In this warm and candid episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk welcomes Jeff Wissel, Vice President, Accessibility at Aira, a friend he first met in a Washington, D.C. hotel hallway when the Secret Service cleared a banquet room for Secretary Elaine Chao. Kirk opens with his own decade as an Aira subscriber: a demonstration at AFB’s New York offices from founder Suman Kanuganti, and the airport navigation that became his most valuable use case. Jeff then traces his own arc, retinitis pigmentosa noticed around age seven, a 28-year career at Fidelity Investments that began before the internet, giving up driving at 34, and years spent covering a non-apparent disability because he had no blind role model and believed he was the only one.
The turning point was meeting Alicia, a blind vice president at Fidelity, who pushed him to start an employee resource group, it now has 8,000 members, and in his own 3,000-person phone center he found nine other people with RP who had each thought they were alone. That led to Fidelity’s Office of Customer Accessibility, then four years and eight months as Chief Accessibility Officer at Disability:IN, and now Aira, where he is two months in. Kirk tells his own Disability:IN story along the way, meeting Northrop Grumman’s Bob Vetere, pitching CEO Wes Bush on the Seattle Lighthouse’s blind and DeafBlind machinists, and winning ITAR certification and a place in the defense supply chain. Both men close on community: Jeff on Aira Explorers and the stigma that disappears when accessibility sits in the accommodations catalog, Kirk on ISDI’s new Community Coalition.
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 that very same Dr. Kirk Adams, speaking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington. And I have with me today — I’d say it’s long enough to say a long time friend and colleague — Jeff Wissel, who’s Vice President, Accessibility at Aira. Hello, Jeff.
Jeff Wissel: Hey, Dr. Kirk, how are you?
Dr. Kirk Adams: I’m good. And this is really interesting to me, because two really interesting parts of my life are intersecting here today. When I first was hired by the American Foundation for the Blind to lead that iconic organization, Helen Keller’s organization, I moved to New York City from Seattle. And among other things, learned how to travel the subway system using the long white cane, which is an orientation and mobility personal highlight for me. And I got a call very early on from a gentleman named Suman Kanuganti, who said he was developing a system for blind people to connect with human beings who could offer sighted assistance. And he wanted to show it to me. So he and another gentleman whose name escapes me, who I never encountered again, came into the offices at AFB, and we sat in the conference room and I put on a pair of Google glasses, and I downloaded an app onto my iPhone and I connected with an agent who described the room to me. What was on the walls? The view out the window down onto Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. There was a bust of M.C. Migel, the founder of AFB. She described that. After about five minutes of that, it was enough of a wow factor that I was pretty much an Aira fan from then on.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And I’ve been a subscriber since then — I guess ten years, coming up on ten years. And wow. And Aira has gone through many different steps and evolutions and advancements and improvements. And probably the most intense situations I’ve used Aira to support me is in airports. Even the Uber driver — you say Alaska Airlines, they drop you off in front of an airport and you’re going in, and where’s the Alaska Airlines desk? And in the past, you would kind of wait till you heard a friendly sounding set of footsteps: excuse me, can you direct me to the Alaska desk? And sometimes that worked well and sometimes it didn’t. But with Aira, you say, can you help me? I need to locate the Alaska desk. And they say, hold your camera up. Turn it a little left. Hold up your phone. Turn a little left, a little right. Okay, there it is. Turn 20 degrees to your left. Walk about 25 feet. Now turn ten degrees to your right. Go about ten more steps, a little left. There you are. You’re in line. So it’s like magic. For me, as someone who has traveled a lot for business travel, that’s probably my most interesting use case. I’ve also done, many times, I’m in this hotel room and it is really hot and I cannot figure out this climate control.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And which of these buttons does which? How do I — where’s the fan? How do I turn it on? My suitcase is locked. These four little rotors need to all be turned to zero. Can you help me get them adjusted so I can unlock my suitcase? So obviously, for me, a lot of travel stuff. But then at some point, not long after, I was at a conference. It was in the DC area. It might have been after I moved to Arlington, Virginia. Honestly, I attended so many conferences representing the American Foundation for the Blind, I don’t recall exactly what it was. But I was by myself. I was at a table with other folks, but I was the only person from AFB there. And they said, everybody clear the room. Secretary Elaine Chao was coming to speak, and the Secret Service needs to make sure the room is safe. So everybody get up and go into the hall. And as I merged into the traffic in the hallway, I encountered another gentleman with a long white cane. And it was Jeff Wissel, there with the team from Fidelity. And we stood there and got to talking for about 15, 20 minutes while the Secret Service did their thing. And they cordially invited me to join them at their table, which I did.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And so Jeff and I have been in pretty regular contact since then, as both of us have turned various pages and chapters in our career paths. And so I’m just so pleased to have Jeff here. I’m so excited that the Aira part of my life and the Jeff Wissel part of my life have now aligned. So it’s a good thing for everybody in our community. And Jeff, I really just want to hand the microphone to you. I know our experiences with blindness are so very different. I became totally blind very quickly as a five year old when my retinas detached. I know the arc of your becoming a blind guy, it’s quite different than mine. And so I would love to hear your reflections on that journey. Hear about your career path, any thoughts you might have for especially young blind people out there wanting to make their way in the world of work. And then really the excitement about Aira — what your role is there, and what you’ve discovered so far in the short time you’ve been there, where you see things. What’s the current state of the union at Aira, and where you are a visionary. So where do you see things going? So I’m handing you the talking stick.
Jeff Wissel: Awesome. Thanks, Dr. Kirk. And I’m honored to call you my mentor and friend. And as you were describing how we first met, I was remembering it vividly. It was an honor to meet you also, because you’re a legend in our space. And when you and I first met, I was pretty new on my accessibility leadership journey, and you really took me under your wing. And I’m forever grateful for that. So for the audience, I’m Jeff Wissel. This month, actually, I’ll be turning a young 59 years of age. And the reason I lead with my age is, for me, my personal journey with sight loss started — I have retinitis pigmentosa, or RP. And when I first noticed symptoms, I’ll say I was seven years old, somewhere in there. And one experience, I was riding my bike with a friend of mine on our school parking lot near our house. It’s dusk time and we’re riding and I start pulling ahead of my friend and I’m like, wow, I must be really fast. But what I didn’t realize is I was getting ready to run into a rusty chain separating the parking lots, that my friend saw from way behind. Fortunately, the way it hit the tire, the fender, the handlebar had flipped right over me and I didn’t get a scratch. And I just ran through this metal chain, and it was like one of the worst experiences I can remember.
Jeff Wissel: And for many in the audience who have retinitis pigmentosa, our journey is probably very similar. Night blindness, one of the key symptoms. For me, I still have sight to lose. I became a late in life runner, so it drives my wife crazy. But when the conditions are light and it’s safe enough, I can run. In that same environment at night time, if I didn’t have my white cane or my guide dog, Gabe, you would swear I was a drunk man walking, because I can’t navigate the sidewalk, just stepping into the grass and everything. But throughout my life, it is a degenerative eye disease. So different things. I started out driving and playing softball, just an alumni league after high school, and I remember being in the outfield and saying, I got it, and ball’s hit and I got it. All of a sudden it’s like, I don’t got it. And ball dropped 20 feet from me. Do that a couple of times and it’s like, all right, I kind of have to get rid of that sport. Gave up driving when I was 34. And for many folks, when I tell them that, they’re like, oh my gosh. And I reverse it and I say, no, it was really thank gosh. That last year and a half of driving, nothing happened.
Jeff Wissel: But it was so stressful. It’s always, to this day, been more of a relief than it’s ever been an inconvenience. Even not being able to teach our two daughters to drive, or not being able to just get in the car and go to Home Depot and things like that — as much as you could think, wow, that would really stink. To this day, it’s always been more of a relief. I had a really good long career with an amazing financial firm, Fidelity Investments, for 28 years. And when I first started, I was 26 years of age. It was before the internet. I started in 1997 and everything was printed. We had these big magazine style booklets that would have all the information for all the mutual funds that were available through Fidelity, and I was able to read those. And you can imagine being on the phones, there’s a lot of information you have to describe verbally over the phone to clients. And after about two or three years, that just started becoming blurry pieces of paper to me. And fortunately, things started getting online and some of that information was online. So lots of challenges along the way, but that’s —
Dr. Kirk Adams: What was your first assistive technology? Was it magnification or speech, or what?
Jeff Wissel: For me — sorry, for me —
Dr. Kirk Adams: What did you use first?
Jeff Wissel: I had come across one of those magnifiers that you could do high color contrast. So I think I spent $500 for this thing. And it just reversed the image, so I could hold it over that booklet and it would make the screen black and the text white. And I could magnify it a little bit.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.
Jeff Wissel: And then —
Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, there you go. Assistive technology.
Jeff Wissel: Yeah. And this is before cybersecurity was a really big thing. I remember buying a copy of JAWS myself and putting it on my work computer. And I mean, back then you could put stuff on your computer. And that worked for a while. And a little bit later I’ll talk about covering a non-apparent disability, but I was able to fly under the radar a little bit. And it’s an amazing company. It was nothing about them. It was just Jeff. I didn’t have my inner voice. And so that technology worked for a while, until — air quotes — a system enhancement. And then it stopped speaking to me, and a different journey then.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That’s because your employer changed something internally.
Jeff Wissel: Yes. Yeah. Like a new user interface.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. So just a brief aside. My doctorate, PhD, is in leadership and change from Antioch. And I did an ethnographic study of blind adults employed at large American corporations and asked people how they made their way. How did they forge a successful path? And there are some common themes. People had good family support. They had good blindness skills. They had a supportive manager. They had a lot of outdoor activities that have given people a strong sense of agency, strong internal locus of control through experiences in childhood or teen years, often. And then the ninth theme was disappointment. And everyone I talked to had some pretty significant levels of disappointment that they were the only person with an apparent disability who reached that level in their organization, that people who were junior to them, less experienced than them, were promoted beyond them. And a common complaint was just the constant battle for accessibility. And often people cited — often people talked about the fact that their employer would change productivity tools and change systems without taking accessibility into account. So able to do your job one day, and then walk in and not be able to do it the next, and have to fight those battles to regain accessibility. So I just say that you experienced something that many other blind and visually impaired people working in the corporate world of work have also experienced.
Jeff Wissel: Absolutely.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So you weren’t asking for accommodations. You were just doing what you needed to do in order to continue to do your job well.
Jeff Wissel: Absolutely. I was in that statistic where there’s the disability index that hundreds of companies have taken for 11 years, shows that in corporate America, it’s like 3.97% of employees self disclose any form of disability.
Jeff Wissel: We know it’s way more than that. But there’s all types of reasons. And for me, I think back on my life and I try to put things into life lessons. I did not have information. When the human brain has gaps of information, it fills those gaps in with fear and anxiety and all kinds of misinformation. So I thought I was the only one. I was the only one that I knew that was legally blind in my regional phone center of 3,000 people, and I was putting stuff between my ears that, I’m kind of less than, this is my fault, all those different things. And I didn’t have a role model. I didn’t have a mentor. I didn’t know anyone in my circles who was blind or low vision. So it kind of just went through it the best that I could. And it’s — you mentioned family support. My wife and I are celebrating 29 years next month. I have amazing family support, our daughters, my siblings. That was always there. But I didn’t have, in the professional world, a mentor.
Jeff Wissel: So I thought there was some mold I was supposed to fit into. 70 plus percent of disabilities are not apparent, or invisible. So you kind of think, oh, well, everybody’s just fully abled, and so forth, and I need to be like that. So I was the poster child for covering, or trying to cover, non-apparent or invisible disability. And so fortunately for me, when I was 23 years old, I came across a motivational speaker named Zig Ziglar. And one of his series was See You at the Top. And I say this unequivocally, other than my family and friends, the most important or most influential person in my life is Zig Ziglar. Always listening to that positive message and realizing it’s up to me and I can do it. I, to this day, on a weekly basis, I’ll listen to him for a couple of minutes when I’m getting ready in the morning. That positive thinking really helped me along my journey of sight loss. To this day, it does.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Cool. So at the time I met you, you were still with Fidelity, but you had a cane in your hand. So you went from covering to something else.
Jeff Wissel: Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: On that journey.
Jeff Wissel: So I had an amazing thing happen. I had the opportunity to have a temporary loan position to Margie at Fidelity. She was leading accessibility, and just what an amazing opportunity. What an amazing human being. And had the opportunity to — she introduced me to a colleague that we worked with. She’s out of Boston, I’m in Cincinnati, and this woman’s name is Alicia. And she had lost her sight due to diabetic retinopathy 20 years earlier. And she was a coach to our senior leadership. And Margie introduced us via email. And so Alicia and I talked and we set up a recurring, like every other week, meeting. I now had someone in my life who was blind. And not only that, she was a vice president and a coach to our senior leadership. And she’s speaking to me.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Nice.
Jeff Wissel: We became fast friends and everything. And the most amazing thing happened after our connection. We would tell our colleagues about the connection that we made. And every time I tell someone, they would say, oh, wow, that’s pretty cool. I have, you know, whatever, or my daughter was just diagnosed with — and it’s like, once I allowed myself to be vulnerable, other folks felt comfortable. And everybody’s got something. Even Ken and Barbie have something. It may not be a physical disability, but everybody has something. And when you allow yourself to be vulnerable, it’s amazing what goodness happens. And Alicia said, you know, this is really working for us. You want to start an employee resource group for colleagues with disabilities? And I’m like, okay, I’m the poster child for covering this, but you’re a vice president and it’s working for us. So I went through this chain of events and ended up starting our employee resource group. We started it in my regional phone center where we had 3,000 people. And after six months, it was —
Dr. Kirk Adams: About what year was that?
Jeff Wissel: Oh gosh. 2017, 2018.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay. Okay. So —
Jeff Wissel: And it was successful. So we were able to have it happen in the other ten regional phone centers. But we would market this in our internal publication a couple times, and every time we put an article, our colleagues from the other phone centers would say, hey, when this gets to Boston or Merrimack, I want to be part of it, because I have, or my spouse has. And so it was just amazing how much we were learning about the disability dimension of our own employee base.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Jeff Wissel: And with that, I found nine other people in my little regional office of 3,000. Nine other folks who had RP.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So you were not the only one.
Jeff Wissel: But they all felt they were the only ones, and they were covering. And that’s just RP. All the other disabilities then.
Jeff Wissel: And so that led to the opportunity then to think, okay, if we’re learning about all this on our own associates, what are our customers telling us? And so we had the opportunity to go through some research and found that, wow, we have a pretty large segment of our client base who have disabilities, that are self disclosing during courses of their financial conversations. And a very common one —
Dr. Kirk Adams: All of the employees of the Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind were Fidelity customers. That’s where we did our 403(b), our retirement.
Jeff Wissel: I think one out of four people have a retirement plan with Fidelity. It’s an amazing company.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Jeff Wissel: And so we found that, wow, if a spouse — say a spouse loves talking to us, but due to the aging process, they’re not able to hear on the phone anymore. So their partner has to call in, who never wanted to call us in the first place, has to gather information that they’re not familiar with and then share it. And the person who really loved doing this is missing out. It’s not a complaint. It’s just a life event. But you get enough of these life event stories together and we build a business case, and found that, wow, this segment is a very profitable segment. And especially in financial markets, it generally takes a lifetime to accumulate wealth. So the population skewed older, and all these things. So that helped us to launch an Office of Customer Accessibility and to initiate a lot of accessibility processes. And just an amazing journey. But that vulnerability, embracing vulnerability, was one — I think that is the greatest leadership lesson any manager, any leader, can possess. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, it just knocks down walls and it allows everybody to be their authentic selves.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Jeff Wissel: It’s such a great leadership. But the other thing I’ll say, Dr. Kirk, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if it wasn’t for every single person that played a role in this. I’ll give you a really quick example, because I think this is important for all folks out there who are managers of people. We had our phone center and we had our phones, and the phone had a little light indicator on there. And if it’s red, I mean, you got a lot of people holding, right? And you always want to take care of that client like they’re the most important person you can talk to that day. But you always have to be efficient and effective and right and everything. And when I went to my manager after Alicia said, we ought to think about this, that light was red. It was during tax season. And when I asked my manager about this, I would love to pursue this. He so easily could have said, Jeff, you know, the light’s red. I believe in you. It’s a great idea. It’s just not the right time right now. His name was Andy. He didn’t say that. He said, let’s go talk to Matt, our general manager. And that’s like, it’s a great idea. It’s going to be beneficial for our employees and for our customers. And it just went up the ranks. Without, if any one of —
Dr. Kirk Adams: What was the modification?
Jeff Wissel: Oh, no. I’m going to start an employee resource group. So if any one of those people in the leadership roles —
Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh, now’s not the right time. That means I’m sorry.
Jeff Wissel: The light was red.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Just meant that we’re super, super busy. Okay. Absolutely.
Jeff Wissel: Sorry about that. Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That’s okay. So if the light’s red, we don’t have time to do anything else but tend to the phones. Gotcha.
Jeff Wissel: That’s how cool Fidelity is. Yeah, that type of leadership. But and then everyone else, in addition, after that, could have derailed it. But now there’s 8,000 people, 8,000 employees who are active members of employee resource group. It’s amazing when you look back how life kind of ebbs and flows.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, that’s enough of a legacy for a lifetime for you. You created an employee resource group that’s now supporting 8,000 people. That’s amazing.
Jeff Wissel: It’s an amazing company. Amazing people.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, then actually another pretty significant part of my life and Jeff Wissel intersected, and that was with Disability:IN. So I was hired by the Lighthouse for the Blind here in Seattle in 2000 to be the development director and set up the foundation and the fundraising board and things like that. I entered this field through resource development. And I think around 2003, there was a woman named Marthalee Galeota, and she had managed the Lighthouse Deaf-Blind program, and she was hired as the first disability inclusion accessibility lead at Starbucks, a Seattle based company. And she called me one day and said, there’s this thing called the United States Business Leadership Network. And it was started by the U.S. Chamber. It’s a bunch of companies that are committed to including people with disabilities. And we’re having this conference and you really need to come. So I went to my first USBLN conference, which was later renamed Disability:IN. I think it was 2003, around in there. It was at the Gaylord at National Harbor, Maryland, which is a huge labyrinth, an O&M challenge in itself. And there are probably 300, 350 people there. And they’re primarily kind of HR specialists, HR generalists who are trying to figure out how to hire some people with disabilities. And fast forward to today, it’s a powerhouse in the corporate space.
Dr. Kirk Adams: If you go to https://disabilityin.org and click on their corporate partners, you’ll see the companies that are involved. Thousands of people attend the national conference. Jeff — John Kemp was the executive director when I first went. Jill Houghton has been the executive director there for quite some time now. I met her when she was Jill Deatherage, and she was leading the Washington State Business Leadership Network here in Washington state. So I attended probably 12 or 14 Disability:IN conferences. You mentioned the Disability Equality Index earlier. That’s a tool that they developed. I was on the advisory council for developing the DEI. They’ve got the Disability-Owned Business Enterprise certification program, where businesses owned by people with disabilities can become certified, and their corporate members are committed to doing business with that supply base. So they’ve done a lot of great things, and one great thing they did was hire you as the Chief Accessibility Officer. So I know I introduced you as Vice President, Accessibility at Aira, which is your new role, but in between Fidelity and Aira, there was Disability:IN. And so we’d love for you to talk a little bit about that chapter of your life, and what your reflections upon the knowledge, skills, experiences, wisdom you gained through that chapter.
Jeff Wissel: We don’t have enough time for me to share everything. It was such an amazing — it was a daily pinch myself opportunity. It was an amazing opportunity, amazing organization. But I’ll go back a few years, Dr. Kirk, before I even heard of Disability:IN, when I was on loan to the Fidelity accessibility, to Margie. I was doing some Google searching and I came across this thing called the Disability Index. And I downloaded this benchmarking survey and had this gold mine of what the best in class companies were doing around disability accessibility and disability inclusion. And one of the things I noticed was that best in class companies have an accessibility help link in the global footer section of their website. So that way, no matter what page you’re on, that link is always down at the bottom there if you needed assistance. Well, I looked at https://fidelity.com and we didn’t have that. And so I started reaching out to the leadership. And the disability index, it’s a roadmap of everything. There’s like ten categories. One’s accessibility, one’s culture, all these others. And that was my roadmap. And so I would get, reach out, an email internally to someone who I didn’t know who they were, but I saw their title, and shared with them that I was on loan to the accessibility team.
Jeff Wissel: I’m an individual phone representative and have a couple questions about this. And it took about a year, a year and a half, and ultimately got that link on the website. The website at that point took like 2.3 million hits on average per day. And I was just waiting for someone to say, now, who are you and why are you asking us these questions? But that index gave me the confidence in the information and the knowledge to have those conversations. Again, just one of those things that happens in life. And another thing was procurement. Companies buy so many products and services, and they don’t have control over the accessibility unless you ask for it. So I started reaching out to our procurement team and came across this wonderful woman, Rhonda, and I shared with her what I was looking at. Next thing I know, she’s scheduling meetings with the head of procurement. And I’m like, I’m going to get in trouble. I have no authority. But it was amazing, because it made so much sense. So anyway, that was my first engagement with Disability:IN, was the Disability Index.
Jeff Wissel: Well, okay, after that first year and a half and we got some things done, then I asked our leadership if we could take the Disability Index, and we did. And each year we would improve on what we were doing, and I would attend the conferences. So I had the opportunity then to meet Jill and the team, and was pretty involved with Disability:IN from the corporate side. And then there was a voluntary buyout offer and it was a perfect time in my life, and I accepted it. And then this amazing chain of events where Disability:IN had the opportunity for the Chief Accessibility Officer role. And I was offered that, and it was an amazing four years and eight months. I had the opportunity to work with the accessibility leaders and teams and employee resource group leaders, diversity officers, accommodations teams, procurement teams of the world’s greatest companies. Like 72 of the Fortune 100 are part of it. And the greatest thing, Dr. Kirk, was not the knowledge — knowledge sharing and information gathering was just amazing. But I always, when someone asks how I’m doing, it’s a Zig Ziglar thing, I always say I’m doing beyond awesome. If there’s something going on in my life —
Dr. Kirk Adams: I did not know where that came from, but I certainly know that’s what you do say.
Jeff Wissel: If something’s going on in my life, I’m transparent. I’ll share it. But I am constantly surrounded by people who are trying to make a positive difference for others. That was every day of my life at Disability:IN. So the accessibility folks who are making the positive difference, the accommodations teams, that was my every call. That’s what that was all about. So that’s why, I mean, it was a pinch myself moment every day to be part of that. And again, one of the really cool things about this space, the accessibility space — I quote Jenny Lay-Flurrie when she says, when one of us wins in this space, we all win. And my buddy Mike from JP Morgan would always say, it’s oftentimes we’re so heads down and just going through everything you need to do to make your websites and digital and mobile and all that accessible, that sometimes it’s just good to lift your head up and have this network of competitors and business who are collaborators in accessibility, to know that your positive affirmation that you’re on the right track. And it’s amazing how many companies are willing to share things where they failed, things that are working, on things that they’re having success with, all in the accessibility space. Everybody pays it forward. It’s one of the things about the Disability:IN conference — that’s an annual conference every year that you mentioned. The most common comment that we hear is folks say, I’ve never been in a corporate environment where so many people have so freely shared. Nobody’s giving away their trade secrets or NDAs, but there’s so much that we can share, and together, we’re better. And what an amazing experience.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, I’ll tell you, before we turn the page again to Aira, I wanted my brief Disability:IN story. I was at a conference in probably 2008 or 9, and I happened to be sitting next to a blind gentleman in one of the audiences. And we got to talk. His name was Bob Vetere, and he was an HR leader with Northrop Grumman, and he was totally blind. I had just gotten my first iPhone. Over lunch, he actually taught me how to send a text on my iPhone with VoiceOver. So whenever that was. But I was running the — I was president and CEO of the Lighthouse for the Blind here. And we have blind and DeafBlind machinists who make parts for the Boeing company, and have done for many years, and are a top rated supplier of aerospace parts. So it’s precision machining. And I was telling him about that. Of course, Northrop Grumman’s an aerospace company. So I said, you need to meet Wes Bush. He was the CEO at the time of Northrop. And he said, we’re having this reception tonight. It’s only for Northrop people, but I’ll take you. And so we went. And Wes Bush is a wonderful man. Very busy. People want his time. He said, give him your 30 seconds. So I said, Mr. Bush, so glad to meet you. I’m president and CEO of the Lighthouse for the Blind in Seattle, where we proudly employ 150 blind and DeafBlind machinists who make AS9100 certified aerospace parts for the Boeing Company.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And he said, let me get this straight. You say out in Seattle, you have blind, DeafBlind people who can make AS9100 certified aerospace parts. I said, yes, sir. And he turned to someone and said, get them in the supply chain. So as a result, Northrop Grumman sent engineers and they spent eight or nine months and probably many tens of thousands of dollars to get us ITAR certified, which is international trade in arms regulations, so that we can make parts for defense. And we became a Northrop Grumman supplier, and we became a Boeing defense supplier. And that is my best Disability:IN story. Well, thank you, Bob, in your retirement. Appreciate you. And so now, Aira. Aira comes calling, or you come calling them. I imagine you knew the team there and encountered them and their good work and were familiar. But how — the grass, what is it? A rolling stone gathers no moss. No moss gathered on you between Disability:IN and Aira. One minute I sent you an email that said out of office, no longer with Disability:IN. And then seemed like a week or ten days later, I am now a Vice President, Accessibility at Aira. So tell us about that.
Jeff Wissel: Sure. So it was probably eight years ago when my life was enhanced by Aira. I mentioned, when I was at Fidelity, we launched the Office of Customer Accessibility, and I live in Cincinnati. Well, the headquarters is in Boston, Massachusetts, and I had to fly from the Cincinnati airport to the Logan Airport. And a month or two before I was going to fly there by myself. Again, I wasn’t using a white cane at that point. So I’m using the sight that I have left to navigate the airports. And I wasn’t a frequent traveler on the airplanes, so I started using Aira. And like you mentioned, Dr. Kirk, the agents are able to provide the visual assistance that I needed and that I need today to navigate confidently and effectively and efficiently. It’s a point now where I waste zero mental energy when I think about traveling, because I have the confidence that when I need it, I’m going to have a trained, experienced agent that has amazing resources on their computer that’s able to see everything from the — now, my glasses, the camera on my glasses. But you can also just use your phone’s camera to help me independently travel. And when I had the opportunity to go to Boston to meet the leadership team, that was our steering committee, Aira and the agent helped me navigate the airport, helped me find baggage claim. I had a picture of my suitcase on the photo portion of the app, so the agent’s able to see my luggage coming around the carousel. And Dr. Kirk, all these are steps that help me find my inner voice, to realize that my sight loss is a strength and not the weakness or vulnerability that I was allowing it to be up until I was age 48.
Jeff Wissel: It’s something I relearn every day, right? I mean, there’s always things that come up where you have to have that internal endurance and mental fortitude to know that, hey, this might be challenging right at this moment. I’m going to be better 20 minutes from now because of what’s happening right now. But Aira helped me gain that independence, and to keep my independence, I should say. So I’m an avid user of Aira. So when — every time has a season, and it was just the right time for me to move. I don’t change jobs very often. 28 years at Fidelity, four years and eight months at Disability:IN. But a mentor of mine who’s blind, who’s lived in 16 countries, who is a CFO of a major airline, he’s a mentor and a friend. And about nine months ago we were talking and he said, you’ve been in the corporate world, big business, for 34 years. I’ve been consulting with startups for quite a few years, in addition to his day job. And he said, it’s fascinating. He said, I would encourage you to kind of check it out. So I spent time researching all this. Well, Troy is the CEO of Aira, and I’ve known Troy for years.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Troy Otillio. Yeah.
Jeff Wissel: He’s amazing. He’s one of the smartest guys I know. He is unequivocally the most collaborative leader I have ever had the honor of knowing. Now I get to work for him. But I reached out to Troy to get his guidance, and we were talking, and the opportunity was presented to join Aira and to use the experience of 34 years in the corporate world, especially the past ten plus years building a network of folks leading accessibility departments and everything that I mentioned. And my passion the rest of my life, Dr. Kirk, is to help individuals who are blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, really anyone with a disability, if they haven’t embraced it, to find their inner voice with their disability, and to do everything that we can to help them realize that what they have is a strength. It’s not a weakness or a vulnerability. It’s the exact opposite. Because on a daily basis, we all know we have to solve problems. We have to find alternative ways to do traditional things every hour of every day. That is what companies want. They want folks who are innovators and thinkers and who can overcome adversity just even to show up, let alone to be able to perform at their peak. But it takes someone or an experience or a chain of experiences to help folks realize this, because there are stigmas about disability and so forth. And Aira is an amazing tool. It’s amazing. You can bring online, on your phone or Meta glasses, in a matter of seconds, a trained agent who can give visual interpretation. We also have a platform for American Sign Language interpreters. You can bring up an American Sign Language interpreter in a matter of seconds, who can make what would normally be an awkward or almost impossible conversation — even just checking into a hotel, if you’re deaf, hard of hearing — they can make that like a pleasurable experience, like everyone else is able to have.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. That’s great.
Jeff Wissel: It’s a tool.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And that’s fairly new, right?
Jeff Wissel: So it is. Past couple of years. Yeah. That’s great. So Aira is a tool. It’s an assistive technology. It’s perfect for when it’s needed. It’s not going to solve everything. I use a golfer’s analogy. I’m not a golfer, not yet anyway. But a golfer always has a bag of clubs. You can’t get through a golf course effectively and competitively with a putter. Aira is a tool, just like a golf club is a tool. We all need alternative devices. But in all of the circumstances where it works, it’s amazing. So that’s how I got to Aira. I’m two months now behind the scenes, and Dr. Kirk, it’s my — our friend Mike, who encouraged me to check out a startup, was right. It is innovative. It is fast paced. There’s no bureaucracy. Stuff moves, especially —
Dr. Kirk Adams: Probably doesn’t take you a year and a half to get a link added to a website.
Jeff Wissel: But what’s cool — you mentioned Suman. Yeah. Aira, the acronym A-I-R-A, stands for Artificial Intelligence Remote Assistance. This was 11 years ago. That’s pretty forward thinking, isn’t it?
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.
Jeff Wissel: Yeah. And now we are heavily involved with artificial intelligence, and folks who use Aira for visual interpreting, we call ourselves Aira Explorers. The Aira Explorers have the opportunity to opt in, because Aira is a subscription service.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right?
Jeff Wissel: And Explorers can opt in and allow that interaction. It’s anonymized, and so all personal information stripped out of it, but that data can be used then to train a large learning model so that it has actual representative information about the blind low vision community.
Dr. Kirk Adams: And I certainly signed up for that as soon as I learned of it, because I —
Jeff Wissel: You have 72 hours to cancel it if you want, but you can do interaction by interaction. Yeah. And then it’s free. That interaction is free to the user. Yeah.
Dr. Kirk Adams: I have an ongoing dynamic of angst around the fact that the lived experience of disability is underrepresented in the large language models, because they’re built on data. The data is gathered by people using technology, and people with disabilities use technology less than people without. So some bad things happen because of that underrepresentation of our lives. So I applaud Aira for efforts to address that by gathering our anonymized data to train the LLM. So good on you.
Jeff Wissel: What’s great in my role is, one strategy around that 3.97% self disclosure rate is for companies to provide assistive technologies that kind of bypass the accommodations process. So when companies bring Aira into their enterprise and make it as an accommodation for employees who are blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing, they don’t have to go through the accommodations process. What’s really cool?
Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. When Suman first rolled out the employment initiative for Aira, the American Foundation for the Blind was the first company to sign up as an employment partner and offer Aira as an accommodation for our blind and visually impaired employees. And proud of that. And it worked great. We were largely virtual. So we had a blind person working from their home office. And this is before [Aira? 00:49:38] desktop. Their computer froze and JAWS stopped talking, and they didn’t know what was going on the screen. So they could call up the agent and hold up their phone, figure it out. So it worked really well for workplace accommodations for our blind and visually impaired folks.
Jeff Wissel: I love it. Yep. And when it’s part of the process, when it’s part of the accommodations catalog, it takes the stigma away from it. Yeah. And so forth. So that’s a huge win there. And then think about this. If a company has a headquarters, it’s not just employees that are there. They’re bringing guests in from their customers and everybody, vendors. I ask leaders to think about this. Do you want to be that company that when someone who is blind, low vision or deaf, hard of hearing, one of your customers is coming in to your headquarters and you don’t have an accommodation, you don’t have an ASL interpreter on staff, so that deaf, hard of hearing person who uses ASL as their primary language cannot fully participate?
Dr. Kirk Adams: Right?
Jeff Wissel: Or someone’s blind, low vision, to not have that. Do you want to be that company, or do you want to be that company that wants everybody that enters their headquarters to be able to fully participate? So having it — we can geofence the location. So anybody that comes in that perimeter automatically, the company pays for the minutes then, but everybody’s welcomed. Everybody can fully communicate. Effective communications. And we’re grateful to Walmart, to Starbucks, to Target, the Cincinnati airport, all these airports. This Sunday I have the opportunity — it’s the last home game for the Cincinnati Reds. Great American Ball Park here in Cincinnati, Ohio, offers Aira for visual interpreting and American Sign Language to anyone that comes to the ballpark.
Dr. Kirk Adams: You can go get your hot dog during the seventh inning stretch independently. That’s pretty cool.
Jeff Wissel: Find my seat on the way back. And I can get a hot dog for someone else. Yeah. It’s incredible.
Dr. Kirk Adams: That’s fun. Yeah. So I know we’re coming to the end of our time. And I know after two months, you’re probably still kind of crafting your role. Knowing you, you’re shaping that. But it sounds like your focus currently is on working with companies and institutions, airports, businesses. Is that your focus right now?
Jeff Wissel: Yes. Overall accessibility. Definitely business development. A big focus on the corporate environment and global, and then also creating the awareness and the messaging, and always making it innovative, using AI in the right way, and making sure that Explorers are able to, in a matter of seconds, get what they need and be able to just move on to the next task of their day. I think one of the greatest opportunities is really creating that awareness, getting more folks to use Aira, more companies to offer it not only as an accommodation, but to their customers. How cool would it be to be able to go to your local grocery store independently and have Aira helping to find what you need in the aisles and so forth? So anyone that works for a company out there, if you need it as an accommodation, ask for it and we’ll help. Anybody that’s in the leadership position that thinks, wow, we want folks who are blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing to have an amazing experience at our retail stores or our banks, whatever it might be, we can help with that. We can geofence a location in about an hour. It’s incredible how fast we can go.
Dr. Kirk Adams: How do people get in touch?
Jeff Wissel: You can reach out to me directly. It’s very easy. It’s Jeff — jeff at Aira. Again, Aira is A-I-R-A, and since we’re a startup, it’s dot I-O. So jeff@aira.io, easiest way to get ahold of me.
Dr. Kirk Adams: So I’ve been thinking about community. As you mentioned, you thought you were the only one, and I didn’t know anyone, didn’t have any role models, etc. And then when you met Margie and she had introduced you to Alicia, so you had a blind role model there at Fidelity. And then you started the ERG. And then lo and behold, you find out there’s nine other people with RP right in the place you were working. So now there’s 8,000 people on the ERG. So I think about community. After I left — I went to a school for blind kids for first, second, third grade. After that, I was always the only blind student in my schools, and then all the way through every level of schooling. And then I was in banking and finance for ten years out of college, regional bank and a large commercial bank. I was the only person I was aware of who was blind, certainly the only totally blind person in my workspaces. So I didn’t really start interacting with blindness community until I was 30, early 30s. And I certainly wish I’d done it before. And now with the technologies we have at hand, it’s so much easier for us to connect and find others. And you certainly have a community of Explorers that you’re building. So I urge people to think about that. People say, especially parents of blind kids, what should we do? And find other parents of kids.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Join in community. I will say that one of my hats, I’m executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion here in Seattle. And we’ve just recently launched a Community Coalition. It’s like Aira, it’s a subscription, it’s a monthly subscription to join this coalition, that people who are interested in diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging, social justice, human dignity. So reach out to me if you’d like to learn more about that. You can reach Jeff at jeff@aira.io. You can reach me at kirkadams@drkirkadams.com. I’m on LinkedIn every day. It’s Kirk Adams, PhD on LinkedIn. And Jeff, this time flew by. And what I’d love to do is have you come back in about six months and tell us all of the things you’ve accomplished at Aira. Because I know there will be many accomplishments, having watched your career since we met in that crowded hallway in a D.C. hotel as they cleared the banquet room for Elaine Chao those many years ago. So it’s been great deepening our friendship and our professional relationship. Hopefully you’ll be coming back through Seattle for another Alaska cruise so we can have another nice sunset seafood dinner on the waterfront. Please give your wife our best from me and Ros, and we’ll talk again soon.
Jeff Wissel: Dr. Kirk, thanks for this amazing opportunity. Thanks for being my friend.
Dr. Kirk Adams: Absolutely. We’ll see everybody next time for another episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams. Take good care.
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