ATU656 – Dr. Kirk Adams PhD

Hi, this is Dr. Kirk Adams, managing director of Innovative Impact LLC, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 656 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on December 22, 2023. Today, folks, we’re super excited to have Dr. Kirk Adams on the show. And you know what, let’s just go ahead and get on with the interview.

Listeners, I am not 100% sure how to introduce our next guest, as I’m bound to just leave something out. Dr. Kirk Adams is the previous leader of the American Foundation for the Blind and is now working on multiple projects revolving around employment, technology, and opening access for individuals who are blind or visually impaired. And well, we’re just excited to learn more. My only real regret about today is that I feel like with the background such as his, we really should had him on the show a whole lot earlier. Dr. Adams, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it.

Yeah, I am really excited to just kind of hear about everything, but I guess could you start us off by telling our listeners just a little bit about yourself?

Sure, sure, sure. I am a totally blind person, have been since age five. My retina is detached. And I went to a school for blind children, the Oregon State School for the Blind. First, second, and third grade, learned how to read and write Braille and travel independently with a white cane, how to type on a typewriter so I could start in public school when I was ready and type my assignments for my teachers. But I also learned how to love myself as a blind person, how to feel confident moving through space, how to take on challenges and solve problems.

So I was given a lot of gifts that are really predictors for being able to thrive as a blind adult. So I had high expectations from my school and my parents, which is a great success factor. I had that strong internal locus of control built into my bones, believing that I could take on challenges and solve problems and also blindness skills, which include technology skills. At that time, the technology was a manual typewriter. Technology is different now, but you have to be able to master the current technology really in order to thrive.

So I had all those seeds planted early and went on through school, got an undergraduate degree in economics, had a very challenging time finding employment as so many of us do with only about 35% of working-age blind adults in the workforce. I managed to get a job actually in the securities industry selling tax-free bonds over the phone, a straight commission. I did that for 10 years. And then I pivoted into the nonprofit sector. I really decided at around age 30, I wanted to devote my professional career to creating opportunities for people who are blind and making the path easier for the next generations of young blind people moving from school to work and wanting to become employed and have careers and buy houses and have families and all the things. So I’ve devoted myself to that.

I became a nonprofit fundraiser was how I entered the field and raised money for the statewide Talking Book and Braille Library here in Washington State. And then through some twists and turns, I became the president and CEO of the Lighthouse for the Blind here in Seattle, which is a social enterprise employing blind and deaf-blind people in businesses, most interestingly aerospace machining. So about 120 blind and deaf-blind machinists using very sophisticated equipment to machine parts for all the Boeing aircraft.

And then was recruited to become president and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind, which is Helen Keller’s organization where she served as brand ambassador for 45 years. And took on that role. And in 2016, my wife and I moved from Seattle to New York City, which was an adventure, and then to the Washington, DC area. And then after six years at AFB, which was a financial turnaround situation, did what I set out to do and got them back on a good footing and wanted to move back home to Seattle, first grandchild was being born, my father was passing away, all my family’s here. So came back home and about 16 months ago started a consulting practice called Innovative Impact LLC, and really using what I’ve learned over the last 35 years to work with for-profit and nonprofit organizations to help them accelerate inclusion of people who are blind in their workforce. So that’s a quick run through the life to date.

Well, and I feel like we could probably fill two or three shows just having you elaborate on some of those things. But I want to talk about some of the projects that you’re working with kind of through your consulting and other stuff. And I know you’re currently working on some great projects around employment and individuals with different kinds of visual impairments. So let’s start with the work with the Apex program. I guess start by just giving us a broad overview of the project.

Yeah. So when I was at the American Foundation for the Blind, we had a five-year cooperative agreement with a federal agency called the AbilityOne Commission to do research on three new lines of business that could be brought under the AbilityOne umbrella to create career pathways for people who are blind into competitive integrated employment. And we did a very thorough job of research, and one of the three areas we identified was cybersecurity.

And the White House put out a guidance this past July, strategic framework for education and workforce in cybersecurity. And at that time they cited there were 755,000 open positions in cybersecurity in the United States. And as I mentioned earlier, only 35% of blind adults are in the workforce. So it seems like a very logical thing to do would be to create a pathway for blind people to move into cybersecurity careers.

And as luck would have it, summer 2022, when I started my consulting practice, I had reached out to friends and colleagues to let them know I was looking for fun, high-impact, innovative projects to work on. And a blind colleague and friend, Dan Berlin, had met one of the founders of a cybersecurity company called Novacoast. And Novacoast is about 27 years old, privately held, started out in Santa Barbara, California. They mostly work with large global financial institutions. They’re very well respected and established.

They had started a business some years ago. They were having trouble finding enough entry-level people to hire for themselves, so they created a 10-week virtual training program to prepare people for cybersecurity careers. And they set that up as a business unit known to train people in general who were interested. They moved their headquarters from Santa Barbara to Wichita Kansas for tax purposes and we’re connected with a blindness agency there called Envision. And Envision proposed that they should consider training blind people for cybersecurity careers using the curriculum they had. So they worked together, they made everything accessible so blind people like myself who use screen reading software can participate, follow the curriculum, sit for the tests, get the certifications. And then Novacoast also has another business unit, which is a staffing unit, and they place people into cybersecurity jobs with other employers.

So I came along right when the program had been established, it had been set up with the state of Kansas vocational rehabilitation, but they weren’t getting students. My friend Dan met one of the founders. She was telling him the story and saying they were very excited about the prospects of training blind people for cybersecurity but that they weren’t getting the outcomes they wanted as far as the students signing up.

So they connected with me and I had an hour-long meeting with their president who lives in Seattle, and we said, “Let’s make this happen.” So what I’m doing, the program is called the Apex Program, and there’s a website, www.theapexprogram.com, there’s an inquiry form. If anyone listening would like to learn more, go to www.theapexprogram.com and fill out the inquiry form.

But it’s 10 weeks, 200 hours of training, 20 hours a week. There are tutorials, there are transcripts people can read, you could listen to a verbal lecture, you can do both. There are videos for those who have some vision. And then the person does the 20 hours a week however they can fit it into their life. There’s a daily quiz just to make sure people are staying on track. And then at the end of 10 weeks, there are two basic certifications that are standard in cybersecurity. One is called Network+, one’s called Security+. And people sit for those tests, they get their certs, and then Novacoast’s staffing will help them to find interviews.

And a couple of beautiful things I’ve learned about cybersecurity. One is you don’t need a degree.

Nice.

The certifications are king in cyber, and once you have your initial two, you’ll probably go on and get more and more. And probably 90% of the jobs are remote. So that is such a beautiful thing for people who are blind in particular because transportation is always one of the top barriers to successful employment. Transportation and employer attitudes are always either one or two on the list of greatest barriers to successful employment. So the fact that most of the jobs are remote really fits in with the population that I’m seeking to serve.

And it’s a very new program. We’ve had our first successful student graduate certified hired. We’ve got about 20 students in the pipeline right now. And we start a new group the first working Monday of every month. Five more people just started this month. So I’m very excited about it. I’ve been working on blind employment for 35 years and this is a winner. And we’re getting it set up state by state so vocational rehabilitation can pay the cost of the program. And it’s a beautiful thing.

No, that’s really cool. And what a great partnership that you found a place that couldn’t find enough employees so they built a training program and then they built their own program to help people find jobs, and then were smart enough to partner to find a population that wants to work. So yeah.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

It’s amazing when you can look at a problem, look at another problem and another problem, put them all together and find a solution,

And all the pieces fit together. And for anything really significant to happen, transformational in society, you have to have government, corporate, nonprofit, and community all aligned together. So in this case, you’ve got the government piece with the vocational rehabilitation agencies funded by Department of Ed, how you’re paying for the training. We’ve got a list of 70 companies that also cannot find enough people to hire who would happily interview anyone who goes through this program. Then we are establishing partnerships with nonprofit agencies in various communities. And then, of course, reaching out to the blindness communities, the Council of the Blind, Federation of the Blind, et cetera. So we’re getting everybody rowing in the same direction here.

Oh, that’s excellent. I know you gave us the website, and we’ll definitely go over that kind of again later. But let’s say that someone is interested in this kind of program. Are there certain kinds of skills that maybe an individual should have coming into the program?

Great question. Yeah, you have to have basic computer skills, mostly around operating in a web-based environment. Most of the cybersecurity productivity tools are very accessible, they’re Microsoft-based, we-based. But yeah, if you’re using JAWS screen or reading softwares and texts, whatever you use, you don’t have to be a computer genius, but you need to be able to do a search engine search and navigate around a website.

Okay.

And then it’s detailed work. You have to be able to enjoy digging into detail to be a creative problem-solver. The entry-level cybersecurity analyst 1 is very structured. It’s kind of like a tax form. If A, then B, if not A, then go to C. There’s a playbook basically that you follow. So you’re being notified that something’s happened. There’s automated tools that are constantly scanning these digital assets looking for cybersecurity incidents. And they’ll send the cybersecurity analyst a notice, like, “Something happened.” And then the analyst job is to go and look at it, follow the playbook, and either determine, no, nothing bad did happen. There’s no need for further action. Or if there’s a need for further action, then it gets elevated to a more specialized person. But once you enter the cybersecurity world, there are just so many hundreds of different career paths that people can take.

It’d definitely be shortchanging the audience if we stop with just this project. Although, I mean, I think that’s probably enough to make a great show, but you’re involved in so much other great work as well. So can you tell us a little bit about your work with United Safety Tech?

Sure. So as I mentioned, I have experience in involving people with disabilities in manufacturing. United Safety Technology is a company that makes personal productive equipment. When the pandemic first started, they quickly stood up a factory in California to make respirators, and the Department of Defense became a customer because they were one of the few domestic producers at any scale of the sophisticated face masks.

And then subsequently, the Department of Defense has determined strategically that as a country, we need domestic suppliers of PPE before the next pandemic or health crisis happens. And they provided grant monies to companies to stand up domestic production. So United Safety Technology was given a hundred million dollar grant to stand up domestic production of medical gloves. There was a huge shortage of those at the beginning of the last pandemic. And our first responders and medical people did not have the medical gloves they needed to protect themselves and their patients.

So they have leased a former Bethlehem steel plant right outside of Baltimore, 700,000 square feet, and they are importing equipment to make medical gloves from Malaysia where most of the world’s production is done. They will have 2,000 employees when they’re up and running, and they want to use this opportunity to stand up a new operation to be inclusive of the community.

The owner has a severe learning disability that he’s kept hidden for most of his life, and he is very intentionally going to target 30% of his workforce to be people with disabilities. So that would be 600 jobs. They’re starting hiring as we speak. They’ll hire their first 500 employees over the next 12 months. And to help them move forward, I was able to arrange their leadership team to visit the Walgreens, warehouse and distribution center in Anderson, South Carolina, which is a really cool story.

A gentleman named Randy Lewis was head of supply chain for Walgreens. He’s retired now, but has an autistic son. And when he was tasked with building from the ground up this new warehouse distribution center in South Carolina, he got buy-in from Walgreens leadership to design it specifically to be inclusive of people with developmental disabilities, with a target of 40% of the employees being people with developmental disabilities. And they’ve accomplished that. And they’ve partnered with, again, the government, state agencies, vocational rehabilitation agencies in South Carolina, the nonprofits who bring them potential employees.

They’ve put together a very unique on-the-job, hands-on, nine-week interview process. They partnered with a small university called Anderson University to track all the data. So that Anderson, South Carolina warehouse and distribution center with 40% of the employees being people with disabilities, they’ve got about 550 total employees. It’s their most productive warehouse and distribution center. It’s got the highest employee morale, the best safety records, the lowest turnover, the lowest absenteeism. And if you sit down with their management, you’ll just hear what a transformational experience it is for everybody and how inclusion has improved the lives of everybody who works there.

And so I was able to take United Safety Technology there for a day. And leadership teams were able to sit together and really talk about it and really work through the brass tacks of how they’ve done this over the last 15 years. And now since then, Sephora, the company Sephora has followed the Walgreens model. They’re doing it. And United Safety Technology is starting to do it. And we would love to find other manufacturers, warehousing, distribution center type operations who would like to be inclusive because there’s a great model that works well and you get better business outcomes through doing it.

Oh, sure. And I always love the Anderson story just because it takes all those misconceptions people have about having employees with disabilities and shows that actually pretty much the opposite is true.

That’s right.

Of your, “Well, it’s going to cost more and they’re not going to be able… And people aren’t going to be able to show up for work.” And all these just misconceptions that I know I’ve run into working in employment and AT and other kind of places. And it’s like, “No, actually, really the opposite is actually true.” So very, very cool. And I love that you were able to kind of show them there at United Safety Technologies that that can work. And hopefully more and more places will get on board. Well, we’ve got a little bit more time left. You’re also an advisor to the CurbCutOS team. Tell us a little bit about that project.

Yes, CurbCutOS is a company I became acquainted with when I was at the American Foundation for the Blind and we had an accessibility consulting practice. And it is a company that helps companies make sure they are accessible from a very 360 degree standpoint. It’s a very fragmented industry, but typically a company will reach out to an accessibility company when they’re being sued or being threatened with a lawsuit because they’re not accessible. CurbCut tries to get ahead of that. And it’s usually a fix the problems model where they’ll use a digital tool, scan everything, fix it, and then next time they make any kind of a change, it can become inaccessible again.

So CurbCut works with companies to look holistically at accessibility, not just their website and their apps, but their recruiting and hiring processes, their marketing. They look at accessibility as a journey. They work with the company to find out where they can take the first bite of the elephant and start improving and put together a long-term plan. They teach the people how to fish, they train the IT staff on accessibility, and they’ve developed some really wonderful tools that companies can use no matter which accessibility company or tools they’re using that uses a combination of AI and human manual testing and feeds into a best practices database based on every project and everything they do to build this database of best practices that their clients can take advantage of.

And full disclosure, I’m a very small percentage owner of this company. When they asked me to be on the advisory board, they offered me a small ownership piece. But I just really like their approach. They are hiring people with disabilities very intentionally and proactively as well. So I’m really driven by employment. So any project I’m involved in.

I’ll tell you about another one.

Yes, for sure,

Eye C Better. It’s E-Y-E C Better. And it’s a startup, also a very small owner. But they are a platform to help support people with glaucoma. And they’ve developed technology so people with glaucoma can measure their own eye pressures and it feeds into an app. And Eye C Better helps them to manage their diet, their exercise, their medications.

And my driver there is they’re out seeking, they’re raising funds right now. But if they scale to the point where we want them to, they’ll have 300 or 400 patient care coordinators and they want to be intentional to hire blind and visually impaired people for those jobs. And we’re adapting a patient care coordinator certification program, that’s an industry standard, so it’s accessible. So blind people can go through the training, become a certified patient care coordinator, and then move into these jobs. And the plan calls for hiring our first 30 during calendar year 2024, and then accelerating from there.

Yeah. And it’s all, I know this is an Assistive Technology Update, none of this happens, none of this happens without assistive technology and accessibility.

Oh, for sure.

I found myself on five or six meetings today saying, “Accessibility is like baking blueberry muffins. It’s hard to put the blueberries in after the muffins baked.” So accessibility has to be in the ingredients.

Oh, very true. Yeah, that’s always my favorite. Whenever companies will come and kind of ask us, “Hey, we want to hire more people with disabilities, we’re trying to make our place fully accessible.” And it’s like, “Well, they can’t get to the application because your website’s not. So that’s why they’re not getting there.” It’s like, “Oh, well, we didn’t even think about that part.” It’s like, “Well, you got to start.” Like you said, you got to start at the beginning. You can’t get the blueberries in there at the very end.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Dr. Adams, how can our listeners find out more maybe about these great projects, about you, about the consulting? What are the best ways for them to do that?

LinkedIn is something I’m on a lot every day. So it’s Kirk Adams, PhD on LinkedIn. And my email address is my first and last name 000 at gmail.com. So kirkadams000@gmail.com. And I will talk to anyone anytime, go anywhere in order to accelerate inclusion of people who are blind in the workforce.

Awesome. We will put that information in the show notes so our listeners can easily find it and reach out. Thank you for all of the work that you’re doing.

Oh, thank you.

And thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about it. We look forward to maybe having you on somewhere down the road and just hear about all the other great things and some of the success stories out of everything you’re working on right now.

Hey, anytime. Anytime. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate you.

All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, are supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. And I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-Bye.