A statement on online course content and accessibility
news.berkeley.edu
news.berkeley.edu
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798
In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong.
What I see is:
- Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity
- Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population
(The $Y is extra costs to close-caption, transcribe to braille, etc.)
That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you must spend that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me.
E.g. The school budget has finite money. Let's say It can release 15 free courses by spending just $X but to avoid a lawsuits, it can only release 10 courses by spending $X+$Y ... or release none at all because it's not worth the legal minefield. Why is the 2nd scenario more optimized for humanity?
Sure, we should encourage the universal accessibility of the video courses but to formalize it into the nastiness of lawsuits? It doesn't seem right.
If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system, and this is especially bad when it applies to learning — which disabled people can benefit disproportionately from.
Using the legal system to achieve these ends appears to be the American Way so I won't comment on that.
It's highly unlikely that the complainants went directly to the Civil Rights Division without talking to Berkeley first, that's not how these things go. Frankly, it's preferable for the DoJ to be involved because a problem in this area is a lack of specific regulation and guidance to schools on how exactly to interpret the strong but vague language of the law. If the University just quietly works it out with individuals or a group, that's going to be a lot less helpful to making all educational institutions more accessible.
Reality is a multi-class system. It's always and everywhere going to be more difficult to get things done when one lacks a capacity which most people have (e.g. sight, hearing or mobility); it's always and everywhere going to be easier to get things done when one possesses a capacity which most people lack (e.g. intelligence, strength or wealthy parents).
Measures which aim to level the playing field really can't raise those who lack up: all they can do is lower those who have. But that leaves us all poorer in the end, because those who could have achieved did not.
Harrison Bergeron was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
Because, despite your "I'm alright Jack" attitude, it generally turns out that society is a better place for everybody when inequality is at its lowest and when you try to ameliorate the worst effects of survival of the fittest.
Nothing about mandating extra help to those who need it restricts the abilities of those who don't. You can still take the stairs, it'll be OK.
An analogy appropriate to this site is a free app that does an adequate, but not great job for a given need, that prevents others from creating (or maintaining) a polished app for money. That is, we might get 80% of a great app with the last 20%, the hard part, never being achieved. It is what it is in a free market, but the government has a bit of a mandate to try to take the larger perspective and create pathways to cover that last 20%, at least in the case of accessibility.
Having said that, I feel a better approach would be to provide grants or services to support making such content accessible. There is something odd about having to tell people that not only do they need to be an expert in a subject but also in how to convey that in a way that is useful and good to the people who are blind, deaf, or manually impaired.
By this I mean, for example, why is it clear that a simple transcript on a video is suitable? Surely it would be better to design courses to take advantage of the abilities of those using it and compensating for the lack of certain abilities. It is not clear to me that simply captioning a video is the best outcome for providing materials to deaf people. It would be far better to encourage and fund people expert in teaching deaf people or blind people to create materials directly, perhaps based on these other free materials.
As a creator of an online math course, one in which heavy use is made of graphs, it is not clear to me how I could even begin teaching graphing to blind people. I simply do not have the knowledge or experience to do so.
"Faculty developing UC BerkeleyX courses can, but are not required to, develop courses in collaboration with the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). BRCOE follows best practices in design for accessibility and also has a quality assurance process that includes deploying various accessibility evaluators; remediating layout, page structure, downloadable or styling accessibility barriers; and obtaining transcripts of all audio and video files associated with a course."
They follow that with a checklist which all faculty which opted out of using those resources since July 2015 was required to sign.
To me, this looks like a system which is trying to comply, but the people within the system have failed to take the requirements seriously.
The actual letter from the Department of Justice (linked at the bottom of Berkeley's response) goes into more detail. The DoJ is not demanding current materials be removed, nor are they expecting changes to happen overnight. But the ADA isn't new, nor is its mandate that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity," nor are the web standards for ensuring that content is accessible.
Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" or certain private parties trying to take grievances to the court system for a pay day. Individuals brought a complaint to the DoJ, and now it's doing its job by investigating.
Berkeley and other public institutions have been complying with the ADA since it was passed in 1990. Compliance tends to be expensive and unintuitive - that's the entire point! Applying the ADA to online course content really shouldn't be much more of a burden than it already was to comply with it in other respects.
Sure, that seems justifiable for commercial businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking free donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted.
If UC Berkeley used the viewing of those videos as a mandatory requirement to qualify for admissions into the school or required viewing for the students to pass a class, then I think most of us could see the fairness of forcing them to caption it -- regardless of costs.
However, the goodwill act of making them free for humanity's knowledge-seeking causes the DOJ to threaten lawsuit? That does not seem right.
>Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit"
In the last page of the cited PDF, the DOJ explicitly writes "lawsuit":
>"In the event that we are unable to reach such a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA"
That this particular DOJ letter is one or a few steps removed from a "formal lawsuit" doesn't detract from my overall point. The DOJ threatening a lawsuit is the tool of choice we're using instead of other options ... such as raising a crowdsourced fund to pay for captioning or recruiting volunteers to transcribe them into braille.
If there is an effort of goodwill to make something available, I think society should pay that back with reciprocal goodwill in finding a way to make the material accessible to the disabled.
The donation and the litigation response to that donation is asymmetrical. It gives the ADA bad press.
The metaphor I had in mind was restaurants that make too much food, and (sometimes; some restaurants) they donate it to foodshelves (when appropriate) or sometimes just to some homeless guys who happen to be nearby. The extra food is an externality of their real purpose as a business, which is to take money in exchange for feeding people. They could throw the food away, but instead they're doing something nice with it. Almost nobody would say they should throw the food away because the homeless guys who happen to be the recipients of their largesse are benefiting, while other, further-away homeless guys are not. Such an argument would be idiotic.
In just this way these videos and course materials are an externality of the 'real' business of Berkeley, which is educating the people who are admitted to Berkeley and enrolled in the classes. Berkeley, and others like them, are going above and beyond to be nice to the rest of humanity, to our great collective benefit. This ADA thing is just a kick in the face, and it pisses me off.
Just because you're making a gift doesn't mean the law doesn't apply to you.
Your second statement is irrelevant, we are not talking about what the law does, but what the law should do. And I absolutely think that gifts (and good samaritan acts in general) should be held to a much lower standard than commercial enterprises.
This is not at all unprecedented in US law (or in many places in the world), every state has some form of good samaritan law[1], which protects (to some extent) individuals who act in good faith to aid strangers in need of immediate medical assistance. There is also a federal law indemnifying donors of properly labeled foods, except in the case of gross negligence or intentional misconduct.
These laws are important, because donations result in no benefit for the bearer, so making them cost money is a significant deterrence to charity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_Stat...
My second statement is disagreeing with yours. The law does and should absolutely hold organisational gifts to the same standard as commercial transactions. Not least because otherwise you create a massive loophole ripe for exploitation, at all levels.
"Hey, don't tax my import, it was a gift!".
"Hey, my formula milk shouldn't be subject to marketing laws, it's a gift to new [and ill-educated] mothers!"
"Hey, I shouldn't be subject to your weird license restrictions, my source code was a gift to the community!"
Now, sure, good samaritan laws are important things. But so is equality legislation, and disability rights legislation, and much of the other legislation that defines the standards society expects of its participants.
I mean, if you want to impose costs (check carefully food, possibility of lawsuit) on a donation, what you get, predictably, is less donations.
It seems to be the case that you have an assymetrical view of harm: harm by not giving food is always acceptable, harm by giving food, usually unacceptable. Why would it be the case?
This is already happening. UK supermarkets used to lock their bins to stop people stealing waste food because they were concerned they'd be liable for health violations. There were public protests, so they raised their games and began properly managed waste-food donation programmes.
It's asymmetrical because it's bigger than the one donation you have before you. When you look at the big picture, you have to say sometimes "this thing isn't good enough. Even though it might hurt society in the short term to refuse it, it will hurt it more in the long-term to accept it. So we refuse."
I dispute labeling this program as a "donation". It's an official program run by a quasi-governmental institution that is supported by taxpayer dollars. Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of this content that's ostensibly provided for the public benefit.
It's a release of course videos that they don't charge for. Making free videos available for the public certainly isn't going to help UC Berkeley's $150 million budget deficit.[1] It's not going to make anybody rich. If any university wants to provide free videos to the public with no strings attached, I consider that a generous gesture on their part. I want us (society) to be generous in return. Therefore, lawsuits are the wrong tool for captioning videos for the disabled audience. (Oh btw, I know your school is losing money and may lay off some employees but about those free videos ... yeah we're suing you for that!)
>Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of this content that's ostensibly provided for the public benefit.
There seems to be a "accommodate-ADA-no-matter-what" principle that's present in many comments. We are not that inflexible. Disabled people may pay Federal taxes but we did not install multi-million chairlifts on Yosemite Half Dome (a Federal Park) so wheelchair bound people can experience the summit. The Yosemite Park entrance pass is $15 per car and we didn't all agree to make it $200 per car so that we can subsidize helicopters to take all disabled people to the summit for those who can't climb it on their own power. Yes, we do have wheelchair lifts for the buses running on the valley floor but we didn't make everything equal for all disabled tourists.
If a business has 14 employees or less, we also don't make them comply with ADA access. That exclusion is written into the ADA law.
The point is that there are are tradeoffs, limits, exceptions, and compromise to make ADA work. If a "14-employee threshold" seems like a reasonable exemption from ADA, let's make "freedom of spreading knowledge" another reasonable exemption. Don't punish institutions for providing free knowledge. Let's not disincentivize other institutions from releasing free videos just because they didn't cross every 't' and dot every 'i' to comply with ADA. Let's find another way to add captions and braille without the lawsuits.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=uc+berkeley+operating+defici...
This rings true in my mind; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users. And training and employing work-study students to audit and improve the accessibility of the content seems like a low-cost approach that could bring them substantially into compliance. Rather than allowing untrained faculty to self-certify accessibility compliance of their self-maintained content with a checkbox, which is allowed today.
"Freedom of spreading knowledge" certainly doesn't make for a valid set of exceptions. By that logic, as a knowledge-spreading institution, Berkeley wouldn't need to build wheelchair ramps and elevators on its physical campus. I assume you'd agree that that's a settled question.
In some ways and in some cases, online education is already a reasonable substitute for in-classroom education. It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations to what we've already deemed just in the physical world.
It wasn't meant as a perfect cost-for-cost comparison. It was to diffuse the absolutist tone of "make them all comply with ADA in all situations and show them no mercy".
People seemed to think the ADA applies everywhere. It does not. We already make many exceptions to the ADA so the other commenters being being absolutist about it with no wiggle room for free videos that benefit us seems disingenuous of how society actually implements the ADA with exemptions.
>; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users.
No, it isn't obvious to you because you're using the wrong framework. It is a "fundamentally altered experience" for non-disabled because the lawsuit intimidation tactics from DOJ and deaf organizations can cause to the courses to not be available at all. You're only thinking about how the encoding of the captions in the bytestream of the video file doesn't affect non-disabled users. That is true but that's not the only way to alter the experience. If other universities now choose to keep their class videos locked away in a vault because of the lawsuits against UCB, Harvard, MIT, that is a fundamentally altered experience for the rest of humanity!
>It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations
We should push, encourage, volunteer, crowdsource, raise awareness, ask for grants, solicit donations from billionaires like UC Berkely alum Eric Schmidt, contribute to open source speech-recognition software to auto transcribe with 99.99% accuracy, etc. We can do a lot of things. I'd just rather for society not to threaten everybody with lawsuits. The hostility towards free videos not having captions is baffling. Yes, it's an undesirable situation and we need to improve it but the hostility is just weird. Good quality captions (especially for college courses with heavy jargon) takes time and costs money. It's not an automatic and trivial process. I saw some Stanford courses for Apple iOS programming on Youtube[2] and the captions are often wrong because Google uses automated software. The deaf audience deserves better than that. It would be wrong for those videos to be deleted because the captioning was inadequate.
If a career coach offers to donate 2 hours of free time at the local library to talk to unemployed job seekers on how to train for new skills or polish their resumes, I think it's wrong to threaten him with a lawsuit if he doesn't pay $200[1] for a sign-language interpreter to accompany him. Yes, of course the deaf deserve to participate in such a free workshop but to threaten with a lawsuit seems incredibly mean-spirited. Let's find another way to provide a sign-language interpreter. If we exhaust all options in an attempt to accommodate deaf access (e.g. library doesn't have budget to pay $200, no volunteer sign-language interpreter is available, etc) then we should at least let the class continue. There is no need to punish the coach† or the non-disabled job seekers‡ by cancelling the class because the disabled didn't have access. Sharing knowledge should take precedence.
[1]http://smallbusiness.costhelper.com/interpreters.html
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lRx1zoriPo&feature=youtu.be...
(Click "CC" to turn on captioning)
caption text: "it means that instead of _our_ here it wants us to put let"
correct text: "it means that instead of _var_ here it wants us to put let"
That is a serious transcription error because "var" is a reserved keyword Apple Swift programming language.
------------
† (e.g. hey coach, you must pay for the interpreter for the deaf and if you don't, fuck off with your free seminar)
‡ (e.g. if the deaf can't take advantage of the class, the rest of you can't either)
UC Berk is a public institution, using public funds to create these resources. This is not a free charitable creation from a private person, to which people respond "well, you should give us MORE or we'll SUE!"
No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public. Public buildings, public libraries, public transportation, etc. are all subject to the ADA; I see no reason why this particular public resource should be an exception.
I thought about this, and I'm actually not sure what to think. As UCB made clear that the alternative would be to take those resources down, making it completely unavailable to the public. Do we just consider this an acceptable collateral damage from the ADA?
UCB has another alternative, use those public funds they take to make the course material accessible. They don't want to do that because that takes money away from them. Taking down the material is not the only alternative, it's just the only alternative they're willing to take because it's cheap.
It takes money away from the enrolled students that UCB is currently spending money on.
http://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013-14%20UC%20B...
I understand your argument, but if you only have to say "I can't afford to support disabled people!" in order to not have to be in compliance with the ADA, then the ADA becomes meaningless.
The answer of "we can't afford it" is always about priorities. They could choose to spend money spent on other things to make this content accessible; it isn't like they are spending their entire school budget on this. It is ALWAYS going to be cheaper to NOT provide accessible content, so this argument could happen in every single instance. The resources spent making content accessible could always be spent on making more stuff for non-disabled access. However, as a society we have decided, no, it is unfair to choose not to spend those resources on accessibility,so we mandate it, because we know a pure utilitarian action will leave disabled people always getting the short end of the stick.
Yes, this means that non-disabled people will lose out on some stuff (and maybe this content is one of those things). That is a price we as a society have decided to pay, and I think it is a worthy one.
Think about it; the same goes for handicapped ramps and the like. If businesses didn't need to pay for those, they could use the money on other stuff. Prices would go down. So yes, we all have to pay a little more so everyone can enjoy the same access (or at least a certain level of access)
In the case of captioning the videos, the captioning costs several times more than putting up the videos in the first place. Probably on the order of 100x more. A lot of these lecture videos are just someone with a camera recording the lecture live, someone who would be there, watching the lecture, regardless. They do some trivial editing / splicing, and upload to YouTube. This is essentially free, other than having the professor/school sign off on them doing it.
Once the ADA gets involved, you now have to caption the video while watching, or after the fact, something you likely would not have done otherwise. You probably also have to submit it to some authority in the university now (don't want to get sued!), who will have to rewatch the video and verify the captions.
In the old system, it took you less than 5 minutes of inconvenience per lecture to upload them. In the new system, it takes you 2 x len(lecture) => 120 minutes or so, per lecture. This is a huge tax in relative terms.
Automatic caption creation is coming on in leaps, well beyond what YouTube is achieving already. The quality is startlingly good in some cases, certainly good enough to allow a (crowd-sourced) editing pass. The cost is nothing, nothing like 100x. Hell, the BBC has a project that will automatically translate content into other languages [0], and they have that publishing to a live site without editorial intervention.
If the will is there, these things are eminently possible. The ADA is trying to make sure the will is there.
It will be soon.
There's a lawyer, in the Bay Area, that has made his wad off ADA lawsuits. I guarantee, he is setting up shop as we speak.
I know this because my best friend (deceased) got caught up the ADA lawsuit game. He took a driving job. He drove around these two handicapped individuals. They drove through out the U.S.
He used to call me from the road, and say the strangest things. Like, it seems like they want to go to resturants/gas stations that don't have the required ADA construction. Then they slip, and fall? My job is to take pictures of them on the ground. He was naieve, and thought it was a "travesty", the way these horrid capitalists couldn't build the right way. Most of these owners had no idea they were breaking the law. These subsequent lawsuits shut down many small businesses. Although, this lawyer would settle out of court--much of the time.
He got home, and I told him he was being used by these guys, and that lawyer. He couldn't believe they would do such a thing.
It's almost the same as saying, they don't have to release free courses, which is also nonsensical to me.
It's not a bad thing and accomplishes much of what you speak of, but the ADA is pretty clearly the mechanism behind it, not people seeking good feels.
If you are trying to pitch something, something that is going to cost a business money, "the right thing" isn't the place to start. "It's the law" is the far easier pitch.
An ADA story: New startup has a funky cool HQ setup in some loft space. Their new HR/PR head, herself right out of university, advertises a communications position. Everyone reads resumes and eight candidates are selected for interview. They could have gone with Skype, but the founder wanted to see the candidates in person, to get a feel for whether they have the "cultural fit". Seven show up. They pick someone and move on. All seems well in startup land. A few months later the lawsuit appears. It turns out that #8 uses a wheelchair ... a wheelchair that required an elevator ... which their hip new HQ did not have and their hip new HR head didn't have the experience to anticipate. Now they are meeting with a not-hip lawyer at definitely not-cool law firm, but one with an elevator because every lawyer knows about the ADA.
But part of me does side with the guy. The startup wasn't wheelchair accessible. And they were small enough that making it accessible would have been very costly. Even if he had made it to the interview there was a good chance they might have passed him over because of his chair. That's the sort of discrimination that the ADA was meant to address. The startup should never have setup at that location.
Frankly, they had so many people crammed in that they were probably in violation of the fire code, another law that they don't teach you about at coding bootcamps.
- Scenario B: Spend $X * Y to make free content accessible to 100% of people.
- Scenario C: You wish to do A but are forced to do B via legislation. $X * Y is greater than your budget to make said content available $Z, so you don't make the content available. I know of more than one organization that has selected this option with free content and with some paid content (in which case $Z is the budget to create it based on the expected revenue) so this is not a theoretical scenario.
Now, Y can vary quite a bit depending on the content and depending on what you're trying to make it accessible to. In the case of making a transcript available, you may have to pay a transcriber. In the case of an app, you may need to buy a screen reader to test with. There are free ones, but they're often not as full featured as the popular one that most folks are using. So, you'll need to buy the $1,100 screen reader (JAWS with the non-Home license) to test against in addition to testing the free open source one. You may also need to pay someone to do more standardized testing with as well.
It's not an insignificant amount of money or work in many cases. I've run into it with PortableApps.com. I had to buy a newer version of our toolkit to be able to get it working with screen readers at all and rewrite multiple controls. I don't have JAWS yet to test against but I do test against NVDA.
There are ways to mitigate some of this. There are multiple groups that transcribe for free to help make content available accessibly. And if you make free open source software that's useful, you can probably find many impaired users willing to help you test as I have for PortableApps.com.
On a personal note, I very much believe in making everything I create accessible.
The Department of Justice seems to have received complaints mainly regarding absence of transcripts for audio or video content. Can't speech-to-text tech help?
Other complaints include poor formatting of pdf's. If the courses are indeed taken down, I can only hope that at least this starts a conversation about how to create smarter regulations -- regulations that cause less collateral damage.
I know it sucks for people with disabilities and Berkeley should invest into making it accessible to everyone, but it would be a loss for everyone if the consequence of this is that their courses become entirely unavailable :(.
[0] https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/20018602...
Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all.
IANAL, but I believe the ADA would be applicable for students of the college, not necessarily online content consumers viewing the college's courses.
Of course, the problem here is that you have to start playing expensive lawyer games to get that clarified -- and it might take years. So even if Berkeley has done nothing wrong, they still might end up having to pull the courses.
To be fair, the whole point of the ADA is to harm millions of people for the benefit of very few people.
Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?"
If you expect to accomplish that via a community effort to make tools for deaf people, you're likely right. But i bet we aren't that far away from "Hey alexa/siri/google, what are the top stories on hacker news right now?"
Sadly? I strongly disagree. If all my human-computer interaction would be like communicating with Siri/Google Now (e.g. conversational), I would have ditched computers years ago. It's all about giving semantic information to screenreaders so the user can eficiently navigate that content. In the rare case that I need some kind of human description, I just share my screen with someone that has working eyeballs.
FYI, I'm totally blind.
Well actually I would love html to be more to be like latex/markdown, I just thought, that if I recognize it as a list, it should be parsed by a screen reader as such too.
May I ask you which screen reader you use and at what speeds? (or do you use some braille screen?)
The carefully worded letter appears reasonable, except what purpose was conveyed other than forcing the universities to incur high litigation fees? Using ADA as a weapon to purge free sharing of collective intelligence is despicable. I understand universities have limited resources and priorities for their enrolled students, but they should retaliate out of principles.
The community can help with providing captions. Charing $1 fee. Routing the money to a charity. Anything is better than removing the content because that is the complaint's end goal.
Why UC Berkeley this time? I don't know, other than the complainants came to the DoJ about them, and not some other school.
The purpose of the letter is not to cost the University or to stop them making the materials available. The DoJ never suggests that, it's Berkeley that raised the idea on their own. The purpose is to explain how the University has been violating the law and what they can to correct it so ultimately what is offered can also be used by people with disabilities.
If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about.
FYI, Harvard and MIT were received with the same letters few months ago. It was on the New York Times, but I could still be wrong since I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Do any of these courses or the means through which they are made available advertise paid options, paid alternatives, or other paid courses?
If both of those are 'no' then this is disgraceful. If either is 'yes' then it is completely justified.
http://www.wendel.com/knowledge-center/publications/older/no...
It's not very expensive to do the basics of adding transcripts (for the deaf) and verbal descriptions of diagrams (for the blind). The reason the university didn't just do it seemed to combine departmental politics with ambivalence about undercutting their main product (in-person education) with a free online version in the first place.
From the DOJ letter:
> 1. Some videos did not have captions.
> 2a. many videos did not provide an alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations, or urls on slides)
> 2b. videos containing text sometimes had poor color contrast, which made the text unreadable for those with low vision
> 3. Many documents were inaccessible ... [HTML and PDF stuff]
> 4. Some links were not keyboard accessible
> 5. Websites and materials that were integrated into the course material were not fully accessible
Before we jump to debating the ADA, let's see if there's a sensible solution!
2b, 3, 4 should be fixed at the CMS level.
5 Can't you blame those website creators?
No. University of California, Berkeley is a part of the University of California system, not a private company.
For more information: - UC Policy: http://www.ucop.edu/electronic-accessibility/initiative/poli... - CSU Policy: http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/
While there are discussions to be had about how to move forward; I would hope the end result would be continuing to offer the free courses, while solving the accessibility problems, perhaps with the help of the communities they serve. I would be happy to contribute transcription and captioning to the courses that I take online; I transcribe and caption all of my videos on YouTube, religiously. It's not that big of a time cost, and I take notes when I'm taking a class, anyway.
I hope this will be viewed as an opportunity to (not necessarily in this order):
1. Improve accessibility tooling for these courses, particularly captioning videos.
2. Improve awareness of accessibility guidelines for websites and online materials.
3. Make all of these fantastic learning resources available to people with disabilities.
Yes, certainly, content should be made accessibly available. Yes, certainly, Berkeley's responsibility is to its enrolled students.
But removing content from public access serves neither of those needs. It doesn't help the blind, deaf or otherwise handicapped; it doesn't help tuition-paying students.
It makes everyone equal, in the same sense that an eye for an eye makes everyone equal.
In most cases, it is probably simply a lack of awareness on the part of the people making the material available. The difficult part is educating the faculty and staff of the University about the legal requirements they must meet and the resources available to them to make compliance easier, and, perhaps more importantly, an integral part of the process.
I don't know what kind of tools UCB could make available on their videos...but, the technology exists to community source the video captioning.
Or rather:
1. What would be the cost to transcribe a one hour video?
Does the transcriber need any knowledge apart from English? (and presumably a one week course so that when the teacher points at something, it goes into the transcription)
2. What would be the cost to take an unformatted text, and format it in accord to guidelines?
3. What would be the cost to make a one-page website accessible? What kind of change does it entail?
4. In the matter of 'poor contrast', would a color transformation applied to the video be enough to comply (to the letter of the law)? Would it be enough to make it accessible (i.e.: comply to the spirit of the law)? AFAIK, the requirement that "[no] chart or graph [should] differentiate information only by color" seems to make sure that at least some manual video editing is necessary.
5. Is it the case that, in any part of the process, the transcriber/developer/editor/worker involved needs (by law) a certain qualification, or can anyone (in principle) do the work?
6. Are there any other measures necessary?
1. Do you disagree?
2. How many courses does UCB make available to the public for free? (on edX, this number seems to be around 50)
It would need some kind of percent complete count, or something, along with maybe a rating system where visitors who need those captions can report poor or confusing transcription.
Braille is harder; but, I would think most courses already have written course notes and materials, which can be read by screen readers. I'm not sure what to make of the mention of braille, here, actually. Are they expecting UCB to send out printed materials? That doesn't make sense, and goes beyond what websites are required to do by the ADA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_R...
Once they've completed that process, it usually has the side benefit of making those specific materials accessible to all future students with similar needs. The whole process is also getting better over time, especially for textbooks and similar material. However, video and audio are especially problematic areas when they are produced by individuals who don't understand (or aren't aware of) these requirements. If you just setup a camera and/or microphone to capture a lecture, public release and captioning may not be on your mind at the time.
This seems to work very well, but is ad-hoc and wouldn't be suitable for a massive online course.