In the specific case of Berkeley, campus officials estimated that it would have cost a few extra hundred thousand dollars in order to put in the infrastructure

In the specific case of Berkeley, campus officials estimated that it would have cost a few extra hundred thousand dollars in order to put in the infrastructure to caption all of the videos that they made public. Given that the return for the University on making these videos public isn't really clear - and could be very low - it's hard to justify that investment, especially in Berkeley's present financial situation. For context, we have an enormous budget deficit, state funding is not keeping up with rising costs, and the UCs in general had their first budget deficit ever this year. It's worth mentioning that captioning services are provided for students with disabilities, but that infrastructure simply isn't a part of what was made public, and is only provided in those classes that have students with disabilities in them. It's one thing for them to provide public access to exactly the same portal that students used to access the webcasts that are being made anyway, but an entirely different one to also a). Run the risk of expensive lawsuits on the university's dime, and also b). ensure that those videos are up to federal accessibility standards. Edit: wording and fixing dictation errors.