Verizon Communications

Product teams bring their apps and devices to Verizon's Accessibility Technology and Innovation Lab so Fred Moltz's testing staff can identify and fix accessibility failures before products reach retail stores and customers' hands.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Develop Accessible Implementations
• Builder-side Interventions → Test for Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Provide Support Channels
• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility

What it is

Verizon Communications runs an Accessibility Technology and Innovation Lab in Freehold, New Jersey, where product and engineering teams conduct accessibility testing on apps, devices, and set-top box experiences before those products reach customers.¹ Fred Moltz, Verizon's Chief Accessibility Officer, leads the lab and built Verizon's broader accessibility program over more than two decades. The lab opened on May 16, 2024, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, after five years in development. Moltz, who developed a disability himself after a car accident left him without nerve sensation in his fingers and lower left leg, designed the space around the principle "nothing about us without us."

The lab divides into three sections. The Home Section replicates a residential living room with Fios set-top boxes, Apple TV, Xbox, Alexa, and iOS and Android devices, so testers can observe real-world usage patterns. The Collaboration Section seats ten people and includes dual Windows and Mac computers, Braille displays, a Braille printer, and retail point-of-sale systems, where teams find and remediate accessibility defects in products before launch. The Education Section provides a podium space for training sessions, webinars, and live demonstrations tailored to specific Verizon business units.¹

The lab tests nine Verizon homepages daily, more than 40 branded apps, all phone models listed on Verizon's website across multiple operating system versions, and the Fios set-top box experience. Testing combines automated and manual methods and explicitly extends beyond compliance: the team evaluates whether products that may meet technical standards still produce poor user experiences.¹ Verizon also runs an annual Accessibility Bug Bash in which product teams across the company coordinate to resolve accessibility bugs together, and maintains the Accessibility Resource Center at verizon.com/accessibility, which offers bills and brochures in Braille, large print, audio CD, and MP3 formats.²

The accessibility operation is supported by two dedicated customer service channels: the National Accessibility Customer Service line (NACS) for wireless customers and the Verizon Center for Customers with Disabilities (VCCD) for Fios and landline customers, which operates an ASL/Video support line.³ Verizon established a Disability Advisory Board in May 2021, drawing ten external leaders from organizations including the National Association of the Deaf, the American Foundation for the Blind, the Hearing Loss Association of America, and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.⁴

Why it matters

The Bell System's telephone network, built under AT&T's regulated monopoly between the 1870s and 1984, assumed a hearing, speaking user as its default. Relay services, TTY devices, and amplification options were afterthoughts added under pressure from deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates, not design choices baked into the original infrastructure. Congress first imposed a product design obligation on the telecom industry with Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which required manufacturers and service providers to make their equipment and services accessible if "readily achievable." The FCC's final guidelines under Section 255 took effect on March 5, 1998.⁵ The law covered analog and early digital telephone infrastructure but could not anticipate VoIP, mobile internet, video conferencing, or streaming video, leaving the emerging internet-era telecom stack outside its reach. Congress passed the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act in 2010 to fill that gap, extending accessibility obligations to advanced communications services and requiring annual compliance certifications.⁶ Verizon's lab enters this sequence in 2024 as a development and qa-testing operation that extends Verizon's accessibility work beyond what either law requires, building internal testing infrastructure that catches failures before products reach the market rather than after complaints reach regulators.

Verizon's compliance record illustrates the gap between declared commitment and documented performance that institutional accessibility programs must close. In 2021, Verizon received its sixth consecutive perfect score on the Disability Equality Index, a joint initiative of the American Association of People with Disabilities and Disability:IN.⁷ That same year it established a Disability Advisory Board under the stated principle "nothing about us without us."⁴ In July 2022, the FCC's Enforcement Bureau proposed a $100,000 fine against Verizon Wireless for willfully and repeatedly failing to produce documentation showing whether its Premium Visual Voicemail service was accessible to a deaf Samsung Galaxy S10 user who filed a CVAA complaint.⁸ The FCC found that Verizon submitted conclusory statements without data, selectively cited aggregate customer numbers that did not address disability-specific usage, and ignored documented problems on Verizon's own community message boards.⁸ The Bureau's finding that Verizon's stonewalling threatened the FCC's statutory 180-day deadline demonstrates that institutional scores and board memberships do not, by themselves, prevent users from being forced to assert their rights when products fail. In September 2024, a legally blind New York resident filed a class action complaint alleging Verizon's eStore website failed WCAG 2.2 standards, blocking independent phone purchases because of missing alt text, non-descriptive hyperlinks, and UI components that screen readers could not parse.⁹ These cases sit alongside the company's internal lab, advisory board, and perfect DEI scores, a coexistence that documents how institutional compliance structures can allow documented failures to persist inside organizations that score well on external benchmarks.

Verizon's net neutrality lobbying in 2014 shows how corporate actors use disabled people's identities as policy arguments without authorization from the communities invoked. Verizon lobbyists told congressional staffers that fast lanes under a tiered internet model would benefit disabled users who need priority bandwidth for medical devices and relay services. Mark Perriello, then president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told BillMoyers.com that he had never heard "these specific talking points" and was hearing them for the first time.¹⁰ Five disability organizations (Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc. (TDI), the National Association of the Deaf, the Hearing Loss Association of America, the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network, and the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Telecommunications Access) responded by filing joint FCC comments supporting net neutrality and explicitly rejecting Verizon's framing.¹⁰ The episode points to a pattern that Marta Russell identified in Beyond Ramps (1998) and in "Capitalism and Disability" (co-authored with Ravi Malhotra, Socialist Register, 2002): corporations extract value from disabled people's identities and needs to legitimize market positions, with or without those communities' participation.¹¹ The Disability Advisory Board Verizon established seven years later was structured to prevent exactly this kind of ventriloquism: the board's founding principle explicitly names the right of disabled people to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing users documented Verizon's accessibility program from inside their own community on AllDeaf.com and in a 2012 Change.org petition. The AllDeaf thread called TTY compatibility for cell phones essentially theater: "TTYs for cell phones are RARE because there are NO cell phones with BUILT IN TTY interfaces." Users noted they were using videophones and relay services, not TTYs, making TTY support a compliance gesture that addressed a problem they did not have.¹² The 2012 petition, filed by Isaiah Lewis, charged that Verizon forced deaf customers to purchase unlimited voice plans they could not use, without offering data-only alternatives, even as Apple announced FaceTime availability on mobile networks.¹³ Deaf users who wanted to use video communication as their primary access mode paid for voice minutes they would never consume, an adaptation tax concentrated on the group whose communication needs diverged most sharply from the assumptions built into Verizon's pricing structure. Ed Roberts and the Independent Living Movement's foundational argument, made in the context of Berkeley's Center for Independent Living in 1972, applies here: accommodation offered without consumer governance reproduces rather than resolves the exclusion it claims to address.¹⁴ Verizon's Disability Advisory Board, which includes representatives from the National Association of the Deaf and the Hearing Loss Association of America, represents a structural attempt to bring consumer governance into Verizon's product and policy decisions, though its authority over pricing, plan design, and service contracts has not been publicly documented.

Deaf users blocked from communication services face physiological and safety consequences. Emergency relay services require functioning communication infrastructure: a deaf person whose visual voicemail does not work and whose video relay access is degraded cannot contact 911 the same way a hearing user can. Communication barriers concentrate documented psychological harm: the American Psychological Association has identified social isolation as a risk factor for depression, anxiety, and accelerated cognitive decline, and deaf users cut off from reliable communication channels by inaccessible infrastructure face amplified versions of that isolation.¹⁵ The adaptation tax that Verizon's plan structures imposed on deaf customers, requiring payment for voice minutes they could not use, produces a chronic economic stress alongside the functional exclusion. Chronic economic stress correlates with elevated cortisol and disrupted sleep-wake cycles, and the literature on minority stress, documented by Ilan Meyer in his foundational 2003 framework and subsequently extended to disabled populations, shows how structural exclusion becomes embodied through repeated encounters with systems that do not account for one's existence.¹⁶ Disabled users who endure inaccessible systems rather than litigating or switching providers absorb these costs silently.

Verizon's Accessibility Technology and Innovation Lab represents a shift in where accessibility testing happens, moving from post-launch complaint response to a pre-launch gate. No prior accessibility initiative at Verizon built dedicated physical space for disability testing at this scale, with Braille printers, ASL support, and residential simulation environments. The CVAA's 180-day enforcement clock, documented in the Visual Voicemail case, shows that federal accessibility law relies on individual complaint-filing by disabled users to trigger enforcement, a structural condition that limits how far any pre-launch testing program can reach on its own. The lab addresses failures the regulatory system cannot catch because it operates before complaints exist, but it covers only Verizon-branded apps and homepages, not the third-party applications that run on devices Verizon sells. It does not address pricing structures that impose adaptation taxes on deaf users. And its scope, however broad internally, depends on the continued institutional commitment of leadership rather than on law. Verizon's record, a lab that tests 40 apps daily alongside an eStore that a blind user could not use independently in 2024, is the record of a front that advances in some places while remaining static in others.

Real-world examples

In the news

Accessibility Technology and Innovation Lab at Verizon (May 2024)
-- Equal Entry

• Equal Entry documented the opening of Verizon's Accessibility Technology and Innovation Lab in Freehold, New Jersey on May 16, 2024, Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The piece profiles Fred Moltz, Verizon's Chief Accessibility Officer, and details the lab's three sections, testing scope (nine homepages tested daily, 40+ branded apps, all device models on the website, all Fios set-top box experiences), and the "nothing about us without us" design principle. The lab's Collaboration Section is where development and testing teams remediate accessibility defects before product launches.

In the news

FCC Takes Enforcement Action Against Verizon Wireless for Apparently Failing to Produce Documentation Exhibiting Due Diligence in Exploring Accessibility and Achievability of its Premium Visual Voicemail Service (July 2022)
-- Federal Communications Commission

• A deaf customer filed a CVAA complaint in December 2021 after Verizon's Premium Visual Voicemail service failed to function on her Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. The FCC found Verizon submitted only conclusory statements, selectively reported aggregate complaint numbers that did not address disability-specific use, and ignored problems documented on Verizon's own community message boards. The Enforcement Bureau proposed a $100,000 fine. The case shows that even a company with six consecutive perfect Disability Equality Index scores can force disabled users to assert their rights through regulatory channels when product accessibility fails.

In the news

Verizon Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Alleged Web Accessibility Issues (September 2024)
-- Bureau of Internet Accessibility

• Derek Pollitt, a legally blind New York resident, filed a class action complaint under Title III of the ADA alleging that Verizon's eStore website blocked independent phone purchases due to missing alt text, non-descriptive hyperlinks, and UI components without programmatically determinable names. The case documents a gap between the lab's testing scope and the digital properties that blind users encounter when shopping. Pollitt's inability to independently complete a phone purchase illustrates that pre-launch testing programs have uneven coverage.

In the news

Verizon Says It Wants to Kill Net Neutrality to Help Blind, Deaf and Disabled People (June 2014)
-- Bill Moyers

• Verizon lobbyists cited blind, deaf, and disabled people's bandwidth needs to argue against net neutrality protections without consulting disability organizations. The American Association of People with Disabilities' president said he had never heard "these specific talking points." Five disability organizations responded by filing joint FCC comments supporting net neutrality. The episode documents a pattern in which a corporate actor used disabled people's identities as a policy instrument while those communities organized a counter-response through regulatory channels.

• Verizon scored 100 on the Disability Equality Index for at least six consecutive years through 2021, covering culture, leadership, enterprise-wide access, employment practices, and supplier diversity.⁷
• The Disability Advisory Board launched May 20, 2021 with ten external leaders from organizations including NAD, AFB, HLAA, DREDF, DeafBlind Citizens in Action, and Disability:IN.⁴
• The American Foundation for the Blind announced its Chief Technology Officer Matthew Janusauskas's appointment to Verizon's Disability Advisory Board, noting that Verizon had previously received AFB's Helen Keller Achievement Award.¹⁷
• Fred Moltz helped organize CES 2026's inaugural Accessibility Stage, which drew standing-room attendance from over 100 speakers across design, aging, assistive technology, and emergency preparedness.¹⁸
• A 2012 Change.org petition by Isaiah Lewis documented Verizon forcing deaf customers into unlimited voice plans they could not use, with no data-only alternative. The petition launched after Apple announced FaceTime availability on mobile networks.¹³
• The EEOC sued Verizon for denying reasonable accommodations to hundreds of employees under the company's "no fault" attendance policies; Verizon settled for $20 million in what was at that time the largest disability discrimination settlement in a single EEOC lawsuit in history.¹⁹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the development and qa-testing stages involves catching failures before they reach customers rather than waiting for complaints:

• "We go beyond compliance: something can technically pass WCAG and still create a poor user experience, so we check both."
• "We test every phone model on the website across different OS versions. A bug that appears on one configuration and not another still needs to be fixed before we sell that device."
• "We created the lab so teams have a physical space to observe real-world usage patterns, not just run automated checkers, but watch how people with disabilities actually use the product."
• "Nothing about us without us."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect involves treating accessibility as a documentation exercise rather than a functional requirement:

• Verizon's response to the FCC voicemail complaint cited millions of customers using the service successfully, without providing data specific to disability or device type.⁸
• "Our TTY support meets the regulatory standard."
• "We'll address accessibility in a future release."
• "The feature works for most users."
• "We scored 100 on the DEI. Our accessibility program is well established."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor disabled Verizon customers undertake when products fail to work:

• A deaf Samsung Galaxy S10 user whose Premium Visual Voicemail produced only error messages tried a replacement phone, found the same failure, and then filed an FCC complaint as the only available channel.⁸
• "TTYs for cell phones are RARE because there are NO cell phones with BUILT IN TTY interfaces." ¹²
• A deaf Verizon customer on AllDeaf.com described paying monthly for unlimited voice minutes they would never use because Verizon offered no data-only plan alternative.¹²
• Derek Pollitt, a legally blind New York resident, could not independently complete a phone purchase on Verizon's eStore because product images had no alt text and UI components produced no output readable by his screen reader.⁹
• Pollitt's complaint documented a pattern that other blind users on accessible retail platforms describe: having to ask another person for help just to see which phones were available before attempting a purchase.⁹

---

All observations occur within the context of retail telecommunications accessibility in the United States, centered on Verizon Communications' consumer-facing products, services, and compliance record.

Footnotes

1. Equal Entry, "Accessibility Technology and Innovation Lab at Verizon," May 2024. https://equalentry.com/accessibility-lab-verizon/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Verizon Accessibility Resource Center. https://www.verizon.com/accessibility/ ↩

3. Verizon Accessibility FAQs. https://www.verizon.com/about/accessibility/accessibility-faqs ↩

4. Verizon, "Verizon launches Disability Advisory Board and pledges to upskill the next generation of innovators," May 20, 2021. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-launches-disability-advisory-board ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. WebAIM, "Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996." https://webaim.org/articles/laws/usa/telecomm ↩

6. Wikipedia, "Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-First_Century_Communications_and_Video_Accessibility_Act_of_2010 ↩

7. Verizon, "Verizon earns a top score on the 2020 Disability Equality Index for the fifth consecutive year," 2020. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-earns-top-score-2020-disability-equality-index-fifth-consecutive-year ↩ ↩²

8. Federal Communications Commission, "FCC Takes Enforcement Action Against Verizon Wireless for Apparently Failing to Produce Documentation Exhibiting Due Diligence in Exploring Accessibility and Achievability of its Premium Visual Voicemail Service," July 8, 2022. https://www.fcc.gov/fcc-takes-enforcement-action-against-verizon-wireless-apparently-failing-produce-documentation ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. Bureau of Internet Accessibility, "Verizon Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Alleged Web Accessibility Issues," September 2024. https://www.boia.org/blog/verizon-faces-class-action-lawsuit-for-alleged-web-accessibility-issues ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. BillMoyers.com, "Verizon Says It Wants to Kill Net Neutrality to Help Blind, Deaf and Disabled People," June 13, 2014. https://billmoyers.com/2014/06/13/verizon-says-it-wants-to-kill-net-neutrality-to-help-blind-deaf-and-disabled-people/ ↩ ↩²

11. Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra, "Capitalism and Disability," Socialist Register, 2002. Reprinted in Keith Rosenthal, ed., Capitalism and Disability (Haymarket Books, 2019). ↩

12. AllDeaf.com, "Verizon Wireless and deaf customer service." https://www.alldeaf.com/community/threads/verizon-wireless-and-deaf-customer-service.16475/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

13. Isaiah Lewis, "Stop Discriminating Against Deaf Customers -- Verizon Wireless," Change.org, September 20, 2012. https://www.change.org/p/verizon-wireless-stop-discriminating-against-deaf-customers-verizon-wireless ↩ ↩²

14. H. Zukas, "The History of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living (CIL)," in Report of the State of the Art Conference (Berkeley: Center for Independent Living, 1975), https://www.independentliving.org/docs3/zukas.html; Gerben DeJong, "Independent Living: From Social Movement to Analytic Paradigm," Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 60, no. 10 (1979): 435-446, PMID 496597, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/496597/ ↩

15. American Psychological Association, "Social Isolation, Loneliness Increasingly Recognized as Health Risk," 2023. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/01/cover-connection-health ↩

16. Ilan H. Meyer, "Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence," Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003): 674-697. ↩

17. American Foundation for the Blind, "AFB Chief Technology Officer Matthew Janusauskas Appointed to Verizon Disability Advisory Board," May 2021. https://www.afb.org/news-publications/press-room/press-release-archive/press-release-2021/cto-matt-janusauskas-appointed-verizon-disability-advisory-board ↩

18. Your Tech Report, "CES Accessibility Stage Breakthrough with Fred Moltz of Verizon," February 6, 2026. https://yourtechreport.com/2026/02/06/ces-accessibility-stage-breakthrough-with-fred-moltz-of-verizon/ ↩

19. EEOC, "Verizon to Pay $20 Million to Settle Nationwide EEOC Disability Suit." https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/verizon-pay-20-million-settle-nationwide-eeoc-disability-suit ↩