Birgit Olzem (@CoachBirgit) introduced us to her Project “Inclusive Language Checker for Open-Source Contributors“. At the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
Okay, Birgit, what is your project called and what is it all about?
Birgit:
Okay, the project I’m currently leading is called the Inclusive Language Checker for Open Source Contributors.
Simon:
I love how all the project titles at this hackathon are like 10 meters long.
Birgit:
Yeah, we managed to keep it short and possible.
It should also be descriptive enough. So basically the idea behind it is to improve written content on basicallyMakeWordPress.org or all WordCamp sites to make sure that there’s always the usage of inclusive language.
Often documentation is written in English and often based in the US and there’s always use of slang or terminology whichmight be difficult and offensive to someone else.
And also we have other cultural backgrounds and so we are looking basically for a list of terms and phrases which may be problematic and want to highlight that in the back end when you are composing content using in our case now WordPressblock editor to have a basic check if the terms you are using in your documentation documentation is inclusive or highlights when you maybe use a word which needs to be replaced for instance.
So that is the basic functionality we are having scoped out for the hackathon but for the future we imagine also have a basic accessibility check for correct semantic and hierarchy of headings and paragraphs but also the correct usage of alttags for image and visuals but also checking always for the good color contrast currently is a basic check already in there but we want to bring it more into awareness that these small tweaks for contributors are more helpful to make sure that the content published is more inclusive for everyone who isn’t really aware of that there is an issue maybe and we don’t want to put a burden on contributors contributors as well and we want to keep it as simple as possible so that is not invasive and nondestructive but also helpful educative in a wild dream maybe something like this will exist someday in core by default to make the wordpress project more accessible and inclusive by default but it’s a dream and we can dream about.
And we have a great team at our current setting. We have a really diverse team based on development.
We have some folks who are good in writing documentation.
We have a linguist. We have a project manager.
And so we are currently checking a list of words, which may be extended afterwards.
We are also putting the basics on GitHub, like creating workflows, how to open a bug report. so it gets tagged already inthe right position.
So we are preparing our GitHub repositories for a scale so that we can scale afterwards.
But it’s also easier to merge maybe to the WordPress org account on GitHub.
So we try to stay as close as possible to the WordPress core.
Don’t add any fancy new stuff, just hooking into the existing functionality and trying to catch and be performant as good aspossible so that we also stay in a sustainable way, not only from performance side, but also sustainable that contributors geteducated that there might be an issue, but doesn’t offend them or judge them for bad practices, but just only a gentle hit.
Okay, maybe you can tweak a little bit. it. That’s a basic idea.
Simon:
Okay. Thank you so much.
Birgit:
Thank you very much.