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:
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.
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.
"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."
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...), 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."
I would ask those downvoting this comment to provide a counter argument.
This is absolutely ridiculous. A university was providing something, for free, to everyone who wanted it. And because someone complained that their personal circumstances made it impossible to enjoy this free thing, now no one is allowed to get this content.
It's as if I threatened to sue Costco because one of their free samples had nuts in it and I couldn't eat it, resulting in them canceling the program.
But these videos are not "free". The content was created by university employees and hence, public funds. It's likely university resources were used to produce and edit it for online consumption.
I imagine the reasoning is that if you allow the university to deprioritize the needs of the disabled on the basis of "Well, something is better than nothing", then it incentivizes the production of such content because of the lower costs, and results in more disenfranchisement of the disabled.
I have to object to your reducing the situation to "because someone complained that their personal circumstances", as if it were just one person who is potentially disenfranchised by the situation. Just because one person's name is on a legal complaint doesn't mean that the law impacts that one and only person.
The world is demonstrably worse off as a result of this lawsuit. Valuable knowledge that was freely available to many is now available to very few.
The disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem, but if the logical (for Berkeley) solution to this problem is the disenfranchisement of all, perhaps we shouldn't go through with "solving" this problem. Perhaps it is better to accept that some amount of unfairness is inevitable, and that it's preferable to have these videos publicly available than to not.
It's not just about this point in time, but to increase the priority of creating accessible resources. Everyone generally believes "disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem", it took a law to make society at least realize those costs. Building handicapped ramps and accessible bathrooms is a massive upfront cost for businesses and institutions, funds which come from the same pocket for services and benefits intended for the non-handicapped.
The law itself is poorly written, but the intent makes sense. It's important to protect the rights of those who are most vulnerable, which certainly includes deaf and blind people.
Is this inevitably going to lead to fewer free online lectures, as public institutions will now be unable to release the videos for free without including the closed captioning? How frustrating, particularly in light of the fact that at least a portion of the Deaf community chooses to remain so.
EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.
This is not the first time deaf people have used the ADA to take down free educational materials, and it won't be the last. This is the same reason Stanford's cs231n was taken down as well. Luckily it was downloaded and re-posted by many people so it's still available, but future courses won't be.
It would be one thing if students were required to watch the videos as a primary source of instruction in their courses. But blocking the videos from the public seems like a severe overreaction.
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.
I'm not sure about contempt, I'd say indifference or apathy instead. I can only hope that efforts like YouTube's automatic captions get better because it'll I.prove the situation just by giving a cheap way to handle 90% of cases.
Making the choice to deliberately exclude people with disabilities, even though there's a nearly thirty year old law mandating accessibility is treating people with contempt.
As properly transcribing a video lecture is more expensive than making the lecture in the first place, it's a reasonable choice to gift something to many but not all people at a small fraction of what the cost would be if it had to be more accessible.
Accomodations are reasonable if they require a small adjustment to the product - like automated speech-to-text transcriptions would be, or making navigation so that it's possible to use with screen-readers for blind people. However, if the required adjustment effort overwhelms the original product, then I'd say that "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" applies - yes, the content isn't perfect, and it's not suitable for many uses, but it's a gift; if you don't want it, then don't take it and it shouldn't be anybody's duty to make that gift differently.
...and this is why just about fuck all has been done for accessibility over the last 30 years and we still have major services that are very hard for people with disabilities to use.
People tried asking nicely, and were ignored. Now people are taking action. We can't say we weren't warned. We were warned 30 years ago when the law was passed.
You could make that claim if they made such a decision, and you could assume they did if they had to go out of their way to disable CC. But of course, they have to go out of their way to include CC (in time, money and effort) so its entirely absurd to name it "contempt". At best, its negligence, and at worst, its reasonable (the video lectures aren't really related to the school's operations, it just happens to be easy to do).
Really, you could turn it around and call it contempt on the disabled's part, for suing with no clear benefit to anyone
How do you expect this will work? Everything created by humans from here on out must be accessible to every last minuscule quadrant of humanity or it's banned? Nobody's allowed to release audio without texted or text without audio, or video without text explaining what's going on?
We aren't talking about everything created by humans. We are talking about something created by a public university, partly funded by taxes, and with a rather large endowment.
> 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.
Welcome to the unintended consequences of government regulations. This is exactly what many "anti-regulation" people rail against, but examples like this are rarely brought up by "pro-regulation" arguments.
It's a public university. They could pay a grateful student a federally-subsidized wage to transcribe 5 hours of video per week, and have it count toward the University's community service quota.
> 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.
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. ???
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
They were complying with (a reasonable reading of) the ADA: if you were accepted to Berkeley (via an ADA-compliant process), and then enrolled in one of these classes, they would ensure that any required course materials were translated to accommodate any covered disability you had.
What Berkeley was doing afterward was saying "well, we've provided this class in compliance with the law, might as well open up access to the materials to anyone who could benefit from them".
The court's interpretation would be like saying, "If a store gives away unused, edible meat at the end of the day, they must provide an equal amount of vegetarian food."
I can understand "equal access" arguments for "if you sell meals, you must provide a vegetarian option" (which Berkeley did the analog of). But why would they be expected to do the same for "byproduct" giveaways?
>> I can understand "equal access" arguments for "if you sell meals, you must provide a vegetarian option" (which Berkeley did the analog of). But why would they be expected to do the same for "byproduct" giveaways?
To use a hyperbolic example: you can see that "Free meals (NO GAYS)" would be discriminatory.
>The ADA’s nondiscrimination mandate states that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity
The "or be subjected to discrimination" is possibly what they're getting at.
>To use a hyperbolic example: you can see that "Free meals (NO GAYS)" would be discriminatory.
Yes, I can. And if that situation modeled the dynamics of the current one, it would change my mind. But I don't see how it does.
They're not denying the free meals/course materials to gays/vegetarians/the deaf. They're giving away byproducts that, by their nature, gays/veg's/the deaf cannot use, which came about as an incidental product of legal, non-discriminatory behavior.
For an analogy that does capture the dynamics: imagine if some factory's production process spewed out a waste product that happened to be perfectly usable as an STD prevention device for hetero sex but not homosexual sex. So the owners shrug and say,
"Hey, anyone who wants these hetero STD prevention devices, feel free to take them away!"
Would you say they're violating the spirit of such anti-discrimination law if they didn't also pay for the manufacture of gay-optimized condoms at a 1:1 ratio?
Right, I should have said "that they cannot use in the original byproduct form". But the same point applies, that it costs money to convert it, and the effect of requiring the conversion is to end a free giveaway that promotes a social good.
Only if you believe that any free product given away, such that it isn't usable by everyone, "says it's fine to discriminate against people with disabilities".
Do you seriously believe that no one should be able to give away uncaptioned videos, on the grounds that doing so "promotes the idea that it's fine to discriminate"? Khan Academy should have been shut down until their videos were accessible? Personal blogs?
Do you not draw any distinction here between a class for sale vs its free materials?
Accommodation is great, but you also have to appreciate the costs as well as the benefits.
Except they didn't say NO GAYS. Rather some have meat allergy so they can't eat them. There are a lot of people who are hungry and could really use the free meat, except here a few people with meat allergy come in and say, "Since we're unable to partake in these free offerings we'd rather other people starve".
At Stanford, we have similar requirements to caption any video publicly available. This meant that some professors simply stopped posting the videos publicly.
I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.
That's interesting, Stanford's not a "public entity" and would seemingly not be beholden to these regulations (which I'm assuming is different than the law requiring handicap-accessible facilities by private entities).
You're mixing up equal access to educational materials with an equal sensory experience. Giving sighted and hearing people access to educational materials that the blind or deaf can't access is discrimination.
The ADA also covers things like plays (classified as "entertainment"), and plays like Hamilton were sued for not providing audio descriptions of what is happening on stage. Movie theaters have to provide the same service to blind users and this also applies to Netflix movies and shows.
Restaurants probably wouldn't fall into the entertainment category, so they're not covered by the ADA.
For the "deaf and blind" scenario, most litigation is held off by the provision that says the establishment doesn't need to provide an accessible experience if providing such experience would be "unduly burdensome". For example, a blind and deaf man sued Cinemark for not providing tactile ASL interpreters for him (he communicates using sign language and by touching the hands of someone signing to him). The theater said it costs $60 per hour for an interpreter and a movie would require 2 interpreters, so $120 per hour is a bit nuts.
But audio descriptions and subtitles are not considered unduly burdensome - they're not that difficult and are basically seen as a requirement at this point.
Well, for blind users, an audio book would suffice. For blind + deaf, braille would be the only option, and if a library couldn't provide that option, there would need to be a resolution.
In most cases, the resolution is to provide the material in the format required to the user. This is usually a trivial matter as books can be ordered in braille fairly easily.
The university decided that making their content available to all users was too difficult, so their resolution is to make it available to no one. A library could do the same and that resolution would be legal. It's just stupid. Which is why people are saying what the university is doing is stupid.
Voice recognition is astoundingly fantastic even on poor hardware. If you want to see the state of the art try dictating a few lines here - https://speechnotes.co/ no registration required, no training required, use any microphone you want.
I was absolutely astounded when I found out the state of the art today. I was used to, "Computer, how do you wreck a nice beach" from a couple of decades ago.
Why can't a place like Stanford auto-caption things? Especially things like lectures which are super easy - a single speaker droning on in a silent room using high-quality speakers. without any editing the output should be absolutely useable.
The only time it really wouldn't work at all is in a very noisy environment where you can hardly understand it anyway.
I realize some of the captions might end up garbage, but I don't think enough would to make it into a complaint.
Your link uses Google APIs, nothing local, so it would be weird if Youtube (which apparently isn't good enough) used a worse version of those. But who knows...
How did you find my link? (I mean, what did you think of it, assuming you tried it).
By the way, I find Google's autogenerated CC is useless on any video no matter the type or audio quality. (For example a lecture.) Another reason to think the link uses something else is that it takes several seconds (during pauses) to come up with the result - it is slower than real-time. I don't know if Google takes the time to slowly process every video in case someone clicks the autogenerated CC... The quality definitely strikes me as different. (And one of the reasons I was so surprised that the above link is actually useable.)
Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now.
I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint?
I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.
I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.
The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]
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.
The same way it owes people with disabilities the best parking spaces, loading zones, ramps, automatic doors, accessible restrooms, elevators, places to put wheelchairs on buses and subways, TTY phone numbers for essential services, the right to bring service dogs where pets are not allowed, etc.
Mandatory disability accommodation is a huge part of our society. There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).
> There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).
And yet, here we are, with a building build after the ADA, that is noncompliant. It's too expensive to make it compliant, so the only legal option is to tear it down.
While I understand the strive for equality, the destruction of information is a price that should not have to be paid in today's world.
That just seems....inflexible. I definitely see where the reasoning comes from (it's not fair for deaf or similarly disabled people who pay taxes to these public schools to not be able to receive the same benefit as everyone else) but the lack of wiggle room sucks.
Yeah, many other requirements of ADA are for small businesses to actually build things. This would require paying a transcriber for a couple hours per hour of video.
That's really not a lot. Probably blame a dumb and inflexible budgetary process.
Doing a good video transcript takes more than 2x the running time of the video. A lot more. Really.
Have you ever tried transcribing a video in a level of detail such that someone who can't see the video has a full understanding of what's going on? Give it a shot and report back to us.
Source: I've actually transcribed instructional videos for disabled students.
Update: Google suggests budgeting 4-9 hours of transcription time per hour, which is closer to my experience.
You might get by with 4 hours if it was just someone talking (with no slides, etc.). If the person performing an activity (say, a lab course) 9 is going to be a lot nearer the mark.
Remember, this has to be done so that both deaf and blind students can use the material.
It's not about the videos, it's about sending a message. Specifically, that it's critically important to make sure that the deaf have the same access that everyone else does, even if it's expensive and inconvenient, because we as a society demand that level of fairness.
Yeah, this is the bad case. But this sort of policy also has an effect on other situations:
Suppose it costs $100 to make a video accessible for those with hearing impairments. Furthermore, suppose this video is really important - the university is willing to spend up to $20,000 on making it, but fortunately only has to spend $15,000. Without being a dick about "deaf accessible or you can't publish", the university would get $5000 of producer surplus and the hearing impaired lose out. With this rule, the university gets $4900 worth of producer surplus, and the hearing impaired can actually watch this very important video.
It's really easy to forget about the cases that aren't getting fought over but are still subject to the rule. If you've got an idea for a better rule that lets Berkeley publish these videos, but still keeps universities from pretending that they can't afford to make videos accessible when they actually can, I'm all ears.
I have no idea if your cost assumptions make sense or not so I don't know whether they are pretending. Either way, I have a better idea: no rules.
They are releasing high quality content online for free to a large segment of the world's population. Just let them do it!
Here's another idea: The people who are so concerned about accessibility could join their efforts and provide a transcription. In multiple languages, by the way. We don't want to exclude anyone.
I guess the same argument could be made in regards to not providing accessibility accommodations to buildings: that there should be "no rules", and if a building is built without accessibility accommodations at least access to such building "is free to a large segment of the world's population. Just let them do it!"
It's pretty clear that such arguments lost with the passage of the ADA.
That's a completely different situation. The online classes are an "extra" in the sense that the university's core product are the classroom courses. They're simply being nice for releasing the videos.
Furthermore I have never heard of a building being closed until accessibility accommodations are built.
Oh my, interventionists are so cliché. Passive-aggressive hyperbole and all.
Should they provide transcriptions to satisfy the transcription validation committee, I'm sure you'd be demanding the videos to be taken down because they are not also transcripted in Spanish or dubbed in French, or some other excuse that would prevent the majority of people to have access to the content (including those who could be interested in working on transcriptions instead of complaining online).
I appreciate this discussion because we need to realize the trade offs of strict fairness. In order to be fair, we have provided less good/utility for those that were benefiting unfairly from the service. We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service.
Yeah, it is a trade off. We're basically forcing content producers to subsidize access for the hearing impaired. This will make some content not worth publishing at the margin, while also forcing the clearly-worth-publishing things to provide access at their expense.
The non-obvious thing is that this compliance-by-force is non-local. If you only look at Berkeley's videos, you're giving up these videos pointlessly. You have to also look at the videos that are going to be published anyways, and whether they'd include access for the deaf if people weren't dicks about enforcement.
I like the way you put it: the creators are required to subsidize the disabled.
Would it be better if this was approached from the other side? Creators could create without this concern. Disabled consumers would then pay for services that make specific creations accessible to them. The US government could then explicitly subsidize the disabled people.
> We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service.
If you insist on looking at this incident in isolation, yes. But if you look at it like that, there's no reason to imprison murderers, because it won't bring the victim back to life.
If there were no requirement, very few things would be accessible. As a minority, the deaf will always be irrelevant to the majorities' utility calculus.
There's definitely reasons to imprison murderers: (1) to prevent them from murdering again, (2) to rehabilitate them so they do not murder again, (3) to give feelings of closure/justice to those that cared for the victim.
I think ThrustVectoring said it best in a post above yours: we're requiring creators to subsidize the disabled.
An alternative way to subsidize the disabled might be to give them some amount of money every year which they can use to buy transcription, parking, etc. services. This might result in only certain content being transcribed. This might result in less parking spaces that are continuously empty. Maybe that would be a better use of everyone's time. Maybe it would create unnecessary decision burden on disabled people.
The notion that prison rehabilitates has been widely discredited. Most of the time prison hardens criminals and makes them worse, with high recidivism rates being the rule rather than the exception.
Also, if your goal was to prevent murderers from murdering again, why would you ever let them out? To generalize this to other crimes: why would you let any criminal out if your goal was to prevent them from committing more crimes?
The current law demands that level of fairness, but it's clear even from this thread that there's currently not a consensus in society if we really do demand that level of fairness given the drawbacks that we see; the society can also choose a slightly lower level/cost of fairness and might on whole be better off that way.
The needs of a few never outweigh the needs of the many.
Shutting down videos to millions of potential viewers because the recorders did not have the time nor money to produce transcripts, gains nothing / takes away everything.
If things were really fair, we should be able to now sue the complainants for taking away from us everything that could have resulted from viewing the course material.
>The needs of a few never outweigh the needs of the many.
This is, uhh, kind of false. In liberal democracies like the US, we have some extraordinarily protections for the needs of the few at the expense of the many. For example, we've ruled as unconstitutional anti-miscegenation laws. The founding fathers were explicitly worried about the tyranny of the majority, too.
The irony is that many of the videos people are most interested in are Deep Learning courses, the very technology that is making this moot by improving the accuracy of auto-generated captions. Presumably taking everything down now will delay the improvement in this technology.
In my opinion close-captioning the courses wouldn't be enough. A lot of people, including myself, lack the requisite education to appreciate these courses, or to benefit from them. It's extraordinarily frustrating that they exist, and that tens of thousands people can benefit from them, but I can't.
If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.
"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.
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.
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.
Transcribing actually takes significantly longer than the length of the actual lecture. I randomly picked a psychology course (from 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).
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.
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.
>You also have to create an accessible way to describe all graphs and pictures
If a picture is worth a thousand words, and the video is 30fps. Then a one hour video would require well over 100 million words. I agree, too much to do in real time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I don't know how far I'd want to go down that path. Cochlear implants aren't risk-free. I'm also curious about the implant's ramifications if other interventions (e.g. stem cell treatment) become possible.
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.
The idea that people can perpetuate their own disability and then force society to provide special adaptions for them is definitely a liberal idea.
The libertarian response would be that you have the right to be how you are, but the ADA should be torn down.
How children should be treated is a tricky subject since it is a balance between parent's rights to raise their children and society's interests and I think there is a lot of conflict that falls into this bucket.
As technology develops to the point that being deaf is a choice, I am much more sympathetic to the libertarian view that if you choose to remain deaf you should not be entitled to special support.
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.
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.
The NAD is just trying to get the most for their members using the law. We are mad because we can't have access to free stuff that seems socially beneficial. This is people and society trying to find a balance. Is this the right balance? Probably not. But the whole 'welcome to hardcore liberal ideology' seems needlessly reductive both in terms of the argument and looking for an answer.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadhttp://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
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...
which informed the university that the free online video content was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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.
That sounds like the real reason for the move.
https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
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.
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."
This is absolutely ridiculous. A university was providing something, for free, to everyone who wanted it. And because someone complained that their personal circumstances made it impossible to enjoy this free thing, now no one is allowed to get this content.
It's as if I threatened to sue Costco because one of their free samples had nuts in it and I couldn't eat it, resulting in them canceling the program.
I imagine the reasoning is that if you allow the university to deprioritize the needs of the disabled on the basis of "Well, something is better than nothing", then it incentivizes the production of such content because of the lower costs, and results in more disenfranchisement of the disabled.
I have to object to your reducing the situation to "because someone complained that their personal circumstances", as if it were just one person who is potentially disenfranchised by the situation. Just because one person's name is on a legal complaint doesn't mean that the law impacts that one and only person.
The disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem, but if the logical (for Berkeley) solution to this problem is the disenfranchisement of all, perhaps we shouldn't go through with "solving" this problem. Perhaps it is better to accept that some amount of unfairness is inevitable, and that it's preferable to have these videos publicly available than to not.
EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.
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.
Accomodations are reasonable if they require a small adjustment to the product - like automated speech-to-text transcriptions would be, or making navigation so that it's possible to use with screen-readers for blind people. However, if the required adjustment effort overwhelms the original product, then I'd say that "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" applies - yes, the content isn't perfect, and it's not suitable for many uses, but it's a gift; if you don't want it, then don't take it and it shouldn't be anybody's duty to make that gift differently.
People tried asking nicely, and were ignored. Now people are taking action. We can't say we weren't warned. We were warned 30 years ago when the law was passed.
Really, you could turn it around and call it contempt on the disabled's part, for suing with no clear benefit to anyone
The ADA does not generally apply to individuals.
> from here on out
From 1990, which is when the law was introduced. We should have been doing this for nearly thirty years now.
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.
Huh? I do not follow
It's a public university. They could pay a grateful student a federally-subsidized wage to transcribe 5 hours of video per week, and have it count toward the University's community service quota.
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.
And a 10x increase is still large, although perhaps not prohibitively large.
> 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
What Berkeley was doing afterward was saying "well, we've provided this class in compliance with the law, might as well open up access to the materials to anyone who could benefit from them".
The court's interpretation would be like saying, "If a store gives away unused, edible meat at the end of the day, they must provide an equal amount of vegetarian food."
I can understand "equal access" arguments for "if you sell meals, you must provide a vegetarian option" (which Berkeley did the analog of). But why would they be expected to do the same for "byproduct" giveaways?
To use a hyperbolic example: you can see that "Free meals (NO GAYS)" would be discriminatory.
>The ADA’s nondiscrimination mandate states that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity
The "or be subjected to discrimination" is possibly what they're getting at.
Yes, I can. And if that situation modeled the dynamics of the current one, it would change my mind. But I don't see how it does.
They're not denying the free meals/course materials to gays/vegetarians/the deaf. They're giving away byproducts that, by their nature, gays/veg's/the deaf cannot use, which came about as an incidental product of legal, non-discriminatory behavior.
For an analogy that does capture the dynamics: imagine if some factory's production process spewed out a waste product that happened to be perfectly usable as an STD prevention device for hetero sex but not homosexual sex. So the owners shrug and say,
"Hey, anyone who wants these hetero STD prevention devices, feel free to take them away!"
Would you say they're violating the spirit of such anti-discrimination law if they didn't also pay for the manufacture of gay-optimized condoms at a 1:1 ratio?
There is nothing in the nature of these videos that makes them unsubtitleable.
It also promotes a social harm. It says it's fine to discriminate against people with disabilities.
Do you seriously believe that no one should be able to give away uncaptioned videos, on the grounds that doing so "promotes the idea that it's fine to discriminate"? Khan Academy should have been shut down until their videos were accessible? Personal blogs?
Do you not draw any distinction here between a class for sale vs its free materials?
Accommodation is great, but you also have to appreciate the costs as well as the benefits.
I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.
If I'm blind and I go to an art gallery should there be an audio track to somehow explain what I'm not seeing?
What about a play? Are plays specifically exempted or is it just that nobody has bothered to sue a theatre for a lack of subtitling just yet?
What if I go to a fancy restaurant but have no sense of taste or smell? How will that restaurant compensate me for the experience I'm missing out on?
The ADA also covers things like plays (classified as "entertainment"), and plays like Hamilton were sued for not providing audio descriptions of what is happening on stage. Movie theaters have to provide the same service to blind users and this also applies to Netflix movies and shows.
Restaurants probably wouldn't fall into the entertainment category, so they're not covered by the ADA.
For the "deaf and blind" scenario, most litigation is held off by the provision that says the establishment doesn't need to provide an accessible experience if providing such experience would be "unduly burdensome". For example, a blind and deaf man sued Cinemark for not providing tactile ASL interpreters for him (he communicates using sign language and by touching the hands of someone signing to him). The theater said it costs $60 per hour for an interpreter and a movie would require 2 interpreters, so $120 per hour is a bit nuts.
But audio descriptions and subtitles are not considered unduly burdensome - they're not that difficult and are basically seen as a requirement at this point.
Doesn't that mean that libraries must remove books that are not also available in braille?
In most cases, the resolution is to provide the material in the format required to the user. This is usually a trivial matter as books can be ordered in braille fairly easily.
The university decided that making their content available to all users was too difficult, so their resolution is to make it available to no one. A library could do the same and that resolution would be legal. It's just stupid. Which is why people are saying what the university is doing is stupid.
I was absolutely astounded when I found out the state of the art today. I was used to, "Computer, how do you wreck a nice beach" from a couple of decades ago.
Why can't a place like Stanford auto-caption things? Especially things like lectures which are super easy - a single speaker droning on in a silent room using high-quality speakers. without any editing the output should be absolutely useable.
The only time it really wouldn't work at all is in a very noisy environment where you can hardly understand it anyway.
I realize some of the captions might end up garbage, but I don't think enough would to make it into a complaint.
By the way, I find Google's autogenerated CC is useless on any video no matter the type or audio quality. (For example a lecture.) Another reason to think the link uses something else is that it takes several seconds (during pauses) to come up with the result - it is slower than real-time. I don't know if Google takes the time to slowly process every video in case someone clicks the autogenerated CC... The quality definitely strikes me as different. (And one of the reasons I was so surprised that the above link is actually useable.)
I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.
I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.
The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI
[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...
Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished.
Reminds me of this Louis CK bit: https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s
"How does the world owe you something you didn't even know existed 30 seconds ago?"
Mandatory disability accommodation is a huge part of our society. There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).
And yet, here we are, with a building build after the ADA, that is noncompliant. It's too expensive to make it compliant, so the only legal option is to tear it down.
While I understand the strive for equality, the destruction of information is a price that should not have to be paid in today's world.
ADA imposes much more expensive mandates to much smaller businesses, and I'm under the impression that most people consider that to be acceptable.
"Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."
So it seems like they need to be quite accurate.
That's really not a lot. Probably blame a dumb and inflexible budgetary process.
Have you ever tried transcribing a video in a level of detail such that someone who can't see the video has a full understanding of what's going on? Give it a shot and report back to us.
Source: I've actually transcribed instructional videos for disabled students.
Update: Google suggests budgeting 4-9 hours of transcription time per hour, which is closer to my experience.
You might get by with 4 hours if it was just someone talking (with no slides, etc.). If the person performing an activity (say, a lab course) 9 is going to be a lot nearer the mark.
Remember, this has to be done so that both deaf and blind students can use the material.
Suppose it costs $100 to make a video accessible for those with hearing impairments. Furthermore, suppose this video is really important - the university is willing to spend up to $20,000 on making it, but fortunately only has to spend $15,000. Without being a dick about "deaf accessible or you can't publish", the university would get $5000 of producer surplus and the hearing impaired lose out. With this rule, the university gets $4900 worth of producer surplus, and the hearing impaired can actually watch this very important video.
It's really easy to forget about the cases that aren't getting fought over but are still subject to the rule. If you've got an idea for a better rule that lets Berkeley publish these videos, but still keeps universities from pretending that they can't afford to make videos accessible when they actually can, I'm all ears.
They are releasing high quality content online for free to a large segment of the world's population. Just let them do it!
Here's another idea: The people who are so concerned about accessibility could join their efforts and provide a transcription. In multiple languages, by the way. We don't want to exclude anyone.
It's pretty clear that such arguments lost with the passage of the ADA.
Furthermore I have never heard of a building being closed until accessibility accommodations are built.
If you think about it critically for just a second you realize there is no line. Accessibility is an absolute in the United States.
If you disagree then I wish you the best of luck in your campaign to repeal the ADA.
Should they provide transcriptions to satisfy the transcription validation committee, I'm sure you'd be demanding the videos to be taken down because they are not also transcripted in Spanish or dubbed in French, or some other excuse that would prevent the majority of people to have access to the content (including those who could be interested in working on transcriptions instead of complaining online).
The non-obvious thing is that this compliance-by-force is non-local. If you only look at Berkeley's videos, you're giving up these videos pointlessly. You have to also look at the videos that are going to be published anyways, and whether they'd include access for the deaf if people weren't dicks about enforcement.
Would it be better if this was approached from the other side? Creators could create without this concern. Disabled consumers would then pay for services that make specific creations accessible to them. The US government could then explicitly subsidize the disabled people.
If you insist on looking at this incident in isolation, yes. But if you look at it like that, there's no reason to imprison murderers, because it won't bring the victim back to life.
If there were no requirement, very few things would be accessible. As a minority, the deaf will always be irrelevant to the majorities' utility calculus.
I think ThrustVectoring said it best in a post above yours: we're requiring creators to subsidize the disabled.
An alternative way to subsidize the disabled might be to give them some amount of money every year which they can use to buy transcription, parking, etc. services. This might result in only certain content being transcribed. This might result in less parking spaces that are continuously empty. Maybe that would be a better use of everyone's time. Maybe it would create unnecessary decision burden on disabled people.
Also, if your goal was to prevent murderers from murdering again, why would you ever let them out? To generalize this to other crimes: why would you let any criminal out if your goal was to prevent them from committing more crimes?
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-...
You would let murderers out because you think there is some compromise between their freedom and the crime they committed.
What is your suggestion?
Shutting down videos to millions of potential viewers because the recorders did not have the time nor money to produce transcripts, gains nothing / takes away everything.
If things were really fair, we should be able to now sue the complainants for taking away from us everything that could have resulted from viewing the course material.
This is, uhh, kind of false. In liberal democracies like the US, we have some extraordinarily protections for the needs of the few at the expense of the many. For example, we've ruled as unconstitutional anti-miscegenation laws. The founding fathers were explicitly worried about the tyranny of the majority, too.
If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.
Unintended consequences of a well intentioned law - everyone loses access to information, even many disabled people who still could have used it.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley/playlists
As pmoriarty mentioned above, youtube-dl works very well for downloading entire playlists:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
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.
Have you ever transcribed content? The length of the recording is the lower bound on time it takes to transcribe, not the upper bound.
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).
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.
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
If a picture is worth a thousand words, and the video is 30fps. Then a one hour video would require well over 100 million words. I agree, too much to do in real time.
It's harder than it sounds.
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...
How could one get all URLs and put them in one place for all 20k+ videos?
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
edit: If Netflix can be sued and forced to provide captions, so can any other entity providing uncaptioned video.
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
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_and_Fury_%28film%29
The libertarian response would be that you have the right to be how you are, but the ADA should be torn down.
How children should be treated is a tricky subject since it is a balance between parent's rights to raise their children and society's interests and I think there is a lot of conflict that falls into this bucket.
As technology develops to the point that being deaf is a choice, I am much more sympathetic to the libertarian view that if you choose to remain deaf you should not be entitled to special support.
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.
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.
I highly recommend watching the short followup, "Sound and Fury: 6 years later": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-zKebd5us
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.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13769321 and marked it off-topic.
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.
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.
Oh right! Thanks!
Rush - 'The Trees' [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXeUvDOMgGY
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.