Be My Eyes “Inclusive Language” Guide

Be My Eyes set out to change how people talk about its users, who are Blind People and those who have Low Vision, and the guide begins with a plain question: what do we call them? Blind is a word that deserves respect and carries a positive meaning, so no softer substitute is called for. Be My Eyes research shows that three quarters of its users have some vision, which is why it pairs blind with low vision. Legal labels such as legally blind and registered blind mark a status on paper, so the guide keeps them for moments when that status is the point and otherwise says Blind People.

Part one of the guide lists habits that carry ableism into everyday speech. Ableism, it explains, is the belief that nondisabled people are the norm and People with Disabilities are exceptions, and it gives people different worth the way racism does. Labels built on a picture of damage or partial sight are ableist to the core, dated, and syrupy. A phrase about loss tells a person who became blind decades ago to keep looking back, when most blind people focus on who they are. Phrases that wrap blindness in negative feeling add an emotional judgment to someone's experience, so where the state must be named, the guide suggests naming someone's lived experience of blindness. Dodging the word see does no favors either. Blind people see films, watch shows, and see friends, and what offends is talking to them differently than to anyone else. Two more older words complete the list, one that disabled people have hated for fifty years in every form and a pair of labels that grade how well a person lives in the world.

Part two of the guide takes on person first wording, the advice of recent decades to say people with disabilities, or a person with blindness, rather than disabled people. The reasoning was that disability words sound negative and call for balance by putting the person up front. The guide points out that this pattern is reserved for disability alone. Nobody says a woman with riches, because rich is no insult, so we say a rich woman. It encourages saying a blind woman, which treats blindness as the ordinary description it is, rather than setting disability language apart from every other kind.

A plain word said with respect carries more dignity than a soft word said with pity. Part three of the guide turns to tone, and it says the tools blind people use are alternative techniques, never inferior stand ins. That is why it favors access technology, a name that points at barriers in the world and at no neediness in the person. It swaps words that picture a power imbalance for partner, describer, interpreter, and volunteer, which rest on equality. It prefers became blind to wording that implies a whole person has changed, and it prefers a plain description of how powerful and efficient a tool is to a claim that someone is regaining independence, since the blind person is the one to speak of their own independence. It also warns that gushing praise casts a blind person as remarkable, when many simply want to be seen as capable and ordinary, and it points out that many organizations raise money by turning a person with a disability into a mascot. Our work in communities rests on the same view, because new words alone leave old attitudes standing and the people who live with a barrier know best where it is. An old word can carry a lesser view of blind people straight into a welcoming plan.

Used with respect, the plain word keeps its dignity.

Read the Full Article: Be My Eyes “Inclusive Language” Guide.
By: Michele