At VidCon, creator Peet Montzingo was joined by Imani Barbarin, Briel Adams-Wheatley, and Pat Valentine of the Valentine Brothers at the panel, Accessibility for All: Creating Inclusive Spaces Online and IRL.
The panel came together to discuss their experience as creators advocating for disability rights. Pat Valentine, who makes videos with his brother Zach, who was born with Down syndrome, represented the duo on the panel, while Imani Barbarin and Briel Wheatley-Adams were able to speak to their own experience.
When asked how accessibility overlaps in their personal and professional lives, Barbarian said, “I personally view accessibility as imagination and practice. I think that disabled people are some of the most creative people on the planet, because we have to adapt every single day to our environment.”
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Valentine noted, “Being accessible as a community and as society is really just honoring voices, listening to disabled people, and including them in everyday life and everyday conversations.”
While Wheatley said, “Everyone has a disability, if they want to admit it to themselves or not, whether that’s physically, mentally, or emotionally, and we all deserve to be somewhere and everywhere.:
The panel’s conversation focused on navigating disability in the everyday world, and as Barbarin wisely put it, “the disability math” that is required every day to navigate the world. Much of the dialogue focused on the importance of visibility, noting how the disabled community was institutionalized during the Industrial Revolution, and the importance of listening to disabled voices rather than speaking for them.
As Barbarin put it, “Disabled people are rarely seen as reliable narrators of their own stories and experiences, and so everybody else becomes an authority upon us, and it makes it so much harder to actually advocate for ourselves against the backdrop of a society that has stolen our voices from us.”
