Digital Accessibility News

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is proposing a new rule aimed at improving access to state and local public services online for people with disabilities, the White House announced Tuesday. The proposed rule would establish technical standards — like captioning videos, adding text descriptions to images and making navigation more accessible — for state and local governments’ web and mobile app-based services, like voter registration,...

Yamaha Corporation of America operates a website that is not fully accessible to blind and visually-impaired visitors in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and New York City law, a class action lawsuit alleges. The Yamaha class action lawsuit notes that there are about 8.1 million visually-impaired Americans, including 2 million blind Americans, according to the 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report. Plaintiff Luis Mercedes says he...

This month, Seattle-based Amazon has announced updates to a few accessibility features for the industry’s doyenne of digital assistants in Alexa. The updates encompass three features: Tap to Alexa, Alexa Captions, and the new Automatic Speech Recognition technology. With Tap to Alexa, it’s now possible to use one’s voice to enable the functionality by asking “Alexa, enable Tap to Alexa.” As the name implies, Tap to...

A push is underway to get employees back into the office. The Commonwealth Bank kick-started this conversation recently, with reports the organisation is requiring staff to work at least half the week on-site. A range of organisations are directing employees to return to the office. These reportedly include Amazon, General Motors, Meta and Disney. But although COVID lockdowns have ended, many employees want to continue to work...

When Daniel Belquer was first asked to join a team to make a better live music experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, he was struck by how they had developed work-arounds to enjoy concerts. "What they were doing at the time was holding balloons to feel the vibrations through their fingers, or go barefoot and flip the speakers facing the floor," Belquer said. He thought the team...

Dollar General violated the law by making one of its websites inaccessible to Americans who are blind or visually impaired, a new class action lawsuit alleges. Plaintiff Mary Conner filed the class action lawsuit against Dollar General Corporation and Dolgencorp LLC on July 10 in a North Carolina federal court, alleging violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Conner is a visually-impaired and legally blind...

Learning Braille took a lot of persistence and perseverance, though it also felt natural to now 22-year-old Mason Fessenden of Dana Point. When Mason was born premature and completely blind, his mother, Martha Fessenden, said she was told he would never be able to learn Braille. “We were told he was never going to talk; he was going to have cerebral palsy,” Martha recalled. “He is a...

On the Cutting EDge podcast, Terrill Thompson, the manager of the University of Washington’s IT Accessibility team, says that universities need to establish a culture that emphasizes the importance of web accessibility while they wait for stronger standards to arrive. “I don’t consider [accessibility] an outcome. I consider it more of a process that we’re actively trying to build a culture of accessibility,” Thompson says. “People...

This is an article about a lawsuit filed by AudioEye, a multi-million dollar accessibility company, against Adrian Roselli, a long-time leader in the global digital accessibility community. Adrian has been a vocal critic, as have I, against one-line of code software that claims to make websites accessible. AudioEye sells (licenses) an overlay. The company has sued Adrian to stop him from expressing his opinions about the...

Whether using desktop software to solve enterprise problems or scrolling through your social media feed in the supermarket checkout line, online connectivity is ubiquitous. In less than two decades, internet users grew from just 0.4% of the global population to 69% in 2022. In the U.S., 85% of Americans say they go online daily, while more than one-third report being online “almost constantly.” Meanwhile, 90%...

Plaintiff Frank Senior, a legally blind man, claims Garmin has not designed its website so that it is fully compatible with screen-reading software used by individuals who are blind or visually impaired to access the internet. Senior argues Garmin is ultimately depriving individuals who are blind or visually impaired from the benefits of its online goods, contents, and services, in an alleged violation of the...

While the internet is abuzz with talk of Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, a significant portion of migrating users are already frustrated, and not because of annoying notifications or the inability to delete just your Threads account. Instead, in a strange step back for the tech giant, the hours-old platform — unabashedly attempting to poach Twitter's migrating user base — doesn't seem to accommodate those with...