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.
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)