When drawing from dominant norms, university career centers can promote ideas of professionalism that systematically train marginalized identities to suppress embodied knowledge. I analyze five career center websites using thematic coding to identify how career centers can circulate ableist notions of professionalism on their public-facing websites. I then offer a theory of (dis)ability deconditioning to encourage collaborative interventions between technical and professional communicators and career center professionals to challenge ableist norms and center embodied intersectionality.

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.

In this article, I examine how the language circulated by two-year college writing center websites impacts discursive understandings of disability and offer recommendations for more accessible documentation practices grounded in critical disability studies and technical and professional communication theory.