The Disability & Media Alliance Project (D–MAP) strives to show life as it really is for people with disabilities by forming a coalition of film producers, disability rights experts, newspaper and television reporters and others who are committed to ending the misinformation and harmful stereotypes that stand in the way of human and civil rights for all people.

Web Accessibility

Deafness and the User Experience

by Lisa Herrod

How many times have you been asked this question: if you had to choose, which would you prefer to be: deaf or blind? The question illustrates the misconception that deafness is in some way the opposite of blindness—as though there’s some sort of binary representation of disability. When we look at accessible design for the deaf, it’s not surprising to see it addressed in a similar fashion: audio captioning is pretty much the equivalent of alt text on images for most designers.

Read the rest of this article at "A List Apart"

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rahm emanuelSpecial Olympics CEO calls out Rahm Emanuel for using R-word - The letter from Tim Shriver, Chairman and CEO of the Special Olympics. Here's the article from the Wall Street Journal, where Rahm Emanuel (pictured) was quoted using the R-word.

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Language Matters

On November 17, 2009, Senators Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Michael Enzi (R-WY) introduced a bill they named Rosa’s Law that would replace the phrase “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability” in all Federal policy references (see the press release here).

This development follows the protests around the word “retard” repeated in the 2008 film Tropic Thunder and a campaign by the Special Olympics to get people to stop using “the R-word.” A few months earlier, in July 2009, Little People of America called on the Federal Communications Commission to ban use of the word “midget.”

The request followed an episode of Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, called "Jesse James and the Midgets," that LPA found demeaning. Language is political. And political correctness around words is not new. There have always been offensive epithets for ethnic groups and nonconforming individuals.

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