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Comment by mbrookes | Hacker News Reader

"many visually impaired I've talked to"

This says it all really.

As a blind person myself, I think I get from where you're coming here. But, as has been suggested by others, my first read of this was "non-native English speaker" rather than "offensive." I can't count how many times we've been referred to by folks as "blinds," which cracks me up every time (in a good-natured way, that is.) My girlfriend, a wheelchair user and speaker of 4 languages, regularly finds such things amusing as well, particularly as she can usually understand the linguistic reasoning behind much of the awkward phrasing.

That said, I'm glad they seem to be working with blind/visually-impaired folks. I hope they likewise staff their company with blind developers/designers as well, since we're still not terribly well-represented in tech, and it always makes me a little sad to see companies building products for us, but only involving us in the testing/final steps. I'd love to hack on something like this myself, and have played with Arduino-based echolocation augmentation for help with solo cycling/sports/other non-basic use cases. I hope there are blind developers working with you on the firmware.

Thanks for jumping in. In fact one of the founders is Visually Impaired. Fernando is a tremendous asset to Sunu, he has a Ph.D. in Physics by Harvard, has built two successful companies before Sunu and is one of the smartest, hard-worker and good persons I know.

Woow, that was a long discussion for a peculiar observation. To be honest I didn't clearly understand what the observation was at the beginning, I did feel it was pointing some sort of incoherence in my reply although I didn't know what it is exactly, and from all your reply's its evident everyone understand something a little different, so... it doesn't really "says it all". Yes, I am from Mexico and we don't have a problem saying "Visually Impaired" (they don't have a problem either), in Mexico we say "Ciego" for blind but people who want to be gentle say "Invidente" which means "no vidente" which can be understand as "not seer" or "no clairvoyant" which is funny and not accurate. In summary, this is not racism, is a medical term for a real condition. It doesn't makes sense to be gentle, embracing the disability is important for adaptation, starting from the term. This is my market, this is the people I love and I want to encourage to be active, the term is just a term, the product and my work spent over the years does says it all.

In what way does it "say it all"?

Do you feel there's a lot someone could learn about you that isn't immediately clear from your comment above? Or does it "say it all" about you?

Apparently insensitive language is ok, but questioning it is not? HN, you've lost your way.

I think the founder is originally from Mexico so it's possible that English is not their first language. And either way, there's a more polite way to bring something to their attention than as you did. It's possible to have your heart in the right place, but misstep with language.

I am a native English speaker (UK) and I cannot figure out what the problem was. Instead of assuming why not explain?

I am GUESSING that some people think "visually impaired" is insensitive?

Why is this insensitive language? What do you think he should have said instead? I'm curious because I would not want to offend anyone. 'Visually impaired' seems like a standard way to describe people who have either full or some degree of partial blindness, in the UK you can even register as 'visually impaired' with the government and the NHS (National Health Service) uses this term.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Visual-impairment/Pages/Introdu...

I guess their complaint is that the phrase "visually impaired", rather than "people with a visual impairment", or even the less respectful "visually impaired people", sort of makes it sound like the people he spoke with are defined by their disability.

It comes across pretty badly in my dialect of American English to turn adjectives about people into nouns. For example, "I saw a disabled on the bus today" or "a visually impaired" or "a Chinese" without "person" afterward would all be really weird phrasing, and if you were otherwise fluent in my dialect it would imply that whatever you were about to say next was likely to be pretty clueless about that group.

BUT I wouldn't apply that inference to someone with a foreign accent, even a British accent. It's a fine point of style that I can't assume will translate across dialects. (For example, "I saw a German on the bus today" would be much less weird than "a Chinese" to anyone speaking my dialect. How do we know? We just know.) So here I think mbrookes has the wrong idea.

All I can say is thanks for taking the time to write this. For the life of me I could not figure out what did the op do wrong.

What should it be? I found this a much nicer way of describing 'blind' people than you, apparently, did. What is a better, more polite way to describe someone whose vision is impaired?

You're not questioning; you're attacking. Why?

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