> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
There is nothing in the nature of these videos that makes them unsubtitleable.
It also promotes a social harm. It 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.
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.
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.
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.
And a 10x increase is still large, although perhaps not prohibitively large.
> 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
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.
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.
Really, you could turn it around and call it contempt on the disabled's part, for suing with no clear benefit to anyone