Tremmel Watson

Tremmel Watson

Role	Lead Ambassador, 10P W.E.L.D.
10P journey	Began 10P as a participant while incarcerated
Based in	Sacramento, California
Known for	Communication access, disability rights, criminal-justice advocacy
Policy work	Public Policy Analyst, Disability Rights California
Leadership	Region IV Director, Association of Late-Deafened Adults; Chair-Elect, Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text Captioning
Public service	Sacramento County Disability Advisory Commission

Tremmel Watson is a disability-rights and social-justice leader from South Sacramento, California, and the Lead Ambassador of 10P W.E.L.D., which stands for Wholeness + Emotional Literacy for the Disabled.¹ He is a Black, late-deafened adult. His work connects emotional literacy with disability inclusion, accessibility and reentry, on the conviction that people cannot do emotional work in rooms they cannot fully access.

Lived experience

Watson's involvement with the criminal legal system began when he was a teenager and led to a collective decade in adult jails and prisons. He became deaf while incarcerated.²

It was inside that Watson began the 10P Program. He committed himself to the work, and he is a product of that dedication: a participant who came home and became one of the program's leaders. Inside, getting sign language interpreters and captions was a constant struggle, and he turned to the Prison Law Office for help with his accommodations.³ That fight became his calling. He describes the gap between being present in a room and truly participating in it, and he has made closing that gap his life's work.⁴

Advocacy and policy

Watson is a Public Policy Analyst at Disability Rights California, where he works on legislation affecting deaf and hard-of-hearing Californians.⁵ He serves as Region IV Director of the Association of Late-Deafened Adults. In 2025 he testified before a California Senate committee in support of including hearing aids in the state's essential health benefits.⁶

He also works at the national level: - He served as a subject matter expert on the Federal Communications Commission's caption quality working group.⁵ - He is Chair-Elect of the Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text Captioning.⁷ - He consults on communication access in correctional settings, including for the Prison Law Office.⁶ - His federal case on communication access ended in a settlement affirming that a deaf person's requested accommodation, in his case live human captioning (CART), must receive primary consideration.⁸

Watson is also an appointee to the Sacramento County Disability Advisory Commission.⁵ His writing has appeared in the Hearing Health Foundation's publications and the Journal of Court Reporting.⁴

Contribution to emotional literacy

Watson's path runs from participant to leader. He came to 10P as an incarcerated man learning to read his own emotions, and today he leads W.E.L.D., which brings the The 10P Emotional Literacy System to disabled people and to the programs that serve them. Paralympian Juan Angulo serves alongside him as an ambassador.

His contribution is a principle the rest of the field often skips: emotional literacy depends on communication access. A person cannot Read, Understand and Respond to what they cannot hear or see. In his talks for 10P, Watson has described the program's healing circles at Sacramento State, Legends & Leaders, and Warriors & Queens, and he has pressed for access without apology: accommodations built into the work from the start, not added as an afterthought.

His story also gives weight to APEs: Adverse Prison Experiences. Disability inside a prison compounds isolation and loss of control, two of the five patterns 10P names.

Work with Tremmel

To bring W.E.L.D. to your organization or invite Tremmel Watson to speak, contact the 10P office at (530) 341-3226 or learnabout10p@gmail.com.

See also

• Samual Nathaniel Brown
• Emotional literacy in prisons and reentry
• APEs: Adverse Prison Experiences
• The 10P Emotional Literacy System
• Eric "Maserati-E" Abercrombie
• Robert Jafari
• Tasha Danvers

Cite this entry: Samual Nathaniel Brown. “Tremmel Watson.” The Emotional Literacy Encyclopedia, 10P Program, 2026-10-30. https://emotionalliteracy.org/encyclopedia/tremmel-watson/