UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public

I imagine the reasoning is that if you allow the university to deprioritize the needs of the disabled on the basis of "Well, something is better than nothing", then it incentivizes the production of such content because of the lower costs, and results in more disenfranchisement of the disabled.

I have to object to your reducing the situation to "because someone complained that their personal circumstances", as if it were just one person who is potentially disenfranchised by the situation. Just because one person's name is on a legal complaint doesn't mean that the law impacts that one and only person.

The ADA does not generally apply to individuals.

> from here on out

From 1990, which is when the law was introduced. We should have been doing this for nearly thirty years now.

Huh? I do not follow

It's a public university. They could pay a grateful student a federally-subsidized wage to transcribe 5 hours of video per week, and have it count toward the University's community service quota.

No, both of your figures are wrong. I actually worked in UC Berkeley lecture recording and captioning, and the figures are on the order of magnitude of $10/hour for each. The problem lies in the massive backlog of older courses that would need to be captioned for only a few non-students per course.

To use a hyperbolic example: you can see that "Free meals (NO GAYS)" would be discriminatory.

>The ADA’s nondiscrimination mandate states 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

The "or be subjected to discrimination" is possibly what they're getting at.

Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished.

Reminds me of this Louis CK bit: https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s

"How does the world owe you something you didn't even know existed 30 seconds ago?"

"Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."

So it seems like they need to be quite accurate.

Have you ever tried transcribing a video in a level of detail such that someone who can't see the video has a full understanding of what's going on? Give it a shot and report back to us.

Source: I've actually transcribed instructional videos for disabled students.

Update: Google suggests budgeting 4-9 hours of transcription time per hour, which is closer to my experience.

You might get by with 4 hours if it was just someone talking (with no slides, etc.). If the person performing an activity (say, a lab course) 9 is going to be a lot nearer the mark.

Remember, this has to be done so that both deaf and blind students can use the material.

Suppose it costs $100 to make a video accessible for those with hearing impairments. Furthermore, suppose this video is really important - the university is willing to spend up to $20,000 on making it, but fortunately only has to spend $15,000. Without being a dick about "deaf accessible or you can't publish", the university would get $5000 of producer surplus and the hearing impaired lose out. With this rule, the university gets $4900 worth of producer surplus, and the hearing impaired can actually watch this very important video.

It's really easy to forget about the cases that aren't getting fought over but are still subject to the rule. If you've got an idea for a better rule that lets Berkeley publish these videos, but still keeps universities from pretending that they can't afford to make videos accessible when they actually can, I'm all ears.

The non-obvious thing is that this compliance-by-force is non-local. If you only look at Berkeley's videos, you're giving up these videos pointlessly. You have to also look at the videos that are going to be published anyways, and whether they'd include access for the deaf if people weren't dicks about enforcement.

If you insist on looking at this incident in isolation, yes. But if you look at it like that, there's no reason to imprison murderers, because it won't bring the victim back to life.

If there were no requirement, very few things would be accessible. As a minority, the deaf will always be irrelevant to the majorities' utility calculus.

This is, uhh, kind of false. In liberal democracies like the US, we have some extraordinarily protections for the needs of the few at the expense of the many. For example, we've ruled as unconstitutional anti-miscegenation laws. The founding fathers were explicitly worried about the tyranny of the majority, too.

The cochlear implant issue itself is a rather complex and interesting one. Most hearing people are immediately outraged when they learn that some deaf people want to prevent their children from hearing, but I think this is a knee-jerk reaction that stems mostly from ignorance of Deaf culture[1] and its value in the Deaf community.

There's a great documentary called Sound and Fury[2] that explores this issue by interviewing deaf and hearing families as they struggled to decide whether to have implant surgery performed on their children. I strongly encourage everyone to watch this documentary before making up their minds on this issue.

Also, talking to some Deaf people, getting some exposure to and knowledge of Deaf culture, learning about the long and ugly history of discrimination and paternalistic interventions by hearing people against deaf people, and the struggle of deaf people for self-determination would probably be a good idea too.

With this knowledge I think it becomes difficult to dismiss the issue as ridiculous or say that there's any easy, obvious answer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_and_Fury_%28film%29

Furthermore, I can't imagine any public university administrators wants to get questioned by legislators about why they're outsourcing work nowadays. Nor do I think the administrators want to admit that they're paying (by first world standards) sweatshop wages.