Stop Calling People “Impaired”

Ather Sharif
3 min readJun 12, 2022
Close-up image of a damaged green threaded jumbo bag with almost half of the threads damaged

Google “impair,” and we get: “weaken or damage something (especially a human faculty or function).” I am not advocating for removing emotionally-destructive barbarous words from the vocabulary entirely, but really, summon every ounce of ethics and morality within yourself and ask — is this how we want to describe people? The “damaged” ones?

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Ather Sharif

PhD student @uwcse Accessibility, Visualization, Personalization | SWE Lead @comcast | Founder @evoxlabs | React developer | 🐱 dad | 🍩 eater | 🦅 🔔 #philly ❤