We aim to make BOU events as inclusive as possible and ask presenters to assist us in this respect.

Making presentation text accessible
We ask presenters to avoid jargon and ensure that materials are suitable for non-experts in their field and for non-native English speakers.

When preparing a presentation for a BOU conference, including talks, posters and Bluesky presentations, please consider the following suggestions for ensuring your text is accessible:

• Consider making font type, size and colour dyslexic friendly. See this dyslexia friendly style guide from the British Dyslexia Association.
• Consider using full sentences rather than linguistic short-cuts. In some cases, emojis and symbols can be helpful in conveying your message.
• Abbreviations like PCA, CRISPR, GLMM or ANOVA may only make sense to a specialist audience and may need to be explained in detail. Think – is it necessary to use the abbreviation / name of method or can it be omitted? For Bsky presentations, the answer is almost always that the abbreviation can be omitted.
• If you want to use abbreviations to save on characters in future posts or slides, make sure you explain them upon first use.
• Some words that are commonly used in ecology, or your specific branch of ornithology, may actually be alien terms to others. Ask yourself, would someone outside of my research group, or my family member, understand this term? Some examples may include: angiosperm, oology, albumen, quadrat, abiotic. See this helpful glossary from the British Ecological Society for more examples of terms that are frequently used in ecology but may actually be quite hard to define and may be misunderstood.