In the early 20th century, having a disabling condition was still a source of social stigma and people with disabilities were excluded from many of the activities of U.S. society, including participation in the creation of popular culture via creative writing or reportage. People with disabilities had no control over their depiction in media run by, and catering to, the non-disabled majority and were generally represented by inaccurate and denigrating stereotypes, including well-meant but patronizing characterizations. This inability to speak for themselves, particularly on public policy issues directly affecting them, motivated different groups representing people with particular disabilities to begin their own publications.
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The Deaf community
The Deaf community has a long history of publications in this country. The North Carolina School for the Deaf began the first publication for deaf persons in 1848 with its school newspaper, The Deaf Mute. The American Deaf community is unique by being tied together not only by lack of hearing, but also by a linguistic tradition, American Sign Language, which they identify as forging their Deaf culture.
Deafness-related publications started when states began building residential schools for deaf children in the mid-19th century. These schools used sign language to teach and employed many deaf teachers. Thus, these schools became a location for the transmission of deaf culture to deaf children, and they began their own newspapers at these schools to help cement their community. After the North Carolina school published the first school newspaper, soon each school followed suit. These were known as The Little Paper family. They exchanged items of interest and stories and generally transmitted the deaf community back to itself. Histories of American Schools for the Deaf reports that in 1893 that there were 50 of these residential school newspapers and they generously exchanged each other's news. A study of the Little Papers and found that they provided a significant cultural forum for the deaf community to discuss important political events affecting the community, as well as small news events such as a new stained glass window at a school.
The blind community
The blind community also has a long and vibrant publication history, and in terms of physical accessibility to news, the blind community was at the forefront with its growing number of publications in the early 20th century. In 1907, the "Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind" was founded to give people without sight access to selected articles from print periodicals. This general-interest magazine originally was published both in braille and New York Point, an embossed writing system no longer in use. The magazine's founder, Mrs. William Ziegler, was the mother of a blind son and an heiress who solely funded the publication. Her endowment continues to provide for free distribution of the "Ziegler," as it is known.
The Braille Book Review began in 1938 and described the newest books in Braille from the National Library Service for the Blind. Once sound technology was more prevalent, Talking Book Topics was founded in the 1930s to give the blind community information about the most recent recorded books at the National Library.
Choice Magazine Listening, founded in 1962, by the nonprofit Lucerna Fund provides a free audio magazine anthology to anyone in the U.S. who is blind, visually impaired or physically disabled. Each quarterly issue contains 12 hours of articles, short stories, essays and poems, chosen from over 100 publications, and read, unabridged, by professional narrators.
Disability specific publications
Other disability-related publications continued a tradition of fostering solidarity within the different sub-cultures of the disability community. After World War II, soldiers who had been disabled in war came home, which led to the Paralyzed Veterans of America's development of the magazine, Paraplegia News, in 1946.(26) Many disability publications target similarly distinctive audiences, from people with a specific disability to parents to health care professionals.
Disability rights activism
In terms of overt disability rights activism, disability publications such as The Ragged Edge, Mainstream, and Mouth helped fuel the disability community’s civil rights agenda. The disability community began to assemble the American Disability rights movement in the mid-to-late 1970s. After the Rehabilitation Act was passed in the 1970s but not given entitlements, the disability community began to organize protests and activism. Publications grew from these activities such as the beginning of Mainstream magazine in 1975 and the beginning of The Disability Rag in 1980 (renamed The Ragged Edge in 1997). Mouth began in 1990 after its founder Lucy Gwin "escaped from what amounted to a nursing home." Mouth originally started to serve the community of people with neurological impairments but evolved into a general all-disability rights advocacy publication.
Douglas Lathrop explained in the Society of Professional Journalists The Quill that these rights-based publications sprung up because many in the disability community were tired of the persistent negative media stereotypes of people with disabilities as inspirational or courageous in the mainstream news media. "In light of this persistent reliance on oppressive stereotypes, the disability press fills the void," Lathrop said. Lucy Gwin, the editor of Mouth, explained in The Quill: "Nobody (in the nondisabled media) is going to cover the disability-rights movement, so we’re just going to have to cover it our own damn selves."