Category: Remarkable World Commentary

In this heartfelt episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes her pottery instructor, Shaun Kelly, who shares how clay first came into his life through his mother, and how a career as a programmer and IT project manager that kept him always on call, and at 350 pounds, gave way on his doctor’s advice to a healthier life in pottery. He credits his first teacher, Pauline Harman, for the projects-and-templates approach he still uses with beginners, and his mentor, Sandi Dunkelman, for teaching him everything from throwing to loading kilns, making glazes and running a sale.

In this candid episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes Brian Moore, a blind digital accessibility leader at TD Bank whom she has known for many years, for a conversation that runs from an eleven-year-old taking the bus alone in Montreal to a senior role auditing a national bank’s apps and websites. Brian traces a career that began in 1994 at a small Calgary assistive technology organization in the DOS era, moved through close to twenty years of tech support at Frontier Computing in Toronto, and became a self-taught specialty in web and document accessibility once AODA compliance started bringing people to his door. Along the way he is unusually frank about what he learned from the other end of the support line, about tokenism in earlier jobs, about automated scanners catching only thirty to forty percent of accessibility issues, and about the day he had to ask his eleven-year-old son to sign his own employment background check because the form was inaccessible.

In this genuinely uplifting episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes three-time Paralympian Priscilla Gagné, who traces a path from a childhood in Granby and Sarnia, where doctors spent more than two decades cycling through diagnoses before landing on a rare, then-unstudied form of retinitis pigmentosa, to a silver medal in Para judo. Gagné describes a home where she was allowed to scrape her knees and a school system that would not let her run, the two years at W. Ross Macdonald School that taught her to advocate for herself, and the rugby team that made her the water girl and gave her the same ribbons as everyone else. She walks listeners plainly through how para judo classification and weight classes actually work, and is candid that the hardest part of moving to the national training centre in Montreal was not the training volume but the years when almost nobody would partner with the blind athlete on the mat.

In this reflective episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA presents her first solo podcast for September and builds it around a single argument: one size does not fit all. Thanking listeners who have written in, she makes the case that no template can meet every situation, because every person with a disability has a unique requirement and a unique set of needs, a mistake she admits making herself at times, and one she calls a lack of respect. It applies, she says, whether you are a phone rep, an agent, a teacher, a government department, or any other type of entity.

In this practical episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA presents her September Ask Advocate Donna feature, opening with a favourite quotation, speak in such a way that others love to listen to you, listen in such a way that others love to speak to you, before turning to her recurring word game. She contrasts two pairs of advocacy words: commitment versus compliance, where committing is proactive and complying is merely following the leader, and afterthought versus forethought, illustrated with website developers who bolt on accessibility features at the end and managers who only remember employees with disabilities once the plan is already written.

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.