Despite the fact that 26 percent of U.S. adults live with a physical or psychological disability, people with disabilities are largely unseen or inaccurately depicted in movies and other media, a study by Nielsen and RespectAbility finds.

Based on a Nielsen survey, the study found that respondents with disabilities were 7 percent more likely than other respondents to say that there was not enough representation of disabled characters onscreen and 8 percent more likely to say that a television show's portrayal of a character with a disability was inaccurate. An analysis of a Nielsen database of more than ninety thousand films and TV shows from 1920 to 2020 found that while only three thousand titles included significant disability themes or content, the volume of disability-inclusive content in 2011-20 increased by more than 175 percent over the previous decade.

Of those titles with disability-inclusive content, 64.2 percent were feature films, 16.5 percent were series, and 8.9 percent were TV movies. "Television is where audiences spend the most time," the analysis notes, "but TV programs have lagged movies in representing people with disabilities." The study also found that real-life experiences of someone who is living with disability was the most common theme, while the keywords most often associated with portrayals of disability were family (23 percent) and relationship (18 percent).

"Even though the number of disabled characters on screen [has continued] to increase in recent seasons, an estimated 95 percent of available roles are portrayed by talent without a disability," said Lauren Appelbaum, vice president of communications and entertainment and news media at RespectAbility and author of The Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit. "When disability is a part of a character's story, too often content can position disabled people as someone to pity or someone to cure. It is crucial we have disabled talent both in front of and behind the camera to develop genuine multi-dimensional characters."