🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #107: Interview with Ann Chiappetta, Author, Poet and President of Friends in Art | By Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-op
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-08-24-2026/ 
In this moving episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA speaks with author, poet and Friends in Art president Ann Chiappetta about a life rebuilt three times over. Ann describes being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 1993 at 28, while expecting her first child, losing her job, her acrylic furniture design career, and for a while her sense of herself, and the “angels” who pulled her back: her ophthalmologist, her rehab counselor, and eventually writing itself, which she calls a catharsis for everything she could not say about going blind. She talks about the ten years she spent delivering the Building Bridges disability awareness program to children in kindergarten through second grade, and the payoff of overhearing a child in a supermarket teach their own parent not to touch a guide dog.
The second half turns to work and craft. Ann recounts her nine years as a readjustment counselor with combat veterans at the White Plains Vet Center, where not being able to see her clients made them disclose sooner, and where a federal system’s inaccessible tools kept her permanently catching up, and the three-year fight simply to sit her licensing exam with accommodations, a fight she won and an exam she then failed twice before deciding she had given it enough. Donna, mid-fight with CompTIA and Pearson over her own cybersecurity certification, tells her plainly: “I totally understand what you’re telling me.” They close on independent publishing, the screen-reader barriers that nearly killed Ann’s first book Upwelling, how she writes by ear with text-to-speech, and her advice to anyone adjusting to sight loss, don’t give up, fight the good fight, and ask for help, including mental health help.