What are “unusual characters”

The world is a complex place. It is tempting to enforce simplicity upon it to make things easier for computers. Gender is a boolean, no one is older than 99, all text flows left to right, and names are always in English. That makes it nice and easy for us to write computer systems – and who cares if it is dehumanising?

Recently, I tried to register with phone company EE. When someone asks for my first name, I usually just give my initial. But this box wasn’t having any of my nonsense. It demanded two characters – and no “unusual” characters.

It’s the banality of the bigotry which gets to me. Usual. Normal. Standard. They’re just dull ways for dull people with limited imaginations to dehumanise other people. The people who designed this form probably didn’t think of themselves as racist. They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary.

Language matters. We’re a decade on from “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” – so ignorance is no excuse. And telling people that their names are abnormal is rude.

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