My Zero Con Recap
About the Zero Project Conference, finding new role models, and having the post-conference accessibility blues. The girls who get it, get it.
In the latter half of February, the Zero Project Conference 2024, focusing on Inclusive Education, and ICT this year, took place in the United Nations Office in Vienna. It was my first time at the Zero Con, which means I have a lot of first impressions I want to write about!
What’s the Zero Con?
The Zero Conference is organized by the Zero Project, which is - in short - seeking to support the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Something that, we hopefully can all agree on, is cool.
The Zero Conference is an annual get-together of their global network to facilitate connections between professionals in every niche of the disability inclusion space. You don’t necessarily have to be working in the accessibility field to join, everybody is welcome to contribute to a world with zero barriers.
Being in the bubble
Entering an event like this and just knowing that everybody present understands that access is a basic human right. Oh, that made me so happy! It’s something hard to describe in any other way than: those people “just get it”.
On Wednesday evening, I left with a bit of a conference blues. As nice as it is to be among like-minded individuals, after these 3 days we all have to leave our cozy bubble again and return to arguing why accessibility and inclusion are important. And this gets tiring quickly! At ZeroCon, I knew I wouldn’t have to tell anyone to just be a decent human being and consider persons with disabilities as their clients, users, and stakeholders.
But even if everything inside my bubble is perfect, that won’t serve the millions of disabled individuals who experience life outside the accessibility bubble.
There are over one billion people with disabilities in the world, of whom between 110-190 million experience very significant difficulties. This corresponds to about 15% of the world’s population and is higher than previous World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, which date from the 1970s and suggested a figure of around 10%.
Recording Recommendations
How the disability narrative works best on screen
Among the few panels I was able to catch in person in between running into familiar faces and being introduced to new people, How the disability narrative works best on screen was by far the best!
I think what made this panel so interesting was that one of the speakers, Yuria Knoll, is an actress with a disability, with an amazing “take no shit” attitude. She is not one to be typecasted just for diversity, and that’s exactly the direction the world needs to go into.
It’s an interesting topic on its own, how disability is framed in the arts. What I’ve seen a lot of is an overly emotional narrative being constructed around it. Yikes. Yuria fittingly called out works that non-disabled productions sometimes result in “disability as a plot twist, which makes no sense at all”.
I also had the pleasure of listening even more to Yuria on the way home, which was a whole experience because we had to go all the way over to the next wheelchair-accessible subway entry. I’ve read about #CripTime before in Disability Visibility, but there’s definitely a difference between just reading about it and walking all the way over to the other subway exit to get to an elevator when you are already tired from a 12-hour day.
Talk about leaving the accessibility bubble and being hit in the face by the real world!
A Model for Transforming Investment in Disability Inclusion
A Model for Transforming Investment in Disability Inclusion made me an instant fan of Special Advisor Sara Minkara. The first question to her starts at 15:45 and her response is most likely the best piece on intersectionality that I’ve ever heard fit into just 5 minutes.
Maybe I’ll find another mind-blowing panel later, then I’ll definitely let you know! But in reverse: Please share with me your favorite sessions. With so many videos, I need help picking a place to start.