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.<p>In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-XXv-cvA_iAShOv65z-FQswFbEClTbW6" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s" rel="nofollow">http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s</a>
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?<p>Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.
Berkeley should attempt to crowd source the captions. I'm sure many of the more popular classes could be captioned by volunteers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites.<p>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.<p>Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student.<p>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.<p>Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.
In response, Berkeley is planning to release new and compliant content. Their official statement[1]:<p>"[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.<p>... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)."<p>They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2]<p>[1] <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/" rel="nofollow">http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-capture-content/" rel="nofollow">http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...</a>
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.
Just so I understand...<p>In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account?<p>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?
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.<p>It's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.
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.
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?
TBH this makes Berkley look pretty bad.<p>The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place.<p>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.
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 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! <a href="http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures" rel="nofollow">http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures</a> There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection!
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.<p>Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)