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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

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LeoPanthera

> And they had to take down all their published courses!

No. They chose to take them down, instead of providing reasonable accommodations to those with disabilities.

Choosing to see everything in the most cynical light doesn't make that version of events true.

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How is this a better outcome than not having captions on free content? Which can be Auto dubbed on YouTube anyway

Yes but it's stupid to force them to do it. If the state wants to demand this the state can pay for it. To hide free knowledge just because of a few specific pet disabilities... The content is also not accessible to someone with serious enough learning disabilities for example. Should they be forced to create an accessible version of that?

Oddly enough, UC Berkley is public education, so it's the federal government and state government. At least technically true.

Making giving that away for free instead cost millions of dollars has an obvious and inevitable outcome.

This is really a tragedy. Make millions of people suffer harm because 1 person cant be accomodated is about as pure an example of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" as i can think.

There is no malicious intent here. Why arent these documents grandfathered in? It simply makes no sense.

You realize it would cost a significant resources to make the “accommodations” you are suggesting? Money, despite what you may believe, doesn’t grow on trees. Given the range of worthy competing interests where the money could be spent, the university likely had no practical choice but to take it offline, lest it face the bad press and wrath of Progressives.

You remind me of people who insist every single new apartment must be ADA compliant instead of a reasonable percentage throughout the city. Another example is banning SROs on the grounds they are “inhumane”. The moral purity results in less housing and forcing people to live in the cars or on the street.

Our society is better when the things that are available are available to everyone, not just the privileged. I don't see why accommodations for the disabled are considered some unnecessary burden; they should be considered a cost of doing business, for everyone who does business.

Yes, business.

This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.

And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.

I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.

I shouldn't have used the term "business," because that made people think that I was referring more to economics instead of "doing the right thing even when the right thing is slightly more expensive." Look, UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules around disabilities and accommodations. It's well established law at this point; the ADA is 35 years old. They should know this, and they should be able to comply. To take down the videos suggests laziness and ignorance on Berkeley's part.

> doing the right thing even when the right thing is slightly more expensive

And that's why I made the argument that it wasn't slightly more expensive. It's possible it would have cost more to add subtitles than the entire rest of the project combined.

I think it's fair to mandate subtitles when there's a certain level of budget. I don't think it's a good idea to unconditionally mandate subtitles.

> UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules

In their normal course of action. I don't think this side project was plugged in to the core tasks of the university.

Shutting it down counts as lazy but what do you want a project with minimal budget to do?

We're not shaming other universities for not putting courses online. We're only shaming one that did it "badly" and then gave up. That's unfair. Every other university that doesn't fund similar subtitles and uploads should get the same reaction.

And by "badly" I mean it still had okay subtitles, just not particularly good ones.

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