Accessible and inclusive language guidelines
The words we use have power. Inclusive content design means writing for everyone, everywhere and that we don’t exclude or harm any of our users.
Check out the guidelines: Accessible and inclusive language - Polaris.
What and why
When I joined the Content Design team at Shopify, I’d often be asked, or come across questions like the following:
I’m trying to avoid blacklist but can’t think of an alternative. Does anyone know a good word to use instead?
Is it okay to say accounts are disabled?
Do you have a link to the terms to avoid spreadsheet?
We didn’t official guidelines to help with these kinds of questions. I also thought it was really important that we set a tone and direction for inclusive design practices.
So, I did some research, and started creating a project — spinning up a proposal, gathering and aligning stakeholders, and sourcing contributors. I used the company’s Hack Days, a 3-day quarterly event for learning and experimentation, to kick the project off.
“‘We’re not our users’ refers to the false-consensus effect. This is the tendency to assume that others share our beliefs and behave like we would in a given situation. But we’re also quite literally not representative of the people we design for. In the tech industry we have known and serious gaps in our cultural defaults. Tech employees are overwhelmingly young, white, cis-men from North America.
We need better representation and inclusion in tech. And, our content and design should reflect our international and diverse user base. For instance, 15% of the world’s people have disabilities. Our users come from different cultures, ethnicities, lived experiences, and speak different languages. Our users also come from historically-excluded communities, and have intersectional identities. Language has power, and we need to be aware of how our language can harm and exclude our users.”
What I did (and how)
I couldn’t be prouder of this work. I lead this project from idea to launch, and to post-launch governance.
If you’d like to know more, I wrote about the process in detail to empower others to do the same: How to create accessible and inclusive product content guidelines.
Now, Shopify’s design system empowers accessible and inclusive content design across the entire org, and is also referenced widely externally. When launched, the accessible and inclusive guidelines were the top performing pages on Polaris, a site that has half a million visitors each month.
It wasn’t easy, but things well worth doing rarely are.
