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Cal-Berkeley Forced by Justice Department to Remove Lectures from YouTube

Brainster

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Get the reason why:

The University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts in response to a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the educational content accessible to people with disabilities.

I mean seriously? Just because not everybody can use the lectures and podcasts, nobody can use them? Why is this even a federal government concern?
 
That is not the entire situation.

it was like this : somebody complained they could not use the free lecture, and indicated that the ADA forbid giving public access without disablities access, then the DOJ applying the law had no other chocie but to ask them to make sure the lecture were offered with disablities access.

The university naturally chose to simply remove the public access, and thus it is not covered anymore by ADA.

The DOJ had no other chocie but to apply the law. The university decided (rightfully their choice) that they would not pay for the access. And the person which complained about it , (may even had gotten money for it as some mention of the DOJ judgement seem to indicate the unviersity has to offer mcompensation to the otehr parties), and spoiled it for everybody else.

Whatever you want to say, the DOJ had to apply the law.

Personally I think the one which should be scorned is the woman which complained of having no deaf access to the free course to the DOJ.
 
That is not the entire situation.

it was like this : somebody complained they could not use the free lecture, and indicated that the ADA forbid giving public access without disablities access, then the DOJ applying the law had no other chocie but to ask them to make sure the lecture were offered with disablities access.

The university naturally chose to simply remove the public access, and thus it is not covered anymore by ADA.

The DOJ had no other chocie but to apply the law.

It's still a stupid law.
 
It's still a stupid law.

No, iot is a good law. It is the same law which impose handicapped access like ramp in places where normally they would have none, and AFAIK it is the same law imposing book have to drop their copyright to allow blind/braille copy in the library of congress and similar stuff.

Try being handicapped and you will get another stance, comparing the live of today to the 1970 for example.

Once again, the law is good, but it does not take into account "free" stuff. if you want to point finger, point finger at the woman who wanted to COPY the free stuff for her own lesson plan but could not , so she decided to pick a tantrum and add the DOJ to the equation.
 
No, iot is a good law. It is the same law which impose handicapped access like ramp in places where normally they would have none

First of all, those are two different things. Second, just because a particular person has trouble accessing something doesn't mean it should no longer be available to people with, say, legs.

Try being handicapped and you will get another stance

Appeal to emotion.

How did the removal of those videos help anybody?
 
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I think black people should have equal access to University courses, even if those courses are free to everyone else. Just because my skin is darker than other's, it doesn't mean I don't want to get my learnin' on.
 
First of all, those are two different things. Second, just because a particular person has trouble accessing something doesn't mean it should no longer be available to people with, say, legs.



Appeal to emotion.

No, appeal to rationality. The live of handicapped folk is much better now than it was 40 years ago, not because people wised up and decided on their own ethically to give access to handicapped, but because ADA laws and similar force them.

That any laws can have negative side effect is a given. You have to look at the whole rather than the part. Maybe back decades ago they could have added a paragraph for free stuff not being covered, but they did not and frankly when the laws were made "free" and "fremium" or "internet" as we know it were not even that much of a concept, much less free course downloadable by everybody. ADA is 1990 may I remind you.

How did the removal of those videos help anybody?

Did I say it helped anybody ? No. I am saying that it was the law, and that the DOJ and the University can do nothing but respect it once requested by the woman to enforce it.

Again if you want to point finger, point finger at the woman which asked the DOJ to enforce ADA laws on free content because she could not copy it. She was the one rolling the ball and ultimately the one which forced a removal to all.
 
Again if you want to point finger, point finger at the woman which asked the DOJ to enforce ADA laws on free content because she could not copy it. She was the one rolling the ball and ultimately the one which forced a removal to all.

UC Berkeley began posting lectures and other course content online in 2006. The process for this was largely unstructured. It was mostly just recording a lecture and putting it on YouTube.

This is a bit older than just the current complaint. This goes back a few years. MIT and Harvard created edX in 2012 as a means of delivering massive open online courses (MOOCs). UC Berkeley was one of the participating schools. These online courses became popular and started integrating with regular courses as well and providing certificates, on-going education for professionals, and a means of common discussion among peers. It appears to be becoming a critical means of education for both students and professionals.

The problem was that the content was not being designed to be accessible by people who are deaf or have other disabilities. Left unaddressed, people with these disabilities would be left behind, and the longer it goes without being addressed the more difficult it becomes to change.

So a few disability rights advocacy groups filed a complaint. In 2015 there was a settlement with edX to make sure the contact of the online courses would be accessible to people with disabilities.

In early 2015, Berkeley launched a big MOOC program. It stopped posting content on its own and started delivering it through edX. DOJ investigated the courses Berkeley was providing and determined they were not in compliance with the terms of the edX settlement.

Berkeley reached an agreement with DOJ to make the content compliant. The problem is that they didn’t meet that agreement. So a complaint was filed with DOJ. DOJ found that Berkeley’s new content still had the same problems it had originally found and no change to the archived content. In addition, DOJ found Berkeley was not even in compliance with accessibility policies of the University of California. So DOJ hit them a bit harder and demanded compliance.

Here’s the confusing part: DOJs remedy for the violations requires Berkeley to make content on its YouTube channel accessible. Why? Berkeley stopped posting content there in 2015 just like they had told DOJ they would do. What is the point in demanding they make a bunch of old videos accessible that were created before the 2015 agreement, and many even before edX existed?

So Berkeley responded by taking their ball and going home. That seems the most sensible solution. They cite that many of the videos are out of date, have been replaced by newer content, or are rarely used. There is no reason to invest in updating a bunch of old junk that started being replaced by edX content two years ago.

I think DOJ is just looking for ways to punish Berkeley for not complying with the 2015 agreement, and Berkeley is taking the simplest drastic measures to demonstrate that DOJ is overreacting. We’ll see if DOJ backs down from their overly aggressive demands.
 
Well thanks that put it in a slightly different perspective than it was explained to me. But in the end , this is still what I was saying : they are enforcing the law. You may find that dumb or aggressive, but in the very end what we want from a justice system is that it is impartial and do not deliver different treatment depending on the defendant. As such, the law is still that the content must be covered by the ADA. It does not matter if it is new or old content.

And if it was really old and outdated content, then nothing of value is lost, and the complaint in this very thread are not valid.
 
Outdated facts?

What an odd comment.

Still a stupid law.

It will go away soon. The president has had to provide far to many luxuries to ungrateful disabled people at court order for the law to be safe. I suspect the equal housing act will shortly follow.
 
No, appeal to rationality.

Telling me to put myself in someone else's shoes isn't an appeal to rationality. You are confusing your personal opinion with fact.

The live of handicapped folk is much better now than it was 40 years ago

Of course.

You have to look at the whole rather than the part. Maybe back decades ago they could have added a paragraph for free stuff not being covered, but they did not and frankly when the laws were made "free" and "fremium" or "internet" as we know it were not even that much of a concept, much less free course downloadable by everybody. ADA is 1990 may I remind you.

I don't see how this makes the law not stupid. I find it stupid to punish 95% of people because someone didn't make something accessible to the other 5%.

Again if you want to point finger, point finger at the woman which asked the DOJ to enforce ADA laws on free content because she could not copy it.

Why? All she asked was for the law to be enforced.
 
Get the reason why:



I mean seriously? Just because not everybody can use the lectures and podcasts, nobody can use them? Why is this even a federal government concern?
This isn't an unheard of response to accessibility laws. There's a serious of public bathrooms in Portland that are boarded up for that reason.
 
Well thanks that put it in a slightly different perspective than it was explained to me. But in the end , this is still what I was saying : they are enforcing the law. You may find that dumb or aggressive, but in the very end what we want from a justice system is that it is impartial and do not deliver different treatment depending on the defendant. As such, the law is still that the content must be covered by the ADA. It does not matter if it is new or old content.

And if it was really old and outdated content, then nothing of value is lost, and the complaint in this very thread are not valid.

Isn't it interesting how knowing ALL the facts makes things seem less black-and-white.

I also find it hard to understand why you object so much to someone wanting equal access to free education. Funny, when I put it that way, I hear civil rights echoes in my head. A lot of deaf people have very limited finances.
 
Try being handicapped and you will get another stance

I already have that. I am completely deaf in one ear, and you would be surprised how much this affects my everyday life.

One of the minor consequences of my disability is that I cannot hear music in stereo. I am at a disadvantage when using YouTube because I cannot access the whole content of each video (missing the right channel). I therefore demand that the DoJ force YouTube to take down all Youtube content that contains stereo sound.

Of course, this demand makes no sense; about the same amount of sense as the complaint by that mean-spirited woman with the "if I can't have it then no one can" attitude.
 
Outdated facts?
What an odd comment.

Still a stupid law.

No. Outdated content. Read more carefully next time. Content might be out of date because better ways of teaching the content have come about, better graphics, audio, demonstrations, analogies or other teaching aids. In some cases new measurements might need to be taken into account.
 
No doubt, we will have to ban all podcasts, radio broadcasts, telephones and other audio only devices because they disadvantage the deaf and hearing impaired. :boggled:
 
In Canada, all TV broadcasts must be closed captioned. CC costs about $100 per half hour.

Many also require described video, audio track. More $$.

Such requirements are contributing to a contraction in the industry. Even cable access channels must do this. Cable access cannot sell advertising so those $$ come from cable subscriber's pockets.

It seems that such requirements are now going to be applied to the internet, at least to the low hanging fruit of corporate productions such as this university. Applying it to personal videos, especially foreign content, would result in quite the brouhaha.
 
It seems that such requirements are now going to be applied to the internet, at least to the low hanging fruit of corporate productions such as this university. Applying it to personal videos, especially foreign content, would result in quite the brouhaha.

All of my posts here are closed captioned and machine readable. (They also smell like lilacs.)
 
In Canada, all TV broadcasts must be closed captioned. CC costs about $100 per half hour.
Is there any requirement for the captioning to be in real time or can the captions appear (at the rate of 1 word per minute) half an hour after the person has spoken like it does where I live? Do the words have to be spelled correctly and be the words actually spoken or can any BS do?
 
It seems that such requirements are now going to be applied to the internet, at least to the low hanging fruit of corporate productions such as this university. Applying it to personal videos, especially foreign content, would result in quite the brouhaha.

Is it possible the university receives federal funding that requires it to comply with the ADA?

That would distinguish it from other content providers on the internet.
 
Although specific examples can always be cited to show how ridiculous these access rules can be (and they are sometimes easy to portray in that fashion) I do wish to weigh in as supporting the overall concept. A few years ago I had significant mobility problems and it were the changes previously imposed on the businesses, shops, public facilities, around me etc. that allowed me to continue to live some semblance of a normal life. I am certain that many owners complained and resisted along the way and that many thought the changes were silly. But the handrails, ramps, etc. were crucial for my ability to continue to work and to be a productive member of society. And it wasn't all roses, either- often I had to circle around to the back of a building to gain "handicap" access, or to wobble an extra 100 meters to find a ramp, etc. But I was and am grateful for the ADA act and I still recognize how much it means to those with problems even though I am now perfectly healthy in this regard. The situation in the USA was amazingly different from many other countries without such a policy and in which I find myself effectively barred by my limitations from one third to half of the public facilities others could enjoy.

Of course the overall goal of better accessibility can be (and has been) from time to time extended into absurdity by the mindless applications of rigid rules. And perhaps the example in the OP is one of these cases (I don't know the details). But often accessibility can be significantly increased with not much effort if the problem is highlighted and people are pushed off their behinds to do something about it. In the case of the OP- computers in general now offer many ways for the visually impaired or otherwise limited to access information posted on websites. Perhaps the problem in the OP was caused by thoughtlessness, and can now be readily fixed, by simple changes in the formatting of the websites or the on-line information to allow the recipients' brewers to read file audibly, or by providing additional resolution to allow images to be blown-up further, etc.

I suspect that the goal of the Feds was to make this information more widely accessible in practice, not universally accessible by some type of miracle.
 
I already have that. I am completely deaf in one ear, and you would be surprised how much this affects my everyday life.

One of the minor consequences of my disability is that I cannot hear music in stereo. I am at a disadvantage when using YouTube because I cannot access the whole content of each video (missing the right channel). I therefore demand that the DoJ force YouTube to take down all Youtube content that contains stereo sound.

Of course, this demand makes no sense; about the same amount of sense as the complaint by that mean-spirited woman with the "if I can't have it then no one can" attitude.

I'm deaf in one ear as well. If the system has no mono setting my headphone connectors can be rigged to feed both channels to both ears. Got a set of Bluetooth headphones I've been planing to modify but just ain't got'n 'round to it yet (don't use 'em all that much).
 
Is there any requirement for the captioning to be in real time or can the captions appear (at the rate of 1 word per minute) half an hour after the person has spoken like it does where I live? Do the words have to be spelled correctly and be the words actually spoken or can any BS do?
Keep in mind I saud Canada.
Live shows have more lax regs. Anything that requires post production though must have correct spelling and accurate. Both require that captioning keep up with the spoken dialogue, though in a live situation it's not always possible. This applies to commercials as well.

When we used to cover fishing tourneys live, I had a live chat line with the captioner. If I saw something spelled wrong , I would note it on the chat. They were too busy to reply on the chat but next time the same word came up I would see it spelled correctly. For instance Lund Boats came out first time as Land Boats. Names were difficult too. I would send an email the day prior with a few that would or probably would come up, such as Gustafson, and Pizer.
 
Well, who the heck doesn't saud Cannada?!?!?






ETA: Sorry jaydeehess, I'm the last one who should be pointing out others' typos (rocks and glass houses and all) but "I saud Canada." just had such a nice lilt to it, I couldn't resist.
 
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Well, who the heck doesn't saud Cannada?!?!?






ETA: Sorry jaydeehess, I'm the last one who should be pointing out others' typos (rocks and glass houses and all) but "I saud Canada." just had such a nice lilt to it, I couldn't resist.

I do have trouble with the three vowels lined up on the keyboard. It's worse if I type "lick" when I want "lock".

ETA: btw only one "n" in Canada
 
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I don't get why captions and subtitles don't qualify? If they are blind then they can listen to the lecture, and if deaf can read the captions.

No need to remove the whole thing.
 
In Canada, all TV broadcasts must be closed captioned. CC costs about $100 per half hour.

Many also require described video, audio track. More $$.

Such requirements are contributing to a contraction in the industry. Even cable access channels must do this. Cable access cannot sell advertising so those $$ come from cable subscriber's pockets.

It seems that such requirements are now going to be applied to the internet, at least to the low hanging fruit of corporate productions such as this university. Applying it to personal videos, especially foreign content, would result in quite the brouhaha.
For a TV station, the costs of the CC are a pittance compared to the costs of the shows themselves. In the Netherlands, the commercial TV stations have also long been dragging their feet about providing subtitling "because it costs too much", but really, when you put on a quiz with a grand prize of €100,000, what's your complaint about a couple of hundred bucks? :boggled:

I agree that, when you get further down, the case gets harder. And the moment you require everyone who uploads their cat video to provide CC and audio description, you've effectively shut down Youtube.
 
A somewhat similar phenomenon:

My wife comes from a small South Georgia (US) town. When anti-discrimination laws took effect in the 60's, the only public swimming pool was permanently filled in with dirt.
 
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