I was going to post a message on
this topic back in January when it came up during the Florida Certification
effort with Mark Early et al. Florida wanted
the opening VIBS script changed from “Welcome to the Visually Impaired
Voting System” to “Welcome to the Audio Ballot Voting System”. The reason given was that they
considered the nomenclature offensive. We rejected this request, because we
call the system VIBS throughout GEMS, the Card Creation Dialog, and
documentation. You can’t just
change the name on the audio script without making it consistent the rest of
the product. That said,
Florida changed
it anyway for their own “we’re special” audio
script, and I decided to just let sleeping dogs
lie.
Today brought a second report
with the same opinion, this time from
Maryland, so I
don’t think we can let this rest. I am still having a tough time
grasping at this though. It
does not seem to be a problem for the The Visually Impaired Persons of Southwest
Florida, the University
of Maryland’s Exhibition for the Visually
Impaired, nor the National
Association for Parents of Children with Visual Impairments. Did someone make the term impaired
offensive and not tell me? It’s
not like we are calling people who have trouble reading our ballot
handicapped or blind. Call me
political correctness impaired I
guess.
The prevailing alternative
appears to be Audio
Ballot. Someone
might want to go and trademark
that while we have the chance.
If no one sees a problem with this change, we’ll do a system wide
move to the new name in the next mainline
releases.
Ken