by Amy F. Robertson | Feb 10, 2016 | News
CREEC is very excited to welcome Moe Leneweaver as our new Office Manager! Moe brings important community organizing and multiple-hat-wearing experience to the job. She worked most recently at IMPACT Charlottesville, engaging in grassroots organizing, planning an annual direct-action event, and otherwise doing a lot of just about everything in a two-person office working toward empowering the faith community of greater Charlottesville, Virginia to create significant social change through unified direct action. Moe earned a Bachelor’s of Journalism from the University of Missouri in 2012. At the center of all of her pursuits is her passion for making sure that people are treated fairly. When Moe isn’t busy herding cats here at CREEC, she can be found wandering in the forest or lindy-hopping across the dance...
by Amy F. Robertson | Feb 9, 2016 | Accessibility, Systemic change litigation
On February 9, 2016, CREEC and our wonderful co-counsel at the National Association of the Deaf, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and the Disability Law Center got terrific decisions in our cases challenging Harvard’s and MIT’s failure to caption online content in thousands of videos that the universities make available to the public on the internet. Plaintiffs filed suit against each university under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504). Each university moved to stay the case against it until the Department of Justice issued promised regulations governing website accessibility or to simply dismiss the case. In decisions issued today, Magistrate Judge Katherine A. Robertson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts recommended denial of the universities’ motions in full and included excellent language affirming the digital communication rights of people who are Deaf or hard of hearing. The court issued a lengthy decision in the Harvard case and adopted the same reasoning in the MIT case. The court’s holdings in the Harvard case include: The plaintiffs’ claims and their theory of discrimination “fit[ ] squarely within the parameters of Section 504 as delineated by the [Supreme] Court;” Regardless of the status of the Department of Justice regulations, the plaintiffs’ position was supported by the Department of Education regulations; The goal of Section 504 is to ensure that “all programs, projects, and activities receiving [federal financial] assistance … [are] carried out in a manner consistent with the principles of … respect for the privacy, rights, and equal access (including the use of accessible formats) of …...
