UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content
insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned.
So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? Surely there are deaf people who are quite alright with watching these videos with the auto CC, and believe they would be better off if the videos were available in their current form than not available at all. Just look at the list of courses [1] that will be removed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-...
If it was left to the companies,they'd maximize profit and streets will look like 15 century London.
So, the society, in the current incarnation, will stongarm the misbehaving entities to ensure that the overall civilization benefits.
Most in this thread are not seeing this because they aren't looking at the big picture of what a society really is, and what values it upholds (sometimes even by force).
They should have struck a deal where all new content will be ADA compliant and all courses will never depend/actively refer to the old material, but keep the old material still online for further research.
Of course UC needs to stay compliant. But that doesn't mean forcing it to take down old material will help anyone.
I'm asking honest where you draw the line.
But, for this application, I would have thought the YouTube CC was pretty adequate. Especially given that, as you say, I'd expect most college courses on technical topics are going to have a lot of the content on the slides anyway.
Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.
The reason this is happening in 2017 is that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow plaintiffs to collect damages (California state law is different). That means compliance comes solely when an affected individual has the time and financial resources and the will to pursue a long and drawn out case. Note the references to 2015 in the article suggest that UC Berkeley actively opposed compliance during the mediation period before DOJ issued an order.
The DOJ issued specific guidance for web page accessibility in 2003 [1]. That's before Youtube. Before MOOCs. Before online course materials over the internet were a viable option. UC Berkeley had more than a decade to come up with a plan that met the intent of the law.
With the right software, the rest could be cut up into segments, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to caption it for very little cost.
Berkeley could add a button to the viewer to report (or even for viewers to correct) errors that were made by Mechanical Turk users, when they are found by others viewing the material.
The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites.
The worst part is that Berkeley should have these captioned for their own students anyway. I don't see how making the videos available to Berkeley students only helps in anyway.
Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student.
If I were enrolled in Berkeley I would request that 100% of the videos be captioned, so I had access to any of them I needed to learn something in the middle of the night before a test or for a paper.
Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.
"[W]e have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features ... This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from “pirates” who have reused content for personal profit without consent.
... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)."
They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2]
[1] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/
[2] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...
Plato's Republic is almost 24 centuries old. De Re Metallica is almost 500 years old.
I imagine that lectures just a few years old are not worthless.
A university should not be in the business of taking down knowledge, and the Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself.
For better or worse, ADA is Federal civil rights legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access.
[1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.
In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account?
How does this improve anything? Either you have the internet and can access these videos on YouTube or you don't have the internet and you can't access them on YouTube. How does this satisfy the court order?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
The gist of it is: you have to think past the current situation. The U.S. passed the American Disabilities Act because it decided that creating an equal society for the disabled was an important value for America. Overlooking violations that disenfranchise the disabled makes that law meaningless. Every business that has had to install handicap-accessible facilities has had to eat major costs that indisputably hurt their bottom-line. But business owners don't get to say, "Well, having a wheelchair accessible doorway would force me to close my shop, so I can't do it, and having my shop open to serve the non-disabled is better than nothing."
The other thing to consider is that Berkeley's content is not free content. Berkeley is a state university funded by tax dollars. State employees created, curated, edited, and produced that content for the web, all on taxpayer dime. It would have cost more to close-caption them, but that's the law. And when you don't enforce the law, you get institutions like Berkeley deprioritizing what they are federally mandated to do, which is to follow the ADA.
Berkeley is not being inconvenienced in the slightest by "enforcing the law". The general public is.
Disabled people aren't being helped in the slightest by "enforcing the law". Instead, they are losing access to material that at least some of them can use.
When "enforcing the law" harms people who had nothing to do with violating it, does nothing to help those who were supposed to benefit, and doesn't really punish those who have (allegedly) broken it, it is quite clearly a poorly-written (or perhaps, enforced) law.
Again, you have to think more broadly than the specific parties in this incident. Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past.
If this lawsuit hadn't raised attention, then it's possible Berkeley (and others in society) would continue to make inaccessible content. The law isn't very effective if it requires a disability advocate to file a lawsuit before it is enforced.
But Berkeley isn't being punished. The general public, including disabled people is.
"Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past."
I realize that. However, it seems to me that this outcome is, if anything, making the situation worse. Blind people could presumably get something from the audio content. Deaf people could get something from the video content. Now they can't. How is this better?
It's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
I suspect very little of this actually has to do with helping the disabled, if that was the goal then your solution would be the logical conclusion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
Public institutions are required to abide by ADA when they release things to the public.
Deleting the videos is unfortunate, but there's really no good excuse and they should have foreseen this. The MIT OpenCourseWare videos, for example, all have real (not generated) closed captions.
The amount of wiggle rooms needs to be kept pretty small or people will always work to use the wiggle room.
Which even though I say that I'm not sure I agree with this outcome, but it's inevitable that there will be corner cases if the law has any power at all.
Despite laudable aims, it creates a new class of persons empowered to bring lawsuits. Those lawsuits might, or might not have their basis in actual discriminatory behavior. And outcome could be determined by lawyer quality, jury selection, availability of funds, and many factors having little to do with workplace interaction. This is much too big a risk for small businesspersons. I am sure this took a toll in hiring, and helped maintain an aggrieved class of persons.
The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place.
And I don't like how they're handling the response. The court ruling doesn't require them to delete the videos, only to make them accessible. But instead of doing the right thing and captioning the videos, they're kind of throwing a fit and deleting them all.
Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.
Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.
It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.
What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
Why? Money's a finite resource. If, as appears to be the case, a lot of this is older and not frequently viewed content, it's not clear to me why the university should spend a lot of money updating just "because." Especially if it's mostly Creative Commons and will continue to live elsewhere.
If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content. I can harass any institution providing service to the public that incidentally contains content that I dislike for political or religious reasons or any reason of my choice. I can deny service to millions using theoretical lack of service to hypothetical individuals as my weapon.
Why, I could go after HN for presenting your comment itself in textual form instead of braille or audiobook format. They could fix that technologically, but I'm sure it would be easier to delete your comment entirely. The fact that I'm only bringing up deletion of your comment because we disagree politically is mere coincidence, I assure you its solely for ADA compliance that I must ask for HN to delete your comment ... surely you must agree with my reasoning that your comment must be deleted, right?
Or hire a lawyer that defends ADA cases, since "reasonable accommodation" does not, in fact, mean "whatever anyone demands", successfully defend the case, and move on. And, if the instigator has a pattern of doing meritless ADA cases for extortion or political suppression, possibly tack on some nice counterclaims in the process. While they aren't perfect, the justice system does have tools to deal with the kind of abuse of process you describe.
I disagree. In a world with finite resources the optimum outcome is one that best applies those resources to serve the greatest possible good.
Berkeley is a publicly funded institution, anything that increases their costs either A: increases the tuition they are required to charge, thus lessening the availability of education. or B: Increases the tax burden, lowering the total net income of the populous.
Now many argue that we can raise taxes in order to pay for these types of things. They say that the costs of this individual mandate is minimal, thus it is common sense to implement it. What they miss is that each percentage raise in tax will render a certain number of businesses non-viable. This will in turn increase unemployment, and lower overall tax revenue. At the same time the demand for public assistance grows. Thus necessitating further increases in taxation.
It doesn't stop there. As this common sense regulation is implemented, more follow, and more still. There is an endless stream of things under the heading of "wouldn't be nice if", where do you draw the line?
The impact of these regulations are hard to measure. How many business owners who now find themselves bankrupt will commit suicide this year? How many teenagers will be unable to find summer jobs, and thus be unable to save for college? How many families will fall apart due to constant frustrations regarding money? You can never say, but all of the data I have looked out shows that poverty cuts wide and deep having negative effects on the lives of children exposed to it well into old age.
So lets take your example of elderly healthcare. Is it worth extending the life of someone in their 80's a few years if it means that a non-zero number of young families will be pushed below the poverty line? I never see this aspect considered. When I search for data I am offered an appeal to emotion. I think regulation needs to be more thought out than that.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with the decision in this case but there are sometimes good reasons to have hard and fast rules even if they lead to arguably bad outcomes in specific cases
From a societal perspective, the entire idea behind the ADA is that the right to equal access for the disabled--including the public accommodations necessary for them to actually make use of that access--is something we value beyond the initial cost of implementing it.
Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)
If everyone gains, then it is "good for society" but what if some people gain and some lose, as in most regulations.