Lainey Feingold

Blind and visually impaired people and their advocacy organizations retain Lainey Feingold to negotiate accessibility agreements with banks, pharmacies, retailers, and technology companies through Structured Negotiation, a collaborative dispute resolution process that produces binding commitments without filing lawsuits.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Assert One's Rights
• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility

What it is

Deborah Kendrick reported in AccessWorld that Feingold and co-counsel Linda Dardarian began their first Structured Negotiation in 1995, when blind customers and the California Council of the Blind asked them to pursue accessible ATMs from Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank.¹ Instead of filing suit, Feingold and Dardarian wrote letters to each bank explaining the access barrier and inviting collaborative resolution. Bank of America reached a preliminary agreement within six months, and by early 2000 all three banks had committed to installing talking ATMs and providing statements in braille and large print across California.² That 2000 Bank of America agreement also became the first web accessibility commitment by a U.S. company, after blind advocates who had been navigating the bank's services through modems, telephones, and braille displays told Feingold that online banking had become inaccessible.³

Feingold and Dardarian developed Structured Negotiation as a method for asserting rights without the adversarial posture, expense, or delays of litigation. The process begins with a carefully drafted opening letter that identifies the legal claim and invites the company to negotiate rather than litigate. Both sides then agree on ground rules, share information without formal discovery, bring in joint experts, and draft a binding settlement. Disabled claimants participate directly rather than being sidelined by procedural requirements. Deborah L. Cohen reported in the ABA Journal that the method requires no third-party mediator and instead positions both sides as partners solving a shared problem.⁴ Under fee-shifting provisions of disability rights statutes, the responding organization pays attorney fees, so claimants bear no cost.⁴

Over more than twenty-five years, Feingold and Dardarian have produced over sixty binding agreements with some of the largest organizations in the United States through Structured Negotiation. On behalf of the American Council of the Blind, the California Council of the Blind, and individual blind claimants, they negotiated talking ATMs at thousands of bank branches nationwide, tactile point-of-sale devices at Walmart, Target, CVS, Staples, and Best Buy stores, accessible websites and mobile apps at Major League Baseball and all thirty team sites, talking prescription labels at CVS and Rite Aid pharmacies, braille and large-print credit reports from all three major bureaus, accessible pedestrian signals at over eighty San Francisco intersections, and audio description in Cinemark theaters.⁵ More recent agreements have extended to digital platforms, with Discord (2021) and Patreon (2020) committing to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) standards for their websites and mobile applications after negotiations with the American Council of the Blind.⁶ A 2024 agreement with Charles Schwab updated the company's digital accessibility standard from WCAG 2.0 to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, building on a relationship that began with a 2012 agreement.⁵

Feingold operates as a sole practitioner from Berkeley, California. She served as a founding steering committee member of the Disability Rights Bar Association and as Litigation Director at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) from 1992 to 1996 before opening her own practice.⁷ The American Bar Association named her a Legal Rebel in 2017, and she has twice received the California Lawyer Attorney of the Year award (2000 and 2014).⁷ She authored Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, published by the ABA in 2016 and released in a second edition in 2021 with forewords by Haben Girma and Susana Sucunza.⁸

Why it matters

Banks designed ATMs for sighted users from the machines' first commercial deployment in the late 1960s, and that design persisted as default for three decades. Touchscreen interfaces at pharmacies and retail checkout counters followed the same pattern. Web applications adopted visual layouts that screen readers could not parse. In each domain, builders who set requirements specified the product for a sighted population and treated blindness as an edge case outside the scope of the initial design. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 established Section 504's prohibition against disability discrimination in federally funded programs, and its 1998 amendment added Section 508's requirement for accessible federal information technology. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 extended civil rights protections to the private sector. Yet the gap between statutory obligation and private-sector implementation remained wide, because no enforcement mechanism compelled most companies to act until a blind person or advocacy organization brought a claim.⁹ Feingold and Dardarian entered that gap in 1995 with the first Structured Negotiation, creating a mechanism that converted statutory rights into binding corporate commitments without requiring blind people to endure the adversarial process of litigation.

The legal profession trains lawyers to approach disputes as adversaries, and disability rights law absorbed that orientation. When blind people or their organizations identified an access barrier, the standard path required filing a complaint, surviving motions to dismiss, producing discovery, enduring depositions, and waiting years for a resolution. Feingold told Alice Wong in a Disability Visibility Project interview that litigation gives disabled clients less of a role in the process and the outcome, forcing them to endure inaccessibility in the very process meant to remedy it.¹⁰ Feingold and Dardarian repositioned the blind claimant as a direct participant rather than a procedural subject. Organizations like the California Council of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind did not merely file paperwork through counsel. They sat at the table, described the barriers from direct experience, and helped shape the technical solutions. Deborah Kendrick reported in AccessWorld that cases consistently began when individuals with visual impairments identified the problem themselves and brought it to counsel, and Feingold consistently described disabled people as the established experts in those conversations.¹ Feingold and Dardarian moved the locus of authority from the courtroom to the negotiating table, where the person who encountered the barrier daily held standing that litigation procedures routinely eroded.

Federal ADA Title III lawsuits over web accessibility reached 3,225 filings in 2022, and a small number of plaintiffs and firms filed a disproportionate share.¹¹ Business lobbies and trade press used the volume to argue that disability rights litigation had become predatory, framing disabled plaintiffs as threats rather than people seeking access they had been promised by statute. That framing shifted the political cost of asserting rights onto the people the statute was meant to protect. Feingold and Dardarian changed the cost structure of rights assertion by removing the adversarial frame that generated political backlash. Feingold told Wong that the media does not report on win-win solutions, so most people had never heard of Structured Negotiation, because collaborative outcomes attracted less coverage than adversarial ones.¹⁰ The economic logic also differed. Litigation imposed open-ended defense costs that companies could cite as evidence of regulatory burden, whereas Structured Negotiation produced a defined commitment with a timeline, training requirements, and monitoring provisions. Bank of America Associate General Counsel Brian Frumkin said at a 2019 disability rights awards gala that the collaborative practice had made him "a more effective lawyer and, perhaps, a happier person," a remark Feingold quoted in her Business Law Today article on the method.¹² Each agreement reduced one domain of the adaptation tax that blind people carry, the cost of asking sighted strangers for help at ATMs, of enduring inaccessible pharmacy labels, of switching to alternatives that accommodate their needs. The underlying arrangement, in which builders design for sighted users by default, persisted in every domain the next agreement had not yet reached.

Mike Oliver argued in The Politics of Disablement that disability originates in social organization rather than in individual bodies, and that the built environment disables people whose impairments would not produce exclusion under different structural conditions.¹³ Feingold and the California Council of the Blind enacted that distinction when they negotiated talking ATMs. They did not ask banks to fix blindness. They asked banks to fix the ATM, locating the obligation with the builder who designed the interface and the institution that deployed it. Marta Russell argued in Beyond Ramps that liberal anti-discrimination law alone cannot end the systemic exclusion of disabled people, because the economic structure that organizes work around profit tolerates exclusion when inclusion requires investment.¹⁴ Feingold and Dardarian partially circumvented that limit by embedding accessibility into corporate governance through staff training requirements, accessibility committees, and ongoing monitoring, converting a one-time legal claim into a durable institutional commitment. Yet each new claim must be initiated one company and one barrier at a time, by a disabled person or organization willing to start the negotiation. Russell's structural critique holds in every domain the method has not yet reached.

Blind people who needed cash before talking ATMs existed routinely asked strangers to enter their PINs, surrendering financial security to complete a basic transaction, as Deborah Kendrick reported in AccessWorld.² The American Foundation for the Blind's Access to Drug Labels survey documented the bodily cost of inaccessible pharmacy labels among approximately one hundred respondents with vision loss. Nearly all relied on sighted companions or strangers to read prescription information, and respondents reported illness, emergency room visits, hospitalization, and medication errors resulting from labels they could not read.¹⁵ One respondent who could not distinguish between insulin bottles gave himself the wrong insulin and was hospitalized. Another took expired medication without knowing, triggering a multiple sclerosis relapse that required three weeks of hospitalization and two months of recovery.¹⁵ The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2016 that pharmacies had generally adopted few of the thirty-four best practices for accessible labels, citing low demand and high costs as barriers, and noted the absence of any federal requirement to implement them.¹⁶ Pharmacy system designers chose small visual type on curved surfaces as the sole format for medication information, concentrating differential bodily risk in the seven million Americans with significant vision loss. That design choice propagates through the label to the patient's body as medication errors producing hospitalization, anxiety, and in some cases permanent physiological harm. Feingold and the American Council of the Blind negotiated agreements with CVS that brought ScripTalk talking labels through cvs.com in 2014 and Spoken Rx, an in-app talking label system, to all CVS locations by 2021.¹⁷ A study conducted by Issues & Answers Network under IRB guidance, commissioned by ScripTalk manufacturer En-Vision America, found that 98 percent of ScripTalk users reported feeling safer taking their medications, and while 35 percent had experienced a medication error before using the technology, none reported a medication error afterward.¹⁸ Those agreements reduced embodied risk for blind pharmacy customers at one chain. At pharmacies without comparable commitments, the same biosocial pathway remains active.

Peggy Martinez, a blind singer and technology trainer in California, told Kendrick in AccessWorld that she was forty years old before she deposited or withdrew money from her own bank account for the first time.² Feingold and Dardarian opened that territory through a process that adversarial litigation had not reached. Before 1995, no binding agreement between a blind advocacy organization and a national bank had ever produced that kind of outcome without a filed complaint, without a courtroom, and without the years-long procedural delays of litigation. More than sixty agreements later, the method still depends on voluntary engagement by the responding company, and companies that refuse the opening letter face no procedural consequence. The Department of Justice published an ADA Title II final rule in April 2024 requiring state and local governments to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, then extended those compliance deadlines in April 2026, but the private sector remains governed by Title III, which lacks specific technical standards and relies on case-by-case enforcement.⁹¹⁹ Feingold and Dardarian fill a gap that statutory enforcement leaves open, but each filled gap requires a new agreement rather than producing a structural mandate. Every talking ATM installed, every in-app prescription label deployed, and every website rebuilt to WCAG standards through this process advanced what blind people could independently access. Private-sector accessibility remains voluntary in the absence of a specific complaint, and the labor of initiating that complaint still falls on disabled people and their organizations.

Real-world examples

In the news

2 lawyers use 'structured negotiations' to improve access for the disabled (December 2013)
-- Deborah L. Cohen, ABA Journal

• Cohen reported that Feingold and Dardarian first deployed Structured Negotiation in 1994 to persuade U.S. banks to add interactive audio prompts to their ATMs, completing the Bank of America agreement in under six months and adapting 12,000 existing machines. Feingold and Dardarian went on to reach agreements with Major League Baseball, Trader Joe's, Target, and UCSF Medical Center without litigation, positioning both sides as partners rather than adversaries in resolving builder-side design failures.

In the news

Lainey Feingold: Negotiating better access for the disabled (September 2017)
-- Stephanie Francis Ward, ABA Journal

• Ward profiled Feingold as part of the ABA's Legal Rebels series, reporting that Feingold contacted Citibank in 1995 and reached a final agreement by 2001 requiring text-to-speech screen readers at ATMs. Ward also reported that point-of-sale device negotiations with Target, Dollar General, and Trader Joe's addressed touchscreen accessibility for blind users, converting navigator-side burdens into builder-side commitments.

In the news

Lainey Feingold: Defending Civil Rights Through Collaboration (July 2021)
-- Meredith Kreisa, InclusionHub

• Kreisa reported that Feingold's settlements with Bank of America, Walmart, CVS, Major League Baseball, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Houston's Metropolitan Transit Authority all used Structured Negotiation rather than litigation. Feingold told Kreisa that traditional lawsuits force adversarial roles discouraging genuine dialogue, and that disabled people need to remain front and center in accessibility conversations rather than being displaced by procedural requirements.

In the news

Q&A With Lainey Feingold, Disability Rights Lawyer (January 2022)
-- Equal Entry

• Feingold identified workplace software barriers as her most pressing concern, noting that inaccessible internal tools limit disabled workers' ability to secure and advance in employment. She referenced an Accenture and Harvard Business School report suggesting that approximately 75 percent of employers use AI hiring technology that potentially excludes applicants with disabilities, extending the domain of rights assertion beyond public-facing products into employment infrastructure.

• In October 1999, San Francisco City Credit Union installed the first talking ATM in the United States, following Structured Negotiation between Feingold, Dardarian, and the banking industry. By 2010, all 18,000 Bank of America ATMs nationwide had talking capability.²
• The 2021 CVS Spoken Rx agreement, negotiated with the American Council of the Blind, made CVS the first major pharmacy to offer in-app talking prescription labels at every U.S. location, covering prescription name, dosage, directions, and pharmacy contact information in English and Spanish.¹⁷
• A 2024 Structured Negotiation with CVS addressed kiosk accessibility, extending the method's reach from websites and ATMs to in-store self-service devices.⁵
• Before developing Structured Negotiation, Feingold served as co-counsel on national class actions against Shell and Chevron that produced ADA implementation at over 5,000 service stations across the country, addressing physical accessibility barriers for wheelchair users.²⁰

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at requirement-setting involves building accessibility into corporate governance rather than treating it as a one-time compliance event:

• "We received a Structured Negotiation letter and treated it as an opportunity to improve our products, not as a legal threat."
• "Our accessibility governance committee reviews every product release before it ships, and that committee includes disabled users."
• "We trained our entire development team on WCAG standards as part of our agreement, and we kept the training current through annual updates."
• "We committed to WCAG 2.2 AA because the previous standard no longer reflected how our customers actually use the platform."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect involves treating accessibility as an afterthought contingent on external pressure:

• "We'll fix accessibility when someone sues us."
• "Our legal team doesn't respond to advocacy letters. Only court filings."
• "We assumed screen readers would handle it."
• "Accessibility improvements are too expensive to implement company-wide right now."
• "We don't have blind users."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor blind and visually impaired people carry when builders design for sighted users by default:

• "I had to tell a stranger my PIN so she could read the ATM screen for me. I did that for years before talking ATMs existed."
• "The pharmacy wouldn't give me accessible prescription labels until an advocacy organization got involved. Before that, I sorted my pills by bottle shape and hoped I got it right."
• "I spent months documenting accessibility failures before the company would even respond to our letter."
• "I found a lawyer willing to negotiate instead of sue, but not everyone knows that option exists."
• "I switched banks three times looking for one that had talking ATMs in my neighborhood."

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All observations occur within the context of U.S. disability rights law and private-sector accessibility, where Structured Negotiation operates as a mechanism for converting statutory obligations into binding corporate commitments across banking, pharmacy, retail, and digital platform domains.

Footnotes

1. Deborah Kendrick, "Lainey Feingold: The Power of Structured Negotiations," AccessWorld, American Foundation for the Blind, December 2013. https://www.afb.org/aw/14/12/15726 ↩ ↩²

2. Deborah Kendrick, "Money Talks: An Overview of Access to Automated Teller Machines," AccessWorld, American Foundation for the Blind, 2001. https://afb.org/aw/2/4/15021 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. "The First U.S. Web Accessibility Agreement was Signed Twenty Years Ago this Week," Law Office of Lainey Feingold, March 2020. https://www.lflegal.com/2020/03/bank-of-america-at-20/ ↩

4. Deborah L. Cohen, "2 lawyers use 'structured negotiations' to improve access for the disabled," ABA Journal, December 2013. https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/2_lawyers_find_settlements_on_the_path_of_least_resistance ↩ ↩²

5. "Settlements in Structured Negotiation," Law Office of Lainey Feingold. https://www.lflegal.com/negotiations/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. "Discord Digital Accessibility Settlement Agreement," Law Office of Lainey Feingold, October 2021. https://www.lflegal.com/2021/10/discord-agreement/ ↩

7. Stephanie Francis Ward, "Lainey Feingold: Negotiating better access for the disabled," ABA Journal Legal Rebels, September 2017. https://www.abajournal.com/legalrebels/article/lainey_feingold_diability_law_adr ↩ ↩²

8. Lainey Feingold, Structured Negotiation: A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits, 2nd ed. (2021). ↩

9. "IT Accessibility Laws and Policies," Section508.gov. https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/ ↩ ↩²

10. Alice Wong, "Interview with Lainey Feingold: Technology, Access, & Structured Negotiation," Disability Visibility Project, January 16, 2017. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2017/01/16/interview-with-lainey-feingold-technology-access-structured-negotiation/ ↩ ↩²

11. "Plaintiffs Set a New Record for Website Accessibility Lawsuit Filings in 2022," Seyfarth Shaw ADA Title III Blog, January 2023. https://www.adatitleiii.com/2023/01/plaintiffs-set-a-new-record-for-website-accessibility-lawsuit-filings-in-2022/ ↩

12. Lainey Feingold, "Tired of Being a Shark? Structured Negotiation Offers an Alternative," Business Law Today, American Bar Association, January 2022. https://businesslawtoday.org/2022/01/structured-negotiation-offers-an-alternative-to-being-a-shark/ ↩

13. Mike Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990). ↩

14. Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998). ↩

15. "Access to Drug Labels Survey Report," American Foundation for the Blind. https://afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/your-rights/rx-label-enable-campaign/access-drug-labels-survey-report ↩ ↩²

16. U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Prescription Drug Labels: Actions Needed to Increase Awareness of Best Practices for Accessible Labels for Individuals Who are Blind or Visually Impaired," GAO-17-115, December 2016. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-115 ↩

17. "CVS Spoken Rx Settlement Agreement," Law Office of Lainey Feingold, November 2021. https://www.lflegal.com/2021/11/spokenrx-agreement/ ↩ ↩²

18. Issues & Answers Network, Inc., "ScripTalk Study Results," conducted under the guidance of a certified Institutional Review Board (IRB), commissioned by En-Vision America. https://www.envisionamerica.com/scriptalk-study-results ↩

19. U.S. Department of Justice, "Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities," 89 FR 31340, April 24, 2024; compliance dates extended April 2026. https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/ ↩

20. "About Lainey Feingold," Law Office of Lainey Feingold. https://www.lflegal.com/about/about-lainey/ ↩