As part of our endeavor to create a socially just, equitable environment for ourselves and our students, we must first acknowledge that the university is founded on academic ableism and unfortunately “powerfully mandates able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, as well as other forms of social and communicative hyperability” (Dolmage, 2017, p. 7). Disability is hierarchized in the Ivory Tower, which achieves its mission to reproduce normative forms of thinking through highly regulated classroom procedures and workflows, such as participation criteria, attendance policies, inflexible deadlines, and standardized outputs (Price, 2011, p. 104-106). The implication is that academic success requires an “unaffected” brain (p. 104) and that “presence is the sine qua non of learning in higher education [and] the ‘choice’ of whether or not to be present belongs to the individual student” (p. 65). The academic ecosystem emphasizes able-bodied and able-minded norms around perfectionism, productivity, and excellence, thus normalizing and homogenizing how faculty members teach and research as well as how students learn and write (Brown, 2020a, p. 3-5). 

As members of the university, we are surrounded by academic ableism, and our own spaces and practices may unintentionally reflect this. Such problematic practices include: (1) the LMS design that students find unintuitive; (2) documents that sacrifice legibility for visual appeal; (3) classroom setups that pose difficulty for sensory minorities; and (4) the rushed “retrofit” of course materials to satisfy official accommodation requests received during the semester, which already narrowly construe access needs.

As long as we compose our pedagogies, materials, and learning environments in ways that presume normative bodies and minds, we reproduce academic ableism and suggest “there are some specific bodies and minds that do not at all have a right to the university” (Dolmage, 2017, p. 44): the ones that silently struggle with the course materials and LMS, with attendance, with participating in ways we deem acceptable, and/or with matching the rhythm of the class.

Entry and access are not the same. We have begun to recognize and address this with our shift to labor-based grading, which acknowledges issues of inequity and recenters the processual nature of writing. As a set of design principles, accessibility is inherently feminist and antiracist, essential to learning and to advancing social justice and equity. It matters who we imagine as part of an audience; it matters who we conceptualize as students, colleagues, and writers (Yergeau et al., 2013). At any given time, our classrooms are composed of students who are visibly and invisibly disabled, deaf or hard of hearing, blind or low-vision, chronically ill, autistic or in a sensory minority, psychiatrically disabled, temporarily disabled, not-yet-diagnosed, and/or circling the periphery of any of these categories. The dynamic learning communities we have created in our Writing Studies program will be all the more vibrant and collaborative if we more closely align our work with the organizing principles of disability justice. 

This document serves as the preface to and rationale for a starter kit for accessible course materials, media, and pedagogical practices, which we hope evolves into a multimodal, multi-authored website. This toolkit is a living document that is always in process. As you read the following rationales and explore the practical manuals and materials we’ve compiled, we invite you to reflect on your students requests and your own needs in considering how to improve access for everyone. Together, we hope to better enact a culture of access in our program and our classrooms.

Modeled after the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990) — along with the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) (2008) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) — prohibits discrimination against people who qualify as disabled, guaranteeing disabled folks the same opportunities as the non-disabled regarding participation in the workforce, commercial exchange, and state and federal programs and services. The ADA defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that “substantially limits” major life activities. Pursuant to the ADA, universities promise reasonable accommodation(s) to qualified individuals with documented disabilities if and where the disability affects educational performance. 

Pace University’s Student Accessibility Services office considers deaf and hard-of-hearing students, blind and low-vision students, mobility impaired students, and psychiatrically disabled students eligible for reasonable accommodations. Their list of qualifying disabilities legitimizes specific disabilities over others and mystifies the status of others. Explicitly eligible conditions include: “attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, traumatic brain injury, bipolar disorder, vision and hearing loss, cerebral palsy, paraplegia, and certain chronic health conditions.” To receive accommodations in individual classes, eligible disabled students — students who, presumably, fit into this list and are expected to know they do — are required to obtain medical documentation, complete paperwork for the university, and coordinate with the Student Accessibility Services, their adviser, and their professors. This tedious process must be repeated every semester to ensure accommodations are granted in each class. 

We are required by law to accommodate our students, but university procedures to comply with the ADA are often stigmatizing, exploitative, and restrictive. For every student who requests accommodations, there are many more who can’t obtain medical documentation, whose medical documentation isn’t proof enough, who are experiencing changes in their physical and/or mental health that consequently change their access needs, who silently endure difficult learning conditions due to internalized ableism, who are too embarrassed by or sensitive about their conditions to confide in a relative stranger about their access needs, and/or who are too exhausted and humiliated by the accommodations process to go through with it. As Konrad (2021) has argued, disabled individuals are “often encouraged to advocate for their own access without consideration for the mental and emotional labor required to do so” (p. 180). This includes administrative work (e.g., sending emails, making phone calls), cognitive labor (e.g., understanding and completing paperwork), and emotional labor (e.g., the anxiety of having to ask in the first place, particularly if the request is an unusual one or one not officially granted by the university and/or when flexibility isn’t foregrounded in Accessibility Statements on university websites or classroom policies). Language like “qualifying” and “eligible” exacerbate the already daunting task of revealing one’s access needs to strangers. 

Those who successfully navigate the process are frequently let down by cookie-cutter accommodations. Dolmage (2017) observes that students who seek accommodations rarely know what they could receive; rather, they “go in to disability services, offer up their diagnosis, and have that diagnosis matched with a stock set of accommodations. In other exchanges, students might be asked by disability services to ‘tell us what you need’ — ­and again students have to guess” (p. 24). First-generation disabled students, disabled students who don’t fully grasp the culture of higher education, and students in the process of medicalization are further disadvantaged (pp. 24-25).

“Alternative entrances, disclaimers — by their very nature, these create a special population of people, who we then identify as disabled” (Yergeau et al., 2013). Disabled students are frequently in learning spaces with peers and professors who are unfamiliar with or have implicit bias about disabilities. Even when the accommodations request is granted, these students typically find that they must verify their eligibility to professors who are very likely to believe, like their peers, that accommodations give them an unfair advantage. 

It’s also worth noting that the university frames disability as an almost exclusively “student” issue even though it affects educators as well. In 2012, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that disability among professors has not received the same attention (p. 30). The essential functions of a faculty position are considered to include constant cognitive and emotional labor, such that disclosing sensory issues, psychiatric disability, or “brain fog” in order to request accommodations comes with a risk to one’s career. 

Obtaining accommodations as a faculty member is just as thorny as it is for students, if not more so. As Brown (2020b) notes, “attitudes and expectations in relation to productivity and ways of working are such that deviation from that norm is practically impossible, especially in an environment where precarious contracts and job insecurity are rife” (p. 64). Since we are employees and not learners, “reasonable” adjustments for us encompass modifications to the environment, such as an ergonomic office chair or being assigned an office in a building with elevator access (Brown, 2020b). Such adjustments don’t address social perceptions and stigma around disability and academic identity. For instance, openly admitting to brain fog in a profession that prides itself on cerebral activity or chronic fatigue in a culture of overwork carries a social stigma. Neither of the aforementioned conditions or similar non-apparent ones subject to variability can be resolved with “ready-made” accommodations from the university’s disability support services or human resources department.

Disability activists and disabled folks have identified a host of problems with the university’s approach to accessibility (Price, 2011; Dolmage, 2012, 2017; Konrad, 2021; Hubrig, 2021). The ADA is a legal framework, focused on obtaining guaranteed rights and “reasonable” accommodations from existing power structures; however, this type of disability rights-based framework isn’t appropriate for all situations, lacks intersectionality, and tends to center individuals with power, status, and access (Sins Invalid, 2019; Brown, 2020a). Educators should be familiar with and meet the legal requirements of the ADA, ADAAA, and Section 504, but they should perceive this as an initial step, not the end goal of accessibility (Hubrig, 2021). 

The two governing assumptions of ADA compliance and institutional biocertification processes are (1) that disabled students and faculty possess the knowledge, energy, and resources to successfully navigate their rights and the accommodations process, and (2) that they require simple, one-time adjustments, like a note-taker, extra time on exams, a podium, or an office chair. These assumptions allow the university to prioritize normativity and default practices and setups that assume able-bodiedness and able-mindedness for students and faculty alike. 

In reality, ADA accommodations don’t acknowledge that disability is intersectional and fluid. Bodies are not neutral. They are defined and confined by gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and other categories that cannot be separated and that together inform and impact the ability of a person, student or teacher in the classroom (Sins Invalid, 2019, p. 19). Gender, race, class, and other axes of identity co-create and inform access needs. Access needs often require multiple, mutable forms of accommodation to create an equitable environment for learning, teaching, and collaborating. Unfortunately, academic timetables and systems are too inflexible to cope with the fluctuating health concerns of both professors and students, and the ADA’s usefulness is limited by what it considers “eligible” and “reasonable” (AAUP, 2012; Brown, 2020b). Finally, since violations of the ADA are usually redressed through lawsuits, financial barriers may prevent disabled individuals from getting their needed accomodation. 

As Hubrig (2021) suggests, “too often, how we think about access is reductive.” Just because we include Accessibility Statements in our syllabi — albeit typically buried at the end — doesn’t mean our classrooms are accessible so much as it signals institutional compliance with ADA (Dolmage, 2017; Hubrig, 2021). “Access must not be seen as a problem created by or solely applicable to ‘those people over there'” (Price, 2013), referring to how non-normative bodies aren’t centered in the design of our course materials or lesson plans. Instead, whenever a disabled body drifts into our classes, we “retrofit” our materials, “making them accessible after the fact, only after people complain” (Kerschbaum, 2013). But all bodies have access needs, so there should be no shame in expecting those needs to be met prior to entry, without institutional biocertification or having to ask for a retrofit.

Instead of relying on a bare-minimum, often inequitable framework, we take our inspiration from the work of disabled people, disability activists, and mixed ability organizing. We perceive our program’s values as informed by the guiding themes of disability justice movements: (1) “Nothing about us without us,” (2)  “Access is love,” and (3) “Solidarity not charity.” Our task is not simply to ensure we are ADA compliant, but also to broaden how we think about access, how we actively demonstrate accessibility and acceptance through universal design and anti-ableist rhetoric, and how we enact a culture of access in our classrooms and programmatic spaces. In doing so, we hope to pivot away from the retrofit approach to accessibility and toward preemptive inclusion. 

That said, we can’t pretend that universal design doesn’t create more work for us. It’s additional labor to educate ourselves and habituate access-oriented awareness, provide live captions and captions for recordings, post transcripts, appropriately format documents and online spaces, appropriately arrange physical classrooms, provide large-print hard copies of whiteboard notes, and structure our lessons around bio-breaks, food, and stretching. However, none of this is extra labor — it’s work we should already be enacting to achieve universal accessibility and design. In some ways, it’s the retrofit that creates more work for us, as we must scramble to make the necessary adjustments after the course LMS is already published and the class is already underway.

To minimize this burden, we have assembled the following toolkit to facilitate our students’ and our own access across physical and virtual environments for learning and working in ways that adhere to and exceed ADA guidelines. Implementing these suggestions in advance of a given course or event makes retrofitting superfluous and indicates to current and future students and members of our department that we are committed to equitable, accessible work and learning environments.

Our profession is not conducive to embodied awareness, mental and emotional burden, or cognitive difference. As Finesilver et al. (2020) assert, “although we all ‘do in academia in our own way,’ there are inherent tensions between the collegial and the individual, and between an embodied awareness of our bodies and the fixed structures of teaching, learning, and researching” (p. 144). Non-disabled and disabled faculty are expected to cope with and work through issues like, for example, computer-related injuries, repetitive stress syndromes, pain, transient and chronic illnesses, sensory variations, psychiatric issues, and/or mobility impairments. We are supposed to ignore the state of our bodies, but both temporary and long-term disability make that impossible.

We offer the following guidelines for tailoring our pedagogical practice to resist academic ableism and the interlocking systems of oppression that uphold it in our physical and virtual spaces. We remain mindful of the fact that crafting accessible courses and implementing classroom policy is time-consuming labor. This document extends our Equitable Labor Statement for Faculty. In an effort to support our Writing Program Faculty, we have also created syllabus, calendar, and handout templates as well as course shells for LMS pages.

Writing, and writing instruction, are profoundly embodied processes, but academic ableism neutralizes embodiment and asks us to do the same: to construe any physical, emotional, and cognitive struggle as a malingering, weakness, or lack of motivation. Anti-ableism is a continuous, reflective, and compassionate process of asking: How do we read physical, intellectual, and social inaccessibility into our spaces, and how do we counteract these challenges? How do we, as rhetoricians and writing instructors, nurture anti-ableist language and attitudes in our classrooms and department spaces?

We live in a capitalist system whose material and psychic frameworks “designate some bodies and minds as normative, valuable, and acceptable and others as deviant, worthless, or dangerous. We all have a stake, and role to play, in disability justice, in dismantling ableism” (Sins Invalid, 2019, p. 68). Everyone has access needs, and reducing the stigma and shame around these needs is worth fighting for. We should all engage in the work of anti-ableism and universal access and remember that what’s good for disabled people is often good for everyone else too (Yergeau et al., 2013).

American Association of University Professors (2012). Accommodating faculty members who have disabilities. 2012 Bulletin. pp. 30-42.

Brown, N. (2020). Introduction. In Brown, N. & Leigh, J. (Eds.), Ableism in academia: Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education (pp. 1-10). UCL Press.

Brown, N. (2020). Disclosure in academia: A sensitive issue. In Brown, N. & Leigh, J. (Eds.), Ableism in academia: Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education (pp. 51-73). UCL Press.

Dolmage, J. (2017). Academic ableism. University of Michigan Press.

Finesilver, C., Leigh, J., & Brown, N. (2020). Invisible disability, unacknowledged diversity. In Brown, N. & Leigh, J. (Eds.), Ableism in academia: Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education (pp. 143-160). UCL Press.

Hubrig, A. (2021). Access from/as the start: On Writing Studies and “accessibility.” Composition Studies.

Konrad, A. (2021). Access fatigue: The rhetorical work of disability in everyday life. College English, 83(3), pp. 179-199.

Price, M. (2011). Mad at school. University of Michigan Press.

Sins Invalid (2019). Skin, tooth, and bone: The basis of movement is our people (2nd Ed.). Berkeley, CA.

Yergeau, M. R., Brewer, E., Kerschbaum, S., Oswal, S., Price, M., Selfe, C., Salvo, M., & Howes, F. (2013). Multimodality in motion: Disability & kairotic spaces. Kairos, 18(1).