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University of California, Berkeley, To Delete Publicly Available Educational Content (insidehighered.com)
In response to a U.S. Justice Department order that requires colleges and universities make website content accessible for citizens with disabilities and impairments, the University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts. Officials said making the videos and audio more accessible would have proven too costly in comparison to removing them. Inside Higher Ed reports: Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university's webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms -- a process that will take three to five months -- and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them. The university will continue to offer massive open online courses on edX and said it plans to create new public content that is accessible to listeners or viewers with disabilities. The Justice Department, following an investigation in August, determined that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley's free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues. Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education, made the announcement in a March 1 statement: "This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes U content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. 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."
When it's mandated that everyone must be a winner, everybody loses.
Make no mistake: this isn't "deafies" ruining a good thing, it's the government.
A government gone berserk with the only power it has: to make laws.
Free stuff should be exempt. Putting a cost (for the provider) to a free thing (for the public) will usually make that thing not free (for the public) anymore.
I also forgot the obvious part:
-Layoff workers in the US and vote bonus to executives for having such a great idea.
Well, that's not entirely true. The ADA requires that content be accessible if students request it, too. The difference is that students who request it can get assistance with the non-accessibility-friendly content on a one-off basis in exchange for their tuition. It isn't that it is too expensive to do the captioning, but rather that it is too expensive to do it without compensation.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is not because of the government, this is due to a complaint:
"The Department opened its investigation of UC Berkeley based on a complaint"
This is not because of a complaint, it's because of the government's response, which should have consisted of a bureaucratically-worded version of "...and?...so what, it's free?" instead of the present myopic, pigeon-holing, thinking-strictly-within-the-box, easily-predictable, and all-too-typical bureaucratic mess of unintended consequences whenever big government gets involved.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Bureaucratic Messes are usually related to poorly written laws.
Or laws that did not anticipate the future.
"It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
There's something frustrating and sad about this article but I'm afraid I can't remember what it is. Felt like a doozy though.
It has nothing to do with the DOJ caring about anything. The only thing that's important is the letter of the law. The law says publicly-available material must be handicap-accessible. This material is not. Therefore, the university has to fix this situation, to get into compliance with the law. They could spend a bunch of money and transcribe it all, but that's expensive. So they chose the cheaper option: remove it all from public availability. So, if there's no material that's publicly-available, then they're not running afoul of the law that says all publicly-available material must be accessible, and they're OK.
What the DOJ cares about is irrelevant. Even if the DOJ doesn't like this, it's too bad: the law is the law. The law doesn't say "publicly-available material must be handicap-accessible, and if someone complains, you have to make it more accessible, rather than just removing it".
The DOJ isn't really to blame here; they're just enforcing the law as written. If you don't like it, then you need to get Congress to amend the law and pass a better one. There's two parties at fault here: 1) Congress, for writing a crappy law (it should have exempted stuff that's freely available, as in beer: no one's under obligation to provide stuff for free, and beggars can't be choosers), and 2) the self-serving moron who complained about this and made it into a big legal issue.
This is social justice at its finest. No sight for the sighted unless the blind can see.
The law was proposed by a democrat, but the vast majority of congress critters both republican and democrat voted for it. A republican president then signed it into law. Basically both sides liked it, so you'll have to find someone else to hate for now.
Because elected officials were willing to be known as "that guy who hates people in wheelchairs and expects them to drag their bodies up the steps of a building with just their hands"...?
Come on, this is the Social Justice m.o. -- Terrible law which has no business being passed gets passed because every official who votes for it gets to virtue-signal as being Caring and Pro-Diversity and Forward-Thinking, because "if it only helps one person this {128374-page law with 4 billion in bureaucratic overhead and hundreds of billions in compliance costs to ever man, woman, child, and business in our society} will have been worth it!"
Well, 40 years into the Progressive Revolution and we've long passed the point of diminishing returns, where now each new "right" for each new sub-sub-subgroup is actively depriving the majority of people from looking at a damn website, because the ability to look at a website that other people might not be able to look at is cruel and heartless and a tool of oppression by the white male heterosexist ablist hegemony.
Let's repeat that again -- the federal government has established that the simple act of people looking at a website is trampling on the equal-protection rights of a victim class. LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
You're not Rosa Parks; this isn't the 60s; nobody is siccing dogs on you or firebombing your home, they are LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
OH NOOES!
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
How is he supposed to know if they ride Harleys?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No longer UC's property, no longer UC's problem. And still available to whoever may wish to view it.
What you're advocating is that the government ignore the law and do what is effectively legislating from the bench.
No.
I'm saying the government should not be making so many laws covering so many things, so that similarly-stupid scenarios/occurrences are not so common. That government that governs least, governs best, and government that is closest to those people whose laws they affect, governs most equitably.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Hold on a sec. Maybe eventually they'll find volunteers or resources to assist in the conversion. In the shorter term they don't want to be sued so they are taking it down.
Our org is facing a similar issue. We publish older statistics for the public, but due to ADA-related issues, we are planning on pulling it off our site, instead adding a contact number for those wanting copies.
I do agree that ADA needs some practical adjustments, though. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath-water. ADA has helped a lot of injured veterans.
Table-ized A.I.
if half the bloody electorate wasn't working hard to make sure government didn't work because it's so convinced government doesn't work. Seriously, this is what happens when you put people in charge who are doing everything they can to hamstring the basic functionality of government (and no, Obama is not, was not and never will be 'in charge'. He had a few months with a congress full of DINOs).
You elect people who want to tear down the government and the complain it's been torn down. Sheesh!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Crab mentality- "If I can't have it, neither can you."
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It's ridiculous the people trying to pawn the problem off on the ADA, politics, politicians, or the deaf people complaining. The problem is that universities jumped on this bandwagon of minimal effort, low production, record the classroom with a webcam bullshit as a means of advertising and it is biting them in the ass. Realize that universities aren't putting content online out of altruism, but as part of advertising and brand building.
All of that said, it's even more retarded bullshit that a university is going to pull the content when a cheap scalable solution exists: automated closed captioning and OCR of projector / blackboard material, which can then produce output for braille. There is a solution and it is cheap, why is this even a discussion? Will the output be buggy, sure, but in the intervening time before grad students can be enslaved to tweak transcriptions, it's workable.
On the other side of things, the universities know their legal requirements, and they already know from experiments like The Feynman Lectures on Physics to know that transcription is a huge chore. Easy fix: put the prof's notes online with the lecture.
At least this action is in full compliance with the "Americans With Stupidity Act".