kindHerWords

Say what you mean and mean what you say.

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A project for cmd-f 2019 - Vancouver's first all-female* hackathon!

Created by Victoria Chang, Shanice Mcsavaney, and Nicole Li

Hosted on https://kindherwords.com/

Inspiration

The name kindHerWords is a representation of our team of females trying to promote more word-inclusivity in people’s everyday lives.

The Problem: Some words create an environment that perpetuates negative connotations and perceptions of certain genders, people with disabilities, race and age.

The project was inspired by the values of the cmd-f hackathon: Women* Supporting Women*, Building Confidence and Positive STEM Identities and Learning [https://cmd-f.nwplus.io/]. We hope this project can serve as a tool for the everyone to establish a better sense of belonging through using more inclusive words. We not only want to suggest more affirmative words you can use, but we also aim to be educational and explain words that hurt and why.

What it does

The Solution: We want to create a tool for people to reclaim words for themselves as a form of empowerment and learn how words can have an impact on others. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

We prototyped our idea with a website. You submit your text in an input field and we will suggest alternative words and an explanation why the word may be deemed a better alternative!

How we built it

RESEARCH > PROTOTYPE > CODE AND REPEAT

We researched by looking at human resource guidelines, LGBTQ+ resource center material and articles on the topic. We started paper-prototyping our ideas and working out workflow on paper. Then with Github set-up, we divided up our tasks to make the front-end with Bootstrap and backend with JavaScript. We used assets from an inclusive design-package for the background.

Challenges we ran into

Oh my gosh, UI aligning takes a long time. Text parsing can be so tricky :/ And those merge conflicts GAH

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Showing up to the hackathon, learning how to turn coffee into code, seeing our idea come to life and having a blast with our teammates.

What's next for kindHerWords

We would love to expand our database and make a Chrome extension to take our prototype to all webpages. Adding this to other platforms like Slack would also be awesome.

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