Berkeley Removes 20,000 Free Online Videos to Comply with DOJ Ruling

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

The complaint was put forward by two employees of Gallaudet University - not students.

Gallaudet University is a private university for the deaf. I would like to point out that their videos are not friendly to those with visual impairments and they should have their videos removed for the same reason UC Berkeley has to remove theirs. Here are a few such examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffqU3mT4k1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWdF7G1SrzA

I have seen the same thing happening in construction. An old building was being refurbished into some social housing units, and this building had a lot of storage space in the basement. But because the lift couldn't reach the basement, the contractors were forced to build a brick wall to block access to the basement otherwise it would violate disabled access laws. So no one can benefit from the storage space...

This makes no sense. The courses are up on youtube with closed captioning. https://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley

I hope someone is downloading these all and putting up a torrent.

So to go against the grain: this is a bad thing. Those videos not being accessible to the deaf is unfortunate. What is even more unfortunate is that those videos are now also no longer available to lots of people who would never in a lifetime stand a chance of attending Berkeley, many of them outside of the reach of that particular law.

I'm all for accessibility but this 'reset' causes a lot of good content to disappear for reasons that are suspiciously close to spite, and spite that has far wider ranging consequences than for those that have access to alternatives.

A blind person in the USA has more options available to them than almost any person somewhere in the developing world and those were the biggest beneficiaries of these videos. Principles are great, looking beyond your own interest is even greater.

If you muzzle accessibility laws then there will be little to no compliance, organisations and companies do not do these things by choice, that is the evidence of history, laws have been implemented to address this, true, though there is little legal support for those who need assistance to defend what little rights they have gained, it's commercial interests in the main that hinder the implementation of accessibility. Organisations using excuses like this are doing little to address the underlying issues, they are more likely driven by a desire not to pay legal fees and would rather err in favour of their finances.

Hmm, maybe some big company with a great speech to text capability could offer to process the videos to add captioning info ...

This is so ridiculous. There are fantastic courses here.

This is easy to solve, have the public add closed caption. As volunteers add closed caption to them they become publicly available.

Seems like a better course of action would have been to make the videos accessible rather than force them down.

I'm sure if they asked the american public, or their students, or youtube, or anyone if they were willing to help transcribe educational videos they would have gotten the help they needed. It sounds more like a petty way for administrators to get back at people who just wanted to be treated equitably.

Assuming that Reason.com presented the facts of this case fairly (a rather generous assumption), rather than framing it as the DOJ forcing Berkeley to take the videos down, I think the fairer way is to say that Berkeley is refusing to make the videos accessible to the hearing impaired. Captioning the videos would be hugely beneficial to all users of the videos, not just those with hearing problems. I am skeptical that the DOJ would not accept a good-faith active project to caption the videos to allow them to stay online.

But the facts as presented don't make much sense anyway. I'm not sure I understand how withdrawing access to just Berkeley students and professors changes the ADA implications. Curious if anyone knows something about this.

Edit, here's the actual statement from Berkeley: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/

    we 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.... moving our content behind
    authentication allows us to better protect
    instructor intellectual property from “pirates”
    who have reused content for personal profit
    without consent.

Ah, so this is actually just an opportunity to reset some decisions made 10 years ago about how open they wanted to be with their content.