Fair point, but Japan has a pretty commendable culture of including and enabling people with physical disabilities. I once encountered a large group of Haneda airport employees participating in an exercise where each of them had adopted a different disability (one in a wheelchair, another blindfolded, another with crutches, etc) and the group was methodically navigating every centimeter of the airport with a separate team taking notes.
California has lawyers doing the same thing at businesses across the state, and suing accessibility-law violators.
Sadly, it's more of an extortion racket using the letter of law as a weapon than a vehicle for improving access.
This does happen in California but it's important to observe that this is mostly private lawyers in California rather than lawyers acting on behalf of a state regulatory agency, ie disabled people have a private right of action against businesses that decline to accommodate their disabilities.
This is what 'leaving it to the market' looks like. Now, some would say that the market should only involve decisions about where to spend your money or not, but every libertarian and market theorist I've ever talked to says that if someone is being unfairly excluded from the market they should sue for inclusion, so here we are. Now, it's true that for some businesses the costs involved in serving some customers (eg installing a ramp for wheelchairs) is likely to exceed the benefit of doing business with those customers which can hurt profitability. But given that people decided systematic exclusion was a sufficient ill to pass a law about it, either businesses make themselves reasonably accessible or a public agency does it and recoups the cost via tax.
Of course, it's often not so much the cost of the accommodation as the confrontational manner in which the issue is litigated. The culture of diametric opposition and winner-take-all outcomes that pervades our legal and political systems may be the biggest part of the problem.
