Here, Dr. Kirk Adams sits down with Tom Babinszki, owner of Even Grounds and a travel and tourism accessibility consultant, whom he first met across an exhibit table at a Kennedy Center LEAD Conference, where, as Kirk tells it, “what to my wondering hands should appear” was a 3D model of the White House, pillars and porticos and all. Babinszki was born completely blind in 1970s Hungary, where a close family member advised his parents not to take him out on the street because it would be embarrassing, and suggested that one day he might watch the geese at the end of the village. His parents decided instead that their son would have exactly the education everyone else had. A scholarship year at the Overbrook School for the Blind in Philadelphia followed, then Trinity College in Hartford, then George Mason, three years directing the Center for Entrepreneurship at the Hadley School for the Blind, and some twenty-five years in digital accessibility, including teaching thousands of people at IBM.
Even Grounds grew out of a failure. A lifelong traveler, “my favorite smell is jet fuel,” and a coin collector who bought building replicas in museum gift shops just to understand where he was standing, Babinszki hired a designer and a 3D printing company and produced models of Washington landmarks, only to find his blind friends admired them and had no wish to own fifty large buildings. Museums and schools did. The company he founded in 2023 now pairs holistic accessibility consulting with tactile 3D work for the Toledo Zoo, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Opera, a Kenyan school for the blind through Clovernook, and a Braille map from the 1800s remade so it could finally be touched. One small tactile map of a public restroom drew thirteen hundred LinkedIn likes against his usual fifty. His advice to listeners is the whole argument in four words: don’t ever accept that something is not accessible.
TRANSCRIPT:
Podcast Commentator: Welcome to Podcasts by Dr. 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, Dr. Kirk Adams.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams. I am Dr. Kirk Adams, talking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington. And today I have a guest who’s doing some very interesting things to make the world more accessible for us who are blind and visually impaired. Today I have Tom Babinszki. He’s the owner of Even Grounds. He’s a travel and tourism accessibility consultant. Say hey, Tom.
Tom Babinszki: Hi, Kirk. Thank you for your invitation. I’m glad to be here.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, absolutely. So several summers ago I attended a conference here in Seattle that was sponsored by the Kennedy Center for the Arts. It’s called the LEAD Conference, and it’s about leadership and accessibility of the arts. And one of the exhibitors there was Tom. And [I] visited his room, his booth, his table — and what to my wondering hands should appear, but 3D models of buildings and architectural wonders that I had never seen and had no concept of what they looked like. I lost my sight at five when my retinas detached. I cannot remember anything visual at all. I cannot conjure up a visual image in my mind. I cannot recall colors. If you say blue, in my mind I see the Braille characters.
Tom Babinszki: Blue — I’m the same way.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. But I remember having in my hands a 3D model of the White House, and I was so surprised by the pillars and the porticos and the verandas. And it was not a symmetrical situation. It had a lot going on. And it was very interesting. And I spent quite some time with the 3D model. And Tom and I recently reconnected, and he is creating accessibility for museums and various sites, points of interest. One thing he is doing that I applaud so heartily [is] 3D maps of [unclear 00:02:49] public restrooms. How many times have I searched for the paper towels? How many times have I decided, no, I’m not going to wash my hands, because I’m going to pick up more germs trying to find the faucet and the soap that I’m going to lose. So Tom’s doing some really cool stuff. We just want to hand it over to you and have you talk a little bit about your experience with blindness, your personal lived experience — and then you’ve had such a long and varied career in accessibility, I know 20, 25 years at least. So I would love to hear the summary of that, and how you came to start Even Grounds, what the history has been so far, where you’re at, what you’re doing now, and then what do you see for the future? So Tom, it’s over to you.
Tom Babinszki: Thank you. Kirk, if you don’t mind, let me start from the very beginning, from where I was born. Because I think that’s pretty relevant to where I am today. I was born in the ’70s in Hungary, and that was one of those socialist countries in Eastern Europe. So education for blind people was rather limited. There was a school for the blind. But what started everything was that when I was born, there was a close family member who said that my parents shouldn’t take me out on the street because it’s embarrassing. And then she said, well, maybe when he grows up, maybe he can watch the geese at the end of the village. Now, mind you, I think watching the geese at the end of the village was going to be much more difficult than my two master’s degrees, but I didn’t know what she had in mind. But that was the point where my parents said that, regardless of how — they had no idea how to do it — but this kid is going to have the same education that everybody else [has]. And that’s when I was a baby.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So did your parents — were there other brothers and sisters already, or were you the first?
Tom Babinszki: I was the first at that point, and later I had a brother two and a half years [younger?] 00:05:03. So we’re pretty close, growing up.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, so high five to your parents. Good for them.
Tom Babinszki: Thank you. I’ll tell them. Because it was incredible what they did. And they took me to — where they found a school for the blind, they took me there. I studied there and then went to high school. But then I had to advocate a lot for myself, because there really wasn’t too much advocacy. So I had to fight for every single thing. All I heard is that you cannot do it because you are blind, and blind people can’t write. So I heard it enough. And I’m very thankful to every one of those people, because —
Dr. Kirk Adams: Did you get blindness skills instruction? Were you [taught?] 00:05:56 Braille and cane travel?
Tom Babinszki: [Taught?] 00:05:59, actually. So when I was 16, I got a scholarship. It was an international scholarship at the Overbrook School for the Blind in Philadelphia. And I spent there a year, and I got lots of mobility instruction there and other skills. Actually, I just came back from the LEAD Conference last week, which was in Philadelphia. It was amazing to be back after 30 years and wander the same streets.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Cool.
Tom Babinszki: But then, in the meantime, life was difficult, because my parents gave me the education, but what they couldn’t give me is, they couldn’t stop the discrimination. Every time I looked for a job, they either told me you can’t do it because you’re blind, or somehow they started convincing me that I need a car and the driver’s license, in a city where public transportation is amazing.
Tom Babinszki: And then I got a scholarship to the US, and I came here and I finished my master’s degree, and I got a job. And —
Dr. Kirk Adams: Where did you go to school?
Tom Babinszki: At that point, I went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. And later, when I moved to Washington, DC, and I was working in accessibility, I went to George Mason.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Tom Babinszki: So this country welcomed me. They didn’t ask me what is it you cannot do. They told me that you’re welcome to help us with anything that you would like to, and do what you can, and we’ll support you. I get so much support from people that I didn’t even know, because they never looked at me as a blind person. They looked at me as an accessibility consultant. And sure, I know we still have problems, and we do, and that’s why I’m still doing what I’m doing. But at least I was able to succeed. And so I started working for accessibility consulting companies. And I’m not going to keep it too long here, but at some point, for three years, I was at the Hadley School for the Blind, where I was the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh, I did not know that.
Tom Babinszki: Yeah. I built that program. George Abbott started building it, and then under his leadership, basically I got the whole thing, and they told me build it from scratch. And that was a ton of fun. But what’s most important here is that the travel bug bit me when I was young, very young. And I love traveling. You know, my favorite smell is jet fuel.
Tom Babinszki: And every time I have a chance, I go. And I hardly ever had — other than during Covid time — in my life when I didn’t have an upcoming airline ticket to be used. But that interest in travel gave me something, that it wasn’t just enough to be there. I wanted to experience so much. And some of the things that I really wanted to experience was buildings. Every time I went somewhere like a more famous building, I always started out at the gift shop, because some of the places have building replicas.
Tom Babinszki: And when they had it, it was interesting to buy that building and understand where I am and what it looks like. Because everything is just large and cold, and walls and bricks and doors, right? One building can be like the other, unless you learn more about it. But many, many buildings didn’t have replicas. And so I did all kinds of accessibility stuff. I did IBM.
Dr. Kirk Adams: But if they do, they’re very simplistic.
Tom Babinszki: It could be anything, but for the most part, yeah, oftentimes. But that’s much better than nothing.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Sure.
Tom Babinszki: And yeah, I was mostly in digital accessibility for about 25 years. And one day I said, well, let’s do something about it. And then I hired a 3D designer, and I hired a 3D printing company. And we designed a few buildings from Washington, DC.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And was it just part of your regular job, or was this something you were doing on the side?
Tom Babinszki: No. At that point, that was just something on the side.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Tom Babinszki: And we printed out a few buildings, like the White House and Pentagon, Capitol. And so in the meantime, I was traveling a lot for work. And I found that many people asked me questions about how blind people travel. Now, those were good questions, but not from the places where I got them, because those were coming from the hospitality industry, from people who should have had some understanding of people with disabilities. So in the meantime, I started a travel blog. It was travel for blind people, but mostly targeting sighted people. But interestingly, I reviewed so many accessibility features and locations that mostly many blind people picked up on my blog. So that’s when I started the blog, and I started making these buildings. And then ultimately my blog developed into a consulting business. And that’s Even Grounds, that I started in 2023. So anyway, I got those buildings ready and I showed it to a few friends, and they said, well, make some more. I made some more, and I made some even more. And then I showed it to more people and they loved it. So I started selling them on eBay and Etsy. And none of my blind friends were buying it. I said, you gotta be kidding me, you said those were nice. And they said, yes, those were nice, but I don’t want to have 50 large buildings in my house. And I was sad. You know, that was the first failure. Actually, my business grew out of this failure.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Tom Babinszki: Then I started thinking, okay, now blind people don’t want to have it. And I talk more to them. Okay, what do you want to do with it? They said, we just want to touch it. We want to understand it and move on. I don’t want to have it, though. Who would want to show it and not give it to people? Museums, schools. And so I started working with museums and creating replicas. And then I came across the Clovernook School for the Blind, and the Clovernook Center for the Blind [and] Visually Impaired.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Cincinnati. Yeah.
Tom Babinszki: Right. And at that time they started some work with a school for the blind in Kenya. And so they ship 3D printers and filaments to the schools in Africa and [unclear 00:12:34] other continent. And they design buildings, maps, educational tools. And they send the files so that people can print it out there, which is much cheaper than printing it here and sending it. So I got more involved. I hired more designers by that time, because I was selling those buildings, and we started working together. And that’s how I ended up creating maps. So first we created the map of Kenya, and then the map of Ohio, because — why not? That’s where I live.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Tom Babinszki: And then all kinds of other things, like biology tools — you know, like a human-size heart that you can open and explore the inner working of it. And then just one thing after the other, and then started consulting with museums. The other thing that’s really interesting is, I’m a coin collector, and I went to many, many museums — before my guide dog, [and] who was my guide dog. Well, I probably went to the most money museums, I believe, 15 in six countries. And I found that they were so interested in showing me everything, because by default the coin museum is not necessarily for blind people. It’s actually pretty darn boring, because everything is behind glass.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Glass. Right.
Tom Babinszki: Yeah. But they went out of their way to show me things that was okay to touch. And obviously not everything, because some are just expensive and can’t be touched. But then, so I started working with these museums and showing them, okay, if you could do it for me, you could do it for so many other people. Because that’s all we are looking for. It’s okay if most things are behind glass, but if we can have one or two hours of experience that’s relevant to your mission, to your organization — it’s educational, entertaining, that’s what we all do in a museum — and why not make it available to blind people. And many did. One day, I —
Dr. Kirk Adams: That’s great. Can I — let me pause for one moment. So I want to go back to Clovernook and Kenya. Were you working with Stephanie Jones, by chance?
Tom Babinszki: I met her once when we went to the Braille Challenge in Canton, Ohio.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, okay.
Tom Babinszki: We hadn’t worked too much together.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. I’m just asking because I’m a big fan of Stephanie Jones. She works for Clovernook, and you just mentioned the Braille Challenge. And last time I saw her was at the Braille Challenge banquet on the USC campus in June, and she was speaking about how Clovernook had partnered with Braille Challenge to bring the Braille Challenge to Kenya. So I’m assuming the students who were at the Braille Challenge in Kenya were the same students who were benefiting from your 3D models. So just a beautiful alignment. And hats off to Clovernook, hats off to Braille Challenge, hats off to Stephanie, hats off to you.
Tom Babinszki: So I’m a big fan of all of them. I mostly work with Samuel Fuchs, Clovernook.
Tom Babinszki: But I really have lots of respect for all the great work that they’re doing.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right. And then I had another question for you. Have you ever been to the museum at the Perkins School? They have — well, you know where it is, it’s in Watertown, Massachusetts — but they have a small museum, and it’s in the lowest level of their main building. But they have wooden architectural models of famous buildings that were made by artisans during the Great Depression, during the 1930s. There was a program called, you know, the WPA, Work[s] Progress — Work Projects Administration — but they hired artists and artisans to keep them employed and to keep the economy moving. And so there’s gorgeous wooden models, and the one that I was most fascinated by was the Parthenon. And it was built so that the top could be lifted off, so you could feel the interior.
Tom Babinszki: And that’s how we built ours. Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, yeah.
Tom Babinszki: Otherwise it’s just a cage.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right, right.
Tom Babinszki: Once you can feel what’s in it, it’s amazing. Right. No, I haven’t been there. And I haven’t been to so many places yet, unfortunately, even though I constantly go to museums. But only the United States has approximately more than 10,000. I have a lot to cover.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Tom Babinszki: And yeah, the Perkins is on my radar. And APH — as soon as it opens, I’ll be there. I was at the Technological Museum in Madrid last year, and they also had lots of architecture there.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So I had interrupted you when you were talking about going to money museums and coins, and how your guide dog holds the record for the most money museums visited by a guide dog. And I —
Tom Babinszki: I don’t —
Dr. Kirk Adams: — know. But I think we’re going with that. We’re going to go with that. And then you mentioned that the curators of the museums were very open to talking to you about making the experiences more accessible for people who are blind and visually impaired. So I’ll hand you back the mic after my interruption.
Tom Babinszki: You know, I feel that many people, many organizations, are open to accessibility. Sometimes there is the “I don’t have time, I don’t have money” kind of duo. Sometimes it’s an excuse, sometimes it’s real. I taught digital accessibility, especially at IBM. I taught thousands of people around the world. I met many people who weren’t sure about it at the beginning. I never had anybody who said at the end of the training that I don’t care about accessibility. Where I see the problem is not that they don’t care. It’s more that they don’t know about the needs, or there’s something exists that they are not meeting, or there are people who can’t necessarily benefit from what they are doing. And every time I show it to them how — oftentimes how easy it is, because there’s always a low-hanging fruit that they can do and make one change — and people are genuinely excited about it.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And so you’re at [Hadley] 00:19:06, you were doing work at IBM. You started making some 3D models of DC-area buildings on the side, showing them to blind people. They were very well received. Then when you went to take them to market, people didn’t want to — people wanted to access them, people wanted to experience them, but they didn’t necessarily want to own them themselves. So you turn to the museums and architectural sites as your customer base. So then you founded Even Grounds in ’23. And so what was the first year or two like?
Tom Babinszki: First I was doing it on the side, so slowly building up my business, and then I turned it into a full-time business. Yeah, right now I work with lots of museums, doing actually maps. So what’s good about this company is that we don’t just do 3D. I do all the accessibility consulting that I’ve done before. So it’s holistic consulting. I help them with physical accessibility, event accessibility, web accessibility. I don’t even want to get into it because there’s lots of people doing it, and probably you talked with many of them already. There’s no need to repeat it. But it kind of became a niche that I’m doing, that everything starts with the 3D, it seems, and a lot of organizations want maps. And one of the things that I did — it has been a frustration to me, as you mentioned at the beginning, that the restrooms. And honestly, I just try to avoid it as much as possible. And I was always wondering, why isn’t there a good way? And with the cane or with the guide dog, it was still pretty dirty experience.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Tom Babinszki: And the one thing I —
Dr. Kirk Adams: I always say, when I retire, I’m going to start a crusade that all public restrooms should be standardized. That’s a —
Tom Babinszki: Oh, that would be beautiful.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. Of course, that’s a pipe dream. But —
Tom Babinszki: Right.
Dr. Kirk Adams: But we —
Tom Babinszki: — can always try.
Dr. Kirk Adams: We share the frustration of being adrift in a large public restroom. So the map — the map of the layout space would be so helpful.
Tom Babinszki: Yeah. So one day we just created a sample map. I tried so many things with 3D, experimented a lot. I threw it at the wall to see if it sticks. You know, 80% doesn’t, but the other 20 takes off, and that’s okay. That’s what a small business does. But one day we made this little restroom map, and it’s pretty cool, because everything feels like a little restroom. Like, you can feel the little toilets, you can feel the little sinks, right? So even if you don’t read Braille and you can’t read the map key, you’ll still figure a good 80% of it.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, yeah.
Tom Babinszki: And then I posted it on LinkedIn. And usually if I get 50 likes, I take out the family for dinner and celebrate. I got 1,300.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Nice.
Tom Babinszki: And you know, it’s not about the likes, obviously. That’s not — but I got so much interest that —
Dr. Kirk Adams: That’s an —
Tom Babinszki: — indicator. Yeah. For a whole month I couldn’t put the phone down. And people just want these restrooms, because that’s a very easy entry to accessibility. You can make a big difference. It’s not difficult, it’s meaningful, it’s easy to explain. It was a story that I could explain in ten seconds. Because, you know, there’s the elevator speech that you explain what you do in 30 seconds. Nobody listens to you for 30 seconds anymore. That’s history, you know? Ten seconds, you’re done, tops. And this restroom, I did it. And yeah, that’s it.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, I’m not a technical person. I’ve never run a 3D printer. I’ve seen the products of 3D printing. One really good experience was when I was [at] the Lighthouse for the Blind here in Seattle. We had a breakfast for our donors out at Seattle Center, and the King Tut exhibition was in town, and they had created 3D replicas of some of the items in the exhibit. So we were able to get some hands-on of some of the artifacts in a 3D printed form. But I don’t know how. Give me the very simple layman’s explanation of, how do you create a map of a bathroom? Are you taking photographs? How is that converted into some sort of digital information? How does it work?
Tom Babinszki: Yeah. So basically we either get drawings or photos or videos of the entire layout. We mark up everything that’s fixed. So if there’s a movable trash can, we don’t put it there, because there’s no guarantee it’ll be there. And then I hand it over to my designers, and they look at it and then they create the map, and they make a rendered picture, and we send it back to the organization just to make sure we got everything right, and all the [unclear 00:24:14] and everything is fine.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right. So you don’t have to physically go there. The people at the site can provide you with the photographs. Right? Okay.
Tom Babinszki: Right. So, no, we give them very detailed instructions on what we’re looking for. We have sample drawings, sample pictures of — if you look at it, this is what it should look like.
Dr. Kirk Adams: This is what we’re after.
Tom Babinszki: Yeah, yeah. And in a few minutes they can just put it together, upload it to Google Drive, and we’re good to go. You know, in a few days we have it done.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Why don’t I ask you this. Let’s do a use case. Talk to me about a museum project that stands out for you. Please name the museum, so the people who listen can go and thank them for making our museum accessible. But tell us about a project — all the aspects of the project that you feel good about.
Tom Babinszki: Well, here’s one that we are just wrapping up, that’s fresh in my mind. We are actually doing it in collaboration with Clovernook. This is the Toledo Zoo. And so I always say that, what do we use 3D printing for? We make things which are too small, too big, or too dangerous to touch.
Tom Babinszki: And so what we did for them, we made five buildings on their property, so that you can get a sense of what the buildings look like from the outside, because they are very beautiful, detailed buildings. We made the aviary and the aquarium and the museum and a bunch of buildings. But we also made animals. There’s two kinds of giraffes at the property. One is the Masai giraffe, and I can’t remember the name of the other one, but so they are different — slightly different. So now you can’t really touch the giraffes, but you can have a seven-, eight-inch model, and you can compare the two giraffes. Or we put together three heads in a row. One is the brown bear, one is the polar bear, and one is the Kodiak.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Cool.
Tom Babinszki: And so those animals that you really can’t touch, you can get a sense of what they feel like. For another organization, we made a comparison of the alligator and the crocodile.
Tom Babinszki: There was a museum in Iowa where we made a replica of a Braille map. Interestingly, it’s a map of part of Asia and part of Russia and part of Europe. The map was created at the end of the 1800s, and it’s old and you can’t redo it at this point. So it’s behind glass. But it was specifically made for blind people, and now blind people are the only ones who can’t see it. Right? So we made an exact replica in 3D, and they exhibited that beside the original, so that everybody can touch it. It was in the [Iowa Art Museum?] 00:27:29. That’s why [we] did so many. Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Those are great. What are the most commonly sought-after 3D printed — they call them artifacts. What do you call them? Items.
Tom Babinszki: You know, I honestly don’t see a trend.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Tom Babinszki: They always surprise us. There was the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, for example, who was looking for a [stage?] with the musicians on the stage as they are playing, so that you can show it to blind people what the layout is like.
Dr. Kirk Adams: The strings are here, the woodwinds are here. Right? Yeah.
Tom Babinszki: We had the Cincinnati Opera, who was looking for 3D replicas of their characters. We had a [country?] 00:28:30 museum which wanted the map of the radio broadcasting layout in the United States and Mexico. They always surprise me. Yeah. Just recently — it was for a dance company. They were looking for teaching tap dance moves to blind people. And then we created 11 steps, [we] created the dancers one by one.
Dr. Kirk Adams: The position of the body.
Tom Babinszki: Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Each of the movements.
Tom Babinszki: Yeah. So you could just hand it to them, and it’s much easier to demonstrate that way than to explain.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, to conceptualize that. Yeah.
Tom Babinszki: You know, my trend is that there’s no trend.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Gotcha.
Tom Babinszki: We did paintings in a museum, the Dominican Republic. And it’s like an outside display of different paintings that we kind of reimagined in 3D — actually more like two-and-a-half-D — so that you can feel the different figures on the painting.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So I am imagining, in the audience listening to us right now, there are probably more blind and visually impaired individuals than there are museum curators and directors of zoos and operas and symphonies. But if you are leading a cultural institution, please listen to what Even Grounds can do for you. If you’re a blind and visually impaired person, I would guess you could — if you have a favorite museum or a favorite place where you go to enjoy music or theater, you could certainly contact the accessibility folks there and let them know about what Tom and Even Grounds are doing to make experiences more accessible. But Tom, what would you ask people listening to do, in order to help move things forward, make the world more accessible, get your work into more places?
Tom Babinszki: Think out of the box, step out of the box, and be open and interested. And don’t ever accept that something is not accessible, because sometimes it only takes a little creativity. And ask. Ask for it. I used to hate museums, because I couldn’t touch anything, and I wasn’t brave enough until I really started traveling. I said, no, I can’t enjoy it. So then I asked — if they didn’t have accessibility features, I went out there and asked, can you show me? Can you give me a guided tour? Can you let me touch a few things? And everybody was so positive. And I think that’s what you can do. And then when you encounter organizations that will listen to you, then share it with them, that it’s actually possible — that the same way they shared it with you, they can share it with everybody else.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. When I was first, second or third grade at the Oregon State School for the Blind, I didn’t realize until later, of course, what a wonderful, amazing set of experiences they intentionally provided us. But we’d go on school field trips, we’d go to a dairy farm, we’d milk cows, we would go to Fort Clatsop where Lewis and Clark spent the winter, and we would lay on the bunks, the replicas of their cabins, and we’d put wood in the wood stove and boil water. And it was super experiential.
Tom Babinszki: That’s beautiful.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Then starting in fourth grade, when I was in public school and I was always the only blind student, field trips were go to a building and walk around and touch glass cases and framed things on the wall covered in glass. So, right.
Tom Babinszki: Did your classmates help you, explain?
Dr. Kirk Adams: You know, sure. To the extent that they could. But it was still frustrating. Largely frustrating. So what you’re doing, I applaud. So how do people get in touch? Website, email — how do people reach out to you and Even Grounds?
Tom Babinszki: You can find my website at https://evengrounds.com, or you can write me at tom@evengrounds.com. You can also check out my blog. I write a lot about my coin-related travels. Blind Coin Collector — https://blindcoincollector.com.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Cool. Good. So —
Tom Babinszki: You can find me on LinkedIn.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yes. I found you on LinkedIn.
Tom Babinszki: I live on LinkedIn.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Me too. Another thing we have in common. So go to https://evengrounds.com or email tom@evengrounds.com. Go to Blind Coin Collector and read the blog. Let’s help spread the tactile experiences of cultural sites, and let’s all get better, and let’s all have better experiences in the public restroom. And for me, you can find me at my website, https://drkirkadams.com. You can sign up for my monthly newsletter. You can buy my book, which came out last month, on Amazon — there’s a link. It’s called The Disability Dividend: Supercharge Your Bottom Line Through Disability Inclusion. It’s a guide for employers to help them win the war for talent by hiring people with disabilities. And I’m also on LinkedIn, Kirk Adams, PhD. So reach out to one or both of us. We will happily talk to you about how to make the world a more accessible place and create opportunities for people with disabilities to thrive. Tom, it’s been a pleasure. The time flew by. We’ll have you back again for chapter two at some point. So thank you so much for being here.
Tom Babinszki: Well, thank you, Kirk. I appreciate the conversation and the opportunity.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. And for everybody else, we’ll catch you next time on another episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams.
Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Don’t forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at https://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.
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.
Connect With Me:
🌍 Website: https://drkirkadams.com
📕 Book: https://drkirkadams.com/the-disability-dividend
📧 Email: kirkadams@drkirkadams.com
📞 Phone: +1 (206) 660-1363
📃 Dissertation: https://drkirkadams.com/dissertation
🎙️ Podcasts: https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts
🎙️ Apple Podcasts: https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-apple
🎙️ Amazon Music: https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-amazon
🎙️ Spotify: https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-spotify
🎙️ iHeart Radio: https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-iheart-radio
📧 Subscribe: https://drkirkadams.com/subscribe
💬 Facebook: https://drkirkadams.com/facebook
💬 LinkedIn (Individual): https://drkirkadams.com/linkedin
💬 LinkedIn (Company): https://drkirkadams.com/linkedinpage
💬 Mastodon: https://drkirkadams.com/mastodon
✏️ Medium: https://drkirkadams.com/medium
🛜 RSS: https://drkirkadams.com/feed
💬 X (Formerly Twitter): https://drkirkadams.com/x
📽️ YouTube: https://drkirkadams.com/youtube
📍 Address: 140 Lakeside Avenue, Suite A, Seattle, Washington 98122-6538