If it stands, this ruling is going to be a huge mess for a few years... but I actually think it will turn out to be a good thing overall. (Measured in society's

If it stands, this ruling is going to be a huge mess for a few years... but I actually think it will turn out to be a good thing overall. (Measured in society's terms, not web developers.) As others have pointed out: the point of the ADA is that the disabled are a tiny, tiny market, and the cost-benefit analysis done by a for-profit business is rarely going to result in any accommodation for them. It is explicitly a government mandate that these people be accommodated because society is a better place when people who have been disabled are not also woefully under-served. (You can disagree with that last statement, I suppose -- it's a question of values. But I agree, in general.) What I think needs to happen is an adjustment in the ADA. I'd love to see exceptions made for very small businesses (so startups aren't choked by the requirements) and for user-generated content. Netflix is an edge case: the content is not theirs to close-caption, but it's not "user-generated" either. I could see either requiring that they only show close-captioned material, or imposing more requirements on the production side of streaming video. But I really don't see any reason that large, profitable web companies like Google, Facebook, or Amazon should be exempt. "It will cost money" or "Making screen-reader-friendly sites is boring" are not good excuses.