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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

If this causes a chilling effect such that universities find it easier or less costly to withhold the free lectures, it means the net effect on society from ADA lawsuits [about the free learning videos] is harmful.

Similar discussion as previous thread on UC Berkley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519761

If the universities avoid releasing free videos, that punishes all of us including the majority of people who don't have disabilities. I'd prefer to find another way to caption these videos besides throwing around lawsuits.

If a Federal appeals court rules that Netflix doesn't have to caption their commercial videos[1], surely we can cut some slack for free education videos.

[1]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/9th-circuit-rules...

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Unfortunately I don't think the Netflix ruling is going to apply here because Netflix doesn't take federal money to operate.

Your argument here applies against all services which provide access to people with disabilities at increased expense, and is furthermore highly dependent on how you define net effect.

Disability advocacy groups have pursued this cause through other channels, to no effect. This lawsuit is a last resort. The institutions have had a long time to get it together; as the article says, a letter was sent by the DOJ way back in 2010.

>Your argument here applies against all services [...]

No, not all. I was restricting my argument to things given away for free with no commercial gain.

As society, we've agreed that making commercial entities like restaurants install wheelchair ramps is good.

However, if we see a soup kitchen feeding the hungry poor and notice that the building they use doesn't have a wheelchair ramp, we should threaten them with a lawsuit?!? (Yes, the hungry poor can be wheelchair bound too.) It seems means-spirited and a misguided use of the ADA.

Okay. So your argument is if a service is provided for free and there is no commercial gain for the provider, it should be exempt from accessibility requirements. Furthermore, you argue free online courses satisfy these two tests and thus should be exempt from accessibility requirements.

There are several lines of attack on this argument. The first is against your contention that these institutions enjoy no commercial gain. There are clear PR gains from offering these courses, both through engendering goodwill and increasing prestige. I am not saying these courses are offered only for PR reasons, but it is difficult to deny their effect.

The second line of attack is against your belief that free goods & services should not be subject to accessibility requirements. You use the example of a soup kitchen. Here I will digress for a moment and say I believe analogies are an exceptionally poor form of argument in civil rights contexts, which operate on abstract principles such as the value of equality. Thus an emotional appeal to our intuition about what is mean-spirited is unlikely to be useful. Returning to the argument at hand, we can question what is special about a free good or service which enables its exemption from accessibility requirements while remaining consistent with our principles of equality. So, I pass the ball back to you - what is your answer for this question?

How is someone supposed to respond to an abstract question without analogy to similar questions? The ADA only demands "reasonable accommodation," and frankly that's what we are arguing about: what is "reasonable?"

Our law provides many special cases when the entity is engaging in non-profit activities: taxes, labor requirements, among others.

So you ask why non-commercial should entities be excluded from accessibility requirements: because they already get excluded from other onerous requirements we place on businesses, and it seems like a "reasonable" line to draw.

Maybe you don't find it reasonable, but now it's up to a court decide.

If you believe the ADA is a net negative, it's good thing that you have no opportunity to ever become disabled then.

> the majority of people who don't have disabilities

Almost 19% of the US' population is disabled in one way or another. That's a lot of folks to discriminate against. But you're right, they're the minority, so what rights should they have to get access to publicly available services? Rip out those ramps, get rid of the parking spaces, close up the isles, and shut down those elevators.

> Netflix doesn't have to caption

Netflix won that appeal, and lost the next. Rather than take it further, they made a deal and added closed captioning. So, yes, if you offer public content, it should be available for everybody. Cost of doing business.

While this content may be nominally free, it's an advertisement for MIT and Harvard classes. As much money as these universities spend on their regular marketing materials, they can afford a few TAs to add captions to their video courses.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with GP here. Even if they're ads for MIT and Harvard, they're "good ads". We absolutely don't want to disincentivize them. Forcing these kind of regulations against them is a disservice to society, as it puts more knowledge away.

It'd be great if they were closed captioned, true. But it's already "good enough" that they're public. Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.

> a disservice to society

A disservice to society is treating some people who, through no fault of their own, as worth less than everyone else.

> Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.

So you'll allow them to hold their data hostage to get special favors and exceptions from federal law? Where do you draw the line then?

They already provide wheelchair ramps, braille (and low vision) compatible signs, ARIA tags on their websites, door openers, all for free for anybody who comes to their campus; what makes their videos exempt?

That they have gotten away this long is them not paying attention to the laws; these lawsuits are simply an attempt to get them to follow the laws in the country they live and work in.

So you'd rather have it be that no one has access to these free educational lectures/videos than that a small minority (<20%) can't use them? That's pretty much the perfect example of cutting of your nose to spite your face.

If these laws go through, Harvard and MIT should just set up a small subsidiary in another country and upload the videos through those. Problem solved.

The laws already exist, and Harvard et.al. have been operating under them for years. If they followed those laws and subtitled the videos, the problem would also be solved.

But why should the extra expense be forced upon them ? As has been announced, this will result in the videos being taken offline, not in anything that helps the disabled.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...

So rather than helping anyone, you're sabotaging many.

I would like to point out though that merely uploading a video to YouTube results in it being captioned, for free, by a machine learning algorithm.

Is there a law stating that universities must release their course notes, lectures, videos, assignments, etc, free of charge to the public?

The line is, their content is free, even though they were not required to.

If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care. But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.

I've asked some hearing-impaired friends what they thought about this article. Their reaction was that it was ridiculous to sue over the accessibility of information given away for free.

> But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.

Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine? These aren't poor, barely solvent community colleges, these are private institutions with huge revenues and investment funds in the hundreds of millions.

> If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care

If it were created with money from a federal grant, then yeah, people would still care.

> Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine?

Do you have any sources that shed light on whether any of this material is the product of federal grant money? You assume it is, when the article and other sources I can find offer no suggestions or evidence that the universities are releasing federally funded information in an inaccessible format. Based on your comments here, you have made a set of assumptions and concluded that because the universities accept federal funding, and because they have released course material to the public, that this course material is the product of federal money. That has not to my knowledge been shown to be the case. If you're including loans/grants that are awarded to students, then all colleges, even the poor, little, barely solvent ones, are to be subject to the same principles. But when you make what sound like snide remarks about an institution's investment funds and revenues, you somewhat betray that you're only outraged because the university has money, and isn't doing what you think it should with that money.

>If you believe the ADA is a net negative,

I originally didn't word that clear enough to avoid misinterpretation. The "net negative" was specifically about the free education videos and not about all ADA lawsuits in general. I added the "[about the free learning videos]" to make that reference clearer.

>Netflix won that appeal, and lost the next.

I see no cites that says Netflix lost another appeal to NAD after April 2015.

> was specifically about the free education videos

MIT and Harvard were not following the law; the lawsuit simply attempts to bring them back in line. Free videos or not. MIT and Harvard both provide multiple ADA allowances as part of the cost of doing business; I think the question should be why are they trying to get around this one? The ADA has a history of trying to resolve these issues directly before resorting to lawsuits.

> I see no cites that says Netflix lost another appeal to NAD after April 2015.

My mistake; they were approached with a new lawsuit, and immediately decided to settle; the settlement document from April of this year:

http://www.adatitleiii.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/121/2016...

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