It's a release of course videos that they don't charge for. Making free videos available for the public certainly isn't going to help UC Berkeley's $150 million budget deficit.[1] It's not going to make anybody rich. If any university wants to provide free videos to the public with no strings attached, I consider that a generous gesture on their part. I want us (society) to be generous in return. Therefore, lawsuits are the wrong tool for captioning videos for the disabled audience. (Oh btw, I know your school is losing money and may lay off some employees but about those free videos ... yeah we're suing you for that!)
>Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of this content that's ostensibly provided for the public benefit.
There seems to be a "accommodate-ADA-no-matter-what" principle that's present in many comments. We are not that inflexible. Disabled people may pay Federal taxes but we did not install multi-million chairlifts on Yosemite Half Dome (a Federal Park) so wheelchair bound people can experience the summit. The Yosemite Park entrance pass is $15 per car and we didn't all agree to make it $200 per car so that we can subsidize helicopters to take all disabled people to the summit for those who can't climb it on their own power. Yes, we do have wheelchair lifts for the buses running on the valley floor but we didn't make everything equal for all disabled tourists.
If a business has 14 employees or less, we also don't make them comply with ADA access. That exclusion is written into the ADA law.
The point is that there are are tradeoffs, limits, exceptions, and compromise to make ADA work. If a "14-employee threshold" seems like a reasonable exemption from ADA, let's make "freedom of spreading knowledge" another reasonable exemption. Don't punish institutions for providing free knowledge. Let's not disincentivize other institutions from releasing free videos just because they didn't cross every 't' and dot every 'i' to comply with ADA. Let's find another way to add captions and braille without the lawsuits.
Your examples of chairlifts and helicopters are strained because obviously they would fundamentally alter the experience and cause extreme financial burdens, which make for allowable exceptions under the ADA. This is not parallel to the Berkeley case-- from the DOJ letter: "...UC Berkeley has not established that making its online content accessible would result in a fundamental alteration or undue administrative and financial burdens."
This rings true in my mind; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users. And training and employing work-study students to audit and improve the accessibility of the content seems like a low-cost approach that could bring them substantially into compliance. Rather than allowing untrained faculty to self-certify accessibility compliance of their self-maintained content with a checkbox, which is allowed today.
"Freedom of spreading knowledge" certainly doesn't make for a valid set of exceptions. By that logic, as a knowledge-spreading institution, Berkeley wouldn't need to build wheelchair ramps and elevators on its physical campus. I assume you'd agree that that's a settled question.
In some ways and in some cases, online education is already a reasonable substitute for in-classroom education. It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations to what we've already deemed just in the physical world.
>Your examples of chairlifts and helicopters are strained because obviously they would fundamentally alter the experience and cause extreme financial burdens,
It wasn't meant as a perfect cost-for-cost comparison. It was to diffuse the absolutist tone of "make them all comply with ADA in all situations and show them no mercy".
People seemed to think the ADA applies everywhere. It
does not. We already make many exceptions to the ADA so the other commenters being being absolutist about it with no wiggle room for free videos that benefit us seems disingenuous of how society actually implements the ADA with exemptions.
>; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users.
No, it isn't obvious to you because you're using the wrong framework. It is a "fundamentally altered experience" for non-disabled because the lawsuit intimidation tactics from DOJ and deaf organizations can cause to the courses to not be available at all. You're only thinking about how the encoding of the captions in the bytestream of the video file doesn't affect non-disabled users. That is true but that's not the only way to alter the experience. If other universities now choose to keep their class videos locked away in a vault because of the lawsuits against UCB, Harvard, MIT, that is a fundamentally altered experience for the rest of humanity!
>It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations
We should push, encourage, volunteer, crowdsource, raise awareness, ask for grants, solicit donations from billionaires like UC Berkely alum Eric Schmidt, contribute to open source speech-recognition software to auto transcribe with 99.99% accuracy, etc. We can do a lot of things. I'd just rather for society not to threaten everybody with lawsuits. The hostility towards free videos not having captions is baffling. Yes, it's an undesirable situation and we need to improve it but the hostility is just weird. Good quality captions (especially for college courses with heavy jargon) takes time and costs money. It's not an automatic and trivial process. I saw some Stanford courses for Apple iOS programming on Youtube[2] and the captions are often wrong because Google uses automated software. The deaf audience deserves better than that. It would be wrong for those videos to be deleted because the captioning was inadequate.
If a career coach offers to donate 2 hours of free time at the local library to talk to unemployed job seekers on how to train for new skills or polish their resumes, I think it's wrong to threaten him with a lawsuit if he doesn't pay $200[1] for a sign-language interpreter to accompany him. Yes, of course the deaf deserve to participate in such a free workshop but to threaten with a lawsuit seems incredibly mean-spirited. Let's find another way to provide a sign-language interpreter. If we exhaust all options in an attempt to accommodate deaf access (e.g. library doesn't have budget to pay $200, no volunteer sign-language interpreter is available, etc) then we should at least let the class continue. There is no need to punish the coach† or the non-disabled job seekers‡ by cancelling the class because the disabled didn't have access. Sharing knowledge should take precedence.
It's a release of course videos that they don't charge for. Making free videos available for the public certainly isn't going to help UC Berkeley's $150 million budget deficit.[1] It's not going to make anybody rich. If any university wants to provide free videos to the public with no strings attached, I consider that a generous gesture on their part. I want us (society) to be generous in return. Therefore, lawsuits are the wrong tool for captioning videos for the disabled audience. (Oh btw, I know your school is losing money and may lay off some employees but about those free videos ... yeah we're suing you for that!)
>Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of this content that's ostensibly provided for the public benefit.
There seems to be a "accommodate-ADA-no-matter-what" principle that's present in many comments. We are not that inflexible. Disabled people may pay Federal taxes but we did not install multi-million chairlifts on Yosemite Half Dome (a Federal Park) so wheelchair bound people can experience the summit. The Yosemite Park entrance pass is $15 per car and we didn't all agree to make it $200 per car so that we can subsidize helicopters to take all disabled people to the summit for those who can't climb it on their own power. Yes, we do have wheelchair lifts for the buses running on the valley floor but we didn't make everything equal for all disabled tourists.
If a business has 14 employees or less, we also don't make them comply with ADA access. That exclusion is written into the ADA law.
The point is that there are are tradeoffs, limits, exceptions, and compromise to make ADA work. If a "14-employee threshold" seems like a reasonable exemption from ADA, let's make "freedom of spreading knowledge" another reasonable exemption. Don't punish institutions for providing free knowledge. Let's not disincentivize other institutions from releasing free videos just because they didn't cross every 't' and dot every 'i' to comply with ADA. Let's find another way to add captions and braille without the lawsuits.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=uc+berkeley+operating+defici...