Accessible
Queerness
Elia Zeno Covolan
they/them
Accessible Queerness is a project of the Treat it Queer Foundation, an international not-for-profit organization that advocates for health justice, with a particular focus on the queer community. Accessible Queerness aims to use technologies to make healthcare advocacy more inclusive and accessible, especially for queer people living with chronic illness, (sensory) disabilities and/or neurodivergence.
What will you be working on during the fellowship?
We aim to improve the Treat it Queer website and educational material according to the Web Accessibility Content guidelines. Specifically, we want to use Accessible and Universal Design principles to make our content accessible and inclusive for users with chronic illness and/or (sensory) disability including dyslexia, color blindness, sight impairment and for neurodivergent users. Our scope is to educate health professionals to provide accessible and inclusive health advocacy and to promote the development of accessible health education content.
To what future do you aspire?
We seek to cultivate a growing awareness and understanding of the existing health inequities affecting gender and sexually diverse people worldwide, as well as bring greater visibility to the real, lived experiences of queer people. We use an intersectional approach, examining the ways in which different axes of privilege and oppression simultaneously contribute to health inequities. The dismantlement of power dynamics related – and not limited – to gender, race and class and ability is central in our work.
What does being a risktaker mean to you?
Risktaker means to me employing my person and professional background for the wellbeing of our community through bottom-up grassroot projects. I am a transmasc, non-binary, neurodivergent graphic designer and accessibility consultant with disability. My work focuses on creating inclusive content by recentering marginalized people, and on translating complex concepts into accessible visual forms. I employ a mixed approach to thematic research in my work, through the lenses of qualitative sociology, design thinking, queer and crip studies.