Meredith J. Weaver

In her half-dozen years with Disability Rights Advocates, Weaver has taken on some imposing defendants to get access and services for her clients.

She recently settled a lawsuit against the San Jose Sharks to have the hockey team’s mobile app made usable by the blind. In July, she sued the Society for Human Resource Management alleging its educational materials aren’t available to deaf members. And, on Dec. 1, she will go to trial against Philadelphia over the city’s delay in making streets and sidewalks accessible and safe for people with disabilities.

Weaver was also involved in negotiating a wide-ranging settlement several years ago with Kaiser Permanente that improved access and services for the health care organization’s blind and low-vision patients throughout California. She remains deeply involved in monitoring a class action settlement with Sutter Health to make its hospitals and services more available to disabled persons.

The connections she made on those two matters turned out to be very valuable as the health care industry adapted to the pandemic, she said. Now, she is “focusing more on discriminatory impacts of the industry-wide shift that’s taken place since COVID hit in March 2020.”

Early on, the DRA received many complaints about drive-thru testing facilities from the vision-impaired and other people unable to drive. “There really wasn’t much information to be found [about] accommodations,” she said. “Could they just walk up, or was that off limits?”

There were more problems as medical care went virtual because many doctors’ websites couldn’t accommodate screen readers for the blind. Vaccine-registration websites had similar issues.

Hospitals rushed to adopt virtual remote sign-language interpreting for deaf patients, but the systems didn’t work well for those with vision difficulties.

Weaver was able to address such issues early with Sutter because she meets monthly with officials, including its general counsel and ADA coordinator, as part of monitoring the settlement.

She and DRA also wrote to their contacts at Kaiser and other health care providers to highlight potential issues they believe should be averted.

So far, her organization has filed no litigation over pandemic-related issues.

“We’ve mostly been doing behind-the-scenes advocacy,” she said. “But now we’re a year and a half out and things have still not been addressed. I think now we’re going to start seeing more of those cases coming.”

— Don DeBenedictis