Re: People first language (comments to Biz Case)

Sharron,

All my comments were ‘for editor’s discretion‘, especially considering how late they were. And, yes, certainly don’t change the language used by someone else!

GitHub is usually fine for me, but I’ve recently lost my 2-factor access and may have to open a new account :(

Thanks for considering my comments.

Andrew

Andrew Arch
Intopia

________________________________
From: Sharron Rush <srush@knowbility.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2018 06:48
To: Andrew Arch; EOWG (E-mail)
Subject: People first language (comments to Biz Case)

Andrew, thanks for adding your comments and I am considering the ones around people first language. I am willing to change some of them but ask you for a bit of forbearance. In the UK  and to some extent in Canada and the US "disabled" "blind" etc are often used and are not regarded as disrespectful, depending on context.  My experience is that torturing the language is not always a necessity and can sometimes belabor the sentence to the point of awkwardness and become almost a self-parody.  I strongly feel that the "people first" movement was useful and valuable way to raise consciousness about how people are regarded.  I also believe that language can be respectful without having to follow such strict rules in every single case as to become unnatural and forced. Some of these instances - "blind students" for example were written by leaders in the field and I do not want to second guess their choice of how to express themselves.  Other instances are quotes from scholarly references. So can you give me a break on some of these or will you insist on people first language in each instance that it appears in this article?

Entirely different subject: Yours were very last minute comments (we re-opened the survey which we are happy to do.) But in consideration of the fact that comments have been open for several weeks, can you next time use GitHub? It is a real time sink to tease out needed changes from an essay like this in the comment section. Would you like Robert or another person who is comfortable to provide a quick refresher on GitHub?  we are happy to do that and it really makes addressing these comments ever so much easier.

Thanks again for commenting - truly! Please don't let my grumpy response obstruct the fact that I really need and appreciate your perspective.  I am very interested in your response to my point of view about this and hope you take it in that spirit.

Best,
Sharron



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Sharron Rush | Executive Director | Knowbility.org | @knowbility
Equal access to technology for people with disabilities