Adobe Acrobat Becomes Excessively Disability-Aware

I was using Adobe Acrobat 9 in Windows 7.  Suddenly it developed a sensitivity to diversity issues, particularly in the area of disability.  That is, it started offering accessibility services that I didn't want or need.  One message come up when I printed a .PNG image file to PDF.  As soon as Acrobat opened the PDF, it said this:

This page contains only an image of a scanned page.  There are no text characters.  Would you like to run character analysis to try to make the text on this page accessible?

I clicked the "Do Not Show Again" box and then OK.  The only alternative was Cancel, and I was afraid that would be construed as "please ignore what I just said."  Wrong guess:  it ran OCR on the page, which in this case meant it completely screwed it up.  I printed it again.  This time it didn't ask.  Fortunately, it seemed to be ignoring what I had just instructed it to do (i.e., run OCR without asking):  it didn't run OCR.  Another thing it did, when I printed an HTML page to PDF, was to flash a screen that said this:

Content Preparation Progress

Please wait while document is being prepared for.

At least I think that's what it said.  It flashed by pretty quickly.  It didn't say what the document was being prepared for.  But the result was a crappy-looking PDF.

I guessed that I must have hit a funky key combination that turned on some kind of accessibility feature.  I hadn't started this post when the problem first arose, but something had caused Acrobat's Accessibility Setup Assistant to spring into action.  There didn't seem to be any option to shut it off, at least not on the dialog that popped up.  I ran a search.  In one thread, someone commented that this sort of thing happened only when they had Speech Recognition turned on.  In Acrobat, I went into Edit > Preferences > Accessibility.  I unchecked everything and then printed that HTML page again.  No improvement.  Another person in that thread suggested going to C:\Program files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\plug_ins and renaming Accessibility.api to be Accessibility.old.  I tried that.  Now I got a new message:

No Screen Reader Support

This version of the Adobe Reader does not support screen readers.  Information about downloading a version with screen reader support is available at http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download

Apparently the step of making the Accessibility.api file unavailable was to persuade the system that Acrobat was not available for this purpose, and it should use Adobe Reader instead.  In that case, it sounded like the instructions to use accessibility settings might be coming from Windows, not from Acrobat.  I clicked the "Do not show this message again" box and tried printing the HTML page again.  No, it still displayed the page in Acrobat, not Reader -- which, when I checked in Control Panel > Programs and Features, wasn't even installed on my system.  I decided that renaming Accessibility.api to be Accessibility.old had not solved the problem, so I changed it back.  I did take a look, nonetheless, at Control Panel > Ease of Access Center (formerly Accessibility).  I went into the "Make the computer easier to see" option.  The only thing turned on there was the first option, "Turn on or off High Contrast when ALT + left SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN is pressed."  I turned that off, clicked Apply, and tried printing the HTML page again.  No, still got lousy output.

I couldn't see anything else obviously wrong in the Ease of Access center, so I went back to that discussion thread for more ideas.  But there weren't any.  A How-To Geek webpage gave me the idea that maybe the full message (above) was, "Please wait while the document is being prepared for reading."  This page said that renaming or removing Accessibility.api would kill that "Please wait" message.  And that might have been true; I hadn't looked specifically at that part.  But that wasn't my main objection. My main objection was that I was getting crappy PDFs.  And when I put it that way, I realized that it might be a problem with the PDF printer.  I was using Bullzip.  Was there an option that had gotten set wrong somehow?  In Bullzip's Options > Image tab, the resolution was set to only 150.  Was that 150 dots per inch?  If so, that could explain part of the problem.  I set it to 300 and tried again.  No change.

Participants in another thread, describing similar problems, seemed to say that the problem arose, for them, when they used Acrobat's speech tools.  I wasn't familiar with them, but thought I might take a look.  I went into Acrobat with no document open.  In Advanced > Accessibility, the only option that wasn't grayed out was Setup Assistant.  I went in there and selected "Set all accessibility options" > Next.  This seemed to be taking me through the same options that I could have gotten via Edit > Preferences.  I noticed that "Disable text smoothing" was checked, so I unchecked it; text smoothing sounded good.  In the next screen, I left it as I found it, with only one thing selected, "Infer reading order from document."  In the screen after that, the only thing selected was, again, the default, "For large documents, only read the currently visible pages."  In the screen after that, "Disable document auto-save" had somehow gotten checked.  I wanted auto-save, so I unchecked it.  Evidently the funky key that I had accidentally hit, whatever it was, had told Acrobat that I had some kind of disability, and therefore it launched into a whole menu of disability assumptions.  Anyway, the only thing I left checked on that page was "Reopen documents to the last viewed page."  By this point, I was seeing that, yes, I could have achieved these same changes by going into Edit > Preferences, but the one-size-fits-all disability assumption seemed to cherry-pick options from a variety of different Preferences submenus.  This seemed to be a better way of detecting what it had messed up.

Anyway, that was the last screen.  I clicked Done, and tried printing my HTML document again.  This time it was better.  The font looked good.  So part of the solution was to go through the Accessibility Setup Assistant and reverse some of its settings.  I was still getting that message, "Please wait while document is being prepared for."  I renamed Accessibility.api to be Accessibility.old again and reprinted the HTML document.  No more "prepared for" message.  So the other part of the solution was to kill Accessibility.api.  Ah, but now I had a new problem.  When I tried to go into Edit > Preferences, I got an error:  "Failed to load an application resource (internal error)."  I restarted Acrobat and tried again.  Same error.  Apparently it couldn't go on living without its Accessibility.api.  I renamed Accessibility.old back to Accessibility.api and tried again.  Yes, now I could go into Preferences.  So it seemed I might have to cope with that "document is being prepared for" message.

One poster in that thread seemed to say that, if Microsoft Magnify was turned on when Acrobat started, Acrobat would detect it and would assume that the user had a disability.  This was an interesting possibility.  Was Acrobat detecting some running program and inferring disability from that?  I went into Start > Run > taskmgr.exe > Applications tab and took a look.  Nothing obvious.  Well, the Ease of Access Center was open.  I closed that and tried printing my HTML page.  Nope, that wasn't the answer; I still had the problem.  I right-clicked on an empty spot on the Taskbar and went into Taskbar tab > Customize.  I looked at the System Tray utilities shown there.  A couple of possibilities but, again, nothing obvious.  There was a troublesome utility that I'd had a hard time deleting, DropCommand, but I was able to delete it now.  I doubted it was the problem.

I rebooted into Safe Mode, thinking this would tend to simplify the picture somewhat:  fewer programs would be loaded and running.  Instead, Safe Mode gave me a new cluster.  No PDF printers installed.  I didn't know that about Safe Mode.  I tried installing Bullzip, but got an error when I got to the part of installing the Ghostscript part:  "Unable to register the DLL/OCX:  RegSvr32 failed with exit code 0x5."  I started Acrobat, but within a few seconds I got an error message there too:

Licensing for this product has stopped working

You cannot use this product at this time.  You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling the product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help.

So, OK, at least this gave me an opportunity to reboot.  Back in Normal Mode, thankfully, I did not get a licensing error message.  So then, to return to the question:  what programs might be running that would trigger a belief, in Acrobat, that I needed a bunch of disability options to be installed without asking me?

I wasn't sure how to get an answer to that, short of a potentially very time-consuming process of eliminating programs, one by one, and rebooting, and seeing what happened.  This was problematic now because, for some reason, when I tried to print my HTML page, I didn't have any problems.  So it seemed that I might have fixed the symptoms, at least.

Instead, a day or two later, there were new developments.  Now Acrobat's toolbars were no longer functioning properly.  They had been erratic in Acrobat 8; less so in Acrobat 9; but now the Crop option was gone, and other toolbar settings would be disregarded.  I tried a repair:  Control Panel > Progams and Features > select Adobe Acrobat > Uninstall/Change > Repair.  This repair called for a reboot.  I'm not sure how that turned out; my notes are weak at this point.

I also had another problem.  When I opened a newly downloaded PDF, I got this message:

Reading Untagged Document

This 133-page document is untagged and must be prepared for reading.  While the document is being analyzed, your assistive technology will not be able to interact wiht this application.

I canceled out of that and went through the steps I had figured out so far:  change things back the way I wanted them in Advanced > Accessibility > Setup Assistant.  Then I reopened the PDF.  Still got that same "Reading Untagged Document" dialog.  I had that DropCommand program installed on that machine too, so I deleted it.  There wasn't an uninstall option that I could see.  As on the other machine, I had to move the executable to the Recycle Bin folder and then delete it after a reboot.  A couple of days passed before I did that reboot.  The problem was still there.

This problem was one of several, along with some major hardware changes, that prompted me to give up and reinstall Windows 7.  My best guess was that this problem was related to a sticky Shift key problem, and that several such issues ultimately stemmed from a failing KVM switch.

Notes from "Philosophical Reflections on Disability"

Book Discussed

Ralston, D. C., & Ho, J. (Eds.) (2010). Philosophical reflections on disability. Dordrecht: Springer.

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In another blog post, I was taking notes on Houtenville et al. (2009), Counting Working-Age People with Disabilities.  I got as far as page 28 and came back again to the question of how to define disability.  I had recently borrowed a copy of this book by Ralston and Ho, and decided to check it out.  So here are some notes that came to mind as I perused a few chapters of that volume.

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Chapter 1:  Introduction

The introduction just summarizes and comments on the book's various articles.  I used it to help select which chapters to focus on, in the brief time I had available.

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Chapter 2:  Silvers, A. (2010). An essay on modeling: The social model of disability. In D. C. Ralston & J. Ho (Eds.), Philosophical reflections on disability (pp. 19-36). Dordrecht: Springer.

Among its many interesting insights and much information that was new to me, I found this chapter somewhat illogical in spots.  For example, Silvers says, “[T]here is not nor can there be such a thing as a social model of disability” and goes on to refer to “the so-called social model” (p. 21) and to “supposed models of disability” (p. 22).  But then she goes ahead and talks about the social model in terms that indicate she does think it exists, with comments such as “[T]he medical and social models portray disability in very different ways” (p. 22).

Her point there seems to be that the social model is a model in the sense of being a “collection of claims” (p. 23) rather than somehow being a “simplified representation” or “replica” (p. 22) of disability.  But that seems like an odd point.  How would one construct a representation of disability, as though it were a tangible object instead of a concept?  This so-called “collection of claims” seems par for the course, where concepts are concerned.  That’s what models are, in this kind of context:  “Theoretical representations that simulate the behavior or activity of systems, processes, or phenomena.”  The social model of disability describes disability as a system or process in which society takes an impairment and makes it into a disability.

That was an isolated example until I got to page 31 or so.  I was learning a lot, and I was mostly engaged.  But then she said this:

Of course, we cannot infer from our sense of one’s condition’s being less preferable than some others that it also is inherently bad.  We often prefer someone else’s condition to our own – someone richer, smarter, handsomer, or more generous than ourselves – without condemning our own state as bad. . . . So the fact that not being disabled may be preferable to being disabled does not entail that the state of being disabled is bad.  The social model counsels the acceptance of disability as being a natural state of some people . . . . 

I wasn’t sure it mattered if disability was “bad.”  The point was, it’s less preferable.  Lots of things are “natural” – hepatitis, for example – and yet not desirable.  If we consider ourselves ugly or poor, that’s a comparative judgment that we would typically like to address by magically becoming beautiful and rich.  That’s natural too, even if such a belief might actually make us less happy, or if the magic didn’t ultimately yield the imagined results.  Whatever.  At the point of decision, we go toward what is more desirable because, on many levels, this is the approach that tends to keep us alive and healthy.  The word “bad” is irrelevant; however you phrase it, people generally don’t want to have disabilities, and there are good reasons for that.

Silvers (pp. 34-35) feels that the social model  may now be nearly as entrenched as the medical model (in which disability is identified as a flaw in the person that should be corrected), and that each has its usefulness from particular values perspectives.  But she says that a problem arises when a focus on the social model causes funding to be directed toward modifications of social conditions rather than toward prevention and cure.

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Chapter 8:  Merriam, G. (2010). Rehabilitating Aristotle: A virtue ethics approach to disability and human flourishing. In D. C. Ralston & J. Ho (Eds.), Philosophical reflections on disability (pp. 133-151). Dordrecht: Springer.

This article prompted me to write a separate post regarding overpopulation, eugenics, and the right to reproduce.  

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Chapter 13:  Tollefsen, C. (2010). Disability and social justice. In D. C. Ralston & J. Ho (Eds.), Philosophical reflections on disability (pp. 211-227). Dordrecht: Springer.

Tollefsen distinguishes citizenship from well-being.  His conclusion (p. 223) is thus:

[T]he moderately disabled, the temporarily dependent, the “normal” human person, the profoundly retarded, the brain damaged, and even those in a persistent vegetative state, are all alike as regards the fundamental reason that justifies political authority:  all are inadequate in some respect or other for their own flourishing.  All lack self-sufficiency in regards to the conditions necessary for them to achieve the level of well-being they are capable of . . . . No special attempt need be made to see any of them as citizens, or potential citizens, or even like citizens, in order to see that they fall within the fundamental scope of the political authority’s concern, the basic commitment “to foster the dignity and well-being of all persons within [the state’s] borders” [source of quote unspecified].

In other words, contra Nussbaum (2006), Tollefsen sees a person in a persistent vegetative state as being nonetheless a human being.  That, however, does not warrant his postulation of a state’s commitment to foster well-being of everyone within its borders.  A state might decline to do so, rightly or wrongly, for illegal immigrants, prisoners, and others; it might also do so unequally on a variety of grounds, including one’s individual or collective (as e.g., part of an influential constituency) wealth or political power or lack thereof.

Tollefsen does acknowledge that the state has to provide many things, including infrastructure and internal and external security, and therefore that there are limits to what the state can do, to be determined through prudent judgment.  “Such limitations,” he says (p. 224), “are not matters of injustice.”  As philosophers sometimes do, however, he repeatedly makes assertions that could be empirically supported, refuted, or qualified.  For example (p. 224):

[F]amily members such as parents and spouses, friends, and parishes all have a better grasp of the particular needs and capacities of individuals with disabilities, and all have a greater capacity for emotional involvement and sustained commitment than do any agents of the state. . . . The state should not be in the business of taking over the care of the disabled . . . .

These assertions seem quite unlikely in particular cases.  Caregivers do not tend, in any event, to be qualified professionals, and they are also not insurance companies.  For a variety of discriminatory, agenda-driven, resource-related, and competence-related reasons, parishes and other local organizations may lack the capacity and/or inclination to care effectively for people with disabilities.  It is not clear, from this essay, why the handling of disabilities would be considered a predominantly private matter, while the handling of criminal behavior is not.

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Chapter 14:  Englehardt, H. T., Jr. (2010). The unfair and the unfortunate: Some brief critical reflections on secular moral claim rights for the disabled. In D. C. Ralston & J. Ho (Eds.), Philosophical reflections on disability (pp. 229-237). Dordrecht: Springer.

When I read this chapter, I had just read an article about health care in the United States – about how expensive and illogical the health care system has been.  I had wondered about questions of affordability and logic while reading materials about disability as well.  Whatever was going to happen in the realm of disabilities in the future, it seemed that cost and rationality would be important considerations.

Englehardt (p. 231) says this:

Disease and disability are surely, ceteris paribus, unfortunate.  The issue is whether they are unfair in a way that generates general secular moral claim rights against others who did not cause the disease or disability.

In response, he concludes that “Moral diversity, the fact of moral pluralism, undermines the self-evident character often attributed to claim rights for care, support, and accommodation” (p. 235).  In other words, not everyone prioritizes the same things.  His position seems to be that it is not entirely certain that society ought to put its full resources behind all forms of environmental manipulation, making everything more accommodating for people with disabilities, when there are other things that we could do with the money.

What we have, Englehardt says, is political compromises, not moral certainty.  Disabilities get a certain amount of funding, and not more or less, as a result of advocacy on behalf of disability-friendly perspectives.  “In such circumstances, entitlements for the disabled will not enjoy a secular moral authority.  They will simply be outcomes that it will usually be prudent to accept” (p. 236). 

Disability Prevalence -- Where Are We?

This post summarizes the general flow of my posts on disabilities over the past half-year.  I still have a few more posts in draft form, and I'll be wrapping those up shortly, but this is a good point at which to sketch out the picture as it has developed in this blog.

This post originated as an e-mail message to a researcher who seemed potentially interested in looking into data on disabilities.  I wanted to summarize, for him, the questions I have been studying.  As the message grew longer and began to cite my other blog posts, I realized that I should probably just put it up on the blog and refer him to it.  So what was going to be an e-mail message has now become the following paragraphs.

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Let me describe the situation in general terms, and see if there are particular aspects of it that seem to have the best potential for further investigation from a research perspective.  I tend to be somewhat philosophically oriented, so my apologies in advance if it takes me a while to reach the ground.

What the Question Is

The general question is, how many people have disabilities?  There is a definitional aspect to that question.  Speaking strictly from my own perspective, I have posted some blog entries about such matters.  This definitional question matters in the sense that, if we make the circle too small, we deny relevant assistance to people who need it.  An example, in the area of mental disability, is a person who does not qualify for an official psychiatric diagnosis but nonetheless experiences obvious difficulty.

That general question is operationalized in various surveys.  At this level, we move from the purely conceptual to a mix of the hypothetical and the actual.  Elsewhere, I have cited references to a so-called National Disability Data System (NDDS).  The NDDS itself does not exist formally; the concept is that it exists in effect, through the data provided by actual research efforts.   This is still an academic's discussion; at this level we are kicking around various ways of going at the question of disability prevalence.

From there, we move to a more concrete level.  This is the level at which politicians and the public are given specific numbers.  They may not be the right numbers, but that's what footnotes are for.  Most notably, the American Community Survey (ACS) replaces the decennial census; that is, questions about disabilities have disappeared from the latter because the prevalence of disabilities is now being estimated rather than counted.  The ACS is in the process of replacing the census, for this purpose, down to the local level.

Why It Matters

As you can see, I have been trying to get a grasp on what we think we know, and why we think we know it.  But why does it matter?  Why should we care about the prevalence of disabilities?  There seem to be two ways to answer that.

The National Perspective

On one hand, we can approach the issue from a national perspective.  As the posts describe, the disability-related questions on the ACS have been modified, in the last few years, for purposes of improved reliability.  All well and good; but in the process, the estimate of people with disabilities dropped by some 15%.  Meanwhile, more sensitive measures (e.g., the SIPP) have the potential (but, alas, not the financial backing) to show a significantly higher rate.

The nation has a profound interest, budgetary and otherwise, in knowing whether the number of people with disabilities is 38 million or, instead, 53 million (to cite one alternate figure that I have encountered).  A million people here, a million people there, and pretty soon we're talking about real people.  The estimates are definitionally driven, of course, but that's the point:  how much higher does the prevalence rate go if the researcher uses a different, but comparably respectable, definition?

For example:  in an interesting book, Bagenstos contends that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been developed in the direction of treating disability as a minority-rights kind of issue.  This, he says, has had the advantage of drawing upon the legacy of civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, thus giving disability rights advocates a certain automatic sense of legitimacy.  The drawback has been that such movements invite opposition from those whom they exclude, particularly if the latter are expected to pay for adjustments to rectify perceived wrongs.

The alternative, Bagenstos says, is to treat the condition in question -- disability, in this case -- as a universal issue, something in which everyone partakes, or is at risk of partaking, through various forms of inability and imperfection.  In this approach, disability prevalence can be calculated without segregating "people with disabilities" into their own conceptual ghetto.  If disability is treated as something that anyone is capable of experiencing, like chickenpox or the flu, but if only a fraction of the population is likely to experience it at any particular point, what is that fraction?

Good question.  But how can we answer it?  The budgetary infeasibility of extending the SIPP to localities across the entire nation, on a par with the ACS, demonstrates that national disability prevalence estimation is presently stuck in a rather absurd place.  Because of its lack of local foundation, it can be gerrymandered, from a desk in D.C., to add or drop five or ten million people here and there, for reasons of statistical or budgetary convenience.  The nation, and the disability community, need something better than that.  The following suggestion illustrates a national alternative on the local level.

The Local Perspective

The relatively narrow operationalization of disability in the ACS is obviously problematic.  If its national estimate of disabilities is on the conservative side, its local estimate will tend to be so as well.

That seems reasonable enough.  But putting it that way highlights a bigger problem.  The idea seems to be that the best way to know whether my neighbor has a disability is to wait for the latest ACS to be completed; wait for the local-level ACS data to be compiled by someone in Washington; adjust that local number upwards by a fudge factor due to the conservative bias of the ACS; and then calculate my neighbor's odds.

Faced with that kind of logic, practical decisionmakers and advocates say, in effect, "Research be damned."  They aren't going to plumb the intricacies of the Supreme Court's latest interpretations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they aren't going to invest the time required for a clear understanding of the ACS.  They're going to rely, instead, on what they've heard and what they believe, supplemented by the occasional citation to some source or other.

Suppose we began, instead, from present experience.  Suppose, for example, that I cannot walk to work.  Research on the benefits of outdoor exposure suggests that this state of affairs will tend to make me less happy than I would be if I could walk to work.  The reason for this impairment of my subjective well-being may not be crucial:  it may not matter, for that purpose, whether I can't walk to work because I have no legs or, instead, because the streets between here and there are dangerous for pedestrians.  Either way, I can't do it.

The focus, in that example, is upon achieving a certain outcome.  Outcome-oriented disability estimation is, in essence, the language of actual local life.  The mayor finds that 39% of her constituents are furious about the state of the roads.  They are experiencing some transportation-related disability.  The fact that 3% of constituents are furious about the state of the sidewalks may be politically trivial, but a transportation-related disability nonetheless exists there as well.

Improved accessibility will often be politically infeasible if the public impression is that we are trying to spend a fortune on curb cuts for a small number of people in wheelchairs who never use the sidewalks anyway.  Rather than ask for special handouts, a more defensible view of transportation-related disability would focus on getting the roads and sidewalks into shape for people on foot, in wheelchairs, and in cars.  Infrastructure is essential.  Everyone needs effective transportation.

Summary

Disability has been defined in different ways.  A cursory review suggests that American law is presently oriented toward treating a disability as a flaw in the individual.  Hence, instruments like the ACS look for vision impairments and other personal characteristics that prevent people from functioning like everybody else.  The social model of disability is incorporated only in the limited sense that some survey questions acknowledge, in various ways, that disability may entail mismatch between person and society; yet even that acknowledgement inevitably brings the focus back to the individual.

That approach to disability has the potential to get everyone bogged down in mutual recrimination, with the familiar old vocabularies of "handouts" versus "privilege," and "normal people" versus "the oppressed."  An approach that could be more readily calculated on the local level, and more consistent and politically supportable on the national level, would focus upon desired life outcomes.

Using transportation as a particularly important disability-related outcome, one can ask how many people are not able to get where they need to go within a reasonable amount of time, in a reasonable manner, at reasonable cost.  There are many kinds of transportation-related disabilities in this sense.  Here are some examples:

• People who are disabled from independent transportation because they are under the control of others.  Examples include children and prison inmates.  
• Those whose health precludes independent travel -- hospital inpatients, for instance, and nursing home residents.
• People may also be economically disabled from utilizing independent transportation:  for instance, they may not have money for a car or even for bus fare, assuming there is a bus line near them.
• People whose obligations prevent independent travel:  people have to stay at work, or have to stay near a certain location to be available for work, or have to stay home with the kids or with a sick relative.
• Social disability precluding independent transportation.  People are stared at and harassed if they are someplace where, in effect, they don't belong.  This can include kids in the vicinity of a bully, women who are out late alone, bicyclists on a busy street, individuals of an unfamiliar or unwelcome race, and people who dress funny or act funny.

The purpose of such an investigation would be to provide an alternative perspective that would be more immediately familiar to the public and more responsive to actual human experiences of disability.  The idea is that, for whatever reason, some people can't get where they need to go.

Needless to say, this post does not purport to address the gamut of disability-related concerns and issues.  Indeed, it is precisely not that sort of thing.  What I have observed, in my half-year of exposure to disability-related matters, is that the cerebral model of disability -- the one that begins with abstract, individual-oriented definitions and works its way down to concrete application -- is not really very practical.

It tentatively seems that it would be more useful, marketable, and appropriate to treat disability as a matter of sociopersonal constraints that everyone experiences in various forms, and to focus especially upon those global, national, state, and/or local conditions that most profoundly impair the achievement of the most important outcomes.  This approach would still prioritize many individual impairments, but would do so as a matter of an investment in society's future rather than as a handout to a person who has managed to become privileged in the eyes of the law.

Disabilities and Politically Correct Terminology: Some Current Articles

I just did a search for scholarly articles mentioning "politically correct" and "disabilities" in the first few months of this year.  This gave me 22 hits.  In this post, I set out to summarize what those articles said about disabilities and politically correct terminology.

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Whitfield, H. W., Venable, R., & Broussard, S. (2010). Are client-counselor ethnic/racial matches associated with successful rehabilitation outcomes? Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin, 53(2), 96-105.

This article did not mention political correctness, and therefore did not come up in my search.  What did come up was a document entitled “Continuing Education Questions” that appears on pages 121-123 of that same journal volume.  One of the questions referring to this article appears in that list of questions (on p. 122).

Turner, R. J. (2010, January 25). [Review of Review: Teach! Change! Empower! Solutions for closing the achievement gaps, by Carl A. Grant.] InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1).

Turner uses “politically correct” in two places.  The first says this:

Grant does make it clear that educators [apparently at the high school level] should work in groups (p. 1), and that the encouragement of colleagues may lead to greater candor. But in our politically correct, hyper-polite society, whether co-workers will point comfortably to one another’s inner bigot is questionable.

In this quote, Turner seems to be critical of political correctness, equating it not with politeness, which would presumably be positive, but with hyper-politeness, which implies excess.  The nature of the excess that Turner identifies seems to be that politically correctness operates as a potential barrier to the frank identification of bigotry in one’s coworkers.

We teachers can no longer afford to insulate ourselves from difference and hide behind politically correct jargon if we want to remain relevant in a technologically driven global community.

Here, Turner again characterizes politically correctness as “jargon” and a barrier to relevance.  When she speaks of “difference,” she seems to be referring to the previous sentence, where she says (quoting Lu, 1992) that students and educators need to recognize the politics of their decisions.  Turner offers the example of an exercise, described in Grant’s book, in which the instructor selects books that involve race, class, gender, or disability, and develops multimodal assignments that allow student expression through writing, drawing, and role playing.  The point of such an exercise would be to involve students’ multiple learning intelligences in instructors’ efforts to “address the elephant in the room” by actively including different sociocultural groups in what they teach.

Turner, and apparently Grant, seem to be saying that, if differences among people are not deliberately brought into the classroom through e.g., the assignment of diversity-oriented books, then instructors will be essentially complicit in making sure that students are simply assimilated into the dominant culture.  Such assimilation will only exacerbate the “mire of esteem issues” that disadvantaged students struggle with.

The idea seems to be that teachers and/or readings tend to be from a gender, race, and/or social class that does not match those of many disadvantaged students; that this needs to be brought out into the open; and that politically correctness hinders teachers from doing so.  I am not sure how that last step works.  I am guessing that she means that teachers in very mixed classrooms in Los Angeles may be walking on eggshells to use politically correct terminology, and are therefore not communicating frankly and effectively.

Jerlinder, K. (2010). Swedish primary-school teachers' attitudes to inclusion - the case of PE and pupils with physical disabilities.  European Journal of Special Needs Education, 25(1), 45-57.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Parley, F. (2010). The understanding that care staff bring to abuse. The Journal of Adult Protection, 12(1).

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Mohideen, H. Ali, M., & Mohideen, S. (2010). Awareness of contemporary lexical change for professional competence in English language education. European Journal of Social Sciences, 13(1).

The abstract for this article, written by two members of the faculty at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, states:

Influential languages such as English reinvent themselves and prosper. The ongoing language developments taking place in such dynamic languages make it imperative for language users to be up-to-date and be familiar with the changes affecting the language they are professionally involved with, more so those involved with its instruction. . . . Language teachers’ awareness of such changes will enhance their professional growth.

Within that background, the article’s sole reference to political corrections appears, in context, as follows:

As teachers, we need to be keenly aware of what has come to be known as verbal hygiene (Cameron, 1995). Verbal hygiene is non-offensive, non-sexist and non-racist language. There are interested groups who believe “that achieving a change in linguistic usage is itself a worthwhile form of public, political action and consciousness raising” (Holmes, 2008: 332). Verbal hygiene is synonymous with being politically correct and euphemistic [emphasis added]. When we practice verbal hygiene we avoid being vulgar, racist, sexist and discriminatory to individuals and specific groups of people. Gone are the days when we described our below average students as ‘weak’ and ‘poor’. Today we refer to them as ‘underachievers’. They are ‘intellectually challenged’ or ‘not very bright’. Positive words are included in describing disabilties. 

Educators need to use language which is not so unpleasant, less harsh and less hurtful. Euphemistic terms are being coined continually. Even the widely used term ‘disabled’ to refer to people with physical disability has been found to be inadequate. There is recognition that disabled people have abilities which are different from physically normal people. A new term which has been proposed is ‘people who are differently abled’. Another term now is ‘physically challenged’. 

Language instructors are looked upon as models for language use by students and parents. Euphemistic use will provide the instructors a healthy image of being sensitive, fair, contemporary and, accommodating.

I found this excerpt disturbing, amusing, remarkable; and the more I looked into it, the more so it became.  First, the editorial advisory board for this “European” journal named 30 people, of whom 21 (many with names that do not sound either European or American) were at universities in the United States, and six were at universities in Asian and Middle Eastern countries.  Of the other three, two were at universities in the United Kingdom, and one was at a university in Macdeonia.  It thus tentatively seemed to be more of an American or, at best, a global journal of perspectives on European social science.

I could not locate an introduction to the issue in which this article appeared.  It seemed that some, but not all, of the articles in this issue were pedagogically oriented.  As with this particular article, most seemed (judging by titles) to be oriented toward social science topics in developing nations, not in Europe.  At this point, then, I had no idea why this was called a European journal.  Its “Aims and Scope” said nothing about Europe, except to mention European Studies (among a number of other topics) as an area of focus.

The abstract, in the first excerpt quoted above, acknowledged the dominance of English, and attributed that dominance to the English language's dynamic self-reinvention.  In this context, the foregoing remarks about the journal’s provenance gave me the impression that its readers tended to be what one might call Third-World Anglophiles, especially in a social science sense.  The idea seemed to be that educated people from developing countries would convey Euro-American social science concepts back to, or would employ such concepts in, their homelands.  Politically correct language appeared to be a part of the socioscientific package being thus transmitted.  Current developments in disability-related terminology evidently comprise part of a cultural avant-garde with which non-native speakers of English are trying to keep up.

The point of the article (based upon the abstract and a brief glance otherwise) seemed to be that, to be competent and/or perceived as competent, an English teacher must remain current in his/her knowledge of English.  In the authors’ view, such a teacher should be aware that it is politically more correct to call a student “not very bright” than to call them “weak,” and that “differently abled” and “physically challenged” are new disability-related terms.  This was, as I say, remarkable.  In a brief search, I found “differently abled” in a footnote in a law journal article from 28 years ago (Ferleger, 1982, p. 595).  Not exactly a new term!  If this is the state of affairs for English teachers in developing nations, one might infer that the generation of new terminology will facilitate the disability-related linguistic inferiority of English learners in those nations for the indefinite future.

Interestingly, Ferleger's footnote read as follows:  "'Differently-abled'" is a more positive and more accurate description than 'handicapped' or 'disabled,' words which have acquired negative connotations, especially to those people to whom they are applied."  This prompted me to wonder:  if “disabled” can be rehabilitated as “persons with disabilities,” could “handicapped” fare likewise?

The foregoing excerpt from the Mohideen article equates political correctness with euphemism, which itself is defined as “the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.”  Ferleger’s footnote thus seems to have identified the core issue:  euphemisms are preferred in order to avoid offending the people to whom they are applied.  The implicit message is that those people are vulnerable to what others call them.  This is a slippery slope.  What offends is not, ultimately, the term itself.  The arrangement of letters in c-r-i-p is not intrinsically more offensive than in its inverse, p-i-r-c.  What is offensive is how c-r-i-p is used.  It is (sometimes) used disparagingly, and therefore becomes something that some people would not want to be called.

The problem is that anything can be used disparagingly, and ultimately the attempt to avoid that reality (through e.g., “differently abled”) becomes disparaged itself.  For example, despite Ferleger's sensitivity, his own article uses words (e.g., "retarded") that are now considered insensitive.  What would seem to better serve the Mohideens and the disabled alike, at this point, would be to stop confusing people with new terms and focus instead, on developing clear and kindhearted understandings of people and situations.

It is interesting that the Mohideens consider political correctness to be a rejection not only of discrimination, but also of vulgarity.  Their perspective on what we are doing, with politically correct language, seems to be that we are incidentally looking down upon language that is common, coarse, and lacking in cultivation or taste.  And that is interesting, because discrimination tends to be against disadvantaged people, whose socioeconomic circumstances do frequently put them among the more uncultured elements of society.  In the name of helping less privileged people, that is, we seem to be disempowering those very people from speaking in their own terms.

A final observation:  as quoted above, the article says, “Euphemistic use will provide the instructors a healthy image of being sensitive, fair, contemporary and, accommodating.”  The authors seem to have unwittingly captured the key point:  political correctness conveys an image of fairness and sensitivity.  It does not necessarily have much to do with actual fairness and sensitivity.

Perlstein, M. (2010). Virgins and veterans: Culturally sensitive supervision in the LGBT community. Women & Therapy, 33(1-2), 85-100.

This article’s only reference to “political correctness” is as follows:

I feel that if one is not overly “politically correct,” humor that will not be perceived as laughing at someone but with someone helps ameliorate tense situations, allowing them to be held up to the light. 

Perlstein thus treats political correctness as a potential hindrance to therapeutic humor, consistent with a study suggesting that liberals enjoy humor less than conservatives (Ariely, 2008).  The point seems to be that someone whose sense of humor and ability to laugh at him/herself has not been eroded by abuse may find it easier to participate in the reduction of tension in some situations.

Lumby, J., & Morrison, M. (2010). Leadership and diversity: theory and research.  School Leadership & Management, 30(1), 3-17.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Smith, S. R., Purzner, T., & Fehlings, M. G. (2010). The epidemiology of geriatric spinal cord injury. Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation, 15(3), 54-64.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Kendler, K. S. (2010). The problem:  Charge to the conference.  In D. P. Goldberg, K. S. Kendler, P. J. Sirovatka, & D. A. Regier (Eds.), Diagnostic issues in depression and generalized anxiety disorder: Refining the research agenda for DSM-V.  Arlington, VA : American Psychiatric Association.

What Google Books identifies as this book’s only use of “politically correct” is as follows:  “Although it might be politically correct to argue that all validators are created equal, this is unlikely to be a sustainable position” (p. 7).  A validator, as Kendler is using the term here, seems to be something that validates an interpretation.  Kendler appears to be using the term in a tongue-in-cheek fashion:  he seems to be alluding to the concept that “all men are created equal,” and treating that as a politically correct belief.  It is interesting that he may thus inadvertently give us a glimmer of insight into how members of his circle view that concept.  In any event, he seems to be contrasting political correctness against accuracy.

Kaldjian, L. C., Shinkunas, L. A., Bern-Klug, M., & Schultz, S. K. (2010). Dementia, goals of care, and personhood: A study of surrogate decision makers' beliefs and values. American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Care, 1-11.  DOI:  10.1177/1049909109358660

This article's only reference to political correctness occurs in a statement from one of the patients who were evidently interviewed as part of a study.  That statement says, "He’s very much not politically correct and that upsets my one brother."  No context is provided.  It is not clear whether the lack of political correctness in that instance upsets the brother because the brother, himself, is a member of a group to whom disparaging reference is made, or whether it is just that the brother prefers for people to use politically correct terminology.

Gilborn, D. (2010). The white working class, racism and respectability: Victims, degenerates and interest-convergence. British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(1), 3-25.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Ashbolt, A. (2010, January 18). Time for a real education revolution.  The Drum: Unleashed.  

"Politically correct" does not appear in the article.  It appears only in one reader's comment, as follows:

What the parents really need is a huge dose of reality. They also probably need parenting classes so that they can understand their responsibility concerning the raising of their children. School is there to give the children an academic education, not one in morality, or responsibility,, that is the parents responsibility.

Um I know that this is not politically correct to say things like this in anymore in Australia, but Huh,,, I don't live there anymore.

I emphasize with all the teachers in Australia. You certainly have a hard job to do, and I for one would never teach in Australia. Too bloody hard to deal with all the Ps and Qs.

Time to stop politically corrupting Australia's children.

This reader’s view seems to be that political correctness discourages people from saying that parents should play a greater role in teaching their children orality or responsibility.  This use of the term seems to emphasize the “speak no evil” aspect of political correctness, without involving any sorts of disadvantaged people.

Liddell, G. J., Liddell, P., & Shaffer, D. (2010). Is Obama black? The pseudo-legal definition of the black race: A proposal for regulatory clarification generated from a historical sociopolitical perspective. The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Minority Issues, 12, 213.

This article mentions “politically correct” one time, as follows:

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is the federal agency responsible for developing guidelines for the collection of data and recordkeeping concerning race in federal programs. . . . In its background statement, the OMB clarifies: "The [racial] categories represent a social-political construct designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based." . . . The OMB guidelines state: "Terms such as 'Haitian' or 'Negro' can be used in addition to 'Black or [African-American].'"  In this statement, the OMB recognizes "race" as a sociopolitical construct, rather than a scientifically based construct for which many, including the American Anthropological Association, have argued.  It is also interesting to note that the definition treats "Haitian" as synonymous with "Black," "African-American," and "Negro."  This inclusion certainly leaves one querying as to what other geographical groupings might obtain their own politically correct moniker.

Without researching the background materials identified in footnotes (not shown in the quote), it appears that, for some reason, the OMB used racial categories of a sociopolitical nature, as distinct from racial categories that would be scientifically based.  It is not clear who is being referred to, in the statement about using “Terms such as ‘Haitian’ or ‘Negro.’”  It does not appear that the definition treats Haitian as synonymous with Black; it appears, rather, that OMB is assuming that Haitians are black.  What the final sentence seems to be saying is that OMB also assumes that Haitians are African-American.  It is not clear, from the limited amount of material supplied, whether that is an accurate interpretation of OMB.  Assuming it is, the last sentence seems to mean that OMB does not consider Haitian a race, and therefore treats Haitians as members of the race that is variously called Black, African-American, or Negro.  The authors thus seem to be musing that perhaps people from other geographical locations like Haiti will be assumed to be black as well, and thus will be likewise lumped in as Black, African-American, or Negro.  It would not be politically incorrect to call someone Haitian; the argument seems to be that the alleged African-American race is an admittedly sociopolitical category, chosen for its political correctness rather than for its scientific accuracy or logic.  In this reading, the authors use “politically correct” to mean terminology that almost nobody will complain about, even that terminology is scientifically nonsensical.

*  *  *  *  *

At this point, I ran out of time for this project.  And it was probably just as well.  While some of these articles had given me some very interesting perspectives on disabilities and political correctness, most did not seem to link the two in any meaningful way.  I decided, in other words, that I could probably get more insight from a different search.

My interpretations of these articles (that is, of the portions of these articles that I glanced at) could be summarized as follows:

Turner.  Political correctness is something that teachers hide behind, to avoid offending anyone.  It discourages frank and open exchanges in the classroom.  As such, it treats disabilities and other minority statuses as something alien, dangerous, or otherwise not to be grappled with.  Teachers need to encourage students to address such topics.

Mohideen & Mohideen.  Political correctness generates an endless supply of new terms that non-native teachers of English must struggle to keep up with.  They will not always succeed at that.  They are therefore apt to remain somewhat outdated in the terms they use to refer to disability.  The purpose of these various new terms is to euphemize the low-class and discriminatory ways that unsophisticated people speak.  As such, the generation of political correct terminology disadvantages socioeconomically inferior people in English-speaking countries as well.  Discriminatory ways of speaking are discouraged, at least in part, because they offend people, but any term can be used offensively.  A focus on politically correct terminology appears to distract attention from a more readily transferred concern with actual fairness and sensitivity.

Perlstein.  Political correctness can impair humor, at times when humor would help.

Kendler.  Political correctness means saying something that sounds good, like “all men are created equal,” even if it not literally true.

Ashbolt.  A reader feels that political correctness means not saying anything that will offend anyone.

Liddell et al.  Political correctness means using terminology that sounds good or familiar, even if it does not make sense in the particular circumstances.

*  *  *  *  *

Concluding Reflections

I was surprised that people were so negative about political correctness.  I probably should not have been.  It had not occurred to me that, by this time, the term was pretty much owned by people who are not happy with the directions or at least the excesses of culturally sensitive speech – aside from the occasional non-native English speaker who may not be catching some important nuances in this sort of discussion.

One concern, for people who are interested in the terms used to refer to disability, is that their selection of terms will be perceived, by a potentially large portion of their audience, as more of the same – more politically correct novelties, to be picked up and used in more or less the same way as the terms that people were using before.

My learning continues.  But by way of a progress report, at this point I am surprised that this sort of thing has been allowed to consume so much of the attention of disability advocates.  Possibly what is really happening, in all this, is that new terms have the advantage of being more likely to be heard and adopted by younger people and by those for whom it is important to be in the vanguard of “new” developments.  Maybe changing concepts of disability (or of other minority statuses) are brought into the mainstream for the purpose (or at least with the effect) of sidelining people who are older and/or less in-touch with such developments – by putting them, in other words, into a position in which their views and ways of speaking can be marginalized.

Presently, I am not sure how having a disability is fundamentally different from having a handicap.  I understand that "handicap" -- as a term, as distinct from a condition -- can be offensive because of its associations with past injustices.  At the same time, though, it is common, and it does not seem terribly important, that we still have, and refer to, "handicapped" parking spaces.  Younger people, with or without disabilities, are not necessarily familiar or concerned with the old battles in which "handicapped" and "disabled" really did make a difference.

In other words, at some point there does not seem to be a lot to be gained by just substituting one term for another.  At a certain point, the effort might be better spent in educating oneself and others on how a handicap is, as in golf, something that you start with, not necessarily where you end up.  In that sense, I would think that “handicap” would imply something less permanent and more surmountable than “disability,” which seems to mean that the ability just ain’t there, period.

If we are not just replacing one term with another that means more or less the same thing, but are instead switching to substantially more precise language, that’s different.  “Disabled” is not as clear as “learning disabled” or “developmentally disabled.”  But that, from what I can tell, is not what generates dissatisfaction with politically correct disability-related terminology.