So you are at inclusive and accessible content I presented this morning at 6 a.m. the start of my day and I'm back at around two to end my day. So it's pretty exciting. Um I love sharing uh my knowledge.Um I wanna start with a quote from Barack Obama. We are at a time in our country's history that inclusive language is better than exclusive language. And this really isn't just for where I live in the United States. This is global and my name is Amy June, uh title Camel Case Capital A capital J. I used to pronounce. She and her, I'm on the community team for the, for open source.com on the editorial team. I'm a hospice nurse by trade. So I understand how some folks um uh have issues uh accessing digital information. My cat is on a diet. He is very vocal cause it's not quite dinner time but almost um and his name is Spot. So you might hear him during the presentation and then we have another kitty named Pantera, but she's probably in the closet. What is inclusion? You can think about it in sort of a, a layered way you know what is inclusion on a personal level, on a community level and on a global level and inclusion can mean different things to different people.

So when you look at the title of my slides, um what does it mean to have inclusive content? So let's start with some definitions. Diversity, inclusion are oftentimes lumped together and people think that they're the same thing, but really they're far from it in the workplace, Diversity equals representation without inclusion. Though all of those connections that attract all types of talent and participation in the things that foster creativity and lead to business growth won't happen. Diversity is more about focusing on tracking the characteristics and identity and it really seeks to invite people who have been excluded based on, you know, certain things like gender or, you know, uh sexual orientation or ability. Um All of the things that people can be labeled with, it refers to the vast array of human differences. Whereas inclusion refers to the intent of individuals or systems to actively include this vast array of differences. Inclusion is about welcoming and embracing diversity. It's about amplifying voices and ideas, inclusion exercises, diversity. And it's a conversation that's really deepened by diversity. And um oh, the image is wrong here. I'm supposed to have an image of Verna Myers.

Um Verna Myers is a public speaker and she said diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance because again, inclusion alone doesn't drive that in or diversity doesn't drive inclusion. Um There's an article I like to quote too that says, uh diversity is when you count the people and inclusion is when the people count and for excluded communities, it's the difference between being tolerated and being accepted and celebrated. What does meaningful content mean?

Um You know, think about who your readers are, but of course, you know, we have our target audiences but really on most websites and digital assets, the copy should be for everyone and meaningful content means we can't make assumptions. Um We can't assume a person's political stance.

We shouldn't assume their socio-economic class. We shouldn't assume anyone's abilities, either cognitive or physical abilities. Because remember as we get older, because I'm in that boat, everyone becomes more disabled with time, you know, our hearing and our eyesight deteriorate over time and then there's situational disabilities.

Um not and not everyone. Um not everyone's disability can be seen, you know, debilitating pain, dizziness, brain injuries, learning differences, you know, those invisible uh things um that we often don't think about people think a lot about hearing and vision and other assumpt assumptions people make are around one's gender identity, sexuality and their pronouns.

Um Important note is gender, sex and sexual identity are all very different. So we should be aware of our language when we use um around the use of our pronouns too, right? Um One example, I like to give is the phrase preferred pronouns that doesn't make a lot of sense because they're just someone's pronouns. And when you say preferred, it's like they have a choice, you know, so they're just pronouns. So inclusive language, you know, increasing that inclusivity of our language means really striving to understand the ways that we speak and how our language often unconsciously makes assumptions about people. It can really, it reinforced those dominant norms that come around gender and ability and sexual orientation or race or class, ablest language is any word or phrase that devalues people who live with a disability. Um Most of the time it's inadvertent, it comes to, you know, not being aware and not having the knowledge but ablest language suggests that people with disabilities are abnormal. And a good example of this is um and this is something I practice using the phrase accessible parking over handicapped parking.

Um And lots of folks will tell you to use person centered language is a general rule, but make sure that you use the language people prefer, you know, if they prefer to be called deaf community, then call them the deaf community. You don't have to say, you know, the community who is deaf, we wanna avoid negative or demeaning language for people who live with disabilities. Um So instead of A I DS victims or uh you know, you wanna say people living with HIV or A I DS, uh people who use wheelchairs rather than someone confined to a wheelchair or whe wheelchair bound and something I like to really comment on is that it's become really uncommon um in the workplace or even just in general to use descriptive words like crazy or dumb or retarded.

Um, and using crazy might seem harmless but giving negative values to words like crazy or insane can really marginalize folks. And then when we're talking about cognitive, you know, like ad D or a DH D or O CD, these are common terms that are misused and can be hurtful. You know, obsessive compulsive disorder is a mental state that means so much more than just having a knack for organization. It's an obstacle that people live with every day. So we can choose to use words like clean and organized. Instead, another aspect of inclusive language is making sure that our words are gender neutral. You know, we wanna use words that encompass all the genders rather than just two. This includes things like pronouns, titles and names um and nouns and it's simply not OK to use a gendered introduction for a diverse group of individuals. Um again, the words seem benign, but if someone is annoyed when you're saying, hey guys, then the polite thing to do is to call them something else, use folks or everyone or you're all.

Um It's hard for me even, you know, I live in California and you kind of develop the language around you, you know the word dude and the word guys is like really in my language. But the more I use other terms like folks or y'all, it becomes muscle memory. Um So there's a lot of examples up here but you know, instead of women and men, you would say everyone, you know, instead of ladies and gentlemen, because we have folks that don't live in that binary, you know, Children instead of boys and girls, um siblings are kindred instead of brothers and sisters.

And our language is littered with symbolism of white as positive and black as negative cultural racism. Like using um here's some examples, things like culturally deprived or economically disadvantaged and underdeveloped. These are terms that kind of warp the truth and frames a sense of superiority.

So let's eliminate, you know, using the word color when describing people, you know, use people of color. It's a widely accepted umbrella term that includes any uh nonwhite person. Um There's a few examples up here, but I'm just gonna give a couple gyp comes from the words Gypsy, which refers to um Romanian people who were often un unfairly characterized as thieves and swindlers, gyp or ghetto. I mean, is suspected to derive from slang from Italy um for waste. And it dates back to the concentration camps of World War Two where marginalized communities were forced to inhibit um uh for the concentration camps. And then also it's what we label our are are areas that people live in that have social and economic disadvantage. You know, so classism and racism come into the picture when you call a place or a person ghetto, there's also the idea of privilege when it comes to our language. Um We, we want to make sure that we use language that doesn't assume a certain level of education. Um We can't assume that all people have graduated from high school or that they've gone to college or that they will go to college or matriculate from junior high. We want to use language that doesn't assume a certain level of financial means or a certain sort of vocation.

Um You know, not assuming that everyone present is employed or has a stable living condition or even can afford their basic needs. Um Can't assume that they work first shift. You know, when we think about phrases like real job and honest living, those can be problematic because they perpetuate discriminating against certain sectors of the, of the labor force. And as the internet opens up to more people, we're really living on this world stage, especially, you know, since the shelter in place, more people are connecting through the internet, English as a second language can be a privilege or a situational privilege. So this is something to keep in mind when we think about people who um consume our content and an important part of inclusion is accessibility. Um So how do we embrace accessibility? First? We have to understand what it means. Um I have a quote from Temple Grandin and um she is an American Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University and she really kind of defines that differences are not quantifiable. She says I'm different, not less. She's one of the first people on the who is autistic uh to publicly share insights from her personal experience according to the. Now, this is a very non inclusive stat because I'm just using North Amer uh North America United States here.

But the Center for Disease Control uh reported that 26% of people living in the US live with some form of disability. That's one in four, you know, um pretty close to 62 million people. And again, remember as we get older, everyone becomes more disabled. There are temporary abilities and disabilities like recovering from LASIK or your screen needs to be dimmed. There are situational disabilities like your mouse running out of batteries or you're using a smartphone or tablet in the bright sun. Your house is overrun by noisy Children who are at home because of the shelter in place and you can't find your headphones, but there's no captions. And um the other day, I was talking with some folks on my team and we were talking about the word special needs or special ed. And um I wanna introduce the idea that inclusion is not about giving special privileges to people. It's about those barriers being removed. And so when we use words like special needs and, and special ed, it can be troublesome because these are basic human rights and there's nothing special about it. Um There's four broad parameters um for making your content accessible. We wanna make sure that our content um is easy to see. So we accommodate visual needs.

Um We wanna make sure that folks who might live with palsy from Parkinson's or paraplegia from A LS or maybe they were an accident, you know, um how do they interact with your, with your digital assets? So you wanna make sure that you accommodate motor needs. I'm hard of hearing. And so I utilize captions and transcripts. So this is something near and dear to me, we wanna make sure that we accommodate auditory needs and make it easy to hear. And this is not just for folks like me who are hard of hearing, but it's also for folks who are in those noisy environments. And then the last broad parameter is make sure it's easy to understand. So you accommodate cognitive needs and this can include people who are distracted or have um a difficult time focusing. I'm gonna go over a few examples of copy because examples are always uh good to have under our belt student admission pages. I work for uh I have worked for companies, you know, where we um help build higher ed uh uh websites. Um Do your pages represent your school you know, um stereotype threat refers to the risk of confirming negative stereotypes about individuals, race or gender or cultural group tokenism.

Um um is the illusion of equality without achieving it. It's like the practice of, you know, hiring a person who belongs to a minority group only to not be criticized and have the appearance that you're, that you're hiring a diverse candidates. And remember our imagery should align with our, with our um population uh strip our code bases and archives and documentation of harmful language, you know, white list and black list can be uh replaced with things like allow list or denial, list, master branches. Um A lot of our repositories are replacing that by default, but maybe we use parent and child branches and then our pronouns, you know, instead of using he and she, we use they or the user words. Sometimes in our tech job descriptions can skew towards gendered um interpretation and discourage uh excluded groups from applying, you know. So we want to avoid the gendered language we don't think about and male um oriented titles. Yeah, I think you can call it that like hacker hacker or ninja. And then also when we use insider language in our job ads, um it makes it easy for applicants to feel like outsiders. So we want to make sure that we keep our language simple and straightforward and don't expect people to know every aspect of your company's culture before having the chance to experience it.

You can bring a lot of compassion into your job ads by thinking about perks and benefits that actually matter to more to more diverse, different groups of candidates, you know, including the financials, um including perks, like parental leave, comfortable workspaces for a narrow diverse talent or people with disabilities and then benefits that cover domestic partners is pretty important and culture fit, you know, I hate seeing this word because the likelihood that a job candidate will be able to conform and adapt to those core values and collective behaviors that make up an organization is pretty rare.

So companies are discovering that looking for culture fit does not promote inclusion. Equal opportunity statements should also appear in your job postings, but they need to reflect the truth. The language we use in our job listing should be consistent with our equal opportunity statements.

If we don't have them in there, the rest of the job, if, if the rest of the job ad contains words that attract male applicants, then those e those opportunity statements lose their effectiveness. So we're gonna talk a little bit about some pragmatics about accessibility because it's more than just alt text. But alt text is a good idea, provide captions um that are succinct, provide alt text. You know, even for things like presentations, describe the images or the videos.

Um This is helpful for people who have poor internet connections or for people who have their images turned off, you know, describe the picture, subtitles, captions and um and having auto play disabled are important for our videos and gifts. Um Auto play can be distracting for some folks.

Captions can be either open or closed, open captions are always in view and cannot be turned off or closed. Captions can be toggled on and off by the viewer and I know we're right at the end. So I'm gonna kind of breeze through these and like I said, there's like bonus material at the end that y'all can look at with the slide deck. Um I want to talk a little bit about social media, use capital letters to break up your hashtag like my name, you know, capital A capital J. Um It makes it easier for people who use assistive technology for parse and it really comes to readability. You know, remember that Twitter doesn't distinguish between cases when we search hashtags, you know, you can search for Black Lives Matter with all lowercase letters or Black Lives Matter with capital B, capital L capital M. And they're all gonna come back with the same results.

Images even in social media should be captured or described. And a lot of the social media platforms al allow for that. Now too, here's my favorite example of a, of a muddled uh hashtag um So lots of folks saw that now that Cher is dead, but really it was uh uh now Thatcher is dead. So again, it comes down to that readability and it helps people who are in a hurry. People with low literacy, people who are stressed, people who are multitasking low English fluent fluency. And um folks with cognitive impairments too. Emojis and emoticons, everyone loves them.

Screen readers really love them. They love them so much that they read every single one of them in line. We've all seen those tweets with multiple emojis. Imagine the screen reader reading them all before they even get to the content. And this can be cumbersome. Digital blackface refers to um non-black folks claiming black identities online um or to non-black folks using black people in gifts or memes to convey their own thoughts just as we don't want to see um or tolerate a white person taking the stage dressed in blackface. We need to have that same level of no tolerance in our online spaces too. And really why it's important is because it can perpetuate black stereotypes or any, any stereotype, you know, native Americans, Indians, um disabled people. Uh It turns their emotions into comedy at the pleasure of, you know, the privilege and the problem lies in the way, you know, excluded individuals have been and still are exploited by the media for humor. Couple more slides and I promise we'll be done. Um Start by being a good example in an ally, you know, make your stuff accessible. Um You know, scan your text for gendered words. Um And there's lots of tools available to help with content, use accessibility checkers, you know, read checkers. I have links in the resources at the end of the slides. Um some people are being ized by, you know, adding their pronouns to public um to public uh profiles and email signatures.

And this is really to normalize gender identities and conversations around them, you know, and it's really easy for us to criticize folks. But calling out is the idea of publicly letting people know when their values don't align. And this can be oppressive behavior and often shuts people down.

Um It's a shaming culture that's amplified on the internet because it's anonymous and often it makes the conversation horizontal and that um folks are, are are fearful of being targeted. Whereas I invite people to call in and take it the form of like a private conversation in a time for education because people make mistakes and are often unaware that they cause harm. And that calling in versus calling out can be a more productive dialogue. So again, you know, think of the inclusion in your layers, you know, on that personal level, on the community level and the global level, and if you have the privilege to change your language because you have the ability or the resources or the cognitive ability, consider becoming more aware of how your everyday speech and text and interactions can perpetuate ablest gender and racial ideas and values and like I said, this was a lot of content and I have more at the end, but I do wanna say thank you.

And I do have a QR code if you wanna connect on linkedin because I've went over time. Um But I wanna kind of scan the rest of the slide deck so y'all can see what, what's at the bottom. Um I have how to make your presentations accessible, things you should know about acronyms and abbreviations, numerals, um things around forms. Um How do you, how do you provide education and training? And then I have some really cool links to some tools that check for grammar, inclusive language, gender terms. And then I also have some accessibility tools that help you with the look and the feel of the website to make sure that your content is coming across to everyone. So, thank you. I'm gonna go back to that slide um with my information. So if you wanna connect and ask me questions, uh you can do that because I, I love having conversations around this and then if there's something you think was totally missing or maybe it just I can improve upon, let me know because it's all a learning process. Thank you.