By Casey D. Hall
Insight Staff Writer

"If you were a kid that was disabled you knew you would be picked last," said Jones, director of the Center for an Accessible Society, an advocacy group in San Diego.

These experiences are carried into the adulthood of many professionals with disabilities, Jones said.

"Nobody wants to be disabled," William G. Stothers said. " 'Disabled' is deeply rooted in American consciousness as something to be avoided."

Jones and Stothers joined Beth Maples-Bays, editor and publisher of the Equality Herald, an online LGBT publication in Tennessee, to discuss media coverage of disability and accessibility in the NLGJA session: "Breaking Down Barriers: Making Media Accessible" on Saturday.

Three people attended.

"I think it's typical," Maples-Bays said. She said that larger numbers may have attended had the panel been in an earlier session.

"We are just as much a part of daily life and sometimes we are on the margins," Stothers said.

Stothers, Jones' husband, is the deputy director of the Center for an Accessible Society.

He said people with disabilities often are portrayed negatively in media, usually with the aim to evoke pity.

"People with disabilities are either portrayed as monsters or the dimwitted person who has a good heart but needs to be taken care of," Stothers said.

Often, news media only use the disabled as examples and quote medical experts rather than people with disabilities, he said.

"That wouldn't happen to any other group," Stothers said.

Disability issues aren't covered enough, either, he said.

"Disability affects so many people that it could almost be in any story," Jones said.

Some disability issues include the gradual removal of the American Disabilities Act, education, marriage inequality and workplace discrimination, she said.

Maples-Bays, who worked for five years as a registered nurse, said that because of her vision impairment, she didn't feel welcome when she tried to work for a medical phone line.

"They were pretty clear that they saw me as a walking ADA lawsuit," she said.

Jones said that for several years, San Diego gay pride was celebrated on July 26, the celebration day for the American Disabilities Act and the LGBT community refused to move the day.

"They basically said: 'We're a hundred thousand people, and you're a couple hundred. Too bad'," she said.

Jones became emotional when she said that the disabilities community tried to open their arms to the LGBT community but weren't accepted.

Maples-Bays said she thinks the topic of disabilities will become increasingly important to the NLGJA as the baby-boomer generation ages.

According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study in March 2001, 1 in 5 working-age adults had a disability.

"Everyone will become disabled if they live long enough," Jones said.

Maples-Bays hopes to hold a workshop about the use of closed-captioning in presentations, and a panel about age and disability discrimination for the 2008 NLGJA convention in Washington, D.C.