The ADNA Presents

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.

In this final segment of Bridget's interview, Roy Samuelson pulls back the curtain on a years-long campaign to get audio description performers formally recognized by the Television Academy, a move that opens the door for blind professionals to take their rightful place at the table. He shares the staggering 180-degree shift from being told "there's nothing we can do" to a full green light, and re...

A film about blindness that actually gets it right: Roy sits down with Tony Stephens of the American Foundation for the Blind to talk Possibilities, a powerful new doc that reclaims Helen Keller's legacy and centers blind voices, on-screen and behind the scenes. From international buzz to an all-blind audio description team, this episode dives into what it really means to make media that's not jus...

Think voice acting is just "reading into a mic"? Joan Baker once threw a creative director behind the booth. They sweated, stumbled, and left saying: "I had no idea this was so hard." That's the point. In this episode of The ADNA Presents, Joan Baker & Rudy Gaskins, co-founders of SOVAS (That's Voiceover Career Expo + the Voice Arts Awards), pull back the curtain on contests that launch careers, s...

What does hitting snooze have to do with solving a 75% unemployment rate for blind professionals? Everything. In this episode, Roy Samuelson sits down with Paul Conley, Executive Director of the TAD Foundation, to explore how possibility becomes action, and how blind talent are rewriting the rules of leadership, confidence, and career success. We cover: Why audio description is more than access -...