Organizations increasingly recognize web accessibility as both necessary and beneficial for legal, ethical, and economic reasons. This article shows how instructors can easily integrate accessible web design into an introductory web design and development course for business students who have limited experience with design theory and user interface design. By applying testable criteria, following industry-standard guidelines, and using online tools, these business students can successfully build websites that individuals with visual, hearing, cognitive, or motor-control disabilities can use. The authors present their approach, describe specific assignments, and provide suggestions for incorporating accessibility into a traditional introductory web development course.

Technical and professional communicators need to continue to interrogate how the seemingly mundane documents they create, such as terms of service (ToS) and community guidelines, and the systems those documents become a part of can oppress, exclude, and affect marginalized and hypermarginalized communities. This article presents an adapted corpus-assisted discourse analysis of how “sexual content” is defined across a corpus of 176 ToS and community guidelines from 118 social media sites. The findings show how ToS and community guidelines can work together to complicate our understanding of how values are intentionally and unintentionally embedded in these documents in order to uphold power or to meet emancipatory ends.

This corpus-based study investigates the grammatical stance constructions in CEO statements within the annual reports of U.S. and Vietnamese banks from 2020 to 2022. The findings indicate that modality is the dominant stance type followed by attitudinal and epistemic stance markers. Both groups of bank leaders favor desire/intention/decision verbs with infinitive complement clauses, certainty/likelihood verbs controlling complement clauses, and volition/prediction modality. But variations exist in the specific stance devices employed to shape corporate image and engage with stakeholders. These findings provide insights into cross-cultural corporate discourse in the banking sector and have valuable implications for business writing and professional communication.

This study uses an online questionnaire survey to investigate Chinese social media users’ acceptance of firm-generated credibility-building posts (FGCPs) on Sina Weibo. The findings show that heuristic cues related to content (i.e., topics regarding competence, benevolence, and integrity) and source (i.e., firm nationality and industry types) along with the moderating role of topic, account, and platform familiarity cues significantly influence users’ acceptance level of such posts. After incorporating the insights gained from participants’ responses to open-ended questions in the questionnaire, this study concludes with practical recommendations for crafting effective FGCPs on social media platforms like Sina Weibo.

This study investigates the social media strategies that Chinese museums use in communicating on Weibo, focusing on the ways these museums engage with the public and the effectiveness of their online interactions. Combining grounded theory and content analysis, the authors analyze 319 posts from six major museums and 842 posts from 36 smaller museums. Their findings suggest that although museums effectively use social media for educational purposes, there is room for more interactive and diverse content to enhance public engagement. The study provides practical insights on how museums can optimize their social media strategies by emphasizing audience-centered communication and greater interactivity in order to foster deeper connections with the public.

International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

Request emails are vital in workplace communication. This study uses a three-round Delphi method to investigate the types, frequencies, and perceived burdens of request emails in Korean organizations. Fifty workers from large corporations identified and evaluated 32 common email scenarios, revealing that the most frequent requests are sent to superiors asking for approval, feedback, and document reviews whereas the most burdensome requests are sent to colleagues asking them to perform tasks. Highlighting the hierarchical dynamics of Korean workplaces and the importance of culturally appropriate communication strategies, the findings from this study can inform global training programs and curricula on workplace communication.

This article builds a heuristic that raises the artificial intelligence (AI) literacy of Latine students. Nefarious people are exploiting marginalized Latine communities by using AI in creative partnerships, similar to those described in technical communication research, to build social profiles of Latines. These people are rhetorically using AI in passive-income and voice-over scams that target Latines who are insecure about their financial and citizenship situations. The heuristic offered here guides instructors on how to increase Latine students’ AI literacy by making these students aware of the rhetorical relationships between nefarious individuals and AI.