Producing Positive Disability Stories: A Brief Guide – Haben Girma -needs-cat/tags

How we describe disability experiences in the media can help or hurt the disability community.

Positive portrayals promote inclusion, increasing opportunities for education, employment, and social integration. People with disabilities represent the largest minority group, numbering one billion worldwide. Reaching an audience of this scale benefits media producers. Those who choose to produce positive disability stories also move us towards a more inclusive society. While we can’t change our past, we can influence our future through the messages we send.

Positive Messages To Send

• We respect and admire disabled leaders, just as we respect and admire our non-disabled leaders.
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Harmful Messages To Avoid

• Non-disabled people should feel grateful they don’t have disabilities. This perpetuates hierarchies of us versus them, continuing the marginalization of people with disabilities.
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Storytelling Practices

• Spotlight the voices of people with disabilities. Stories about disability have a disturbing pattern of marginalizing disabled voices in favor of the voices of the non-disabled parent, teacher, friend, etc. Practice focusing the story’s attention on the perspective of the person with a disability rather than the perspective of the non-disabled person.
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Make Your Stories Accessible

Videos

• Provide captions so that Deaf individuals can access the audio content. You can learn how to create captions on YouTube , and upload captions to Facebook videos.
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Podcasts/Radio

Provide a transcript to ensure access for Deaf viewers.

Images

Provide an image description near the image. The image description should communicate key visual information. …

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Articles

Please make sure the text in your articles is machine-readable. Machine-readable text can be read by software used by blind viewers to convert the text to speech or digital braille. Most text on the web is machine-readable, so your text is probably accessible. …

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Curated by (Lifekludger)
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