On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Brent Reynolds wrote:

> Now, that's just interesting.  If it costs about a thousand bucks to
> upgrade an existing ATM with the speech technology, then, instead of
> giving a million bucks to the NFB's building fund, they could upgrade a
> thousand ATM's.

Bingo!  The goal of the lawsuit was to ensure atm access for the blind at
all the Rite Aid stores in the United States with a Diebold ATM.  Diebold
has an arrangement with the drugstore chain where they are the atm owners
and Rite Aid collects a fee for the location.  The NFB did not obtain
class-action certification for the lawsuit.  This means that the lawsuit
did not include all the blind persons in the country who use Rite Aid
drugstores but only to the named blind people in the lawsuit, all of whom
live or work in Washington, DC.  Could the NFB have turned this into a
class action?  Possibly, but they decided to settle for five or six
locations:  all of the stores in DC plus NFB headquarters in Baltimore.
The NFB has not made the settlement agreement available for review.
However, it is clear that there is no binding commitment for Diebold at
any time in the future to provide atm access at hundreds or thousands of
Rite Aid drugstores.  Might this text to speech solution be better, less
expensive, and easier to implement for the atm owner, leading to more
access?  Possibly, but no one in the world tried the voice guidance
solution with .wav files until blind people enlisted human rights
commissions and plaintiff's attorneys to force banks to do the right
thing.  while an access solution is not available off the shelf for the
cheap cash dispensers, an access solution has existed for many of the
machines found at most banks for most of the 1990's.  The banks haven't
cared to provide it.

kelly


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