Best practices for inclusive content creation

We’ve all seen pernicious stereotypes about the abilities of various groups in our culture. For example, girls aren’t good at math or science, or Asian kids are very smart and hardworking.

As you choose names and situations for the imaginary people who populate word problems and illustrations, avoid reproducing these stereotypes. Shake up your characters to reflect our belief that anyone can learn anything.

Make sure that if you cast individuals in various professions, you don't reproduce stereotypes about who belongs in a profession, e.g. all doctors are men and all nurses are women.

This is not to say that every word problem needs to have a secondary goal of inverting stereotypes, but as a general rule, try to make about half of your characters female and half of them male, and men and women (and people of all races!) should be represented equally across scenarios.

Kids and adults the world over use KA, so get creative with your character names. Here’s a list of names from many different cultures if you get stuck.

And here's a name generator

As much as possible, our content should be accessible to people with disabilities, including illustrations that take into account both color blindness and vision impairments in general.

The image and illustration widgets come with an alt-text box that allows content creators to describe the image and illustration in detail. Use it! Make sure the alt-text includes all information relevant to understanding the problem or concept at hand.

Unless there’s no other word available to convey the intended meaning, avoid using gendered language.

For example, use chair instead of chairman. Even when the chair is a man.

Do not “gender” professions, such as stewardess. Use flight attendant instead.

Many people still use he/she, “he or she,” or (s)/he to communicate situations where the pronoun of the individual is unknown. This is a little clunky, so consider varying your pronouns in an article. For example, “A dentist knows she has to fit three more patients into her schedule this afternoon,” and later, “When a patient arrives, he should have his insurance card with him.” It is also okay to use “they” as a singular pronoun! e.g. "The doctor cares about their patients."

There are also some words and phrases in all languages that have racist origins, and we should avoid using them. Some of these are obvious, while others are less obvious, so when in doubt, look it up.

Our language also has a tendency to associate dark things with badness and light things with goodness. We’re not in a position to completely reorient the symbolism of the English language, but we can try not to reaffirm those associations. For example, it’s just as easy to write “Mark was in a terrible mood” as “Mark was in a dark mood.”

Much of our content will be translated into other languages. With that in mind, make sure that your examples aren't too specific to where you live or to a particular region. For example, rather than use "badminton" which is not played widely, you could use "tennis". Whenever possible, insert examples of different cultures and eras. Avoid cultural jokes.

Khan Academy should be a fun place to learn, and our examples and scenarios, especially for content aimed at young audiences, should paint a picture of a positive world. We never know what kind of trauma a learner might be bringing to the site with them, so we want to avoid damaging their opportunity to learn by (re)traumatizing them unintentionally.

Needless to say, history, MCAT, psychology, biology and other subjects at the high school or college level will need to deal with difficult issues at times. In those cases, be factual and dispassionate. Don’t give more detail than is necessary for understanding the concept.