Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue was that people with disabilities across the country (i.e. non-Berkeley-students) were suing* Berkeley for not making their videos accessible. That's why you can't have nice things unfortunately. See here: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/13/a-statement-on-online-co... Lectures up to 2015 are still there though? Do you consider their materials obsolete or something? *Edit: Specifically, the Attorney General…
> The issue was that people with disabilities across the country (i.e. non-Berkeley-students) were suing Berkeley for not making their videos disabled-friendly. What the f#$k? Suing because their videos are not "disabled-friendly"? What does that even mean? God, the lawsuit trigger-happiness of some people...
I'd say lawsuits such these would be far fewer if people were at least aware of the existence of disabled people, and spend a modicum of attention on how to enable their participation in society.
"video" being latin for "to see" may provide a clue as to the type of disability that could have trouble accessing this content.
I'm not familiar enough with the subtleties of this case to know if subtitles, which IMHO could have been created rather cheaply or through volunteers, would have been enough to make them accessible, or there would have been problems with, for example, visual content such as diagrams and photos. In any way, I suspect the project was on weak footing within Berkeley anyway, and whatever support it may have had within the administration couldn't overcome the legal risks.
It's rare to find an example where the outcome, in strictly utilitarian terms, is as clearly negative as it is in this case. However, the ADA and similar legislation will always be a net negative if you're evaluating it in those terms.
To use the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which has recently been in the news: guaranteeing disabled students equal access to public education is a losing proposition in terms of total utility. There will always be cases where a school needs to spend, say, $30,000 to make the new library accessible to people in wheelchairs, or may even decide not to build that library in the first place, because it doesn't have those $30,000. Without a doubt, spending the $30,000 on more books for that library would create more "total learning", even if means the few students in wheelchairs never even see a real book in their lifetime. There will even be cases where all this happens at school that don't even have any students in wheelchairs.
The reasoning, therefore, has to be different than purely utilitarian. Laws for disability access are a collective decision to break with purely economic rationality in an effort that emphasises a limited core of rights to be guaranteed for everyone much stronger than the broad welfare of society as a whole. That's not an unusual tradeoff. It's the same that's at play when we don't torture drug dealers to get them to give up their suppliers.
Note that there lots of reasonable exceptions on the books. Nobody is saying that your paragliding school needs to make accommodations for people in a persistent vegetative state. In this case, I'd argue that remote learning is an opportunity almost tailor-made for people with disabilities, and that whoever made this ill-fated decision at Berkeley – knowing how it will become a talking point against disability access – made a grave mistake.