Inclusify

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Landing page
Editor page
Editor page in action

Inspiration

Women and non-binary people are often at the receiving end of gender-biased language. It is something that is seen throughout many instances in our lives, whether it be conversations, job postings, or publications. Our goal is to encourage people to be more cognizant of their language and more motivated to use unbiased and inclusive vocabulary.

What it does

Inclusify identifies the words that are racially insensitive, gender biased or inappropriate to use in the context of talking about people with a disability and provides more acceptable alternatives. For example, “master”, an insensitive word, could be substituted with “professional” or “principal”. Inclusify also supports simultaneous Grammarly editing.

How we built it

Inclusify was built using Javascript to gather our word bank and made requests using Axios to the WordsAPI to obtain substitutions for these words. We created our word bank using file-system. Our front-end is composed of mainly React, and we also used React-Router, Bootstrap, and Material UI.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was pinpointing a feasible web application solution to a global issue. There were many aspects of our project that we had to tackle: creating a library of insensitive words and their synonyms, building a user-friendly interface, and supporting live word-scanning. To create our word library, we perused innumerable resources including online articles and libraries, thus bringing in many perspectives and experiences into helping improve the scope and effectiveness of our application.

Another challenge was the text-box. It was a challenge to make it both editable and clickable. This was fixed by adjusting between two React states. Moving the text cursor around between the states was the biggest challenge, but was solved with string building.

Finally, our last challenge was setting up a Domain.com custom domain with our web app which is deployed on Heroku. This was really tough since we were unfamiliar with Domain.com as well as setting up custom domains on Heroku/Netlify. After two hours of fumbling around and seven domains later, we were finally able to get one working!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing live-word analysis that connected to our word library
Collaborating and sharing individual input amongst each other
Sourcing from multiple different resources and experiences throughout the creation of Inclusify

What we learned

While creating the list of insensitive words we realized that we subconsciously use terms such as “crazy”, “weirdo” and “master” which can be derogatory to certain sections of the population. Discovering synonyms for these words informed us of the importance of using words that are more sensitive and inclusive towards others.