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Hi, this is George Abraham and welcome to Eyeway Conversations. I have with me Shilpi Kapoor, my colleague. Hi Shilpi!
Hi, George!
Our guest today is Lainey Feingold, a disability rights lawyer, an author and a public speaker from Berkeley, California. To begin our conversation, tell us a little bit about your background, and how did you get interested and involved with disability rights work?
You know, it's funny with any story where does it start, and I really do have to say for especially for younger people listening, my path started when I was fired from a job. Yeah, I had never been fired before but I had been a lawyer for 10 years and I was like, whoa, what do I do now and there was an opening in a disability rights nonprofit, near where I live. It's called the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. And during that time, I had the opportunity to work with blind people on access to transportation, to financial services and I love the work, I love the people, I love the issues. Prior to that I had worked for labor unions and worked on gender and race discrimination so it was a natural fit to do disability rights. But if I hadn't been fired, I probably never would have discovered it.
You know, I was reading up on Lainey Feingold, and the words "structured negotiation" kept coming back at me. Tell us a little bit about the structured negotiations and it seems to be a very effective alternative to lawsuits.
Yes, thank you for asking about that right at the top, because structured negotiation has been central to my work. And again, it all started during those first four years with the disability rights nonprofit. While I was there, some blind people came to the organization and ATMs, Automated Teller Machines were sort of new at the time, and blind people couldn't access them at all, which meant blind people did not have access to their own money. So blind people came to me in the organization as a lawyer and said, you know, could we do anything about this because in the United States, you know, we have a law called the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was passed in 1990. So this was all happening to me in 94-95. So we had a new law and we're like, oh, what can we do, could we make ATMs that work for blind people and we could have filed a lawsuit. But you know, it was a new law and there were no ATMs that worked for blind people, so we said, instead of filing a lawsuit, why don't we just see if the banks will talk to us, so we wrote letters to three banks in the US, and out of those letters which we sent in 95, the next four to five years were spent working with the banks. Probably the key thing was making sure that the bankers could meet blind people, could understand the needs, could understand why blind people needed ATMs to talk, which was a solution we were going for. And because that relationship was formed, then we did not have to do a lawsuit. We were in talking. We were in ATM labs all over the country, and our blind clients for giving advice, and they were all people very advanced in technology because they had ideas and they knew how it could work. It just hadn't been done yet. So when that was over, we got the ATM to talk and towards the end of that negotiation, one of our clients said, well, great, we have ATM to talk. But here's this new thing called online banking, which was new at the time, it like 97-98. And they said, Lainey you know, we did a good job with the ATMs but if we don't get online banking and banking websites that talked, that are accessible, we're gonna again be locked out of our own money. And, you know, access to financial money, financial issues is a real essential privacy issue. Disabled people don't have privacy if they don't have access so because we had a good relationship, we went to the banks and said, you know, we really need to make these websites accessible too and that worked and when that worked, which is a long way of answering your question, we said, wow, that was kind of effective. Maybe we should call it something, maybe we shouldn't just say it was a casual conversation, we should give it a name, so we named it and we called it structured negotiation for various reasons. And ever since then, that's how I've done work. That's how the blind people in blind organizations I've worked with have done work and we've used structured negotiation for a lot of companies, websites, healthcare, finance, entertainment. Yes, so it's just been a way to bring people together to solve problems, to know that the law is there, but not have the law be the central driver, rather have inclusion and participation in civil human rights be the driver.
George?
Yeah.
What do you think about structured negotiation for India? Considering we have a law, but it's not very strong, we don't have, you know, a lot of implementation yet but we do want to get organizations there, listening to Lainey, doesn't it sound like an opportunity for us?
Yeah, it sounds like an opportunity. It also sounds very simple that I was about to ask Lainey, what was it that actually brought the bankers and the other stakeholders to the table? Was it the fact that you were a lawyer? Did it take an effort for you to bring them on to the table?
That is an excellent question and I write about that in my book, I do have a book about this. It's called Structured Negotiation, a Winning Alternative to Lawsuits. I'm happy to say I just put the second edition, it was published this week, so I'm happy for that. And I explained in there that the first, letters, getting the banks to the table at the beginning, we wrote very aggressive letters, we said, you better come to the table, or else we're going to sue you and we had a copy of what we would file in court and we had a lot of yelling in the letter. Do you know what I mean, how words can be aggressive, even if they're written and that was how we got them to the table at the beginning. But the truth is, the way we kept them at the table was by the strategies in the book regarding, you know, really, it's about relationship building because once you get people to the table, and having the clients be front and center, we had about seven blind people, and a blind organization who were spearheading this with the lawyers. And, you know, one of the blind people was a lawyer, one was a technology person, one was an advocate, one person, you know, he wasn't really much of an advocate before it started, his bank was starting to charge people two dollars if they came in to get their cash instead of using ATM, because they were trying to steer people to the technology. And he would go in and he said, I can't use the ATM because I'm blind, it's not accessible and they're like, well, sorry, it's two dollars if you want to use a teller, so that turned that person into an advocate, but his story was so compelling for the bankers. The problem with litigation, it can be very effective and very important, very hard to get the stories told and listened to. So because it was so successful in those early cases, we stopped with the aggressive language and now, we're not just now, this has been going on for 25 years now, so the past 10 to 15, maybe even 20 years, we're more phrasing that initial ask as an invitation to participate, an invitation to a negotiation because nobody likes to be threatened, even big companies, because one thing I've realized is that I don't care how big the company, inside, there are individual people with feelings and if you write a letter, and you tell people that they're bad and that they don't care about blind people, because then our issues, I don't know how it is in India, even here in the US, a lot of times people are not aware of the issues. It's not like they're deciding, well, we're gonna lock out blind people by building an accessible app. It like it's just not a priority. And once you have relationships between disabled people and decision makers, it's harder to put it on the back burner.
These stakeholders from the bank, were they government banks or were they private banks because in India, a number of banks that operate are government banks, and talking to the government is a little difficult.
Yeah, the banks were private. There were three private banks. They were Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank that became national bank so we end ended up expanding the effort nationally but we have used the process with government agencies and in the second edition, I interviewed some people who had used structured negotiation, you know, since the book came out, and they too, told stories in there in the book of government agencies. So the things that I personally have worked on with government agencies in the biggest ones, probably in San Francisco, when we worked on accessible pedestrian signals. Other government cases, like I've worked with transit agencies or making their websites accessible. And some of the new stories are lawyers who used structured negotiation to work with prisons, to improve conditions for incarcerated people with disabilities, structured negotiations has been successful working to get cities here to implement curb ramps, and the streets. So I haven't, I don't think there's anything with the financial sector, but most of the financial sector is private in the United States.
So Lainey look, this is the second edition and I just bought my edition right now. And, you know, with the second edition, you know, I think we've seen you go from structured negotiation, to also start to talk about baking it in and baking accessibility in. So how did that transition happen because you went from a very legal process, to a very fun approach to how people can take on accessibility.
Yeah, that's a good question. I do a lot of public speaking and I have really, about five or maybe even seven years ago, I realized that just because you know, something doesn't mean you're a good speaker about the thing, you know, doesn't necessarily mean you're a good communicator. And again, stories are everything so I wasn't the first accessibility person to come up with the idea of a baking analogy. Cordelia McGee Tubb, who's an accessibility advocate here was the first to say that accessibility is like a blueberry muffin. If you put the blueberries in at the end, it's not going to work. Just like accessibility has to be built in throughout and that really resonates with people. It's just it's a simple thing. And I can just in a lawyer structured negotiation context, I do that in writing the agreements, but it doesn't make for good motivating talk, you know, it doesn't make people excited, but the baking analogies and so then I had the idea of putting it on Twitter, asking people to send me their analogy so I do have a post. My website is lflegal.com. And I have a post called Accessibility is Delicious, where I collect all these baking analogies and, you know, someone I know from India sent me one you can't put the garam masala into the curry at the end of the process and I'm seeking international examples. Someone sent me an ice cream cone accessibility is a mess unless you do it early, and the ice cream cone is dripping. So I think one of the problems with law and accessibility is people tend to think of, especially here in the US, we have so many lawsuits, oh, this is an obligation, this is a checklist, this is a set of requirements. Whereas I like to talk about accessibility in terms of motivation, in terms of innovation, in terms of inclusion so that's how I that's how I came up with the baking analogy. I can't really work it into a legal settlement agreement. But I prefer you know, even in negotiations, when you're at a table, there's the details of the legal agreement, what standards are we going to use, what testing but underneath all that is the motivation for people to want to do it and do the right thing, so I think stories like the baking analogies help with that.
George, we have to get people to a bake out or maybe attend those so that we can start getting them to want to do this with us and make it fun, rather than obligation.
In the context of baking, you were actually talking about corporate America and you're talking about companies and hiring and various things of that kind so I was wondering whether you were actually doing any kind of advocacy work with hiring and accessibility.
Hiring is, it's really key to accessibility. I mean, I do a talk on the accessibility cookie, which is, you know, part of the baking thing and one of the ideas there is that just like there's a lot of ingredients in a cookie, there's a lot of roles that go into a successful accessibility program, it's not just on the shoulders of the IP department. It's not even just on the shoulders of design and IT, the HR needs to know and the procurement people need to know. And one element of the cookie, one of the ingredients, is hiring disabled people because it's kind of like structured negotiations. Once you know, once this relationship between people with disabilities, and people without disabilities in the workforce, it's less likely that inaccessible content software is going to be put out if the person in the next cubicle is deaf, it's unlikely that you put out a video that doesn't have captions. Or if the person in the next cubicle uses a screen reader, it's unlikely you're going to put all your content in an image that is full of text that can't be read. So hiring disabled people is part of the cookie. I also like to say that salt, which is important for a sweet cookie, but you can't have too much of it, that's where I see the law, like you need the law, but you can't have too much law, because then people are afraid and people aren't, you know, seeing all the good that comes from accessibility, not just the business case, but the public appreciation and approval of companies that are doing the right thing. And, you know, for that I really point to Microsoft doing, you know, we have the Super Bowl, US football, we shouldn't call it football, but you know, US football game every year, and Microsoft advertising their accessible gaming controller that lets disabled people play video games. That's not just so disabled people know, it's out there that for the whole public to know that Microsoft is a good company committed to these issues, or Google, they did, you know, they take out national advertising on captions. So nobody's taking out national ad that saying I complied with the ADA, you know, it's just not like that, we got to tell a story that's more engaging.
So true and we need to learn from that, and we need to get Indian corporates to see this aspect of inclusion and accessibility. George, we got our work cut out for us.
I was reading that you've done a lot of work on providing access to people who are blind to various sports in the US. So what is it that you actually did and what was the outcome?
I'm glad you asked that question. So we did a structured negotiation with Major League Baseball and that was started back in 2006, I think seven or six. And at the time, I had only worked on issues of finance and pedestrian safety and so when blind baseball fans came to me and said, could we use structured negotiation to fix the website of Major League Baseball, because they had a radio program on the website, you could listen to your games, your home team, no matter where you were. And they also have a ton of statistics so everybody wanted it and I was like, Oh, I only do serious things like finance or healthcare or pedestrian safety. But George, I will tell you that I think that might be the most popular thing that we ever worked on because people like sports, you know, people like sports, and again, the structured negotiation, we actually did that whole case on the phone. We never met in person but we had avid baseball fans who are blind who needed the information. But we set up a call and again, it wasn't just with the lawyers, we had the blind fans and we had the people at major league baseball who build the website and it was like a match in heaven. They were most of the time just talking about baseball. And then, you know, we had to get to the accessibility part because they were all you know, baseball, baseball so it was a great partnership and Major League Baseball became a national leader. And you know, maybe we can make some connections with the sports industry in India, because I still to this day, call upon my Major League Baseball contacts if something comes up. So we were in negotiations with them almost finished when the app store opened in the way, and they put out an app but accessibility was not a thing so when it came out, it wasn't accessible. But because we had the relationship, they knew they had to do it, so it wasn't once we once we got the engagement, it was smooth sailing, and most of the time that's what it is. The hardest part is having the open mindset to get people to the table so they feel comfortable that this is going to be something that's to their benefit.
Yeah, this sounds like a dream coming true but I don't know how difficult or simple it's going to be in India. We are dealing with a huge population, we are talking about various players and getting people to turn to the table is going to be quite a challenge.
Yeah well, you know, one thing, George, another sort of theme, I talked about the book and I talked about when I do public speaking, is small steps, celebrating small steps, defining small steps, coming, like when we came to the banks, you know, we wanted talking ATMs, but when they got the first, we got the first five talking ATMs from Citibank, we had a press release, we had a press conference, we had TV cameras, because we celebrated that, we didn't complain that it was only five, we celebrated it and celebrating small successes motivates people to do more. So defining what the initial ask is, I think is important part of the process, especially, like you say, with big organizations and big issues, and you know, they probably have a lot of broken accessibility things so finding one where you can build on, you know, create success and build on it, I think is a good part of the process.
Little drops of water make the mighty ocean, as the poet said, and also the idea of celebration, and getting everybody who's involved with that change to be happy and feel great about it, I think that's a strategy that I think should work in any environment. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you, Lainey.
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