A court ruling in favor of accessibility

The Federal Administrative Litigation Court No. 3 upheld a collective injunction filed by people with disabilities and various organizations -ADC among them- and ordered the Council of the Judiciary and the National Supreme Court of Justice to “adopt, within the scope of their respective powers, the necessary measures to make the National Judiciary´s Digital Portal accessible to visually impaired attorneys using screen readers, both for consultations and other proceedings”. Although the platform was created in 2015, the virtual mode practitioners with reduced vision when trying to retrieve judicial records via the web.

The information on the site lacked alternative text, impeding the professionals from accessing information through the screen readers they use on their devices and requiring the help of other people, a situation that violates their right to autonomy. In response to this, a group of visually impaired lawyers, along with several civil society organizations including ADC, filed a Collective Protection Action in August 2020, to urge the National Judiciary to improve the accessibility of its website. In the brief, it was emphasized that the portal is a fundamental tool to obtain justice and its inaccessibility violates the right to work under equal conditions while impeding people with disabilities and digitally illiterate older adults from getting justice