Access Information News Posts

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, welcomes National Organization on Disability as the publication’s newest Sponsor, effective Monday, September 28, 2026, and argues that this one is a genuinely different kind of Sponsor. Nearly every Sponsor comes to reach the newsletter’s blind, low vision, deaf, deafblind, neurodivergent and disabled readership directly. NOD does not. Founded in 1982 by Alan A. Reich out of the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons, and led since May 2024 by President and CEO Beth Sirull, the Washington, DC nonprofit sells to corporate human resources departments and works what Sirull calls the demand side of disability employment, changing how companies hire, onboard, accommodate and promote disabled workers. Rather than paper over that distinction, Di Blasi names it plainly: there are hundreds of organizations working on making you ready for the job, and very few working on making the job ready for you.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, welcomes Jeremy Grandstaff and The Inspiration Foundation as the publication’s newest sponsor, and traces the unlikely path that brought them there. It begins on a supermarket shelf, with the working Braille printed on Cleanlogic’s bath and body packaging, a feature that required moving an entire product line off plastic and onto paper, and one that exists because of Beatriz “Bea” Shapiro, who lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa at about age seven and spent her career training blind people to use adaptive technology and placing them into jobs. Her son Isaac Shapiro and his business partner Mike Ghesser built Cleanlogic around that idea in 2006, and run an American production floor in Audubon, Pennsylvania staffed substantially by people with disabilities under a program they call Purchase To Employ. Di Blasi is careful to separate what is independently documented, the Overbrook School for the Blind hires, the twenty-nine jobs brought back from overseas, the reported wages and benefits, the NBC News coverage, and Pennsylvania’s 2025 Governor’s Achievement Award, from the share-of-workforce percentages the company reports about itself.