Visually impaired people fear smart glasses backlash | Hacker News Reader

Visually impaired people fear smart glasses backlash

bbc.com

16 pointsbookofjoe13 comments

Blind. The article is referring to blind and partly blind people. I'm visually impaired and thus I wear corrective lenses. This practice of applying euphemisms to every disability and impairment is stupid and unhelpful.

Just wanting to point out that visual impairment is a scale.

Very few people can't actually see anything, and so you are choosing your level of visual impairment as 'not blind' but someone else's at 'blind'. Someone else may put that line in a different place.

Fitting something not binary to a binary scale is hard.

One thing that we can all agree on is that they have some issue with their sight, e.g. some visual impairment.

“Visually impaired” isn’t really a euphemism for “blind.” It’s a broader term that can include people with different degrees of vision loss, including people who are partially sighted and people who are blind. So in this context, the article is using the term pretty normally.

Also, wearing glasses doesn’t automatically make someone visually impaired. If your vision is fully corrected with glasses or contacts, you generally wouldn’t be considered visually impaired. The term usually refers to vision loss that remains even with the best available correction.

I'm not sure I've ever heard of poor visual acuity (that can be corrected with lenses) being referred to as "visual impairment".

Really, acuity is a spectrum and almost nobody has perfect vision.

old people don't mind being lumped together.

https://unwall.app/www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx2qlz7ney2o

Thanks. This is a helpful tool. BBC blocking access to non-uk IP's is very annoying.

Annoying but you'd probably do the same, you categorically cannot be funding the media you're consuming when you're visiting the BBC on a non-UK IP. The ad impressions don't cover it, and BBC Worldwide take a cut before the BBC proper receives anything anyway.

The BBC proper doesn't receive anything from advertising, in fact. But that's because what most people think of as 'the BBC' actually isn't the BBC proper.

It is indeed the BBC proper (i.e. the corporation with the royal charter) that encompasses BBC News, which is the source of this article, as one of its divisions. But BBC News and the BBC proper are not the commercial organizations, i.e. BBC Studios and whatnot.

Inside the U.K., there are no advertisments on this or any BBC News article. Outwith the U.K., what people get is actually coming from a separate commercial company, BBC Global News Ltd..

> The BBC proper doesn't receive anything from advertising, in fact. But that's because what most people think of as 'the BBC' actually isn't the BBC proper.

Not only did I make this distinction in the comment you're replying to, but you're also just wrong -- the BBC takes about £5b a year from BBC Worldwide and part of that money is ad impressions. The point is that it doesn't cover the cost to supply the service.

We need more stigma against those devices, not less.

But at the same time we need to make medical vision devices that are exempt from those bans because they give strong privacy protections to the passerbys.

Why? If we can make medical devices with strong privacy protections, why can we not make regular glasses with strong privacy protections? This is a totally incoherent take.

Because the strong privacy protections could be of the form "no image leaves the device" and "only vetted software will touch the image data".

Sometimes, privacy is at odds with features. That is why those devices would no longer be marketable as "regular smart glasses."

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