To understand what newsrooms will do in 2026 to strengthen diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, we need to first understand how the media has covered disability over the years.

Media coverage of disability in India has been on a gradual learning curve, moving from a largely charity and human-interest narrative to a more rights-based and realistic perspective over the last few decades.

The advent of assistive technology, legislations, and empowerment work by disability welfare organisations has helped shift the narrative. Crucial landmarks include the 1995 Persons With Disability Act, the 2016 Rights of Persons With Disability Act, and India's ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disability in 2007.

Besides, the emergence of social media has enabled people with disability to directly challenge old tropes and present a more positive image of themselves. Since traditional media covers trends on social media, this has had a spillover effect. In recent times, media coverage has included:

• Assistive technology such as screen readers, magnifiers, subtitles, electric wheelchairs, and refreshable braille displays.
• Disability achievers such as those who won medals in Paralympic events, chess, and other sports like blind cricket and football, and wheelchair tennis.
• People with disability with extraordinary academic achievements, such as those clearing secondary school or high school exams with distinction and those succeeding in competitive and civil services exams.

In recent years, specifically since 2022, the focus has been shifting towards how Artificial Intelligence has been empowering people with disability by reducing the need for human assistance to a large extent.

Tools that help the blind identify and interpret their surroundings, specifically talking smart glasses, have been receiving more attention, alongside explanations of the practical applications of AI avatars from Google, Meta, and OpenAI.

I see this trend continuing in 2026. As a media insider, I plan to write more on how AI is transforming the lives of people with disability, especially the blind — from clicking their own pictures using smartphone cameras to creating images with text prompts. More specifically, as AI-based tools for navigation, object recognition, and scene description continue to improve and become more accessible, many blind people are likely to gain richer and more immediate ways of understanding their physical environment, potentially reducing some forms of dependence that previous generations experienced.

Another important trend I foresee in 2026 is that with the advent of AI and significant enhancements in assistive devices, people with disability will increasingly be seen as credible and viable human capital. Although corporate companies are already investing in disabled human capital, this trend will strengthen and intensify in 2026, and newsrooms will capture it more frequently than in the years gone by.

As for what newsrooms need in terms of disability coverage to achieve meaningful progress, we must remember that media is a reflection of society at large. People who come to work in the media carry with them the same levels of understanding about different communities that they gained through their work or education before entering the newsroom. Therefore, their exposure to disability, or to the issues affecting people with disability, is often very limited or almost non-existent.

The one positive aspect of the media and the people working in it is their ability to learn fast and observe changing trends much earlier than other industries. The media needs to be informed about what is happening. They may not have deep understanding or expertise in disability, but they listen to positive trends and report on the progress made by people with disability with considerable enthusiasm.

As someone who has covered disability for Deccan Herald for more than two decades, I feel disability organisations require more exposure to how the media works and how to engage with media professionals so that their issues are reported more widely. Contrary to their belief, engaging the media is not a costly affair. It simply requires regular interaction with media persons, invitations to their events, and constant enquiries to understand whether there are opportunities to participate in the news stories they write or produce.

Disability organisations, despite doing what is required in many areas, often do not have a media policy or a strategy that they implement. They require better training and a stronger understanding of media relations. Disability organisations conduct numerous training and capacity-building programmes for several other sectors, but they rarely extend such efforts to the media.