Listen to this post:

Let’s just start here, with this picture of Mia Mingus, Alice Wong, and Sandy Ho smiling, and with the idea that providing access is a way to demonstrate love.

And then, let’s have this short, subtitled video from Alice with more about it. In the video, you have Alice, an Asian-American woman wearing a red hoodie and with a mask over her nose with a tube for her Bi-Pap machine. She addresses the camera directly. She addresses us directly. As she has been her whole life.

This awesome campaign provides you with lots of resources around accessibility in the spirit of Disability Justice, not the spirit of legal compliance. So far, focusing on compliance hasn’t gotten us what it was supposed to. And who wants to feel like their life revolves around other people following laws about how to exist in the world with you? We need the laws for compliance because of the extreme absence of love, respect, value, and opportunities to hold positions of power and leadership. And that means in organizations, in companies, in government, and in community groups that aren’t specifically about disability or deafness. (And yeah, even in some disability-specific groups, it’s still non-disabled people running the show. Sigh.)

I’ve gone to several events recently that didn’t have good accessibility. When pressed about it, often the response is, “We didn’t have the money for access.” The questions I want to ask next–especially for large organizations who say this as often as small ones–is, “Did you write it into your budget from the very beginning and run out of cash? If so, how did you decide that scrapping accessibility was the best move? Who’s served by that? Or was the budget issue because you didn’t think of accessibility until someone from my community requested it, and you genuinely had nothing left in the pot to cover access?” Because I can assure you that there are many cases where the lack of access at the event or in the final product is because it wasn’t considered from the beginning. It wasn’t considered integral to having the event or making the thing or hosting the meeting. Period. As someone who makes my living providing access and who goes to lots of community events–some that aren’t accessible and some that are–I have receipts. I have a very large pile of receipts.

I’m a huge fan of this idea of promoting love and access as love, and I hope you will be too.

There are so many ways to show love, and there are also many ways to support this campaign. You can buy some Access Is Love swag for starters. You can share the campaign. You can support people doing Disability Justice. For instance, you could donate to the Disability Visibility Podcast on Patreon. You can find free information and resources and, if possible for you, hire consultants and educators like Vilissa Thompson and ChrisTiana ObeySumner and Leroy Moore to lead you into more access, more love, more disability justice.

These are only a few starting points. But really, I’m convinced that if your access work doesn’t include love, or if you don’t understand what the hoopla is about access, or you know about access for some groups and not others, this campaign and the people running it are for you. And if you already know that #AccessIsLove and want to bask in some disabled-designed stuff celebrating it, welcome!