From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Wed Jun 25 2003 - 15:50:17 EDT
William Overington wrote on 06/25/2003 06:26:25 AM:
> Well, I realize that what I say may, at first glance, possibly appear
> extreme at times, yet please do consider what I write in an objective
> manner. If Unicode has a WHEELCHAIR SYMBOL then that is a symbol, if
> Unicode encodes a HANDICAPPED SIGN then that is a description of someone
to
> whom it is applied, a Boolean sign for all, whatever the disability may
be,
> whether it is relevant to the matter in hand or not. I do wonder
whether
> the encoding of the symbol as HANDICAPPED SIGN would be consistent with
> human rights as it would be assisting automated decision making with a
> Boolean flag and providing an infrastructure for such practices.
Wm, the name is simply a unique identifier within the std. A name may be
somewhat indicative of it's function, but is not necessarily so. You could
call it WHEELCHAIR SYMBOL, but that engineering of the standard is not
also social engineering, and people may still use it to label individuals
in a way that may be violating human rights -- we cannot stop that. No
matter what we call it, end users are not very likely going to be aware of
the name in the standard; they're just going to look for the shape, and if
they find it, they'll use it for whatever purpose they chose to.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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