I am not sure this will have any real impact other than to waste taxpayer money. Already, Microsoft and Apple operating systems can do talk to text and read any page out loud, and feature enhanced display modes for people with impaired sight and hearing.

See, the thing is the WCAG guidelines aren't that hard. It's mostly simple stuff like adding alt test to images and using labels, and using strong instead of b for emphasis.

Sites like yours MIGHT require a little bit of one off work but as it's made in HTML it wouldn't take too much. It's full on Flash sites with not HTML fallback that would have issues.

The "standard" page development techniques are generally bloody terrible. The main reason we've stuck with them so long is the Internet Explorer kept us mired in a pile of tables and general horribleness, with XP being finally officially shot in the head and Chrome and Firefox both ramping up it's possible to really start make nice, fast, slick websites without having to rely on the cludge we've had to put up with.

Nowadays I mostly write back end code, as my design skills are awful, I'll be the first to admit. But if I'm given a design I'll lay it out, and I'll do it using up to date techniques which are automatically accessible.

"...the WCAG guidelines aren't that hard..."

You are right for simple websites; complex ones are much harder. But, for the sake of argument, let's grant that you are right.

Why should I be required to implement this? It's my website, my blog. Look at how the ADA has been abused for brick-and-mortar businesses, and tell me you really want that for the web.

Think brick-and-mortar for a moment. If I want to open a restaurant on the second floor, in an old building with no elevator - why should the government prohibit this? Some number of people have disabilities. Their lives will not end if they can't make it up to my restaurant; mine might, because perhaps I cannot afford to make my restaurant ADA compliant.

On the web, it is even easier. People with disabilities can use their own tools to access almost any web resource, even ones that are not compliant with the accessibility guidelines. And if I've created a crappy website where it doesn't work, life will go on.

Closed captioning for porn?

"In the name of forcing people to be inclusive of the disabled, we will make speech less free, and in turn, erode our civil liberties further."

None of which is an accident. Our ruling elites are hugely pissed off by the existence of the Internet, and Washington these days has made no secret (e.g., John Paul Stevens' recent speech) of the fact that they'd like to gut the First Amendment. They'd very much like the Internet to be run along the lines of TV broadcasting, where you have a handful of government-licensed and approved content providers, and everyone else is a passive listener.

The ADA has already proven to be a handy tool to harrass business owners and strip them of certain rights. The totalitarian impule is never, ever satisfied.

We had a decades-old business close in Richmond, Va due to ADA being forced on them. They had an old freight elevator that had to be replaced to meet the new (at that time) requirements.

Problem was they no longer used it for customers but did use it to gain access to the second and third floors SO it was cheaper to close the downtown store and move to the burbs.

Side note: The city also required the downtown stores to replace their storefront doors (not sure why). Surprise! The burbs gained new businesses and downtown became more barren.

Took 2 or 3 decades before new blood came in and renovated (sorry Spike Lee) w/new business.

I'm pretty sure Simon Proctor just volunteered to bring the Advice Goddess website into compliance.

Paving roads with the very best of intentions,,,

With my eyesight, I have troubles. Waiting for a bus, I cannot read the route designator signage until it is less than forty feet away: should I sue to have an always-on loudspeaker audible for five hundred feet? Then I might not have to wave any off as they are stopping to allow me to board, annoying drivers and passengers, when I realize this is not the one I am waiting for.

Sure, it's easy to go in and change strong to b or whatnot... but NOT a small task when you've got gobs of posts. Imagine a blog that's been up for two years posting weekly. This is neither terribly long nor frequently. That's about 104 posts, probably with images. Now somebody needs to sift through them and find the odd bits of code to change.

Of course, we should also consider that many bloggers have ZERO coding ability. They use the visual editor and go on. This is why WordPress is popular - you don't need to learn HTML or CSS to use it. I know a teensy bit, but that's it. When I changed themes awhile back, I had to go in and remove all my featured images due to a compatibility issue. It was maybe 30 posts and it took me several days - several days of NOT working on the content. Actually, I'm still not done, but I'm not going to dig all the way through the archives, I don't have the time or patience.

Even assuming that somebody had the time, knowledge, and ability (no 10 year old blog with daily posts), there's still liability if you miss something.

Now, add in that images will likely need captions that can be read out loud by the computer (what, you didn't caption the stock photo of a woman looking like she was ready to hit her computer? Get hopping!, you'll need descriptions of video and text renditions of audio.. and it's a mess.

Also, say you have a blog about science. How do you make that accessible for cognitively disabled individuals? All those sites that discussed the Higgs thingamajig - or other nerdy things - will be in danger.

I want as many people as possible to get use from my websites, but I have limitations. I have to focus on what I can do rather than all the things I might like to do (such as translate it into German).

Agree with Cousin Dave. Justice Stevens and much of the lawyer left fancy they're the school administration and the rest of us are the student body talking out of turn.

One of Mr. Reagan's biographers has said his research had persuaded him that Robert J. Dole was 'a total heel'. The most salient 'accomplishment' of said political careerist was the Americans with Disabilities Act, a breeder of train-wrecks. Of course, the editorial commentary at the time remarking on its stupidities was limited to columns written by Stephen Chapman. Justice Stevens would like to return to a world where the Establishment had to contend only with Chapman.

Oh, it's worse than you imagine. I do freelance work for any number of grant-funded education initiatives. If your money comes from the federal government, you are required to make your resources accessible according to the section 508 Amendment of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

It's a nightmare. It's the reason most educational material put out by the feds is mind-numbingly boring. Technologies that make training more interactive and more engaging cannot be readily perceived by the blind or the deaf, so you have to provide alternatives. This doubles your cost. Or, you just omit them. You not only save on the accessibility cost, you save on the primary development cost by just having a simple block of text that can be read by an e-reader.

Want to do a matching exercise? Drag images from a left-hand column onto boxes in a left-hand column? Triple your development cost coming up with an alternative for the blind. That might or might not be approved by the funder in the first place. If it's not approved, don't think you'll get additional funding. Oh hell no.

You're not allowed to consider your audience. I did some research on a piece I recently did on the neurological causes of learning disabilities. It's a short course of continuing education designed for remedial literacy teachers. The number of blind AE instructors in this country is under .01 percent. But I spent TWO THIRDS of the development budget accommodating them.

So yeah, mandating accessibility is EXPENSIVE, and people avoid the expense by doing far less.

I'm gonna guess you'd be ok, because it might be considered a personal website. You're not actually selling a product or service, I mean yeah sometimes you link to amazon, and it is self-promotion, but...

How will this affect porn sites?

"The number of blind AE instructors in this country is under .01 percent. But I spent TWO THIRDS of the development budget accommodating them."

This. This is exactly the problem: the costs of accommodating the disabled is often completely disproportionate to the benefit. But the ADA does not allow common sense. If anything like it gets passed for the web, expect that to be the same.

The lobbies for the disabled do their constituents no favors by pushing for this stuff. It leads to resentment, rather than sympathy, which is more subtle but in the long run a far bigger problem.

Until Congress has to abide by the 'rules' under a 'budget' we are screwed.

Hell, they don't even read or abide by the laws their aides write.

Coincidentally, my website just stopped working (style explosion). I did nothing to it, so I've not clue what happened. I'm not an expert. I will probably spend 3-5 hours fixing it. The more hoops I have to jump through, the worse it is.

Now, given that said explosion makes the site look different (still has content), it is possible that something like this (probably some auto-update by WordPress or something) could make one fall out of compliance. Unlike buildings, the internet can be modified by accident rather easily. Once you install a ramp, it's hard to suddenly have it not be there. Code on the other hand... well a lot is out of the non-expert user's control.

"Once you install a ramp, it's hard to suddenly have it not be there. Code on the other hand... well a lot is out of the non-expert user's control."

That's a great point. You can be thrown out of compliance by a change to the underlying operating system or rendering engine or whatever, and not even know it until the feds come knocking at your door. Consider how many ever-changing compatibility issues already exist in the ordinary universe of HTML 5, Flash, Silverlight, Javascript, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.

Lamont Cranston:

I'm gonna guess you'd be ok, because it might be considered a personal website. You're not actually selling a product or service, I mean yeah sometimes you link to amazon, and it is self-promotion, but...

I'm gonna' guess she'd get smacked down the very first time she annoyed some passing boor. What she might do though, is migrate to a server in France and stop talking about LA.

See, the thing is the WCAG guidelines aren't that hard.

Way to miss the point. Meeting them isn't hard. So what? Should that then be a requirement?

I regularly read blogs who have chosen appalling themes like grey 8 point text on a dark blue background. My eyesight is pretty good and I still have trouble reading it. But that's their choice, even if it pisses me off. The content is worthwhile.

The problem with this is it will become a catch-all tool for the government to shut down anyone they don't like. Can't get you on First Amendment grounds? Ok, we'll charge you with wire fraud (Conrad Black), tax evasion and targeted audits (Al Capone or more recently a number of right wing support groups), or we'll just criticise your blog style. If you've had one cent of revenue fro ads or Amazon referrals, gotcha!

Doesn't matter whether you get convicted or not. The process is the punishment.

The real losers here, apart from the occasional blogger chosen to be victimised for a particularly pithy comment, will be small businesses who can't afford to get their websites "certified" for accessibility.

And then there are questions like what about foreign websites?

And I remember reading a while back that some major website (like Amazon or eBay) had bought barges that they were outfitting as server farms.

Tow them out past the 12 mile limit and then fire them up. How does the ADA work now?

My experience was awhile ago now....at least 5 years ago.

I suspect Amy's site would be fine or easy to remedy since it just basically text.

This customer (A bank as you might guess) had a federated website (e.g. several smaller ones run under an umbrella) and they were having some enhancements done and one of the things they wanted done was to be accessible to the disabled, I think it was the ADA standard but may have been another one. One site was chosen to go hard core and the rest were told to just do our best with doing things like alt tags. In the end, the site I was involved in was completely unusable by blind people according to the testers. The site they went all out on cost an extra $1million, met the requirements in all but one small way but was still pretty much unusable by the blind....and was harder to use for the sighted users...so much so that the company ended up allowing users to select between the original version and the new one.