Accessibility costs a lot of money and it's a perfectly valid observation that one can skimp on it for profit. You may call it immoral, I call it mathematics.
By default, links are underlined. For text content, many major browsers (Firefox and mobile Safari for sure) include a "reader mode" or similar where the user can adjust their own contrast - as long as you don't break your HTML and prevent the reader mode from working. Web pages are black and while by default, so anything with lots of bright colors is something you have to do intentionally. Animations are also something you have to add intentionally.
It really seems like just by not breaking the defaults (I.e., no work at all) your web page should do a decent (not perfect) job of being accessible. But we're so obsessed with making things shiny and swooshy that we've lost sight of that.
Even that one is overstated. Sure, taking some existing video, and treating it as the only representation of the content, and then trying to transcribe it -- that's expensive.
But virtually every such video (esp. lectures) intended for conveying information is going to correspond to some text equivalent, and they can just post that in a place that's easy to find. Not only is it cheap, many users who can hear will prefer that version.
I think it's just a widespread attitude problem (for lack of a more refined diagnosis). It's not just big institutions, but discussion forums where some users will stubbornly link a video as their only citation, and won't even take the time to summarize the key point they think it's substantiating.
You bring up lectures as example - I certainly don't have transcripts of lectures I've given, and neither do most professors/lecturers/whatever that I know; a few of them have most of their talk content in their slides but that's a horrible practice that distracts from effective lecture or presentation; in general all the non-audio material is intended to be a supplement to the talk and either are not meaningful without it (e.g. illustrations) or are not representative of the talk (e.g. a textbook chapter that's mostly about the same topic, but different). The recorded audio (if it'd be recorded) would literally be the only copy of the content of that lecture in existence.
The same applies for many other genres of video content. Most videos aren't scripted, and thus no script exists; heck, even videos that are clearly well prepared, staged and filmed with multiple takes (e.g. many of "youtube creators") generally don't have a script beforehand, the textual content is improvised on the spot and doesn't exist in written form unless it gets transcribed.
Interviews and podcasts are other good examples - as you say, many users who can hear would prefer to read it, I certainly would, but the obvious reality is that the textual version of those things does not exist unless it gets made, and making it takes much more time than recording the interview or podcast in the first place.
For my own teaching, no, I don't write up a "script" beforehand, I prepare content and plan for the topics and key points that I intend to cover in this lecture (and the next one, if we go quicker than expected), but the actual content heavily depends on how the students react, what they are (mis)understanding, what are the questions, etc. I don't consider well-scripted lectures a good thing, the lecturers that I know who are more into "reading off a script" give quite weak lectures IMHO.
Preparing in-depth textual material would seem a waste of effort as students would get the same content in the lecture. I wouldn't use it for other students since I'd anyway never give the same lecture twice - research is progressing fast, so my 2016 content is dated now and this year's content will definitely have to be rewritten (and the course restructured) next year. Admittedly, that's context-dependant - my situation is uncommon, there's a lot of teaching that involves lecturing the same introductory topic for many years off of a classic textbook to multiple larger audiences, and in that context your arguments would definitely apply.
But that's actually all offtopic.
The main issue is that none of this is equivalent to the transcript. Nothing of what you propose would make the video accessible to a deaf person. A textbook chapter or the lecture materials are alternatives to the video, it helps making do without the video, but doesn't make accessible the part of video where the lecturer is writing something interesting on the blackboard and explaining something that you can't hear.
>The main issue is that none of this is equivalent to the transcript. Nothing of what you propose would make the video accessible to a deaf person. A textbook chapter or the lecture materials are alternatives to the video, it helps making do without the video, but doesn't make accessible the part of video where the lecturer is writing something interesting on the blackboard and explaining something that you can't hear.
That's overstating it. The relevant metric is, if some deaf (or video-hating like me) person wants to learn the material, do they have a useful option? The fact that you can't make that specific video useful isn't relevant. Even pointing to some text that hits the same key points is major step up, and is trivial to do, and yet most refuse to do, just like most refuse to provide the one insight that they're making me watch a three minute video to hear.
When you really dig into it, though, most of the accessibility issues for the UI of a web application are still among the things you have to know to present accessible content on a website. In either case, the important point is to know when you're pushing the boundaries so you can make an informed decision about your testing requirements. It's just another metric to consider, like browser compatibility or mobile presentation.
If your design starts with accessibility in mind, the costs can be minimal. Keep in mind that the use of small and low contrast elements is a design decision. If the decision is made to use large and high contrast elements from the start, there should be no difference in the development costs. Making it possible to scale pages for pages where things are laid out spatially is far more difficult and incurs much more testing, yet costs can be reduced if the decision is made from the outset. Even the more difficult factors, such as captioning images and videos, can be eased if planning is done ahead.
The problem with arguing that it's 'mathematics' is that there are many variables involved in the equation. If the variables use values for poor planning and design decisions, the result is going to be a much higher cost. If the variables use values for solid planning and design decisions, the difference is going to be much lower. Of course it also depends upon the media being used, so it is very difficult to use that equation to make generalizations for all cases.
The most troubling wave of ADA litigation is just beginning to crest. The ADA’s next frontier—and next target of litigation—is the most innovative segment of the domestic economy: e-commerce. The latest trend in ADA litigation is suing commercial websites that aren’t sufficiently accessible to the disabled—because, for instance, they lack assistive technologies for the blind or hearing-impaired. Even though the ADA was enacted before websites became ubiquitous, many courts have interpreted the term “public accommodation” in Title III to encompass the Internet, and will entertain suits applying to it. In 2008, Target paid $6 million to settle a class-action suit brought by the National Federation of the Blind charging that the retailer’s website was allegedly insufficiently accessible to blind customers. Target also paid nearly $4 million in costs and attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. Why would Target pay $10 million to settle a case when the law is unsettled and its culpability far from certain? Class-action lawsuits are particularly expensive to defend, and because the potential liability is aggregated to reflect the entire class (all blind consumers, in this example), the financial exposure for a firm if it loses in court presents an unacceptable risk to most corporate defendants. https://www.city-journal.org/html/ada-litigation-monster-151...
Netflix now does the right thing and captions everything.
If that is the case, are Netflix's customers better or worse off, individually and collectively? Is society better or worse off? (I don't have a clear answer, and I'm not sure there's an objectively clear answer, but I do think that there are tradeoffs in these discussions that are sometimes hidden/ignored.)
They only have to provide it, if it originally had captions. They didn't have to caption stuff that never had captions to begin with, but they went ahead and captioned everything, pretty much, and if you look at their new self-created shows, they are typically multi-lingual(multiple voiced languages) and multi-captioned (multiple written languages).
I would say, it forced them to deal with becoming a global provider and not US/English centric like they were, which I think we can say has been good to their business overall :)
When there's not a single audio source for the main speaker, that becomes a problem, but that's the fault of the people recording it for not getting a clean audio source. However, in practice, this is rarely going to be the case for something like a product video because the studio will have recorded it correctly in isolated sound rooms.
We're automatically reverting to "a human should do it" with adding aria tags, video subtitles, and screen readers. That is the problem because developers often have many other things to worry about -- database, security, scalability, maintenance, documentation. Accessibility gets put right beside those and it's no wonder developers don't prioritize it.
Technology is not the magic bullet to fix everything. We're no where near that place.
In the mean time, I still can't use your site. And neither can people with any number of other issues (medical, environmental, simple bandwidth, etc).
Don't pawn it off on tech, people need to take responsibility for this kind of stuff.
There aren't good tools for collaboratively captioning videos ala a Google Doc. ARIA is a massively complicated spec that is much harder than <font color="red"> tags.
There are simple and easy tools for making inaccessible content (Flash was a big one). It is much, much harder to make accessible content, and it shouldn't be that way.
Making no effort just because a perfect effort would be hard comes across as a cop out. Would we accept this so easily if we were discussing testing?
It should be impossible to make inaccessible content. We could have browsers and/or compilers that just break the whole page if it isn't accessible.
I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be done, but the idea that it's effortless is simply not true.
Its complicated and its not directly related to your core work/competency. One uses a lot of frameworks/tools to build on top of what if they are accessible and you can't build the thing completely on your own? Its quite to get started to be sure which one is just some regulatory checklist and which ones actually matter. I have trying to be knowledgeable on this but compared to normal web development informations are both sparse and harder to grok. And its also much harder to test/validate than just checking if my script/css is working/looking right. I have done very little screenreader tests but it somethings they are terribly good at working through and some things break too easily. It might make perfect sense for an accessibility expert but can be very non-intuitive for a regular developer.