A statement on online course content and accessibility

Scenario D: If $X + $Y is greater than your budget to make free content available $Z, simply remove the content so it is inaccessible to everyone. I know more than one organization that has done this when faced with an ADA complaint about free content.

I can only speak for the UK, but we can give personal attention to disabled students, making sure all content they need is available to them, including individual tutoring for example.

This seems to work very well, but is ad-hoc and wouldn't be suitable for a massive online course.

- Scenario A: Spend $X to make free content accessible to 99% of people.

- Scenario B: Spend $X * Y to make free content accessible to 100% of people.

- Scenario C: You wish to do A but are forced to do B via legislation. $X * Y is greater than your budget to make said content available $Z, so you don't make the content available. I know of more than one organization that has selected this option with free content and with some paid content (in which case $Z is the budget to create it based on the expected revenue) so this is not a theoretical scenario.

Now, Y can vary quite a bit depending on the content and depending on what you're trying to make it accessible to. In the case of making a transcript available, you may have to pay a transcriber. In the case of an app, you may need to buy a screen reader to test with. There are free ones, but they're often not as full featured as the popular one that most folks are using. So, you'll need to buy the $1,100 screen reader (JAWS with the non-Home license) to test against in addition to testing the free open source one. You may also need to pay someone to do more standardized testing with as well.

It's not an insignificant amount of money or work in many cases. I've run into it with PortableApps.com. I had to buy a newer version of our toolkit to be able to get it working with screen readers at all and rewrite multiple controls. I don't have JAWS yet to test against but I do test against NVDA.

There are ways to mitigate some of this. There are multiple groups that transcribe for free to help make content available accessibly. And if you make free open source software that's useful, you can probably find many impaired users willing to help you test as I have for PortableApps.com.

On a personal note, I very much believe in making everything I create accessible.

Classic lobbying. The Department of Justice is filing the complaints against the institutions offering free online courses with an illogical argument masked with virtuous intent. The DOJ is okay with the paid online courses because the levying cost on consumers provides immunity to such violations. Depriving everyone's access to the free content because it did not accommodate those with disabilities sets dangerous precedent for the future. You can't design a system that accommodate everybody from the beginning. Progress requires time and the rational reason for DOJ to begin this investigation is corporate lobbying. What businesses or markets would benefit from this?

The carefully worded letter appears reasonable, except what purpose was conveyed other than forcing the universities to incur high litigation fees? Using ADA as a weapon to purge free sharing of collective intelligence is despicable. I understand universities have limited resources and priorities for their enrolled students, but they should retaliate out of principles.

The community can help with providing captions. Charing $1 fee. Routing the money to a charity. Anything is better than removing the content because that is the complaint's end goal.

This simply doesn't make sense.

Yes, certainly, content should be made accessibly available. Yes, certainly, Berkeley's responsibility is to its enrolled students.

But removing content from public access serves neither of those needs. It doesn't help the blind, deaf or otherwise handicapped; it doesn't help tuition-paying students.

It makes everyone equal, in the same sense that an eye for an eye makes everyone equal.