Fitter, Happier: the Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (2024) by Lois Peters Agnew argues that American cancer rhetoric from 1900-1990 was built around eugenic ideology. Agnew says, "The tension between the need to acknowledge the real danger of cancer and the American insistence upon confidence and control lies at the heart of cancer rhetoric" (p. 5). This tension is delineated through a disability studies approach to analyzing historical documents regarding cancer and cancer patients. Agnew asserts that though cancer and disability are not synonymous, "the lens of disability studies can be helpful in understanding how cancer rhetoric establishes a pattern of normative responses to the phenomenon of disease" (p. 6). Her analysis of these responses relies on the work of disability studies scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thompson (1997), Jay Dolmage (2017), Sharon Snyder and Jack Mitchell (2015), Susan Sontag (1977), and Susan Wendell (2013), whose work helps to illustrate the overlap of disability, cancer, and eugenic rhetoric.

Tables, one of the most familiar forms of data visualization, are often put to use as a popular workaround for laying out pages in word processing programs. This article illustrates examples of friction, compatibility , and congruence between accepted guidance for designing effective tables in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and widely adopted accessibility standards outlined by the largest international software vendors and non-profit organizations. While acknowledging critiques in critical disability studies and in TPC of standards-based approaches to accessibility, we argue that adherence to standards offers a starting point for redressing the inaccessibility created by some TPC pedagogical practices. Navigating these departures and overlaps is important because designing effective data visualizations, laying out pages, and creating accessible documents are core competencies in technical communication that instantiate deeply held professional and disciplinary commitments to creating usable and ethical documents.

This article explores what lip reading can teach us about interface design. First, I define lip reading. Second, I challenge the idea that people can "read" lips---an idea that is deeply imbedded in the literate tradition described by Walter Ong (1982) in Orality and Literacy. Third, I frame lip reading as a complex rhetorical activity of filling in the "gaps" of communication. Fourth, I present a lip reading heuristic that can challenge those of us in communication related fields to remember how the invisible "gaps" of communication are sometimes more important than the visible "interfaces." And finally, I conclude with some reflections about how lip reading might "reimagine" disability studies for technical and professional communicators.

This special issue asks us to refl ect on the transformative potential of disability studies to reimagine technical and professional communication (TPC). Informing this special issue is the notion that disability "enables insight---critical, experiential, cognitive, sensory, and pedagogical insight" (Brueggemann, 2002, p. 795). Rather than consider questions of access from the margins---e.g. after we receive a letter of accommodation from a student, when we need to satisfy a legal mandate, or when we turn to our organization's web accessibility checklist---disability studies places disability and difference at the center of our practices and pedagogies (p. 814).

Drawing on narratives (Jones, 2016; Jones & Walton, 2018) from bilingual technical communication projects, this article makes a case for the importance of considering language access and accessibility in crafting and sharing digital research. Connecting conversations in disability studies and language diversity, the author emphasizes how an interdependent (Price, 2011; Price & Kerchbaum, 2016), intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989; Medina & Haas, 2018) orientation to access through disability studies and translation can help technical communication researchers to design and disseminate digital research that is accessible to audiences from various linguistic backgrounds and who also identify with various dis/abilities.

Drawing on an analysis of a usability teaching case with users who are deaf and who communicate using American Sign Language, we argue that there is a need for industry and the academy to refocus on more accessible testing practices, situated more decidedly within the social, cultural, and historical contexts of users. We offer guidelines for more inclusive practices for testing with users who are deaf prompting designers, developers, and students to think about systems of behavior, such as audism, cultural appropriation, and technological paternalism that undermine accessibility in their design and practices. More broadly, we propose ways in which instructors of technical communication can leverage usability tools and research methods to help students better understand their users for any artifact they design and create.

This study examines design aspects that shape human/machine collaboration between wearers of smart hearing aids and their networked aids. The Starkey Halo hearing aid and the TruLink iPhone app that facilitates real-time adjustments by the wearer offer a case study in designing for this sort of collaboration and for the wearer's rhetorical management of disability disclosure in social contexts. Through close textual analysis of the company's promotional materials for patient and professional audiences as well as interface analysis and autoethnography, I examine the ways that close integration between the wearer, onboard algorithms and hardware, and geolocative telemetry shape everyday interactions in multiple hearing situations. Reliance on ubiquitous, familiar hardware such as smart phones and intuitive interface design can drive patient comfort and adoption rates of these complex technologies that influence cognitive health, social connectedness, and crucial information access.

The word "access" means to enter into, participate in, and engage with, and captions for sounds are a way to provide access to video content for persons with disabilities. Trying to capture an absolute way for captioning sounds in video media texts is as illusive, impossible, and unethical as trying to establish or declare a single way to write or to read a text. Sean Zdenek's book Reading Sounds investigates the practices that create captions and examines captions as a rhetorical artifact related to the composition of video. This review will examine Reading Sounds from the perspective of a practitioner in the area of web, classroom, and information communication technology accessibility and an academic focused on communication design and disability, indicating points relevant to both practitioners and academics.

Meloncon's Rhetorical Accessability explores the connections between critical work in disability studies and technical communication. The first collection of its kind, included essays combine theory and practice to emphasize the value of placing disability studies at the forefront of design, workplace practices, and pedagogies. Echoing the diversity of scholarship that has contributed to this emerging area of study---from disability studies, technical communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies--- the collection emphasizes technical communication as a crucial multidisciplinary ground for critical discourse regarding disability and accessibility. As a whole, Meloncon's collection initiates a broader scholarly conversation centered on issues of accessibility in various technical communication contexts.

This position paper proposes the undertaking of a systematic research agenda on the tangled questions of accessibility, technology, and disability from the perspective of Technical Communication field. O'Hara (2004), Oswal and Hewett (2013), Palmeri (2006), Porter (1997), Ray and Ray (1999), Salvo (2005), Slatin and Rush (2003), Theofanos and Redish (2003 and 2005), and Walters (2010), have approached accessibility issues in various Technical Communication contexts and have emphasized the need for more attention to accessibility in our research, teaching, and practice. Likewise, the major journals in our field-- Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly and the IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication ---have also published at least one special issue EACH on the topic of accessibility. While all this sporadic research has appeared on accessibility-related topics in different venues, this research has not yet gained the type of traction one would generally expect from an area with such a growth potential. As a user-centered discipline, we also ought to remember that presently 57.8 million Americans have one or more disabilities. Among the U.S. veteran population alone, 5.5 million are disabled. And, if we consider the reach of our Technical Communication work via the World Wide Web, this planet has 1 billion people with disabilities who can be affected by our accessibility research (National Center for Disability, 2013).