How is society improved by taking them down?
First of all, I agree with you. I think most others do as well.
The problem is, we can look at a case like this and say, "Obviously we shouldn't lose access to this." Then there's a next time, and a next time, and a next time. And eventually the deaf are at a measurable informational disadvantage to those who can hear. That's why these laws exist.
So, everyone should take a step back and figure out a reasonable solution. I hope that's the reason for the judgment.
We can't make being deaf the same as not being deaf. Disabled people will always be at some disadvantage to their abled counterparts. All we can do is make reasonable compromises. And it should be utterly obvious to everyone involved that this is not a reasonable compromise.
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.
The law didn't force UCB to take the videos down, they chose to take them down rather than comply with the law.
Not the same thing..
It totally did, it's an unreasonable cost, and thus a fake choice.
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!
What about blind people? Or people who cannot afford internet access? Or people who don't speak English?
If you take your reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, nobody can give anything away for free, because there will always be some minority that is put at a disadvantage.
...says the guy who's partially blind after a stroke
If it feels insane, it's because it is insane
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...
Nonsense. The content is normal undergrad lectures recorded using no special techniques, with YouTube/Google providing automated captioning. The DOJ letter states specifically that the automated captioning is non-compliant (at least it was in March 2015) and that additionally, the videos would need to be edited such that all relevant visible content is described by the lecturer, and poor color contrast is avoided etc. For 20,000 hours of video the cost of doing that manually is huge relative to the funds available to such a project in a public university struggling with a budget deficit and generally with the difficult financial climate for public higher education.
Someone below said that they assessed it would cost (at least) $1,000,000. There are 20,000 lectures so that's $50 per lecture, which seems reasonable. With a $3 CPM on youtube, that's ~16,000 views per video. I'm sure there's some hurdle in the way to enable ads, but the point still stands. The costs here per video is small enough that it's hard to at claim that the videos are both very valuable and at the same time impossible to make compliant.
1. UC Berkeley is an entity that uses the internet
2. The internet can be used, to great advantage, for distributing video files
3. The video files in this case were made with the best intentions of improving the world, and this is also the reason for wanting them to be available to the internet-connected world, for free. They harm no-one, and they make the world a better place.
4. So they should be able to use the internet to distribute their video files, without any special extra costs.
The issue isn't 20000 formerly made videos aren't compliant, it's that Berkley was making the videos out of compliance while claiming to be compliant.
THe DoJ's assessment is that Berkley has the resources to correct their error without "undue ... [burden]", so their options were take the videos down or engage in a program to meet compliance witht he videos, less they be penalized.
Berkley opted to just take the videos down. I get this from a financial standpoint, even though it'd be nice if they aimed for compliance.
But don't mistake them taking it down as an order so much; they weren't making the videos accessible as they had pledged to, they claimed they were, and they were continuing not to comply. The complaintants called them on it, and it's unfortunate, but they should have been complying from the beginning before they had a video queue of 20000.
I hope from here on out they will make compliant videos and use their on-campus resources; Berkley's response certainly seems to suggest interest in compliance, so I hope that this can just be a tragedy that we can move past.
[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
We're saying the judgement lacks discernment and does more harm than good. I feel the prejudice suffered by everyone far outweights the justice brought by this case.
Berkley made a mistake, and their solution to correct it is to just take it down. The Justice Department made it clear in their report that it wasn't an all or nothing outcome and they were willing to work with Berkley on a palatable solution, Berkley just chose the easiest option.
They produced videos that can't be distributed. This isn't much different from say having an electronics project that isn't FCC certified, not having licensed the content in a video or not distributing source files with software containing GPL code. I can produce all those things all I want, but I can't distribute it and I can't continue distributing it just because I've already started.
At the end of the day, for any given resource, there will always be a subset of people who can benefit maximally from that resource, and everyone else who is impeded in some way (can't understand target language, don't have appropriate education; suffer from a mental or physical disability that is relevant; don't have personal freedom to view resource, etc). And though it may seem childish to you, in fact the people are absolutely correct who say "This is political correctness gone mad. If you take your arguments to their logical conclusions we'll never be able to distribute anything because some minority group will be saying it's unfair."
I've spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks following this saga. I get the impression that national-level organizations like the National Association of the Deaf approve of the sort of selfish, spiteful litigation that was carried out. It doesn't make one think positively of them at all.
[1] Their edx.org material is depressingly dumbed-down relative to their video lectures, but that's a separate topic; welcome to the future I guess.
It's why their decision is really so strange, as per the order from the DoJ, the Department looked like it was being fairly reasonable (there wasn't an immediate timeline produced, there wasn't a mandate to change structure that didn't already exist).
Again, I think everyone agrees that the world is better with the videos online - even the complainants. What the complainants wanted was for Berkley to start enforcing their compliance, not to take down the video.
My gripe with the LBRY guys and most opposition to the DoJ/Complainants that brought the issue to a head is that everyone seems to think it's two blind people demanding that Berkley take the videos down when that was never the case. It was two blind people pointing out that Berkley was not doing what they committed to and promised to, and wanting that to change going forward. The 20000 videos were evidence, not property that anyone was going after.
Truthfully, the LBRY guys blew this out of proportion and I feel like they either misunderstood or misrepresented the facts in their post. I'm glad they mirrored it all, but the hype built around it is not appropriate given the actual story.
So all in all, it's this concept that I think needs to be corrected:
> Some people on the disabilities rights side seem to think that public access to this innocently-produced material should be taken away, despite their full awareness that the world will be strictly worse off after doing so.
Since no one proposed or wanted that. The removal was just a legal solution, not a legal demand from the complainants.
Although, again, Berkeley has already started enforcing their compliance, since 2015 in fact. So what the complainants/DOJ said in effect was "It's not enough that you have started to only release accessibility-compliant videos, we want you to also go back through 20,000 hours of historical video, and change those, presumably via painstaking manual editing since we deem automated captioning to be insufficient". To which the response of the vast majority of people who've commented on this issue, including many kind-hearted liberal types, is "Sorry, nope".
Maybe the laws should specify a tax-funded department to go around close-captioning everything then.
The fact that that people writing the law had good intentions doesn't change the fact that they're morons who wrote a demonstrably terrible law. With due apology due all deaf people, I'd rather repeal the law and leave deaf people at a disadvantage than leave it in place and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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.
Does this mean I should have to provide a text annotation?
C.f. Harrison Bergeron
While I can sympathize, I'm not sure holding back the progress of an entire society just to not disadvantage a subset of it is as reasonable as you seem to think. I agree that a better solution would be ideal though.
Perhaps they should just fund a machine learning program for closed captioning, instead of punishing people who are advancing social interests.
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.
That's a hard argument to make too. Some of the people that may have learned from these lectures might go on to champion disability rights, or may go on to invent tech that may address some of those disabilities. We simply can't all progress in lockstep, and trying to force that is probably harmful to all.
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.
Are you so sure that the learning style you seem to prefer is really ideal for all people? Because you sound really sure, but I'm not sure how that could be.
There weren't really an alternative, so whether the format has endured or not isn't really relevant. Many other schools are doing this differently. At this point your statement about "holding back the progress of an entire society" seems rather hollow. I can't convince you data exposing data is more useful, but I also shouldn't have to. It's one of the fundamentals of computer systems if not the Internet.
Having come this far without doing so, this situation becomes a reasonable response. And I think everyone knows that it is not ideal.
What would be even better is if the new host would make them ADA accessible, or ask someone to do so for them (or other solution).
Now, years later, they released it for free to the general public as is.
UCB wasn't ordered to take them down. UCB was ordered to make them accessible, and chose to take them down rather than spend the money.
BTW this would be a good crowdsourcing project.
> If there is no penalty for not making them available for the deaf, why would any institution pay for captioning?
Do you realize the insanity of that kind of logic? If there is no penalty for not curing HIV, how can McDonald's sell hamburgers? Where does it end?
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.
I agree.
>The law cannot eliminate that. All it can do is make reasonable compromises to mitigate it.
I also agree with this. And I believe that's what this law is doing: saying "you may be at a disadvantage in these ways, but you won't be in this way if we can help it."
Surely you jest. As the parent noted, such reasoning is squarely on the path to insanity.
What a society could possibly attempt to ensure is "equity". What you are suggesting should be sought is "equality". Since this is (trivially) impossible to attain, to attempt to do so is a fool's errand.
You may be measurably more intelligent than me. Should society force some crippling drug on you, to ensure I am not relatively hindered, merely because you can think more effectively than me?
Some appear to believe so...
What's insane is people comparing the government drugging us to equalize our IQ to the enforcement of a law that requires a publicly funded institution to put closed captions on their videos if they're to be publicly available.
I'll bet a reasonable solution comes from this, sets a precedent for the future, and the huffing and puffing will be for naught.
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.
Regulation is more about creating incentives than conditioning.
> The study of reinforcement has produced an enormous body of reproducible experimental results. Reinforcement is the central concept and procedure in special education, applied behavior analysis, and the experimental analysis of behavior and is a core concept in some medical and psychopharmacology models, particularly addiction, dependence, and compulsion.
Which also confirms pretty much everything an ex-gf, who completed a master in Psychology when we were dating, told me about positive versus negative reinforcement. Basically, stick doesn't work much, carrot does.
I agree that it's a widely different topic for regulation. I probably shouldn't have mixed the two so directly, there are many discrepancies. However it's been shown that incentives (i.e. rewards, positive reinforcement of some behaviors) work at the societal level, e.g. family/reproduction incentives (giving money to people who have children; I don't know how these policies are called in the US), or incentives to buy houses, newer cars, etc.
> more about creating incentives than conditioning
I fail to grasp how the former isn't a particular subset of the latter.
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.
People pay for cars with seatbelt. Free videos don't earn income.
The deaf OR hard of hearing population of the united states is roughly 4.1% (10.6 million).
A closer example would maybe be: if paraplegics needed special seatbelts to be safe in cars, should we mandate that all car makers be required to install special seatbelts that are paraplegic compatible? (Paraplegics make up a small fraction of the population of the United States - somewhere around 300,000).
Obviously that comparison has holes in it as well, but it is a lot closer. And I would think the answer would be no, not because of heartlessness, but simply because it doesn't make sense. I assume, again not heartlessly, that most paraplegics do not drive. Likewise, most deaf people will not access these videos.
It seems closer to insanity than reasonableness to mandate either of these things.
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 includes description of relevant non-verbal sounds, but it's not clear to me why the price difference is so big.
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?
Why would any institution pay for captioning if they can just come around to compliance by taking the videos down without any penalty.
This is now how you use legislation to move toward a the goal of greater (ultimately universal) accessibility.
Even if it wasn't a free service, if the regulations make the venture unprofitable, it won't happen. Same for taxes, etc.
If the legislators want "standards", they had better pay for it out of the tax payers pockets, instead of shifting the burden to business, where it doesn't belong.
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.
You're also missing the point completely. Whether a business wants to do something depends on whether it is expected to be profitable. If the laws make it unprofitable, then it doesn't want to do it.
You're posing a false dilemma with "it's more important that those persons be allowed to participate in society than it is for a business to make money". If society wants participation, society should pay for it, not just business. It's just really easy for the government to use people with disabilities, because opposing such legislation is unpopular.
Who decides what's reasonable, anyway? If you're a small business, building some ramp can easily break your budget. If you're McDonalds, it make no difference. Are you going to treat both companies equally? If so, you're sponsoring big corporate.
It's highly questionable that having 20,000 free videos removed from public access is the intention behind the law. More likely, it's an unwelcome side-effect.
Why should the law not allow an exception for free content? Why should the law put the burden squarely on the provider? The tradeoff isn't in having "everyone" participate or not, it's in who pays the bill.
You could argue that a car with no seatbelts is better than no car at all, but as a society we've decided that seatbelts are needed or else the car cannot be driven. This incentivizes car producers to produce cars with seatbelts, even though cars get slightly more expensive and slightly fewer cars may be sold.
If someone builds a car with no seatbelts, upon being told by a court that the car needs seatbelts, they may even choose to junk the car rather than pay to install the legally required seatbelts. Their choice.
The same principle applies here.
Of course, this case might be different for two reasons. First, the videos have already been produced, so we see the direct harm of the regulation (often the harm is invisible). Second, the trade-off here between higher-quality goods vs more goods might have a different balance in this situation than others.
"I can't hear it, so I'm better off if nobody else can either" doesn't really compute.
Note that on YouTube you can open access to a video for community contribution. Someone other than the original uploader can come along and provide closed captioning.
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.
I tend to agree with the other commenters that this seems like a good project for crowdsourcing because it's something many people do care a lot about, although I can see how that might not satisfy ADA compliance.
For all the talk about these types of issues, it seems to be very rare for tech conference videos to be captioned, see:
https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type...
I think this is potentially a good area to explore collectively - any technology solutions that make accessibility cheaper would feed back to places like UC Berkeley.
Do the captions need to meet a very high standard of quality? If not, automated captioning would have been a good student project.
Especially as they're being offered for free. The "If X group cannot have it, nobody can have it" reasoning seems mad. So because the deaf cannot get value from those videos, others cannot either. I'm not deaf, but I cannot imagine many deaf people thinking this is reasonable.
You might also think of other minorities. Why isn't it also illegal for free lectures not to accommodate blind people? Or those without internet access at all. If you take the "X group doesn't have it, nobody can have it" reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, it seems to me that nothing can be provided for free to anyone.
The lawsuit addressed both deaf and blind students. In addition to captions, there should be screen-reader friendly versions of pages and documents, audio descriptions of visual data, etc. Public universities have limited budgets, so to spend possibly millions of dollars to support a free offering may not have been feasible.
Compare this to a free art museum operated by a local non-profit , and suddenly being forced to bring the building up to ADA code, building wheelchair ramps, installing elevators, providing audio descriptions of artwork, braille descriptions, etc. Instead of spending millions that they don't have to complete that work, they shut down the museum.
1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...
In many ways.
People ignore speed limits pretty frequently. Traffic flows faster, more efficiently because everyone is breaking the law.
Laws against gay marriage and other discriminatory laws. Society is greatly improved by making them optional. Some states have strange and bizarre laws in the books but nobody is bothering enforcing them. Everyone treats them as optional and the society is better for it.
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.
We live in a society with many optional laws already.
This law was put in place to protect hearing disabled people not punish everyone else. It also wasn't intended to deprive the world of 20,000 free lectures.
Perhaps these videos could be granted some kind of temporary waiver until they can be closed captioned. Youtube even has system for community driven captions. People have suggested crowdfunding projects. People have lots of ideas for fixing this.
If the videos are down the incentive to make them available to the deaf is removed. Some kind of optional application of the here could incentivize a fix that works for everyone.
In all seriousness, you're arguing a false position because nobody is arguing we live in a society of optional laws. I think most people are lamenting the consequences of this particular law for this particular circumstance.
Both sides have legitimate grievances. Hearing impaired people should have access to free lectures if a university is offering them. It puts hearing impaired students at a disadvantage when they don't have access to the same resources as hearing impaired. On the other hand, we want to live in a world where it's not prohibitively expensive to post lectures that are accessible to everybody.
So, what do we do?
Can we solve this problem so both parties have good solutions? Could we raise money on Kickstarter and post the transcription jobs on Amazon's Mechanical Turk? Is this a good opportunity to start a voice recognition moonshot effort where schools can compete to transcribe audio for esoteric subjects?
But
nobody is arguing we live in a society of optional lawsI'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.