I really pity this poor fool - if this is how they define their lives and their accomplishments then they live a very shallow existence. From The Weekly Standard:
Berkeley Goes Offline
A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist named Stacy Nowak went to take a look at a college course offered online by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called "Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to UC Berkeley; she teaches art at Gallaudet University. But she was displeased with the quality of the closed captioning the university provided on the course's video.
Nowak, who declined to be interviewed for this article, got hold of the National Association of the Deaf, which she's a member of. In doing so she set in motion a train of events that will come to a head on March 15. Already famous for other reasons, the Ides of March will likely stand as a signal day in the development of modern liberalism, or progressivism, as we are supposed to call it. That's when one bastion of left-wingery, UC Berkeley, will give in to the demands of another, the disability-rights movement, to deprive the rest of us of a uniquely wonderful resource of modern technology. It's not as complicated as it sounds.
Since 2012, UC Berkeley (among many other schools) has offered video and audio recordings of many of its courses to the general public, via YouTube and iTunes U. The Seussian acronym is MOOCs, for massive open online courses. Over the years Berkeley's catalogue of MOOCs has grown to more than 40,000 hours of high-end pedagogy. There are introductory courses in economics, European history, statistics, physics, geography, and pretty much everything else. More advanced courses range from "Scientific Approaches to Consciousness" and "Game Theory" to "The Planets" and "Philosophy of Language," this last taught by John Searle, the country's, and maybe the world's, greatest living philosopher. Not all of the content will be to everyone's taste, of course, and I'm sure there's something to annoy anyone sooner or later. Professor Michael Nagler's simpering "Intro to Nonviolence" makes me want to punch something. I probably wouldn't like "Journalism for Social Change," either.
A bit more:
After Nowak notified the National Association of the Deaf of her frustration with Berkeley's MOOCs, NAD went straight to the white-hot center of the American grievance industry, the federal government's Department of Justice. The organization filed a complaint with DoJ on behalf of Nowak and a Gallaudet colleague as "aggrieved individuals." The government lawyers got to work.
UC Berkeley, needless to say, is deeply involved in the disability rights movement and has gone to great lengths to keep it satisfied. Its Division of Equity and Inclusion boasts a Disabled Students Program that offers a long list of services to accommodate disabled students, including Disability Management Counseling and disability-specific problem-solving groups. The school adheres to an accessibility policy that issues Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that are enforced by the Web Accessibility Services team. There's even a minor in disability studies.
None of this impressed the Justice Department or the aggrieved individuals or the activist organization of which they are a part. Note that the accommodations listed above are for students and faculty only. But Berkeley opened its MOOCs to the general public. Among the videos, the intrepid DoJ investigators discovered some without captions, thus discriminating against members of the general public who are deaf. Some "contain[ed] text [that] had poor color contrast," thus discriminating against Americans with visual impairments. Others contained graphs and charts in which "information was sometimes conveyed using one color alone," thus discriminating against the color-blind.
So they are pulling all the classes. What a pathetic little bint and what a classic example of all that is wrong with the progressive movement today. There is actually quite the cottage industry filing ADA Lawsuits (here, here, here and here).
I get it. I really really get it. Being disabled sucks and there are many unintentional barriers to your living a full life. That being said, this should be a personal one-on-one matter and not something that is litigated. And also, there are things I cannot do and I do not consider myself to be disabled. Do I sue? No - that is for wusses who do not have a life. Grow a pair - bionic if you want.
