Assessing disability in political advertising through the VIS-ABLE Framework

Political advertising helps shape public perceptions of who counts in civic life. However, people with disabilities, who number over one billion globally, are routinely absent or misrepresented in campaign messages. This article examines the nature of this representational gap and its implications for advertising analysis. This article develops the VIS-ABLE Framework, a four-lens analytical and evaluative framework for assessing disability representation and communicative accessibility in advertising. It demonstrates the framework through illustrative cases from U.S. political advertising. The framework translates social, cultural, legal, and historical disability perspectives into a structured approach for evaluating how advertising makes disability visible, marginalizes it, or creates barriers to access. The article shows how advertising practices can reinforce or challenge dominant assumptions about political participation and citizenship. The article concludes by outlining directions for future research, including the potential application of the VIS-ABLE Framework in comparative and cross-cultural advertising contexts.