Comments on: Politically-correct labels

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:55:22 +0000

Read SWAP by Sam Moffie. the hero is deaf and so is the author.

By: Juanita Audit-Tcake

Juanita Audit-Tcake — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 15:46:07 +0000

And I think it’s reasonable to say that a lot of Americans are simply unaware that other versions of english are spoken beyond their shores.

That’s not particularly a criticism, the British were just as myopic in the mid 19th century. It’s an empire thing.

By: Vicki

Vicki — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 10:51:48 +0000

Howie that is so true. People with disabilities often think they are being “picked” on but in truth they’re not always. People can be impatient and intolerant of anyone who doesn’t measure up to their own “standards of perfection”. And others simply don’t care about anyone except themselves. It’s (I’d guess in most cases) not a particular insult to people with disabilities, because of the disability.

The person who was so definite about the terminology for people with hearing loss was a Deaf person who sees the attitudes behind the words as the problem, more than the words themselves. I understand that, which is why I wrote that we need to be aware that the labels are important to people, whether or not we identify with that importance.

My personal opinion is that people with an underlying attitide so insensitive to those with disabilities are not going to be sensitive to the nuances of politically-correct labels.

By: howard

howard — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 03:13:33 +0000

I think you really have to make a judgement about the rationality of people such as you described above, who choose to be THAT picky about innocuous terminology. ‘Hard of hearing’ or ‘hearing impaired’ Both adequately describe the situation.

What is true though is that it is not unimpaired people who have a monopoly on oversensitivity. Unfortunately, that sort of argument by them detracts from the importance of recognising and dealing with it compassionately and thoughfully.

By: Vicki

Vicki — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 23:15:43 +0000

No I think you’re right Jem. Blindness and low-vision disabilities are the most obvious, probably because the whole net experience is more radically different (and difficult) for those people than those with most other disabilities. This would in part explain why the focus is on these people.

An amazing number of web designers on various discussion groups I’ve belonged to don’t see any need at all to do more than put alt attributes on images. They say, “It depends on your target market and we are not targetting blind people”.

Web sites we as designers do for clients are generally sites for the client’s business. That means, they’re selling either goods or services. Make using a website and/or buying a product or service difficult for a user with one of the vast number of disabilities in the population, and that potential customer is lost to our client. Is that what our clients want? I hardly think so!

So I’m not sure why it’s really hard to get through to web designers that a) web accessibility is about a very large proportion of people in our society and they are people with money who buy things, and b) implementing accessibility measures on a website site is neither difficult or time-consuming in most cases.

(OK I’m blushing now. This blog is has not been modified - yet - for web accessibility but I will get to it! Really! )

By: Jem

Jem — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 19:56:00 +0000

One problem I’ve come across in my small group of accessibility-obsessed friends is that they seem to think that disabilities stop at those who’re visually impaired. Maybe it’s because I’m looking at the wrong websites, but I think this general attitude stems from 90% of websites we’ve (my friends and I) looked at focusing only on improving websites for screen-readers.

Is this true of most accessibility-focused pages or am I just missing out on a proportion of the good ones?