Empish Thomas – WordPress.com Information

Welcome again to our “WordPress.com Favorites” collection! In these interviews, we’ll be highlighting bloggers about their ardour challenge. Warning: contents assured to be inspiring. This interview has been flippantly edited.    

Shortly after Empish Thomas earned her journalism diploma within the mid-’90s, she started experiencing extreme complications and sensitivity to mild. After a go to to the attention physician, she was recognized with uveitis, a generalized eye irritation that may shortly escalate to everlasting injury. Sadly, Empish fell into that class, shedding her sight absolutely inside a couple of years. 

Since then, she’s been a author, journalist, and advocate for blindness and incapacity rights, telling tales and championing consciousness alongside the best way. 

Empish generously took the time to reply a couple of of my questions and share some concepts on how we are able to all be higher advocates for incapacity rights.  

1. Inform us a little bit bit about your self. What do you write about and why? How lengthy have you ever been running a blog?

I’m a contract author and blogger. I began off as a author a few years in the past and later began running a blog in 2013. Though I’ve a journalism diploma, I like writing for the pure pleasure of it. I launched my very own weblog about two years in the past as a protected place to write down my very own ideas and concepts about issues that involved me. I write particularly about my life as a blind particular person as a result of once I grew to become disabled 20+ years in the past, I hardly ever noticed constructive and attention-grabbing tales in regards to the disabled.

2. What are among the most typical adverse portrayals you see about people with disabilities within the information or in popular culture?

Effectively, there are literally two issues I discover. One is the “superhero crip” picture. That could be a disabled particular person overcoming these unimaginable challenges and doing superb issues that everybody is impressed by. It sends a message that each one disabled individuals are purported to or wish to be that means. It communicates a false expectation. On the finish of the day, we’re all human beings and dwell lives like everybody else.

The second is that we’re not seen in any respect. Many occasions, I’ll learn a narrative or watch a information phase and surprise, “The place are the blind folks? What is occurring to these with disabilities?” This isn’t essentially a adverse factor, however extra [shows our] exclusion from the storyline.

3. Let’s transfer to the office. How can employers turn out to be higher allies and advocates for incapacity rights?

First, ensuring that disabled staff get their lodging to carry out their jobs. 

Then, offering the assist, encouragement, and motivation to assist them transfer upward within the firm the best way you’ll an abled-bodied particular person. Generally I feel that individuals with disabilities aren’t inspired to maneuver up into administration or higher-level positions. It’s like folks can’t think about a blind particular person as a supervisor or director. However with the proper assist, they might do the job like anybody else.

A Few of Empish’s Favourite Posts:

4. You’ve talked about podcasts in quite a lot of weblog posts. Do you may have any favourite listening experiences to suggest?

Sure, a few of my favourite podcasts are HISTORY This Week, LeVar Burton Reads, The Stacking Benjamins, Code Swap, and Grammar Woman. 

5. What can somebody do at present to be a greater advocate for incapacity rights, particularly within the on-line area?

For me, being a greater advocate is studying as a lot as you may about blindness and visible impairment. Studying issues written by disabled folks in their very own voices. By my years of writing in regards to the disabled, I’ve had folks attain out to me to study extra and that may be a good factor. 

Additionally, serving to these of us with visible disabilities get entry to the web. I can’t start to let you know the variety of web sites I am going to with accessibility points. It’s a common problem. Reaching out to net builders is difficult and exhausting generally. However having allies to assist on this course of could be fantastic. It could possibly be a easy factor like bringing consciousness, as a result of folks don’t suppose that blind individuals are on-line.

6. Do have any ideas for aspiring bloggers or freelance writers? 

Relying on the kind of weblog you might be writing, it’s so necessary to be organized. I exploit an editorial calendar the place I jot down weblog concepts for every month. I take into consideration issues arising, present occasions, trending matters, and many others., and add them to the calendar. This helps me to maintain a great circulate of weblog posts.

As soon as folks begin subscribing they count on to see posts regularly, and having an editorial calendar helps me keep on observe.

Wish to study extra about being organized and constant along with your writing? Join our free, self-guided Intro to Running a blog course at present: