E54: GAAD Special: Lainey Feingold on Advancing Disability Rights Without Litigation

In this GAAD special episode of the United in Accessibility podcast, Lainey Feingold explores how Structured Negotiation advances digital accessibility by centering disabled people and building relationships over confrontation. 

She shares examples like talking ATMs, accessible prescription information, and inclusive sports platforms—showing what’s possible when disabled communities lead the conversation.

Transcript

Sam Evans 00:00 

This podcast was recorded on January 15, 2025, 5 days before Donald Trump became President of the United States. Lainey asked us to record the following message at the beginning of our conversation, 

"Four months have passed since this podcast was recorded. In that time, our democracy has been threatened and our civil rights attacked by the current federal administration. Disabled people, along with people of color, immigrants, Trans people and other marginalized groups are at risk. The legal system itself is at risk, government agencies we rely on have been decimated. All the while, resistance grows across the country and there are reasons to be hopeful. I still strongly believe in Structured Negotiation and the power of collaboration to advance digital accessibility. But in these dangerous times I would be remiss if I didn't also explicitly say that collaboration is not the appropriate tool for every dispute. Lawsuits and judges are proving to be an important bulwark against the tyranny of this administration. That doesn't undermine the importance of Structured Negotiation as a digital accessibility strategy. But more than ever I also value the power of lawsuits and appreciate the lawyers doing all they can to save the country at this critical juncture.” 

Speaker 01:30 

Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility podcast. In this special Global Accessibility Awareness Day edition, we're joined by Lainey Feingold, an internationally recognized disability rights lawyer, author and negotiator who has shaped the field of digital accessibility for nearly three decades. Laney pioneered Structured Negotiation, a collaborative approach to resolving accessibility barriers without litigation. Her work with the Blind and disability communities has led to lasting agreements with organizations like Bank of America, Major League Baseball and CVS, advancing equal access and disability rights in meaningful, measurable ways. She's the author of Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, and a frequent keynote speaker honored by the American Bar Association as both a legal rebel and problem solver. Today, we sit down with Lainey to talk about what it means to lead with trust, the legal tools that don't require a courtroom, and the importance of collaboration in the fight for digital equity. Join us for a conversation that honors both the legacy and future of accessibility, right here on the United in Accessibility podcast. 

Sam Evans 02:50 

Hello. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Samantha Evans. I'm the Certification Director at the International Association of Accessibility Professionals and I have the great pleasure of supporting the work of so many amazing colleagues, advocates and experts in the field of accessibility. And today, we're very lucky to be joined by Lainey Feingold, who many of you may already know, but for those of you who don't, it's a great opportunity to learn a little bit about one of our colleagues in the legal field, who's a digital accessibility expert on their own. Structured Negotiation, you'd learn what that means if you don't already know and learn a little bit more about what Lainey has learned, observed and helped guide in the realm of achieving our goal of accessibility. Lainey, would you be willing to take a moment or two and introduce yourself and share how you came to work in the legal field around accessibility, probably not a path most people have taken when they come out of law school.  

Lainey Feingold 03:50 

Thanks, Sam. And thanks, IAAP for wanting to chat with me for this hour and thanks to all of you who are going to listen and are listening. Yeah. So, my name is Lainey Feingold. I have a website which is lflegal.com and I think maybe I'll just start with that, like, why is my website, lflegal.com because a blind friend of mine, when I was first getting my website back in 2008 said, don't be laneyfeingold.com which is what I was thinking, because no one will know how to spell Lainey, no one will know how to spell Feingold, and your email address will not fit in one line of Braille on your business card. Which are things we used to have, and the person suggested you should be lflegal. So, I worked for myself out of my house, which is where I've been since 1996, and I share that to start to say that my entire career and my entire achievements in the field of digital accessibility have been because of my relationships with blind people. I could have paid a lot of money for branding to get lflegal. You know, you can find me on Bluesky. You can find me on Mastadon, used to be able to find me on Twitter. So, and that's all because of relationships with blind people. And I got into the field before I knew any blind people. I'd like to start by saying that I was fired from a job that I thought would be a forever job, because sometimes people look at people like myself. I'm a white woman. My hair is white and gray, turning to white very rapidly, which I share as my salient visual feature, because I've been in it for a long time, and I'm old and getting older, as I real, you know, you look at people on my side of the career saying she was fired from a job. Yes, I was, and when I was, I was like, I'm a lawyer. What am I going to do? I was doing traditional civil rights, race and gender. I was doing labor law, representing labor unions, and I fell into a four-month role at a disability rights non-profit while I was there, blind people came to the nonprofit saying there's not an ATM in the United States that we can use as blind people. It was two or three years after the ADA passed, and that was my first introduction to people who are blind. What accessibility needs are. I ended up staying those four months turned into four years, and then I decided my children were young and it was just too much working for this non-profit. I decided to work out of my house, which we now call remote work, and here I've been so I can stop there, and that's how I got started. 

Sam Evans 06:39 

Let's go ahead and start by having you help us understand what Structured Negotiation is and what that means for people who aren't familiar in legal terms and then we could talk about how you've done some of that work with some of your organizations you've worked with. And then we'll talk about your book and some other things. But could you help first so that we talk about this idea and help people understand what Structured Negotiation means and how you approach that in your work. 

Lainey Feingold 07:03 

Yes, thank you for that question. So, I was at the nonprofit. Couple blind people came in wanting to use ATM machines. I worked with a private law firm at the time, and my close colleague, Linda Dardanian, who I've done most of this work with over the years, and we gathered together and investigated, yeah, it wasn't just these two people. It was that every blind person couldn't get money out of an ATM, and like so many accessibility issues, that was an issue of privacy and security, because people had to share their PIN with literal strangers in order to get money, their own money out of their own accounts. So, it was a very compelling issue. This was a time before all the banks were national. We looked at it. We put together groups of blind people as well as blind organization, California Council of the Blind, and we chose three banks where there was this problem and where we had clients who were customers of the banks. That has been another key to my work in the legal accessibility space is always centering blind people or whatever disability, always centering people. We could talk a little more about how some people don't do that in the legal field, but for now, we had these groups that, you know, really strong groups of blind people in the banks, and we're like, should we file a lawsuit? And we didn't want to file a lawsuit, you know, in part, because it was so close to the ADA passage, like, did we really want to screw up the ADA? Also, because there were no ATMs that work for blind people, which we now call talking ATMs, but that wasn't a thing when we started and like, could we really file suit to get something that didn't exist? So, we decided to write letters. And we wrote these letters; they were very serious. We said we could file a lawsuit, but instead, would you sit down with us and with your blind customers and try to figure out a technological solution to this lack of access, lack of privacy. Fast forward, I do have a book, and I tell a story. Within four years, we had some of the first ATMs that talk in the United States. Towards the end of that, some of our clients who were into this day are so much more technologically savvy than I am. Came to me in like 97/98 and they said, there's this new thing, online banking. We better make that accessible, or we're going to not have access to our own money again. And because we had relationships with these banks because we hadn't sued them. Not that it was all smooth and happy and friendly, but eventually we had relationships. We went to Bank America and said, we want to talk about accessibility of online banking. And they said, “yes.” And the very first web accessibility agreement in the United States we negotiated in the year 2000 it was signed.  So that all happened, and when it was over, we're like, wow, we got what our clients needed, we got the accessibility. We even got what the law allowed, which is payment to the attorneys, so we could do the work. Was that just luck, or did we do something we could replicate in other issues? And we decided, let's try to replicate it, and to replicate it we said we got to give it a name, so we decided to name this now, a mouthful sort of sound, but you know, we'll talk about what it is, Structured Negotiation. It's really collaborative law. We could not use that name, because that's used in another part of the law to talk about other kinds of cases. So that's what we called it, and that's what we did. After that people kept calling us, and we kept doing the work in this way, relationship building, collaboration, centering disabled people.  

Sam Evans 10:58 

I think that approach is really interesting, because the goal is keeping the people centered first and achieving what they need to be able to live, learn, work, play independently you know. As a powerful move can you talk about how that differs from and you said, other people may not do this, but how does that approach differ from somebody might choose to sue a company. And what have you observed the differences between this approach of Structured Negotiation, working with companies to achieve the goal. 

Lainey Feingold 11:30 

Litigation is a very important tool to enforce civil rights laws. Most of the civil rights and accessibility work is under the ADA or relevant state laws, other federal laws, and lawsuits are a key component of that. And I never want to be seen as like the poster child to say lawsuits are bad. I also want to say one of the reasons I wrote the book, which first came out in 2016. It’s called Structured Negotiation, A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits was because I do think the methods are available, not just to lawyers on all sides of the table, but to advocates who are advocating for accessibility. Because the truth is, if you are doing accessibility work, you are, by necessity, an advocate for disability rights in disability inclusion. So, you know, a lot of the things I talk about in the book, like, we need to be patient, we need to celebrate small steps. We need to listen. We really need to listen. A lot of those often are not possible in the context of a traditional lawsuit. I also want to say that you know, before 2017 there were about 57 lawsuits on web accessibility. And as we all know, last year, there were more than 4000. And that is motivating to some people. I have written about the ethics of digital accessibility lawsuits. You can find that on my website, which, like I said, is lflegal.com. I'm all for lawsuits that have a goal of improving accessibility. You can't just say, give me some money, say you're going to meet WCAG, and I'll go away. Because even if you say you're going to meet WCAG, if you don't have what good lawsuit settlements have, you know specific things, you're going to meet standards, you're going to do testing, you're going to do training, you’re going to do, you're going to do, you know, usability studies, all sorts of things. You're going to look at, procurement, all the kinds of things that make accessibility real. A lot of times, when you get in a lawsuit, the other side is defensive. As a matter of fact, we try not to use the word defendant, because we don't want people to be defensive. We want to say you have a problem, and these are your customers, or these are your employees, or these are, you know, whatever. So other lawyers do use Structured Negotiation in the accessibility space. I did the second edition of my book in 2021, and I tell some of those stories too. And like I say, non-lawyers, advocates have spoken of the value to them in the workplace, like, how do all of you? I just want to take my hat off to anyone listening to this, you're probably always convincing people to prioritize accessibility. It's not always easy. So, the convincing strategies I've had to use with big companies. I think they are applicable all across the line.   

Sam Evans 14:25 

So, one of the nicest things Lainey, I when I read your website often, is that you also have a plain language version, a description at the top of each post to explain what's in that, what's in what follows. So, if you haven't had a chance to go to Lainey's website and read her blog and her content, it's a great way to have a plain language explanation what happens and then details and then updates too. So again, I'm a long-time reader.  

Lainey Feingold 14:53 

Well, I want to say something about those updates. So, I try to have a site that WCAG, current versions are now 2.2 AAA compliant. And in our agreements with companies, we've always used the AA standard. We've never asked for AAA, I started with 1.0 that was very first well with Bank America. But you know, 2.0 1.2. And so, I did those plain language summaries. They were at the bottom of the article, and there was a link at the top that said, you know, I want to be a AAA site. And this, I forgot what success criteria it is, requires a plain language summary and it always felt like a burden, like, who's going to read this? And, you know, I did it, but in like it. So, one day, I put on social media, does anybody care about these plain language summaries? And several people wrote to me and said, Yeah, because this tells me, if I want to read the whole thing, it's like the TLDR, too long. Don't read things. We all know now, but I've been doing it for a long time. And, you know, people with other disabilities, people without disabilities. I love reading that, because I don't, so I moved it up to the top. I took out the reference to WCAG, because that made it kind of like psychologically for me. I think it was like burdensome, because I felt I was complying with something that no one needed. I. Then I realize, you know, like we say in accessibility. Essential for some, useful for all, and that's really what's happened. I get a lot of what Sam just said. I get a lot of positive feedback on those summaries, and I feel it's made me a better writer overall, because once you get in the hang of doing a plain language summary and the WCAG standard is ninth grade reading level, so I always first do it in Word, and if it's a 9.8 I, you know, take out an Ing word or make a sentence shorter. Yeah, so thanks for mentioning that, but it's I like the example of we want to do accessibility to meet the standards, and you know, the testing is around the standards. The standards really matter, but it's so much more than the standards. And in our advocacy, if we're just limited to standards, is that risk of checklist. I've done it. I'm finished, which, as we know, doesn't work to make things truly inclusive. 

Sam Evans 17:15 

So, you mentioned one of your first endeavors with Bank of America and talking ATMs, and then that led to online banking. Can you choose just one other, maybe big, high-profile group that you worked with that you might want to share a story about? 

Lainey Feingold 17:31 

Sure, I think. So, we did a lot of banks. Once we did the West Coast banks, we got calls from people around the country, and one of the strategies we learned is that everybody likes to be celebrated. And we did joint press releases with almost all of the banks. And I have a topics page of the high-level navigation on my website, and it has everything on the website. It's like 350 I think, articles, and everything's organized by topic. You can look up press releases, and we'd be like first Spanish speaking, talking ATM, and first one in North Carolina, and first and everybody, people feel good when they're complimented. That became part of our strategy. We focused on the finance cases. We did some public safety, accessible pedestrian signal cases, we did one in San Francisco to get the city to install accessible pedestrian signals, and that became the first one in the country. We worked on talking prescription labels, which are so important and under recognized, again, driven by blind people. And when we got in a room with pharmacists. We did this with CBS. We did it with Walmart, who was actually the first company to do talking prescription labels. Blind people explained in the room. Well, what I have to do now is take one medication, you know, put one rubber band on it, and keep it in the kitchen so I don't confuse it with this other medication that I put two rubber bands on and keep it in the bathroom. And the pharmacists were like, well, we don't want that. Whereas, if it's a lawsuit and you say, oh, that's illegal to do it, the lawyers say, well, we don't have to do it, but we can, with Structure Negotiations, sort of bypass and talk to the people who we find commonality with. So I was doing the health work, we also did medical websites, things like that, when in the sort of mid I think was like around 2007 a blind person in Massachusetts who had worked on the talking ATM initiative called and asked me if I thought Structured Negotiation would work to get Major League Baseball to make its website accessible. And I was a Red Sox fan, a die-hard Red Sox fan, Brian Charleston, who some of you may know. And my first response, which I guess shows I'm not really a baseball fan, was, you know, is that important? Like accessibility is about privacy and finances and health care and public safety. And I was a little, you know, snooty and poo pooing it. And fast forward, we got together a group of baseball fans from around the country, many centered in Boston, but not all Red Sox fans, and we wrote the letter Structured Negotiation always starts with a letter to the company instead of a lawsuit, which you know can be so you violated this law and you violated that law, and you're a terrible company with an opening letter. And this, I think, applies to advocacy wherever you're doing it. First, we explain it from the people's point of view, like these are baseball fans who are blind. And they told them they had great stories. They'd been Boston Red Sox fans or Seattle Mariner fans forever. And what they use the website for the two major issues were people listening to games of their home state when they didn't live in their home, you know, within radio signal, which I didn't know was a thing, but it's a big thing. Everybody likes to tune in. And you'd think, Oh, that'd be easy on a website, but before MLB was accessible, which is now, you couldn't either find the player, you couldn't adjust volume, or you couldn't change the station, or, you know, all those things and statistics, so those parts of the and we so we're able to explain specific things while saying something good about the company as well. And usually, if you try hard enough, you can find something good that person you're advocating with is doing like we did a lot of work with retail checkout, and we were usually able to say, Trader Joe's, you're great with customer service. You need to apply that greatness to your technology, to be inclusive. So, we wrote the letter to MLB we had the first phone call. We actually never met in person. The whole thing was by phone, even before Zoom, and it was like a match in heaven, like the blind baseball fans and the Major League Baseball executives and tech people and the lawyer had so much to talk about that Linda Dardarian, who I mentioned I we could kind of take a back seat, you know, guide it forward. But, and, you know, fast forward. I think I already said fast forward before, because none of these things happened quickly, which is why I had to write a book about them. Major League Baseball did agree to make their mlb.com website accessible. I don't want to say they loved the process, but it was a very good relationship, and they ended up doing the websites of all the individual teams in Major League Baseball. And then when the first mobile app came out, which I believe was 2008 we said, you know, we got to work on this too. So, we extended our agreement to cover the mobile app. And it was really, you know, I sometimes joke and say, well, in my obituary, they'll say the most important thing she worked on was Major League Baseball accessibility. Because honestly, people care about that. You know, people expect, you know, they want to get their money, and they want privacy. So, I kind of want to share that, because whatever role you're listening to, whatever role you have in whatever sector, it matters to someone that you're accessible and inclusive. And I've been talking about blind people because that has been my personal experience with Structured Negotiation. I've done a few other things with other disabilities, but mostly not but of course, accessibility affects so much more than just people who are blind. So yeah, I would say Major League Baseball. And then when I finally, here's another little piece of story. After the case was all over, I was in New York, and so I called the lawyer. I said, we should meet, because we had never actually met. It was also they're in there in New York, and I went up the elevator to their building, to their offices, and you walk in, in the waiting room, there’s like baseball, all this stuff. And there was a plaque that they had gotten from the American Council, the Blind, who was the organizational leader in all this, that they had given Major League Baseball an award. And that really drove home something which I knew people like to be congratulated and recognized, celebrated, had gratitude. But here's big Major League Baseball, and they had this ACB plaque right in their headquarters in the waiting room. Whenever you can celebrate something, I say celebrate it, especially in these challenging political times. 

Speaker 24:33 

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals currently offers four certifications. IAAP certifications are indicators of your commitment to the accessibility profession, the industry and community. View the certification overview page on our website to learn more. 

Sam Evans 24:53 

I think about Lainey, the person who first explained audio descriptions to me, said, and it goes back in time, because they referenced the best audio descriptions would be like if you were listening to a baseball game on the radio, so that you could feel like you were there, and the excitement in the voice, so that the tension and the excitement and all the goings on would happen. The good audio descriptions would be like that kind of thing, of course, that was the only way you could get it on a transistor radio. I'm going to way, way back, transistor radios were, if you were local enough to get it, or if you had a long wave radio. But I think the advent of the technology for websites, which is where then, if people aren't baseball fans, it's one of the ways you can watch and or listen to games through major league baseball in the US. So that technology advancement, how do we move from radios, radio wave signals to web-based content, so and with ATMs, and then to online banking you mentioned and with prescription labels? Can we talk a little bit more about prescription labels? I think that's probably a really interesting concept, not just for people who are blind or low vision, but also for people who are aging or who are caring for aging parents or caregivers.  

Lainey Feingold 26:10 

Yes, this is a topic that I really wish the AARP would publicize more, because I agree with you. It’s important, not just for people with disabilities. So, there's a couple products that were the outcome of not just Structured Negotiation, but you know, businesspeople with good ideas. One of the largest is Envision America. And their solution, which is what Walmart uses. There's an RFID chip at the bottom of the package. So, you either prescription bottle or, you know, whatever. We're careful to say prescription container, and there's an RFID chip. You can take that and put it on a reader, you know, it's like the size of a, I was going to say CD player. If those of you know what a CD player is, you know, and if you put the bottle anywhere near it, it will read what's on the label. And there's samples on the Envision America website; I would really check that out. So, Walmart did that, and Walmart has a solution. You know, again, another sort of inherent part of both Structured Negotiation and accessibility advocacy overall is not just celebrating but celebrating small steps. And when we started with Walmart, they agreed to do X number of stores, and then we had, like, another negotiation. Not, I'm not totally clear on the details right now, but it's on my website. You know, there wasn’t every single store all the time overnight. Now they have a system which they carried on after our agreement was over, which is really what our goal is, because accessibility is never one and done. And when we do an agreement, all Structured Negotiations that are successful end in an agreement. And once the agreement is signed, it's usually in effect for a couple of years to make sure it goes smoothly, and there's, you know, feedback and all that kind of stuff. But we always want things to last forever, not that anything lasts forever. But now with Walmart, you can go into any store in the country and request that they equip that location with the ability to put the RFID chip on, and they'll send you the reader for free within 30 days. You know, in this particular type of case, you know, we had to understand that it can't be done overnight. So, this was a good solution with the ATM. Same thing, we wanted every location to have an ATM. And now there are regulations under the ADA that are very specific about talking ATMs. They didn't exist when we were doing this. We were figuring out what are the key components, which later became the regulations, but we wanted one for every location. The first press release was with Citibank and Berkeley. They did five in the whole country, but we were so excited for them. And I still have the stack in the old days, you know. The actual press releases and the coverage and their media people were so excited now, now it's very different. So that's one solution, and the other solution is something CVS has done, which is built into the CVS mobile app. If you use a CVS mobile app or you want to download it and check it out, their brand of it is spoken Rx. So, they do the same thing. They put the RFID chip on the bottle, but you can use your standard phone, put it next to the phone. It's possible Envision America also has a mobile app solution as well. I'm not sure, but yeah, the basic idea is, of course, to get the key information, you know, what the medication is, the name of the person. And we worked out again, there were no regulations on so much of what we did there were no regulations. Which is another reason it's essential to have disabled people involved in the process, because, you know, we talked very specifically. What is the order the information like, you have to have the person's name, because maybe there's two people in the household, you know, what is the medication? What is the dosage? Those kinds of things. So, you mentioned audio description. We also did a Structured Negotiation with a movie chain called Cinemark, and I will tell the story in the book. It was, it was a little slow going, I have to be honest. And at the end of the day, we had a, they agreed to do a test run, and we had a private showing of the Cars movie in San Francisco with like, 10 blind people and the head lawyer from the company flew out from Denver, and when he was in the room seeing blind people react to the movie, he was happy. I have; there's a great quote in the book from him. He's like, this is what we wanted. And like, there's no number of words I could have convinced him of that, you know, he had to see blind people laughing at the right times. You know, maybe a tiny delay because of the description, but it was extremely powerful, yeah. 

Sam Evans 30:53 

That's fantastic. I think that the ability to connect humans, people to people, and the product, or the process is adapted to help people. I think that might get missed sometimes in some other of the carrot and stick dynamics. So, I'm not sure how the magic happens of finding the right people to write your letter to when you start that really good research connections. I'm not sure. I think that initial outreach, probably, if you hit the right combination of people and they're open. Do you find more often that the research in advance helps you find the right people to where they're more likely to say, yes, I'd like to pursue this. Do they ever consider that as like a warning signal to I should do this this way, lest I become a list and a target for traditional lawsuits, or I don't know if you have enough to say it's a there's a trend or anything that you've learned along the way? 

Lainey Feingold 31:49 

Well, that's a really good question. And because we're lawyers, if you have a legal claim and you're a lawyer, you're supposed to talk to the lawyer for the company. So even if I work with a company and I might know someone there, I can't just write to that person, so we always write to the top lawyer. So that gives us an advantage. You know, I do feel the strategies of Structured Negotiation have something to say to advocates on the ground. And like I say in my book, I have quotes from advocates who aren't lawyers about that, but for us, we're always talking to the top lawyer, and the hardest part of Structure Negotiation is writing that letter, because the letter has to be open enough, so people see the advantage of the process. The very first press we got on; it wasn't really a Citibank announcement in downtown Berkeley. It was a Wells Fargo press release; Wells Fargo made the first commitment. Citibank, I think, had the first ATMs, but Wells Fargo made the first commitment. And when they did, it got a lot of coverage, and a lot of the coverage was threatened with a lawsuit. Wells Fargo and I was always pushing back. We're not threatening. We're not threatening. You know, a lawyer reads it, and we do include the legal aspect of the claim. It's not just do this because it's the right thing to-do or do this because it's good for business. We have to, I mean, we're lawyers, and there is a legal claim, and we have to leave open the possibility that, you know, maybe it won't work. We might have to file a lawsuit. So, we do include the legal stuff, but it tries to be in a container of here's information you should know. Like I always start by saying, you know, the good thing about Structured Negotiations, we're not going to have to fight about what the law requires. But we think it's important to explain to you why we think this implicates the ADA, you know. So, it's just less you know, we try not to say you violated the ADA. We try to talk about, you know, our clients’ rights to privacy, and usually you can find that thing like the pharmacist. It's dangerous when people don't have accurate information about what's in the bottle. You know, when I go to the Wells Fargo ATM now there is a big sign, you know, cover the keyboard when you're entering your PIN. Because that was, like, our main point, like, people have to share their PIN. So, yeah, the letter is tricky, and people don't always say yes right away. You know, one of the things, there's a great quote I forget by whom it says, I've stood on a mountain of nos for a yes. And we often have that. We've had many cases where, you know, a lawyer writes a letter, so of course, they're paid to say, no, we don't have to do it. No, no, no, no, no. Any little lie, a little thing that says, but we're willing to have a phone conversation, but we're willing to talk to you, and that's just, how do we slide in so we can get the clients in front of the decision makers.  

Sam Evans 34:46 

This is fascinating. I would love to, like, have, like, a day where we just sit and chat with Lainey. 

Lainey Feingold 34:49 

We can have an IAAP, you know, one book, book club if you want. 

Sam Evans 34:55 

I think that would be great. I think people would love to read number one. It would be great for people to read and listen, however they want to consume the book, and then to be able to ask some questions. If you're going for that, I think I could find a couple 100 people who would sign up in a blink. 

Lainey Feingold 35:10 

I do want to say the book is now available in Spanish thanks to some collaborative lawyers in Spain who really liked the idea, who knew nothing about accessibility, but like the idea of the collaboration, and they're a group that works to bring collaboration to all areas of law, you know, mostly in Spain, and so they get the proceeds they paid for the translation so.  

Sam Evans 35:35 

Fascinating. So, I'm talking not Spain. I'm going to use this as a segue to talk about accessibility being a global dynamic, laws obviously pertain, usually country by country or within a country, province, state, region. How do you tackle legal and cultural differences in accessibility laws, standards or regulations when you approach advocacy on a global scale? 

Lainey Feingold 35:59 

That's a good question. First of all, I have to say that I just love the global accessibility community, and no matter what our roles, including mine right here in my house where I've been, you know, to just remember that we're all part of this global effort of people all over the world trying to make the digital world inclusive. I take great comfort in that. So, I want to say that. I have, I do call myself a global public speaker, because I have spoken once, I spoke in three different countries. I said that's honest and transparent. First, I don't do cases or anything in other countries. I want to give a shout out to David Liposky in Canada, who's a blind advocate there, who's done amazing work for many years, focused on Ontario, and he brought me up there right when the book came out. And it was just a great trip. He got me on like a public TV show. I have all this in the media part of my website, if you're curious. And you know, I spoke at law schools, couple law schools up there, and I think there is a global eagerness to do things without fighting. I think that is common, as a matter of fact, more common in other places than the US. The US is the most by far, using the word litigious, you know, fighting thinking litigations. I’ve already given my phrase to good, ethical lawsuits, but nowhere else is this go to of litigation. And in fact, many people, advocates and countries wish there was more individual rights to bring lawsuits or to bring claims. So, I support that too. One thing I've meant to say before is there have been people who have filed lawsuits and then pivoted to Structured Negotiation. I have some examples of that in the topics page. You know, sometimes you have to file a lawsuit for various reasons. A time may be running out, or your clients really want it, but once you're in it and you look at it like, wow, do we want to spend money taking a deposition, which is so expensive, or do we want to have a meeting where people can talk with each other? Yeah, that's one thing. My most recent global conversation was at the Paris Web Conference last year in the fall, which was wonderful. It was a wonderful conference, and there was real interest in how we did this work, both on the lawsuit side, you know, people want to know what's happening in the US, and you know how we can do it with collaboration. So, I think that the weak link is that in a lot of countries, they may have laws on the book. They're not as strong as we have. We have very strong foundation in the United States. Now we're going to have the European Accessibility Act and the individual laws in those countries. So, I think there is, as a matter of fact, in the European Accessibility Act. If those of you read it at the beginning, there's like 100 you know, whereas this and whereas that, it's not actually part of the lot. And I swear number 90, I don't know if it's 90 says, you know, we encourage people to use alternative dispute resolution to resolve claims. And you know, when I first wrote my book, The first edition was published by the American Bar Association. They sent it to some lawyer for review in the East Coast, and all he wrote on it was, where the hell does she find these clients who want to work in collaboration? And you know, that has been the biggest gift of my work, that most people, you know, all of the blind people I work with organizations, they prefer to do it this way. And I think most human beings prefer not to fight. I mean, in all aspects of our life, you know, family, friendship, spirituality, neighbors, people want to get along, and so I think we can bring some of those ideas into advancing accessibility, even when there's a legal violation. In other countries where the laws aren't quite as strong, it's more of a challenge you don't have that background. Oh, we'd better do it If, on the other hand, Structured Negotiation teaches that these other arguments, like privacy and safety and security resonate with people, so we can get at them in different ways. I do have a global page on my website, lflegal.com, and there's a legal update in the high-level navigation. And there's a global page, which, for those of you listening, that page is there because of contributions from people all over the world. Contributors are listed in links. So, if you see anything that's not there from your country or another country or something wrong, please let me know, because it's a collaborative effort, and it's all Creative Commons on my website for all of us to use.  

Sam Evans 40:59 

So, you do public speaking, and in organizations and groups are lucky to have you join them on that front. Can you share and you may have heard about it after the fact, but can you talk about some of your public speaking engagements that either you learned from them that it had a lasting impact on them, or something that happened in one of your one of your speaking trips that had a lasting impact on you?  

Lainey Feingold 41:21

Oh, that's a good question. Well, the Paris web thing was very impactful, in large part because there were a lot of younger women in the audience who I had some really nice connections with, doing the work, wanting to do the work, learning from what's happened in the US. I also had the amazing opportunity to speak in India, December 2023 at the Barrier Break Conference, which is called Inclusive India, Digital First. That's run by the consultancy Barrier Break, and Shilpi Kapoor, who's ahead of that, and a good friend of mine, and I just think it's really important that those of us in the US recognize how much work is getting done in the Global South, places like India, Brazil, Africa, and the depths of knowledge in those countries, and the depths of commitment from accessibility people in the country. So, to be in a room with accessibility advocates in India was just very thrilling. And really hats off to Barrier Break for pulling it together. They did one in December of last year, and they're planning to do another one this year, so. Yeah, to tell you the truth, I really learned something every time I speak. I also do training on Structured Negotiation which is longer, you know, three hours, or I've even done a seven hour. I have something about that on my website. For those and some other things, oh yeah, it sometimes I talk to, I like talking to companies. You know, so confidential talks, not just the public talks, but, you know, accessibility teams and companies. And when I have a chance to do that, I like to send out a little questionnaire in advance and ask some, you know, confidential questions. Like, what's your biggest challenge being an accessibility advocate, and what's your most recent victory? And so, then we can tailor the conversation around what's actually happening in those places. And I learned just so much from, you know, hearing what happens on the ground, like how hard it is. It's not easy to be an accessibility advocate in any sector. I've done a lot of talks in higher ed, which I really like, because I'm on the board of Teach Access, which, if you're not familiar with it, teachaccess.org does amazing work in mostly the higher ed space around making sure people are have the opportunity to learn about accessibility no matter what they're studying, not just engineering, and learning from students and from people working inside the organizations. And you know, it's not easy. I just want to acknowledge that. I'm optimistic. I believe Helen Keller's quote that nothing can be accomplished without open optimism. I subscribe to that, and I want to acknowledge how hard work is. And you know, the burnout in our field and all of that, I'm always learning. I hope that when I stop learning, I got to get out of this line of work. 

Sam Evans 44:27 

 A lot of digital accessibility is based on technology platforms, and technology is changing really fast. So, in the last year or two, we've seen a lot of discussion about AI and other emerging technologies. We had a conversation with some other colleagues, where this excitement, and I think, if it's well managed and ethical, AI has the capacity to help us scale things. What are your thoughts about emerging technology in our daily lives, and how can we encourage accessibility to be built into that or? 

Lainey Feingold 44:59 

Well, this is another one of those reasons to understand the Why of what we're doing. You know, the Why is so disabled people are included in all aspects of society. So now there's AI, you know, ATMs were once an emerging tech, and then talking ATMs and websites and mobile and you know, so this what's hot now, I learned a lot about accessibility issues in AI and disability inclusion from Jutta Treviranus, who's, that's J-U-T-T-A, who writes a lot about the real like, what is AI and how does it impact disabled people, and how are disabled people included in the data sets that form AI? Another thing I think about is this is a place where there's intersectionality between race and disability and gender, and there were some early examples of, you know, AI monitoring when you're taking a test, the same AI that may not recognize, you know, say you have a glass eye so it doesn't think you're making eye contact. They may not recognize that. They may not, they might not recognize. Autism, or they may misread the AI might misread a person who's autistic and isn't making eye contact, and they may also misread a Black person because they're trained on white people. So, I think it's really important to tread carefully. There's a really good guidance from a federal agency in the US about AI hiring tools, because we don’t want AI to be a blocker to disabled people getting hired. So, you can just, if you look up AI hiring tools on my website, there's a link, you know, to the government’s work on that. So, yeah, I think we have to be careful, also I think there's a lot of promise, you know, there is a lot of promise, if done right and Jesse Lorenz is a blind woman who now works at Microsoft, and she writes a lot on LinkedIn. She just did a train ride across the country with her daughter, and kind of shared how she used all the AI tools to navigate the world. So, I want to believe in the promise, but I also want to be wary of the hype. 

Sam Evans 47:31 

And the bias that can be built in if the data input isn't representative. 

Lainey Feingold 47:36 

I think it's something we often really stay on top of and be careful about. And I think our guiding principles of inclusion, if we dig deep enough, are going to keep our analysis where it should be on the needs of disabled people, and how this can be yet another tool for inclusion or yet another tool for exclusion. That's the question. 

Sam Evans 48:02 

Let's lean towards the hope that we build better data sets for AI to be more inclusive and be aware of when we can recognize when it's not. So, I think we might have the opportunity to highlight that, maybe for systems, companies or tools, to say, hey, you know your AI said something, gave something, did something that I think might indicate. I don't know how to contact those people, but I have seen some...hallucinations. I think they're called an AI, where it creates concepts and it spits things out that if you've built this AI tool, can we correct some of this? There's a bias that becomes very clear. Does that? I mean, I'm not sure how we direct that into the 

Lainey Feingold 48:41 

I was asking myself that question yesterday because I wrote an email, and I was talking about the LA fires, which you want to acknowledge the crisis and disaster there. And I wrote to my friend, I said, It's so awful. And the AI option on the email was, here's another way to say it. It's unfortunate. And I'm like, unfortunate and so awful are not the same things. Being a serious person, I actually went to the thesaurus and said, is awful and unfortunate, do those mean the same things and they don't. So, I don't know how this AI learned to suggest unfortunate when someone says so awful, but I wish there was someone I could write to and tell them that. Just don't take anything, same with the lawsuits or the problems with the overlay companies, we need to like to do our due diligence in everything we do to make sure that the goal of inclusion is front and center. 

Sam Evans 49:47 

And so that was going to be my question what's your one piece of advice. And I think you just, I think you just, you just said it. But I think Lainey, I think what people can learn is that they have a really good opportunity. I'm so, so lucky. I've never, I've always worked in mission driven organizations. So, I have this great pleasure in serving and supporting the work of this global world, this this worldwide set of people working for accessibility. To advance which everybody's work is good, and they're making things better and more equitable and accessible. And so, I think everyone…I try to encourage people that you don't have to be an expert to be a really good accessibility champion, and that everybody in all of their roles, can take what they learn. They can read Lainey’s latest book, read the blog, follow her on LinkedIn, and join the other accessibility leaders and community to learn. So, I don't know. I think all of us are working towards that same community. I think it is a community because I see people support individuals. I see people calling it mentors or mentees or just casual support, and the openness and willingness for people to support others doing this work. I don't know that it always exists in every other profession, but I think I'm seeing a lot more of it as people identify as accessibility professionals. So, to that end, in our work towards being United in Accessibility at IAAP and beyond, members or not, we want to support the work. Lainey, if you have any closing thoughts. Make sure that you have visited lflegal.com, to read Lainey’s website, blog, great articles and resources information, check out her book. Lainey, I'll let you tell us where your book is available, because that varies by publisher and author. Anything else you'd like to say as we wrap up today? 

Lainey Feingold 51:36 

Well, the book should be available everywhere, like I said, self-published a second edition, and you have to make a choice, Amazon only, or, you know, a different ISBN number. So, it's everywhere. So, it should be everywhere. And of course, it's accessible. And I want to thank Laura Brady, who's an incredible, accessible publishing expert out of Canada, that has helped me with all of that piece. And yeah, I think community is a great word to end on. I am glad accessibility is becoming an industry, a profession, because we need more people, and we need ethical people, and I don't want to lose a community feel of it. So, I believe we are a community. I believe whatever your role is you are part of that community. And thanks Sam for having me on. I appreciate it.  

Sam Evans 52:24 

Thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate it and to all of you who are listening or reading along, thank you for joining us on The IAAP podcast United in Accessibility. 

Speaker 52:35 

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals offers a variety of membership options for individuals and organizations. Whether you are an expert in accessibility or just starting your journey, join the only global accessibility professional association promoting and improving digital accessibility and physical environments. IAAP advocates for the inclusive design and creation of accessible products, content, services and spaces to ensure no one is left behind due to a physical, sensory, cognitive, health or psychological related impairment. United in Accessibility, join IAAP and become a part of the global accessibility movement.