Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Bella Roberts is twenty four, she edits film and television, and she has spent years being told there is no room for her in either. Primary lymphoedema means her lymphatic system does not clear fluid the way it should, so she wears compression around the clock and travels by mobility scooter on some days. That is not what has kept her out of the industry. What has kept her out is an entry route designed as though every young editor arrives with identical stamina and nothing standing in the way. Roberts now takes more than a million followers on TikTok and Instagram inside that route, and what her audience sees is that the exclusion is structural, not personal.
The first rung of this industry is physical by design. Aspiring editors, producers and directors are told to start as runners, and the job is exactly what the name promises: hauling supplies across a set, shifting equipment, and ferrying scripts and call sheets wherever they are wanted. Roberts took a stint in that role and pushed herself past her limits trying to hold the pace, and everyone around her could see it was not sustainable. She turned to post production expecting an accessible way in. What she found was an interview room sitting two flights of stairs above her, and she caught herself hoping the job would go to someone else, because she could not take those stairs every working day. An editor who could do the work brilliantly was stopped by a staircase nobody planned around, and a staircase is exactly the kind of barrier communities can choose to remove.
Then comes the part where asking costs you the job. Roberts describes emailing ahead of a role to spell out what she requires in order to work, while twenty other applicants send no such email, and she is under no illusion about who gets picked. The numbers back her up. The Creative Diversity Network counts People with Disabilities at 9.7 percent of everyone working off screen, against a national workforce figure of 20 percent, which means this industry is refusing more than half the talent it should already employ. That gap is not a shortage of skill and it never was. It is a filter that has been running for years, screening people out long before anyone looks at what they can actually do.
A door that opens only after a million people are watching was never really open. Roberts got through by going public. Years of sporadic work, a place on a scheme, and short form videos about editing eventually led to one post where she said plainly that she was stuck and asked for a chance, and it travelled far enough to fill her inbox and win her a first editorial trainee credit. Work now reaches her through messages sent straight to her Instagram. We already know the order this is meant to run in: Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities come from planning inclusion in before anyone shows up, and barriers survive mostly where that planning never happened. This article documents the reverse, and we do not want the people joining our own programs carrying that kind of weight.
The access details belong in the listing, every time. We name the step free route, the seating, and the task options before applications open, so nobody has to ask and risk losing the spot for asking. That is how we build Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities alongside People with Disabilities.
Access published in advance is a door that is already open.
Read the Full Article: 'Disabled people are having to work 10 times harder to live their life and pursue their dreams'.
By: Lottie Elton
