Law Office of Lainey Feingold
Disability Rights Legal Advocacy

The Law Office of Lainey Feingold’s website is a WordPress site designed and maintained to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AAA Success Criteria. Yet according to Joseph Karr O’Connor, an accessibility advocate and consultant and a WordPress expert, only a handful of themes in the WordPress Theme Directory are accessible to all users. Just four of of 1,747 themes as of April, 2013 designed to be inclusive? Karr O’Connor is out to change those numbers with the Cities Project, an international effort to increase the number of free accessible WordPress themes. Karr O’Connor will be bringing his message to the University of California Berkeley on June 11, and the public is invited to learn more about the collaborative creative effort that is the Cities Project.

Five years ago today, on June 4, 2008, disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson died unexpectedly at her home in South Carolina at age 50. With today’s 24/7 news cycle and a deluge of information each morning when we turn on our computers, is it easy to forget to stop and remember people no longer with us. Harriet McBryde Johnson is worth remembering. Five years after her untimely death, her activism and writings, her commitment to social justice, and her willingness to confront bigotry wherever she found it serves as a continuing reminder of the core values and goals of today’s disability civil rights movement.

Szilvia Nyusti and Péter Takács are blind advocates in Hungary who wanted their bank (the largest bank in their country) to install Talking ATMs. After all, they paid the same fees as sighted customers, why shouldn’t they have the same access to services and technology? After a five year legal battle in Hungary, they took their claims to the United Nations. On May 16, 2013, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities issued an historic ruling finding that Hungary violated the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) by failing to ensure that Hungarian banks had Talking ATMs. Congratulations to Szilvia and Peter. Congratulations to the United Nations. Congratulations to the CRPD for working as it should in protecting the rights of people with disabilities. Shame on the United States for failing to ratify the treaty.

Today, May 9, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day — a great day to become aware of laws around the globe that impact digital accessibility. Laws related to digital accessibility support and protect the civil rights of people with disabilities. Core components of life in the 21st century exist in the digital space, and without accessibility, basic human rights are diminished or completely denied. These include the right to education, employment, public services, health care, community, travel and more. Laws protecting the rights of people with disabilities to access digital content — whether found on the web, in a mobile application, through electronic kiosks or elsewhere — are an important piece of the puzzle that makes digital accessibility a reality.

On May 9, 2013 people around the world will be gathering for workshops, seminars and other events to celebrate and recognize the second annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day, or GAAD. As explained on the GAAD Facebook page, the day is a community-driven effort whose goal is to focus one day to raise the profile of digital (web, software, mobile app/device, touch screen kiosk, etc.) accessibility and people with different disabilities. The Law Office of Lainey Feingold’s legal practice is entirely focused on digital accessibility, and this post is my tribute to the wonderful idea that is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Congratulations to the grassroots community that is growing GAAD and especially to accessibility activist extraordinaire Jennison Asuncion whose enthusiasm and commitment is significantly responsible for the tremendous growth of this day of awareness.

Cynthia Waddell, a pioneer in developing and advocating for legal theories to support website accessibility for people with disabilities, died on April 2, 2013. In 1998, two years before the first Structured Negotiations web accessibility settlement, eight years before the Target web litigation was filed, and long before the U.S. Department of Justice stated its intention to issue web accessibility regulations, Cynthia wrote articles and gave speeches explaining the legal basis for universal design in the development of webpages. Before Twitter and its ubiquitous #a11y and #ux hashtags, Cynthia was an international advocate for an inclusive web, open to all.