7 ms·

The amount of doublespeak in this document is absolutely off the charts. Disability equals Mismatched Human Interactions - really? http://download.microsoft.c

• ZenoArrow 10y ago
  > "Why bend and squish words into different definitions?" It's not bending definitions, the World Health Organisation's definition of disability is a generic description of what a disability is. To be clear, the definition given was... “a mismatch in interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live.” In what way does that not line up with what a disability is?
  • blfr 10y ago
    This definition matches every discomfort.
    • ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Such as? Perhaps it helps to think of disability this way to shake the idea that it has to be a permanent state. If I break my leg, but it eventually heals, was I not temporarily disabled?
      • blfr 10y ago
        Such as not enough leg room on a plane, a chair with not enough padding or ventilation -- every possible discomfort, including most trivial ones, even to a fully-abled, mint-condition, picture-of-health human is some mismatch between them and their environment. (If I wanted to be snide, I'd include "using Windows".)
        • ZenoArrow 10y ago
          Using your leg room example, if it's inhibiting your potential range of motion whilst sitting then you are disabled. To look at it a different way, isn't a person with healthy eyes as equally disabled as a blind person when they're in a completely dark room? The source of the disability is not as important as the outcome.
          • kevhito 10y ago
            No. Because you (and WHO) are consistently leaving out the obvious -- all of this is in comparison to "typical" human abilities. According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter, since none of us can survive outside without special clothing. And if humans could see magnetic lines, we'd all certainly be better matched to our earth environment, so does that mean all humans disabled?
            • ncphillips 10y ago
              > According to that definition, everyone living in a northern climate becomes disabled each winter This seems valid to me. The prefix "dis-" is a negation prefix[1], and "abled" means to have a range of abilities[2], so it is equivalent to not-abled. Not having a range of abilities. There's nothing in this most basic description that suggests being disabled is an abnormal or permanent state. In the context of getting to the grocery store in the winter, I am quite literally disabled by the cold temperatures, unless I have some natural occurrence or form of technology that en-ables me–el nino, clothing, vehicles, underground tunnels. I am disabled from reading this screen if I don't have my glasses on. This is a permanent disability, but I can correct it by either putting on my glasses, or by making the text bigger. Our set of abilities is not immutable, and technology is just meant to add to this set. Microsoft's document is just about making designers aware that not everyone always has the same set of abilities as the designers themselves. Recognizing this allows us to design technology that helps more people in more situations. WHO did not change _the_ definition of "disabled", they _corrected their own_ definition to recognize that whether or not a person is disabled is a contextually dependent question. [1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dis- [2] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled http://www.dictionary.com/browse/abled