Access Information News Posts

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.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, welcomes the National Organization on Disability as the publication’s newest Sponsor, effective Monday, September 7, 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, introduces Luna AI, the publication’s newest Sponsor, and the person who built it. Luna AI is an AI tutor you reach by making an ordinary telephone call. There is no app to download, no account to create before you can hear anything, no smartphone requirement, and no screen anywhere in the process. You dial the number, or reach the same service on WhatsApp, and a tutor answers: it explains a concept out loud, asks you about it, listens to your answer in your own words, and tells you when you have it wrong. Load your own lecture notes, transcripts, PDFs or a Quizlet set into a Study Library first, and the session comes out of your material rather than out of whatever an AI happens to know. Calling is free, there is no paywall, and every caller has access to the full product, with a paid Luna AI Pro tier planned for 2027.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, welcomes Cazerny Bussey and Even Though I’m Blind, Inc. (ETIB) as the publication’s newest Sponsor, joining on August 10, 2026. Di Blasi opens with the detail that gives the piece its title: in 2021, Bussey, a Brooklyn-born recording artist who lost his eyesight at fifteen, released an album called Cfly 728, and one of its tracks was called “Even Though I’m Blind.” Four years later, that song title is the name of an organization running an internet radio station, an interview podcast, a curated directory of blind-owned businesses, a blog, an events calendar, and a project that collects encouragement from the community in fifteen-second voice recordings. The introduction came from Dr. Kirk Adams in late July 2026; Bussey accepted the following morning, and his first note back thanked Adams before it thanked Di Blasi.