UK’s publishers are being asked to include more disabled characters in children’s books. The request comes from a reader who was born with a disability himself. This interesting topic came to us from The Guardian in their article, “Schoolboy calls for more disabled characters in children’s books.”
Like most organizations and industries, raising diversity among their staff has been a priority. Extending those priorities to the products they create is the next step for publishing houses. The 14-year old reader named Frankie said, “I think if we involve disabled people in books, we can raise awareness and it will become the norm to people. They won’t stare, they won’t make comments, and life would get better, society would get better.”
A Bloomsbury editor said the publishing industry was “very aware of the need to represent diversity in our books”, and that “we are working very hard here at Bloomsbury and elsewhere in the industry to ensure that everybody is represented in some way in some books”.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
