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.
The heart of the episode centers on the urgent, practical stakes of ADA Title II digital accessibility: what the rule means for public entities, why inaccessible PDFs and online records still block equal access, and how the coming compliance deadlines are forcing agencies to confront massive backlogs. Calvo explains why traditional document remediation is slow and expensive, then describes how Pneuma’s tools, including Scribe for Documents and AI-assisted “augmented” workflows, aim to remediate content at scale, fast enough to meet real-world demand. Along the way, Adams and Calvo trade grounded optimism (and healthy skepticism) about AI’s accelerating impact for blind users, and they close with a call for advocacy and practical action, pushing listeners to use the law, ask hard questions, and insist that access be treated as a right, not a favor.
TRANSCRIPT:
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Advertisement: ADA Title II has a real compliance deadline. April 2026. Public entities are required to make their digital content accessible, including websites, PDFs, reports, applications, and public records. If a document cannot be read with a screen reader, it is not compliant and if it is not compliant, blind people are still being denied equal access. For a clear explanation of what the rule requires, visit http://www.title2.info. It’s one of the leading resources explaining what agencies must do and when. This message is brought to you by Pneuma Solutions, we have remediated hundreds of thousands of pages in days, not months or years, aligned with WCAG 2 AA guidelines at a fraction of traditional costs. Accessibility isn’t a privilege, it’s a right. Now that you know, ask your agencies a simple question, are your documents actually accessible?
Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you’re passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in with your host, Doctor Kirk Adams.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am that Doctor Kirk Adams talking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington, and talking to an incredible guest who I am really enjoying getting to know who is about as far away in the United States as he could get. Mike Calvo. Hi, Mike.
Mike Calvo: Hello there from sunny Miami. Don’t get mad.
Dr. Kirk Adams: There you go. There you go. And Mike is co-founder of Pneuma Solutions, which is a company that’s really leading the way, producing accessible digital content. We’ll we’ll get into that in a in a moment. For those of you who don’t know me again, I’m Kirk Adams. I am a blind person, have been since age five, and my retina is detached and became blind very suddenly. Went to a school for blind children for first, second and third grade and got my blindness skills down solid like a rock and sink or swim into public school. Then all the way on through was the only blind student in all the schools I attended. After the Oregon State School for the blind, I got a degree in economics, spent ten years in banking and finance. I moved into the nonprofit sector went back to school, got a master’s in not for profit leadership. And after lots of twists and turns was fortunate to become the president and CEO of The Lighthouse for the blind here in Seattle, where I worked alongside 250 other blind and deaf blind people in a variety of businesses, including aerospace, manufacturing, making parts for all the Boeing aircraft, and then was recruited to join the board of the American Foundation for the blind, Helen Keller’s organization. And again, had had the terrific honor of being the president and CEO of AFB. And you know, when we moved to New York City in May of 2016, if I, if I was having a rough day and needed a shot of inspiration, I could walk down the hall and sit at Helen Keller’s desk and play with her typewriter, which was an awesome feeling.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Very cool. And yeah, for the past three and a half years, I have been the manager managing director of my consulting practice, Innovative Impact LLC, where I say I just look for fun, innovative, high impact projects that will make the world a more inclusive place for people who are blind and people with significant disabilities. And I’m really interested in employment and creating career pathways into meaningful work. I do have a PhD in leadership and change, and my dissertation was called Journeys Through Rough Country. My dissertation, an ethnographic study of blind adults employed in large American corporations. So I interviewed a bunch of blind people working at a lot of companies whose names we all know, and learning about what led to their successes and the challenges they faced. The the, the consistent theme of disappointment and how challenging things were in order to thrive in those workplaces. And, you know, one of the nine success factors that people talked about was accessibility and that they couldn’t do their jobs if the materials productivity tools, information systems that they were needing to, to use for their jobs were not accessible, they could not be successful. And I know, Mike, you have devoted your life and have a burning passion for making the world a more accessible place. You’ve been at it for a long time, and I applaud you for everything you’ve done and are doing and will do. But you know, we’d love to hear your story, your your journey. What what led you to the place you are now? And I’m going to hand you the microphone.
Mike Calvo: Doctor Adams, I have never heard that story. About your upbringing. It is extremely interesting to me at how similar our paths are. I also have detached retinas. Mine detached. Well, mine were detached. I was born with them detached, and then they kept getting more and more detached. And I kept losing my sight. Lost it by the time I was 18. Different than you, though. I went to Michigan school for the blind. I’m. I’m a son of Cuban immigrants, and I was raised in Miami, Florida. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and of which it’s funny because I don’t sound Cuban. I don’t sound like I’m from Georgia, but, hey but my folks took me up to Michigan School for the blind, where I got my training there. And I was mainstreamed in the third grade. Okay. And it was so different than your than your than your journey. It really was mine was Miami Street’s craziness. Parents, you know, immigrant parents trying to trying to make a living, trying to, you know, deal with the system. That was I mean, what? 504 was in 1973, I think it was. And I was born in 67. So you can imagine my my parents, my Cuban parents you know, blue collar folks third, you know, fourth grade education kind of between them and raised in the revolution, you know, in the Cuban Revolution and got here and had a blind kid and didn’t really understand how to advocate and it was just a very interesting upbringing, but I found it intriguing at how we started, very similar in that, you know, our visual impairment, our education. Yeah. And, and went through so many different weird paths. That is that is super cool. And it just goes to show I, I trained blind people for, for a couple of years. And back in 1989, I found myself working at a bank and, and you know, and got trained on how to use their systems because I’d been doing music for years and years. And
Dr. Kirk Adams: Don’t skip over that.
Mike Calvo: No. Well, I was raised, I was raised in Miami, and at 11, I started doing radio public access radio. My voice hadn’t changed yet, and the public access radio station thought it would be cool to have this blind kid on there, and I did that. I I started working at a skating center when I was 13 and and deejaying there, and all of a sudden realized that they liked watching the little blind kid deejay. So I started getting invited to adult clubs because of the performers act and started in music there and just kind of got very, very involved in the Miami nightlife in the 80s. Craziness. That Miami had to offer of pharmaceuticals, entertainment.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Miami Vice.
Mike Calvo: Oh. You know, I tell people Miami Vice was a team version of Miami. Okay, back in the day, it really was. And we I mean, Miami, I, I just recently moved back to Miami in in 2001, I moved away from Miami to raise my kids. Didn’t want them to be raised in this environment here. And then my wife my wife and I just moved here because it was better for her business back to Miami. And, you know, it’s interesting. Miami is a lot more involved in the United States than it used to be. When I grew up, we didn’t here. Washington was way over there, you know? And we just we’re here, dude, you know, type of thing. And it wasn’t so it wasn’t easy. Now you’re hearing me in Miami. So it was. It was, you know, that was that was just kind of how I was raised. I dealt with just trying to make it. Trying to get out there. Didn’t understand bureaucracy. Came from a world where I learned really early that work going and and doing the corporate climb, kissing the corporate butt or ring, whatever you want to look at it. Just dealing with I was always rebelled against authority. Authority was my my, you know, my problem. Okay. Because I learned at a very young age whenever I was going to put myself into the hands of someone in authority over me, they were going to shoot way for the low, and I was going to shoot way for the high. And that.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Expectations.
Mike Calvo: Oh, dude, you don’t know it was. Well, yeah. You do. Okay. Yeah. Yeah you do. And that’s the that’s the thing is so, you know, just realize really early that if I could either, you know, struggle and make very little at a menial job you know, with because I dropped out of high school, I ended up dropping out of high school because of a lack of. In my 12th grade year, my teacher forgot. My itinerant teacher forgot to order my books. Oh in my 11th grade year for my 12th grade year. So 12th grade year came along. And here you’re teaching this kid who was a DJ at clubs and this and that to go get readers. What are those? You know and my parents didn’t know how to advocate for me, and, you know, it was just crazy. It was it was a, you know, too long to explain here, but it was interesting. And then later, as I, I worked into, you know, I’ve got more involved in music, opened up a recording studio started putting out Miami records and in the 80s and, and, you know, just really liked it, but had a kid in 89. Had to get a real job. Started working in a bank and learned how to use my computer. Trained my first blind person at the bank. And did my first while at the bank, I also did my first corporate presentation of just technology and at and what we could do for an organization and work for the Division of Blind Services. I actually stood in for Greg Luther, who was probably one of the greatest mentors I’ve ever had. One of the only people that.
Dr. Kirk Adams: What what were you using? I mean I just I was out I was at CSUN for the they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of jaws. Oh, so so what were you using?
Mike Calvo: I started I started using telesensory systems. Virt plus.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Mike Calvo: With that. Pros 4000 baud. Man, that was a little crazy. And then and then.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I had the. I had a versa Braille, so.
Mike Calvo: No, I’m a little bit after the verse of Braille.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. That was my that was my first the.
Mike Calvo: I saw the verse of Braille. I saw the verse Braille at a camp for the blind. I used to go to the Florida Lions camp.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Mike Calvo: And and I saw a verse Braille. It was so cool that you put a cassette in it and.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, exactly. It was on cassette, but Braille display.
Mike Calvo: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it was it was, it was, it was an amazing product. I, I did, I did get into the opticom though when that, when that came out and it was, it was very helpful to me in junior high school and stuff. But again, it, it was, it was not to be. I went to I went to the bank and worked there and, and I, I learned there that unless we really advocated strongly for ourselves and really just shined, we were going to just, you know, as as my supervisor said at the time, We don’t know what to do with you people. They basically said you know, we all all that you were, you know, the person that set it up your job, set it up and said, here’s the guy who knows how to do that, and that’s it. We don’t know what you’re capable of, what you’re not capable of. So you can do what you can. And, and and I said, so wait a minute. So if I do really good, if I’m a good dog, what do I get? Well, 5% raise from the 13 five that I was making back in 1985, 89.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Mike Calvo: And and I said, so wait a minute. So did some quick math. I’ve always been good at math. So after 20 years, you know, basically I’ll be making about 50,000, at which point I’ll get a roadmap, a sandwich and maybe a watch. Will it be Braille? No. You know, so Greg said, well, you know, if you don’t, he said, you know, you you need to learn that computer behind that computer, you’re an equal.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And Greg.
Mike Calvo: Greg Luther is my my mentor from the state of Florida, from the Division of Blind Okay. All right. And he. He believed in me. He’s like, I know you’re going to take to it like a duck to water. Greg was from Iowa. So. So and And he was right. Got into the computers, raised my productivity at that point we had a patronizing blind productivity rate and a normal. And I’m not even kidding when it was written that way. Normal employee productivity rate.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Wow.
Mike Calvo: This is pre Ada man. And so so yeah. So it was it was it was interesting. They so I raised my productivity to a crazy number by putting in an auto dialer and things like that that would like through scripts on the screen would go and pull the phone number and send it to a modem, and it would dial the phone number and then my, my shirt would read all my my my, the information on the credit card, whatever that I was doing. Collections. I would do collections in the morning and customer service in the afternoon. It was insane.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Wow.
Mike Calvo: But it was great. I mean, I, you know, it sharpened me up and and, you know, I, I can I look back and, and I understand the adversity that all of us go through. But you know, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Yep. And I’ve just learned to be resilient. I truly, to this day, as running this company, do not know where my next paycheck is coming from and do not know what I would do if this company didn’t work, because who’s going to hire a, you know, 58 year old, very highly opinionated blind guy who’s never worked for anybody dropped out of high school in the 80s. You know, I mean, it’s it’s just crazy. So aside from the 85% unemployment rate. So so if you’re out there use our services, please. No, but not not not not just for for for niceness, but because we actually provide great services. I think I got involved in that. I got, I got, you know, I moved forward in two I, you know, one of the things that I don’t talk a lot about but I was very involved in the drug scene here in Miami distribution of such items at that small time. But it was part of my story and got out of that in about 1995. You know, got involved a lot more in spiritual things, church and whatnot, and really turned my life around, changed things. And that was truly a line for me to say, you know, I got to do something with my life. I was an angry blind guy, really pissed off, really just had enough, didn’t believe that this world was for me. I was constantly being told, you know, to not strive to high, you know, don’t rock the boat. Quote be normal, you know, whatever that means. And in 95, Just really just found it. Found myself in a place where I needed change. And in 2001, I kind of floated around for five years trying to figure myself out, trying to figure out where I was going to go. And in 2001 started Sterile Tech, which is a company that did a lot of firsts.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Now, I didn’t know you or who you were, but I certainly knew Ceretec. So why don’t why don’t we talk about that for a few minutes?
Mike Calvo: So, ceretec, you know I used to be very angry. And I’m righteously angry, I guess, these days, but for whatever that means. But but I was very angry, and I used to just, you know, tap my head and be like, this is the brain that just some really disturbing people in the world have had, and I’m going to make a better world, and you guys are going to benefit from it, you know, blah, blah, blah, and and righteous crusader. Yeah, I guess, I mean, you know. And so very kind of you just a I looked at myself as just a very pissed off blind person and, you know, and, and so I, I got this idea because the internet, I wanted my piece of that internet pie, man. You know, I wasn’t hustling on the streets of Miami anymore or whatever. I found that that the internet was the best hustle ever. But I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t get on there. There wasn’t anything accessible, you know? And there was AOL at the time. So I set out to make an AOL type box and came up with a box called the Freedom Box. And you could talk to it and all that kind of stuff. And that that launched me really into 17 years at tech, providing the world’s first web based screen reader. That was free. We had a battle with Freedom Scientific, a lawsuit. And and it was a truce. Okay. They didn’t like that we called our products freedom. But what was really what they were really mad about was the fact that we were coming out with System Access to Go, which was the world’s first web based free screen reader before.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Free.
Mike Calvo: Pre Nvda. And I was getting I was getting emails from people just on cruise ships, you know, saying, I’m on there, I’m on a computer that doesn’t even have a screen reader. Like, wow. Yeah. So it was, it was it was an amazing time. Matt Campbell I have the honor of working with Matt Campbell my business partner today, my former CTO over at at Ceretec. And and he he’s just an amazing blind guy. We are a for us by US company. We believe in the in the refrain. Of course, nothing about us without us, you know. And we’ve we.
Dr. Kirk Adams: You know, I’ve shortened that. Okay. Just to let you know it’s nothing without us.
Mike Calvo: So nothing about us?
Dr. Kirk Adams: No. Just nothing without us.
Mike Calvo: Oh, nothing without us. You know, that makes sense. Yeah. I I’ll tell you. I mean, to me, I, I think that we we’ve got a great, a great community. The internet has been one of the most amazing things that has happened to our community. Technology has changed so much, and I, I find that we’re currently at a crossroads because somewhere along the line, D-I got mixed up with blindness and because of things of an administration that is just angry and whatever, you know, and I’m not going to get political, but, you know, just the we have lost his we’ve lost 20, 30 years as a community, you know, years, you know, hundreds of hours, thousands of writings of of pages of advocacy. You know one of the interesting things is title two compliance is is where all local, state and federal organizations have been have been compelled or you know.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Talk to us like for five year olds. Now, as far as the title two of what.
Mike Calvo: Yeah. So title two is a part. It’s a, it’s a Department of Justice put out a ruling a couple of years back that said that all local, state and federal organizations need to be compliant with this title two mandate. And what it means is that all of their websites, all of their software, in other words, mobile apps or what have you, and all of their documentation, which is where I live, have to be accessible.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And that’s under the umbrella of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Mike Calvo: Correct. And they and they have to meet wcaG standards, which is the, you know, the standards that we all live by and, and web accessibility guidelines. And the biggest challenge with doing that for an organization is, first of all, most a lot of organizations have thousands and thousands and thousands of pages that need to be remediated and up to we and a few others started doing what we call augmented content remediation, which means computer assisted, fancy way of saying computer assisted remediation. It has to be done by humans and it costs it takes a human 30 minutes just to do a standard page of content and to the tune of $15 a page, $16 a page, as you can imagine, it’s going to be very difficult for an organization that has thousands and thousands of pages to remediate and bring themselves up to compliance. But hey, the government said you got to do it. So we’ve been building a remediation platform that aligns.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And we is now.
Mike Calvo: Numa solutions have been.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Spell that, spell that for those who want to search engine it.
Mike Calvo: That’s the joke. We put a P at the beginning. It’s p n e u m a solutions.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. New solutions.
Mike Calvo: Yeah. Serotec serotec. Everybody. What happened to Serotec? We had a great run at Serotec, but my business partner in 2017, my business partner, Michael Fox got dementia, and he, we lost him last year actually. But Michael stepped down, and it was just Michael was our chief operating officer. And it was it was just legally better for us to walk away from tech. We didn’t know anybody, any money or anything, but it was just it was it was just too, too much of a of a mess to do it another way. And gotcha. Technology had moved on. Technology had moved on. There’s just a whole lot of reasons. And then Matt went to go work at Microsoft on narrator for a few years, and we both got the itch again. I was like, man, let’s do something. And and, you know, and we did Numa and we started back in 2020 with scribe for documents is the name of the platform we during Covid, we gave the platform away to home educators so that parents could remediate their own kids documents. And what remediate basically means is to make these daily. They upload them to our service. Our service turns around and says, okay, what do you want to do with this? You want to make it, you know, braille, large print, MP3, daisy, whatever from whatever you upload, including untagged PDFs.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Mike Calvo: And, and okay. And during, during Covid, we basically gave that away and, and product that really didn’t get a lot of recognition, but we, we kind of built it around our technology back then, and it was accessible for, for accessible meetings. And it was, it was, it was, it was cool and and it worked well, but just didn’t get picked up because everybody went back to work, so. But
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right. Gotcha.
Mike Calvo: Yeah. Fast forward to title two. And then and then our other kind of claim to fame is a product that we brought over from Serotec called Remote Incident Manager. Rim. And Rim is probably one of the most used remote training and support products for the blind community. It’s been around since 2007 from serotec. And Matt and I brought it back in 2021 trying to make some money because, you know scribe wasn’t quite ready for prime time yet. It wasn’t doing what it’s doing today. Ai just changed the world for everybody. And it made us it just it AI doesn’t do what we do. But boy, did it really speed our time to market. It speeded up our time. And that’s a story in itself. My son David is our our our AI guru in house. And David is just he’s a graduate of Johns Hopkins in computer science. And he’s just an amazing young man and has developed this platform has worked with Matt to redevelop this platform from what Matt started. And we now have a platform that makes accessible documents. And in instead of Hours or days or years or months. We can do. We just did. Lately we’ve done December. We did 180,000 page remediation for a very large content provider which I’m prohibited by contract to talk about, but but we did it in two days.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So. So is it based? Is it based on the scribe for documents product that you talked about that you’re giving away to educators during the pandemic? Same.
Mike Calvo: Yes. Yes it is.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Basic. Okay. Yeah.
Mike Calvo: It is. It is a platform scale.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. Instead of a parent or a teacher uploading a document to put it into an accessible format for a student, you’re dealing with thousands and thousands of pages and making them accessible.
Mike Calvo: Yeah. With our platform, you can either, you know, we can. We can do it for you or or you can upload a zip file to our platform of just straight, inaccessible PDFs. We will process those PDFs. We’ll tell you how many pages there are, how much it’s going to cost you, and we take your money. Of course you upload them and a few hours later, depending on how many documents and I’m talking about, you know, we’ve gotten, you know, three, four, 5000 documents at a time. And people are amazed. Oh, there’s 50,000 pages there. And you got them back to me in an afternoon. Yeah, yeah, that’s what we do. So we we’ve been really excited, but the challenge has been nobody takes I hate to say it like that, but it’s just true. I don’t think anybody takes this administration seriously when it comes to accessibility. They don’t think. I think everybody, as a friend of mine said recently, everybody’s been hoping for an 11th hour reprieve from the Department of Justice, and they didn’t do it. So now.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So that deadline, that deadline is around the corner, brother.
Mike Calvo: And and not even around the corner is literally up the street. I mean, it is like it is we as we record this, we are on February, in February and today, February 20th, 19th, 19.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Something like.
Mike Calvo: That. Yeah. And, and the deadline for and I don’t understand this. So for municipalities, for agencies that serve more than 50,000 people, they have to be compliant with this. Title two. This title two deadline by April of 2026. If you serve less than 50,000, it’s April of 2027. I don’t get it. Unless it has to do with budgeting or something like that. Why? You would put it that way, I would figure it would be the other way around. But but anyway. But so, you know, we have it’s been very challenging because we started last year to really work into the product in earnest and hoped that that it would, that it would just take off, that everybody would be, you know, really interested in doing this title two compliance. And after January of last year when we got back, bright eyed and bushy tailed from the holidays to do title two, we looked at Inauguration Day and said, oh my goodness.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, yeah. So so let me ask, let me ask an advocacy question. So some new neighbors moved in next to us here in Seattle, and we bought this house in 1989. And there’s, there’s a fence. And we’ve always thought, man, that fence is really close to our house. I’m wondering if it is on the proper property line. So as the house is our dear neighbors, we love to gotten elderly and passed away, and the house was left to a child and was up for sale. So we said this would be the time for us to figure out where our property line is. So I did my research as a King County Assessor’s office. You could get a copy of your plat. So I went through the process and I got a completely inaccessible something, electronic something. So according to title two, that document should be accessible now. So if someone’s listening, who’s blind or visually impaired, disabled, dyslexic needs an accessible document and they are dealing with a local municipality and they cannot get an accessible document. What what do you think? What would you advise they do?
Mike Calvo: I think that they need to reach out to their local local, you know, consumer and nf-b ACB self-advocacy, of course. I mean, you know they if if, I mean, let me tell you. Because even if, even if organizations kind of, you know, say, well, you know, don’t take the deadline too seriously, there are others, there are other rules that go into place in other parts of the world. So organizations are paying attention. They are doing stuff. It’s just that we’re not getting a lot of United States stuff right now, but we’re seeing more and more people come to us as the dates get closer. But really, self-advocacy is the way to go. If you if you.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And and can Mike can Mike Calvo and numerous solutions provide some language and some references to the regulations and laws that they could use.
Mike Calvo: Absolutely. We can we have a website that we have it’s called title 2.info. So it’s title, the number 2.info, and it’s a community of of people that are talking about title two. We have a monthly newsletter that goes out. Right now we are running title two. Announcements. Just just kind of, you know, little prompts saying, hey, title two is coming. If you need advocacy, go to your local governments. This is the time to really stand up and let yourself be heard, you know, and we’re not we’re not being, you know, we’re not being, you know real, real adversarial about it. It’s just like, hey, this is the law. And if you, you know, we’ve got an opportunity, you got a soapbox to stand on. So go get out there and do it, you know, and and we we can back you up in any way we can in, in, in any way that’s as possible. It’s why I’m doing this, you know, and things like it, you know, so. And and our prices, you know, just so we can understand each other. Right. We that like I said earlier remediating a normal page, which means just a regular, like a novel costs $17, 15 to $17 for half an hour of work per page. Wow. Okay, we brought it down to $1.75 a page and we like I said, we did 180,000 pages in two days, you know.
Mike Calvo: And the the dollar 75 actually doesn’t just get you remediated once because it’s in the digital domain. We remediate the whole library for you, and then we come back every six months as our technology progresses. Because as Sam Altman once said the guy from ChatGPT AI is the worst it’s going to be today. Okay. You know, so. And and that is so true. I mean, this is not just about AI. We’re not just going to ChatGPT and saying, remediate this document. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. And we are, you know we are you know, training our own models and, and things of that nature that are coming down the pike so people can do these things locally and not have to depend on the big things, on the big, on the big LMS large language models. But basically here we can remediate hundreds of thousands of documents from PDF to PDF, all aligned with wcaG 2.11 standards. And when the every six months we’re going to come back and we’re going to say, hey, can we’re do you want us to remediate the entire library? We’ll do it at our expense until we reach parity with human remediation, we will not stop. And I’m fairly confident that we are very, very, very close within the next 12 months.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That’s great. Let me just ask you about your vision with with AI. So I went to CSUN last March and AI was everything was everywhere talking about AI and, and, you know, kind of the big buzz among blind people was, you know, image description and getting visual information from AI. What what is this picture? What does that person look like? What’s the view from this window? And the kind of the people who seem to have the highest level of expertise will say, well, you know, next year it’s all going to be about agentic AI. You know, having AI do things for you and talking to it and telling it, you know, to help you with tasks and those types of things. And then I went to the Consumer Electronics Show CES in January in Vegas. And. You know, people stuck AI on everything. They bolted it on. I think lots of things that we would have called automation before people. Were calling it AI. And then, you know, there’s people are starting to use AI resources to perform functions that screens screen reading software performing. I just connected with a startup in the Bay area called lumen, where you can process your email just with voice using AI. And then, you know, there’s people who point out rightly, you know, the large language models, the you know, they’re built on data. The data comes from people using technology and of course, people with disabilities. People who are blind use technology to a lesser extent than the general population. So our data is underrepresented. So there’s these biases built in. So, you know, double edged sword pros and cons. Yin and yang that that stuff I.
Speaker6: Want to I want to push back on that a little bit.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. That’s what I’m asking you I want you you’re much more versed and immersed in it than I. So I just kind of spewed out some, you know, some reflections and observations and things I’ve, I’ve heard and seen. But I’d love your take on it. And blindness and how they relate and what we should be thinking about.
Mike Calvo: So so first let’s I saw a post one time and of course it was probably written by AI.
Speaker6: But.
Mike Calvo: It said it was on Facebook and a blind person. There’s a great AI for the blind list on Facebook. If you haven’t gotten on there, it’s a community of like thousands of blind people. A guy named Sean Keane started it. Amazing group of people, newbies, you know, old timers, just everybody. And and everybody’s talking AI. I think AI is great for blind folks. I understand where we have been underrepresented. Underrepresented in the past. And and I agree. I mean, I remember the days when I would tell AI I’m blind and it would tell me I’m sorry. It’s like, it’s not your fault. Then
Speaker6: You know, but that’s.
Mike Calvo: But that’s where that’s where what? Jonathan Mosen and and others at the Sina at Sina, at the NFB and ACB are doing to kind of work with and and be my eyes people with with with open AI.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Mike Calvo: And IRA is working with with others as well, doing developing their models. So they are getting the true skinny on how to talk to us, how to deal with us. And this post just said, I hear you. I saw all your posts. I’ve seen. So our advocacy, you know, on a normal day, we might we might hope to run into a person who knows about blind people, and maybe a person who’s heard about blind people got trouble with this or that, but AI has it all. So all of our advocacy, all of the standards, everything we’ve ever done, it was taken into account. Rightly or wrongly. I’m not here to judge that.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. You know.
Mike Calvo: I live I live in Miami, Florida. Miami, Florida at one point used to belong to the Seminoles. You know, am I going to stop living here? Because there was a war and one prevailed over the other. And, you know, I don’t like the way they were treated or whatever. No, that’s not my that wasn’t my war, you know. And just the same way, am I going to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, I’m not going to use AI because it perhaps was trained on this information or that information? The only thing people are ticked off about is that AI can do it faster than you and me, because if I want to write a song, if I want to write a pop song today, I’m going to study Taylor Swift. I’m going to study, you know, Harry styles, I’m going to study Bruno Mars, I’m going to listen to them, and then I’m going to go into the studio, and I’m going to try and do the best I can to roll them up, Mikey style, you know what I’m saying? And do it my way. That’s all AI is doing. Ai isn’t taking a couple of notes from Bruno, and a couple of notes from Taylor, and a couple of and making a, you know No, it’s actually using algorithms to reproduce. And in our community, when it comes to we can literally, as Burger King used to say, have it our way. If I, you know, we, we, we have a system called the Accessible Archive that sits on a large content managed system like a large CMS.
Mike Calvo: And as content is coming through. So, for example, if you have a court docket, a court case that you’re looking at, right, it will. And court cases have a particular have a particular challenge because they’re all did different digital assets that are there. Everything’s digital. But you could have a it could be a picture of a tax return. It could be of a picture of a light bill. It could be a picture of a bank statement. It could be whatever. So what this content management tool that we’ve developed does is it sits on the server and as the blind person is navigating the website, it is taking that digital content, that graphical content and remediating it, not only just like with great alt text, you know, the bird and a tree with a, with a with red feathers, you know. No no no no no no no no no. This is like this is your it takes for example, if the if the exhibit is a tax document and it knows it’s looking at a tax document. Therefore it formally formats that as a tax document complete with all the blind kind of markup, you know, with all the, all the, the markup that we need as blind folks to be able to navigate this stuff with our screen reader and that when I saw when David showed me that the first time, I just about cried, man, I was like, what is that? I saw him present it to this group that shall remain nameless. And all they said when he. He did this presentation.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Showing.
Dr. Kirk Adams: David is.
Speaker6: Who.
Mike Calvo: David. David is my.
Speaker6: Son. David.
Mike Calvo: David. David is my.
Speaker6: Son. Okay.
Mike Calvo: Produces our AI.
Dr. Kirk Adams: The AI guy.
Speaker6: Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Speaker6: Gotcha.
Mike Calvo: So he he he did this presentation. It was a point, a proof of concept for an organization. And at the end of the concept, the the proof of concept, you could have heard a pin drop. He’s like, do are there any other questions? And everybody was like, no. Where do we get this? You know, because the blind people on the call were just amazed at, you know, at what can be done with what the AI community has done with what we as blind people bringing our knowledge to the table. You know, I am such so hopeful and yes, I, I understand the pitfalls. But, you know, again, I can’t do anything about those pitfalls. Is AI going to take over the world? I don’t know, I’m already seeing home prices go through the roof. I saw I saw a report the other day where people are selling acres of property for millions of dollars to AI companies that want to build data centers there, you know. And what’s that going to do to our already crazy housing market? You know, so, you know, our, you know, the cost of, you know, of Ram, you know, and the cost of, of, of those types of things is going up. There’s a Seagate just announced this morning that it is sold out until 2027. Every hard drive, you know. So what is it? So AI is disrupting our world and.
Dr. Kirk Adams: But but as you said earlier, your quote, Sam Altman quote, the AI is the the worst. It’s going to be right now, right?
Speaker6: That’s right.
Mike Calvo: And that’s where we’re so we’re hoping you know, we’re we’re hoping. I mean I as a blind person, I’m very hopeful for AI. I think this is this is incredible. I wish I wish I’d had AI 20 years ago. I mean, the difference. I think any blind person the story, you know, that we would have told the future for blind people is so much brighter than it was for us because of this technological breakthrough. I think right when I.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Went to college, I had textbooks on a four track cassette recorded by volunteers at recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, which is Learning Ally Now, and I took notes in my econ classes with the slate and stylus, and at night I would copy them with a Perkins Brailler. So I would I, I welcome all time and labor saving technologies.
Mike Calvo: I gotta ask you because.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Make life easier for us.
Mike Calvo: Yeah, I gotta, I gotta ask you. This happened to me, and I used to. I used to use an IBM Selectric.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh, I had that with the erase ribbon. Yeah, that was the leading edge technology.
Mike Calvo: Yeah, well, let me tell you, with the little ball and everything, how many times it happened to me? Twice. Did you type a full paper? And it was blank?
Dr. Kirk Adams: More than I want to admit. More than I want to admit.
Mike Calvo: It was so demoralizing. People cannot imagine how you go. And you. You’re already flying blind. Pun totally intended. Writing this document where you don’t know where the hell it is. And if you’re if you’re one space off or whatever. But then then you don’t. Then for somebody you handed somebody like, oh, it’s blank. And you’re thinking, oh, stop kidding around, man. Stop. Stop goofing me. No, no, it’s really blank, bro. It’s like what? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I mean, it has been just so demoralizing. So, but I, I’m, I’m very excited about the future. I’m glad to be a knowledgeable old guy. Interestingly enough, my business partner, who is truly one of the the my co-founder, Matt Campbell, is one of the best, one of the best developers of blindness technology I’ve ever met. Him and Glenn Gordon and others like them just deserve. And, you know, Jim Fruchterman and others. Well, Jim’s not blind, but but but, you know, they just deserve all kinds of accolades. And Matt was kind of resistant to AI, and he’s even, like, looking at what we’re doing and, and and said, yeah, you know, this is this is making a difference. This is changing. So, you know advocate, advocate and, and and if there is title two work to be done in your local community, in your state or whatever, they can afford this. They’ve got budgets for this. And those budgets are based around 17, 16, $17 a page. And we’re charging 10% of that. You know what I’m saying? So it’s a it’s a it’s scalable. And at that, at those prices that that kind of savings, you know, before understandably organizations would have to triage. Well, we can we can do this, but we can’t do that. We can. And that’s one of the things, one of the horrible things that happened in California. Back 20, 20 or so, they had to take 2.7 million documents offline for everybody, not just because of us.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Mike Calvo: Wow. You know, not, you know, because they couldn’t comply. Because the state of California gave them two years to become to remediate 2.7 million documents.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Mike Calvo: So.
Dr. Kirk Adams: If people if people want to get. So if people want to get in touch, Mike, and and learn more about Numa solutions and what you can do and to get your advice on how to work with their local municipality, the language to use. How how can people get in touch.
Mike Calvo: So they can reach out to me? I’m at Mike.Calvo. That’s C A L V as in Victor O at Pneuma Solutions. I will spell that for you again. P N E U M A Solutions.com. All things Title II Information is available at Title2. Title, the number 2.info. And do help us spread the word. We really we really need you to to to get out there and advocate and and definitely check out scribe for documents. That’s the consumer version. So the other side that you would have been able what you would have been able to do Doctor Adams is you would have been able to if you would have had our scribe service. Right. You’d have been able to upload that inaccessible document. I invite you to send it. Invite you to send it to me if you’d like. And I’ll redo it for you just for fun.
Dr. Kirk Adams: You know I will do.
Mike Calvo: Yeah, but but it it and you can bring your own accessibility. I personally believe very much that as blind people, if it is financially viable, and I know that it’s not sometimes I really do, you know. But if it is, bring your own accessibility people, you know, bring your accessibility. It’s just going to. Yes. Is it is it right? Maybe not. Maybe so I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want access to this stuff and bye bye. Whatever is the path of least resistance. And sometimes the path of least resistance is saying, you know what? I’m going to pay for this. I’m going to have it available to me, and that’s it. I mean, my meta glasses, I. They’re worth their weight in gold. You know, my meta, my meta AI glasses. My.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that I think that should be the tagline for this podcast. Mike, I just want access to this stuff. So I think we’ll I think we’ll go with that. The time has flown by. It’s been great visiting with you. I’m looking forward to next time. Title two. Title two A lot of people went to a lot of work to get those regulations on the books. So leverage that, my friends. And you are entitled to have those government documents accessible to you, and numerous solutions can help. And if you want to get in touch with me, go to my website academy.com. My email address is there. Subscribe to the newsletter or I’m on LinkedIn every day. Kirk Adams, PhD on LinkedIn. So again, a great visit with you, Mike. Thanks everyone for listening to podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams and we will catch you next time.
Mike Calvo: Thank you sir. Take care.
Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Don’t forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at http://www.DrKirkAdams.com. Together we can amplify these voices and create positive change. Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep making an impact.
” 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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