We don’t always think of language itself as a usability or accessibility issue, but language is highly complex and socially constructed. Language can draw a user in or make her feel rejected or othered, which will make or break an experience. This talk will center on why language is a content, usability, and accessibility issue, and highlight the consequences of not considering your users/audience when designing/writing content. You will learn how to reflect on your language choices, be more thoughtful with your content, and when/how to use translators.
By the end of this session, you should learn:
- How language standards become standards and what that means when writing for specific audiences
- More about the social and contextual effects of meaning-making and how humans communicate without saying exactly what they mean
- How you can be more inclusive with your writing
- Why you need to test your content with users, especially if you are using translated material
- The benefits of using a human translator and testing your translated content with your target audience and why it matters that you test
Attendee skill level: Minimal. I will explain any technical language/terms I use and will provide real-world examples to illustrate.
Session Slides
Chris has worked at Comcast for 9 years — currently as a Senior Principal Engineer. He enjoys building/motivating teams and ramping up new projects. Besides coding in Javascript, He loves spending time with his family and helping out in the community. Chris is also heavily involved with local colleges and schools to mentor the next generation.
Jason is a technical writer and monitoring evangelist at Datadog, where he spreads the message that monitoring increases knowledge and knowledge is power. Prior to becoming an evangelist he was the DevOps & Web Performance community manager at O’Reilly Media and a software developer at MongoDB. In his spare time you can often find him travel hacking, cooking in a restaurant or hunting for rare whiskies.
Heidi is a widely experienced technical writer with an interest in writing herself out of work. She specializes in creating entire documentation suites for new companies and products in less time than you would believe possible. She speaks on topics like search-led writing, starting new documentation products, and whistleblowing as a technical writer.
Corey Vilhauer is a user experience strategist at Blend Interactive, a web strategy, development, and design firm in the middle of the Midwest. He is a recovering advertising copywriter and a closeted fan of professional wrestling. He writes at length about methodology, empathy, and small-business content strategy at Eating Elephant, and writes about other things at Black Marks on Wood Pulp.
Michelle is an independent graphic designer and front-end developer in Minneapolis. Before beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. Together, this resulted in a love of How To Solve Problems. Lately she has been specializing in WordPress theme development and high-end presentation design for her clients. She loves the open source community and speaks/volunteers/organizes at WordCamps and other events and conferences around the country.
Mykl is a web designer and passionate community builder. As owner of Orange Jackalope Creative, he specializes in the design and development of a variety of digital experiences for both local and national organizations.
In addition to building engaging websites with WordPress, Mykl is the director of Social Media Breakfast – Minneapolis/St. Paul, host of the Social Media Boombox podcast, and co-organizer of the MN Blogger Conference. He speaks frequently on the topics of design, typography, and social media.
Adrian is a member of the W3C Web Platform Working Group, W3C Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group, and W3C Accessibility Task Force. He has written articles for trade journals, web sites, and participated as an author and editor on five web-related books. Back in 1998 he co-founded a software development consulting firm before leaving at the start of 2016 to start all over. Some may recognize Adrian from his days helping to run evolt.org, one of the first communities for web developers. Adrian has been developing for the Web since 1993.
John Riviello is a Distinguished Engineer and Lead Front-end Developer at Comcast where he works on the XFINITY customer websites and web applications. He is also the author of the Lynda.com course ‘CSS to Sass: Converting an Existing Site.’ In his free time, he prefers surfing waves over surfing the internet.
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