Black Disabled Lives Matter

July is Disability Pride Month. Though the month is ending, anti-ableist and anti-racist activism shouldn't. Once again, so many people have created resources that put things into words better than we can, so we've compiled a non-exhaustive list of some of these resources. As usual, please feel free to email us at team@linghacks.tech if any of the information below is incorrect.

Educational Media

Readings

• ​Racism and Ableism
• Ableism in Natural Language Processing
• Disability, Bias, and AI
• All of the articles linked and summarized on Black, Disabled, and Proud
• A Brief History of the Disability Rights Movement
• Workplace Ableism
• How Academic Jobs Screen Out Disabled People
• The Harriet Tubman Collective
  

Motion Pictures

• All the documentaries listed on the Disability Visibility Project
• Lives Worth Living

Podcasts

• Black Disabled Women in the Media
• Black Mental Health
• This list of disability podcasts​

Action Items

Organizations to Donate To (Credit to NY Mag, Nylon, and getinformed.carrd.co)

• Autistic People of Color Fund
• Disability Justice Culture Club
• Sins Invalid
• Ramp Your Voice
• This thread of GoFundMe's

Black Disabled People to Follow and Support (Partial Credit to Disability Horizons)

• ​Fats Timbo
• Devin Manning
• Lauren "Lolo" Spencer
• Garrison Redd
• Haben Girma
• Stephanie Thomas
• Keah Brown
• Andrea Dalzell
• Tatiana A. Lee
• Clara Holmes

How to Combat Ableism in Everyday Life

• If you create any sort of visual media (e.g. a graphical plot, a table, a web application), whether it's an educational tool for a course or part of a paper/presentation, and need to distinguish some visual elements, try to distinguish them in at least two ways if you have any color-coded components of your visual. For example, if you have a series of red, green, and blue lines representing different things, consider making them red solid, green dashed, and blue dotted lines to make your content more accessible to colorblind people. As another example, if you shade certain regions of a graph with different colors, try also shading them with different fill patterns (e.g. gradient vs. solid vs. lines). The R programming language and Google Drawings both have different line types, fill types, and shapes, so this is both a feasible and accessible step to take whenever you create visuals.
• If you make graphical posts on social media, make sure to also include image descriptions in plain text in the captions. This is because screen readers can't interpret images, but they can process text and speak it to a user who otherwise who otherwise wouldn't be able to enjoy the content (great explanation here).
• If you area a recruiter and/or job description writer, please don't put any weight lifting requirements (or any physical requirements) in a job description unless the job is literally a weight-lifting job. This is just blatantly ableist. An example is "must be able to lift 20 lbs"--it's unnecessary and discriminatory.

That's all for this post. Remember to keep being intersectional into your activism, and check this site frequently for action items!