After disabled model Tanja Kiewitz got the courage to pose with her missing limb to recreate Eva Herzigova’s infamous Wonderbra ad, she thanked her friends and “a couple of glasses of wine,” according to Huffington Post. You might remember Herzigova: A voluptuous brunette wearing nothing but a black brassiere dares readers with the caption: “Look me in the eyes … I said the eyes.” Likewise, readers can’t keep their eyes off Kiewitz’s arm, which ends at the elbow — but that’s O.K. It’s for a good cause, as she’s working to raise money for Belgian disability awareness group CAP48.
In what the disability community has been saying all along, Kiewitz told GlobalPost in an interview that “it would be good if handicapped people started to be used to advertise other things.” (Handicapped is a term commonly used in Europe). “Why shouldn’t somebody with a disability be a model? It would make a change from those models who all look alike. Why don’t we have more people in wheelchairs speaking on TV, they can speak as well as anybody else,” she says.
More opportunities for people with disabilities
Lots of opportunities come to mind, from models to actors to politicians. Today, Jonathan Phang, the host of Britain’s Missing Top Model, began backing a campaign calling for the fashion industry to use disabled models on the catwalk and in ad campaigns. And earlier this year Debenhams, a famous U.K. department store, became the first retailer of its kind to use disabled models in campaign photography. Debenhams has just announced they are supporting the Disabled & Sexy fashion show, which will be held October 25 in London’s Notting Hill.
“We need to look beyond stereotypes. Not only to encourage the fashion world to change their thinking, but to help raise a deeper understanding about the prejudices young, beautiful, disabled women have to overcome every day,” Chang says.
Hollywood and the disabled
The next industry that should pick up cues Is Hollywood. Fox’s Glee has cast a singing and dancing wheelchair user who is not disabled. However, there are two actors with Down’s syndrome on the show. Out of a total of 587 characters on television shows this season, only six roles have disabilities and only one role is played by a disabled actor, according to Hollywood Reporter. That actor is Robert David Hall, a double leg amputee, who plays a coroner on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Hollywood says it’s not always easy to find talented disabled people to fill their cast and crew. ABC, for instance, recently put out a Facebook casting call for a deaf actress and two male deaf actors for a new family series.
It’s Hollywood’s job to make art reflect life, but also for life to reflect art. Forrest Gump, I am Sam and Rain Man were all superb movies, played with aplomb by able-bodied actors. This is likely more a reflection of the business model of Hollywood; not wanting to risk a typically overblown movie budget on an unknown actor who has a disability.
Companies step up disability advertising
In the consumer space, some companies have recognized the selling opportunity and are reworking their ads to include people with disabilities. Props to Milk-Bone for including a wheelchair user in a recent T.V. commercial, and for supporting service dogs for the disabled. Kudos, too, to Babies “R” Us, who is working with Autism Speaks on a collection of photographs titled “Faces of Autism” that are appearing on signs in stores and on a section of the Toys “R” Us Website.
For many years, ads and catalogs for Toys “R” Us have included children who are physically disabled. Consumers with physical disabilities, younger and older, have appeared in campaigns for advertisers like Cingular Wireless, Levi Strauss, Pepsi, McDonald’s and Target.
Some artists are taking matters into their own hands. In May, photographer Holly Norris shot a spoof of the hip-and-skinny, teenaged American Apparel print ads with her friend Jes Sachse. Calling it American Able, the ads featured Jes, who has a rare genetic disorder called Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, in a series of poses that have been called “a searing satire of fashion photography.”
Last year, American Airlines ran a campaign that honored the best local TV commercial featuring positive portrayals of the disabled. The winning spot — the Texas Lion’s Club — won free air time during the airline’s in-flight entertainment programming. After the dismissal of a disabled passenger by US Air this week, more airlines might want to look into this niche.
There are nearly 1 billion people globally with disabilities. Like or not, the message is getting clearer: Leave out the disabled and you’ll leave money, and customers, on the table.
September 27, 2010 at 10:55 am by Suzanne Robitaille
I recently stopped into American Girl Place in Chicago. My American Girl dolls are a popular, experiential concept where you choose a doll and then customize her through the purchase of clothes and other accessories that reflect hobbies like cheerleading and taking tea. Absent from the shelves, however, is much in the way of a disabled doll theme.
American Girl, which was acquired by Mattel in 1998, says it wants you to “create a doll as unique as you are,” but doesn’t offer many accessories that fully represent the 54 million Americans with disabilities and two million children with special needs. You can purchase a wheelchair accessory ($34), but it looks like one that belongs in a hospital waiting room for injured people — not like the ones used by real kids with disabilities. You can also purchase crutches for temporary injuries, and funky-colored eyeglasses.
If a wheelchair is supposed to represent all of disability at American Girl Place, why does the company offer so much variety in other areas? The sheer volume of My American Girl dolls and accessories at their retail stores would make any girl swoon: 40 different combinations of eye color, hair color and style, and skin tone. Two floors filled with racks of dresses, shoes, books and accessory sets for hobbies like eating fondue, taking a bubble bath, going camping, playing basketball, riding a dog sled, and celebrating the Sabbath.
For children with disabilities, the pickings are much slimmer. Kids with disabilities come from all walks of life. They use wheelchairs, yes, but they also wear hearing aids, eyeglasses and arm braces. Sometimes their pet dog ($20) is their service dog. Sometimes they have diabetes and need insulin shots a few times a day. Sometimes they go through life with a catheter. At American Girl, a doll version of themselves simply does not exist.
While I was in the store, I approached a mother pushing her daughter in a wheelchair. Dana Morel, 23, was born with toxoplasmosis, a disease that made her blind and unable to move and speak. She is a former American Girl customer, but never had the option to buy a doll with items like a power wheelchair, head stick, adaptive switches, or the audio version of an American Girl book. “I would buy these things for her, and she would have wanted them,” says her mother, Janet Morel, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Changing this scenario would not be difficult for American Girl, which reaped $463 million in 2009 sales. The company does not accept product ideas from parents and kids, but they should, as this would help diversify and grow their product lines. They could then add a bigger selection of accessories to their shelves like hearing aids, eyeglasses, silk scarves for kids with cancer, walking canes, braille and audio books, and insulin devices.
America thrives off the diversity of its peoples, but the disabled demographic is being ignored by too many consumer-goods makers. For American Girl, expanding the breadth of their accessories and content to better reflect their customers with disabilities would go a long way. Sales would climb, and young and tween-age girls with disabilities will get a dose of reinforcement that they’re perfect just the way they are.
Even in the upper echelons of employment, disability issues continue to muddle the workplace. In England, a British foreign diplomat who is deaf recently had her promotion revoked after officials ruled that her deafness would make it too expensive to send her abroad.
Jane Cordell, who was to be Britain’s new deputy ambassador to Kazakhstan, is now suing the government for discrimination, saying that it’s the only way she can get clarity on her career. “We need answers to the question, ‘Can [people with disabilities] expect to have normal diplomatic careers, or not?’” she tells The Independent.
These days, more clarity on accommodations would be good, too. The Americans with Disabilities Act say an employer has discretion to choose among effective ‘reasonable accommodations’. Similarly, the U.K.’s Disabilities Discrimination Act requires employers to make so-called ‘reasonable adjustments,’ but the term is not defined in existing legislation.
Over and over, employers fail to see how hiring and accommodating an employee with a disability is good business. Perhaps nobody has taken the time to spell it out for the British Foreign Office, but accommodating Cordell will yield far more significant returns on investment that outweigh the costs.
Cordell is a Cambridge-educated diplomat who worked for four years as first secretary at the embassy in Warsaw. Her supervisor says Cordell did a “superb diplomatic job” in Warsaw. Fluent in Polish, she used Polish-to-English interpreters in her job as well as a rotating team of “lip speakers” who relayed information to her in real-time.
Here’s what’s interesting. While in Warsaw, Cordell also championed disability rights, though it wasn’t part of her job. She organized three disability conferences with the government, worked with Polish parliament to draft new disability legislation and helped with a bill to recognize Polish sign language.
Arguably, Cordell could do the same in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic that is still rebuilding after years under Soviet rule that crushed its political and educational system and economy. Today Kazakhstan has a 99.5% adult literacy rate and its capital is home to many colleges and universities. Many Kazakhs go onto Ivy League schools and prestigious colleges in England like Oxford.
Cordell can work to improve disability discrimination laws in Kazakhstan as well as increase work opportunities for young and educated Kazakhs with disabilities. Her efforts will contribute positively to the country’s economic well-being and also position it as a leader in international disability affairs.
Her ingenuity in Kazakhstan would also reverberate to England, where up and coming students with disabilities who are interested in interested in foreign policy and public work would want to emulate her success. This is a necessary action: A more diverse population in the workplace better reflects the global population and marketplace. Globally, 1.2 billion people report having a disability. In the U.S. alone, people with disabilities have more than $1 trillion in spending power.
Cordell’s hire also is likely to bring ongoing process and cost efficiencies. The Foreign Office claims it would cost nearly £300,000 per year ($468,400) to pay for the salaries, cost of living and travel for a team of security-cleared lip speakers shuttling between Kazakhstan and Britain — a cost deemed to exceed the definition of ‘reasonable.’
But Cordell believes the Foreign Office is overestimating the costs. In Warsaw, her lip speakers cost the government around £176,000 ($274,800) per year, which she thinks is achievable in her new role. People with disabilities are generally very conscientious about the burden of accommodations on their employer and look for ways to trim costs. By working with Cordell, the government will keep the price down and learn better processes for installing support teams for deaf and other disabled workers in foreign posts.
And don’t forget, too, that the British government would be employing four people that might otherwise not have had an opportunity to gain experience abroad working as lip speakers for diplomats. Upon the end of her assignment in Kazakhstan, these four people are fully trained and cleared to serve other deaf diplomats and foreign workers, which further reduces costs.
The fate of diplomacy jobs for deaf workers in England is in Cordell’s hands. If she does win her case, let’s hope she goes to Kazakhstan with a renewed sense of purpose to trailblaze opportunities for people with disabilities around the world.
Oprah Winfrey, who is starting her own network called OWN and is looking for contestants to host a new reality TV show, is at the center of a voters’ dilemma. Rumors are adrift that Winfrey’s show producers may be rigging viewers’ votes against lead contestant Zach Anner, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. Anner auditioned for a spot with a video showing his comedic value and finesse as a traveler with a disability, calling himself a “wheelchair-bound lady magnet.”
The rumors surfaced Tuesday when another contestant, a woman by the name of Dr. Phyllis, mysteriously gained more than 300,000 votes, surpassing the previously first placed Anner in 20 minutes. Both contestants now have more than four million votes apiece.
All votes aside, Oprah needs Zach Anner and so does the world. She should find a way to bring him on board regardless of the results. Anner is cute, funny and gives a fresh take on life. Anner has the potential to crack open the injustices and inconsistencies for the disability community on a stage built by the word’s most famous talk show host.
Viewers will be blown away by how difficult it is to travel with a physical disability within the U.S., let alone places like Europe and Africa. Wheelchairs that get knocked around in cargo. Travelers whose chairs cannot fit through the doors of hotel rooms, or give enough room for a chair to turn around fully. Showers with too high of a “lip” so that a chair can’t roll in. Transfers (from chair to bed) that break in mid-air.
The list goes on. Tourist attractions with no accessible bathrooms. Places steeped in history, such as Paris and the French capital, that have architecture making it difficult to maneuver (and local attitudes don’t help.) “The biggest problem that exists worldwide is the lack of accessible ground transportation,” says Candy Harrington, author of Barrier Free Travel and 101 Accessible Vacations. Wheelchair users who cannot find an accessible cab often must resort to a van or livery service, at a much higher cost.
Watch Zach Anner's OWN audition video.
In seeking her new reality show contestant, Oprah opened her auditions to the public. In my opinion she should have hand-picked her own contestant if she didn’t want to see how the sausage is made. The thing is, I believe she’s all about the sausage, but that her show’s producers (and public relations team) might not be. Keep in mind that they’ll be the ones following Anner around the globe in his wheelchair if he wins. (Note to OWN crew: Put Anner up in Microtel.)
Situations like open contests are difficult for people with disabilities to compete in. The very nature of a contest weeds out weak performers, especially If there’s a preconceived notion that someone is physically or mentally unable to carry the torch. It happens in showbiz, in sports and in the job market.
Anner won four million votes. He deserves an opportunity to make us laugh, cry and see the world in a different light while peeling back the intimate layers of traveling with a disability. (Vote for him here.) It won’t be pretty, but he’ll give viewers one of the most rewarding experiences on TV. And that’s something Oprah can truly OWN.
Read more of Suzanne Robitaille’s articles on abledbody.com
Taking a cruise may sound luxurious, but for people with disabilities it can be a logistical nightmare. From making sure a wheelchair can fit through the doors, to finding your way around a ship using tactile braille, it’s almost easier to just stay home.
Things may be getting a little easier for this group. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation has just announced the first federal rule to specifically provide Americans with Disabilities Act protections to people with disabilities who travel on boats and ships. Now, people with disabilities who ride public boats, such as ferries, and private vessels, including cruise ships, will be entitled to better access and accommodations.
Why the new rule? DOT says it wants to make sure that boat and ship operators don’t deny access to passengers based on their disability. They also want to make sure that those passengers, once aboard, are treated fairly, according to DOT’s website. Passengers with disabilities cannot be charged extra for accessibility-related services, such as sign-language interpreters and pool lifts, and will not be required to furnish their own attendants.
The new law also requires boat and ship operators to inform passengers of vessel accessibility and services, and to have a knowledgeable person available to help passengers with disabilities resolve their concerns.
The DOT rules are a boost for the overall industry. For some cruise lines, however, it won’t drastically change the way they operate. That’s because 10 years ago, several top cruise lines including Carnival, Royal Caribbean International and Celebrity Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line and Holland America were slapped with class-action lawsuits by Access Now, a disability organization, who wanted cruise ships’ staterooms and bathrooms to be made handicapped accessible. The ships agreed to make changes, and they now offer staterooms with wider entries, roll-in showers and more room for the wheelchair user to turn around in his or her chair.
Royal Caribbean takes accessibility quite seriously, and has gone above and beyond ADA requirements. For instance, many of their staterooms and balconies are accessible and have automatic doors. Blackjack casino tables are modified for wheelchair users, and the ship provides state of the art hydraulic pool and whirlpool lifts. Like other ships, Royal Caribbean today offers sign language interpreting services for the deaf and cruise directories and menus in braille for the blind.
Even so-called invisible disabilities, such as diabetes, must be considered. Special Needs At Sea, a company based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., provides many cruise lines with oxygen canisters and in-room storage for dialysis equipment. This is important because passengers who need to refrigerate their medicines would otherwise resort to using the mini-bar, which isn’t ideal.
One aspect this rule won’t cover is establishing standards for building new vessels or altering existing vessels. Access Board, an independent agency will consider the rules to be adopted for new ships. This rule also doesn’t apply to private vessels that transport passengers while providing another key service, like charter fishing boats or dinner cruises. However, a Department of Justice rule will cover that group of operators.
The DOT’s new rule takes effect in 120 days. There is a 90-day comment period concerning whether passengers with disabilities should be allowed to bring emotional support animals on board, among other considerations. You can visit www.regulations.gov to add your comments.
Read more of Suzanne Robitaille’s articles at abledbody.com
Microsoft unveiled its new add-on for the Xbox 360, known as Kinect, which uses motion detection instead of hand controls to play –- similar to Nintendo’s Wii. Microsoft, which launched Kinect at E3 in L.A., believes the program will make the Xbox more accessible to disabled gamers.
Ablegamers.com writer Steve Spohn has some nice things to say about Kinect. The biggest accessibility enhancement for disabled gamers, he says, is the addition of voice commands. For people with physical disabilities this means being able to play and pause games with the use of a voice instead of a remote control.
But the more exciting applications of Kinect are the uses that go beyond gaming. For example, being able to control the television with a voice or wrist is a dream come true for people with physical disabilities, who often must buy expensive environmental control units to make their home theaters work. By talking or waving, a camera will pick up your movements and let you control the system.
Using Kinect, you can use one hand to navigate through the menu to select and use Netflix, Zune, Facebook, and many more applications. The video chat feature lets you call up a friend, and listen to music, surf the web or watch a movie in the same window together.
Video chat is a great accessibility feature for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, too. The new iPhone 4 that launched last week also includes a video chat program called FaceTime, which will let deaf people communicate with each other in sign language, lip-reading and facial expressions. Sure, Skype video already exists, but having this technology on a mobile platform is a powerful tool for communication for this group.
One of Kinect’s new proprietary games is called Kinectimals – a next-generation version of taking care of virtual pets. Microsoft demonstrated this game with a seven-year old girl and her virtual pet tiger named Skittles. The little girl was able to scratch, pet, hug, and even play with the tiger using only her hands and her voice. Kinectimals apparently won the crowd over at E3, and it might help a child with a cognitive or physical disability grow their social skills.
In addition to Kinectimals, Kinect games include football, racing, water adventure sports, fitness, and dance competition. But for disabled gamers, Spohn is split on whether Kinect has enough overall appeal. “In order to know whether to be excited about this device, you’re going to have to take an inventory of your disability,” Spohn writes.
Kinect will be available November 4 and is rumored to cost around $150, according to PC World. The iPhone 4 can be pre-ordered starting today and will ship June 24.
Other video game makers, including Nintendo and Sony, are expected to make announcements at E3 as the week continues.
Amtrak’s website was down, and I needed to book my ticket from Stamford to Boston for the sixth annual Games for Health conference. G4H focuses on many uses for videogames and videogame technologies in health and healthcare. I’m speaking at Game Accessibility day on May 25 about games for people with physical and mental disabilities. So I decided to use TRS — telecommunications relay services for the deaf — to call Amtrak instead.
What should have been a three-minute online booking experience turned into a one-hour, agonizingly slow relay call, reminding me again why I chose to get a cochlear implant to help me hear on a regular telephone, which I can use most of the time. Sometimes I like relay because I can ensure that I’m getting the right information, and I get the automatic 15% Amtrak disability discount. It’s all about the perks, right?
I wanted to share with you excerpts of this relay call to show you how frustrating it can be for deaf people to make calls to hearing parties. In 2010, we still do not have speech-to-text technology that can translate a random person’s voice into text. That leaves the deaf community having to use TRS to make important phone calls. It would be great if Amtrak had a direct customer service line for the deaf, or a live chat window for its deaf population. However, since their website was down, I couldn’t even search for these features.
This is how the call starts: You type a phone number and a human relay operator places the call. I used Purple Communication’s excellent and professional i711 service, which lets you make Internet Protocol relay calls using chat programs like AIM. Note the time stamp of 2:32 p.m. ET.
Now it is about 10 minutes later, and I am still waiting for the relay operator to navigate through the automated channels to get me a live Amtrak customer service rep. I finally get “Cindy,” and I type some information about my travel plans, which is relayed verbally to Cindy by the relay operator. I am able to book my ticket eventually, but subtle miscommunication sets in as Cindy tries to understand my questions about ticket pick-up. This is par for the course in these types of calls. I also have to give out my credit card number, which I don’t really prefer to do over the phone, but I’m at the mercy of the situation.
45 minutes into the call — and with very little to show for it. Note how the relay operator warns me that the Amtrak rep “sounds hurried” — this is to help convey their tone and breathing, which speaks volumes over the telephone. Cindy is obviously getting annoyed by me. This is also par for the course for deaf people using relay. I’m actually lucky she didn’t hang up.
Notice the time stamp. It is now 3:25, almost a full hour on the relay call to book a one-way railroad ride. If I had done it online, it would have taken 30 seconds. This call, like other relay calls to customer service lines, was a royal pain in the butt.
Companies should train their reps on how to more efficiently handle these types of calls — without getting frustrated at the deaf caller on the other end. If we could hear, we wouldn’t be using relay — try to remember that. SK
For more articles see Suzanne Robitaille’s website on disabilities, abledbody.com
When I first saw the Milk-Bone TV ad portraying a college student in a wheelchair, I admit I was stunned. It took me only a few seconds to realize the connection: The student had a service dog and flipped the dog a few treats after a long day at class.
On Wednesday, the pet-snack maker hopes to do even more to highlight the work of service dogs for people with disabilities by sponsoring a primetime PBS documentary with a voiceover by actor Neil Patrick Harris, that will have viewers seeing dogs in a whole new light.
Through a Dog’s Eyes will air at 8 p.m. Eastern on WLIW21, Thirteen/WNET New York and Connecticut Public Television. The program follows the life-changing journey of four people with disabilities and their families as they go through the heartwarming and sometimes difficult process of receiving and being matched with a service dog. Jennifer Arnold, founder of Canine Assistants, one of the nation’s largest service dog organizations, shows her unique teaching methods and gives viewers an intimate look at the canine-recipient matching process.
Milk-Bone is perfectly suited for this film: For the last 12 years, it has donated a portion of sales of its dog snacks to Canine Assistants, which has placed more than 1,000 people with disabilities with service dogs in the last 20 years — at no cost to the recipients. The company also has stepped up marketing efforts to people with disabilities with the “It’s Good to Give” campaign, which launched in September. Milk-Bone, owned by Del Monte Foods, spent nearly $8 billion on advertising in 2009, up from $600,000 in the previous year– partly to pay for TV advertising for the campaign, according to Brand Week.
As Through a Dog’s Eyes shows, it’s not all smooth sailing for the recipients of service dogs, who must spend two weeks at Canine Assistants’ training camp in Atlanta learning how to work with their new companions. One recipient, Bryson Casey, 30, is an Iraq war veteran and new quadriplegic who needs his dog, Wagner, to help him navigate the simple tasks of daily life he can no longer do on his own.
There’s also six-year-old Aiden, who was born with cerebral palsy and spends most of his time in a wheelchair. He wants his dog, Nala, to learn to help him pick up pencils at school and offer silent support in social situations.
The “It’s Good to Give” campaign includes a Facebook page where fans can follow the life of Noble, a puppy who was bred, and now being trained for, a life as a service dog. Noble, like other service dogs, is a Golden retriever who will train for six months to two years in an intensive program run by Canine Assistants volunteers. The organization relies heavily on Milk-Bone donations to pay for animals’ training, boarding and lifetime medical care, which cost upwards of $20,000 per dog.
As a century-old company that made its first biscuit at a bakery on the Lower East Side of New York City, Milk-Bone has clearly put its money where its heart is – on dogs, and the extraordinary things they do for people.
