12 ms·

A statement on online course content and accessibility

156 points by wfunction 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
malloryerik 10y ago
U.C. Berkeley has some fantastic classes online. It would truly be a shame to lose them. Many were clearly produced on shoestring budgets. The Department of Justice seems to have received complaints mainly regarding absence of transcripts for audio or video content. Can't speech-to-text tech help? Other complaints include poor formatting of pdf's. If the courses are indeed taken down, I can only hope that at least this starts a conversation about how to create smarter regulations -- regulations that cause less collateral damage.
- daenney 10y ago
  Agreed. I've had access to a few of their courses, they're pretty awesome. I know it sucks for people with disabilities and Berkeley should invest into making it accessible to everyone, but it would be a loss for everyone if the consequence of this is that their courses become entirely unavailable :(.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    I think your reaction is the law working as intended. Without the ADA, there is little will to go above and beyond. With the ADA, everyone is outraged that they have to go above and beyond and somehow find the resources to do it.
- blackoil 10y ago
  Would it be legal to have community created transcripts for all courses? Would not mind to spend some time doing so in lieu of free content.
  - xmlblog 10y ago
    Would you want to be legally liable for content someone else may or may not produce when the best of intentions inevitably rub up against real-world time constraints?
  - mkolodny 10y ago
    Khan Academy gets help dubbing and translating videos from volunteers around the world [0]. I would also be happy to help. [0] https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/200186020-Translators https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/20018602...
- extra88 10y ago
  Speech to text software alone isn't good enough, it makes too many errors, the DoJ discusses the evidence of that. Captioning video is basically a solved problem, through outsourcing.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
reustle 10y ago
Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company? I hate to say but "this is why we can't have nice things". We are trying to move into an age of more digital education, but if there are a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to even attempt it, won't the barrier to trying be too high for some institutions?
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company? No. University of California, Berkeley is a part of the University of California system, not a private company.
  - vizeroth 10y ago
    To expand on this, the government of California requires the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems to comply with the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act of 1974 (if you've ever heard of 508 compliance, it's a reference to section 508 of the latter Act). In recent years, both systems have been expanding their efforts to comply with this requirement, especially in regards to technology. (The CSU system includes not only the schools with CSU or Cal State prefixes, but also most of the schools with State or SU suffixes, including SFSU, SJSU, and SDSU.) For more information: - UC Policy: http://www.ucop.edu/electronic-accessibility/initiative/policy.html http://www.ucop.edu/electronic-accessibility/initiative/poli... - CSU Policy: http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/ http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
"...the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in its view, not all of the free course and lecture content UC Berkeley makes available on certain online platforms is fully accessible to individuals with hearing, visual or manual disabilities..." Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all. IANAL, but I believe the ADA would be applicable for students of the college, not necessarily online content consumers viewing the college's courses. Of course, the problem here is that you have to start playing expensive lawyer games to get that clarified -- and it might take years. So even if Berkeley has done nothing wrong, they still might end up having to pull the courses.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all. To be fair, the whole point of the ADA is to harm millions of people for the benefit of very few people.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    About five years ago I was on crutches for several months and I can highly recommend the experience to anybody who is against the ADA as an eye-opener.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      You can be against ADA without being against disability access entirely. The main complaints are that it's enforced through lawsuits which bankrupt small businesses. Often over trivial issues, like their mirror being 1 inch too high, or the parking sign not having the correct sticker on it, etc. That's a very different thing than not having a wheelchair ramp.
- posterboy 10y ago
  The problem here is that it might set precedence and that the long time loss would be bigger if that precedent isn't set, compared to the intermediate costs of subtitles.
Mao_Zedang 10y ago
Berkeley should just incorporate a non profit in another country, transfer the IP and serve it via there. Outside the jurisdiction of the DOJ.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Why would they do that? UCB is a public insitution, with a mandate to serve the public. They're not a torrent site trying to skirt the law. While there are discussions to be had about how to move forward; I would hope the end result would be continuing to offer the free courses, while solving the accessibility problems, perhaps with the help of the communities they serve. I would be happy to contribute transcription and captioning to the courses that I take online; I transcribe and caption all of my videos on YouTube, religiously. It's not that big of a time cost, and I take notes when I'm taking a class, anyway. I hope this will be viewed as an opportunity to (not necessarily in this order): 1. Improve accessibility tooling for these courses, particularly captioning videos. 2. Improve awareness of accessibility guidelines for websites and online materials. 3. Make all of these fantastic learning resources available to people with disabilities.
jasode 10y ago
Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra costs to close-caption, transcribe to braille, etc.) That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you must spend that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me. E.g. The school budget has finite money. Let's say It can release 15 free courses by spending just $X but to avoid a lawsuits, it can only release 10 courses by spending $X+$Y ... or release none at all because it's not worth the legal minefield. Why is the 2nd scenario more optimized for humanity? Sure, we should encourage the universal accessibility of the video courses but to formalize it into the nastiness of lawsuits? It doesn't seem right.
- adolph 10y ago
  _ Scenario C: spend $X-(.75$Y) to release the courses and .75$Y as a settlement
  - JohnTHaller 10y ago
    Scenario D: If $X + $Y is greater than your budget to make free content available $Z, simply remove the content so it is inaccessible to everyone. I know more than one organization that has done this when faced with an ADA complaint about free content.
- bonaldi 10y ago
  And yet libraries have to meet disability access requirements. If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system, and this is especially bad when it applies to learning — which disabled people can benefit disproportionately from. Using the legal system to achieve these ends appears to be the American Way so I won't comment on that.
  - 10y ago
hacker314159 10y ago
Thanks DOJ for the Kafka-esque move that will most likely deprive everyone of free educational materials. Glad to know justice was served.
- posterboy 10y ago
  What if the proposition to take down the content is rather a threat to instigate the public, than a real concern.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
jimiz 10y ago
Unfortunate to see this free content be lost. In the same line of thinking it is also sad that in this day and age there are not easy tools / systems to help transcode and make content ADA approved. (At least cost effective)
- vizeroth 10y ago
  One of the things pointed out in the findings is that Berkeley makes people/tools/systems readily available to the people producing these resources, but does not require them to be used. Generally, the costs may be prohibitive after the fact if the people producing the material did not take them into consideration. However, they can usually be factored into the costs of production up front, and steps can be taken to make it easier to make the material accessible. In most cases, it is probably simply a lack of awareness on the part of the people making the material available. The difficult part is educating the faculty and staff of the University about the legal requirements they must meet and the resources available to them to make compliance easier, and, perhaps more importantly, an integral part of the process.
  - extra88 10y ago
    Yes, Berkeley has quite a few resources available, more than most schools. It's probably because of a settlement in a separate case about not serving the needs of their enrolled students. The costs may be prohibitive to an instructor or their academic department but they shouldn't be for the institution as a whole. Not cheap, but not prohibitive.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Not really directly relevant to this, but YouTube makes captioning videos as painless as I can possibly imagine it being, and provides incredible automated and manual tools for doing so. I caption all of my videos on YouTube because it's the right thing to do, and I would do it even if it were more painful than it is, but I specifically use YouTube for everything because they make it so easy to add good captions (they also allow you to download the captions which can be converted to other formats and such). I don't know what kind of tools UCB could make available on their videos...but, the technology exists to community source the video captioning.
Normal_gaussian 10y ago
Are any of these courses paid? Do any of these courses or the means through which they are made available advertise paid options, paid alternatives, or other paid courses? If both of those are 'no' then this is disgraceful. If either is 'yes' then it is completely justified.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Even if they made advertising money on it, it may not have been very much.
  - Normal_gaussian 10y ago
    When providing a paid for service you have significantly different obligations to if the service is charitable.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      It is charitable. It's provided freely by a nonprofit organization.
bluesign 10y ago
can someone explain how they can keep the same material for access by enrolled students but not to public considering ADA requirements?
- vizeroth 10y ago
  More than likely, the material released to the public is not the material used for enrolled students. At the same time, they most likely have funding to make material accessible to enrolled students on an as-needed basis. If a person with a particular disability is enrolled at the University, the University will work with the student to discover their requirements and how they can best meet their needs. At that point, they can go through the list of courses the student has enrolled in for each quarter or semester and ensure that all of the course materials are accessible to that student. Once they've completed that process, it usually has the side benefit of making those specific materials accessible to all future students with similar needs. The whole process is also getting better over time, especially for textbooks and similar material. However, video and audio are especially problematic areas when they are produced by individuals who don't understand (or aren't aware of) these requirements. If you just setup a camera and/or microphone to capture a lecture, public release and captioning may not be on your mind at the time.
  - extra88 10y ago
    Yes. There are more options for providing accommodations to individual students taking a short list of classes in person. Out of all the classes, relatively few will have a student enrolled who requires the most elaborate accommodations. Some books will be used for many years so making an accessible version will likely get reused but quite a lot of course content can have a short shelf life so an accessible version made for a student today may never be reused.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  I can only speak for the UK, but we can give personal attention to disabled students, making sure all content they need is available to them, including individual tutoring for example. This seems to work very well, but is ad-hoc and wouldn't be suitable for a massive online course.
tomohawk 10y ago
Follow the money. http://www.wendel.com/knowledge-center/publications/older/notorious-disabled-litigant-entitled-to-pursue-access-lawsuits http://www.wendel.com/knowledge-center/publications/older/no...
- extra88 10y ago
  This is a slur. Almost all accessibility cases seek only correction of the problem and reimbursement for the costs of the lawsuit.
  - tomohawk 10y ago
    Just because most are not, does not mean that this is not being monetized by some unscrupulous people. In the city where I live, there are law firms where this is their business model. They'll go into a bathroom and carefully measure it. Any reasonable person would say it is accessible, but because it doesn't 100% correspond to the ada standards that came out later they get to sue and make money.
  - AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
    That does not seem to be the case at all.
anotheryou 10y ago
I feel like it's about time to ditch all that accessibility stuff and join forces to create a more human screen reader. Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?"
- notatoad 10y ago
  >Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News..." If you expect to accomplish that via a community effort to make tools for deaf people, you're likely right. But i bet we aren't that far away from "Hey alexa/siri/google, what are the top stories on hacker news right now?"
- bramd 10y ago
  > Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?" Sadly? I strongly disagree. If all my human-computer interaction would be like communicating with Siri/Google Now (e.g. conversational), I would have ditched computers years ago. It's all about giving semantic information to screenreaders so the user can eficiently navigate that content. In the rare case that I need some kind of human description, I just share my screen with someone that has working eyeballs. FYI, I'm totally blind.
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    oh, great to hear from someone actually needing this. But than I'd still argue, that semantics should be possible to parse from the style of the site. Big letters? Must be a headline. Well actually I would love html to be more to be like latex/markdown, I just thought, that if I recognize it as a list, it should be parsed by a screen reader as such too. May I ask you which screen reader you use and at what speeds? (or do you use some braille screen?)
cheriot 10y ago
A lot of this sounds like there's an engineering solution that edX and Coursera can offer as a service. Course creators would have SOME work to do, but limited to uploading the charts and files used in their video. From the DOJ letter: > 1. Some videos did not have captions. > 2a. many videos did not provide an alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations, or urls on slides) > 2b. videos containing text sometimes had poor color contrast, which made the text unreadable for those with low vision > 3. Many documents were inaccessible ... [HTML and PDF stuff] > 4. Some links were not keyboard accessible > 5. Websites and materials that were integrated into the course material were not fully accessible Before we jump to debating the ADA, let's see if there's a sensible solution!
- mavhc 10y ago
  If you're going to crowd source education, crowd source this. Ask people to correct computer generated captioning, annotate slides. 2b, 3, 4 should be fixed at the CMS level. 5 Can't you blame those website creators?
Houshalter 10y ago
The biggest concern is not even that the lectures get taken down. It's that other universities see this and don't put their content up in the future. Many organizations are extremely risk averse when it comes to lawsuits, and our crazy legal system has trained them to be that way.
bluetwo 10y ago
For anyone working on federal training, this has been a thing for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_R...
calimac 10y ago
Liberalism is a mental disorder. A crazy DOJ Social Justice Warrior has crossed the line to attack it's own. I have seen the ADA used as a weapon too many times.
arieskg 10y ago
Classic lobbying. The Department of Justice is filing the complaints against the institutions offering free online courses with an illogical argument masked with virtuous intent. The DOJ is okay with the paid online courses because the levying cost on consumers provides immunity to such violations. Depriving everyone's access to the free content because it did not accommodate those with disabilities sets dangerous precedent for the future. You can't design a system that accommodate everybody from the beginning. Progress requires time and the rational reason for DOJ to begin this investigation is corporate lobbying. What businesses or markets would benefit from this? The carefully worded letter appears reasonable, except what purpose was conveyed other than forcing the universities to incur high litigation fees? Using ADA as a weapon to purge free sharing of collective intelligence is despicable. I understand universities have limited resources and priorities for their enrolled students, but they should retaliate out of principles. The community can help with providing captions. Charing $1 fee. Routing the money to a charity. Anything is better than removing the content because that is the complaint's end goal.
- extra88 10y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about. Paid online courses are also required to make their courses accessible to students, what's different for them is they can make a course accessible to each specific student which can be easier (e.g. if a student is deaf, they need captions but not written descriptions of visuals). Most cases involved brick 'n mortar businesses and institutions and in many online cases they've been extensions of the physical world (Target, UC Berkeley). More recent cases (Netflix) have made it clear that online-only entities are also considered places of public accommodation. Why UC Berkeley this time? I don't know, other than the complainants came to the DoJ about them, and not some other school. The purpose of the letter is not to cost the University or to stop them making the materials available. The DoJ never suggests that, it's Berkeley that raised the idea on their own. The purpose is to explain how the University has been violating the law and what they can to correct it so ultimately what is offered can also be used by people with disabilities.
  - arieskg 10y ago
    I respect several points you made, but there's no reason for me to rebuttal since the argument became unintelligible with your first sentence. If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about. FYI, Harvard and MIT were received with the same letters few months ago. It was on the New York Times, but I could still be wrong since I have no idea what I'm talking about.
wtbob 10y ago
This simply doesn't make sense. Yes, certainly, content should be made accessibly available. Yes, certainly, Berkeley's responsibility is to its enrolled students. But removing content from public access serves neither of those needs. It doesn't help the blind, deaf or otherwise handicapped; it doesn't help tuition-paying students. It makes everyone equal, in the same sense that an eye for an eye makes everyone equal.
thr0waway1239 10y ago
Perhaps add a login and get people (crowdsource) to contribute transcripts/accessibility features until it is deemed OK for public release? I don't know how to incentivize people to contribute though - maybe add their names as credits in the video description?
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Seems like early access could potentially be incentive enough, perhaps? I mean, it's a public service that I would think/hope many people would be willing to chip in their time for free (I mean, you take notes when you're in a class, anyway...the very act of writing down what you've heard is an important part of learning for many people). So, sign up for a class, get access while it happens if you agree to help with the transcription and captioning. Progressing to the next video requires either contributing to the transcription or signing off on it. YouTube has incredibly good tools for captioning; perhaps they can be convinced to work with UCB to enable this kind of system. It would need some kind of percent complete count, or something, along with maybe a rating system where visitors who need those captions can report poor or confusing transcription. Braille is harder; but, I would think most courses already have written course notes and materials, which can be read by screen readers. I'm not sure what to make of the mention of braille, here, actually. Are they expecting UCB to send out printed materials? That doesn't make sense, and goes beyond what websites are required to do by the ADA.
tlb 10y ago
The same forces caused Andrej Karpathy to have to take down his YouTube videos of his Stanford CS231n course on convolutional neural nets. [https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/727618058471112704 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/727618058471112704] Fortunately, unofficial mirrors have surfaced. It's not very expensive to do the basics of adding transcripts (for the deaf) and verbal descriptions of diagrams (for the blind). The reason the university didn't just do it seemed to combine departmental politics with ambivalence about undercutting their main product (in-person education) with a free online version in the first place.
josinalvo 10y ago
Can someone provide an estimate of how much it would cost to make one course accessible. Or rather: 1. What would be the cost to transcribe a one hour video? Does the transcriber need any knowledge apart from English? (and presumably a one week course so that when the teacher points at something, it goes into the transcription) 2. What would be the cost to take an unformatted text, and format it in accord to guidelines? 3. What would be the cost to make a one-page website accessible? What kind of change does it entail? 4. In the matter of 'poor contrast', would a color transformation applied to the video be enough to comply (to the letter of the law)? Would it be enough to make it accessible (i.e.: comply to the spirit of the law)? AFAIK, the requirement that "[no] chart or graph [should] differentiate information only by color" seems to make sure that at least some manual video editing is necessary. 5. Is it the case that, in any part of the process, the transcriber/developer/editor/worker involved needs (by law) a certain qualification, or can anyone (in principle) do the work? 6. Are there any other measures necessary?
- josinalvo 10y ago
  having written that list of questions, I am left quite sure that the cost of making a course accessible is above 1000$ per course, and my best guess is 5000-10000$. 1. Do you disagree? 2. How many courses does UCB make available to the public for free? (on edX, this number seems to be around 50)

156 points by wfunction 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

U.C. Berkeley has some fantastic classes online. It would truly be a shame to lose them. Many were clearly produced on shoestring budgets. The Department of Justice seems to have received complaints mainly regarding absence of transcripts for audio or video content. Can't speech-to-text tech help? Other complaints include poor formatting of pdf's. If the courses are indeed taken down, I can only hope that at least this starts a conversation about how to create smarter regulations -- regulations that cause less collateral damage.

daenney 10y ago
Agreed. I've had access to a few of their courses, they're pretty awesome. I know it sucks for people with disabilities and Berkeley should invest into making it accessible to everyone, but it would be a loss for everyone if the consequence of this is that their courses become entirely unavailable :(.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  I think your reaction is the law working as intended. Without the ADA, there is little will to go above and beyond. With the ADA, everyone is outraged that they have to go above and beyond and somehow find the resources to do it.
blackoil 10y ago
Would it be legal to have community created transcripts for all courses? Would not mind to spend some time doing so in lieu of free content.
- xmlblog 10y ago
  Would you want to be legally liable for content someone else may or may not produce when the best of intentions inevitably rub up against real-world time constraints?
- mkolodny 10y ago
  Khan Academy gets help dubbing and translating videos from volunteers around the world [0]. I would also be happy to help. [0] https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/200186020-Translators https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/20018602...
extra88 10y ago
Speech to text software alone isn't good enough, it makes too many errors, the DoJ discusses the evidence of that. Captioning video is basically a solved problem, through outsourcing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

reustle 10y ago

Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company? I hate to say but "this is why we can't have nice things". We are trying to move into an age of more digital education, but if there are a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to even attempt it, won't the barrier to trying be too high for some institutions?

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Sorry for sounding naive but isn't UCB a private company? No. University of California, Berkeley is a part of the University of California system, not a private company.
- vizeroth 10y ago
  To expand on this, the government of California requires the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems to comply with the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act of 1974 (if you've ever heard of 508 compliance, it's a reference to section 508 of the latter Act). In recent years, both systems have been expanding their efforts to comply with this requirement, especially in regards to technology. (The CSU system includes not only the schools with CSU or Cal State prefixes, but also most of the schools with State or SU suffixes, including SFSU, SJSU, and SDSU.) For more information: - UC Policy: http://www.ucop.edu/electronic-accessibility/initiative/policy.html http://www.ucop.edu/electronic-accessibility/initiative/poli... - CSU Policy: http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/ http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

"...the Department of Justice has recently asserted that the University is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because, in its view, not all of the free course and lecture content UC Berkeley makes available on certain online platforms is fully accessible to individuals with hearing, visual or manual disabilities..." Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all. IANAL, but I believe the ADA would be applicable for students of the college, not necessarily online content consumers viewing the college's courses. Of course, the problem here is that you have to start playing expensive lawyer games to get that clarified -- and it might take years. So even if Berkeley has done nothing wrong, they still might end up having to pull the courses.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Wow. Talk about harming hundreds of people for no reason at all. To be fair, the whole point of the ADA is to harm millions of people for the benefit of very few people.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  About five years ago I was on crutches for several months and I can highly recommend the experience to anybody who is against the ADA as an eye-opener.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    You can be against ADA without being against disability access entirely. The main complaints are that it's enforced through lawsuits which bankrupt small businesses. Often over trivial issues, like their mirror being 1 inch too high, or the parking sign not having the correct sticker on it, etc. That's a very different thing than not having a wheelchair ramp.
posterboy 10y ago
The problem here is that it might set precedence and that the long time loss would be bigger if that precedent isn't set, compared to the intermediate costs of subtitles.

Mao_Zedang 10y ago

Berkeley should just incorporate a non profit in another country, transfer the IP and serve it via there. Outside the jurisdiction of the DOJ.

SwellJoe 10y ago
Why would they do that? UCB is a public insitution, with a mandate to serve the public. They're not a torrent site trying to skirt the law. While there are discussions to be had about how to move forward; I would hope the end result would be continuing to offer the free courses, while solving the accessibility problems, perhaps with the help of the communities they serve. I would be happy to contribute transcription and captioning to the courses that I take online; I transcribe and caption all of my videos on YouTube, religiously. It's not that big of a time cost, and I take notes when I'm taking a class, anyway. I hope this will be viewed as an opportunity to (not necessarily in this order): 1. Improve accessibility tooling for these courses, particularly captioning videos. 2. Improve awareness of accessibility guidelines for websites and online materials. 3. Make all of these fantastic learning resources available to people with disabilities.

jasode 10y ago

Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra costs to close-caption, transcribe to braille, etc.) That these lawsuits are obstinate in that you must spend that extra $Y to fulfill Scenario B or humanity can't have the knowledge at all is nonsensical to me. E.g. The school budget has finite money. Let's say It can release 15 free courses by spending just $X but to avoid a lawsuits, it can only release 10 courses by spending $X+$Y ... or release none at all because it's not worth the legal minefield. Why is the 2nd scenario more optimized for humanity? Sure, we should encourage the universal accessibility of the video courses but to formalize it into the nastiness of lawsuits? It doesn't seem right.

adolph 10y ago
_ Scenario C: spend $X-(.75$Y) to release the courses and .75$Y as a settlement
- JohnTHaller 10y ago
  Scenario D: If $X + $Y is greater than your budget to make free content available $Z, simply remove the content so it is inaccessible to everyone. I know more than one organization that has done this when faced with an ADA complaint about free content.
bonaldi 10y ago
And yet libraries have to meet disability access requirements. If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system, and this is especially bad when it applies to learning — which disabled people can benefit disproportionately from. Using the legal system to achieve these ends appears to be the American Way so I won't comment on that.
- 10y ago

hacker314159 10y ago

Thanks DOJ for the Kafka-esque move that will most likely deprive everyone of free educational materials. Glad to know justice was served.

posterboy 10y ago
What if the proposition to take down the content is rather a threat to instigate the public, than a real concern.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

jimiz 10y ago

Unfortunate to see this free content be lost. In the same line of thinking it is also sad that in this day and age there are not easy tools / systems to help transcode and make content ADA approved. (At least cost effective)

vizeroth 10y ago
One of the things pointed out in the findings is that Berkeley makes people/tools/systems readily available to the people producing these resources, but does not require them to be used. Generally, the costs may be prohibitive after the fact if the people producing the material did not take them into consideration. However, they can usually be factored into the costs of production up front, and steps can be taken to make it easier to make the material accessible. In most cases, it is probably simply a lack of awareness on the part of the people making the material available. The difficult part is educating the faculty and staff of the University about the legal requirements they must meet and the resources available to them to make compliance easier, and, perhaps more importantly, an integral part of the process.
- extra88 10y ago
  Yes, Berkeley has quite a few resources available, more than most schools. It's probably because of a settlement in a separate case about not serving the needs of their enrolled students. The costs may be prohibitive to an instructor or their academic department but they shouldn't be for the institution as a whole. Not cheap, but not prohibitive.
SwellJoe 10y ago
Not really directly relevant to this, but YouTube makes captioning videos as painless as I can possibly imagine it being, and provides incredible automated and manual tools for doing so. I caption all of my videos on YouTube because it's the right thing to do, and I would do it even if it were more painful than it is, but I specifically use YouTube for everything because they make it so easy to add good captions (they also allow you to download the captions which can be converted to other formats and such). I don't know what kind of tools UCB could make available on their videos...but, the technology exists to community source the video captioning.

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

Are any of these courses paid? Do any of these courses or the means through which they are made available advertise paid options, paid alternatives, or other paid courses? If both of those are 'no' then this is disgraceful. If either is 'yes' then it is completely justified.

Houshalter 10y ago
Even if they made advertising money on it, it may not have been very much.
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  When providing a paid for service you have significantly different obligations to if the service is charitable.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    It is charitable. It's provided freely by a nonprofit organization.

bluesign 10y ago

can someone explain how they can keep the same material for access by enrolled students but not to public considering ADA requirements?

vizeroth 10y ago
More than likely, the material released to the public is not the material used for enrolled students. At the same time, they most likely have funding to make material accessible to enrolled students on an as-needed basis. If a person with a particular disability is enrolled at the University, the University will work with the student to discover their requirements and how they can best meet their needs. At that point, they can go through the list of courses the student has enrolled in for each quarter or semester and ensure that all of the course materials are accessible to that student. Once they've completed that process, it usually has the side benefit of making those specific materials accessible to all future students with similar needs. The whole process is also getting better over time, especially for textbooks and similar material. However, video and audio are especially problematic areas when they are produced by individuals who don't understand (or aren't aware of) these requirements. If you just setup a camera and/or microphone to capture a lecture, public release and captioning may not be on your mind at the time.
- extra88 10y ago
  Yes. There are more options for providing accommodations to individual students taking a short list of classes in person. Out of all the classes, relatively few will have a student enrolled who requires the most elaborate accommodations. Some books will be used for many years so making an accessible version will likely get reused but quite a lot of course content can have a short shelf life so an accessible version made for a student today may never be reused.
CJefferson 10y ago
I can only speak for the UK, but we can give personal attention to disabled students, making sure all content they need is available to them, including individual tutoring for example. This seems to work very well, but is ad-hoc and wouldn't be suitable for a massive online course.

tomohawk 10y ago

Follow the money. http://www.wendel.com/knowledge-center/publications/older/notorious-disabled-litigant-entitled-to-pursue-access-lawsuits http://www.wendel.com/knowledge-center/publications/older/no...

extra88 10y ago
This is a slur. Almost all accessibility cases seek only correction of the problem and reimbursement for the costs of the lawsuit.
- tomohawk 10y ago
  Just because most are not, does not mean that this is not being monetized by some unscrupulous people. In the city where I live, there are law firms where this is their business model. They'll go into a bathroom and carefully measure it. Any reasonable person would say it is accessible, but because it doesn't 100% correspond to the ada standards that came out later they get to sue and make money.
- AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
  That does not seem to be the case at all.

anotheryou 10y ago

I feel like it's about time to ditch all that accessibility stuff and join forces to create a more human screen reader. Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?"

notatoad 10y ago
>Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News..." If you expect to accomplish that via a community effort to make tools for deaf people, you're likely right. But i bet we aren't that far away from "Hey alexa/siri/google, what are the top stories on hacker news right now?"
bramd 10y ago
> Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?" Sadly? I strongly disagree. If all my human-computer interaction would be like communicating with Siri/Google Now (e.g. conversational), I would have ditched computers years ago. It's all about giving semantic information to screenreaders so the user can eficiently navigate that content. In the rare case that I need some kind of human description, I just share my screen with someone that has working eyeballs. FYI, I'm totally blind.
- anotheryou 10y ago
  oh, great to hear from someone actually needing this. But than I'd still argue, that semantics should be possible to parse from the style of the site. Big letters? Must be a headline. Well actually I would love html to be more to be like latex/markdown, I just thought, that if I recognize it as a list, it should be parsed by a screen reader as such too. May I ask you which screen reader you use and at what speeds? (or do you use some braille screen?)

cheriot 10y ago

A lot of this sounds like there's an engineering solution that edX and Coursera can offer as a service. Course creators would have SOME work to do, but limited to uploading the charts and files used in their video. From the DOJ letter: > 1. Some videos did not have captions. > 2a. many videos did not provide an alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations, or urls on slides) > 2b. videos containing text sometimes had poor color contrast, which made the text unreadable for those with low vision > 3. Many documents were inaccessible ... [HTML and PDF stuff] > 4. Some links were not keyboard accessible > 5. Websites and materials that were integrated into the course material were not fully accessible Before we jump to debating the ADA, let's see if there's a sensible solution!

mavhc 10y ago
If you're going to crowd source education, crowd source this. Ask people to correct computer generated captioning, annotate slides. 2b, 3, 4 should be fixed at the CMS level. 5 Can't you blame those website creators?

Houshalter 10y ago

The biggest concern is not even that the lectures get taken down. It's that other universities see this and don't put their content up in the future. Many organizations are extremely risk averse when it comes to lawsuits, and our crazy legal system has trained them to be that way.

bluetwo 10y ago

For anyone working on federal training, this has been a thing for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_R...

calimac 10y ago

Liberalism is a mental disorder. A crazy DOJ Social Justice Warrior has crossed the line to attack it's own. I have seen the ADA used as a weapon too many times.

arieskg 10y ago

Classic lobbying. The Department of Justice is filing the complaints against the institutions offering free online courses with an illogical argument masked with virtuous intent. The DOJ is okay with the paid online courses because the levying cost on consumers provides immunity to such violations. Depriving everyone's access to the free content because it did not accommodate those with disabilities sets dangerous precedent for the future. You can't design a system that accommodate everybody from the beginning. Progress requires time and the rational reason for DOJ to begin this investigation is corporate lobbying. What businesses or markets would benefit from this? The carefully worded letter appears reasonable, except what purpose was conveyed other than forcing the universities to incur high litigation fees? Using ADA as a weapon to purge free sharing of collective intelligence is despicable. I understand universities have limited resources and priorities for their enrolled students, but they should retaliate out of principles. The community can help with providing captions. Charing $1 fee. Routing the money to a charity. Anything is better than removing the content because that is the complaint's end goal.

extra88 10y ago
You have no idea what you're talking about. Paid online courses are also required to make their courses accessible to students, what's different for them is they can make a course accessible to each specific student which can be easier (e.g. if a student is deaf, they need captions but not written descriptions of visuals). Most cases involved brick 'n mortar businesses and institutions and in many online cases they've been extensions of the physical world (Target, UC Berkeley). More recent cases (Netflix) have made it clear that online-only entities are also considered places of public accommodation. Why UC Berkeley this time? I don't know, other than the complainants came to the DoJ about them, and not some other school. The purpose of the letter is not to cost the University or to stop them making the materials available. The DoJ never suggests that, it's Berkeley that raised the idea on their own. The purpose is to explain how the University has been violating the law and what they can to correct it so ultimately what is offered can also be used by people with disabilities.
- arieskg 10y ago
  I respect several points you made, but there's no reason for me to rebuttal since the argument became unintelligible with your first sentence. If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about. FYI, Harvard and MIT were received with the same letters few months ago. It was on the New York Times, but I could still be wrong since I have no idea what I'm talking about.

wtbob 10y ago

This simply doesn't make sense. Yes, certainly, content should be made accessibly available. Yes, certainly, Berkeley's responsibility is to its enrolled students. But removing content from public access serves neither of those needs. It doesn't help the blind, deaf or otherwise handicapped; it doesn't help tuition-paying students. It makes everyone equal, in the same sense that an eye for an eye makes everyone equal.

thr0waway1239 10y ago

Perhaps add a login and get people (crowdsource) to contribute transcripts/accessibility features until it is deemed OK for public release? I don't know how to incentivize people to contribute though - maybe add their names as credits in the video description?

SwellJoe 10y ago
Seems like early access could potentially be incentive enough, perhaps? I mean, it's a public service that I would think/hope many people would be willing to chip in their time for free (I mean, you take notes when you're in a class, anyway...the very act of writing down what you've heard is an important part of learning for many people). So, sign up for a class, get access while it happens if you agree to help with the transcription and captioning. Progressing to the next video requires either contributing to the transcription or signing off on it. YouTube has incredibly good tools for captioning; perhaps they can be convinced to work with UCB to enable this kind of system. It would need some kind of percent complete count, or something, along with maybe a rating system where visitors who need those captions can report poor or confusing transcription. Braille is harder; but, I would think most courses already have written course notes and materials, which can be read by screen readers. I'm not sure what to make of the mention of braille, here, actually. Are they expecting UCB to send out printed materials? That doesn't make sense, and goes beyond what websites are required to do by the ADA.

tlb 10y ago

The same forces caused Andrej Karpathy to have to take down his YouTube videos of his Stanford CS231n course on convolutional neural nets. [https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/727618058471112704 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/727618058471112704] Fortunately, unofficial mirrors have surfaced. It's not very expensive to do the basics of adding transcripts (for the deaf) and verbal descriptions of diagrams (for the blind). The reason the university didn't just do it seemed to combine departmental politics with ambivalence about undercutting their main product (in-person education) with a free online version in the first place.

josinalvo 10y ago

Can someone provide an estimate of how much it would cost to make one course accessible. Or rather: 1. What would be the cost to transcribe a one hour video? Does the transcriber need any knowledge apart from English? (and presumably a one week course so that when the teacher points at something, it goes into the transcription) 2. What would be the cost to take an unformatted text, and format it in accord to guidelines? 3. What would be the cost to make a one-page website accessible? What kind of change does it entail? 4. In the matter of 'poor contrast', would a color transformation applied to the video be enough to comply (to the letter of the law)? Would it be enough to make it accessible (i.e.: comply to the spirit of the law)? AFAIK, the requirement that "[no] chart or graph [should] differentiate information only by color" seems to make sure that at least some manual video editing is necessary. 5. Is it the case that, in any part of the process, the transcriber/developer/editor/worker involved needs (by law) a certain qualification, or can anyone (in principle) do the work? 6. Are there any other measures necessary?

josinalvo 10y ago
having written that list of questions, I am left quite sure that the cost of making a course accessible is above 1000$ per course, and my best guess is 5000-10000$. 1. Do you disagree? 2. How many courses does UCB make available to the public for free? (on edX, this number seems to be around 50)