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I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

(michaels.world)
405 points blindgeek | 2 comments | 18 Nov 24 10:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | source
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blindgeek ◴[18 Nov 24 10:14 UTC] No.42171168[source]▶
The author was essentially too smart to be blind.
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yorwba ◴[18 Nov 24 10:39 UTC] No.42171252[source]▶
I wonder whether talking about "looking at the javascript console" somehow made them think that this person cannot possibly be blind, since how could a blind person "see" the JavaScript console? (But "having my screen reader read the content of the JavaScript console to me" is a bit of a mouthful.)
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blindgeek ◴[18 Nov 24 11:30 UTC] No.42171499[source]▶
You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me. For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner. Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way. Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest of sighted culture. And then once in a great while, we get condescended to for it. There's a really good example of this in the second season episode of DS9, The Alternate.

``` ODO It was a dilemma for me. I'd never seen anything like these creatures either.

     MORA
   "Seen" isn't really an appropriate 
   description.  He had no eyes per 
   se...

     ODO
   I was only trying to describe it in 
   simple terms...

     MORA
    (ignoring that)
   He had never perceived anything like 
   us before... go on...
```

I can pretty much guarantee that every blind person has had a condescending, patronizing douche canoe like Mora in their life at least once.

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1. pbronez ◴[18 Nov 24 15:07 UTC] No.42172965[source]▶
I suppose one could say "observed" as a sense-neutral alternative to see / hear. Might be a worthwhile language shift, similar to using "they" as a gender-neutral alternative to "he" and "her".

We usually talk about the inclusion benefits of neutral language. It can also be valuable by making specific terms more meaningful when used appropriately. If I know you usually say "they", then when you choose to say "he" I get more information -- there's a clear gender expression. Similarly, if you usually say "observe", then when you say "see" I know we're specifically talking about vision.

Of course, it's an awkward transition. It's hard to get used to "they/them" and saying "I observed a delicious aroma" sounds like a robot impersonating a person.

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2. blindgeek ◴[18 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42173404[source]▶
It's notable that the majority of the people who would be "included" by the change to "more inclusive" language aren't offended in the first place. The sentence "I am watching TV" literally offended no blind person, evah. It is only sighted do-gooders who have the spoons to be offended by nothingburgers on our behalf. We're too busy dealing with stuff like, ... I dunno, landlords who refuse to rent to us because all they have is second story units and we might fall down the stairs. Yes this actually happened to me in 2000 or so, and I don't have enough faith in human intelligence to believe that it isn't happening today. We're too busy being oppressed by captchas and websites made by frontend devs who seem to care more about chasing JavaScript framework du jour than they care about accessibility. We're busy struggling against a built physical environment which has been designed for cars and not people. The supposedly non-inclusive language of "I watched TV" or "I looked at my browser's JS console" aren't even on our radar.

I coined the term "Sapir-Whorf Stalinists" a few weeks ago to describe the sort of people who think that monkeying with language will magically make things better for marginalized groups.

Here's Lee Atwater talking about the Southern Strategy:

> You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, > nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. > So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, > and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, > and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a > byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut > this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, > and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”