Disability and language

[elettaria]

I just updated ColorfulTabs, and found myself rather irritated by the language being used, which was no doubt meant well but comes off as condescending. I'm curious to know what other folks think. Please do talk about this further in the comments.

Comments

[elettaria]

I have to say that "differently abled" puts my hackles up as well, it just sounds to me like it's one step away from "specially abled". OK, several steps, that last one is ghastly, but my main point is that disabilities do not magically confer other abilities. There isn't really any term that even approaches being perfect. All the ones which lay emphasis on "special" or "challenged" or "different" further position people with disabilities as Other, and I think contribute towards the stereotype of the brave little crip making a big effort to be a valuable member of society, which in turn conjures up its partner stereotype of us all as lazy scroungers. It's so difficult to avoid highly charged language, and neutrality is something we really need here.

Have you tried No Squint for the scotopic sensitivity (which I have too)? Again you have to faff around setting colours for individual websites, and you only have a limited palette to choose from, but in my experience there are enough colours in there that you should be able to find something that works for you. It won't affect sites unless you want it to (unlike ColorfulTabs where you have to spend a while setting it up so that you can avoid the colours it initially displays), so if need be you can just use it on a few of your most-used sites to make them easier to read. I have the BBC and Google set to a pale yellow background, for instance.

ColorfulTabs is indeed a faff to set up, though once you've set it up for your most common sites it's fairly good. You can choose custom colours and keep them a lot less lurid than the standard ones used if you let it pick the colours yourself. Mind you, I don't mind random sites popping up in random colours, and since you presumably do then that would be a problem, unless you are going to spend almost all your time on the internet on the same websites. I find it useful as an organisational tool, though, it's not really about which colours I'm comfortable reading, it's to make it easier to skim tabs.

[littlemissalien]

I tend to use Irlen Filter to apply a light orange tint to the whole screen and that way things are much better.

I got into a bit of a discussion last week when a disabled person posted to a community, gave no indication of being disabled and then went into one when someone posed a question starting with "Would you be able to...?" crying ablism as loud as possible. She then took offence to being called disabled too, but gave no indication of how to refer to her issues. Consequently I interchangeably used the terms 'less able' and 'differently able' which didn't seem to incur her wrath, although I find them just as sketchy tbh.

Have you ever come across anyone using the term 'enabled'? I found that one to be just a little bit too positively discriminating because it was being used to refer to people who used various aids to help them in their lives - fair enough, the aids were enabling them, but it was also still drawing attention to the fact that they needed the aids in the first place. If it was being used by a group of people with impairments to reclaim their sense of ability and worth within society than fair enough, but the context I found it in was some patronising "they have ways to help them cope, they are now enabled" tone.

[elettaria]

Is this the software that overlays the whole screen? Glad it works for someone. I found that because it made the dark colours lighter and moved everything however many steps towards the chosen colour, the contrast was too poor and it felt like looking through a fog. I've done quite well with putting coloured plastic overlays on top of the screen, at least visually: they attract dirt like you've never seen and they're always falling off, plus I have to take them off and put them on whenever I want to watch a film on the laptop. Apart from that, they do help but I find that changing the background colour will still be more comfortable where possible. I think I'm a medium contrast gal, as opposed to high or low contrast.

That sounds like a ghastly situation. Misunderstandings and lack of willingness to give people a chance aside, we do have a serious problem caused by not enough suitable and inoffensive terminology. I don't like "less able" or "differently able" either, although fair enough that some people do.

"Enabled"? For real? This sounds to me like the myth that disability aids will completely make up for the disability in question, and may even confer an advantage over non "enabled" people. This may be true for a few cases, but the vast majority of the time a disability aid will not fully compensate for whatever's been lost or is not functioning as it should, and will call attention to the person using it and make them more likely to be the subject of discrimination or even hate crime. When I was fighting with my uni for disability adaptations for my studying and particularly for my exams, I kept hitting a brick wall of "but if we do X then you'll have an unfair advantage over the other students." Yes, I can type faster than I can write (admittedly by this point I couldn't actually write at all), so giving me a laptop for exams did give me that advantage, but it didn't even come close to outweighing all the other disadvantages I still suffered from memory loss, not having the energy to keep writing for several hours on the trot, and being completely thrown by the laptop freezing for thirty seconds every time I saved the file I was writing in. There's a strong suspicion of allowing people with disabilities anything that might actually help them, perhaps because it often looks weird and incomprehensible, and because it may cost money or effort to the non-disabled people.