18 ms·

According to the post this was caused by a letter from Department of Justice (pdf link from the post: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-

by Jun8 10y ago

According to the post this was caused by a letter from Department of Justice (pdf link from the post: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...), which states that two representatives from National Association of the Deaf brought a complaint: the videos did not have captions so they the complainants could not use them in their classes. I don't understand their motivation, did they think Berkeley would spend the money to generate captions? How is the current situation a win for anyone, now nobody can use the videos. EDIT: Ugh, they even have this in remedial measures: "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."

cameldrv 10y ago
The irony is that many of the videos people are most interested in are Deep Learning courses, the very technology that is making this moot by improving the accuracy of auto-generated captions. Presumably taking everything down now will delay the improvement in this technology.
masterleep 10y ago
It is simply another instance of outrageous government regulation.
- bionsuba 10y ago
  I would ask those downvoting this comment to provide a counter argument. This is absolutely ridiculous. A university was providing something, for free, to everyone who wanted it. And because someone complained that their personal circumstances made it impossible to enjoy this free thing, now no one is allowed to get this content. It's as if I threatened to sue Costco because one of their free samples had nuts in it and I couldn't eat it, resulting in them canceling the program.
  - danso 10y ago
    But these videos are not "free". The content was created by university employees and hence, public funds. It's likely university resources were used to produce and edit it for online consumption. I imagine the reasoning is that if you allow the university to deprioritize the needs of the disabled on the basis of "Well, something is better than nothing", then it incentivizes the production of such content because of the lower costs, and results in more disenfranchisement of the disabled. I have to object to your reducing the situation to "because someone complained that their personal circumstances", as if it were just one person who is potentially disenfranchised by the situation. Just because one person's name is on a legal complaint doesn't mean that the law impacts that one and only person.
    - _vertigo 10y ago
      The world is demonstrably worse off as a result of this lawsuit. Valuable knowledge that was freely available to many is now available to very few. The disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem, but if the logical (for Berkeley) solution to this problem is the disenfranchisement of all, perhaps we shouldn't go through with "solving" this problem. Perhaps it is better to accept that some amount of unfairness is inevitable, and that it's preferable to have these videos publicly available than to not.
      - danso 10y ago
        It's not just about this point in time, but to increase the priority of creating accessible resources. Everyone generally believes "disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem", it took a law to make society at least realize those costs. Building handicapped ramps and accessible bathrooms is a massive upfront cost for businesses and institutions, funds which come from the same pocket for services and benefits intended for the non-handicapped.
  - namlem 10y ago
    The law itself is poorly written, but the intent makes sense. It's important to protect the rights of those who are most vulnerable, which certainly includes deaf and blind people.
piker 10y ago
Is this inevitably going to lead to fewer free online lectures, as public institutions will now be unable to release the videos for free without including the closed captioning? How frustrating, particularly in light of the fact that at least a portion of the Deaf community chooses to remain so. EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.
- modeless 10y ago
  This is not the first time deaf people have used the ADA to take down free educational materials, and it won't be the last. This is the same reason Stanford's cs231n was taken down as well. Luckily it was downloaded and re-posted by many people so it's still available, but future courses won't be.
gingerbread-man 10y ago
It would be one thing if students were required to watch the videos as a primary source of instruction in their courses. But blocking the videos from the public seems like a severe overreaction.
DanBC 10y ago
> now nobody can use the videos The Americans with Disabilities Act came in in 1990. The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with disabilities.
- simcop2387 10y ago
  I'm not sure about contempt, I'd say indifference or apathy instead. I can only hope that efforts like YouTube's automatic captions get better because it'll I.prove the situation just by giving a cheap way to handle 90% of cases.
- Myrmornis 10y ago
  Releasing video of academic lectures is showing contempt for people with disabilities?
  - DanBC 10y ago
    Making the choice to deliberately exclude people with disabilities, even though there's a nearly thirty year old law mandating accessibility is treating people with contempt.
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      As properly transcribing a video lecture is more expensive than making the lecture in the first place, it's a reasonable choice to gift something to many but not all people at a small fraction of what the cost would be if it had to be more accessible. Accomodations are reasonable if they require a small adjustment to the product - like automated speech-to-text transcriptions would be, or making navigation so that it's possible to use with screen-readers for blind people. However, if the required adjustment effort overwhelms the original product, then I'd say that "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" applies - yes, the content isn't perfect, and it's not suitable for many uses, but it's a gift; if you don't want it, then don't take it and it shouldn't be anybody's duty to make that gift differently.
huevosabio 10y ago
At Stanford, we have similar requirements to caption any video publicly available. This meant that some professors simply stopped posting the videos publicly. I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.
- danso 10y ago
  That's interesting, Stanford's not a "public entity" and would seemingly not be beholden to these regulations (which I'm assuming is different than the law requiring handicap-accessible facilities by private entities).
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Most of these laws apply to anyone taking federal money and quite a few apply to private entities.
    - WillPostForFood 10y ago
      INdeed, Netflix was sued in 2010 by the National Association of the Deaf, under provisions of the ADA, for not having captions on all their videos.
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Also, the Target case which probably is a good reminder for web developers https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/target-case-study https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/target-case-study
      - gydfi 10y ago
        What if I'm both deaf and blind? Should Netflix have to cater to me through some kind of touch system? If I'm blind and I go to an art gallery should there be an audio track to somehow explain what I'm not seeing? What about a play? Are plays specifically exempted or is it just that nobody has bothered to sue a theatre for a lack of subtitling just yet? What if I go to a fancy restaurant but have no sense of taste or smell? How will that restaurant compensate me for the experience I'm missing out on?
paws 10y ago
Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now. I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint? I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked. I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine. The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3] [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI [3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...
- chadscira 10y ago
  Can't they just export the youtube captions?
- thesimon 10y ago
  The Department seemed to be aware of it though. The Department found that [...] many had automatic captioning generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology. In March 2015, the Department selected 30 videos. [..] for review. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.
  - paws 10y ago
    "Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete" Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished. Reminds me of this Louis CK bit: https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s "How does the world owe you something you didn't even know existed 30 seconds ago?"
    - closeparen 10y ago
      The same way it owes people with disabilities the best parking spaces, loading zones, ramps, automatic doors, accessible restrooms, elevators, places to put wheelchairs on buses and subways, TTY phone numbers for essential services, the right to bring service dogs where pets are not allowed, etc. Mandatory disability accommodation is a huge part of our society. There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).
TTPrograms 10y ago
On the other hand, there are services that provide captioning at extremely low costs. The university could write a relatively small check to comply. ADA imposes much more expensive mandates to much smaller businesses, and I'm under the impression that most people consider that to be acceptable.
- derefr 10y ago
  Is there anything saying that the captions have to be correct? Could they just use e.g. Youtube's (horrible) auto-captioning algorithm?
  - thesimon 10y ago
    The letter says "Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities." So it seems like they need to be quite accurate.
    - miranda_rights 10y ago
      That just seems....inflexible. I definitely see where the reasoning comes from (it's not fair for deaf or similarly disabled people who pay taxes to these public schools to not be able to receive the same benefit as everyone else) but the lack of wiggle room sucks.
- TillE 10y ago
  Yeah, many other requirements of ADA are for small businesses to actually build things. This would require paying a transcriber for a couple hours per hour of video. That's really not a lot. Probably blame a dumb and inflexible budgetary process.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Doing a good video transcript takes more than 2x the running time of the video. A lot more. Really. Have you ever tried transcribing a video in a level of detail such that someone who can't see the video has a full understanding of what's going on? Give it a shot and report back to us. Source: I've actually transcribed instructional videos for disabled students. Update: Google suggests budgeting 4-9 hours of transcription time per hour, which is closer to my experience. You might get by with 4 hours if it was just someone talking (with no slides, etc.). If the person performing an activity (say, a lab course) 9 is going to be a lot nearer the mark. Remember, this has to be done so that both deaf and blind students can use the material.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
It's not about the videos, it's about sending a message. Specifically, that it's critically important to make sure that the deaf have the same access that everyone else does, even if it's expensive and inconvenient, because we as a society demand that level of fairness.
- fiter 10y ago
  I appreciate this discussion because we need to realize the trade offs of strict fairness. In order to be fair, we have provided less good/utility for those that were benefiting unfairly from the service. We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service.
  - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
    Yeah, it is a trade off. We're basically forcing content producers to subsidize access for the hearing impaired. This will make some content not worth publishing at the margin, while also forcing the clearly-worth-publishing things to provide access at their expense. The non-obvious thing is that this compliance-by-force is non-local. If you only look at Berkeley's videos, you're giving up these videos pointlessly. You have to also look at the videos that are going to be published anyways, and whether they'd include access for the deaf if people weren't dicks about enforcement.
    - fiter 10y ago
      I like the way you put it: the creators are required to subsidize the disabled. Would it be better if this was approached from the other side? Creators could create without this concern. Disabled consumers would then pay for services that make specific creations accessible to them. The US government could then explicitly subsidize the disabled people.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    > We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service. If you insist on looking at this incident in isolation, yes. But if you look at it like that, there's no reason to imprison murderers, because it won't bring the victim back to life. If there were no requirement, very few things would be accessible. As a minority, the deaf will always be irrelevant to the majorities' utility calculus.
shanusmagnus 10y ago
In my opinion close-captioning the courses wouldn't be enough. A lot of people, including myself, lack the requisite education to appreciate these courses, or to benefit from them. It's extraordinarily frustrating that they exist, and that tens of thousands people can benefit from them, but I can't. If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.
- fellellor 10y ago
  Jesus Fuck!
  - chillee 10y ago
    It's satire.

by Jun8 10y ago

cameldrv 10y ago

The irony is that many of the videos people are most interested in are Deep Learning courses, the very technology that is making this moot by improving the accuracy of auto-generated captions. Presumably taking everything down now will delay the improvement in this technology.

masterleep 10y ago

It is simply another instance of outrageous government regulation.

bionsuba 10y ago
I would ask those downvoting this comment to provide a counter argument. This is absolutely ridiculous. A university was providing something, for free, to everyone who wanted it. And because someone complained that their personal circumstances made it impossible to enjoy this free thing, now no one is allowed to get this content. It's as if I threatened to sue Costco because one of their free samples had nuts in it and I couldn't eat it, resulting in them canceling the program.
- danso 10y ago
  But these videos are not "free". The content was created by university employees and hence, public funds. It's likely university resources were used to produce and edit it for online consumption. I imagine the reasoning is that if you allow the university to deprioritize the needs of the disabled on the basis of "Well, something is better than nothing", then it incentivizes the production of such content because of the lower costs, and results in more disenfranchisement of the disabled. I have to object to your reducing the situation to "because someone complained that their personal circumstances", as if it were just one person who is potentially disenfranchised by the situation. Just because one person's name is on a legal complaint doesn't mean that the law impacts that one and only person.
  - _vertigo 10y ago
    The world is demonstrably worse off as a result of this lawsuit. Valuable knowledge that was freely available to many is now available to very few. The disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem, but if the logical (for Berkeley) solution to this problem is the disenfranchisement of all, perhaps we shouldn't go through with "solving" this problem. Perhaps it is better to accept that some amount of unfairness is inevitable, and that it's preferable to have these videos publicly available than to not.
    - danso 10y ago
      It's not just about this point in time, but to increase the priority of creating accessible resources. Everyone generally believes "disenfranchisement of the disabled is a problem", it took a law to make society at least realize those costs. Building handicapped ramps and accessible bathrooms is a massive upfront cost for businesses and institutions, funds which come from the same pocket for services and benefits intended for the non-handicapped.
- namlem 10y ago
  The law itself is poorly written, but the intent makes sense. It's important to protect the rights of those who are most vulnerable, which certainly includes deaf and blind people.

piker 10y ago

Is this inevitably going to lead to fewer free online lectures, as public institutions will now be unable to release the videos for free without including the closed captioning? How frustrating, particularly in light of the fact that at least a portion of the Deaf community chooses to remain so. EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.

modeless 10y ago
This is not the first time deaf people have used the ADA to take down free educational materials, and it won't be the last. This is the same reason Stanford's cs231n was taken down as well. Luckily it was downloaded and re-posted by many people so it's still available, but future courses won't be.

gingerbread-man 10y ago

It would be one thing if students were required to watch the videos as a primary source of instruction in their courses. But blocking the videos from the public seems like a severe overreaction.

DanBC 10y ago

> now nobody can use the videos The Americans with Disabilities Act came in in 1990. The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with disabilities.

simcop2387 10y ago
I'm not sure about contempt, I'd say indifference or apathy instead. I can only hope that efforts like YouTube's automatic captions get better because it'll I.prove the situation just by giving a cheap way to handle 90% of cases.
Myrmornis 10y ago
Releasing video of academic lectures is showing contempt for people with disabilities?
- DanBC 10y ago
  Making the choice to deliberately exclude people with disabilities, even though there's a nearly thirty year old law mandating accessibility is treating people with contempt.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    As properly transcribing a video lecture is more expensive than making the lecture in the first place, it's a reasonable choice to gift something to many but not all people at a small fraction of what the cost would be if it had to be more accessible. Accomodations are reasonable if they require a small adjustment to the product - like automated speech-to-text transcriptions would be, or making navigation so that it's possible to use with screen-readers for blind people. However, if the required adjustment effort overwhelms the original product, then I'd say that "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" applies - yes, the content isn't perfect, and it's not suitable for many uses, but it's a gift; if you don't want it, then don't take it and it shouldn't be anybody's duty to make that gift differently.

huevosabio 10y ago

At Stanford, we have similar requirements to caption any video publicly available. This meant that some professors simply stopped posting the videos publicly. I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.

danso 10y ago
That's interesting, Stanford's not a "public entity" and would seemingly not be beholden to these regulations (which I'm assuming is different than the law requiring handicap-accessible facilities by private entities).
- protomyth 10y ago
  Most of these laws apply to anyone taking federal money and quite a few apply to private entities.
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    INdeed, Netflix was sued in 2010 by the National Association of the Deaf, under provisions of the ADA, for not having captions on all their videos.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Also, the Target case which probably is a good reminder for web developers https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/target-case-study https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/target-case-study
    - gydfi 10y ago
      What if I'm both deaf and blind? Should Netflix have to cater to me through some kind of touch system? If I'm blind and I go to an art gallery should there be an audio track to somehow explain what I'm not seeing? What about a play? Are plays specifically exempted or is it just that nobody has bothered to sue a theatre for a lack of subtitling just yet? What if I go to a fancy restaurant but have no sense of taste or smell? How will that restaurant compensate me for the experience I'm missing out on?

paws 10y ago

Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now. I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint? I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked. I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine. The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3] [1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI [3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...

chadscira 10y ago
Can't they just export the youtube captions?
thesimon 10y ago
The Department seemed to be aware of it though. The Department found that [...] many had automatic captioning generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology. In March 2015, the Department selected 30 videos. [..] for review. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.
- paws 10y ago
  "Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete" Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished. Reminds me of this Louis CK bit: https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s "How does the world owe you something you didn't even know existed 30 seconds ago?"
  - closeparen 10y ago
    The same way it owes people with disabilities the best parking spaces, loading zones, ramps, automatic doors, accessible restrooms, elevators, places to put wheelchairs on buses and subways, TTY phone numbers for essential services, the right to bring service dogs where pets are not allowed, etc. Mandatory disability accommodation is a huge part of our society. There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).

TTPrograms 10y ago

On the other hand, there are services that provide captioning at extremely low costs. The university could write a relatively small check to comply. ADA imposes much more expensive mandates to much smaller businesses, and I'm under the impression that most people consider that to be acceptable.

derefr 10y ago
Is there anything saying that the captions have to be correct? Could they just use e.g. Youtube's (horrible) auto-captioning algorithm?
- thesimon 10y ago
  The letter says "Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities." So it seems like they need to be quite accurate.
  - miranda_rights 10y ago
    That just seems....inflexible. I definitely see where the reasoning comes from (it's not fair for deaf or similarly disabled people who pay taxes to these public schools to not be able to receive the same benefit as everyone else) but the lack of wiggle room sucks.
TillE 10y ago
Yeah, many other requirements of ADA are for small businesses to actually build things. This would require paying a transcriber for a couple hours per hour of video. That's really not a lot. Probably blame a dumb and inflexible budgetary process.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Doing a good video transcript takes more than 2x the running time of the video. A lot more. Really. Have you ever tried transcribing a video in a level of detail such that someone who can't see the video has a full understanding of what's going on? Give it a shot and report back to us. Source: I've actually transcribed instructional videos for disabled students. Update: Google suggests budgeting 4-9 hours of transcription time per hour, which is closer to my experience. You might get by with 4 hours if it was just someone talking (with no slides, etc.). If the person performing an activity (say, a lab course) 9 is going to be a lot nearer the mark. Remember, this has to be done so that both deaf and blind students can use the material.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ThrustVectoring 10y ago

It's not about the videos, it's about sending a message. Specifically, that it's critically important to make sure that the deaf have the same access that everyone else does, even if it's expensive and inconvenient, because we as a society demand that level of fairness.

fiter 10y ago
I appreciate this discussion because we need to realize the trade offs of strict fairness. In order to be fair, we have provided less good/utility for those that were benefiting unfairly from the service. We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  Yeah, it is a trade off. We're basically forcing content producers to subsidize access for the hearing impaired. This will make some content not worth publishing at the margin, while also forcing the clearly-worth-publishing things to provide access at their expense. The non-obvious thing is that this compliance-by-force is non-local. If you only look at Berkeley's videos, you're giving up these videos pointlessly. You have to also look at the videos that are going to be published anyways, and whether they'd include access for the deaf if people weren't dicks about enforcement.
  - fiter 10y ago
    I like the way you put it: the creators are required to subsidize the disabled. Would it be better if this was approached from the other side? Creators could create without this concern. Disabled consumers would then pay for services that make specific creations accessible to them. The US government could then explicitly subsidize the disabled people.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  > We have not provided any additional good/utility for those that were not able to benefit from the service. If you insist on looking at this incident in isolation, yes. But if you look at it like that, there's no reason to imprison murderers, because it won't bring the victim back to life. If there were no requirement, very few things would be accessible. As a minority, the deaf will always be irrelevant to the majorities' utility calculus.

shanusmagnus 10y ago

In my opinion close-captioning the courses wouldn't be enough. A lot of people, including myself, lack the requisite education to appreciate these courses, or to benefit from them. It's extraordinarily frustrating that they exist, and that tens of thousands people can benefit from them, but I can't. If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.

fellellor 10y ago
Jesus Fuck!
- chillee 10y ago
  It's satire.