Ready Sexy Able Resources
General Disability Links
Crisis Resources For people living in the United States: The National Center for College Students with Disabilities has put together this list of hotlines and other support tools, with disability-specific information and self-help suggestions. Click here for a list of text-based and phone-based hotlines and other self-care tools.
Disability Language Style Guide Not sure whether to say someone’s been challenged by or suffers from their disability? Wondering what word you should use to describe someone who isn’t disabled? The National Center on Disability and Journalism has you covered. This style guide is a must-have for journalists, academics, and all professional writers and public speakers. Oh, and: Describing someone who doesn’t have a disability is as simple as that – nondisabled, “isn’t disabled,” or, best of all if you actually don’t know someone’s disability status, “not visibly disabled.” Click here for background and guidance on everything from “able-bodied” to “wheelchair-bound.”
Valuable Bodies A disabled artist discusses her portraits of disabled and otherwise marginalized people, and what including disabled people in art means for representation and inclusion over all. Click here to watch this presentation on Youtube.
Diversity through Inclusive Practice: An Evolving Toolkit for Creating Inclusive Processes, Spaces & Events You can plan inclusive events. Making sure that people of different abilities, sexual orientations, races and ethnicities – oh, just make sure that people who are diverse and different from each other – are at your event will make it a richer experience for everyone, whether it’s a dance party or a political planning meeting. This toolkit gives us tips on planning inclusive events and covers everything from choosing a location, to preparing event materials, to training staff and volunteers, to welcoming participants – and so much more. They even cover the thorny issue of how to make space in the budget for inclusion and accessibility. Click here for the toolkit.
An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues. Focused on Web access, but paints a useful picture of just how broad diversity really is. Click here for an A to Z of disability.
Disability Visibility ProjectDVP collects “the diverse voices of people in the disability community and preserve their history for all, especially underrepresented groups such as people of color, immigrants, veterans, and LGBTQIA people with disabilities.” Through a partnership with StoryCorps, DVP collects and shares oral histories.
learn how to participate in DVP, read transcripts of oral histories, and learn about the issues important to disabled people.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines and tools for making your web sites accessible to people with all kinds of disabilities. WAI is essential for site owners, designers, and developers, and can be used whether you’re building your site from the ground up or are using a site creation platform. Research has shown that accessible sites are easier to maintain, are ranked higher in search results, and ultimately reach more people. Click here to learn about WAI guidelines, find evaluation tools, and learn design and development techniques.
Disability History Museum Click here for online archives of American disability history.
How to Communicate with a Deaf Person Through An Interpreter. Click here for the “dos” and “don’ts.” Hint: Once you get familiar with the different communication methods deaf people use, it all comes down to being polite.]
How to Go Fragrance Free. More and more people are developing health problems that are triggered by fragrances found in common cleaning products, air fresheners, and personal care products. Click here to learn why to go fragrance-free and find lists of fragrance-free products.
FWD/Forward Feminists with Disability For A Way Forward was active from 2009 to 2011 and addressed feminist issues (relationships, sexual assault, employment, education, and more) from disabled people’s perspectives. At that time, disability wasn’t being talked about in mainstream feminist spaces. Now, in 2017, there’s more disability inclusion, but disability is still frequently not integrated into feminist politics and activism. We’re grateful that FWD/Forward archived their content. This is valuable disability history, and relevant for activism and education today. Click here for those archives – on everything from accessibility, to media and popculture, to work.
What You’re Saying When You Say “I Don’t Need a Mic”
This is the best explanation of hearing loss or impairment, and hearing aids, I’ve ever come across. There’re lots of great suggestions here for how to make lectures and group conversations more accessible to hard-of-hearing folks, and lots of compassionate, fact-filled, empathy-building information on what using hearing aids feels like. Most important point here: Wearing hearing aids doesn’t correct or relieve hearing loss the way wearing glasses does for the kinds of mild vision loss your average glasses wearer experiences. Read this fabulous article here, and share with your friends and colleagues.