Is the term "blind spot" peculiar to the English language, or is it likely to be well understood worldwide, even by people who don't have English as their first language?
Some background
I'm currently searching for a term I can use in some software I'm developing. The feature in question allows the user to draw rectangles over an image to denote areas they'd like to ignore in a later analysis of the image. I need the user to be able to create and delete as many of these areas as they like.
Currently, the areas are called "exclusion areas", but that causes problems when you've got a button labelled "Remove exclusion area". We've seen people being tripped up by the double negative.
One thought was to rename the "exclusion areas" to "blind spots". However, do you think this will cause more problems for non-native English speakers?
Best Answer
I like @horatio's answer, the common term for what you're doing is masking unwanted parts of the image, so it could be called a mask rectangle.
I tried to come up with a better word, but I think there's a deeper problem: what the word removed means. What does a button labelled "Remove Exclusion Area", "Remove Blind Spot" or even "Remove Ignored Area" do? To me it sounds like it will actually remove the area the rectangle covers from the image. It sounds like, no, what it does is remove the rectangle denoting what parts of the image are to be ignored.
That's why I would go with mask. It's specific enough to refer to what's doing the covering, not's what's underneath. "Remove Mask" should be understood in English, although I'm not sure how it translates.