RECORDING TRANSCRIPT
MoxieCon Host: Our next and final content presenter of the day, not least just last. Is Doctor Kirk Adams. And you know, when you heard from hobby earlier today he was talking about being blind from birth and traveling and your senses. So what Doctor Adams is going to bring to this is really about understanding the experiences of blind individuals within corporate America. I think that if you think about all the sessions we’ve had today, each one is building on another. And so I thought that this would be a great session to end our day with. So Kirk.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Good am I, am I visible?
MoxieCon Host: You are.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay, good. And I’m audible. All right. Yes. So hi. I’m I’m I’m Doctor Kirk Adams. And I want to thank Nadine for including me in Moxy Con and to Gretchen for her fabulous organizing skills. Thank you. Gretchen. And I do want to talk just a little bit about myself, really, to give some context, before I give you an overview of my dissertation research, which focuses focused on employment of people who are blind. For myself, my retinas both detached when I was five years old and I became totally blind very quickly. And as families were directed at that point in time, I was I went to a school for blind children, the Oregon State School for the blind, for first, second and third grade. And there I was intentionally, but but of course, as a six, seven, eight year old, didn’t realize I was being given three gifts. That will really feature prominently in my research findings gifts that lead to the possibility of thriving as a blind adult. One one was blindness skills. So I learned to read and write Braille as a six year old, learned to type on a typewriter when I was six so I could start public school. When I was ready and type my assignments for my sighted teachers. I was given high expectations both from my family and the school. So if blindness was your only impairment, then you, you were definitely expected to be performing at grade level and passing the standardized tests and all, all those things.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And unfortunately, lots of kids with significant disabilities are born into families or communities or go to schools where they might not receive that gift of high expectations. And then, then the third was the sense of agency or an internal locus of control, where I really got the sense and the belief deep in my bones, unshakable, that I was able to solve problems and do what I wanted to do and figure things out. And they, they really inculcated that strong sense of agency in us through a lot of outdoor activities. This was Salem, Oregon. We went horseback camping and the Three Sisters Wilderness area. Cutting firewood with crosscut saws. We were up on Mount Hood, building snow forts out of huge snowballs, and we were in the tide pools on the Oregon coast. Look, feel feeling around for CNN, sea anemones and starfish. And they they gave us those experiences to really instill in us that we can move through space gracefully, confidently as blind people learn to love our bodies as young blind kids. So I think that school for those gifts, and then it was a sink or swim in public school fourth grade into public school. And then I was always the only blind student in any school I attended from fourth grade through my, through my doctoral program. So fast forward rapidly to college. I graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla. I received a full scholarship academic scholarship to attend.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I graduated with an econ degree, a 4.0 a Phi Beta Kappa cum laude. And then I had applied to some graduate schools, got in, but I really wanted to work and earn a paycheck and marry my college sweetheart. We’ve been married 40 years now and have kids and buy a house, do those things. So I started seeking employment in the, in the finance area. And I would send out my cover letter and my resume and I’d get a phone interview. It would go wonderfully. And then I, I’d get called in for the in-person and I would walk in with my long white cane and my slate and stylus so I could take some notes in Braille. And then not surprisingly, the, the person sitting across the desk had probably never worked with a blind person before, did not understand the tools and the techniques we use and could not imagine. You know, how how could this blind kid do this job that he’s applying for? And so, you know, when you have an apparent disability in the employment journey, you need to decide when to disclose your disability. So I wasn’t disclosing until I was, you know, face to face at the interview. So then I changed my strategy and I started disclosing, I put in my cover letter. And my retina is detached. When I was five, I went to a school for the blind. I learned these skills.
Dr. Kirk Adams: This is how I’ve accomplished all these things you see on my resume. This is how I’ll do this job. And, and then I wasn’t even getting the, the phone interview. So I, I’ve had firsthand experience with the barriers to employment faced by so many people with significant disabilities. I was offered a job in sales by a small securities firm in Seattle whose sales manager had also gone to. Whitman was also an econ major. Had some professors in common. He, he called some of them and said, you know, could could Kirk Adams sell municipal bonds over the phone? And they, they said yes. Yeah, he could, he could do that. So I did that for ten years. Straight commission got married, bought the house that I’m sitting in now in Seattle had our kids. Now there’s grandkids. So all, all, all that was, was wonderful. Fast forward again. I made a pivot to the nonprofit sector when I was about 30 years old, really decided I wanted to be in the nonprofit sector in leadership. I wanted to work with agencies that helped create easier pathways for other people who are blind. Other blind kids make it easier for them. So I after many other twists and turns, I did become the president and CEO of the lighthouse for the blind here in Seattle, Which is a nonprofit social enterprise employing about 250 blind and deaf blind people in a variety of businesses, including very sophisticated precision machining, making parts for all the Boeing aircraft.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And later, I had the honor and privilege of serving as president and CEO of the American Foundation for the blind, which was Helen Keller’s organization. And my my focus really sharpened on employment. I saw so many issues faced by people with significant disabilities that could be solved by a meaningful, well-paying job. So in the leadership positions I was in, I felt I could really leverage assets that I had and add more. So I decided to study leadership formally. So I enrolled in a PhD program in leadership and change at Antioch University. And when it came time to start thinking about my dissertation, I. Of course they they scaffold you up to that point. So there was a lit review. So I read, you know, every peer reviewed journal article on employment of people who are blind that have been published in the previous 20 years. And, you know, some things I found in the lit review people with significant disabilities, including blindness, only 35% of us are in the workforce in the US, which is about half the general population. More than half of us work in non-profit organizations or for governments. We’re in a much narrower band of occupations than the general population. And we tend to stick at the bottom few levels of the org chart. So as a result you know, one third of us are living in poverty. Home ownership is one tenth of that of the general population.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So through the Lit review, I really got clarity that that from my perspective, the place where we could make the most progress the fastest would be in corporate America, in large corporations. If we wanted to expand that narrow range of occupations, if we wanted to move people, more people into private employment with large companies where salaries were not generally capped, like in nonprofits and governments. So I really just decided to focus in, in large companies. So my dissertation is called Journeys Through Rough Country, an ethnographic study of blind adults employed in large American corporations. So I wanted to find people who self-identified as Successfully employed in large corporations. And I define that as a company with 1000 employees or more. And I just started the way you do, reaching out to my network. People I know, asking them who they knew, who they thought might self-identify as successful talking to them, asking who they knew. So using that kind of that snowball technique, I came up with a group of research participants who, who did respond that they did self-identify as successful employee. They did work in a company of 1000 or more people. And I wanted people who were fairly new in career people with long tenure, people who are blind, totally blind people with low vision people who use screen readers, people who use magnification, etc.. So I got, I got together a very good group and then I wanted to understand the success factors that led to their successful employment so that as a field, we could have better information and think about how to create conditions for successful employment.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So the, the first question I asked was and I identified nine themes. I’m going to walk quickly through the nine themes and then would love to answer questions. So the first question was why do you identify as successfully employed? And there are many different answers, but the common theme, everyone talked about financial compensation. So everyone talked about money. Every participant referenced the independence that comes with, with being compensated for, for their work. So one participant, Joe said, quote, I’m not just making ends meet by being able to go out with friends, being able to have some amount of financial freedom to make purchases and do activities that could be out of the realm of someone who’s just barely employed. The next theme that emerged very strongly again was that sense of agency or internal locus of control. Participant named Savannah. She’d been hiding her deteriorating vision since middle school. And then, quote, she said, I, I fell down a set of stairs. So that’s what led me to go to the orientation center for the blind. That changed things for me. She talked about hiking and rock climbing, downhill skiing, and giving her that sense that she could move through the world and accomplish what she set out to.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Another participant who had a long, long career in the telecom industry recalled going to summer camp sleepover camp with her sister, twin sister. They were ten years old. Her she was totally blind. Her sister was sighted. They got to summer summer camp. And when it came time to do horseback riding, the counselors told the young blind girl. She said, well, no, you can’t do the horseback riding. That’s too dangerous. You’ll you’ll need to sit. Sit with us while the other kids do it. So that night, she and her sister snuck out of the cabin. They went to the stables. They got a couple horses, and they rode horses, and she just. She recalls 45 years later, the sense of freedom and exhilaration riding the horse in the night with her sister. Another blind, blind person who. Super successful computer science degree, law degree. He had a lot of struggles in elementary and middle school with feeling excluded. And he fell in with a group of neighborhood boys when he was 12 or 13 who did bicycle tricks. They would ride their bikes and jump off, jump over things and down ramps and stand on the handlebars. And he, he he cited that as the Liberating a set of experiences that he had. The. The next thing was was knowledge, skills and abilities to be able to do the job. Everyone said, of course I need to be able to perform the job functions excellently.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And Anthony said, I don’t think they knew I was blind. If you can come in and do the code, then usually they’re pretty happy about that. So everyone realized they had to perform the job. The next theme was family. Fourth theme. Henry said his family gained, quote, self realization that we could work with this blindness thing and that there would be no reason other than what other people put up in terms of barriers, why I couldn’t be as successful as their other three boys. The fifth theme was being part of teams and groups. Clara said I did lots of sports growing up, learning teamwork. Michelle said, singing in choirs. It helps you in terms of getting in front of people and expressing. The sixth theme was supportive of the immediate supervisor. And Lee said he really saw me as somebody who had some capabilities where other people had seen me as somebody who had a disability. The seventh theme that everybody talked about a lot was employer provision of accommodations and accessibility. Tristan said having the software tools, first of all, being fully accessible and usable in a way that makes someone with a disability able to be completely productive. The eighth theme was senior management support, and Henry said our whole senior management team here is very supportive. Diversity and inclusion that are not only looking at it from an employment perspective, diversity is a multithreaded strategy. And the final theme and the one that was pretty revelatory was disappointment.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Everybody expressed different levels of disappointment, whether that be that they’re the only person with an apparent disability who achieved their level on the org chart, or that there were no other people with apparent disabilities in upper management or on the board. That other people who were junior to them, who had less experience and less skills were promoted beyond them. That they had to continually refight the battles around accessibility more than one comment that they had their employer change systems without considering accessibility. So they would come in one day and all of a sudden they couldn’t do their job because the system had been changed and was no longer accessible. So Tristan said, I experience a lot of roadblocks along the way, particularly in the area of work tools that I’ve needed. It has made me feel more alienated than I’ve ever felt in my life. So how do we lead in this space? How do we create change? 65 to 70% of us with significant significant disabilities are not in the workforce. And that number hasn’t changed significantly over the years. It’s a complex problem with a complex set of dynamics. So there’s no single easy answer. But I am always asking, you know, what, what do we do to create opportunities for people with significant disabilities to thrive? Of course, my, my, my worldview is through being a blind person. So that’s, that’s my lived experience. But I certainly know that people with other significant disabilities share many of the same barriers.
Dr. Kirk Adams: We’ve, we’ve created these barriers as a society as we’ve created the three environments we live in the built environment, the digital environment, the social environment. We know that just because a person has an impairment, that does not mean we’re always in a disabling situation. So I will often use the example of leading a board meeting and say, if I am at the head of the board table and I’m running the meeting and I have my agenda and my committee reports and my financials and Braille, my visual impairment does not place me in a disabling situation because the built environment in that case is Braille, and I can interact effectively with that environment. If you have brought me a stack of print materials, my visual impairment then places me in a disabling situation because I cannot interact effectively with the built environment of the print. So thinking about these environments we’ve created and how to reduce the number of disabling situations For those of us with parents, be they sight, hearing, mobility, cognitive other is what I spend my time thinking about. And I know that moxie con and springboard consulting and. Nadine think, think about these things as well. So again, I’m just very grateful to be included today. And thank you for my for my time and opportunity to speak. And I’d love to have a conversation for the remaining part of the time we have here.
MoxieCon Host: That was great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kirk. Yeah, a question did come in and this, this was interesting because it said I have two adult children with disabilities, one who is blind. I deal with a vocational rehabilitation. I’ve dealt with education systems. What can these individuals learn from your research?
Dr. Kirk Adams: They can learn that I, I, I want to just be, I know we have a quick time that the, the quick and easy answer not easy. The quick most direct answer is teach people the skills that the the marketplace is demanding. A really interesting research study where VOC rehab counselors and HR hiring managers were both asked, what is the, what is the biggest barrier to successful employment of people with disabilities? And the VR counselors said employer attitudes. And the employers said lack of understanding of what we need. And I had a really interesting situation when I was at a AFB. We had a very strong relationship with Google, sitting with with Google HR folks and saying, you know, the the state of California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation keeps sending sending us people they’ve trained on Microsoft Office suite. We don’t use Microsoft Office Suite. We use Google Tools. So back to the research where people acknowledge they had to have the knowledge, skills and abilities to do the jobs. So understanding what are the jobs? When I was at AFB, we had a cooperative agreement with the federal government to identify three lines of business that could be brought under a federal employment program called ability, one that could lead to knowledge based careers for people who are blind in particular. And we we identified contract management, cyber security, and digital health. So what are today’s jobs? What are tomorrow’s jobs? What skills do people really need to compete?
MoxieCon Host: Yeah, I thank you for that. I will I’ve had personal experience with VOC rehab in different locations around the country, and they do need some education and understanding. Most of them do anyway. So the, another question was Well, actually, let me see because okay, well, I’ll change it because you just said about an education. So this person wants.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And I’ll just, I’ll just add VOC rehab, wonderful people, passionate people. It’s a, it’s a government bureaucracy. Yeah. They’ve got a nice $4 billion annual budget. They’ve got lots of staff and they can do lots of things. But you have to be a very loud, squeaky wheel sometimes.
MoxieCon Host: Yes, absolutely. So that’s kind of the advice you’d give them. What advice would you give me as a talent acquisition person working in a large global corporation?
Dr. Kirk Adams: I think interfacing with the community is really important and communities of people with disabilities. Of course, in my world, it’s the American Council of the Blind National Federation of the blind. So, you know, I go, I’ve go to all the conferences. So I go to disability in, which is corporate people who’ve made formal commitments to disability inclusion and the VOC rehab system is not there. The education system is not there. I go to Vision Serve Alliance, which are non-profit, serving, serving people who are blind. Vr is not their corporate employers are not there. And then you go to CSA, VR Council, state agencies of rehab and the, the, the employers, the employers aren’t there, the non-profits aren’t there. So there, there’s four sectors, government, corporate, non-profit and community and all share goals of better employment outcomes, but they’re in silos. So I, I think getting it out into those other sectors, go to the meetings of the government agencies, go to the meetings of the non-profit agencies, go to the gatherings of the community disability advocates.
MoxieCon Host: We have one. We have time for one more question. And this one is as parents of children who are blind or have other disabilities. We’re concerned about their future. What one piece of advice would you give to us.
Dr. Kirk Adams: As much as possible? Having them doing what’s developmentally appropriate for their age. Understand their kids with multiple disabilities. That complicate matters. But if your two year old sighted child is playing being read board books and flipping the pages and chewing on the covers, then you know, your blind child should have a board book with Braille in it being doing the same. If your 4 or 5 year old is playing in the playground and the sandbox and tussling with other kids over the toys, you know, your child with a disability should should be there. If your middle school student is going down to meet, meet their friends to go to them, go to a movie, then your child with a disability should be doing the same and it and so on. And it takes a lot of creativity and work and perseverance, and it can’t always be done. But I think that’s the goal because that’s the way we develop, develop skills and strengths is by overcoming increasingly difficult challenges. So as you grow older and move into more complex environments, both built, built digital social environments, you’re going to be faced with increasingly difficult challenges. So figuring those out, and I think the path is to figure out how to have your kid doing what other kids their age do in whatever form or fashion that whatever supports that takes.
MoxieCon Host: Well, thank you. Thank you very much for sharing all of that information. And I know that just like for all of our speakers today, everybody has really benefited from the research and the information that you’ve shared. So thank you.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That was a fast half hour. Thank you.
MoxieCon Host: I know it always is, right? Always is.
MoxieCon Host: Alright. So ladies.
Event Details at a Glance
- 📅 Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
- 🕘 Time: 9:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Eastern
- 🎤 Dr. Kirk Adams’s Session: 4:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Eastern
- 💻 Format: 100% virtual and live-streamed (no physical venue)
- 🎟️ Ticket: $550 per person, single General Admission tier
- 💳 Payment: PayPal or any major credit card. Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.
- ♿ Accessibility: Live captioning will be provided. Additional accommodations can be requested on the registration form and will be kept confidential.
- 👔 Attire: Business (for presenters and honorees).
- 🔗 Register: https://consultspringboard.com/moxiecon-2026-north-america
I’m thrilled to share that on Wednesday, April 29, I’ll take the MoxieCon 2026 virtual stage to present the first major conference distillation of my doctoral research, a study I spent years on because the question at its heart would not leave me alone. Why are roughly 70% of working-age blind Americans out of the U.S. workforce, and what can we learn from the 30% who are in?
The Key Takeaway
Blind adults succeed in American corporations every day, yet the paths they actually take are rarely described in detail. My research set out to map one such path, and what I learned reframes how employers, ERG leaders, and blind professionals themselves should think about disability inclusion.
The Question That Drove the Research
I’ve spent my career in executive roles, leading The Lighthouse for the Blind in Seattle, serving as President and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind, and now advising corporations through Innovative Impact. In every one of those seats, the same stubborn ratio kept surfacing. Roughly seven in ten working-age blind Americans are not in the workforce, the inverse of the overall adult employment rate. I wanted to understand, in specific detail, what the three in ten had done to get in and stay in.
For my doctoral research at Antioch University, I designed an ethnographic study built on semi-structured interviews with eleven blind adults successfully employed at large American corporations, names you know, and whose products and services you almost certainly use every day. The title I chose, Journeys Through Rough Country, reflects what their careers actually looked like. Not smooth highways paved by inclusive employers, but self-navigated routes through terrain most sighted colleagues will never have to cross.
What the Interviews Revealed
Nine factors emerged as decisive. Some were about the individual: hard-won blindness skills like Braille, cane travel, and fast accurate typing; mastery of assistive technology; and a strong internal locus of control that kept them moving when the environment did not. Some were about formation, long before the first résumé, high expectations from family and school, and family support that treated corporate employment as the expected outcome, not a stretch goal.
And crucially, several of the factors were not about the individual at all. They were about the environment. The accessibility of workplace tools and systems. The presence, or absence, of reasonable accommodations. The compensation offered relative to sighted peers. And the deeply personal calculation of self-advocacy: when, how, and whether to disclose a disability, knowing that any answer carries consequences.
Taken together, the picture is this: successfully employed blind adults have largely forged their own paths, with family support, hard-won skills, and a strong sense of agency playing crucial roles. Corporate inclusion of blind employees is in its infancy.
The Limitation I Want to Name Up Front
I studied success. That is a deliberate choice, and it has consequences worth stating plainly. The eleven participants in my study are not a representative cross-section of blind Americans, they are, by design, people who got in and stayed in. Their journeys teach us a great deal about what works, but they cannot tell the full story of the 70% who are not in the workforce. That story, why people exit, why they never enter, why accommodations are denied, why careers stall, deserves its own dedicated research. What my study offers is a clear-eyed map of one specific route through rough country. It does not, and cannot, stand in for a map of the country itself.
Why MoxieCon 2026 Is the Right Stage
MoxieCon 2026 is a one-day, fully virtual, fully captioned conference produced by Springboard Consulting and hosted by Nadine Vogel, a leader whose firm has stayed the course on disability inclusion in a climate where many have not. The day is built for the people who actually do this work: ERG leaders, chief diversity officers, HR and talent-acquisition leads, compliance professionals, digital-accessibility practitioners, and the consultants who support them.
The agenda opens with a keynote from Dr. Hoby Wedler, a blind chemist and sensory storyteller whose work reminds us that perception itself can be trained. I find that pairing meaningful. Hoby’s work teaches sighted professionals to perceive more deeply by removing sight. My session speaks to what it actually takes to succeed as a blind professional inside the corporate environments those same sighted peers run. Perception and practice. Research and lived experience. I can think of few better ways to spend a Wednesday in April.
What This Means
For individual blind professionals: You are not alone in weighing the disclose-or-not-disclose dilemma, in navigating an inaccessible automated hiring screen, or in asking for an accommodation that has been denied to others before you. The nine factors from my research are not a checklist, they are a vocabulary. Use them to name what you already know, and to advocate with precision for what you need.
For employers: Inclusion of blind employees is in its infancy, and that means the cost of course correction is still low. Audit the accessibility of your digital hiring tools and onboarding systems. Train managers in how accommodation requests should actually be handled. Build ERGs with real executive sponsors and real budgets. And understand that a workforce that reflects the society it serves is not a charity project, it is a strategic advantage.
Conclusion
Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a strategic advantage. That line has been the through-line of my work since my first executive role, and it is the line I will carry onto the MoxieCon stage on April 29. My session is thirty minutes. Registration is open, the event is virtual and captioned, and I invite you to join me. Let’s turn dialogue into action, together.
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
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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