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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't work in real life. Your scenario would apply just as well to not serving "blacks" and "coloreds". Well if they don't like it, they can complain to management and it will get fixed when they feel like it.

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I don't think that is a good metaphor. There is a significant difference between forcing a company to provide equal service to everyone regardless of skin colour and forcing them to provide additional services for the benefit of disabled people. In the former case they'd just be being racist and nasty by refusing to serve black people with their existing product, in the latter they may not actually have this additional service - eg. they may not have closed captions for their video yet, or there may be technical restrictions on why they cannot provide them, etc.

Your analogy makes no sense. Netflix isn't 'not serving "blacks"': Def people are allowed to use Netflix all the same as other people, but as they can't hear what is said their experience is arguably worse than other peoples, but that is not Netflix's fault.

Did you read the comment I replied to? My point is that "complaining to management" will never work, which is why we have laws and regulations.

Yes I read it and I was trying to point out why I thought you were wrong in using racial segregation as a metaphor.

It is a totally different thing to deny someone service based on factors they cannot control as skin-color or disabilities, than to not extend your service to take every group in the world into account.

If i develop a service that is useful to a lot of people, I shouldn't be punished for not taking into account every possible user.

I am not saying that deaf people don't deserve to be able to watch movies on Netflix, but I think that Netflix should be encouraged through grants etc. to make the site more useful for people with disabilities instead of forced.

As a society, we have decided to extend services to people even when it doesn't make economic sense, or is a pain, or slows down or economy as a whole, etc. Like building ramps, or reserving parking spots. Or putting captions on movies.

That's a bit of a straw man argument. Serving "blacks" and "coloreds" does not require any extra work. Serving people with various disabilities can take an extreme amount of extra work.

I'm assuming these movies are captioned by the studio or somebody anyway in order to provide the DVD subtitles, how much extra work would it really be to add them to a netflix stream?

I think dasil003 made the point better than I did. My main problem with dfxm12's post is that the way he describes "This is the way this is supposed to work" does not work.

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