Category: News

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, welcomes Jeremy Grandstaff and The Inspiration Foundation as the publication’s newest sponsor, and traces the unlikely path that brought them there. It begins on a supermarket shelf, with the working Braille printed on Cleanlogic’s bath and body packaging, a feature that required moving an entire product line off plastic and onto paper, and one that exists because of Beatriz “Bea” Shapiro, who lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa at about age seven and spent her career training blind people to use adaptive technology and placing them into jobs. Her son Isaac Shapiro and his business partner Mike Ghesser built Cleanlogic around that idea in 2006, and run an American production floor in Audubon, Pennsylvania staffed substantially by people with disabilities under a program they call Purchase To Employ. Di Blasi is careful to separate what is independently documented, the Overbrook School for the Blind hires, the twenty-nine jobs brought back from overseas, the reported wages and benefits, the NBC News coverage, and Pennsylvania’s 2025 Governor’s Achievement Award, from the share-of-workforce percentages the company reports about itself.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, introduces Luna AI, the publication’s newest Sponsor, and the person who built it. Luna AI is an AI tutor you reach by making an ordinary telephone call. There is no app to download, no account to create before you can hear anything, no smartphone requirement, and no screen anywhere in the process. You dial the number, or reach the same service on WhatsApp, and a tutor answers: it explains a concept out loud, asks you about it, listens to your answer in your own words, and tells you when you have it wrong. Load your own lecture notes, transcripts, PDFs or a Quizlet set into a Study Library first, and the session comes out of your material rather than out of whatever an AI happens to know. Calling is free, there is no paywall, and every caller has access to the full product, with a paid Luna AI Pro tier planned for 2027.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, welcomes Cazerny Bussey and Even Though I’m Blind, Inc. (ETIB) as the publication’s newest Sponsor, joining on August 10, 2026. Di Blasi opens with the detail that gives the piece its title: in 2021, Bussey, a Brooklyn-born recording artist who lost his eyesight at fifteen, released an album called Cfly 728, and one of its tracks was called “Even Though I’m Blind.” Four years later, that song title is the name of an organization running an internet radio station, an interview podcast, a curated directory of blind-owned businesses, a blog, an events calendar, and a project that collects encouragement from the community in fifteen-second voice recordings. The introduction came from Dr. Kirk Adams in late July 2026; Bussey accepted the following morning, and his first note back thanked Adams before it thanked Di Blasi.

Both Access Information News Sponsors and Content Contributors alike can now connect their very own Google Analytics account to the AI assistant they already use, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other, and simply ask, in plain English, how much traffic we send them. It all starts from a single link on our analytics page. Your assistant reads that link, walks you through a one-time setup of about five minutes on a computer using a free, no-code connector, and from that point on you can ask from any device, including your phone. The numbers stay entirely inside your own analytics: we grant access to nothing, and we see none of your data. Claude works on every plan, including the free tier; the other assistants offer a fuller path on their paid plans. No spreadsheets, no dashboards, and no analytics degree required. What follows is the story of why this matters so much to me, and exactly how to put it to work.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi, Publisher for the Access Information News weekly newsletter, announces the launch of independent, LinkedIn-verified Audience Insight reports, an answer to the question Sponsors have been asking him for nearly two decades across both Top Tech Tidbits (founded 2004) and its sibling publication Access Information News (spun off in November 2022): who, exactly, reads these publications each week? On May 15, 2026, the publication uploaded a hashed copy of its email list to LinkedIn Matched Audiences. LinkedIn matched 38,123 of approximately 44,851 subscribers against active member profiles, an 85% match rate well above LinkedIn’s published 30-60% B2B baseline. The new Audience Insights page publishes twelve full demographic panels (top job functions, seniority, industries, employers, geography, skills, and content interests) drawn from those verified profiles, with quarterly regenerations on the calendar to give Sponsors a continuing third-party view of audience composition over time.

Here, Aaron Di Blasi announces that the Access Information News website redesign is complete, thanks to funding from Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. He explains that while the original site served its purpose for several years and was built with accessibility and future remediation in mind, it had a major limitation: it was not mobile-friendly. The new version fixes that issue by moving to WordPress.com and creating a mobile-first experience that works across devices while remaining accessible to assistive technologies, with testing done using JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack.