NOBLE AIMS, MIXED RESULTS

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As any disabled person knows, it is often the small gesture that can make an inhospitable world seem welcoming. After a sunglasses vendor in Palatine, Illinois, advertised her sign-language skills, people with hearing impairments flocked to her stand to discuss frame shapes and lens tints. At the Chicago Botanic Garden, shelves and pulley systems enable wheelchair users to inspect a special exhibit. In the rest rooms there, a cheap innovation safeguards the disabled from the nasty scaldings their legs routinely endure in public places: the hot-water pipes beneath the sinks are wrapped with insulation. When a business takes the time to consider such obstacles, says Sue Brogdon, the garden's program supervisor, "this can become a part of an institution's culture."

That, in large measure, is what the disabled had in mind five years ago when they successfully pressed for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which this week marks the third anniversary of its enactment. While the specific aim of the landmark legislation was to provide America's 49 million physically and mentally disabled people with access to public areas and workplaces, the larger spirit of the law was to puncture the stifling isolation of the disabled and draw them into the mainstream of civic life. Noble in design but threadbare on specific guidelines that spell out what improvements are required in places as varied as public courthouses, private business offices and local bowling alleys, the ADA has proved a mixed blessing for the disabled.

On the one hand, the law's mandate requiring universal access to public buildings, transit systems and communications networks has made a once daunting world more navigable. Curb ramps, lift-equipped buses and extrawide rest-room stalls for wheelchair users are now as common a feature of the American landscape as are closed-captioned TV titles. A phone relay system called Text Telephone enables the deaf to order pizza. "There's a guy in Georgia who has a job for the first time because his bus has a lift, and a woman in Kentucky who's seen her brother play baseball for the first time because the stadium was made wheelchair accessible," says Speed Davis, acting executive director of the National Council on Disability. "The ADA has got people's attention."

But much of that attention is proving hostile. Local and state officials are often at a loss to interpret a law that demands "reasonable accommodation" of the disabled yet allows that compliance need not incur "undue hardship." At a time when voters are feverishly opposed to more regulations and higher taxes, the country's 85,000 state and local government agencies bump up against public resistance when they want to spend money to benefit a relative few. "That's taking time and resources that could have been used in a lot of other ways," says Wally Douthwaite, city manager of Des Plaines, Illinois, which spent $2 million to improve sidewalks and curbs. "The ADA is a pain in the butt."