That's fine if it is truly by choice. But would you like to go back to a system where, for example, black could only work for blacks?

Go ahead and try to break Amazon's DRM to help blind people -- the government has your back (see point (6)).

The cost of doing business, once you are not very small, is that no one gets to discriminate. What would be truly unfair is to not have that expectation for all medium/large companies.

You need to get out more. There is now a modern and popular trend not to kick disabled veterns out of jobs.

Here is a good example for you. It used to be the case that set-top Closed Caption decoder boxes cost Deaf individuals a couple of hundred dollars. Economies of scale, now that TVs have had the circuit built-in for a decade, has reduced this to pennies per box. Even if you personally never use captioning, does that not appeal to your basic sense of human decency?

The Web is an information medium. The same things that make the Internet work for search engines, RSS, and (someday) the Semantic Web are even more important for accessibility to people with disabilities.

Yes, DMCA is a nightmare for the blind. Fortunately, there is an exception. See point (6).

pretty much everything Luke and Vader did in toppling the Emperor was pointless, because all the legwork had been done by Han and the Ewoks on the surface and by the Alliance fleet and Lando up in space

Wait, I thought the only reason the DeathStar II blew up was because Luke and Vader threw the Emperor into the reactor core! Did I make that up?

The FCC has a call for public comment on this topic.

If the private sector recognized the market value there would not be end-users (with disabilities) loudly complaining to their legislators. Your vaunted "leading Internet companies", at least on the social media front, are part of the problem.

No one is asking that web pages be dumbed down. If businesses were beter about the basics, like alt tags and closed captioning, there would not be end-user clamoring for legislation.

For tax payers and the government, the results of such a study would not really matter, although I agree with you that it would be interesting to have the data. From a strictly financial accounting perspective, the cost of providing food, shelter, and some basic quality of life can only be more expensive than subsidizing gainful employment. Taxpayers and government are on the hook for the former even if they would disavow the latter. Unless one wishes to countenance warehousing, which we did for a long while in the U.S., this is good fiscal policy -- as well as being the better moral choice.

You are correct that catering to those with disabilities is not sufficiently profitable to companies this is happening in the open market. Which is exactly why we need legislation to raise the floor and make accessibility a fundamental cost of doing business for everyone.

> news websites? questionable.

I disagree, and so does the Department of Justice! Just as it is now settled law that their buildings must be accessible, soon it will be illegal for the websites of medium and large businesses to discriminate against people with disability. It is about time!

There is a way to add captions that is non-invasive and which will soon be required. The legislation that is focus of this article is invisible but quite important.