The ADA Stalks The Internet: Is Your Web Page Illegal?

One of the most fascinating characteristics of democracy's quest for "equality" is the process by which a genuine desire to help the unfortunate metastasizes into a regulatory cancer. Few examples

serve better than the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), an act of charity that has become a swelling tithe, enriching class-action lawyers quick to feast on vague legislation promoting poster-child plaintiffs.

Don't look now, but the ADA industry has its sites on the Web. In a few years, if regulatory history is repeated, any Web site that doesn't provide government-sanctioned equal access for the handicapped could be declared illegal.

Originally intended to promote commonsense accommodations like wheelchair ramps for new public buildings, the ADA will be applied to make Web pages "equally accessible" by the blind, the blind-deaf and the cognitively disabled.

This is both a noble goal and a fascinating technical challenge. Great strides have already been made, enriching the lives of many people previously living on the fringes of society. In a free country, resources would continue to be applied to these challenges in proportion to both the attractiveness of the market and the spirit that motivates acts of charity. Celebrities would draw attention to the plight of the unfortunate, and good works would be rewarded with public acclaim. Practical objectives would be pursued, leading to incremental advances that would be accepted with gratitude by thankful recipients.

But who lives in a free country? According to Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, not us. Watch as a parade of empowered "victims" and their professional advocates begin discovering and demanding their rights.

The first step will be to use the $26 billion-a-year procurement power of the federal government to strike fear into the hearts of IT vendors.

Based on recommendations recently unveiled by the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (www.access-board.gov), vendors that don't conform to the board's ideas of how to make hardware and software usable by the handicapped won't be allowed to sell equipment or services to the federal government. This in itself is no great threat to liberty. Right now, no products meet the proposed regulations. Who cares if the government grinds to a halt because its own mandates prevent it from upgrading its computers?

But things will not stop there. It's only a matter of time before Yahoo, AOL and other fat targets get hit with class-action lawsuits claiming that their Web sites violate the ADA. These lawsuits will demand millions in damages and will generate reams of front-page media coverage as learned pundits cluck about the "visionless divide." The first lawsuits will fail, but each successive round will sharpen the next attack.

Drawn to the TV cameras like flies to an open sore, congressmen will hold hearings at which cybercelebrities will speak about the need for government-industry cooperation as they quietly make campaign contributions to members of the Judiciary Committee overseeing their commercial activities.

Finally, an out-of-court settlement will be reached by exhausted executives tired of being featured on the cover of Newsweek as abusers of the handicapped. This settlement will initially apply only to the largest media companies, which will be given several years to comply. But in time, the regulations will be extended to smaller Web site operators until no exceptions are permitted.

A multibillion-dollar fund will be established to hand out grants to designated enterprises that would otherwise have a hard time achieving compliance. A cottage industry of professional facilitators will train Webmasters on how to get certificates of approval from the Access Board, whose funding will have to be vastly expanded to process the flood of annual renewals. Pirate Web sites flouting the regulations will be brought to justice by an expanded arm of the FBI's cybercrimes unit. Democrats and Republicans will fight over who can increase the cybercrimes unit's budget faster. Congress will, of course, be exempt from all of these regulations as it keeps busy dreaming up new ways to extend its influence into cyberspace.

Or maybe none of this will happen. Maybe the distributed netizens of the Web will look up, yawn, and go about their business with complete disregard to any pronouncements coming from Washington. One can only hope.

Bill Frezza is a general partner at Adams Capital Management. He can be reached at frezza@alum.mit.edu or www.acm.com.