Maria Miller: Listening, Liberia, and the Girl Who Said "I'm Networking"
Release Date: 06/23/2026
269 - Bryan Duarte part 2: Who Gets to Read a Face in Public
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 on an iPhone. He also takes on the harder question of what happens when the person being read never agreed to it. His answer draws on 13 years with his guide dog, Dixon, and on what happened to guide...
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268 - Bryan Duarte - Hapware - part 1
The ADNA Presents
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 Part 1, Bryan talks about what the wristband feels like after a few hours and why learning the patterns is like learning a new ringtone. He also explains why HapWare stopped trying to tell a slight...
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Timothy Prewitt: Don't Look at the Top of the Mountain
The ADNA Presents
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. His work has nothing to do with Audio Description. This one is about how you start when the task in front of you is too big to look at. For Audio Description, there can be hundreds of description...
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You Can't Be Fast and Good
The ADNA Presents
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, nothing else. Anna oversees the Audio Description department at Deluxe. She started as a writer, then learned the audio side so she could talk to her engineers in their own language. She walks through...
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The $40,000 Bet: Soud Habbas on Trust, Small Bets, and Walking Away
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 outperformed programs ten times its size, and a million-dollar-a-year partnership with the John Deere Foundation that worked because of one thing: trust. He talks about what it takes to hold a partner...
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Maria Miller: Listening, Liberia, and the Girl Who Said "I'm Networking"
The ADNA Presents
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 monitored elections in Ethiopia. She worked in places where what she assumed was essential turned out not to be. Then she retired early and moved her work closer to home. She now sits on the board of Girls...
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264: Connor Scott-Gardner, part 2: Consent, Craft, and What Audio Description Owes Its Audience
The ADNA Presents
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 filmed blind users without consent, what that reveals about power and trust, and why intent is never the whole story. He also turns the mirror on himself, reflecting on a viral video he made years...
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263: Awareness Isn't Enough: Connor Scott-Gardner on What Actually Changes Things, Part 1 of 2
The ADNA Presents
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 out every barrier without offering a direction. And he explains why awareness, on its own, has a ceiling. This is a precise, generous conversation with someone who has thought hard about the...
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Dr. Cynthia Bennett Part 2: What We Lose When We Stop Describing Things to Each Other
The ADNA Presents
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 built without the people it's supposed to serve. In this conversation, we get into why imperfect, unpredictable human moments are exactly what AI struggles with most. Why she thinks claiming to be...
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261 - Quality at Scale: Josh Miller on What Accessibility Actually Costs
The ADNA Presents
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 over ten thousand customers across education, entertainment, and enterprise. He sits on the CTA's Content and Entertainment Council. He has watched captions go from a niche accommodation to...
info_outlineRoy 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 monitored elections in Ethiopia. She worked in places where what she assumed was essential turned out not to be.
Then she retired early and moved her work closer to home. She now sits on the board of Girls Global Academy in Washington, DC, the city's first all-girls International Baccalaureate charter school, as vice chair and head of community engagement.
In this conversation: what Liberia taught her about what's essential, how you change a system slowly without claiming the credit, the personal cost of a career built across 20 countries, and what a teenage girl who said "I'm networking" revealed about why possibility has to be visible before it can be chosen.