6 ms·

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 bo

by 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.
- extra88 10y ago
  Libraries are not required to make every book available in Braille or in a digital format compatible with text to speech software. That's considered an unreasonable burden on the library. It's highly unlikely that the complainants went directly to the Civil Rights Division without talking to Berkeley first, that's not how these things go. Frankly, it's preferable for the DoJ to be involved because a problem in this area is a lack of specific regulation and guidance to schools on how exactly to interpret the strong but vague language of the law. If the University just quietly works it out with individuals or a group, that's going to be a lot less helpful to making all educational institutions more accessible.
- wtbob 10y ago
  > If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system Reality is a multi-class system. It's always and everywhere going to be more difficult to get things done when one lacks a capacity which most people have (e.g. sight, hearing or mobility); it's always and everywhere going to be easier to get things done when one possesses a capacity which most people lack (e.g. intelligence, strength or wealthy parents). Measures which aim to level the playing field really can't raise those who lack up: all they can do is lower those who have. But that leaves us all poorer in the end, because those who could have achieved did not. Harrison Bergeron was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
  - bonaldi 10y ago
    What a hideous post. Lord of the Flies was also a cautionary tale. Because, despite your "I'm alright Jack" attitude, it generally turns out that society is a better place for everybody when inequality is at its lowest and when you try to ameliorate the worst effects of survival of the fittest. Nothing about mandating extra help to those who need it restricts the abilities of those who don't. You can still take the stairs, it'll be OK.
jostylr 10y ago
While I understand your sentiment and agree with it to some extent, the other side of the argument is that by releasing a free course, you disadvantage someone who would create this content, for a fee, and use that money to make it accessible to all. In effect, they are giving a free advantage to those without disabilities, making it even harder for those with disabilities to compete. Is that fair? An analogy appropriate to this site is a free app that does an adequate, but not great job for a given need, that prevents others from creating (or maintaining) a polished app for money. That is, we might get 80% of a great app with the last 20%, the hard part, never being achieved. It is what it is in a free market, but the government has a bit of a mandate to try to take the larger perspective and create pathways to cover that last 20%, at least in the case of accessibility. Having said that, I feel a better approach would be to provide grants or services to support making such content accessible. There is something odd about having to tell people that not only do they need to be an expert in a subject but also in how to convey that in a way that is useful and good to the people who are blind, deaf, or manually impaired. By this I mean, for example, why is it clear that a simple transcript on a video is suitable? Surely it would be better to design courses to take advantage of the abilities of those using it and compensating for the lack of certain abilities. It is not clear to me that simply captioning a video is the best outcome for providing materials to deaf people. It would be far better to encourage and fund people expert in teaching deaf people or blind people to create materials directly, perhaps based on these other free materials. As a creator of an online math course, one in which heavy use is made of graphs, it is not clear to me how I could even begin teaching graphing to blind people. I simply do not have the knowledge or experience to do so.
- vizeroth 10y ago
  From the DoJ letter: "Faculty developing UC BerkeleyX courses can, but are not required to, develop courses in collaboration with the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). BRCOE follows best practices in design for accessibility and also has a quality assurance process that includes deploying various accessibility evaluators; remediating layout, page structure, downloadable or styling accessibility barriers; and obtaining transcripts of all audio and video files associated with a course." They follow that with a checklist which all faculty which opted out of using those resources since July 2015 was required to sign. To me, this looks like a system which is trying to comply, but the people within the system have failed to take the requirements seriously.
eqmvii 10y ago
What you wrote is logical, but applicable to any instance of accommodation to those with impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related actions/legislation/policies explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation. The actual letter from the Department of Justice (linked at the bottom of Berkeley's response) goes into more detail. The DoJ is not demanding current materials be removed, nor are they expecting changes to happen overnight. But the ADA isn't new, nor is its mandate that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity," nor are the web standards for ensuring that content is accessible. Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" or certain private parties trying to take grievances to the court system for a pay day. Individuals brought a complaint to the DoJ, and now it's doing its job by investigating. Berkeley and other public institutions have been complying with the ADA since it was passed in 1990. Compliance tends to be expensive and unintuitive - that's the entire point! Applying the ADA to online course content really shouldn't be much more of a burden than it already was to comply with it in other respects.
- jasode 10y ago
  >The Americans with Disabilities Act [...] explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation. Sure, that seems justifiable for commercial businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking free donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted. If UC Berkeley used the viewing of those videos as a mandatory requirement to qualify for admissions into the school or required viewing for the students to pass a class, then I think most of us could see the fairness of forcing them to caption it -- regardless of costs. However, the goodwill act of making them free for humanity's knowledge-seeking causes the DOJ to threaten lawsuit? That does not seem right. >Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" In the last page of the cited PDF, the DOJ explicitly writes "lawsuit": >"In the event that we are unable to reach such a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA" That this particular DOJ letter is one or a few steps removed from a "formal lawsuit" doesn't detract from my overall point. The DOJ threatening a lawsuit is the tool of choice we're using instead of other options ... such as raising a crowdsourced fund to pay for captioning or recruiting volunteers to transcribe them into braille. If there is an effort of goodwill to make something available, I think society should pay that back with reciprocal goodwill in finding a way to make the material accessible to the disabled. The donation and the litigation response to that donation is asymmetrical. It gives the ADA bad press.
posterboy 10y ago
> 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. It's almost the same as saying, they don't have to release free courses, which is also nonsensical to me.
sandworm101 10y ago
There are plenty of other areas where this same law has similar effects but is tolerated. One niche area is the provision of legal services to the deaf. The lawyer must not charge extra, despite the need to hire a translator. That means taking a case involving a deaf defendant/plaintiff might be unprofitable. But you have to do it all the same. We do such things, foot the bill, because the law is the law. The government created the law to promote equality. The appropriate means of redress is to lobby for its repeal ... which will happen right after they pull the benefits of wounded veterans.
- mavhc 10y ago
  We don't do it because it's the morally correct thing to do? Or even to promote a society where such things happen, just in case we or our relatives become disabled?
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    It seems to overwhelmingly be the case that people make accommodations because it's law. It's not a bad thing and accomplishes much of what you speak of, but the ADA is pretty clearly the mechanism behind it, not people seeking good feels.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    How is it morally correct? It's not the lawyer's fault you are deaf. Why not make everyone equally pay taxes to subsidize the cost of the disabled? Putting the cost on the people that serve the disabled isn't really fair, and creates bad incentives, as seen by this very post.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    A business does it because it is the law. A person may do or not do something based on personal choice, but in this situation there is no room. Businesses must meet the minimum standard of behavior. In this case the government has issued a warning that this particular business seems not to have met the bar. If you are trying to pitch something, something that is going to cost a business money, "the right thing" isn't the place to start. "It's the law" is the far easier pitch. An ADA story: New startup has a funky cool HQ setup in some loft space. Their new HR/PR head, herself right out of university, advertises a communications position. Everyone reads resumes and eight candidates are selected for interview. They could have gone with Skype, but the founder wanted to see the candidates in person, to get a feel for whether they have the "cultural fit". Seven show up. They pick someone and move on. All seems well in startup land. A few months later the lawsuit appears. It turns out that #8 uses a wheelchair ... a wheelchair that required an elevator ... which their hip new HQ did not have and their hip new HR head didn't have the experience to anticipate. Now they are meeting with a not-hip lawyer at definitely not-cool law firm, but one with an elevator because every lawyer knows about the ADA.
JohnTHaller 10y ago
- Scenario A: Spend $X to make free content accessible to 99% of people. - Scenario B: Spend $X * Y to make free content accessible to 100% of people. - Scenario C: You wish to do A but are forced to do B via legislation. $X * Y is greater than your budget to make said content available $Z, so you don't make the content available. I know of more than one organization that has selected this option with free content and with some paid content (in which case $Z is the budget to create it based on the expected revenue) so this is not a theoretical scenario. Now, Y can vary quite a bit depending on the content and depending on what you're trying to make it accessible to. In the case of making a transcript available, you may have to pay a transcriber. In the case of an app, you may need to buy a screen reader to test with. There are free ones, but they're often not as full featured as the popular one that most folks are using. So, you'll need to buy the $1,100 screen reader (JAWS with the non-Home license) to test against in addition to testing the free open source one. You may also need to pay someone to do more standardized testing with as well. It's not an insignificant amount of money or work in many cases. I've run into it with PortableApps.com. I had to buy a newer version of our toolkit to be able to get it working with screen readers at all and rewrite multiple controls. I don't have JAWS yet to test against but I do test against NVDA. There are ways to mitigate some of this. There are multiple groups that transcribe for free to help make content available accessibly. And if you make free open source software that's useful, you can probably find many impaired users willing to help you test as I have for PortableApps.com. On a personal note, I very much believe in making everything I create accessible.

by jasode 10y ago

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.

extra88 10y ago
Libraries are not required to make every book available in Braille or in a digital format compatible with text to speech software. That's considered an unreasonable burden on the library. It's highly unlikely that the complainants went directly to the Civil Rights Division without talking to Berkeley first, that's not how these things go. Frankly, it's preferable for the DoJ to be involved because a problem in this area is a lack of specific regulation and guidance to schools on how exactly to interpret the strong but vague language of the law. If the University just quietly works it out with individuals or a group, that's going to be a lot less helpful to making all educational institutions more accessible.
wtbob 10y ago
> If you don't have minimum standards for accessibility, you perpetuate a two-class system Reality is a multi-class system. It's always and everywhere going to be more difficult to get things done when one lacks a capacity which most people have (e.g. sight, hearing or mobility); it's always and everywhere going to be easier to get things done when one possesses a capacity which most people lack (e.g. intelligence, strength or wealthy parents). Measures which aim to level the playing field really can't raise those who lack up: all they can do is lower those who have. But that leaves us all poorer in the end, because those who could have achieved did not. Harrison Bergeron was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
- bonaldi 10y ago
  What a hideous post. Lord of the Flies was also a cautionary tale. Because, despite your "I'm alright Jack" attitude, it generally turns out that society is a better place for everybody when inequality is at its lowest and when you try to ameliorate the worst effects of survival of the fittest. Nothing about mandating extra help to those who need it restricts the abilities of those who don't. You can still take the stairs, it'll be OK.

jostylr 10y ago

While I understand your sentiment and agree with it to some extent, the other side of the argument is that by releasing a free course, you disadvantage someone who would create this content, for a fee, and use that money to make it accessible to all. In effect, they are giving a free advantage to those without disabilities, making it even harder for those with disabilities to compete. Is that fair? An analogy appropriate to this site is a free app that does an adequate, but not great job for a given need, that prevents others from creating (or maintaining) a polished app for money. That is, we might get 80% of a great app with the last 20%, the hard part, never being achieved. It is what it is in a free market, but the government has a bit of a mandate to try to take the larger perspective and create pathways to cover that last 20%, at least in the case of accessibility. Having said that, I feel a better approach would be to provide grants or services to support making such content accessible. There is something odd about having to tell people that not only do they need to be an expert in a subject but also in how to convey that in a way that is useful and good to the people who are blind, deaf, or manually impaired. By this I mean, for example, why is it clear that a simple transcript on a video is suitable? Surely it would be better to design courses to take advantage of the abilities of those using it and compensating for the lack of certain abilities. It is not clear to me that simply captioning a video is the best outcome for providing materials to deaf people. It would be far better to encourage and fund people expert in teaching deaf people or blind people to create materials directly, perhaps based on these other free materials. As a creator of an online math course, one in which heavy use is made of graphs, it is not clear to me how I could even begin teaching graphing to blind people. I simply do not have the knowledge or experience to do so.

vizeroth 10y ago
From the DoJ letter: "Faculty developing UC BerkeleyX courses can, but are not required to, develop courses in collaboration with the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education (BRCOE). BRCOE follows best practices in design for accessibility and also has a quality assurance process that includes deploying various accessibility evaluators; remediating layout, page structure, downloadable or styling accessibility barriers; and obtaining transcripts of all audio and video files associated with a course." They follow that with a checklist which all faculty which opted out of using those resources since July 2015 was required to sign. To me, this looks like a system which is trying to comply, but the people within the system have failed to take the requirements seriously.

eqmvii 10y ago

What you wrote is logical, but applicable to any instance of accommodation to those with impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related actions/legislation/policies explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation. The actual letter from the Department of Justice (linked at the bottom of Berkeley's response) goes into more detail. The DoJ is not demanding current materials be removed, nor are they expecting changes to happen overnight. But the ADA isn't new, nor is its mandate that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by a public entity," nor are the web standards for ensuring that content is accessible. Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" or certain private parties trying to take grievances to the court system for a pay day. Individuals brought a complaint to the DoJ, and now it's doing its job by investigating. Berkeley and other public institutions have been complying with the ADA since it was passed in 1990. Compliance tends to be expensive and unintuitive - that's the entire point! Applying the ADA to online course content really shouldn't be much more of a burden than it already was to comply with it in other respects.

jasode 10y ago
>The Americans with Disabilities Act [...] explicitly bind society to inefficient resource allocation. Sure, that seems justifiable for commercial businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking free donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted. If UC Berkeley used the viewing of those videos as a mandatory requirement to qualify for admissions into the school or required viewing for the students to pass a class, then I think most of us could see the fairness of forcing them to caption it -- regardless of costs. However, the goodwill act of making them free for humanity's knowledge-seeking causes the DOJ to threaten lawsuit? That does not seem right. >Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit. It's a DoJ investigation under the ADA focused on enforcing existing laws and regulations. It's not about "formalizing it into the nastiness of a lawsuit" In the last page of the cited PDF, the DOJ explicitly writes "lawsuit": >"In the event that we are unable to reach such a resolution, the Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA" That this particular DOJ letter is one or a few steps removed from a "formal lawsuit" doesn't detract from my overall point. The DOJ threatening a lawsuit is the tool of choice we're using instead of other options ... such as raising a crowdsourced fund to pay for captioning or recruiting volunteers to transcribe them into braille. If there is an effort of goodwill to make something available, I think society should pay that back with reciprocal goodwill in finding a way to make the material accessible to the disabled. The donation and the litigation response to that donation is asymmetrical. It gives the ADA bad press.

posterboy 10y ago

> 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. It's almost the same as saying, they don't have to release free courses, which is also nonsensical to me.

sandworm101 10y ago

There are plenty of other areas where this same law has similar effects but is tolerated. One niche area is the provision of legal services to the deaf. The lawyer must not charge extra, despite the need to hire a translator. That means taking a case involving a deaf defendant/plaintiff might be unprofitable. But you have to do it all the same. We do such things, foot the bill, because the law is the law. The government created the law to promote equality. The appropriate means of redress is to lobby for its repeal ... which will happen right after they pull the benefits of wounded veterans.

mavhc 10y ago
We don't do it because it's the morally correct thing to do? Or even to promote a society where such things happen, just in case we or our relatives become disabled?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It seems to overwhelmingly be the case that people make accommodations because it's law. It's not a bad thing and accomplishes much of what you speak of, but the ADA is pretty clearly the mechanism behind it, not people seeking good feels.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  How is it morally correct? It's not the lawyer's fault you are deaf. Why not make everyone equally pay taxes to subsidize the cost of the disabled? Putting the cost on the people that serve the disabled isn't really fair, and creates bad incentives, as seen by this very post.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  A business does it because it is the law. A person may do or not do something based on personal choice, but in this situation there is no room. Businesses must meet the minimum standard of behavior. In this case the government has issued a warning that this particular business seems not to have met the bar. If you are trying to pitch something, something that is going to cost a business money, "the right thing" isn't the place to start. "It's the law" is the far easier pitch. An ADA story: New startup has a funky cool HQ setup in some loft space. Their new HR/PR head, herself right out of university, advertises a communications position. Everyone reads resumes and eight candidates are selected for interview. They could have gone with Skype, but the founder wanted to see the candidates in person, to get a feel for whether they have the "cultural fit". Seven show up. They pick someone and move on. All seems well in startup land. A few months later the lawsuit appears. It turns out that #8 uses a wheelchair ... a wheelchair that required an elevator ... which their hip new HQ did not have and their hip new HR head didn't have the experience to anticipate. Now they are meeting with a not-hip lawyer at definitely not-cool law firm, but one with an elevator because every lawyer knows about the ADA.

JohnTHaller 10y ago

- Scenario A: Spend $X to make free content accessible to 99% of people. - Scenario B: Spend $X * Y to make free content accessible to 100% of people. - Scenario C: You wish to do A but are forced to do B via legislation. $X * Y is greater than your budget to make said content available $Z, so you don't make the content available. I know of more than one organization that has selected this option with free content and with some paid content (in which case $Z is the budget to create it based on the expected revenue) so this is not a theoretical scenario. Now, Y can vary quite a bit depending on the content and depending on what you're trying to make it accessible to. In the case of making a transcript available, you may have to pay a transcriber. In the case of an app, you may need to buy a screen reader to test with. There are free ones, but they're often not as full featured as the popular one that most folks are using. So, you'll need to buy the $1,100 screen reader (JAWS with the non-Home license) to test against in addition to testing the free open source one. You may also need to pay someone to do more standardized testing with as well. It's not an insignificant amount of money or work in many cases. I've run into it with PortableApps.com. I had to buy a newer version of our toolkit to be able to get it working with screen readers at all and rewrite multiple controls. I don't have JAWS yet to test against but I do test against NVDA. There are ways to mitigate some of this. There are multiple groups that transcribe for free to help make content available accessibly. And if you make free open source software that's useful, you can probably find many impaired users willing to help you test as I have for PortableApps.com. On a personal note, I very much believe in making everything I create accessible.