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: Registration details to come. Watch this space.
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.
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 (48K), 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 leave with a reason to start, one platform to start on, and a way to be read once you do.
Registration details are coming shortly, and I will post them here as soon as they are set.
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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