While marketers and content creators routinely debate and swap advice on if, when and how to use these practices, a disabled person can’t choose if, when and how to be disabled. For them, digital accessibility is a full time, lived experience.
As live music returns in much of the country, advocates and artists with disability say the industry should learn some lessons from the pandemic and build back up in a more inclusive way.
Thursday, 20 May marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day. With Australians spending over 40 percent of our time awake online, digital accessibility and inclusivity has become increasingly important. Make your business digitally inclusive and accessible, with some best practice tips.
Diversity policies, especially when it comes to disabled people, are often created and implemented by decision makers with very different life experiences to those who their policies affect most. We would never expect economic policy to be crafted without input from economists and bankers. We should demand the same for disability policies, if we want to create the change needed to produce inclusive societies.
During the pandemic, when the world shrank, many of us walked in the bush. For someone who can’t see, it isn’t necessarily something that I can do independently. But over the years, it is something that has become important to me.
Like many parents, Jonathan Wenig was concerned about his daughter’s career path after she left school last year. Tali, 20, who has autism, faced more than the usual challenges in finding a job that would suit her.
nd and low-vision Australians are being shut out of the Covid-19 vaccination process because the government’s eligibility checker and clinic finder website fail to meet basic web accessibility standards, according to Australia’s biggest provider of low-vision services.
“We have seen the benefits of working from home, as well as the accessibility of online events,” Carly tells The CEO Magazine. “For many people – especially disabled people – events and art going online because of the pandemic has been the first time they’ve had access to it. We have seen accessibility created because non-disabled people have required it, yet disabled people have been calling for these provisions for many years.”
You’ve already been told by your potential employer that your resumé is the best they have ever seen. The employer has every intention of giving you the job. The interview is just a formality. But, when you arrive for the interview, you find yourself unable to enter the building. Because of this, no matter how perfect you are for the position, you won’t get the job.
In moves to address climate change, many of us make assumptions about how to make a difference. Stop using straws, get rid of packaging, use less air-conditioning. But what if that straw makes the difference between being able to drink or not, you rely on packaged, pre-cut fruit because you’re unable to cut it yourself, if air-con is essential for your ability to function.
Carl Thompson, 31 – who lives with cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair – and his girlfriend Kirsty Crosby, 24, from Melbourne, say they are often met with confusion when people realise they are in fact in a relationship.
When children can’t and don’t see themselves and the possibilities of their lives, joy and dreams in what they watch, read and play with, it’s like a black hole gets torn inside them.
When 26-year-old Nathan Johnston tried to connect with people during the peak of last year’s COVID-19 lockdown, he realised how challenging it could be for people living with a disability to use social media networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Model and activist Angel Dixon says there are two invisible barriers that prevent her and other disabled people from entering a clothing store — and they’re both essential to the shopping experience. “If your store isn’t physically accessible or your staff feel uncomfortable around a person with a disability, then we’re not coming in,” she says.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is seeking new astronauts for the first time in a decade and wants to recruit one person with a disability. At a briefing held today, ESA experts and astronauts discussed the selection criteria for the four to six astronauts who are needed. The agency said it was keen to improve its record on diversity and inclusion and wants one of the new recruits to have a disability – a “parastronaut”.