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HelloFresh class action lawsuits overview:
Who: Consumers filed several class action lawsuits against meal kit company HelloFresh this year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service also issued a public health notice over ground beef products in some of its kits.
Why: Claims against HelloFresh revolve around its auto-renewal practices, online website accessibility and promotional text messages. The public health notice was in regard to potential E. coli contamination.
Where: HelloFresh is available to consumers in the continental United States.

DES MOINES, Iowa — People who are deaf and hard of hearing face unique challenges this general election, including accessibility and information.

A couple of the questions some hearing-impaired voters may have:

Will I be able to cast my vote at the polls?
How can I become informed about who’s on the ballot?

WASHINGTON — On Friday, U.S. Senate Aging Committee Chairman Bob Casey, D-Pa., Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jon Tester, D-Mont., and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Mark Takano, D-Calif., sent a letter to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, urging the VA to do more to make the agency’s websites and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.

This is an article about a proposed law in the United States. The proposed law is called the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act. It was introduced in the US Congress in September of 2022. The law would require regulations to tell everyone how to make websites and software accessible to disabled people. The law says that people with disabilities are discriminated against when they can’t use tech because of access barriers. The law has other parts too. Many disability rights organizations support this law. It may take a long time and no one should wait to make websites and software usable by disabled people.

Daria Korzhavina is an active young woman. She is a journalist, civic and political activist, co-founder of the Fight for Right NGO, human rights activist, winner of the Top 30 Under 30 award, and a mother of a seven-year-old daughter. She constantly uses websites and social networks, and reads and writes a lot on the Internet.

She is also blind.

A screen reader helps her work online. This is a software application that renders text and image content as speech, and many mobile phones also have this software. Mobile applications operate on the following principle: when the user taps an application, they announce the name of the application; quickly double tapping the application opens it.

October marks Disability Employment Awareness Month (DEAM), which is a meaningful time of the year for Disability:IN because it honors the contributions of talent with disabilities.
When most people think about diversity and inclusion, they likely first think of racial or gender representation, and rightly so. However, there are 1.3 billion people with disabilities worldwide — 70% of whom have non-apparent disabilities, yet people with disabilities are so often missing from the diversity and inclusion conversation.

Voices offer lots of information. Turns out, they can even help diagnose an illness — and researchers are working on an app for that.
The National Institutes of Health is funding a massive research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech.
Everything from your vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says laryngologist Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida’s Health Voice Center and a leader on the study.

The AI-based retinal scanning system is called QUARTZ (QUantitative Analysis of Retinal vessels Topology and siZe), and it’s developers asy it makes the diagnosis of heart diseases more accessible and affordable than ever. Whereas traditional heart-health checkup methods such as blood-pressure analysis and blood tests require blood samples of the patients and are relatively time-consuming, QUARTZ represents a quick and non-invasive technique capable of delivering results with the same accuracy as that of blood tests.

Who: A woman who is legally blind is suing Harvard University.
Why: The plaintiff says Harvard does not make its website accessible to the blind.
Where: The Harvard class action lawsuit was filed in a New York federal court.

Zuk Fitness is an online fitness service created by and for wheelchair users. It offers live and prerecorded workouts led by both paras and quads. Strength, cardio, warmup and stretching routines can all be completed from your wheelchair, often with minimal equipment.

The service was founded by wheelchair user and lifelong athlete Dillon Connolly. An admitted endorphin junkie, Connolly used to rise before 5 a.m. each day to get in 26 hours per week of intense swimming prior to becoming a quad. He earned a swimming scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he became an NCAA All-American talent.