Our Site gives women with disability a voice
In the Real Stories section of Our Site, women with disabilities tell their own stories. Using their own words, via written pieces, videos or audio recordings, they cover topics as diverse as para dancing and discrimination in the health care system.
Giving women and girls with disability a voice is at the core of Our Site.
Launched in March 2020, Our Site is a website that provides information and resources that aim to support women and girls with disability to learn about their rights.
Our Site covers five key areas:
- Your Rights
- Lead and Take Part
- Life Choices
- Sex and Your Body
- Safety and Violence
Women With Disabilities Australia, an award-winning national organisation, led the development of Our Site.
“[Our Site] came about after really decades of women with disability saying that there was a lack of accessible information on various areas,” explained Heidi La Paglia, Project and Policy Officer with Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA).
“Our Site is very broad. So, it does try to cover a range of issues. But one of the key things that it tackled was women with disabilities not necessarily being aware of all their rights or knowing how to convey that to others and stand up for what their rights are. So that was the aim of Our Site overall to try and empower women and girls with disability to stand up for their own rights.”
WWDA staff, Our Site Advisory Panel members and Story Contributors at the Our Site launch in Sydney March 2020
The five pillars of Our Site
The five pillars of Our Site—Your Rights, Lead and Take Part, Life Choices, Sex and Your Body, Safety and Violence—cover a wide range of topics.
Under Your Rights, visitors to Our Site can learn about things like their rights in Australia, disability discrimination and harassment and how to make a complaint. Your Rights helps give women and girls with disabilities the tools and knowledge to stand up for their rights.
Lead and Take Part provides information about how to get involved in your community. It includes pages on work, politics and activism and education. Life Choices provides information on making decisions around topics like housing, money and healthcare. Sex and Your Body explores sex and consent, pregnancy and positive body image. Safety and Violence covers what violence is and how to get help.
Our Site was a co-design project, with many women with disability contributing to the project.
Our Site co-designed with community
From the beginning, the project was co-designed with women with disabilities. The project steering committee was mostly made up of women with disabilities. An expert panel of more than 40 women with disability were also a part of the co-design effort.
“The team really focused on ensuring that women and girls with disabilities were a part of the project the whole way through,” said Libbi Cunnington, Senior Project Officer with WWDA. “The team at WWDA worked really, really hard to ensure that the women’s voices were front and foremost in developing the site.”
“When you do things in co-design, properly and authentically, you’re going to get great results. Because it’s coming from the women.”
As well as the steering committee and advisory panel, WWDA also ran six workshops across the country with different groups of women with disability including Aboriginal women with disability in Tennant Creek and women with intellectual disability.
“The purpose of those workshops, as well as the expert advisory panel were to really narrow down what women with disability wanted and needed on the website,” Heidi said.
“Then we worked over a period of about six months, with the expert advisory panel in smaller groups to actually write the content and get it right. And that consisted of email consultations, as well as meetings over zoom, as well as one in person meeting. A couple of surveys as well with both women with disability and service providers of people with disability.”
“We took a quite a few different approaches. Because we know that not everyone was going to engage in one particular way of consulting.”
Quality Review Panel members at the final review meeting in January 2020 before Our Site launched.
Our Site an accessible blueprint
Unsurprisingly, making Our Site accessible and inclusive was a big goal for the project. There is an easy-read version of the website that is available at the click of a button. It’s something the WWDA hopes other organisations can take inspiration from to make their own projects more accessible.
“We’d love it to be something that other organisations refer to was leading the way with accessibility. We want to be that example of how to do it right. If we can get other organisations saying this is how we need to build our websites and our communications… then that would be awesome,” said Jacinta Carlton, WWDA’s Media and Communications Officer.
But Our Site will not be resting on their laurels. There space for more content and more own voices contributions from women and girls with disability. But feedback from the community will help determine what is next for Our Site.
“We do have a feedback form that if people think oh, you know, what I was looking for wasn’t there, they can tell us. Because we really want to know about that,” Heidi said.
Visit Our Site to learn more about your rights and to find information and resources to help you stand up for your rights.