(UN)TRANSPARENTLY COMMUNICATING ACCESSIBILITIES IN THE FIELD OF TRANSPORT: A GENRE-BASED AND CORPUS-INFORMED ANALYSIS

The increased importance of accessibility has contributed to the approval of laws aimed at the inclusion of people with various disabilities as well as the drafting of guidelines for the creation of more accessible web pages. Given the lack of studies on this topic from a linguistic perspective and the importance of this issue in the transportation sector, this study aimed to analyse a comparable corpus of web pages and documents on accessibility produced by companies operating in this sector in different country groups. Combining the tools of genre analysis and corpus linguistics, the research examined whether these web pages and documents may be featured as texts with standardized and common rhetorical moves, the discursive construction of accessibility, and the linguistic strategies employed by companies to transparently or vaguely communicate their approach to this issue.
From both a cross-sector and cross-cultural perspective, evidence from the genre analysis showed the presence of common, albeit nonlinear, persuasive and informative rhetorical moves, with the former being more prevalent than the latter. Results from the corpus-informed analysis suggest a stronger discursive association of accessibility with disability inclusion than with web accessibility. The close reading of the extended concordance lines of the words accessible and accessibility revealed a greater use of promotional language and vague linguistic items in the whole corpus, which suggests a lack of transparency towards actions and initiatives ensuring services or digital accessibility. In contrast, strategies conveying transparency observed across all the country groups include statements of compliance with digital-accessibility guidelines and the more explicit mention of inaccessible facilities or content in texts produced by Scandinavian companies. The few cross-sector and cross-cultural divergences found in the corpus imply a common linguistic and communicative approach to accessibility in the field of transport