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Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams

Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams

By: Dr. Kirk Adams PhD
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Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams is a compelling podcast series that brings listeners into the world of accessibility, leadership, and social change through the lens of one of the most influential voices in blindness advocacy. Dr. Kirk Adams, former President and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind and a lifelong champion for the rights of people with visual impairments, hosts this insightful and inspiring program.2024 Economics Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Robert Annis, Co-Founder, NEURO

    Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Robert Annis, Co-Founder, NEURO
    Jun 16 2026
    🎙️ Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Robert Annis, Co-Founder, NEURO https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-by-dr-kirk-adams-06-16-2026/ In this candid episode of Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams welcomes Robert Annis, a London-based coach and organizational psychologist, and founder of NEURO, an inclusive charity built to make neuroinclusion a competitive advantage rather than a matter of ethics alone. Annis speaks openly about his own "late diagnosis" at 45 (he's now 47) as profoundly autistic, with co-occurring ADHD, prosopagnosia (face blindness), aphantasia, alexithymia, an absence of interoception, and severely deficient autobiographical memory, a lifetime of "masking" that finally had names. He explains why he founded NEURO after growing frustrated with charities focused on awareness alone: he wanted real social change, so he deliberately built NEURO to look and operate like a business consultancy, meeting leaders in the language of innovation, adaptability, and talent rather than moral obligation. It's a thesis Dr. Adams shares in his forthcoming book, The Disability Dividend: Supercharge Your Bottom Line Through Disability Inclusion, that the resilience and cognitive diversity forged by overcoming barriers are exactly what organizations need to thrive. The conversation then turns to how NEURO actually drives change: the NEURO Standard, an accreditation spanning five organizational pillars and three tiers that lets employers and universities prove they are continuously investing in inclusion, and, in turn, attract the roughly one in six people who are neurodivergent, plus everyone who loves them. Annis shares early wins, a Great Britain Olympic rugby player who rebuilt her youth-coaching approach for neurodivergent kids, and final-year students in London and Manchester who used the NEURO Standard to audit their own universities as their capstone project, alongside fast traction for a charity registered only about two months earlier: three university partners (two UK, one Australian), local-council ties reaching some 26 high schools, a charity-of-the-year award, volunteers across three continents, and a first major client in a large energy provider. He closes with a borderless five-year vision, licensing the model to "commercial delivery partners" worldwide, growing a free NEURO Library of practical resources, and recruiting volunteers in a way that deliberately advances each volunteer's own career. TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: 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 Podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am that Doctor Kirk Adams, talking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington — one of the sites for the World Cup. We had Egypt and Belgium yesterday, down the street from me, and on Friday it's the US and Australia, so football has taken over our city. And, coincidentally, I'm speaking today with someone from the United Kingdom: Robert Annis, who's based in London. Robert is the founder of NEURO, an inclusive charity seeking to make inclusion a competitive benefit to society — which aligns very closely with the work I do. Good morning to me, and good afternoon to you, Robert. Robert Annis: Thank you, Kirk — it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Dr. Kirk Adams: I'm glad you're here. I met Robert fairly recently through my good friend LinkedIn. As I said, Robert is the founder of NEURO, really focusing on working with organizations — companies, NGOs, governmental agencies — to help them understand that being inclusive of people with neurodiversity is a competitive advantage. I have a forthcoming business book that should be out soon; it's going into formatting right now, and it's called The Disability Dividend: Supercharge Your Bottom Line Through Disability Inclusion. So Robert and I have very similar views on the impacts of being truly inclusive of people with impairments — whether sight, hearing, neurological, or physical — and I'm really pleased to have Robert here today. We'll turn the microphone over to you; I'd love to hear the story. What's the journey that's brought you to where you are today with NEURO, and where are you going to take things? Robert Annis: Well, thank you, Kirk — that's a lovely introduction; I really appreciate it. It's really nice to be here. Getting to do something like a podcast is always a real pleasure, and it's always fascinating — you never know who's going to reach out afterwards and where it might lead, so I'm excited to see where this takes us. I think it's a really interesting topic you ...
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    36 mins
  • Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Jack Walters, Founder & CEO, Hapware

    Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Jack Walters, Founder & CEO, Hapware
    Jun 15 2026
    🎙️ Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Jack Walters, Founder & CEO, Hapware https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-by-dr-kirk-adams-06-15-2026/ In this illuminating episode of Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Jack Walters, co-founder and CEO of HapWare, to explore ALEYE, a haptic wristband built to give blind and low-vision people access to the visual, nonverbal layer of communication that makes up the majority of human interaction. Walters explains how the system pairs with Meta smart glasses to capture a live video stream, classifies gestures, facial expressions, and body language through the company's custom algorithms, and translates them into intuitive vibrations on the wrist, a handshake, a smile, a wave, someone walking away across the room, all in under a quarter of a second. He traces HapWare's journey from a research project at the Colorado School of Mines, where he met his blind co-founder Bryan Duarte (one of roughly twenty blind people worldwide with a PhD in computer science), through candid lessons about early prototypes that delivered real value but were bulky and uncomfortable, to a ground-up redesign led by industrial designers recruited from Hydro Flask, Tesla, and Rivian, the goal being a wearable people are genuinely proud to wear, not another device that lands on a shelf after a year. Dr. Adams and Walters then turn to the road ahead: HapWare plans to ship its first units at the end of 2026 and roughly a thousand through 2027, with a waitlist, pre-orders, and regional demonstration centers already taking shape. Walters describes a striking resonance with the deaf-blind community, the company's independently developed haptics map closely to pro-tactile communication, and HapWare is now working with the Helen Keller National Center and the FCC on the iCanConnect program, and lays out a roadmap toward emotional-intelligence cues and a broader vision of ALEYE as a "universal communication device." Drawing on his own experience with pro-tactile interpreting during his years leading the Seattle Lighthouse, Dr. Adams reflects on how haptics can deliver this information without crowding the audio channel that blind travelers rely on, and the two close with HapWare's current funding round (backed by Adaptation Ventures, where Dr. Adams is a limited partner) and the company's open, equity-bearing roles for people eager to help bring the technology to market. TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: 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 Podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am that Doctor Kirk Adams, talking to you from my office in sunny Seattle at the beginning of World Cup week here in Seattle — Belgium and Egypt are playing right down the street from me right now. My guest today is someone I met in person for the first time at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: Jack Walters, the founder of HapWare, an exciting new technology that will make the lives of blind people such as myself richer, deeper, and more vibrant. Say hey, Jack. Jack Walters: Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, absolutely. I first heard of HapWare from Thomas Panek, the CEO of the Lighthouse Guild in New York. He and I have been colleagues and friends for many years, going back to our National Industries for the Blind days, and he was very excited telling me about it. We touched on the fact that a large majority of communication, when people are talking, is nonverbal — it's visual, it's body language and facial cues and those types of things. And blind people have to contend with the fact that, traditionally, we haven't been able to incorporate that visual information into our communications. Thomas was very excited about it. Then I was at the Consumer Electronics Show, and my wife and I were wandering ballroom G, where most of the assistive technology companies were clustered, and we came across HapWare — a wearable that gives us information about the person we're talking to. I met Jack and some of the team. Later on — I'm a limited partner in an angel investing group called Adaptation Ventures, which specifically does early-stage investing in disability tech, and we have sessions where startups come and pitch their company to us — there was Jack, making the case for the Adaptation Ventures angel group to invest in HapWare, which we did. So there are quite a few roads leading me to Jack. I'm really just grateful for your time and for the opportunity to learn even more about the company. Could you tell us a little about the journey — your ...
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    39 mins
  • Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with James Dykstra, Founder, Code Stack Systems

    Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with James Dykstra, Founder, Code Stack Systems
    Jun 9 2026
    🎙️ Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with James Dykstra, Founder, Code Stack Systems https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-by-dr-kirk-adams-06-09-2026/ In this forward-looking episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, host Dr. Kirk Adams sits down with James Dykstra, founder of Code Stack Systems, to unpack why so many businesses are watching their AI initiatives stall, and what it actually takes to fix that. Dykstra traces his path from a childhood spent tinkering with DOS to finance and strategy roles at Amazon and Microsoft, then to co-founding a services firm built on the conviction that technology should improve lives. The central insight: companies rush to buy powerful AI tools, but those tools only magnify the gaps in fragmented, poorly tracked data. Using the analogy of a high-performance engine that is useless until it is connected to the rest of the vehicle, and of data as crude oil that must be extracted, refined, and piped before it can power anything, Dykstra explains Code Stack's "work backwards" methodology: start with a client's three-year vision, identify the tools and data required to reach it, and consolidate that data into a single platform rather than ripping out and replacing existing systems. The conversation closes on the future, where Dykstra is candidly optimistic. He anticipates a convergence of robotics, language models, new sensors, and cheaper energy driving steep cost declines, alongside real disruption and the rise of agentic AI, in which people task teams of AI "direct reports" much like human staff. Adams connects this to the accessibility frontier he knows firsthand, noting how rapidly AI-powered access to visual information has gone from novelty to expectation in the blindness and low-vision community, with agentic AI now emerging as the next horizon. Dykstra leaves listeners with a message of hope tempered by realism: the road will be hard, but the foundational investments made now, in the right data behind the right tools, will determine who thrives. TRANSCRIPT: 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 a blustery Seattle Washington. Today. You might hear some rain whipping against the windows in June Seattle that's that's that's the way we like it. Today I have a really interesting guest from a very interesting company. James Dykstra, the founder of Code Stack Systems, is with us today. Hi, James. James Dykstra: Hello, doctor. Kirk Adams, thank you very much for having me on the show. Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, absolutely. So encountered code stack. I attended and, and gave a keynote presentation to a two day, two day gathering here in Seattle in March of start up companies and entrepreneurs and incubators and people interested in innovative technologies. And afterwards, one of the attendees, a gentleman named Ruben, came up to me and he said, I was really struck by your keynote presentation and in particular, your differentiation between impairment and disability. And it really resonated with me and I think it would resonate with my team. So would you. Would you be interested in getting on a call and talking more about it, and learning about what we do, and telling us more about what you do, and see if we could work together in some form or fashion. And I of course said, of course. I'm, I'm very prone to say, yes, let's, let's let's get to know one another and let's find where we share common ground and how we can help each other move forward. And so did that. Got on a call with, with the team. And we're continuing dialogue as I am an advisor to in a shareholder in another, a number of disability tech startups and always wanting to understand how innovation can create a more inclusive world and a world that's more accessible to everybody. And in my case, particularly people with disabilities. And so I will take just one minute 90s to talk about that differentiation between impairment and disability that that Rubin was struck by. Dr. Kirk Adams: So myself. Yeah. So myself, I'm totally blind, have been since age five. And I live in a world of work and play and scholarship and family. And many of the environments I operated in are not constructed specifically with me in mind. My impairment, visual impairment, my inability to see. And so we think about living in three different environments that we as human beings have created. One is built, which is the physical, one is social and one is digital. And as a person with an impairment, I ...
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    45 mins
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