How ADA-For-The-Web Regulations Could Kill This Website
So few people understand how laws passed can be used -- and easily misused. Stretched into something they were never supposed to be (or not what they were said to be about, anyway).
For example, Title IX was supposed to be about allowing girls equal participation in school sports. The Obama admin has turned it into a system of campus kangaroos courts removing due process from men accused of sexual assault.
Next in line for strrretching is the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Walter Olson has been following the Obama administration's apparent intent to publish new interpretations of it, and he linked to Hans Bader's writeup at CEI:
Can websites be forced to change to accommodate the disabled -- by using "simpler language" to appeal to the "intellectually disabled," or by making them accessible to the blind and deaf at considerable expense?Generally, the First Amendment gives you the right to choose who to talk to and how, without government interference. There is no obligation to make your message accessible to the whole world, and the government can't force you to make your speech accessible to everyone, much less appealing to them. The government couldn't require you to give speeches in English rather than Spanish to reach a larger number of listeners. And the Supreme Court once noted that the poem Jabberwocky is protected by the First Amendment, even though it makes no sense to most people.
But now, the Obama administration appears to be planning to use the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to force many web sites to either accommodate the disabled, or shut down. Given the enormous cost of complying, many small web sites might well just go dark and shut down. The administration wants to treat web sites as "places of public accommodation" subject to the ADA, even though they are not physical places. Courts used to reject this argument when it was made just by disabled plaintiffs, but now that the Justice Department is making it, too, some judges are beginning to buy it, opening the door to trial lawyers surfing the web and sending out extortionate demand letters to every small business whose web site is not accessible to the blind (or perhaps too hard to understand for the mentally-challenged).
Bader gives some examples from Walter Olson, from his testimony to Congress, of awful changes that would ensue, like that amateur publishing would become "more of a legal hazard." They'd go after websites like mine, that make a few shekels from Amazon links and a few more from Google ads. I need this money to supplement the money that's fallen out of newspaper writing; also, I love the people who comment here and the discussion that goes on. It's what keeps my eyes pried open at 11 p.m. when I need to post a blog item half an hour after I should have gone to bed for my 5 a.m. book- and column-writing wakeup time.
Also, added in the morning, after waking up worrying about this all night -- making something "accessible" for a tiny minority could ruin it for everyone.
And what sort of understanding do we really owe people? I don't do well with complex physics and I have limited attention for things I don't understand that don't grab my interest enough to figure them out. Should physics websites dumb themselves down for Amy Alkon's brain? How many scientific websites will be brought down by disabled people going around to them like the quadriplegic lawyer in the wheelchair filing profit-making suits and closing classic hamburger stands and other businesses in California over ADA claims?
Also from Olson's testimony:
Many widely used and highly useful features on websites would be compromised in functionality or simply dispensed with for reasons of cost, delay or cumbersomeness. To take but one example, a small town newspaper or civic organization might feel itself at legal risk if it put audio or video clips of the city council meeting online without providing text translation and description. Such text translation and description are expensive and time-consuming to provide. The alternative of not running the audio and video clips at all remains feasible, however, and that is the alternative some will adopt.
Bader continues:
The defenders of expansive ADA interpretations say that the government's compelling interest in eradicating discrimination against the disabled overrides any competing First Amendment rights. If this frightening argument is accepted, states that have disabled-rights laws even broader than the ADA -- like public-accommodation laws that apply to private clubs and associations -- will eventually try to impose their restrictions on the web sites of small non-profit groups, using such laws to silence non-profits because of their inability to design their web sites to accommodate every conceivable disability.
What this is is an attempt to disable free speech and to make our country increasingly authoritarian and unfree. Basically, it's a form of "Think of the children!" Except adult citizens are the children and one particular party is the answer. (Which isn't to say I'm a fan of the Republican party, either.)
This is yet another way for some to have unearned power over the rest of us -- to bully us into muzzling ourselves because we cannot afford the lawsuits filed against us.
I suspect that in their grab for power, some agency will claim that even if the original event was only in one language or medium, a reporter will have to provide more.
What a wonderful way to stop dissent!
Radwaste at June 11, 2015 2:19 AM
Thanks to "net neutrality", the FCC may now have the authority to make this a reality.
Dwatney at June 11, 2015 4:26 AM
I think part of it is having words attached to every image so a speech reader program could describe the image. That would be fun for a porn site, eh?
mer at June 11, 2015 5:33 AM
Let's extend this to medical school for the retarded, with guaranteed jobs doing surgery on Federal Government employees after graduation. Sounds fair to me.
MarkD at June 11, 2015 6:32 AM
You'd just have to move your domain and web hosting offshore, away from the "land of the free."
Snoopy at June 11, 2015 6:46 AM
making something "accessible" for a tiny minority could ruin it for everyone
It already has. I used to live in Boston, and I remember a lovely little restaurant up on the 2nd floor of an old building. No lift, and no way to install one. The ADA forced the place to close, since it could not be made wheelchair accessible.
There was a really lovely amateur theater group that I also really enjoyed. They used an old barracks that didn't even have heating, much less ramps for wheelchairs. I'm sure they've been shut down by now as well.
Disabled people are - guess what - disabled. There are things that they cannot do. Shutting down things that everyone else can enjoy, because the disabled cannot - utterly selfish, egoistic and stupid.
a_random_guy at June 11, 2015 7:34 AM
The Harrison Bergeron Act of 2015.
Beth Cartwright at June 11, 2015 7:48 AM
If you can't revive the Fairness Doctrine to shut down your opponents, use the ADA.
Conan the Grammarian at June 11, 2015 8:16 AM
Thanks for the heads up. Good article.
Richard Speights at June 11, 2015 8:26 AM
This piece needs to be translated to Urdu and Rioplatense, then triple-checked for accuracy.
Harry Bergeron at June 11, 2015 9:49 AM
This goes back to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that growing wheat on your own farm for only local sale still can be regulated as affecting "interstate commerce" -- because non-local wheat was not purchased!
This leads to the idea that the government can force you to buy a private product -- health insurance -- for your own, and the public, good.
So, how far-fetched is it that the government will seek to exert total control over the greatest technology since fire, which is a source of most knowledge and the dissemination of free thought?
I'm surprised it's taken this long. The delay is because of pesky things like national boundaries. Wouldn't one world government be more effective and efficient at protecting the oppressed and downtrodden among us?
Remember, government regulation by those who know best for us, along with work ("arbeit"), will "macht frei." I recall reading that somewhere ...
Jay R at June 11, 2015 11:10 AM
REASONABLE ACCOMODATION isn't just mandated by law, it's socially responsive, and responsible. It's good manners.
But holding to both the spirit and letter of that term, it is unreasonable, and questionably a violation of the civil rights of many, to hold everyone to the same standard. We all have varying challenges and abililties, which is a great thing if we would figure out how to be team mates. Attempting to flatten the field so we can all play the same position is both unreasonable and unproductive. It could even be described as discriminatory. Because you can't doesn't mean I can't, or shouldn't be allowed to.
I say this after decades of pushing my son's wheelchair up ridiculously steep ramps only to find a door that is too narrow, that I have to hold open with my hip while running over my own feet, just beneath a sign that reads Handicap Accessible. I say this after years of hard work, figuring out where both my son's and my own bootstraps were, and pulling hard to figure out what worked for us. In moments I was breathless with the brutality of daily life. Learning to accept limitations, and doing the work of finding something else that worked for us was the Reasonable Accomodation I had to make for the rest of the world.
This new bastardization of the ADA and Reasonable Accomodation is...well, unreasonable. It makes me feel like my hard work, and the hard work of so many that struggle to face their challenges with a modicum of grace, is rendered pointless.
Bethann at June 11, 2015 2:20 PM
"government's compelling interest"
Those are kind of scary words.
charles at June 11, 2015 5:13 PM
And the Supreme Court once noted that the poem Jabberwocky is protected by the First Amendment, even though it makes no sense to most people.
So it's just like the Supreme Court!
JD at June 11, 2015 8:31 PM
Orwell's "1984" is required reading for every thoughtful adult. Orwell published it as a warning about Socialism and Communism. It continues as an instruction manual for Progressive Totalitarianism.
George Orwell's "1984" on line: http://msxnet.org/orwell/1984
More about Orwell at: msxnet.org/orwell/
Andrew_M_Garland at June 11, 2015 11:48 PM
This is no joke. If you work for Federal Money, which I do, everything published to the web must be Section 508 compliant.
It's like a choke chain on a leash. Many, many tools and features useful to 99% of your users must remain unavailable because 1% of the people who come to your site might not be able to use them.
It's one of the reasons ANY federal web site is so BORING in design.
Lamont Cranston at June 12, 2015 7:10 AM
Boring, but also useable. I don't have to worry that I'll go there one day and find that, say, all of the content has been hidden behind flyout menus that don't work properly on the HTML5 implementation used by my browser. I don't have to worry that the page will load slower than a retarded turtle because it's been rewritten to use dynamic sizing so that the same page code to work for tiny-screen iPhones and big-screen desktops. I don't have to worry about popup windows saying that I ought to register with the site to keep reading the document.
DensityDuck at June 13, 2015 10:25 PM
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