UC Berkeley to remove public legacy libraries
news.berkeley.edu
news.berkeley.edu
UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content (insidehighered.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13803564
72 points | 77 comments
It's a tough spot to be in. On the one hand, it's great to make all the content accessible to handicapped folks, but on the other hand, is society better off not having this material at all or having it without accessibility?
I think that's the most tame and non-sarcastic way I can respond to your question. This sort of stuff makes me furious and it's only going to keep happening.
There's likely a fairer way of doing this instead of denying access to all for the sake of a few. For example, a JIT system for accessibility. A disabled person, if interested, could make a request to have material translated to their preferred mode.
Still, I think it's a matter of interpretation. Access is being denied for all i.e. the public.
The amount of video that is being produced and uploaded today makes a requirement to put traditional closed captioning on each one absolutely laughable and ridiculous. It's telling that the requirement was dreamed up in 1990, probably by people without a lot of vision for how cheap bandwidth might become and the amount of content that would be produced and shared within a few decades.
The public is the loser, here. Institutions like Berkeley will have to pull down high-quality content, but amateur content isn't affected. So the overall quality of content available to the public just got worse.
There is no way in which this is a win for the majority.
These "legacy" things are between 3 and 10 years old.
The law had been in effect for 17 years before Berkeley started producing video.
Or maybe there are other considerations at stake.
> For better or worse, large portions of society (especially those found in academia and cities) have decided that a level playing field is more important than having any playing field.
That's completely false. What people has decided is that sometimes is worth having a small cost for the big benefit for everyone that it is to have accessibility. Without a more careful case your arguments falls into the Straw Man fallacy. (This fallacy includes an attempt to "prove" an argument by overstating, exaggerating, or over-simplifying the arguments of the opposing side and attacking that "straw man" argument instead of the original one.)
> This sort of stuff makes me furious and it's only going to keep happening.
I hope that this video helps you to understand what's suggested for help people with disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPymLgfXSY
It is about helping them, not about making things difficult for the rest. If you have the opportunity to talk with some disabled people that have seen their lives improved thanks to this measures probably you are going to be less furious and more happy about it. :)
The approach typically applies to retrofits for fueling stations, coal power plants, etc.
This content is new enough (by 15-22 years by UCB's count) tht it should have had support for everyone. They just didn't notice or didn't care.
In a few years perhaps it can come back for everyone through a new tool. In fact they could spend some of the captioning money on a better autocaptioner than youtube. In fact I am surprised that KLH's auto-captioner didn't already do this since the letter says this material is on youtube.
The benefit was to the public to have access to the material, much less so to Berkeley. By putting the onus on Berkeley to caption the videos, they've (very reasonably) just pulled them down, and the public loses.
You mean some of the public loses. Others in the public never had access to lose.
People said the same thing when the government decided buildings should have ramps, public bathrooms, etc. Things worked out OK.
I don't think it's either one. If I'm a prof and I want to make my lectures more accessible, I'm going to put them online, and be glad that 95% of the population can see it. If I have time and budget, maybe I'll hire someone to caption it. But still, I'd rather have it out there for 95% of the world to see than not at all.
> In fact I am surprised that KLH's auto-captioner didn't already do this since the letter says this material is on youtube.
They were sued because the auto-captioner was wrong enough to be considered harmful.
legacy content that is 3-10 years oldSome wider implications are very alarming. Consider all of the video content that libraries hold. If it's not ADA-compliant, having it available to the general public is arguably discriminatory.
Barring some public funding to make it possible for institutions to caption videos, which would be the reasonable solution, the demand for captioning vastly raises the barriers towards putting content online.
They could have spread the cost over the 25 years the law has been in place instead of leaving it all until now.
This is entirely separate from your examples, as people in india arent taking american buses or elevators - but they most certainly are taking advantage of american educational content that is publicly available.
Because it's prohibitively expensive, or because they can't be arsed?
I used to assume the prohibitively expensive angle, but DEF CON has had live closed captioning for 3 or 4 years now, and is done so the recorded material can be used in classrooms with accessibility requirements. If DT can afford it, I have little regard for people who pretend to be committed to educating the masses and still don't bother.
It won't be expensive once we have better speech recognition and NLP 10 years from now. Seriously, just make the content available. Not to mention that leaving the content up might even inspire volunteer and crowd-sourced efforts to caption some of the higher-quality content.
I'm all for promoting accessibiltiy but can we not do it at the expense of impairing others? Hiking trails in Yosemite are not handicapped-accessible; does that mean we should shut them down?
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prenda_law_attorney_w...
I'm not American so I don't know a lot. With what I've heard, political correctness is more about possible discrimination.
There is an old Chinese story. A Chinese emperor once demanded all brewing tools to be confiscated because he didn't want people to drink when there was an ongoing war. One day when he was walking with one of his advisers, the adviser asked him to arrest a man as a rapist. "How do you know, it's a total stranger," the emperor asked. "He got the tools to rape," answered the adviser. The emperor laughed and revoked the absurd rule.
Is this idea feasible?
P.s. Your idea completely makes sense. I wish google instead of wasting money in many different ways(for example starting cs education site , which of course will be not even close to what Berkeley offers) would do this. Anyone would do this ,would become my here, literally.
Transcribing every video might be a terrible use of resources, unless there are other benefits of the transcripts (which might be the case; search would be a nice side effect).
A better solution would be to allow a user to request a captioned version of a video and then have it farmed out to volunteers. It would be a much more reasonable amount of effort (with some ratelimiting to prevent asshat behavior or scripting) and you'd be sure to transcribe the content that users actually want first. By chunking a video up, you might be able to transcribe it quite quickly, too. If I did need video captioning, I'd much rather have a system like that, vs. hoping that some multi-year effort to transcribe everything has hit the one video I need today.
However, it's not clear that such a solution would actually help Berkeley, because of the asinine way the laws are written.
However, it also states this:
> UC Berkeley is not, however, required to take any action that it can demonstrate would result in a fundamental alteration in the nature of its service, program or activity or in undue financial and administrative burdens.
Given the obviously prohibitive costs of transcribing all of these freely shared lectures (including describing all charts, graphs, tables, and other visual aids), it seems clear that UCB should not be required to transcribe all of the videos, nor remove them from public access. This is a travesty of justice.
It's a result of California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which states that private plaintiffs can receive monetary damages for discrimination. Most states don't have this provision, IIRC.
It does serve as a way to get the public to do the work for the State, rather than having to provide for ADA inspectors and such.
I suppose there's no chance of getting it relicensed?
[0] for example, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
In this specific case the court looked at the results of the technology and found a significant number of errors.
New technology that does't have that many errors is probably fine.
> The Department found that of the 543 videos it could identify on the YouTube channel, 75 had manually generated closed captions. Of the remainder, many had automatic captioning generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology. In March 2015, the Department selected 30 videos – 15 with manually generated closed captions, 15 without – for review. The 6 lectures were selected across a sample of subjects and based on popularity. Examples of barriers to access on UC Berkeley YouTube channel content included the following:
> 1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.
> 2. Approximately half the videos did not provide audio description or any other alternative format for the visual information (graphs, charts, animations, or items on the chalkboard) contained in the videos. For example, in one video lecture, a professor pointed to and talked about an image and its structure without describing the image, making it inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities.
> 3. Some visual content presented in the slide presentations had low color contrast. For example, two video lectures referenced computer code on the screen that had insufficient color contrast, making it difficult for an individual with low vision to discern. Another video lecture used different colored lines on a graph, but the colors could not be differentiated by an individual with low vision.
It's not just old content created with old tech.
> In January of 2016, the Department reviewed ten new and archived courses available on UC BerkeleyX. The Department observed some improvement in new and archived courses, including the addition of closed captions on some content, but in general, the new courses had most of the previously reported accessibility issues and the archived courses were still inaccessible. Specifically, the Department found that both new and archived courses are inaccessible because many have incorrect alternative text, videos without captions, undefined headings, a lack of color contrast, inaccessible PDFs, and inaccessible keyboard links.
People seem to be focusing on captioning. That's part of the problem, and maybe the hardest to solve, but it's not the only problem. There also seems to be a focus on hearing impairment, but deaf people aren't the only people with disability that Berkeley chose, illegally, to exclude.
> Between March and April 2015, the Department reviewed the sixteen MOOCs then available to the public on UC BerkeleyX. None of the courses reviewed were entirely accessible. For each course reviewed, it would be difficult for an individual with a hearing, vision, or manual disability to understand the content conveyed to course participants. Examples of barriers to access found across most course content included the following:
> 1. Some videos did not have captions. As a result, the audio content in the video was inaccessible to people with hearing disabilities.
> 2. Some videos were inaccessible to people with vision disabilities for several reasons. First, many videos did not provide an alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations, or urls on slides), such as audio description, alternative text, PDF files, or Word documents. Second, videos containing text sometimes had poor color contrast, which made the text unreadable for those with low vision. Finally, information was sometimes conveyed using color alone (for instance, a chart or graph would differentiate information only by color), which is not accessible to individuals with vision disabilities.
> 3. Many documents were inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities who use screen readers because the document was not formatted properly. For instance, headings were sometimes neither defined nor arranged in a logical order; page structure was not always defined, contained empty elements or was incorrectly defined; some tables did not have row and column headers defined; math equations were not always defined in a comprehendible way. Many PDFs either did not have a tag structure defined or the tag structure was incorrect. Individuals with vision disabilities who use screen readers would have a difficult time understanding and navigating the content.
> 4. Some links were not keyboard accessible and did not indicate whether they were expandable or collapsible, so individuals with vision disabilities who use screen readers may not understand the purpose of the links and individuals with manual disabilities would not be able to use the links.
> 5. Websites and materials that were integrated into the course material were not fully accessible
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California_fin...
It is unfortunate that Berkeley couldn't transfer ownership of the archive to an institution located in a different jurisdiction.
The ultimate solution would appear to require a legislative change in CA, though, so perhaps by pulling everything down and creating some public concern, they are doing the right thing in the long run.
Good luck if you live in CA getting the law changed...
Has that impacted OCW availability? I was noticing a lack of newer OCW material, but I have no data to substantiate that perception.
Imagine if you could save a video by watching it and correcting the typos in the existing transcript.
But there's no way it'd be a viable business. (That's Rev, and it costs $1/minute, and it doesn't even give you a .srt file that you can upload to YouTube.)
Plus, you'd have to deal with spam/abuse, and creative uses of captions (e.g. niconico).
I tried building a prototype of this in college, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work financially, so I had to take a paid summer internship at YouTube.
If it has existed for years, why wasn't it used to save the UC Berkeley library videos?
I'm thinking more of a Google Docs style interface, where you can make a lightweight edit (only one or two lines of captions) and someone else can concurrently time and edit other lines.
So even though it's free, somehow they have to take it down and ruin it for everyone.
See: https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-13-167/
The government, at public expense, provides Braille books and "talking books" to blind readers on demand. If someone requests a title that doesn't have a Braille edition, the (Federal) government will pay to have one made. They're distributed through the public library system and recovered after use to be lent out again.
A few years ago there were some articles around about the Braille and talking editions of the Harry Potter books, which were produced so that they could be released at the same time as the regular print editions for sighted readers. Quite cool. I think the government will also do periodicals (there are regularly Braille copies of national magazines at my local library, which they seem to get out within a few days of the regular edition).
Aside from the unwieldy size of Braille books, it seems like a pretty nice system. It's a trivial cost in government terms, and it serves a community that would otherwise not have a reliable source of content. I'm sure it's imperfect and could use improvement (though I think they now do talking books digitally), as most public programs could, but it's existed and been basically uncontroversial for generations.
What it does not do, of course, is it does NOT obligate traditional publishers to produce Braille editions. That would be ridiculous, and would vastly cut down on the number of books that could be published by increasing the cost, and would result in more Braille content than there's really a demand for anyway. It's a completely insane way to try to increase accessibility.
Plus, the whole "old equals bad" consumerism rationalizations.
"This ____ will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that ____ meet higher ____ standards as a condition of ____."
And if ____ is not done, and the ____ does not meet the higher ____ standards, will the Department of Justice cause it to ____?