CONCLUSION
At this point, some readers may expect a Part IV that lays out a series of solutions for how to navigate the accessibility challenges across the layers of the Internet stack. But I hope that this article has established, if nothing else, that these challenges are dramatically broader and deeper than a single article might address. While this article has sketched a framework for addressing the sufficiency of existing legal rudiments at the content, application, network, and physical layers, among devices that connect to the Internet, concerted future research, advocacy, policymaking, and technological development will be needed to apply, extend, and augment these rudiments to ensure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to access the Internet on equal terms.
Disability scholars have already laid an important foundation for Internet accessibility, and Title III of the ADA, the disability provisions of telecommunications law, and other statutes and regulatory regimes provide helpful doctrinal bases for achieving it. But to fully understand what making the Internet accessible will entail, disability scholars and advocates will have to navigate the puzzles of perspective that have confounded Internet-law scholars for the past two decades.
332. See 36 C.F.R. § 1194.1, App’x A, B, D (2018).
333. 29 U.S.C. § 794d (2012).
334. 36 C.F.R. pt. 1194, App’x A (E103).
335. § 794d(a)(1)(A).
336. See LAZAR ET AL., supra note 6, at 93–95. This approach of accessibility via procurement has also been utilized in cases under Title II of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act against universities. See id. at 85–88.
337. FCC Disability Advisory Committee, Recommendation of the FCC Disability Advisory Committee (Dec. 6, 2016), https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-342526A1.pdf [https://perma.cc/9NVN-DVD6].
Augmenting disability law’s traditional internal perspective with an external view reveals new angles and challenges hidden within the Internet’s layered architecture for accessibility. Considering disability law through the lens of perspectives also helps illuminate the important role that an internal perspective, like the one taken by disability scholars, can provide for illustrating the societal salience of the Internet and Internet-enabled technology for specific groups of people—and in turn, animating broad policy concerns that flow from their experience of the Internet— while showing that the external perspective can be helpful for designing comprehensive and granular regulatory schemes.