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Comment by sfeng | Hacker News Reader

There should be a 'good samaritan' provision to the ADA which allows for less-than-accessible things to be done if they're provided for free. Accessibility is great, but it doesn't serve anyone to raise the bar required to release free content above what institutions can provide.

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{I am not a lawyer [1]}

For better or worse, ADA is Federal civil rights legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access.

[1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.

You do realise that captioning costs money, right? Already a number of popular courses aren't recorded because of budget issues.

Recording the video costs money. The instructors who lecture cost money. The buildings where the videos are shot cost money. UC Berkeley systematically budgeted for each of those and many other costs such as administrators and legal council and student recruitment and admissions officers and an inter-collegiate athletics and systematically did not budget for accessibility.

Accessibility for all of the US? Indeed they did not, because it doesn't make sense. Students at Berkeley already have these transcripts available to them.

It does serve someone because it forces publishers to be inclusive to people with disabilities.

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