Here, Dr. Kirk Adams explains why he and Aaron Di Blasi are spending an evening in December with the Blind Professionals Network talking about blogs, podcasts and personal brands, and why he believes it is one of the most practical career conversations a blind professional can have.
Event Details At A Glance
- What: A professional development session with the Blind Professionals Network
- When: Wednesday, December 16, 2026, 7:00 to 8:30 PM Central Time
- Who: Dr. Kirk Adams, Executive Director, Institute for Sustainable Diversity & Inclusion and Aaron Di Blasi, Sr. Project Management Professional, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
- Topic: Personal branding, content creation, blogging, podcasting and building a web presence
- Cost: Free
- How to join: Open to anyone, and registration is required. Register for the session. It takes a minute, and you do not have to be a BPN member to attend.
In 1983, I Had No Way to Be Known Before I Was Judged
I graduated from Whitman College in 1983 with a degree in economics, on a full academic scholarship, and then I went looking for work.
The pattern repeated for months. I would send a cover letter and a resume. I would get a phone interview, and the phone interview would go wonderfully. Then I would arrive in person with a long white cane in one hand and a slate and stylus in the other, and I would watch an interviewer who had never worked alongside a blind person try, and fail, to picture how I would do the job.
So I started disclosing my blindness in the cover letter instead, on the theory that it was better to get it out of the way early.
The phone interviews stopped.
That is the part I would ask you to sit with. Not the rejection, which every job seeker knows. The silence. I had no body of work anyone could read, no record of how I thought, nothing at all that could walk into a room ahead of me. The only thing that ever arrived first was a fact about my eyes.
A Personal Brand Is Not Self-Promotion. It Is Evidence.
The thing I did not have in 1983 costs almost nothing to build in 2026.
A blog. A podcast. A monthly newsletter. A LinkedIn presence you actually tend. A website with your own name on it. Every one of those is a way of arriving already known, and I want to be precise about why that matters, because “build your personal brand” usually gets said in a tone that makes serious people wince.
This is not about performance. It is about evidence. A body of published work is something a hiring manager, a client, a conference organizer or a board chair can read before they ever meet you, and it moves the opening question of the relationship. Instead of “can a blind person do this job,” the question becomes “what does this person think about the thing I am trying to solve.”
That is a completely different conversation, and you get to start it.
What It Does for You, and for the People Who Hire You
For you: opportunities begin arriving instead of being chased. You control the narrative rather than spending the first ten minutes of every meeting correcting someone else’s. You accumulate a public record of judgment that no resume format can carry. And you meet the other people doing what you do, which matters more than almost anything else on this list.
For employers and clients: they meet how you think before they meet how you travel. They come to you already convinced of the thing you would otherwise have to prove.
That second benefit is not a nice sentiment. It is the finding from my own research. My doctoral dissertation at Antioch University, Journeys Through Rough Country, interviewed blind adults who were successfully employed in large American corporations and identified nine factors that separated them. Two of the nine were a supportive immediate supervisor and support from senior management.
Here is the practical implication nobody told me at twenty-two: a public body of work is how you find those people before you take the job, rather than discovering after you start whether they exist.
It matters because the numbers are not close. Roughly 44 percent of working-age people who are blind or visually impaired are employed, against about 79 percent of the general population. We are not going to close that gap one cover letter at a time.
“But I Don’t Have Anything to Say”
I hear this more than any other objection, and I have three answers.
You are not the lone expert, you are part of a constellation. Write from where you actually stand. Nobody is asking you to be the final word on anything.
Start with what you already explain. Every blind professional I know explains something constantly, whether it is a screen reader workflow, how to open an accommodation conversation without it becoming a negotiation, or how you got an inaccessible procurement decision reversed. That explaining is already content. You are simply doing it one to one instead of one to many.
Consistency beats brilliance, and I will use my own numbers as proof rather than as a boast. The Innovative Impact Newsletter went from 2,404 subscribers in April 2025 to 6,229 in August 2026, across seventeen monthly issues. That is not a viral hit. There was no clever growth strategy. That is showing up once a month for sixteen months.
Choose Tools You Can Actually Drive
One practical note, because I think it gets skipped.
The publishing platform has to be accessible to you, or you will quietly stop using it. I do not just recommend platforms on this basis, I have built on it. I stood up my own Mastodon server in November 2024 specifically to have an accessible community space, and I publish my podcast across Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio and a host of others so that no listener is forced onto a single app to hear it.
Pick what you can drive with confidence. An inaccessible tool is not a challenge to overcome. It is a reason you will have quit by March.
Five Things to Build, and the Order Is Not Optional
When Aaron and I sat down to plan this session, he said something that reorganized how I think about all of it. Most people treat a personal brand as a menu: pick a blog, or a podcast, or a newsletter, or a social profile, whichever appeals. He argues it is not a menu. It is a sequence, and four things come before any of the interesting choices, because each one depends on the one before it.
First, your domain. This is the one people skip, and the one that costs the most to get wrong. Length matters far more than anyone expects, because you will type your own domain over and over for years, signing in and signing out, and everyone who hears it has to remember it. Try for the .com. If the .com is gone, or forces you into something long, there are dozens of other endings available now, and a short name on a different ending beats a long one on a .com.
Where you search for it matters too, and this is the part almost nobody is told. Look a name up somewhere that cannot sell it to you, then buy it somewhere that will not upsell you. ICANN Lookup is run by the nonprofit that coordinates the domain name system itself. It reads the registry’s own record, and it has no interest in any name you type into it. Then register through a provider where you can tell the controls from the advertisements, which is a genuinely useful test to apply the first time you log in.
And be honest about why the short name is hard to find. A .com that is both unique and genuinely short is very difficult to get today. That is the market rather than a failure on your part, and it is exactly why so many marketers point people toward the other endings: a wider field means a short name is still within reach. Framed that way, a different ending stops feeling like settling for second best.
When the name you want is gone, and it usually is, there are more moves than people think. A hyphen between the words. Your middle initial. Your profession added to your name. A word on the end, something like online, media, works or studio. Or a different ending entirely. Aaron will work two or three of these out loud on the night, because hearing one name solved teaches more than a list of tactics does.
One more thing to do the same day you buy the domain: claim your name on the main social platforms, even if you never intend to post there. It costs nothing and it is the cheapest insurance in this entire framework. And keep the name consistent everywhere, including the domain, wherever you can. One name across everything is what makes a person findable. Four variations make you look like four different people.
Second, your logo. Second rather than first for a practical reason: a logo very often contains the domain, so you have to know what you are calling yourself before anyone can design one. And yes, I am aware how that lands in a room full of blind professionals. You still need a visual mark, because that is how the rest of the world reads a brand, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Third, your tagline. One line, short enough to sit inside the logo, because that is very often where it ends up. What you do, or what you stand for. It does not have to be perfect. It has to exist before the logo can be finished.
Fourth, your website. Your portal to the world, the place you send everyone, and the only one of these four you genuinely own. Aaron’s recommendation is WordPress, hosted directly with WordPress.com on the Business plan at $300 a year, and he gives two reasons. The first is that it is the tier that lets you upload your own plugins and themes, which is what makes real customization and real accessibility work possible. The second matters more: WordPress.com keeps the whole thing updated and secured for you. Cheaper hosts often hand you a copy of WordPress and then leave it to rot, and an out-of-date WordPress site is how people get broken into.
On the theme, I can speak from the inside. The site you are reading this on runs Braillewright, a free, accessibility-first WordPress theme that Aaron builds and maintains. It costs nothing, it always will, and you do not need an account to download it.
And since this room will care more than most: website accessibility is really three separate things, and it helps enormously to know which is which. The theme decides the structure, the heading order, the keyboard navigation, the contrast, how the menu behaves. You fix that once, by choosing correctly. The content is yours forever and no theme can do it for you, which means alt text on images, real headings rather than bold text, and link text that means something on its own. The plugins are the part that quietly undoes the other two, because a form or a slider or a pop-up can drop inaccessible markup into a perfectly good theme.
The theme is a decision, the content is a habit, and the plugins are a risk. I would add one more thing, aimed squarely at this audience: a website of yours that genuinely works for blind readers is a credential almost none of your competitors can claim, and it is visible the moment anybody arrives.
Fifth, your email at that same domain. This one I had not thought of as separate until Aaron insisted on it, and he is right. Once you own the domain you can have your own name at your own domain instead of a free webmail address, and for anyone job-hunting or pitching, that single change does more per dollar than almost anything else on this list. It says the operation is real.
It gets its own place in the order because it is genuinely a different job from getting the website online. A website is hosting and a theme. Email is mail records, a mailbox provider and deliverability, and none of those skills carry over from the other. The two arrive together because they come from the same domain, which is precisely why people assume buying one gives them the other. It does not.
One more free thing worth having while you do any of this: Simple Surf, an in-browser link manager Aaron built. Building a brand generates links constantly, publications you want to pitch, sites you are studying, places your own work has landed. A free board lives in your own browser, holds five hundred links, and needs no account and no sign-in at all. He did not build it to solve a blindness problem, and he would not claim otherwise. He built it accessibly because that is how he builds everything, which is why it is worth your time.
Then, and only then, everything else. With a domain, a logo, a tagline, a website and your own email in place, every one of the things people usually start with finally works: social profiles that point somewhere real and that you can actually measure, a newsletter sent to an audience you own instead of one you rent, press releases with a home to link back to, sponsorships, advertising, a podcast, video.
Which brings up the mistake Aaron sees most often, and it is worth naming plainly. A great many people start with a social media profile and stop there, treating it as the whole brand. It does not look professional, it is not how marketing works, and you cannot meaningfully measure what a rented profile sends you. Build the five, then point the profiles at them.
Then pick a rhythm you can actually keep. Not a cadence in the abstract, an actual date. Once a month on a named day beats saying you will publish regularly, because regularly is what all of us mean right up until we stop. My own numbers are the proof and they are not impressive ones: 2,404 subscribers to 6,229 over seventeen monthly issues, with no strategy behind it beyond showing up.
And I want to be straight with you about money, because pretending it does not matter would be insulting. A bigger budget genuinely does buy more reach, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Doing this on nothing is not impossible, it is slow. That is exactly why a rhythm you can sustain matters more for you than it does for someone with a budget. Consistency is what substitutes for money. It is the only thing that does.
Publishing Is the Easy Part. Being Read Is the Hard Part.
This is where Aaron Di Blasi comes in, and it is the half of the evening I am most looking forward to.
I should tell you how I know any of this works, because I am the case study.
Aaron and I met in May 2024, introduced by a mutual friend, Blake Steinecke. The following month he joined me on Heart of Influence, the show I co-host with Sean Callagy and Bella Verita, and we spent an hour working out how far our two networks overlapped. By that October I had a website with my own name on it, for the first time in a forty-year career.
That sequence is not a coincidence. It is the work. Nearly everything I have recommended in this article is something Aaron built and still runs for me: this website, launched in October 2024; the monthly newsletter that has gone from 2,404 subscribers to 6,229; the podcast, published across all major platforms so no listener is shut out; my own Mastodon server, stood up that November; and the link tracking that lets every organization I link to see the traffic I send them. I write the words. The machinery that carries them is his.
Aaron Di Blasi, PMP is the Senior Project Management Professional and founder of Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., an award-winning digital marketing agency he founded in 2004 and has run ever since. That is the part of his background our community tends not to know, and it is exactly why I wanted him on this call rather than simply mentioning his name.
Marketing is not a sideline he picked up from publishing. It is his business. Mind Vault is a fully remote marketing agency that he runs out of Cleveland, Ohio that serves as the outsourced marketing department for organizations all over the world that do not have one, and Aaron holds current certifications in the exact platforms this session is about. He is a Meta Certified Digital Marketing Associate, a Hootsuite Certified Social Marketing Professional, and a Constant Contact Certified Email Marketing Professional. In 2018, Constant Contact named him a Solution Provider All Star, an award that goes to the top ten percent of its provider base.
What makes him unusual is where all of that points. Very few marketing professionals also carry working knowledge of ADA, WCAG and Section 508 compliance, and fewer still have spent two decades applying it on behalf of blind clients. Aaron is a computer engineer by degree, and he was hand-coding Top Tech Tidbits for accessibility and email compliance in 2007, thirteen years before he owned it, under two previous publishers. He has been getting content into the hands of blind readers for longer than many accessibility consultancies have existed.
Today he publishes four newsletters. Three weekly ones, Top Tech Tidbits (47K), Access Information News (48K) and AI-Weekly (53K), go out to a combined 149K opt-in subscribers each week. The fourth, Title II Today, is monthly and covers ADA Title II compliance on behalf of Pneuma Solutions. He is also the PR Director for AT-Newswire, and the founder of the PWD Media Distribution Co-op, which Donna J. Jodhan and I joined as its second and third founders.
The Co-op works on a simple premise. Members contribute their own social media channels to a shared network, and any member can then send a single post across the whole thing. As of today that network is 56 connected channels and 28 member organizations, reaching 200,512 blind, low vision and disabled readers with every scheduled post.
Translation: You write something once, and it lands in front of two hundred thousand people who actually want to read it.
And here is the part that should interest everyone in this session. The Blind Professionals Network is already a member. BPN joined the PWD through its support of Access Information News via sponsorship, which means this is not a service anyone is going to pitch you on December 16. It is something your organization already has, and we want to make sure you know how to use it.
Why This Group, and Why Now
The Blind Professionals Network was founded in 2019 by Victoria Hillard, who lost her vision at thirty and could not find anywhere built for the career problems that followed. It began as a peer support group. It is now run entirely by blind and visually impaired staff, and everything it offers its members is free.
When I first spoke with BPN about the Apex Program several years ago, they had 150 members. Jean Parker tells me they are now at roughly 800.
Eight hundred professionals with something to say is eight hundred voices this field is not yet hearing. That is the opportunity, and it is the whole reason for the session.
Join Us on December 16
Aaron and I will be with the Blind Professionals Network on Wednesday, December 16, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM Central Time. We will talk about where to start, what to build first, how to keep going when nobody is reading yet, and how to get your work in front of the people who should see it.
You will not simply leave with notes. We will build a Personal Brand Kit live in the session, your own domain, your own logo brief, your own tagline and your own website plan, and we will work several of them out loud with the room. You will leave with the first draft of your own, and a clear next step.
The session is open to anyone who wants to come, and you do not have to be a member of the Blind Professionals Network to attend. Registration is required and takes about a minute: register here. One thing worth knowing: BPN records these sessions but does not publish the recordings, so the evening itself is the only chance to be in the room and ask your own question.
Forty years ago I had no way to be known before I was judged. Forty years later, you do. Come and build it.
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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