Foregrounding Accessibility Through (Inclusive) Universal Design in Professional Communication Curricula

Universal Design in Professional Communication Scholarship

In the introduction toRhetorical Accessability: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies,Meloncon (2013)argued that with shared commitments to social constructivist views of science and technology and a shared concern with accessibility, professional communicators are equipped to enact disability studies theories. However, we have not explored how professional communication discourses shape and are shaped by social constructions of disability and normalcy (Palmeri, 2006). Disability and accessibility can usefully inform discussions of web and document design, usability, and writing for 21st-century audiences. Despite these connections, however, disability and accessibility are often positioned as additional issues to consider—add-ons to the other rhetorical considerations of professional communication. In this section, I foreground disability and accessibility as critical issues that are integral to professional communication theory and instruction, discussing how principles of UD can usefully inform professional communication pedagogy.

Focusing on disability both in our teaching practices and at the curricular level encourages ethical and inclusive professional communication practices.Colton and Walton (2015)have argued that incorporating discussions of disability and accessibility presents students with a starting point for drawing connections between the work of communication design and social justice. The authors drew insights about disability and accessibility from a technical communication course that they designed specifically to address issues of disability and ethical design.Colton and Walton (2015)reflected that their students gained more inclusive understandings of what it means to be effective and ethical communicators and to design, write, and edit for a wide range of potential users. Accessibility informs multiple professional communication roles and situations and connects to broader themes of social justice that should concern writers in business and professional communication.

Accessibility cannot be fully achieved if students are encouraged to think of accessible design as accommodating individual users or specific disability categories.Walters (2010)referred to this as an impairment-specific approach to disability, which is limiting because the focus is on a specific solution for a specific disability rather than a more nuanced understanding of disability and ability as contextual, fluid, and always changing. By accommodating characteristics of a disability rather than thinking more critically about users’ varied experiences with texts, we risk oversimplifying and overgeneralizing the disability experience.Walters (2010)has advocated instead for a universally designed multimodal approach that encourages students to write and design more critically, to resist substituting one mode for another when designing for a specific user, and to bring users together by creating a more inclusive and accessible text from the start. Incorporating principles of UD into the business and professional communication classroom can ensure not only the accessibility of the texts that students produce but also the accessibility of the classroom itself—accounting for students’ different physical, mental, and learning disabilities and learning styles.

UD is based on the idea that if spaces and products are made accessible to disabled users, they will meet the needs of all users.Pullin (2009)argued that there are two key concepts at play in UD: First is material access for disabled people and second is an acknowledgment that, regardless of ability, all people have different needs and may want or need to access products or services differently than intended. Although this understanding clearly identifies material access for disabled people, UD is often articulated and enacted in ways that position disabled people as simply different kinds of consumers or users, which erases important differences—notably, that disabled groups experience structural discrimination. In fact, UD acknowledges that design can both include and exclude users and that all users have different, dynamic needs.Lupton (2014)acknowledged this when she argued that all disabilities—whether permanent or only temporary—are intensified by bad design. UD, then, combines functional accommodation with aesthetic design to create dynamic experiences for both disabled and nondisabled users.

UD, in many regards, meets the goals of the disability rights movement by positioning disability accessibility not as somethingseparatefrom everyday life and use but as something integral and useful for a range of spaces, texts, and people.Williamson (2012)noted that UD is often celebrated because it encourages designers to incorporate disability into considerations of usability, rather than treating it in isolation. UD rejects impairment-specific approaches that create individual solutions for individual disabilities, which can flatten and overgeneralize the needs of disabled users.Kerschbaum (2013)has advised designers to consider the diversity of users’ needs within categorical disabilities, rejecting the desire to treat disability as an individual problem and instead reimagining the many ways and modes we can use to convey information in more accessible ways. This is an example of UD—not accommodating disabilities in individual, prescriptive ways but instead reimagining design as accessible to a diverse range of users’ modes of accessing and using texts.

Usability and user-centered design (UCD) share these goals of meeting users’ needs, but they do not always account for a diverse range of users.Dolmage (2005)drew attention to the dangers of equating usability with UCD and privileging normate users, writing, “Usability often takes the ‘dis’ out of disability—by ignoring users with varied needs and goals, or by suggesting that technologies, spaces (and perhaps pedagogies) can be re-designed to make disability disappear” (Blending Two Frameworks section, para. 3). Dolmage pushed for UD to ensure the accessibility and inclusivity of UCD.Bowie (2009)further detailed the issues with UCD, arguing that the way we approach UCD is through the lens of a mythical universal user, which results in products and services that are user-centered for a specific group of people. With the field’s focus on usability and UCD, addressing disability explicitly is necessary for designing spaces and texts that are truly usable and accessible for disabled people and for ensuring that we do not erase the experiences and needs of a variety of nonnormative users.

UD has been attractive to a variety of disciplines because of its social constructivist focus on meeting the needs of all users; however, there are many critiques of it. Just as scholars have troubled the universality of UCD and usability, so too have they troubled UD’s idealism and potential to erase disabled experiences.Williamson (2012)described the irony of UD—that is, the erasure of people with disabilities through the integration of features related to disability accessibility in mass market products and services. When texts and spaces are designed to be accessible to everyone, this may increase accessibility but does not ensure inclusivity if these efforts are intended to normalize user experiences. Indeed,Hamraie (2013)noted that scholars often call onbroad accessibilitywhen making claims about UD as a form of inclusive design that meets the needs of the largest number of people as possible. Broad accessibility assumes that a wide range of people benefit from inclusive design, but vague articulations of accessibility for all can erase disability by still privileging normate, nondisabled users.Hamraie (2013)argued that design is value based, and, when we don’t critically and clearly define who is included in the universal, certain bodies and experiences are valued over others. When professional writers and instructors argue that UD is good for everyone without considering who specifically it benefits, we render disabled users—and students—invisible by arguing that they are just like everyone else.

UD encourages flexibility and a multiplicity of modes to engage users, but this can add an extra layer of complexity to a text.Pullin (2009)argued, “Good design often requires the courage to value simplicity over being ‘all things to all people’” (p. 85). This exists in opposition to the principles of UD but may lead to increased accessibility because simple products are often the most inclusive and accessible (Pullin, 2009).Pullin (2009)offered resonant design as a practice that is more inclusive than UD because it emphasizes simplicity rather than multiplicity to meet users’ specific needs. The idea behind resonant design is that you design for users’ shared needs, or resonances (e.g., captions benefit deaf or hard-of-hearing users, but they also meet the needs of a variety of users). As business and professional communication instructors, we already encourage students to write and design for specific audiences and users, and having a concrete understanding of our design audience means acknowledging that we simply cannot design for all people and all bodies at once (Pullin, 2009). Identifying the needs and shared resonances of the people who access and use the documents that professional writers produce allows us to have more critical discussions about users’ varied needs and experiences.

Although many have critiqued UD for its idealism, its potential to erase disability through normalizing users’ experiences, and its tendency to reduce accessible design into a checklist-based approach (Dolmage, 2005,2009;Hamraie, 2013;Oswal & Meloncon, 2017;Pullin, 2009;Williamson, 2012), UD’s principles of being flexible and adaptable to users, meeting the needs of a wide range of users rather than the “average” user, and engaging users in multiple ways can usefully benefit professional communication curricula when applied critically. LikePullin’s (2009)vision of resonant design as a “fundamental aspiration” (p. 93),Dolmage (2009)said, “UD is a form of hope, of forethought, recognizing that the needs of any community change and that the environment must be responsive to all” (p. 180). UD—like good pedagogy—works when it is adaptable and flexible to the needs of specific users, rather than the needs of an ambiguous universal user.Lupton (2014)noted that even though we cannot meet the needs of all users at all times, paying attention to the diverse needs of users can still improve access to services, products, and information. UD can never be truly universal, but it can still meet a wide range of users’ shared needs. This distinction is important for encouraging professional communication students to be mindful of difference when making rhetorical choices about writing and design, because ensuring accessibility can feel overwhelming to designers who have not experienced inaccessible spaces or texts themselves.

Universal Design as Theory and Practice in a Professional Writing Curriculum

Oswal (2013)identified information design as a field that we can learn from in terms of integrating accessibility into our preexisting research and classroom practices. In this section, I introduce WRTG 3306, “Writing as Information Design II: Usability and Accessibility,” which is the second course in a three-part information design sequence in the professional writing track at the University of Central Arkansas. As a professional writing professor with a background in rhetoric and composition and disability studies, I approached this course in spring 2016 with disability and accessibility in mind. Before this, the course had been taught primarily as a usability course with attention to legal accessibility. Accessibility best practices complement usability best practices, such as writing text that is easy to scan and read, facilitating wayfinding and navigation, and designing clean and simple documents. But by treating accessibility as an afterthought or final chapter in usability scholarship (e.g.,Krug, 2014), we perpetuate models of accommodation in our professional communication scholarship and instruction rather than forwarding inclusive design.

I designed my WRTG 3306 course with two elements of accessibility in mind: making the course accessible to the students’ diverse needs and introducing students to accessible writing and designing. To illustrate how to incorporate accessibility in a professional communication curriculum and, more specifically, how traditional assignments can be made more inclusive with attention to theories of accessibility and UD, I detail WRTG 3306’s four core assignments:

I focus on the course design and core assignments rather than the work of the students to show how to adapt and create universally designed assignments that foreground accessibility. As professional communication instructors, we must foreground accessibility in our teaching practices and in our course design because inaccessible texts are unusable texts.

Project 1: Persona

Oswal and Meloncon (2014)argued that “professional communicators should put into practice what our scholarship has long touted—that is, putting the user first” (p. 294). Project 1 immediately required students to challenge their assumptions about user experiences:

For your first project, you will develop a persona for a UCA student with a disability. The goal is not to create a stereotyped character but to do some research and to think critically about different identities and how/why people access texts differently.

Project 1 was designed as a low-stakes introduction for students to start thinking critically about disability, accessibility, and the users for whom we design—or maybe, users we do not often consider. The process of developing a persona “clarifies user needs and behaviors and is an effective means of creating empathy for the user perspective” (Lidwell, Holden, & Butler, 2003, p. 182). Although some of the students may have had disabilities, I assumed that few of my students had consciously produced texts for a range of disabled users in their other courses, so Project 1 was framed as an introduction both to disability and to user research. Students used institutional research data to collect information about the student population and compare it with secondary and primary research about a specific disability. I began the semester with this assignment to encourage students to question assumptions about disability, while highlighting the importance of starting a project with users’ needs (audience and purpose) in mind.

A concern with a project like this is nondisabled instructors and students unconsciously perpetuating stereotypes about disability.Horton and Quesenbery (2014)have argued that our assumptions about use are necessarily influenced by our social and cultural contexts, individual needs and preferences, and physical ability. That is, we understand use based on our own modes of being and orienting to the world, so nondisabled professional writers, instructors, and students need critical examples of disability experiences to move beyond stereotyping users. Disability is often stereotyped as a monolithic identity, but asHenry (2007)noted, people with disabilities have varied backgrounds, interests, experiences, expectations, and preferences that they use to make meaning. In WRTG 3306, I tried to address the nuances of disability identity in two ways. First, we readHorton and Quesenbery’s (2014)personas of people with disabilities, which feature users with a range of disabilities—including autism, cerebral palsy, and blindness—and users with accessibility needs based on language learning and aging to illustrate the benefits of inclusive design. Second, I followed up this discussion by disclosing specific ways in which my mental disability affects both the production and consumption of texts and encouraged students to research how a range of disabilities can affect use. While three students focused on visual impairments, the others focused on mental and learning disabilities, researching attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, generalized panic disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Project 2: Usability/Accessibility Protocols

Building on discussions of accessible design, Project 2 was a set of usability and accessibility protocols that asked students to consider the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility principles:

For your second project, you will create a collection of customized usability and accessibility testing steps and procedures. These steps and procedures—sometimes called protocols—are meant to guide usability and accessibility testing. Testing allows professional communicators to better understand how users (consumers and readers) experience the documents, software, digital tools, or manufactured products that we test.

Project 2 provided students with the theoretical foundations of usability and accessibility and required them to synthesize those principles into flexible protocols that are comprehensive, well written, and well designed. This project was grounded inKrug’s (2014) Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile UsabilityandHorton and Quesenbery’s (2014) A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences.Krug (2014)is considered a go-to for usability, and his three laws of usability—design texts to be self-evident or self-explanatory so that users do not have to think about what the text is or does, present clear and easy choices, and be concise—complement the accessibility principles outlined byHorton and Quesenbery (2014)about clear purpose, clean presentation, and plain language. Although both texts address principles of accessible design, their purposes vary, which can be illustrated in their respective discussions of presentation and visual design.

Krug (2014)outlined principles of usable design that facilitate scanning: taking advantage of genre conventions, breaking up elements on the page, eliminating noise, and formatting text to support scanning. Although he advocated for creativity and innovation,Krug (2014)warned, “The rule of thumb is that you can—andshould—be as creative and innovative as you want, and add as much aesthetic appeal as you can,as long as you make sure it’s still usable” (p. 33). These principles for usable design are also principles of accessible design, although not made explicit.Horton and Quesenbery (2014)outlined similar principles for minimizing distractions and designing for easy comprehension, but they also offered concrete practices intended to facilitate accessibility, such as using color contrast to separate foreground content from background content and using clean typography to facilitate readability. LikeKrug (2014),Horton and Quesenbery (2014)advocated for digital texts that are adaptable and can be customized for different user needs, information that is communicated in more than one mode, and visual design that facilitates easy reading. Both texts call attention to good design practices, but by foregrounding accessibility,Horton and Quesenbery (2014)make explicit the material consequences of design choices for specific users, offering both broad and concrete practices that designers can incorporate.

Asking students to create separate usability and accessibility protocols emphasizes their differences as processes and practices. Usability best practices complement accessibility best practices, but one cannot be substituted for the other, nor is it useful to discuss them in isolation. Foregrounding accessibility is necessary for discussions of usability because an inaccessible text is an unusable text, regardless of whether it follows usability best practices. Project 2 provided students with theoretical knowledge of usability and accessibility and asked them to synthesize these theories into adaptable guidelines for evaluating digital texts. Importantly, students were evaluated not only on the content of these guidelines but also on the design: adherence toWilliams’s (2015)design principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity; the use of headings to chunk information and to facilitate wayfinding; and their efforts to emphasize key information and make information easy to skim. These protocols became the basis for students’ usability and accessibility work for the semester.

Project 3: Team Usability Testing

Usability testing can be a great way to ensure the accessibility of a text, but it does not always account for individual needs so much as an ideal or average user. In Project 3, students implemented their accessibility and usability protocols:

Understanding how users use websites is critical to your ability to design your own websites. Because a project as extensive as (re)designing a website is rarely done alone (in the “real world” workforce), this assignment requires you to work as a consulting team of 2-3 to make usability and accessibility decisions about a professional website.

Students worked in teams to adapt their protocols for a specific digital text: the Department of Writing’s website. Their goals were to inspect the department’s website for usability and accessibility issues (Newbold, 2014), conduct usability testing with three to five different users, and write a recommendation report for changes to the website based on their findings and best practices.

A significant limitation of this assignment was that I did not require students to find users who identify as disabled, because we did not have an ethical plan in place for doing so, although many students had friends with disabilities who agreed to participate. However, I used several web accessibility and usability technologies to ground classroom discussions about meeting users’ needs. For example, the websitePaletton (n.d.)allows users to test color schemes through simulations of color blindness;Ladner and Bigham (n.d.)offer WebAnywhere, a web-based screen reader that allows users to experience websites nonvisually; andStarkey Hearing Technologies (n.d.)offers a simulation of how pitches and sounds are affected by hearing loss. There are also more comprehensive websites that offer a mixture of both accessibility guidelines and usability tools, such asWebAIM (2016), which offers a web accessibility evaluation tool, WAVE, that allows designers to copy and paste any URL to evaluate the website’s accessibility. These tools can supplement discussions of usability and accessibility, but they should not be used in isolation of critical discussions about disability and responsible design. AsPalmeri (2006)argued, these activities are not meant to give nondisabled students an understanding of what it is like to be disabled but rather to develop a clearer understanding of how different assistive communication technologies shape and reshape communication design. Giving students practical experiences with accessible technologies is useful, but we need to engage in critical conversations about disability and accessible design rather than accommodating interfaces.

Usability testing helps foreground accessibility by paying attention to how different bodies access, interact with, and are barred from physical and digital environments (Dolmage, 2005). Students were asked to find a range of users and speak with them about their educational and technological literacies in order to better understand users’ choices during usability testing. This project required students to recognize and apply design theories and principles, to engage critically with their findings, and to make rhetorical choices about which technical and rhetorical issues need to be addressed to present a more effective website. Working in teams helped divide the labor of Project 3 and emphasized that accessibility is a collaborative effort.

Project 4: University of Central Arkansas Promotional Video

Throughout the semester, WRTG 3306 students were asked to read and reflect on technical and rhetorical accessibility considerations that undergird the production of professional digital texts. For their final project, students created their own accessible digital texts:

For your final project, you will work individually or in small teams of two to partner with a campus entity, such as a student organization, campus organization (e.g., the bookstore, residential housing), or an academic department. You will produce a promotional video for that entity.

Our university underwent a rebranding effort the semester of this course, which included a series of new promotional videos that we watched in class to get familiar with the genre and to brainstorm how they could be improved. For example, students noted that the current videos could be more usable for prospective students if there were less focus on social activities in the city and surrounding state and more attention paid to specific activities on campus. The videos could also be made more accessible with the addition of closed captioning.Kerschbaum (2013)argued for relaying information in multiple ways—incorporating redundancy—to ensure the customization, flexibility, and accessibility of digital texts. This is an important reminder for professional communicators who are responsible for creating and circulating digital texts. Therefore, students were asked to create two texts that can be accessed differently: a captioned video and an accessible transcript.

There is a difference between designing for technical accessibility and designing for a pleasant user experience, and students were asked to consider the rhetorical nature of composing accessible media. Students readZdenek’s (2011)“Which Sounds Are Significant? Towards a Rhetoric of Closed Captioning” to understand the rhetorical considerations involved in accessible design (e.g., what speech and nonspeech sounds to caption and how best to communicate those sounds).Zdenek (2011)argued, “Captioning is a rhetorically complex and creative act. Captioners are rhetorical agents who must, at times, make decisions about which sounds to caption and how to caption them” (Conclusion: Naturalizing Captions section, para. 1). In class, we practiced captioning and transcribing, trying to identify which sounds—both speech and nonspeech sounds—are significant.

While incorporating accessibility directly into the text is preferred (rather than creating separate accessible content), it is important to have a plan if something does not work or users want to access the text differently than you anticipated (e.g., the video does not load or someone does not have time to watch the entire video). Like captioning, the transcription process requires students to make rhetorical choices about which speech and nonspeech sounds to include. I asked students to create a transcript, but a transcript alone is insufficient to provide access. AsKerschbaum (2013)noted, it is nearly impossible to read a transcript and watch a video at the same time, and providing accessibility involves more than creating a separate accessible component that exists outside of the original text.Horton and Quesenbery (2014)have also critiqued accommodations that exist as separate “accessible” versions, since they provide a degraded experience for disabled users (p. 43). If students were asked to create only a video and transcript, they would be providing access, but it would be retrofitted access. Providing users with multiple options to access content without specifically requesting it is an example of inclusive UD.

Toward a More Accessible Professional Communication Curriculum

We might expect discussions about accessibility and UD to occur in classes about information design, web design, and usability, but these are also critical conversations that can be integrated throughout a curriculum. For example, in spring 2014, I taught an introductory professional writing course based on a shared curriculum. There was a moment during usability testing when a male student sat down to make a friendship bracelet and said, “I can’t do this. I’m color blind.” My students had created a beautiful website but had not considered the accessibility of their project: They did not label the strings and had chosen colors with low contrast. This was a concrete opportunity to discuss audience, usable design, and “what bodies we signal, center, and ignore in the construction of our professional and virtual spaces” (kuiamalynne, 2013, 0:52). Along with preparing students for workplace writing situations and helping them produce clear texts, it is important for students to learn how the production and circulation of professional texts is an ethical commitment to ensuring the accessibility of texts to all users.

Foregrounding accessibility through attention to UD has two benefits for business and professional communication pedagogy: (a) The professional communication scholarship about UD offers critical discussions of its potential and limitations, presenting students with a framework for developing more inclusive professional communication, research, and design practices; and (b) incorporating principles of UD in our pedagogical practices—presenting content in multiple formats, designing usable and accessible course materials, creating a collaborative space for note-taking—helps meet students’ diverse accessibility needs while also modeling UD for students. UD, when enacted critically, repositions accessibility not just as a legal requirement but as a socially just, ethical commitment to creating a rich rhetorical experience for a range of diverse users.