For the sake of your argument, it doesn't appear to matter whether the service is "free" or whether the service provider is charging. You reason that if it's not the government, then there should not be a requirement to provide "reasonable accommodation". Can you explain why it matters whether the service is free or not?
> I'd wager that's the more economically easier route
Well, of course. It's almost always cheaper to not build ramps, provide captions, hire interpreters, ...
> For any free service, there is no obligation for the service provider to do anything to accommodate anyone unless they want to. The argument feels like someone who has peanut allergy suing someone who hands out free cookies/biscuits.
What if someone is handing out free hand grenades? Again, why does it matter whether it's free?
For a better analogy, consider a local company that provides nice restrooms available for public use for "white people only". Along comes a piece of legislation that says you cannot discriminate on the basis of skin color. To remain compliant, the company has two options
1. destroy the bathroom 2. remove the discrimination
Suppose the company destroys the bathroom. You want to sit here and talk about how it is a free service and how does it help anyone if the company destroys the bathroom? Are you going to ask why this anti-racial discrimination bill is targeting a _free service_? If non-white people do not have the opportunity to use the bathroom, don't I think the actions of this civil rights act now resulted in opportunities being lost to everyone instead of a few? How is that a good outcome or even a win for non-white people from the eyes of general society?
I'm banking on the expectation that those questions sound absurd to you. If they don't we have too fundamental of a disagreement to carry on.
If the questions sound absurd, and you object to my analogy because there is no "real" basis for a bathroom being only for white people, then we can continue. You might think there is no additional effort required to make a bathroom more broadly accessible, and it's just a blatant display of racial discrimination. I hold to the analogy because you can be sure that a business will try to argue that it is more expensive to manage such a bathroom (perhaps claiming that white people are more economical with water, or whatever). We don't even have to go through such contortions if you consider that the bathroom has an automatic soap dispenser that is not reliable with darker skin colors.
The ADA is 100% a piece of anti-discrimination legislation. It exist because of advocacy effort foremost by disabled people, along with allies.