Dyslexia Awareness Week
by Emma Chalmers, DEN co-chair
Dyslexia awareness week is the 2nd to the 8th of October, and I thought I’d focus my blog this week on that.
Firstly- what is dyslexia? Well NHS Inform speak of it this way- ‘Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that mainly causes problems with reading, writing and spelling. It’s a specific learning difficulty, which means it causes problems with certain abilities used for learning, such as reading and writing. Unlike a learning disability, intelligence isn’t affected. It’s estimated up to 1 in every 10 people in the UK has some degree of dyslexia. Dyslexia is a lifelong problem that can present challenges on a daily basis, but support is available to improve reading and writing skills and help those with the problem be successful at school and work’.
1 in 10. For an average sized hospital ward, that could be 3 to 5 of your colleagues. It’s more prevalent than I believe most people realise.
Now, I want to preface the remainder of this blog by saying that I don’t have dyslexia and am in no way speaking for those who do. My mum and my partner both have it and I want to discuss it from the perspective of someone alongside it, not embedded with it. So, these are my thoughts and experiences.
My mum is an exceptionally intelligent woman who, before she retired, ran a special educational needs department in a mainstream school and had many qualifications under her belt. She also had to do all this without any additional support until she was at university the second time (I was about 8 or so). All through school she was treated as though she was not smart enough because her papers would always come back with red pen marking all over them. The dreaded red pen. Even in my own work in education now I never use red for feedback, based on the negativity felt by my mum. Imagine really knowing your stuff but because the spelling wasn’t correct, you were marked down or failed? And with it being consistent, why did no one consider that there may be an underlying problem?
I remember when she was writing her essays for her second degree. She would hand write it all first then use our very high tech (at the time) Othello computer’s word processor to type it up for printing. She would struggle to read the words on the paper, type them and ensure they were spelled correctly all at the same time. So here comes little helpful Emma who would read out loud the words to be typed as her auditory processing was much better. I improved my reading skills and mum was able to write essays with less frustration. Honestly, nowadays I’m pretty convinced she let me do that so that I was out of trouble, but it was my first understanding that people learn or process information differently to each other.
Did you know that all our posters, printing, presentations, written word, and anything else that is going to be published either in paper form or online needs to be dyslexia friendly? I’m not sure how many people outside of the patient info group know this. You can find out more from the British Dyslexia Association at this link (Dyslexia friendly style guide – British Dyslexia Association (bdadyslexia.org.uk)) but be aware of this if you’re writing anything. Don’t remove screen covers if they are on computers as these can help when trying to read on white backgrounds (all our Word docs!) on screens.
I bet a bunch of you cursed the recycled beige paper that we got a few years ago for printing. I heard many people saying it looks cheap or unprofessional. Now that might be your opinion, but I’ll tell you this one thing- it’s much easier for our dyslexic peers to read!
So, the next time you see something printed in Comic Sans MS and on pink paper, maybe consider that it isn’t childlike or unprofessional but is actually an accessibility need for 1 in 10 of our peers and we should embrace it.
To end, I will give you a wee joke from my mum, because, as she says sometimes ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’-
My spy movie disappointment
By Emma Chalmers, co-chair of DEN
1 August 2024
CW for movie spoilers
When I was a kid, I was utterly obsessed with Bond movies. Ian Fleming wrote stories that to me showed exotic women, distant tropics and gadgets that woke the geek in me. I religiously watched the films, at least once a fortnight, and knew all the pub quiz answers for the film round at uni.
New spy movies give me so much excitement and I can say that if you name one, I will probably have seen it. That’s not a challenge though so please don’t spam my inbox!
Recently I rewatched Kingsman: The Secret Service. I’d seen it in 2014 when it was released and loved it. This was, however, prior to my overt disabilities and certainly before I became DEN co-chair and pushing for disability advocacy and positive change. So imagine my discomfort when seeing that the two ‘bad guys’ are ‘disabled’. And yet, the actors are not.
Samuel L Jackson plays Richmond Valentine, a megalomaniac who wants to rid the world of excess people to stop climate change. Valentine has a lisp. Jackson does not. I fail to see how adding that ‘character trait’ makes his bad guy any more scary. A lot of the movie is quite tongue in cheek and comic but even with this angle it is once again a lazy way of othering those with disabilities.
Now, had that been Kingsman’s only foray into the lazy disabled villain trope, I might have been able to look past it to an extent. But they made it worse by having Sofia Boutella’s character Gazelle have both lower limbs missing, to be replaced by ‘sword blades’. Yep, the blades that amputee athletes wear to run in. But swords too. Obviously she used these blades to kill people frequently. I actually adore Boutella’s acting (check out Atomic Blond, The Mummy (2017 version, not Brendan’s era) and Star Trek Beyond as some examples of her great acting) but I had to go and google if she was disabled, or at the very least, an amputee. Nope. Not at all. One article I came across lauded the CGI teams on both this movie and Mad Max: Fury Road (Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is missing an arm and has a bionic limb) which definitely is great CGI but is just wrong in principle.
You might be asking yourselves why I’m bothered about this. This is why. Instead of employing disabled actors, or those with amputations or missing limbs, studios would rather spend masses more money on ‘disabling’ the non-disabled. It happens far too often and is not challenged enough. I could speak about so many other characters and I’m sure you could think of some too, like Professor Xavier of the X-Men franchise- neither Patrick Stewart nor James McAvoy are wheelchair users. Another article I read had a great point on this. Studios will often argue that they need the character to walk as their becoming a wheelchair user is a plotline. However, if you can make Chris Evans look like a 90lb man for a few scenes in Captain America, then you can damn well apply the same principle the other way.
Why is it ok for studios to use our disabilities in a way that is convenient to them but not to then use talent that also suits your need for a disabled character? Are our disabilities honestly only seen as plot lines? Can the non-disabled seriously think it’s alright for everyone to bury their heads in the sand on this? When a studio does use a disabled actor for the role of a disabled character, they are celebrated for being so forward thinking and inclusive. But if TV and film were just fully inclusive, that celebration would be unnecessary. As it stands right now, that celebration leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and an uncomfortable feeling in my gut that really isn’t down to my IBS.
The writing had certainly not covered even 1% of the times that studios choose non-disabled actors over disabled actors and I’m sure you all can think of others. Next time you see the disabled villain trope, or even the disabled good guy played by a non-disabled actor, ask yourself if watching that movie is a form of ignorance around accessibility. Or perhaps, talk about this issue with friends and family to open up more eyes to our plight.
I’ll keep watching my spy movies because I love them. But I’ll happily complain about and condemn the use of my people as easy writing shortcuts. Because I’m anything but quiet.
Ps- if you want to see me and Jack discussing how the disabled villain trope links into ableism and eugenics, then please watch our Let’s Talk About Eugenics lecture from Dec 2023 on the DEN intranet page.
Pps- Sean Connery was of course the best bond and I’ll defend that stance until my dying breath!
How does advocating for others lead to advocating for myself?
9 July 2024
By Emma Chalmers, DEN co-chair
A little bit about me before we start. I am a nurse by trade, but I now teach nurses. I have been disabled all my life but only discovered this in my mid-30s and I have almost exclusively used a wheelchair since 2021. As a nurse, my world was advocating for my patients – ensuring their wishes were heard and acted upon, supporting their loved ones and keeping my team together as best I could. When my occupational health consultant told me that I could no longer work clinically I grieved. I had to feel that loss to then be able to move on. But that is a blog for another day.
My job now as amazing. I still help patients but in a more background manner. Working Monday to Thursday helps me to pace and conserve energy. And I also have more free time for other pursuits- including becoming co-chair of the Disabled Employee Network. This role allows me to advocate for a new group of people- but with skills I have learned in the past.
So, to the point. You may be asking, ‘but Emma, how can you advocate for others if you can’t advocate for yourself?’ Which is a fair question. In my prior life, I sympathised but couldn’t empathise with the patients because although I knew medically what they were experiencing, I never had a cancer diagnosis myself so I couldn’t know what they were going through. This is how I approach DEN advocacy- each person’s disability is individual to them, but even if there was a person with identical disabilities to me, I still wouldn’t know their own personal experience. We are our own experts.
Another thing that I think some readers will recognise is our ability to push for the rights of others, to help others as much as we can but to not apply that same activism to our own selves. An example for you- about a year ago I applied for a post. On the application it asks if you see yourself as being disabled and then what reasonable adjustments you need. I asked for a wheelchair accessible room, focusing on my physical needs, but I forgot entirely that I also struggle with word finding, auditory processing and would also require the questions in advance. The irony? I had advised someone of this exact right not 3 weeks prior!
The retrospective light bulb moments of being disabled can be enormously frustrating but you can be sure that if I ever apply for another job, I’ll be asking for every reasonable adjustment I can get! When I research policy etc to advise our DEN members, I often discover that the same can be applied to myself and in this way, I am learning to advocate more for myself. I often use the expression ‘You cannot pour from an empty cup’ and I need to learn this for myself sometimes. Helping people is ingrained in my whole being, but so is being a disabled person and both are allowed to exist within me.
The TL:DR- advocacy is an incredible gift and one we must give to ourselves as well as others.
