Collective Communication Access

A framework developed by McDonnell et al. (2023) that reconceptualises communication access as a shared, co-constructed practice distributed across everyone involved in an interaction, rather than as an individual accommodation provided to disabled participants. CCA argues that accessibility emerges from the collective actions of speakers, listeners, interpreters, technologies, and platforms — and that responsibility for making communication accessible therefore cannot be offloaded to a single actor or assistive technology. The framework has been especially influential in thinking about group videoconferencing, captioning, and sign-language interpretation, and underpins subsequent work on participatory captioning and community-sustained accessibility infrastructure.