U.S. Higher Education Websites and Accessibility

In a study of 40 university homepages, Meyer (2008) concluded that while universities had adopted an online approach to directing students to campus services, home page design was messy and the interface difficult to navigate for the inexperienced user. Inaccessibility is problematic because a university website is the institution's "virtual face" and represents its priorities (Meyer, 2008; Wilson & Meyer, 2009). Similarly, a writing center's website provides a virtual face to students seeking writing support. Inaccessible writing center websites and lack of statements regarding disability support misrepresent the field's priorities and commitment to students with disabilities. The number of students with disabilities pursuing higher education continues to increase (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2009; Gabel, Reid, Pearson, Ruiz, & Hume-Dawson, 2016). According to the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (2016), 11% of undergraduates are disabled. With 2014 undergraduate enrollment reaching 17.3 million, this means there were nearly 2 million enrolled students with disabilities with a wide range of characteristics across social groups. For example, a proportionately higher number of students with disabilities are veterans (21%) than non-veterans (11%). There is also a greater number age 30 and older (16%), followed by ages 24 to 29 (11%), and finally ages 15 to 23 (9%). As for race/ethnicity, there are some striking differences in the percentage having a disability: Pacific Islander (15%), American Indian/Alaska Native (14%), Two or more races (14%), Black (12%), White (11%), Hispanic (10%), and Asian (8%). Because undergraduate enrollment, including enrollment of students with disabilities, is projected to increase, writing centers have an interest in meeting the diverse needs of students with disabilities who could potentially visit their websites, use their support, and whose enrollment numbers each year edge closer to a quarter of the entire student population.

The problem, according to Gabel et al. (2016), is that "disabled students are often invisible on college campuses, in part because many do not self-identify as disabled by contacting the campus disability services office" (p. 65). Through their review of related literature, Gabel et al. found that less than 1% of students in 4-year Californian IHEs (California Postsecondary Education Commission, 2009, as cited in Gabel et al., p.66), as well as in a regional university in the Midwest, identify as disabled (Gabel & Miskovic, 2014; Miskovic & Gabel, 2012). Moreover, even when a student did identify as disabled, they remained invisible in and inadvertently absent from digital institutional discourse, such as websites and student academic support resources (i.e. writing center digital resources). When more disabled students enroll in IHEs yet remain forgotten, this creates a disability paradox (Gabel et al., 2016). Because of this, in this study we ask what this lack of representation suggests about the reception and support provided to students with disabilities in IHEs generally, as Gabel et al. explored, and writing centers specifically (the focus of our research).

Definitions and Models of Disability

The challenge of representing and providing support to a diverse population of students with disabilities lies in the myriad, multidimensional and often contradictory aspects about definitions and models of disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and ADA Amendments Act (ADAA) of 2008 has defined disability as a physical or mental impairment that "significantly restrict[s]" and "substantially limits" and impacts "major life activit[ies]" (U.S. Congress, 1990; U.S. Congress, 2008). While this definition provides a legal framework that then informs protective measures at the legislative and employment levels, we did not adopt the ADA's language for our research because the language framed disability from an able-bodied perspective. Disability is lacking ability of the normal able-bodied majority. The U.S. Department of Education NCES (2016), has elaborated by defining disabled students as having one or more medical conditions: "a specific learning disability, a visual impairment, hard of hearing, deafness, a speech impairment, an orthopedic impairment, or a health impairment." The NCES' definition focused on the medical deficits of those who have been diagnosed as disabled. Granted, it provided added detail, but it did not capture the broader implications of being citizens, people with disabilities in the United States, and specifically within institutions such as Higher Education. As such, we did not adopt the NCES definition. The IWCA (2006a) Position Statement on Disability and Writing Centers has defined disability using a 2004 Frequently Asked Questions resource from the United Nations and World Health Assembly, which defined disability as "Any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being." The World Health Organization (WHO) (2017) has affirmed that disability involves physical impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. WHO framed disability using a social model and stated that disability is a "complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person's body and features of the society in which he or she lives." While we do agree that social barriers exist and must be eliminated, in this study we adopt the human rights approach developed by the United Nations (UN) (2015) because it frames disability as one of many examples of "human diversity." With a human rights approach, there is no longer an "us," the able bodied, and "them," the disabled. There is only one group. All persons are "rights-holders," and the human rights approach to disability "promotes respect for their inherent dignity" (UN) while also addressing disabling social conditions. A human rights approach helped us identify the context of the disabling conditions of writing center websites so that the field and IHEs may focus on developing strategies to promote and respect the inherent dignity of all students.

Writing Centers, Disability, and Institutional Discourse

Disability studies continue to remain at the center or forefront of writing center narratives, lore, and empirical research (Babcock, 2017, p. 329). Inquiry has revolved around accessible online writing labs and instruction (Brizee, Sousa, & Driscoll, 2012; Olsen & Martinez, 2015; Mohr, 1998; Oswal, 2015; Ries, 2015; Wilson, 2017), disability and tutoring practices (Babcock, 2008; Cherney, 2017, Kiedaisch & Dinitz, 2007; Neff, 1994), and accessible policies and practices (Babcock, 2015; Degner, Wojciehowski, & Giroux, 2015; Elston, 2015; Grutsch McKinney, 2013).

While much has been written about creating accessible spaces and resources, as well as inclusive policies and practices, very little has been written about writing center websites as an extension of institutional discourse barriers. By institution, we mean the covertly enduring constraints of "exert[ed] pattern[s] [through] higher-order effects on the actions … of individuals and organizations without requiring repeated collective mobilization or authoritative intervention to achieve these regularities" (Clemens & Cook, 1999, p. 445). The content, design, and infrastructure of a website are all forms of institutional discourse. As a form of institutional discourse, then, writing center websites circulate, sustain, and reinforce the meaning (the ways we think, talk, write, and act toward people – people with disabilities for this study) thereby creating a dominant discourse. By analyzing writing center websites, as Fairclough (1995) has suggested, through three elements of communicative events – the text, the discursive practices, and the social and cultural structures and relations – scholars can begin "to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony" (p. 135). Any discourse less powerful is marginalized, often misunderstood, and completely ignored or overlooked. For this reason, the discourse of digital texts needs to be analyzed for what they include as well as what they omit because "the absence of something creates meaning, as does its presence" (Gabel et al., 2016, p. 67).

Confusing navigation and interfaces, inaccessible texts and images, absent explicit language indicating support for individuals with disabilities – these website attributes indicate audience segmentation and assumptions about visitors' needs and characteristics (Meyer, 2008, p. 143). Inaccessible writing center website design frames an assumed identity for the visitor and their needs and leads to the acceptance of one meaning over another: namely, that anyone accessing the website is not disabled and that the material needs of visitors with disabilities were not explicitly considered when creating the center's virtual face. The website becomes a textual artifact, then, a tradition (Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996) of ableism, reinforcing normalizing discourses and material social inequalities. In this way, it silences oppositional voices as a form of containment and imposes a linguistic spiral of silence and "isolation offer[ing] protective features that soften risk to the speaker" (Gabel et al., 2016, p. 67). Through containment, a writing center website "determines who can speak and act and what can be said or done" (p. 67). Paraphrasing Gabel and Miskovic (2014), when a writing center website ignores something, "remains silent about or unresponsive to something," such as the material needs of students with disabilities, this serves as a way to "mask the more fractious discourse of deficits, abnormality, and exclusion" (p. 1147). Furthermore, writing center websites have the ability to open and close doors to students with disabilities (Bruyere, 2008). For example, when writing related materials, resources, and information are posted to the university office's website yet are inaccessible, it "can pose significant barriers to people who are visually impaired or deaf or have learning disabilities. Sites that fail to meet accessibility guidelines increase the potential for inadvertent discrimination against these students" (Bruyere, p. 37).

Critical analysis and inquiry of writing centers' digital face is necessary. Inaccessible websites and materials, as well as little representation or acknowledgement (by way of the mission statement) of the diverse student body ("abled" and "disabled"), highlight the broader problem of inclusiveness within university writing center discourse. Grutsch McKinney (2013) warned about the writing center grand narrative in which there is "cognitive dissonance between the work we do and the work we talk about" (p.4), as well as the way we talk about that work. That discourse creates a writing center akin to a "cozy home" that makes administrators and consultants feel good because the center is "anti-academic, anti-establishment, caring, and iconoclastic" (p.25). The writing center mission statement, then, becomes an extension of this discourse. What we claim and what we achieve do not overlap. Rendleman (2012) urged the field to critically analyze and reflect upon the lexicon of each word in writing center mission statements. Rendleman found that analysis of these words leads to defining, and "definition offers a reference to things in the real world, emotive associations, sense relation, and words found in collocation among the corpora" (p.4). The definition informs practice and perception – from consultants to students seeking writing support. Even the term "writing center" results in contradictory and "pieced together semantics" (Simpson, 2010, p.1). Just as mission statements fall short of capturing the work done at the writing center, they also point to the need for increased inclusivity.

Procedures

This study took place over four months from September to December 2017 and then rechecked from June to August 2018 as part of an extended project in an upper level course in the Professional Writing and Rhetoric Undergraduate Program. Our – the primary author and four student team members – perceptions and approaches were impacted by our personal stake in the support, accessibility, and representation of disability on writing center websites. The primary author lives with chronic illness and disability and researches accessibility in technical and health communications. Of the four student team members, half had experienced some form of permanent or temporary disability and knew someone in their immediate or extended family who lived with a disability. All four students knew someone outside of their family who lived with a disability. Additionally, three of the students worked at the university writing center and were familiar with the limited resources available to the current director for maintaining the writing center website and digital resources.

Our information sources were the comparison institutions used by our university, McKendree University, and consisted of similar IPEDS, Local Private, Great Lakes, and Carnegie Classifications — Master's Colleges and Universities: Larger programs (M1) (see Appendix for a complete list). The project's purpose was twofold:

1. to analyze whether and how the writing centers articulated support for individuals with disabilities; and
2. to identify and discuss the accessibility of content, design, and navigation for individuals with disabilities, including visual representation of these students.

In this study our primary question was what does website content, presentation/design, and navigation say about the 55 university writing centers' priorities regarding disability and providing support to students with disabilities? We chose these specific universities because the amount provided a manageable, convenient amount of data. Additionally, these universities shared similar characteristics with ours, such as amount and type of degrees and programs offered; smaller enrollment sizes; student demographics; student support services, such as writing centers; and potential and actual material resources that could be invested to support a writing center's physical and digital space. Because our initial question stemmed from our observations and concerns regarding our writing center's website (as well as how to improve our writing center's digital resources), these specific institutions seemed a logical choice and fair comparison because, at the broader university level, administrators also collected comparison data about the same universities. Finally, the large number of students potentially accessing these university websites suggest the importance of studying this type of discourse to unearth underlying meanings and to identify unconscious messages related to disability and normalcy.

Data Collection Strategies

To evaluate whether (and, then, how) a writing center website articulated support, as well as the accessibility of the websites, we used three assessment tools.

Snapshot Click Assessment

Of the 55 universities evaluated, 35 had established writing center offices (see Table 1). Twenty of those were independent offices (identified as WC), and fifteen were writing center offices housed in a larger student success/support office (identified as WCA-SS). Two university writing center offices, both located in a larger student success office, explicitly articulated a statement regarding support for students with disabilities: Bellarmine University and Vanguard University. These statements were found in less than 4 clicks. One other university, Illinois Wesleyan, included a statement about referrals for students with disabilities. We will discuss these universities' mission statements later in the Textual Analysis sub-section of this Results section.

Table 1
Snapshot Click Assessment Results by Type of Institution and Writing Center Office

	Type of Writing Center Office
Institution Type and Amount	WC	WCA-SS	Disability Statement, Representation
Great Lakes (N =15)	3	5	1 (< 4 clicks)
Carnegie (N = 14)	5	3	1 (< 4 clicks)
IPEDS (N = 14)	4	6	Not found
Local Private (N = 12)	8	1	Not found
Total (N = 55)	20	15	2

Kennedy, Evans, and Thomas' (2011) Accessible Website Design Assessment

After analyzing the 35 writing center websites using Kennedy, Evans, and Thomas' (2011) four characteristics of accessible website design, we found that none of the websites incorporated movement or interaction to generate interest, nor did they use voicing to narrate the text (see Table 2). University writing center offices were relatively successful at using simple navigation and easy-to-read text and short sentences (see Table 3). Simple navigation "shorten[s] the number of links to get to get to important information" (Meyer, 2008, p.156) that offer "just a few choices, rather than navigation with lots of choices" (Kennedy, Evans, & Thomas, 2011, p.33). Using Astroff's (2001), Wilson and Meyer's (2010), and Gabel et al.'s (2016) use of the "snapshot click," helped us determine how easy or difficult it might be to locate important information, such as the mission statement. Information found in 4 clicks or less indicate simple navigation. All 35 writing centers' websites attempted to use simple navigation, simple text, and short sentences. Of those who attempted simple navigation, 29% did so ineffectively; of those who attempted simple, easy-to-read text with short sentences, 34% did so ineffectively. Writing centers were less successful at incorporating pictures/visuals in meaningful ways (see Table 3). Less than 50% attempted to include images and 71% of those attempts were ineffective because the pictures were poorly designed and/or did not add any meaningful information, reinforce the text, or include alt tags for screen readers.

Table 2
Writing Center Website Design Assessment Results by Accessible Design Characteristics

Institution Type	Accessible Pictures		Simple navigation		Simple text & short sentences		Voice narration
	Effective	Ineffective	Effective	Ineffective	Effective	Ineffective
Great Lakes (N = 8)	2	1	5	3	6	2	Not used
Carnegie (N = 8)	0	3	4	4	5	3	Not used
IPEDS (N =10)	1	2	7	3	7	3	Not used
Local Private (N = 9)	1	4	9	0	5	4	Not used

Table 3
Total Attempts and Ineffective Attempts at Accessible Writing Center Website Design by Characteristics

	Accessible Pictures		Simple Navigation		Simple Text, Short Sentences
	Attempted	Ineffective	Attempted	Ineffective	Attempted	Ineffective
Amount of Writing Centers	17	12	35	10	35	12
Total (N = 35)	49%	71%	100%	29%	100%	34%

Section 508 Compliance Assessment

Overall, writing center websites are accessible according to Section 508 Guidelines. After analyzing websites using the 508 Guidelines as a checklist, we checked for accuracy using WAVE v4.0. This evaluation tool analyzed six general website features: accessible errors that need to be fixed, general alerts, contrast errors, accessible features, accessible structural elements, and accessible HTML5 and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), which is a set of attributes that help make web content and applications, such as JavaScript, more accessible for those with disabilities. Aggregated data from each comparison university cohort emphasize the amount and percentages of accessible and inaccessible content (see Table 4). For example, 43% of content was inaccessible on writing center websites in the Local Private cohort, while 14% was inaccessible in the Carnegie classification. The average amount of inaccessible content across all cohort websites was 25%. This means a quarter of all information on writing center websites was difficult to navigate and access by students with disabilities.

Table 4
WAVE v4.0 Assessment Results by Number of Inaccessible Alerts and Accessible Features of Writing Center Office Institution Type

Institution Type	Total Inaccessible Alerts	Total Accessible Features	Total Alerts & Features	Amount of Inaccessible Content (%)
Great Lakes	252	419	671	38%
Carnegie	316	1954	2270	14%
IPEDS	655	2403	3058	21%
Local Private	671	899	1570	43%
Grand Total	1894	5675	7569	25%

When analyzed at the institution and cohort levels, however, the amount of writing center websites with inaccessible content more clearly highlights the difficulties students with disabilities will experience when attempting to navigate and access information (see Table 5). Of the 35 writing center websites analyzed, 40% of the offices had websites wherein 31 – 40% of the content was inaccessible. Roughly 21 – 30% of website content was inaccessible on 17% of the writing center websites. Only one writing center – Illinois College – had a website where 100% of content was accessible. Nine percent of writing center websites contained content of which 41-50% was inaccessible. The amount of inaccessible content on two websites – Drury University and Hope College – reached between 61-70%. The data show that, depending on the website, a student with a disability will be unable to access anywhere from 1 – 70% of the content. As such, those students won't be able to determine whether the inaccessible content is important or requires extra effort to seek out. What amount of inaccessible website content is acceptable? Even if writing centers agree the highest amount of inaccessible content should not exceed 20%, our data show 71% of the 35 writing centers analyzed had websites where 21 – 70% of the content is inaccessible.

Table 5
WAVE v4.0 Assessment Results by Number of Writing Centers with Inaccessible Website Content and Amount of Inaccessible Content

Institution Type	Percent of Inaccessible Content
	0%	1-10%	11-20%	21-30%	31-40%	41-50%	51-60%	61-70%
Great Lakes (N = 8)	0	0	0	3	3	1	0	1
Carnegie (N = 8)	0	3	3	0	2	0	0	0
IPEDS (N =10)	1	1	1	0	6	1	0	0
Local Private (N = 9)	0	1	0	3	3	1	0	1
Total (N = 35)	1	5	4	6	14	3	0	2
Total (% of N)	3%	14%	11%	17%	40%	9%	0%	6%

Textual Analysis of Mission Statements

As discussed earlier, two university writing center offices, both located in a larger student success office, explicitly articulated a statement regarding support for students with disabilities: Bellarmine University and Vanguard University. Illinois Wesleyan writing center website also discussed referrals. No other university's writing center website provided a mission statement at the time that also explicitly articulated some type of acknowledgement or support for students with disabilities. Consider Bellarmine's and Vanguard's mission statements (below).

Bellarmine University Writing Center's Statement:

The Writing Center is dedicated to promoting and supporting research in writing and writing pedagogy. We provide a site for ongoing research as well as encouraging engagement in writing research among our undergraduate and graduate staff. The Writing Center acknowledges the integral relationships between literacy education and the democratization of higher education. We are committed both to our role in increasing access to that education for all students and to the development, practice, and evolution of anti-oppression pedagogies. We are committed to cultivating a broad-based recognition of the value of World Englishes to both intellectual and public discourse. We ally with and advocate for writers from historically marginalized or oppressed groups and for writing that counters traditional accounts of "standard" academic English by extending conceptions of audience, purpose, and meaning. (Emphasis added)

Vanguard University Writing Center's Statement:

The Writing Center is committed to assisting students from all disciplines in a collaborative, Christ-centered environment, and we value students' learning differences and diverse voices. (Emphasis added)

While Bellarmine's and Vanguard's mission statements did not explicitly use words such as "disability" or "disabled," their language acknowledges the social construction of disability. Bellarmine does so by using language focusing on the "democratization of higher education" and "anti-oppression pedagogies." By advocating for "marginalized or oppressed groups," which include students with disabilities, Bellarmine's writing center mission statement – and by extension, virtual face – espouse an institutional discourse that aligns with the human rights model of disability. Vanguard's mission and virtual face also reaffirm this by using language that places value on "learning differences" and "diverse learners."

Finally, while some universities, such as Illinois Wesleyan, did acknowledge the needs of students with disabilities by including statements in their policies that indicate students will be referred to Disability Services when "deemed appropriate" or providing writing support for diverse learners, no other writing center offices' websites explicitly included such intentional or deliberate language in their mission statements or elsewhere on their website when compared to the explicit language we searched for and found on Bellarmine's and Vanguard's writing center websites. Furthermore, none incorporated images that represented disability or insinuated anything other than able-bodied students using the writing center's services.