Our team worked hard to keep our project as inclusive and accessible as possible while working towards engaging and reducing barriers for under-represented communities in science.
We created educational materials for high school indigenous students, some of whom were from regional or remote areas with limited access to scientific education. We also aimed to create an accessible website utilising colour blind friendly graphics, tone indicators for our promotional video for autistic viewers, audio descriptors, alternative text and an audio transcript for vision and hearing impaired individuals, accessible fonts as well as making the entire wiki set up for keyboard navigation by using tab and enter keys.
The main way we worked to improve the access to science for marginalised people was our educational materials developed for Indigenous high school students. Our Tahgara workshop was developed at a high school level to be accessible to our students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as low socioeconomic status and regional and remote areas. These factors make access to science extremely hard for these students and our workshop aimed to help eliminate some of these barriers by creating a free, engaging and accessible program to improve the confidence of these students to enter science. Programs like this are extremely important for under-represented communities, shown by one of our iGEM members, Kawana, finding her pathway to tertiary science education through this program when she was in high school. Our education material can be found in the Education and Communication page.
As well as this, our team worked exceptionally hard to ensure our website was inclusive as possible by incorporating accessibility measures. The content text uses the font Helvetica, as this is considered reading accessible. All of the charts and graphed results have been created using colour blind friendly colours to be readable for colour-blind individuals. Alternative text has also been provided for all webpage figures and our promotional video features visual descriptive aid to be inclusive of vision impaired individuals. Transcripts are provided for our promotional video and podcast as well so that hearing impaired individuals are able to enjoy our contents. The transcript also include tone indicators to better communicate the tone of our sentiments and conversation as a whole. Our entire webpage is keyboard only accessible, allowing users who are unable to use a mouse to navigate the webpage using the ‘Tab’ and ‘Enter’ keys.
All these features were added to ensure that our research was accessible to as many people as possible, removing barriers to access and promoting inclusivity in synthetic biology.