Advancing Disability Inclusion in Organisational Communication: A Rationale for Collective Access

Focusing on the experiences of people with disability, this chapter explores contemporary tensions and challenges pertaining to access and inclusion in organisational communication. I discuss the problem of individualistic, ‘tick-box’ approaches to inclusive communication that place responsibility for access on disabled people; a phenomenon I conceptualise as ‘access labour’. In response, I propose that organisations ground their communication practices (and broader diversity, equity, and inclusion work) in a culture of ‘collective access’, in line with the Human Rights Model of Disability and the guiding principles of Universal Design. In making this recommendation, I outline some important considerations for centring cultural safety, particularly when engaging directly with lived-experience communities (as per a ‘nothing about us without us’ framework) to inform research, practice, and/or policy. Ultimately, I argue that professional communication scholars, practitioners, and policymakers collectively face an imperative to transform current understandings of disability inclusion through a lens of ‘problem-solving’ to, instead, prioritise an ethic of social justice and collective action.