Clearly able: sensitive editing for texts on disability
Welcome! Please join a circle. And join a circle I did at Julie Uusinarkaus’s Saturday afternoon session “Clearly able: sensitive editing for texts on disability”.
It was an unorthodox talk in every sense: a welcome message on a flip chart as we trickled in after lunch, conference chairs arranged in intimate circles of six in the regal setting of the Aula Magna, the presenter down off the stage so she could speak to us on the same level. Peer-to-peer. Perfect. Changing those things that feel so normal to us, innate even, is exactly what sensitive editing is all about. Reimagining, rethinking, relearning – questioning the status quo.
Julie created a space in which we could share ideas with peers and learn from one another, following prompts in her simple yet effective slides, which she adeptly brought to life throughout the hour we spent together. Applicable across the board, whether you work in HR or academia (the sectors her sample texts were taken from), medicine or marketing, the content had us thinking deeply from the off.
We first discussed definitions of disability, psychological accessibility and our own experiences working on disability texts, before reflecting on our responsibility as language professionals and exploring different viewpoints (namely the client’s and the reader’s). The interactive part of the session saw us working on real-world content, diving into a text to look for red flags: wording that needed to be rephrased to focus more on facts and abilities, and less on judgements and disabilities. As Julie echoes in her METM25 podcast interview, this session was about putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.
As always, the METM audience shared openly, both in the small working groups and as a collective, feeding back to the room. The pressure was off in the accessible set-up and it felt like a safe space for sharing. I was lucky to have editors, interpreters and translators spanning five decades in my group, which revealed just how useful it can be to exchange ideas across our broad profession and across generations.
One participant commented on how it is the environment that is disabling, rather than the people who are disabled. This reminded me of a point Federico Federici made in his METM23 keynote about our state of vulnerability being dependent on our environment (when discussing minority versus majority languages as being context dependent). Context matters; the words matter. There was also an elegant fil rouge connecting Julie’s session to Holly-Anne Whyte’s workshop on respectful language. To my mind, the METM magic happens when these themes start to emerge and make us think.
What we do when we find ourselves in front of a problematic text is situational, like almost everything in our work as language professionals, so the session wasn’t about finding “the answer”. Instead, it was an invitation to reflect: should language be people-first or identity-first? It depends. Is autism really a “puzzle”? Hmm. Are people using a wheelchair “confined”? We can do better. We can treat people as people, paying attention to how communities refer to themselves or asking them how they want to be referred to, removing the irrelevant, concentrating on the core – what brings us together, not what makes us different. And as our clients turn to us more and more as language consultants and experts, can we develop skills and expertise in this area to help make the world more inclusive, one better-placed word at a time?
This session was an invitation to listen. As Julie said, “I’m here to hear”, and so were we. Peer-to-peer learning at its very best.
This METM25 presentation was chronicled by Hayley Smith.*
Featured photo by METM25 photographer Julian Mayers.
*Sign in to the MET website to view Hayley’s profile.