What is inclusive content and why does it matter?

Table of content

Inclusive content refers to content that is relevant, accessible, and understandable for audiences of versatile backgrounds and demographics. That means anyone can read the content regardless of educational qualifications, age, gender, location, economic background, etc. These could be any content like – blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, or anything else. Only you need to ensure that anyone can engage and interact with your content.

The aim behind generating this content is to celebrate the diversity and globalisation among the readers. Moreover, they promote business growth and sustainability. 

So, learn how inclusive content is captivating the world.

Importance of inclusive content writing

Before learning about the significance of inclusive content, you must understand what inclusivity is. Inclusivity refers to the people who have been marginalised. We can say that inclusivity indicates a specific community suppressed from social, economic, and civic life-related opportunities. Now, let’s consider a practical example to provide a better view. The Black Lives Matter movement highlighted the social injustice and systemic inequalities for dark-skinned people. 

Thus, to make your content inclusive, you need to consider the diverse abilities of people so that they can access the content without any difficulties. However, not only the diverse capabilities, you also need to consider linguistic diversity, such as identities, ethnicities, communities, races, cultures, abilities, beliefs, and backgrounds. Though taking care of all these factors is pretty challenging, you should be aware of them and allow everyone to enter the digital space. 

Core elements of inclusive content strategy

• Audience identification

Before creating your content, go for a deep dive into your audience demographic and background. Then, understand their unique needs and preferences. Analysing these factors, you must specify your message for the targeted audience. 

• Language

It would be best if you were extra careful about the language of the content. Some words lead towards implicit biases. Thus, use culturally sensitive words, nurture connection, and mitigate barriers.

• Sensitivity check

 Checking the sensitivity of content doesn’t stop by merely accepting diversity. So, consider regional sensibilities, acuteness, and cultural nuances. Thus, consistent sensitivity checking becomes mandatory for developing sensitivity checks. 

Ways to design inclusive content

1. Omit bias words from your content

While creating inclusive content, focus on the pronouns. Do you use ‘he’ or ‘she’? If yes, review your content again. You need to remove this gender bias from the content. Instead, you can use ‘they’. But not only gender bias; you can’t use any terminology against culture, social class, political issues, or other socially sensitive matters. 

To overcome this problem, you need to understand the bias blind spot and eliminate the terminologies associated with bias. In this way, you can improve user experience and spread awareness against the bias. 

2. Use responsive design

Responsive devices allow the users to consume content concerning different screen sizes using the breakpoints. Sometimes, the developers lock the screen orientation or turn off the app’s zooming ability. But they must avoid this practice and instead follow these rules of responsive web design – 

• Don’t fix your screen size. Instead, use a flexible grid that offers resilient screen layouts. 

• Use semantic HTML tags that describe the purpose of the page element.

• Apply relative units for font sizes like viewport height, viewport width, or percentage units. 

• Create meaningful alt text.

• Add the link text to describe the link destination. 

Also, follow the web accessibility guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) through W3C. It will help the search engines to interpret and crawl your sites. 

3. Create powerful structure and graphics for your document.

Use simple and hierarchical headings so end users quickly determine what they want. The headings guide you in assembling the web pages, emails, or documents. Then, focus on graphics. The graphics should not contain any complex information. 

If you have any issue related to the graphics or layout of the email client, ensure that you add the link to the web version for any HTML message. Additionally, use semantic HTML when you’re using HTML messages. Email also accepts tables for layout. You can also use CSS for it.  

Finally, evaluate your content with or without graphics. Sometimes, content with graphics creates barriers for people with visual impairment. Thus, you need to adjust the graphics with the content. As a result, your content will be accessible despite a lousy internet connection, lower fidelity or with a screen reader.

4. Use alternative texts for the visuals.

The alt texts for your visuals, like images, should be simple and descriptive. The text should explain what the image is about. It proves the relevancy of the image to the content. The goal behind alt text is to provide everybody with access to the information of that image.

The alt text should have the data if your image incorporates a graph or chart. For an illustration or a creative photo, the alt text must append the details. Again, sometimes your content may have a less significant image; in that case, you can use the null alt text. 

Furthermore, you need to ensure accessibility and inclusion for the labels of forms, buttons, and fields. Use simple language for these labels. If the button labels contain any images or icons, then you need to describe the function of that button within the label. 

Additionally, follow these tips – 

• Avoid using colour combinations like – blue/green, yellow/red, and red/green for images. 

• Maintain a brightness ratio of 4:5:1 between the interactive elements and texts. 

• Use enough white spaces. 

• Keep your font size a minimum of 14 px.

• Try to use Sans Serif fonts like Calibri, Helvetica, Arial, etc. 

5. Ensure accessibility of social media posts.

Social media platforms dominate the world of content. They can deliver messages and share ideas quickly with short-form content like images, videos, carousels, etc. Use proper descriptions to ensure the accessibility of social media content. For instance, you can add voiceovers, captions, or song lyrics as descriptions. 

But never address a specific group of people. Instead, make it available to everyone, including people of all ethnicities, genders, cultures, and disabilities. 

Now follow these tips to create inclusive social media posts –

• Use hashtags to make your social media posts easily accessible.

• Apply a larger text size.

• Add alt texts for the visual elements to make them more accessible. 

• Last but not least, use paragraph breaks within a chunk of text. 

Conclusion

Inclusivity in content refers to establishing your content in front of a diverse audience to make your brand more credible and trustworthy. Ask your site visitors and users for their valuable feedback. These will help you to generate more impactful strategies for creating inclusive content. Finally, it is worth noting that developing inclusive content is not a piece of cake. Also, you need to apply consistent effort to it.