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