Dyslexia - Day in the Life with Mark Miller

Dyslexia is often misunderstood as simply a challenge with reading or spelling, but Mark Miller explains that the reality is far more nuanced. In this episode, Mark shares how dyslexia and ADHD have shaped the way he learns, communicates, builds confidence, and sees the world. He discusses the role of assistive technology, the value of big-picture thinking, and the importance of reframing failure as part of the learning process rather than evidence of limitation.

Mark Miller is the founder of Inclusion Impact Accessibility and a longtime digital accessibility professional. In this conversation, he talks with Taylor about dyslexia, ADHD, entrepreneurship, childhood experiences in school, martial arts, assistive technology, and what it means to build self-understanding after years of being misunderstood.

This conversation is practical, warm, and deeply reflective. Mark does not present dyslexia as either a simple obstacle or a simple superpower. He offers a fuller picture: one shaped by frustration, adaptation, creativity, humor, lifelong learning, and the confidence that comes from learning to be “comfortable with the uncomfortable”.

Episode Links:

Mark's Company: https://inclusionimpact.co/

Mark's Podcast: https://inclusionimpact.co/podcasts/

Mark's Blog: https://inclusionimpact.co/blog/

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Mark: 00:01

If we were to really generally categorize the challenges with dyslexia, one way to look at it is difficulty perceiving detail. There are a few other things we’ll probably get into, but let’s just say perceiving detail. If you think about spelling, if somebody says, “Oh, I’m a great speller,” right away in my mind, I think, you probably don’t have dyslexia. It’s one of the first questions: How is your spelling? “Oh, it’s terrible.” Okay, now we can dig in. I can’t diagnose someone with dyslexia, but that’s how I know there may be something there. It’s the detail. Words can be confusing. There are letters, and the letters are hard to put together. But where people with dyslexia tend to be really good is with the big picture. If you think of the saying, “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” we’re really good at seeing the whole forest. It’s more difficult for us to see the trees. And don’t ask us about the leaves. That’s just way too much detail.

Taylor: 01:05

Welcome to the Day in the Life series on the Accessible Community Podcast, where we explore disability and accessibility in everyday life. Each podcast episode is a new lens to broaden our understanding and drive inclusion. For show notes, go to accessiblecommunity.org slash podcasts. Let’s make accessibility part of every day. Hey everyone, and welcome to a new episode of Day in the Life, a podcast series where we discuss different disabilities to raise awareness and educate the community. We’ve been talking a lot about neurodiversity, whether it was autism, ADHD, and at some point we may even cover other disabilities that fall under that umbrella. One that also falls under neurodiversity is dyslexia. I’m excited to be talking about that today with my good friend Mark. I’ll allow him plenty of time to talk about himself, introduce himself, and tell you a bit about him. Before I turn it over to him, I’m your host for this series, Taylor Dorward. I’m a Caucasian male with blue eyes. I almost said blue hair—definitely not blue hair—blue eyes, short-ish brown hair in kind of a messy-ish style today, and a plain light gray long-sleeve T-shirt. That’s a bit about me, but we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to learn about Mark. I’ll go ahead and let Mark tell us a bit about himself.

Mark: 02:46

Thank you, Taylor. I’m Mark Miller. I’m a light-skinned male as well. My hair is not too dissimilar from Taylor’s—kind of flipped up in the front, short—and I’m wearing a blue golf shirt today. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I do a lot of podcasts and talking. I have my own podcast that I do with a gentleman named Justin Stockton called The Accessibility Breakdown, where we talk about accessibility. But in all of that podcasting and all of the talks I’ve done, I don’t really talk about my personal disability, which is dyslexia and ADHD. So this is a unique opportunity for me to come in and talk about it, and I really appreciate you making that available to me. You want me to tell people a little bit about what I do and all that kind of stuff? Great. I’m the founder of Inclusion Impact Accessibility. We’re a digital accessibility company, so we help organizations make sure their websites, applications, documents, and things like that are accessible to people with disabilities. That includes helping them meet the guidelines surrounding that. Right now, Title II is a big deal. There’s a new rulemaking around Title II that requires state and local governments and entities to be accessible. Title III, which is public stuff, has driven the industry for a long time. I’ve been doing this for 13 years. I started with a small company that sold, then we merged with a big company, and I’ve been doing it for a large enterprise company for a number of years. Now I’m back to a small company—my own consultancy, my own business—and back to really being able to support the client.

Taylor: 04:56

That’s awesome. I’m sure there’s a lot more, but it’s always good to start with that higher-level stuff, and then we can dive into each bit a little deeper. I really appreciate the introduction. It gives us a good higher-level view of who Mark is. I’m curious: you told us about having dyslexia and ADHD. As a business owner, how does that affect you day to day, like doing administrative tasks or communicating, and how do you get around those?

Mark: 05:33

It has a lot of different effects. Probably the biggest thing I worry about most with dyslexia is that it’s hard for me to know when I’ve made a mistake. I use a lot of different technologies along the way—spell check, Grammarly, a product called Got It. There are a lot of ways now that people with dyslexia can make sure things are spelled right. I’m good with my grammar, but that doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes. One of the things with dyslexia, at least in my experience, is that your brain is really good at tricking you. It knows what you meant, and it’s really good at filling things in the way you expected them to be versus the way they actually are. Because of that, I’m sort of nervous all the time that I’m putting something out there in public that has a mistake that would be embarrassing to most people. My way around that is to use a lot of technology and to set things aside and look at them later, because sometimes that distance gives me a fresh enough look where I will catch mistakes. I can’t really look at something and proofread it very well, but I hear things wrong almost hyper-accurately. When you have something like dyslexia, there are ways your brain doesn’t quite work like other people’s do, but there are also ways in which it works in an enhanced way. We can talk about more of those later. One of the ways, I think, is that I’m pretty good auditorily—not necessarily at parsing sounds, which we’ll talk about, but if I meant for something to have an S on the end of it and I didn’t type an S on the end, I won’t see that, but it will sound wrong. So I listen back to a lot of things that I write, particularly if it’s critical, with a screen reader. This is where you and I probably, even though we have very different disabilities, use similar assistive technology. I’m sure I don’t use the same screen reader as you because I like screen readers where I can highlight something with a mouse, point at it quickly, and make it go, or things built into products like Word. I don’t need all the navigation capabilities that JAWS and NVDA have, though every once in a while I’ll use those. I do like screen-reading technologies that can help me proofread. I also read sometimes with screen reader technology the same way. I have a product called Helperbird where I can summarize things. I’ll listen to a summary first and then dive into the details of an article. At any one of those stages, I can flip over and listen. Lots of times I’ll listen and read at the same time. I can read well. I’m never going to be a fast reader, but I can read well, and I can comprehend well. That doesn’t mean listening isn’t a better experience for me. Generally speaking, I onboard information better by listening to it.

Taylor: 09:01

That’s very interesting. Throughout this process, every person I’ve spoken with so far, regardless of the disability they have, I’ve found so many similarities in how we interact with the world, the different assistive technologies we use, how we identify with our disabilities, and all these different things. But so far, interestingly enough, dyslexia has been the one I find the most overlap with. As you said, I, as a blind individual, also use a screen reader quite a bit. I can read some. I do have some functional vision still, as most blind people do. But as you said, I can read and comprehend well, just not very fast. So to make up some time, I use that screen reader. I love that you highlighted the fact that where you do have some limitations, you also have certain situations where it can enhance your abilities. Actually, with the last person I spoke with, John, about dyslexia, he referred to it as his superpower and doesn’t really like to call it a disability. I respect that, and I love looking at it through that lens. So I’m curious: when thinking about your dyslexia and even your ADHD, what are some situations or things that you think are enhanced because of how you do things?

Mark: 10:36

That’s interesting. The first thing I’ll say is that I think it’s great that you’re having multiple people with a similar, whatever we want to call it—disability, in this case dyslexia—because everybody’s lived experience is very different. My answers are going to be very different from John’s. I’m sorry, see, there we go. There’s my short-term memory. I’ll tell you one thing it doesn’t give you is a very good short-term memory. John and I are going to have very different experiences with where we have challenges and where things may be a little enhanced for us. This is kind of a big subject, and I’ll start by saying that one of the most interesting perspectives I’ve heard is that dyslexia didn’t exist, in air quotes, until reading and writing existed. If you go way back to the days of kings and queens and medieval times, even when you had specific people, like monks, who could read and write, the average person couldn’t. People with dyslexia really were kind of on top of the world in a way. The reason for that is that if we were to really generally categorize the challenges with dyslexia, it’s with perceiving detail. There are a few other things we’ll probably get into, but let’s just say perceiving detail. If you think about spelling, if somebody says, “Oh, I’m a great speller,” right away in my mind, I think, you probably don’t have dyslexia. It’s one of the first questions: How is your spelling? “Oh, it’s terrible.” Okay, now we can dig in. I can’t diagnose someone with dyslexia, but that’s how I know there may be something there. It’s the detail. Words can be confusing. There are letters, and the letters are hard to put together. But where people with dyslexia tend to be really good is with the big picture. If you think of the saying, “You can’t see the forest for the trees,” we’re really good at seeing the whole forest. It’s more difficult for us to see the trees. And don’t ask us about the leaves. That’s just way too much detail. So if you go back to those medieval times, presumably—there’s no data, right?—those people were likely the people doing military strategy or some big-picture thing like that. They may not have been able to get into the details, but they could look at a battlefield, look at the battle, and understand the big picture and strategically how things fit together. That’s where I live, and that’s why you hear that a lot of entrepreneurs have dyslexia, because they’re looking at business from that big-picture level. They’re seeing the odd things that other people don’t see, or that don’t fit, which is a trait of dyslexia. If I walk into a room and something is in a place that’s a little odd, two hours later somebody can say, “Where is my hat?” and I’ll ask, “What did it look like?” They’ll say, “It’s a red hat,” and I’ll say, “Oh, I saw a red hat.” I’ll notice those things. But if it’s in its place, I don’t. It’s sort of backwards. So that big picture, along with noticing things in a different way than most folks do, and being able to connect things that most people tend to think don’t connect, is where we end up being these big-picture strategists. The most interesting thing, I think, is that a lot of authors or people who write big stories—you would think, well, it’s writing, why would somebody with dyslexia go toward writing? But people like Anne Rice are dyslexic. I’m sure she’s a terrible speller, but her ability to look at New Orleans and imagine this whole complicated world of vampires and put that story together—that’s something dyslexics can be very good at. We’re very episodic, narrative. They call us narrative. We understand things that are in a story format. So to see that big picture, to see that story, to match together things other people wouldn’t connect—if you’re familiar with Anne Rice’s novels, she’s connecting this fictitious world of vampires in a way that makes it feel real. I wouldn’t say I have a superpower in that area. Some people with dyslexia do. I’m in this weird place of average dyslexia. I’m sort of a little bit good at all those dyslexic traits. They thought Einstein was dyslexic. You can’t prove it, right? You can’t go back in time and prove it. But he came up with the theory of relativity because he could imagine things in his mind, which is a dyslexic trait. I couldn’t do that, but I’m pretty good at turning things over in my head and imagining the physics of something in my head—not like Einstein. He couldn’t do basic math, but he came up with the theory of relativity. That gives you that separation there. I tend to be a pretty decent writer. I don’t get writer’s block. I can put those kinds of things together. I tend to be able to imagine strategy from a business standpoint. That thing where I put weird things together is something I do quite a bit. I don’t know. Does that answer your question?

Taylor: 16:50

Yeah, certainly. I love having this conversation, no matter what the exact topic is, because a lot of people, especially if they don’t have any direct perspective into life with a disability, have all these misconceptions. They assume that just because someone has a limitation, they aren’t going to be successful or can’t thrive at doing this or that. I think raising awareness and addressing misconceptions is so important, because a lot of disabilities, even ones that are widely known, like autism and ADHD, are widely misrepresented, especially in media. So when it comes to talking to someone who doesn’t have that personal experience, whether in themselves or someone they care about, they can have a very altered reality of what it looks like to live with that disability. I always love taking plenty of time to address that and highlight not only the barriers people like us face and their limitations, but also how we can reframe the way we think about it. For me, yeah, I can’t read very well and, like you, I can’t see detail very well. But I can absorb content a lot quicker than the average person because I can listen to my screen reader at 200% speed. I can listen a lot quicker than the average person can read. So if I focus on that and don’t focus on the negative, it’s a lot easier to be successful—not just in work, but in day-to-day life.

Mark: 18:36

Yeah, I agree with that. I think there are a couple of things you said in there, Taylor, that are spot on and interesting. One of them is something you said a few minutes ago, where John mentioned that he doesn’t really see dyslexia as a disability. I think that’s a really good perspective because, for me, it’s almost like a shift. Instead of it being, “You can’t do this,” it’s a shift in the way your mind works. And when you shift it over, you leave behind things like being able to spell and perceive detail, and you shift into things like being able to really follow and create narrative well, being able to see the big picture, and being able to turn things over in your mind in a way other folks may not be as good at. Now that I’m an adult, that’s how I see it. As a child, I didn’t know I had dyslexia. I was diagnosed with all sorts of learning disorders, but I don’t know if I was ever diagnosed with dyslexia because the records weren’t kept, and that’s not a word people were really using. I do know I was diagnosed with a lot of “learning disabilities,” and the help I got was in line with dyslexia. This was in the ’80s. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I personally went, “Oh, this is dyslexia.” Then I searched and figured out whether any of my diagnoses had to do with dyslexia and all of that. But as a child, I had this perception that there was something wrong. As an adult, my perception is that I think differently. And as somebody who works with me—as an employer or something like that—you can take advantage of that, or you can look at it as a negative. That’s up to you. That’s not my business; that’s your business. I saw a really interesting talk by a woman who was on the autistic spectrum, I believe. She had done a bunch of research, and she had a really fantastic way of laying this all out. It was a keynote speech at the University of New Hampshire at their diversity, equity, and inclusion conference. I was a speaker on a panel, and she was the keynote speaker. I wish I could remember her name off the top of my head, but I can’t. The thing that stuck with me is that she put up two graphics. The first one showed what employers look for. Essentially, they look for what’s called the B student. When you look at how employers look at data and how people perform, it’s like a B student, meaning they’re pretty good at math, pretty good at English, pretty good at everything. So you have this flat B graph. Then she showed what people like you and me, Taylor, with disabilities are like. We sit on a graph with high peaks where we’re really good at something and low valleys where we’re really bad at something. The one place we do not fall is anywhere near that B-student line. The implication was that we would be more likely to be looked over for employment, as an example. I don’t know that I’d claim to fit into that category because, with technology, I can fake my way past my dyslexia enough. But the point is that when you don’t have people in your workforce who have the highs and the lows, you don’t get somebody with those highs. Those big, major capabilities—you don’t get them. You have to take the lower capabilities to get the bigger ones. I have a buddy who has dyslexia, and this guy can look at any large business or building and almost without calculating tell you what the costs are, what you need to do, and where you’re going to lose money if you do it this way or that way. People will do the math behind him, and he is always right. In my mind, it’s his dyslexia that gives him the ability, particularly after years and years of doing this kind of work, to see the big picture and the profits without having to do the math. He is usually better than people who sit there and do a lot of math behind it. Do you want that guy working for you? It’s unbelievable, probably the money he’s made and saved for people with that ability. But if you judged him based on how good of a speller he is, you never would hire him. That’s where your comment about disability coming with advantages and disadvantages, especially in neurodiversity, is particularly interesting. We’re talking about dyslexia, but people who have autism are actually on the opposite end of a spectrum in many ways because a lot of times they’re extremely good at detail. We’ve all heard the stories of a person with autism who hears a song and then sits down and immediately plays it note for note on the piano. I knew a child whose father rented my apartment, and his name was Talon. He was autistic, and he could tell you any car by the sound of its horn. He would hear a horn honk and tell you the make and model of the car. I might not even be sure it was a horn. So when people with autism are placed well, they can really be someone who can live in the fine details.

Taylor: 25:16

Yeah, you made an amazing point there, and I love that visualization you described with the flat B line and then someone with those peaks and valleys. I had that realization a number of years ago—three or four years ago, maybe. Like many people with disabilities, I was struggling to find where I fit in the work world and how I could find employment. But I realized I was focusing on my values and on those peaks. I was like, all right, I know what I’m good at, so what can I do where I can use what I’m best at? Once I had that realization, it made my decision-making around business a lot easier because I wasn’t just trying everything, failing, and getting discouraged. I was focusing on the peaks I have, those enhanced abilities: the quick rate at which I can take in content, my ability to communicate things because I can’t see them, and how I have to be very descriptive but also concise so I don’t bore people. Finding an area where I can use those skills I’ve developed to thrive, rather than focusing on what I lack, has been incredibly helpful. I try to share that with as many people as I can, especially those who have acquired disabilities, because they may not have learned that yet. They may not have even realized they have those peaks you were talking about. It may take some time to find what those are, but once you do, you can say, all right, how can I use that in a career and put A and B together?

Mark: 27:14

Yeah, I think you bring up a fantastic point there. The way I would frame this, Taylor, is that you’re doing this podcast to help people understand the lived experience of people with disabilities and, presumably, to give them insight they may not have. A lot of times we think about disability perception in an external way. That graph I talked about is an external graph: how your employer sees you, how you benefit your employer, how your friends and family see you. What people don’t think about as much, and I think this is what you’re touching on, is that it’s also an internal issue. How do you see yourself? This is where, particularly with neurodivergence, it’s so important. Not only are there the things we just talked about, but it’s also sort of invisible. For example, if you’re blind and going through school, people will hopefully accommodate you or understand how to accommodate you in a certain way because you can’t see. They’re not going to give you a printed book to read; they’re going to teach you to read braille. There’s going to be a pretty good understanding that you’re not going to look at the monitor of your computer screen and that you need something else, so you’ll probably get a screen reader. Same thing if you’re deaf. They may teach you to speak English, but it would be done in a different way, and you may also be taught sign language. You’re not going to be given a book on tape to listen to. But with neurodivergence, I think that external understanding is harder, and therefore the internal understanding is harder. That’s where I think, for our children, we need to really pay attention. We do so much better now. I grew up in the ’80s, Taylor, and we just didn’t have the knowledge we have today. One of the things that almost makes me giddy is when I read stories about academia and how they’re really making an effort to diagnose dyslexia sooner. They’re starting to address it because you can teach kids with dyslexia to read if you know about it and teach them differently. But I’ll tell you, one of the hardest things for me was growing up in the ’80s in academia and not having the teachers or the students understand, and therefore I didn’t understand. One example is the anxiety I still have if I’m writing something by hand and someone is watching me, or even if I’m typing while sharing my screen. When I type words and sentences, my experience is that I spell something wrong, the computer tells me, and I fix it—or I type it wrong, backspace, and fix it. So if you’re watching me, you see my mistakes. If I were to write on a piece of paper, I’m not going to spell correctly. And when I don’t spell correctly, it’s things that are embarrassing to spell wrong. I’m not talking about big words; I’m talking about average things where people react like, “What do you mean you don’t know how to spell?” That makes it difficult to ask people how to spell things. To this day, I have anxiety if there’s somebody over my shoulder in those situations. A lot of that comes from being in school and being asked to write on the board. I tell people it’s the only time both the students and the teacher will make fun of you. That was my experience: students saying, “Wait, you just spelled that wrong?” and laughing, and the teacher saying, “What did you—? That’s spelled this way.” They didn’t necessarily make fun of me in the same way as the students, but they were irritated, confused, or had some kind of reaction that wasn’t supportive. It wasn’t, “Oh, spelling is hard for you. You have dyslexia. Let’s help you spell that word.” Imagine what that does to somebody’s internal perception of themselves. How do you build value as a child when a major part of your experience is along those lines? I think a couple of things saved me. One is that when I was in high school, I had somewhere between a third- and fifth-grade spelling ability. As a 56-year-old adult, maybe it’s sixth grade. I don’t know. But I had a college-level vocabulary, and I spoke to adults in a way that was almost shocking to them because I spoke like an adult with an adult vocabulary. People would say, “Wow, your son is so articulate. He’s so intelligent.” I was told I was intelligent based on people’s experience with me through verbal communication, while also having the opposite experience in writing. So I was confused more than anything. It wasn’t just damage, but that doesn’t mean that’s everybody’s experience. The difficult part was that what I heard from my teachers was, “You’re so smart, you just need to apply yourself. If you just tried harder, you would do better. You need to focus.” Dyslexia comes with ADD, so that messaging didn’t make any sense to me. I would miss one day of school or have a perfect attendance record. I would be at every classroom lecture. When I was in college, I showed up. My friends would say, “I’m not going to class today,” and I showed up to every class, knowing that had to be some baseline for me. Even if I did show up to every class, I still didn’t retain the material the same way. I remember my friend getting an A in a class, and I asked, “How did you know the answers to that?” His answer was, “Well, that’s what the teacher said.” I said, “When did she say it? I was there. You missed four days this semester. I was there for every one.” I didn’t hear it. I didn’t take it on board: short-term memory, attention problems, detail problems, all that kind of stuff. To be told your problem was that you just didn’t try hard enough is so damaging. It took me much longer—twice as long, maybe five times as long—to figure out what I needed to do to take in information academically than I hope and think it takes for kids today. Teachers don’t say that kind of stuff anymore, at least most of them don’t. They understand that everybody’s brain is a little different and that if a student is not onboarding information, there’s probably a reason for it. It’s incumbent on them as educators to help figure that out and make sure the student has what they need. It’s not that this was happening at a zero level when I was a kid, because I was put in classes; it just wasn’t very well figured out at the time. So, circling back around, people with disabilities do better, just like you said, Taylor, when they understand themselves. It was that self-awareness and self-realization that helped me really start to do well—or at least better.

Taylor: 35:29

Yeah, I think that’s so important. I love that you highlighted the fact that dyslexia is categorized as a learning disability. When I first moved into this space, I always assumed it was a visual disability because you think it has to do with reading, so you think, “Oh, the eyes.” But then when I learned more about it, I thought, “Oh, that’s so interesting.” As a learning disability, it certainly affects you throughout the schooling process, as you were mentioning. Things have changed and hopefully changed a lot for the better. What are some things you wish you knew back then that you know now about how you best function and how you best learn? Maybe someone with children with dyslexia can learn from it.

Mark: 36:31

Yeah, and I’ve had those conversations with people. I think that’s a really important question. For me, I’ll start with the widest brush possible: I wish I knew I could learn. If you go back to everything I said, my experience was that eventually you stop trying because you end up with these labels: bad speller, not good at school, poor reading comprehension, all of these things. I’ll give you an example. As a bad speller—and I hope this changes one day—you can teach a person with dyslexia to read, and they probably will never be a fast reader, but they can read and have really good reading comprehension. They can be very effective readers. Brain scans show that if somebody with dyslexia learns to read, they actually use a different part of the brain from the average person. But what you don’t see is people with dyslexia being able to spell well. For me, not understanding that I could learn meant I thought I was a bad writer. That one critical part of writing—spelling—translated to “bad writer.” Because I had labeled myself through this experience as bad at spelling, that label extended to bad at writing. It wasn’t true, and I can tell that story, but it wasn’t until college that all of that changed for me. So, very simply, I wish I had known that I could learn. I think that’s the experience of a lot of people with dyslexia, because you’ll find that people with dyslexia are lifelong learners. They eventually figure out how to learn, and they figure that out on their own. If I have to learn something, I have to teach it to myself. However it’s presented, whether through an instructor or something else, I’m probably not going to learn it that way. I need to take that material and change how I present it to myself in order to learn. Once I learned I could learn, I went wild. To this day, I prioritize learning on a daily basis. I failed Spanish in high school. Now I’ll call myself fluent. If you’re fluent in Spanish, you might disagree with me a little bit, but I’m pretty darn good at Spanish, and I continue to study it every single day. So I wish I had known that. I also wish I had known enough to tell some of the adults around me to go jump in a lake earlier on, because believe it or not, that was part of what empowered me. I realized that these adults I thought were the ones who knew what was going on and were the authorities actually didn’t. I gained the self-agency to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that I’m stupid. I don’t buy that I just need to try harder,” or whatever the advice was coming down from those adults. I could say, “Okay, you don’t understand this, and I’m going to go off on my own and do it my way, and we’ll come back.” Even in school, when someone says, “This is the way you need to solve this problem,” that can be problematic because that way may not be good for certain brains. I need to go solve the problem a different way. So I wish I knew I had that capability when I was younger, Taylor, and I wish I had that agency to say, “If you want me to be successful at this, you need to let me approach it in a different way. You need to realize I can do it in a different way.”

Taylor: 40:27

So I like that. What advice would you share with a parent trying to help their child through the schooling process with dyslexia?

Mark: 40:39

This is where I think parents have a hard time, because kids are kids. They don’t always have that drive of, “I need to be good at this,” or, “I need to be good at that.” As adults and as parents, we’re like, “You need to be good at school.” So it’s this fine line parents have to walk. They have to make sure none of the damaging stuff happens. The parent might need to take agency for the child when they’re really young, push back on a school system, or recognize that the problem is not with their child, but with how academia is presenting something to their child, or whatever the case might be. I think academia is much better now, so I don’t want to put that completely in people’s heads. But you also need to be careful that you don’t take over so much that you frustrate the child and turn them off. You can over-parent them in that way as well. So it’s this difficult task of finding balance, where you’re guiding kids into areas where they can be successful, and if they’re not having success in school, you’re asking—and forcing the educators to ask—how do we need to present this differently? But you’re also not assuming that the child is actually in there motivated and doing it, because the other half of my problem was that I was a kid. I’d rather be outside running around. I’d rather stare out the window. Those things are reality too. So that’s what I would say. I wish I had a really clean, easy answer for parents, but it’s: be an agent for your child, teach your child agency, and be careful how hard you push and pull them because you don’t want to turn them away either.

Taylor: 42:44

Yeah, it seems like it can be a thin line to walk. I’d like to shift a little bit. We’ve learned quite a bit about you and your experience with dyslexia, which has been amazing. I’ve gotten the pleasure of knowing you quite a bit, and so I’d love for you to share more about you personally—things you do outside of work and what makes you you, outside of dyslexia and the rest of who you are.

Mark: 43:18

Yeah, I appreciate that. All of it ties together, right? The things I do tie together. From a work standpoint, I really found my home in accessibility and in digital accessibility. I like technology, so I worked in technology for a while. But when I figured out that I could help people with disabilities and work in technology at the same time, that really rang for me. My work is more than just work to me. It’s really part of who I am, and as much of a cliché as it is, it’s a passion for me. But I think what you want to hear about, Taylor, because we have this in common as well, is that when I was a child, I found the martial arts. That’s probably one of the biggest ways I gained confidence and started to build schemas in my mind for success. I found the martial arts—Kenpo karate—and was very successful. It was my first thing. I wasn’t great at team sports, but I was good at this karate thing. Very quickly, I started teaching. I was a black belt teaching by the time I was halfway through high school. I think I got my black belt as a freshman in high school, and I was teaching, running schools, and learning business by running schools. It first built confidence, and secondly it was the first thing that laid out schemas: a pattern I could repeat to create success. I actually started to apply some of the things I was learning in the martial arts, from that big-schema standpoint, to academia. I started to become really good at school in certain ways in high school because of the martial arts. That created a lifelong martial artist out of me. I’ve studied Kenpo, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Yoshitsune Combat Jiu Jitsu, a little bit of judo within that, and Muay Thai kickboxing and a lot of striking, which is really the world I came out of. But mostly what I do now is teach. I still teach a couple classes a week. The money I make from that, in air quotes, goes back to scholarships for kids who are neurodivergent, or families of kids who are neurodivergent and may not be able to afford martial arts, so they can hopefully have a similar experience to the one I had. That’s one of my passions. I also learned to skateboard at 48 years old with my son and did a lot of transition skating, and I loved that. I haven’t skated in a few years, but I need to get back to it. I have a messed-up foot, but I need to get back to doing that. My degree in school was in studio arts, so I love art. I was a photographer all my life. Again, that visual kind of thing. Photography and art help in business because I can always do my own design work if I need to, or at least inform that. And again, cliché, but being a husband and a father are probably my two favorite things and the things I think I’m pretty good at—my wife might argue with the husband part a little bit. I have two amazing kids and have amazing relationships with them. My wife and I just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, and we are still, to this day, best friends above and beyond anything and everything else. If you said, “We’re going to take everything away from you except one thing,” that would be the except. Don’t take my family. If I have my wife and I have my kids, I really don’t have anything to complain about.

Taylor: 47:44

That’s awesome, and congratulations on the 30 years. That’s awesome. I fully agree. We’ve talked about this briefly before, but it happens occasionally: I’ll speak with guests before the interview, and then we’ll revisit things. Echo, stop. So distracting, going off in the background. It thinks you’re talking to it, and you’re not.

Mark: 48:09

Yeah. I tried to power through it. I’ve got the lady in the box over here that every once in a while thinks I’m talking to her, and she starts talking to me. I’m like, “Stop it.”

Taylor: 48:17

Yes, it’s reminding me to take the trash out. I did that yesterday, and I don’t know why it’s reminding me again. But yeah, it’s something that happens a decent amount on these interviews. I like to get to know the people before we get on the podcast and revisit threads I picked up before. One was martial arts, and I wanted to hear more about that. I think it’s awesome that you found that and were able to thrive in it. I fully agree—the amount of self-confidence you gain from that, mentally and physically, brings so many benefits. I’m certainly not at the level you are; I’ve only been doing it for a couple of years. But it’s so powerful, what it can do for you. For me, I try to encourage other blind individuals I meet to try it out. For me, it’s Jiu Jitsu.

Mark: 49:16

Jiu Jitsu is fantastic for people who are blind.

Taylor: 49:19

Yeah. I was terrified the first time because it’s an uncomfortable situation. You have to get used to lying on your back, having people on top of you simulating punching you and choking you. But you learn to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, which is one of my favorite things. The first day was really uncomfortable, but over time I got used to it, and now it’s kind of a latent benefit.

Mark: 49:51

I’ll tell you, it wasn’t uncomfortable because you’re blind. It was uncomfortable because it’s uncomfortable. Everybody has that. First-day Jiu Jitsu is just very, very different and typically very awkward and uncomfortable for people. I know a handful of people who are blind who do judo and Jiu Jitsu—Jiu Jitsu black belts. I mean people who would just own me on the mat and who are blind. They’re very good. Striking can be a challenge.

Taylor: 50:20

Yeah, because you don’t have the contact. That’s what I loved about Jiu Jitsu. You’ve got the tactile stuff. I can feel what my opponent is doing, and I can feel if their hand is in a certain spot, then they’re open for a certain hold and all this stuff.

Mark: 50:38

It’s very difficult when you’re not making contact with somebody to have any perception of how they’re going to hit you. A friend of mine, Larry Lewis, who I worked with for a while, told me he did taekwondo, and he was blind from birth. He said the only way you could do it from a sparring standpoint was to take the first hit. He had to get hit the first time, unmitigated. What people may not realize is that even if you don’t block something, you might partially block it. You know it’s coming, your body perceives it, and it tenses. There’s a lot more than just stopping it that mitigates that. When you have none of that, it’s a whole different thing to get hit. So it’s difficult. But yeah, I agree with you. There are two things. Being comfortable—and my favorite saying is learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable—is huge. The other thing people don’t necessarily realize is the grind. I call it grinding metal against metal. If you want to sharpen your sword, you have to sharpen it against something that’s at least as hard as the sword itself. People think of martial artists as these people who walk around in a superior way because they’re not afraid someone can hurt them. What they don’t think about is that martial artists walk into a scenario every day where the people there are definitely better than them. You walk onto the mat every day, get on the ground, and roll every day. If you’re doing it right, you’re doing that with people who are better than you and who you can’t win against because they know more than you. That’s how you get better and sharpen your sword. It’s really that concept of tearing down to build back up. That’s why you’re confident—not because, “I’m a big deal,” but because, “I’m comfortable with being uncomfortable. I’m comfortable being the weakest person in the scenario and fighting my way through and surviving it. I’m comfortable doing that and learning from it.” That’s really what people mean when they say martial arts gave them confidence. I love public speaking. You could tap me on the shoulder and say, “Mark, I need you to speak in front of these 500 people,” and I’d say, “Okay.” As I’m walking up to the stage with you, I’d look at you and say, “Oh, by the way, what do you want me to talk about?” I don’t care. That’s what the martial arts gave me. There are situations where I do get nervous, so I don’t want you to think otherwise. But that’s the confidence for me.

Taylor: 53:31

Yeah, it’s been life-changing. Like you were saying with the sharpening-the-sword analogy, that’s really good. I like that, and it has translated to me living with my disability and being comfortable and accepting the fact that it’s okay not to be perfect and it’s okay to fail at something. I’ve failed hundreds of times in Jiu Jitsu, but because of that, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m so much better. I wouldn’t have gotten there if I didn’t fail. If I just went in there and rolled with a 10-year-old, I wouldn’t learn anything because I wouldn’t have to worry about technique. I wouldn’t learn from my failures or have my weaknesses exposed and be comfortable with that.

Mark: 54:28

Yeah, that’s one of the things I tell my students all the time, Taylor. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m sorry I forgot that,” or, “I messed that up,” or, “I didn’t do that right.” And I’m like, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Taylor: 54:36

Yeah.

Mark: 54:37

If you got it right out of the gate, you wouldn’t need me to teach you anything. You wouldn’t need to come here and learn this. You asked me a question earlier in the interview: what would I tell parents? That’s actually another good one. I would say, make sure your kids know that the road to success is paved with failure. There’s no other way than to get stuff wrong. So when you’re getting stuff wrong, you’re not a lesser human being, you’re not stupid, and you’re not “not getting it.” You are executing perfectly the process of learning. I tell people all the time: they see people in the dojo with black belts and think they’ve always been that way. I’m like, they were messing stuff up just like you are right now, if you’re a white belt or something. There was a day when they were getting everything wrong just like you are right now, maybe even worse. But you don’t get to be them without going through that process. You have to go through the process of failing. I think it’s a great point, Taylor.

Taylor: 55:48

Yeah, and it has translated to me working and living with my disability. I used to think about those failures throughout the day and get stuck on them, but then I started thinking, well, I fail a lot doing this too, and now I’m at a point where I’m more confident in my problem solving and I’ve gotten so much better. So I take those opportunities of failure and reframe them into opportunities to better myself and learn from them. That’s it.

Mark: 56:19

If you take away one thing, that's it.

Taylor: 56:22

Right there.

Mark: 56:22

Reframe those failures and learn from them.

Taylor: 56:25

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's one of those things, it's a very simple concept, but it is immensely challenging to adopt.

Mark: 56:36

Being able to say it and being able to do it are two wildly different things. To this day—and it’s one of the reasons I continue to teach—when I’m teaching people things like that, it helps remind me. I don’t even get that concept for free. I still fail by not recognizing failure or by being upset by failure, and then I have to have a conversation with myself: you know better than this. You know failure is part of the process. I still go through that. So not even that comes for free. Not even that comes without failure. Just because you understand it doesn’t mean you can employ it. You have to work every single day. Become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Become comfortable with being bored. If you’ve got ADD like me, the best thing you can learn is how to become comfortable with boredom and how to refocus your mind in the face of boredom. You and I get to walk onto a mat every day and practice those things. That’s the privilege of being in the martial arts. It’s not just all that we learn; it’s that we practice these big life things every single day, and we’re reminded every day.

Taylor: 58:00

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s an amazing point to end on. I just want to thank you, Mark, so much. It’s been great chatting with you as always, and I really appreciate all the valuable perspectives you shared on what it’s been like for you and how you’ve taken advantage of those peaks in your life and used them to your advantage. Hopefully anyone listening who has dyslexia or knows someone who does can share that message. I think that’s probably the most impactful thing people can take away from this. That, and being okay with failure.

Mark: 58:38

That’s right. Be okay with failure. I really thank you so much. Like I said, I do a lot of this kind of thing, and this is probably the first time I’ve really talked about myself—certainly the first time I’ve gone to any level on dyslexia. It was really interesting and helpful to think through these things with you, Taylor, and another learning process. So thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you for doing this podcast. I think it’s an important one, and thank you for being a friend and for all the chances I’ve had to get to know you and share these things. It’s really fantastic.

Taylor: 59:17

Absolutely. I appreciate it. I’ll make sure we include your podcast in the show notes so people can check it out and go check out other things Mark is doing at Inclusion Impact Accessibility and stay in touch. It’s been great chatting with you, Mark. Thank you all so much for listening and/or watching, depending on the platform you’re on. Feel free to follow this podcast so you get notified when new episodes are released. With that, thank you so much, and we’ll see you next time on Day in the Life. Hey there, and thank you for joining us for this episode of Day in the Life on the Accessible Community Podcast. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you did, make sure you’re following this show wherever you get your podcasts. That way you get notified each week when we release a new episode. At the bottom of each episode’s show notes, there is a link to our podcast feedback form. We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, the Day in the Life series, or the Accessible Community Podcast as a whole. Your feedback helps us continue creating conversations that are meaningful and valuable to you. Thanks again for joining us, and we’ll see you in the next episode.