- From: Kelly Pierce <kelly@ripco.com>
- Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 19:24:25 -0600 (CST)
- To: "Jacobs, Steve I" <jacobsi@SRDPOST.DAYTONOH.ncr.com>
- cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org, "'love26@gorge.net'" <love26@gorge.net>, "Kasday, Leonard" <kasday@att.com>
It should be made clar that the ada requires different access standards for government services than it does to private business. Additionally, the ada, in general, does not apply to the services or programs of the federal government, except to the congress. for non-government, or private, entities, the ada applies only to **places of public accommodation, which it lists. All are physical spaces. For example, a retailer of compact disks on the Internet would likely not be covered by the ada unless the business also operated a store in which people could visit physically. this would also likely be the same for the many online stock brockerages springing up on the internet, unless they also conducted business in a physical space that was open to the public. this is only the prevailing legal theory not legal fact. There has not been a court case where a defendant who had a business that would be covered by the ada if he operated a physical space justified inaccessibillity and refused to provide accommodation in virtual space because he was not "a place of public accommodation." Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies only to provide an accommodation. It does not need to be effective. such an accommodation could include providing the content of the web page in a different way, such as mailing a floppy of the file via snail mail or searching a database by telephone. Of course both of these might require more time to accommodate than simply designing the page properly in the first place. kelly
Received on Wednesday, 21 January 1998 20:24:37 UTC