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5 Items, latest addition, Fri, 27th April 2007

Advocates for the blind sue AOL

04/11/1999

In a suit filed in federal court in Boston today, officials of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) said AOL is violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by refusing to adapt its program to run on so-called screen-access systems that convert electronic information into Braille or voice-based systems.

NFB executives said they've made repeated unsuccessful requests to AOL officials to modify the company's operating programs.

"We are asking AOL to make its system useable [for blind consumers], not to come up with a new system," Marc Maurer, the federation's president, said at a press conference in Boston.

Officials of Dulles, Virginia-based AOL weren't immediately available for comment on the suit.

With more than 19 million subscribers, AOL is the world's dominant Internet access provider and boasts a market value of more than $143 billion. Microsoft's MSN service is No. 2, with about 2 million customers.

Maurer said the NFB focused on AOL because it's the leading Internet access provider, and its programs are becoming the standard for the industry.

"We'll be frozen out if [AOL's operating programs] become universal," said Maurer, who is blind. The Baltimore-based NFB represents 50,000 visually impaired citizens.

AOL's proprietary software requires users to click on icons via a computer mouse, Maurer said. Screen-access programs don't have that capability, he explained.

Those kinds of problems mean that visually impaired parents can't activate parental control functions on AOL's system to monitor what their children are picking up off the Internet, Maurer added.

Daniel Goldstein, a Baltimore lawyer representing the NFB, said the suit is the first seeking to prod an Internet service to accommodate blind users.

"If AOL is worth having for anybody, then it's worth having for everybody," Goldstein said.