Hello. Thank you for listening to I'm speaking with Elizabeth West. I am your host, and today I'm going to be talking with Erin Perkins. And Erin, if you can tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do, and who you do it for?

Sure, thanks for having me. I'm Erin Perkins, and I am the founder of Mabely Q and also Successible. What I do. I do want to make a side note. I am deaf blind. But this confuses a lot of people because you really can't tell because one, I do speak. I do wear a hearing aid and a cochlear implant one on each ear. And my vision is about 40 degrees. To put it in perspective, most people see 180 degrees.

So I still have clear central vision, but it's a lot less than what a normal person would see. I teach independent business owners about how to be accessible in their business. Most independent business owners think about accessibility as, oh, it's my website, but I push people beyond that. I teach them about how to be accessible on email, social media, in your event, your website, for sure, just the way you interact with people, all kinds of stuff like that.

That is amazing. And it's like, I didn't realize also your vision was wow. So we can talk about so many things on how you can school us, so to speak, on a lot of things, especially like virtual. I was going to go according to audio projects, which podcasting, podcasters, audio summits that are on the rise. Podcasting is on the rise. But we can cover even more ground because there's virtual summits are on the rise and everything like that reels on Instagram, making it more accessible, and yeah. I would like to ask you, how long have you been an advocate for is it okay to say the deaf community?

Yeah, I was born deaf, so I've always been somewhat a part of the deaf community. I will say there was a time from fifth grade until I went to college was in fifth grade. I was actually bullied by some people in the deaf community because they considered that I was not deaf enough. And I ended up going to a mainstream school where I was around other hearing kids. And so at that point, I did have a lot of mistrust in the deaf community because it was like, oh, because you can hear, because you can speak, you're not like us. You can kind of straddle the rules. But it's challenging no matter what because there are times where I'm like, I don't feel like I fit in the hearing community. I don't feel like I fit in the deaf community.

But as I've gotten older, the last probably five or six years, I've actually owned my identity of being deaf, and the last two years has been deaf blind because it really is a spectrum. And I think the pandemic taught me a lot about that because everything is a spectrum in regards to your disability. And that was, I think, a huge eye opener for me.

Wow. I love that word spectrum. I'm glad that you brought that up because me being someone that I talk a lot about, being an introvert and being an empath and being a highly sensitive person and how it's all on a spectrum. We're not like everyone thinks, oh, you're.

Either not all zero or 100. We can be in between.