What’s in a name (sign)?
A lot. Here’s why workplace name pronunciation features need to include the ability to add phonetics and video for name signs
Books have always been an enormous part of my life.
I’ve always been a voracious reader. Being in a wheelchair in the 70s for four years continuously in casts constrained my ability to participate in just about everything outside my home, including school. Before the ADA, there was no guaranteed parking and no curb cuts. Even my bedroom wasn’t accessible. My father had to swap his office for my bedroom for several years since my wheelchair couldn’t make the two quick 90-degree turns required to get into my bedroom. For one eighteen-month stretch, I rarely left the house. So, I turned to books as a way to occupy my time.
Growing up, my mother had a rule — I couldn’t check out more books from the library than I could carry. School librarians were always my best friends since spending free time in the library was an excellent method of avoiding the rain, outside activities, and school bullies who loved to make fun of the gangly female nerd who couldn’t walk. My love for books even passed on to my oldest daughter, whose first verbal word was “book.”
So it is probably not a surprise that before the turn of the millennium, the name sign I was gifted by a Deaf 3-year-old whose guardianship case I was handling was related to the word “book.” I was always bringing stacks of paperwork and books to her house. The family had no internet, cell phones barely existed, and neither did Google Drive or DropBox.
My name sign is the handshape of S for Sheri but in movement and form of the word book. Secondarily, I ask interpreters use my initials (SBH) as an alternative because I know how hard it is to sign my long, awkward, complicated name repeatedly
Name signs are gifted to hearing individuals by d/Deaf individuals. Typically they represent some aspect of the person’s personality. For example, Kamala Harris’ name sign is a Lotus (which is what her name means in Sanskrit).
For years, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)-identifying individuals have been raising name mispronunciation as a sign of disrespect. Some relevant stories include:
What’s my Starbucks Name — TL;DR, many Asian individuals with names that are difficult to spell from the White perspective have Anglicized names they use at Starbucks, so their real name doesn’t get butchered.
Why getting a name right matters — TL;DR, getting names wrong, or even worse, making fun of them sends the message that a core aspect of your identity is unimportant.
Additionally, we as a society acknowledge that getting someone’s gender wrong is also problematic. It is discriminatory when this is:
Intentionally done to transgender individuals, or;
Communications from unknown parties make assumptions about your gender based on the field you work in, as I discussed in this article about my anger about constantly being misgendered in unsolicited vendor communications.
With that background in mind, why is it that organizations shout from the rooftops, “Hey, we solved this inclusion problem” when rolling out a feature that allows you to verbally record your name while not including phonetic name pronunciations or name signs? This type of behavior squarely comes under the category of attempting to be diverse while ignoring the needs of people with disabilities, or what some people call #Diversish.
People with stutters, aphasia, or other speech issues might not want to record their names.
People without voices *can’t* record a name pronunciation.
People who are deaf may prefer their name to be their name sign, not the fingerspelled version of their names.
That is one reason why recently, I added a block of text and two links to all of my e-mail signatures. The text includes the phonetic pronunciation of my name, which is:
shei riə bUHRn heɪ buhr
How do I know my phonetic pronunciation? I picked words that sounded similar and looked them up in my favorite local dictionary. For example,
burn instead of Byrne
hay instead of Ha then repeated and prepended an “s” for Sheri
The audio recording of me saying my name is at
And finally, my ASL Name Sign is in a video at
I am proud of my name sign and want to make sure people in the d/Deaf community and interpreters know that I have one and I want them to use it.
Every proposed feature needs to be looked at through the lens of:
How is a person with a disability going to use this?
Everyone has to be able to use it. If anyone is excluded because of poor or incomplete design choices, it’s not inclusive, regardless of the creators’ intent or other marginalized identities that may benefit. It is never acceptable to improve one group of marginalized identities’ inclusion at the expense of another’s. Corporate inclusion is not a game of Survivor. There can’t be only one winner at the expense of all others.
If you are going to do it, don’t claim inclusion success until you do it right. And doing it “really right” means everyone can use it.
Accessibility Deaf Inclusion UX Asl