AbleTalks

10/08/2026

Excellent!

Isaiah Grewal is believed to be the first nonspeaking autistic trainee fully included in a LEND program at the advanced training level, and his participation has shifted how peers and faculty think about communication and research. His and Director Michelle Ballan's reflections show what becomes possible when nonspeakers are involved as collaborators, not just consultants.

📰 Read the article: https://autismspectrumnews.org/lessons-from-listening-to-a-typer-stony-brook-medicine-school-of-social-welfare-leadership-education-in-neurodevelopmental-and-other-related-disabilities-lend-fellowship-program/



“Lessons From Listening to a Typer: Stony Brook Medicine School of Social Welfare Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Other Related Disabilities (LEND) Fellowship Program”

By Isaiah Tien Grewal
and Michelle S. Ballan, PhD
Stony Brook Medicine School of Social Welfare LEND Fellowship Program

09/23/2026

Very cool!!😎

08/05/2026

🤔

07/19/2026

Oh, yeah!! I’m so glad to have found these guys.

07/15/2026

Wow! 🤩

Brazil has passed a new law requiring companies to adapt workplaces for autistic employees and create more inclusive work environments. The legislation makes workplace inclusion a legal obligation rather than a voluntary commitment, covering practical changes such as sensory-friendly spaces, structured routines, and improved communication practices.

The move addresses a well-documented global gap. Autistic people face consistently low employment rates worldwide, not because of a lack of capability but because most workplaces were designed without neurodivergent employees in mind. By embedding inclusion requirements into law, Brazil is shifting the burden of change from individual employees having to advocate for themselves to employers being legally required to meet them.

The India Autism Center, which shared the news, used it to raise a direct question about India, where no equivalent legislation currently exists. The framing was pointed. If Brazil can make this a legal requirement, what is stopping others?

If your country introduced a law like this tomorrow, what is the one workplace change that would make the most difference to you personally?

06/29/2026

💫 🌟 ⭐️

Nora Keegan was 9 years old when she noticed that the hand dryers in public bathrooms hurt her ears, and that other kids covered theirs too. Plenty of kids have said the same thing. She decided to find out if there was something to it.

She got a professional decibel meter and started measuring. Over the next few years she tested roughly 44 automated hand dryers in real public places around Calgary, Alberta. The key insight was simple and something the manufacturers had mostly skipped: she measured at the height of a child's ears, not an adult's. She also tested each dryer with hands held in the air stream, which reflects the sound back and pushes the volume up.

The loudest models were the high-speed ones. Certain Dyson Airblade and Xlerator units reached around 110 decibels or more at a child's ear height, well above the levels their makers advertised, which were generally measured at adult height. For comparison, Health Canada caps children's toys at 100 decibels. Slower conventional dryers were noticeably quieter. She even built a simple muffler out of furnace-filter material that brought the noise down by about 11 decibels.

She started the project at 9. By the time her research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Paediatrics & Child Health, she was about 13. The paper ran in 2019 under a title that says exactly what she found: "Children who say hand dryers 'hurt my ears' are correct."

It didn't rewrite any laws or force a redesign. What it did was put real numbers behind something kids had been saying for years and getting waved off about. The next time a child plugs their ears in a public bathroom, there's a teenager in Calgary with a decibel meter and a journal citation who can tell you they're not exaggerating.

03/23/2026

Ed Summers, a blind software engineer and Head of Accessibility at GitHub, was returning home from the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, where he had been representing GitHub, when passengers in nearby seats began demanding that his guide dog, Loki, give up the underseat space Loki needed. The passengers, apparently traveling with their own animals, wanted the area for their pets. The dispute escalated in the cabin. Summers could not see the looks around him, but the tension was audible.

Jen Hamilton, a nurse and TikTok creator with 4.7 million followers, was seated nearby and filmed the interaction before stepping in. She offered to switch seats so that Summers and Loki would have the space they needed undisturbed. "Hi, my name is Jen. Can I sit with you?" she asked Summers in the video. "Do you mind if I just slide over?" Summers said yes. Hamilton then addressed the camera in a voiceover. She described Summers as an IT professional whose entire mission was to make the world more accessible to people with disabilities. "So I would just like to take this time to personally thank those crusty, musty di*********es for making a big deal out of something that wasn't a big deal," she said, "so that I got to hang out with literally the coolest guy ever." She captioned the video "the best flight of my entire life."

Summers posted his own response video, praising Hamilton specifically because she offered a solution rather than taking control or making assumptions, and then checked in with him directly before acting. "That allowed me, the target of the situation, the person with a disability, to choose how the situation would play out going forward," Summers said. GitHub issued a statement through a spokesperson. The video of Hamilton and Summers collected 4.5 million views. Delta said it could not investigate the incident without specific flight details.



- SOURCES

"Fake Service Dog Owners Demand Delta Move Blind Passenger — Wanted His Underseat Area Too" — View from the Wing "Viral Video Appears to Show Blind Plane Passenger Caught in Tense Service Dog Dispute" — Fox News / Newsweek "Influencer Films Plane Passengers' Shocking Response to Guide Dog on Flight" — Newsweek

03/17/2026

Natty Anderson, what a thoughtful article.

Photo: ohmydearlife / Pixaby Most people think discrimination looks like an employer openly saying, we don’t hire autistic people...