It's time to Rethink Disability

Time to Rethink Disability

It’s all about the audience

As co-chair of the BBC’s disabled staff network I’ve become more and more committed to how we need to ensure all our audience see themselves reflected in truly authentic ways through the stories we tell. This ethos is the main driver behind what my BBC Ability co-chair Claire Harris FRSA and I do  in our day to day work with the network.

One of the big set pieces of the year for us and something we instigated in 2023 is the Rethink Disability Festival. Timed to coincide with the UN International Day for Persons with Disabilities which takes place on 3 December every year, the Rethink Disability Festival is an opportunity to focus on authentic inclusion across the media industry and to raise awareness of the need for more disabled people within the BBC and wider sector.

Hosted by BBC News Senior North America Correspondent Gary O'Donoghue , this year’s festival put the spotlight on how we can make media more inclusive and representative for everyone. The whole day is available to watch again via the   Rethink Disability Festival website, which I’d obviously encourage you all to do. If you’re pushed for time however it’s worth   catching up with the   Rethink Disability opening key note address from the BBC’s Chief Operating Officer and Ability executive sponsor Leigh Tavaziva who underlined the BBC’s commitment to disability representation on and off screen. I’d also suggest the workshop with disability and inclusion consultant Zara Todd who explained   how the social model of disability can be incorporated into all aspects of our newsrooms.

The day really was a huge success and is a shining example of what can happen when people come together for a common goal. Hugethanks to Lalita Taylor FRSA , Karen Marshall , Rowan Kerek Robertson , Tom Speight , Jana Mrazova and everyone else involved in the production and planning for the day. We know the news industry needs more disabled people if we’re going to represent all our audiences. Senior leaders however need to understand why this isn’t just about hiring more disabled journalists. The environment needs to change and the culture needs to become fit for purpose if we’re ever going to make progress.  

Progress over perfection

The progress over perfection mantra was the abiding takeaway from the Rethink Disability Festival. It’s also something the founder of Google’s Accessibility Discovery Centre Christopher Patnoe  was keen to press home when I visited the ADC at Google’s offices in London. The tour was great and a brilliant opportunity to explore how a company like Google continue to embed accessibility and inclusion into everything they do. Chris was very open however in that there’s still a lot of work to do and that it’s all about progress.     Thanks To the fantastically fragrant Hans Zimmermann for organising the visit and being so welcoming to myself and BBC colleagues.

Something we talked about on the Google visit was the introduction of “expressive captions” for Android users which uses AI to understand the context of sounds for Deaf    and/or hard of hearing audiences. Google’s Director of  Product Management for Android Angana Ghosh recently announced how Android's expressive captions is using AI to bring emotion to captions. Angana explained that the way captions   have been presented haven’t changed much over the past fifty years which means the nuances of language and sound , including emphasis, tone and personality are often lost. 

“Expressive Captions uses AI on your Android device to communicate things like tone, volume, environmental cues and human noises.” She explained. “ These small things make a huge difference in conveying what goes beyond words, especially for live and social content that doesn’t have pre-loaded or high-quality captions.”

Ensuring accessible coms

One of the barriers explored in Zara Todd’s workshop at the Rethink Disability Festival  was access to communications. We need to ensure that all workplace coms are accessible to everyone no matter how they’re accessing the content. There’s no point in extoling the virtues of employing diverse journalists if how you communicate with us creates a barrier. This also goes for audiences. Many news organisations now have a whole raft of newsletters to share content and drive engagement, but many off the shelf authoring tools create content which builds exclusion into the product.     In this blog post about how to write accessible E mails, Kirsty Marrins gives practical guidance on the use of proper heading structures, good colour contrast, proper alt text and the value of punchy sentences and white space when creating your coms. Good solid advice.

For me the biggest lever to build a more inclusive and accessible newsroom culture is to  have more disabled people at senior decision making levels. Easy in theory, but when the existing culture prevents this from happening, we need to try and change it. Every year Nieman Lab asks different journalists and newsroom leaders for their predictions for the industry in the next 12 months. You can read the full list of predictions for journalism 2025 here, but one of the predictions that caught my eye was by Rachel S. Hunt who believes that newsrooms need to better understand what’s going on with all their journalists if they want to keep them. In her accommodating journalists is in- or you're out prediction, Rachel encourages all journalists to look after themselves and for disabled journalists in particular to understand their rights when it comes to accommodations or workplace adjustments.  More great advice, but I think we need to go further and move the responsibility from individuals and create a culture where inclusion is seen as proactive rather than reactive.    Newsrooms need to anticipate diversity and create an environment where accessibility is already factored in.  Writer and Futurist Jonathan J Kaufman explains this perfectly in his   Separating accommodations from accessibility and why the difference matters post on LinkedIn. It’s crucial that any strategies newsrooms might create in order to diversify their  workforce to better serve their audiences understand that anticipating different accessibility requirements will always be better than constant firefighting. As a11y queen Sheri Byrne-Haber (disabled) says,   “Accessibility isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a culture to be built.”

A great point to end on.

That’s it for this edition of Journalism A11y. As ever please do share with anyone else working at the intersection of journalism, audiences, inclusion and accessibility you think might be interested in the newsletter.

Thanks again and talk soon

Johny