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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

According to the post this was caused by a letter from Department of Justice (pdf link from the post: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...), which states that two representatives from National Association of the Deaf brought a complaint: the videos did not have captions so they the complainants could not use them in their classes.

I don't understand their motivation, did they think Berkeley would spend the money to generate captions? How is the current situation a win for anyone, now nobody can use the videos.

EDIT: Ugh, they even have this in remedial measures: "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."

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At Stanford, we have similar requirements to caption any video publicly available. This meant that some professors simply stopped posting the videos publicly.

I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.

That's interesting, Stanford's not a "public entity" and would seemingly not be beholden to these regulations (which I'm assuming is different than the law requiring handicap-accessible facilities by private entities).

Most of these laws apply to anyone taking federal money and quite a few apply to private entities.

INdeed, Netflix was sued in 2010 by the National Association of the Deaf, under provisions of the ADA, for not having captions on all their videos.

Also, the Target case which probably is a good reminder for web developers https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/target-case-study

What if I'm both deaf and blind? Should Netflix have to cater to me through some kind of touch system?

If I'm blind and I go to an art gallery should there be an audio track to somehow explain what I'm not seeing?

What about a play? Are plays specifically exempted or is it just that nobody has bothered to sue a theatre for a lack of subtitling just yet?

What if I go to a fancy restaurant but have no sense of taste or smell? How will that restaurant compensate me for the experience I'm missing out on?

You're mixing up equal access to educational materials with an equal sensory experience. Giving sighted and hearing people access to educational materials that the blind or deaf can't access is discrimination.

The ADA also covers things like plays (classified as "entertainment"), and plays like Hamilton were sued for not providing audio descriptions of what is happening on stage. Movie theaters have to provide the same service to blind users and this also applies to Netflix movies and shows.

Restaurants probably wouldn't fall into the entertainment category, so they're not covered by the ADA.

For the "deaf and blind" scenario, most litigation is held off by the provision that says the establishment doesn't need to provide an accessible experience if providing such experience would be "unduly burdensome". For example, a blind and deaf man sued Cinemark for not providing tactile ASL interpreters for him (he communicates using sign language and by touching the hands of someone signing to him). The theater said it costs $60 per hour for an interpreter and a movie would require 2 interpreters, so $120 per hour is a bit nuts.

But audio descriptions and subtitles are not considered unduly burdensome - they're not that difficult and are basically seen as a requirement at this point.

> Giving sighted and hearing people access to educational materials that the blind or deaf can't access is discrimination.

Doesn't that mean that libraries must remove books that are not also available in braille?

Well, for blind users, an audio book would suffice. For blind + deaf, braille would be the only option, and if a library couldn't provide that option, there would need to be a resolution.

In most cases, the resolution is to provide the material in the format required to the user. This is usually a trivial matter as books can be ordered in braille fairly easily.

The university decided that making their content available to all users was too difficult, so their resolution is to make it available to no one. A library could do the same and that resolution would be legal. It's just stupid. Which is why people are saying what the university is doing is stupid.

Voice recognition is astoundingly fantastic even on poor hardware. If you want to see the state of the art try dictating a few lines here - https://speechnotes.co/ no registration required, no training required, use any microphone you want.

I was absolutely astounded when I found out the state of the art today. I was used to, "Computer, how do you wreck a nice beach" from a couple of decades ago.

Why can't a place like Stanford auto-caption things? Especially things like lectures which are super easy - a single speaker droning on in a silent room using high-quality speakers. without any editing the output should be absolutely useable.

The only time it really wouldn't work at all is in a very noisy environment where you can hardly understand it anyway.

I realize some of the captions might end up garbage, but I don't think enough would to make it into a complaint.

Your link uses Google APIs, nothing local, so it would be weird if Youtube (which apparently isn't good enough) used a worse version of those. But who knows...

How did you find my link? (I mean, what did you think of it, assuming you tried it).

By the way, I find Google's autogenerated CC is useless on any video no matter the type or audio quality. (For example a lecture.) Another reason to think the link uses something else is that it takes several seconds (during pauses) to come up with the result - it is slower than real-time. I don't know if Google takes the time to slowly process every video in case someone clicks the autogenerated CC... The quality definitely strikes me as different. (And one of the reasons I was so surprised that the above link is actually useable.)

speechmatics.com

It would be one thing if students were required to watch the videos as a primary source of instruction in their courses. But blocking the videos from the public seems like a severe overreaction.

In my opinion close-captioning the courses wouldn't be enough. A lot of people, including myself, lack the requisite education to appreciate these courses, or to benefit from them. It's extraordinarily frustrating that they exist, and that tens of thousands people can benefit from them, but I can't.

If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.

Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now. I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint?

I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.

I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.

The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI

[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...

The Department seemed to be aware of it though.

   The Department found that [...] many had automatic captioning
   generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology. In March 2015, the Department
   selected 30 videos. [..] for review. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the
   content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.

"Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete"

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?"

The same way it owes people with disabilities the best parking spaces, loading zones, ramps, automatic doors, accessible restrooms, elevators, places to put wheelchairs on buses and subways, TTY phone numbers for essential services, the right to bring service dogs where pets are not allowed, etc.

Mandatory disability accommodation is a huge part of our society. There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).

> There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).

And yet, here we are, with a building build after the ADA, that is noncompliant. It's too expensive to make it compliant, so the only legal option is to tear it down.

While I understand the strive for equality, the destruction of information is a price that should not have to be paid in today's world.

The question is why would you build a non-compliant building after the ADA, and what is a regulation if it's not enforced?

Right. What was going through the head of the producers of those 20,000 videos, flouting the regulations for all that time.

Apparently Berkeley doesn't owe us free lectures. It's definitely a crappy resolution to the issue though.

Is this inevitably going to lead to fewer free online lectures, as public institutions will now be unable to release the videos for free without including the closed captioning? How frustrating, particularly in light of the fact that at least a portion of the Deaf community chooses to remain so.

EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.

This is not the first time deaf people have used the ADA to take down free educational materials, and it won't be the last. This is the same reason Stanford's cs231n was taken down as well. Luckily it was downloaded and re-posted by many people so it's still available, but future courses won't be.

It's not about the videos, it's about sending a message. Specifically, that it's critically important to make sure that the deaf have the same access that everyone else does, even if it's expensive and inconvenient, because we as a society demand that level of fairness.

Now they have the same level of access: none.

Yeah, this is the bad case. But this sort of policy also has an effect on other situations:

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.

I have no idea if your cost assumptions make sense or not so I don't know whether they are pretending. Either way, I have a better idea: no rules.

They are releasing high quality content online for free to a large segment of the world's population. Just let them do it!

Here's another idea: The people who are so concerned about accessibility could join their efforts and provide a transcription. In multiple languages, by the way. We don't want to exclude anyone.

I guess the same argument could be made in regards to not providing accessibility accommodations to buildings: that there should be "no rules", and if a building is built without accessibility accommodations at least access to such building "is free to a large segment of the world's population. Just let them do it!"

It's pretty clear that such arguments lost with the passage of the ADA.

That's a completely different situation. The online classes are an "extra" in the sense that the university's core product are the classroom courses. They're simply being nice for releasing the videos.

Furthermore I have never heard of a building being closed until accessibility accommodations are built.

So where, exactly and precisely, is the line between "extra" and "normal"?

If you think about it critically for just a second you realize there is no line. Accessibility is an absolute in the United States.

If you disagree then I wish you the best of luck in your campaign to repeal the ADA.

Oh my, interventionists are so cliché. Passive-aggressive hyperbole and all.

Should they provide transcriptions to satisfy the transcription validation committee, I'm sure you'd be demanding the videos to be taken down because they are not also transcripted in Spanish or dubbed in French, or some other excuse that would prevent the majority of people to have access to the content (including those who could be interested in working on transcriptions instead of complaining online).

I appreciate this discussion because we need to realize the trade offs of strict fairness. In order to be fair, we have provided less good/utility for those that were benefiting unfairly from the service. We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service.

Yeah, it is a trade off. We're basically forcing content producers to subsidize access for the hearing impaired. This will make some content not worth publishing at the margin, while also forcing the clearly-worth-publishing things to provide access at their expense.

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.

I like the way you put it: the creators are required to subsidize the disabled.

Would it be better if this was approached from the other side? Creators could create without this concern. Disabled consumers would then pay for services that make specific creations accessible to them. The US government could then explicitly subsidize the disabled people.

> We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service.

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.

There's definitely reasons to imprison murderers: (1) to prevent them from murdering again, (2) to rehabilitate them so they do not murder again, (3) to give feelings of closure/justice to those that cared for the victim.

I think ThrustVectoring said it best in a post above yours: we're requiring creators to subsidize the disabled.

An alternative way to subsidize the disabled might be to give them some amount of money every year which they can use to buy transcription, parking, etc. services. This might result in only certain content being transcribed. This might result in less parking spaces that are continuously empty. Maybe that would be a better use of everyone's time. Maybe it would create unnecessary decision burden on disabled people.

The notion that prison rehabilitates has been widely discredited. Most of the time prison hardens criminals and makes them worse, with high recidivism rates being the rule rather than the exception.

Also, if your goal was to prevent murderers from murdering again, why would you ever let them out? To generalize this to other crimes: why would you let any criminal out if your goal was to prevent them from committing more crimes?

Keep in mind I said prison, not "US prison system in 2017".

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...

You would let murderers out because you think there is some compromise between their freedom and the crime they committed.

What is your suggestion?

The current law demands that level of fairness, but it's clear even from this thread that there's currently not a consensus in society if we really do demand that level of fairness given the drawbacks that we see; the society can also choose a slightly lower level/cost of fairness and might on whole be better off that way.

The needs of a few never outweigh the needs of the many.

Shutting down videos to millions of potential viewers because the recorders did not have the time nor money to produce transcripts, gains nothing / takes away everything.

If things were really fair, we should be able to now sue the complainants for taking away from us everything that could have resulted from viewing the course material.

>The needs of a few never outweigh the needs of the many.

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 irony is that many of the videos people are most interested in are Deep Learning courses, the very technology that is making this moot by improving the accuracy of auto-generated captions. Presumably taking everything down now will delay the improvement in this technology.

On the other hand, there are services that provide captioning at extremely low costs. The university could write a relatively small check to comply.

ADA imposes much more expensive mandates to much smaller businesses, and I'm under the impression that most people consider that to be acceptable.

Is there anything saying that the captions have to be correct? Could they just use e.g. Youtube's (horrible) auto-captioning algorithm?

The letter says

"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.

That just seems....inflexible. I definitely see where the reasoning comes from (it's not fair for deaf or similarly disabled people who pay taxes to these public schools to not be able to receive the same benefit as everyone else) but the lack of wiggle room sucks.

Yeah, many other requirements of ADA are for small businesses to actually build things. This would require paying a transcriber for a couple hours per hour of video.

That's really not a lot. Probably blame a dumb and inflexible budgetary process.

Doing a good video transcript takes more than 2x the running time of the video. A lot more. Really.

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.

It is simply another instance of outrageous government regulation.

I would ask those downvoting this comment to provide a counter argument.

This is absolutely ridiculous. A university was providing something, for free, to everyone who wanted it. And because someone complained that their personal circumstances made it impossible to enjoy this free thing, now no one is allowed to get this content.

It's as if I threatened to sue Costco because one of their free samples had nuts in it and I couldn't eat it, resulting in them canceling the program.

But these videos are not "free". The content was created by university employees and hence, public funds. It's likely university resources were used to produce and edit it for online consumption.

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 world is demonstrably worse off as a result of this lawsuit. Valuable knowledge that was freely available to many is now available to very few.

The disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem, but if the logical (for Berkeley) solution to this problem is the disenfranchisement of all, perhaps we shouldn't go through with "solving" this problem. Perhaps it is better to accept that some amount of unfairness is inevitable, and that it's preferable to have these videos publicly available than to not.

It's not just about this point in time, but to increase the priority of creating accessible resources. Everyone generally believes "disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem", it took a law to make society at least realize those costs. Building handicapped ramps and accessible bathrooms is a massive upfront cost for businesses and institutions, funds which come from the same pocket for services and benefits intended for the non-handicapped.

The law itself is poorly written, but the intent makes sense. It's important to protect the rights of those who are most vulnerable, which certainly includes deaf and blind people.

> now nobody can use the videos

The Americans with Disabilities Act came in in 1990. The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with disabilities.

I'm not sure about contempt, I'd say indifference or apathy instead. I can only hope that efforts like YouTube's automatic captions get better because it'll I.prove the situation just by giving a cheap way to handle 90% of cases.

Releasing video of academic lectures is showing contempt for people with disabilities?

Making the choice to deliberately exclude people with disabilities, even though there's a nearly thirty year old law mandating accessibility is treating people with contempt.

As properly transcribing a video lecture is more expensive than making the lecture in the first place, it's a reasonable choice to gift something to many but not all people at a small fraction of what the cost would be if it had to be more accessible.

Accomodations are reasonable if they require a small adjustment to the product - like automated speech-to-text transcriptions would be, or making navigation so that it's possible to use with screen-readers for blind people. However, if the required adjustment effort overwhelms the original product, then I'd say that "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" applies - yes, the content isn't perfect, and it's not suitable for many uses, but it's a gift; if you don't want it, then don't take it and it shouldn't be anybody's duty to make that gift differently.

...and this is why just about fuck all has been done for accessibility over the last 30 years and we still have major services that are very hard for people with disabilities to use.

People tried asking nicely, and were ignored. Now people are taking action. We can't say we weren't warned. We were warned 30 years ago when the law was passed.

You could make that claim if they made such a decision, and you could assume they did if they had to go out of their way to disable CC. But of course, they have to go out of their way to include CC (in time, money and effort) so its entirely absurd to name it "contempt". At best, its negligence, and at worst, its reasonable (the video lectures aren't really related to the school's operations, it just happens to be easy to do).

Really, you could turn it around and call it contempt on the disabled's part, for suing with no clear benefit to anyone

Or it shows it's a terrible law and total compliance with it results in terrible effects.

How do you expect this will work? Everything created by humans from here on out must be accessible to every last minuscule quadrant of humanity or it's banned? Nobody's allowed to release audio without texted or text without audio, or video without text explaining what's going on?

We aren't talking about everything created by humans. We are talking about something created by a public university, partly funded by taxes, and with a rather large endowment.

The ADA does not generally apply to individuals.

The fact you think "deaf people" are a "miniscule quadrant of humanity" is interesting.

> from here on out

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

> The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with disabilities.

It costs roughly $1 for a professor to prop his camera up at the back of a room and record himself speaking for an hour, then post it online (11GB @ 3¢/GB = 33¢; we'll add double that for bandwidth &c.); it costs $180-$600 to close-caption that video. The ADA turns lecture videos from something anyone can do to something basically no-one will do.

Yes, life sucks when one's deaf. Yes, it'd be awesome for every organisation to have the resources to close-caption every recorded lecture. But requiring every recorded lecture to be close-captioned merely ensures that to a first order of approximation no lecture will be close-captioned.

Welcome to the unintended consequences of government regulations. This is exactly what many "anti-regulation" people rail against, but examples like this are rarely brought up by "pro-regulation" arguments.

> But requiring every recorded lecture to be close-captioned merely ensures that to a first order of approximation no lecture will be close-captioned.

Huh? I do not follow

I agree that it's immensely frustrating that Youtube's auto-captioning isn't good enough for DoJ.

> it costs $180-$600 to close-caption that video

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.

> It costs roughly $1 for a professor to prop his camera up at the back of a room and record himself speaking for an hour... it costs $180-$600 to close-caption that video.

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.

I got my figures for close-captioning from http://www.automaticsync.com/captionsync/closed-captioning-c...

And a 10x increase is still large, although perhaps not prohibitively large.

I see, but that website is clearly biased as they're trying to sell their product. Also, they don't even use correct math which makes me even more certain they're just making up numbers. They mention that other places cost $1/minute, and they claim that half of that cost is $3.33/hr. ???

I believe you had a lapse in reading comprehension.

> To add it all up, an untrained captioner could easily spend eight to ten times the length of a video to create a timed caption file. Let’s call it 9X on average, meaning that each minute of video takes nine minutes for this beginner to caption.

$1 / min of video * 1/2 = $0.50 / min of video 1 min of video = 9 min of transcription time $0.50 / 9 min of transcription time = $3.33 / hour of transcription time

They were complying with (a reasonable reading of) the ADA: if you were accepted to Berkeley (via an ADA-compliant process), and then enrolled in one of these classes, they would ensure that any required course materials were translated to accommodate any covered disability you had.

What Berkeley was doing afterward was saying "well, we've provided this class in compliance with the law, might as well open up access to the materials to anyone who could benefit from them".

The court's interpretation would be like saying, "If a store gives away unused, edible meat at the end of the day, they must provide an equal amount of vegetarian food."

I can understand "equal access" arguments for "if you sell meals, you must provide a vegetarian option" (which Berkeley did the analog of). But why would they be expected to do the same for "byproduct" giveaways?

>> I can understand "equal access" arguments for "if you sell meals, you must provide a vegetarian option" (which Berkeley did the analog of). But why would they be expected to do the same for "byproduct" giveaways?

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.

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

Yes, I can. And if that situation modeled the dynamics of the current one, it would change my mind. But I don't see how it does.

They're not denying the free meals/course materials to gays/vegetarians/the deaf. They're giving away byproducts that, by their nature, gays/veg's/the deaf cannot use, which came about as an incidental product of legal, non-discriminatory behavior.

For an analogy that does capture the dynamics: imagine if some factory's production process spewed out a waste product that happened to be perfectly usable as an STD prevention device for hetero sex but not homosexual sex. So the owners shrug and say,

"Hey, anyone who wants these hetero STD prevention devices, feel free to take them away!"

Would you say they're violating the spirit of such anti-discrimination law if they didn't also pay for the manufacture of gay-optimized condoms at a 1:1 ratio?

> They're giving away byproducts that, by their nature, gays/veg's/the deaf cannot use

There is nothing in the nature of these videos that makes them unsubtitleable.

Right, I should have said "that they cannot use in the original byproduct form". But the same point applies, that it costs money to convert it, and the effect of requiring the conversion is to end a free giveaway that promotes a social good.

> that promotes a social good.

It also promotes a social harm. It says it's fine to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Only if you believe that any free product given away, such that it isn't usable by everyone, "says it's fine to discriminate against people with disabilities".

Do you seriously believe that no one should be able to give away uncaptioned videos, on the grounds that doing so "promotes the idea that it's fine to discriminate"? Khan Academy should have been shut down until their videos were accessible? Personal blogs?

Do you not draw any distinction here between a class for sale vs its free materials?

Accommodation is great, but you also have to appreciate the costs as well as the benefits.

Except they didn't say NO GAYS. Rather some have meat allergy so they can't eat them. There are a lot of people who are hungry and could really use the free meat, except here a few people with meat allergy come in and say, "Since we're unable to partake in these free offerings we'd rather other people starve".

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