Web Accessibility and Equal Access to Information: The Impact of the Americans with
Disabilities Act on the Internet
By: John Pham
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"Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down."
— George H.W. Bush1
The rise of the Internet and e-commerce has fundamentally changed the way
millions of people in the United States access information and make business
transactions. Among those who benefit from greater access to information available on
the Internet are people with disabilities. Despite the challenges of making the Internet
available to more than 51 million people with disabilities,2 current technology has
advanced enough to meet the needs of such people, allowing them to browse the web and
participate in activities such as Internet shopping. Even so, there are still many instances
where e-commerce businesses fail to provide web sites that are accessible to people with
disabilities. Unless these businesses follow web accessibility standards in the design of
their web site, Internet users with disabilities will be disadvantaged in that the assistive
technology that they rely on to browse the web will not work properly with such sites.
There are laws that exist in the United States to protect people with disabilities
from unfair discrimination by stores, but would failure to provide web accessibility be
covered as a discriminatory business practice? A law that pertains to this issue is the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which defines places of public accommodation
such that if a store meets the criteria, then that store has to be accessible to people with
disabilities. It is still unclear as of yet whether the ADA can force e-commerce
businesses—specifically those that have both physical and online stores, but also quite
possibly including businesses that exist purely on the Internet—to provide accessible web
1
http://www.eeoc.gov/ada/bushspeech.html
http://www.census.gov/PressRelease/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/006841.html
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sites, since the courts have not decided if such businesses fit the public accommodation
definition. Regardless of the court ruling, in order for policymakers to justify mandating
all American e-commerce stores to make their web sites accessible to disabled users, it
becomes clear that the moral benefits of such a policy’s protection of the civil rights of
people with disabilities by providing equal access to information for them would
outweigh any economic costs incurred by businesses.
The role of web accessibility standards in providing equal access of information
for people with disabilities is important because following these guidelines will allow a
web site to be fully compatible with software used by people with disabilities to browse
the web. Accessibility standards have been created by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), a non-profit organization that develops other web standards, and by Section 508
of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, which mandates government agencies to make their sites
accessible. Web sites that follow the guidelines defined by the W3C and Section 508 are
specially designed in a way that the site is readable by software used to help people with
disabilities use the Internet. For example, a quick tip that the W3C suggests to make a
web page accessible is to provide HTML tags such as “alt” that serve as captions for
pictures; 3 in doing so, blind people using assistive technology to visit a web site
providing “alt” tags for a picture can still obtain information about that picture because,
using speech technology, such users can still hear a the text description of the image. If a
business chooses not to make its web site accessible by failing to develop a site that
conforms to such standards, then any assistive software that attempts to read the page will
not work properly (Rienan, Tedeschi). In such a situation, people with disabilities who
3
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips/Overview.php
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rely on the technology to make purchases on the Internet from that business’ web site do
not get the same level of information as other people would, and this is morally
questionable because it puts such people using that software at a disadvantage because of
unequal access to information as a result of such discrimination.
Laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act were designed to correct the
problem of unethical treatment towards people with disabilities by protecting them from
unfair business discrimination, but these laws were passed before the Internet was widely
available. Disability advocate organizations such as the National Federation of the Blind
(NFB) have sued businesses in order to have the courts broaden the scope of the ADA to
include e-commerce businesses. In 1999, the NFB sued America Online (AOL) for
failing to make its sites accessible by screen readers for the visually impaired (Bick). The
argument made by the advocacy group was that AOL’s services, such as its web pages
and chat features, are open to the public, and thus, are places of public accommodation
that must also serve the needs of people with disabilities. Essentially, the ADA defines a
place of public accommodation as “a private entity that owns, leases, (or leases to), or
operates a place of public accommodation” (Gostin 43), and prohibits such entities from
discriminating against individuals on the basis of disability. According to the NFB, such
a definition of public accommodation could actually be extended to the Internet, since an
online businesses providing web accessibility should not be any different than a physical
store providing ramps for wheelchair access. The issue of whether the provisions of the
ADA could be extended to the Internet was never resolved, since AOL agreed to settle
and provide future versions of its software that would be accessible to the disabled.
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Currently, the National Federation of the Blind is suing Target for violating the
Americans with Disabilities Act because its web site is “essentially an extension of its
other public accommodations, and as such, should be easily accessible to people with
disabilities” (Tedeschi). Thus far, a federal court in California has refused to dismiss the
case on the grounds that “Target appears to treat its website as an extension of its stores
and a piece of an integrated marketing effort” (Rienan). Therefore, it is quite possible
that if the NFB were to win this court case, thousands of businesses in the United States
with click-and-mortar stores (businesses which have both physical and online retail
presence) would be forced to re-design their web sites to comply with the ADA.
Additionally, it may even be possible to extend the application of the law to pure plays
(stores without a physical presence that exist only on the Internet, such as Amazon.com)
to provide web accessible sites. Any court decision would, therefore, have to justify
protecting the rights of the disabled by providing equal access to information as being
important enough to outweigh the enormous burden of compliance with the ADA—in
other words, showing that the moral benefits provided to people with disabilities must be
of greater value than the costs of businesses obeying the new law.
Compliance with the ADA would require some cost, but would the costs needed
to provide web accessibility present too much of a burden for businesses? Using the
public sector as a comparison, federal and local governments have been able to purchase
services and technology to provide accessible web pages, but not without a substantial
cost. According to the United States Department of Justice, federal, state and local
governments are mandated by Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Law to provide
“electronic and information technology [that is] accessible to people with disabilities,
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including employees and members of the public,” and this includes making sure that web
sites are accessible. To meet the legal requirements of the law after it was passed in
1998, based on data provided by the General Services Administration, agencies of the
federal government spent over $12.4 billion on accessible information technology in
2000, some of which was incurred as a result of making web pages readable using
assistive technology (EOP Foundation). To put this cost into perspective, the federal
bureaucracy spent approximately $40 billion that year overall on information technology
equipment (Williams), meaning that over one-third of the budget that year was spent on
implementation of the standards. In contrast to the federal government, which was able
to fully implement web accessibility standards outlined by Section 508, some local
governments that failed to comply have actually cited an “undue burden” because of the
financial costs involved in meeting such standards.
If the private sector equivalent of Section 508 were passed, there may be
substantial costs that businesses must shoulder in order to meet the requirements of web
accessibility. According to the W3C, meeting accessibility standards can be complex
because the nature of web development requires collaboration between many groups of
people with different responsibilities:
It is essential that several different components of Web development and
interaction work together in order for the Web to be accessible to people with
disabilities. These components include: content… Web browsers, media
players… assistive technology… users… developers… authoring tools… [and]
evaluation tools…4
4
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/components.php
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Given that businesses will have to take many aspects of web design into consideration in
order to properly and fully serve many types of disabilities, it is foreseeable that some
small businesses may actually find it too burdensome to purchase new equipment and
hire additional information technology workers to ensure compliance. For government
agencies in the same situation as these small businesses, Section 508 addresses the
possibility of an “undue burden” by allowing exceptions for agencies that find it too
costly or difficult to implement accessibility. Similarly, if e-commerce web sites owned
by private businesses are to be seen as places of public accommodation, then perhaps
some of these companies will argue for a similar “undue burden” clause. On the other
hand, it can also be seen that such costs have created a market failure that gives
businesses the incentive to avoid the cost of web accessibility by discriminating against
people with disabilities and failing to fully serve their needs. Thus, it is arguable that
government intervention is needed to protect people with disabilities against unequal
access to product information.
In contrast to small businesses, large companies may also cite an “undue burden,”
but for a different reason: the difficulty involved in maintaining the accessibility of a
complex web site. Indeed, it is reasonable to believe that as a site grows in complexity in
order to meet the needs of an increasing number of customers, the harder it is for a
business to ensure that the web site remains accessible. Debunking this belief, a
statistical study of web accessibility from 1997 to 2002 found that even though
government web sites became more complex in nature, they still remained accessible by
minimizing the number of scripts used on their pages (Hackett). This suggests that
businesses that choose to expand their web sites can still do so in a way that does not
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discriminate against users with disabilities. A counterargument is that companies will no
longer be able to use the latest Internet advancements to design pages with visual eyecandy. Nevertheless, perhaps these new technologies should also cater to the needs of
people with disabilities, who are, in reality, customers who expect to be able to access
information everyone else can retrieve—and to treat these customers differently from
others is morally questionable.
Indeed, new technologies on the web such as Flash and other scripts threaten
accessibility because web pages containing such components cannot be retrieved
correctly by assistive technology. While the current trend on the Internet is for
companies to design web accessible pages anyway, possibly to avoid future litigation
(Bick), many businesses take the risk of not doing so because they favor web site designs
that are more appealing or intuitive in order to create a better user experience for the
general population. However, such a practice is short-sighted because such web sites
actually worsen the browsing experience of people with disabilities. As an example,
users with disabilities on Target.com cannot check out their purchases without assistance
from someone who can see the screen (Reinan). Even more important, however, is the
disadvantage that disabled Internet shoppers face in terms of not being able to retrieve
information that is assumed by the company to be available to all visitors; whether
inadvertently or not, businesses that do not serve web accessible sites are effectively
discriminating against such shoppers by not providing them the same level of information
as everyone else. It seems that extending the definition of public accommodation to
Internet businesses in order to ensure universal conformity to accessibility standards is
the only way to eliminate this discrimination. Doing so, whether through litigation or an
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amendment of the law, is justified from a moral point of view because it is only fair to
protect the rights of shoppers with disabilities by giving them access to information that
is supposed available to all consumers.
When he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, George H.W. Bush wanted
to tear down the “shameful wall of exclusion” that people with disabilities face in places
of public accommodation. Today, that shameful wall still exists on the Internet, a
publicly available resource that has become an increasingly preferred place for people to
shop; such a wall is reprehensible because it reflects unfair discrimination towards
disabled users of such an important technology. There are concerns that forcing
businesses to make their web sites accessible would be unduly burdensome for some
companies, as was the case when government agencies were required by law to re-design
web sites and purchase new technology to accommodate the disabled. In any case, the
costs of web accessibility are arguably justified by the moral benefits of allowing people
with disabilities access to public information about products that they are excluded from.
Given that there is a trend towards increasing accessibility on the web and that the United
States is a society that opposes discrimination against the people with disabilities, having
a law that mandates web accessibility on the grounds of disability rights would symbolize
the importance of equal access to information for all people.
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