Authentic Accessibility & Inclusion: My Conversation with Daniel Hodges

Hello again, I hope you are having a peaceful enjoyable weekend wherever you may live.
For the first time in a while I'm writing to share a new episode of my podcast The Accessibility Advantage
After over two months of physical therapy to treat a bumm shoulder, I'm feeling up to sharing some of the great conversations I've been having.
Because you know that even when I don't feel up to writing or blogging I'm not going to stop talking, singing, or telling stories.
On this episode, I sat down with Daniel Hodges, JD, MHA — a lawyer, disability advocate, and the President and Co-Founder of Peaces of Me Foundation.
Daniel started the nonprofit while he was still in law school, and it's become one of the most thoughtful voices I've come across on what "authentic" accessibility and inclusion actually look like in practice.
On With The Show
A childhood defined by low expectations, not by vision loss
Daniel was born with retinitis pigmentosa, leaving him with no usable vision in one eye and very limited vision in the other. He also lives with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that wasn't diagnosed until his 30s. But as Daniel told it, the hardest part of his early life wasn't the physical reality of his conditions — it was the social and systemic response to them.
He grew up without access to Braille, a white cane, or assistive technology. Professionals told his family that his future was limited to menial work, with no college, no career, no marriage, and no kids on the table. The lack of support was so severe that he missed grades seven through eleven entirely, only reaching a school for the blind — where he finally learned Braille and cane travel — in what should have been his senior year of high school.
That story reframes a point I care about deeply on this show: so much of what gets labeled "the struggle" of disability isn't inherent to the disability itself. It's the product of missing resources, missing inclusion, and missing opportunity.
Redefining what "inspirational" means
We spent a good chunk of the conversation on a tension a lot of us in the disability community feel: the discomfort around being called "inspirational." Daniel's take stuck with me — inspiration without action is just entertainment. If someone's story moves you but never changes what you do, it hasn't really done its job.
We talked about people like Katie Ledecky, who disclosed her own diagnosis of POTS (a condition also connected to Ehlers-Danlos), and the backlash she got from some corners of the disability community for daring to describe a struggle "on par" with others. Daniel's view: that reaction misses the point entirely. Success stories from people with disabilities — famous or not — show what's possible with the right support, not that anyone's hardship is disqualified from being real.
Rejected by law school after law school: the power of wanting something badly enough
Daniel's path to becoming a lawyer wasn't a straight line, either. He was turned down by Washington University in St. Louis and Case Western, and waitlisted at Mizzou, before landing at the University of Baltimore. When the opportunity came together, he flew out, scoped out the area, and — having spent less than a week in Maryland in his entire life — found an apartment online, packed a friend's car, and moved to start his new life there. Along the way, he also fought for custody of his daughter during her battle with pediatric cancer, after a hospital doubted that a blind parent could raise a child.
That thread connected directly to my own story of building the Midway Marketplace and, eventually, my brand as The Blind Blogger after the family carnival business closed. Neither of us got where we are by wanting things in a passive, "it'd be nice" kind of way. We both talked about the difference between wanting something enough to sacrifice comfort for it, and wanting it in theory.
Why Peaces of Me exists
Daniel co-founded Peaces of Me in the summer of 2019 with his cousin Christie, after conversations about the gaps both of them had experienced — his own fight for medical advocacy and custody, and her family's struggle to find resources after her daughter was born with a limb difference. They realized the problem wasn't unique to one diagnosis or one disability; it was systemic.
Peaces of Me operates on three pillars:
Community education that goes beyond simple awareness and actually teaches people something.
Professional training that helps people apply that knowledge within their own sphere of influence.
Connections to relevant resources so people know where to go to put what they've learned into practice.
Daniel described it as a flywheel: the more people who go through that journey, the more their knowledge and perspective feed back into the community, raising the baseline of awareness for everyone else. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Peaces of Me is building a peer-to-peer library that connects people to resources that often already exist but are hard to find — starting with fact sheets and guidance authored by people with direct lived experience of a given condition.
Accessibility doesn't limit creativity — it can improve it
One of my favorite parts of the conversation was Daniel's reference to David Epstein's writing on how thoughtful constraints can unleash more creativity, not less — and how that idea applies directly to universal design. When choices are unlimited, people tend to default to what's comfortable and familiar. Meaningful constraints, like accessibility requirements, actually force more intentional, creative problem-solving.
We compared it to physical architecture: nobody thinks twice anymore about a new building needing an elevator, and that requirement hasn't stopped architects from designing bold, ambitious spaces. The same logic applies to digital accessibility — it's not a straitjacket on developers, it's a design constraint that, done well, produces better experiences for everyone.
Authentic inclusion means the real possibility of failure
Perhaps the most powerful idea Daniel shared: inclusion is only authentic when there's a genuine possibility of failure, not just success. If someone succeeds only because standards were quietly lowered for them, that "success" comes with an asterisk — one that can haunt both the person it was meant to help and the community around them. Real inclusion means removing bias and barriers so people can compete on equal footing, whatever the outcome.
That idea ties directly into something Daniel and I have both lived with: imposter syndrome, and the nagging question of whether praise for our work is genuine or just "generous, considering." His answer was clarifying — if you can trust that the person evaluating you was being fair, you can actually own your success. If you can't trust that, the doubt never fully goes away.
Daniel's story — missing years of school, getting a GED, and going on to earn a JD — is exactly the kind of thing he wants people to draw the right lesson from: not "isn't that amazing," but "if I can do this, so can you."
About Daniel
Professional photo with black cowboy hat taken by Lisa.
Daniel Hodges is a JD and MHA and a passionate advocate for authentic accessibility and inclusion of people with disabilities. He is the President and Co-Founder of Peaces of Me Foundation (spelled P-E-A-C-E-S), which he launched while still in law school. Peaces of Me's mission is to transform society through community education, innovative professional training, and reconnection to relevant resources that help break the stigma surrounding disabilities of all kinds.
Connect with Daniel
Peaces of Me Foundation website
Facebook
Instagram
X (Twitter)
LinkedIn
YouTube
Keep the Conversation Going
This episode is a good reminder that authentic inclusion takes more than good intentions — it takes real conversations, real resources, and real people willing to share what worked and what didn't. So here's what I'd ask of you:
Watch or listen to the full episode and hear Daniel tell these stories in his own words.
Visit piecesofme.org and look through the resources, or book that free 30-minute conversation with Daniel if you're a business or organization leader wondering where to start.
Follow Peaces of Me on social media and share this post with someone who's navigating a disability, raising a child with one, or trying to make their workplace more inclusive.
Tell us what you learned. Drop a comment, send Daniel a message through his site, or email me at maxwell@theaccessibilityadvantage.com. As Daniel and I talked about on the show, none of us hear often enough that our work made a difference — so if this episode did, say so.
And if you're building or leading something — a business, a nonprofit, a classroom, a team — and you're not sure where accessibility fits into it, that's exactly what I do at The Accessibility Advantage. Reach out and let's figure it out together.
What's your excuse?