Thanks to Francis McDormand’s Best Actress acceptance speech, audiences and at-home viewers alike left this year’s Oscar ceremony with one phrase in mind: inclusion rider. This has since inspired many big industry names to commit to the clause, which ensures that a project will hire and support a diverse cast and crew. A diverse cast and crew also includes those who identify as disabled. Now, the nonprofit organization RespectAbility has released an online toolkit that shows entertainment professionals just how to go about finding and hiring individuals with disabilities.
Per its official press release, The Hollywood Disability Toolkit: The RespectAbility Guide to Inclusion in the Entertainment Industry is a free online guide that provides the information and resources needed to “get disability inclusion right.” This includes information on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), inclusivity and sample inclusion language, and tax and other incentives.
Additionally, the Hollywood Disability Toolkit includes resources regarding where to find both performers and production personnel with disabilities, as well as training programs for minorities. Employers may also look to the toolkit to seek out audio description and closed captioning services, sign language interpreters, and various business-focused disability organizations.
These services and representation are more crucial than studios realize. Although one in five Americans has a disability, “only two percent of television and less than three percent of film characters represent this community.”
Furthermore, none of these representations “were from an underrepresented group or the LGBTQ community” and those that do make it on-screen are, more often than not (95 percent of the time, to be exact), portrayed by non-disabled actors.
At the toolkit’s launch last week, RespectAbility president Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi explained, “When it comes to disability inclusion, people often simply don’t know what they don’t know. By creating this guide, we hope to take away the fear factor from disability inclusion. We want to make it easy.” Representatives from the Academy, 21st Century Fox, NBC, Netflix, Universal Televisions, and others were in attendance.
RespectAbility is not alone in the latest efforts to increase disability inclusion. Just last week, Videocamp, a free online film distribution platform, partnered with UNICEF to launch the world’s “largest social impact film fund of its kind.” This fund invites filmmakers from all of the world to submit a project based on “inclusive education,” and is supported by “Veep” actress Sally Phillips, whose son has Down’s Syndrome.
The competition’s jury includes award-winning filmmaker Yvonne Welbon, Paola Castillo from ChileDoc, and Cecilie Bolvinkel from the European Doc Network. Entries may be animation, fiction, or documentary, and the selected film will be added to Videocamp’s online catalog. As Videocamp Director Carolina Pasquali has emphasized, projects should communicate “how all people, with and without disabilities, benefit from an inclusive education.”
Submissions for Videocamp’s film fund will be accepted until the end of June, and the winning project will be announced this September. For more information and to apply, visit Videocamp’s website.
The Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit and other educational resources may be found on RespectAbility’s website.
