9th Circuit rules Netflix isn’t subject to disability law

So the 9th Circuit Court threw out an ADA suit against Netflix for a lack of captions. To Joe Mullin of Ars it seemed like a question of whether a website constitutes a “public accommodation”, but I don’t know that it does in this instance. I did agree with NFB v. Target, but this seems different.

I don’t think Netflix should have to provide captions for all content on its service. The onus for captioning should be on the content creator and not the delivery service. In other words, if Netflix has an accessible site and captions their own original content, that should be the most anyone could ask of them. They don’t own the majority of their content and could even be legally precluded from captioning it depending on the contract.

As much as I want to see more captioned content made available, I think the ruling makes sense. The case doesn’t seem to be appropriately grounded nor does the ask seem reasonable.