National Federation of the Blind challenges Dept. of Ed. website

Posted: 7:01 pm Wed, October 28, 2009
By Daily Record Staff

The Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind, the nation’s oldest and largest organization of blind people, said it filed an administrative complaint Tuesday with the U.S. Department of Education.

Joining with the NFB on the complaint is Carlos Mora, a blind Baltimore resident. The complaint — the third that the NFB has filed against a federal agency over Internet inaccessibility — asserts that one of the Department of Education’s Web sites, U.S.A. Learns, violates the Rehabilitation Act because it is inaccessible to blind people who use text-to-speech screen access technology or Braille displays to access the Internet.

Blind people cannot access or navigate through the content of the English vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation lessons on the site, the complaint alleges. The NFB and Mora are represented by attorneys Daniel F. Goldstein and Allison L. Harper of Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP.