20,000 UC Berkeley Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

No matter what you do, there'll always be some group who can't access the content.

E.g. people who are deaf, blind, and had both hands amputated.

Do the captions need to meet a very high standard of quality? If not, automated captioning would have been a good student project.

I think it would be hard to argue that the ADA is a bad law, however. If it's not a bad law, it should not be optional. Otherwise it's not, by definition, a law.

But

  nobody is arguing we live in a society of optional laws

I'm trying to point out that a) This situation is not crazy, at all. It's an extension of how our society and the law works. b) Pretending that it's okay to ignore a law because the majority are not affected is short sighted.

Yep, sometimes it's hard/expensive to abide by laws catered towards minorities. Tough shit. That's exactly the reason the law exists in the first place, because it's too expensive for society to do the right thing by default.

If I'm deaf, I know that you have no advantage over me merely because you can hear. I think that's "good". The laws are in place to protect minorities.

Edit: I understand the downvotes, relatively (e.g. as seen by Californians relatively to the US in general). Just know that I speak from France, a country where regulation has gone way, way overboard insofar as it cripples the economy moreso than it protects individuals, by ultimately preventing any reform/change/disruption whatsoever in many, many sectors. There's such a thing as "balance" and "intelligence in regulating". On a general level I very much advocate for a strict body of regulation; I just think it should be as minimal, solid, logical and simple (intelligible) as possible. Which is very much not the case in my country.

If there's no penalty to making cars without seatbelts, then carmakers will make cars without seatbelts. So we outlaw cars without seatbelts. This is exactly the society we live in.

Sure, a car with no seatbelts might be better than no car at all. But society has decided that cost is worth it, in order to incentivize widespread installation of seatbelts.

Berkeley has chosen to throw its car away rather than install the legally required seatbelts.

Not all regulations are good (and this one may not be), but I think the logic behind them is understandable, not insane.

Or going to court and challenging the government's interpretation, as, in fact, the ADA requires only reasonable accommodation.

The university chose that it would be a better use of its time to spend the effort making future content more accessible than establishing, as it quite possibly could, that it had no obligation to do so for this kind of content in the circumstances in which it was offered. Which is clearly it's decision to make, but when the University deliberately chose not to seek an authoritative resolution of it's obligations under the law, it is misleading to claim that the outcome represents it's obligation under the law.

CC (I think) is done live by transcribing what is actually said. That's certainly true for live events where there is no script.

We already have the videos, we really don't need the original school's help. Would it be possible for someone to make a web interface where this could be done in 5 or 10 minute chunks?

And I disagree anyways; if the business wants to do something, they are responsible for following the law. That includes making reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. Because we as a society have decided that it's more important that those persons be allowed to participate in society than it is for a business to make money.

Which is why we're not trying to cure their deafness. Instead, we're trying to ensure that the deaf have access to the same information those who aren't deaf have.

It's horrible that these were taken down, but it's far more horrible that disadvantaged populations are ignored, and put at further disadvantage.

And ultimately the files are still available in a more egalitarian way than they were before. The outcome is arguably better than the way things were before!

Not only is it false equivalence, it's also addressed in the first (and second) paragraph in the letter from the DoJ: "The ADA prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities by public entities. [0]".

"If it feels insane, it's because it is insane"

It only "feels insane" because they violated the law in so many instances. If we consider all the effort, time and cost that went in to making the content in the first place, the cost of compliance is marginal.

[0] https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

Berkeley had one. It was called BRCOE. People creating content before 2015 had the option, or not, of using BRCOE, but had to "self certify" that the content was accessible.

https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

> UC Berkeley’s faculty creates and publishes courses for the public on UC BerkeleyX. Faculty developing UC BerkeleyX courses can, but are not required to, develop courses in collaboration with the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). BRCOE follows best practices in design for accessibility and also has a quality assurance process that includes deploying various accessibility evaluators; remediating layout, page structure, downloadable or styling accessibility barriers; and obtaining transcripts of all audio and video files associated with a course.

> Prior to July 1, 2015, UC Berkeley also allowed faculty and instructors to design, develop and publish courses through a self-service model, which did not include support from BRCOE. Beginning July 1, 2015, UC Berkeley advised the Department that all faculty using the selfservice model will be asked to sign off on a list of accessibility resource reviews prior to publishing the course. The sign-off statements include:

> 1. I have reviewed and implemented edX’s “Guidelines for Creating Accessible Content.”2

> 2. All PDFs attached to my course follow the University of California Office of the President recommendations.3

> 3. I have reviewed and implemented applicable guidelines into my course from the Web Accessibility team’s resource “Top 10 Tips for Making your Website Accessible.”4

> 4. All mp3 and mp4 files in my course have been submitted for transcripts for SubRip Text (SRT) files.

> 5. All video and audio in my course have accurate captioning available to users through the edX HTML5 player.

In this case a reasonable response from society, for example, may have been "ok UCB how much will it cost you to sub those? alright, we'll give you the funds from tax money." Lacking such a response all UCB could do was go "oh society, you don't want to help? then you don't get to keep this."

Keep in mind that only a short-sighted person would say UCB messed up here. They didn't. The USA as a whole messed up, so the USA as a whole gets the stick.

I think that's a hard argument to make when Encarta 95 was more advanced than this. I'm all for making information public, but a video of the presentation that's not searchable, can't skip from slide to slide, doesn't show the presenter, doesn't have an index, can't click on links etc. isn't exactly the future. And with all the information available these days the standard should really be higher.

Now, years later, they released it for free to the general public as is.

https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

> 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

etc.

It's really worth reading the whole thing, but at the very least read up to page 5.

It is not that it can't be understood, they just didn't set themselves up to be easily understood. It's seems like they want to plug their protocol first and share the lessons as a side effect.

It is absolutely the case that these created more than a million dollars of value per year while they were up. But UC Berkeley, by design, captured none of that value.

I hope the auto captions improve over time. I feel like Facebook auto captions are already really, really good. If YouTube can reach that level of auto captioning it would benefit a lot of people.