🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this wide-ranging episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan sits down with Kim Charlson, Director of the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library, to trace Kim’s 41-year journey at Perkins, from losing her vision at age 11, to becoming one of the first totally blind people in the United States to earn a master’s degree in library science, to leading one of the country’s most innovative accessible library programs for the past 24 years. Kim describes how the library has grown far beyond lending books, now offering downloadable audiobooks, loanable Braille e-readers, an audio-described film collection, a professional recording studio, and an assistive-technology “library of things”, a program that helped drive over 900,000 items shipped in the past year alone. She also reflects on mentoring blind professionals into library leadership, noting that five blind directors now lead libraries across the U.S., a barrier she has helped dismantle by example.
The conversation then widens from libraries into the broader systemic accessibility work Kim has championed, including the Marrakesh Treaty, the Internet Archive digital scanning collaboration with the Boston Public Library, accessible prescription labels, accessible voting machines, and a decades-long push for tactile U.S. currency that has finally produced talking currency readers and a forthcoming $20 bill with a tactile edge feature. Kim closes by looking ahead to the technologies she believes will most reshape blind independence next, from Meta glasses that can read the world aloud, to autonomous vehicles arriving at the front door, framing accessibility not as a finish line, but as an ongoing, everyday practice worth advocating for at every level.
TRANSCRIPT
Advertisement: This podcast brought to you by Pneuma Solutions.
Advertisement: I can’t see it.
Advertisement: ADA Title II has a real compliance deadline. April 2026. Public entities are required to make their digital content accessible, including websites, PDFs, reports, applications, and public records. If a document cannot be read with a screen reader, it is not compliant and if it is not compliant, blind people are still being denied equal access. For a clear explanation of what the rule requires, visit http://www.title2.info. It’s one of the leading resources explaining what agencies must do and when. This message is brought to you by Pneuma Solutions, we have remediated hundreds of thousands of pages in days, not months or years, aligned with WCAG 2 AA guidelines at a fraction of traditional costs. Accessibility isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. Now that you know, ask your agencies a simple question, are your documents actually accessible?
Podcast Commentator: Greetings, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP and MBA invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Remarkable World Commentary. I am Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate, accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its websites accessible to every Canadian, not just to cited ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removing barriers. When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. It is my pleasure. It is my privilege and my honor to welcome Kim Charlson to our show today. Welcome, Kim.
Kim Charlson: Thank you so much, Donna. I’m really honored to be here and to be one of your special guests. I’ve listened to your podcast quite often and you have some really incredible folks working on all aspects of advocacy, and I’m honored to be considered in that group. So thank you again.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you again. So let’s start at the beginning. What first drew you toward libraries, Braille and accessible information work, and how did your early life experiences shape the path that you eventually built?
Kim Charlson: So that’s a big question and I’ll try to do it quickly. I’ll take your time. So I was born sighted. I lost my vision when I was around 11 years old due to complications of glaucoma. Oh, okay. Most of I had some usable vision for a little bit, but pretty much lost all of it and became totally blind in my 20s, so my parents got my diagnosis early. They were thoughtful. My ophthalmologist was thoughtful and said to them, you need to get her to an educational program where she can learn Braille. She can learn the skills to become a blind person and an adult who will be able to work and do whatever she wants to do in her life. And so my parents went to find a school for the blind that they were comfortable with on the west coast of the United States, where I grew up in Oregon. Right. And I went to the Oregon School for the blind for five years between like fourth grade and ninth grade. And learn Braille, learned cane travel, learned adaptive things. Then in 10th grade, I went to public school at my local community high school and was able to engage and participate and then on to college. So that in when I was growing up, I had the luxury of living in the same town where our Braille and talking book library was located for the state of Oregon, so I would.
Kim Charlson: And it was only a few blocks away from the school for the blind, which was nice. And I would go there a lot and spend a lot of time in the stacks, just browsing Braille books and looking at those Braille books and picking them. And, you know, I had a dream that I was going to read every book in the library, which a lot of kids think they could do. And not, not very easy to do that because one thing libraries do is they keep growing. So there’s more and more and more and more so. Right. But you know, I always loved books. So in high school, college, I also was bitten with the advocacy bug and which I consider a great illness to have. Advocacy is so important in the work we do. And it became one of my passions to, to work on, you know, disability justice, social justice, make sure that things were equitable to our society and make sure that those kinds of things could be available and accessible to us. So I I had plans to become an attorney, but when I got to my senior year in college, I sort of got that itis that many seniors get where they just kind of go, oh my God, I don’t think I can go back to college for three more years to become an attorney.
Kim Charlson: So I said, I’m going to get a job and think about what I want to do when I grow up. I applied for two jobs. One was in a real estate office. The second one was at the Braille and Talking Book library, and I got hired at the Braille and Talking Book Library to train Braille transcribers and and volunteer narrators to record books. And that’s how I started my career in library and information science. And so I really became an advocate there for access to information, how we could make information more accessible for people. And that after working in that role for a few years, I said, you know, I’d really like to become a manager in Braille and talking book library somewhere in the United States. And but I won’t be able to do that unless I get an advanced degree in library science. So one day I came back to my desk and there was this application package for students with disabilities who want to enter into the career of library science. And I thought, well, you can’t get more targeted than me, and that’s what I want to do. So I applied for the fellowship and I won. Well, I didn’t know was to accept the fellowship. I had to go to the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.
Kim Charlson: So I left my job. I took a leave of absence from the library. I went to Texas. I left my husband at home dodging bill collectors and trying to, you know, keep, keep the, the house and home safe. And I went and got my degree in library science, my master’s degree in library science. And I was one of the first totally blind people in the United States to get a degree in library science because prior to the the late 1980s, when I went to grad school, libraries were not very friendly places for blind people. Everything was paper print books, card catalogues. But in the 1980s, we started to automate libraries. We started to get rid of card catalogs and have online catalogs instead, and processes became much more accessible so that I could do cataloging, which isn’t my favorite thing. But librarians need to know how to catalog. So I would, I would much rather be a manager and build programs and services, but there was an article written about me being sort of a pioneer into a field that had not been very blind friendly prior to the advent of automation in libraries and the Perkins School for the blind. Read the article and they had a position for a an assistant director of library services, and they asked me to apply for the job, and I did, and I got the job and I worked and I moved to Massachusetts.
Kim Charlson: Oh my gosh. And my husband came along and and we love Massachusetts. I’m so happy here. I have I am in my 41st year of working for Perkins, so. Oh my Lord, I have been here a long time. I have been the director of our library here for 24 years and have grown the library to be more than just a national library service for the Blind and disabled State Library. We, we love the NLS program and the Library of Congress. And that’s the basis for everything we do. But I also believe that there are other services that people should have available to them. And we’ve grown those other services as well. So as an example, we have a fairly extensive audio described movie collection about 2000 titles on DVD that can be loaned out to our borrowers. We have a recording studio where we record local interest titles that are not provided by the Library of Congress. We have a Braille production department where we do fee for service, work for the community, and also add books to our collection and produce documents for other departments at Perkins that don’t have Braille production capability within their staff. We loan technology. We have a couple new programs now that are library of things. Which library of things are.
Kim Charlson: Items you can loan that would be useful and people don’t know if they want to buy it until they check it out. So public libraries in the US have libraries of things. So they might be musical instruments or a sander. If you wanted to sand your deck or a drill because you have a maintenance project, but you don’t want to go out to Home Depot and buy a sander or a drill for one project. You can borrow it from your local public library here. So we have an assistive technology library of things where we loan out relatively inexpensive devices that people may not have been able to check out or haven’t had a chance to put their hands on it. And one of my favorite popular things in our collection is a talking am FM radio. Borrowers tend to love it and it speaks all the frequencies like, you know, 106.9, 106.8. So if you’re looking for a number on the FM or AM dial, you can find it, you can tune it in yourself. And all the buttons are labeled and all the functions. So you can switch from am FM and we have talking blood pressure cuff, some of the medical type accessible devices people want to try before they think of getting one for their for themselves because things range from under $10 to about $150, might be the most expensive thing in our library of things.
Kim Charlson: And then we have a demo center, which has the more expensive devices that people want to touch and look at. You have to make an appointment and come and see us for the expensive devices. We don’t loan those out because something like a walk cane, that is, you know, the new cane that has GPS inside and a speaker. Yeah, that’s about an $800 cane. We’re not going to loan that out to somebody. No, but they can come. So just, you know, being able to build those kinds of opportunities and give people access to things is really, really important to me. And, and kind of being a visionary and growing our library is something that I find very satisfying. And our patrons are happy. They love the kinds of programs we have available. And that’s really what it was all about. I do you know, I’m a I’m a library director by day and my avocation, as I say, is advocacy and system change, because I really, really like to work toward system change and fixing the bigger problem. I’ll work with one on one to help somebody get through a problem. But it’s fixing the problem for everybody that really jazzes me. I like to make that kind of system change. That is so important in our advocacy work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This is really impressive. And you know, when I look at your career, one of the most remarkable things is your long service at Perkins. What do you remember most about joining the Perkins Library program in the mid 1980s. And what convinced you that this was where you could make a lasting difference?
Kim Charlson: Well, I knew I wanted to have the opportunity to be in management in a library for the blind in the United States. And at the time I made that career choice, there were no people who were blind that were working in the network, leading the there libraries. There was no managers or directors. There were staff, certainly, who were blind, but there were no managers. So I’m happy to say today there are five blind people who are directors of libraries within the United States. And I’m really, really proud just to to know that, you know, that barrier has come down, that blind people can do this job and have shown they can do this job because of technology and because of, you know, the opportunities that are out there and the possibilities. So I’ve also made it a point in my career to try to mentor and bring other qualified blind individuals and people with disabilities into library work. So I have seven staff. That of my total staff is 29 individuals seven of whom are blind or have low vision, including my deputy director. He is low vision and supervises, you know, a good portion of our team as well. So I have a Braille transcriber, I have an assistive tech manager, I have an outreach person. I have people that work in my duplication and shipping department all throughout the organization. I have qualified individuals who are blind working for me. And I always tell them that I have very high expectations. So they better not disappoint me because if I if I identified you as somebody that I think I would like to work for our library. I don’t want you to disappoint me. So. Right. You know, I work just as hard as I expect any of them to work as well.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Kim Charlson: Yeah. But it’s been it’s been really satisfying. I never, ever expected you know, I thought, oh, maybe I’ll work here 10 or 15 years and then I’ll move on. Right. But I decided, you know, I’ve had opportunities to move on. And I said, you know, I just feel like I’m in such a good place because I can shape the program. If I want to start a pilot program doing something, I can start a pilot program doing something. I don’t have three layers of administration over my head. I just have the the CEO of Perkins to report to and tell him about, you know, whatever I’m thinking of doing. And as long as I have, the budget could cover the expenses for doing what I’m thinking, I want to do the. The directors of Perkins have always been supportive of the things that I come up with to try.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So that is great. I mean, it sounds like the ideal job, right? Like the perfect job.
Kim Charlson: Well, exactly. Which is exactly why I’ve been here 41 years, because I can, you know, I can make my path. I can I don’t have to get that approval from all kinds of different levels of administration. I can start a pilot program, I can test equipment and do all that. And it just is so much more satisfying than fighting an administrative bureaucracy that I might have had to do if I had gone with other opportunities that had come my way. So I’m really happy and satisfied with what I do and the impact that I know I’ve been able to make. On information access for the borrowers here at the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So you have led the Perkins Braille and Talking Book library for many years. From my perspective, as someone who is also blind, accessible reading can be life changing. I know all about that. How do you describe the true mission of that library beyond simply lending books?
Kim Charlson: It’s a wonderful question. I have the pleasure so many times in a given week of talking to patrons who are calling our library and, you know, want to get some more books. And they will often say, my books are my lifeline. Yes. And I hear that so often, and I understand it completely, that getting their talking books just means so much. People will often say, you know, I don’t sleep well at night. So my, my books are my friends and they keep me company. And I just want to be sure I have lots of books to read all the time. So, you know, having services where we can download books as well as get them through the mail. Not everybody is going to have the technological skills to download their own books. And they rely on us to send them talking books through the mail and we do that, but it’s, it is satisfying to be able to talk to people every day who think the service you provide is so amazing and so wonderful, and they’re just so pleased. And tell us just, you know, your angels, you help us.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s so good.
Kim Charlson: You know, I can’t get much more positive kudos from, you know, it’s just great to hear the appreciation that people have and knowing that I’m it. I value the fact that what I want to do, especially with my outreach programs, the staff I have who do outreach, go out into the community to tell potential people who could be eligible for our services about the program. One of the things I hear from new applicants is I thought my days of reading were over, and I am so happy now to know that I don’t have to give up reading. They often reference that to the newspaper and having to give up the newspaper. And, you know, we have a program through our library and and throughout the whole United States where we have Newsline, which is a service that is has been developed by the National Federation of the blind and under contract. I pay for that service for Massachusetts. And we’ve got over 4000 people that use it every day to listen to our local papers, listen to The New York Times. There’s international papers. The Toronto Paper is available to us. Just so many different resources. And people will just so often say that they thought they wouldn’t ever be able to read again, and that the program means so much to them because they can read a best seller and talk about it with their family, or they can read a nonfiction book, read a cookbook, and all those different things that just make so much difference to us. Those who know firsthand because of blindness or low vision, how important it is to have accessible information available to us.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Do you are these services just available to the state of Massachusetts, the, you know, In across the United States. Is it available to Canadians?
Kim Charlson: It is not available because all of our funding is tied to the fact that the individual needs to be a citizen or they need to be a resident in, in my case, a resident of Massachusetts.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Kim Charlson: So one of the advocacy things I worked on with a lot of other people all over the globe was the Marrakesh Treaty for the blind and visually impaired and disabled. And that is the closest way to get access to a lot of the audio and Braille materials that are available through the Library of Congress program, because they do contribute pretty heavily English language titles, Spanish language titles. Those are the two primary languages we produce in the US. And those go into the global book service that Canada has access to and can get those. So it isn’t it isn’t a direct service, but at least some of the materials that we are producing in the US can be made available through through Sila or other localized libraries throughout Canada that blind and low vision people utilize for their reading materials.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Over the decades, you have seen accessible library services evolve from more traditional formats into a much broader digital landscape. What changes have been the most transformative for blind, low vision and deaf blind readers during your career?
Kim Charlson: So when I started my career back in Oregon, nothing was digital, So I was actually training people to learn how to transcribe Braille with Braille writer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Kim Charlson: And I was teaching individuals to narrate talking books with a tape recorder, sometimes in their kitchen. And we all have had that experience of getting something recorded in college or yes, a newsletter that sounds like, you know, the dogs are barking in the background and the airplanes are flying by and the lawnmower next door. And yes, oh my gosh, it was, it was painful sometimes what the end product might be because people were just recording things in their house. And when I had the opportunity to, to set up and establish my first recording studio that actually had a digital sound booth and, you know, special computerized recording equipment, I was so happy because the quality just took such a leap that it sounded so much better. And, you know, I wanted to have high quality recordings. I didn’t want dogs barking and lawnmowers and things like that anymore. And so that was, that was a huge step. And then when we actually went from analog recordings to digital recordings, that was even better because then besides making it easier to correct the titles and fix them and really have high quality professionally narrated recordings from our studio, we were also able to then easily share those digital files and make them available on a download service, where individuals who are blind could actually download any pretty much anything they wanted from the library when they wanted it, instead of having to wait for the mail to deliver it a week later after you ask for it. So when you know audio was the first to be available for download, which was a huge, huge step. Then digital, you know, digital Braille came along with our program here in the US called Web Braille. That was kind of the precursor to Bookshare, which is, you know, text to speech books or Braille files that you can get from Bookshare.
Kim Charlson: And now there’s a lot of international versions of Bookshare. And, you know, in England, in India, you know, many, many countries have an international access to Bookshare. And the Bookshare collection is huge. It’s like 1.5 million titles available in text to speech or BRF files for reading on a on a Braille display. So the change in Braille technology has also been a really significant factor in just making more Braille available. Not necessarily having to put it on paper and then mail it. And sharing is so much easier for digital Braille. We can do that internationally now through Marrakesh, and people can store hundreds of files on their Braille devices. Yeah. And, and our library now loans eReader, Braille devices to our, our borrowers who are Braille readers and can either download them or we can send them. The format we use in the US is called the digital cartridge. And we can put audiobooks on that for the audio player. We can put Braille books on it that you connect to the Braille e-reader, and they’re automatically copied off the cartridge into the bookshelf of your e-reader device. So it was a real high point in my career when we started to loan Braille devices to people. They are not note takers. They are e-readers. They’re designed to be a book reading device, not to, you know, go on the web and do your email and store all your files and write your documents. That’s a Braille note taker that has to be purchased. Those are different that the e-reader is very much a reading device, like a Kindle for sighted people.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Don’t think I know too much about an e-reader, but I should probably try and check it out.
Kim Charlson: Yeah, I would hope maybe something like that is going to be available in Canada. It is for our patrons now, which is really good in the United States. We’re really, really happy about that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Because I use a Victor stream to read all my books.
Kim Charlson: Oh, I love my Victor stream. I do too. Very happy stream user.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah! Yeah.
Kim Charlson: And I love to download things into it. As often as I can. I wish I had more hours in my day so I could read more books. Yeah. Because you know, I’m a librarian, so books are like my world, but. Right. You know, with all these wonderful podcasts like yours, there’s so many hours in the day to read the books.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know, I know.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know your work has helped make accessible reading available at a real scale. When you think about the thousands of patrons and the enormous circulations connected to Perkins, what stories or moments best remind you why this work matters?
Kim Charlson: And I so often remember and try to keep myself grounded in the fact that it matters. Every book that goes out every day, whether it’s an audiobook or a Braille book, absolutely matters for the person that’s waiting for it, right? So we, we do send out a lot of materials, over 900,000 items shipped out from the Perkins Library last year.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Kim Charlson: The highest ever that we have circulated. And that includes our our equipment as well as the books and magazines themselves. So our circulation is higher certainly with audiobooks. And then Braille is is less, but still pretty significant. We have a couple thousand Braille readers and then our library has been providing Braille services to other states since like the, the late 1880s, because Perkins was one was the first school for the blind in the United States. The library started in about 1870, so I have historical records from librarians of many years ago in handwriting saying, you know, they sent such and such a book to this person and such and such a book to that person. Oh, they’re reading records and little books. Little journals. And I even came across a picture that is now in my library’s conference room of a photograph from around 1880. That is a horse drawn cart that has a stack of Braille. Well, they probably weren’t even Braille books in 1880, maybe just beginning. But the first reading method we had in in Massachusetts was called Boston Line Type, which was a raised print letter book. And those books were about two feet high and about, you know, 14in wide and about six inches thick.
Kim Charlson: They were heavy. They had raised print lettering on one side of the page. They had to be produced on a printing press like Franklin’s printing press. And the you know, I, Helen Keller used Boston line type. I can barely read the lowercase numbers. When I touch those books. I can read the uppercase, but the lowercase is so small, I don’t know how people read it, but people say to me all the time, well, I don’t know how you read Braille. And I said, isn’t that hard? So I suppose if I had only Boston line type to read, I would have learned how to read it. But I find it really challenging. But I have a volume of Boston line type here in my library. We have a lot of them in our archives, so they’re protected and safe in an environmentally sound place. But one came in our mail one day. Someone sent it back and it was in pretty good condition. And it was published in 1871. And it was a copy of hamlet.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My lord.
Kim Charlson: I said, this book is going to be mine, and it is going to stay here in the library, and it’s going to be on a display rack. So when people come, I can show them an actual example that they can touch. And so it’s my, my example of one of the first, you know, early Braille, early tactile reading books that was available anywhere because it was patterned after the books that were being used in France and England at the time, which was line type as well. So that, you know, to take a look at that Boston line type book and then to think about the evolution of where all of our formats have come from, from the record to the cassette to our digital books that we use now No to ebooks and the availability of a Braille e-reader and a Victor stream or the audio players that we have available. The. The transition and the development of what we have available is pretty mind boggling, really, that we’ve got the assets and the resources that we have and the formats available to us now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think just listening to this boggles my mind. I mean, I never really thought much about it until, you know, fairly recently, so. Wow. I’m especially interested in innovation that solves everyday barriers. Could you talk about the Digital access Project and what it meant to create a system where people could get accessible versions of books? More, more, much more quickly than before.
Kim Charlson: So about 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the Internet Archive, which is an organization that kind of preserves digital content to make sure that it doesn’t get wiped away, that it doesn’t disappear, that it’s always there and there’s some protection for that. And one of the things that the Internet Archive can do is legally, they can do this. They did get challenged in the past in the courts for putting digital books on the Internet Archive that were under copyright. But they have the ability to put a digital book of any type on the internet archive if it is protected. A daisy format protected and becomes a daisy book. So the Internet Archive is doing that and people can access through the, the Internet Archive website, they have to register and certify, but I think that it is internationally accessible. If someone gets registered, sort of like you have to do to get library services. And the Boston Public Library is a scanning site for the Internet Archive, and they actually have like a half a dozen people who work in the Boston Public Library scanning books all day. And they have they don’t have scanners like we used to have on our desk, where we would scan our print materials. We have like enormous scanners that you can flatten the book on the camera comes down on the pages and takes an image of the page.
Kim Charlson: Then the person sees on a foot pedal. The camera comes up. They flip the page because flipping the page is the one manual part they still need somebody to do, right? And then the they flip the page, the camera comes back down, takes the picture, lifts up, they flip the page so they can scan a book, you know, like a 400 page book and maybe two hours. And they are very accurate. These scanners are big. They’re high end scanners. They’re very accurate. And I met with the people at the Internet Archive in downtown Boston. And I said, you know, I would like to start a collaboration where we could help people who need to get access to a book that isn’t available in an accessible format Anywhere. There are researchers. I ended up having some very active borrowers using that scanning service that was, were professors and they were teaching in college settings around Massachusetts and other places because it was one of the first scanning projects. So people heard about it. They would reach out to me and say, could I get this book scanned? If I send it to you? And I would say yes, because I don’t say no to questions like that, no matter where they live, you know? Yeah. And so we would scan them and then there, then they could use the files especially well on a Victor stream.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Because.
Kim Charlson: There isn’t sophisticated, a lot of sophisticated markup, but at least there was page markup. So you could skip pages and you could, you know, kind of scan through things and do your best. So that was the best way to access the, the, The text to speech on the Victor stream was how individuals could read those scanned books that previously were not available to them at all. And that really helped a lot of authors, writers, instructors, teachers, professors that I work with to get access to material that they had just never had access to before. Bookshare has stepped in and done a lot of now making more and more books available digitally.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Kim Charlson: I don’t have as much call for the digital archive project in the Boston Public Library as I once did, but it sort of set the stage and was kind of, you know, borne out of the concepts around Bookshare and what we could do if we collaborated together with some of the technologies that were available at the time. So now we’ve got Bookshare. And just many, many different aspects. I mean, there’s even mainstream aspects where we can get our books that we didn’t have access to before. Things like Kindle books. There’s an app there’s that can read those. So there’s just so many more options for people if they have the ability to utilize the technologies that are out there, whether it’s, you know, iOS, iPhones or Android phones, smartphones can do so many things and get us access to so many more things than we had even 15, 20 years ago.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Kim Charlson: And it’s just it is mind boggling and technology. You know, I, I want to just say briefly some of the, there’s a couple other things in sort of this systemic change, digital areas that I’ve worked in and done advocacy in that I think are game changers as well. One of them is access to accessible prescription labels for medication.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes. Yes.
Kim Charlson: And being able to get a mail order pharmacy to produce a Braille or a large print or an audio label that you can scan with an app or read yourself. There’s been a lot of work over the last 10 or 15 years in the US, and I think it’s crept into Canada as well. I hope so that some of the pharmacies have it available where people can get accessible prescription labels through script talk. Cvs pharmacy in the US has an app that has a RFID chip that on a sticker on the bottom of a bottle that can be scanned by the app, and it will tell you all sorts of information about your prescriptions. So I think, you know, access to that kind of information enables people to be more independent, manage their own health care, their medical needs, their prescriptions. Reduces accidental, you know, mixing up your bottles using the rubber band or two rubber band. Right, right kind of thing. And then having to remember, you know, which bottle and you just grab one and you took two of the wrong pill or something.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’ve done that. I have stories.
Kim Charlson: Where, where a young mother had twins and she also was caring for her father. And she inadvertently, her father put his meds right next to the kids med.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Kim Charlson: She accidentally gave her child the father’s meds, so it was a frightening experience. Oh, child was okay. There was some sickness because of the medication wasn’t what a child should be taking. She felt so guilty about what happened to her. And I said, you know, we need to to make sure you get connected with a program that will give you accessibility so you don’t have to worry about this ever happening for you again.
Kim Charlson: So another area where I’ve done accessibility work beyond the library is access to voting. And again, it’s an important issue in Canada as well as the US being able to independently cast your ballot, review your ballot, mark it. And in some cases throughout the US actually submit an electronic ballot to the election authorities. We can do that in Massachusetts. There’s several other states within the US that can do that, but elections are managed at the state level in the US. And so it’s state by state how we have access, but we also have accessible machines in the polling places. So if somebody wants to go in and vote in person, those accessible machines have to be set up on Election day. And if a blind person comes in to use one that it has to be set up. One time I went in in person to vote and they said, well, we didn’t think anyone was coming, so we didn’t set it up.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh no.
Kim Charlson: I said, well, I’m here now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Go write it up. Right?
Kim Charlson: And they said, well, that’ll take a while. I said, I’ll wait. I made them set it up. And then I went over and I voted and I turned my ballot and I said, thank you. Next time, set it up in the morning. Because how do you know somebody who’s blind isn’t going to come in to vote? You need to be ready. So I mean, those are just fundamental things that are so important in our society. And I guess the other thing that I’ve worked on, and this one does kind of circle back to the library because we distribute the device, but accessible paper money candidate.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Is.
Kim Charlson: So far ahead of the US.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right.
Kim Charlson: Money.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Kim Charlson: Currency.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Kim Charlson: Because you have a tactile symbol on your on your.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right, that’s right.
Kim Charlson: It’s fabulous. It’s wonderful. Well, we’ve had to battle for decades in the US to get any kind of accessibility. And finally, we had to go to court in 2008, we won the lawsuit. And then the government’s been saying, we’re studying it. We’re trying to figure out how to do it. You know, they our government wants to have paper money, so they’re worried about printing it and having the stacks of money be level in the vault. And I said, that’s not my problem. You know, it’s like.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: We need we need.
Kim Charlson: Access to know what we have. So this when when I was president of the American Council of the blind between 2013 and 2019, one of the first things I did was have a meeting with our Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which prints our money, and I said, what are you doing to make our currency accessible? And they said, well, we have an app and we’re doing this. I said, no, I’m talking about tactile. Identification of.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Currency. Right.
Kim Charlson: What are you doing? Well, we’re trying to figure it out. And I.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Said.
Kim Charlson: Well, you know, ACB won the lawsuit back in 2008. So, you know, I want to challenge you that you need to find some kind of way to provide meaningful access to a blind person who has money they need to identify. So beyond an app, because maybe everybody doesn’t have a smartphone or have it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right. That’s right.
Kim Charlson: What else can you do? Well, six months later, they demoed a talking currency reader that you could slide the bill into and it would speak the denomination. It would beep the this the sound for the specific denomination or it will vibrate the denomination. So we do have talking currency readers now in the U.S. to help. But sometime in 2026, we have not received a date yet. The $20 bill redesign is supposed to be coming out, and it has a tactile feature on the edge where you can feel kind of little rectangles along the edge. And I don’t even know the how many rectangles equals which thing yet because I haven’t seen a bill yet, but we’re supposed to have our first bill coming out with a tactile feature, and we distribute the talking currency readers through our library program here now to make those more accessible to people who are in the U.S. to use our currency and identify it. It’s been a long battle, but, you know, we’re getting there. I’m going to be very, very old when all the bills in.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My.
Kim Charlson: Wallet are all tactilely accessible, but it’s going to happen.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think you’ve done a lot, and there’s so much more that I could ask you, but my clock is winding down. I want to just sneak this question into you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What do you dream of that could be any different or make a difference, or anything you could think of that would help in any way. I mean, I can’t think of anything else that you could do, but what would you like to see?
Kim Charlson: I know, I mean, you know, we often have the philosophical conversation about about, you know, now is the best time to be a blind person because the technologies are just incredible and they’re becoming better and better every day with things like meta glasses and.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. You know.
Kim Charlson: Glide and, and all these different things to help us navigate. I, I’m, I’m still a little skeptical on glide because I’m a longtime guide dog user and I’m pretty darn happy with my guide dog getting around. But.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Kim Charlson: The glide is a pretty cool mobility device. The. We walk cane, a walking cane with GPS. I, I just, you know, it’s, it’s kind of hard to imagine, but I think, I think the, the latest kind of game changer are the meta glasses and.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What they can.
Kim Charlson: Tell you about your world and what they can read to you. We’ve never had accessibility to signs as we have with meta glasses now because they’re very good about reading a sign and giving you information and they’re getting better and better all the time at what they can tell us. So the things that I think about are the, the ability to travel more independently. I, I dream of the day when an autonomous vehicle will come to my front door.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Every.
Kim Charlson: Morning and take me to work and not have to even barely think twice about it. I mean, Uber was a huge game changer, but I think the autonomous vehicle for our community can be an amazing game changer where people can share a car. You know, we don’t all have to own one to be able to use it. We can share it. It can come and go and go help this person, take this person somewhere, come back and get you. Do this and be able to just do that and go where we want, when we want. Is going to be a major thing. Not having to schedule drivers or rides or convince a family member they need to take us somewhere. Yeah, when we can just do it ourselves. That will be an amazing time. And, and the time is now where we have to advocate for that. Because certainly in the US, there’s a lot of positive advocacy around autonomous vehicles, but there’s also skepticism about it. And there’s places where, you know, you have to have a driver’s license to have a ride in an autonomous vehicle. Well, why would that be a requirement? That’s silly. We’re not driving the car. We’re sitting in the car. It’s going to take us somewhere. So we have to find that. We have to pay attention to the policy development and what’s going on, and laws that are being passed in different states about no autonomous vehicles here. Yes, we want them over here because the people are going to eventually determine that autonomous vehicles have a place and they won’t displace other kinds of of workers. There’s a lot of fear around that. But I just think that that’s one of the things on our horizon that will absolutely change our lives so dramatically to have instant access to transportation.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I really enjoyed your this this interview. And I love your attitude and I like your dreams. And I want to thank you for having been my guest for today. And any time you wish, you want to come back and talk more about your dreams, talk more about things you’re doing, please do not hesitate to come. Let me know.
Kim Charlson: Thank you. Donna, it’s really been a pleasure to be a part of of your work and your Remarkable Conversations podcast. And again, I’m really honored to have been asked, and I’ll be happy to come back in the future. So thank you for the opportunity.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’ll be knocking at your door. Thank you very much, Kim. It has been a pleasure. Bye for now.
Kim Charlson: Thank you. Donna. Take care.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You too. Bye bye.
Kim Charlson: Bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at DonnaJodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
Connect With Me:
🌍 Website: https://donnajodhan.com
📧 Email: donna@donnajodhan.com
✏️ Blog (1): https://donnajodhan.com/blog
✏️ Blog (2): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling1
✏️ Blog (3): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling2
✏️ Blog (4): https://donnajodhan.com/blogspot
🛒 Etsy: https://donnajodhan.com/etsy
🎙️ Podcasts (Web): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts
🎙️ Podcasts (Apple): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-apple
🎙️ Podcasts (Amazon): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-amazon
🎙️ Podcasts (Spotify): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-spotify
🎙️ Podcasts (iHeart): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-iheart-radio
💬 Facebook: https://donnajodhan.com/facebook
💬 LinkedIn: https://donnajodhan.com/linkedin
💬 X1 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x1
💬 X2 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x2
📽️ YouTube: https://donnajodhan.com/youtube
🛜 RSS: https://donnajodhan.com/feed
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
Remarkable World Commentary Episode #85: Interview with Kim Charlson, Global Inclusion And Accessibility Advocate For The Disability Community
🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this wide-ranging episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan sits down with Kim Charlson, Director of the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library, to trace Kim’s 41-year journey at Perkins, from losing her vision at age 11, to becoming one of the first totally blind people in the United States to earn a master’s degree in library science, to leading one of the country’s most innovative accessible library programs for the past 24 years. Kim describes how the library has grown far beyond lending books, now offering downloadable audiobooks, loanable Braille e-readers, an audio-described film collection, a professional recording studio, and an assistive-technology “library of things”, a program that helped drive over 900,000 items shipped in the past year alone. She also reflects on mentoring blind professionals into library leadership, noting that five blind directors now lead libraries across the U.S., a barrier she has helped dismantle by example.
The conversation then widens from libraries into the broader systemic accessibility work Kim has championed, including the Marrakesh Treaty, the Internet Archive digital scanning collaboration with the Boston Public Library, accessible prescription labels, accessible voting machines, and a decades-long push for tactile U.S. currency that has finally produced talking currency readers and a forthcoming $20 bill with a tactile edge feature. Kim closes by looking ahead to the technologies she believes will most reshape blind independence next, from Meta glasses that can read the world aloud, to autonomous vehicles arriving at the front door, framing accessibility not as a finish line, but as an ongoing, everyday practice worth advocating for at every level.
TRANSCRIPT
Advertisement: This podcast brought to you by Pneuma Solutions.
Advertisement: I can’t see it.
Advertisement: ADA Title II has a real compliance deadline. April 2026. Public entities are required to make their digital content accessible, including websites, PDFs, reports, applications, and public records. If a document cannot be read with a screen reader, it is not compliant and if it is not compliant, blind people are still being denied equal access. For a clear explanation of what the rule requires, visit http://www.title2.info. It’s one of the leading resources explaining what agencies must do and when. This message is brought to you by Pneuma Solutions, we have remediated hundreds of thousands of pages in days, not months or years, aligned with WCAG 2 AA guidelines at a fraction of traditional costs. Accessibility isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. Now that you know, ask your agencies a simple question, are your documents actually accessible?
Podcast Commentator: Greetings, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP and MBA invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Remarkable World Commentary. I am Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate, accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its websites accessible to every Canadian, not just to cited ones. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removing barriers. When I’m not in a courtroom or in a committee room or in a pottery studio, you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. It is my pleasure. It is my privilege and my honor to welcome Kim Charlson to our show today. Welcome, Kim.
Kim Charlson: Thank you so much, Donna. I’m really honored to be here and to be one of your special guests. I’ve listened to your podcast quite often and you have some really incredible folks working on all aspects of advocacy, and I’m honored to be considered in that group. So thank you again.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you again. So let’s start at the beginning. What first drew you toward libraries, Braille and accessible information work, and how did your early life experiences shape the path that you eventually built?
Kim Charlson: So that’s a big question and I’ll try to do it quickly. I’ll take your time. So I was born sighted. I lost my vision when I was around 11 years old due to complications of glaucoma. Oh, okay. Most of I had some usable vision for a little bit, but pretty much lost all of it and became totally blind in my 20s, so my parents got my diagnosis early. They were thoughtful. My ophthalmologist was thoughtful and said to them, you need to get her to an educational program where she can learn Braille. She can learn the skills to become a blind person and an adult who will be able to work and do whatever she wants to do in her life. And so my parents went to find a school for the blind that they were comfortable with on the west coast of the United States, where I grew up in Oregon. Right. And I went to the Oregon School for the blind for five years between like fourth grade and ninth grade. And learn Braille, learned cane travel, learned adaptive things. Then in 10th grade, I went to public school at my local community high school and was able to engage and participate and then on to college. So that in when I was growing up, I had the luxury of living in the same town where our Braille and talking book library was located for the state of Oregon, so I would.
Kim Charlson: And it was only a few blocks away from the school for the blind, which was nice. And I would go there a lot and spend a lot of time in the stacks, just browsing Braille books and looking at those Braille books and picking them. And, you know, I had a dream that I was going to read every book in the library, which a lot of kids think they could do. And not, not very easy to do that because one thing libraries do is they keep growing. So there’s more and more and more and more so. Right. But you know, I always loved books. So in high school, college, I also was bitten with the advocacy bug and which I consider a great illness to have. Advocacy is so important in the work we do. And it became one of my passions to, to work on, you know, disability justice, social justice, make sure that things were equitable to our society and make sure that those kinds of things could be available and accessible to us. So I I had plans to become an attorney, but when I got to my senior year in college, I sort of got that itis that many seniors get where they just kind of go, oh my God, I don’t think I can go back to college for three more years to become an attorney.
Kim Charlson: So I said, I’m going to get a job and think about what I want to do when I grow up. I applied for two jobs. One was in a real estate office. The second one was at the Braille and Talking Book library, and I got hired at the Braille and Talking Book Library to train Braille transcribers and and volunteer narrators to record books. And that’s how I started my career in library and information science. And so I really became an advocate there for access to information, how we could make information more accessible for people. And that after working in that role for a few years, I said, you know, I’d really like to become a manager in Braille and talking book library somewhere in the United States. And but I won’t be able to do that unless I get an advanced degree in library science. So one day I came back to my desk and there was this application package for students with disabilities who want to enter into the career of library science. And I thought, well, you can’t get more targeted than me, and that’s what I want to do. So I applied for the fellowship and I won. Well, I didn’t know was to accept the fellowship. I had to go to the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.
Kim Charlson: So I left my job. I took a leave of absence from the library. I went to Texas. I left my husband at home dodging bill collectors and trying to, you know, keep, keep the, the house and home safe. And I went and got my degree in library science, my master’s degree in library science. And I was one of the first totally blind people in the United States to get a degree in library science because prior to the the late 1980s, when I went to grad school, libraries were not very friendly places for blind people. Everything was paper print books, card catalogues. But in the 1980s, we started to automate libraries. We started to get rid of card catalogs and have online catalogs instead, and processes became much more accessible so that I could do cataloging, which isn’t my favorite thing. But librarians need to know how to catalog. So I would, I would much rather be a manager and build programs and services, but there was an article written about me being sort of a pioneer into a field that had not been very blind friendly prior to the advent of automation in libraries and the Perkins School for the blind. Read the article and they had a position for a an assistant director of library services, and they asked me to apply for the job, and I did, and I got the job and I worked and I moved to Massachusetts.
Kim Charlson: Oh my gosh. And my husband came along and and we love Massachusetts. I’m so happy here. I have I am in my 41st year of working for Perkins, so. Oh my Lord, I have been here a long time. I have been the director of our library here for 24 years and have grown the library to be more than just a national library service for the Blind and disabled State Library. We, we love the NLS program and the Library of Congress. And that’s the basis for everything we do. But I also believe that there are other services that people should have available to them. And we’ve grown those other services as well. So as an example, we have a fairly extensive audio described movie collection about 2000 titles on DVD that can be loaned out to our borrowers. We have a recording studio where we record local interest titles that are not provided by the Library of Congress. We have a Braille production department where we do fee for service, work for the community, and also add books to our collection and produce documents for other departments at Perkins that don’t have Braille production capability within their staff. We loan technology. We have a couple new programs now that are library of things. Which library of things are.
Kim Charlson: Items you can loan that would be useful and people don’t know if they want to buy it until they check it out. So public libraries in the US have libraries of things. So they might be musical instruments or a sander. If you wanted to sand your deck or a drill because you have a maintenance project, but you don’t want to go out to Home Depot and buy a sander or a drill for one project. You can borrow it from your local public library here. So we have an assistive technology library of things where we loan out relatively inexpensive devices that people may not have been able to check out or haven’t had a chance to put their hands on it. And one of my favorite popular things in our collection is a talking am FM radio. Borrowers tend to love it and it speaks all the frequencies like, you know, 106.9, 106.8. So if you’re looking for a number on the FM or AM dial, you can find it, you can tune it in yourself. And all the buttons are labeled and all the functions. So you can switch from am FM and we have talking blood pressure cuff, some of the medical type accessible devices people want to try before they think of getting one for their for themselves because things range from under $10 to about $150, might be the most expensive thing in our library of things.
Kim Charlson: And then we have a demo center, which has the more expensive devices that people want to touch and look at. You have to make an appointment and come and see us for the expensive devices. We don’t loan those out because something like a walk cane, that is, you know, the new cane that has GPS inside and a speaker. Yeah, that’s about an $800 cane. We’re not going to loan that out to somebody. No, but they can come. So just, you know, being able to build those kinds of opportunities and give people access to things is really, really important to me. And, and kind of being a visionary and growing our library is something that I find very satisfying. And our patrons are happy. They love the kinds of programs we have available. And that’s really what it was all about. I do you know, I’m a I’m a library director by day and my avocation, as I say, is advocacy and system change, because I really, really like to work toward system change and fixing the bigger problem. I’ll work with one on one to help somebody get through a problem. But it’s fixing the problem for everybody that really jazzes me. I like to make that kind of system change. That is so important in our advocacy work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: This is really impressive. And you know, when I look at your career, one of the most remarkable things is your long service at Perkins. What do you remember most about joining the Perkins Library program in the mid 1980s. And what convinced you that this was where you could make a lasting difference?
Kim Charlson: Well, I knew I wanted to have the opportunity to be in management in a library for the blind in the United States. And at the time I made that career choice, there were no people who were blind that were working in the network, leading the there libraries. There was no managers or directors. There were staff, certainly, who were blind, but there were no managers. So I’m happy to say today there are five blind people who are directors of libraries within the United States. And I’m really, really proud just to to know that, you know, that barrier has come down, that blind people can do this job and have shown they can do this job because of technology and because of, you know, the opportunities that are out there and the possibilities. So I’ve also made it a point in my career to try to mentor and bring other qualified blind individuals and people with disabilities into library work. So I have seven staff. That of my total staff is 29 individuals seven of whom are blind or have low vision, including my deputy director. He is low vision and supervises, you know, a good portion of our team as well. So I have a Braille transcriber, I have an assistive tech manager, I have an outreach person. I have people that work in my duplication and shipping department all throughout the organization. I have qualified individuals who are blind working for me. And I always tell them that I have very high expectations. So they better not disappoint me because if I if I identified you as somebody that I think I would like to work for our library. I don’t want you to disappoint me. So. Right. You know, I work just as hard as I expect any of them to work as well.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Kim Charlson: Yeah. But it’s been it’s been really satisfying. I never, ever expected you know, I thought, oh, maybe I’ll work here 10 or 15 years and then I’ll move on. Right. But I decided, you know, I’ve had opportunities to move on. And I said, you know, I just feel like I’m in such a good place because I can shape the program. If I want to start a pilot program doing something, I can start a pilot program doing something. I don’t have three layers of administration over my head. I just have the the CEO of Perkins to report to and tell him about, you know, whatever I’m thinking of doing. And as long as I have, the budget could cover the expenses for doing what I’m thinking, I want to do the. The directors of Perkins have always been supportive of the things that I come up with to try.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So that is great. I mean, it sounds like the ideal job, right? Like the perfect job.
Kim Charlson: Well, exactly. Which is exactly why I’ve been here 41 years, because I can, you know, I can make my path. I can I don’t have to get that approval from all kinds of different levels of administration. I can start a pilot program, I can test equipment and do all that. And it just is so much more satisfying than fighting an administrative bureaucracy that I might have had to do if I had gone with other opportunities that had come my way. So I’m really happy and satisfied with what I do and the impact that I know I’ve been able to make. On information access for the borrowers here at the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So you have led the Perkins Braille and Talking Book library for many years. From my perspective, as someone who is also blind, accessible reading can be life changing. I know all about that. How do you describe the true mission of that library beyond simply lending books?
Kim Charlson: It’s a wonderful question. I have the pleasure so many times in a given week of talking to patrons who are calling our library and, you know, want to get some more books. And they will often say, my books are my lifeline. Yes. And I hear that so often, and I understand it completely, that getting their talking books just means so much. People will often say, you know, I don’t sleep well at night. So my, my books are my friends and they keep me company. And I just want to be sure I have lots of books to read all the time. So, you know, having services where we can download books as well as get them through the mail. Not everybody is going to have the technological skills to download their own books. And they rely on us to send them talking books through the mail and we do that, but it’s, it is satisfying to be able to talk to people every day who think the service you provide is so amazing and so wonderful, and they’re just so pleased. And tell us just, you know, your angels, you help us.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s so good.
Kim Charlson: You know, I can’t get much more positive kudos from, you know, it’s just great to hear the appreciation that people have and knowing that I’m it. I value the fact that what I want to do, especially with my outreach programs, the staff I have who do outreach, go out into the community to tell potential people who could be eligible for our services about the program. One of the things I hear from new applicants is I thought my days of reading were over, and I am so happy now to know that I don’t have to give up reading. They often reference that to the newspaper and having to give up the newspaper. And, you know, we have a program through our library and and throughout the whole United States where we have Newsline, which is a service that is has been developed by the National Federation of the blind and under contract. I pay for that service for Massachusetts. And we’ve got over 4000 people that use it every day to listen to our local papers, listen to The New York Times. There’s international papers. The Toronto Paper is available to us. Just so many different resources. And people will just so often say that they thought they wouldn’t ever be able to read again, and that the program means so much to them because they can read a best seller and talk about it with their family, or they can read a nonfiction book, read a cookbook, and all those different things that just make so much difference to us. Those who know firsthand because of blindness or low vision, how important it is to have accessible information available to us.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Do you are these services just available to the state of Massachusetts, the, you know, In across the United States. Is it available to Canadians?
Kim Charlson: It is not available because all of our funding is tied to the fact that the individual needs to be a citizen or they need to be a resident in, in my case, a resident of Massachusetts.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Kim Charlson: So one of the advocacy things I worked on with a lot of other people all over the globe was the Marrakesh Treaty for the blind and visually impaired and disabled. And that is the closest way to get access to a lot of the audio and Braille materials that are available through the Library of Congress program, because they do contribute pretty heavily English language titles, Spanish language titles. Those are the two primary languages we produce in the US. And those go into the global book service that Canada has access to and can get those. So it isn’t it isn’t a direct service, but at least some of the materials that we are producing in the US can be made available through through Sila or other localized libraries throughout Canada that blind and low vision people utilize for their reading materials.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Over the decades, you have seen accessible library services evolve from more traditional formats into a much broader digital landscape. What changes have been the most transformative for blind, low vision and deaf blind readers during your career?
Kim Charlson: So when I started my career back in Oregon, nothing was digital, So I was actually training people to learn how to transcribe Braille with Braille writer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Kim Charlson: And I was teaching individuals to narrate talking books with a tape recorder, sometimes in their kitchen. And we all have had that experience of getting something recorded in college or yes, a newsletter that sounds like, you know, the dogs are barking in the background and the airplanes are flying by and the lawnmower next door. And yes, oh my gosh, it was, it was painful sometimes what the end product might be because people were just recording things in their house. And when I had the opportunity to, to set up and establish my first recording studio that actually had a digital sound booth and, you know, special computerized recording equipment, I was so happy because the quality just took such a leap that it sounded so much better. And, you know, I wanted to have high quality recordings. I didn’t want dogs barking and lawnmowers and things like that anymore. And so that was, that was a huge step. And then when we actually went from analog recordings to digital recordings, that was even better because then besides making it easier to correct the titles and fix them and really have high quality professionally narrated recordings from our studio, we were also able to then easily share those digital files and make them available on a download service, where individuals who are blind could actually download any pretty much anything they wanted from the library when they wanted it, instead of having to wait for the mail to deliver it a week later after you ask for it. So when you know audio was the first to be available for download, which was a huge, huge step. Then digital, you know, digital Braille came along with our program here in the US called Web Braille. That was kind of the precursor to Bookshare, which is, you know, text to speech books or Braille files that you can get from Bookshare.
Kim Charlson: And now there’s a lot of international versions of Bookshare. And, you know, in England, in India, you know, many, many countries have an international access to Bookshare. And the Bookshare collection is huge. It’s like 1.5 million titles available in text to speech or BRF files for reading on a on a Braille display. So the change in Braille technology has also been a really significant factor in just making more Braille available. Not necessarily having to put it on paper and then mail it. And sharing is so much easier for digital Braille. We can do that internationally now through Marrakesh, and people can store hundreds of files on their Braille devices. Yeah. And, and our library now loans eReader, Braille devices to our, our borrowers who are Braille readers and can either download them or we can send them. The format we use in the US is called the digital cartridge. And we can put audiobooks on that for the audio player. We can put Braille books on it that you connect to the Braille e-reader, and they’re automatically copied off the cartridge into the bookshelf of your e-reader device. So it was a real high point in my career when we started to loan Braille devices to people. They are not note takers. They are e-readers. They’re designed to be a book reading device, not to, you know, go on the web and do your email and store all your files and write your documents. That’s a Braille note taker that has to be purchased. Those are different that the e-reader is very much a reading device, like a Kindle for sighted people.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Don’t think I know too much about an e-reader, but I should probably try and check it out.
Kim Charlson: Yeah, I would hope maybe something like that is going to be available in Canada. It is for our patrons now, which is really good in the United States. We’re really, really happy about that.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Because I use a Victor stream to read all my books.
Kim Charlson: Oh, I love my Victor stream. I do too. Very happy stream user.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah! Yeah.
Kim Charlson: And I love to download things into it. As often as I can. I wish I had more hours in my day so I could read more books. Yeah. Because you know, I’m a librarian, so books are like my world, but. Right. You know, with all these wonderful podcasts like yours, there’s so many hours in the day to read the books.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know, I know.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know your work has helped make accessible reading available at a real scale. When you think about the thousands of patrons and the enormous circulations connected to Perkins, what stories or moments best remind you why this work matters?
Kim Charlson: And I so often remember and try to keep myself grounded in the fact that it matters. Every book that goes out every day, whether it’s an audiobook or a Braille book, absolutely matters for the person that’s waiting for it, right? So we, we do send out a lot of materials, over 900,000 items shipped out from the Perkins Library last year.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Kim Charlson: The highest ever that we have circulated. And that includes our our equipment as well as the books and magazines themselves. So our circulation is higher certainly with audiobooks. And then Braille is is less, but still pretty significant. We have a couple thousand Braille readers and then our library has been providing Braille services to other states since like the, the late 1880s, because Perkins was one was the first school for the blind in the United States. The library started in about 1870, so I have historical records from librarians of many years ago in handwriting saying, you know, they sent such and such a book to this person and such and such a book to that person. Oh, they’re reading records and little books. Little journals. And I even came across a picture that is now in my library’s conference room of a photograph from around 1880. That is a horse drawn cart that has a stack of Braille. Well, they probably weren’t even Braille books in 1880, maybe just beginning. But the first reading method we had in in Massachusetts was called Boston Line Type, which was a raised print letter book. And those books were about two feet high and about, you know, 14in wide and about six inches thick.
Kim Charlson: They were heavy. They had raised print lettering on one side of the page. They had to be produced on a printing press like Franklin’s printing press. And the you know, I, Helen Keller used Boston line type. I can barely read the lowercase numbers. When I touch those books. I can read the uppercase, but the lowercase is so small, I don’t know how people read it, but people say to me all the time, well, I don’t know how you read Braille. And I said, isn’t that hard? So I suppose if I had only Boston line type to read, I would have learned how to read it. But I find it really challenging. But I have a volume of Boston line type here in my library. We have a lot of them in our archives, so they’re protected and safe in an environmentally sound place. But one came in our mail one day. Someone sent it back and it was in pretty good condition. And it was published in 1871. And it was a copy of hamlet.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My lord.
Kim Charlson: I said, this book is going to be mine, and it is going to stay here in the library, and it’s going to be on a display rack. So when people come, I can show them an actual example that they can touch. And so it’s my, my example of one of the first, you know, early Braille, early tactile reading books that was available anywhere because it was patterned after the books that were being used in France and England at the time, which was line type as well. So that, you know, to take a look at that Boston line type book and then to think about the evolution of where all of our formats have come from, from the record to the cassette to our digital books that we use now No to ebooks and the availability of a Braille e-reader and a Victor stream or the audio players that we have available. The. The transition and the development of what we have available is pretty mind boggling, really, that we’ve got the assets and the resources that we have and the formats available to us now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think just listening to this boggles my mind. I mean, I never really thought much about it until, you know, fairly recently, so. Wow. I’m especially interested in innovation that solves everyday barriers. Could you talk about the Digital access Project and what it meant to create a system where people could get accessible versions of books? More, more, much more quickly than before.
Kim Charlson: So about 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the Internet Archive, which is an organization that kind of preserves digital content to make sure that it doesn’t get wiped away, that it doesn’t disappear, that it’s always there and there’s some protection for that. And one of the things that the Internet Archive can do is legally, they can do this. They did get challenged in the past in the courts for putting digital books on the Internet Archive that were under copyright. But they have the ability to put a digital book of any type on the internet archive if it is protected. A daisy format protected and becomes a daisy book. So the Internet Archive is doing that and people can access through the, the Internet Archive website, they have to register and certify, but I think that it is internationally accessible. If someone gets registered, sort of like you have to do to get library services. And the Boston Public Library is a scanning site for the Internet Archive, and they actually have like a half a dozen people who work in the Boston Public Library scanning books all day. And they have they don’t have scanners like we used to have on our desk, where we would scan our print materials. We have like enormous scanners that you can flatten the book on the camera comes down on the pages and takes an image of the page.
Kim Charlson: Then the person sees on a foot pedal. The camera comes up. They flip the page because flipping the page is the one manual part they still need somebody to do, right? And then the they flip the page, the camera comes back down, takes the picture, lifts up, they flip the page so they can scan a book, you know, like a 400 page book and maybe two hours. And they are very accurate. These scanners are big. They’re high end scanners. They’re very accurate. And I met with the people at the Internet Archive in downtown Boston. And I said, you know, I would like to start a collaboration where we could help people who need to get access to a book that isn’t available in an accessible format Anywhere. There are researchers. I ended up having some very active borrowers using that scanning service that was, were professors and they were teaching in college settings around Massachusetts and other places because it was one of the first scanning projects. So people heard about it. They would reach out to me and say, could I get this book scanned? If I send it to you? And I would say yes, because I don’t say no to questions like that, no matter where they live, you know? Yeah. And so we would scan them and then there, then they could use the files especially well on a Victor stream.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Because.
Kim Charlson: There isn’t sophisticated, a lot of sophisticated markup, but at least there was page markup. So you could skip pages and you could, you know, kind of scan through things and do your best. So that was the best way to access the, the, The text to speech on the Victor stream was how individuals could read those scanned books that previously were not available to them at all. And that really helped a lot of authors, writers, instructors, teachers, professors that I work with to get access to material that they had just never had access to before. Bookshare has stepped in and done a lot of now making more and more books available digitally.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right?
Kim Charlson: I don’t have as much call for the digital archive project in the Boston Public Library as I once did, but it sort of set the stage and was kind of, you know, borne out of the concepts around Bookshare and what we could do if we collaborated together with some of the technologies that were available at the time. So now we’ve got Bookshare. And just many, many different aspects. I mean, there’s even mainstream aspects where we can get our books that we didn’t have access to before. Things like Kindle books. There’s an app there’s that can read those. So there’s just so many more options for people if they have the ability to utilize the technologies that are out there, whether it’s, you know, iOS, iPhones or Android phones, smartphones can do so many things and get us access to so many more things than we had even 15, 20 years ago.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Kim Charlson: And it’s just it is mind boggling and technology. You know, I, I want to just say briefly some of the, there’s a couple other things in sort of this systemic change, digital areas that I’ve worked in and done advocacy in that I think are game changers as well. One of them is access to accessible prescription labels for medication.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes. Yes.
Kim Charlson: And being able to get a mail order pharmacy to produce a Braille or a large print or an audio label that you can scan with an app or read yourself. There’s been a lot of work over the last 10 or 15 years in the US, and I think it’s crept into Canada as well. I hope so that some of the pharmacies have it available where people can get accessible prescription labels through script talk. Cvs pharmacy in the US has an app that has a RFID chip that on a sticker on the bottom of a bottle that can be scanned by the app, and it will tell you all sorts of information about your prescriptions. So I think, you know, access to that kind of information enables people to be more independent, manage their own health care, their medical needs, their prescriptions. Reduces accidental, you know, mixing up your bottles using the rubber band or two rubber band. Right, right kind of thing. And then having to remember, you know, which bottle and you just grab one and you took two of the wrong pill or something.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’ve done that. I have stories.
Kim Charlson: Where, where a young mother had twins and she also was caring for her father. And she inadvertently, her father put his meds right next to the kids med.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Kim Charlson: She accidentally gave her child the father’s meds, so it was a frightening experience. Oh, child was okay. There was some sickness because of the medication wasn’t what a child should be taking. She felt so guilty about what happened to her. And I said, you know, we need to to make sure you get connected with a program that will give you accessibility so you don’t have to worry about this ever happening for you again.
Kim Charlson: So another area where I’ve done accessibility work beyond the library is access to voting. And again, it’s an important issue in Canada as well as the US being able to independently cast your ballot, review your ballot, mark it. And in some cases throughout the US actually submit an electronic ballot to the election authorities. We can do that in Massachusetts. There’s several other states within the US that can do that, but elections are managed at the state level in the US. And so it’s state by state how we have access, but we also have accessible machines in the polling places. So if somebody wants to go in and vote in person, those accessible machines have to be set up on Election day. And if a blind person comes in to use one that it has to be set up. One time I went in in person to vote and they said, well, we didn’t think anyone was coming, so we didn’t set it up.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh no.
Kim Charlson: I said, well, I’m here now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Go write it up. Right?
Kim Charlson: And they said, well, that’ll take a while. I said, I’ll wait. I made them set it up. And then I went over and I voted and I turned my ballot and I said, thank you. Next time, set it up in the morning. Because how do you know somebody who’s blind isn’t going to come in to vote? You need to be ready. So I mean, those are just fundamental things that are so important in our society. And I guess the other thing that I’ve worked on, and this one does kind of circle back to the library because we distribute the device, but accessible paper money candidate.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Is.
Kim Charlson: So far ahead of the US.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right.
Kim Charlson: Money.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Kim Charlson: Currency.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes.
Kim Charlson: Because you have a tactile symbol on your on your.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right, that’s right.
Kim Charlson: It’s fabulous. It’s wonderful. Well, we’ve had to battle for decades in the US to get any kind of accessibility. And finally, we had to go to court in 2008, we won the lawsuit. And then the government’s been saying, we’re studying it. We’re trying to figure out how to do it. You know, they our government wants to have paper money, so they’re worried about printing it and having the stacks of money be level in the vault. And I said, that’s not my problem. You know, it’s like.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: We need we need.
Kim Charlson: Access to know what we have. So this when when I was president of the American Council of the blind between 2013 and 2019, one of the first things I did was have a meeting with our Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which prints our money, and I said, what are you doing to make our currency accessible? And they said, well, we have an app and we’re doing this. I said, no, I’m talking about tactile. Identification of.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Currency. Right.
Kim Charlson: What are you doing? Well, we’re trying to figure it out. And I.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Said.
Kim Charlson: Well, you know, ACB won the lawsuit back in 2008. So, you know, I want to challenge you that you need to find some kind of way to provide meaningful access to a blind person who has money they need to identify. So beyond an app, because maybe everybody doesn’t have a smartphone or have it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That’s right. That’s right.
Kim Charlson: What else can you do? Well, six months later, they demoed a talking currency reader that you could slide the bill into and it would speak the denomination. It would beep the this the sound for the specific denomination or it will vibrate the denomination. So we do have talking currency readers now in the U.S. to help. But sometime in 2026, we have not received a date yet. The $20 bill redesign is supposed to be coming out, and it has a tactile feature on the edge where you can feel kind of little rectangles along the edge. And I don’t even know the how many rectangles equals which thing yet because I haven’t seen a bill yet, but we’re supposed to have our first bill coming out with a tactile feature, and we distribute the talking currency readers through our library program here now to make those more accessible to people who are in the U.S. to use our currency and identify it. It’s been a long battle, but, you know, we’re getting there. I’m going to be very, very old when all the bills in.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My.
Kim Charlson: Wallet are all tactilely accessible, but it’s going to happen.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think you’ve done a lot, and there’s so much more that I could ask you, but my clock is winding down. I want to just sneak this question into you.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What do you dream of that could be any different or make a difference, or anything you could think of that would help in any way. I mean, I can’t think of anything else that you could do, but what would you like to see?
Kim Charlson: I know, I mean, you know, we often have the philosophical conversation about about, you know, now is the best time to be a blind person because the technologies are just incredible and they’re becoming better and better every day with things like meta glasses and.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. You know.
Kim Charlson: Glide and, and all these different things to help us navigate. I, I’m, I’m still a little skeptical on glide because I’m a longtime guide dog user and I’m pretty darn happy with my guide dog getting around. But.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Kim Charlson: The glide is a pretty cool mobility device. The. We walk cane, a walking cane with GPS. I, I just, you know, it’s, it’s kind of hard to imagine, but I think, I think the, the latest kind of game changer are the meta glasses and.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What they can.
Kim Charlson: Tell you about your world and what they can read to you. We’ve never had accessibility to signs as we have with meta glasses now because they’re very good about reading a sign and giving you information and they’re getting better and better all the time at what they can tell us. So the things that I think about are the, the ability to travel more independently. I, I dream of the day when an autonomous vehicle will come to my front door.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Every.
Kim Charlson: Morning and take me to work and not have to even barely think twice about it. I mean, Uber was a huge game changer, but I think the autonomous vehicle for our community can be an amazing game changer where people can share a car. You know, we don’t all have to own one to be able to use it. We can share it. It can come and go and go help this person, take this person somewhere, come back and get you. Do this and be able to just do that and go where we want, when we want. Is going to be a major thing. Not having to schedule drivers or rides or convince a family member they need to take us somewhere. Yeah, when we can just do it ourselves. That will be an amazing time. And, and the time is now where we have to advocate for that. Because certainly in the US, there’s a lot of positive advocacy around autonomous vehicles, but there’s also skepticism about it. And there’s places where, you know, you have to have a driver’s license to have a ride in an autonomous vehicle. Well, why would that be a requirement? That’s silly. We’re not driving the car. We’re sitting in the car. It’s going to take us somewhere. So we have to find that. We have to pay attention to the policy development and what’s going on, and laws that are being passed in different states about no autonomous vehicles here. Yes, we want them over here because the people are going to eventually determine that autonomous vehicles have a place and they won’t displace other kinds of of workers. There’s a lot of fear around that. But I just think that that’s one of the things on our horizon that will absolutely change our lives so dramatically to have instant access to transportation.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I really enjoyed your this this interview. And I love your attitude and I like your dreams. And I want to thank you for having been my guest for today. And any time you wish, you want to come back and talk more about your dreams, talk more about things you’re doing, please do not hesitate to come. Let me know.
Kim Charlson: Thank you. Donna, it’s really been a pleasure to be a part of of your work and your Remarkable Conversations podcast. And again, I’m really honored to have been asked, and I’ll be happy to come back in the future. So thank you for the opportunity.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I’ll be knocking at your door. Thank you very much, Kim. It has been a pleasure. Bye for now.
Kim Charlson: Thank you. Donna. Take care.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You too. Bye bye.
Kim Charlson: Bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at DonnaJodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
Connect With Me:
🌍 Website: https://donnajodhan.com
📧 Email: donna@donnajodhan.com
✏️ Blog (1): https://donnajodhan.com/blog
✏️ Blog (2): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling1
✏️ Blog (3): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling2
✏️ Blog (4): https://donnajodhan.com/blogspot
🛒 Etsy: https://donnajodhan.com/etsy
🎙️ Podcasts (Web): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts
🎙️ Podcasts (Apple): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-apple
🎙️ Podcasts (Amazon): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-amazon
🎙️ Podcasts (Spotify): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-spotify
🎙️ Podcasts (iHeart): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-iheart-radio
💬 Facebook: https://donnajodhan.com/facebook
💬 LinkedIn: https://donnajodhan.com/linkedin
💬 X1 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x1
💬 X2 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x2
📽️ YouTube: https://donnajodhan.com/youtube
🛜 RSS: https://donnajodhan.com/feed
Share this:
Like this:
Related
Published in Remarkable World Commentary