4 ms·

How exactly are they perpetrating an unjust or prejudicial treatment of the differently abled on the basis of them being differently abled?

DanBC 10y ago
They have chosen to not make the material accessible to deaf people, even though laws around closed captioning equipment started coming in 25 years ago (more recent changes include Internet streaming), and even though the ADA is 25 years old. There's no excuse to not know about it. They knew about it (because they provide reasonable adjustments to very many students all the time, and they have departments to do so), but they chose to ignore it. It is clearly, unambiguously, discrimination. It might be legal (for the reasons I quoted around practicability), but that legality does not stop it being discriminatory.
- davidivadavid 10y ago
  It seems like what you're saying in your first paragraph supports the idea that what they're doing is wrong because it's illegal. But then you do a 180 and say it's wrong because it's immoral. Obviously, it could be both, but even if the first argument is kind of a "duh" it seems more cogent than going back and forth between those two positions (as many people seem to do in the thread).
  - DanBC 10y ago
    I'm not good at communicating. Society decided it was immoral to discriminate against people with disabilities. We tried asking nicely, and got ignored, and so we passed laws to drive change. Those laws were made some time ago, and while it takes time for change to happen we've had long enough for people to bring things into compliance with those laws. This is especially true for large well funded organisations producing new material. There's not much excuse for a large well funded organisation, who is well aware of reasonable adjustments, to not make new material accessible. Arguments against making material accessible are "it's too hard" or "it's too expensive". That's covered by the law (I included reference to it in my post). But the fact that we still don't have useful speech-to-text or good transcription shows the contempt much of the tech industry has for people with disabilities. See also the choice to exclude people by choosing pale grey text on a bright white background. (Note that this doesn't just exclude people with disability levels of eyesight loss, but also people with mild visual loss).

DanBC 10y ago

They have chosen to not make the material accessible to deaf people, even though laws around closed captioning equipment started coming in 25 years ago (more recent changes include Internet streaming), and even though the ADA is 25 years old. There's no excuse to not know about it. They knew about it (because they provide reasonable adjustments to very many students all the time, and they have departments to do so), but they chose to ignore it. It is clearly, unambiguously, discrimination. It might be legal (for the reasons I quoted around practicability), but that legality does not stop it being discriminatory.

davidivadavid 10y ago
It seems like what you're saying in your first paragraph supports the idea that what they're doing is wrong because it's illegal. But then you do a 180 and say it's wrong because it's immoral. Obviously, it could be both, but even if the first argument is kind of a "duh" it seems more cogent than going back and forth between those two positions (as many people seem to do in the thread).
- DanBC 10y ago
  I'm not good at communicating. Society decided it was immoral to discriminate against people with disabilities. We tried asking nicely, and got ignored, and so we passed laws to drive change. Those laws were made some time ago, and while it takes time for change to happen we've had long enough for people to bring things into compliance with those laws. This is especially true for large well funded organisations producing new material. There's not much excuse for a large well funded organisation, who is well aware of reasonable adjustments, to not make new material accessible. Arguments against making material accessible are "it's too hard" or "it's too expensive". That's covered by the law (I included reference to it in my post). But the fact that we still don't have useful speech-to-text or good transcription shows the contempt much of the tech industry has for people with disabilities. See also the choice to exclude people by choosing pale grey text on a bright white background. (Note that this doesn't just exclude people with disability levels of eyesight loss, but also people with mild visual loss).