To celebrate the 19th anniversary (the *19th* anniversary? Really? Maybe they’re a year ahead of schedule) of the Americans with Disabilities act, the US Department of Labor has relaunched DisabilityInfo.gov as simply Disability.gov, available naturally at http://www.disability.gov.

Disability.gov contains information from 22 federal agencies in ten subject areas, including benefits, civil rights, education, employment, health, and housing. Every section I looked at also had a pulldown menu allowing you to get information on state disability programs and offerings without leaving the site. (Very nice.) Each subject area has sub-areas, allowing you to “drill down” to useful information, usually in the form of link lists with some description. One bad thing: Disability.gov is doing click tracking. So when you’re looking at information on a particular resource and you hold your mouse over its link, you get a URL like http://www.disability.gov/clickTrack/confirm/5450748?external=false. That makes me uneasy because I’d like to know exactly where I’m going when I click on a link.

In addition to these subject areas, the site is also trying to reach out with additional syndication offerings and social media tools. Disability.gov now offers RSS feeds and a Twitter account. The site also has one of those “link to us” icon sets, and a blog. The blog unfortunately is not very bloggish; at the moment it has just the press release for the new site and a frequently-asked-questions document. It could take a lesson from a government blog I enjoy a lot, Gov Gab. If you want information on site updates and news of interest to disabled folks, go to the news page — it’s a lot more interesting.

There’s actually a lot of information here and Disability.gov has gone out of its way to make sure things are easily viewed and sharable. Now if they’d just get rid of those tracking URLs…