In all seriousness, you're arguing a false position because nobody is arguing we live in a society of optional laws. I think most people are lamenting the consequences of this particular law for this particular circumstance.
Both sides have legitimate grievances. Hearing impaired people should have access to free lectures if a university is offering them. It puts hearing impaired students at a disadvantage when they don't have access to the same resources as hearing impaired. On the other hand, we want to live in a world where it's not prohibitively expensive to post lectures that are accessible to everybody.
So, what do we do?
Can we solve this problem so both parties have good solutions? Could we raise money on Kickstarter and post the transcription jobs on Amazon's Mechanical Turk? Is this a good opportunity to start a voice recognition moonshot effort where schools can compete to transcribe audio for esoteric subjects?
But
nobody is arguing we live in a society of optional lawsI'm trying to point out that a) This situation is not crazy, at all. It's an extension of how our society and the law works. b) Pretending that it's okay to ignore a law because the majority are not affected is short sighted.
Yep, sometimes it's hard/expensive to abide by laws catered towards minorities. Tough shit. That's exactly the reason the law exists in the first place, because it's too expensive for society to do the right thing by default.
In many ways.
People ignore speed limits pretty frequently. Traffic flows faster, more efficiently because everyone is breaking the law.
Laws against gay marriage and other discriminatory laws. Society is greatly improved by making them optional. Some states have strange and bizarre laws in the books but nobody is bothering enforcing them. Everyone treats them as optional and the society is better for it.
I think it would be hard to argue that the ADA is a bad law, however. If it's not a bad law, it should not be optional. Otherwise it's not, by definition, a law.
We live in a society with many optional laws already.
This law was put in place to protect hearing disabled people not punish everyone else. It also wasn't intended to deprive the world of 20,000 free lectures.
Perhaps these videos could be granted some kind of temporary waiver until they can be closed captioned. Youtube even has system for community driven captions. People have suggested crowdfunding projects. People have lots of ideas for fixing this.
If the videos are down the incentive to make them available to the deaf is removed. Some kind of optional application of the here could incentivize a fix that works for everyone.