Dr. Kirk Adams Posts

In this reflective episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Laura Bratton, a professional speaker, author, and coach who lost her sight to an unnamed rod and cone dystrophy diagnosed at age nine and was totally blind by the end of high school. Bratton walks through her academic path from an undergraduate degree in psychology at Arizona State to a Master of Divinity at Princeton, where she was the program’s first blind student and had to build her own self-advocacy playbook around accessible textbooks, testing accommodations, and screen reader workflows. Now an ordained United Methodist pastor, she frames her work around change management and the twin resources she calls grit and gratitude, the subject of her book Harnessing Courage: Overcoming Adversity Through Grit and Gratitude.

In this heartfelt episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk welcomes Cheryl Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Access Forge, to discuss Belonging by Design, a new initiative aimed at helping faith-based communities and places of worship become genuinely accessible to people with disabilities. Cheryl traces her journey from volunteering as a reader for the late DC accessibility leader Don Galloway in the mid-1990s, through two decades managing federal disability initiatives in government contracting, to becoming a caregiver for her aging mother, an experience that surfaced everyday accessibility gaps in churches, hotels, and airports. Out of those observations, she and longtime collaborator Mark Bartlett (formerly of AbleGamers) launched Access Forge in 2025 to focus on the cultural, hospitality, and faith sectors she saw lagging furthest behind.

In this warm, wide-ranging episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk reconnects with longtime friend and colleague Anthony “Tony” Candela, a retired vocational rehabilitation professional, author of four books, and prolific essayist, for a far-reaching conversation that travels from the state of the VR system to the shape of a well-lived blind life. They trade notes on what’s changed (and stayed the same) over Tony’s 50-year career in the field, including today’s more holistic, whole-person approach to serving blind consumers, the near-universal acceptance of assistive technology on the job site, and the very real threats now facing the $4-billion federal vocational rehabilitation system as government shutdowns and efforts to dismantle the Department of Education loom. Tony shares his own journey with retinitis pigmentosa, the late-in-life lesson of learning Braille at 34 (and his emphatic advice that kids be taught Braille young), and the first step he recommends for anyone newly navigating blindness: reach out to the consumer organizations, the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, because they will welcome you unconditionally and teach you how to learn.

In this thought-provoking episode of podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Eddie Pate, longtime IDE practitioner, author, speaker, consultant, and fellow ISDI board member, to trace Eddie’s journey from Army brat and All-American Humboldt State football player to senior inclusion, diversity, and equity roles at Microsoft, Avanade, and Amazon, where he ultimately led IDE strategy for a one-million-person worldwide operations organization. Eddie explains why he intentionally leads with the “I” in IDE, framing inclusion as the true engine of sustainable change, and he unpacks his signature “pebbles and ripples” philosophy: small, intentional, daily inclusive behaviors, interrupting the interruption of a woman in a meeting, being deliberate about who sits on an interview loop, expanding “who’s in your kitchen,” and “spending your privilege” to create visibility for others, that compound into lasting cultural and systemic change.