Opening Session: Keynote Speaker: When All Things Are Equal, Blindness is the Competitive Edge

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Description

Imagine if the world saw blindness as a competitive edge in school and employment. In this session you'll learn how changing the world's current bias against blindness starts with you. Kristin Smedley will share how her blind sons beat the negative bias and created the lives of their dreams ‐ and how their success without sight is repeatable.

Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, participants will:
1. See how the skills of succeeding without sight enable a person that is blind/VI to have an advantage over sighted colleagues/peers.
2. Understand the reasons the bias against blindness is causing the $31.7 Billion impact on the US economy.
3. Have a new perspective of how the IEP and Reasonable Accommodation are crucial to succeeding without sight.
4. Hear real stories of real application of blindness as a competitive edge.

This session was presented on October 27, 2022 by Kristin Smedley

Contributors

Kristin Smedley

Kristin Smedley’s mantra is “Life is funny... sort of.” Her fun‐loving spirit and energetic personality guided her life in the direction of a career in teaching. However, when her two sons were born blind, Kristin walked away from the classroom to teach her sons how to navigate a world they could not see. Knowing that Michael and Mitchell needed their mother to fight for them, Kristin began advocating for the tools her blind children needed.

In 2011, Kristin launched a nonprofit to fund research and resources for children living with the rare eye disease her sons have, CRB1 LCA/RP. In just nine years, the Curing Retinal Blindness Foundation has raised over 1.4 million dollars and achieved a National Rare Eye Disease Awareness Day. In 2019, Kristin published her first book called Thriving Blind: Stories of Real People Succeeding Without Sight. It achieved #1 New Release on Amazon for paperback and kindle. Kristin partnered with TMobile and the National Braille Press to make the book available in Braille. She used that book to catapult an engaged and supportive online community called Thriving Blind Academy which connects families living with blindness to each other and to mentors and resources for succeeding without sight.

Kristin lives in suburban Philadelphia with her three children and two rescue dogs.