“Self description for inclusive meetings” What fresh hell is this?

[BlueOrangeRed]

AIBU to not understand this at all? I’ve just attended an online event with around 20 people, from a mix of organisations.

The three organisers of the event introduced themselves by name then followed up with descriptions of themselves along the lines of “My pronouns are she/her. I’m a white woman in my mid thirties. I have blonde hair and am wearing a blue top”

A quick google afterwards came up with the following: “For inclusive meetings, a self-description offers context for visually impaired attendees, focusing on key identifiers like Name, Role, Pronouns, and brief visual cues (gender, skin tone, hair, clothing/accessories, background), keeping it concise (1-2 sentences) and optional, to help everyone feel seen and reduce assumptions. Start with your name and role, then add pronouns (she/her, he/him, they/them) and a quick visual detail like "brown skin, bald head, black hoodie," ensuring it's about access, not performance

It will be a cold day in hell before I start introducing myself like this. Leaving aside the foregrounding of pronouns issue, I can see zero benefits, but lots of pitfalls, about reminding everyone in a meeting that I’m a woman in my early fifties. I would also hate it if I was the youngest colleague there, for example. Or the only non white participant.

I’ve never experienced this before. Is this the latest thing to tick some inclusivity box, and for people to perform some virtue signalling? Because the cynic in me really can’t see how it will help anyone. Do visually impaired people find these kind of descriptions helpful?

Or am I just hopelessly out of touch? I don’t go to many events so maybe I am and this kind of thing is now the norm.

A lot of these efforts remind me of people’s attempts to prevent peanut allergies by advising parents to delay introducing peanuts until after one. Well meaning advice that had no grounding in evidence and ultimately achieved the exact opposite of what was intended.

Well, all I can say is that I really, really struggle on a call with someone who won’t turn their camera on. Captions help to some extent, but don’t replace being able to see someone’s facial movements, and are hilariously wrong sometimes. Maybe it’s more than lip-reading, I don’t know. But cameras off is nowhere near inclusive, and is a terrible suggestion.

I have been out of practice for a while now, let’s average 8 years.

Professional role.

Any conference, event, training, whatever came with weeks of info about hosts, speakers, accessibility options.

Anyone attending would know the hosts names, background information well in advance.

or they would not be there.

So agree with you OP

Pretty niche.

My camera is off pretty much permanently. I’ll turn it on for important one-on-one calls, but I’m off on group calls. I’m getting on with work while the people who love meetings yabber on. Also means people can’t see when you drop off. So I’m not doing a big introduction either. 95% of teams calls are a waste of time, and just a justification for some project person of what they’ve been doing with their time.

So how do you find out that someone in the meeting is visually impaired? Should they be forced to publicly declare it so that everyone knows they have a disibility? Or would it be better if everyone tried to be inclusive without needing to be told?

the description is so visually impaired people can form an image in their minds, making it easier to keep track of who is speaking.

Surely if it is online via zoom or Teams or whatever it lists names of participants and highlights who is talking? A much easier way to keep track of who is speaking than remembering 20 self descriptions.

I’d say “My name is Fanny, there’s no chance of me remembering who you all are and I wouldn’t expect you to remember me either - fortunately Teams shows the name of who is speaking for avoidance of doubt”.

I had this in an online meeting once, the meeting was about design, visual design - not accessible design, you needed sight to do the thing we were talking about, nobody on the call was visually impaired, yet the organisers went through the whole description charade. Makes a mockery of the situations where it's genuinely helpful.

Also to add - if you don't feel comfortable stating these things about yourself, then you don't have to. Just like those who are visually impaired or otherwise disabled don't have to announce this in a meeting, you absolutely don't have to tell people any information that you're not comfortable with sharing

I’m the OP and you’ve either misunderstood or misrepresented what I was saying.

Pronouns and how people choose to identify is not my main concern. My concern was more that encouraging people to introduce themselves by highlighting visually related characteristics such as their age of ethnicity felt off to me. For example if there’s one twenty five year old in a room of fifty year olds highlighting that fact automatically puts them at a disadvantage in terms of authority and credibility. Likewise if someone’s the only non white person in the room.

And on the pronouns point around 50% of attendees had these displayed as part of their zoom name anyway.

Were there lots of visually impaired people at the meeting? Was anyone? Did you self declare your level of visual impairment before attendance and they realised there was a desperate need for it?
more importantly if there were visually impaired attendees would the give a flying fuck about the speakers top? I know I wouldn’t!

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and have done all my life. I recognise actors very quickly and easily from their voices so I'm surprised visually impaired people find this useful.

I can see close family members and not know who they are until they speak. It’s awful. If I was in an online meeting and I got told what everyone was wearing and what pronouns and shit they wanted to be called, it would be information overload and I’d forget the lot and be too busy trying to remember it all that I’d not be paying attention to the meeting.

If you have someone who is visually impaired in the meeting, then I think it’s a nice thing to do. If you don’t, then it’s a load of bollocks.

To get round the vaguely offensive request, use non-visual personal descriptors.

Hello I’m Nathan, black hoody, Smiths fan and my ginger cat weighs 24lbs.

"I'm Hortense, face like a sackful of bricks, hair like wire wool and an aura of pitch black darkness"

I wouldn't be able to help myself

Blimey. I remember once worrying about whether I sounded racist when (after struggling with how to direct someone to a specific desk in a large open plan office to find a Ghanian colleague) ended up declaring "He's the black guy"...

Now we're being encouraged to pigeon hole our visual appearance to be inclusive? :s

I'd be interested to know from any people with experience of visual impairment if this is genuinely useful. Surely if blind or partially sighted you find other coping mechanisms that don't rely on visual cues? Would colour even mean anything to someone who was blind all their life rather than became blind?!

Sorry but I think it is performative bollocks.

I just hate all the stuff about declaring age, sex, pronouns, ethnicity, etc. Why do we need to draw attention to these things on an individual level? They shouldn't matter. Of course, checking at an organisational level whether you're managing to recruit/promote people with a range of characteristics might be helpful. But we shouldn't be drawing attention to these things on an individual level.

I also don't get how it's useful to a visually impaired person to have to take in, at the start of a meeting, not just people's names and job roles, but what they are wearing and what their skin colour is? Surely the most helpful thing (as someone said earlier) would be to note who you are each time you speak ("Beth from finance here, I think ...").

Why is it obvious that you are happy to say what your hair colour is and what you are wearing but object to saying your skin colour and pronouns when you are trying to help someone build a picture of you?

It goes without saying that there is no one size fit all accommodation for all disabilities. We wouldn't refuse to install a ramp because it doesn't help people with depression. But the ramp might help wheelchair users and also parents with a pushchair, an older person with a shopping trolley, someone having a dizzy spell on new meds and an ultra fit marathon runner who sprained their ankle. You are right though, colour blindness is very common and can effect men as they get older. So when making a slide deck always make sure that you are not relying on colour to communicate i.e. don't use three shades of blue to show progress, use three high contrast colours and also use numbers, text, a graph or table to portray the actual data.

There is a cost to being permanently inclusive whether it’s necessary or not. Meeting intros already go on way too long and imo are often a bit pointless because you forget who everyone is. So the cost of being ‘inclusive’ has to be weighed against the cost to the disabled person of having to tell people they are disabled. Tbh I don’t see why a disability needs to be a secret. It should just be a normal thing that when Jane is in a meeting we need to do some specific things that help her (and tbh if you actually ask the visually impaired person what they specifically need it’s going to be much more helpful than just assuming every VI person needs the same thing).

I listen to some professional
podcasts where they do this. I don’t know if you can even watch a video of them - I’ve only ever heard the audio. Each podcast has only two people, with - obviously - different voices. So in that case I put it firmly into the performative bs category.

That was literally in the OP

Bloody hell. I hope this doesn't catch on. I would be the 'tubby older woman with dyed hair and a huge bosom. Accessories include a soup spattered lanyard. And pronouns sex based please'.

This is true. I would add, however, that a person introducing themselves as a woman really neednt also say ‘my pronouns are she/her’. Pretty redundant.