It is unfortunate that the ADA is designed so that the only mechanism of enforcement of disability rights is lawsuits. :-\
Maybe there should be some exceptions around things provided on a "best-effort" basis, if they can be very carefully crafted.
But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.
And you should not expect all disabled people in the country to waive their rights just because you do.
There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.
It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.
It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).
It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.
I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.
I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.
Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?
Entirely irrelevant.
If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.
But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. Should they also be forced to take down the website if the speaker didn’t speak perfect English?
This is a falsehood. The complaint was that some videos had no transcription at all.
There were other complaints, BTW - it wasn't just subtitles. There were complaints about blind people not being able to read the docs.
Edit: I think one of the (multiple) complaints was poor transcription. What I meant by "falsehood" was actually referring to an earlier comment that said something to the effect of "they provided subtitles". In some cases they did not provide subtitles.
By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.
This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.
No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."
There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.
I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.
> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.
What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist.
