Look for disabled sources with multiple, and sometimes opposing, perspectives

Lived experiences and the impairments disabled people experience vary so much that it’s almost impossible to generalize, even about, say, disabled people who have the same subtype of the same diagnosis. A mobility device perfect for one person could be painful for another. Someone’s idea of a supportive, caring service provider is someone else’s paternalistic nightmare. There is no one size that fits all in human experience and rarely one solution that works for everybody. Therefore, best practice is to make sure you get a range of perspectives on disability priorities and policies. And, relatedly, finding many different sources, of course, helps avoid tokenism (a subject I’ll explore in later work).

 
When looking at these perspectives, be mindful of class. What the wealthy want might not be what everyone thinks is highest on the priority list, but the priorities of those who are wealthy may be the ones that the media is most familiar with, because those sources are more accessible.

Keep in mind that there are other differences — than wealth and socio-economic background — in the disability community that outsiders or newcomers may be unfamiliar with. For example, there’s whether a disability is congenital rather than acquired: Were you born with what you have, or did you get it later in life through an injury or illness? Unfortunately, the people with acquired disabilities tend to define the terms of what is important in the disability debate, while the congenital folks are seen as more pitiable, people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

 
Then there are the divisions between visible and invisible disabilities (although these are by no means always discrete categories), between progressive and static disabilities, between life-limiting or fatal disabilities and disabilities with an average life expectancy for the disabled person, and between episodic and not episodic disabilities. All of these can and do change people’s context, perspective and priorities. It’s not that any of these perspectives are wrong — they simply change the experience of a disability and sometimes make it such that someone doesn’t identify as disabled at all (as with some people who identify as part of Deaf culture and some people in the Mad Pride or psychiatric survivors’ movement).

A journalist’s job is not to decide who has the one correct way of interpreting and thinking about disability. Instead, it’s our job to figure out how our sources’ perspectives influence their experience of disability and then represent that accurately and fairly in our work.
All of this highlights the importance of finding many different sources with many different perspectives. Often, we don’t even know what we’re missing and need to find multiple and differing disabled sources to even start getting an accurate picture.