Category: By Dr Kirk Adams

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams, Executive Director for ISDI, turns a moment of fear into a call to arms. Writing as diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging come under what he names an orchestrated assault, programs dismantled, leaders pushed out, whole communities told their voices count for less than they did yesterday, he flatly refuses the quiet despair so many in the field are feeling. His answer is not retreat but construction: the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity & Inclusion, a national online home built on the Circle platform where practitioners, advocates, allies, and the people hit hardest by the rollback can stop weathering this storm in isolation and start organizing as one. The whole piece hangs on a single defiant question, what if the most important thing we could do right now is simply refuse to stand alone?

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams remembers Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest, who died on April 7, 2026, at the age of 97. Forty-five years after the two men first met, Adams looks past the famous summits of Whittaker’s career, Everest, K2, the 1990 Everest International Peace Climb, and his decades building REI, to the climb he believes revealed Whittaker best: Project Pelion, the 1981 expedition that paired twelve climbers with disabilities with twelve of the country’s finest mountaineers on the slopes of Mount Rainier. As a nineteen-year-old who had been blind since the age of five, Adams trained alongside Whittaker and his wife, Dianne Roberts, near Aspen, climbed the mountain only days after its deadliest accident, and became the first blind person to stand on Rainier’s summit, on Whittaker’s own rope team.

Here, Dr. Kirk Adams, blind since age five and a lifelong sports fan, shares the first time he felt a live game unfold beneath his hands, and why a new milestone from OneCourt is about to change the game for blind and low-vision fans everywhere. He traces his own path, from a childhood spent in gyms to a career advancing disability inclusion, and recounts the moment a tactile broadcast let him feel a pitch cross the plate in real time, at the very instant it happened.

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.