Accessibility and Disability: Absent Keywords in Business and Professional Communication

Interactions Between ABC and Users of Its Media

Because websites often represent the first point of contact for scholars in professional associations, I looked closely at the ABC site and the site of the publisher of its two journals, SAGE. A quick test by WAVE—a checker for evaluating the accessibility of web pages to users with disabilities—ofwww.businesscommunication.orgproduced eight accessibility errors; these included links to Facebook and Twitter but no content—only the image, which was not identified, so it would be useless in a screen reader. The WAVE report also indicated 32 alerts and four contrast areas.

Accommodations for conference attendees have represented another area of a willingness to promote inclusion. The online registration form for the most recent ABC conference contained this information for attendees with disabilities: “If you need services for hearing impairment or other medical/food need, please describe.” As far as I could tell, the registration form itself was not accessible to some users with disabilities, but I also have concerns about the language used. People who are hard of hearing prefer to be called just that. “Hearing impaired” is not commonly used in accessibility statements. Moreover, “hearing impairment” is not a “need,” easily tucked under the category of “other medical/food.” A better approach is to request a direct statement about the relevant disability and accommodations needed. For example, conference planners may ask, “If you have a disability and require special assistance, please inform (conference planner) by attaching your requirements to this form or call (conference planner).” Or they may provide a box on the form to be checked by the attendee and note that “You will be contacted by someone from our staff to discuss your specific needs.” These two approaches are widely cited in resources for how to make conferences accessible to all (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010;Jarrow & Park, 1992). The weakness of the disability statement on the conference website (and the lack of any such statement in the printed program) may seem to indicate that the ABC is not attentive to the needs identified in the ADA.

Scholars and practitioners seeking to publish a manuscript in one of the two ABC journals learn about that procedure on the SAGE site, which is not fully accommodating. For example, a WAVE test of the SAGE site forBusiness and Professional Communication Quarterly(BPCQ) produced 17 errors. It was not possible to test the “Submission Guidelines,” as some banners prevented that part of the page from loading. An especially serious problem relates to Manuscript Central, also known as ScholarOne, a peer review submission platform used by thousands of journals. Previously owned by Thomson Reuters and recently sold to Clarivate Analytics, ScholarOne “provides comprehensive workflow management systems for scholarly journals, books, and conferences” (Clarivate Analytics, 2017, para. 1). That comprehensiveness, however, does not include screen readers, a requirement for people who are blind. When the guest editor for this special issue and I informed the SAGE peer review team that the Manuscript Central website was not working with screen readers, we were told that the company was planning eventually to roll out user interface changes that should allow the site to be more compatible with screen readers. The site provided this explanation: “We regret thatScholarOne Manuscriptswas not specifically designed for users with severe visual impairments” (“Editor Support Portal,” 2016). In other words, someone who is blind cannot use the site, and advice on the site for increasing the font size would be irrelevant. The word “specifically” in this statement implies that the designers already knew that the system would not work for screen readers. With its two journals, the ABC can play a role in urging this major peer review submission system to incorporate accommodations for users with disabilities.

Definitions and Categories of Analysis

How people are labeled is not just a linguistic decision. It is also often a political act. For people with disabilities, the challenge continues, as we have seen in the ways in which ableist assumptions construct barriers to access in the workplace (Palmeri, 2006;Zdenek, 2009). Various groups have spent years trying to eradicate how others have chosen to name them. For example, consider the transformation toAfrican Americanfrom “colored.” Nomenclature presents a problem for scholars interested in historical research, as keywords for people and categories have changed over time. A recent work,Keywords in Disability Studies(Adams, Reiss, & Serlin, 2015)—drawing on the legacy of RaymondWilliams’s (1976)seminalKeywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society—provided a useful framework for this review of ABC media, as the editors and authors sought to expand the concept of disability beyond the narrow medical model. Disability Studies as a field explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the concept of disability and what it means to be disabled. Emerging somewhat later than the various civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it incorporates landmark legislation in the United States and other countries such asSection 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973in the United States, theDeclaration of Rights of Disabled Persons in the United Kingdom (1975), theAmericans with Disabilities Act (1990), theBritish Disability Discrimination Act (1995), theUnited Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2008), and the new Indian law entitled TheRights of Persons with Disabilities Act (2016). The latter was a replacement for the earlier Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act (1995). Like the ADA, the 1995 Indian law had a narrower definition of disability, but the new one is having significant effect on employment, as demonstrated by the fact that in New Delhi alone more than 50 blind faculty members are currently employed in that city’s universities. Disability Studies scholars moved from the first wave of advocating for legal rights based on a medicalization model to analyzing disability as a social and environmental construct. In particular, four words in theKeywords(Adams et al., 2015) collection have proven relevant for an inquiry into how the fields of business and professional communication have addressed disability and accessibility: accommodation, access, impairment, and diversity.

In the United States,accommodationhas had a complicated and controversial meaning. In the struggle for African American civil rights, accommodation came to be associated with compromise and gradual change of the sort advocated by Booker T. Washington. However, accommodation took on a more positive connotation when used as a means of changing institutions in response to disability (Emens, 2015).Accesshas an even longer history, having been used for centuries (Williamson, 2015). The classic dictionary definition is “permission, liberty, or ability to enter, approach, or pass to and from a place or to approach or communicate with a person or thing” (“Access,” n.d.). Access has also been closely connected to the notion of equal opportunity, as in having access to the Internet, health care, and other universal services. In a disability context, access is often seen as the bare minimum to cross physical or mental barriers.Accessibilitymoves beyond the minimum to connote inclusiveness, but, asWalters (2010)argued, it cannot be fully achieved if the goal is to accommodate individual users or specific disability or impairment categories. Hence, universal design has been positioned to help the greatest number of users.

Impairment, the third of the useful concepts fromKeywords, has often been equated with disability and has been a euphemism for such discredited terms ashandicapped(Ralph, 2015). Impairment, then, has been used to emphasize structural or medical issues, as opposed to functionality. But it may also carry a negative connotation, as in “damaged goods.” Impairment, which appeared on registration forms for ABC conferences, provided a useful keyword for examining other ABC media.

Diversity, the last of the useful concepts fromKeywords, also has had a controversial history. AsDavis (2015)explained, it would be logical for disability to be included with diversity. But diversity has come to mean gender, ethnic, or racial differences, as opposed to being inclusive of disability.

In addition to access/accessibility, accommodation, impairment, and diversity, I added the termsinclusionandusabilityin my search—words that do not appear in theKeywordsbook. Inclusion, for example, is not just ensuring that all students in any classroom have the opportunity to participate fully in all activities without being segregated for reasons of ability; inclusion is also a philosophical orientation to making accessibility implicit. Usability, in contrast, does not have the same suggestion of accessibility and inclusiveness. Usability has long been discussed in business and professional communication scholarship, but the emphasis has been on the “extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use” (International Organization for Standardization, 2014, p. 2). As is well-known, people with disabilities are not often recruited for usability testing. Consider the Usability.gov website, which has provided extensive advice on selecting participants for usability testing but did not mention anything about disability (“Recruiting participants,” 2015), although a specific example later mentioned how to find participants if the study were to focus on blinded veterans. Thus, the implication is that people with disabilities would be includedifthe usability was specifically for that targeted population but not for more general studies.

This list of terms that guided my research for this article does not include some that are of great significance for Disability Studies, such as ableism—which has been defined as “discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities” (“Ableism,” n.d.). Although the lens of ableism can be helpful in explaining the absence of much discussion related to disability in the scholarly discourse of business and professional communication, the word itself was not likely to have appeared in the artifacts I examined, and other scholars in this special issue will be addressing this concept in some detail. In sum, I employed the following seven words as categories of analysis: accommodation, access/accessibility, diversity, impairment, inclusion, usability, and disability.

Conference Proceedings and Presentations

Conference papers at professional meetings often give insights into which areas of inquiry are of most interest to scholars and thus are a barometer of emerging trends. ABC did not publish any conference proceedings between 1992 and 2002. Beginning in 1999, the conference programs have all been archived online at the association’s website, and proceedings since 2003 are available there as well.

I had originally hoped to construct a table with my findings in the proceedings regarding my categories of analysis. However, the numbers were so low that they can be described very simply. A quick review of the 1990 and 1991 proceedings did not reveal any mention of disability or accessibility (these documents were not searchable as they had been scanned in from printed copies). Conference proceedings from 1992 to 2002, if they exist, are not available online. A total of 256 papers were accepted and published in the conference proceedings since 2003; a few other papers are listed for these years but were not made available online. Here are the results of an analysis of theConference Proceedingsover the 2003-2016 period, based on my seven chosen keywords.

ABC-Sponsored Journals:BPCQandIJBC

To conduct my investigation of the two ABC-sponsored journals, I decided to focus on just one of my chosen keywords, since the other six had not produced any meaningful results. A search of the wordsdisabilityanddisabilitiesyielded a list of 22 articles in theInternational Journal of Business Communication(IJBC) between 1990 and 2017. (IJBCwas previously known as theJournal of Business Communicationuntil the name was changed to include “International” in 2014). The search also picked updisabled, if the exact words of disability and disabilities did not appear. Of those 22 articles, three represented book reviews, two used disability as in disability insurance for graduate students, and one used a quotation from another source, describing “learning disability” to refer to what happens when organizations are poorly managed (Senge, as cited inBarker & Camarata, 1998)—clearly an odd use of disability and one that also suggests a negative attitude toward people with learning disabilities. That left a sample of 16 for further analysis.

Almost all the articles in the sample of 16 included disability or people with disabilities only tangentially. For instance, an article on spelling skills mentioned “learning disability” once to discuss how a student with a low grade point average might have problems with spelling (Martin & Ransom, 1990). In a critique of diversity training materials,Kirby and Harter (2003)included “people with disabilities” but did not explain further.

Buzzanell (2002)confirmed that people with disabilities were a protected class but did not discuss the implications of that status. None of her examples involved disabled interviewers or interviewees, and ableism was never foregrounded in these interactions. Furthermore, she did not discuss how structuration theory, poststructuralism, and standpoint theory could have been employed to unearth the subtler forms of discrimination occurring in the communicational contexts of disability difference. Her discussion of “fit” (Buzzanell, 2002, p. 264) would have been productive ground for developing a brief critique of how employers define all job descriptions ableistically, as if every candidate could “fit” into such a profile and how some of the demands of a job could be characterized quite differently from the perspective of disability and Disability Studies.Buzzanell (2002)then referred to Murphy’s discussion of “deviant” (p. 265) but overlooked the opportunity to point out how people with disabilities also have been viewed as “deviant” both in the perception of legal systems and the workplace. She did not consider the actual contributions such “deviant” but also diverse bodies could bring to the solving of workplace problems in our aging workforce and consumer populations.

Only one article in the sample mentioned disability multiple times—a total of five (Oliveira, 2013); this article suggested that “disability” issues had an effect on corporate discourse. An analysis of corporate social responsibility themes highlighted the importance of disability to U.S. companies (Tang, Gallagher, & Bie, 2015), but there was no discussion of how beyond a brief mention. None of these articles had as a primary or secondary focus the communication needs of people with disabilities in the workplace.

In 1995, the formerBulletin of the Association for Business Communicationofficially becameBusiness Communication Quarterly(BCQ), a peer-reviewed journal, so it would seem appropriate to begin a search for keywords in that year. (The journal was renamedBusiness and Professional Communication Quarterlyin 2014.) The words disability and disabilities appeared in a total of 42 published pieces from 1995 to 2017. When I excluded from those 42 editorials, promotion of this special issue on accessibility and disability (a call for papers), introductions to themed sections or short column pieces (columns were transitioned into themed sections with peer-reviewed articles in 2011), short summaries in the “My Favorite Assignment” columns, “Innovative Assignments (also discontinued in 2011),” and book reviews, I had a sample of 24 articles. Editorials were excluded, as they are short and often simply summarize articles; introductions to themed sections or columns are usually organized in the same way. There were no books reviewed that addressed issues of accessibility and disability, and the My Favorite Assignment columns contain short assignments but not actual research, and Innovative Assignments, while longer, are also focused on practical applications (but more on these features later). I then excluded another 23 articles, as the word disability appeared only peripherally. For example, disability would be mentioned in passing in (a) describing student services, (b) as part of a benefits package, (c) as an example of usability testing, (d) as part of legal requirements for employment interviews and ADA regulations (several articles), or (e) as an example of an ethical issue. By peripherally, I mean the words appeared once or rarely twice with no discussion or follow-up. With these deductions, I arrived at a sample of one article inBPCQwhere the words disability and disabilities appeared more than once or rarely twice.Pomerenke, Varner, and Mallar (1996)included disability or disabilities three times in an article about how people are portrayed in textbooks under the overall umbrella of diversity.

While pieces in the My Favorite Assignment sections were excluded, some of them did address people with disabilities, and the word may have appeared a few times. For instance,Mahin’s (2007)assignment for using consulting projects for teaching business and professional communication referred to the Marriott Foundation for People with Disabilities (twice), and the word disabilities appeared once elsewhere. Although this project involving corporate philanthropy can be considered praiseworthy in itself, the language of the corporate projects and student reports echoed stereotypical charitable attitudes toward children with disabilities.

An Innovative Assignment (an earlier format forBCQarticles) also mentioned the Marriott Foundation for People with Disabilities, with a focus again on consulting projects (Boiarsky, 2004). The numbers are too small to have suggested a trend, but it would appear that asking students to confront real-world problems also brought them in contact with the need to consider people with disabilities, as in theProceedingsarticle mentioned earlier, on a student advocacy project (Lowman, 2013).

I noted several places in “peripheral mention group” where a brief mention of disability could have been expanded. For instance, in her excellent study of usability,Jameson (2013)cited research on how disabled citizens used a web-based system, but the rest of the article did not address any disability issues. In their recent article,Engstrom, Petre, and Petre (2017)presented a rhetorical analysis of word choice in job-related advertisements. The authors argued that the repetition of “high energy,” “recent graduate,” “fun,” and “creative” could “reify these as being characteristics solely of younger applicants, which could instill ageism in the hiring process, especially in the fast-growth company space” (p. 358). The ageism can lead to ableism, as the authors concluded that “companies are likely unaware of the ways in which their word choices are creating a rhetorical situation ripe for excluding older, disabled, and diverse candidates” (p. 358). With the focus on the rhetorical situation, the authors did not actually address what it would mean to avoid ableism.

BPCQ’s special issue on flipped classrooms (Knight, 2016) did not broach the issues of accessibility and disability at all, despite promoting the extensive use of technology to accommodate students’ many needs. Consider, for example, how posting a lecture online before the actual class helps all students in terms of access, because faculty can provide audio description of visual materials and include captioning for audio. It also helps those students who need a longer time to process information for any number of learning or other disabilities. Moving lectures out of the class also leaves more room for participatory group work and less time worrying about covering all the content material.

Fostering Research in Accessibility and Disability

As my project has revealed, the keywords accessibility and disability have been almost entirely absent in professional meetings and journals of business and professional communication. While researchers may thus demonstrate a passing awareness of the ADA and its implications, so far those implications, and, more broadly, issues of access, have not taken center stage. It is unclear why that is so. I am reminded of PierreMacherey’s (1978)theories of silences and absences in literature, where what is left out can be as significant as what is present. Many other academic fields, of course, have experienced similar phenomena. For example, history in the United States was long dominated by the study of male presidents (there has never been a female leader), and then in the 1970s, the field exploded with studies of working class people, minorities, and gender—a trend that has continued until the present.

Disability Studies as a distinct field of inquiry emerged in the 1980s. As evidence of the field’s growing recognition, Syracuse University established the first separate academic department in the United States, the Disability Studies Program, in 1994. Workplace-related research in the United Kingdom has given more attention to disability in the past few decades, and many researchers have critiqued workplaces from the perspective of Disability Studies (e.g.,Roulstone & Barnes, 2005). Researchers in fields related to business and professional communication have been publishing work informed by Disability Studies for some time. For example,WPA: Writing Program Administration(Hunzer, 2017) published a special issue on the topic. Quite a few articles have been published in theJournal of Business and Technical Communication(JBTC) andTechnical Communication Quarterly, andTechnical Communicationhas published a special issue (Lippincott & Riley, 2006). In 2015, an article on disability issues won the outstanding publication award from ABC (Oswal & Meloncon, 2014), published not in an ABC-sponsored journal but inJBTC.

This special issue ofBPCQaims to encourage more practitioners and scholars to explore the inclusion of people with disabilities and accessibility issues in their pedagogy and research. As an organization focused on business and professional communication, ABC can play an important role in advancing research and practice of communication designed not just for some bodies but for all bodies.