Inclusivity Style Guide
Welcome to the ACS Inclusivity Style Guide
This guide aims to help American Chemical Society staff and members communicate in ways that recognize and respect diversity in all its forms.
- Involve a diverse group of people in the creative process
- Be appropriately specific
- Avoid labeling people by a characteristic
- Ask people how they want to be described, and respect that language
- When to include personal characteristics
- Recognize words that assume a cultural norm
- When to use “diverse”
- General resources
- When to mention body size
- How to mention height
- How to mention weight
- How to describe antifat oppression
- Body size movements
- Recognize intersectionality in body size
- Avoid using "fat" to mean something negative
- Don't conflate weight and health
- Avoid healthism
- Critically examine the evidence and sources, and provide context
- Avoid problematic frames of weight
- Don’t glorify dieting, weight loss, or thinness
- Resources on inclusive language for body size
- When and how to mention someone’s health
- People-first language and identity-first language
- Capitalization of health conditions
- Neutral language for disabilities, disorders, and diseases
- Avoid euphemisms related to disability
- Avoid metaphorical uses of disability-related terms
- Avoid using disability-related terms to describe something negative
- Person versus patient
- Drug use
- Resources on inclusive language for health
- When and how to refer to socioeconomic status groups
- Avoid deficit-based language for socioeconomic status
- Acknowledge systemic factors that affect socioeconomic status
- Show variety within socioeconomic status groups
- Do not use racially coded terms for socioeconomic status
- How to refer to occupation
- How to refer to housing status
- Avoid outdated and generalizing terms for countries
- Resources on inclusive language for socioeconomic status
- New Work
- Assistive devices and technologies
- Writing for accessibility
- Fonts and typefaces
- Hyperlinks
- Alternative text and image descriptions
- Images of text
- Formatting tables
- Color to convey meaning
- Color contrast
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Emails
- Infographics
- Posters
- Emoji and emoticons
- Hashtags
- Keyboard accessibility
- Markup languages and ARIA attributes
- Auditing and Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)
- Website overlays
- Resources
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