News and Articles

Recipe for Staying Ahead of the Legal Curve: Bake Accessibility into Your Organization

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At the 2018 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference last month I had the wonderful opportunity to present with Microsoft lawyer Sue Boyd. Our session was titled Beyond Compliance: Staying Out in Front of Digital Accessibility Legal Trends. Our talk focused on the ingredients needed to bake accessibility into an organization. The audience even got homemade chocolate chip cookies to drive home the theme. Check out this post for the full recipe! Read more…

E*Trade Accessibility Agreement Amendment

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The Settlement Agreement Amendment posted here extends the digital accessibility settlement agreement reached between E*Trade and two blind investors in Structured Negotiation. In extending the agreement, E*Trade continues its leadership role in making its website, mobile applications, and trading platforms available to investors and members of the public with disabilities. Read more…

Gratitude for a Poached Egg (an Accessibility and Negotiation Strategy)

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Whenever I travel, I try to eat in local restaurants serving traditional foods. That’s how I found myself at 417 Union in Nashville last month eating poached eggs, grits and a biscuit. The eggs were perfect and I asked the waitress to thank the cook for me. She came back later and told me: “His day is going to go a lot better now that he knows he done good.” Her comment sums up my experience as a negotiator in the digital accessibility space. Everyone wants to know they have “done good.” Telling them so is a powerful negotiating strategy. Read more…

Digital Accessibility Legal Update (and more) at CSUN 2018

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Want to know what’s happening in the digital accessibility legal space? I’m happy to let attendees of the 33rd annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference know that I will be offering the Digital Accessibility Legal update three times this year. (This will be one presentation repeated three times so everyone who wants to attend can!) Lainey will also be co-presenting a fourth session (not the legal update) with Sue Boyd, an Assistant General Counsel in Microsoft’s Regulatory Affairs group who leads a legal and policy team focused on accessibility. Sue and I will be talking about best practices for staying ahead of the curve when it comes to accessibility. Read more…

Chicago Structured Negotiation and Digital Access Events in October ’17

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This post has information about Lainey Feingold’s Fall speaking events in Chicago. Lainey will be presenting at the Chicago Digital Accessibility and Inclusive Design MeetUp, at a free CLE for lawyers sponsored by Equip for Equality and JPMorgan Chase, and at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law with Chicago. disability rights lawyer Andres Gallegos. She is excited to return to Chicago, and is grateful for friends and colleagues in the Windy City making this trip possible. Read more…

Companies are Losing Web Cases: Spend Money on Web Access, not Lawyers

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In less than two months, four different federal judges have said “Yes” to website accessibility. These cases, from Florida and New York, are a wake-up call to every business in the United States that serves the public: If you have a website, make it accessible so everyone can use it, including disabled people. Every business has a budget; every business watches how money is spent. These cases are but the most recent in a long-string of wake-up calls with a simple message: Spend your hard-earned dollars on accessibility, not on lawyers to fight it. Read more…

Blind People Cook: A Web Accessibility Story

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Another day, another hit piece against law suits about website accessibility. Typically these articles are best ignored. But a recent piece in the New York Post demands attention. I’ve asked web accessibility leader and home cook extraordinaire Lucy Greco to join me in responding to the article, titled “Lawyers cash in on suits demanding ADA-compliant websites.” You’ll find out below why Lucy’s cooking skills are as relevant to this piece as her web expertise. Read more…

Lawyers as Changemakers: The Global Integrative Law Movement

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The New York Times ran a powerful obituary on July 26, 2017 about Scharlette Holdman, an unsung woman who devoted her life to inmates on death row. The obituary described those who sought to emulate Holdman’s career by saying “Many mitigation specialists who followed in her footsteps are journalists and social workers. ‘It’s the antithesis of being a lawyer; it’s all about human feeling and connection..'” Is that true? Is human feeling and connection the “antithesis” — the opposite — of being a lawyer? Read more…