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Comment by neoburkian | Hacker News Reader

I'm accepting that the bootcamp is legally required to provide an interpreter. I'm questioning whether or not that requirement is a 'reasonable' accommodation. The bootcamp probably graduates around 60 people per year, this is the first deaf applicant they have likely ever had.

It may be reasonable for large institutions to have dedicated personnel for less than one percent of their customers given that their customer base is so large. That calculation becomes financially unworkable in smaller organizations.

The fact that you resort to ad-hominem without addressing the example is telling. It terrifies me that people endorse the de-facto destruction of a commons just because a tiny fraction of the population can't use it.

EDIT: Some have pointed out that saying an argument is disgusting is not ad-homanim. This is correct, and I was wrong to use it in that way. However, I stand by the second part of the last paragraph.

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The parent did address the issue, and did not make an ad hominem attack. The parent attacked the statement and sentiment where you compared compliance with a law, and making reasonable accommodations with the criminal act of arson.

Universities receive public funds to operate in the public benefit. Our society has laws to ensure that we don’t just leave people with disabilities behind.

If bootcamps can’t “disrupt traditional education” without providing the same social benefits and complying with the law, then that’s a house that (metaphorically) needs burnin’ down.

1) You can hire ASL interpreters by the day

2) "Your argument is disgusting" is not ad hominem

1) This is the best argument I've heard so far and has come the closest to getting me to change my mind. Conditional on ASL interpreters being reasonably priced and getting them to show up requires a minimal amount of bureaucratic rigmarole, then my above sentiment was wrong and ill informed.

If, however, this is prohibitively expensive then things change. E.g. A quick google search led to the hourly cost of an ASL interpreters being between $50-$145 per hour. Assume $100/hr, 5 hr days, 5 days/week, 4wks/month, for a 3 month program and the cost is $30,000 which significantly higher than bootcamp tuition. I don't think it is a trivial thing to force small companies to take customers that create losses in excess of 10K.

Of course, this also depends on how "small" the bootcamp is. If, e.g. it is a huge machine with thousands of students then this could be a reasonable expectation.

2) Yes you are correct. See my above edit.

Take it from someone who graduated with a degree in ASL and worked in the industry for a few years. That price is sticker shock for someone looking to schedule weeks of ongoing work...but hear me out.

90% of appointments booked through interpreting agencies are a two hour minimum. They don't usually have reliable, ongoing, weeks-long, scheduled work for interpreters.

Agencies are businesses. They will wield and deal to lower their price to make the sale. If you go through an agency, you can bet they have interpreters that are qualified. When you have this amount of work, you can strike deals that can lower that rate pretty significantly.

Assume that the median bootcamp price is something like $15K. Can you get an ASL interpreter for 3 months and 5hr days at that rate?

If it turns out that this can be done, I'll concede that the bootcamp was in the wrong and my arguments in this case were incorrect.

I was directly responsible for negotiating prices for ongoing engagements just like this (even more long term). For an engagement like this, we'd probably agree to $40 per hour. At 25 hours per week for 12 weeks, that's a $12k for a single interpreter for that engagement.

The interpreter we'd send would be qualified, but may not be licensed (which is fine and legal under the ADA definition).

You mentioned "reasonable accommodation" earlier, and I think what you're trying to argue is "undue hardship." So, you're the one that gave me numbers...

If a bootcamp charges $15k per student, and they graduate 60 people per year (you mentioned in another comment), that brings a revenue to $900k. Even if the bootcamp needed to pay $30k for one student to have a contracted interpreter, that's only 3% of their yearly revenue. I'm not a tax law expert, but I'd imagine you can also write off the cost of interpreting services as a business expense. It'd be pretty difficult to look at those numbers and see an undue hardship on their business.

Alright, given this argument, I am now convinced that it was in fact reasonable for the bootcamp to hire an interpreter, and the fact that they didn't do that justifiably opens them up for some kind of legal action.

I would like to edit my original post to reflect this, but unfortunately it seems like I can't edit it anymore.

Sorry to be hard on you, but thank you for listening to the debate and changing your view.

I'm not sure what state you performed this in, however it is very well known that ASL interpreters can not interpret for hours on end. ASL interpreters are actually paired at engagements and must swap at very short intervals (20 minutes if I recall). Thus any figures you cited must be doubled.

You are correct, for the most part! We'd always use team interpreting at things like conferences with non-stop speakers and very few breaks. As someone who actually did educational interpreting, there is a lot of downtime/student work time. So, one interpreter is usually appropriate in a setting like a bootcamp.

Keep in mind, profit might be 5% of yearly rev (not crazy for young businesses), in which case that would be more than half of their yearly profit.

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