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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.
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.
"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.
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