The obligation to make broadcast media accessible is often taught as the last step in media production. This article describes a year-long project that paired disabled media-makers with students to create three films and a podcast rooted in critical access theory and disability justice, which necessitated creative, collaborative access planning at the onset of each production. This public pedagogy project promoted technical skills and attitudinal change by applying an intellectual partnership model that allowed students to develop resistance to dominant discourses about access that centered disability in new ways—as a desirable production feature rather than as simply an “add-on.”

This roundtable dialogue foregrounds the pragmatic experiences of five disabled journalists, four of whom are blind or visually impaired. The journalists speak to the politics of disability identity in the newsroom, their career trajectories amid ableist environments, and the ways in which they grapple with the longstanding traditions of disability representation. They engage in larger theoretical conversations about the relationship between disability and media in the fields of communication, journalism, and critical disability studies.Cette table ronde met au premier plan les expériences pragmatiques de cinq journalistes handicapés, dont quatre sont aveugles ou malvoyants. Les journalistes discutent la politique autour l’identité du handicap dans la salle de presse, de leurs trajectoires de carrière dans des environnements capacitistes et comment ils affrontent les grandes traditions des représentations du handicap. Ils s’engagent dans des conversations théoriques au sujet des relations entre l’handicap et les médias dans les domaines de la communication, du journalisme et des études d’incapacité critique.

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For those who were incarcerated in institutions like the Orillia Asylum for Idiots, the Ontario Hospital School Orillia and the Huronia Regional Centre, traces of past lives tangle and twist with the present, one story often linked with several.