(synthetic voice):  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.

N: Hello, I’m Nancy.

P: And I’m Pete. This week we will be talking with a deaf-blind attorney who works in the area of disability rights advocacy.

N: We will speak with Haben Girma about what that includes and some of her major cases settled either through negotiation or by initiating class action lawsuits. We will also learn how she got into this field and how she does her work. But first our tip of the week, which comes from Haben Girma:

H: One tip that I would give to anyone is try to learn as much as you can, and for the blind community that means developing all the tools and skills that you can. Learning Braille, learning technology, taking risks, and learning new talents, new skills, I am always trying to learn new things.

P: And that’s a great tip for anybody. Things are changing very quickly in the world these days, technology marches on, and what we are doing today is very different than tomorrow and particular as a visually impaired person, it’s important to keep abreast of technologies that make it easier for you to do your job or just to have more fun.

N: Also keeping abreast of changes there may be in the law and standard practices. Many of the cases that Haben will discuss later in this program are cases due to which new things are possible or even legal for people with disabilities, and so it’s important to keep track of that so you know what kind of response you might expect when you ask for some sort of accommodation.

P: What it comes down to is: life is a long-term learning experience.

(Music break)

N: Let’s start by meeting Haben Girma.

P: Haben, can you introduce yourself?

(typing sounds)

H: Hello everyone, my name is Haben Girma, a Skadden fellowship attorney at Disability Rights Advocates, a non-profit legal center based in Berkeley California but also has offices in New York City. I work to remove access barriers facing people with disabilities across the country.

N: We mentioned in the introduction that Haben is both blind and deaf. The ticking you may have heard at the beginning of the response is her friend Gordon, who transcribed all our questions for her, but we deleted the rest of that. So we are going to spend most of this session talking about your disability rights advocacy work, but before we get there, most of our audience and guests are blind, but you are also deaf. Can you describe your impairments?

H: I use the term deaf-blind for myself. I have limited vision and limited hearing, and it’s kind of tricky to describe it. I can see print that’s very large, but Braille is my preferred reading method. I can hear some speech sounds and maybe catch 4 out of 10 words, but it’s stressful to strain and listen, so instead of relying on my limited hearing, I use an alternate communication method by pairing a qwerty keyboard to a Braille display. So I have individuals or communication assistants type on a keyboard while I read in Braille.

P: What other technologies do you personally rely on?

H: Computers, I use a Mac with VoiceOver and an iPhone with VoiceOver. So Braille Note, Mac, IPhone. I also use a guide dog from the Seeing Eye, and also a cane on occasion.

P: Do you use any CCTV’s or magnifiers or hearing aids? Are those useful for you?

H: I occasionally use CCTV, but not that often. I don’t use hearing aids because they have not been able to help me up to this point. In my experience, it seems like the market is designed for the majority type of hearing loss, which is high frequency hearing loss, and the opposite is very rare. So hearing aids that assist my type of hearing loss don’t seem to exist right now.

N: Your speech is excellent, so you must have been a little older when you lost your hearing?

H: It’s really interesting, I actually have pretty good high frequency hearing and terrible low frequency hearing. So I speak in a higher range that I hear well, so I am able to hear myself and that’s why I speak clearly.

N: Wow, that’s interesting.

H: Yeah, most people with hearing loss have the opposite kind of hearing loss. Most people have trouble hearing high frequency sounds. I have the opposite where high frequency is fine but I struggle with low frequency noise.

P: And I suppose having that feedback enables you to make your speech output very clear?

H: Exactly! When you’re able to hear your own voice you are getting feedback on whether you are pronouncing things correctly. I think a lot of people with hearing loss, because they miss high frequency, they struggle with consonants, which tend to be high frequency, and vowels are low frequency, and if you can’t hear when you are making the K, or S, or P sound, you struggle to make it and that’s part of the reason there are deaf accents.

(music break with synthetic speech:  You are listening to Eyes On Success)

N:  This week’s focus topic is disability rights advocacy.

P: We also want to talk about your disability rights advocacy work today. We first wanted to ask what does disability rights advocacy mean to you?

H: That’s such a good question. It means a lot of different things. On one hand it means educating the community—programmers, teachers, other lawyers—about what it means to create a more accessible community. Education is a big part of it. I speak at a lot of workshops around the country and internationally to try to teach people what they can do to create a more inclusive community. Another part is helping individuals who have been denied equal access to gain that access, whether it’s through writing a letter on their behalf and explaining their situation in more clear terms, and negotiating with an entity that was not providing services, or it can mean litigation and filing a lawsuit to compel an institution to provide an accommodation or remove access barriers, whether online or on sidewalks, all sorts of different access issues.

N: What would be an example of the work you do?

H: Disability Rights Advocates recently had a case in California where we filed a lawsuit against the County of Alameda to ensure that voting machines are accessible to blind users who need voting machines with text-to-speech capabilities. That’s one example of the kind of work I do through Disability Rights Advocates.

N: We did a show a couple years ago, when New York State had just implemented universally accessible voting machines. That was show number 1144 and we will have links to that show and its show notes in the show notes for this show. On the website it says you do a lot of class action suits, can you describe how those differ from a personal lawsuit?

H: Class actions are on behalf of a group of people, so say all blind individuals who need screen readers or all blind individuals who rely on guide dogs. Class actions have the potential to change things and make things better for a large number of people. Personal lawsuits may make changes for just one individual, and sometimes changing things for one individual actually also has a large impact that makes things easier for everyone across the country. Disability Rights Advocates does high impact litigation. A lot of it is class actions, but sometimes it’s also on behalf of a blindness organization like National Federation for the Blind (NFB), American Council of the Blind (ACB) or National Association of the Deaf (NAD). And through that is able to remove access barriers on a large scale and empower a large group of people.

P: How did you get involved in this work yourself?

H: When I was in college, I was thinking about what I can do to make the world a better place and help people.  A lot of people told me I should go into law and that a law degree gives you the flexibility of helping people in a variety of ways, whether it’s through international non-profit work or teaching and using a law degree to teach various aspects of civil rights. So I went into law and wanted to be a disability rights lawyer, and I heard about Disability Rights Advocates and the work they do, so I applied for a fellowship there. I started my 2 year Skadden fellowship last year and am now just starting my second year.

N: Haben gave a TED Talk earlier in 2014 in which she gives a slightly longer and more humorous version of how she got into doing disability rights advocacy. Let’s just say a slice of chocolate cake figures prominently in the description. We will provide a link to her Ted Talk along with a transcription also in the show notes for this show.

P: Can you give us another example of the type of advocacy you do?

H: One of my biggest interests is technology and education. Right now we have a lawsuit against Scribd. They are an online digital library with over 40 million titles. They have a reading subscription service where you pay $8.99 per month and get unlimited access to ebooks and articles on Scribd…unless you are blind. Because right now they do not have screen reader access for a lot of the material on Scribd. So on behalf of the National Federation of the Blind and a blind mother in Vermont, Disability Rights Advocates and BGL have brought this case to help increase access to Scribd for blind readers, specifically seeking to have Scribd program their website and mobile applications to be compatible with screen readers like Jaws and Voiceover.

P: We have talked with some other disability rights advocates, and they have mentioned that often before things go to a legal setting, companies and organizations will wind up negotiating somehow and fixing the problems.

H: Ideally yes, companies will negotiate and be reasonable, but that’s not always the case unfortunately. And in this instance, we contacted Scribd, and the NFB explained the situation, the access barriers, lack of access for screen readers, and received no response  Scribd just ignored the NFB. So litigation is sort of a last resort. If you try raising complaints internally, try sending a friendly letter from an attorney and still get no response, what else can you do?

P: Sometimes you have no choice.

H: There’s always a choice. There’s the choice of staying home and accepting the lack of access, but in this case, reading is absolutely important, and Scribd is a service that has the potential to significantly increase the access to books and articles for the blind community. So NFB and the plaintiff, Heidi, chose in this case to take action. I am thrilled to be part of this and make history in terms of making the internet and online businesses more accessible to the blind community.

N: I know you’ve only been with Disability Rights Advocates for a little over a year, but what are some of the other cases you have worked on that would be of particular interest to our blind audience?

H: Just a little before I arrived at Disability Rights Advocates, UC Berkeley end DRA, on behalf of students with disabilities at UC Berkeley, reached a settlement agreement to have UC Berkeley produce print materials in alternative formats, within specified time ranges. It used to be that the university was taking a really long time to get materials in digital format or Braille for students with disabilities, so students brought these complaints to DRA, and DRA reached this settlement agreement with UC Berkeley. So one of my responsibilities is to monitor the settlement, and check reports from the university to ensure they are complying with the settlement agreement and making sure students are gaining access to print materials. Another case that would be of interest to the blind community is a case in the Los Angeles region. Taxi companies in the Los Angeles region are using point of sale touch screen terminals to provide sighted riders with ride information and payment services, and there is no text to speech features. So blind riders are not able to independently pay for their rides. So we brought this lawsuit against taxi companies and the operator of the point of sale terminals called RideCharge, to have them install text to speech capabilities on these touch screen terminals. 

P: Is that system actually working now?

H: No, not yet. We filed this case in April so it’s still somewhat in the early stages.

N: So I am wondering, do you know how difficult it is to install text to speech?

H: It really depends on the company and the device. It’s different for every company, but we’ve seen taxi companies already installing text to speech on their terminals and other places have done it too. Another case that DRA did involves Redbox DVD rental kiosks. Redbox agreed to have their Redbox kiosks modified to offer text to speech capabilities, so it’s been done on kiosks and terminals. And we think the taxi companies in Los Angeles could reasonably do the same thing.

P: There must be a tradeoff sometimes in terms of costs the company or organization needs to incur versus the solution they come up with. How is this all worked out?

H: The way the Americans with Disabilities Act frames it is places of public accommodation need to provide reasonable accommodations so long as it’s reasonable, so long as it’s not a financial undue burden. So it really depends on the resources of the company. So we look at the resources, is this a company that can afford to make the changes? How expensive are the changes? It’s determined on a case by case basis.

P: So that word “reasonable” is a negotiation?

H: Reasonable is a term that differs for every entity. So something that’s reasonable in one situation might not be reasonable in another situation, and it’s hard to say without looking at the actual company and actual accommodations being requested. But I would love to go in always thinking that yes, it is reasonable unless shown otherwise.

N: Well as long as you are willing to discuss it with the company and let them prove one way or the other, have them believe what you are saying to them, you should probably arrive at a reasonable solution, I would guess.

H: Yes, we are always telling companies that they need to arrive at a reasonable solution. We only take on cases where we feel the accommodations that we are seeking are reasonable. So we investigate companies at the beginning, seeing what we can learn from public information, from Google, and if we get the sense that this is a company that has the resources to provide the service, then we send them a letter and give them an opportunity to engage in negotiations, and explain themselves and fix the situation on their own. And sometimes they do, and that’s great. It’s refreshing and rewarding when companies take the initiative to resolve access issues on their own.

P: I guess we should really be grateful that Haben and her organization are around and doing the hard work that is making many of these services accessible to the visually impaired and people with other disabilities. It’s great work that they do for all of our benefit.

N: Earlier this year we did a related episode of Eyes on Success in which we spoke with Lainey Feingold about her work on what she called “structured negotiations for better access to information” in which she does some of the same things that Haben is describing. But the details obviously are slightly different, and we will have a link to that show in these show notes as well if you are really interested in the topic of disability rights advocacy. For the earlier show in particular, for access to information.

P: And if you are unable to hear that show, there is a transcript available in the show notes for that episode.

N: And we will have a transcript in the notes for this episode as well.

(music break)

N: Now for this week’s final item, the impact of technology on access for people with disabilities.

P: Some of these new technologies must be making it a lot easier to make accommodations. Can you speak a little about the impact of new technologies?

H: By technologies, do you mean websites?

P: Well I guess websites, hardware, software.

N: Screen readers, text to speech engines, magnifiers.

H: If you look in the area of books and reading, making books accessible to blind individuals has become much easier with technology. So for example, Scribd has digital copies of books, and receives digital copies of books with machine readable texts from publishers that show they operate, and it’s sort of like Netflix for books, where entities and users can upload their documents, allowing blind individuals to connect to that information through screen readers is much easier and affordable than say taking a traditional hardcopy paper book and scanning it or manually typing that on a Braille writer. So technology has made access much easier and faster.

N: I can’t imagine how they prevent their books from being accessed with a screen reader. It just seems like a digital book ought to be readable by screen reader.

H: I absolutely agree. Digital books are originally created with machine readable text, so it’s very strange that blind readers using screen readers are not able to access the books on Scribd. It’s very strange and unfortunate, it’s an unnecessary barrier.

N: We have listeners all across the United States, but also across the world. If somebody is not in an area where you said your organization is able to help them, how would they find somebody to help them with disability rights advocacy?

H: I would still recommend they contact us and we can help connect them to individuals in their area. So say someone in China, if they contact me I can help locate disability rights advocates in China, and I actually spent a week giving lectures in Beijing last year, so I do have some connections in Beijing. So I would be able to help someone in China to locate a local advocate to assist them.

N: That’s great. How would somebody contact you?

H: They could call our office or email me. I’m very happy to answer questions about disability rights for people here and across the world. My name is Haben Girma and you can email me at hgirma@dralegal.org. Phone number is 510-665-8644. I also have a website www.habengirma.com  . And Disability Rights Advocates website is www.dralegal.org . 

P: And as usual we will have all that contact information and links to shows we referenced earlier in the episode in the show notes for this show. Also, we want to thank Haben for sharing her time with us and also thank Gordon for transcribing our questions into Braille so we could do this interview over Skype with Haben.

N: In addition to all the contact information in this week’s show notes, we will also have a link to Haben’s TED Talk and its transcript) and to the website at which she was awarded the White House Champion of Change Award. You can find links to lots more news stories and interviews with Haben if you go to her personal website that she already gave at www.habengirma.com. 

N:  That’s it for show #1447. Next week on Eyes on Success, we will be talking about tablet comparisons for low vision users. There are many varieties of tablet devices and selecting the right ones for needs of a low vision person using magnification and/or color control can be difficult. We will speak with Robbie Sandberg of the Information Pool for Computer Technology aimed at Blind and Partially Sighted People (whose German acronym is INCOBS) about their test results that can help choose the right one for you. And the following week we will continue the conversation with Robbie about a similar test they have done for tablets for blind users using speech output. 

N: If you have any questions regarding something you heard about on the show or would like to share an idea for a future show send an email to hosts@eyesonsuccess.net or call at 586-258-0533 and we will try to address your question in an upcoming program.

(synthetic voice):  You’ve been listening to Eyes On Success, hosted and produced by Nancy Goodman Torpey and Peter Torpey and distributed by WXXI Reachout 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 or Twitter at _EyesOnSuccess.  We hope you’ll 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.