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A year and a half ago, a pair of Oakland, California residents filed a lawsuit against Apple, arguing that San Francisco's Stockton Street Apple Store wasn’t appropriately accessible to disabled customers, specifically those in wheelchairs. That lawsuit has now been settled, according to ifoAppleStore.
Per the terms of the proposed order (which has yet to be signed by the U.S. district court judge overseeing the case), Apple is not liable for the claims, but it has agreed to make changes to the store, including adjusting the opening pressure of the front door, adding a corridor handrail, putting in Braille signage, making alterations to the ground floor restroom, and—perhaps most importantly—training its employees to assist disabled customers by offering to move displays and other equipment to lower, more accessible tables. The changes apply only to the San Francisco store, though Apple has also said that it will add training for current and future employees of all of its retail locations by the end of 2009. The work on the store itself should be completed later this year.
But perhaps the most far-reaching change? Apple has agreed to “monitor the toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom in the Apple Retail Store and insure that an adequate supply of toilet paper is placed in the upper dispenser.” Now there’s a move that we’d like to see applied not just to Apple Stores but to restrooms in all stores across the country.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From Mac World:
