Samantha (synthetic voice over theme music):	Hello and welcome to Eyes on Success a weekly program of information on the ever changing world of accessibility.  Now here are the hosts of this program Nancy Goodman Torpey and Peter Torpey.

Nancy/Pete:	Hello I’m Nancy, and I’m Pete.  On this week’s show we’ll be talking about structured negotiation for information access.  And if you’re wondering what that’s all about listen on.

Nancy:	Lainey Feingold is a disability rights lawyer whose practice is devoted to using structured negotiation to improve access for people with visual impairments.  We’ll speak with her about her methods and some of her successes including accessible ATMs, credit reports, prescription bottles and websites.  But first for our tip of the week.  This week’s tip comes from Lainey Feingold.  

Lainey:	You know I like thinking of accessibility as part of usability because it does make the fight in the mobile app easier for everyone.  Especially things like color contrast.  Sometimes you look at the contrast people choose and it’s like if they had used accessibility standards to make sure there was enough contrast all their users would be thanking them because it would be easier for sighted people to read as well. 

Nancy:	I can’t tell you how many garage sale signs we’ve gone past and people thought “Oh, I’m going to make this really easy to see, I’m going to use a red marker on my corrugated cardboard sign” and nobody can read that from a distance.  

Peter:	You know there’s actually two points here.  One is Lainey talks about things being accessible but also useable.  Just because something may be accessible, doesn’t mean it’s easy to use.  And in this case as Nancy pointed out sometimes just making things easier to use for visually impaired people actually makes the experience more pleasant for those who can see.  

(theme music)

Nancy:	Let’s start by meeting Lainey and learning about how she got into the field of disability rights and about some of her biggest successes.  

Lainey:	Thanks for having me on.  My name is Lainey Feingold and I am a disability rights lawyer.  I work out of Berkeley, California but I do work around the country and for the last 20 or so years I have pretty much exclusively represented people who are blind and visually impaired on access to information in technology cases.  

Peter:	Now I take it you yourself are not visually impaired.  How did you get involved in this field?

Lainey:	Well like everything else you know life has its twists and turns.  When I first got out of law school in 1981 I was representing labor unions and then I was doing more traditional civil rights, race and gender cases and had an opportunity to work for DREDF (Disability Rights Education Defense Fund) fill in while someone was gone and he was supposed to be gone for four months and that turned into four years and while I was there I had an opportunity to work with a private civil rights firm in Oakland and one of the partners in that firm knew Steve Mendelsohn.  Steve Mendelsohn is a blind lawyer and advocate and he called his friend at that firm and said “you know this doesn’t seem right I can’t use an ATM” and the lawyer that I knew in that firm called me and we started thinking about what sort of legal claims could we have around the fact that ATMs at the time didn’t talk, there wasn’t a single accessible ATM in the United States, this was back in 1994 and so we decided to pursue that.  And we wrote letters to three California banks and that started me off on working with the blind community.  

Nancy:	And how did you get into doing structured negotiation?

Lainey:	Since we first wrote those letters to the banks.  We said to the banks “you know we’re lawyers, it was myself and my colleague Linda Dardarian who continues to do this work with me until today, and we wrote to the banks, you know we explained what the issue was for blind customers how they wanted to bank independently and they couldn’t and there was braille on the machines at the time which didn’t do anybody any good and we worked on the lack of alternative formats for bank statements, it was just very early days of online banking which wasn’t accessible, and we said to the banks “you know we think there’s a legal issue here, a legal claim, but rather than file a lawsuit we’d rather work in collaboration and come up with solutions that will be long lasting and work for the blind customers in a true and deep way.  And it worked.  We started with those three banks and since that time we’ve written letters and we’ve reached legal agreements with some of the biggest companies in the United States about a whole variety of issues.  We do a lot of work with web accessibility, accessible pedestrian signals, alternative formats, we’ve done video description in movie theaters, hospital access, point-of-sale devices.

Samantha (synthetic voice over theme music):	 You are listening to Eyes on Success

Nancy:	This week’s focus topic is using structured negotiations to achieve improved access to information and other technologies for people with visual impairment.  So we’re going to get into more details of what types of cases and what kind of successes you’ve had, but we thought we’d start by talking about your method of interacting with, for example, these banks.  You call it “structured negotiation” that’s not a term that’s familiar to most of us.  

Lainey:	It’s a serious way to pursue legal claims but it’s not litigation where someone’s going to win, someone’s going to lose.  Everybody comes to the table to really try to work out solutions that will be win-win for everybody.

Nancy:	And how does it differ from any other kind of negotiation?

Lainey:	Well once you’re engaged in it, it’s similar to other types of negotiations.  A good example is if you meet somebody for the first time, if they stretch out their hand and offer to shake your hand or they punch you in the stomach which situation are you going to have a better reaction to?  And so even though 99% of lawsuits eventually settle, by skipping the whole litigation process that’s very adversarial and encourages people to find reasons not to do things.  We skip all that and are able to work without defensiveness in the best situation.  

Peter:	So I’m kind of curious when you were new at this in the early 90’s and approaching some of the banks and saying “hey your ATMs are not accessible”, what was the initial reaction?  I would expect that some of these people would be a little bit skeptical and say “well you know so they’re not accessible.”

Lainey:	Well at the time we first contacted the banks there were no talking ATMs in the United States and as far as we know there were only 12 talking ATMs anywhere in the world and those were in Canada as a result of advocacy by the Canadian blind community.  And the Royal Bank of Canada had built sort of one off or 12 off automatic teller machines that talked so blind people could use them independently.  So I would say it was more, you know if there was any skepticism it was more like can we do this?  And has it been done before and how are we going to do it and what is it exactly going to look like.  There weren’t a lot of models there were no models in the United states to find those answers.  So that’s why collaboration was particularly helpful because the blind customers were able to meet directly with the bank people and go to ATM labs and really figure out what should this thing look like and how will it work to be most effective.  

Peter:	My guess is, Nancy has often said in the past when we worked at Xerox that if you present people with a solution, that’s better than presenting people with a problem and if you could work collaboratively to figure out the solution that’s a more effective means of dealing with the situation.

Lainey:	Yeah, I agree with that and that’s why my law practice has been based on for the last 20 years.  We have had these agreements with, you know, I think we did 15 agreements on tactic point-of-sale devices so blind people wouldn’t have to expose their pin numbers, we have the talking prescription agreement with Walmart and these are very large companies, very big institutions.

Peter:	So generally people are pretty receptive if you can say “here we can work towards a better solution for everybody and just walk them through them.”

Lainey:	Absolutely.  I think people no matter how big a corporation they’re in people respond better as human beings when a collaborative approach is offered.  Now I really need to say at the outset that of course a corporation or the public entity has to say “yes” to this process.  So there’s a lot of very good work that gets accomplished in disability rights through lawsuits and this is not to say lawsuits aren’t useful and important because they are, it’s just that this is another method that has also worked for achieving access.  

Peter:		There are many tools of the trade.

Lainey:	Exactly, you need many tools in the toolbox.  You know I really have an appreciation for how these large institutions work.  It’s not like you can just call one person who can say yes to something.  There’s a lot of internal discussion that has to go on and there is the consumer side and the technology side in integrating with the business systems.  You know the complexity of it really lends itself to trying to work out solutions in a collaborative way just because it is so complex inside the entities. 

Peter:	We both used to work for a major corporation and there sure are a lot of people to negotiate with and a lot of inertia in big organizations.  

Nancy:	How do your cases get started?  Somebody contacts your office and says “hey I’m having trouble with whatever I’m trying to achieve” where do you typically go from there?  For example, your ATM situation that was where you got started, you started with three banks but I guess you must have known this was going to mushroom to every bank in the country?

Lainey:	You know I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say we knew, or we were going to know.  Like I said most of the 50 cases, most of them have been done with the same Oakland civil rights firm that Steve Mendelsohn initially contacted and the name of that firm is Goldstein, Borgen, Dardarian & Ho and Linda Dardarian who is a partner there, we really operate as a technical partnership but we are colleagues and co-counsel in most of these cases.  So somebody might like in the Steve Mendelsohn early ATM case called her firm, she brought me in.  Now sometimes people call me, sometimes people call her, we are working in the last several years with a lot of other lawyers around the country who want to learn how to do this method, so they may call us because they have a client with an issue.  It’s like most things in life you can’t quite predict what’s going to happen and I can’t say that when we first wrote to the banks we thought this was going to be a national endeavor.  First of all the banks weren’t really national back then.  We wrote to the three banks who were the largest in California at the time but they weren’t all national.  We didn’t really know how it was going to turn out.

Peter:	But it turned out to be a successful method and apparently you’ve applied this to many other situations.

Lainey:	Exactly, well that’s what I’m realizing.  At first to be honest with you, it was almost like maybe the talking ATM blind community issues were so unique that we didn’t need to do a lawsuit and there was something very special about that combination of factors and I think there was.  I think it’s not coincidental, I think the banks when presented with the issue were excited to find a solution.  I’m not saying the very first day when we knocked on their door but eventually it was really a team effort.  But then various things happened and we said “well, hmm, that worked let’s try it with the next set of issues”.

Peter:	Well let me tell you people sometimes think it’s strange that they put braille on the drive-in ATMs or accessible devices on the drive-in ATMs but I’ve used those.  Sometimes that’s the closest one to where I’ve lived and it’s easy to get to and banks are closed at certain times of the day or on weekends at the time and it could be very useful.

Nancy:	Lainey, you mentioned that you’ve done a lot of work with point-of-sale devices can you explain what they are and explain what the issue with them was?

Lainey:	That’s a good question because it means different things in different contexts.  When we talk about it we talk about the device at the consumer end when you’re paying for products or services with a card, a credit card or a debit card, or a benefits card can be used, gift cards, when you have to swipe it through the machine and if it’s a debit type of card and you have to enter your pin, if it’s a flat screen device and you can’t feel the keys, if you’re blind you’re not going to be able to enter your pin.  So the idea of flat screen device is something that the industry introduced in the early 2000’s and without thinking about the impact on people’s disability or someone who can’t use a flat screen they got rid of the key pads.  And all of a sudden we were hearing from people who use to be able to do something independently, enter a pin, and now they no longer could.  So we started getting involved in that.  And that seemed like another good issue to have a conversation about because, I wouldn’t say it was obvious but once brought to the attention of the company it was like “oh yeah, we understand that, people shouldn’t have to give their pin to a clerk.”

Nancy:	So did you contact the major credit card companies or major corporations that do a lot of retail sales or what?

Lainey:	Our work depends on like you started to say who calls us.  So you know we started with the largest retailers primarily because that’s who we got calls about.  We ended up talking to about 15 different institutions based on people who called us and the American Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind and the California Council of the Blind, spear headed the initiative as organizations and we contacted Target and CVS and Rite-Aid, Best Buy and all these companies that had, I would say kind of unknowingly switched to a device that really deprived blind people of their right to privacy. 

Peter:	And so what was the solution there.  Did they have to retrofit all the devices or introduce some new technology?

Lainey:	Yeah, typically there’s third party manufacturers who make two types of solutions for this kind of thing.  One is a separate keypad that plugs in to the flat screen device and the other is a whole new device that has both the flat screen and the keypad.  Hopefully the industry is realizing now that they are better off with what we call the “integrated device”.  There’s just one device it has the keypad and the flat screen.  Because in fact a lot of sighted people prefer the keypad as well.  

Peter:	That’s interesting.  I was wondering what would make them want to incur some additional costs perhaps in retrofitting or buying fancier units?

Lainey:	All the cases we do are based in our understanding of either state law or the Americans With Disabilities Act and you know when we approach a company we’re able to explain to them because we are not doing litigation, we’re not having to fight about whether something is legally required or not and we can instead put it more in terms of customer service or like I said handing over your pin, that’s something anybody can understand. 

Nancy:	What other kinds of cases have you had?

Lainey:	Another thing we did after the ATM cases we had a very successful negotiations with the major credit reporting companies in the U.S. who around that time had started to provide free credit reports under federal law and when they rolled out the free credit reports they hadn’t thought about how blind people were going to access their credit information.  

Peter:	I saw the solution on your website. Can you tell our listeners what it is?

Lainey:	Well we did a comprehensive alternative format resolution with the credit reporting companies.  There’s three major companies in the United States that do the free credit reports and they work together with us very collaboratively, wonderful partners, and now people can get their credit reports both online in accessible format that was a big part of it and also when you call in on the free 800 number, you have an option to request your report in braille or large print or audio.  I’m pretty sure they still have audio.  We did the deal with them in 2008.  And that was another thing that when presented without an adversarial context, it’s pretty easy to understand that people need independent private access to their credit information.  It’s not something you want to have somebody read to you.  

Peter:	That’s great information to know.  I did not know that myself and we will certainly pass that along to our listeners and put links into our show notes that will point to some of those resources.  

Nancy:	So I have a question.  You get individuals calling you up raising the issue and then you negotiate sometimes with major corporations and some of these negotiations end up in things that are going to cost the corporation money.  Who pays your bills or do you do all this pro bono and you actually do something else to keep your law practice alive?

Lainey;	No this is all I do.  I don’t do anything else to keep my law practice alive.  That part of the case is called attorney’s fees.  And basically in the United States people have to pay for their own lawyers that’s how it works.  But in a discrimination case Congress has decided that there needs to be fee shifting, which means that if you’re a woman and you have to sue for sex discrimination or if you’re an African American and you sue for race discrimination, if you win the party who is the wrong doer has to pay your fees.  And the idea that is if you are in a protected class, you know gender, race, disability, ethnicity, anything like that, that you should have a lawyer who can represent you and protect your rights but you shouldn’t have to pay for that lawyer because in most instances you can’t afford to pay for that lawyer.  So the Americans With Disabilities Act is that kind of law of fee shifting statute.  So when we are finished with our negotiations we seek our attorney’s fees from the company that we’re negotiating with so we don’t charge either blind individuals or the organizations we’re working with.

Peter:	That sounds like it’s actually beneficial to everybody.  It can avoid the companies or entities facing an expensive adversarial lawsuit and make it less expensive for them in the long run and actually make their customers more satisfied.  

Lainey:	Yes absolutely.  I mean even though there’s fee shifting in our work of course the amount of our attorney’s fees is significantly less than in a lawsuit because the typical types of expenses you have with fighting over discovery and sharing information and writing legal documents, we’re bypassing that and doing something else instead.

Nancy:	And knowing about the fee shifting should eliminate a big impediment or disincentive to somebody who feels like they are in a situation where they are being discriminated against or they’re losing out because somebody just hasn’t thought about making something accessible and so knowing that they won’t be stuck with legal fees then they’re maybe less disinclined to contact you about trying to remedy the problem.

Lainey:	Well yes but I should right here that the very first thing anybody can do is to try to get the company or the entity the public accommodation the government office, try on your own before you call a lawyer to get the issue resolved.  Make a phone call, fill out a web form, not always possible if the web form isn’t accessible, send an e-mail and keep track of your efforts because the ideal thing is to put people like me out of business.  You shouldn’t need a lawyer to be able to get a document in a format that you can read it in.  So when we approach a company, one of the first things we often here is “oh you should have let us know, you should have called us”.  And we need to able to say, lawyers are only involved here because your customers, your members, your clients they just couldn’t get through the door so people really need to try to solve these problems on their own and sometimes they can.  There’s many corporations I think awareness is heightened now and if you make a complaint about something, people are often going to, you know, get it to the right person and maybe get it fixed.  So the idea is not to have to use a lawyer but if you do have to use a lawyer but if you do have to use a lawyer, regardless of what legal strategy you use, litigation, or structured negotiations you want to be able to show how you tried to fix it on your own.

Nancy:	That’s great advice for anybody about anything.

Lainey:	Exactly.  

Nancy:	So assuming that somebody’s feeling there’s an issue and they’ve tried all of that and they want to contact, for example, you, to help, how would they do that?

Lainey:	Well the best way to contact me is by e-mail.  The best e-mail to reach me at is LF@lflegal.com.  It’s important to know that it needs to be the kind of issue that is affecting the individual as an individual but is also going to be affecting other blind people as well.  

Nancy;	So pretty much something that would if it were in litigation be turned into a class action suit.  

Lainey:	It would have the potential for that.  Yeah that’s a shorthand way of saying it.  Yeah if it’s an individual particular thing about a particular problem someone’s having at work or I don’t do any benefits types of cases those things.  My website lflegal.com and you can get a pretty good feel on that, you know what types of cases that I’ve worked on.

Peter:	And what is your phone number in case people find it easier to find you that way.

Lainey:	E-mail is best but I know that’s not available to everyone so my work line is (510) 548-5062.  

Nancy:	And your Twitter feed?

Lainey:	Yeah the Twitter feed is @lflegal and I tweet about legal issues related to disability community and blind community as well as technology issues related to accessibility and blindness.  

Nancy:	So if you thought this was interesting those are some other places you can to get additional information that wasn’t going to fit into our half hour show.

(theme music)

Nancy:	Now for this week’s final topic, where you can go to hear Lainey Feingold speak about issues related to her work.  

Lainey:	I have been speaking at CSUN which is the Cal State Northridge International Conference on Technology for people with disabilities since 2000 and pretty much every year, not every year, put pretty much every year I speak at that conference and it’s coming up in March in San Diego and Linda and I will be doing a presentation on legal issues around digital accessibility.  We’re trying to use the word digital accessibility to incorporate web and mobile and technology like Kiosks and point-of-sale devices.  We’re now calling it our Annual CSun Update because this will be the fourth or fifth year that we’ve done it.  I’ll also be doing a session on structured negotiations as a method with a focus on how the blind community has been involved because I want to flush out the ideas in community and get feedback and share some of the things we’ve talked about on the show today.  So I’ll be doing those two things at CSun.

	There’s one other conference that’s coming up in May in Austin, Texas that I speak at for many years which is called AccessU and it’s put on by a group called Knowbility, You know any of your listeners who are either wanting to learn more about accessibility, are part of development teams or in corporations who want to learn how to make this thing happen on a large scale so really it’s not a conference not to be missed.  It’s much smaller than CSun, a lot of hands on activities and Sharon Rush who runs Knowbility brings together the highest levels of the accessibility tech world for that conference.

Peter:	Well, it’s interesting to learn how some of these access issues have changed over the years and some of the driving force behind that and now we know part of the story.  So as usual you heard a lot of contact information and other resources there and those will all be in our show notes because we don’t expect you to be writing all that down.  Look at www.eyesonsuccess.net for this particular show and there they are.

Nancy:	That’s it for show number 1406.  Next week on Eyes on Success we’ll be talking about Raspberry Vi, an accessible version of Raspberry Pi which is a tiny flexible and very inexpensive computer.  We’ll speak with Mobeen Iqbal, Mike Ray and Rill about the device, its capabilities and how it opens up the world of computing to people with visual impairments.  

	If you have any questions regarding something you’ve heard about on this show or you’d like to share an idea for a future show, send an e-mail to hosts@eyesonsuccess.net or call us at 585-258-0333 and we’ll try to address your question in an upcoming program.  

Samantha (synthetic voice over theme music):	You’ve been listening to Eyes on Success hosted and produced by Nancy Goodman Torpey and Peter Torpey and distributed by WXXI reach out radio for detailed information or a full archive of programs visit www.EyesOnSuccess.net .  You can also follow us on Facebook and AudioBoom.com at EyesOnSuccess and on Twitter @_eyesonsuccess.  We hope you will join us again next week for more information and updates on products for accessible living.  Thanks for listening to Eyes on Success and have a nice day.