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Internet Architecture and Disability

Maurer School of Law: Indiana University, Digital Repository @ Maurer Law, Indiana Law Journal

Volume 95 | Issue 2

4-15-2020

Blake Reid

Associate Clinical Professor, Colorado Law, Director, Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic (TLPC), and Faculty Director, Silicon Flatirons Center. Affiliations listed for identification purposes only; this article reflects only my personal opinions and not necessarily those of my affiliated institutions or any of the TLPC’s clients. Thanks to Jose Moncada, Grayson Wells, and their colleagues at the Indiana Law Journal for their tireless editing work and helpful contributions, to Annemarie Bridy, Margot Kaminski, Paul Ohm, Sam Bagenstos, Jack Bernard, Brad Bernthal, Peter Blanck, Anna Spain Bradley, Chris Buccafusco, Sarah Burstein, Anupam Chander, Julie Cohen, Rick Collins, Rebecca Crootof, Doron Dorfman, Bryan Frye, Kristelia Garcia, Amy Griffin, Lakshman Guruswamy, Jennifer Hendricks, Meg Leta Jones, Daphne Keller, Craig Konnoth, Sarah Krakoff, Ben Levin, Jack Lerner, Clayton Lewis, Robin Malloy, Susan Nevelow Mart, Helen Norton, Aaron Perzanowski, Sloan Speck, Claude Stout, Karen Peltz Strauss, Harry Surden, Jason Schultz, Scott Skinner-Thompson, Amanda Levendowski, Christian Vogler, and Michael Waterstone for helpful feedback and conversations on this article, to Jim Anaya, Kristen Carpenter, Jane Thompson, Karen Selden, and Derek Kiernan-Johnson for helpful feedback on earlier iterations of this article, to Luke Ewing for able research assistance, to Sophie Galleher for helpful edits, and to Sara and Jonas Reid for their support.
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The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach for fully facilitating Internet accessibility. The prevailing doctrinal approach to Internet accessibility seeks to treat websites as metaphorical “places” subject to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires places of public accommodations to be accessible to people with disabilities. While this place-centric approach to Title III has succeeded to a significant degree in making websites accessible over the last two decades, large swaths of the Internet—more broadly construed to include Internet technologies beyond websites—remain inaccessible to millions of people with a variety of disabilities.

As limitations of a place-based approach to Title III become clearer, a new framework for disability law is needed in an increasingly intermediated Internet. Leveraging the Internet-law literature on perspectives, this article recognizes the place-centric approach to Title III as normatively and doctrinally “internal,” in the terminology of Internet-law scholars. It offers a framework for supplementing this internal approach with an external approach that contemplates the layered architecture of the Internet, including its constituent content, web and non-web applications, access networks operated by Internet service providers, and devices and the role of disability and other bodies of law, particularly including