Re-thinking disability in public: the making of the UTS AccessAbility website project

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Notes

1. UTS AccessAbility, http://www.AccessAbility.uts.edu.au, launched 18 February 2010.

2. A University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Student Association collective.

3. Administered by the UTS Equity and Diversity Unit.

4. The long-awaited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 were endorsed in the days after the launch of UTS AccessAbility. See Media release 05/2010, Dealing with government online to become easier for Australians with disabilities, from the office of The Hon Lindsay Tanner MP, 23 February 2010 (retrieved February 23, 2010, from http://www.financeminister.gov.au/media/2010/mr_052010_joint.html).

5. An image of Aimee Mullins from this shoot is viewable at http://www.nickknight.com/main.html

6. Belinda Mason's photographic exhibition Intimate Encounters can viewed at http://www.belindamason.com/

7. Belinda Mason, exhibition notes to Intimate Encounters, 2010, http://www.belindamason.com/

8. The Don't DIS my ABILITY campaign and its official publication, the Made You Look magazine, are joint initiatives of the New South Wales Government and the Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care. They have been timed to coincide with International Day of People with Disability in December of the past three years. See http://www.dontdismyability.com.au/publications

9. See http://www.dontdismyability.com.au/publications for downloadable versions of the 2008 and 2009 Made You Look magazines.

10. Evidence of how pervasive this older way of conceptualizing disability remains in collective consciousness can be seen within the publicity material generated to promote UTS AccessAbility. Although the exploratory ‘continuum’ visual agenda idea was clearly stated in the brief to the publicity design team the result does not encompass our suggested visual re-think and remains with abstracted, symbol-based imagery.