help them share their knowledge and experience with more people. But, I can't do that without your help. As they say it doesn't matter how compelling the content is if no one ever hears it. So, I'm hoping you will share this post or the links in it with your friends, family members, and online communities. Besides sharing the link Me or Melih would really love a thoughtful comment. And as a host it really makes my day when someone takes the time to rate and review the show. I want to thank you for taking the time to watch or listen. I know you have lots of demands on your time. And you have precious few spare moments to spend. I really appreciate your spending them on me and my show. Hope you will join me again next time. Until then please take care out there, Maxwell
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