📚 The Curb-Cut Effect's Impact on Social Change Communications

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To celebrate Disability Pride Month, I wanted to center disability justice and talk about how we can practice building accessibility into communications. The curb cut effect is an opportunity to build accessibility into your work, while avoiding the ableist assumptions about our world. Read on for more...

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Serving Your Audience Matters

No matter what kind of communications you do, it’s relevant for people with disabilities. Do you focus on bodily autonomy? The climate crisis? Anti-racist education? Economic justice?

All of the causes that we fight for to create social change have a disability justice element to them whether they are visible or not. This month is Disability Pride Month and I wanted to center the disability justice community and share how we can all build better inclusivity and accessibility into our communications. Ultimately, it's all about leading with the progressive values that your organization most likely already hold.

When we think about inclusivity, it’s a common assumption that it means to include everyone. The assumption is to be inclusive, you have to hang a “Welcome All” sign on your doors. However, this misses one of the fundamental pillars to disability justice. Creating inclusive spaces is much more about building up the welcoming part of the sign. It is not, “we will open our doors to all,” but “we will create a safe space where all will want to come.” See the difference?

It is about centering the people impacted and ensuring physical and emotional safety for those that participate. The most obvious example from the digital age is the pandemic “Zoom bombings.” Within that example, Zoom and city councils did not create a safe environment for participants to attend meetings on their platform.

Now imagine something a little smaller. You need a screen reader to read newsletters, but your favorite progressive organizations and independent journalists fill their emails with all caps, pepper them with links, and don’t add alt text to images. The small things like forgetting alt text, becomes a barrier to this person’s desire to do activism. Why read a newsletter that is unreadable and without the full context? When we say activism is for everyone, I want to mean it. Integrating accessibility into your communications can really help us all truly embody that phrase.

Contextualizing Ableism

Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that I am not 100% great on accessibility. In fact, the majority of websites will fail accessibility tests. 90% are inaccessible to people using assistive technology (i.e. screen readers). I’m not here to shame anyone for not having prioritized accessibility. I understand the pressure and time constraints most social change communicators are under. I am here to challenge us to do a little bit better each day.

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