The Deaths by Welfare Project investigates the deaths of disabled people linked to welfare reform and welfare state violence. At the heart of the project, is the Deaths by Welfare timeline, a database of evidence, co-produced with disabled people, showing how the welfare system creates life-threatening policies that lead to people’s deaths, and documenting disabled people’s resistance.
The timeline was co-created by China Mills (Healing Justice London) and John Pring (Disability News Service), and is based on over a decade of research and involvement in disabled people’s anti-austerity campaigning. The timeline was then designed and developed by Access Power Visibility, in conversation with an access advisory group formed of d/Deaf, Disabled and neurodivergent people.
The design of the timeline takes The Social Model of Disability as a design provocation, seeking to reduce barriers to content by allowing people to choose their access settings prior to viewing the timeline. Whether through adjusting colourways, font & cursor sizes, typefaces, title styling, reading masks, use of Easy Read, Audio Description and more.
The timeline also implements an extensive filter, acknowledging the many and multiple narratives that can be revealed through filtering entries through a combination of timeline thematics, people, parties and organisations.
The need for the timeline and its contents is deeply informed by disabled people’s expertise, knowledge, activism, and movements. We hope the timeline will be a tool for disability justice movement organising, to build cross disability and cross movement solidarity, and to create life-affirming systems, with disabled people, and the analysis developed through lived experience, at the heart.
