[blindlaw] Issues Accessing the Legal System for Individuals with Communication Barriers

[Tai Blas]

To clarify, I plan to examine communication barriers for individuals with various disabilities, not just those mentioned in my previous message. 

Tai

-----Original Message-----
From: Megan Pitz [mailto:megan.k.pitz at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 11:52 AM
To: TaiBlas
Subject: Re: Issues Accessing the Legal System for Individuals with Communication Barriers

Do you plan to write about more than the disabilities you note? Because to be honest the courts are far less accessible to individuals with less socially accepted disabilities and I think you'd therefore have a stronger argument if you examined that. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:08 AM, Tai Blas <taiablas at GMAIL.COM> wrote:



	Hello. I am a student writer on a law journal and intend to write an article regarding barriers to accessing the court system for individuals with disabilities. My basic argument is that while courts procure interpreters for individuals with language barriers, they do not always afford the same access to disabled individuals facing communication barriers. The idea for this topic came from the recent Florida decision requiring courts to accept Braille correspondence from a blind prison inmate. I have also heard anecdotal evidence of court failure to provide interpreters for deaf individuals here in Iowa. As a result, a court reporter had to reconfigure the computer to allow the deaf witness to read the proceedings and the deaf witness wrote down his responses. Thus, a proceeding that could have taken ten minutes with an interpreter took thirty minutes without one. 

	 

	Can anyone point me toward cases and secondary resources on this topic?

	 

	Thank you.

	 

	Tai Blas