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They weren't made illegal. The lectures were inaccessible to deaf people. Given that they were created with public funds, that's not acceptable. Berkley decided

by st3v3r 10y ago

They weren't made illegal. The lectures were inaccessible to deaf people. Given that they were created with public funds, that's not acceptable. Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. To those that are preserving/mirroring these lectures, I really hope you have plans to make them accessible to all, not just the hearing enabled.

2bitencryption 10y ago
> Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. Making captions for these takes someone to do the work -- having worked in an office that filmed/distributed lectures before, sometimes there just isn't someone there to do the work. I don't see why someone has to be the bad guy here. Maybe it's just the HN way to get very, very upset about little things like this?
fs111 10y ago
what a mess.
bionsuba 10y ago
Do you expect Berkley to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have over 20,000 videos transcribed and captioned? Assuming each video is only an hour and you paid someone minimum wage to caption them, and they were able to caption them perfectly by going through the video once, then this would cost $145,000. Realistically, a professional would have to do it and would take hours for each video. Removing them so they don't get sued seems like the only sensible option from the university's perspective.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Berkeley's initial estimate for captioning came to more than a million dollar, yeah. And the college is running a major deficit already, so you're exactly right - they didn't really have a choice even if they wanted to do captioning.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Either the videos are valuable, or they're not. They can't simultaneously not be worth the salary of one middle manager for one year and be such an important public resource that they require exceptions to the ADA. Or rather they can to you, but for me, holding to a standard created to protect minorities is more important than that, even if in some cases it prevents majorities from not having everything they want.
  - JCzynski 10y ago
    They are very valuable to many people, but if the cost is borne by a group that acquires no benefit (UC Berkeley, which can use them for its own students for free regardless), then it is not worth that cost. It is absolutely the case that these created more than a million dollars of value per year while they were up. But UC Berkeley, by design, captured none of that value.
- csydas 10y ago
  > Do you expect Berkley to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have over 20,000 videos transcribed and captioned? Since they had implemented such a policy, required staff to sign off on it, and also claimed to be compliant with such a policy, yeah, it probably should have been done. The full report from the Justice Department is available at [1] and the claims are fairly straight-forward by the complainants; Berkley used public funds to make said videos, claimed to be compliant with their own rules and regulations regarding Accessibility, had the necessary department internally to assist with compliance to Accessibility, but neglected to enforce compliance as they were supposed to. When the Justice Department was brought in, it was the finding of the Department that compliance would not cause "...undue administrative or financial [burden]..." on Berkley. Berkley basically had the choice to comply as they were supposed to have been doing in the first place or remove, and they opted to remove. It is a fiscally sensible position, but this issue seems to have been a result of poor enforcement of the University's own policies and promises to Accessibility. The report from the Justice Department, linked on Berkley's response, is fairly short and in plain language. I take the regret in Berkley's official response at face value, since I don't think this is what anyone wanted (no videos at all), but according to the report, Berkley had and continues to have the resources and expertise to do this as the content is created, instead of waiting until they have upwards of 20,000 videos queued up. It's a costly mistake, and they chose the cheaper way of fixing it. [1]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...
  - darkmouth 10y ago
    Research is also done with public funds in a lot of universities but the research papers themselves are conveniently put in behind journal and conference paywalls. I'd say that is a much bigger problem since it affects a larger section of the population but that is apparently completely expected and accepted.
    - abeyer 10y ago
      Agreed, that is a problem, and we should be working to fix the law so that doesn't happen. The difference in this case is that the law requiring it already exists and Berkeley didn't obey it.
NathanKP 10y ago
One thing I don't understand, maybe because I'm hearing, but how is the UC Berkeley YouTube not accessible to deaf people? Doesn't YouTube have a CC feature designed to make videos accessible for the hearing impaired or just so hearing people can watch them with the sound off? Is the suit because the lectures don't have a sign language translation for every single lecture?
- mulmen 10y ago
  This was discussed in previous threads, Youtube captioning is not (yet) good enough to meet the courts standard.
- niij 10y ago
  Auto-generated captions are nearly useless for more technical topics. No one is advocating for sign language translation, but to comply with the ADA they would need to be manually Closed Captioned. 20,000 videos would be prohibitively expensive to pay for people to caption these, so they decided to take them down instead. I think it's a shame, but if they had just captioned them as they released them, it wouldn't have been such a burden to do all 20,000 at once.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 10y ago
  It's not just deaf people. It's people with hearing impairment, or with visual impairment, or with manual disability. The complainants in this case were people with hearing impairment, but the DoJ expanded the scope. You're right that YT can auto-caption some video. The DoJ looked at the accuracy of a selection of video, and found it was rather low. That inaccuracy, coupled with the lack of reasonable adjustments for people with visual impairment or manual disability means that YTs auto-captioning isn't enough to make a video accessible.
  - NathanKP 10y ago
    Okay that makes sense, sounds like someone at UC Berkley took a risk thinking that auto captioning would be enough but it isn't good enough yet. I hope the auto captions improve over time. I feel like Facebook auto captions are already really, really good. If YouTube can reach that level of auto captioning it would benefit a lot of people.
Bartweiss 10y ago
> Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. UC Berkeley assessed the cost of captioning those videos to ADA standards at higher than $1,000,000. Berkeley is currently running a $110 million deficit after making $60 million in budget cuts. Last month, President Trump tweeted a threat to strip the college of all federal funds, and while that's unlikely their state and federal support is certainly not going expand. So no, they aren't cutting off their nose to spite their face. They're broke, and couldn't accommodate the lawsuit's demands without major cuts somewhere else.
lutusp 10y ago
> Berkley [sic] decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It's much more likely that the cost of making the lectures ADA-compliant was prohibitive. Universities aren't corporations who can appeal to equities holders/markets for funds when a need presents itself. So they did what they could ... a warning, well in advance, that the content would have to be withdrawn from public display, with the expectation that someone not subject to the ADA requirements would copy the lectures. In the future, such content will be created already ADA-compliant, but many of these lectures predate the ADA and were created in good faith. It would have been a shame to lose them, especially when you consider that current and future computer resources can provide on-the-fly subtitles (and translations) for those who want or need them.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > In the future, such content will be created already ADA-compliant, but many of these lectures predate the ADA and were created in good faith. The ADA is nearly 30 years old. The videos are 10 years old or so. Berkeley had policies in place to ensure content was accessible, and it had help for creators to make sure content was accessible. The people who created this content were responsible for self-certification. They signed documents saying they were aware of Berkeley policy, and aware of the help available to make content accessible, and they also signed to say that the content was accessible.
  - fs111 10y ago
    Let's burn all books! Blind people can't read them!!
sp332 10y ago
Exactly, you're not allowed to take public money (largely tax money from everyone) and use it to benefit a specific group. The laws were clear before Berkeley made the videos, so they should have been able to estimate the cost ahead of time. Instead they ignored they law and decided that discriminating against hearing-impaired people whose tax money helped pay for the videos was fine.
- seaknoll 10y ago
  These videos already existed and are still being produced, and if you live in CA your tax dollars are being used to produce them whether or not they're made public. They're being created for Berkeley students first, made ADA-accessible as needed by the student body. Since they already exist, wouldn't Berkeley be doing a disservice to many disabled people by just keeping them private? And, because its a public school, couldn't one argue that the videos should be publicly available too?
  - sp332 10y ago
    Because taking money from disabled people and using it to help mostly not-disabled people creates second-class citizens. These videos in their current form are discriminatory.
sergiotapia 10y ago
Are you going to spend time writing these captions?
LordKano 10y ago
Instead of dealing with the time, energy and expense of having them captioned or the expense and frustration of ongoing legal action, they took them offline. Isn't progress grand?
monochromatic 10y ago
> To those that are preserving/mirroring these lectures, I really hope you have plans to make them accessible to all, not just the hearing enabled. That would be great. And as long as money is no object, I really hope they're planning to buy everyone a puppy too.

by st3v3r 10y ago

2bitencryption 10y ago

> Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. Making captions for these takes someone to do the work -- having worked in an office that filmed/distributed lectures before, sometimes there just isn't someone there to do the work. I don't see why someone has to be the bad guy here. Maybe it's just the HN way to get very, very upset about little things like this?

fs111 10y ago

what a mess.

bionsuba 10y ago

Do you expect Berkley to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have over 20,000 videos transcribed and captioned? Assuming each video is only an hour and you paid someone minimum wage to caption them, and they were able to caption them perfectly by going through the video once, then this would cost $145,000. Realistically, a professional would have to do it and would take hours for each video. Removing them so they don't get sued seems like the only sensible option from the university's perspective.

Bartweiss 10y ago
Berkeley's initial estimate for captioning came to more than a million dollar, yeah. And the college is running a major deficit already, so you're exactly right - they didn't really have a choice even if they wanted to do captioning.
pessimizer 10y ago
Either the videos are valuable, or they're not. They can't simultaneously not be worth the salary of one middle manager for one year and be such an important public resource that they require exceptions to the ADA. Or rather they can to you, but for me, holding to a standard created to protect minorities is more important than that, even if in some cases it prevents majorities from not having everything they want.
- JCzynski 10y ago
  They are very valuable to many people, but if the cost is borne by a group that acquires no benefit (UC Berkeley, which can use them for its own students for free regardless), then it is not worth that cost. It is absolutely the case that these created more than a million dollars of value per year while they were up. But UC Berkeley, by design, captured none of that value.
csydas 10y ago
> Do you expect Berkley to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have over 20,000 videos transcribed and captioned? Since they had implemented such a policy, required staff to sign off on it, and also claimed to be compliant with such a policy, yeah, it probably should have been done. The full report from the Justice Department is available at [1] and the claims are fairly straight-forward by the complainants; Berkley used public funds to make said videos, claimed to be compliant with their own rules and regulations regarding Accessibility, had the necessary department internally to assist with compliance to Accessibility, but neglected to enforce compliance as they were supposed to. When the Justice Department was brought in, it was the finding of the Department that compliance would not cause "...undue administrative or financial [burden]..." on Berkley. Berkley basically had the choice to comply as they were supposed to have been doing in the first place or remove, and they opted to remove. It is a fiscally sensible position, but this issue seems to have been a result of poor enforcement of the University's own policies and promises to Accessibility. The report from the Justice Department, linked on Berkley's response, is fairly short and in plain language. I take the regret in Berkley's official response at face value, since I don't think this is what anyone wanted (no videos at all), but according to the report, Berkley had and continues to have the resources and expertise to do this as the content is created, instead of waiting until they have upwards of 20,000 videos queued up. It's a costly mistake, and they chose the cheaper way of fixing it. [1]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...
- darkmouth 10y ago
  Research is also done with public funds in a lot of universities but the research papers themselves are conveniently put in behind journal and conference paywalls. I'd say that is a much bigger problem since it affects a larger section of the population but that is apparently completely expected and accepted.
  - abeyer 10y ago
    Agreed, that is a problem, and we should be working to fix the law so that doesn't happen. The difference in this case is that the law requiring it already exists and Berkeley didn't obey it.

NathanKP 10y ago

One thing I don't understand, maybe because I'm hearing, but how is the UC Berkeley YouTube not accessible to deaf people? Doesn't YouTube have a CC feature designed to make videos accessible for the hearing impaired or just so hearing people can watch them with the sound off? Is the suit because the lectures don't have a sign language translation for every single lecture?

mulmen 10y ago
This was discussed in previous threads, Youtube captioning is not (yet) good enough to meet the courts standard.
niij 10y ago
Auto-generated captions are nearly useless for more technical topics. No one is advocating for sign language translation, but to comply with the ADA they would need to be manually Closed Captioned. 20,000 videos would be prohibitively expensive to pay for people to caption these, so they decided to take them down instead. I think it's a shame, but if they had just captioned them as they released them, it wouldn't have been such a burden to do all 20,000 at once.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 10y ago
It's not just deaf people. It's people with hearing impairment, or with visual impairment, or with manual disability. The complainants in this case were people with hearing impairment, but the DoJ expanded the scope. You're right that YT can auto-caption some video. The DoJ looked at the accuracy of a selection of video, and found it was rather low. That inaccuracy, coupled with the lack of reasonable adjustments for people with visual impairment or manual disability means that YTs auto-captioning isn't enough to make a video accessible.
- NathanKP 10y ago
  Okay that makes sense, sounds like someone at UC Berkley took a risk thinking that auto captioning would be enough but it isn't good enough yet. I hope the auto captions improve over time. I feel like Facebook auto captions are already really, really good. If YouTube can reach that level of auto captioning it would benefit a lot of people.

Bartweiss 10y ago

> Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. UC Berkeley assessed the cost of captioning those videos to ADA standards at higher than $1,000,000. Berkeley is currently running a $110 million deficit after making $60 million in budget cuts. Last month, President Trump tweeted a threat to strip the college of all federal funds, and while that's unlikely their state and federal support is certainly not going expand. So no, they aren't cutting off their nose to spite their face. They're broke, and couldn't accommodate the lawsuit's demands without major cuts somewhere else.

lutusp 10y ago

> Berkley [sic] decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. It's much more likely that the cost of making the lectures ADA-compliant was prohibitive. Universities aren't corporations who can appeal to equities holders/markets for funds when a need presents itself. So they did what they could ... a warning, well in advance, that the content would have to be withdrawn from public display, with the expectation that someone not subject to the ADA requirements would copy the lectures. In the future, such content will be created already ADA-compliant, but many of these lectures predate the ADA and were created in good faith. It would have been a shame to lose them, especially when you consider that current and future computer resources can provide on-the-fly subtitles (and translations) for those who want or need them.

DanBC 10y ago
> In the future, such content will be created already ADA-compliant, but many of these lectures predate the ADA and were created in good faith. The ADA is nearly 30 years old. The videos are 10 years old or so. Berkeley had policies in place to ensure content was accessible, and it had help for creators to make sure content was accessible. The people who created this content were responsible for self-certification. They signed documents saying they were aware of Berkeley policy, and aware of the help available to make content accessible, and they also signed to say that the content was accessible.
- fs111 10y ago
  Let's burn all books! Blind people can't read them!!

sp332 10y ago

Exactly, you're not allowed to take public money (largely tax money from everyone) and use it to benefit a specific group. The laws were clear before Berkeley made the videos, so they should have been able to estimate the cost ahead of time. Instead they ignored they law and decided that discriminating against hearing-impaired people whose tax money helped pay for the videos was fine.

seaknoll 10y ago
These videos already existed and are still being produced, and if you live in CA your tax dollars are being used to produce them whether or not they're made public. They're being created for Berkeley students first, made ADA-accessible as needed by the student body. Since they already exist, wouldn't Berkeley be doing a disservice to many disabled people by just keeping them private? And, because its a public school, couldn't one argue that the videos should be publicly available too?
- sp332 10y ago
  Because taking money from disabled people and using it to help mostly not-disabled people creates second-class citizens. These videos in their current form are discriminatory.

sergiotapia 10y ago

Are you going to spend time writing these captions?

LordKano 10y ago

Instead of dealing with the time, energy and expense of having them captioned or the expense and frustration of ongoing legal action, they took them offline. Isn't progress grand?

monochromatic 10y ago

> To those that are preserving/mirroring these lectures, I really hope you have plans to make them accessible to all, not just the hearing enabled. That would be great. And as long as money is no object, I really hope they're planning to buy everyone a puppy too.