I like a business vs home analogy. If you build a storefront, it needs to be wheelchair accessible. That seems reasonable to me.

If I build a home in the middle of nowhere, my own home does not have to be wheelchair accessible but if I want to build a home in a city, that city may require my home to be wheelchair accessible.

I suspect Berkeley thought they were building an addition on their home, not their business.

Still, it's clear that my analogy is NOT how it works in the real world. There's a critical lack of clarity here, and answers are needed especially for blogs and personal sites.

I personally strongly believe that when we build things for people with disabilities, they become so much easier for people without disabilities to use. I'd personally like to see websites easier to use with screenreaders and other 3rd party aides. But I don't think it should apply to personal webpages or small blogs.

It doesn't really matter what I think though. The legal requirements today are quite unknown.

Here are some statistics about hearing loss: https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...

They are enlightening. 25 % of people between 65 and 75 are hearing-impaired, rising to 50 % of people over 75. What exactly is the argument for excluding the aged from Berkeley's online offerings? It would be wiser to argue in favour of accommodation for disabilities because it may be that you will need them sometime in the future.

...less sympathetic than GP's example, religion is a choice.

That's true for both sides. Why someone would do charity but leave a well-defined group out of it is a mystery.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It's important to acknowledge economic/technical realities separately from value systems.

We can disagree on whether a society should provide for their blind members.

But it's harder to disagree on the proposition that Stanford can definitely provide subtitles for these videos without sacrificing anything of consequence on their end.

It's also difficult to disagree on the proposition that requiring this of all individual bloggers would be an onerous requirement on them.

It's also important that Berkeley is a public school, so a question is "should the government, or parts of the government, be inaccessible to blind people".

Right now it's hard to know what the current legal requirements even are, so we tend to only argue over what they should be. And that's more of a discussion of value than fact.

A human being should be entitled to accessibility, especially by this point in time where much of it can be machine generated.

By the way, the Internet existed, but it wasn't available to the general public.

Downvotes are primarily going to be from people who would prefer that wasn't the case.

However, I believe most accessibility improvements must be "reasonable" accomodations and generally I think aren't intended to be onerous costs (unreasonable).

So there's room for debate on whether accessibility should NO LONGER be a right in the USA. And also room for debate on what's reasonable.

But I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law, due to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This is a global community, though. Many probably interpret the statement from a moral/idealistic standpoint rather than whether or not it's a legal right in any particular jurisdiction.

You can't say 'well disabled people aren't the target demographic, so no I don't have a ramp' any more than you can say 'whites only'.

The other commenter didn't claim it was a moral (as opposed to statutory) right, but even if that was the intention, I think that's a reasonable position to take and argue for, even if others disagree.

One standard proposed at HN from time to time is that maybe websites with high revenue should be required to conform with a specific standard such as W3C's WCAG 2.1 AA.

But it's an open question and I don't know if lawmakers are even aware of WCAG, that would be nice.

I happen to feel this keenly since I'm in the process of dropping a client who insists of putting damage transfer in our consulting colaboration, in an industry vulnerable to GDPR fines. There is no hourly rate that can make me risk bankrupcy for a bug.