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Comment by apozem | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking because the system wasn't designed to handle that.

Any designer must test his or her product on many groups of people to find these problems.

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> A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

Here in Brazil, names with accents on vowels are common. Yet some banking file formats still use positional (fixed-length fields) uppercase-only ASCII files.

The format I'm thinking of also has a field in the header to specify whether the tape is formatted as 1600 BPI or 6250 BPI, so I'm inclined to think the cause is more technological than cultural.

Wasn't there a thing that happened a while back where a fitness tracker was found to not work with darker skinned individuals?

We had some face-tracking Sony pan/tilt cameras in the mid 1990s. They were also racist - they worked fine for me but wouldn't track an Indian friend of mine at all.

It was the apple watch. It also had problems with wrist tattoos.

I recall Kinect had the same problems.

And now I feel compelled to mention Better Off Ted, Season 1 Episode 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIBdmyFWZVE

> These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

My guess would be on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands? It's 2016. There are very few good reasons left to assume text == ASCII anymore.

Having one good reason is enough, and the "it's easier" reason won't be going away anytime soon.

> ...because who has those in the States?

Right! Just:

Hernández, Martínez, Rodríguez, García, González, Gómez...

Jacques Villeré, Jacques Dupré, and Paul Octave Hébert - all governors of the state of Louisiana.

Luis Muñoz Marín, Luis Fortuño, and Aníbal Acevedo Vilá - all governors of Puerto Rico.

Ben Ray Luján - current U.S. Representative

It could also be a cost benefit analysis. How much business lost vs. the cost of supporting. Especially when many such users have encountered the problem often enough to already have a work around.

There are definitely some cases where it is a testing issue, but especially with accepting all possible valid names, sometimes the cost is too high to convince the one in control of funding.

It's just really annoying when it's a government system and it's use is required.

This is slightly off topic, but I recently came across a lawsuit involving German passport and their having a person's name printed IN ALL CAPS. The plaintiff was suing for his right to use lower case characters as that was how his name was spelled correctly vis-a-vis how other families who use the same letters in the same order but with different casing spelt it.

falsehoods government bureaucrats believe about names...

This reminds me of the (endlessly hilarious) tax protester argument that you don't have to respond to a court summons where your name is in all caps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_conspiracy_argum...

Relatedly, the OCR machine-readable part of a standard (ICAO) passport can't contain accented letters, so ICAO has a standard for how to systematically transliterate various scripts into Basic Latin.

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