Ask Me and Believe Me with Mickey Rowe

Welcome to Episode 134 of the Think UDL podcast: Ask Me and Believe Me with Mickey Rowe. Mickey Rowe is an award winning best selling author and speaker. As an autistic and legally blind person, he believes that when we design for accessibility, we help others to perform at their best, and, as he says, that’s not just for disabled folks. He is a Broadway actor, director, consultant and public speaker and was the first autistic actor to play Christopher Boone, the lead role in the Tony Award-winning play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He is a disability and accessibility advocate and his most recent speaking engagement is with TextHelp’s open access conference Back to School Blockbuster: Lights, Camera, Educate! on September 18-19, from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm EST. This is a free virtual conference designed just for educators. If you are listening to this episode after the synchronous online conference, all of the content is available on demand until the end of November and you can find a link to the Back to School Blockbuster conference on the ThinkUDL.org webpage under the resources section of this episode, and in the episode description. In today’s conversation with Mickey, we talk about his experiences as a disabled student at the university level and what he and his professors did to manage the barriers that persisted while he completed his undergraduate degree. Mickey gives us all, students, instructors, administrators, and everyone else, some sound advice on how to reduce the friction but not the rigor of a college education. There are some easy choices and forward thinking designs that can help all of us along the way. I was able to catch Mickey at 6:30am his time in Seattle, Washington, and by the end of our interview his young school-aged children had joined us in the recording and made a brief appearance. You’ll hear them, too!