> Can you explain why it matters whether the service is free or not?

I think it matters since the service is being provided out of the person's goodwill and it will cost x amount of money for them in some way which would have already been factored into their finances which does not affect their budget. I also think its unfair and unethical to ask for the free stuff to be made accessible to <any sect> of people when the cost is not borne by the people asking for it (or the govt), when the cost is being asked to be borne by the person who's giving it out for free. I also feel free matters because you are entitled to a service you pay for, not for something you get as a handout. You can merely request to accommodate you, but if you order the person, the most likely outcome is everybody loses except the person providing the resource/service.

I find your questions absurd, but not for the reasons you cite. I find your analogy does not give an equal comparison to what we're discussing. If you would be open to rephrase your analogy to - two companies giving you access to the bathrooms, but no ramps have been provided for disabled people - then that makes better sense to me. There is a difference between allowing only white people (where you are actively gatekeeping the consumption of the bathrooms) vs having an open door policy to allow anyone, as long as you can go into the bathroom somehow. (The only white part seems a stretch since you can't change your color, but you can ask someone to carry you to the bathroom) This is how I see it, the disabled people aren't prevented from consuming the materials provided by the universities, they can still hire interpreters at their own expense to help them. The univs didn't say "hey i'm gonna provide only video lectures". They said "hey, here's a collection of video/audio/text lectures that you can have access to, go nuts". They didn't say "hey if you come to our univ as a deaf/blind/etc student, we won't help you".

I can think of another analogy. Lectures with just (text) notes and resources, would be discriminating against blind people but not deaf people, because the univs are supposed to provide text to speech software which can convert the text correctly to speech, similar to how the deaf people expect that the univs should be giving CC for the videos. But they are not actively discriminating against the blind, it's just the resources that they feel they can share out of goodwill. Now if the blind campaign against this as discrimination, the likely outcome is the univs paywall the lecture notes as well. Wouldn't this affect the deaf community? What would be the response in this case? IMO (might be wrong), the deaf community would feel bad for the actions of the blind community, where they could have used the opportunity to read the notes, but now have lost access to it. Conversely if the video lectures get paywalled, the blind community would feel bad for the actions of the deaf community since they could have listened to the lectures by themselves. Note that these are resources don't belong to the public/either community, they are merely accessible by the public/either community. Thus I feel we can't/shouldn't ask for accessibility help from the entities providing it for free. And if at all we do require help, I feel we should ask the govt to enable us to access the resources, rather than ask the govt to force the institutions to accommodate us (the institutions do accommodate when you are part of the institution itself). If anything, it is the responsibility of the govt to enable the communities to access the resources. Mandating it on the institutions to bear the extra cost for no return whatsoever does not seem to have the right outcome in any way for anyone.

I still feel the ADA is barking up the wrong tree for the wrong/mismatched outcomes or expectations. The intentions are right, the actions and the outcome of the actions seem wrong to me.

Another question I have is did the univs settle with ADA with money for the lawsuits? If yes, then ADA use that money to do something good out of it, say hire interpreters to transcribe the lectures? If yes, then great (also please do cite it). If no, then what did the lawsuit accomplish other than paywalling the content from the general public and ADA making good amount of money? The least I would expect is ADA using that money for the cause they are campaigning for. If you say/feel that ADA is not obligated to provide the service to help the deaf community, but only campaign for it, then the same logic applies to univs who do not have obligation to cater to the disabled community for resources they provide for free.