Remarkable World Commentary Episode #118: Interview with Michael Feir, Author, Personal Power

🌐 Also available in: Français

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

Donna and Michael then turn to Personal Power, his free guide for blind iPhone users, which he wrote after meeting too many people who did not know that VoiceOver, not Siri, is what makes an iPhone accessible. He talks about AI that can confirm his hearing aids are charging but can also hallucinate, urging listeners to double-check anything that matters, and he points to the VoiceOver tutorial now built into the iPhone’s settings. He recalls meeting Kelly at a W. Ross Macdonald School reunion, which led to eight years of weekly segments on Kelly and Company, explains that the book stays free because of the rules of ODSP and in honor of his late friend John Morgan, and says the fourth edition will cover Apple Intelligence, safety, writing on an iPhone and new games.

TRANSCRIPT

Podcast Commentator: [upbeat digital music] Greetings. Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, and MBA invites you to listen to her bi-weekly 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 the Remarkable World Commentary. I’m 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, an accessibility consultant, author, lifelong barrier buster, who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its websites accessible to every Canadian, not just to sighted 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 the 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.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Everything I do circles one goal, and that is 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. Before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a quick spotlight on today’s guest, a change-maker whose work is as every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I am pleased and privileged to welcome Mike Feir. I hope I am pronouncing your name correctly.

Michael Feir: It’s actually Feir.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Feir.

Michael Feir: [laughs] Yeah.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. I’m pleased to welcome you to the Remarkable World Commentary podcast. Welcome, Mike.

Michael Feir: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you. All right, so let’s jump right in. And in 1996, you founded Audyssey, a free email magazine that was devoted to games that blind people could play, and you edited its first 40 issues through 2004. What sparked the idea, and what did it take to build and sustain a volunteer publication with readers in at least 14 countries? Tell us.

Michael Feir: Well, it all started because in 1996, a couple of things happened to coincide. One of them was I had come across a magazine called XYZZYnews. And that’s X-Y-Z-Z-Y N-E-W-S. And it was all about interactive fiction, text adventures, which I had been playing since I was a kid. And I was just blown away by this magazine that started, that really took the art form seriously and was looking back at older games that I was familiar with, and then telling me about new ones that I hadn’t even known were around. So it was a huge kind of moment, finding that magazine earlier in the year, earlier ’96.

Michael Feir: And then in July, when I went home from university, there was nothing to do in terms of finding a summer job. A lot of other students, a lot of my friends were working, and there was just nothing. And I thought, “Okay, I could sit here and grouch about that, or I could start something.” So I decided to call it Audyssey, A-U-D-Y-S-S-E-Y, as kind of a nod to games being journeys of the mind, and also audio. And thankfully, my deafblind readers forgave me for that [laughs] unintentional slight against them. ‘Cause of course their games don’t have to be necessarily auditory to be playable by blind people.

Michael Feir: So that was how it all started. That summer, I did the first issue and published it on CompuServe. And from that closed environment, I just also decided to send it out on something called Sky Club, which is a CNIB list, and that was the first time I kind of started a bit of a flame war because some people really objected to this massive magazine kind of suddenly appearing. And I guess it did cost information for some people. It was very tight, the information they got. So there was a back and forth flame war about this. But luckily enough people liked it and it spread. People stepped up and said, “Hey, I could make an email list that people could sign up if they wanna get it.” And one of the big things was learning, like, if you don’t know what you’re doing, accept the help, right? And ask.

Michael Feir: And so I did. Travis Siegel and a bunch of other people were responsible for starting mailing lists, distributing the magazine on that list, telling me how to do that. And then it just kept growing. More and more people joined the list, and it became, I wanna discuss things between issues, so okay, we’ll open it up to that. And then it became, well, this is getting a bit fractious. Maybe moderation should happen. I found myself now trying to come up with a charter or constitution for the community of this free magazine. And I had staff join me. I had a volunteer staff. One time it was about four people.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Whoa.

Michael Feir: And they all just decided to regularly contribute articles, which was the biggest thing. Getting people to contribute to something if they’re not getting paid is tougher. So I just kept it going, and it kept kind of growing. The community kept getting bigger. I kept getting these emails from all over. I got an email from a librarian in Russia that was using it to teach language, to teach English to Russians. And a US senator, Bob Mahoney, apparently one of the blind, I’m not sure if he was the only blind senator, but it’s not a high number, and he contacted me about the magazine and was happy to see it. So there were all kinds of situations like that, that suddenly I found that people were reaching back and really cared about what I did. And that kind of kept me caring about [laughs] what I did, so that’s why it lasted eight years. [laughs]

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But 14 countries, my God. Whoa.

Michael Feir: Yeah. I didn’t expect that, ’cause I had no idea. Like, there was no way to keep… I wasn’t asking any money for it. There was the list of email addresses, but I mean, that was huge. No one looked at that really, I didn’t think. But obviously someone did, and they said, “Hey, you know, we’re in at least 14 countries given the addresses here.” I’m like, wow. [laughs] I just never thought it would go that far. And so it was just very rewarding. I learned so much about leadership, about responsibility for one’s words. All kinds of things like that. So it taught me a lot.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I like your quotation, if you don’t know something, ask.

Michael Feir: Yes.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Don’t assume that I know it. I don’t know it, so I’ve got to ask. [laughs]

Michael Feir: Yep, absolutely. Don’t be afraid to ask, and don’t be afraid to accept help. If you’re doing something for free, don’t burn yourself out trying to be the master of absolutely everything. If someone’s willing to step up and help, let them, right? [laughs] I mean, that’s the other side of it too, is don’t let it burn you out. I got burnt out at the end of Audyssey, so that taught me a bit of a stiff lesson in the end about that as well. [laughs]

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I agree with you. I mean, accept help freely, but the other thing, you cannot be master of everything. And I just finished learning that through another project that I had started, the John Panarese Memorial Project.

Michael Feir: Ah, yes.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Found myself… Oh, God. I may talk to you about this afterwards, but anyways, let’s go on.

Michael Feir: All right.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s all about you now. So you believe that people learn the best when they are having so much fun that they do not even notice that the learning is happening. Can you explain that philosophy, and what would you say to parents, teachers, and young blind people about the role that play and fun can have in building independence?

Michael Feir: Well, when I got my first computer and first Braille display, VersaBraille, it ran on tapes. It was sold as a way for me to get my work done. And that’s typically, unfortunately, how blind people are introduced to technology. This will help you do work that you probably are not going to enjoy, but you can do it. So learn this. And it’s like, okay, like, this is… Let’s compare this to sighted children. When they get computers, most often they’re introduced to the new tech through games. The possibilities of computers, the possibilities of programming, it’s wrapped in fun for them. Like, it’s not all fun. They still have to learn the skills of typing and— But when I first got my computer, one of the teachers thought to give me a disc of games. It had about four or five games on it.

Michael Feir: And I took that disc home. One of my favorite games was called The Great Escape. You’re in a maze of 100 rooms, and you have to find your way out, and the exit is to the north. The villain or villain is, like, who it was, which is after you. And I spent as little time as possible doing homework, but I spent tons of time trying to beat this game and other games, and that taught me something about typing, ’cause you had to type in the… In that game it was just four letters, but other games you typed in words. Take rope. Tie rope. Things like that. And you started to build typing skills playing these things. So you come back to school on Monday and that fun you had over the weekend is now letting you goof off in typing class because you know what you’re doing, and you have more time than anyone else to do that.

Michael Feir: So it pays. It teaches you… I learned all kinds of things from games. Everything from using the review of my access technology. If I’m using something and I’m interrupted when I’m listening, I have to be able to go back and hear what was said, otherwise I miss out on that information. So games gave me a reason to learn how to do that, right? So there’s all sorts of things like that, that it’s much more palatable. I will go a whole weekend trying to figure out who murdered Dan Aykroyd, but don’t ask me to do any more homework than the next kid, right?

Michael Feir: So if you have new technology, the best thing you can do is find something you want to do with it, something that is actually interesting and hopefully fun for you, rewarding for you. Not some spreadsheet that you don’t ever wanna do, but you might have to. Something that you actually want to do with this stuff. And that will turn it from a chore into a means to a delightful end, and that is crucial to really putting in the time it takes to really learn this technology well.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So what you’re telling me, Mike, is learning is fun, but if it is work it is not good? [laughs] Is that what you’re telling me?

Michael Feir: I’m saying don’t discount the good sides, the good aspects of play. People dismiss play all too easily as total wasted time, and it’s not. It’s engagement. It’s mental stimulation. It’s thought-provoking. People will go so much farther if they’re having fun and if it’s something they want to do than if it’s something they feel they’re forced to do or something they’re told they have to do, you know? So that is the difference. That is where play really can make a difference.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow. I never thought of it that way, but it does make sense.

Michael Feir: Yeah. It really does. I’ve seen it both ways. I’ve had those times when I’ve had to learn how to do something like math, like finite math. That was just disastrous for me. Right? With my spatial challenges it was just a dismal, dismal time that ate up weekends and hours and hours where everyone else was having fun. And I grew to resent math. I grew to resent the amount of work I had to do to solve stuff that other people could solve much more quickly with sight. And that just, I’ve never felt great about math ever since. It left a bad taste, you know?

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: [laughs] Oh. After a decade of using an iPhone, you spent three and a half years writing Personal Power, the iOS edition, a guide of more than 250,000 words that was released in 2020. You have described this book as closer to a traveler’s guidebook than a manual. Why did you choose that approach, and who did you have in mind as your reader?

Michael Feir: The person I really wanted to help. Like, there are already manuals out there. If a nerd wants to know how to use an iPhone, there are manuals that are already out there. There are videos. I felt there was plenty of help that was there for people who knew what they were doing. It took a while before it really occurred to me that it was the exact same position as when I did the guide for Windows. History was repeating itself. I kept running into people that didn’t know that Siri was not what made an iPhone accessible. They had to learn VoiceOver. Because the people would be given iPhones by well-meaning sighted people who didn’t know what they were really doing, and they were told, “Oh, you can talk to it and it’ll do things.” And that’s technically true, but you can’t read back. It won’t read back a— It’ll say, “I found something on the web. Check it out.” And then you can’t check it out unless you can use VoiceOver to read what’s up on the screen.

Michael Feir: And other things. VoiceOver is what makes the iPhone accessible. If you don’t know it, as good as AI has recently just gotten, you’re still limited in a fundamental way from what you’ll be able to really do with confidence on that iPhone.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You’re right. You’re right. I mean, you can’t go far with Siri. Siri only tells you what’s there, but for you to read it, you gotta know VoiceOver.

Michael Feir: Yeah. And that’s… A lot of people miss that. So I kept running into people who were in that situation, had these great devices, thousand dollar devices, and they were using them for accepting or receiving phone calls, maybe doing some texting, anything that they could manage to get Siri to sort of do well. And I thought, this is wrong. I’m using my iPhone as a replacement computer. In fact, I’d gotten into an argument with a friend, a very interesting fellow, Steve Rogaski, and I were talking about this. And I was telling him, “You know, this really has replaced my laptop in so many ways. I can take this and a Bluetooth keyboard and do pretty much everything that I would want to do on a laptop on my phone.” And that was kind of the genesis, those two things.

Michael Feir: And then keeping hearing from volunteers, like, there was a volunteer that contacted me about someone up north. Joanne was her name, and she couldn’t use her iPhone very well. She didn’t realize that there were programs like Kurzweil, the Kurzweil Reader. You could aim it at a pamphlet on the table and take a picture, and in seconds it would start to read your community bulletin for you out loud, and she had no idea that that existed. So that was kind of the final straw, when I realized how much people didn’t know. I had to do something, and I started writing it with that in mind.

Michael Feir: And then of course, as I was closing in on finishing at my own pace, the pandemic hit. And it was, oh my goodness. Okay, a lot of people are suddenly going to be pushed into doing everything online. Maybe I should hurry up and finish this. And so I did that. I finished it very quickly. And around that time as well was when Kelly and Company was getting going, early as I was making the guide. So that also, I was involved in that. And so a lot of things, when the pandemic was just starting, I published the book and it spread really quickly. One of the first emails I got was from an old lady in England.

Michael Feir: And she basically was in a nursing home. And I guess people were really busy. There was kind of a atmosphere of panic about this pandemic. No one wanted to go and help her find this ring. And she was able to, from reading my guide, she was able to get the Be My Eyes app and was able to use that to then get someone sighted at a safe distance to look through her phone’s camera and help find that ring. So you get an email like that and you know you’ve done something worth doing. That just makes your day. It’s basically why I keep doing what I doing, for interactions like that. Knowing that I put something in the world that made that much difference for people is hugely helpful, given what we’re all going through.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, I have to tell you, like I said, and I’d like to talk to you about this offline. I started a project in memory of the late John Panarese. I promised him, I promised him. He died of cancer almost two years ago. I promised him that I would really try to follow in his footsteps to bring those who have lost their sight and those losing it closer to the iPhone so that they would use it in different ways. But just listening to you, I think I’ve been up the wrong track here, and I’d like to talk to you about this after if you’re interested.

Michael Feir: Certainly. Certainly. Yeah.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: So let’s go on. The second and third editions of your book are also available as audiobooks narrated with AI voices from ElevenLabs, thanks to the help of Harrison Tu. And the latest narration took only about two hours to produce.

Michael Feir: Yes.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: As artificial intelligence moves into our phones and into our daily lives, where do you see it helping blind iPhone users and most, and what concerns should we keep in mind?

Michael Feir: Well, AI, the thing that I’m realizing is AI is… It’s a huge change to suddenly have… What Apple has done is offered, its version is basically set up to be private, to not harvest your data for Apple’s benefit, but to be a tool that you’ve paid for by getting an iPhone that is focused on helping you do your things. So basically, I trust that somewhat more than I trust a lot of the other AIs, just on that basic principle going in.

Michael Feir: But you still, with these AIs, people should keep in mind that it can be really helpful for basic things. Like I use it every night to make sure that my hearing aids are charging in their charger. My charger has two little lights, green lights. And you can’t feel the heat off them or anything like that. They’re tiny little things. So the only way to tell, I could call a sighted person with FaceTime or Be My Eyes, and I used to do that. And they would watch me fiddle with those things until finally we got both lights on. And then God help anyone who bunched my desk and caused even the slightest shift. That would throw them off. So now I can use my phone and the AI just built right into the phone, and VoiceOver scene description, to quickly check and make sure that, yes, there are two green lights on, and I don’t need to involve anyone else, and everything’s happening on my device.

Michael Feir: So that’s huge. Things like that, getting descriptions, getting— New notification available… reading texts. You can get it to read text if you want, documents. Those are hugely helpful. So that’s the kind of thing that AI can really help with. [beep] Record left, right. But when it comes to other things, you have to be more careful, and you always have to check that the AI has done… If you ask it to do something, make sure, double-check that it has done what you think it has done. It can hallucinate and give you wrong information very confidently. So I said, “Yo, send this message to Sarah.” And it said, “All right, I’ve sent it,” and it never sent the message. And it went back and forth. Finally, it did. This happens more with email. I’ve had it happen a couple of times trying to send emails, and you always have to go into your email program and just double… Has that message been sent?

Michael Feir: Right? Always check, because it’s one thing if it hallucinates that there are 16 buttons instead of 18 on a Bluetooth speaker you’re trying to figure out. That’s pretty low stakes. But if it gets something wrong about the medication that you’re grabbing off a counter full of bottles, the more important, the higher the stakes, the more you should check, either with more than one AI or, if things are really life and death, get sighted help, right? I mean, that’s kind of what… It’s not a perfect thing. It’s kinda like GPS, can get you to the last mile, but then how do you navigate inside the mall, right? That’s the kind of thing. So these things are not perfect. It’s very helpful, extremely helpful in a lot of ways, but just keep in mind, it doesn’t understand really what it’s doing. It understands patterns, right?

Michael Feir: So it knows that glass and break are associated often, so glass can break theoretically, sure. But it doesn’t understand what shards are really. It would have to look for other descriptions and sort of build its reasoning from patterns of words and build it up that way. So it’s not really an understanding of things like you and I would understand it. And that’s something people need to keep in mind. And then, of course, there’s privacy, right? We get a lot of benefits from these tools, but they can also be used to do, unfortunately, some harm, and we have to bear… We’re as responsible as everyone else to try and prevent that from happening, right? So that’s another thing that we have to kinda keep in mind, I think.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, just listening to the enthusiasm and excitement in your voice and just learning the fact that it’s not all about asking Siri, who will tell you where to go and what to do, but you can’t read it back, so you have to learn VoiceOver. I never really thought of it in that way, and wow. [laughs]

Michael Feir: Yeah. And of course, now there’s a tutorial built right in. You can go into settings, VoiceOver. Settings, accessibility, VoiceOver, and then in there you’ll find tutorial, and you should go through that tutorial and learn the basics at least of what VoiceOver, what gestures do what and why. It’s good at explaining why you might wanna use all the different gestures. At least gives you a basic reason why.

Michael Feir: So I think Apple did. It took them 10 years too long. This should’ve been there right from day one. I don’t know how they missed that, but thankfully now it’s here, and anyone that can run iOS 27, which goes right back to the iPhone 11, will be able to now use that tutorial. So if there’s nothing else you take away from this, know that that tutorial is there, and go there and make use of it. [laughs] There’s so much you can do with the iPhone if you just, once you’ve learned the basics of VoiceOver, your life will be much easier.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: For the entire run of Kelly and Company on AMI-audio from 2016 until 2025, you produced a weekly segment about audio entertainment and accessibility technology. Accessibility technology, sorry. How did that opportunity come about, and what did you enjoy most about sharing your discoveries with listeners every week?

Michael Feir: Well, it came about ’cause I had started my guide, and also hooked up with my wife Sara, and she is part of a group that does a reunion at W. Ross Macdonald School for former students of that school in Brantford, Ontario. And I was invited along to attend that reunion. I had actually attended W. Ross for a very brief two to maybe two and a half years of the start of my schooling. So I could have gone anyway, but I had no idea it happened. It was even a thing until I’d met Sara. So she thought I should go, and so we did. And during that weekend, I met Kelly, and we had conversations. And he really was looking for contributors to his show. He needed regular contributors to fill out the hour that his show was gonna be every day. So that’s a lot of people. So I was happy to do that. And I thought it would help me basically build the next edition, right? If I worked on sections, and then I talked about what I worked on with every other segment, I kinda did.

Michael Feir: So I tried to split it up so that I had every week there’d be either a technology segment or an entertainment section. And that would give me long enough to sort of make sure that in both of those buckets there’d be something there. So I was always looking and getting audio dramas and different things to cover. So it did have a cost, but I was getting stuff I would’ve wanted to get anyway. And [laughs] so it was the first thing I was kinda paid for regularly, which just felt great. Just doing something and getting—

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Paid.

Michael Feir: That paid for it was, yeah. But I would’ve done it for free. [laughs] They could have had me… Maybe not at the pace they wanted, but I would’ve done at least some for free. But yeah, so I kept going for as long as that would go. And that turned out to be about eight years. So it was quite a long run, and I learned a lot, and I think I did a lot of good helping people learn their technology and know what entertainment is out there. ‘Cause if suddenly you’ve lost your vision, you don’t know about necessarily all the audio dramas and books and things. Podcasts, internet radio communities that are out there.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right. Wow. Gosh. [laughs] Now, every edition of Personal Power has been given away free, and you have never charged for it. In 2024, when your friend Jonathan Mosen organized a fundraiser so that you could get a new iPhone and write about its newest features firsthand, it was fully funded in about five hours. Why is it so important that the book remains free? And what did that outpouring of support from the community mean to you?

Michael Feir: Basically, being on ODSP, Ontario Disability Social Support, there are a lot of rules around that, and in subsidized housing, you have to be very careful what you accept money for. And so if I were going to get an iPhone, I could never have justified buying an iPhone Pro myself. It would have to be a basic one. So basically, if I were gonna, I had a plan to do this without that generosity. I’m very glad I didn’t have to implement that plan. I just never thought that people would care enough to really contribute like that much money. I thought maybe in a month there might be barely enough or something. But no. It was like I went to sleep, I woke up. I should have gotten coffee first, didn’t, and started looking through my social media, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we got enough. We’re closing down the funding.” I’m like, “What?”

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: What? Yeah.

Michael Feir: How is this possible in a world this full of unemployed blind people who can’t find work? How has this just happened? And I’m so thankful for those people. It is so vindicating. I never expected any recompense for my work. It’s in honor of a very good man, John Morgan, who stepped in and helped us. He’s a philanthropist, he was. He’s unfortunately passed on before I could send him my first book. I was gonna show him, get him to see that I dedicated it to him, because he stepped in. Just a really nice guy that was retired and thought he’d help blind people all over the GTA. And Sara and I were beneficiaries of that generosity. And you don’t meet people like him every day. He’s one in a million.

Michael Feir: And he always said, “You know, you gotta help. If you’re in a position of fortune and strength, you have to help those less fortunate. It’s just your duty as part of life.” And his actions, like helping us and helping other people, when he brought me in to advise him sometimes and help, if he thought I could maybe give an opinion that would help or maybe steer him in the right direction to help another blind fellow or something, I would always, always do that if I could. And that generosity, that sense of it adds to life to find ways to give back, is so true.

Michael Feir: And it was all because of, when I was a young 20-something year old, he came over to ask if I would be willing to go with him to help another blind person learn how to use a computer. I happened to say yes instead of no. And that relationship led all the way from that beginning to where we are now, with me keeping this— It needs to be free. He never asked anything in return, but just acknowledgement of what he did. And I don’t ever want a barrier between what I’m enjoying myself so much and having other people be able to enjoy the same thing. If they’ve invested in an iPhone, the lack of information should not be what stops them ever from enjoying it, from making maximum use of it. It’s a big investment. It shouldn’t just be relegated to basic stuff. There’s so much it can do, and so much I’ve gained from it.

Michael Feir: Shopping independence, freedom of who I communicate with, games, entertainment, books, especially books. I’ve got so many books on my iPhone, and they all just fit in my hand, and it’s just glorious. And I want everyone to be able to do that if they want to. I don’t demand that they do everything I do. I expect people to jump around in my book. I didn’t design it to be read start to finish, although people keep doing that. [laughs] So I hope people find what they need from it, and I try to include as wide a range of stuff in it as I can so that there’s something that will hopefully hook into your interests. Whether that be music, games, podcasts, internet radio, community, online communities, whatever it is, and you can find something to get started with and enjoying.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, I wish, I really wish there were more people who had similar sentiments to yours, and these are sentiments that I also share. I came into this world with nothing. I’m going to leave this world with nothing. But I want to give back something before I leave. And as the clock winds down, I have this question for you. You are now writing the fourth edition of Personal Power, which you expect to exceed 400,000 words and to be ready for Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May 2027. What will this new edition add, and what else lies ahead for you?

Michael Feir: Well, the new edition is, one of the big reasons I wrote it was to sort of help people with this transition to where finally now, two years later than we expected, we’re getting our hands on Siri AI. And Apple Intelligence is being integrated into everything. There’s the new things in VoiceOver recognition that can describe scenes and describe what’s on the screen. Images on the screen. You can get all kinds of information, ask questions about, have it all done on device. There’s so much power there. So it’s gonna contain that. I’m still learning [laughs] my way around there, what all the new things are.

Michael Feir: It also contains a lot of sections to help people. It sort of coalesces information that might be a bit more scattered elsewhere. For example, how to write on an iPhone. I have a whole section just dedicated to how to deal with text, copy, cut, paste, select. All of that kind of stuff. Spell check. You have things on security. I have one section, for example, on a primer for people who might be in danger. So if you need to access 911 with your iPhone, if you need… If you’re being stalked and you have to basically, if you’re sharing information with someone and the relationship goes south, and you feel in danger, Apple has built in tools to help you extract yourself from that situation safely and cut off information from people you don’t wanna have it anymore. So I talk you through that. What to do if your iPhone is stolen, right? All that kind of stuff.

Michael Feir: So there are things like that in the book, sections that sort of coalesce information to hopefully help beginners learn what they need to know most urgently, and then go into the bigger sections for more depth if they want. So there’s a number of those through the book. There’s more in Apple. Health, the games, updating to the section on games. A lot’s happened in that space that I didn’t expect. And it’s happening right now. So I [laughs] didn’t think I’d have much to add until, like, maybe in July, I started to realize, oh, things are happening here. It’s vibe coding. People are starting to make their own apps. Same with reading apps. So all of that is kind of the changing landscape. I’m always trying to make sure people are aware of what’s changing in the environment that they’re in, and what new forces are at play behind the scenes that are going to help them have more options at their disposal than they used to.

Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Thank you for this interview. [upbeat music]

Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time. [upbeat music]

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.