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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.
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"
Um, the content is no longer available to the general public and as such the law requiring publicly available content being accessible for people with disabilities no longer applies.
Except that it was a law championed by President Bush, and signed by him. Actually, the first version was signed by Bush the Elder, and the revision was signed by Bush the Younger. So, you know, two Bushes.
The idea was that it's wrong to make handicapped people unable to participate in society.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Its freaking Berkeley. You can bet those leftie loonies were pushing hard for that law. Guess they don't like their own dog food.
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.
allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from 'pirates' who have reused content for personal profit without consent."
Every time I learned something in school, it profited me, at least in the sense that I knew more than before. The whole idea of education is that people benefit from it. If you make something available to world+dog, do they need to get your permission to actually personally profit from it in some fashion? Of course not.
The way print media such as books get around the obligation to provide access for handicapped people is that copyright allows for 3rd parties that specialize in services to the blind, etc., to make copies of non-dramatic works (written, audio, etc) without having to seek the permission of the copyright owner. Seems to me all the uni should have to do is appeal, and point out that there is already a legal remedy that exempts publishers of copyright non-dramatic media from having to comply with the act, given that the law shifts that right and responsibility to authorized 3rd parties.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yes, signed them. Everyone seems to forget the bills originated in the 101st congress which consisted of a senate with 54 democracts vs 45 republicans and a house with 251 democrats and 183 republicans -- overwhelmingly liberal. This was not something that was politically attractive to fight, so he signed it.
"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.
The DOJ findings are ridiculous. I've been reading through that PDF and it seems totally unreasonable. Here are a few samples.
"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."
What right does she have to reuse someone else's copyrighted materials? Just because the lectures are distributed online free of charge does not mean that you have a right to take content from them for derivative works and derive revenue from them.
"Approximately half the videos did not provide audio description or any other alternative format for the visual information (graphs, charts, animations, or items on the chalkboard) contained in the videos. For example, in one video lecture, a professor pointed to and talked about an image and its structure without describing the image, making it inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities."
Because details aren't provided here, I can only assume this was a recording of a lecture given in person to students. If so, the primary purpose of that lecture is to accommodate the students who are in the room, taking the class at that time. If there are students with vision disabilities in that class, the instructor would reasonably be expected to accommodate those students. However, most instructors don't design content to be accessible unless there's a specific need for it at that time. It is typically the responsibility of students to notify the instructor of disabilities, so the instructor can provide appropriate accommodations. I don't see why there should be an issue with posting a recorded copy of that lecture online. I suspect that part of the reason for removing the content from being publicly available is so they can limit access and follow the typical procedure where students with disabilities notify the instructor for the need of accommodations.
"Finally, UC Berkeley has not established that making its online content accessible would result in a fundamental alteration or undue administrative and financial burdens. As indicated below, the Department would prefer to resolve this matter cooperatively."
This seems remarkable given the volume of content. That the content is now being removed suggests this finding is completely false. That's particularly odd, considering this text, also in the report: "In December 2015, UC Berkeley reported that its YouTube channel had about 9,600 hours of course video and 4,200 hours of events and other video content on its YouTube channel. Its iTunes U platform had 10,400 hours of course video, 800 hours of events video, 18,000 hours of course audio, and 225 hours of events audio. About 75 percent of the same video content on YouTube is also available on iTunes U. In May 2015, UC Berkeley informed the Department that for “budget reasons,” beginning in the Fall 2015, UC Berkeley would limit access to new online content on YouTube and iTunes U to enrolled UC Berkeley students taking specific courses."
"To remedy the violations discussed above, UC Berkeley must at least take the following steps: [...] 6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
Huh? There are actual damages because free content was deemed to be insufficiently accessible? This is bizarre.
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.
You have zero knowledge of US history, but I am not surprised. ADA was a brainchild of Reagan. The act was established in 1990 (Reagan/Bush ruled as president from 81-92).
AFAIK, blind activist Patrisha Wright and representative Tom Harkin (Dem who has a deaf brother) were the brainchilds of the ADA. Reagan was against it and he may of actually precipitated it by threatening to revoke Section 504 of the (American) Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (which was opposed by Nixon and Ford, but passed by Carter) when he was in office.
However, after the Reagan era, Bush1 signed the ADA in 1990... and Bush2 signed the amended version in 1998...
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'
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!
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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.
UC Berkeley received $370 Million in federal grants (research dollars) last year. Of that $370 Million, $210.9 Million of those "research" dollars went to administrative costs and overhead (non-research, non-teaching activities). You're talking about an organization where people have an average salary above $200k with a guaranteed job for life. Don't cry for the universities, they're funded just fine. If they wanted to, they could have paid to do this right.
The relevant statute is Title 17, United States Code, Section 121: Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities. It begins as follows: