HARTFORD, Conn. — Several employees at an insurance office are complaining that a blind colleague, David Petrovic, pronounces their names the way his screen reader does. They have repeatedly asked him to stop.
Stacey Westerman, Human Resources’ point person for complaints about Petrovic, said, “One employee is a German man whose name ‘Jan’ is pronounced ‘yawn,’ but Petrovic says ‘Jan,’ like the Brady Bunch kid. Jan is offended, and she – sorry, he – insists HR should take action.”
Sales manager José Mendez is frustrated that Petrovic consistently refers to him as “Josie, like I’m a white girl.”
Petrovic says his co-workers are being ableist. “They aren’t thinking about my perspective. I listen to my screen reader pronounce their names way more often than people. In emails, messages, calendar invites, all that. So it’s a lot of mental effort to remember names.”
“See that sounds like a good point, right?,” asked Westerman. “And I don’t have any idea how screen readers work, so what am I supposed to do? My MSW didn’t cover this.”
She continued: “I pushed back once, and Petrovic said, ‘Why don’t you go ask the blind people in your life what they think about this?’ So then I had to admit I don’t know any blind people, and he just said, ‘hmmm.’”
When we reached out to the company that makes the screen reader, a spokesperson said, “He can change how it pronounces names. That’s right in the settings. It’s super easy.”
But many are convinced Petrovic mispronounces names on purpose.
“He calls me Diarrhea Johnson,” said Daria Johnson. “There’s no way his screen reader says that. There’s an extra syllable. And he said my name just fine until our manager reassigned one of his big clients to me. You think that’s a coincidence?”
“Oh you talked to Diarrhea?” asked Petrovic, “She’s a bit of a conspiracy theorist if you ask me.”
He added, “Plus, if you believe her over me, you’re a bigot.”