Is your site accessible? Wheelchair ramps for the information superhighway.

• Author: Powell, Adam Clayton, III
• Position: Workforce Investment Act's Section 508 requires Web sites to be accessible to the disabled

Some day soon, you may open your morning newspaper and discover a few features are missing:

* Sports scores will be mostly gone, with only the home teams' games and national championship results reported.

* The color weather map will be replaced by a black-and-white version with 1950s-era isobar lines.

* The stock tables will have been dropped in favor of lists of the five most active stocks traded, and perhaps the day's biggest winners and losers.

What will have happened? Under an order from the U.S. Department of Justice, your local newspaper will have been forced to drop those and other features because they are not accessible to people with disabilities.

So say goodbye to small type (too hard for some to read), thus ending comprehensive lists of sports statistics and securities trading. And of course that weather map has to go: It's not accessible to the color-blind.

Sound crazy? Does the Justice Department really have the power to review the design of newspapers? Well, maybe - though not yet the print versions. It may well be assuming the power to review any newspaper's online design.

Webmasters, Uncle Sam wants you to make your Web site more accessible to those who are blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled. And it's not a suggestion: It's the law. The new rules are mandated by a little-known provision of the Workforce Investment Act enacted by Congress last year. Under Section 508 of that law, the new rules will apply later this year to all Web sites operated by federal agencies, by anyone doing business with the federal government, and by many - perhaps all - state governments.

But those guidelines might also soon apply to everyone who puts up a Web site anywhere in the country. For now, the Section 508 rules will be voluntary guidelines. But members of the new federal Web site commission were quoted by the trade news service Ziff Davis in April as asserting that companies and individuals who do not adopt the rules "voluntarily" could soon face a legal mandate to comply - or be exposed to lawsuits filed by any disabled individual who could not read all of the information on a site.

Section 508 is one of those laws that sounds as controversial as apple pie: It simply requires that Web sites be adjusted so that disabled persons can read them. Web site designers will be required to restructure their content, design, and underlying technologies to allow individuals with disabilities "to have access to and use of information and data that is...