Web content accessibility, the practices by which web content is made usable by people with a variety of disabilities, is growing in importance and visibility. Currently, however, there are few formalized paths for accessibility training, leading many professionals to self-educate using textbooks, websites, and social media, which exert significant power over the meanings and practices of accessibility.In this paper, I analyze over 40 web references published between 1997 and 2012, and focus particularly on the genre of the “web accessibility myth list,” in which authors list misconceptions about accessibility and debunk them. These myth lists exert productive power within the industry and serve as a space of contestation. Myth lists encourage the production of professionalized, neoliberal worker identities, create community by reinforcing accessibility's historically oppositional relationship to web design, and promote conflicting ideologies of disability. Ultimately, study of this professional community indicates that industry studies can reveal the contexts not only of media texts, but of the conditions of media access itself.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.