K. Daniel Glover is the associate editor of IntellectualCapital.com and a former editor and reporter at Congressional Quarterly. E-mail him at danny@voxcap.com.

Ask most anyone to define "digital divide," one of the catchphrases of the Information Age, and they are likely to talk about the technology haves and have-nots -- the white, wealthy and urban Americans who own computers and have Internet access, and the minority, poor and rural Americans who do not.

But there is another oft-forgotten element to the digital divide: people with disabilities. They are the "haves" who nonetheless have wont of technologies that meet their specific needs. They are a population for whom computers and the Internet have the potential to open new doors or to shut them out just as they have begun to gain greater access to the bricks-and-mortar world.

"Technology is a double-edged sword," says Cynthia Waddell, the author of a report on the disability-related barriers to the digital economy. "It can create the problem, but it can also solve the problem."

Technology as hero and villain

To a large extent, the Internet has been a boon to the disabled. A recent Harris poll conducted for the National Organization on Disability confirmed the Internet's value to the disabled. According to the poll, computer users with disabilities spend nearly twice as much time online and using e-mail as others, and 48% of them (compared with 27% of people without disabilities) say the Internet has improved the quality of their lives.

Even people like Waddell say technology is not the problem. But the way technology is used definitely can create obstacles to the disabled. Just as architects once designed buildings that were inaccessible to the disabled, she says, e-architects today are designing high-tech structures that effectively lock them out.

That problem is particularly acute for the visually impaired. Screen readers enable them to "see" materials online that might not be as readily accessible to them offline. But screen readers lose much of their functionality on graphics-heavy sites that lack caption-coded images or that use tables and columns.

People with other disabilities face similarly unique obstacles to the online universe -- deaf users who cannot access information available only in an audio format or paraplegics whose voice-activated or laser devices cannot interact with certain computers or Web sites. "There's an incredible number of inventions out there to assist people," says Ron Kelly, director of the federal government's Center for Information Technology Accommodation, but too many of the devices are rendered useless on the other end.

Discussions about the digital divide ignore the disabled

The lack of ease of access to sites like IC -- which, according to the Bobby service at the Center for Applied Special Technology, does not pass the accessibility test -- may not seem like it should be important to the millions of disabled Americans. But it can and does matter when all aspects of life are rapidly moving online or becoming technologically based, the experts say.

Gregg C. Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says technological obstacles are, or have the potential to become, an issue in both the workplace and the marketplace. The careers of disabled workers may stall because technology excludes them from an "executive communication system" that includes cell phones, pagers and more. Or they may not be able to get the products and services they need as commerce moves online.

There are political implications, too, as Internet consulting service OrbitAccess showed late last year in a study that lambasted the inaccessibility of presidential campaign Web sites. "Election 2000 may be only the second election of the World Wide Web era," the study concluded, "but it is more than 30 years into the age of disability access. That political figures calling for the confidence of the electorate cannot achieve even basic accessibility on their high-tech sites is disgraceful."

The scenarios for trouble as technology revolutionizes every aspect of life are as endless as the imagination. "The impact," Waddell wrote in the report she released at a May 1999 digital-economy conference, "is systemic and reaches all sectors of our economy, whether or not the participant is a consumer, business owner, employee, educator, student, parent, child or citizen." And the divide, Vanderheiden adds, "will grow as people get older" because younger people are more likely to rely on technology.

Educating the technology masses

Disability-rights advocates have been working hard to make sure technology closes the digital divide between the disabled and able-bodied rather than making it wider. When that divide first became apparent, they took their case to the technology community -- the creators of computer hardware and software, and the coders who design the millions of pages on the Web.

The World Wide Web Consortium, for example, published "Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines" that advise Webmasters on the finer points of making their pages accessible to the disabled. The HTML Writer's Guild's Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education (AWARE) Center also promotes accessible Web-page design. And the Bobby service mentioned earlier gives Webmasters a personalized report card on the usability of their sites.

The effort to educate the public, and particularly the technology community, about the technological needs of the disabled has yielded some success. The most recent development: Bank of America, the nation's largest banking chain, this month installed the first talking automatic-teller machines in several California cities in an attempt to service blind customers.

But there also has been resistance, especially in the Internet community. Waddell says the same ignorance of the needs of the disabled that made the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) a necessity is apparent in the debate about Web accessibility. "The biggest barrier is not people who don't want to do it," she says, "but people who are ignorant or don't understand it. And that's where we are right now."

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, who authored the OrbitAccess study on the accessibility of presidential Web sites, takes a more jaded view, lamenting the willful ignorance he says he encounters when he raises the issue of accessibility with Webmasters. The Internet of all mediums is flexible enough to meet the needs of all users, he says, but designers dismiss even the simplest of fixes.

"Nobody wants to understand it because it's more work," Bathory-Kitsz says. "If somebody can put up a site that's pretty and get it up quickly, that's adequate." As far as the disabled are concerned, he says, today's online environment is "the worst of all possible worlds -- one in which the access is poor, the tools are limited and the Web-site authors don't care."

Taking the case to the next level

That perception helps explain why disability-rights advocates have taken their cause to Congress, the courts and the Clinton administration. The National Federation of the Blind, for instance, sued America Online in federal district court last November. And the Clinton administration, under the auspices of the U.S. Access Board, is on the verge of imposing a new rule (commonly known as Section 508) that would require government agencies to procure, develop and maintain technologies that are accessible by the disabled.

Dennis Hayes, chairman of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, who is visually impaired, questions the push for regulation -- especially the increasingly vocal demand to enforce the accessibility mandate of the ADA on the Web. That would just encourage litigation that could stifle technological advances targeted at the disabled, he says. "It's not the right time to create a legislative environment where the courts will be creating a standard that is carved in stone."

Walter Olson, author of The Excuse Factory and creator of the Web site Overlawyered.com, was more blunt in his Feb. 9 testimony at a congressional hearing on the ADA and the Internet. "[I]t would be hard to find a better way to curb the currently explosive upsurge of this new publishing and commercial medium than to menace private actors with liability if they publish pages that fail to live up to some expert body's idea of accessibility in site design," he said.

But Waddell, who says criticisms like those of Olson are reminiscent of arguments against the ADA that long ago were disproved, says both outreach efforts and federal rulemaking have their place in the battle to create a world that is technologically friendly to the disabled. "Unless we address accessibility now," she says, "we're going to see a whole new crop of myths" about the way the disabled work, play and live.