Redefining Disability Through Inclusive Media

How can we change the narrative around disability in media and advertising? 

Join us as we welcome Lara Davis and Sarah Bartlett from the Business Disability Forum to talk about their revolutionary campaign, "Changing the Image of Disability." In this episode, Lara and Sarah share their extensive research that underscores a glaring lack of authentic disability representation. They explain how their innovative image bank not only features diverse disabled individuals, including those with less visible disabilities, but also involves the models in the creative process to ensure genuineness.

Discover the crucial importance of obtaining consent and crafting accurate image descriptions for individuals with disabilities. We delve into the responsibilities marketers have to avoid overusing images and to conduct comprehensive research. Antonio sheds light on the pitfalls of AI-generated images, pointing out their tendency to fall into stereotypical depictions. This episode serves as an eye-opener on how AI can improve with better training data, and how our campaign contributes to this by providing authentic images for public use.

Finally, we discuss the ongoing efforts to diversify our image bank, the challenges of using professional models versus employees, and the increasing availability of disabled models through specialized agencies. Our conversation wraps up with a reflection on the decade-long support from clearText and Amazon and our excitement about leveraging social media to further reshape perceptions of disability. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion aimed at enhancing understanding and awareness of disability in today's media landscape.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Access Chat. I'm delighted that we're joined today by our friends from Business Disability Forum, lara Davis and Sarah Bartlett. Welcome, lara and Sarah. And they're here to talk to us about a piece of work that they've done called Changing the Image of Disability. So, lara and Sarah, welcome. Would you like to introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your work?

Speaker 2: 0:30

I'll kick off then. I'm Lara Davis and I'm the Director of Communication Marketing at Business Disability Forum. I've got many years experience in marketing communication, so I'm very interested in inclusive communication, particularly around accessibility to information for everybody, and I'm particularly here today to talk about a campaign that we've been working on called Changing the Image of Disability.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Hi and I'm Sarah Bartlett. I'm a media relations consultant and content writer. I've been working with Business disability forum, um, on the changing the image disability campaign. I also um lead their media work as well and I, like lara, have worked in um. This is like quite a long time about 20 years I think worked on a lot of inclusive communication campaigns around voting and helped set up the 15th paper for people with learning disabilities. So I've got quite a passion for increased communication and particularly this project.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Excellent, and so this project really came about because of the recognition that there is a very limited good quality imagery of an authentic imagery of people with disabilities that can be used in the media and that we're underrepresented. But you didn't just sort of magic up this idea. You did a bunch of research. So maybe, dara or Sarah, you'd like to tell us about the yeah, I can kick off there on the research.

Speaker 2: 2:10

So we we did some research with ipsos. Um, after we done a bit of desk research ourselves, we knew that there weren't images uh out there in stock image libraries and and and things like that. But we did some research uh with ipsos with about six and a half thousand adults across the UK and about nearly half of them identified as disabled, and we basically found a third of adults in the UK hadn't seen any disability represented in content in the last six months, so in advertising, media marketing, and also that less than a quarter of the disabled people that we spoke to said that the images that they saw just didn't reflect them and their experiences of disability.

Speaker 3: 2:49

So it was off the back of that research that we developed, developed our campaign and we did that with disabled people right from the beginning, right the way through, to create all the resources and the content and, just to add, even before we conducted that research, we knew that there was an issue we were trying to fix because we I work in media, so I'm doing media inquiries from journalists a lot, where they're listening to me um, have you got any images to go with the story? Because all I can find are images of wheelchair users, and it's the same image of wheelchair users that's been used again and again, and often it's of a model is in a wheelchair that doesn't actually use that wheelchair, because it wouldn't actually be a realistic wheelchair to use in that situation. So, um, so we knew from ourselves from looking for images, that it was quite frustrating because we couldn't find the images that we wanted and we knew the media couldn't find those images as well. So, um, that's what got started on the campaign.

Speaker 4: 3:44

I think Laura and Sarah welcome to the program. We've featured the Business Disability Forum multiple times in our past 10 years, so we are always glad to have y'all come back. I'm curious about the campaign. I know that we've done here in the United States a lot of work. I know that we've done here in the United States a lot of work with Hollywood and the movies and commercials and we're trying really hard to also as a society to really change the image of a disability and make it more enlightened. But I was curious are y'all using certain hashtags to promote this? How are you promoting it?

Speaker 4: 4:32

I have a marketing background and I wrote the book Inclusion Branding because I really thought, gosh, if we could talk the corporations into including us meaningfully, but then started getting a little discouraged by the lack of progress and the lack of authentic representation.

Speaker 4: 4:45

So I was really glad to hear that you're focusing on this as well, because you know we would see things like models when we were taking real photographs, which I know we still do but models that obviously were not wheelchair users. The community can tell, we can tell by, you know, if we can see looking at it. So we saw a lot of non-authentic images that, like you said, didn't represent our community and we didn't feel that it represented us. Not to mention, we have such a large part of our community that have hidden or invisible disabilities which is very hard to identify, you know, in a way. So I'm curious about that. But how did you wrap this up in a way so that not only you know anybody that works with Business Disability Forum and is in the UK, but actually all of your multinational clients could use it as well?

Speaker 2: 5:50

Yeah, so we basically the resources that we've produced for this include a big image bank of a whole range of people with disabilities, a really broad, diverse range of disabilities, including nearly half of them have images of people who have less visible disabilities and often in imagery you'll find in image banks or used by media or advertising, you will tend to see a lot of wheelchair users and, as you've just said, deborah, people that aren't even disabled models using them. So the authenticity for us was that we used a broad range of models, professional disabled models and some volunteers, but with a real diverse range of disabilities, and we co-created the image bank with them so that we didn't say here's a prop, use this in this image. We said to them what do you normally use in your everyday life? Please bring that to the photo shoot and then the images will look really authentic. So if you use sound cancelling headphones or you turn the lights down or you, you know you use a heat pack because you've got, you know, arthritis in your wrist or whatever, bring those things all with you and, as a result, we're quite confident that our images and the feedback we've had from our members nearly 600 businesses, many of them global that that is exactly the case.

Speaker 2: 7:04

We've got authentic images. Of course, because of cultural differences, we've produced the images in the UK. We didn't have a limitless budget, lovely though it would have been to travel to other places and do photo shoots. Some of the images may not work in other cultures or in other parts of the world. But yeah, we've had some really positive feedback and people are very, very keen to use them, and we've also had take up from the media, so we offered a very smaller number 50 of them to journalists and picture editors. As Sarah was saying before, sometimes we find that they ask for images to go alongside press releases or stories that we've been working and they don't have the images.

Speaker 3: 7:45

So we've provided those free number of national newspapers have signed up to use them, which is great to see yeah, and I was going to say watching on a part about less visible disabilities um, it was a difficult one to tackle, I have to say. We we spent a lot of time trying to work out how you visually represent a disability that's less visible, because obviously that doesn't necessarily go together with image, um, and so then we really looked at how you can use, um, any equipment that a person uses in their day-to-day life, or even illustrating the barrier that the person might experience, um, and show them the scenario with that barrier to illustrate, you know, the real life experience of that person, and we hope we've done it justice there. We hope we have, but what we know it's not an easy issue, so that's why tackling water offered guidance around that, including guidance around how to talk about less visible disabilities in all text which is an interesting one, because obviously you can't see them and in captions and in any surrounding text. That goes with that image as well.

Speaker 1: 8:54

That's great and the feedback that you've got I'm assuming that that's feedback from the disability community saying that they feel that this is much more representative. One of the questions I have, and I think one of the reasons why we see so many pictures of wheelchairs, is that the people choosing the images don't really have a knowledge of disability. Quite often, Even if they do, they have that dilemma that you've already mentioned about. Well, how do we make it obvious that we're including someone with disabilities? I know there's a whacking great wheelchair that says disability. Nothing quite says disability like a great big chair. So what I'm really curious about is there a difference in feedback from the community of people with disabilities that are now feeling represented, compared to the marketing communities where they're having to understand that this is also a good representation.

Speaker 2: 10:05

Yeah, I think part of our campaign has been very much about that. So right from the beginning I think I said that disabled people obviously work with us all the way through, but we also have a lot of marketing, comms, media, journalists, picture editors involved, advertising agencies, pr community, everyone who uses images to make sure that they understand the guidance that Sarah's written she referred to has got a lot of information in there, including, for example, for photographers. So people that are producing shoots about how they make sure that the images they produce are authentic and how they cast. You know, think about who you're casting for shoots. So it's much broader than us just having. I say just. It was a very big project but just producing an image bank of like nearly 500 images, it's broader than that.

Speaker 5: 11:02

Reflecting on that. We know that images on the web are almost unlimited, but even creating this campaign and putting all these images together, how can we avoid repetitions? Because sometimes we end up seeing the same type of picture all over, navigating different sites of the internet. Is there anything else that we can do to, to change, to create a small, different version of the same image, you know, with a different type of context, from, from backgrounds, just just to avoid that, oh, that deja vu situation?

Speaker 3: 11:45

I think we we tried to do that, didn't we? We created a range of images, um. So we didn't just go here's a one model with one image. We tried to create a whole sort of almost suite around different models. We also have tried to use a really broad range of models. When I say models, we use professional models, but we've also used volunteer models as well, which always helped to broaden it out, because then you're not seeing the same professional models they crop up quite a lot as well, which always helped to broaden it out, because then you're not seeing the same professional models, they crop up quite a lot as well. And so I think it is a I mean, it's not an issue you can easily get away from.

Speaker 3: 12:18

I think even within our own collection, we find that sometimes we've got images where we're like oh, actually we've used that one quite a lot ourselves. You know you want your favorite images, so it it's. I think it's just being really conscious of it, and also in the casting of models, you know it's not just looking at even a person's disability, just considering that, it's considering diversity across the whole spectrum as well. So we're looking at, you know, diversity of age, diversity of race, diversity of culture, diversity of background, because we want to show people in in real life people because of the comments we've made. Which was really interesting from one of our focus groups actually was with somebody who is quite young and uses walking sticks day to day life, and the person said that they've often been told that they're too young to be using walking sticks because the image is always of somebody older with a walking stick. So that's really stuck with me, that we're trying to sort of show images that people are not maybe expecting, because I think that really helps to challenge perceptions.

Speaker 2: 13:22

I think the other thing is that we wanted to again. It was a quote from somebody from one of our focus groups who said you know, you often see images where disability is a superpower or it's terrible, nothing in between. If disability is normal. Here I am with my friends and my family doing ordinary, everyday in a realistic scenario type images. So we work really hard to try and make sure that the images that we've created and the guidance that we've given to people about if they're going to create their own images because obviously not everybody has access to our image bank but if people are going to create their own images, what they need to think about, um, and also what sarah said about the diversity is also to show that disabled people are just as diverse as everybody else in in the world. So you know, disabled people have, you know, brightly colored hair or many piercings or tattoos. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 5: 14:14

Just not the kind of images that you tend to see in the back. We've been talking about images. I would like to know from your experience that when we are sharing images, who sometimes are not as obvious, that the person has a disability, is there any editorial tips that you can provide for people to improve the quality of their text, to somehow compose a story and link the picture so that no, it's a person with a disability, but it's not obvious. So how can we improve the story and improve the overall context?

Speaker 3: 14:56

I can take that one if you want that. Um, so in the guidance we talk about that one quite a lot, and so we talk about looking around about how you can use the text that goes with the image to help people understand what is in that image, and for us obviously it's really important that happens, because it is this for us is a campaign. So so we want to. We don't only want to provide lovely images, we want to actually kind of indicate what disability looks like and doesn't look like. So we've talked about things like using image captions, using text descriptors and even using text, because we've even suggested you could use alt text to say there is a less visible disability present.

Speaker 3: 15:33

Now, with that, obviously there is a cap that you need to have permission to share that information about somebody. You can't just go around saying that if you're not sure if the person's happy to have that information shared, and also you need to know how that person would like to have their disability or condition described. So all the models that we worked with, we asked them from the very beginning how they'd like to be described. Are they happy to have that information shared about them? Obviously there's a mixed view. Everybody wants to have that information shared, so we've stuck with that. So when the images in our image bank are are used, you get the descriptors that go with them. So when you're writing your own text for your captions, you know the information that you can include about those models and I would just also say, first of all, compliments on this work, very important work.

Speaker 4: 16:24

So thank you for all the different. You know all the efforts and research and working with the community. We are we really grateful for that. And just a comment to Antonio I think that if you're using an image because you want to, you know, make sure that your brand is including us or whatever. You need to do your own homework. If that one image has been used a whole bunch of times, well then you need. I think it's great that Sarah and Laura are giving advice to the community, but marketers need to do our own job too and make sure these images haven't been used a billion times. And so I just think there is also. We have responsibilities on the marketing and branding side as well. Just to ask you a question you know this is coming because we talked about it before we got on air, but why do we really need this anymore? We got AI now.

Speaker 4: 17:13

I know I am being very funny here. I'm cracking myself up, but I've done a bunch of images, for we Are Billion Strong and Billion Strong, our campaign to bring us together with pride. And the first few times I did it, you know I said disability, they just start AI just started throwing in wheelchairs all manual the wheelchairs. Some of them didn't have wheels on them. I mean it was really. Of course, I'm also using AI with really poor connectivity, so my AI is always misspelling billion. It's just ridiculous.

Speaker 4: 17:50

But I know that when we first introduced AI really a few years ago, the brands reacted by, you know, letting go of content providers. They reacted by letting go of marketing people and I think a lot of those brands realized that was a mistake because AI is still learning. So, but you know how is AI, you know, helped what you're doing, confused what you're doing. I can just see so much confusion with this question, but it's still a good question because sometimes my audience will come to me and say obviously, deborah, you used AI, but I get called out nicely sometimes on it. So I'm also very, very cautious of AI for images because it's so obvious it's AI, so is this impacting the campaign? Also, I do want to ask you again did you um a hashtag to? How did you tell us to find this? I was just curious how you're letting people know about this too.

Speaker 2: 18:55

So, anyway, over to you. Yes, so on the ai point, I share your nervousness, deborah, in terms of ai. Ai is still learning. It is really exciting and there's lots of exciting opportunities it offers. It still requires human input because the AI learns from what humans have put in in the first place.

Speaker 2: 19:15

And I'm anxious about it in terms of authenticity and representation, because in this campaign we've worked really hard to make sure that things are authentic and realistic and AI by its very nature isn't authentic and realistic because it's AI. But you know, for example, it's used quite widely for alternative text, to tag images for screen readers. But often you'll find that the AI really gets it completely wrong. I think I was saying to you earlier, you know, an example of a person who was using a wheelchair and the AI decided that she was not even a human, she was a bicycle, and that's what the AI decided that that she was not even a human, she was a bicycle and that's what the AI put in. So it's.

Speaker 2: 19:52

You know, it's quite, it's quite worrying that things like that are coming out and it also doesn't help us in terms of this campaign, the, the messages we're trying to get across about authenticity and representation and being able to describe people and their conditions or disabilities appropriately, to increase understanding of disability, because that's a that's a real big part of the campaign for us as well. It's all about increasing understanding and awareness of diversity of disability. So, yeah, I think AI is still a watch this space with caution, yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:23

So I'd like to add to that. So I think that one of the reasons that ai is so bad when it comes to disability is actually the lack of training data, because ai models are based on what's out existing on the internet already for the most part, so they're scraping the internet for existing pictures, images, research or whatever relating to the topics they're trying to learn. Well, if they're scraping the internet for pictures of disability, all they're going to find are manual wheelchairs, quite often alone on a beach with the sunrise. So the work that you're doing creating authentic images now and tagging them and the tagging and the alt text and the descriptive text around it gives context, which is something that AI and large language models that really rank highly when they're trying to learn actually could help to play a part in improving AI image generation around disability to make it more representative. Of course, it's not authentic representation because it's not authentic humans. In the same way, although the pictures of the Pope in a puffer jacket work quite good, and it may be the fact that you've got seven fingers counted as a disability, so I think that it will improve, but the work that you're doing here and the work that you're teaching others to do will improve the training data and hopefully make it better when people choose to use AI.

Speaker 1: 22:13

The other question that I had was you've created an image bank and that's great and businesses can use it and so on and so forth. A lot of the content on the internet isn't produced by large businesses. It's produced by small businesses and content producers and stuff like that, and they tend to use the sort of free image banks that are out there on the web. Have you decided to put some of the images in something like Plexels or Pixabay or some of these freely available image banks?

Speaker 2: 22:53

At the moment we're kind of in the first year of the campaign. It's not one that's going to be over and done and dusty. There's lots of different things and extra things that we can do, um, and because we're a membership organization, first off, we've created resources that that our members can use, which are who are businesses and also media. But it's not impossible that down the line we might create some additional images and do what you're what you're suggesting, to get that kind of representation out or maybe to create a free image bank that everybody can access, whilst keeping some specifically for our members. But we're not quite there yet.

Speaker 2: 23:29

What we are at is, um, and we're going to be adding to the image bank. We've just done another photo shoot. We we have. We had some gaps that we knew we had within the images and we got feedback from users to say to confirm that those, those gaps or gaps, um. So we've just done another photo shoot. So we'll be releasing some more images and plan to do another photo shoot in the spring just to get even more diverse images and settings and locations within the image bank. But, yeah, certainly watch this space. It's not a kind of done and dusted campaign for us.

Speaker 1: 24:05

And we're a Paying Up member and so very happy to have access. Sorry, Sarah, I cut across you.

Speaker 3: 24:12

No problem at all, Neil. Sorry, no, and I'm glad you're a paying member, so that's great. Please use the images. I was just going to say that the guidance is completely free to everybody. So the guidance we've written does touch on how to use images that you're not creating yourself, and not just images from the image bank. It's about all images. So about if you're, you know, even if you're posting an individual on social media, how do you select an image to use, or how do you decide to share an image that someone else has sent to you, that sort of thing. So it does, you know, try and cover up all those areas. It's not, you know, it's aimed at members and partners and the media, but it's also there's stuff in it that's available to everybody to help everybody kind of improve how they portray disability.

Speaker 1: 24:59

That's great, and I also want to address something that Deborah raised right why is it that we all use the same images? I can tell you a certain amount is a level of caution amongst marketing teams that they're very reticent to use their own employees because employees leave and they're worried about the issue of permission should employees leave. And you know, this is something we've found in my own organization where actually the employees say we want to do these pictures and the marketing team would go. But what if you leave, but sign the thing that says we want to do, or make an agreement that if you leave we swap the picture out?

Speaker 1: 25:48

I think there are ways around it, but what happens is it becomes easier to go and buy something from, you know, an image bank like Getty, where you have a subscription, than do the work to build your own sometimes. So they take the path of least resistance, which is why we end up with, you know, mediterranean amputee tech guy a lot on websites. You know there's a, there's a gentleman that I see frequently that appears, you know, with his laptop showing his leg. You know, with his laptop and his leg in a different position.

Speaker 2: 26:28

You know so and interestingly though, interestingly, there has been a quite a growth in model agencies to say, uh, with disabled models. I don't know if people saw the there was a document there's been a series on recently about a model agency, but but that means that there's more different models out there with different disabilities and, you know, more diverse and eventually, I think you know that will start trickling through and casting agents need to also be thinking about that. So, um, you know, and then the collections that the image banks can buy will be more diverse. They'll have more interesting stuff and more people download them. So it's commercially a good idea for them because you know they're going to sell more images. So there's, it's moving in the right direction, definitely.

Speaker 2: 27:13

And the more businesses and advertisers and marketers use images, people start thinking I've seen that one before we need to be looking for something different here and also put budget behind doing their own photo shoots. It's not cheap to do a photo shoot, but if you want to have stuff that is really authentic and is not what everyone else has got, then you need to to invest a bit of money in doing that, which is why we didn't use. We could have got staff from lots of the organisations, we who are members, and asked them to kind of volunteer. But we wanted to use professional models. For that reason.

Speaker 1: 27:49

Great. Thank you so, and I think that's really laudable and I'm glad that you've taken that approach and I'm really thankful for the guidance as well because I shall be sharing it. So hopefully we can overcome some of that fear. Antonio put a comment in the um, in the chat actually, which which made me laugh. So he said he tested, um, you know, uh, image generation using live language models and he put in autistic and got a load of people with nuanced hair colors and I think that there's, there's definitely a correlation from our interviews with you know, people in the neurodivergent community Quite a few have quite funky hair, but I wouldn't say that it's causation. Right, correlation is not causation, but I think that definitely there are some things going on there.

Speaker 1: 28:49

So, with the, the next steps, with the next steps of the project, you say you're going to be doing some more stuff. Where can people find it? So I mean, obviously, if you're a member of bdf business disability forum, you know you should know where to go and and get the stuff. But where is a screen url where the general public can access the guidance? Please let everybody know if we want to publicise broadly.

Speaker 2: 29:18

Yeah, so it's businessdisabilityforumorguk forward slash, change the image, and there you can find everything about the campaign. You can find stuff about some of the kind of high profile people that are supporting the campaign, as well as information at the image bank, but, importantly, the free guidance that's available to everyone, not just our members.

Speaker 1: 29:39

you can find it all there fantastic, so we are bang on time. Uh, good job, folks. Um, just remains for me to thank my clearText for keeping us captioned and Amazon for supporting us to keep us on air. We're in our 10th year. Without that support, we probably would have given up the ghost long time ago. So thank you everyone. I really look forward to taking this onto social media with some great images, I hope.

Speaker 4: 30:09

And hashtags.

Speaker 2: 30:12

Oh yeah, and it mentioned the hashtag we're using changing the image of disability is that is the main hashtag that we're using?

Speaker 1: 30:17

so excellent, super. Thank you so much. Look forward to continuing the conversation great, thank you.