Jed Fonner

As someone with a deaf family member, I know how inaccessible movie theaters have been to people with hearing loss. In the past, some theaters provided boosted audio to people with mild hearing loss, but even that distorted the sound and didn't work well. Other theaters provided bulky devices that rendered captions, but they were not in your line of sight and it was so bright as to distract other patrons. Neither was a good solution.

Considering what Google has done with their Google Glass product, I imagined that a much simpler set of glasses could be created to provide captions for people with hearing loss. I always wondered why no movie theater chain was doing this. The first theater to do so would gain extra viewership as well as goodwill, and maybe loyalty, from the deaf community.

Well it looks like this is finally becoming a reality, and it's awesome. Regal Cinemas plans to distribute new closed-captioning glasses from Sony to more than 6,000 screens across the country by the beginning of summer and hopes to have them in all their theaters by the end of the year. As you can see from the picture (right), the glasses look kind of like bulky 3-D glasses except these are used for captioning, not 3D. The captions are projected onto the glasses and appear to float about 10 feet in front of the user at the bottom of their field of vision. In ddition, the glasses also provide "descriptive narration" which describes the action on the screen for the visually impared and they can also boost the audio levels of the movie for those who are hard of hearing.

Hopefully these will work well and a whole new group of people will be able enjoy going out to the movies. This might actually make it worth paying $12 to see a movie in the theater.

Check out the explanatory YouTube video from Regal Cinemas below, complete with captions of course:

Woohoo, the Washington Business Journal just named my company, Appian, as a Top Workplaces of 2013.

No. 20: Along with providing fun workplace activities, Appian, a Reston-based business process management software provider, offers tuition reimbursement, on-going training and rapid career advancement opportunities.

The picture in the Journal (#6) is relatively tame (that's one of our Engineering department groups). Good thing they didn't use a photo from one of our old company cruises. But photos aside, Appian treats its employees well. We just got back from our company-sponsored family retreat to Shenandoah Crossing. Last fall, Appian rented out the National Gallery of Art for our annual night of fun and food. In between all the fun events, we have flexible work hours and generous HR benefits.

More importantly, Appian is also an enjoyable place to get work done. People work hard and are dedicated to doing their best - no one is just putting in their 9-5. Our Engineering department is building a cutting-edge software platform and is pushing agile methodology more than any other company I know (and I go to APLN-DC meetings, so clearly I must know what I'm talking about). Working in our Professional Services department, of which I'm a member, is different than working at other consulting companies. Instead of spending months just building a strategy paper or recommendation document, our consultants create actual working systems using our BPM software suite. By the time you are done at a customer, you've built a real system that's providing real value to real people.

Want to know more? Check out Appian or the Appian Jobs website. Then, if you think you'd like to work for Appian, email me your resume by sending it to referral [at] jedfonner.com.

You can also check out the whole list of Top Workplaces here.

Alternatively, you can just watch a video of Eli riding a horse from our recent Appian family weekend in the Shenandoah Mountains.

Eli's first time riding a horse

I took this Photosphere a while ago and posted it to my Google+ account. But Google just released a Javascript API that lets you embed Photospheres on your website. So here ya go - my first Photosphere. Hopefully this will encourage me to take more of these.

Click to start the dynamic capabilities of the Photosphere. Then click-and-drag to move around or double-click to zoom in.

My company's annual conference, Appian World, runs this Monday 4/29 through Wednesday 5/1. There will be some amazing keynote speeches, terribly interesting customer case studies, and presentations by incredibly smart people. For some reason, they also wanted me to present. I will be talking about the following Appian topics:

This story by NPR Planet Money's Chana Joffe-Walt shocked me and totally changed the way I used to think about our economy. What I didn't know, what most people probably didn't know, is that the number of Americans who are collecting social security disability has increased tremendously since 1980. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government for around $1,000.

Joffe-Walt spent 6 months exploring the disability program. As she reports, the story of the U.S. economy we normally hear is not the full picture, not by a long shot. Our federal disability program is only slightly caused by an aging workforce; it is primarily an increasingly expensive, relatively hidden safety net.

The federal disability program, along with the associated health care benefits, costs about $260 billion a year. That's not only eight times more than we spend on welfare, it's more than we spend on welfare, food stamps, the school lunch program, and subsidized housing combined! And the worst part is that the disability program incentivizes people to stay on the program forever and never get off of it. You know, the opposite of what a welfare program should do.

And another kicker: the landmark welfare reform passed in the 90s encourages states to move healthy people from welfare, in which states have to pay a major share, to disability, which is totally paid by the federal government.

The story is excellent but I was a little disappointed that there wasn't much attention paid to what these people would be doing if they weren't getting paid by the disability program. Simple economics says they would follow demand and move to where the jobs are. But I wonder - most of these people (self-admittedly) are not skilled for the types of jobs needed by our modern economy. So is the disability program really preventing people from bettering themselves, or is it the final and lowest safety net for people left behind by the modern economy? I wish they'd discussed that more, but regardless I highly recommend listening to it or reading it (see below).

Checkout the full NPR mini-website at Unfit For Work, read the transcript, listen to the show or download the podcast.