The ADNA Presents

Part 2 with Bryan Duarte, co-founder and CTO of HapWare. In the ALEYE app, a wearer builds presets for work, home or date night and picks which cues come through. The options include a smile, a furrowed brow (cmon AD writers, you know that one), a handshake, a fist bump and, yes, the middle finger. Bryan explains why the camera is still the hardest problem: 15 frames per second on Meta glasses, 51...

Bryan Duarte lost his sight at 18 in a motorcycle accident. He went on to earn a PhD in computer science studying one question: can touch carry what sight usually carries? Today he's co-founder and CTO of HapWare, building ALEYE. It's a wristband paired with a camera that reads facial expressions, gestures and body language. It plays each one as a pattern of vibrations on the wearer's wrist. In Pa...

Timothy Prewitt spent 30 years across 16 countries, solving seemingly unsolvable problems like hunger, water, and agriculture. To name a few: Kosovo after the war. Afghanistan. Nigeria. He ran The Hunger Project and iDE, reaching close to 13 million people a year. He also keeps a 35-year silent meditation practice, fasts alone in the mountains for four days at a stretch, and plays a lot of pinball...

Pre-recorded for our live Comic-Con panel, The Track You Never Heard, with Colleen Connor and Anna Capezzera. Colleen is blind and runs Audio Description Training Retreats. She built it with a specific rule: the blind professional teaches, as an equal, instead of getting called in afterward to give feedback. Classes cap at eight. Notes go out ahead of time so class time is practice and feedback, n...

Soud Habbas spent his career building systems for nonprofits working in some of the hardest environments in the world: Jordan, Egypt, Rwanda, and the West Bank. As chief operating officer, he made sure programs actually worked, stayed honest with funders, and didn't put people at risk. In this conversation, Soud tells the story of a $40,000 bet on a small women's dairy cooperative that outperforme...

Roy Samuelson sits down with Maria Miller, former Senior Private Sector Specialist with the International Finance Corporation. Maria spent 14 years traveling to more than 20 countries, including post-conflict zones, helping governments rebuild the economic rules that determine who can start a business, get a job, or build a future. She went to Liberia 3 months after a civil war ended. She monitore...

Connor Scott-Gardner is a blind accessibility advocate, disability rights writer, and someone who has spent years thinking carefully about what it means to be helped, witnessed, and included. In this second half of our conversation, Connor names something the accessibility world doesn't say often enough: good intentions are not the same as ethical behavior. He talks about Be My Eyes volunteers who...

Connor Scott-Gardner has presented at the European Parliament, Westminster, and SXSW. He also goes home, gets tired, and sometimes thinks he hasn't done anything. This podcast will prove that he has done much. In this first conversation, he talks about what genuine support for blind young people looks like up close, and what gets in the way of it. He names a trap he's fallen into himself: pointing...

Something went wrong during a live show. An aerial performer fell. The Audio Description professional described it as it happened. Then told the audience the performer was okay. No script covered that moment. No algorithm was ready for it. A human was paying attention, and that made all the difference. Dr. Cynthia Bennett is a blind researcher at Google who studies what happens when technology is...

Josh Miller came to accessibility through telecom, media consulting, and a business school project at MIT. That project ran headfirst into a quote so high it would have eaten up half the program's annual budget. That collision between intention and financial reality is where 3Play Media was born. 19 years later, Josh leads one of the largest media accessibility company in North America, serving ov...

Dr. Cynthia Bennett is a blind researcher at Google who studies the AI systems that are supposed to serve blind people. She found out blind people were making Audio Description, and she, a blind person, had no idea. That gap changed how she works. In this conversation, we get into what authentic representation actually requires, why "good enough" accessibility protects the wrong people, and the to...

Alex Howard and Lee Pugsley are back on The ADNA Presents, and a lot has changed since their first visit. The Darkroom podcast hosts and co-founders of the Blind Film Critic Society join Roy Samuelson for a conversation about what it means when blind critics evaluate Audio Description -- not just as consumers, but as people who can now name the performers, writers, and engineers responsible for th...

Darian Rodriguez Heyman has spent thirty years helping mission-led organizations stop reinventing the wheel. He's the author of AI for Nonprofits, founder of Helping People Help, and someone who has thought seriously about why good intentions so often produce predictable, avoidable mistakes. What drew me to this conversation is that the gap he keeps closing, between what's available and what peopl...

Lee Pugsley and Alex Howard of The Dark Room watched this year's Oscar ceremony with audio description on, and they brought friends. John Stark, and the newest Blind Film Critic Society member Ren Leach, join them to hand out their own awards, debate the night's surprises and snubs, and reflect on what it actually felt like to experience the telecast as a blind audience member. They get specific....

Joanne Levine has spent her career making sure people who aren't physically there, could still experience what happened there. As founding head of programming for Al Jazeera English in the Americas, a producer for Nightline and ABC World News Tonight, and a Senior Advisor for Media at the State Department, she has worked across continents, cultures, and crises. She speaks multiple languages. She h...

What does it take to make a joke land in a language it was never written for? How do you know when the emotional contract with an audience has held, and when has it broken? Scott McCarthy has been sitting with those questions for more than twenty years. As VP of Localization at DreamWorks Animation Television, he oversees dubbing across 30+ markets, from Shrek to preschool series to song-heavy pro...

J. Michael Collins has 30 years in voiceover, 50+ industry awards, and runs the largest voiceover conference in the world. He also still has things worth saying. In this conversation, J. Michael and Roy talk about why the voiceover industry is unusually decent, what abundance actually means in a business full of competition, and how Audio Description continues to earn its place at the table at VO...

Voice actor Maren Garcia joins host Roy Samuelson to talk about how she first discovered Audio Description, and why it immediately felt personal.   Maren shares the moment she was hired for a full feature film, after being found through the Disabled Voice Actors Directory, a resource built to support authentic casting.   She talks candidly about vetting an unfamiliar company before saying yes, the...

Join Roy Samuelson as he chats with Emmy-winning filmmaker David Grabias about his groundbreaking documentary "Brailled It." Grabias shares his innovative approach to incorporating audio description and working with blind filmmakers, challenging traditional views on cinema.  Learn how this unique project redefines collaboration and creativity in filmmaking, and get an exclusive peek into its premi...

What happens when we stop treating audio description as an afterthought, and start treating it as storytelling? In this episode of The ADNA Presents, Roy Samuelson sits down with researcher and accessibility innovator Alison Eardley, whose work reshapes how museums understand inclusion, perception, and the power of narrative. Allison reveals why audio description guides attention, builds emotional...

Audio description is crafted, refined, and checked with extraordinary care, with thanks to quality control specialists. On this episode of The ADNA Presents, Roy Samuelson interviews Rebecca Odom, a blind audio description quality control specialist whose expertise ensures that scripts, narration, and final mixes deliver clear, authentic, and emotionally aligned storytelling. She discusses the evo...

In this special episode of The ADNA Presents, we're doing something different. And deeply personal. Voiceover icon and longtime Television Academy leader Bob Bergen shares his journey advocating for voice actors, opening the doors to inclusion, and why he's endorsing me, Roy Samuelson, for Governor of the Performers Peer Group. If you care about how performers gain recognition, how accessibility r...

What happens when you start teaching for connection? In this conversation with Dr. Tabitha Kenlon, an English professor who teaches students across the world (including in Afghanistan), we explore what it really means to see one another when sight isn't the main channel. Tabitha shares how her experiences with low vision reshaped her classroom, and how vulnerability, curiosity, and access can tran...

Filmmaker Naomi Ross thought audio description was just an obligation - until it changed the way her whole family watches movies. Join Roy Samuelson as they dive into the power of sound, representation, and what happens when storytelling becomes an invitation instead of a checkbox.