Month: April 2026

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams spotlights two high school seniors, Peter Zhao and Owen Gregson, who are building SightSense, a free iPhone app designed to help blind and low vision users understand space, movement, and surroundings in real time through a blend of audio and haptic feedback. After a chance introduction from Foundation Fighting Blindness leader Jill Naughton, Kirk discovered an app with four modes (Navigation, Locate, Text, and Photo and Video Descriptions) that has already grown through collaboration with the California School for the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind of Texas.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams promotes Transforming Culture Through Disability Employment, a three-day working conference at Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina, June 2–4, 2026. For $250 per person, with lunches and dinners included, attendees will tour Bon Secours St. Francis (a Project SEARCH healthcare inclusion site) and the Walgreens Distribution Center, sit through practitioner panels, and engage nearly two decades of research on inclusive employment. Dr. Adams uses the post to explain why he believes the event is one of the most useful three days any executive, HR leader, or operations leader could spend this year, and points readers directly to registration and the conference hotel block.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams announces his forthcoming MoxieCon 2026 session on Wednesday, April 29, 2026, where he will deliver the first major conference distillation of his Antioch University doctoral research into blind adults successfully employed at large American corporations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with eleven such professionals, his study, Journeys Through Rough Country, identifies nine decisive factors spanning the individual (Braille, cane travel, assistive-technology mastery, a strong internal locus of control, family and school expectations) and the environment (accessibility of workplace tools and systems, accommodations, compensation, and the ongoing calculation of whether, when, and how to disclose a disability). The through-line of his findings: successfully employed blind adults have largely forged their own paths, and corporate inclusion of blind employees remains in its infancy.

Here Dr. Kirk Adams reports from the Port of Seattle’s accessibility and traveler support event at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where he met Tuck, a Dalmatian therapy dog in the SEA Pups program, and saw what he considers the most cohesive accessibility system being built at any U.S. airport. Writing as a long white cane user, a former CEO of two blindness organizations, and a current disability inclusion consultant, he argues that SEA Access has matured from a collection of amenities into an integrated program, anchored by signature innovations like the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard (SEA was the first U.S. airport to adopt it), a globally cited Sensory Room, low-tech communication cards, multilingual Pathfinder volunteers, and a Language Access Order that treats language access and disability access as a single civil rights obligation.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams reflects on the personal and universal power of poetry during National Poetry Month. Writing as a totally blind person who has experienced poetry through braille and sound, he draws on voices ranging from Sonia Sanchez and Audre Lorde to John Lee Clark and Emily Dickinson to argue that poetry is not a luxury but a necessity, one that gives marginalized communities a platform to speak, resist, and belong.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams shares a deeply personal remembrance of Jim Whittaker, the legendary mountaineer and first American to summit Mount Everest, who passed away on April 7, 2026, at the age of 97. In 1981, a young Kirk Adams, blind since childhood, joined Whittaker’s rope team on Project Pelion, a multi-disability expedition up Mount Rainier, becoming the first blind person to reach the summit. Adams recalls Whittaker not as a distant icon, but as a vibrant, generous man whose belief in others made the impossible feel natural.