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Comment by mrybczyn | Hacker News Reader

So I guess we'll see more of this? :

2007: https://www.cnet.com/news/uc-berkeley-first-to-post-full-lec...

2017: http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/266033/obama-civil-rights-...

The ADA is a law that was passed during the first Bush administration, not a "product" of Obama's DOJ other than the expectation that the DOJ enforce the laws of the United States.

Do you remember the HN story about the DoJ letter to UCB? Did you read the letter? There is significant leeway in which cases the DoJ pursues, and in how the DoJ pursues and investigates cases. In no way was the DoJ's finding (i.e. threat of legal action, fines, etc.) a given. It also seems obvious that UCB could have claimed that to address the complaint would have been cost-prohibitive (which the DoJ letter listed as a possible defense), yet they didn't attempt to do so.

Also, this action was only pursued after two professors at a university for the deaf filed an official complaint with the DoJ. Isn't it bizarre that two professors at an institute of higher-learning filed a complaint to have educational resources, which were freely available to the entire world, deleted?

> not a "product" of Obama's DOJ other than the expectation that the DOJ enforce the laws of the United States.

A bizarre statement, considering how the Obama administration and DoJ simply declined to enforce laws they didn't like.

> Also, this action was only pursued after two professors at a university for the deaf filed an official complaint with the DoJ. Isn't it bizarre that two professors at an institute of higher-learning filed a complaint to have educational resources, which were freely available to the entire world, deleted?

No, it is not bizarre that lawyers at a university for the deaf, precisely the population that one expects to notice this infraction and to also have the monetary resources to file a complaint, were the ones who filed a complaint. That's often how lawsuits come about.

Yes, the DoJ is all about priorities. Obama's administration put more resources into its civil rights division compared to the Bush (GWB) era, which looked more into voter fraud among other issues. That other administrations may have let the law go unenforced does not mean that the law should or can be ignored when litigants pursue a complaint.

And yes, I have read the other HN threads on this and have occasionally chimed in the discussion [0]. The issue is a lot more nuanced than "THANKS OBAMA SJWs". But it's a path that the United States as a whole decided to walk down in 1990, in bipartisan fashion, when it passed the sweeping American Disabilities Act. The ADA has had massive costs for businesses and organizations in the past decades: http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ada/ch2.htm

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

> No, it is not bizarre that lawyers at a university for the deaf, precisely the population that one expects to notice this infraction and to also have the monetary resources to file a complaint, were the ones who filed a complaint. That's often how lawsuits come about.

Sorry if I was unclear. I meant how ironic it is for people who have devoted their lives to educating others to file a complaint causing freely available educational resources to be destroyed.

That's one irony to note. Another irony worth noting is that a premier publicly-funded university, in the U.S. state that is among the most proactive in enforcing ADA regulations, expended taxpayer-funded resources to produce educational videos that did not meet ADA regulations.

Those educational resources may have been "freely available" because they were posted on YouTube, but the folks who did the work of curating, editing, and producing those resources for YouTube are paid with public funds, and are thus obligated to follow the rules of ADA. If "well at least it's better than nothing" is the excuse for deprioritizing access to these resources, then the ADA's ability to protect the disenfranchised becomes effectively meaningless.

Note that the ADA was passed in 1990, so it had been in place for 17 years before Berkeley started putting video online.

And, for the years between 2007 and 2015 Berkeley staff had lied by saying that they were aware of Berkeley policies to make stuff accessible, and that the material was accessible.

This is new grounds for the ADA. Previous guidance has almost always been about having your site's core functionality accessible. So if you're TurboTax, a blind person should be able to submit their taxes.

The idea that in 2007 anyone thought that all the videos your school would post online would have to be accessible to hearing-impaired users is simply inaccurate.

It was worse than that. The court's decision acknowledged that most of the videos did have subtitles, but found that the subtitles were not 100% accurate, there was a small number of errors, plus they did not provide subtitles and a description perfectly describing graphical content of the videos such as charts. Some videos also didn't have captions at all but merely having captions wasn't the issue.

Among the problems that go beyond simple captioning of voice:

"many videos did not provide an alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations, or urls on slides)"

"videos containing text sometimes had poor color contrast"

"information was sometimes conveyed using color alone"

"some documents were not formatted properly for use with screen readers"

"page structural elements were not always defined"

"some tables did not have row and column headers defined"

"math equations were not always defined in a comprehendible way" (Not sure if any math classes, texts, articles, etc at all pass are capable of passing this new court defined test for everyone.)

"Many PDFs either did not have a tag structure defined or the tag structure was incorrect."

"Some links were not keyboard accessible and did not indicate whether they were expandable or collapsible"

So the court set a very high bar schools and perhaps others must pass in order to be legally allowed to post content on line. Content must not be merely accessible but must be what the government now calls "entirely accessible". By this decision this can be seen to cover a comprehensive set of ideals that go far beyond voice transcriptions, and which by the standards of the court seem to be required to be implemented perfectly without any errors or omissions to pass the standard required by their reading of the ADA.

It's true that the DoJ (and DoEd) have paid attention to these problems relatively recently (less than 10 years). I don't agree that perfection is required or that a bar has been set that must be met in some approved way prior to posting content. It's not like every university with publicly available videos has to caption them now "or else," but they should heed the lessons learned from the outcomes of legal cases like this.

I disagree. First, guidance tends to be updated in response to litigation outcomes as often as in response to executive fiat, arguably more.

Second, why do you deny that anyone had thought of deaf accessibility when the videos were first uploaded? Subtitling and sign language accommodation are not new things, it was entirely foreseeable that there would be both demand for such accommodations and that standards for adding caption data to online video would emerge.

There may not have been litigation or guidance on ADA implementation in place at that time, but you shouldn't need a rule to be in place before you spend money on doing the right thing when the spirit of the law (maximizing accessibility) is clear and the demand and technical requirements of the task are obvious.

It should have been on UCB's to-do list from the day after the videos were uploaded in the first place. To have it otherwise is to say that deaf people don't matter.

2007 is a lot different than 2017 when it comes to online video consumption. For starters, a greater number of people, including the disabled, are consuming online video. This is not entirely different from brick and mortar facilities being hit with lawsuits for not having required wheelchair accessible facilities. Those lawsuits weren't based on new laws, but on the discovery of the inadequate facilities.

The age of the law, and of the building, and of the content, makes this example a bit different.

i) I build a building and then someone passes a law and I have to modify my building to make it accessible.

ii) A law is passed. A decade later I build a building, and I see the law and think it's a good thing and tell my architects and builders to make sure they comply with the law and I offer them support to understand the law, and they sign a document to say "Yep, we complied with that law", and it turns out that they lied and my new building is not compliant with the law and I have to add a ramp anyway.

The Berkeley situation is more like ii than i.

I think it is entirely different. Physical accessibility is virtually a one-time cost: install the rails, ramps, etc, and you're done. But meeting these standards [1] is surely cost-prohibitive, especially when the only person doing it is an already overburdened professor who's merely uploading videos of his lectures, slides, etc. It would increase the preparation time of every lecture, document, etc. by several times over.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13933826

> especially when the only person doing it is an already overburdened professor

That over burdened professor was offered help, and s/he had to sign a declaration to say s/he was aware of the help provided by Berkeley, and that the content was accessible.

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

Pages 3 and 4:

> 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:

For a small business, a $10,000 lawsuit + construction fees is not a trivial cost, and may be cost-prohibitive enough to force the business to close shop. But "something is better than nothing " is not justification alone for not meeting ADA regulations.

I don't think anyone believes that meeting ADA regulations is cheap; the fact that Berkeley (and Harvard and MIT [0]) are in this predicament shows that the cost of producing accessible video is non-trivial. But it's the law, and advocacy groups would argue that the burden shouldn't be on the individual professor, but on the institution, or rather, the federal agencies to provide adequate funding to meet the burden imposed by law.

If institutions aren't forced to realize the costs, then they aren't incentivized to pressure government budget/policymakers to make ADA funding a priority, which neuters the protections that ADA was created for in the first place.

Again, it's costly, but that's the monetary price our civic society pays when it decides to extend protections to those who are disabled. Presumably, the ADA was passed because legislators and constituents thought that the price was worth it.

[0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/2/25/harvard-lawsuit-...

I think that something /given away for free/ should have a different standard than something which is sold as a product or service.

Berkeley themselves thought all the content was accessible. They provided support to content creators to make it accessible, and they required content creators to sign declarations to say that the content was accessible and that they were aware of the support that Berkeley provided.

Why did Berkeley require those declarations to be signed if they didn't care about accessibility?

> "Why did Berkeley require those declarations to be signed if they didn't care about accessibility?"

looks around who said that they didn't?

I can't speak specifically to ADA, but I know federally funded programs were required to meet 508 standards as of 2003, which included captions or transcripts for videos.

So expecting such affordances for ADA purposes in 2007 seems reasonable.

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