The person could have volunteered to write the subtitles themselves or, if they were deaf, to hire someone or even ask someone to volunteer to write subtitles. Or any other number of solutions.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
Why is the onus on the person with the disability to fix the lack of accommodation for the disability? A lawsuit is their remedy. Berkeley chose the laziest form of compliance rather than attempting to do the right thing.
Why should they do any of that when Berkeley was in clear violation of the law, and easily demonstrated to be at fault?
As I said - if this is such an obvious wrong, fix the damn law. As it is written, Berkeley didn't have a leg to stand on.