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The bridge was meant to be very solemnly inaugurated on Sept. 18, 2008, with the President of the Italian Republic attending. However, this ceremony was cancelled due to the protests of associations of people with disabilities, in particular of the Un ponte per tutti petition, because the bridge violates national accessibility norms, as it includes glass-covered stairs that exclude people in wheelchairs.

"On February 10, 2012, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) took the lead, and was joined by several other consumer groups, in submitting comments in support of a petition filed by Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc., Gallaudet University, and Participatory Culture Foundation requesting an exemption for certain classes of work from the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Two of these exemption requests relate to closed captioning - one for IP based media and the other for fixed-disc based media. These exemptions will allow third parties to add or improve closed captioning on video programs without having to get permission from the copyright owner. ...." (with link to the text of the exemption)

The linked-to text of the exemption request is remarkavly clear and could bevery useful model in similar cases in other countries.

An on-line petition called "a bridge for everyone" organized by Roberto Scano, an Italian accessibility expert, urges the postponement of the inauguration of the bridge until the structure will be accessible by all citizens. Mr. Scano remarks: "How can the Government inaugurate a publicly funded structure that does not allow the possibility for everyone to use? As it stands now the bridge is limp."

Amazon has announced that it will give authors and publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any or all of their e-books available for the Kindle 2. The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd