Suppose it costs $100 to make a video accessible for those with hearing impairments. Furthermore, suppose this video is really important - the university is willing to spend up to $20,000 on making it, but fortunately only has to spend $15,000. Without being a dick about "deaf accessible or you can't publish", the university would get $5000 of producer surplus and the hearing impaired lose out. With this rule, the university gets $4900 worth of producer surplus, and the hearing impaired can actually watch this very important video.
It's really easy to forget about the cases that aren't getting fought over but are still subject to the rule. If you've got an idea for a better rule that lets Berkeley publish these videos, but still keeps universities from pretending that they can't afford to make videos accessible when they actually can, I'm all ears.
They are releasing high quality content online for free to a large segment of the world's population. Just let them do it!
Here's another idea: The people who are so concerned about accessibility could join their efforts and provide a transcription. In multiple languages, by the way. We don't want to exclude anyone.
It's pretty clear that such arguments lost with the passage of the ADA.
Furthermore I have never heard of a building being closed until accessibility accommodations are built.
If you think about it critically for just a second you realize there is no line. Accessibility is an absolute in the United States.
If you disagree then I wish you the best of luck in your campaign to repeal the ADA.
Should they provide transcriptions to satisfy the transcription validation committee, I'm sure you'd be demanding the videos to be taken down because they are not also transcripted in Spanish or dubbed in French, or some other excuse that would prevent the majority of people to have access to the content (including those who could be interested in working on transcriptions instead of complaining online).
The non-obvious thing is that this compliance-by-force is non-local. If you only look at Berkeley's videos, you're giving up these videos pointlessly. You have to also look at the videos that are going to be published anyways, and whether they'd include access for the deaf if people weren't dicks about enforcement.
Would it be better if this was approached from the other side? Creators could create without this concern. Disabled consumers would then pay for services that make specific creations accessible to them. The US government could then explicitly subsidize the disabled people.
If you insist on looking at this incident in isolation, yes. But if you look at it like that, there's no reason to imprison murderers, because it won't bring the victim back to life.
If there were no requirement, very few things would be accessible. As a minority, the deaf will always be irrelevant to the majorities' utility calculus.
I think ThrustVectoring said it best in a post above yours: we're requiring creators to subsidize the disabled.
An alternative way to subsidize the disabled might be to give them some amount of money every year which they can use to buy transcription, parking, etc. services. This might result in only certain content being transcribed. This might result in less parking spaces that are continuously empty. Maybe that would be a better use of everyone's time. Maybe it would create unnecessary decision burden on disabled people.
Also, if your goal was to prevent murderers from murdering again, why would you ever let them out? To generalize this to other crimes: why would you let any criminal out if your goal was to prevent them from committing more crimes?
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...
You would let murderers out because you think there is some compromise between their freedom and the crime they committed.
What is your suggestion?
Shutting down videos to millions of potential viewers because the recorders did not have the time nor money to produce transcripts, gains nothing / takes away everything.
If things were really fair, we should be able to now sue the complainants for taking away from us everything that could have resulted from viewing the course material.
This is, uhh, kind of false. In liberal democracies like the US, we have some extraordinarily protections for the needs of the few at the expense of the many. For example, we've ruled as unconstitutional anti-miscegenation laws. The founding fathers were explicitly worried about the tyranny of the majority, too.