(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your company's intranet is horribly designed. Those tiny fonts hurt your eyes and give you headaches; the constant clicking cramps your fingers; the lousy layout undermines your concentration. Unhappy? Tough luck, kiddo. No pain, no gain.

Unless, of course, you have the misfortune to suffer from a disability. Then you can enter the legal twilight zone of the most controversial civil rights initiative of the past decade. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) mandates that companies assure that their physical facilities--stairs, bathrooms, public spaces, etc.--be accessible to the physically challenged.

Companies not only are forbidden from discriminating against the disabled, but also are required to create more accommodating work environments. The ADA, for example, is the centerpiece of professional golfer Casey Martin's suit against the PGA. He's seeking the right to ride a golf cart during tournaments instead of having to walk.

It's simply a matter of (Internet) time before pitched battles over accommodations in the virtual world rival their physical counterparts. It's already happening. Last November the National Federation of the Blind sued America Online for not moving fast enough to make its services accessible to the sightless. You can be sure that intranet-dependent companies with visually impaired workers will either rapidly upgrade their sites or feverishly consult their lawyers.

Business' intensifying dependence on the Net accelerates the need to address disability and discrimination conflicts. Surely a policy erring on the side of access and accommodation is not inherently unreasonable. After all, if organizations can physically modify bathrooms and stairs, they can certainly modify browsers and servers.

But what, precisely, does it mean for network-intensive organizations to accommodate employees suffering from attention deficit disorder or dyslexia? Do you redesign the screens? The act already extends to the thornier realms of accommodating the emotionally and cognitively challenged--Is shyness a disability? Kleptomania? Alcoholism? What happens when emotionally frustrated technophobes claim symptoms of personality disorders that merit protection under the law? Do you provide faster tech support? Given ADA's breadth and ambition, network innovation will inevitably beget innovative disability classifications even as it spawns new rules and regulations to remedy them.

Legal analyst and ADA skeptic Walter Olson predicts that "entrepreneurial litigators" will be "filing...accessibility complaints by the cartload" if commercial Websites don't adhere to emerging standards for public access. Adam Powell, the Freedom Forum's vice president of technology and programs, observes that several proposed standards might leave media and e-commerce sites alike vulnerable to possible litigation by the digitally disabled. Does requiring FORTUNE or the New York Times or CNN to make news sites accessible to the impaired create a First Amendment conflict, or does it righteously affirm the goal of minimizing discrimination? That could be up to the courts.

Proposed regulations defining technical design rules for the disabled are emerging from Web advisory groups. They "ask" site operators to offer multiple multimedia modes of access to those with physical or cognitive difficulties. For example, mouse-click interfaces aren't enough; sites should offer voice access as well. Many of the guidelines are quite clever and well conceived. And in theory, design guidelines could lead to sites and services that make network access far easier and better for everyone. Certainly the need to customize for individual needs will become a dominant redesign theme.

All this conjures up provocative scenarios for management: To the extent companies succeed in revising and enhancing their intranets to accommodate the special needs of the differently abled, will they also be able to insist upon significantly greater performance and productivity? If customized technology really can mitigate the impact of a disability, organizations will become more demanding of their workers. The intriguing result of "special-needs networks" may well be a coarsening of attitudes toward the disabled. Much as the PGA looks askance at Casey Martin's cart, white-collar workers may feel legitimately disadvantaged relative to the perceived preferences that their more challenged colleagues receive online. There are bound to be huge disagreements over how much of a workplace equalizer innovative intranets can be. That, in turn, will likely lead to new rounds of litigation and regulation.

While evolving Net technologies unquestionably offer both the disabled and the enterprise remarkable opportunities to become more creative and productive, these will be relationships dominated by legal systems. Tomorrow's digital divide will not be based on color or class or age or capability. It will be based on who sues and gets sued as societies debate the meaning of "fair" and "cost effective" accommodation for the digitally disabled.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. Reach him at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.