A disabled campaigner has won his third legal case against separate government departments over their failure to provide information in accessible formats.
Graham Kirwan had already secured victories over the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department of Health.
DWP previously paid him £1,700 damages for refusing to communicate by email over his personal independence payment claim, and in 2015 he was responsible for persuading NHS England to publish its first accessible information standard, thanks to another legal action.
Now he has secured a confidential sum of damages from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) over its failure to provide accessible versions of the forms he needs to take legal action for disability discrimination under the Equality Act.
Kirwan, who is partially-sighted, has computer software that can magnify text, but it does not usually work with scanned or PDF documents.
He had tried in 2015 to access forms from the HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) “form finder” web pages but they were only available in PDF format.
He asked HMCTS to make all its forms available in both PDF and Word formats on its website but was told instead to contact his local court every time he required a form.
But this “reasonable adjustment” meant it sometimes took six weeks for a form to arrive, while on most occasions he never received it.
Source: Campaigner defeats third government department on accessible information | DisabledGo News and Blog
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