Progress Over Perfection: The Mantra For Pursuing Accessibility Goals
Issue Seven
Hello, I’m Priti Salian, an independent journalist, researcher and media trainer based out of Bengaluru, a city in South India. Welcome to the seventh edition of Reframing Disability, your fortnightly dispatch simplifying disability-inclusive narratives.
In this issue, read about journalist Johny Cassidy and BBC UK’s work for disability inclusion, data on the disabled travellers market, a course by School of Sanity, and a call to share your wishlist for media coverage of disability issues related to elections in your country.
I crossed paths with Johny Cassidy in the summer of 2022 during my tenure as a journalist fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) in Oxford. He was selected as a fellow for the following term and was about to make history as the first blind journalist in the RISJ fellowship. We met and dove into discussions about the paper I was writing on disability inclusion in India’s news landscape and his experiences at the BBC, where he has worked for 16 years.
At RISJ, Johny conducted research on how blind news audiences are being left behind in the data visualisation revolution, and the ways to fix that.
Last year, he took over as co-chair of BBC Ability, the disabled staff forum for BBC staff, freelancers and associates. Currently, among other things, he has been working with various teams across the BBC to make the organisation one of the best mainstream news providers of visual content for blind and partially sighted audiences.
With all the stellar work Johny is doing, it was time for Reframing Disability to have a chat with him. Below are the excerpts from an edited interview.
What is the most important aspect of your work on accessibility of visual content?
A lot of the work we do is for culture change and raising awareness of what the impact is on many of our audiences who don't [consume] information in what might be considered the traditional way. We talk to the visual content teams to make sure that they're aware of what it is that they need to do to make all their content accessible. We’re currently focussing on writing the most meaningful and impactful alt text* for images, photographs primarily, and then we’ll move on to complex data images like graphs, charts and infographics.
Which guidelines do you follow for alt text?
Everything is built around the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)**, a stringent set of [internationally recognised web accessibility] guidelines already in place. But a lot of times, the language used in WCAG guidelines isn't direct and straightforward. So I’m trying to make things as simple as possible for all journalists to understand the different nuances and considerations so they understand what they need to do.
Writing alt text is quite subjective and context-based. What are your thoughts on that?
That’s true. The bottom line is that the information that an image is conveying [should be] important and relevant, and add value. If the information is available [elsewhere] in the piece, then you can have your alt text a lot less detailed. But if the image is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the understanding of the piece, and the information it is conveying isn't available in words then you have to make sure that that information is in the alt text.
[At the BBC] we use the term text descriptions for alt text because alt text appears like it's an alternative way of understanding. For a lot of people who use screen readers, it’s actually the primary way of understanding an image.
What is the narrative BBC prefers to take on reportage on disability?
Within BBC News, there are guidelines about how to report about disability. We've moved away from using terms like wheelchair-bound for example. We have tried to move away from the narratives of people suffering from a condition, instead we say people living with a condition. As a staff network, we have hosted various events on language and how important it is to get it right.
We also need to "normalise" disability. [Many times] you’ll see either a story about a ‘poor disabled person’, or at the other end of the spectrum, someone ‘inspirational’. It’s brilliant to highlight when people with disabilities have made a huge achievement, like climbing Everest, but when 20-odd percent of people in the UK have got some sort of disability or impairments there's going to be a very, very small percentage of people that are doing super inspirational things. So trying to “normalise” disability would mean covering what a lot of people in the UK live with every day.
We also need to be careful that we don't demonise disabled people just for being different. There is this unconscious bias of what disabled people can or can't do. We just need to be aware constantly that we are thinking empathically about disabled people and taking stories from lived experience by really including disabled people in what it is that we're choosing to report on. By increasing the number of disabled people in any news organisation, you're going to get away from falling into the trap of such stereotypes and get what is a real lived experience.
At the BBC, we like to hear from experts who are disabled but their expertise might not necessarily be of a disability. So if you are an expert in climate change, and you happen to be a wheelchair user, or if you are somebody who is a lawyer, who knows all about business acquisitions, and you happen to have cerebral palsy, the incidental representation of disability is going to be really, really important.
How long has BBC Ability existed and what is its role?
It started in 2001 and to begin with, it was just a loose coalition of different people from across the whole organisation. A lot of it was about socialising, hanging out and sharing different anecdotes and stories about what it was like being disabled at the BBC. Later on, it was formalised and taken into the DNA of the diversity and inclusion department. It’s 23 years now. I think that's quite a mature disability network compared to other organisations.
A lot of stuff that we do is for our [700 to 800] members. We share different advice, workarounds and support. But we also share the concerns and issues that some of the disabled members have with the senior leadership team.
Members [are supported] to understand where they can go to find reasonable workplace adjustments, what it is that they can reasonably expect as a disability-competent employer, what they can ask for, how they can go about it, and what the process is for getting the workplace adjustments. We also host lots and lots of different events. For our members, for example, we've got the “Day in the Life” series. In this series, we ask different members from the staff network, who live with different conditions or impairments, about how those impact their day-to-day life, both inside and outside the BBC. They share the creative workarounds and strategies that they've devised to limit the impact of those conditions. This series is really successful because it allows people (who may be the only disabled person in their team) to be able to talk about what it is that they do. We encourage non-disabled staff to come to these events because they are [meant to] raise awareness and dispel the myths, stereotypes and the cliched tropes around disability. [These events demonstrate] that if the proper facilities are in place, and the barriers are taken away, then there's no reason why a disabled person can't work the same way as a non-disabled person. So these events are very important and valuable and keenly attended. We also get people from external organisations to come and talk to us about accessibility to really push for change and for cultural change within an organisation like the BBC.
BBC has a culture which promotes accessibility, respect and inclusion for persons with disabilities. So how much do you still need to push?
Quite a bit. It's always going to be an ongoing conversation because teams change, different people come and go. And we always need to make sure that those conversations are ongoing. My goal is that disability and accessibility should be considered in any decision that is ever taken by the BBC.
But because it's such a big organisation, things move quite slowly. So it's not always the impact that you would want at the speed you would want. But for the accessibility community, any progress whatsoever is a win. It's progress over perfection, really. You'll never get to the point where it's perfect. More than half the battle with accessibility is within hearts and minds and getting people to realise and understand why it is we need to do it.
What would be your advice to a newsroom that wants to become inclusive of disability?
I would say it will be really helpful if you can make your newsroom a safe psychological environment for people to share their differences, their disability or impairments. Remember, there are a lot of people who are living with non-visible conditions and disabilities but they might not feel psychologically safe to share it because the culture and environment are not safe. If you can start the conversation by saying okay, we honestly want to know how we can make this better, and if it's done in an authentic way, you will get people to come out and share exactly what they're living with day to day. This doesn't just go for media organisations. A lot of different businesses say I don't need to make my website accessible because I don't have any disabled customers. Or we're not really even for a disabled market. But if you do that, because of the amount of people across the world living with a disability or impairments, you're losing out on a heck of a lot of customers.
*Alt text is the text that describes the content of an image in a way that blind or low-vision people can get the same information from it as sighted users. Alt text can be added to images in content management systems and social media platforms. When a screen reader runs over an image, it reads the alt text.
Reframing Disability will cover alt text in more detail in a future issue.
**Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, to persons living with many types of disabilities and to users in general.
The guidelines are developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organisations around the world, with the goal of providing a shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organisations, and governments internationally.
BBC UK’s other offerings for disability inclusion (updated extracts from my RISJ paper)
In the UK, the BBC has a target of 12% disability representation in its workforce and content. Currently, the representation stands at 8%, but having a target, collecting data, assessing it, and identifying gaps has helped the organisation in moving closer to its goals.
Across UK newsrooms, a centralised “Workplace Disability Passport” informs managers about the reasonable accommodations each disabled person needs. This simplifies the process of moving around the organisation for disabled staff.
Under the Reframing Disability project, the BBC trains and mentors journalists to better comprehend disability. This ensures they are comfortable around co-workers and sources.
The BBC’s 50:50 The Equality Project’s new database of expert contributors invites diverse people across specialisms to be a part of the New Voices Database if they wish to contribute as sources. The process is as simple as filling out a form. The database is a good place to find new voices for stories.
Trainee programmes such as Elevate are dedicated to hiring journalists of diverse disabilities at different levels of their careers.
BBC Accessibility Help is a page providing links to resources and documents to help users access the BBC's content and to learn about the BBC’s approach to the development of rich accessible products and services. Great for those who want guidance on accessibility across products.
Useful data on the disabled traveller market
The disabled traveller market has always been underestimated. According to a recent BBC Worklife article, it represents billions in untapped revenue:
“He (Laurent Roffé, principal of Accessio Consulting, a California-based advisory service on accessible travel programs) points to a pair of surveys verified by the Open Doors Organization, an Illinois, US-based disability-services organisation. In 2015, disabled travellers represented a $35bn (£27.4bn) market. In 2020, the number jumped by 63%. For 2023, he says, the industry is poised to break the $60bn (£47bn) mark. Based on this trend, and on studies conducted among the disabled business traveller community, Roffé estimates a year-over-year revenue increase of about 12%.”
Dig into the mental health culture, tech, and economics with School of Sanity
Tanmoy Goswami, the creator of Sanity by Tanmoy, an independent mental health storytelling platform, has launched the ‘School of Sanity', which he describes as an interactive online learning space for people who want to explore the exciting, urgent, and high-stakes intersection of mental health, work, culture, money, and technology – but don't know where to begin.
For: Mental health professionals, social workers, researchers, policymakers, investors, funders, entrepreneurs, students, lived experience experts, caregivers, advocates, writers, creators, and folks curious about the global mental health movement anywhere in the world.
Date: 4th February 24. Click here to explore and book your place at the inaugural session on one of Tanmoy’s favourite topics: a brief (explosive) history of lived experience.
Share your wishlist for media coverage of disability issues related to elections
2024 is an election year for 64 countries including India, the US, the European Union, the UK, South Africa, Indonesia, Rwanda, Mexico, Solomon Islands, and many more. While we're waiting to see whether democracy lives on or dies, let's consider whether the elections in our countries are fully accessible for people with disabilities, if the disability community’s issues have a place in political parties’ manifestos and whether the community has any political representation at all.
What is your wishlist for media coverage of disability issues related to elections in your country? Which issues would you like to see in the news? What can the news media do to improve coverage? Send in your thoughts as a reply to this email or in this Google Form, and I shall include them in a future issue. Reframing Disability reaches many journalists and editors and has readers across 32 countries. Your ideas would help them be inclusive of disability rights in their election coverage.
Thanks for reading this issue of Reframing Disability. I look forward to your thoughts in the comments or as a reply to this email. What would you like to read more of? What should I include in future issues?
If you have taken a step towards accessibility, share it as #AccessibilityBrag and #ReframingDisability on socials. Tag me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I’ll amplify your post.
Warmly,
Priti
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