The ReelAbilities Film Festival: Growing by Inclusion

Undergoing surgery is a stress-inducing prospect for anyone, but children are especially vulnerable to anxiety prior to operations. To avoid using risky anti-anxiety medications on young patients, two anesthesiologists at the Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford have developed creative techniques to distract children from their forthcoming surgeries. They use toys and a unique low-cost video projection system called BERT-Bedside Entertainment Theater.

Inclusive Farm is adapted for people with a wide range of physical needs, like for people who are blind, to give farming students the full range of skills expected on a farm. Inclusive Farm aims to break down barriers for disabled people in the farming industry and is currently ushering its first intake of 14 students toward completing their courses.

Since 1995, Pragnachaksu has paved a path to empowerment for blind women in India, offering academic and vocational classes in addition to braille instruction. The school provides free housing and tuition for girls looking for primary and secondary education, a service that is usually unavailable to the country's eight million blind citizens, and to visually impaired women in particular.

Using audio descriptions of a movie’s action, the XL Cinema app increases the accessibility of movies to a vision impaired audience. The free app has been used thousands of times and production studios are interested in working with XL Cinema to expand its offerings.

Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee created a special show for displaced Syrian children conducted entirely in Arabic. The show teaches children lessons like counting and the alphabet, but it also teaches them emotional coping skills, which is very important for refugee children. The show is accompanied by trained early childhood development facilitators who visit homes and interact with the children playing games or reading books.

To reach kids who must stay at home as a result of the coronavirus and may not have access to reliable internet, teachers in Tennessee's Shelby County schools are recording easily accessible TV lessons. Though teachers can no longer get the same level of feedback from students or adjust to their on-the-spot questions, the lessons are to some degree interactive and aim to reinforce lessons students learned before schools went remote.

The Daily Moth is a daily online news channel devoted to the news accessible to the deaf community. Recently, the channel's focus is on stories about Covid-19 and the fight for racial justice. The programming elevates the perspective of deaf individuals, from deaf first responders to deaf victims of police violence. The channel provides American Sign Language interpretation of news stories, accurate captions, and uses colors and backdrops that make it fully accessible. Securing funding has been a struggle for the channel, but it continues to deliver potentially lifesaving news to the deaf community.

Bronx shelters have teamed up with industry professionals to put together an after-school program offering students an opportunity to receive mentorship. In the program, which is based around video game-themed writing workshops, students are able to practice their writing skills, while being able to manage pandemic-induced isolation by connecting with other students and instructors.

When the coronavirus pandemic shut down school buildings and led to many people working from home in New York City, a city child care program was launched to give children a place to go while they were learning from home. However, the program failed to accommodate children with disabilities who required the assistance of a paraprofessional. After realizing the gap in care, the city is now working to increase access.

The International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards trains employees in the tourism industry to become autism certified, ensuring they know how to care for neurodivergent youth and their families when they’re at places like restaurants or theme parks. Several of these businesses have practices in place like offering noise-canceling headphones, access to quiet rooms or even hosting autism awareness weekends, helping to make the city the first Autism Certified City in the world.