> Berkeley posted a bunch of free course content. They got sued under ADA because they hadn't captioned the material.

This sort of thing really bothers me. Accessibility should absolutely be supported where feasible, but never to the point where it prevents releasing content in the first place.

Not even when you knew about the law and its requirements, violating their own university policies, having professors committing fraud by attesting their course materials were accessible, etc? Read the DoJ findings below, Berkeley is not a victim here in my opinion.

Regardless, no one said Berkeley had to take the videos down. They chose to do that on their own because it was too “expensive” to make them accessible.

However, I did not see Berkeley turning down federal funding, which is in part why they are legally required to make their courses accessible (Section 504, for those wondering). Funny how that stuff works.

https://www.ada.gov/briefs/uc_berkley_lof.pdf

I can't speak to any of that, but it strikes me as a separate issue.

The question is, if a college professor would like to throw up a recording of their course online for the public benefit, and the school would otherwise be on board, will they be able to do so? Or will the school be concerned about getting sued because the video doesn't have subtitles?

Adding subtitles to many hours of lectures which will be posted for free is not a reasonable request. So of course what will happen instead is the videos will never be posted.

If this scenario isn't actually plausible, feel free to correct me.

The courses are not free, they are paid for, in large part, by the federal government and the state.

California did not back then, but they now have their own legislation known as the Unruh Civil Rights Act and of course there’s the ADA/Rehabilitation Act.

Here’s the kicker - they have to do this whether it is posted publicly or not. The legal requirement does not only apply to public material, but to ALL material and the material still exists/can be accessed with Berkeley credentials. It also applies to future material produced that is used with students/in classes.

My guess is, they had to make it accessible regardless and did this out of spite. They had internal resources to help with this but chose not to do so/made it really expensive because of the volume due to not doing it in the first place.

It is kind of like Cybersecurity - people don’t like to spend the money until they have a breach, where it’s much more expensive to remediate and their costs would be much more manageable/risk reduced has they done it “right” the entire time.

My mother is a professor in the CSU system and I will say California public universities are beginning to take this much more seriously now, largely because of lawsuits.

> The courses are not free, they are paid for, in large part, by the federal government and the state.

The courses are not free but the videos are! Releasing publicly available videos is not a requirement in order to receive public funding, it's something extra they did because they could.

> My guess is, they had to make it accessible regardless and did this out of spite. They had internal resources to help with this but chose not to do so/made it really expensive because of the volume due to not doing it in the first place.

If the subtitles were already available for students internally, that does change things. But the articles posted by the OP made it sound like it was something they'd need to add.

And adding subtitles to hundreds of hours of lectures really does strike me as unreasonably costly, given that this content was not intended for students paying tuition and did not garner any additional funding.

I think it is a bit naive to think they released those videos out of altruism. It is free marketing for them and a way of distinguishing their brand, funded by students, the state, and the federal government.

They had an office dedicated to helping professors make course materials, to include resources for subtitling course material and QA processes for ensuring accessibility. For whatever reason, the university did not require use of the office and the professors did not use it even though it was there. The DoJ report I linked above has additional information on that.

I may not be remembering accurately, but I am fairly sure the material Berkeley posted on edX at the time was just recordings of their actual lectures given to on-campus students and/or recordings they were making/were made for online classes (that were paid for). In other words, they were not going out of their way to record these lectures specifically for MOOCs.

Are you suggesting that Berkeley doesn’t have the resources to properly add audio transcripts to their course content?

It really feels like the Overton window on disability rights has shifted in the wrong direction.

Just because it’s free, the university has certain obligations from taking federal funding. These laws have been put into place in order to ensure disabled people have equal access to these educational systems.

One way to solve this would have been for Berkeley to charge a nominal fee (perhaps for a limited time as “early access” or similar) that could then be used to pay people that can transcribe the audio.

Instead, a lack of imagination and a lack of empathy leads to these resources being removed, a net loss for everyone.

Sounds to me like the way the law is enforced should change then. There should be a fine for not following the law if the content is removed or not updated. If the fine is sufficiently high, then there will be no incentive to just remove the content. There will still be a disincentive to create it in the first place, but at least existing content won't disappear.

This seems like a poor idea.

1. Release content not due to requirement but for general good. 2. Get sued because it's not captioned. 3. Have insufficient funds to caption so you pull material. 4. Get fined for pulling material. 5. Watch as no one does step 1 anymore.

It's not a requirement for everyone. Just federally funded groups. Also, these, days, I'm pretty sure you can just turn on captioning and youtube will use voice recognition to do a decent job of captioning your video for free.

I agree with you, since unfortunately the only real way to enforce the ADA is through private citizens filing civil suit.

Regardless, a lack of more effective means for enforcement does not absolve Berkeley of failing to follow the law, especially when they had internal resources to make their material accessible and chose not to do so.

Edit: apologies, misread your post and that is an interesting approach. Another way is to make the university pay back a portion of the federal funding they received, up to whatever amount they estimate it would take to make the materials accessible.

Youtube's auto CC feature gotten very good lately, I think it can handle most of the stuff with clear sound. So hopefully auto CC will help to solve this unfortunate paradox of accessibility.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

Wait, Walter Lewin's videos are gone...?

MIT policy on sexual harassment was found to be violated.

https://news.mit.edu/2014/lewin-courses-removed-1208

So what? Report him to the police, do an investigation, fire him if he really did what he's accused of, let the court deal with the rest... I don't know why removing him from the internet helps.

Removing a persona non-grata and their related authored material may serves multiple purposes:

- The organization signaling to stakeholders that they condemn and take appropriate action against behaviour.

- The organzation engaging in damage control, minimizing future exposure of events linking back to the organization.

- Penalizing transgressive behaviour in a professional setting, through sanctions and revocations of merit, reputation, licensing or employment etc.

Actually, breach of contract could lead to lecture material not being legally available, if a lecturer has sole ownership of such. It could also be that future use of say, recorded lectures, involves compensation to the author. If an organization want to cut ties to the author, or just withhold compensation for a time, they might refrain from using the authors material.

My initial gut feeling was your response, but changed my mind quickly when reading the article. His videos being online resulted in interaction with the students, and that's where he harassed them.

It's a shame, but any other solution feels like it's a broken stair just waiting for someone to trip over it.

Because interacting with students on the Internet is how he harassed people?

Another explainer here.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/23/complainant-u...

Auto captions are plenty good enough to understand material nowadays. And they'll only get better with time.

Considering that, we should remove overzealous captioning laws and simply require auto-captions and focus our accessibility efforts elsewhere in society (like making more new build houses step free - it's ridiculous that 90% of my friends houses I can't visit).