Webinars & Tools

June Isaacson Kailes (www.jik.com) owns a disability policy consulting practice and is a pioneer, leader, and innovator in health care, emergency management, aging with disability, stakeholder engagement, and hospitality. The breadth and depth of her experience in disability, accessibility, and functional needs issues are widely known and respected as a writer, trainer, researcher, policy analyst, subject matter expert, and advocate.

June concentrates on replacing the ambiguous aspects of disability etiquette, sensitivity, awareness, and legal compliance with maximum impact, practices, and measurable skill sets. June works with clients to build critical disability competencies and capabilities. She translates the laws and regulations into clear, actionable, detailed, and sustainable building blocks and tools that close service gaps, prevent civil rights violations, remove barriers, inequities and disparities. June uses the "how, who, what, where, when, and why, to get physical, programmatic, communication, and equipment access right!

June has the unique ability to blend and bridge two worlds: disability user experiences with health and emergency services experiences. Her clients include local, state, federal and international governments, disability-led, disability-focused, community-based organizations, emergency management and health care consultants, health facilities (plans, clinics, medical centers, systems), legal services, colleges, and universities, accrediting organizations, research and training centers and grant makers. June is the recipient of many honors and awards, has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses, workshops, and seminars, and has over 200 publications.

Jessica Gormley, PhD, CCC-SLP is an Assistant Professor, Research Coordinator, and Speech-Language Pathologist in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Munroe-Meyer Institute. She also is a Research Scout for The Informed SLP. Dr. Gormley is a Co-Organizer for the Patient-Provider Communication Network and Co-Director of the project "Improving Health Care Outcomes Through Effective Communication" project funded by Ability Central.

Through her research and clinical practice, Dr. Gormley aims to develop and evaluate tools, strategies, and programs to equip people with communication disabilities and their communication partners to interact effectively in healthcare settings. She has specialized training in providing augmentative and alternative communication services and currently practices as an SLP in the acute care and outpatient setting providing clinical services, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) mentoring, and program development.

Dr. Gormley leads and assists in a number of grant-funded projects related to the research and development of tools that support people with communication disabilities to participate in healthcare interactions. Dr. Gormley has co-authored several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the topics of supporting AAC in acute care, personalization of patient-provider communication, and child-parent-provider communication interactions.

Sarah Blackstone, Ph.D. CCC-SLP is co-editor & author of Patient Provider Communication: A Role for Speech-Language Pathologists and Other Health Care Professionals (2015), and an author of Social Networks Inventory (2003/2012) and numerous articles/chapters related to AAC, health care and people with communication challenges during disasters/emergencies. She was President of Augmentative Communication, Inc. (1987-2012), a partner on the RERC on Communication Enhancement from 2002 to 2012 and served on the National Institute of Health's Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Advisory Council from 2015 – 2019.

Her current interests/activities focus on patient provider communication, improving the outcomes for children with cortical visual impairment, severe physical and speech disabilities who use AAC, the development of emotional competence in children/adolescents who use AAC, and emergency and disaster readiness for vulnerable populations. Dr. Blackstone is a past president of USSAAC (United States Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication) and the International Society of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC). She received the ISAAC Distinguished Service Award Recipient in Sweden. Dr. Blackstone is a long-time Bridge School Board member and currently the PI of Bridge School's Research projects. She serves on the leadership team of the Ability Central Philanthrophy funded Project Improving Healthcare Outcomes Through Effective Communication.

On July 26, 2021, the California Agencies for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CAABVI) announced appointment of Anita Shafer Aaron as founding Executive Director responsible for working with the CAABVI Board of Directors to oversee the creation and subsequent leadership of a formalized not-for-profit organization consisting of private agencies in California serving individuals who are blind and visually impaired.

Aaron, who served for twenty years as Executive Director of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired headquartered in San Francisco followed by ten years as CEO of World Institute on Disability, focuses on formalizing the CAABVI association; strengthening CAABVI's advocacy efforts for effective and equitable training, education and services; facilitating the community outreach and education agenda and expanding funding opportunities for a service system where government revenue sources have been severely reduced and competition for private funds has increased significantly.

Aaron is especially interested in the intersection of vision loss and factors that affect health outcomes and access to healthcare as well as the availability of vision rehabilitation services and the effect on independent living.

Aaron began her career in disability services and justice in the early 1980s as Deputy Director of the Center     for Independent Living in Berkeley, CA. She and her husband live in Point Richmond,  California. Aaron is the mother of one and the grandmother of two.

Tami Altschuler is a speech-language pathologist and Clinical Specialist in Patient-Provider Communication at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, NY. She is spearheading hospital-wide initiatives to include communication access in standard patient care. Tami is also a Rehabilitation Sciences PhD student at NYU and her primary research interest is in identifying and addressing the provider and organizational level factors that contribute to healthcare disparities experienced by persons with communication disabilities. Through participatory action research, she wishes to understand the stigmas encountered by people with communication disabilities and the implicit and explicit forms of ableism which preclude them from healthcare equality and equity.

Tami is a volunteer co-organizer of the Patient-Provider Communication Network and previously on the board of directors of the United States Society of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (USSAAC). She is a published author and lecturer at the national and international level.