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Comment by brendoelfrendo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and without subtitles, the course content is not accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing... which the law says it has to be. UC Berkeley decided not to make their content accessible, and when someone complained, they took it all apart rather than making a reasonable (and legally required) accommodation. I guess I don't see why I'd blame the person filing the lawsuit here. UC Berkeley could have just... put up subtitles.

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It had subtitles. The demand was better subtitles, and the project had barely any budget.

While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.

The person could have volunteered to write the subtitles themselves or, if they were deaf, to hire someone or even ask someone to volunteer to write subtitles. Or any other number of solutions.

To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.

Why should they do any of that when Berkeley was in clear violation of the law, and easily demonstrated to be at fault?

As I said - if this is such an obvious wrong, fix the damn law. As it is written, Berkeley didn't have a leg to stand on.

Why is the onus on the person with the disability to fix the lack of accommodation for the disability? A lawsuit is their remedy. Berkeley chose the laziest form of compliance rather than attempting to do the right thing.

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