Incorporating universal design (UD) both as a topic of discussion and as a pedagogical approach allows business and professional communication instructors to foreground accessibility in ways that acknowledge the rhetorical situatedness of accessibility. This article offers UD strategies that reimagine accessibility not just as a requirement that accommodates users but as an opportunity to create a rich rhetorical user experience for diverse populations. To illustrate how accessibility can be foregrounded in professional communication curricula, this article details the development of an information design course focused on usability and accessibility.

This review essay places Stephanie Kerschbaum’s Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference and Shannon Walters’s Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics in a conversation about how we can more productively identify with and across difference. While they have different theoretical approaches and applications, both Kerschbaum and Walters discuss identification, embracing rather than erasing difference, and the importance of eschewing stereotypes that are harmful to the multiple ways that we encounter and interact with disability and difference in the classroom and in our rhetorical histories and theories.

This article addresses how nondisabled people identify with and become disability advocates and how this identification can also fail to occur. The advocacy work of a group of fraternity brothers in the late 1960s highlights both the local successes that personal connections to disability offer and the shortcomings of large-scale advocacy efforts that lack meaningful engagement with disabled groups. Situated histories of advocacy offer models for how we can build and sustain solidarity across difference, craft more inclusive understandings of accessibility and disability, and engage more thoughtfully in our advocacy work.

"[W]e might say that disability refers to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of bodily, mental, or behavioral functioning aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically." — Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability "Rhetoric needs disability studies as a reminder to pay critical and careful attention to the body. Disability studies needs rhetoric to better understand and negotiate the ways that discourse represents and impacts the experience of disability." —Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric

Article featuring interviews with Melanie Yergeau, Beth Ferri, and Nirmala Erevelles.