Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

Pol Comm Tech Lab believes that fostering and celebrating equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is essential for cultivating a vibrant, innovative, and safe academic and research environment for everyone.

By actively embracing the richness of perspectives and experiences within society, Pol Comm Tech hopes to create positive social change and foster a culture of respect, collaboration, and excellence that benefits Lab members and the broader community.

Our commitment

Pol Comm Tech welcomes and celebrates differences in age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, abilities, political affiliation, religious beliefs, and all other dimensions of diversity. We are committed to fostering a safe and inclusive lab environment atmosphere where everyone feels heard, acknowledged, and empowered to express their authentic selves without fear of judgment or discrimination. We believe in the inherent dignity and worth of every person, and we strive to create an environment that values diversity, promotes respect, cultivates understanding, and encorages feedback and growth.

We are dedicated to dismantling barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of all members of our community. This includes, but is not limited to, removing barriers that impede diverse individuals' participation in hiring, day-to-day tasks, research methods, and knowledge acquisition and mobilization. Whenever possible, we seek to adopt inclusive research methodologies that encorporate missing perspectives and forefront the lived experiences of diverse individuals. Discrimination, harassment, or any form of harm to others will not be tolerated.

Accessibility statement

Pol Comm Tech Lab seeks to ensure physical and digital accessibility for everyone. We want anyone who engages with the Lab to find the experience easy to navigate and simple to understand.

We are currently using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 standard, the most up-to-date international standard for making web content more user friendly, including individuals with disabilities. WCAG guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA, AAA). We've chosen Level AA (the most accepted) as the target for this website. At this moment, we are partially conformant.

We regularly monitor this site to achieve and maintain accessibility, but users may experience some issues despite our best efforts. If you do find any accessibility issues, please get in touch

Actions we are taking

We intentionally cultivate an interdisciplinary lab environment that recognizes the value of collaboration across disciplines;We
We use inclusive language, including individuals' choice of personal pronouns and preferred names;
We allow time for everyone to share their input during meetings and projects;
We promote learning about and training in digital inclusion, including through our Intro to Podcast Accessibility webinar;
We foster digital and media literacy through reading groups, directed research projects, and peer-to-peer feedback; and
We offer flexible work policies to accommodate diverse needs, including in-person, online, and hybrid work options.

In our general communication strategy, including for our social media...

We strive for digital accessibility by:
- Ensuring sufficient colour contrast;
- Using alt text as needed, for example in Instagram, X, and LinkedIn posts;
- Using sans-serif fonts (like Arial or Calibri);
- Only using underlining for hyperlinks;
- Avoiding the use of italics for emphasis;
- Avoiding the use of all caps;
- Avoiding the use of centre alignment for large blocks of text;
- Using left-aligned text instead of justified text;
- Avoiding the use of flashing content;
- Using the clearest and simplest language appropriate;
- Avoiding device-dependent wording like "click-here";
- Capitalizing each word in a hashtag #LikeThisExample.
We make content available in English and French, whenever possible

We share our job postings with diverse sources, networks, and communities to broaden our applicant pool;
We use inclusive and gender-neutral job descriptions and include diversity and inclusion statements in our job postings;
We clearly communicate the recruitment process, criteria, and expectations to all applicants;
We strive to accommodate individuals' needs through the hiring process;
We ask applicants for the same position the same base interview questions;
We pay research assistants equally regardless of gender, physical ability, etc., pursuant to the collective agreements in place between uOttawa and CUPE unions; and
When asked, we provide feedback on applicants' interviews.

We make as much of our research as possible available for free and open-access

Every research project is different and requires different approaches. From the very start we try to design projects which embed our core principles of accessibility in a way that makes sense for that particular study. We also check in as projects progress and ask ourselves questions like: Are there perspectives we are missing? What might other, additional, data collection and analysis approaches offer that we do not already have? Who thinks the knowledge gap we have identified matters and why?
We are always balancing the desire to be expansive in our study with real resource constraints and an understanding that we are not always the team best placed to answer certain questions.
We rely on a variety of methods and theories in an effort to understand social phenomenon form various perspectives.
In our Mean Tweets project we designed our methodological approach to forefront the lived experiences of various diverse individuals, including women and people from racialized and other marginalized groups. This builds off our work highlighting the need to develop positionality-aware machine learning and artificial intelligence systems (see "Assembly 2019: Positionality-Aware Machine Learning" under Other recent work on the Our Research page).
We try to ensure that research assistants working on projects involving manual content analysis come from diverse backgrounds so that findings are informed by a variety of personal experiences;
We provide research assistants working on difficult projects the space to vent and talk about their experience with this content.
We maintain confidentiality guarantees.

By adopting an audio format, we seek to accommodate various learning styles and offer convenient on-demand educational content;
By working with guests who have professional experience in political communication, we strive to make theoretical content relevant to students with various backgrounds, demonstrate possible career paths, and offer a platform for industry leaders with differing experiences and identities;
We search out guests with diverse perspectives;
We offer to accommodate guests' accessibility needs;
We allow guests to take breaks if needed during episode recording, for example to tend to children or dependants;
We use inclusive language, including our guests' choice of personal pronouns and preferred names;
We offer a land acknowledgement during episodes (seasons 3 and 4, and season 6 forward);
We make episode transcripts available in both English and French, and annotate these transcripts with hyperlinks to additional information, relevant context, explanations of idioms and terms of art, etc.;
We make annotated transcripts available in both HTML text and in a downloadable PDF documents;
We include a link to download the MP3 for each episode on the episode web page in case the embedded audio player is not compatible with assistive technologies; and
Podcast content is all freely available without a subscription or paywall.

We strive to achieve W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 standard (AA), including by adopting the following best practices:

Links
- Writing unique descriptive link text for each hyperlink;
- Directing links to open in the same browser tab and indicating (in the link text) when this is not the case;
- Only using underlining for hyperlinks and using a different colour for hyperlinks than for other text; and
- Including accessible text for icon-only buttons/hyperlinks.
Fonts
- Using sans-serif fonts (like Arial or Calibri);
- Avoiding the use of italics for emphasis;
- Avoiding the use of all caps;
- Avoiding the use of centre alignment for large blocks of text; and
- Using left-aligned text and avoiding the use of justified text.
Media
- Ensuring sufficient colour contrast;
- Using alt text as needed, including omitting it for purely descriptive images and, for images which are hyperlinks, describing what will happen when the image is clicked and not what is in the image;
- Preventing video and sliders from auto-playing on page load; and
- Avoiding the use of flashing content.
Page design
- Ensuring page headings are sequential;
- Coding lists with the appropriate mark-up instead of writing bullets and numbers manually;
- Designing pages so they can be easily navigated using the keyboard;
- For pages with a lot of content, like the Toolkit for Academic Policy Impact, including in-page navigation options ("on this page" links); and
- We design content to make it responsive to various screens, including smartphones and tablets
Wording
- Using the clearest and simplest language appropriate;
- Avoiding device-dependent wording like "click-here"; and
- We make content available in English and French, whenever possible.
Other
- Seeking feedback to foster continual improvement.

Please note: While we have been actively working to promote EDI since the Lab's creation, the actions listed above were instituted as Lab-wide standards effective February 2024. Some content prior to this date will not meet these standards (for example: social media posted prior to this date may not have alt text for all images and not all podcast episodes in seasons 1 and 2 have transcripts or translations available).

Known limitations

Our Contact us form has a label error. Individuals encountering difficulty with this form should email polcommtech@gmail.com.
The media player provided by our podcast host, Buzzsprout, may not be accessible to all users. We have included direct MP3 download links on each episode page to allow users to listen to the podcast using the media player of their choice.
Prior to S06E02, hyperlinks on Wonk and War Rooms episode pages may: open in a new browser window instead of the current one, have insufficiently descriptive link text, and use two different link texts to when directing users to a unique URL.

Planned next steps

Finish auditing all pages on this website to ensure accessibility;
Create a guide for developing accessible PowerPoints; and
Create a guide for developing accessible PDF documents.

How are we doing?

We want to know how we can better your experience with the Lab.

If you have any feedback to share, questions about our policies, or have experienced or witnessed any behaviour that contradicts our commitment to EDI, we encourage you to reach out so that the appropriate next steps can be taken.

Please get in touch in one following ways:

Contact us using the form on our contact page,
Email the Lab director at elizabeth.dubois@uottawa.ca, or
Fill out this confidential form to submit your feedback anonymously.

Thank you for helping us build a safe and inclusive space for all.

The Pol Comm Tech Lab is supported by the University Research Chair in Politics, Communication and Technology at the University of Ottawa.