I recently came across the “I am not a typo” campaign. It’s brilliantly done.
The campaign features a series of images like the one I’ve included here, which is a billboard poster featuring a Black African woman and the text “Hello, my name is too African”. Others in the series include “too Asian” and “not English enough”.
This is so, so overdue.
I’ve genuinely lost count of the times my devices have tried to autocorrect away my amazing friends and colleagues who happen not to have anglo-centric names.
The stupid thing is it happens even when:
- their name is in my address book
- their name is in the “from” field of an email I’m directly replying to
- I’ve already typed their name (and corrected the autocorrect) in the same document
Address books and email header fields are places tech companies could easily look for names, which are clearly labelled as such. We know they’re mining our data for their own purposes, but this would be a public benefit.
Even if it’s too much to ask that global names directories are included for everyone (spoilers, it’s really not too much to ask) — operating system providers could simply, and privately, add the names of everyone’s individual contacts to the autocorrect of their device. It would be a start, and it would take minutes to implement.
In the longer term, most languages and cultures have a set of popular names. And the tech companies know this, because if you change the language on your keyboard, suddenly a different set of names become recognised. So for many (though probably not all) languages, the dataset already exists.
It just requires companies to realise that international and cross-cultural communication is the norm these days, and build their models accordingly.
