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When Tatiana Lee was a child, she did not consider herself as “different.” Lee — an actress, mannequin and activist — has spina bifida, that means her backbone and spinal wire did not type correctly at delivery. But as somebody who makes use of a wheelchair, she additionally did not see many individuals like her on TV or in motion pictures.
“You’ve grown up with this society where this entire demographic is completely invisible,” she mirrored. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
That did not cease Lee from chasing her dream of changing into the individual she by no means noticed onscreen. After transferring to Los Angeles in 2010, she’s appeared in an Apple advert marketing campaign for accessible options and merchandise, in addition to modeling campaigns for corporations together with Target and Zappos.
But her journey hasn’t been with out challenges. Acting programs might be dear, and bodily entry to buildings for courses and auditions is not assured for somebody in a wheelchair. On high of that, Lee and different actors with disabilities typically compete for roles with individuals who do not have disabilities and, in consequence, have sometimes had extra entry to coaching. If different actors do have a incapacity, Lee has to push by way of further boundaries as a plus-size black lady.
Lee’s struggles highlight just one example of the widespread challenges that people with disabilities face when it comes to representation and access to spaces — both digital and physical — in our rapidly changing world. As Hollywood pushes diversity initiatives in the wake of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, people with disabilities are often overlooked and excluded. The coronavirus pandemic has also highlighted the urgency of digital accessibility, as more people depend on online interactions for everyday tasks. While virtual meetings and classes have helped eliminate physical barriers for some people with disabilities, several issues remain. That includes the fact that COVID-19 data often isn’t accessible to people who are blind, and many people with disabilities — particularly those in low-income communities and communities of color — don’t have access to high-speed internet.
The issues remain prevalent even 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is designed to prohibit discrimination based on disability.
Thankfully, both Hollywood and the tech industry have ramped up their efforts to address these disparities. Organizations like RespectAbility, a nonprofit that promotes diverse and accurate on-screen portrayals of people with disabilities, host labs designed to help creators find jobs in Hollywood. Similarly, The Black List, which showcases unproduced and overlooked screenplays, launched something called The Disability List, which highlights unproduced scripts featuring at least one lead character with a disability. On the tech side, companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have launched more accessibility features designed to help all customers use their products and services. But there’s still a long way to go.
“Disability cuts across every line in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc.,” said Lauren Appelbaum, vice president of communications at RespectAbility. “If you want to represent America, you can’t do that without including people with disabilities.”
Inclusive entertainment
Although people with disabilities make up 26% of the US adult population, they appear on screen just 2.7% of the time, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Initiatives like the RespectAbility Lab are working to provide people with additional skills and access to industry executives to challenge the notion that there aren’t qualified actors, writers or producers with disabilities.
Apart from being the right thing to do, including more people with disabilities can be financially rewarding, Appelbaum says. According to a 2016 report by Nielsen, consumers with disabilities along with their families, friends and associates make up a trillion-dollar market segment. This, along with the push from accessibility advocates and organizations to diversify casting and hiring efforts, is leading the industry to slowly recognize the value of telling more diverse stories. A growing number of TV shows and movies, from Hulu’s Ramy to Disney Channel’s Big City Greens, have incorporated disabled characters and storylines.
“People are finally realizing that disability stories are cool to tell. They’re interesting and they’re not niche,” Appelbaum said. “Everyone deserves the opportunity to see themselves represented on screen.”
It’s important that representation extends beyond just showing white men with disabilities, Lee says. She especially feels the need for greater intersectionality when she’s competing for roles with people whose race or size may give them an advantage due to social biases.
“If a casting director or an executive is deciding which girl in a wheelchair to pick, are you gonna pick the black girl who is also plus-sized and has kinky hair, or are you gonna pick the white girl in a wheelchair who has long, blond hair?” Lee said. “There’s a huge pool of black women with disabilities who are actually more marginalized than white women with disabilities.”
Expanding accessibility in tech
In a way, progress made in entertainment can shape and inspire progress in other sectors, including tech, says Natasha Mooney Walton, founder of Tech Disability Project, which aims to increase representation of tech founders and employees with disabilities.
“When it comes to social issues, Hollywood often is the leader — [it’s] the hub of our tradition and the keeper of our societal tales,” Walton mentioned. “Making sure we have authentic disability representation is just starting to gain some traction. That’s going to hit a tipping point that I hope will then translate over into the technology industry starting to take our community’s needs seriously as well.”
After all, tech touches virtually each facet of our lives, together with how we eat leisure. When accessibility guide Joel Isaac misplaced his eyesight six years in the past, he thought he’d by no means give you the chance to watch motion pictures once more. Until not too long ago, streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu did not embrace audio description, a separate audio observe that narrates the visible components in scenes with out dialogue. But after being hit with main lawsuits, the businesses pledged to add audio description and make their websites and apps accessible by way of display readers. HBO Max not too long ago agreed to do the identical following a lawsuit settlement earlier this 12 months.
“Even without looking at the screen,” Isaac mentioned, “I can understand and I can be included in watching a movie.”
Thanks to display readers and a rising variety of accessibility options on iPhone and Android, Isaac is additionally in a position to use the hand held gadgets he’d relied on earlier than dropping his sight, and can simply swap between the 2 techniques. He says accessibility on these gadgets has improved considerably over the past decade.
Apple, for example, launched a screen-reading expertise known as VoiceOver on the iPhone 3GS in 2009, which helps blind customers navigate their machine. The iPhone maker has since launched a handful of different options, together with one which lets people who find themselves blind or low-vision detect others round them. Google has additionally launched apps like Live Transcribe, which gives real-time speech-to-text transcriptions for people who find themselves deaf or laborious of listening to, in addition to Lookout, which helps people who find themselves blind or low-vision establish meals labels, pinpoint objects in a room and scan paperwork and forex.
“Having those tools and having things set up in a way where I can experience it, that makes a big difference to me,” Isaac mentioned. “I’ve been depressed when there are things that I want to do and I’m just totally blocked because I was never considered in that experience.”
He notes that some corporations make the error of viewing accessibility as a guidelines, or brush it off as one thing they will work on after absolutely constructing a product. But he says it is a lot more durable to add fixes after one thing’s been constructed.
Twitter, for example, got here below hearth earlier this 12 months after it unveiled its new voice tweets characteristic, which individuals within the incapacity group had been fast to level out lacked closed captioning and was subsequently inaccessible. In response to criticism, Twitter initially mentioned it was “exploring ways to make these types of tweets accessible to everyone.” That prompted one incapacity rights advocate and lawyer to reply by saying, “You don’t, as a matter of civil rights law, get to roll out an inaccessible feature and then, only later, make it accessible.” It was solely after vital pushback that Twitter mentioned it will add transcriptions.
Experts have lengthy emphasised that one of the vital necessary methods to keep away from these sorts of conditions is to embrace individuals with disabilities from the beginning.
“It’s impossible to effectively design products and services for the 1 billion disabled people on the planet without hiring them,” mentioned Meenakshi Das, a incapacity advocate.
Social media corporations are slowly getting to the place they want to be, however there’s nonetheless a great distance forward. Earlier this 12 months, Instagram added automated captions to IGTV, although Lee says she’d like to see automated captions on Instagram Stories, too. These are options advocates say can profit everybody, not simply individuals with disabilities. In reality, a Verizon Media survey final 12 months discovered that 92% of Americans view movies with the hold forth on cellular gadgets. Other accessibility options Instagram has added embrace automated various textual content, which lets individuals with visible impairments hear descriptions of images by way of their display reader whereas utilizing Feed, Explore and Profile. The firm additionally rolled out customized various textual content, enabling customers to add stronger descriptions of their images when importing.
Other platforms like Google Meet, Google Slides, Skype, PowerPoint and Zoom have added dwell captioning and transcriptions to assist individuals with listening to loss absolutely interact in conversations and shows. Zoom additionally now lets customers rearrange and pin a number of movies to allow them to maintain an interpreter and speaker in the identical spot, regardless of who’s speaking. These options have turn out to be much more vital because the coronavirus pandemic has made individuals extra reliant on video chat companies for conferences, courses and digital hangouts.
Both the tech and leisure industries are ripe for change, given the widespread concentrate on selling range and inclusion. For the final a number of years, tech corporations have been working to improve the variety of girls staff. Those actions have expanded to embrace individuals of coloration, and incapacity is now beginning to enter the dialog, too.
“There’s this disruptive moment that makes room for some hopefulness in this area,” mentioned Jutta Treviranus, director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre, which works to guarantee new applied sciences are designed inclusively. “It’s so urgent to get whatever we can into this moment.”
That momentum is inspiring individuals like Lee to proceed to push for progress throughout each leisure and tech, and to be an energetic a part of change that is lengthy overdue.
“I looked for [disability] representation as a kid, and I never found it,” Lee mentioned. “I like to think I developed a brand that the little me would be proud of and would see as a role model.”
(This story has not been edited by Newslivenation workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)