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.
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.
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.
...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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.