FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Why is DFW's Skylink in English only?
View Single Post
Old May 28, 2005 | 10:52 am
  #32  
chicaloca453
10 Countries Visited20 Countries Visited30 Countries Visited20 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: SNA and BNA depending on work and time of year
Programs: UA Silver/ AA EXP/Hyatt Globalist/Marriott Lifetime Titanium/Hilton Diamond
Posts: 2,197
Originally Posted by wherenext
I was able to ride the Skylink at DFW the first day it was open and thought it was great but I wondered why all of the announcements and visual indicators were English only, not even anything in Spanish. Does anyone know if they plan to add other languages, especially when the new International Terminal opens?


Would you also like the gate agents to board the planes bi-lingually? No one ever complains that they don't do this, but yet everything else is supposed to be PC?

I think of it like this. Terminals at DFW are based on letters and numbers. On a whole, most people can look at their ticket or the monitor for a letter and number and look at the sign on the visual to compare. Really, you don't need 6 different languages to say Terminal A Gates 1-9 or whatever the stop may be. Most people (sight impaired excluded) can see the A and 1-9 and know if that's where they belong. It isn't like the gates are called something that a non-English speaking person would not recognize.

Now, it you really really want to get PC, why aren't the boarding passes (and the US Currency for that matter) printed including braille? That is a real issue that truly excludes people. In watching Ray and hearing him need to be paid in singles because he had no way to tell otherwise if he was being cheated just makes me sad.

Many in the US bend over backwards accommodating people who speak/read another language, but they never really bother to consider the natural born Americans who speak English well but can't read it unless it's in another language (BRAILLE).

I think not having spanish on a train that goes to gates in alpha-numeric systems is the least of complaints at an airport.
chicaloca453 is offline