Month: August 2026

In this absorbing episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA speaks with Peggy Chong, The Blind History Lady, about how a 1979 job clearing out the files of a closing Minnesota home for the blind turned into a lifetime of recovering the lives of blind Americans. Peggy describes finding a board member’s letter mentioning “our blind congressman,” tracing it to Thomas David Schall, and calling him her first blind ancestor. She explains why she prefers storyteller to historian or archivist, and why she insists on telling the ordinary and the unflattering lives alongside the celebrated ones, because blind people are a cross section of society, crooks and murderers included.

In this moving episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA speaks with author, poet and Friends in Art president Ann Chiappetta about a life rebuilt three times over. Ann describes being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 1993 at 28, while expecting her first child, losing her job, her acrylic furniture design career, and for a while her sense of herself, and the “angels” who pulled her back: her ophthalmologist, her rehab counselor, and eventually writing itself, which she calls a catharsis for everything she could not say about going blind. She talks about the ten years she spent delivering the Building Bridges disability awareness program to children in kindergarten through second grade, and the payoff of overhearing a child in a supermarket teach their own parent not to touch a guide dog.

In this candid and unexpectedly personal episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA sits down with Steve Barclay, founder of Canadian Assistive Technology and co-host of the AT Banter Podcast, for a career-length walk through Canadian assistive technology. Steve begins in November 1990 as Aroga Technologies’ very first employee, a bench technician repairing 40-pound CRT video magnifiers, Optacons, VersaBrailles and Prentke Romich Minspeak devices, and traces his climb to VP of Sales and Marketing and eventually part owner and chief operating officer. He then tells, in unsparing detail, how that 28-year run ended: his majority partner Grove Bennett diverted company money into a multi-level marketing scheme selling “quantum infused holograms,” ran Aroga into the ground, left behind an unpaid $300,000 tax bill, fled to Australia, and left Steve facing a TD Bank fraud charge and a consumer proposal before he rebuilt from his townhouse basement on his wife’s capital.

In this warm, unhurried episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA talks with Stephen Theberge, a totally blind writer, software builder, and former ADA compliance tester from Attleboro, Massachusetts, about a life spent at the front edge of access technology. He traces the arc from 14 years as a residential student at the Perkins School for the Blind, through a Rhode Island College double major in computer science and English literature that began as an act of stubborn defiance after an advisor told him to switch, to running his own screen-reader business from the late 1980s until the big companies and the shift to graphical interfaces made a one-man operation impossible. Along the way he remembers punch cards and a dispatcher, a Texas Instrument computer that looked like a breadbox, the Covox Speech Thing wired to his own screen reader, and a 1992 WJAR television spot he still keeps.

In this candid and unusually raw episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan hands the microphone to her friend, associate and longtime collaborator Aaron Di Blasi for what he calls a “reverse grilling”, a date-by-date walk through her two-year attempt to sit the CompTIA Network+ exam as a blind candidate. Beginning with the $7,500 Apex Program scholarship awarded in November 2024, they trace a scholarship that turned out to be 21 typo-riddled Word documents with no learning platform and no human support; a first exam abandoned in October 2025 when the reader said “I don’t know what to do here”; the articles Donna published and the scholarship Apex withdrew because of them, telling her “you’ve made us the enemy”; the CNIB stepping in twice; and a second exam in May 2026 where the diagrams were still undescribed, the reader and recorder were one person, and her printed results had to be read aloud to her by a friend in the parking lot.

Here Donna Jodhan steps into what she calls her Ask Advocate Donna shoes for her second solo episode of August, presenting stories of advocacy and inviting listeners to send in their own. She opens with a quote she came across and likes: speak in such a way that others love to listen to you, and listen in such a way that others love to speak to you. Then she runs her favourite word game, offering two pairs of words that advocates meet constantly. Action or conversation: action means getting involved, getting your hands dirty and your feet wet, the hardcore end of advocacy, while conversation means sitting down to listen and discuss, which is more passive. Intention or execution is the opposite pairing: intention is being ready and willing to get something done, execution is having actually done it. Donna is careful to say there is nothing wrong with either side of either pair, and that it depends on the advocate and where they want to go.

Here Donna Jodhan opens the month of August with a solo commentary she frames as entity versus customer, and she puts her opinion on the table straight away. When a form is inaccessible and the customer agent tells a blind or vision-impaired customer to go and find someone else to help them, whose responsibility is that really? Donna argues it belongs to the company and its agent, not to the customer: the form comes from the company, it does not come from her, and it is up to the agent to find a solution rather than to send someone elsewhere. She recounts what happened a few months ago with ServiceOntario, where an agent told her she had to find someone to assist her and she refused, in the most courteous way she could, then phoned again and again until she reached genuinely helpful, supportive agents who helped her complete and submit the form to renew her company’s business. She asks whether what is really at work is a lack of work ethic or an unwillingness to look for a solution, and puts herself out on a limb to say the duty sits with the customer agent.