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Over 96% of Government Websites Hide Disabled Men and Women on Their Site

This article raises an important point about how photos of people are sourced and used.

Sites such as Shutterstock are used to find stock photos of people to use on websites. Searching for “happy person”, “person smiling” or “happy face” rarely surfaces any pictures of visibly disabled individuals. However, “a quick search of ‘person in wheelchair’ revealed that plenty of images of happy disabled people do exist”.

The article investigates an example image and concludes that this happens due to the way the images are tagged. The image in question is tagged with keywords centred around the person’s disability and age. The image therefore won’t show up in general searches and is “unlikely to be used on non-medical web pages”.

According to the article, just 24 out of 502 government websites showed any photos of disabled people on non medical pages. However, this figure includes blog posts about a specific organisation or person, as well as articles about the Paralympics. It is extremely rare to see a stock photo including a visibly disabled person, for a general page.

A few reasons are cited for this trend. Most countries have a ‘social norm’; a “stereotyped idea of how the average citizen looks”. When creating content designed to resonate with a wide audience, photos of the social norm are used to cater for the majority. It is hypothesised that not using pictures of the social norm might lead to fewer ‘conversions’ (clicks), reducing the perceived success of the web page.

The article concludes with an appeal for government sites: to “normalise the use of diverse photographs, including individuals from all walks of life”. [This] is the only way to create an expectation for inclusion”.

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