The key phrase in that letter is "where is the deaf person on the team?" It's arrogant to take someone else's culture and redesign/"enhance" it, particularly i

The key phrase in that letter is "where is the deaf person on the team?" It's arrogant to take someone else's culture and redesign/"enhance" it, particularly if members of that culture are impaired or disadvantaged. Privilege creates blind spots, and the most invidious kind of privilege is the kind that you don't realize you have. The typographer Adrian Frutiger notoriously designed a "universalized" version of Devanagari script in the 60s or 70s. Not having the necessary insight into the history of the letterforms, he made an embarrassing mess of it. I don't think anyone really feels that this made him a bad person, but it's indicative of the tendency to march in and appropriate cultural artifacts in an insensitive way.