🤟 Inclusion That Actually Works: How Leah Riddell Built SignAble Vi5ion from the Inside Out

Picture this. A customer walks up to a counter. Could be a bank, a clinic, a coffee shop. They have a question, or need help, or are just trying to get something done. The staff member looks up, and something shifts. There's a pause. A look. Maybe a piece of paper gets slid across the counter. Maybe they wave over a colleague and disappear. Maybe they smile apologetically and say something the customer can't quite follow. The customer figures it out eventually, or they don't. Either way, they leave with a feeling they didn't come in with.

That moment happens all over Kingston, every day. It happens when a customer is Deaf and the staff member doesn't know any sign language. It happens when someone is blind and needs a menu read to them, not handed to them. It happens when someone uses a wheelchair and the counter is too high for easy eye contact. It happens when someone processes things differently and just needs a little more patience. The details change. The feeling is usually the same: I wasn't really expected here.

Most staff aren't indifferent. They freeze because nobody ever showed them what to do. It's not a character problem. It's a training gap.

For Deaf customers, that gap can carry extra weight. About 70 percent of ASL relies on facial expressions and body language, not hand signs, which means something as simple as a mask can wipe out most of the language overnight.

That gap (what Leah calls the "deer-in-headlights reaction", the awkward handoff, the customer who goes home and tells their whole community about it) is exactly what Leah Riddell built SignAble Vi5ion to close. She has been working on it in Kingston and beyond for years.

SignAble Vi5ion is a Deaf-led inclusive communication business based in Kingston. Leah is Deaf, and that's not a footnote to what she does. It's the foundation of it. She works with workplaces, schools, municipalities, and public services to help their teams communicate more effectively with Deaf, hard of hearing, and deafened customers, clients, and colleagues. The training covers Deaf awareness, practical ASL for real situations, how to work alongside an interpreter, and how to keep communication clear when things don't go to plan. Everything is customized, because what works for a retirement home looks very different from what a coffee shop on Wolfe Island needs. 

The thing most people get wrong about what she does: she is not teaching people to memorize signs. She is teaching them to actually communicate. There is a difference. Leah builds training around the specific environment a team works in, where communication breaks down, and what to do when it does. That includes working effectively with an interpreter, what to do when one isn't available, and how to build systems so inclusion isn't dependent on the one person in the building who attended the workshop. 

According to Leah, "Our new Sign2Connect ASL courses have live instructor-led learning designed to help participants build practical communication skills and confidence in ASL." Organizations and teams interested in workplace ASL training or inclusive communication sessions are also welcome to reach out for customized group training. And for those who prefer to learn on their own schedule, Sign2Thrive covers ASL foundations through self-paced online modules.

Her second school felt like a step forward. She was placed with two other Deaf peers and a Teacher of the Deaf who actually knew sign language. For the first time, she had access to real communication. But the school also moved her into hearing classrooms for math and science, on the basis that she could lipread. That put her in a different room from her Deaf peers, trying to follow along through visual guessing and whatever partial information she could catch. 

At her third school, two more Deaf students joined. Two of them were integrated into public school classrooms, but access remained limited. At times Leah found herself informally interpreting, bridging communication in a room where it was never set up to work for her in the first place.

By Grade 7, she transferred to Sir James Whitney School for the Deaf. For the first time, things actually fit. Real language access. Community. A place where sign language wasn't a workaround, it was just how people talked. Those four schools left a mark that never went away, and you can trace a straight line from what she experienced in each of them to the work she does today. 

After Grade 12, she headed to Rochester Institute of Technology through the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, where she studied photography and later added graphic design. A summer internship brought her back to Ontario, and a new friend who worked as an ASL/English interpreter invited her to a party in Kingston. That new friend happened to be the cousin of a man named Eric. After finishing her degree, Leah moved back to her parents' home in Belleville, then married Eric and settled in Kingston, where she has been ever since.

Leah and Eric are coming up on 26 years together this August. Eric is a Principal at Shoalts and Zaback Architects, Kingston's oldest continually-operating architecture firm. They raised their two kids bilingually, in both ASL and spoken English. Their children are CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults), not a small thing, growing up between two languages and two communities. 

Their oldest child stopped signing around age three, for reasons that only became clear after a diagnosis came later. The other took to ASL naturally and easily, without any prompting. Watching that unfold gave Leah a clarity she hadn't been expecting: the connection she had been looking for didn't require a workaround. It was already there, in the language she had always known.

Leah kept running into organizations that genuinely wanted to do inclusion work, but were going about it in ways that left Deaf and senior insight on the sidelines. An agency leading the effort, making decisions about the community without actually involving the community. Good intentions, wrong process. She had a simple choice: keep trying to fit into systems that weren't listening, or build something that actually worked the way inclusion is supposed to. She built something. 

The list of Kingston organizations she has worked with since tells its own story. Kingston Economic Development Corporation brought her in to help ensure their programs were genuinely accessible to Deaf entrepreneurs and business owners. Kingsbridge Retirement had residents in their 70s, 80s, and 90s learning ASL so they could communicate with a staff member who signs. The Boys and Girls Club SouthEast had her train staff to work with children who are Deaf or hard of hearing. Kingston Circus Arts, Theatre Passe Muraille, Haymaker's Coffee Co. on Wolfe Island, Score Pizza, the Kingston Frontenac Public Library (Isabel Turner Branch), and the Seniors Association Kingston Region have all worked with her. More recently her work has expanded beyond Kingston, reaching organizations at a regional and national level, including META Employment Services, the CRTC, and ScribeWire. 

She brings solid credentials to all of it: certified ASL instructor, CEFR language teaching certification, AODA customer service and integrated accessibility standards training, and Rick Hansen Foundation Fundamental training. 

At a TD Canada Trust branch on Strand Boulevard, especially caring Customer Experience Associate Tiffany Knapton took it upon herself to keep learning sign language, visit after visit, steadily building a vocabulary she uses with Leah and other Deaf clients. Small effort, wide ripple, and exactly the kind of shift Leah is working toward.

Her photography and graphic design background shows up in the advocacy work too. She designs logos, creates illustrations, and develops visual art that reflects Deaf culture and identity. Through the Kingston Arts Council,  her artwork was displayed at a local bus stop, a small but meaningful moment of public visibility for a language and community that doesn't always get it. Her ABC handshape illustration made it all the way to national television, appearing on Amazing Race Canada. Read the full story on her blog, watch the CTV Kingston segment on YouTube (note: not captioned), or find the episode on Crave. 

The recognition has followed. In 2025 she was named one of the Top 20 Global Woman Leaders, a distinction that reflects the reach her work has quietly built beyond Kingston. Closer to home, she received the OSD-SJW Alumni Association award for Cultural Leadership and Artistic Vision from the alumni association of the school that changed everything for her in Grade 7. That one, she says, meant something particular. 

The awards are meaningful. But ask Leah about the state of accessibility in 2026 and doesn't sugarcoat where things stand.

"In 2026, we still cannot walk into a movie theatre and expect equal access. Open-captioned movies are often offered only once a week, sometimes during the middle of a weekday when many people are working or in school. Hearing people can choose from multiple showtimes throughout the week and weekend. Deaf people often get one option and are expected to make it work.

I have arrived at appointments where the provider knew I was Deaf, yet no interpreter had been arranged. Instead of focusing on my appointment, I had to spend time advocating for myself and finding a last-minute virtual interpreter because an in-person interpreter was not booked. The responsibility should not fall on the Deaf person to fix an accessibility issue that should have been addressed beforehand.

The same inconsistency exists with virtual meetings. If no interpreter is provided, something as simple as turning on Zoom captions is often overlooked. Accessibility is frequently treated as an afterthought rather than a basic expectation.

Healthcare is another example. Access to sign language interpreters can vary depending on the hospital, not because Deaf patients need different accommodations, but because of how interpreter services are funded and arranged. One hospital may have systems in place, while another faces barriers because of billing agreements or restrictions on which service providers they can use. The result is that Deaf patients experience very different levels of access depending on where they receive care. Access to communication should not depend on administrative agreements or funding models.

There are also ongoing concerns around choice and autonomy. In some situations, Deaf people are limited by systems that control which interpreters or service providers can be used. This can affect access to therapists, counsellors, and other professionals, reducing the ability to choose someone who is the right fit.

Progress has been made, and there are many people working hard to improve accessibility. But the gap between policy and practice remains significant. For many Deaf people, accessibility is still inconsistent, unpredictable, and something we must constantly advocate for. That is why the work remains important."

Leah is focused on growing SignAble Vi5ion's training programs and making them accessible to more organizations. That means developing more structured formats, including smaller team sessions, multi-session programs, and self-paced options, so organizations can choose what actually fits their staff rather than being handed a one-size approach. Her Sign2Thrive online course is already live. Just reach out to get started.

She's also noticing a shift in how workplaces are coming to the conversation. More organizations are arriving already understanding that inclusion isn't just about having the right policies on paper. It's about whether staff can actually communicate when it counts. Once that piece clicks, she says, everything else follows. 

The connection between Leah and ScribeWire runs deeper than a vendor recommendation: they first connected through the WeCan Project at Queen's University, and CCS later featured her in an accessibility awareness campaign. The two organizations have been aligned around the same values ever since. Leah is deliberate about who she works with and highlights, and ScribeWire fits her criteria: accessibility done properly, with genuine respect for community and lived experience, not just for compliance.