Perhaps I should start by saying that I am all for collecting statistics about such matters: collectively, we do not do terribly well at either race or disability and we need statistics if we are to do better. Ignorance, in these matters anyway, is no help at all. That said, they are also both tricky areas in which it is all too easy to make things worse by trying to be helpful.
In this particular case, it is hard to know, but I think that if I were a person of either race or disability, I would find this form rather irritating. For a start and thinking with my fingers, I think it would have been better to have clearly separated boxes for each of race and disability and for both boxes to have options for 'prefer not to say' and 'other', this last for those who don't feel that the options provided cover their case.
And then there are all the readers of the Daily Mail who are easily irritated by these things. You need their statistics too, so the device of ordering the options alphabetically, in some contexts rather a good way of smoothing things out, is probably not going to work very well here. A good part of that part of the great British public which thinks of itself as white is not going to be too happy about being an option near the end. Rather as having to poke around among the U's for 'United Kingdom' when asked by your computer for country of residence - something which seems to happen to me at least once a week - is rather irritating.
I turn now for help to the chrome auto-fill machinery, machinery which is pretty clever at filling out computer forms for me. I suppose that works by chrome labeling all one's properties and qualities with tags which a form writing computer programmer can plug into, so if chrome had race, disability (and probably sexual orientation) on its list of tags, I could answer the questions once, be irritated once and then be done with. Get on with my life.
The first catch would be that everyone with good intentions is apt to want to have their very own list. I suspect that lists obey a power law whereby the number of different lists can be expressed as a power of the number of organisations which want them, with the power being around one half. So if 625 organisations need to know about disability, you will need 25 lists to keep them all quiet. 25 times 25 being 625.
No doubt there is a second catch.
PS 1: thinking of race, I remember that in my days as a population statistician, we used the proxy of country of birth for race, which at that time did well enough. Perhaps we could ask now for country of heritage, heritage being all the rage. While I think the census statisticians got themselves well tied up in knots when it came to finding out about religion, these days a rather less emotive topic for most people.
PS 2: I also remember coming across white people who thought of themselves as British, but who were a bit miffed about having to declare their country of birth as India, which was apt to get them consigned to the wrong line at immigration at airports... Perhaps they would have been happier if they had been allowed to say British India. Not so many such people about these days.
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