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The article reports on lawsuits against New York City art galleries over the accessibility of websites to blind people. Topics discussed include the view that the suits are either salvos for civil rights or a way for lawyers to scrape the internet for a quick paycheck, background of the two New York lawyers who are suing the galleries, Joseph NH. Mizrahi and Jeffrey M. Gottlieb, and the statement by courts that the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to websites.

The article reports that a blind man, Emanuel Delacruz has filed a case against Hofstra University on Long Island, New York as he was not able to access the university's website which comes under violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The article reports on the lawsuit filed against the New York City for violation of federal laws including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, regarding the rights of parents with intellectual disabilities and bias behavior from child welfare agencies.

A small cadre of lawyers, some from out of state, are using New York City's age and architectural quirkiness as the foundation for a flood of lawsuits citing violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The lawyers are generally not acting on existing complaints from people with disabilities. Instead, they identify local businesses, like bagel shops and delis, that are not in compliance with the law, and then aggressively recruit plaintiffs from advocacy groups for people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Sears Roebuck & Company had agreed to a $6.2 million settlement in a case under the Americans with Disabilities Act. A federal court judge approved a consent decree in the case, in which Sears was accused of firing employees instead of providing reasonable accommodations for them. In a statement, the commission said the settlement was the largest ever among the disability-related cases it had handled. Agency lawyers said they had found more than 100 cases of Sears employees who sought to return to work with an accommodation and were fired. A spokeswoman for Sears, Kimberly Freely, said that although the company ''continues to believe that it reasonably accommodates'' employees on leave because of work-related injuries or illnesses, it settled the case because the legal proceedings could have taken another five years and ''considerable expense'' to resolve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]