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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a university (I can't remember which) that supposedly posted free videos of lectures on their website. The content was said to be absolutely awesome. Then they got sued for not having subtitles and the university decided to just take the videos down. It was a loss to all.

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I believe that was s/Stanford/Berkeley. Automated text to speech is so cheap now though. Lectures could be uploaded to YouTube and Google would do it for them.

so that google can make money on their content?

Context is important. This is Berkeley. They can do text to speech at an inconsequential cost. Other websites probably not so much.

It's important to acknowledge economic/technical realities separately from value systems.

We can disagree on whether a society should provide for their blind members.

But it's harder to disagree on the proposition that Stanford can definitely provide subtitles for these videos without sacrificing anything of consequence on their end.

It's also difficult to disagree on the proposition that requiring this of all individual bloggers would be an onerous requirement on them.

It's also important that Berkeley is a public school, so a question is "should the government, or parts of the government, be inaccessible to blind people".

Right now it's hard to know what the current legal requirements even are, so we tend to only argue over what they should be. And that's more of a discussion of value than fact.

I still believe they shouldn't be obligated. It's stuff they're giving away for free. It's like giving a beggar a sandwich and then having to compensate the beggar for having included cheese in the sandwich I gifted them when they're lactose-intolerant. I'd just not give away sandwiches in the future, then.

Most people would agree we need clearer legal framework around this.

I like a business vs home analogy. If you build a storefront, it needs to be wheelchair accessible. That seems reasonable to me.

If I build a home in the middle of nowhere, my own home does not have to be wheelchair accessible but if I want to build a home in a city, that city may require my home to be wheelchair accessible.

I suspect Berkeley thought they were building an addition on their home, not their business.

Still, it's clear that my analogy is NOT how it works in the real world. There's a critical lack of clarity here, and answers are needed especially for blogs and personal sites.

I personally strongly believe that when we build things for people with disabilities, they become so much easier for people without disabilities to use. I'd personally like to see websites easier to use with screenreaders and other 3rd party aides. But I don't think it should apply to personal webpages or small blogs.

It doesn't really matter what I think though. The legal requirements today are quite unknown.

The analogy fails. Consider instead a charity kitchen in a town with a fairly substantial Jewish or Muslim community, but the charity kitchen insists on serving pork.

Here are some statistics about hearing loss: https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...

They are enlightening. 25 % of people between 65 and 75 are hearing-impaired, rising to 50 % of people over 75. What exactly is the argument for excluding the aged from Berkeley's online offerings? It would be wiser to argue in favour of accommodation for disabilities because it may be that you will need them sometime in the future.

> Consider instead a charity kitchen in a town with a fairly substantial Jewish or Muslim community, but the charity kitchen insists on serving pork.

...less sympathetic than GP's example, religion is a choice.

religion is a choice

That's true for both sides. Why someone would do charity but leave a well-defined group out of it is a mystery.

How about, instead of a charity kitchen, it's a restaurant that gives away its leftovers? If they only have pork leftovers, should they not give those away to those in need? By disallowing them, their choice would either be to throw the food in the trash or obtain other food to give away in addition to the pork. Of course, most businesses would just shrug and throw it away.

Are you seriously suggesting that a charity kitchen dispensing pork should be illegal?

Maybe Stanford too, but the case I know was Berkeley.

Edited mine to correct this. I think the Berkeley case has had a chilling effect on other universities, such as Stanford. They also have not released lecturers since then as far as I can tell.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It's super depressing. My friend made the impolite and glib comment that perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to have math classes online either because the mentally disabled can't understand them. Emotionally, it's a pretty bad argument. But it definitely stuck with me as an interesting point...

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