Why is this insensitive language? What do you think he should have said instead? I'm curious because I would not want to offend anyone. 'Visually impaired' seems like a standard way to describe people who have either full or some degree of partial blindness, in the UK you can even register as 'visually impaired' with the government and the NHS (National Health Service) uses this term.
It comes across pretty badly in my dialect of American English to turn adjectives about people into nouns. For example, "I saw a disabled on the bus today" or "a visually impaired" or "a Chinese" without "person" afterward would all be really weird phrasing, and if you were otherwise fluent in my dialect it would imply that whatever you were about to say next was likely to be pretty clueless about that group.
BUT I wouldn't apply that inference to someone with a foreign accent, even a British accent. It's a fine point of style that I can't assume will translate across dialects. (For example, "I saw a German on the bus today" would be much less weird than "a Chinese" to anyone speaking my dialect. How do we know? We just know.) So here I think mbrookes has the wrong idea.
I guess their complaint is that the phrase "visually impaired", rather than "people with a visual impairment", or even the less respectful "visually impaired people", sort of makes it sound like the people he spoke with are defined by their disability.
I think the founder is originally from Mexico so it's possible that English is not their first language. And either way, there's a more polite way to bring something to their attention than as you did. It's possible to have your heart in the right place, but misstep with language.
What should it be? I found this a much nicer way of describing 'blind' people than you, apparently, did. What is a better, more polite way to describe someone whose vision is impaired?
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Visual-impairment/Pages/Introdu...