Our newest Sponsor does not sell anything to you. It sells to the people who decide whether you get hired, and that is exactly why I wanted them here.
If you are blind, low vision, deaf, deafblind, neurodivergent or disabled and you have ever worked, you already know the part of the job search that no amount of preparation fixes.
You can master your screen reader. You can hold the degree, the certification, the fifteen years experience. You can write the cover letter, rehearse the answers, arrive early and perform well. And you can still lose the role to something that happened on the other side of the desk entirely, in a conversation you were never in, conducted by a hiring manager who had never worked with anyone like you and quietly decided it would be complicated.
That’s not a skills problem. It has never been a skills problem. It’s a demand-side problem, and it is not one you can solve from your own desk no matter how good you are.
Welcome, National Organization on Disability
NOD is our newest Sponsor here at Access Information News, effective Monday, September 7, 2026. And they are a genuinely different kind of Sponsor for this newsletter, because almost everything they do happens on the employer’s side of that desk.
Most organizations in this space work on preparing disabled people for employers. National Organization on Disability works on preparing employers for disabled people. They are one of the very few doing it from that direction, and it is the direction the problem actually lives in.
What NOD Is, Plainly
National Organization on Disability is a Washington, DC nonprofit that has been working on disability employment since 1982. It came out of the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons, and was founded by Alan A. Reich, the first person ever to address the UN General Assembly from a wheelchair.
A note on identity, because plenty of otherwise careful sources get it wrong. NOD is not the National Council on Disability, the independent federal agency at ncd.gov. Nearly identical names, completely different organizations. NOD is a private nonprofit that employers pay.
Today NOD’s work runs on four legs: a paid corporate membership network called the Leadership Council, a confidential benchmarking assessment attached to a public recognition, a paid on-demand training platform, and federal policy advocacy backed by university research partners.
It is led by Beth Sirull, President and Chief Executive Officer since May 2024, who came to disability employment from impact investing and philanthropic management rather than from the disability rights movement. Alongside her are Charles-Edouard Catherine, Vice President of Corporate and Government Relations and a Paralympian, and Sara Walsh, Chief Operations and Finance Officer.
Why This Sponsor Is Different
I want to be straight with you, because you will notice it yourself within a minute of visiting their website.
Nearly every Sponsor in this newsletter is here because they want to reach you. They make a screen reader, an app, a service, a piece of hardware, and you are the customer. NOD is not built that way. Their paying customers are corporate human resources departments. Their product is a change in how a company hires, onboards, trains, accommodates, promotes and retains disabled workers.
Beth Sirull describes it as working the demand side of the disability employment problem, as distinct from the very large supply side made up of organizations that prepare disabled people for work.
Translation: there are hundreds of organizations working on making you ready for the job. There are very few working on making the job ready for you. NOD is one of them.
What You Can Actually Use Yourself
The picture is not quite as one-sided as it first looks. Several things at NOD an individual reader can reach directly, without going through an employer at all.
- EnAble Learning, individual licence. Their on-demand course platform is $100 per year for an individual, discounted to $50 for a first year as an early adopter.
- Network of Allies. NOD’s individual membership, as distinct from the corporate Leadership Council.
- Virtual career fairs. Real hiring events with real employers, free for jobseekers. The next one runs September 10, 2026 and lists Sedgwick, the American Heart Association and CoBank among the participants.
- CEO Office Hours. Open Zoom sessions with Beth Sirull, no ticket price listed. One ran on May 6, 2026 on inclusive talent acquisition, and the next is set for December 17, 2026.
- Technology and the Disability Experience. Their annual showcase, this year on Wednesday, October 1, 2026 at the Times Center in New York. Standard tickets are $199. Last year drew 250-plus people and featured Aira, Be My Eyes, the Howe Innovation Center at Perkins School for the Blind, Inclusively, Target and Toyota.
- The Speakers Bureau. Launched March 24, 2026, roughly 29 speakers including Lex Gillette, Tiffany Yu, Keely Cat-Wells, Catarina Rivera and Josh Basile. Booking is normally an employer’s purchase, but worth knowing if your workplace asks.
EnAble Learning
When I asked Beth what NOD is pushing hardest right now, EnAble Learning was the first thing she named.
It went live in 2026, and it is a straightforward idea executed well: modular, self-paced, roughly hour-long courses that teach a workforce how disability inclusion actually works in practice. The current catalogue includes Disability 101, Managing Teams in the Age of Rising Mental Health Challenges, AI, Emerging Technology, and Accessibility, and Neurodiversity at Work. There is also a Microsoft Accessibility Fundamentals course offered in collaboration with Microsoft.
For employers it scales down to $50 per learner per year up to 250 learners, $25 per learner per year from 251 to 2,500, and negotiated access above that including export into a company’s own learning system.
Translation: if your employer has ever said that disability training was too expensive or too hard to source, that excuse now costs them twenty-five dollars a head.
The Rule Change Landing on September 21, 2026
This is the part I would forward to your employer today rather than next month, as I believe it is the reason NOD’s timing here is most fortuitous.
On August 21, 2026, a final rule was published in the Federal Register, document 2026-17115 at 91 FR 54482. It takes effect on September 21, 2026. It rescinds the Section 503 requirement that federal contractors set a 7 percent disability utilization goal, and it removes the requirement that they invite applicants and employees to identify themselves as disabled. The veterans equivalent under VEVRAA is untouched.
For roughly a decade, that 7 percent goal and that self-identification invitation are what made a great many large employers pay attention to disability hiring at all. They were the compliance stick. As of September 21, 2026 for federal contractors, the stick is gone.
What is left is the business case, and the business case now has to do the entire job on its own.
I want to be careful here about who is saying what. NOD is not named anywhere in that rule. That paragraph is my analysis as a publisher, not their position. But it is difficult to look at an organization whose entire model is persuading employers to do this voluntarily, and at a rule that removes the requirement to do it involuntarily, and not conclude that their work matters considerably more on September 22 than it did on September 20.
What NOD Sells Employers
This section is for the readers among you who hire, who manage, who sit in HR, or who are close enough to someone who does that you could forward this to them.
The Leadership Council is NOD’s paid employer membership, currently 35 member organizations, structured in four tiers including two sized for mid-market companies: Medium Enterprise at 251 to 2,000 employees and Small Organization up to 250. Named members include Boeing, Eli Lilly, EY, Hilton, Kaiser Permanente, KPMG, Marriott, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PwC, Target, Toyota and Wells Fargo. Membership buys disability inclusion specialists, peer networking, talent acquisition support, learning seats and event tickets. At the Premium tier it also buys either two secured entry-level hires or ten qualified candidate referrals through their partner James Emmett & Company.
The Disability Inclusion Blueprint is their free confidential self-assessment, benchmarking a company across talent outcomes, strategy and policies, and practices and programs. Top-quartile participants who opt in earn the Leading Disability Employer Seal, which has no tiers.
One honest caveat, and I would rather you hear it from me. The Blueprint survey is not running in 2026. NOD states it plainly on their own site, and they expect to move to an every-other-year cadence beginning in 2027. If you go looking for it this year you will not find it, so plan around that.
Through their Employer Disability Practices Center, NOD tracked 257 companies that completed their assessment at least twice between 2021 and 2024, and reports that those with fully integrated disability inclusion hired twice as many people with disabilities and promoted five times as many. Those are NOD’s own findings rather than independently replicated results, and I am flagging them as such.
How This Happened
This one did not arrive the way most of them do.
It began on April 10, 2026, with an introductory meeting with Aaron Brown, NOD’s Director of Resource Development. That same day I made an introduction of my own, connecting Aaron Brown with Dr. Kirk Adams.
Over the following months Dr. Adams did what he does best, which is build relationships. Second only to his ability to make connections. He met with Aaron Brown shortly after my introduction and has been in conversation with Beth Sirull directly, whom he will be interviewing for his podcast. When NOD and I finally sat down together, we already shared common ground, and it was Dr. Adams that helped to build that synergy. His guidance has taught me that having a solution is not enough. You have to locate and connect with the people that need that solution, and then explain to them why they need it. Something he does exceptionally well. And as a result, something that I too have begun to do as well. Everyone talks the talk. Few walk the walk. Dr. Adams is one of those few.
For readers who do not know him: Dr. Kirk Adams is the former President and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind and of The Lighthouse for the Blind in Seattle, Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion, Managing Director of Innovative Impact, LLC, and author of The Disability Dividend. He holds a PhD in Leadership and Change from Antioch University, where his dissertation studied blind adults successfully employed in American corporations. In the interest of full disclosure: Dr. Adams sponsors this newsletter himself, and he sits on the editorial team at our sister publication, Top Tech Tidbits.
On Thursday, August 27, 2026, I met Beth Sirull and Amber Cecil, NOD’s Director of Marketing and Communications, by video call. It was the first time any of us had met. I presented the full program, they asked a great many questions, and we found a considerable amount of common ground rather quickly. By the end of the call NOD had agreed to support the ongoing distribution of Access Information News.
Amber has been at NOD since April 2012, the longest-serving member of their senior staff. If NOD’s public voice has shifted over the last decade from awareness language to something written for a boardroom, that is largely her work.
What I Checked
Since it is the question I am asked most often by readers and least often by advertisers: yes, I vet everybody, and no, I do not accept everybody.
NOD’s finances, governance and filings are public and I read them. The one thing worth flagging is the one above that affects what you can do this year: the Blueprint survey is paused for 2026. Everything else is the ordinary texture of a forty-four-year-old nonprofit in a difficult funding climate, and none of it changed my view that this is serious work our readers benefit from.
Sponsors provide much-needed support in exchange for verified, measurable reach. They cannot buy our editorial judgement. This article was written from an objective point of view.
Where to Learn More
- 🌍 Website: https://nod.org/
- 🎓 EnAble Learning: https://enable.nod.org/
- 📍 Address: 700 12th Street N.W., Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005
What to Do With This
You have just read a great deal about an organization that does not sell to you. So let’s close with what each of you can actually do.
- If you are job seeking: put the September virtual career fair in your calendar, and look at who is participating before you decide whether it is worth your time.
- If you are employed: forward this article to whoever owns hiring or learning and development at your organization. That single act is the entire mechanism by which this Sponsorship pays you back. EnAble Learning costs your employer twenty-five dollars a head.
- If you hire, manage, or work in HR: the Leadership Council has tiers built for companies with fewer than 250 employees, so this is not only a Fortune 500 conversation. And the September 21, 2026 rule change is worth an hour of your attention this month regardless of what you decide about NOD.
- If you are a caregiver, family member or advocate: the person you support is going to encounter an employer eventually. Knowing that an organization exists whose entire job is working on that employer is worth carrying with you.
A Note of Thanks
Access Information News is operated as a not-for-profit project by Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. All Sponsorship dollars are held in escrow and used solely to fund the ongoing distribution of the publication. When the Sponsor cap is not met, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. covers the difference.
If you enjoy reading Access Information News for free each and every week, it is Sponsors like National Organization on Disability that make it possible. Without their support, there would be no Access Information News.
Every Sponsor of this publication also joins the PWD Media Distribution Co-op, which stands at 30 members across 46 connected channels, reaching 199,512 disability-specific readers with every post, as of this writing.
Beth and Amber, thank you both for the conversation, for the questions, and for saying yes. Dr. Adams, thank you for the months of quiet work between the introduction and the handshake.
Welcome, National Organization on Disability. So very happy to have you with us.
Cheers,
” The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference. “
Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Engineer, Educator, Advocate, Publisher & Journalist
President & Sr. PMP, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., PR Director: AT-Newswire, Publisher: AI-Weekly, Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, Title II Today
Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
President, Sr. Project Management Professional (2006 — Present)
Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform.
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