"I'm not sure holding back the progress of an entire society just to not disadvantage a subset of it is as reasonable as you seem to think."

I think that's a hard argument to make when Encarta 95 was more advanced than this. I'm all for making information public, but a video of the presentation that's not searchable, can't skip from slide to slide, doesn't show the presenter, doesn't have an index, can't click on links etc. isn't exactly the future. And with all the information available these days the standard should really be higher.

> I'm all for making information public, but a video of the presentation that's not searchable, can't skip from slide to slide, doesn't show the presenter, doesn't have an index, can't click on links etc. isn't exactly the future.

Are you so sure that the learning style you seem to prefer is really ideal for all people? Because you sound really sure, but I'm not sure how that could be.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Exposing the data, that is already there, is what gives people the choice how to learn. If you just have a blob of video there's no practical way to e.g. search for something.

You can't search lectures you attend in person either, yet that format has endured for quite some time. This video format provides a certain kind of structure that may be suited to some, but not to others. For those others there are alternatives.

"You can't search lectures you attend in person either, yet that format has endured for quite some time."

There weren't really an alternative, so whether the format has endured or not isn't really relevant. Many other schools are doing this differently. At this point your statement about "holding back the progress of an entire society" seems rather hollow. I can't convince you data exposing data is more useful, but I also shouldn't have to. It's one of the fundamentals of computer systems if not the Internet.

Until society as a whole recognizes the imperative to uplift all its members it does not deserve to move on.

In this case a reasonable response from society, for example, may have been "ok UCB how much will it cost you to sub those? alright, we'll give you the funds from tax money." Lacking such a response all UCB could do was go "oh society, you don't want to help? then you don't get to keep this."

Keep in mind that only a short-sighted person would say UCB messed up here. They didn't. The USA as a whole messed up, so the USA as a whole gets the stick.

> Until society as a whole recognizes the imperative to uplift all its members it does not deserve to move on.

That's a hard argument to make too. Some of the people that may have learned from these lectures might go on to champion disability rights, or may go on to invent tech that may address some of those disabilities. We simply can't all progress in lockstep, and trying to force that is probably harmful to all.