> What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the real story behind their protest?
It's a bit worrying that you have such strong opinions when you haven't read the DoJ letter yet.
> Stacy Nowak, a member of NAD, is a professor and PhD student at Gallaudet University
and she is deaf. Ms. Nowak would like to avail herself of what she believes is the increasingly frequent use of video and audio-based scholarship. Ms. Nowak teaches communication courses at Galludet, including Introduction to Communication and Nonverbal Communication. She would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, “Journalism for Social Change,” but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures.
Berkeley is a public institution, offering educational services, under the ADA.
Berkeley has a legal duty to make accessible this content, unless it would be unduly financially burdensome, or unless it would change the nature of what they do.
Berkeley has some policies around accessibility. They were not following those policies.
Berkeley were not just discriminating against people with hearing impairment, but also people with visual impairment and people with manual disability.
Berkeley chose to remove all the video rather than i) make it accessible during creation or ii) pay to make it accessible after creation.
Don't forget the law is 27 years old. Most of these videos are 10 - 5 years old.
The going rate to manually close caption transcribe those 20K videos seems to be missing. Apparently the DOJ did, but did not share that number in the letter, yet charges ahead that doing so would not be "unduly financially burdensome".
Back of the envelope: assume an average 60 minutes per video, 20,000 videos. Googling around, I see manual, high-accuracy transcription and captioning goes for about $5-6 per minute, and up from there. The DOJ nailed UC Berkeley on the existing automated captioning being not accurate enough, so we're no longer in low-ball territory. Say it is $5 per minute. 5 * 60 * 20K = 6M. I don't know what rarefied circles you run in, but $6M to comply is not chump change to my sensibility to just take care of the backlog, not to speak of run rates and now periodic attorney reviews to ensure they don't fall afoul of inaccuracy charges again.
Does this set a precedent that any public organization that produces any educational content for free have to do this as well? A homeless shelter publishing self-help videos for runaway teens? A domestic violence center publishing videos on how to navigate the court system? A food bank? It is unclear to me reading Title II and III of the ADA as a layperson if any of these kinds of organization accepting local/state/federal financial support are exempt; it doesn't seem like it but I'm not an attorney.
Is there a cutoff below which an organization won't have to comply, and if so, what is that cutoff metric? Near as I can tell without Lexis-Nexis handy to look up the cross-references in the DOJ letter, there is no such cutoff other than the whims of enforcement.
And once this is done in English, can UC Berkeley rest assured Gallaudet University and the DOJ won't come back after them for Spanish/other languages? Braille? Note that those are 2-300% more per minute. Just add Spanish and suddenly you're looking at an $18M tab, minimum. Add Braille on top and you're talking $30M.
I don't see bright lines being drawn here, and the lack of discretion around freely-available content with highly valuable social benefits may very well have a chilling effect upon the spread of free educational content on the Net.
I see far more promise in working on automated transcription that learns from manually-curated crowdsourced edits so the access-challenged gain greater freedom from relying upon other people to perform the transcription for them in the future. As the population age bulge floats upwards, there is constantly-increasing pressure to solve this problem, and the access-challenged today will find their numbers swelling with the elderly tomorrow.
Why is it acceptable to your post's position for this law to be used as a bludgeon to force everyone who wants to share free educational content to now use cognitive bandwidth to decide if they want to risk an enforcement action? Is your position that it is better for the world to have far fewer, and far more expensive educational content that complies (because extremely few people and organizations are going to spend this kind of money unless the access-challenged community ponies up the business case in some form or fashion), than wider distribution of knowledge for free?
Once this content is gone from public access, even the access-challenged community will not easily gain it back. That means the community has zero chance of accessing it, whereas in its current flawed form the community has some chance at some point in the future, or a guaranteed chance if members of the community decide to pay for transcription now for specific content they want for actionable results.
Media Studies 104A seems to have around 26 lectures. Call it 30, two per week in a 15-week semester. About an hour each, so $9K. The BerkeleyX course Journalism for Social Change likely has the same (can't get at the videos, course is closed now). So, for the sake of say $20K in transcription costs, they are effectively shutting down billions of dollars worth of education around the world over the next decade, once you take the chilling effects of this enforcement action on other content into account? This is akin to "if I can't have it, nobody can", applied to free educational material, is it not?
Could this all potentially just boil down to a couple of professors who didn't have the budget to transcribe what they wanted from free videos thinking if they shook down UC Berkeley with the DOJ they would get it done by UC Berkeley for them, but the scheme went very awry?
Taking away these resources via this enforcement action, as flawed as they are in their current format for the access-challenged, is like burning books. The ideology is different, but the effect of destroying access to knowledge is exactly the same. How does this restricting access to knowledge in any form benefit the access-challenged community? For all we know, there is a kid in sub-Saharan Africa/Shanghai/Nepal/etc. today that could consume this material because they can't afford traditional college and in their time deliver sight to the blind, regrown bodies to the maimed, or sound to the deaf tomorrow.
Perhaps this is a culture clash, and I simply do not understand the access-challenged POV since I'm not immersed in that community. If so, then please educate where my reasoning is going off the rails from that perspective. Thanks in advance.
From the disability community's perspective, the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 are key safeguards to protect them from discrimination. Not enforcing these laws because the lectures benefit able-bodied people is ableism and discriminatory against the disabled community.
UCB was found to be in non-compliance. UCB could have chosen to fix the accessibility issues, but it did not. It wasn't the deaf community that took down the videos, but UCB's choice.
I appreciate the disability community's "hand up, not hand out" attitude. But Bloomberg TV's and CNBC's closed captioning for example, are nearly incomprehensible much of the time. Far, far more of the disability community's members are impacted by timely, accurate financial news than the ones who wanted to take UCB's free video courses.
So why single out UCB? Why single out free educational content instead of for-profit content with a wider, more actionable impact?
I understand UCB pulled the videos. From my layman's perspective, that doesn't actually address the DOJ's enforcement action. The Title II compliance demand still stands even after taking down the videos from public access. I am concerned that UCB will simply ban all the videos from even student access, and only allow them back into use as they are vetted, one by one, slowly, by their Web Accessibility Services team, and now with expensive attorney time on top, and only when an actual disabled student attends a specific course.
The disability-compliant transcription processing cost is about 2.5X more expensive than stenography transcription. An all-day deposition will cost in the range of about $1K, and 8 hours of closed caption transcription will run around $2.4K. Yet court stenographers are not mandated absolutely everywhere on the off-chance a court-accepted record might be needed, only in a court where their output is required to make a decision. So why is the criteria for ADA compliance set so much broader?
Would Gallaudet University have pressed the case if the fewer than a handful of courses that were desired were re-done and transcribed to meet their accuracy requirements? If not, what is the rationale for a blanket injunction to transcribe all courses regardless of demonstrated need? The services to meet compliance are very expensive, is advocating for indiscriminate enforcement as a blanket policy economically realistic at this point of automated transcription development?
I want to see us reach the point where all media is seamlessly, automatically and practically for free transcribed for the disabled in a variety of formats. But we're still in a world ruled by scarcity for quite a while longer, and I am currently unable to reconcile the enormous costs placed upon society at large and content creators in particular. Please share your perspective, thanks in advance.
Making those 20,000 videos accessible now would be expensive.
But since the law had been in place at least 15 years before these videos were created Berkeley should have just complied with the law, and stopped their employees from lying about complying with the law, when the content was created.
All the videos created before 2015 were "self certified" - someone had to sign a bit of paper to say "I've read the Berkeley stuff on accessibility, and this content is accessible".
> I see far more promise in working on automated transcription
That only fixes the subtitling issue. While in this case the complainant were people with hearing impairment the DoJ letter is clear that the content is not accessible to people with hearing impairment, or visual impairment, or manual disability.
> Could this all potentially just boil down to a couple of professors who didn't have the budget to transcribe what they wanted from free videos thinking if they shook down UC Berkeley with the DOJ they would get it done by UC Berkeley for them, but the scheme went very awry?
Interesting that you use the term "shook down", when it's Berkeley that was not complying with either the law or its own policies.
The problem here was all the people signing Berkeley documents saying they had complied with Berkeley polices and the law when they were ignoring the law.
It's all in the DoJ letter. https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
It's a bit worrying that you have such strong opinions when you haven't read the DoJ letter yet.
> Stacy Nowak, a member of NAD, is a professor and PhD student at Gallaudet University and she is deaf. Ms. Nowak would like to avail herself of what she believes is the increasingly frequent use of video and audio-based scholarship. Ms. Nowak teaches communication courses at Galludet, including Introduction to Communication and Nonverbal Communication. She would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, “Journalism for Social Change,” but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures.
Berkeley is a public institution, offering educational services, under the ADA.
Berkeley has a legal duty to make accessible this content, unless it would be unduly financially burdensome, or unless it would change the nature of what they do.
Berkeley has some policies around accessibility. They were not following those policies.
Berkeley were not just discriminating against people with hearing impairment, but also people with visual impairment and people with manual disability.
Berkeley chose to remove all the video rather than i) make it accessible during creation or ii) pay to make it accessible after creation.
Don't forget the law is 27 years old. Most of these videos are 10 - 5 years old.