In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong.
What I see is:
- Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity
- Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population
(The $Y is extra costs to close-caption, transcribe to braille, etc.)
That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you must spend that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me.
E.g. The school budget has finite money. Let's say It can release 15 free courses by spending just $X but to avoid a lawsuits, it can only release 10 courses by spending $X+$Y ... or release none at all because it's not worth the legal minefield. Why is the 2nd scenario more optimized for humanity?
Sure, we should encourage the universal accessibility of the video courses but to formalize it into the nastiness of lawsuits? It doesn't seem right.
What you wrote is logical, but applicable to any instance of accommodation to those with impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related actions/legislation/policies explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation.
The actual letter from the Department of Justice (linked at the bottom of Berkeley's response) goes into more detail. The DoJ is not demanding current materials be removed, nor are they expecting changes to happen overnight. But the ADA isn't new, nor is its mandate that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity," nor are the web standards for ensuring that content is accessible.
Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" or certain private parties trying to take grievances to the court system for a pay day. Individuals brought a complaint to the DoJ, and now it's doing its job by investigating.
Berkeley and other public institutions have been complying with the ADA since it was passed in 1990. Compliance tends to be expensive and unintuitive - that's the entire point! Applying the ADA to online course content really shouldn't be much more of a burden than it already was to comply with it in other respects.
>The Americans with Disabilities Act [...] explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation.
Sure, that seems justifiable for commercial businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking free donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted.
If UC Berkeley used the viewing of those videos as a mandatory requirement to qualify for admissions into the school or required viewing for the students to pass a class, then I think most of us could see the fairness of forcing them to caption it -- regardless of costs.
However, the goodwill act of making them free for humanity's knowledge-seeking causes the DOJ to threaten lawsuit? That does not seem right.
>Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit"
In the last page of the cited PDF, the DOJ explicitly writes "lawsuit":
>"In the event that we are unable to reach such a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA"
That this particular DOJ letter is one or a few steps removed from a "formal lawsuit" doesn't detract from my overall point. The DOJ threatening a lawsuit is the tool of choice we're using instead of other options ... such as raising a crowdsourced fund to pay for captioning or recruiting volunteers to transcribe them into braille.
If there is an effort of goodwill to make something available, I think society should pay that back with reciprocal goodwill in finding a way to make the material accessible to the disabled.
The donation and the litigation response to that donation is asymmetrical. It gives the ADA bad press.
I came back to make a comment just like this, but you already did it better than I would have.
The metaphor I had in mind was restaurants that make too much food, and (sometimes; some restaurants) they donate it to foodshelves (when appropriate) or sometimes just to some homeless guys who happen to be nearby. The extra food is an externality of their real purpose as a business, which is to take money in exchange for feeding people. They could throw the food away, but instead they're doing something nice with it. Almost nobody would say they should throw the food away because the homeless guys who happen to be the recipients of their largesse are benefiting, while other, further-away homeless guys are not. Such an argument would be idiotic.
In just this way these videos and course materials are an externality of the 'real' business of Berkeley, which is educating the people who are admitted to Berkeley and enrolled in the classes. Berkeley, and others like them, are going above and beyond to be nice to the rest of humanity, to our great collective benefit. This ADA thing is just a kick in the face, and it pisses me off.
That's not a good comparison, not complying with health regulations substantially devalues the food given away, because of the significantly increased risk of illness resulting from consumption of said food.
Your second statement is irrelevant, we are not talking about what the law does, but what the law should do. And I absolutely think that gifts (and good samaritan acts in general) should be held to a much lower standard than commercial enterprises.
This is not at all unprecedented in US law (or in many places in the world), every state has some form of good samaritan law[1], which protects (to some extent) individuals who act in good faith to aid strangers in need of immediate medical assistance. There is also a federal law indemnifying donors of properly labeled foods, except in the case of gross negligence or intentional misconduct.
These laws are important, because donations result in no benefit for the bearer, so making them cost money is a significant deterrence to charity.
What does it matter in your scheme if the food being given away is substantially devalued? It's a gift, it should be held to a lower standard, right? Or are you saying that the gift must be of an equal value to that sold? Do they have to also serve it on fine china to the homeless? How low should the lowered standard be, then?
My second statement is disagreeing with yours. The law does and should absolutely hold organisational gifts to the same standard as commercial transactions. Not least because otherwise you create a massive loophole ripe for exploitation, at all levels.
"Hey, don't tax my import, it was a gift!".
"Hey, my formula milk shouldn't be subject to marketing laws, it's a gift to new [and ill-educated] mothers!"
"Hey, I shouldn't be subject to your weird license restrictions, my source code was a gift to the community!"
Now, sure, good samaritan laws are important things. But so is equality legislation, and disability rights legislation, and much of the other legislation that defines the standards society expects of its participants.
I mean, if you want to impose costs (check carefully food, possibility of lawsuit) on a donation, what you get, predictably, is less donations.
It seems to be the case that you have an assymetrical view of harm: harm by not giving food is always acceptable, harm by giving food, usually unacceptable. Why would it be the case?
Yes, it should. What you get is arguably fewer donations, but the donations you get are better donations. You raise the standard. And others want to follow suit, so they up their game too.
This is already happening. UK supermarkets used to lock their bins to stop people stealing waste food because they were concerned they'd be liable for health violations. There were public protests, so they raised their games and began properly managed waste-food donation programmes.
It's asymmetrical because it's bigger than the one donation you have before you. When you look at the big picture, you have to say sometimes "this thing isn't good enough. Even though it might hurt society in the short term to refuse it, it will hurt it more in the long-term to accept it. So we refuse."
> Sure, that seems justifiable for commercial businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking free donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted.
I dispute labeling this program as a "donation". It's an official program run by a quasi-governmental institution that is supported by taxpayer dollars. Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of this content that's ostensibly provided for the public benefit.
It's a release of course videos that they don't charge for. Making free videos available for the public certainly isn't going to help UC Berkeley's $150 million budget deficit.[1] It's not going to make anybody rich. If any university wants to provide free videos to the public with no strings attached, I consider that a generous gesture on their part. I want us (society) to be generous in return. Therefore, lawsuits are the wrong tool for captioning videos for the disabled audience. (Oh btw, I know your school is losing money and may lay off some employees but about those free videos ... yeah we're suing you for that!)
>Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of this content that's ostensibly provided for the public benefit.
There seems to be a "accommodate-ADA-no-matter-what" principle that's present in many comments. We are not that inflexible. Disabled people may pay Federal taxes but we did not install multi-million chairlifts on Yosemite Half Dome (a Federal Park) so wheelchair bound people can experience the summit. The Yosemite Park entrance pass is $15 per car and we didn't all agree to make it $200 per car so that we can subsidize helicopters to take all disabled people to the summit for those who can't climb it on their own power. Yes, we do have wheelchair lifts for the buses running on the valley floor but we didn't make everything equal for all disabled tourists.
If a business has 14 employees or less, we also don't make them comply with ADA access. That exclusion is written into the ADA law.
The point is that there are are tradeoffs, limits, exceptions, and compromise to make ADA work. If a "14-employee threshold" seems like a reasonable exemption from ADA, let's make "freedom of spreading knowledge" another reasonable exemption. Don't punish institutions for providing free knowledge. Let's not disincentivize other institutions from releasing free videos just because they didn't cross every 't' and dot every 'i' to comply with ADA. Let's find another way to add captions and braille without the lawsuits.
Your examples of chairlifts and helicopters are strained because obviously they would fundamentally alter the experience and cause extreme financial burdens, which make for allowable exceptions under the ADA. This is not parallel to the Berkeley case-- from the DOJ letter: "...UC Berkeley has not established that making its online content accessible would result in a fundamental alteration or undue administrative and financial burdens."
This rings true in my mind; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users. And training and employing work-study students to audit and improve the accessibility of the content seems like a low-cost approach that could bring them substantially into compliance. Rather than allowing untrained faculty to self-certify accessibility compliance of their self-maintained content with a checkbox, which is allowed today.
"Freedom of spreading knowledge" certainly doesn't make for a valid set of exceptions. By that logic, as a knowledge-spreading institution, Berkeley wouldn't need to build wheelchair ramps and elevators on its physical campus. I assume you'd agree that that's a settled question.
In some ways and in some cases, online education is already a reasonable substitute for in-classroom education. It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations to what we've already deemed just in the physical world.
>Your examples of chairlifts and helicopters are strained because obviously they would fundamentally alter the experience and cause extreme financial burdens,
It wasn't meant as a perfect cost-for-cost comparison. It was to diffuse the absolutist tone of "make them all comply with ADA in all situations and show them no mercy".
People seemed to think the ADA applies everywhere. It
does not. We already make many exceptions to the ADA so the other commenters being being absolutist about it with no wiggle room for free videos that benefit us seems disingenuous of how society actually implements the ADA with exemptions.
>; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users.
No, it isn't obvious to you because you're using the wrong framework. It is a "fundamentally altered experience" for non-disabled because the lawsuit intimidation tactics from DOJ and deaf organizations can cause to the courses to not be available at all. You're only thinking about how the encoding of the captions in the bytestream of the video file doesn't affect non-disabled users. That is true but that's not the only way to alter the experience. If other universities now choose to keep their class videos locked away in a vault because of the lawsuits against UCB, Harvard, MIT, that is a fundamentally altered experience for the rest of humanity!
>It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations
We should push, encourage, volunteer, crowdsource, raise awareness, ask for grants, solicit donations from billionaires like UC Berkely alum Eric Schmidt, contribute to open source speech-recognition software to auto transcribe with 99.99% accuracy, etc. We can do a lot of things. I'd just rather for society not to threaten everybody with lawsuits. The hostility towards free videos not having captions is baffling. Yes, it's an undesirable situation and we need to improve it but the hostility is just weird. Good quality captions (especially for college courses with heavy jargon) takes time and costs money. It's not an automatic and trivial process. I saw some Stanford courses for Apple iOS programming on Youtube[2] and the captions are often wrong because Google uses automated software. The deaf audience deserves better than that. It would be wrong for those videos to be deleted because the captioning was inadequate.
If a career coach offers to donate 2 hours of free time at the local library to talk to unemployed job seekers on how to train for new skills or polish their resumes, I think it's wrong to threaten him with a lawsuit if he doesn't pay $200[1] for a sign-language interpreter to accompany him. Yes, of course the deaf deserve to participate in such a free workshop but to threaten with a lawsuit seems incredibly mean-spirited. Let's find another way to provide a sign-language interpreter. If we exhaust all options in an attempt to accommodate deaf access (e.g. library doesn't have budget to pay $200, no volunteer sign-language interpreter is available, etc) then we should at least let the class continue. There is no need to punish the coach† or the non-disabled job seekers‡ by cancelling the class because the disabled didn't have access. Sharing knowledge should take precedence.
There's a lawyer, in the Bay Area, that has made his wad off ADA lawsuits. I guarantee, he is setting up shop as we speak.
I know this because my best friend (deceased) got caught up the ADA lawsuit game. He took a driving job. He drove around these two handicapped individuals. They drove through out the U.S.
He used to call me from the road, and say the strangest things. Like, it seems like they want to go to resturants/gas stations that don't have the required ADA construction. Then they slip, and fall? My job is to take pictures of them on the ground. He was naieve, and thought it was a "travesty", the way these horrid capitalists couldn't build the right way. Most of these owners had no idea they were breaking the law. These subsequent lawsuits shut down many small businesses. Although, this lawyer would settle out of court--much of the time.
He got home, and I told him he was being used by these guys, and that lawyer. He couldn't believe they would do such a thing.
UC Berk is a public institution, using public funds to create these resources. This is not a free charitable creation from a private person, to which people respond "well, you should give us MORE or we'll SUE!"
No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public. Public buildings, public libraries, public transportation, etc. are all subject to the ADA; I see no reason why this particular public resource should be an exception.
> No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public.
I thought about this, and I'm actually not sure what to think. As UCB made clear that the alternative would be to take those resources down, making it completely unavailable to the public. Do we just consider this an acceptable collateral damage from the ADA?
For one, they haven't made it clear that they need to take them down; they said they are going to do whatever they can first, but leave open the possibility that they will be unable to meet the regulations and would need to remove the content.
I understand your argument, but if you only have to say "I can't afford to support disabled people!" in order to not have to be in compliance with the ADA, then the ADA becomes meaningless.
The answer of "we can't afford it" is always about priorities. They could choose to spend money spent on other things to make this content accessible; it isn't like they are spending their entire school budget on this. It is ALWAYS going to be cheaper to NOT provide accessible content, so this argument could happen in every single instance. The resources spent making content accessible could always be spent on making more stuff for non-disabled access. However, as a society we have decided, no, it is unfair to choose not to spend those resources on accessibility,so we mandate it, because we know a pure utilitarian action will leave disabled people always getting the short end of the stick.
Yes, this means that non-disabled people will lose out on some stuff (and maybe this content is one of those things). That is a price we as a society have decided to pay, and I think it is a worthy one.
Think about it; the same goes for handicapped ramps and the like. If businesses didn't need to pay for those, they could use the money on other stuff. Prices would go down. So yes, we all have to pay a little more so everyone can enjoy the same access (or at least a certain level of access)
While your comparison to wheelchair ramps seems analogous, it in fact has a significant flaw. Wheelchair ramps cost the business almost nothing to build relative to the cost of operating the business. The tax for these sort of physical accommodations is almost certainly less than 1%, which nearly everyone would consider acceptable.
In the case of captioning the videos, the captioning costs several times more than putting up the videos in the first place. Probably on the order of 100x more. A lot of these lecture videos are just someone with a camera recording the lecture live, someone who would be there, watching the lecture, regardless. They do some trivial editing / splicing, and upload to YouTube. This is essentially free, other than having the professor/school sign off on them doing it.
Once the ADA gets involved, you now have to caption the video while watching, or after the fact, something you likely would not have done otherwise. You probably also have to submit it to some authority in the university now (don't want to get sued!), who will have to rewatch the video and verify the captions.
In the old system, it took you less than 5 minutes of inconvenience per lecture to upload them. In the new system, it takes you 2 x len(lecture) => 120 minutes or so, per lecture. This is a huge tax in relative terms.
> In the case of captioning the videos, the captioning costs several times more than putting up the videos in the first place. Probably on the order of 100x more
Automatic caption creation is coming on in leaps, well beyond what YouTube is achieving already. The quality is startlingly good in some cases, certainly good enough to allow a (crowd-sourced) editing pass. The cost is nothing, nothing like 100x. Hell, the BBC has a project that will automatically translate content into other languages [0], and they have that publishing to a live site without editorial intervention.
If the will is there, these things are eminently possible. The ADA is trying to make sure the will is there.
So holding something some people would find valuable is an acceptable way to bypass the law?
UCB has another alternative, use those public funds they take to make the course material accessible. They don't want to do that because that takes money away from them. Taking down the material is not the only alternative, it's just the only alternative they're willing to take because it's cheap.
I guess this makes sense. I was pretty miffed at first but what you've said here is logical. UC Berkeley is bound by the ADA to make any and all of its services compliant, and in 2016 I'd imagine the DOJ isn't going to accept a "Well, it's the Wild West of the Web!" to set an undesirable precedent.
And yet libraries have to meet disability access requirements.
If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system, and this is especially bad when it applies to learning — which disabled people can benefit disproportionately from.
Using the legal system to achieve these ends appears to be the American Way so I won't comment on that.
Libraries are not required to make every book available in Braille or in a digital format compatible with text to speech software. That's considered an unreasonable burden on the library.
It's highly unlikely that the complainants went directly to the Civil Rights Division without talking to Berkeley first, that's not how these things go. Frankly, it's preferable for the DoJ to be involved because a problem in this area is a lack of specific regulation and guidance to schools on how exactly to interpret the strong but vague language of the law. If the University just quietly works it out with individuals or a group, that's going to be a lot less helpful to making all educational institutions more accessible.
> If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system
Reality is a multi-class system. It's always and everywhere going to be more difficult to get things done when one lacks a capacity which most people have (e.g. sight, hearing or mobility); it's always and everywhere going to be easier to get things done when one possesses a capacity which most people lack (e.g. intelligence, strength or wealthy parents).
Measures which aim to level the playing field really can't raise those who lack up: all they can do is lower those who have. But that leaves us all poorer in the end, because those who could have achieved did not.
Harrison Bergeron was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
What a hideous post. Lord of the Flies was also a cautionary tale.
Because, despite your "I'm alright Jack" attitude, it generally turns out that society is a better place for everybody when inequality is at its lowest and when you try to ameliorate the worst effects of survival of the fittest.
Nothing about mandating extra help to those who need it restricts the abilities of those who don't. You can still take the stairs, it'll be OK.
While I understand your sentiment and agree with it to some extent, the other side of the argument is that by releasing a free course, you disadvantage someone who would create this content, for a fee, and use that money to make it accessible to all. In effect, they are giving a free advantage to those without disabilities, making it even harder for those with disabilities to compete. Is that fair?
An analogy appropriate to this site is a free app that does an adequate, but not great job for a given need, that prevents others from creating (or maintaining) a polished app for money. That is, we might get 80% of a great app with the last 20%, the hard part, never being achieved. It is what it is in a free market, but the government has a bit of a mandate to try to take the larger perspective and create pathways to cover that last 20%, at least in the case of accessibility.
Having said that, I feel a better approach would be to provide grants or services to support making such content accessible. There is something odd about having to tell people that not only do they need to be an expert in a subject but also in how to convey that in a way that is useful and good to the people who are blind, deaf, or manually impaired.
By this I mean, for example, why is it clear that a simple transcript on a video is suitable? Surely it would be better to design courses to take advantage of the abilities of those using it and compensating for the lack of certain abilities. It is not clear to me that simply captioning a video is the best outcome for providing materials to deaf people. It would be far better to encourage and fund people expert in teaching deaf people or blind people to create materials directly, perhaps based on these other free materials.
As a creator of an online math course, one in which heavy use is made of graphs, it is not clear to me how I could even begin teaching graphing to blind people. I simply do not have the knowledge or experience to do so.
"Faculty developing UC BerkeleyX courses can, but are not required to, develop courses in collaboration with the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). BRCOE follows best practices in design for accessibility and also has a quality assurance process that includes deploying various accessibility evaluators; remediating layout, page structure, downloadable or styling accessibility barriers; and obtaining transcripts of all audio and video files associated with a course."
They follow that with a checklist which all faculty which opted out of using those resources since July 2015 was required to sign.
To me, this looks like a system which is trying to comply, but the people within the system have failed to take the requirements seriously.
There are plenty of other areas where this same law has similar effects but is tolerated. One niche area is the provision of legal services to the deaf. The lawyer must not charge extra, despite the need to hire a translator. That means taking a case involving a deaf defendant/plaintiff might be unprofitable. But you have to do it all the same. We do such things, foot the bill, because the law is the law. The government created the law to promote equality. The appropriate means of redress is to lobby for its repeal ... which will happen right after they pull the benefits of wounded veterans.
We don't do it because it's the morally correct thing to do? Or even to promote a society where such things happen, just in case we or our relatives become disabled?
A business does it because it is the law. A person may do or not do something based on personal choice, but in this situation there is no room. Businesses must meet the minimum standard of behavior. In this case the government has issued a warning that this particular business seems not to have met the bar.
If you are trying to pitch something, something that is going to cost a business money, "the right thing" isn't the place to start. "It's the law" is the far easier pitch.
An ADA story: New startup has a funky cool HQ setup in some loft space. Their new HR/PR head, herself right out of university, advertises a communications position. Everyone reads resumes and eight candidates are selected for interview. They could have gone with Skype, but the founder wanted to see the candidates in person, to get a feel for whether they have the "cultural fit". Seven show up. They pick someone and move on. All seems well in startup land. A few months later the lawsuit appears. It turns out that #8 uses a wheelchair ... a wheelchair that required an elevator ... which their hip new HQ did not have and their hip new HR head didn't have the experience to anticipate. Now they are meeting with a not-hip lawyer at definitely not-cool law firm, but one with an elevator because every lawyer knows about the ADA.
At the time, the ADA was harsh. He went to a lawyer when then sent a demand letter. This person was what some would call a 'professional plaintiff'. Laws in recent years have made that sort of thing more difficult, but the ADA still needs to be respected if you want to avoid headaches. Don't interview people in an non-accessible location.
But part of me does side with the guy. The startup wasn't wheelchair accessible. And they were small enough that making it accessible would have been very costly. Even if he had made it to the interview there was a good chance they might have passed him over because of his chair. That's the sort of discrimination that the ADA was meant to address. The startup should never have setup at that location.
Frankly, they had so many people crammed in that they were probably in violation of the fire code, another law that they don't teach you about at coding bootcamps.
How is it morally correct? It's not the lawyer's fault you are deaf. Why not make everyone equally pay taxes to subsidize the cost of the disabled? Putting the cost on the people that serve the disabled isn't really fair, and creates bad incentives, as seen by this very post.
It's had similar effects because there is no legal alternative. The lawyer can't just stop working altogether, so the society is forced to get the benefit of the law. Over here the alternative is to just not release the courses for free which is not the outcome society would seem to prefer.
- Scenario A: Spend $X to make free content accessible to 99% of people.
- Scenario B: Spend $X * Y to make free content accessible to 100% of people.
- Scenario C: You wish to do A but are forced to do B via legislation. $X * Y is greater than your budget to make said content available $Z, so you don't make the content available. I know of more than one organization that has selected this option with free content and with some paid content (in which case $Z is the budget to create it based on the expected revenue) so this is not a theoretical scenario.
Now, Y can vary quite a bit depending on the content and depending on what you're trying to make it accessible to. In the case of making a transcript available, you may have to pay a transcriber. In the case of an app, you may need to buy a screen reader to test with. There are free ones, but they're often not as full featured as the popular one that most folks are using. So, you'll need to buy the $1,100 screen reader (JAWS with the non-Home license) to test against in addition to testing the free open source one. You may also need to pay someone to do more standardized testing with as well.
It's not an insignificant amount of money or work in many cases. I've run into it with PortableApps.com. I had to buy a newer version of our toolkit to be able to get it working with screen readers at all and rewrite multiple controls. I don't have JAWS yet to test against but I do test against NVDA.
There are ways to mitigate some of this. There are multiple groups that transcribe for free to help make content available accessibly. And if you make free open source software that's useful, you can probably find many impaired users willing to help you test as I have for PortableApps.com.
On a personal note, I very much believe in making everything I create accessible.
> That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you must spend that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me.
It's almost the same as saying, they don't have to release free courses, which is also nonsensical to me.
Scenario D: If $X + $Y is greater than your budget to make free content available $Z, simply remove the content so it is inaccessible to everyone. I know more than one organization that has done this when faced with an ADA complaint about free content.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798
In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong.
What I see is:
- Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity
- Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population
(The $Y is extra costs to close-caption, transcribe to braille, etc.)
That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you must spend that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me.
E.g. The school budget has finite money. Let's say It can release 15 free courses by spending just $X but to avoid a lawsuits, it can only release 10 courses by spending $X+$Y ... or release none at all because it's not worth the legal minefield. Why is the 2nd scenario more optimized for humanity?
Sure, we should encourage the universal accessibility of the video courses but to formalize it into the nastiness of lawsuits? It doesn't seem right.