
UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public - Myrmornis
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-capture-content/
======
Jun8
According to the post this was caused by a letter from Department of Justice
(pdf link from the post: [https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf)), which states that
two representatives from National Association of the Deaf brought a complaint:
the videos did not have captions so they the complainants could not use them
in their classes.

I don't understand their motivation, did they think Berkeley would spend the
money to generate captions? How is the current situation a win for anyone, now
_nobody_ can use the videos.

EDIT: Ugh, they even have this in remedial measures: "Pay compensatory damages
to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to
comply with title II."

~~~
DanBC
> now nobody can use the videos

The Americans with Disabilities Act came in in 1990. The fact that even after
twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt
that organisations have for people with disabilities.

~~~
zeveb
> The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore
> the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with
> disabilities.

It costs roughly $1 for a professor to prop his camera up at the back of a
room and record himself speaking for an hour, then post it online (11GB @
3¢/GB = 33¢; we'll add double that for bandwidth &c.); it costs $180-$600 to
close-caption that video. The ADA turns lecture videos from something anyone
can do to something basically no-one will do.

Yes, life sucks when one's deaf. Yes, it'd be _awesome_ for every organisation
to have the resources to close-caption every recorded lecture. But requiring
every recorded lecture to be close-captioned merely ensures that to a first
order of approximation _no_ lecture will be close-captioned.

~~~
occamsrazorwit
> It costs roughly $1 for a professor to prop his camera up at the back of a
> room and record himself speaking for an hour... it costs $180-$600 to close-
> caption that video.

No, both of your figures are wrong. I actually worked in UC Berkeley lecture
recording and captioning, and the figures are on the order of magnitude of
$10/hour for each. The problem lies in the massive backlog of older courses
that would need to be captioned for only a few non-students per course.

~~~
zeveb
I got my figures for close-captioning from
[http://www.automaticsync.com/captionsync/closed-
captioning-c...](http://www.automaticsync.com/captionsync/closed-captioning-
cost/)

And a 10x increase is still large, although perhaps not prohibitively large.

~~~
occamsrazorwit
I see, but that website is clearly biased as they're trying to sell their
product. Also, they don't even use correct math which makes me even more
certain they're just making up numbers. They mention that other places cost
$1/minute, and they claim that half of that cost is $3.33/hr. ???

~~~
shkkmo
I believe you had a lapse in reading comprehension.

> To add it all up, an untrained captioner could easily spend eight to ten
> times the length of a video to create a timed caption file. Let’s call it 9X
> on average, meaning that each minute of video takes nine minutes for this
> beginner to caption.

$1 / min of video * 1/2 = $0.50 / min of video 1 min of video = 9 min of
transcription time $0.50 / 9 min of transcription time = $3.33 / hour of
transcription time

------
WillPostForFood
"The Department of Justice letter indicates that they believe our legacy
Course Capture content from webcast.berkeley.edu and located on YouTube and
iTunesU is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. "

Unintended consequences of a well intentioned law - everyone loses access to
information, even many disabled people who still could have used it.

~~~
Frqy3
Unfortunately they have gone for the Harrison Bergeron approach to achieving
equality.

A better approach would have been to build a tool that allows crowdsourcing of
captions with a way for students with special needs to tag videos for
prioritisation.

~~~
kingbirdy
User-submitted captions are already a built-in YouTube feature

------
rudimental
Thanks DoJ. This will definitely make it a little harder for people to access
high quality, free content online.

URLs of the videos won't be removed: "Individual video URLs (links) will
remain unchanged."

[http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-
cou...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-
capture-content/)

How could one get all URLs and put them in one place for all 20k+ videos?

~~~
Myrmornis
I may be wrong, but unfortunately I believe that the URLs will only work if
you are authenticated as a Berkeley university user.

~~~
rudimental
You might be right. I read it as the YouTube URLs won't be altered / made
inaccessible. Your reading may be correct - I'm not sure!

~~~
ennuihenry
It appears they will appear on Youtube as private.

------
k_sze
You know what's also wrong? Somebody paid lawyers to sue or send letters
instead of paying people to add captions or make transcripts.

------
malodyets
There is unrest in the forest There is trouble with the trees For the maples
want more sunlight And the oaks ignore their pleas ... So the maples formed a
union And demanded equal rights 'The oaks are just too greedy We will make
them give us light' Now there's no more oak oppression For they passed a noble
law And the trees are all kept equal By hatchet, Axe, And saw

------
kccqzy
There's gotta be a preservation effort somewhere. Maybe archive.org would be
interested in obtaining a copy before they disappear?

~~~
rudimental
I talked to someone at the archive. He said a few people are aware of this,
including people involved with the way back machine. It might be hard for them
because video content in general doesn't save well, especially if it's hosted
on YouTube. I tried out some video streaming, audio streaming, and download
links on previous snapshots of the site, and they all lead to error pages.

~~~
pmoriarty
Youtube videos can easily be downloaded and saved using youtube-dl.

[https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

------
carlosgg
Their youtube channel says content posted on Spring 2015 and earlier will
remain available via youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley/playlists)

~~~
Myrmornis
They've changed that notice now: it says the content will be removed
3/15/2017.

As pmoriarty mentioned above, youtube-dl works very well for downloading
entire playlists:

[https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

------
Myrmornis
Original letter to campus community from vice chancellor for undergraduate
education:

[http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-
capture/](http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/)

The university is removing public access to all of the YouTube and iTunesU
video content that is currently available. Apparently this is 20,000 videos.
For example, here are the lecture courses in Computer Science that are
available but will soon disappear:

[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science)

The reasons for doing this seem to stem largely from this letter from the
Department of Justice

[https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf)

which informed the university that the free online video content was in
violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

------
Liuser
This happened to Stanford as well. I remember watching about half of their
videos for a course when all of a sudden it was unavailable. It was
frustrating that the DoJ would stifle free learning.

Fortunately the videos were being shared via torrents so I could finish the
course, and eventually reuploaded by others on their own personal youtube
channels.

~~~
ReverseCold
> videos were being shared via torrents

Oh right! Thanks!

------
Flammy
Most important part which triggered all of this:

Q: Why now? Is this related to the DOJ letter?

A: ...The Department of Justice letter indicates [...] Course Capture content
[...] is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Later it is mentioned specifically this is due to the videos are not
captioned. Thus the solution to this is to remove all older recordings.

------
angry_octet
They should just make them available with the sound all distorted and super
noisy like partially deaf people face, or just no sound, and autogenerated
subtitles.

Then, have online students sign up to write sub-titles or verify subtitles.
For every hour of subtitling you get 20 hours of hearing. Verification via a
CAPTCHA like system that interrupts video playback to verify snippets of
audio. Sell this corpus to deep learning people.

With hundreds of thousands of people doing MOOCs it should be very doable.

------
prats226
What is accuracy of state of the art algorithm for audio captioning? YouTube
has about 95% accuracy according to some folks. And what is the accuracy
needed by regulation? If cost of running algorithms is the only issue, there
should be a smarter solution like whoever is watching video lectures has to
contribute some compute from his device to run algorithm.

------
partycoder
While it is a legitimate claim to ask for more accessibility, this crab
mentality ("if I can't have it neither can you") is not in the best interest
of humanity.

There are many types of disability and to produce content that is fully
inclusive is almost impossible.

You have hearing problems, various types of vision problems including color
blindness... you can have extreme cases where someone is deaf-blind and also
has no hands therefore braille doesn't work. Can that person deny content to
everyone else by suing and force everyone to adapt to their needs? Can you
possibly cover each individual disability?

This sets a precedent that invites other universities to also take down all
their content, basically wasting a lot of excellent, valuable hard work.

------
ensignavenger
It was my understanding that the ADA requires 'reasonable' accommodations? If
that is the case, how does removing the videos from access to anyone qualify
as reasonable?

~~~
dragonwriter
Removing the videos isn't a reasonable accommodation, it's removing the
offering to the general public that creates an obligation for reasonable
accommodation, thus avoiding the bother of litigation to determine what
reasonable accommodation might actually be required.

Berkeley was compelled to remove the content, they chose to in order to avoid
the costs of resolving the dispute, to focus on unquestionably compliant
content moving forward.

~~~
ensignavenger
Thanks, I guess I understand that, the point I was trying to make was that the
Justice Departments interpretation of the law seems off. I hate to bring up
the President- but Trump promised less over-regulation, perhaps he should step
in with one of his famous (infamous?) executive orders.

------
dnquark
Do these accessibility requirements only concern public institutions? Stanford
has been taking down course videos (notably, CS231n) for the same reason,
which just does not make sense to me. I understand the argument that an
institution is obligated to provide accessible materials if the consumer is
/paying/ for them, either directly or as a taxpayer. But imposing these
requirements on those providing content for free seems a little ridiculous.

~~~
WillPostForFood
They apply to public and private institutions. Netflix was sued in 2010
because they didn't have captions on all their videos, and ended up settling
out of court.

------
0xFFC
This is devastating, at least for me , I learned so much from their channel.
Do you think starting a petition would work ? Can we start petition ?

------
blitmap
I feel like we could educate so many young people simply by removing content -
which would inspire a stubborn person like me to regain access and view it.
I'm not saying the work put into creating these videos was owed, or that the
university owes this access to the public - but certainly the world would be a
better place for it. I thought that was their overarching goal.

~~~
afarrell
So many more people would just never hear about it or would not have the
focused time to succeed at that though.

------
ryukidn
THIS very foreseeable outcome is what happens when the gov't is too big & too
powerful. Today, they restrict someone else's freedom, but, eventually, their
power will crush everyone's freedom!

"And then they came for me ..."

------
k-mcgrady
Surely they (Berkeley) could use some speech-to-text software to do this
relatively well, easy, and free. There's also bound to be people who would
have volunteered to do it for free so they didn't lose access.

~~~
PeterisP
No, that's not considered sufficient.

    
    
       The Department found that [...] many had automatic captioning
       generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology. In March 2015, the Department
       selected 30 videos. [..] for review. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the
       content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I thought that would be the case. What I really meant was for Berkley to play
the content while speech-to-text is running and then check it for errors
before making real (not live) captions/transcripts available.

------
Animats
Is there good speech to text for video available in the browser?

~~~
popey456963
Youtube automatic captions aren't actually that bad last time I checked. They
updated their algorithm recently (read: last couple of years) and on non-
technical phrases it probably has about 95%+ accuracy with good audio quality.

------
comp1927
Well, how many math and economics class available on edx now ...

------
officialjunk
does the closed captioning need to be in all possible languages? if the
captions are in english, even though the audio is, is that enough. can the
same argument be made for everyone that can't read english?

~~~
dragonwriter
Difference in preferred or proficient language are not a disability under the
ADA, AFAIK.

------
Yetanfou
Some appropriate music for this occasion:

Rush - 'The Trees' [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXeUvDOMgGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXeUvDOMgGY)

------
bbcbasic
I wonder, could they release with a permissive license, allowing other people
to host them or share them?

------
jshaqaw
Stuff like this is why Trump happens

------
1_2__3
Welcome to hardcore liberal ideology. Yes, they expected Berkeley to spend
tens of thousands of dollars adding captioning for the tiny fraction of people
who need it.

~~~
cooper12
Being deaf/disabled is a liberal issue now?

~~~
troisx
In a weird way, yes. There are deaf groups that believe that having cochlear
implants is unnatural, and that the government needs to enforce compliance
with ADA rules for people who could technically get permanent hearing. Now,
not all deaf people are curable, but it's still insane to me that 10,000
people could lose access to something because one person insists that they,
too, get access.

~~~
pmoriarty
Are you saying the people who don't believe in putting cochlear implants in to
their kids must be liberals? If so, why?

The cochlear implant issue itself is a rather complex and interesting one.
Most hearing people are immediately outraged when they learn that some deaf
people want to prevent their children from hearing, but I think this is a
knee-jerk reaction that stems mostly from ignorance of Deaf culture[1] and its
value in the Deaf community.

There's a great documentary called _Sound and Fury_ [2] that explores this
issue by interviewing deaf and hearing families as they struggled to decide
whether to have implant surgery performed on their children. I strongly
encourage everyone to watch this documentary before making up their minds on
this issue.

Also, talking to some Deaf people, getting some exposure to and knowledge of
Deaf culture, learning about the long and ugly history of discrimination and
paternalistic interventions by hearing people against deaf people, and the
struggle of deaf people for self-determination would probably be a good idea
too.

With this knowledge I think it becomes difficult to dismiss the issue as
ridiculous or say that there's any easy, obvious answer.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_and_Fury_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_and_Fury_%28film%29)

~~~
victorhooi
See, I don't get this.

I have a congenital hearing defect in both ears, and have hearing aids since I
was a child. (I am not deaf - only hearing impaired).

If I could undo all that, and fix my hearing, would I? Heck yeah. Without a
doubt.

I also have a daughter - and I most certainly would not wish a hearing
impairment on her. She doesn't need to go through the c*ap I went through.

If I was profoundly deaf and used sign language - well, I still don't think
I'd wish deafness on my enemy - let alone my own child.

You don't see people with blindness or bad eyesight going - gee, I'm glad I'm
blind or have bad eyesight.

~~~
pmoriarty
There is no "blind culture" as there is Deaf culture. Also, many deaf people
don't consider themselves disabled, and some even view hearing people as the
ones who are disabled because they don't know sign language and don't
understand or appreciate Deaf culture, and can't appreciate the world as a
deaf person can. Another reason is they want their children to be like them,
to share their culture, to share their language, to see the world as they do,
to understand what they went through and be able to relate to their children
as well. There are many other reasons too.

I'd say some of the issues involved are somewhat analogous to the Europeans
and Western people coming to "civilize" indigenous populations, which were
viewed as primitive and inferior, and towards whom the Europeans held the
attitude that they know best what's good for the "primitives" \-- but without
actually knowing much of the indigenous peoples at all, surely not
understanding them or their culture, often misunderstanding them, not
appreciating them, and at the same time in many ways it was the Europeans who
were inferior. But they were blind to it.

Still, these Europeans managed to virtually wipe out the cultures and
languages of the native civilizations and languages they encountered and
dominated.

Today sign language and Deaf culture both face a very real possibility of
extinction in the near future. Those are yet more reasons that many in the
Deaf community are concerned.

At the risk of making this issue even more political, but with the aim of
clarifying what's at stake for some in the Deaf community: imagine if what was
at stake was the extinction of the Hebrew language and the Jewish identity.

Once again, I'd recommend watching the documentary I linked to for a clearer
understanding of some of the issues, and to hear some of the reasons for the
anti-implant position from the mouths of the affected people themselves,
parents and children.

On the other hand, some deaf people and hearing people with deaf children,
especially those who are not part of the Deaf community and who don't know
sign language, feel like you do. The choices even in these cases are still not
easy, as the film makes clear. Check it out.

~~~
victorhooi
My question to you is - what if deafness was eradicated?

Sign-language as a living language might suffer.

But would you consider this a net positive?

An analogy might be if blindness and sight problems became eradicated - and
braille suffered a decline.

I would consider this a net positive for human quality of life.

I don't see the analogy between Hebrew/Jewish identity, and braille/sign
language and blindness/deafness.

To me, the first is a cultural/religious identity - whilst the latter is an
adaption to communicate as best as one can, with a more limited toolset. Of
course, I see that it's not that black and white - there is a thriving deaf
community, and they do have their own "language" (as in, more than just sign
language itself), cultural norms etc.

However, I do really hope for one day where we might eradicate all of
disabilities - deafness, blindness, mobility impairments etc.

------
DougN7
"Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect
instructor intellectual property from “pirates” who have reused content for
personal profit without consent."

That sounds like the real reason for the move.

~~~
Myrmornis
You'd think, but have you read the letter from the DoJ?

[https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf)

It seems that the reason is genuinely that they were told that their free
video content was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

------
tabeth
I'm very curious, how long does it actually take to make captions? Seriously,
the slowest it could be is probably the length of the actual lecture. Just pay
some student $20 to do it. $20 for an hour of work. Am I missing something?

EDIT:

Hmm, I think I was unclear. I am not referring to making a "professional
grade" captioned video. I am simply referring to having literally what the
speaker says included with the video as a transcription.

I do admit it would probably take more than $20. Even if it was $200 a video
that would still be pretty cheap. It's probably what, less than a cent extra
per student per semester? Unless of course you do this for every new
iteration/instance of the class.

~~~
kevindong
Transcribing actually takes significantly longer than the length of the actual
lecture. I randomly picked a psychology course (from
[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/) ) and tried to
transcribe a minute of it. It was wholly undoable at normal speed, so I
changed it to 1/2 speed and it was tough at best. Keep in mind that I type at
100 wpm, which is well above normal.

Furthermore, transcribing _just_ the audio is not sufficient to meet the ADA
requirements. You also have to create an accessible way to describe all graphs
and pictures for the visually impaired (generally, that means you have to
describe each and every photo using words).

~~~
markdown
$20 will pay for a days work somewhere in the world. Surely a 15min video can
be transcribed in 6hrs, charts included.

~~~
kevindong
Sure, but what would be the accuracy of the transcription? In addition, I
can't imagine someone able to transcribe high-level English would be very
cheap (then again, I could be entirely wrong; I can't say for certain).

Furthermore, I can't imagine any public university administrators wants to get
questioned by legislators about why they're outsourcing work nowadays. Nor do
I think the administrators want to admit that they're paying (by first world
standards) sweatshop wages.

~~~
markdown
Have you heard of the medical transcription industry?

If you find yourself in a US or UK hospital, it's very likely that your
medical reports and prescriptions dictated by your doctor are sent off to
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, or elsewhere to be converted into
text.

So yeah, English isn't a problem, and there is already a huge pool of talent
in the 3rd world trained in turning audio into text.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_transcription](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_transcription)

