Mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) is an extractive industry that exploits both humans and nonhumans. The extractive underpinning of mainstream AI systems means that technical communicators must be careful when advocating for accessibility and inclusivity in AI because those efforts may expose marginalized groups to further exploitation. Extractive AI also necessitates that technical communicators reconsider how their own discipline may be complicit in the damaging logics and practices of extraction.

This study uses grounded theory to explore Korean professionals' experience with communication in Business English as a lingua franca (BELF). The author collected data for the study by conducting semistructured interviews with 12 Korean professionals, resulting in 120 concepts, 33 categories, and 14 main categories in the coding process. The findings highlight the significance of accommodation, which affects the success of BELF communication and serves as a major action for resolving problems. The study emphasizes that BELF dynamics should be understood as a multifaceted and interactive process in which various factors are intricately interconnected, giving rise to fluid and complex BELF phenomena.

Generative AI tools allow anyone without web-design experience to have a business website created when the user provides a few specifications about the business, such as its name, type, and location. But the resulting websites not only fall short of the business's basic needs but they also raise major concerns about their accessibility for disabled users. This study specifically examines whether these AI generated websites are accessible to screen-reader users with visual disabilities. It presents data about the usability and accessibility of the products of three generative AI website builders, highlights the specific problems found by an expert screen reader test along with an automated machine scan of these sites, and discusses some causes of and recommendations for solving these problems.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) has recently turned to social justice to interrogate seemingly neutral documents’ impacts on marginalized populations, including disabled individuals. In workplace contexts, such efforts are often impeded by rights-based discourse that maintains ableist institutional spaces and impedes efforts toward broader institutional change. Recognizing that TPC practitioners likely will encounter rights-based discourse, this article offers an ethical decision-making framework that couples the field's previous disability studies work with disability justice. We offer guidelines and a critical vocabulary for bridging legal rights and social justice concerns to inspire ethical articulations of disability access needed for transformative change.

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

Novice Web developers and other technical communicators need to learn not only accessibility standards but also factors that make designs usable to audiences with disabilities. One challenge of teaching accessibility to novices is creating exigency; another is emulating experiences of users with disabilities. This article tackles teaching novices to create Web sites for visually impaired audiences using a five-stage, recursive approach. Teaching best coding practices is only one stage: Instructors should create exigency by introducing real users and their experiences. They should also check for accessibility and emulate screen-reader output using tools such as WAVE and FANGS, respectively. Furthermore, novice developers should examine how different tools can be used in combination to provide a variety of feedback.

Revising instructions for clients of health care facilities provides students with valuable practice in good technical communication techniques: organizing information for maximum accessibility, analyzing the audience's needs, using formatting and graphics to enhance communication, and clarifying sentence structure and diction. Suitable for both individual and team work, the project offers experience in both revising instructions for a lay audience and writing persuasively. It also emphasizes the accountability of technical writers to the users of their documents.

This research report examines the roles of convention, conflict, and conversation in the formation of audience constructs. One group of construction engineers and another group of design architects and engineers, both working in a bureaucratic setting, relied on disciplinary and institutional conventions while constructing, addressing, and invoking audiences. Incongruities among contextual conventions restricting audience analysis resulted in inappropriate textual features and necessitated conversation during corporate training. This conversation focused on redefining problems of audience analysis and accommodation. The problem solving associated with analyzing situational audiences during the composing process was possible only when writers understood the problem-posing conventions of their discourse communities.