‘CODA’, a film about the hearing child of deaf parents, won this year’s Best Picture Oscar, and one of its stars, Troy Kotsur, became the first deaf man to win an Oscar for acting when he won the award for best second ROLE. Lauren Ridloff became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first deaf superhero in “Eternals.” The Hulu mystery comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” won acclaim for an almost entirely silent episode that highlighted the perspective of a deaf character (played by James Caverly).
Even with these prominent examples of on-screen portrayal of disability, compared to the roughly 26% of adults in the United States who have a physical or psychological disability, portrayal continued to lag behind, according to a new study. published Tuesday by Nielsen. The report, timed for release on the 32nd anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, analyzed the portrayal of characters with disabilities in movies and TV shows released from 1918 to 2022.
The titles came from a Nielsen database that included approximately 164,000 movies and TV shows that were created over the last century. Of these, approximately 4.2%, or 6,895 titles, were labeled as having significant disability themes or content.
Disability inclusion was highest, according to the study, in 2019, when 518 productions on disability-related themes were released.
Overall, in this year’s report, movies fared even better than TV – of the 6,895 titles with significant disability themes or content, around 59% (4,066) were feature-length features and 18% (1,209) were regular series. (The remaining performances were in other categories like shorts, limited series, TV movies or specials.)
These figures represent a slight shift towards TV from last year, when a Nielsen report showed that 64% of portrayals of characters with disabilities were in feature films and 16% in regular TV series.
A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users on the representation of disability in the media carried out in the first quarter of 2022 also found that people with disabilities were significantly more likely to challenge depictions of characters with disabilities. Viewers with disabilities were 34% more likely to say there was not enough representation of their identity group in the media, and they were 52% more likely than those who did not identify as having a disability to qualify a television portrayal of their identity group as inaccurate. .
Lauren Appelbaum, vice president of RespectAbility, a nonprofit that participated in Nielsen’s study last year, told The Times at the time that while the number of characters with disabilities continued to rise, about 95% of these roles were always played by actors who had none. have disabilities.
But there have also been positive portrayals, such as in the HBO series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which features a character who uses a wheelchair (played by Lauren Spencer, known as Lolo), a confident student attending the show’s iconic nude. to party. Alaqua Cox also won acclaim for her performance as Maya Lopez/Echo, a deaf Cheyenne who has the ability to mimic others’ movements, in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye.”
