A second kind of work addressing the dearth of material for people likely to be literacy learners is practices of student publishing, and similar efforts to broaden the circle of published writers within community and working class contexts. There is often a political animus to learner or community publishing — a struggle against the very ordinary oppression in industrialized societies, that in spite of their being so much print, most people's voices, experiences, and knowledge, are not represented. Community publishing aims not to allow institutions to communicate more effectively with the public, but to allow more people to have a say. Learner publishing, giving literacy students access to publishing through literacy programs, relates to more general issues of access to the means of communication, for women, native people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and people living in poverty. Creating a literate environment that is permeable to those learning literacy, or those with limited literacy skill, is an open boundary of literacy work.

These two different kinds of work can be expressed in terms of of rights of access. Plain language work involves access to information. Learner and community publishing involves access to the means of communication. All these efforts need to be documented, and institutional resistances to them confronted.