Western’s web development team recently rolled out a small change in its Cascade web content management system. If you’re working on – or visiting – one of Western’s staff listing pages, the team hopes you take notice.
Western staff listing pages frequently have headshots associated with them, and web developers insert a placeholder graphic on the page while waiting for a photo to be provided. It’s like Twitter’s egg, only it is a silhouette of a headshot.
The web team simply changed the file name of Western’s placeholder graphics in order to make them more inclusive of all staff on campus.
Stock files named “headshot-female-115×150.gif” and “headshot-male-115×150.gif” used gender pronouns to denote the staff member listed. The file names have been changed to “lh-staffheadshot.jpg” and “sh-staffheadshot.jpg” detailing not the avatar’s gender, but the length of the hair in the image (“lh” for long hair and “sh” for short).
“When I was saving the short-hair placeholder graphic, I thought to myself, ‘I have a lot of (male and female) friends with that haircut,’ said Mathew Hoy, Western’s Senior Web Designer. “It occurred to me that in a tiny way, we could make the web more inclusive for those who construct and access it every day by focusing on the haircut and not the staff member’s alleged gender.”
These graphics are available to all websites built using the Cascade CMS. If developers have a site they’d like to apply this change to, they can contact web@uwo.ca to request the graphics effective immediately.