Disability and Accessibility
Disability is one of the few identity markers that can shift across a person's lifetime. Everything from congenital disorders to chronic illnesses to injuries to old age can change anyone's ability to engage with the world at any moment in time. The very ubiquity of disability is why studying disability is so vital; since anyone/everyone can experience disability (even briefly), disability is central to the human experience. Our faculty members research how disability is represented and discussed and how to make the world more accessible for people with disabilities.
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This chapter overviews the work that has been done using corpora to research augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) users' discourse in the workplace and other relevant work that helps researchers understand the reality of the experiences of AAC users in their work environment. According to The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, an AAC system is “an integrated group of components, including the symbols, aids, strategies, and techniques used by individuals to enhance communication. The system serves to supplement any gestural, spoken, and/or written communication abilities”. One important focus of research on AAC has included users' real-time interactions and communication in workplace contexts. In order to compare the speech produced by AAC users while using their devices and vocalizing, researchers have extracted three sub-corpora from the AAC and non-AAC workplace corpus (ANAWC). The ANAWC is a specialized corpus focusing on AAC users' and non-AAC users' talk in the workplace.
What I propose here is a beginning to resisting anthropocentrism in order to habilitate both nonhuman and animalized human animals through rhetorical theories. It is a presentation of what I call haptic rhetoricity. I take “haptics” to mean sensations involving touch and feeling originating both inside and outside the skin. I'm following Diane Davis's notion of rhetoricity, the “affectability or persuadability” that comes with “the exposedness of corporeal existence.” Davis's rhetoricity takes root in Derrida's rejection of the foundational anthropocentrism of continental philosophy. I find that haptics can be a vocabulary for vulnerability, the experience of the exposedness that constitutes rhetoricity. If haptics are extralinguistic, what grounds can rhetorical theorists stand on to understand them? I will explore the communicative potentials of haptics in the bodies of animals (nonhuman and neurodivergent human animals). Through reading the work of Helen Keller and the research of both neurotypical and neurodivergent animal scientists, rhetorical theorists, and cultural historians, I've sifted haptics into four modes: thermodynamics, texture-pressure, vibration, and pain. These modes each provide haptic vocabularies for the vulnerable experience of rhetoricity. Before exploring the haptic modes, I will show the anti-anthropocentric, anti-ableist, and sensory roots of Davis's rhetoricity.
Only 8.8% of faculty have reported receiving formal training for developing ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant online courses (Gould & Harris, 2019), yet in any given semester, faculty may be required by federal law to make their course accessible for a student that has enrolled with a disability. Linguistics faculty face many of the same challenges (namely time and resources) as other disciplines with implementing ADA federal guidelines. However, there are further obstacles with linguistic specific topics (such as dialect illustrations, phonology, morphology) that require special attention when devising accessible material for those that are either visually or hearing impaired. Through the exploration of an undergraduate linguistics course (LING 2050: Language of Now), this paper reflects on best practices, suggested modifications, barriers in developing an ADA compliant online linguistics course, and presents a resource developed by the author aggregating resources that facilitate making a course ADA compliant.
This conceptual feature generates a framework for utilizing the National Professional Development (NPD) grant to create accessible and equitable professional development (PD) for teachers of multilingual learners (MLs), emphasizing the importance of targeted opportunities for pre-service, novice, and in-service teachers and the need for PD specific to teaching MLs. We highlight micro-level PD opportunities, such as day-long workshops that are local, low-cost alternatives to other PD options (e.g., conferences). We also highlight macro-level PD opportunities. For example, we have used the grant to create affordable pathways for educators to pursue college-level education and complete coursework to gain an English as a second language (ESL) teaching endorsement. Providing a range of opportunities for teacher learning addresses accessibility and equity gaps in our local community related to time, affordability, location, and relevance. Together, the grant activities reflected in this framework represent an effective way to partner with local K-12 education agencies to address the needs of school districts with few or no ESL endorsed teachers. Through the NPD grant, we have been able to create a series of sustainable opportunities for teacher learning that address a crucial need: the equitable opportunities and outcomes of multilingual students.
This paper presents an overview of the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and Non-AAC Workplace Corpus (ANAWC) (Pickering & Bruce, 2009). The corpus is the first resource of its kind that makes it possible to systematically study the typical language patterns of both AAC users and comparable non-AAC users in the workplace. We discuss the origin of the corpus and give an account of the methodology used for its collection and transcription. We also introduce several publications that demonstrate the novel qualitative and quantitative findings that can be generated on the basis of the corpora. This kind of research will be crucial to guide future developments in AAC development for workplace applications.
Read More: “An Introduction to the ANAWC: The AAC and Non-AAC Workplace Corpus”
Using four animated texts about anthropomorphic animals—Zootopia (2016), Sing (2016), Sing 2 (2021), and Zootopia+ (2022)—this article explores two related questions: How can animated films featuring cities for anthropomorphic animals rethink accessibility? How is accessibility sustained and/or adapted through continuations as seen in franchises and transmedia storytelling? I argue that the two series I analyze offer two different approaches to accessibility and the maintenance of it, one which works better than the other. This comparison suggests that accessibility needs to be an integral part of world design from the very beginning in order to stay stable over time.
Read More: “‘All Creatures Great and Small, Welcome’: Animating Accessible World Design”
