Accessibility NYC Meeting Recap: Two Decades of Disability Rights Advocacy with Lainey Feingold

KAREN GOURGEY: Good evening, friends, and welcome, welcome, welcome, to the book-signing event, featuring our author, Lainey Feingold, author of Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, — thrilled to have you here, I'm Karen Gourgey, and I'm the director for the Computer Center for Visually Impaired People at Baruch College, and we're thrilled to put this event together with the help of a couple of other entities which we'll introduce very quickly. We do want to also, so much, thank the folks from the Baruch College Bookstore who are welcoming us. Let's give them a hand [Applause]

KAREN GOURGEY: And what next? Let's see. I want to make sure that I do thank our staff here at the Computer Center for Visually Impaired People, Lisa Saunders, and Roberta Feliz, and our volunteers, who's all of whose names I don't know, but you are fabulous! Let's give staff and volunteers a huge hand! Thank you very much. We would not have been able to do this without the help of a couple of very important sponsors and our first sponsor who agreed to help us with this, and indeed, agreed to help with financing of this which is such a critical thing is the American Foundation for the Blind, and here, all the way from Washington to say a few words on behalf of AFB is a gentleman known probably to many of you whom I'd like to call the policy wonk-in-chief. But who

actually is the Director of Public Policy at the American Foundation for the Blind. I want to introduce for you for a couple of comments is Mr. Mark Richert.

MARK RICHERT: So I want thank, on the board of trustees, I want to tell you that it's a personal honor. I've been a huge fan for Lainey for years and years and years. And, certainly, you know, all of our behalf, Lainey has been a tremendous champion. AFB, and Lainey have a professional relationship going back decades. And it's been wonderful.

I bet everybody in this room knows who and what AFB is, but I do want to take a brief moment to mention to you that one of the claims to fame that we have in addition to having worked with Lainey for a while, is there was a woman by the name of Helen Keller. Maybe one or two of you might have heard about her before. No one ever talks about Helen. You know, the deaf- blind girl at the water pump. But people don't often think, though, that Helen grew up. And frankly when she grew up, she was a real handful. She was a real diva, as a matter of fact. And I'm not kidding. There's a history written of AFB in the blindness field called the Unseen Minority. And it's about four

times the size of Lainey's book. So read Lainey's book first and then read the Unseen Minority. But if you read that book you'll see a lot in there about the history of AFB and their work with Helen Keller. I'll tell you that she's a huge clothes horse.

They would send Helen, and Annie Sullivan across the country to do various presentations and then they would write back to AFB headquarters and say, you know what, that spending allowance that you spent for wardrobe, it's all gone. I'm not making this up. It's a true story. And the second thing that I'll tell you is that Helen loved — she loved to — she would do presentations, let's say for schools for the blind, let's say. And she would absolutely demand that there would be, you know, so many flowers waiting for her in her dressing room in advance. This is a woman who clearly understood — knew all too well — she knew all too well how good she was, how effective she was, her status, and that is one thing that Lainey does not have in common with Helen Keller. Of all the

professionals I know in this field, there are plenty of people who toot their own horn who are real divas and some people had really earned the right to be divas. Lainey is one of those people but she is not. And so I think in the true spirit of Helen Keller's fierce advocacy, a woman who was a social — an advocate for the downtrodden, for the women, for minorities, someone who was truly a progressive, it's really in that spirit that we are so pleased to be able to honor, this evening, Lainey Feingold. So thank you so much for helping us out with that.

[ Applause ]

KAREN GOURGEY: Thank you very much, Mark, we really appreciate it. The other sponsor that we're so thrilled to have and who is helping us with all of our live- streaming and our captioning is A11y NYC, New York City. And the director of the A11y NYC Meetup, which is also a sponsor of this event, and I would like to introduce him to you to say a few words is Mr. Thomas Logan. Thomas, could you come here?

THOMAS LOGAN: So hello everyone. And we're very happy to be also contributing to this event. We're a monthly meetup — A11y New York City. Our hashtag is a11y on Twitter. And we use that on Twitter and on Meetup and we talk about a range of accessibility topics. We typically meet each Tuesday. Our next meetup will be on November 7th and we're going to be having a technology executive from Comcast talking about resizable text, making sure that text displayed on our screens is readable by everyone at different font sizes cleanly. So we'll change up the events quite a bit. So happy to get to work with Baruch College and with the organization here. Thanks to Lainey Feingold for helping our group network here in New York City. We're a big city and we don't all get to know each other, and I echo — same words,

AFB, that Lainey Feingold has been someone that I have learned a lot from in my 15 years in the career working in accessibility. I'm very excited to hear her talk and to be able to share her presentation with those of you all online, as well. Thank you for Joly McAfee for helping us put the video feed together. Make sure the guide dog doesn't get run over by the suitcase! And, also thank you to Stanley Sakai, who's here today doing the live captioning for our event. And so that is why all of the words that are being spoken in today's event are also being translated visually on a screen up here at the front.

So I appreciate his work, as well, and I appreciate being here and ready for a great event. Thanks. [ Applause ]

KAREN GOURGEY: Thank you. So Lainey Feingold has been in the business of disability and law for more than 20 years. And before that I think she was in labor law. So she was always interested in the rights of people. And if you've seen any of the advertising for the book, or for this event, or for anything, Lainey has just been fantastic in helping us get access to so many basic — basic parts of life. I — I have a certain family member who happens to be in this room who, when the ATM first came out said, "Wow, this is like Monopoly money, man!" And I was very mad and very jealous because I couldn't access that. Well, I can now! And Lainey was seriously involved in making that happen. She has had so many interesting — interestingly titled awards

since this book of hers has come out. The American Bar Association actually I think it's their law journal has dubbed her "a legal rebel." I don't know what it means. Maybe she'll tell us. And then she also received a problem solver award from the Dispute Resolution Division of the American Bar Association.

Now you know lawyers love disputes, so. But she got a problem solver award. And she also got awards as the California lawyer of the year, not once, but twice. Once in 2000, and I think once in, what, 2016? She wants me to stop talking now. So, friends, I am thrilled to give to you Lainey Feingold.

[ Applause ]

LAINEY FEINGOLD: I don't know how I can follow all that kindness but I'm going to try. So thank you for coming. Thank you, Karen, who, when I called her and said, "Do you think we could do a New York City event?" She was completely all over it and put this together in a huge way. Mark and the American Foundation for the Blind just really stepped up and supported it. And for those of you who don't know, A11y New York City, I love the accessibility meetups. I've spoken at the one in Toronto and in Chicago, and San Francisco, and I'm really glad to be in A11y New York City. So thank you for coming out and thank you for your interest and structured negotiations.

So I wasn't going to start with Helen Keller but since Mark was telling us that she was a clothes horse, I do want to say that I do quote Helen Keller in my book and what I quote her on is this: No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. And I love that quote and I have it in a section of the book called Grounded Optimism. Because structured negotiation is a way of solving legal problems without lawsuits. It's a way of enforcing legal rights without fighting but, instead, collaborating. And I really find Helen Keller a rolemodel in the idea that you have to believe — you have to have optimism that what you're doing in collaboration, and in being kind instead of

going the traditional legal route is going to bear fruit. And after practicing structured negotiation for — I'm kind of dating it 22 years now for reasons I'll tell you in a minute, I do. I have optimism that this is a way that legal problems can be solved, and, especially — especially legal issues about the rights of disabled people. And especially, especially, especially the rights of blind people to access information and technology. So I have the book. It's called Structured Negotiation, a winning alternative to lawsuits about how this process can be used in all sorts of different types of legal disputes.

It doesn't have to be disability rights. But my story, thanks to Mark, and Karen, and other people in the room, is a story of disability rights. So I want to share some of how this whole thing got started. Some of the people who played a role, some of how we do what we do, and how we convince, you know, Bank of America, Walmart, CVS, you know, all these companies have worked with people like you, blind individuals, blind organizations like AFB to improve access to websites, mobile apps, ATMs, and they've all done if without lawsuits. So I have optimism like Helen Keller does and I want to tell you how it all started. So it started actually with a blind lawyer in New York City named Steve Mendelson, which you probably know, and Steve came to a colleague of mine

in 1994 and said, there's not a single ATM in the entire New York, not just California where he lived, not just the United States, but the whole world, there was not a single ATM that a blind person could use independently. There was not a single ATM that spoke aloud, or allowed independent input. So he came to us, and my colleague, Linda Dardaria, who had done a lot of work on this, and The Americans With Disabilities Act was brand-new. It was four years old. And we had a great lawsuit. You know, structured negotiation is not a thing you do because you're kind of scared to go to court or you think you have a bad case. We have a good claim. We could have had a good class-action lawsuit. But we thought you know what? What if we go to court and a judge thinks,

really, blind people using an ATM? No way. I mean, this is what happens when you go to court, everybody loses control. And so we said we're going to try to write a letter, and we, in fact, wrote three letters to Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank. And much to our surprise, the lawyers of those banks said, okay, we'll sit down and talk to you about ATM accessibility. So for the next four years, and I tell these stories in the book, for the next four years, blind people, primarily in California because that's where we were based and that's where those banks were based at the time, worked with Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, to develop the first ATMs not just in the United States, but the whole world, and blind people really had input and influence on what those

machines were gonna look like. That we were testing blind people were in the labs, they were looking at mock-ups. We were doing a Wells Fargo ATM where the voice was really the guy standing beside me. And I said, that sounds really familiar! And he said, that's just me! I was just practicing! And I think that taught us, that this approach when you can avoid a lawsuit — no idea let me just say, lawsuits are really important and they're especially important in this political climate in which we find ourselves. Lawsuits are under attack from a lot of directions.

Lawsuits are critically needed to enforce civil and human rights. So I'm not here to say don't do a lawsuit — lawsuit's bad! I'm saying, in some circumstances where there's an opportunity for cooperation, to me, it's worth the effort to see if you can establish the collaborative space. So don't leave here, and those of you watching on the live stream say, Lainey Feingold, you shouldn't do lawsuits. No, lawsuits are important, and they've shown to be important in the last ten months but there are many, many issues where working together is a better tool. One of the things that I say is structured negotiation is a tool in the toolbox. I used to carry around a whole big toolbox to make a point. But now I've found this way, which I'm going to pass around, but make sure I get it back. It's a

12-tool pocket monkey, it's called. And it can do 12 things. I still haven't figured out what all they are. I know it can open a bottle and do a measurement. And this is not a toy, do not give to children! It says on it. So I'm not pass it around so you guys can see. But I carried this around really to emphasize that — here you go. Yeah, you can pass it behind you when you're done. Just said that this is a tool, and this has been a really effective tool. And the first place it was effective was in ATMs.

So by 1999, we had some of the first talking ATMs, and some of our blind clients who were technologically very sophisticated as I know some of you in this room are came to us and said, you know, you're doing a great job on ATMs but there's a new thing. And that new thing is online banking. And this was, like, 1998. And some people, Roger Peterson, Jerry Kunz, and others we worked with, some of you may know said if you can't use this process of structured negotiation to get us access to online banking, we're going to be back to square one and not have control over our finances. So, you know, what I think I'm going to do with my tool so that it doesn't distract people — I can see — that was not a good idea! I'm going to take

it back. If you want to play with it, you can come up to the desk afterwards. Here. Sorry. That was a bad idea.

MARK RICHERT: That's hilarious!

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Don't try this at home, those of you on the live stream. So we went to Bank of America, and if we had been in a lawsuit, there would have been a million reasons for Bank of America to say no, we didn't tell you about a website. You didn't tell us about that. To whats this website thing? There's no law, there's no regulations. But because we were in a relationship with them, and they had gotten to know blind people, they said, yeah, there's a new thing, online banking, we want to make that accessible, too. And Bank of America has really been a leader and a champion in the accessibility space ever since then. In 2000, they became the very first company in the United States to sign an agreement, of web accessibility, and in later years, we

worked with them on their mobile app and their mortgage documents but it all stemmed from the fact that they — the bankers met blind people. And that is really the key to structured negotiation. And like I always say, you don't have to wait if you work for a company, you're a consultant, you don't have to wait for a lawyer to knock on the door. You gotta bring disabled people into the development process of all technologies, and tools, and whatever it is you're building because that is why structured negotiation has been successful, and that is why you have accessibility when it really works in a company. It's when a company gets it, and brings people in. So I have another prop. I'm not going to pass this around either. But I want you to know it's up here. This is

another reason structured negotiation works. This is a stamp. And the stamp says, "Don't believe the Braille." And this stamp is — it's a real stamp. And it was put on a stamp pad and someone, who I'm going to tell you in a minute, who, used to stamp red ink on ATM screens in the '90s in Berkeley because when The Americans With Disabilities Act passed, the Banking Association, the American Bankers Association, put Braille on every ATM in the United States. Now there is still Braille there now along with talking adding other information but the bankers — maybe because they thought it was less expensive, well, obviously, it was. Maybe blind people could benefit from Braille from an ATM. Which, those of you in the room know they can't, because the screens of an ATM are static.

This stamp was made by Josh Kneely, and he gave me this stamp when I finished this book as a present. And I value it because it really is a lesson of structured negotiation that, in this process, because it's more client driven and people driven just like I'm always saying when I do accessibility legal talks, accessibility is about people, so is structured negotiation as compared to traditional legal strategies. So with the ATMs, we were able to show, not tell. If we had been in lawsuits, ≈ we'd be writing in briefs to say what this stamp says. They would have an expert. And the banks would have an expert and they would try to prove that Braille did work. The light bulb — you could just see them go off. And I have seen that time and time again. I did

a I did a structured negotiation for a woman who is an options trader with Charles Schwab, which is a really complicated thing to do, trade options. It's very fast. This woman does it with a computer with an audio output as well as a Braille display and we had a meeting with her and all the Charles Schwab developers and users, it took ten minutes for her to use that site. They wanted her to fix that website. First of all, they never had really thought that they were designing for a blind trader. That is a battle. No matter what our role is in this. I mean, if you're in this room, you're a champion of accessibility, you are a person who needs accessibility. That is our challenge: To get decision makers and builders to understand that we are users in a whole variety

of contexts, not just apps, not just websites but, you know, movies and prescription labels and everything we use that people who are building it have to know that we all have different abilities. Some of us are disabled and have civil rights to this information. Couple other things. Two more props that I wanted to tell stories about.

MARK RICHERT: That you're not going to hand out.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: That I won't hand out. Before I do that, because I don't want to forget which I was going to read in the book. Because I see Tony Mandela here. And when I wrote this book, the book was not just for lawyers, it took me five or six years to write because I wanted it to be available to anyone who wanted to read it, so the American Bar Association did publish it, and I had a great mentor for it. And they sent it out to the east coast, and some lawyer on the east coast wrote back and said, "She's going to start thinking like a regular lawyer. How is she going to find clients who want to work collaboratively?" Because one thing I've learned is you can be a strong advocate without pounding on the table, and being mean. And being difficult.

You can still be a strong advocate and I think that's what this proved. So because of that comment, I went back. I mean, I had been really privileged that I started working on the talking ATMs like I said, and ever since that happened, the blind community around the country came to me and my colleagues because they wanted to work in this way. It wasn't like I just sat in my office and said, oh, let's work on point-of- sale devices. Like AFB and Mark, and Paul Schrader were really instrumental in getting 12 national retailers to do tactile point of sale devices.

We didn't do that in our offices, we heard from the community who came to us. So it was never an issue for me. Oh, I need to find blind people who want to be cooperative. Everybody I know — blind or not — would rather not do a lawsuit. You know, most people who want access. They just want access. They just want to go to a website. They don't want to do a lawsuit. They don't want to do structured negotiation. They don't even want to call the help desk. They just want to go to the site, get what they need, and do it. But most of the people — and I interviewed many people for this book — said to me, yeah, I would rather work in cooperation. That's how I'd like to work. However, one person said something

different and I am going to read one little paragraph of the book about that.

MARK RICHERT: Remember, this is a family event.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: I know but it's kind of fun and doing the interviews was the most fun part of writing the book. So I talk about a lot of other people who said, yeah, I always would rather cooperate. It's my nature. It's how I like doing things. But then there was this. "Clients who do not come by a collaborative approach naturally can still be strong claimants when the process is explained and they're coached to be effective participants. Tony Candela who's sitting right here in the front row was a driving force behind the structured negotiation initiative — for Walmart, CVS and a dozen other retailers and then I sort of explain in layterms what the POS issue is. Back to Tony, as a blind professional Candela was justifiably frustrated patients in collaboration are not his go-to approaches. Quote, I'm just

as prone to say, sue the bastards! Candela told me when I asked if the structured negotiation attitude came naturally to him. But I know that structured negotiation — this is Tony's words — I know that structured negotiation is a long- term and more constructive approach to bringing people together. I know how successful it's been. And then he went on. So I did answer the question of the east coast lawyer by explaining — when you are a client with a legal claim — if you're a blind person with a legal right, you have a right to choose the kind of lawyer you want. Same with the companies. You know, I'm always telling companies if you get a letter from me, or even if you get a lawsuit. You know, there's a lot more lawsuits being filed as many of you know, you have a choice

when you're a company, what kind of lawyer you're going to hire you want to hire someone who wants to fight, or do you want to hire someone who wants to work things out? So we've been really — it's not really luck because I've used this process for about 85 cases, and other disability rights lawyers around the country have used it in their cases. So I don't really think it's luck but it's using — it's like Helen Keller said — it's being optimism that if you follow the path that we lay out, and if you have an attitude of cooperation, the chances are, the people on the other side, even companies like Wells Fargo or Walmart, or companies not known, you know, for their warm and fuzzy selves if I may say. There are still people in those companies, who when given

a chance to do the right thing, I have found do the right thing. Couple of other things that I want to share. Karen tells me that I'm out of time. Two things, another prop I have up here which I'm definitely not passing around because it's too fun is my fear monster, which is a plastic, like, 3-inch-high werewolf kind of guy with big claws and a growly face and red eyes and all that. The reason I have that is because in so much of the work that the blind community and I have done together, there has been fear on the other side and I'll just give you two quick examples. We worked on accessible pediatric signals with the city of San Francisco. The traffic and parking department was truly afraid that if they had audible signals, a blind person might mishear them, step into

the street and get hit by a car. Our clients right now thought that was ridiculous because right now, the signals were silent at the time so how could it be worse to have some audible, and tactile information coming from the signals? But that's what they felt. Talking prescription labels. We've worked with Walgreens — that's another thing that AFB was involved with, and the American Council for the Blind really taking a leadership role with this. We've worked with Walgreens, CVS, CareMark. And I think they were really afraid — and if any of them are listening, you can tell me if I'm right, they were afraid that if they put the audible information on the labels, the blind person would mishear, and take the wrong amount, and die. So if we had been in a lawsuit, the situation would have been to write to a judge

to say, that's not true, blind people need audible information, we would have had to do, like, a whole history of blind people listening to audible. But we didn't have to do that because we were able to believe that there was this fear and talk through it, and have actual relationships between blind people and the companies — spur the companies to realize, oh, yeah, we were wrong about this. ATM same thing. They were afraid that oh, my God, this was a money thing. We had someone tell us that we can't have talking ATMs because blind people would be mugged when they take out money. And I said, you have to leave that decision to blind people the traditional legal structure doesn't leave a lot of room to explore those, to make people feel comfortable, et cetera. Now the last prop is this, the Harry

Potter magic wand. And someone told me the other day, you need to have a bigger wand for your presentation. This thing is only about 4 inches. But I'm traveling around. I'm not getting involved.

MARK RICHERT: TSA might take that from you.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: The reason that I have a magic wand is we did a case with Cinemark on audio description, which for those of you who don't know, it's technology that movie theatres can install to give blind people additional information about visual stuff that's going on in the theatre. So we worked with the California Council of the Blind who was very involved in many of our cases, as well as a mom and her daughter named Riah Popper. And Riah really wanted to go to the opening of the Harry Potter movie. I think it was the third one. And we weren't getting anywhere with Cinemark. Even though we had Helen Keller's optimism. Or tried to, sticking with it. That's a big part of this process — stick with it. Believe in it. And Helen Popper — not Helen Keller — Riah's mother said, called me up and said,

do you think you could convince them to install that in one theatre so Riah could go to the opening? And they did. It was a little enough ask. They did. It was great. She had royal treatment. They reserved seats, and popcorn. And I said to both the mom and the daughter, can you write an email that I can send to the company and show your appreciation because appreciation, even in these big companies, people want to hear what they're doing right and I always say when I'm talking about web accessibility or mobile app — you have a whole team, it looks like a mountain. Baby steps. I really believe in that. Honoring, appreciating what people do, not criticizing for what's not done yet, but appreciating what's done, having a time frame that's doable, and sticking with it. But recognizing not everything

can get done overnight. So I think the small step thing has been really been critical to a lot of these successes and I think Karen wants me to stop so you guys have plenty of time for questions. I have a lot more stories if no one has any questions but go ahead, and question!

KAREN GOURGEY: Thank you so much, Lainey! Now we are gonna have some time — we're going to have some time for Q&A and then we're going to have some time for you to consider buying books. These books are — Lainey's book is accessible on Book Share, but remember, Christmas and Hanukkah are coming. These will make wonderful gifts for many friends.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: I did not know she was going to say that!

KAREN GOURGEY: So we are going to start our Q&A by having Mr. Mark Reichart, esq to ask the first, possibly the first and second questions. Mark, take it away.

MARK RICHERT: Once again, big hand for Lainey Feingold! Lainey. I'm practicing my radio voice... thank you. I don't know about you all but I am often asked when people hear about the kind of accomplishments, Lainey, that you've had over the years — you and Linda Dardarian over the years. So, gee, what is this thing, structured negotiation, what exactly is that? Now you've talked about it a good bit and we'll certainly read about it in the book, and I get the notion of collaboration and, you know, welcoming. I think as a legal process thing, it's obviously common for lawyers often to file lawsuits, and then the lawsuit gets settled out of court for terms. And that involves — that process of — that sentimentalment process often involves bringing people together, perhaps under duress of the lawsuit, but it brings people together. And that settlement

process, sometimes results in some really good chances for folks with disabilities. You know, I think one example — the only one that's coming to mind at the moment, but certainly the one that's most known in our community is the Target case, the target.com case. Just take a minute or two and walk us through what is the fundamental difference between sort of that standard approach of going to court, and, yeah, it's not, you know, taking it to trial, or taking — having a judge role, but so many times, those cases get settled. What's the difference between that kind of settlement and the structured negotiation approach to settling a claim?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Okay. That's a good question. And I do have an entire one-hour PowerPoint on that. But let me just repeat that lawsuits have been very important in many fields, including disability access. National Federation of the Blind has done amazing work, the one you mentioned with Target, and tons of other lawsuits. I have a digital accessibility legal update. I just did it in Chicago last week and it is going to be online. So anyone who's really interested in the legal stuff on this part can — it'll be on my website, posted. Okay. So the difference — so I just want to say that. The end settlement, a settlement agreement is the goal of a structured negotiation and we call a structured negotiation successful when we get such an agreement. The actual agreement is really no different than an agreement at the end of a lawsuit. One small

difference is when you have an agreement at the end of a lawsuit, if there's a problem, then you can go to a judge to make sure the agreement sticks. In our cases, we don't have a judge. But the truth is we had never had to go to a judge to make sure the agreement sticks because we have built a relationship. And, yes, things go wrong. When you're talking about talking prescription labels at every Walgreens store in America, sure, there's going to be people who go into their store and don't get what we negotiated. But because we have a relationship, we have been able — I can pick up the phone. And if picking up the phone isn't enough, we've had cases, we've had new structured negotiations, or smaller structured negotiation. So the real difference here is wanting

to avoid the conflict and expense that is kind of the hallmark to not just litigation but to a traditional demand letter. You know, most people write a demand letter and they say, fix this in 30 days or we're going to sue you! We start with a letter but it doesn't sound like that because I'm here to tell you that in almost nothing that I've ever done could be — the accomplishments could not have been accomplished in 30 days. And my experience has been, when real people read the letter, that first impression is gonna make a difference. So we try to extend an invitation to negotiate. We save a ton of money on experts. That's another big difference. In a litigated case, even that results in settlement, usually what happens, one side hires an expert, the other side hires an expert. The goal is to

tear down the other guy's expert. It's very, very expensive and kind of known in the litigation system as a dysfunctional system for bringing in expertise. In structured negotiation, we encourage joint experts. I mean, when we did that first Bank of America web case, they didn't really know about web accessibility. We recommended Shawn Henry who's now at the Web Accessibility Initiative but who was a private consultant. She was the best there was. And one of the top — there's more people in the field now, but one of the very top people in the field, we wanted Bank of America to have the advantage of a good person. And that has happened time and time again. So the use of experts, the collaborative fields. Just the tone. I can't — I mean, I was a traditional lawyer like Karen said. I started

out being a union-side lawyer and then did civil rights. It's just a very different tone and skill set to decide you're going to work with someone, or with a big company and communicate directly with them. It's just a very different feel. And, yes, you can accomplish great things in lawsuits but this is a way that you can accomplish them with less stress conflict, and money spent.

MARK RICHERT: That's an excellent answer. And my second question that I want to ask you, exercising my prerogative as sponsor — you all are a captainive audience. But I think this is an important question: how do you, and Linda, and folks who do structured negotiation, are there other people in the country doing this, I snuck an extra question in there. Are there others?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Yeah, in Chicago, there's a lawyer named Andrej Scalagos, and he does a lot of really important work with hospitals. He mostly represented wheelchair riders. He did things like Lenscrafters, the whole chain, that if you're in a wheelchair —

MARK RICHERT: That's great. People are following in your work. So how do lawyers who are engaged in structured negotiation make a decision about whether a matter that comes to your attention — as you say, you're our friend, we know you. So let's say our community goes to you and says, this thing is really irritating us. How do lawyers decide you know what, maybe the thing that you guys are asking us about, maybe this thing isn't right for structured negotiation? What are some of the criteria you all go through to sort of decide, yes, structured negotiation is an appropriate approach, or, no, it might not necessarily be the best approach.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Well, one good thing about structured negotiation is you can try it, and if it doesn't work, you can file a lawsuit. So you're not really losing anything unless, you know, in law there's a thing where you have to file a lawsuit by a certain time. So that's a thing. If someone comes to you a month before the time is gonna run out, there might not be enough time to figure out if structured negotiation would be a good strategy, and you would say, you need another lawsuit. There are other things — if it was an employment type of case and you were trying to get damages for nationwide class.

Like, get money from everybody. Probably millions and millions of cash dollars to people, companies would not be willing to turn over without more of a litigated environment but one of the things I've learned, partly in talking about this book over the past year and giving a lot of talks is that you can combine structured negotiation with other strategies. So you can, you know, like, you can start in structured negotiation and if you get stuck and can't do the money piece, then go to a mediator. And I know Linda has done wonderful work, Linda Dardarian, my colleague, with Sutter Hospitals chain in California.

Now one of the things about this is you can co- create, who would otherwise be a defendant and you could say, you know, maybe this issue is better in court. You can kind of both decide because the company might want protection against other people suing. There's a lot of factors like that. So it's really a question of being open, both the lawyer and the client, being open that there are many tools in the toolbox. And so, it's hard to predict in one given case, this would work, this wouldn't. But not to automatically go for the hammer. That's one of the messages. When everything — when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I mean... yeah.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you think a lawsuit is the only way to go, you're going to do a lawsuit. But you realize — and lawyers shouldn't be deciding on their own. They should be deciding with clients because there's various factors for different processes. There's also government agency complaints. In the past administration, the U.S. Department of Justice was a real hero of ours in terms of accessibility. Of course they aren't now. But hopefully that won't be forever. But, you know, there's state agencies and there's lots of different strategies available to enforce our rights.

MARK RICHERT: Karen back to you?

KAREN GOURGEY: Thank you, Mark, thank you, Lainey, that was a great interchange. Now, friends, we're going to go to an audience Q&A, and because we're streaming and the interpreters have to survive, also, thank you, interpreters, this is what I'd like to do. What we'll do is if you have a question, raise your hand. Lainey will pick somebody and we have volunteers with mics. Are you guys ready with mics? And then so Lainey can call on someone. Our colleague, Roberta will bring a mic to you. Please say your name and ask a concise question. Okay? So let's rock and roll. Are we ready? Go ahead.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: You guys can — Tony will be next.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Lainey for coming. My name is Alan Gunsberg. My question is about HR-620 and all the moves about the current congress to abridge the rights of everyone, including the disabled. How will this affect structured negotiations and even lawsuits going forward?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Yeah — the question is about HR-620 which is a very dangerous law currently in congress that is misnamed the AVA education act, but really what it is, is a way to limit people's rights under the ADA. It says that nobody can sue unless there's notice, which, on its face, sounds like, well, what's so bad about that? I mean,, you know, people always say to me, don't you like that because you don't ever file a lawsuit. No, I'm very opposed to HR-620, as are all disability rights organizations. The primary reason being, this law, The Americans With Disabilities Act, is 27 years old and if all of a sudden, congress now puts in a notice requirement and it's an onerous one, it's burdensome about how you have to write the letter, and you can't have the lawyer to help you if you want that lawyer

to be paid, all that. But at the court, any notice requirement, any notice requirement means that no one's going to do anything until the person comes. And what if the person comes, like, just a really easy example, New York City, people are here on vacation. They come on vacation, they can't give notice. They don't know what problem they're going to have. The ADA was supposed to fix things by 27 years out. Things were supposed to be fixed by now. So, you know, it's terrible to take away the rights. Right now, there are not — I don't believe websites are part of it now but there's a real push by industry to get websites to be part of it which would really be not good for the accessibility effort. Now I just want to say — because I don't want people to freak

out. We have a strong foundation with accessibility law with other laws but the ADA is at risk like so many other things are at risk in this administration. So if you haven't talked to your congressperson, or sent a letter, you know, educate yourself about this to know that it's coming and be aware. A good place to get information is from the Disability Rights Defense Fund Website, and it's DDRF.org. They post action items. And thanks for mentioning that. You know, it's weird, I have a book about optimism and I'm talking about it in the year — the very first talk I did was in Boston with Paul Peravano, who's a blind guy who works at MIT, and he spoke at Harvard Law School, and I almost wanted to cancel. My whole thing is about collaboration, and getting along with

people, and being optimistic. And I've kind of, on parallel tracks for the past year because I still deeply believe that there's so many opportunities to collaborate and cooperate. At the same time, we have to be paying attention to the things that are not negotiable like HR-620, or the Muslim Ban, or a million other things that are happening. So I think we can hold both of those ideas and that's what I had to do that seven days after the — it was really hard to do that talk. But yeah, that's what we have to do.

We have to cooperate when we can. We have to model something different. And we have to be aware and protect our rights. Tony was next.

TONY: Thank you. Actually, Alan asked the question I was going to ask. But just to add to it, there is an awful lot of deregulation and an awful lot of changing of regulations going on right now, especially at the federal level that will do some of the same things. They would eliminate the right to sue, or other actions that can be taken sooner rather than later. And, you know, we have a feeling that New York foul-mouthing Tony aside, we have a feeling that structured negotiation depends on the threat of lawsuit to some extent. So all these things that happened that have taken away the ability to go to a suit, to some extent, might weaken structured negotiation, too. And Lainey and I have talked about it. Also before I give up the mic, we've got another

award. When I was working with Mark at AFB, we gave you, and Linda an Access Award. And that was a good 13, 14 years ago, and Linda and Lainey, you've done a fantastic job.

KAREN GOURGEY: Next question.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: With structured negotiation, how do you guys get paid 'cause in a lawsuit, usually the ADA, you know, pays the lawyers. So how do you guys get paid?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: That is a good question and when I spoke to lawyers, that is usually the first question I get: how the hell do you guys get paid!? You didn't say your name.

AUDIENCE: Alice.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: As Alice mentioned, under the ADA, in the United States, people usually have to pay their own lawyer. But we have something called fee shifting and congress decided back in the day that disabled people, women, minorities, if they have a legal claim, their lawyers should be paid by the person who's discriminating. So that's when there's — like in the Target lawsuit that Mark mentioned, Target had to pay. So when we have a lawsuit, how do we pay it. Well, — we say you have violated the ADA, we have three remedies. There is the fix — well, under the ADA, there's the — the disabled person who has a civil rights claim has a right to get their attorneys paid and a right to the fix. Under several state laws, including New York, there's also the right to get damages for yourself. So those are the

three core types of relief. They call it relief. Three core types of results that you can get in an ADA lawsuit. The fix, the talking ATM, the attorneys being paid in the damages. Well, structured negotiation does not compromise any piece of that. So when we start with the companies, we have a ground rules document and we have to say, in there, at the end of the day, if these negotiations are successful, paying the attorneys i.e. me, will be one of the elements. And in regular life, there's a lot of fighting about attorneys' fees. In structured negotiation, I am really happy to say that in the vast, vast, vast 98% of the cases, we don't really have a problem because by the end of the day, they know us. As I said, the fees are less because

the fees in this kind of law work by the hour. It's not like when you have an accident case, your lawyer takes a percentage. It's how much time did we spend. And that's how I — you know, there's a lot of skepticism in the legal profession when I talk to lawyer audiences, they're like, well, what if, what if, what if? And all I can say is this is what happened. I have gotten paid. This is the only way that I've worked for the last 22 years, so yeah. So that's how it works. Yeah. Thomas?

THOMAS: I have a question.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Well, you need the mic.

THOMAS: Thomas from A11y New York. Your website is a great resource for actually being able to go back and review your past settlement agreements. You know, it's been a resource for me by looking at the language and types of things to explain to other companies to say, hey, this is what you should be thinking about. Have you always had that? Do you open source, make available that information, and also the companies that didn't want that language on their site?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: That's a good question. And for those of you who have not been to my site, it's lflegal.com and there's a little usability story there, when I got the website in 2008, I was gonna call it LaineyFeingold.com, and Josh said, that's ridiculous because no one can spell Lainey, no one can spell Feingold, and it needs to fit on Braille. I've made a brand. I now think of myself as LF Legal.

So you can go to the website, lflegal.com, there's a topics page where you can look at press releases by subject. You can look at the web accessibility releases, ATM. We have really pushed hard to make the agreements public. Early on it was to establish our credibility of this effort in the cases, and to be transparent because — well, we didn't do a lawsuit and we made some sort of agreement but you can't see what it is. And we convinced the companies that the community really had a right to know. Especially because we were representing the ACB, and the AFB, and the membership organizations and they're non- profit. And we really, really pushed. I think out of the 80% cases, there were two or three that just said, this is a dealbreaker, we do not publicize settlement agreements but in those cases,

we did get press releases. But we always, we never have settled — you know, occasionally I do one thing for one person on one issue, that's different but for these types of things where we're fixing companies, fixing websites, it's always either been the agreements public, or the press releases are public. And I'm a big believer that the company should let the community do what they're doing as kind of a protection against future legal claims. Though it doesn't always work. There are some people who will always file a lawsuit no matter what. But I will say that there are some people who have filed lawsuits against some of the companies and when told there was a structured negotiation agreement, they dropped the case. So we always encourage companies if you happen to get a lawsuit, call us. Because I kind

of feel like our names are on — like, when I see an ATM, I feel like my name is on it. I feel responsible for it even though these cases are now, like, 17 years old. Yeah, good question.

KAREN GOURGEY: Next question?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Okay. —

KAREN GOURGEY: I'm going to do it until 7:30 because we want people to have time to...

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Eat cupcakes!

KAREN GOURGEY: I think we have another eight or ten minutes. Keep them concise if you can, folks.

AUDIENCE: I have a question. The Walgreens downtown and in Midtown would not have — I don't know what to do also is going to need a new meter by Abbot labs, called the Freestyle Libra where you don't have to put your fingers anymore. And it's not going to be speaking, at least not that I know of. What can we do to make it speak?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Two good questions. First of all, when you're dealing with big companies, there's bound to be issues. So people can always contact me through my website, by email, preferred. I can give out my email now if you want. You can find it through the website, lflegal.com, or my email is [email protected]. With the branding thing. So you can always find me and report on a particular store with a problem that I've already worked on and I'll try to get it fixed. As for new issues, if people have new issues, what I suggest — email is really the best way to let me know about issues. One thing I should say is these cases like, occasionally people will call me and say, can you fix this? But all the cases require advocates.

You can't be a person to call me and say, will you fix this, and then don't want to participate yourself. Now you could be a person who says, I have ten friends with the same problem, they'll fix it, and then you don't have to. But all of these cases are partnerships. Like I started — structured negotiation is a client-centered, person- centered approach. So it's not — some people, I think, think I'm on the payroll of, like, AFB, or ACB and they say, put this on the list, can you get this fixed next month? Well, it kind of sounds simple, you know, when I talk about the cases but, honestly, you gotta write the letter, it's a lot of research. You gotta spend a lot of time convincing the company to engage.

It is a real structure, which is why we named it structured negotiation. So I'm always happy to hear about issues that are important to the blind community. Can never guarantee that it's something that I can help with, but I'm always happy to hear about it.

KAREN GOURGEY: Questions?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Over here.

SVETA: Hi, my name is Svetlana and I'm an accessibility consultant. You know, I've heard a lot of great things about your work and I like your perspective on negotiation rather than lawsuits. I'm wondering if you are working with different people with disabilities, not only the blind community, or if you specialize in the blind community because I know you were talking about your experience with Bank of America and the talking ATM, which is great.

But I'm wondering what about deaf-blind people? How are they going to use the ATM? And also, related to website accessibility as well with the Bank of America website, it's not accessible to deaf people because they, you know, use Bank of America in Europe, and their credit card was blocked and the Bank of America website used to have an Internet chat feature but now they don't have that anymore. So now people are stuck and they have no way to contact the bank and Bank of America said you have to call but you can't make calls as a deaf person from Europe. So they prefer some type of direct communication like email, or the Internet chat. So I'm just wondering if you also worked with other people with different disabilities other than blindness.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Yeah, that's a good question. In fact many people often ask me this. Not for any, like, particular reason. It's just it's so — I have worked only with blind people because that is my expertise and there's a lot of great disability rights lawyers doing work with the Deaf community.

For issues of Bank of America like you explained, I would be happy to hear about it and — because I know that banks, there were a lot of cases in negotiations around the relay services issue around about five or six years ago. I don't know much about calling from Europe, and whether they have accessible communication, whether they have text-based communication, but with companies that I have close relationships with, I'm happy to try to put you in touch with the right person and I'm not ruling out — if I worked on a — if I personally worked on an issue for deaf people, I would definitely want to work with other lawyers with expertise because, I mean, as you guys know, who are blind in the room, and as you know who are deaf, there's so many details if you

want to do this right. You can't just come in and say, well, I'm a lawyer, I know the law. This is a different kind of legal practice where I think the better lawyers — and I'm really encouraging people now. You know, there's more lawyers in the field. If you have an issue, vet your lawyer and make sure their really understand. So I'm happy for you to email me offline and tell me about the Bank of America situation.

AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Silvia. I am working on an accessibility initiative at work. I work at a company that makes mobile products. And I'm wondering when you were saying that Bank of America was working with blind — or blind customers, how did they go about making those relationships and finding those users besides, you know, maybe coming out to meetups like this. I'm trying to — if anyone wants to speak with me, I'm kind of open over here. But getting — I just want your insight on how to create those relationships, and what are — what's kind of like the etiquette in terms of, you know, having people voice their opinions?

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Yeah, that's a really good question. Now my experience of being a lawyer in structured negotiation, I can help facilitate those relationships with people who are clients. But for companies, I know there's a lot of work, and I don't know, Alan, and others might know, Thomas... in terms of having disabled people for usability testing. I don't know if CCVIP, if you guys do that. Yes, you do? Yeah, so non- profit organizations like CCVIP, the Computer Center for Visually Impaired People that is sponsoring this — I have a list — I have a resource page on my website that has some non-profits that do this work. I mean, one thing to note: people are doing this work. You have to expect to pay. It's not like it used to be where you could just call Lighthouse for the Blind and get some blind people to

volunteer. You'll get better results and it's only fair that people pay. And you can ask around for certain standards, it will come in for about $75 or whatever — I mean, not $75, but if you come in, what's a reasonable payment for an hour, half an hour. But on my website on the resources tab, I have cubs for this work. Some of them they'll do it remotely like the Carole Center in Newtown, they do remotely. So afterwards, some people might have ideas for New York City but yeah, it's really good that you're thinking about that because I would say that one hour with a blind person, or a deaf person, or someone with mobility issues, or, I mean, low vision.

I mean, I usually focus on blindness because that's been my work. But the accessibility issues for mobile are cross disability. You know, and seniors, too. Like, my dad's 85. He's really active and working.

And the other day he put something up on Facebook and I said, dad, you can't put up your password. You don't know how this works. And, you know, he's a big guy, he's 6'2, and big hands. And I did see that he has issues with color contrasting — I can tell that he has issues.

KAREN GOURGEY: Thank you, everybody, very, very much. Now I know there are more questions and I'm going to be called a bad name but I think we really need to give people — the book store closes at 8:00, sharp. So I'm going to have to call a halt at 7:55. Now Lainey will be at this table and she will be happy to sign your book once you've bought it. And also, if you have a question, perhaps she'll be happy to consider your question. So for anybody who — the book — the book is available at the counter in the book store. And we have volunteers who are — will be happy to help you get there. If you don't actually know where that is. So you can just, you know, sort of raise your hand and let people know that you'd like to do that.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: And you can also come up and see all the props if you didn't get to do that.

KAREN GOURGEY: So you have an awful lot to do — also to eat a cupcake between now and five minutes to 8:00. So let's do it. Thank you.