Unwittingly, critics of “useless products” are sitting at the core of a battle the disability community has been engaged in for decades: The right to live in their communities, and to receive the services that enable them to do that. If you can’t use your hands to open a jar of pasta sauce, does that mean you should live in an institution?
Having written about my disability publicly for the guts of nine years, I’ve come to learn that, under the guise of inclusivity, there’s also tokenism and the act of being taken advantage of in the media, creating a misguided perception of disabled people that then feeds into our daily life.
People living with disability are largely excluded from conversationsabout sexuality, and face overlapping barriers to sexual expression that are both social and physical.
Around 5% of the population, or 1.2 million Australians have a communication disability. Communication disability can arise if a person has a health condition affecting their speech, language, listening, understanding, reading, writing, or social skills.
“I spent the first three-and-a-half years of my life in hospital but the best thing my family did was never to wrap me in cotton wool,” says Alcott, who on this forbidding Melbourne morning is rallying against a wall in an underground carpark. “They never cared about the fact I had a disability so I took the view that if they don’t care, why should I?”
The government’s failure to roll out technology that enables television access for 450,000 blind or visually impaired Australians appears to breach anti-discrimination laws, according to the disability commissioner.
Nearly one in five people have a disability, but just 2% of publicly available imagery depicts their lives. The photo company, alongside Oath and the National Disability Leadership Alliance, is working to change that. In the stock photo world, images of people with disabilities tend to cluster at two poles. “They’re either depicted as superhuman … Continued
Being hard of hearing has seen me saddled with shame – but if you think I’m living in a state of self-hating sorrow, you are sorely mistaken.
For the National Disability Insurance Scheme to be successful, our cities will need to change. Our new research explores the impacts that the NDIS is having on Australia’s cities. A major goal of the NDIS is to improve participation in mainstream services by people with disability. The success of the scheme will depend on how well it achieves this.
Findlay, a writer, spoken-word performer and “appearance activist”, has recently taken up the new post of inclusion coordinator for the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Her goal for her three-year tenure as inclusion coordinator is to get the proportion of artists with disabilities at Melbourne Fringe to around 20 per cent, which would be similar to the proportion in the general community.
Here sits senator Jordon Steele-John, the West Australian Green who in November last year, just weeks after turning 23, became the Australian Parliament’s youngest-ever senator. He’s sitting alone at the back of the room because he can’t get to the floor of the chamber to greet the new arrival. It’s an all too common experience for someone … Continued
Reports surfaced this month that the Commonwealth Bank is facing legal action over the accessibility of its point of sale eftpos machine known as ‘Albert’. The news stands as a stark reminder that even the biggest companies, those with resources, compliance expertise – and according to the CBA – the will to build accessibility into its services, can be easily tripped up without due diligence to process.
Stephen Hawking was one of the most prominent people in history to use a high-tech communication aid known as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Today, many Australians who need AAC still lack access to the technology and the support they need to use it. It’s time for that to change.
With only 53 per cent of people with a disability employed and only half likely to finish year 12, it’s time to take stock of our disability discrimination laws.
“The fear of not being able to navigate busy, cluttered and visually oriented environments is a major barrier to participation in normal life,” says Meere, 52, “be that going to the shops, going for a walk in the park, going to work, looking for work, or simply socialising.”