I was listening to Just One More Book podcast today, in which Jane Ray talked about In The Picture, a project aimed to encourage illustrators, authors & publisher to include disabled children in their books for young readers. As written in their 10 Guiding Principals, “The point is not that disabled children should be the prime focus of stories or pictures: simply they should be there, a natural feature of every child’s landscape.” The program encourages the inclusion of disabled children in children’s stories and picturebooks… it is not aiming to create a seperate strain of books for disabled children, but to acknowledge that disabled people are part of our society.

I appreciated Jane discussing how some illustrators feel unsure of how to portray disabled children in their illustrations in a way that does not offend the disabled children themselves. To help encourage illustrators to include disabled children in their works, the In The Picture website has an Image Bank which has a variety of photographic resources illustrators can draw upon. There is also an Inspiration gallery where illustrators have posted their works of disabled children to inspire & encourage other illustrators to do the same… my favourite childhood illustrator, Quentin Blake, contributed 3 works, one of which is shown above.