>Your examples of chairlifts and helicopters are strained because obviously they would fundamentally alter the experience and cause extreme financial burdens,

It wasn't meant as a perfect cost-for-cost comparison. It was to diffuse the absolutist tone of "make them all comply with ADA in all situations and show them no mercy".

People seemed to think the ADA applies everywhere. It
does not. We already make many exceptions to the ADA so the other commenters being being absolutist about it with no wiggle room for free videos that benefit us seems disingenuous of how society actually implements the ADA with exemptions.

>; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users.

No, it isn't obvious to you because you're using the wrong framework. It is a "fundamentally altered experience" for non-disabled because the lawsuit intimidation tactics from DOJ and deaf organizations can cause to the courses to not be available at all. You're only thinking about how the encoding of the captions in the bytestream of the video file doesn't affect non-disabled users. That is true but that's not the only way to alter the experience. If other universities now choose to keep their class videos locked away in a vault because of the lawsuits against UCB, Harvard, MIT, that is a fundamentally altered experience for the rest of humanity!

>It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations

We should push, encourage, volunteer, crowdsource, raise awareness, ask for grants, solicit donations from billionaires like UC Berkely alum Eric Schmidt, contribute to open source speech-recognition software to auto transcribe with 99.99% accuracy, etc. We can do a lot of things. I'd just rather for society not to threaten everybody with lawsuits. The hostility towards free videos not having captions is baffling. Yes, it's an undesirable situation and we need to improve it but the hostility is just weird. Good quality captions (especially for college courses with heavy jargon) takes time and costs money. It's not an automatic and trivial process. I saw some Stanford courses for Apple iOS programming on Youtube[2] and the captions are often wrong because Google uses automated software. The deaf audience deserves better than that. It would be wrong for those videos to be deleted because the captioning was inadequate.

If a career coach offers to donate 2 hours of free time at the local library to talk to unemployed job seekers on how to train for new skills or polish their resumes, I think it's wrong to threaten him with a lawsuit if he doesn't pay $200[1] for a sign-language interpreter to accompany him. Yes, of course the deaf deserve to participate in such a free workshop but to threaten with a lawsuit seems incredibly mean-spirited. Let's find another way to provide a sign-language interpreter. If we exhaust all options in an attempt to accommodate deaf access (e.g. library doesn't have budget to pay $200, no volunteer sign-language interpreter is available, etc) then we should at least let the class continue. There is no need to punish the coach† or the non-disabled job seekers‡ by cancelling the class because the disabled didn't have access. Sharing knowledge should take precedence.

[1]http://smallbusiness.costhelper.com/interpreters.html

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lRx1zoriPo&feature=youtu.be...

(Click "CC" to turn on captioning)

caption text: "it means that instead of _our_ here it wants us to put let"

correct text: "it means that instead of _var_ here it wants us to put let"

That is a serious transcription error because "var" is a reserved keyword Apple Swift programming language.

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† (e.g. hey coach, you must pay for the interpreter for the deaf and if you don't, fuck off with your free seminar)

‡ (e.g. if the deaf can't take advantage of the class, the rest of you can't either)