Shortcuts Make Us Blind: What Ponzi Can Teach Businesses About Accessibility Quick fixes rarely work. True accessibility requires strategy, awareness, and action. Charles Ponzi didn’t invent fraud. ...

Agreed with Nielsen Norman Group regarding the #ios26: "Summary: iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replac...

It’s Customer Service Week. One of the biggest frustrations for deaf customers? Being told to call to talk to a representative. While some businesses now offer text and email, many still rely on ph...

Today marks the end of Deaf Awareness Month — but awareness doesn’t stop here. You may see my posts from time to time, but posts alone don’t replace in-depth awareness, training, and strategy. Acce...

Just like in travel, healthcare shows a troubling double standard: hearing foreigners often receive better communication accommodations than deaf people living in their own country when visiting doct...

Please. Don’t. Ask. A. Deaf. Person. If. They. Lipread. Ever. Even if a deaf person tells you they can lipread, don’t assume you can speak rapidly or unclearly and expect them to understand ever...

In one of my recent posts, I mentioned that lip reading is not a science and provides at most 30% of visual information. The rest is a lot of guesswork and depends on many factors. I’m often asked wh...

📞 Too many businesses still rely on outdated, phone-only communication — excluding millions of people who are deaf, nonverbal, or simply prefer typing over talking. As a deaf customer and B2B accessi...

When people think about hearing devices, many assume they “cure” deafness — but they do not. Hearing aids amplify sounds and help people who are hard of hearing. Cochlear implants help those with sev...

Many people assume that deaf communication fits neatly into two boxes: sign language or speech/lipreading. But there’s another approach — cued speech — that doesn’t always get the recognition it deser...

Today is International Day of Sign Languages. 👐 While sign language is essential for some deaf people, it’s important to remember that deafness doesn’t automatically mean sign language. In fact, it’s...

Contrary to common misconceptions, lipreading doesn’t solve communication barriers. At best it provides about 30% of the information visually; the rest is guesswork — shaped by lighting, position, spe...

As we celebrate Deaf Awareness Month, I want to honor an outstanding deaf leader I have had the privilege of knowing: Dr. Robert Davila. Dr. Davila, the son of Mexican immigrants, became deaf at age ...

✈️ When hearing foreigners travel, they are usually well-accommodated: multilingual brochures, interpreters, guides, translated websites. But when disabled travelers go abroad, our needs are often ov...

Many people assume speech-to-text apps are a simple solution for accessibility — “just push a button and captions appear.” In reality, the limitations of these apps mirror the challenges that deaf an...

Attending various events without a microphone has been a significant challenge for me as a deaf person. It’s critical to ensure accessibility at events

When it comes to captioning quality, accuracy often gets all the attention - but readability is just as important. ✅ Accuracy ensures the words are correct. 
🎨 Readability makes sure the captions can...

Captions and subtitles are NOT the same thing. Captions capture language while subtitles substitute language. They both serve different purposes - captions are accessibility for deaf people while su...

Producers of video and live events all want a larger audience. One of the most cost-effective ways to increase audience size is to provide quality captions. This serves not only the deaf and hard-of-h...

You may be meeting more people with hearing disabilities than you realize — perhaps even on a regular basis. Why don’t you notice? Because the majority of deaf and hard of hearing people don’t use si...

It was been 24 years ago that I personally witnessed the event as a young professional working in the midtown Manhattan. When events like this happen, the scariest thing for deaf people like myself ...

This morning, I took the Metro-North Railroad train to White Plains for an event — and the ride back reminded me how far accessibility still has to go. As I boarded, I showed my ticket to the conductor. He shook his head and said something I couldn’t understand. I explained that I’m deaf, and he told me I had gotten on the wrong train — an express that skips my stop. I panicked for a moment, imagining getting off in the city and spending another hour or two to get home. Then the conductor motioned me to wait, made a quick call, and soon came back saying I could get off at my stop. I thanked him profusely — he smiled and nodded. This isn’t a new issue. Twenty years ago, commuting to graduate school in White Plains, I faced the same problem and ended up asking a family member to pick me up after class to avoid the risk. Two decades later, nothing has changed: there are no visual indicators at the station showing whether a train is local or express. Timetables list stops, times, and gate numbers (that are sometimes even wrong!), but the announcements are aural only — completely inaccessible to someone who is deaf. Bless the conductor — he was wonderful — but Metro-North as a system needs to do better to make commuting accessible for deaf travelers, so they don’t have to worry about boarding the wrong train or missing critical announcements. This September, Deaf Awareness Month, is a good reminder: accessibility isn’t just about compliance — it’s about making daily life possible for everyone. If anyone at Metro-North would like to discuss these accessibility issues with me further, I would be happy to connect. #business #accessibility #communication #travel (2025-09-10) Justin R. Vonashek Chad Scholes Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Yesterday I posted that deafness is not a barrier to learning foreign languages and shared how I learned them. Now you might wonder: How did I learn to pronounce words as a profoundly deaf person wit...

Yesterday I posted about my one-year anniversary of learning Spanish with Duolingo. But Spanish isn’t my first foreign language. My journey began at age 10, when I started teaching myself English. At...