Media & Disability
Guide on media & disability
Why Do You Need To Use This Guide?
The guide is designed to help you think about how to be more inclusive in your programme-making. Some of the information also relates to how your organisation can become more disability confident.
The number of people with disabilities is growing, particularly as populations age. Depending on how disability is defined it is safe to say that, as far as Europe is concerned, between 15-20% of the population of any country is disabled. This applies to both men and women, and people of different racial backgrounds. One in three people between the ages of 50 to 65 are likely to be disabled and this is a growing sector of the population. Increasingly, industry and commerce is alert to the numbers and economic importance of people with disabilities in our society. The audio-visual industries should be no exception. After all, disabled people help to pay for the industries by buying television licences, advertised products, cinema tickets, DVDs, videos, subscriptions to broadcast services and so on. However, we have additional responsibilities, because of the fundamental role we play in responding to and shaping public attitudes.
People with disabilities are a significant part of your audience - whether they are listeners, viewers or web users. Yet they are almost invisible in programmes and significantly under-represented in the industry’s workforce. Improving this is first and foremost a challenge for senior managers in the sector as well as for all producers. The way you report and portray people with disabilities will affect society’s attitude to disability. More fundamentally, the best way of ensuring that people with disabilities are reflected on-screen and on-air is that they are adequately reflected in the programme-making workforce. To neglect this almost certainly means that you are missing out on a group of talented colleagues who are also disabled.
Since a significant proportion of the industry’s workforce is usually on short-term, freelance contracts, this is not an environment that is conducive to equality of opportunity and fair representation.
Disability is still marginal to most producers. If they feature at all, disabled contributors usually appear in programmes about disability, and production teams working on disability output may hire some disabled staff. Although this can provide disabled people with their first break and valuable work experience, disabled people still find it hard to move up the career ladder or on to non-specialist programme-making.
Please read and use this guide, which reflects the combined experience of many broadcasters and programme-makers. It is full of positive, realistic, practical and empowering advice to help you make your own contribution to ensuring that your programmes reflect the importance of people with disabilities to both the audio-visual industries and to our society. People with disabilities are individuals with their own stories to tell and their own perspective on life that will enrich your programmes. Without doubt, you will also enrich your own experience. There is a great deal that an individual producer can do.
How to Use this Guide
This guide has 6 main sections of information:
- Opening Introduction including law
- Disabled people participating in programmes
- Employing disabled people as programme-makers
- Disabled access to broadcast services
- Adjustments and aids for people with specific disabilities
- Communicating with disabled people
The guide has been divided into a number of smaller sections in order that you can move from one to another, according to your current needs and interest. The information is provided as a range of suggestions for you to choose from, and implement in ways most appropriate to your own productions. There is a certain amount of repetition between sections for clarity and, although you may not need to read the entire guide at one time, you are advised to cross reference the sections.
Tight deadlines and budget pressures inevitably affect programme ideas and your choice of production personnel, contributors and interviewees. You probably rely heavily on personal contacts to recruit people onto your production teams. Similar pressures and demands may also affect your choice of contributors and interviewees. Yet a few simple steps go a long way to improving your output and making your workplace more diverse.
The ideas in this guide come from film and programme makers in news, entertainment, factual, drama and documentary. They are aimed at all programme makers, not just those working on specialist disability output.
Many broadcasters and producers have already improved the way they portray or employ disabled people. As one senior programme producer put it: “Don’t worry about being politically correct, just do it, and you can see that you CAN make a difference!”