Category: Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams

In this candid episode of Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams welcomes Robert Annis, a London-based coach and organizational psychologist, and founder of NEURO (neurocharity.org), an inclusive charity built to make neuroinclusion a competitive advantage rather than a matter of ethics alone. Annis speaks openly about his own “late diagnosis” at 45 (he’s now 47) as profoundly autistic, with co-occurring ADHD, prosopagnosia (face blindness), aphantasia, alexithymia, an absence of interoception, and severely deficient autobiographical memory, a lifetime of “masking” that finally had names. He explains why he founded NEURO after growing frustrated with charities focused on awareness alone: he wanted real social change, so he deliberately built NEURO to look and operate like a business consultancy, meeting leaders in the language of innovation, adaptability, and talent rather than moral obligation. It’s a thesis Dr. Adams shares in his forthcoming book, The Disability Dividend: Supercharge Your Bottom Line Through Disability Inclusion, that the resilience and cognitive diversity forged by overcoming barriers are exactly what organizations need to thrive.

In this illuminating episode of Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Jack Walters, co-founder and CEO of HapWare, to explore ALEYE, a haptic wristband built to give blind and low-vision people access to the visual, nonverbal layer of communication that makes up the majority of human interaction. Walters explains how the system pairs with Meta smart glasses to capture a live video stream, classifies gestures, facial expressions, and body language through the company’s custom algorithms, and translates them into intuitive vibrations on the wrist, a handshake, a smile, a wave, someone walking away across the room, all in under a quarter of a second. He traces HapWare’s journey from a research project at the Colorado School of Mines, where he met his blind co-founder Bryan Duarte (one of roughly twenty blind people worldwide with a PhD in computer science), through candid lessons about early prototypes that delivered real value but were bulky and uncomfortable, to a ground-up redesign led by industrial designers recruited from Hydro Flask, Tesla, and Rivian, the goal being a wearable people are genuinely proud to wear, not another device that lands on a shelf after a year.

In this forward-looking episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, host Dr. Kirk Adams sits down with James Dykstra, founder of CodeStack Systems, to unpack why so many businesses are watching their AI initiatives stall, and what it actually takes to fix that. Dykstra traces his path from a childhood spent tinkering with DOS to finance and strategy roles at Amazon and Microsoft, then to co-founding a services firm built on the conviction that technology should improve lives. The central insight: companies rush to buy powerful AI tools, but those tools only magnify the gaps in fragmented, poorly tracked data. Using the analogy of a high-performance engine that is useless until it is connected to the rest of the vehicle, and of data as crude oil that must be extracted, refined, and piped before it can power anything, Dykstra explains CodeStack’s “work backwards” methodology: start with a client’s three-year vision, identify the tools and data required to reach it, and consolidate that data into a single platform rather than ripping out and replacing existing systems.

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.

In this deeply reflective episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Claudia Lorant, bestselling author and creator of the Quantum Omni Mindset framework, for a candid conversation about trauma, healing, and transformation. Lorant shares her own history as a survivor of profound abuse and explains how years of therapy, study, and self-experimentation led her to develop a five-pillar framework aimed at helping people move beyond surface-level “positive thinking” and into deeper healing through meditation, subconscious reprogramming, and nervous-system awareness.

In this insightful episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams welcomes Sucheta Narang, founder of Accessible World and creator of Access Trader, an accessible, screen-reader-compatible trading assistant, into a wide-ranging conversation about independence, inclusion, and financial empowerment. Born blind in a traditional North Indian family, Sucheta describes learning early that “waiting for a fix” wasn’t an option, then charts a path through mainstream education, international disability work in India and the UK, and corporate roles where she embedded accessibility at scale, including work with Wipro, Google (Chrome team), and Adobe.

In this candid episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with accessibility entrepreneur Mike Calvo, co-founder of Pneuma Solutions, for a wide-ranging conversation that blends personal journey with big-picture systems change. Calvo shares how he navigated vision loss, a nontraditional education and work path, and early tech experimentation to become a longtime “for us, by us” builder in the blindness tech ecosystem, connecting the dots from early assistive tech days to his groundbreaking work at Serotek (including pioneering web-based access tools) and ultimately to launching Pneuma.