This page is out of date and has been replaced by the much improved version that you can find HERE

The remainder of the page is kept for archive use.

I’m a big fan of TED, and find their talks useful, inspiring, and motivational. There are well over 1500 TED talks on a range of topics, but I was mildly surprised to find that when you search for ‘disability’ and related words, there are only 67 talks that include any of the keywords. Given the nature of TED, I was surprised it was so low. Worryingly it turns out even worse that that.

TED’s website doesn’t make searching videos that easy, it’s pretty difficult to get the site to sort the search results by comments, or views, or event date. So I wrote a small bit of code to sort the list by most viewed, and I thought I’d share it with you guys.

The original set of 67 talks is here. Unfortunately it contains a lot of talks that mention disability only in passing, or in the sense of “disabling the security”. So I ended up removing quite a few (I removed Dave Eggers with a heavy heart – I liked his so much that I went to visit the project in San Francisco). The interface between disability and mental illness caused me a couple of problems, and I ended up removing a couple of (inspirational nonetheless) videos that were solely about depression (the list is already dominated by mental illness, which is interesting in its own right). I had to remove at least 10 from the top 20, which implies that there are far fewer than 67 in total. More to the point, looking at them as a group… it starts to look like TED has the same representation problem as Hollywood…