AndHumanity, Inclusive Marketing Agency

"Whether you’ve experienced abuse or are watching someone you love go through it, your voice matters. Your story matters. We can’t let shame or fear keep us silent." In recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month in Canada, AndHumanity’s Sheryl Johnson shares her powerful story of resilience and the complex legacy of domestic violence within West Indian culture. From witnessing her grandmother’s silent suffering to confronting her own experiences, Sheryl opens up about the generational impact of silence and shame. Her story is a call to action—to break the cycle, to speak out, and to support each other in healing. This month, let’s stand together to bring awareness to domestic violence and challenge the culture of silence surrounding it. Check out the post! https://lnkd.in/gtkVnr3G Trigger warning: This story discusses domestic violence, including physical abuse and emotional trauma.

Here’s step 5 of 6 from our 6 Principles for Inclusive Community Engagement — Ensure Clear Communication. By actively closing the feedback loop, we demonstrate our commitment to transparency and accountability. It’s not enough to simply gather input; we strive to share back what we’ve learned and how it shapes our decisions. This process not only validates participants’ voices but also builds a culture of trust and collaboration.

What is brand polarization in our Inclusion Continuum? In polarization, a brand is moving from awareness to understanding. The brand may be set in its current ways. Polarization is an ethnocentric placement, meaning that all other cultures or dimensions of difference are compared to the dominant one. While unintentional, there is often an implication that equity-deserving audiences are different from or less than the dominant culture. Learn more from our article. https://lnkd.in/e8ZB2WWC

Transcript: Often, inclusive design is written about and articulated by designers and the industry as a specialized field. However, inclusive design should be synonymous with user experience (UX), and more specifically, UX design. UX design is research-based design with the goal of creating seamless user experiences. Here are some examples of what inclusive UX design might look like: First is text size. Research by Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) illustrates that older adults find sites and digital designs are created with a young demographic/user in mind and difficult to read. Older users often find user interfaces (UI) illegible due to presbyopia – a form of farsightedness that is common after middle age. Keeping the user experience in mind, UX designers could increase the font size, use a clean typeface, and have a high contrast between characters in the foreground and background to ensure legibility. To move towards inclusive UX, designers could also consider providing a button that allows the user to increase the font size to what works for them. Not only would this accommodation work for older users, but it would also benefit younger users who might deal with eye strain due to high consumption and use of digital devices. A second example of what inclusive UX design might look like includes using inclusive imagery when creating graphics and illustrations. Designers often think creating minimal imagery consisting of outlines produces inclusivity, as the graphics are generic and devoid of certain physical features such as skin colour. However, in reality, research has shown that users feel this establishes the opposite. With skin tone and other identity characteristics missing, users felt that these illustrations more likely consisted of white folks. To move towards inclusive UX, diversify the imagery you create to better align with your user demographics and to support the full range of human diversity. What are some examples you can think of that incorporate inclusive UX?

Here’s step 4 of 6 from our 6 Principles for Inclusive Community Engagement — Practicing Ongoing Consent. Practicing ongoing consent means not only obtaining initial agreement but actively nurturing a dialogue that empowers participants.

On National Coming Out Day (Oct 11), we reflect on the importance of visibility and the systemic barriers that affect the queer community. In Sydney McNeill’s (they/them) latest article titled “National Coming Out Day: Holding Systems Accountable and Coming Out Late”, they explore the need to move beyond empty encouragements to “come out” and reflect on their own coming out journey. It's a reminder that coming out is personal, and that we all have an accountability to make it safe to come out. https://lnkd.in/gVz4gYpR

What is brand denial in our Inclusion Continuum? In denial, a brand is ignoring or negatively impacting audiences (whether intentionally or unintentionally) and assumes a lens in which the dominant group is presumed superior. In this stage, the brand struggles to conceptualize ways to engage in diverse efforts and inclusive understandings. Learn more from our article: https://lnkd.in/e8ZB2WWC

Many of our clients ask us the same questions. In our latest blog, we share our most frequently given advice, including tips on how to meaningfully engage with Dates of Significance, how to incorporate accessibility into your content, and how to tell stories authentically and inclusively. https://lnkd.in/gRRMkDJW

We’re back with the 6 Principles for Inclusive Community Engagement! Step 3 is about emphasizing lived experience. Lived experience refers to the firsthand knowledge gained through personal circumstances and identity. As we can never fully see the world through someone else’s lens, we prioritize including those with lived experience to shape the process of engagement. This commitment to 'nothing about us, without us' ensures that the voices of those most impacted are central to decision-making.

Transcript: At AndHumanity, inclusion is at the heart of everything we do. Including our design work. But what is inclusive design? Inclusive design is often mixed up with two related methodologies – accessible design and universal design. While all three approaches aim to create inclusive experiences, the focus of each slightly differs from one another. *Accessible design* primarily focuses on ensuring products, devices, services, digital designs, and environments can be engaged with effectively by people with disabilities. An example of accessible design considerations is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). While accessible design is an integral part of inclusive design, the scope of inclusive design is much larger. It is also important to note that accessibility standards are the bare minimum. Truly accessible and inclusive design must consider full participation *Universal design* focuses on incorporating “all” identity dimensions to create an experience and or outcome that can be accessed and used by the greatest number of people. While commonly used in the design of physical environments, the universal design methodology is also often used by inclusive digital design teams, such as AndHumanity. However, what differentiates universal design from inclusive design is that universal design tends to focus on a single solution, emphasizing the end goal and often leaving out the process to get there. *So, what is inclusive design? Inclusive design* focuses on incorporating as many identity dimensions as possible in creating a process and product that addresses a diversity of barriers and fulfils as many user needs as possible. This means including and learning from individuals with a wide range of needs and perspectives. Inclusive design may address experiences related to accessibility, age, culture, education, geographic location, language and race, to name a few examples. It is also important to note that inclusive design incorporates all of this into the design process (including research and testing) and not just the final product.