First-person perspectives in disability coverage on the Australian Web

In this study, we focus on first-person accounts of disability found online to examine the self-presentations that are available to young people in public web resources. We describe the procedures for curating a specialised corpus of Australian webpages that refer to disability, from which we were able to identify first-person accounts of persons with disability. A collocation analysis of the use first-person pronouns in accounts from persons with disability, compared with collocates identified in accounts from other kinds of contributor, reveals patterns in how disability experiences are presented online. Alongside discussion of the prominent themes that characterise published first-person accounts of disability, we consider aspects of narrative form to facilitate a critical discussion of how these online resources offer a model for understanding disability. We find that the Australian webpages offer a relatively narrow range of disability representations that favour positive outcomes and emphasise the role of other supportive social actors in an individual’s disability experience.