This is done whenever public utilities buy custom software.

The freedom of users of accessibility software is more important than ever.

Blind people in my family rely on proprietary software for dealing with visual impairments. It's painful and offensive how exploitative these tools often are. The thought of installing something by a similar company into one's body is frankly dystopian.

As a citizen of a country with free healthcare, Sweden, I wonder how we deal with these issues. We dont exactly have a stellar record when it comes to software procurement in the health sector.

It's not the only imaginable way, but it is the society we (in the vast majority of the world) live in, and I agree it doesn't really make sense to bash something not continuing to exist unprofitably when it was developed for profit.

It's annoying when software support ends for anything, phones, Nest Protect, (any Google product!), but I think best to bear it in mind in buying anything that it's a possibility, who are you relying on for what and what's their incentive to keep going.

Thanks for those links. I recently looked for a plugin that reads highlighted text in firefox that "just works"... but found limited success (this was on linux). But really great to see that there are large-scale, OS-level already established FLOSS projects out there.

"blind" isn't a noun though. "a noun person" is what you mentioned, but "an adjective person" is different. A tall person isn't all about their height, they're just way above average in height. "A person with tallness" would emphasize the height aspect in a strange way.

In TFA it could be as simple as trying to differentiate between fully "blind" people vs people with MACD (or other severe visual impairments as indicated at the end)

i.e, people with a condition that leads to blindness, full or partial.

You make a completely false equvilance.

A car person would be some kind of car person hybrid if you read it literally. Car person is acting as a short hand for "Car obsessed person." Car is a noun, blind is an adjective, etc...

> Is there really an "obsession"?

There's somewhat of a debate about it throughout the European eastern block. Policing language is somewhat of a touchy topic around here.

Personally I much more often stop saying certain things than start using some expressions - they typically age badly.

> Is there really an "obsession"?

Not sure that specific phrase is an obsession, but I hear a lot of language-police-type people who try to shame others into changing some phrases like this. The one I hear most often where I live is to use "person experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless person", the idea being to not to consider "homeless" as a part of their identity, but to acknowledge that it's a (hopefully) temporary situation they have found themselves in.

I get what people are trying to do here, but I think it's unnecessary, and just increases people's cognitive load and adds verbosity to expression. And gives disingenuous people more ammunition to derail discussions. And as you say, it seems like most of the people pushing for things like this haven't even talked to a blind/disabled/homeless person to ask what language offends them. I don't know any blind people, but the people I've talked to with various disabilities had no issues with being called "disabled".

> You're "frankly fed up" with something that barely affects you at all. Why?

Not the person you're replying to, but I assume the problem is that other people often shame or "correct" them when they use the "wrong" terminology, which is not only annoying, but can even cause real-world problems (e.g.: use the "wrong" term at work and maybe your career prospects get worse).

"something that barely affects you at all. Why?"

First, this is often forced on people from the above. I don't like the idea of language coercion, doubly so for ideological reasons. Imagine that BBC journalists were forced to include Allah or some nationalist tropes in their work in order to increase piousness and patriotism of their readers; to some people, this actually sounds like a good idea! I don't believe you would wave it away easily.

Orwell described this well with his "Ministry of Truth". BBC (from which this article comes) isn't a ministry, but isn't a private subject either.

Second, can you think about the long term consequences? Just look around at the sorry state of Western politics and Western online discourse.

Language is one of the few cultural commons that remains. There is no chance that stuff like "people with blindness" or "LatinX" will universally prevail. Too many people react to it negatively, including in the young generation. We run a real risk of the left and the right developing mutually incomprehensible languages, which would be a disaster - once that happens, the polarization will be cemented in, because swing voters would have to be bilingual.

I've seen the split of Czechoslovakia myself, and Czech and Slovak aren't even mutually incomprehensible. Just far enough to remind the people that they are very different from each other.

Third, this construct is extremely impractical. One of the actual observations of Chomsky is that natural languages are good at chaining things. For example, you can easily talk about poor blind homeless black people. Once you enter this rabbit hole fully, you have people of color with blindness experiencing poverty and unhousedness. This is just not a reasonable way to communicate and this is also my main hope that this abomination dies out. (It reminds me of Old Norse kennings [0], but those were an art form and never considered to be an actual language of communication.)

Again, see Orwell and his newspeak (Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.) Orwell wrote his dystopias based on experience with the English intellectual far left, and it seems that those ideas live on.

===============================

Summed together, to start all this while the actual blind people DGAF, as you yourself say, is at best an experiment in futility and at worst throwing more ** into the fan that has us already deeply covered in **.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning

Well, it's not always nice to realize that your condition is casually used as a negative conotation in everyday language. OTOH, there are worse things in life, so I mostly blink and move on... There are other hills to die on.

Isn’t “visually challenged” (or similar) a useful term for people who have visual impairments, but aren’t technically blind?

Do you have the same objection to, say, “visually impaired” if a person is trying to talk about all people with various vision problems, up to being fully blind?

If those are unacceptable, what would you use in that case?

Nah, its only perceived as a slur by language police people with little stakes in the actual game. And, the slur thing is definitely not an US only phenomenon. In the german speaking area where I dwell, the youth use "spast" as a general derogatory term for everyone they dont like or perceive as "below" them. That is definitely a slur that went rogue.

Ahh, and to the language police people who downvote my POV: You are the problem. Stop patronising us.

The idea of replacing "blind people" with "people with blindness" has absolutely nothing to do with the idea that "blind" is negative - if it did, I suspect proponents would, you know, not use the word blind!

The actual reasoning is putting the people first, not their disability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language

Deaf-mute is not a slur in the US

Sorry to hear that. Given that it's genetic only something like Crispr could perhaps one day help.

Off topic but in the same vein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)

My layperson understanding is this happens because the mechanism that dilates the pupil responds to visible light so glasses cause it to open wider, but if they don’t block UV then you end up with more UV exposure than if you didn’t wear anything

Most plastics are transparent to UVA, which is like 90% of UV that reaches earth's surface. They only start absorbing at higher UV frequencies. That's why sunglasses have dedicated UV ratings. You can bring your sunglasses to basically any optometrist and test how well they block UV. It takes 20 seconds and they'll probably do it for free.

Glass protects from UV bellow 350nm, which leaves 350nm-400nm band open. So additional coating is required. I might be wrong but such factors as glass thickness and the radiation intensity should be also accounted for. Every physical object is mostly an empty space ...