People with disabilities and families can’t always find useful info. In Episode 10 of the Blind Experience, our Board’s Executive Director Teri Morgan and Dr. Joe Ashley discussed information access.
What do we mean by info access? Info should be easy to get, easy to understand, correct and respectful. Yet, info is often old or wrong. Sometimes the info is right but doesn’t make sense. The info can be full of jargon or uncommon words. Getting help is already hard enough. Getting info to get help shouldn’t be hard.
Ms. Morgan and Dr. Ashley also talked about Information Access Champions. This new initiative aims to make info better. “…Families and people with disabilities have so many experiences of having to fight for what they are eligible for, entitled to, what should be available to them. And they shouldn’t have to fight,” Ms. Morgan said. She explained that to make info better, we must change the system.
Our system is made up of disability organizations. Thus, Information Access Champions asks organizations to pledge to four values: accessibility, inclusion, collaboration and continuous improvement. These four values say that “…we need new strategies for when information is created and developed: how it’s going to be made usable, accessible, understandable, on the front end. You know, it needs to be a question that’s asked at the beginning of the process…”
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