Abstract
Know your audience. We might consider this assertion the grounding tenet of technical communication and the touchstone, if not starting point, of any project. Although considering audience demographics, user experience, and knowledge level is second nature, we sometimes neglect questions of embodiment. It is at this point that Rhetorical AccessAbility: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies intercedes. As Lisa Meloncon states in the introduction, this collection works toward “expanding the conceptual apparatus for understanding the intersections between disability studies, technical communication, and accessibility” (p. 11). These broad goals are achieved best by drawing technical communicators’ attention to theoretical, research-based, and practical spaces of our work that could be enriched by more deeply understanding issues of disability. Although some aspects of this collection might be of interest to any audience, technical communicators will gain the most from it.
The collection brings together various authors from technical communication (and to a lesser extent, disability studies), including established and new professors, graduate students, and practitioners. Such a strategy represents technical communication’s complicated intersections and unites divisions between practitioners and academics.
The introduction explains that the book’s organization hinges on the following topics: “design perspective” (p. 6), theory and language–metaphor, teaching about accessibility, international perspectives, Web accessibility statements, and “resources for understanding disability and accessibility better” (p. 9). I sensed the emergence of three broader themes, however, and use them to organize this review: theoretical grounds, inclusive research models, and Web accessibility. Each theme targets specifically technical communication teachers, researchers, and students or practitioners.
Chapters 3 and 4 offer the technical communication student, practitioner, or teacher an initiation into some of the underlying theoretical concepts important in disability studies (and in this collection at large). Meloncon’s “Toward a Theory of Technological Embodiment” is a whirlwind of philosophical grounds for embodiment as a construct. In this chapter, Meloncon incorporates theories of embodiment from authors such as Haraway, Hayles, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Foucault, and Zizek. Although this approach risks overwhelming readers, her main argument—that technical communication must consider the diversity of corporeal bodies and their various relationships with technologies—provides the impetus for the collection. For readers unfamiliar with disability studies, Gutsell and Hulgin’s “Supercrips Don’t Fly” offers a fine introduction to important concepts, especially those that are central to the field of technical communication. They introduce a basic tenet of the field: Disability is not “a problem that … should be overcome or fixed” but is an extension of the diversity of all bodies (p. 89). The authors advocate the creation of inclusivity through carefully crafted language, and toward that end, they focus on metaphor use, particularly negative stereotypes.
Chapters 1, 5, and 9 push theory to practice and advocate for inclusive models of research and writing. Reading these chapters will be particularly fruitful for researchers and practitioners. These authors show us what can be gained by carefully considering the needs and perspectives of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. In “Embracing Interdependence: Technology Developers, Autistic Users, and Technical Communicators,” Elmore argues for the invaluable inclusion of autistic people in the design and development of new technology (especially technologies specifically for people with autism). Her compelling argument is built on critique of studies that excluded autistic people, generally because “they” were considered to be too challenging or unreliable for user testing. She smartly pushes against this kind of representation for representation’s sake or the inclusion of neurodiverse people without considering their needs in user testing. She argues that “user experience research and user-centered design can help us think critically about our development of assistive technologies and ensure that they increase quality of life rather than a faulty valorization of able-bodied independence” (p. 34).
This concept of inclusivity continues in “The Care and Feeding of the D-Beast: Metaphors of the Lived Experience of Diabetes.” Here Arduser also advocates for including voices too often ignored or silenced. Her research focuses on how people with diabetes talk about their disease, particularly metaphorically, arguing persuasively that “narrative self-representations of people with disabilities and chronic diseases often challenge the more prominent narratives apparent in the medical community and media” (p. 95).
Finally, in “Web Accessibility Statements: Connecting Professional Writing, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Burkean Rhetoric,” Larkin identifies a serious flaw of audience awareness in many Web accessibility statements. That is, they seem to be written for other Web designers and not their purported audience: people with disabilities who would look for and access these statements in order to use accessibility features that should be (but often are not) identified there.
This collection is at its strongest in chapters that address aspects of Web accessibility. Chapter 2, “Designing for People Who Do Not Read Easily,” by Jarett, Redish, and Summers, provides an incredibly useful description of the authors’ study about the Design to Read project that has implications that are especially useful to teachers and practitioners. The authors studied four groups who “struggle with reading—people with lower literacy skills, people who are older, people who are under stress, and people who must rely on screen readers” (p. 44). Their goals were twofold: to develop better understanding of reading difficulties and to find design solutions and accommodations to lessen these difficulties. Three particular categories of difficulties—cognitive, emotional, and physical—are highlighted here, along with strategies that each group uses to negotiate reading (including overly thorough reading and skipping parts of the text). As part of their potential solution to such difficulties, the authors make one of the most important arguments in this collection: “Helping one group helps others” (p. 50). In other words, making accommodations for a particular group who has difficulty reading—such as low-literacy readers—also helps other groups with different reading difficulties as well as those who do not have any notable reading difficulties. With six specific guidelines that “help everyone deal more easily with what you write,” the authors advocate for positive universal design strategies that can help students and practitioners make information more accessible and readable for any audience.
Chapter 7, “Accessibility Challenges for Visually Impaired Students and Their Online Writing Instructors,” by Oswal and Hewett, is similarly strong in its thoughtful, thorough, and useful approach to making online instruction more accessible. Although clearly addressed to instructors, much of the advice could also be useful to practitioners. Additionally, although focused on visual impairment, the authors note that their approach should be a starting point for considering accessibility challenges of any sort. Oswal and Hewett offer a direct challenge to “the willingness of online writing instructors to remain uneducated and underprepared to assist disabled students” (p. 137). Building from disappointing results of national surveys on online writing instruction (OWI) that indicated instructors’ lack of active planning for their potential students, Oswal and Hewett push instructors to go beyond the minimum legal requirements. Specifically, they argue that instructors “[engender] confidence for developing a more inclusive pedagogy based on equality and social justice” (p. 152) by actively taking responsibility for their pedagogical choices and advocating for students. Toward those ends, they provide in-depth explanations of accessibility, identify barriers to accessibility that blind and visually impaired students face, and make suggestions about adaptive technologies to which these students might have access. From here, the authors offer extensive advice on choosing textbooks and technologies (including course management systems, multimodal texts, and evaluative strategies) that will make OWI more equitable. A final appendix, “Tools for Improving Accessibility of Electronic Materials for the Blind,” further serves instructors’ desires to meet accessibility challenges.
In Chapter 8, “Disability, Web Standards, and the Majority World,” Lewthwaite and Swan tackle complexities of global disability and accessibility by exposing how Web “standards” are neither standard nor sufficient. Their first important move builds on prior theories about using “minority/majority” instead of “first world/third world” or other common descriptors of global division; the minority/majority description considers distribution of and access to power and wealth, thereby denoting that the majority of the world, “between continents but also within a small locale,” lacks this distribution and access. This important distinction calls attention to just how many people are excluded from resources necessary to gain power in the world and to the importance of specification when considering guidelines and standards. For example, they argue that the “WAI [Web Accessibility Initiative] publishes non-normative supportive documentation to enable web designers and developers to better understand the groups they are addressing … [and those] regarding how disabled people use the web, represent culturally normative depictions of people with disability and do not take into account scenarios in majority countries” (p. 164). Their critiques and recommendations are complex and vital for considering questions of global access and ability.
Finally, Chapter 11, compiled by Maloney, completes the collection with a practical list of resources for further study. This handy guide aims to “help technical communicators and disability studies scholars to become better acquainted with laws, guidelines, tools, and other information about disability and accessibility” (p. 219).
On the whole, Rhetorical AccessAbility offers strong contributions for furthering technical communication’s relationship with disability studies. From a disability studies perspective, though, some chapters are a bit difficult. Although the intentions and suggested takeaways are reasonable, the means of reaching those conclusions occasionally border on insensitive or suggest a lack of familiarity with the extensive work of disability studies. For example, in Chapter 6, Pass declares, “I teach that disability is more than a legal definition; it must also involve a diminished ability to perform” (p. 117). While I understand the intention here is to broaden understanding of disability in the context of teaching students accessibility and Web design, such a definition reflects the medical model of disability. It places the “deficit” of disability on the person (“diminished ability to perform”), not on structural design problems as is understood in the social model of disability (e.g., poor Web site structure diminishes the ability to perform). Ironically, these chapters demonstrate exactly both why disability studies is needed in technical communication and how it can intervene in the ways Meloncon intends.
At its best, though, this collection includes vital information to deepen our understanding of audience and inclusivity regarding disability, with lessons that can be expanded to other embodiment issues that often go overlooked (e.g., race, class, gender, and sexuality). Lewthwaite and Swan, in Chapter 8, provide an excellent thesis for the collection by arguing that, when considering our audience, we must always ask, “Who is missing here?” (p. 170). Such a question highlights the repeated emphasis throughout many chapters: Design that considers users who have more accessibility challenges is good design for all users. If we take this particular approach to audience-centered design—that is, to consider not only the most typical user but the potentially least represented user—we all benefit.