A group of blind federal contractors filed a lawsuit against the General Services Administration last week over a contractor website they say shuts out the visually impaired.

The System for Award Management website, SAM.gov, contains numerous buttons, checkboxes, drop-down menus and “mouseovers” that federal contractors must navigate each year in order to keep their contractor status current.  Those bells and whistles make it difficult or impossible for screen reading software that blind people use to navigate the Internet to decode the site, the suit claims.

GSA phone-in help desk employees are also not sufficiently trained in disability issues, the suit claims, making it even more difficult for blind contractors to complete their registrations.

The suit was filed as a class action by the American Council for the Blind and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  The groups claim GSA violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which, among other things, bars discrimination against federal contractors and grantees based solely on a disability.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2014/04/lawsuit-says-gsa-discriminates-against-blind-contractors/83179/