In this episode, Allie and Michelle talk to Hannah, one of the team members at Yoast who was instrumental in creating the newest beta feature of the Yoast SEO plugin which helps you keep your writing inclusive and welcoming.
Episode Transcript:
Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database, but with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.
Michelle Frechette:
Hi, Allie.
Allie Nimmons:
Hi, Michelle.
Michelle Frechette:
How are you?
Allie Nimmons:
I’m fantastic. I missed you. We’ve been off doing podcasts individually for a couple weeks, so it’s nice to be back on with you.
Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. I think we even skipped a week. We were both like, “Oh, my God, I’m out of town,” and you were like, “Let’s just do it next time.” But, yeah, I was on vacation, and that was really restorative to me, and then I got back and you’ve moved and opened an office space and so you have been a little bit off the grid and so, yeah, we’ve been filling in for each other. Although I’m sure this comes as no shock to our audience, but we do text each other all the time because I love you and we’re friends. So it’s all good. But welcome back. It’s good to have you. It’s good to say, “Hi, Allie,” at the beginning of the [inaudible 00:01:03].
I am super excited because we have a guest this week. We don’t always have guests. Sometimes we have stand-ins for each other, right? Last week, I talked to Piccia and, a couple weeks ago, I talked to Kenny, but this week we have a guest we both get to interview together and I’m super excited because the work that this person is doing in the company that I absolutely adore is just phenomenal. Let me introduce Hanna. Hanna is a developer and researcher at Yoast, and you might think what does Yoast have to do with Underrepresented in Tech? Well, first of all, they really do value underrepresentation and they try to hire that way. They value it so much that they sponsor Allie to do some of the work that she does in Underrepresented Tech.
Allie Nimmons:
They sponsor me to work on this project, and ,yeah, it’s been a great partnership so far.
Michelle Frechette:
And we did not invite Hanna today because we’re trying to do a commercial for Yoast. We invited Hanna today because Hanna’s got a project that absolutely rocks for underrepresentation and for representation in the community. So Hanna, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about you and what you do at Yoast.
Hanna:
Hi. Yeah, I work as a researcher and a developer at Yoast and I work on features that are responsible for the content analysis. So we try to make feedback that helps the user make their content more easy to read, rank better, and now also inclusive, which is related to our new feature.
Michelle Frechette:
Personally, ever since I started using Yoast back in the dark ages when I started working in web, love the red light, green light, yellow light thing that you have with Yoast. I don’t live and die by it because I think that that’s the wrong way to plan SEO, and I know that you all say the same thing, right? Content is what’s important, so make sure that your content match, but that red light, yellow light, green light, lets me know how I’m doing around the content that I’m planning. And I think it’s brilliant because it’s just a visual indicator of whether I’m hitting the mark for what I’m looking for. And now you’ve brought even more into the plug-in, and the project that you invited me to take a look at a couple weeks ago, and I was blown away by, is inclusive language indicators within the Yoast plug-in. So can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
Hanna:
Yeah, sure. [inaudible 00:03:49] language feature, it basically tries to detect words in the text that are potentially non-inclusive. And for that we collected and made research based on guides made by activists and people from the communities that are affected by potentially non-inclusive words. So basically when someone makes a post, the feedback highlights which works in the text are potentially non-inclusive, which it tries to provide an alternative and it links to help page that shares more information about what makes the word non-inclusive and how to replace these words in a way that still keep the meaning.
Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. I love that. So I think I met you at seven o’clock in the morning, which is so early to me, but you’re so six or seven hours ahead of me. So I appreciated that. First of all, y’all sent me some time so I could look at, and it was 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM or 7:00 AM. I’m like, well, I’m definitely taking the 7:00 AM call because 3:00 AM, it was great for you, but not so good on my schedule. But I met with y’all and just as soon as you shared your screen and started to show me, and then I actually got to log into your test site and play with it a little bit myself. I was blown away by how thorough you are. So words are like, let’s call it like we see it. There are words that if you have to refer to the word by the letter, say the N word or the R word, the R slur, the N slur, we don’t say those words publicly.
You shouldn’t have them on your website. And absolutely those kinds of words are going to get called out. But it’s not even just about the horrible words that people can tend to use in general language. It’s about sensitivity to more than that. So for example, the article that you had put in there said boys and girls. [inaudible 00:06:22] like a teacher talking about boys and girls. And it prompted you to remember that this is not necessarily inclusive because there are non-binary people in the world, perhaps it’s better to say students or children or other language for that.
And so you don’t just say, “Hey, this is bad.” You say, “This is why this is not inclusive. And here are some alternate ways that you might think about saying that.” So it’s not just the, “Hey, you’re doing that wrong, but let me educate you and let me show you ways to replace it to make your post, your article stronger.” And I really appreciated all the thought [inaudible 00:06:58] the effort that went into building out that language base to be able to put that on there. So just brilliant. Allie, you’ve got to see it. It’s on our website. You’ll see it. I know, but it’s just brilliant.
Allie Nimmons:
I have to go play with it. I haven’t had time to go take a peek yet, but yeah, I think it’s genius. And I mean, what fascinates me about what you just said, Hanna, was, you mentioned that you did a lot of research with these particular communities about what words we should be looking for and what suggestions should be added. Can you talk a little bit more about that research? How long did it take you to conduct all of that research? I assume that it’s a lot of people you might have spoken to.
Do you have an idea of how many people or how many communities you touched base with? I want to understand kind of the breadth of that research that you did because in our experience, in my experience, one of the hardest things about inclusive language is there’s so many cultures, there’s so many communities, there’s so many ways across the world in which people use and think about language differently. Like things in the US that might be okay, might not be okay in south America or vice versa. So can you talk a little bit more about the experience of that research that you did?
Hanna:
Well, yeah. We were working in a group of four people. Well, one of them was a scientific advisor. So a person who had extra knowledge from the social linguistics side and the guides we collected were based on sources that [inaudible 00:08:49] exist already. For example, the trans language primer, multiple guides on disability and language on the impact of colonization on language and we unfortunately didn’t get to talk to many people. We just used all the sources we could [inaudible 00:09:29] to collect lists that also partly came out from our head based on our own experiences.
Allie Nimmons:
That’s amazing. I can’t imagine having to do all of that kind of research. Was it nerve-wracking? Did you feel nervous when this came out in terms of, did you catch everything or did you miss something? Did you feel super confident that yeah, we got everything that we could or? Also, is this a work in progress? Is this something that you plan on updating further on into the future?
Hanna:
Yeah, it is a work in progress for sure. And just like we were afraid to miss something, we were also afraid to [inaudible 00:10:21] to false [inaudible 00:10:23]. So for example, what if a word is inclusive in one context, but not in another. And people already are very not happy often to be told about what words they cannot and can’t use. So if we give advice on that, we try to be sure that there’s a reason we are giving advice. So that’s why we try to take into account well, did take into account, context and it’s why the feedback is different depending on if the word is just not acceptable in all context, or if it’s okay when you talk about yourself or someone else who uses that word towards themselves. So it also depends whether a word has been reclaimed or not. And if there is a general agreement between the impacted group on whether it’s should be now common or not.
That’s why many of the feedback, even for the example of the boys and girls [inaudible 00:11:59] says, unless you know that the group consists of boys and girls [inaudible 00:12:05] husband and wife. Unless you know that they want to be referred to with this term.
And there was many things to be nervous about. And we also tried to give confidence feedback, but still make it clear that we are ourselves also still learning and growing [inaudible 00:12:34] because the world is rapidly evolving. I consider myself very active in this field, but I’ll admit there were a few words there I didn’t know I would see there. And that’s why we also want to be sure that people who use that feature won’t feel like we’re imposing it. So to even make it work, they have to go to the settings and turn it on rather than suddenly it appears.
Allie Nimmons:
That’s a really good point though. Because I was wondering that as well. So it’s a setting that somebody will now have to manually enable in the plug-in. It doesn’t automatically happen. Is that what you said? Cool. So, yeah, she’s nodding for those of you who are listening. Because I was thinking about, there are a lot of people out there who just want to put their content up and don’t particularly care about inclusivity. So I mean, one of the reasons I think this tool is so amazing and one of the reasons that I just feel like gushing about it is I think it is brave when a brand takes a stance on something that can potentially frustrate or isolate a subset of their users. And I can definitely imagine that there’s a subset of people who would’ve been like, “[inaudible 00:14:09] I don’t want all this stuff. I’m just trying to blah, blah, blah, blah.”
I can hear the rhetoric now about, “Everyone’s so sensitive these days, blah, blah, blah. Why do I have to police what I say.” My husband is a writer and we have conversations all the time about when words are censored and people tell you that you can’t say that word or you shouldn’t say this word. And he gets really frustrated by that. And I really love this approach because in most cases, well you can’t say that. It’s, here’s a better way to say that, here’s a way to say that that isn’t hurtful to people and you can choose if you want to be hurtful or not. And that’s continuously evolving.
And I’m so curious and excited to see how this tool evolves in reaction to language evolving. I’m relatively young in the world and I’m starting to learn that some words that I previously thought were okay, are not okay, as things are changing. Is there a method or a tool or a form or something that y’all have available that somebody can say, “Hey, you have here that mentally challenged is a better alternative, but we actually don’t see that anymore.” Do you have a tool that somebody can go in and provide suggestions, as a part of that community, of how the language is evolving? I’m not [inaudible 00:15:45] sure if my question is making sense.
Hanna:
Yeah, sure. We want that to be part of the [inaudible 00:15:53] so that when people go to the link page or the help page or find the feature, that they also have an option to share their own feedback, maybe add words or comment on the words, or maybe add better replacement words. The feature is still in its beta phase. So this will be part of working on it [inaudible 00:16:28].
Michelle Frechette:
One of the things that we’ve talked about before, Allie and I, is that inclusivity should not be a political thing. It shouldn’t be politically charged to use language that’s inclusive language, but we know that that’s not how the world works and that there will be people who will say that this is a political stance or that you’re making a political statement on it. I personally don’t see it that way, but I know that and I know that you’ve all thought of that too. I talked to Taco and he’s like, yeah, this could be a hot button subject, but it’s important to us. It’s important to us that we include this and the ability to turn it off is important to some people, I’m sure. I can see extremely religious organizations not having any problem with boys and girls and husband and wife, for example, and not caring that that’s in there and not caring to police their or suggest their content, things like that.
But for the majority of people… I mean for all people, I think this tool is excellent, but I know that there will be some people who won’t want to use it, is what I’m trying to say. But over and above, I think that people who turn on this feature in Yoast will be very pleased to see that there are better ways to say the things that they want to say and get their thoughts across in a way that’s a more inclusive way to say it. We can choose to be politically incorrect sometimes, for sensationalism or for whatever else. I have said some things in blog posts in the past to get people’s attention, but that does not mean that I have said things that were unintentionally exclusive to others.
So it’s a choice. Language is a choice. And being able to just hitting the marks on whether or not your content is hitting the SEO, being able to have some kind of feedback as to whether your language is also hitting the marks for inclusivity, I think is super important. And I, for one, really appreciate that you’ve built this into the plug-in and just want to thank you so much for the work that you’ve been doing.
Hanna:
Thank you. Actually, people indeed, yes, see inclusiveness as fully political, even though it affects everyday life also depending on the person’s background situation. And it is tricky also to find that direct link between [inaudible 00:19:12] and inclusive language. But we thought that since we are working on making the web better, trying to. Then yeah, maybe this could just be part of that. And if replacing one word with another helps to decrease the chance to alienate someone from receiving that knowledge or reading that fun content then maybe to help some of us who write and want to contribute to that [inaudible 00:20:02].
Allie Nimmons:
And I think it sets a really good precedent as well. I mean, Yoast is one of the biggest plug-in companies, at least in my mind, I don’t have numbers to back that up, but in terms of WordPress plug-ins-
Michelle Frechette:
[inaudible 00:20:16].
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, very well known. Millions of downloads and all of these things. And I think it sets a really good precedent when a big name in a community like ours does something like this, because it really opens the door and it encourages other companies to say, okay, well what does your tool provide for inclusivity? What are you doing to move the needle forward a little bit in terms of just making the world a little bit of a nicer place, a little bit of a more pleasant place for people to live. And yeah, things like this make me proud to be a member of this community because it’s like we are using our software for good. We are using our resources for good and it makes me super proud. So yeah, thank you Hanna for this work.
Michelle Frechette:
If anybody’s interested in learning more about it, Yoast did a article recently on their own blog about this project. We will retweet it from the Underrepresented in Tech Twitter account and include it in the show notes for this episode also. So if you’re interested in learning more, obviously just go to Yoast.com and you’ll be able to find all of the information there, but we’ll share some direct links to that article too. Anna, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate all the work that you’re doing in the WordPress community and the work that you do to make it a more inclusive and better community.
Hanna:
Thank you two, a lot. Was nice to talk about this. Thank you.
Allie Nimmons:
Alrighty. Thank you [inaudible 00:21:48] so much for listening and yeah, connect with us on Twitter if you have any questions and yeah, check our Twitter for the retweet for the Yoast blog post if you’d like to learn more and we’ll talk to you later.
Michelle Frechette:
Bye.
Allie Nimmons:
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