A shame. Lawsuit filed was unlikely to have been done with the interests of the disabled in mind - but it's correct that "public" (government) institutions must abide by the ADA and implement accessibility standards.
It's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.
I somewhat understand the intention, but this feels like a ham-fisted 'solution.' Deprive majority of people access because it doesn't suit everyone? Being partially physically disabled, I absolutely sympathize with the need to push for more adherence to accessibility standards. But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information?
>But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information?
I suspect very little of this actually has to do with helping the disabled, if that was the goal then your solution would be the logical conclusion.
It's 2017, and two employees from Gallaudet University can cause the destruction of 20,000 free lectures, including some with nearly half a million views, because of ADA requirements?
Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.
Nope, regulations and compliance always end up trumping the public good. I think they should work to make the courses ADA compliant, but that doesn't mean they should remove all of the content in be meantime. Just replace them as they go.
ADA became US civil rights law the same year Berners-Lee wrote the first browser. It was signed by the first president Bush.
The reason this is happening in 2017 is that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow plaintiffs to collect damages (California state law is different). That means compliance comes solely when an affected individual has the time and financial resources and the will to pursue a long and drawn out case. Note the references to 2015 in the article suggest that UC Berkeley actively opposed compliance during the mediation period before DOJ issued an order.
The DOJ issued specific guidance for web page accessibility in 2003 [1]. That's before Youtube. Before MOOCs. Before online course materials over the internet were a viable option. UC Berkeley had more than a decade to come up with a plan that met the intent of the law.
In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account?
How does this improve anything? Either you have the internet and can access these videos on YouTube or you don't have the internet and you can't access them on YouTube. How does this satisfy the court order?
The difference is that the University can provide their own students ADA accommodations without captioning and making accessible every video on the platform. The only requirement is that the material they provide comply with the ADA; if they don't provide any, they don't have to make any changes to it.
The gist of it is: you have to think past the current situation. The U.S. passed the American Disabilities Act because it decided that creating an equal society for the disabled was an important value for America. Overlooking violations that disenfranchise the disabled makes that law meaningless. Every business that has had to install handicap-accessible facilities has had to eat major costs that indisputably hurt their bottom-line. But business owners don't get to say, "Well, having a wheelchair accessible doorway would force me to close my shop, so I can't do it, and having my shop open to serve the non-disabled is better than nothing."
The other thing to consider is that Berkeley's content is not free content. Berkeley is a state university funded by tax dollars. State employees created, curated, edited, and produced that content for the web, all on taxpayer dime. It would have cost more to close-caption them, but that's the law. And when you don't enforce the law, you get institutions like Berkeley deprioritizing what they are federally mandated to do, which is to follow the ADA.
Here is the problem with your "enforcing the law" argument:
Berkeley is not being inconvenienced in the slightest by "enforcing the law". The general public is.
Disabled people aren't being helped in the slightest by "enforcing the law". Instead, they are losing access to material that at least some of them can use.
When "enforcing the law" harms people who had nothing to do with violating it, does nothing to help those who were supposed to benefit, and doesn't really punish those who have (allegedly) broken it, it is quite clearly a poorly-written (or perhaps, enforced) law.
The law argues that disabled people were harmed when Berkeley used public resources to publish something not accessible to the disabled.
Again, you have to think more broadly than the specific parties in this incident. Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past.
If this lawsuit hadn't raised attention, then it's possible Berkeley (and others in society) would continue to make inaccessible content. The law isn't very effective if it requires a disability advocate to file a lawsuit before it is enforced.
"The law argues that disabled people were harmed when Berkeley used public resources to publish something not accessible to the disabled."
But Berkeley isn't being punished. The general public, including disabled people is.
"Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past."
I realize that. However, it seems to me that this outcome is, if anything, making the situation worse. Blind people could presumably get something from the audio content. Deaf people could get something from the video content. Now they can't. How is this better?
Is there a word for cases where ADA action causes net harm to society? When a great good can be achieved for almost free, and it is hindered because ADA compliance would cost a lot, what is the benefit to the disabled?
The amount of wiggle rooms needs to be kept pretty small or people will always work to use the wiggle room.
Which even though I say that I'm not sure I agree with this outcome, but it's inevitable that there will be corner cases if the law has any power at all.
From a strictly economic standpoint, the ADA as a whole is a net negative to society. It is a case where the government has decided to make society slightly worse off to provide a large benefit to a small portion of the population that would otherwise be highly disadvantaged.
Despite laudable aims, it creates a new class of persons empowered to bring lawsuits. Those lawsuits might, or might not have their basis in actual discriminatory behavior. And outcome could be determined by lawyer quality, jury selection, availability of funds, and many factors having little to do with workplace interaction. This is much too big a risk for small businesspersons. I am sure this took a toll in hiring, and helped maintain an aggrieved class of persons.
I randomly picked a video [0] from their course list, jumped to the middle of the video, and compared the YouTube automatic closed captioning (CC) with the spoken word. I'd say CC was about 95% accurate.
In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned.
So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? Surely there are deaf people who are quite alright with watching these videos with the auto CC, and believe they would be better off if the videos were available in their current form than not available at all. Just look at the list of courses [1] that will be removed.
But you got born in a civilization with access ramps, accessibility washrooms, semaphores with audio feedback , etc, just in case one day you may be incapacitated in some fashion. If such tragedy strikes, you can still be productive and somewhat happy/content. You can live, and occasionally, if you happen to be called Hawking, turn physics university upside down for benefits of the masses.
If it was left to the companies,they'd maximize profit and streets will look like 15 century London.
So, the society, in the current incarnation, will stongarm the misbehaving entities to ensure that the overall civilization benefits.
Most in this thread are not seeing this because they aren't looking at the big picture of what a society really is, and what values it upholds (sometimes even by force).
I'm not arguing against the ADA. I think disability benefits are important. But I think it isn't having the intended effect- getting UC Berkeley to improve the accessibility of these videos. I understand what the law is trying to accomplish and agree that we should optimize for that, but the practical effects might need a few edge cases hammered out. I think everyone can agree the better outcome would be one where somehow UC Berkeley is in a position to improve the accessibility of these existing videos.
Except that in this case the blind will no longer be able to listen to the audio recordings and the deaf will no longer be able to use the animations and automated closed captions.
They should have struck a deal where all new content will be ADA compliant and all courses will never depend/actively refer to the old material, but keep the old material still online for further research.
Of course UC needs to stay compliant. But that doesn't mean forcing it to take down old material will help anyone.
So if something isn't offered in every language, transcribed, sign language overlay, CC, and let's say color blind mode... it's half baked educational content?
Automated speech to text is still a pretty mixed bag. A lot depends on sound quality, speaker accent, nature of the material etc. I just (again) spent some time looking at various options for my podcast and decided pretty quickly to continue using human transcriptions because anything else just wasn't worth my time.
But, for this application, I would have thought the YouTube CC was pretty adequate. Especially given that, as you say, I'd expect most college courses on technical topics are going to have a lot of the content on the slides anyway.
Google officially stated that error rate is less than 50%, 95% is just making numbers up based on one or a few videos. When you look at the whole thing, there's still a lot to improve.
Time to make a 'college' torrent for people who have no money. Download all of the content through OCW, UCB, UCI, etc and put it back up as torrent seed to make sure this crap doesn't happen.
Could they just release it all under CC and let the world worry about distributing it? If you're going to the trouble of making things available to the public, why set yourself up for hassles like this? Just release all control of it and be done.
Most of the videos are already Creative Commons licensed (Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) and all have been been saved by ArchiveTeam.
Public institutions are required to abide by ADA when they release things to the public.
Deleting the videos is unfortunate, but there's really no good excuse and they should have foreseen this. The MIT OpenCourseWare videos, for example, all have real (not generated) closed captions.
Berkeley should attempt to crowd source the captions. I'm sure many of the more popular classes could be captioned by volunteers.
With the right software, the rest could be cut up into segments, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to caption it for very little cost.
Berkeley could add a button to the viewer to report (or even for viewers to correct) errors that were made by Mechanical Turk users, when they are found by others viewing the material.
The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites.
The worst part is that Berkeley should have these captioned for their own students anyway. I don't see how making the videos available to Berkeley students only helps in anyway.
Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student.
If I were enrolled in Berkeley I would request that 100% of the videos be captioned, so I had access to any of them I needed to learn something in the middle of the night before a test or for a paper.
Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.
There should be a 'good samaritan' provision to the ADA which allows for less-than-accessible things to be done if they're provided for free. Accessibility is great, but it doesn't serve anyone to raise the bar required to release free content above what institutions can provide.
For better or worse, ADA is Federal civil rights legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access.
[1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.
Recording the video costs money. The instructors who lecture cost money. The buildings where the videos are shot cost money. UC Berkeley systematically budgeted for each of those and many other costs such as administrators and legal council and student recruitment and admissions officers and an inter-collegiate athletics and systematically did not budget for accessibility.
Accessibility for all of the US? Indeed they did not, because it doesn't make sense. Students at Berkeley already have these transcripts available to them.
"Good for society" in my view is a measure of what is lost compared to what is gained. It is good when that ratio is a positive number. Removing the content entirely seems to be a pretty clear net negative.
In response, Berkeley is planning to release new and compliant content. Their official statement[1]:
"[W]e have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features ... This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU 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.
... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)."
They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2]
The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided.
Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.
Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.
To see how horrible your words sound to some of us, replace ADA with 'elderly healthcare'.
It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.
What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
>What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
Why? Money's a finite resource. If, as appears to be the case, a lot of this is older and not frequently viewed content, it's not clear to me why the university should spend a lot of money updating just "because." Especially if it's mostly Creative Commons and will continue to live elsewhere.
Well UCBerkley is/was providing the educational content free of charge for the public at it's own expense. I would liken it to a free public service. If the service does not work/apply for you, do you sue the entity/entities in charge to make it work for you, or do you just move on? And how is the university's choice to pull its content behind a UCBerkley login a disgusting move? In my opinion, it's well within it's right to do so and also well within it's rights to not make the material publicly available in the first place. I also think that it is totally understandable move considering it would have to incur additional costs to keep the material publicly available.
Yet to see how accurate his words sound, replace "elderly healthcare" with "banning books".
If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content. I can harass any institution providing service to the public that incidentally contains content that I dislike for political or religious reasons or any reason of my choice. I can deny service to millions using theoretical lack of service to hypothetical individuals as my weapon.
Why, I could go after HN for presenting your comment itself in textual form instead of braille or audiobook format. They could fix that technologically, but I'm sure it would be easier to delete your comment entirely. The fact that I'm only bringing up deletion of your comment because we disagree politically is mere coincidence, I assure you its solely for ADA compliance that I must ask for HN to delete your comment ... surely you must agree with my reasoning that your comment must be deleted, right?
> If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content.
Or hire a lawyer that defends ADA cases, since "reasonable accommodation" does not, in fact, mean "whatever anyone demands", successfully defend the case, and move on. And, if the instigator has a pattern of doing meritless ADA cases for extortion or political suppression, possibly tack on some nice counterclaims in the process. While they aren't perfect, the justice system does have tools to deal with the kind of abuse of process you describe.
>It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.
I disagree. In a world with finite resources the optimum outcome is one that best applies those resources to serve the greatest possible good.
Berkeley is a publicly funded institution, anything that increases their costs either A: increases the tuition they are required to charge, thus lessening the availability of education. or B: Increases the tax burden, lowering the total net income of the populous.
Now many argue that we can raise taxes in order to pay for these types of things. They say that the costs of this individual mandate is minimal, thus it is common sense to implement it. What they miss is that each percentage raise in tax will render a certain number of businesses non-viable. This will in turn increase unemployment, and lower overall tax revenue. At the same time the demand for public assistance grows. Thus necessitating further increases in taxation.
It doesn't stop there. As this common sense regulation is implemented, more follow, and more still. There is an endless stream of things under the heading of "wouldn't be nice if", where do you draw the line?
The impact of these regulations are hard to measure. How many business owners who now find themselves bankrupt will commit suicide this year? How many teenagers will be unable to find summer jobs, and thus be unable to save for college? How many families will fall apart due to constant frustrations regarding money? You can never say, but all of the data I have looked out shows that poverty cuts wide and deep having negative effects on the lives of children exposed to it well into old age.
So lets take your example of elderly healthcare. Is it worth extending the life of someone in their 80's a few years if it means that a non-zero number of young families will be pushed below the poverty line? I never see this aspect considered. When I search for data I am offered an appeal to emotion. I think regulation needs to be more thought out than that.
You can come up with all sorts of examples where complying with the ADA imposes costs that are out of proportion to any possible benefit. (e.g. handicapped accessible ramps on mountain cabins only accessible by a steep rocky trail) However, the legitimate concern is that, if you start allowing for a lot of exceptions, before you know it, organizations start finding reasons why just about everything should be an exception.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with the decision in this case but there are sometimes good reasons to have hard and fast rules even if they lead to arguably bad outcomes in specific cases
The economics of the ADA were known from the beginning. By definition, it addresses a situation where business owners weren't implementing the changes necessary. Practically across the board, it was cheaper and easier to say "oh well" to the disabled than to make accommodations for what was a small percentage of their customers. It was before my time, but the business community was aggressively against the ADA back when it was being drafted.
From a societal perspective, the entire idea behind the ADA is that the right to equal access for the disabled--including the public accommodations necessary for them to actually make use of that access--is something we value beyond the initial cost of implementing it.
Similar issue happens with public bathrooms / venue bathrooms. Many cities / countries have laws saying that should be certain % of accessible bathrooms. Solution? Do not have any! Or have one regular and one accessible for like 1000 people venue. Seen those examples both in North America and Western Europe.
The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place.
And I don't like how they're handling the response. The court ruling doesn't require them to delete the videos, only to make them accessible. But instead of doing the right thing and captioning the videos, they're kind of throwing a fit and deleting them all.
Another view might be that universities realize that putting free quality content online would do to them what free access to quality news sites did to newspapers.
Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)
89 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIt's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
I suspect very little of this actually has to do with helping the disabled, if that was the goal then your solution would be the logical conclusion.
Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.
The reason this is happening in 2017 is that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow plaintiffs to collect damages (California state law is different). That means compliance comes solely when an affected individual has the time and financial resources and the will to pursue a long and drawn out case. Note the references to 2015 in the article suggest that UC Berkeley actively opposed compliance during the mediation period before DOJ issued an order.
The DOJ issued specific guidance for web page accessibility in 2003 [1]. That's before Youtube. Before MOOCs. Before online course materials over the internet were a viable option. UC Berkeley had more than a decade to come up with a plan that met the intent of the law.
[1]: https://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm
In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account?
How does this improve anything? Either you have the internet and can access these videos on YouTube or you don't have the internet and you can't access them on YouTube. How does this satisfy the court order?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
The gist of it is: you have to think past the current situation. The U.S. passed the American Disabilities Act because it decided that creating an equal society for the disabled was an important value for America. Overlooking violations that disenfranchise the disabled makes that law meaningless. Every business that has had to install handicap-accessible facilities has had to eat major costs that indisputably hurt their bottom-line. But business owners don't get to say, "Well, having a wheelchair accessible doorway would force me to close my shop, so I can't do it, and having my shop open to serve the non-disabled is better than nothing."
The other thing to consider is that Berkeley's content is not free content. Berkeley is a state university funded by tax dollars. State employees created, curated, edited, and produced that content for the web, all on taxpayer dime. It would have cost more to close-caption them, but that's the law. And when you don't enforce the law, you get institutions like Berkeley deprioritizing what they are federally mandated to do, which is to follow the ADA.
Berkeley is not being inconvenienced in the slightest by "enforcing the law". The general public is.
Disabled people aren't being helped in the slightest by "enforcing the law". Instead, they are losing access to material that at least some of them can use.
When "enforcing the law" harms people who had nothing to do with violating it, does nothing to help those who were supposed to benefit, and doesn't really punish those who have (allegedly) broken it, it is quite clearly a poorly-written (or perhaps, enforced) law.
Again, you have to think more broadly than the specific parties in this incident. Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past.
If this lawsuit hadn't raised attention, then it's possible Berkeley (and others in society) would continue to make inaccessible content. The law isn't very effective if it requires a disability advocate to file a lawsuit before it is enforced.
But Berkeley isn't being punished. The general public, including disabled people is.
"Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past."
I realize that. However, it seems to me that this outcome is, if anything, making the situation worse. Blind people could presumably get something from the audio content. Deaf people could get something from the video content. Now they can't. How is this better?
The amount of wiggle rooms needs to be kept pretty small or people will always work to use the wiggle room.
Which even though I say that I'm not sure I agree with this outcome, but it's inevitable that there will be corner cases if the law has any power at all.
Despite laudable aims, it creates a new class of persons empowered to bring lawsuits. Those lawsuits might, or might not have their basis in actual discriminatory behavior. And outcome could be determined by lawyer quality, jury selection, availability of funds, and many factors having little to do with workplace interaction. This is much too big a risk for small businesspersons. I am sure this took a toll in hiring, and helped maintain an aggrieved class of persons.
In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned.
So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? Surely there are deaf people who are quite alright with watching these videos with the auto CC, and believe they would be better off if the videos were available in their current form than not available at all. Just look at the list of courses [1] that will be removed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-...
[1] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s
If it was left to the companies,they'd maximize profit and streets will look like 15 century London.
So, the society, in the current incarnation, will stongarm the misbehaving entities to ensure that the overall civilization benefits.
Most in this thread are not seeing this because they aren't looking at the big picture of what a society really is, and what values it upholds (sometimes even by force).
They should have struck a deal where all new content will be ADA compliant and all courses will never depend/actively refer to the old material, but keep the old material still online for further research.
Of course UC needs to stay compliant. But that doesn't mean forcing it to take down old material will help anyone.
I'm asking honest where you draw the line.
But, for this application, I would have thought the YouTube CC was pretty adequate. Especially given that, as you say, I'd expect most college courses on technical topics are going to have a lot of the content on the slides anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
Public institutions are required to abide by ADA when they release things to the public.
Deleting the videos is unfortunate, but there's really no good excuse and they should have foreseen this. The MIT OpenCourseWare videos, for example, all have real (not generated) closed captions.
With the right software, the rest could be cut up into segments, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to caption it for very little cost.
Berkeley could add a button to the viewer to report (or even for viewers to correct) errors that were made by Mechanical Turk users, when they are found by others viewing the material.
The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites.
The worst part is that Berkeley should have these captioned for their own students anyway. I don't see how making the videos available to Berkeley students only helps in anyway.
Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student.
If I were enrolled in Berkeley I would request that 100% of the videos be captioned, so I had access to any of them I needed to learn something in the middle of the night before a test or for a paper.
Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.
For better or worse, ADA is Federal civil rights legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access.
[1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.
If everyone gains, then it is "good for society" but what if some people gain and some lose, as in most regulations.
"[W]e have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features ... This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU 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.
... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)."
They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2]
[1] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/
[2] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...
Plato's Republic is almost 24 centuries old. De Re Metallica is almost 500 years old.
I imagine that lectures just a few years old are not worthless.
A university should not be in the business of taking down knowledge, and the Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself.
Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.
Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.
It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.
What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
Why? Money's a finite resource. If, as appears to be the case, a lot of this is older and not frequently viewed content, it's not clear to me why the university should spend a lot of money updating just "because." Especially if it's mostly Creative Commons and will continue to live elsewhere.
If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content. I can harass any institution providing service to the public that incidentally contains content that I dislike for political or religious reasons or any reason of my choice. I can deny service to millions using theoretical lack of service to hypothetical individuals as my weapon.
Why, I could go after HN for presenting your comment itself in textual form instead of braille or audiobook format. They could fix that technologically, but I'm sure it would be easier to delete your comment entirely. The fact that I'm only bringing up deletion of your comment because we disagree politically is mere coincidence, I assure you its solely for ADA compliance that I must ask for HN to delete your comment ... surely you must agree with my reasoning that your comment must be deleted, right?
Or hire a lawyer that defends ADA cases, since "reasonable accommodation" does not, in fact, mean "whatever anyone demands", successfully defend the case, and move on. And, if the instigator has a pattern of doing meritless ADA cases for extortion or political suppression, possibly tack on some nice counterclaims in the process. While they aren't perfect, the justice system does have tools to deal with the kind of abuse of process you describe.
I disagree. In a world with finite resources the optimum outcome is one that best applies those resources to serve the greatest possible good.
Berkeley is a publicly funded institution, anything that increases their costs either A: increases the tuition they are required to charge, thus lessening the availability of education. or B: Increases the tax burden, lowering the total net income of the populous.
Now many argue that we can raise taxes in order to pay for these types of things. They say that the costs of this individual mandate is minimal, thus it is common sense to implement it. What they miss is that each percentage raise in tax will render a certain number of businesses non-viable. This will in turn increase unemployment, and lower overall tax revenue. At the same time the demand for public assistance grows. Thus necessitating further increases in taxation.
It doesn't stop there. As this common sense regulation is implemented, more follow, and more still. There is an endless stream of things under the heading of "wouldn't be nice if", where do you draw the line?
The impact of these regulations are hard to measure. How many business owners who now find themselves bankrupt will commit suicide this year? How many teenagers will be unable to find summer jobs, and thus be unable to save for college? How many families will fall apart due to constant frustrations regarding money? You can never say, but all of the data I have looked out shows that poverty cuts wide and deep having negative effects on the lives of children exposed to it well into old age.
So lets take your example of elderly healthcare. Is it worth extending the life of someone in their 80's a few years if it means that a non-zero number of young families will be pushed below the poverty line? I never see this aspect considered. When I search for data I am offered an appeal to emotion. I think regulation needs to be more thought out than that.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with the decision in this case but there are sometimes good reasons to have hard and fast rules even if they lead to arguably bad outcomes in specific cases
From a societal perspective, the entire idea behind the ADA is that the right to equal access for the disabled--including the public accommodations necessary for them to actually make use of that access--is something we value beyond the initial cost of implementing it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
jew lawyers.
you're all idiots.
The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place.
And I don't like how they're handling the response. The court ruling doesn't require them to delete the videos, only to make them accessible. But instead of doing the right thing and captioning the videos, they're kind of throwing a fit and deleting them all.
Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)