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.
In this episode, we speak with Carly Findlay about ableism, the media and the new book Growing Up Disabled in Australia.
Following community outrage at the decision to portray disability in this way, the studio has offered the standard empty “sorry to those who were offended”. But the damage is done. Movie-going children in their millions, whose world views are being actively shaped, will now associate limb difference with being scary and dangerous. They’ve learned a powerful, early lesson that disability is gross and scary.
Advocacy groups say the commission must recognise that segregation of people with disability is discrimination and a breach of human rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (of which Australia is a signatory).
The new series of The Crown is extraordinary in two ways. Not only does the storyline include Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, the Queen’s cousins who both had a learning disability, but it has also cast actors with a learning disability in those parts.
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Kimberly’s sunny, athletic and inquisitive about everything. But for years she harboured terrible secrets about what happened to her. Janine Fitzpatrick investigates why her school failed to heed credible warnings that she was in danger.
This was the second session of the Advocacy Sector Conversations forum held on Zoom webinar for the first time, on 29 July 2020 (due to COVID-19 event restrictions not allowing large gatherings). Yvette Maker, Senior Research Associate, Melbourne Social Equity Institute (University of Melbourne) is part of the research team who has been working with essential and basic service providers, people with cognitive disability, and their representative organisations to develop tools to promote the consumer rights of people with cognitive disability.
When Bodhi Dreyfus-Ballesi, 25, is happy, he will jump, clap and slap the top of his head. Now for the first time, his non-verbal expressions will be used as vital feedback to help inform the design of an all-ages and all-abilities playground.
The NDIS funding model provides a one size fits all approach, making it difficult for good quality group supports to survive and thrive, and for new ones to evolve. In recent months we have conducted cost analysis for a range of providers of group programs. The results painted a bleak picture.
Annabelle Lindsay is one of two Australian Gliders who recently had their hopes of competing dashed by a change in the classification rules for wheelchair athletes set to compete at the Games, being told they were now ineligible just weeks before the proposed start of the Games, had they taken place this year.
“I got bullied because of my disability, I used to get called a cripple or a spastic everywhere I went. That stuff made it really hard for me — and I believed them. I believed I was less than them.” Alcott said that changed when he went to his first wheelchair tennis tournament, where he said his eyes were opened.
High-profile Paralympian and wheelchair tennis star Dylan Alcott has slated officials for taking his competitions off the schedule for this year’s US Open tournament. “It is blatant discrimination for able-bodied people to decide on my behalf what I do with my LIFE AND CAREER just because I am disabled. Not good enough,” he said.
One of the applications rejected by the Federal Government was a project to improve disability access to Horsham’s aquatic centre, in western Victoria, for upgrades that disability advocates rallied for many years for.
The problem with inspiration is its intangible quality. How to turn inspiration into habits and concrete change? Trading on inspiration also fails to appreciate wider obstacles and barriers preventing disabled people participating in sports and society.
Dina Bassile and her business Tibi have moved to Melbourne to continue her services to provide education and access consulting to festivals, venues and artists on accessibility in venues.