9 ms·

What you wrote is logical, but applicable to any instance of accommodation to those with impairments. The Americans with Disabilities Act and related actions/le

by 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.
- shanusmagnus 10y ago
  I came back to make a comment just like this, but you already did it better than I would have. The metaphor I had in mind was restaurants that make too much food, and (sometimes; some restaurants) they donate it to foodshelves (when appropriate) or sometimes just to some homeless guys who happen to be nearby. The extra food is an externality of their real purpose as a business, which is to take money in exchange for feeding people. They could throw the food away, but instead they're doing something nice with it. Almost nobody would say they should throw the food away because the homeless guys who happen to be the recipients of their largesse are benefiting, while other, further-away homeless guys are not. Such an argument would be idiotic. In just this way these videos and course materials are an externality of the 'real' business of Berkeley, which is educating the people who are admitted to Berkeley and enrolled in the classes. Berkeley, and others like them, are going above and beyond to be nice to the rest of humanity, to our great collective benefit. This ADA thing is just a kick in the face, and it pisses me off.
  - bonaldi 10y ago
    No but people would say they food they give away should still comply with health regulations. Just because you're making a gift doesn't mean the law doesn't apply to you.
    - crazy2be 10y ago
      That's not a good comparison, not complying with health regulations substantially devalues the food given away, because of the significantly increased risk of illness resulting from consumption of said food. Your second statement is irrelevant, we are not talking about what the law does, but what the law should do. And I absolutely think that gifts (and good samaritan acts in general) should be held to a much lower standard than commercial enterprises. This is not at all unprecedented in US law (or in many places in the world), every state has some form of good samaritan law[1], which protects (to some extent) individuals who act in good faith to aid strangers in need of immediate medical assistance. There is also a federal law indemnifying donors of properly labeled foods, except in the case of gross negligence or intentional misconduct. These laws are important, because donations result in no benefit for the bearer, so making them cost money is a significant deterrence to charity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_Stat...
arkades 10y ago
All agreed, except: UC Berk is a public institution, using public funds to create these resources. This is not a free charitable creation from a private person, to which people respond "well, you should give us MORE or we'll SUE!" No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public. Public buildings, public libraries, public transportation, etc. are all subject to the ADA; I see no reason why this particular public resource should be an exception.
- NhanH 10y ago
  > No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public. I thought about this, and I'm actually not sure what to think. As UCB made clear that the alternative would be to take those resources down, making it completely unavailable to the public. Do we just consider this an acceptable collateral damage from the ADA?
  - mhurron 10y ago
    So holding something some people would find valuable is an acceptable way to bypass the law? UCB has another alternative, use those public funds they take to make the course material accessible. They don't want to do that because that takes money away from them. Taking down the material is not the only alternative, it's just the only alternative they're willing to take because it's cheap.
    - Rylinks 10y ago
      >They don't want to do that because that takes money away from them. It takes money away from the enrolled students that UCB is currently spending money on.
      - AndrewD_ 10y ago
        If anyone wants the numbers, tuition is 28% of the budget and state funds are 14% of the budget. http://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013-14%20UC%20Berkeley%20Budget%20Plan%20-%20Final%20%289-5-13%29.pdf http://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013-14%20UC%20B...
icantdrive55 10y ago
"Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit." It will be soon. There's a lawyer, in the Bay Area, that has made his wad off ADA lawsuits. I guarantee, he is setting up shop as we speak. I know this because my best friend (deceased) got caught up the ADA lawsuit game. He took a driving job. He drove around these two handicapped individuals. They drove through out the U.S. He used to call me from the road, and say the strangest things. Like, it seems like they want to go to resturants/gas stations that don't have the required ADA construction. Then they slip, and fall? My job is to take pictures of them on the ground. He was naieve, and thought it was a "travesty", the way these horrid capitalists couldn't build the right way. Most of these owners had no idea they were breaking the law. These subsequent lawsuits shut down many small businesses. Although, this lawyer would settle out of court--much of the time. He got home, and I told him he was being used by these guys, and that lawyer. He couldn't believe they would do such a thing.
- wbl 10y ago
  Replace "not ADA compliant" with "has a 'no blacks' sign" and you understand the impact of inaccessibility. It means you won't be able to be served.

by eqmvii 10y ago

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.

shanusmagnus 10y ago
I came back to make a comment just like this, but you already did it better than I would have. The metaphor I had in mind was restaurants that make too much food, and (sometimes; some restaurants) they donate it to foodshelves (when appropriate) or sometimes just to some homeless guys who happen to be nearby. The extra food is an externality of their real purpose as a business, which is to take money in exchange for feeding people. They could throw the food away, but instead they're doing something nice with it. Almost nobody would say they should throw the food away because the homeless guys who happen to be the recipients of their largesse are benefiting, while other, further-away homeless guys are not. Such an argument would be idiotic. In just this way these videos and course materials are an externality of the 'real' business of Berkeley, which is educating the people who are admitted to Berkeley and enrolled in the classes. Berkeley, and others like them, are going above and beyond to be nice to the rest of humanity, to our great collective benefit. This ADA thing is just a kick in the face, and it pisses me off.
- bonaldi 10y ago
  No but people would say they food they give away should still comply with health regulations. Just because you're making a gift doesn't mean the law doesn't apply to you.
  - crazy2be 10y ago
    That's not a good comparison, not complying with health regulations substantially devalues the food given away, because of the significantly increased risk of illness resulting from consumption of said food. Your second statement is irrelevant, we are not talking about what the law does, but what the law should do. And I absolutely think that gifts (and good samaritan acts in general) should be held to a much lower standard than commercial enterprises. This is not at all unprecedented in US law (or in many places in the world), every state has some form of good samaritan law[1], which protects (to some extent) individuals who act in good faith to aid strangers in need of immediate medical assistance. There is also a federal law indemnifying donors of properly labeled foods, except in the case of gross negligence or intentional misconduct. These laws are important, because donations result in no benefit for the bearer, so making them cost money is a significant deterrence to charity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law#United_Stat...

arkades 10y ago

All agreed, except: UC Berk is a public institution, using public funds to create these resources. This is not a free charitable creation from a private person, to which people respond "well, you should give us MORE or we'll SUE!" No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public. Public buildings, public libraries, public transportation, etc. are all subject to the ADA; I see no reason why this particular public resource should be an exception.

NhanH 10y ago
> No, this is a public institution using public funds to create a public resource... which it then only makes accessible to a subset of the public. I thought about this, and I'm actually not sure what to think. As UCB made clear that the alternative would be to take those resources down, making it completely unavailable to the public. Do we just consider this an acceptable collateral damage from the ADA?
- mhurron 10y ago
  So holding something some people would find valuable is an acceptable way to bypass the law? UCB has another alternative, use those public funds they take to make the course material accessible. They don't want to do that because that takes money away from them. Taking down the material is not the only alternative, it's just the only alternative they're willing to take because it's cheap.
  - Rylinks 10y ago
    >They don't want to do that because that takes money away from them. It takes money away from the enrolled students that UCB is currently spending money on.
    - AndrewD_ 10y ago
      If anyone wants the numbers, tuition is 28% of the budget and state funds are 14% of the budget. http://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013-14%20UC%20Berkeley%20Budget%20Plan%20-%20Final%20%289-5-13%29.pdf http://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013-14%20UC%20B...

icantdrive55 10y ago

"Importantly, this is NOT a lawsuit." It will be soon. There's a lawyer, in the Bay Area, that has made his wad off ADA lawsuits. I guarantee, he is setting up shop as we speak. I know this because my best friend (deceased) got caught up the ADA lawsuit game. He took a driving job. He drove around these two handicapped individuals. They drove through out the U.S. He used to call me from the road, and say the strangest things. Like, it seems like they want to go to resturants/gas stations that don't have the required ADA construction. Then they slip, and fall? My job is to take pictures of them on the ground. He was naieve, and thought it was a "travesty", the way these horrid capitalists couldn't build the right way. Most of these owners had no idea they were breaking the law. These subsequent lawsuits shut down many small businesses. Although, this lawyer would settle out of court--much of the time. He got home, and I told him he was being used by these guys, and that lawyer. He couldn't believe they would do such a thing.

wbl 10y ago
Replace "not ADA compliant" with "has a 'no blacks' sign" and you understand the impact of inaccessibility. It means you won't be able to be served.