Inclusivity Style Guide
Welcome to the ACS Inclusivity Style Guide
This guide aims to help American Chemical Society staff and members communicate inclusively while sharing science with each other and to the broader public.
- Introduction to accessibility
- 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 and newsletters
- Infographics
- Posters
- Emoji and emoticons
- Hashtags
- Keyboard navigability
- Markup languages and ARIA attributes
- Auditing and Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)
- Website overlays and widgets
- Resources on inclusive language for accessibility
- Introduction on data visualization
- Accessibility considerations for data visualizations
- Choosing accessible color schemes in data visualizations
- Choosing color to represent people in data visualizations
- Ordering groups in data visualizations
- Identify biased data
- Design with empathy
- Disaggregate when possible
- Handling small data samples
- Resources on inclusive data visualizations
- Introduction on health
- 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
- Disability-related terms: Euphemisms
- Disability-related terms: Metaphors, hyperbole, and specificity
- Person versus patient
- Drug use
- Resources on inclusive language for health
Gender and Sexuality
- Introduction on gender and sexuality
- When and how to mention gender and sexual orientation
- How to describe relationships
- Language about the body
- Using "female" and "male" versus "woman" and "man"
- Gender-neutral language
- Singular "they" when gender is unknown or irrelevant
- Singluar "they" for people who use that pronoun
- Discussing pronouns
- Glossary of terms
- Intersex
- LGBTQ+
- Nonbinary
- Queer
- Transgender
- Two-spirit
- Resources on gender and sexuality
- Introduction
- When and how to mention race and ethnicity
- When and how to mention nationality and locations
- When and how to mention immigration status
- Capitalization and hyphenation of races, ethnicities, and nationalities
- Races and ethnicities as adjectives
- BIPOC, BAME, and People of Color (POC)
- Brown
- Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latine, and Latinx
- Indigenous peoples
- Minorities, non-White
- Multiracial, mixed race
- Resources on inclusive language for race, ethnicity, and nationality
- Introduction
- When and how to refer to socioeconomic status groups
- Neutral language for socioeconomic status
- Factors that affect socioeconomic status
- Show variety within all socioeconomic status groups
- How to refer to community types
- How to refer to occupation
- How to refer to housing status
- How to describe countries in relation to wealth
- Resources on inclusive language for socioeconomic status