RE: ADA requirement? [was RE: Attitude Adjustment Plea]

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