[blindlaw] Associated Press: Legally blind Vt. law student wins 1st big case

[David Andrews]

>
>
>Legally blind Vt. law student wins 1st big case
>Published August 07, 2011
>| Associated Press
>
>
>MIDDLESEX, Vt. -  Deanna Jones, a third-year law student who's legally blind
>and learning disabled, has won her first big court case: her own.
>
>Jones sued the National Conference of Bar Examiners in July, accusing it of
>violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by refusing to let her take a
>key legal ethics exam using a computer with screen access software that she
>has used to read in college and in law school.
>
>Armed with a federal judge's order, she was able to take the test Friday,
>closely watched by a proctor, test supervisor and someone from the ACT, Inc.
>testing company, she said.
>
>"I think I did OK," she said. "I left feeling like I probably passed it."
>
>Jones, who attends Vermont Law School with hopes of practicing disability
>law, needs the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam to practice in
>Vermont. The NCBE fought her request and plans to appeal, saying the
>security of its pencil-and-paper test could be jeopardized if taken
>electronically. The organization had offered instead to have someone read
>the test to Jones, to let her take the test in Braille, in enlarged print,
>and use an audio CD.
>
>But a judge ruled Tuesday that the examiners had to provide her a laptop
>equipped with the special software. Jones said she was "just emotionally
>overcome" when she finally sat down for the exam.
>
>"I just sort of broke into a fit of bawling for a moment," she said Friday
>afternoon, after nearly six hours of testing. "It was unbelievable to me
>what it had taken just to be able to sit in that chair," she said.
>
>Dan Goldstein, a Baltimore-based lawyer for Jones and the National
>Federation of the Blind, said he's been involved with four other similar
>cases, three of which have been successful, resulting in preliminary
>injunctive relief. The federation paid Jones' legal bills.
>
>Her lawyer, Emily Joselson of Middlebury, said federal disability rules and
>laws require that examiners "provide the accommodations that best ensure
>that the test taker's results on the exam will reflect the substantive
>knowledge that's being tested and not their disabilities."
>
>U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss said in a 26-page decision that
>"reasonable accommodations" for Jones were not enough and without the laptop
>and software Jones had requested "the MPRE will primarily test her ability
>to work through her disabilities and that she will not be able to compete on
>an equal basis with non-disabled test takers."
>
>NCBE, based in Madison, Wis., did not return a phone call seeking comment.
>Court papers show the nonprofit corporation is seeking to withhold Jones'
>score.
>
>Reiss questioned NCBE's priorities.
>
>"The public interest compels the court to order accommodations that will
>best ensure a disabled person's access to a professional exam that will, in
>part, determine whether he or she may practice a chosen profession," she
>wrote.
>
>"The public's interest in the integrity of secure, professional licensing
>exams while important and legitimate does not trump the ADA," Reiss wrote.
>
>Jones' disabilities have long been tested. Legally blind since she was 5 and
>not diagnosed with a learning disability until she was in her 30s, Jones
>described her public school years in Hightstown, N.J., as a "rough ride."
>
>What got her through? "My mom," she said.
>
>I'd come home from a school a mess, you know, just crying at the table," she
>said.
>
>Her mother, Elaine Jones, would get her organized and help her through the
>work.
>
>But Jones dropped out of college after high school with a GPA of .92 after
>one year.
>
>She went on to start a record store and later to run the food service at the
>Statehouse in Montpelier.
>
>In her 30s, everything changed. She learned that in addition to macular
>degeneration in each eye - depriving her of centralized vision and
>preventing her from seeing anything other than peripheral objects - she also
>had atypical retinitis pigmentosa, eyesight-threatening damage to her retina
>that causes loss of peripheral vision.
>
>"What's important about that is that meant I wasn't just going to lose my
>central vision, I was going to lose all of my vision," she said at her
>Middlesex home.
>
>She also discovered that she had a learning disability.
>
>In early 2000, Jones learned about the computer software programs that
>allowed her to read and return to college: The ZoomText Magnifier/Reader,
>which magnifies text, and Kurzweil 3000 screen reader, which reads the text
>aloud and highlights sentences and words that she can follow with a cursor.
>
>Until then the only book she'd gotten through was a large-print edition of
>"The Diary of Anne Frank," which she used for every book report she wrote.
>
>"So when I got to Vermont College with this particular software and I could
>scan any book in the world and read it. It was just unbelievable.
>
>"It was the first time in my life I was able to read books and it just
>opened up the whole world," she said, with tears welling in her eyes. "It
>was so amazing."
>
>She read literature classics - "Moby Dick," ''The Great Gatsby," and "Anna
>Karenina" as well as psychology and books in myriad subjects, enough for her
>to get a liberal arts degree.
>
>"I couldn't read until I was in my 30s. It's a big deal," she said.
>
>While she was an undergraduate, she studied the Americans with Disabilities
>Act, rekindling her childhood dream of going to law school, she said.
>
>She's not sure exactly what she'll do as a lawyer. She thinks about working
>with colleges and professional schools, giving sensitivity training about
>people with disabilities and how to accommodate them.
>
>For now, she expects another fight next year when she takes the Vermont bar
>exam - which also comes without technology. She hasn't yet inquired about
>special accommodations to take that test.
>
>So far, she's got the grades to prove her success.
>
>"I have a 3.28 GPA. And if I get a 3.5 by next semester or even in the
>following semester, I can graduate cum laude. And I am dying to graduate cum
>laude," she said.
>
>
>Read more:
><http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/07/legally-blind-vt-law-student-wins-1st-
>big-case/#ixzz1URD5pUrN>
>http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/07/legally-blind-vt-law-student-wins-1st-b
>ig-case/#ixzz1URD5pUrN