Friday, March 28, 2014

Friday Favorites


I like this blog, by an Australian disability blogger, because while her general orientation in the disability world is similar to mine, she is also very good at presenting thoughtful arguments for positions I don’t agree with. For instance, she made one of the most persuasive arguments I have ever read for why it might be okay to support both inclusive education and “separate schools”. Often, people who blog their “contrary” opinions do so in a deliberate attempt to be provocative, to be mavericks. “She Types Things” really believes what she says she believes, so her arguments are strong, but not aggressive or smug.


This is simply a very well-written blog that I have just recently started reading. I added it to my Disability Blogs list after reading a beautiful piece on CP Awareness Day. It made me think in a new way about some of my own disability-related quirks. Anyone who can show me an unfamiliar perspective on disability is someone I’m going to follow.


This is as close to the kind of disability website I would like to create as I have ever seen up and running. It looks great. It is updated often. It covers a wide range of disability issues and perspectives. It’s run by a small but diverse team. Its overall tone is more or less in line with my thinking about disability. It combines personal blog-type articles with more objective news and feature stories. It has an easy to locate and explicitly defined mission, so there’s no sense of mystery about what the site is actually about. And its execution and scale seem to be in line with its ambitions. In other words, the Disability Horizons team seems to have set a reasonable goal and they are achieving it. I have seen several other “full featured” disability websites, (as distinct from more narrow, personal blogs), and too many of them either fall well short of too-ambitious goals, or are a little confusing, because they seem like they are semi-secretly affiliated with some vague sort of business venture that may or may not match up with the website’s topic and tone. The only slight drawback is that Disability Horizons is based in the United Kingdom, and is generally oriented to British disability issues. Still, that’s good I suppose, since it means there’s still room for something like this here in the US.

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