Category: Remarkable World Commentary

In this eye-opening episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan welcomes Chris Schiafone, who recently joined the revived board of Barrier-Free Canada as a director, to walk listeners through what he calls a journey through lived experience: growing up with low vision and extreme light sensitivity, learning to type at three or four and to read braille while he could still see, and losing the rest of his usable sight after high school. Chris explains how remembering what things look like lets him picture the spokes of a wheel or the shape of a pear, why students born blind need a deeper explanation and something to explore by touch, and how one neuroscience professor had his class build a neuron out of candy so that he could learn it by touch, alongside other low-cost materials such as string, clay, pipe cleaners and stencils.

In this inspiring episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan welcomes Hayley Xie, a 15-year-old blind advocate from the UK who runs a podcast, an accessibility campaign and a youth magazine, and whom Donna calls probably her youngest guest yet. Hayley explains that she was born sighted, that with her condition, Stargardt’s, her sight can never become zero, and that she wants sighted people to understand that blindness has a range: “Blindness is not always darkness. It is sometimes nothing.” She describes her podcast, Beyond Vision, which she started so people can learn about blind lives without having to ask, and guests such as Lord David Blunkett and Daniel Kish, whose words that independence is also a form of freedom she now carries into her own presentations.

In this motivating episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA welcomes back Diane Bergeron, Head of Global Strategies and Senior Vice President of Public Affairs at CNIB, and congratulates Diane on the honorary Doctor of the University degree that MacEwan University awarded her this past June. Diane says that in her convocation address she told the graduates she has learned more from her failures than from any success, and that failure builds the resilience people with disabilities need. Diane traces her focus on abilities rather than assumptions to a Montreal stable where, at 16 or 17, she was told she could not volunteer because she was blind, and where she ended up teaching classes before the end of the summer. She also describes going back to school as a single mother, through two diplomas, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, and how CNIB brought its international, government relations and advocacy work together into one global strategies and public affairs area.

In this inspiring episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan welcomes Michael Feir, the totally blind writer who founded Audyssey, the free email magazine about games blind people can play, in 1996. Michael explains that discovering the interactive fiction magazine XYZZYnews and a summer with no job led him to start Audyssey, which grew through volunteers, mailing lists and even a flame war into a community that reached at least 14 countries over eight years, until he burned out. He describes his belief that people learn best through play, recalling how a disc of games, including a 100-room maze called The Great Escape, taught him typing and how to go back and hear what his access technology had said, while finite math left him resenting the subject.

In this illuminating episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan welcomes Joel Snyder, who takes listeners back to his years as a volunteer reader at the Metropolitan Washington Ear and explains how audio description began. Joel credits Dr. Margaret Pfanstiehl, the blind founder of the Washington Ear, and Chet Avery, a blind man at the Department of Education, with the idea that grew into the first professionally described theater production, Major Barbara at Arena Stage in the summer of 1981, and he credits Gregory Frazier, whose San Francisco master’s thesis he says was the first published work on the subject. He traces description from live theater to television with WGBH, then to DVDs, movie theaters and streaming services, and points listeners to the American Council of the Blind’s Audio Description Project at https://adp.acb.org.

In this inspiring episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan welcomes Jerry Nicholson, co-founder of Accessible Data, from the UK. Jerry traces his path from studying geography at the University of Edinburgh and qualifying as a chartered accountant to moving to Bangladesh with his wife, Fiona, after the two of them read Muhammad Yunus’s Banker to the Poor. There they set up Tindercapital to bring early stage venture capital to businesses that could scale, invested in the eco-friendly manufacturer Oasis Coffins, and ran Open Accelerator for rural entrepreneurs. Jerry speaks openly about how hard that first investment was, including a breakdown just before COVID that he says he has fully recovered from.

In this practical episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA presents her October Ask Advocate Donna, opening with one of her favorite quotes, by an unknown author: 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. Her word game sets complacent against active, arguing that complacency leaves little room for advocacy while being active makes room for it, and then turns to in kind and unkind, wondering whether being cruel to be kind applies to the pair.

In this pointed episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA opens October with a question she calls controversial: when barriers shut people with disabilities out, are they being left out or left behind? She points to online forms that banks, educational institutions and certification bodies still fail to make accessible, calling out the Apex organization for inaccessible sign-up forms, InnoSearch for trying and failing, and Pearson VUE for an online certification exam she says was not accessible in any way. She recounts trying to renew her business registration through ServiceOntario, where the online form was inaccessible and the first agent told her to find someone to help, until a third agent resolved it. She also raises elevators in medical buildings with no braille labels or speech, office buildings designed without accessible entrances, and the lack, as far as she knows, of a federal minister assigned to accessibility in Mark Carney’s government, adding that she is a Mark Carney fan and would apologize if a minister has been named.

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.