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Numerous federal, state and local covid vaccination registration and information websites violate disability rights laws, preventing blind people from signing up for potentially life-saving vaccine, investigation found by KHN.
Across the country, people who use special software to make the web accessible have not been able to sign up for vaccines or get vital information about covid-19 because many government websites do not have accessibility features required. At least 7.6 million people in the United States over the age of 16 have visual impairments.
WebAIM, a nonprofit web accessibility organization, checked the covid vaccine websites collected by KHN in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. On January 27, he found accessibility issues on nearly all of the 94 web pages, which included general vaccine information, lists of vaccine providers and registration forms.
In at least seven states, blind residents said they were unable to register for the vaccine with their state or local governments without help. Telephone alternatives, when available, have faced their own issues, such as long wait times and not being available around the clock, like websites.
Even the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine administration management system, which a small number of states and counties chose to use after its difficult deployment, has been inaccessible to blind users.
These issues violate the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which established the right to communications in an accessible format, said several legal experts and disability advocates. The US Federal Disability Act, a civil rights law that prohibits governments and private companies from discriminating on the basis of disability, further enshrined this protection in 1990.
Doris Ray, 72, who is blind and has significant hearing loss, encountered such problems when she tried to sign up for a vaccine last month with the CDC’s system, used by Arlington County in Virginia. As the Director of Outreach at the ENDependence Center of Northern Virginia, an advocacy center run by and for people with disabilities, she had qualified for the vaccine due to her face-to-face work with clients.
When she used screen reading technology, which reads text from a website aloud, the drop-down field to identify her county was not working. She couldn’t register for more than two weeks, until a colleague helped her.
“It is outrageous in a time of a public health emergency that the blind cannot access something to get vaccinated,” Ray said.
Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, wrote to the US Department of Health and Human Services in early December outlining his concerns about the accessibility of vaccines.
“A national emergency does not exempt federal, state and local governments from providing equal access,” he wrote.
Dr Robert Redfield, then head of the CDC, responded that the interim vaccine manual for health departments included a reminder of legal access to information requirements.
CDC spokeswoman Jasmine Reed said in an email that VAMS complies with federal accessibility laws and the agency requires testing of its services.
But more than two months after the start of a national vaccination campaign, those on the ground are reporting problems at all levels.
Some local officials who use VAMS are aware of the lingering problems and blame the federal government. Arlington County Deputy Director Bryna Helfer said that since VAMS is managed by the federal government, the county cannot access internal operations to troubleshoot the system for blind residents.
Connecticut Department of Public Health spokeswoman Maura Fitzgerald said the state was aware of “a lot of accessibility issues” with VAMS. She said he had staffed his call center to handle the issues and was working with the federal government “to improve VAMS and activate the promised functionality.”
Deanna O’Brien, president of the National Federation of the Blind of New Hampshire, said she has heard from blind people unable to use the system. The New Hampshire Department of Health did not respond to questions from KHN about the issues.
Blind people are particularly vulnerable to contracting the covid virus because they often cannot physically distance themselves from others.
“When I go to the grocery store, I don’t have the opportunity to walk around and not be near a person,” said Albert Elia, a blind lawyer who works with the San Francisco-based law firm TRE. on accessibility cases. “I need someone at the store to help me with my purchases.”
There is no standardized way to sign up for a covid vaccine nationwide – or solve accessibility issues online. Some states use VAMS; some states have centralized online vaccination registration sites; others have a mix of state-run and locally-run websites, or leave it all up to local health departments or hospitals. Ultimately, state and local governments are responsible for making their immunization systems accessible, whether they are using the VAMS system or not.
“With those portals open, it’s a race to see who can click the fastest,” said Riccobono. “We don’t have time to do things like take legal action because at the end of the day we have to fix it today.”
Common programming failures that make sites difficult for the visually impaired to use include text without enough contrast to distinguish words from the background of the page and images without alt text explaining what they have shown, a showed the WebAIM survey. Worse yet, parts of the forms on the 19 state pages have been designed in such a way that screen readers cannot decipher what information a user has to enter into search bars or registration forms. vaccines.
The new vaccine pages contained more errors than the main state coronavirus pages, but slightly less than state government websites in general, said WebAIM associate director Jared Smith.
In Alameda County, Calif., When Bryan Bashin, 65, who is blind and CEO of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Disease in San Francisco, attempted to register on Feb.9 for his date for the vaccine, he encountered multiple obstacles. The dates got away. That night he received an email from the city of Berkeley offering vaccinations. But after two hours of struggling with his unreachable website, all the slots were taken again, he said in an email.
He was only able to get an appointment when his sighted sister signed him up and has since received his first vaccine.
“It’s a little bit of discrimination, as pungent as anything I’ve been through,” Bashin said.
Susan Jones, a 69-year-old blind man from Indianapolis, had to rely on the Aira app, which allows a sighted person to use their computer remotely, when she tried to register for her appointment. you for the vaccine.
“I’m sorry the assumption is that a showy fairy godmother should be there at all times,” said Sheela Gunn-Cushman, a 49-year-old woman also in Alameda County, who also had to rely on Aira. to pre-register for a vaccine.
Emily Creasy, 23, a visually impaired woman from Polk County, Oregon, said she tried unsuccessfully for a month to get the scheduler device to work with her screen reader. She finally received her first vaccine after her mother and roommate helped her.
Even Sachin Dev Pavithran, 43, blind and executive director of the US Access Board, an independent agency of the federal government that works to improve accessibility, said he struggled to access vaccine registration information at Logan, Utah.
The Indiana Department of Health, Berkeley’s Public Health Division and Polk County Public Health in Oregon did not respond to requests for comment. The Bear River Utah Department of Health did not respond to questions on the matter.
After Alameda County received complaints from users that its site was not compatible with screen readers, officials decided to move away from its pre-recording technology, the gate said. -speak of the Department of Health Neetu Balram in mid-February. The county has since changed to a new form.
If vaccine accessibility issues are not resolved across the country, lawsuits could follow, Elia said. Members of the blind community recently won landmark lawsuits against Domino’s Pizza and the Winn-Dixie grocery chain after being unable to order online.
And, said Elia, “it’s not ordering pizza – it’s being able to get a potentially life-saving vaccine.”
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national information service on health policy. This is an independent editorial program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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