To those that are preserving/mirroring these lectures, I really hope you have plans to make them accessible to all, not just the hearing enabled.
UC Berkeley assessed the cost of captioning those videos to ADA standards at higher than $1,000,000. Berkeley is currently running a $110 million deficit after making $60 million in budget cuts. Last month, President Trump tweeted a threat to strip the college of all federal funds, and while that's unlikely their state and federal support is certainly not going expand.
So no, they aren't cutting off their nose to spite their face. They're broke, and couldn't accommodate the lawsuit's demands without major cuts somewhere else.
Making captions for these takes someone to do the work -- having worked in an office that filmed/distributed lectures before, sometimes there just isn't someone there to do the work.
I don't see why someone has to be the bad guy here. Maybe it's just the HN way to get very, very upset about little things like this?
Assuming each video is only an hour and you paid someone minimum wage to caption them, and they were able to caption them perfectly by going through the video once, then this would cost $145,000. Realistically, a professional would have to do it and would take hours for each video.
Removing them so they don't get sued seems like the only sensible option from the university's perspective.
Or rather they can to you, but for me, holding to a standard created to protect minorities is more important than that, even if in some cases it prevents majorities from not having everything they want.
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.
Since they had implemented such a policy, required staff to sign off on it, and also claimed to be compliant with such a policy, yeah, it probably should have been done.
The full report from the Justice Department is available at [1] and the claims are fairly straight-forward by the complainants; Berkley used public funds to make said videos, claimed to be compliant with their own rules and regulations regarding Accessibility, had the necessary department internally to assist with compliance to Accessibility, but neglected to enforce compliance as they were supposed to.
When the Justice Department was brought in, it was the finding of the Department that compliance would not cause "...undue administrative or financial [burden]..." on Berkley.
Berkley basically had the choice to comply as they were supposed to have been doing in the first place or remove, and they opted to remove. It is a fiscally sensible position, but this issue seems to have been a result of poor enforcement of the University's own policies and promises to Accessibility.
The report from the Justice Department, linked on Berkley's response, is fairly short and in plain language. I take the regret in Berkley's official response at face value, since I don't think this is what anyone wanted (no videos at all), but according to the report, Berkley had and continues to have the resources and expertise to do this as the content is created, instead of waiting until they have upwards of 20,000 videos queued up. It's a costly mistake, and they chose the cheaper way of fixing it.
[1]https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
The difference in this case is that the law requiring it already exists and Berkeley didn't obey it.
Is the suit because the lectures don't have a sign language translation for every single lecture?
I think it's a shame, but if they had just captioned them as they released them, it wouldn't have been such a burden to do all 20,000 at once.
You're right that YT can auto-caption some video. The DoJ looked at the accuracy of a selection of video, and found it was rather low. That inaccuracy, coupled with the lack of reasonable adjustments for people with visual impairment or manual disability means that YTs auto-captioning isn't enough to make a video accessible.
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.
From a previous discussion, they are not of good enough quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13769549
It's much more likely that the cost of making the lectures ADA-compliant was prohibitive. Universities aren't corporations who can appeal to equities holders/markets for funds when a need presents itself. So they did what they could ... a warning, well in advance, that the content would have to be withdrawn from public display, with the expectation that someone not subject to the ADA requirements would copy the lectures.
In the future, such content will be created already ADA-compliant, but many of these lectures predate the ADA and were created in good faith. It would have been a shame to lose them, especially when you consider that current and future computer resources can provide on-the-fly subtitles (and translations) for those who want or need them.
The ADA is nearly 30 years old. The videos are 10 years old or so.
Berkeley had policies in place to ensure content was accessible, and it had help for creators to make sure content was accessible.
The people who created this content were responsible for self-certification. They signed documents saying they were aware of Berkeley policy, and aware of the help available to make content accessible, and they also signed to say that the content was accessible.
That would be great. And as long as money is no object, I really hope they're planning to buy everyone a puppy too.
Isn't progress grand?