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Appeals Court Says ADA Doesn't Cover the Web

Posted by michael on from the need-a-seeing-eye-web-browser dept.

tassii writes "In this article from CNet, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court's decision from October 2002, which concluded that Web sites cannot be required to comply with the 1991 disabilities law."

3 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A shame by nharmon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lunacy is interpreting a law that was intended to give disabled people access to buildings to mean a website has to be written a certain way.

    Please remember, that this could have freedom of speech implications. This would be like requiring protestors to talk a certain volume, because some in the audience may not hear what he/she is saying.

    As far as spirit of the law...since you can't tell me with 100% accuracy the spirit and intent of every congressman and senator who voted for this law, all we have to go on is the wording. And the wording does not support your position.

  2. Re:A shame by pauljlucas · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The court cited the fact that the Internet wasn't listed in the 1991 law. ...which of course is to be expected since lawmakers would have been unaware of anything called the Internet back in 1991.
    Congress is free to amend the ADA by specifically adding a provision for the Internet. You're free to write your repsentatives to urge them to do it.
    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  3. Ignore headlines by Piquan · · Score: 4, Insightful
    In many newspapers, the headlines are written by somebody different than the story's author. The headline writer quickly skims the story, and puts down whatever he thinks will be good.

    Here, that process gave us the headline: "Disabilities Act doesn't cover Web, court says" on cnet. The /. headline is essentially just a rephrasal of that: "Appeals Court Says ADA Doesn't Cover the Web".

    But this isn't what happened. The cnet article starts off saying: "Acting largely on procedural grounds," indicating something rather different. The article says that the appeal was disallowed because there was a procedural error. In particular, the plantiffs used a different argument in appeallate court than they did in the district court, which is generally a no-no. So the appeallate court had no choice but to dismiss the appeal.

    But it's clear that this isn't them saying that the ADA doesn't cover the web. "In declining to evaluate the merits of this case, we are in no way unmindful that the legal questions raised are significant," wrote one of the three judges. That's in the article. If you read the judgement itself, it says in the introduction, "Unfortunately, we are unable to reach the merits of this case, however, because none of the issues on appeal are properly before us. Accordingly, we are constrained to dismiss the appeal."

    From reading the judgement, I get the impression that the judges are sorry they didn't get to decide the issue. It's almost apologetic in tone, and comes close to giving the plantiffs "hints" on how they might argue a similar case next time. But they're not allowed to review issues that weren't raised in the district court, unless there's a really good reason. You can read the judgement for details; it spends most of its length discussing why it can't examine this case.

    The headline here is just plain wrong; the appeallate court said nothing of the kind. Don't believe headlines.