As science and society mutually influence each other, we believe everyone should be allowed to engage in scientific discussion. In the ‘Leaving no one behind’ promise of the United Nations, social inclusion is defined as “the process of improving the terms of participation in society for people who are disadvantaged on the basis of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status, through enhanced opportunities, access to resources, voice and respect for rights” [1]. In other words, embrace everyone no matter their gender, race, disability, socio-economic status, or other disadvantage.
We think that inclusivity is fundamental when introducing a new project. Following this line of thought, Colourectal is designed in a way that considers inclusivity, by being available and accessible to everyone. We included inclusivity in the various aspects described below: disability, gender & race, language and socioeconomic status.
At the beginning of the project one of our team members told us he is colour blind. We wanted him, and other people with colour blindness, to be able to see our logo, website, and graphics clearly. Graphs or figures can be hard to read or interpret when they have multiple colours that are not recognized well by colour blind people. When choosing our colour palette, we validated the colours through a test to ensure all colours are distinguishable to people that have a colour vision deficiency [2].
Additionally, we chose a typeface that is easy to read for people with dyslexia. Several studies showed that a ’sans serif’ font is easier to read for people with dyslexia [3]. Sans serif literally means ‘without serif’, meaning that the letters do not have little decorations, as is seen in for example ‘Times new roman’. The typefaces we use are ‘Multicolor pro’ for titles and ‘Myriad pro’ for normal text.
We wanted everyone to be able to identify themselves with our persona, Noah. Therefore, we created a gender-neutral persona, with a gender-neutral name. Moreover, Noah has a purple skin colour to prevent exclusion of race. Finally, Noah speaks in English and does not use complicated words, to ensure anyone can understand them.
We started the Colourectal project by thinking of improving the colorectal cancer screening programme in the Netherlands. However, it would be best if our living diagnostic tool could be implemented all over the world. Therefore, we found it important to engage with people from several countries. We did this not only by interviewing an English doctor, but also by spreading our survey in different languages. We translated our questionnaire in five different languages to reach as many people as possible in a short time. We also included people from all ages and backgrounds.
Scientific texts often include complicated terms and information that is not always known by the general public. However, we believe that everyone should have access to scientific information. To make this possible, the scientific community needs to communicate in a way that everyone can understand. Therefore, we translated the abstract and project description to plain language with the help of Supertext, a company that converts texts into plain language. Plain language ensures the reader can understand a text both quickly and completely.
In 2022, the number of people living in extreme poverty is expected to increase by more than 200 million people [4]. One of the reasons for this is increasing food prices. Healthy food, like fruits and vegetables, are increasing more in price than unhealthy foods, making it hard for people in the lower socioeconomic groups to have a healthy diet [5]. We found that healthy food is one of the key factors for decreasing the risk of colorectal cancer. In the Colourectal project we advertised a healthy diet that is easy and affordable via a self-made cookbook. We included healthy recipes with basic and cheap ingredients, and we made our cookbook open access. We hope to inspire the people around us to strive for a healthy lifestyle and with this cookbook we want to make a healthy lifestyle accessible to people from every socioeconomic level. If you wish to learn more about the cookbook, click here.