The Movement was integral to achieving the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, and the four-year project will record and digitise these unique social history and heritage stories. These will be used to create an accessible and interactive website that is dedicated to the story of the Disability Rights Movement in the UK. The website will:
- digitise and preserve collections of key figures from the Disability Rights Movement
- build an e-learning portal with a full suite of accessible assets including gaming, zines and graphic novels for younger audiences
- catalogue and create an extensive collection of oral history films
The project will add to the National Disability Arts Collection & Archive (NDACA), created by Shape Arts through a previous Heritage Fund project in 2018. A walk-in learning zone will be created at Peckham Library and people can engage with the project across the UK with the ‘Off the bus tour’. A Routemaster bus will visit locations throughout 2025, sharing these stories through a mobile cinema. These will take place in 2025, 30 years after the Disability Discrimination Act was passed.
Some of the stories and collections that will be preserved will be available to see for the first time and include some key figures from the historic movement including Keith Armstrong, Agnes Fletcher and Adam Thomas, Penny Pepper, Allan Sutherland, films from the Le Court Film Unit and Blast TV oral histories from Baroness Jane Campbell, Alia Hassan, John Evans and Micheline Mason.