Shortly after the National Federation of the Blind sued AOL in 1999 -- saying the service was inaccessible to visually impaired readers -- writer Walter Olson warned a congressional subcommittee that the case would be the first of many such lawsuits.

Olson told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and the Constitution that Web sites are "easy pickings" for crafty lawyers who could program robots to scour the Web for sites with accessibility issues and file suits "by the bushel basket."

Olson's prediction so far has not come to pass -- to date, the AOL lawsuit is the only significant case brought against an Internet service provider or media company. The federation withdrew that suit within a year after AOL promised to improve access.

But Olson -- who has written three books on litigiousness in America -- still believes that Web sites ranging from those of the nation's largest newspapers to his own Weblog, Overlawyered.com, could become targets of disability discrimination suits, he said in a recent interview by e-mail.

The federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 states that if you operate "a place of public accommodation" you must make it accessible to the disabled. The AOL lawsuit argued that the service is a "public accommodation" and so must be accessible to the disabled, just like restaurants and theaters.

But the courts have not yet reached any consensus on whether the ADA applies to the Internet. In fact, in a November of 2002 case involving the Southwest Airlines Web site (Access Now Inc. v. Southwest Airlines Co.), a U.S. district judge ruled that a Web site is not a "place," so therefore it can't be a "place of public accommodation" covered by the ADA.

Disability rights activists aren't conceding the point. "The Southwest Airlines ruling has set back the process of trying to get Internet sites covered by the ADA," said Curtis Chong, who heads the computer science division of the National Federation of the Blind.

"But one of these days we'll find a better place to file a better suit and maybe try and get it taken care of."

In the meantime, disability groups find solace in other rulings that have gone the other way in narrowly focused cases. Courts have ruled, for instance, that government Web sites such as one operated by Atlanta's public transit system are covered by the ADA (Martin v. Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority).

A recent report issued by a federal advisory group -- the National Council on Disabilities -- concluded that the courts will eventually find that most Web sites are covered by the ADA.

"The Web sites people will use for shopping, for research, or for entertainment readily come within the scope of the kinds of entities that are deemed public accommodations," the position paper stated.

"The question ... is not whether the ADA applies to the Internet, but whether its application is going to be managed in an orderly way, so as to minimize costs and maximize benefits for all, or whether, under the pretext of deregulation, we are going to leave the process to inconsistency, chaos and fear."

The National Council on Disabilities report recommended that the Justice Department step in and draft accessibility guidelines for the Internet, drawing on several existing federal regulations and the guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium.

If disability rights activists prevail in the courts and the ADA is extended to the Internet, the changes that Web publishers would be required to make would be "fantastically expensive and would seriously curtail the freedom of publishers, authors and creators to communicate in their preferred manner," Olson said.

Web sites would be required to accommodate not only the blind but also the deaf by including captions with audio and video feeds.

As Olson told Congress in 2000, "Per the W3 consortium, inaccessible content includes images without alternative text; lack of alternative text for image map hot-spots; misleading use of structural elements on pages; uncaptioned audio or undescribed video; lack of alternative information for users who cannot access frames or scripts; tables that are difficult to decipher when linearized; or sites with poor color contrast."

"I don't think most e-commerce and journalism sites generally are anywhere vaguely near compliant -- far from it," Olson said.

The National Council on Disabilities position paper dismissed fears that the ADA would impose an oppressive burden on Web sites, saying that those alarms are based on "genuine ignorance, misunderstanding or reflexive distrust of all government."

There is a way to prevent such fears from coming true, the paper concluded. "To prevent an impractical, wasteful and intolerably confusing situation for industry and the public, key sectors of commerce may be better-served by working together to establish clear and appropriate national standards than by short-sightedly resisting them or seeing them as the thin edge of some mysterious and giant wedge."