A significant number of Internet users have physical or sensory disabilities. Work that addresses this group of users, as Bowker’s does, is rare. Bowker founded her work on philosophical, psychological, and linguistic theories, and conducted a qualitative analysis on her data. The paper presents the results of a small online survey in which 21 disabled people participated. They completed 35 (largely) open-ended questions.

This approach provides an interesting alternative look at both the application of discourse analysis and disabled users. Regrettably, the results are vague and lack detail. Consequently, design guidelines for online applications for the disabled cannot be extracted. The added value of the paper is limited, although some interesting ideas are presented.