Community Profile

(We're also on LiveJournal at accessportrayal!)

This community is for people with disabilities to provide information about their disabilities for writers who want to portray disabled characters. All disabilities are welcome here. If it's something you want to see portrayed better, more or differently, and it's a physical, cognitive or emotional difference of any kind from the standard configuration, then yes, I mean you. You don't have to identify as disabled-- and your difference doesn't have to be nothing but bad all the time-- to be misrepresented or underrepresented, so as long as you find that portrayals of people like you suffer from ignorance or prejudice, you're welcome to contribute information about your condition. Because it can be stigmatizing to have certain conditions, you can also submit information anonymously.

These are the rules I expect you to follow when posting here:

1. No name-calling.

2. Where necessary in getting across information about living with a disability, it's okay to use slurs (e.g., "having [condition] makes people think I'm crazy" or "people call me retarded" would be completely fine), but please don't call other community members those things as an insult. In fact, please don't call anyone or anything an ableist (or any other) slur as an insult here.

3. Long entries and triggering or non-worksafe content go under a cut.

4. This project might end up moved to a different site or format. If so, your entries will be reproduced there. If you have a problem with that, don't post them. If you want attribution, that's fine. (It's also fine if you don't want it.)

5. If someone's already written on a particular topic, but you feel you have more to say, please feel free to add more information, or correct any bad information you see.

6. There is a template. It's there to help you organize your thoughts and to provide some idea of what we're looking for. If you can't use it for whatever reason, we still want your knowledge. If you can, but can't fill out every section, that's fine, too.

7. Please use appropriate tags. Tag general categories of impairment (mobility impairment, chronic illness, etc.), specific impairment (autism, blindness, etc.) and assistive technology mentioned in the article (e.g. wheelchair, screenreader). If you can't figure out what tags to use, I'll edit them in. No pressure.