What is the Whole Whale inclusivity tool?
The Inclusivity Tool is a tool that checks a URL that you input and analyzes the text on the page. You’ll get warnings for any language on the page that could be considered offensive, as well as an alternative language to use in its place. Plus, it’s free to crawl any page on your website!
How does the Whole Whale inclusivity tool work?
We deploy a bot to crawl the URL you enter in the tool. That bot looks at all of the text in the body of that page and compares the language on your site against our database, a compilation of language that inclusive communication professionals have deemed as non-inclusive. If the bot spots any text that matches the database, it will return an alert with the location of the text with a helpful suggestion and context to learn more.
Request a full website Inclusivity Audit.
How did Whole Whale determine whether language is offensive or not?
The open source database that we started this tool with is called alex. The folks at alexjs.com have compiled this database of non-inclusive language based on resources written and shared by inclusive communication professionals, but community members are also able to send in suggestions or requests to keep the database current. Whole Whale then invested in deeper research on increasing this list to over 800 terms including context to help users learn more.
Since language is always evolving, we want to stay current on the most inclusive forms of language too! If you catch any language that should be flagged as non-inclusive, want to make any changes to our recommendations, or have other suggestions, drop your comment in the form below!
Why did Whole Whale create the inclusivity Tool?
As part of Whole Whale’s work to further our DEI values internally, we sought to ensure that the language on our website was as inclusive as possible. But auditing hundreds of pages accumulated over the course of 10+ years is no small feat. Plus, the nature of language is ever-changing, and we realized we would have to do the same audit again and again in the future to honor the labels that marginalized people choose for themselves.
Luckily, we love to build tools. If we were facing this issue, then we probably aren’t the only ones. Thus, we created this tool to help other websites – and ourselves – audit their content at scale with the smallest time investment possible.
To learn more about Whole Whale’s Inclusive Language Checker visit www.InclusivityTool.com or click here to download a PDF tool kit.