Category: Remarkable World Commentary

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.

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.