Access Excess.

• Author: Olson, Walter

The Americans with Disabilities Act goes online.

As we filed out of a Capitol Hill hearing room on February 9, Web accessibility expert Judy Brewer stopped me and said she was sure I wouldn't want to spread misconceptions about our subject. I'd just warned members of the House Judiciary Committee that requiring Web publishers to make their sites "accessible" to blind, deaf, and other handicapped users under the Americans with Disabilities Act was a nearly perfect way to stifle creative freedom and slam the brakes on the Internet's expansion. That sort of talk misrepresented the aims of the Web accessibility community, Brewer advised me. It was particularly irresponsible for me to suggest that if Web site owners suddenly decided to take seriously the prospect of being legally liable for content not accessible to impaired users, they might pull down millions of existing Web pages. I should be aware, Brewer sternly told me, that the accessibility community did not want existing pages to be torn down. It just expected them to be improved.

So was I guilty of "fear-mongering," alarmism, or worse, as disabled activists later charged in an online discussion? As readers of this space know, I've written a lot about the ADA's often surprising effects in areas such as employment and schooling. And on a personal level, I put out a Web site, Overlawyered.com, for which I do the HTML coding and other techie stuff myself, so I constantly run into the sorts of design issues that might trigger liability under an expansive reading of the law. Has this led me to overreact to a distant and rather unlikely threat? Read on, and decide for yourself.

The British national anthem has been described as a series of curt demands on Jehovah, but it has nothing on the list of demands placed on Web developers by the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines," published by the private but quasi-official W3 Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (which Brewer directs). "Don't rely on color alone" to convey information. Don't use navigation methods that require a mouse; some users have motor impairments. "Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement in pages." Same with blinking or, worse yet, flickering text (which may cause seizures in persons with photosensitive epilepsy). Don't use tables for layout unless you're really trying to render tabular data, and watch out even then (text readers for the blind have trouble with tables). Don't use block quotations as a shortcut when all you're trying to do is indent. (For the full text of the guidelines, see www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT.)

That's just a sampling. Other sins include "poor color contrast," "lack of alternative text for imagemap...