9 ms·

While I understand wanting to make things available to the deaf, making them unavailable to everyone else is nuts. It's crazy that the law put UC Berkeley in th

• artursapek 10y ago
  It's not
• akinalci 10y ago
  Aren't we neglecting people with deafblindness? Hearing-enabled and deaf people should be blocked from accessing all online courses until the videos are translated into braille.
  • garysieling 10y ago
    If you have closed captions, that should not be an issue, because letters map to braille characters.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • nnutter 10y ago
      For those not familiar, there are braille displays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display
    • klipt 10y ago
      > braille characters No matter what you do, there'll always be some group who can't access the content. E.g. people who are deaf, blind, and had both hands amputated.
      • garysieling 10y ago
        Yes, and yet Stephen Hawking is still able to write books. For the Hacker News audience, I would think every barrier should present at least an interesting technical or business challenge. I tend to agree with the other commenters that this seems like a good project for crowdsourcing because it's something many people do care a lot about, although I can see how that might not satisfy ADA compliance. For all the talk about these types of issues, it seems to be very rare for tech conference videos to be captioned, see: https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type_l2_Conference=Software https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type... I think this is potentially a good area to explore collectively - any technology solutions that make accessibility cheaper would feed back to places like UC Berkeley.
    • akinalci 10y ago
      You're right. Damn it Berkeley, you could have just recruited some eager undergrads to caption the videos. Do the captions need to meet a very high standard of quality? If not, automated captioning would have been a good student project.
• adewinter 10y ago
  How is society improved by making a law optional?
  • E6300 10y ago
    You're seeing an example right here, unless you think that university lectures are a bad thing.
    • adewinter 10y ago
      Unless you think the ADA is a bad thing, it should not be optional.
      • E6300 10y ago
        I happen to think that requiring a producer to put specific features into a work is a bad thing, actually.
  • rdtsc 10y ago
    > How is society improved by making a law optional? In many ways. People ignore speed limits pretty frequently. Traffic flows faster, more efficiently because everyone is breaking the law. Laws against gay marriage and other discriminatory laws. Society is greatly improved by making them optional. Some states have strange and bizarre laws in the books but nobody is bothering enforcing them. Everyone treats them as optional and the society is better for it.
    • adewinter 10y ago
      I agree that bad laws should be struck down. So if you're saying the ADA is a bad law - like low speed limits and banning gay marriage... sure. I think it would be hard to argue that the ADA is a bad law, however. If it's not a bad law, it should not be optional. Otherwise it's not, by definition, a law.
      • sqeaky 10y ago
• FfejL 10y ago
  If there is no penalty for not making them available for the deaf, why would any institution pay for captioning? UCB wasn't ordered to take them down. UCB was ordered to make them accessible, and chose to take them down rather than spend the money.
  • therealmarv 10y ago
    And UCB is also a really really poor university which cannot afford to make them accessible, right? BTW this would be a good crowdsourcing project.
  • darawk 10y ago
    The consequence of which was forcing an organization to choose between spending an enormous amount of money, or making a previously free resource unavailable. How is this a good thing? > If there is no penalty for not making them available for the deaf, why would any institution pay for captioning? Do you realize the insanity of that kind of logic? If there is no penalty for not curing HIV, how can McDonald's sell hamburgers? Where does it end?
    • idiot_stick 10y ago
      >How is this a good thing? If I'm deaf, I know that you have no advantage over me merely because you can hear. I think that's "good". The laws are in place to protect minorities.
      • darawk 10y ago
        Yes, but deaf people are always at a disadvantage. The law cannot eliminate that. All it can do is make reasonable compromises to mitigate it. This compromise is very clearly not reasonable.
        • idiot_stick 10y ago
          >Yes, but deaf people are always at a disadvantage. I agree. >The law cannot eliminate that. All it can do is make reasonable compromises to mitigate it. I also agree with this. And I believe that's what this law is doing: saying "you may be at a disadvantage in these ways, but you won't be in this way if we can help it."
• dopamean 10y ago
  It's not. And I'd really like to know if many deaf folks would really feel like this properly serves their interests.
• andy_ppp 10y ago
  Why not just crowd source this process, I'd be happy to help...
  • andy_ppp 10y ago
    Okay so Amara.org looks good enough to do this...
• ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  It's not just about the Berkeley videos, but about what sort of rules and standards we have. We don't ban speech that is bad for society for the same sort of reasons. We've decided that we having rules and spending the time, money, and effort necessary to include the deaf and disabled. If you carve out an exception for free class lecture videos for Berkeley, it makes it more difficult to enforce these rules in all the circumstances that we want.
  • galacticpony 10y ago
    This is ass-backwards. If a business has to spend extra time and effort to fulfill some regulation to provide a free service, it's just not gonna happen. Everybody loses. Even if it wasn't a free service, if the regulations make the venture unprofitable, it won't happen. Same for taxes, etc. If the legislators want "standards", they had better pay for it out of the tax payers pockets, instead of shifting the burden to business, where it doesn't belong.
    • st3v3r 10y ago
      UC Berkley is a Tax funded university, so your argument is bunk. And I disagree anyways; if the business wants to do something, they are responsible for following the law. That includes making reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. Because we as a society have decided that it's more important that those persons be allowed to participate in society than it is for a business to make money.
      • galacticpony 10y ago
        I'm making a general statement, not specific to UC Berkeley. Even if you don't consider UCB a business, most of its income does not actually come from taxes and its spending isn't going to be all that different from a private university. Clearly, their decision here was not to spend, but to delete instead. That was the economical thing to do. You're also missing the point completely. Whether a business wants to do something depends on whether it is expected to be profitable. If the laws make it unprofitable, then it doesn't want to do it. You're posing a false dilemma with "it's more important that those persons be allowed to participate in society than it is for a business to make money". If society wants participation, society should pay for it, not just business. It's just really easy for the government to use people with disabilities, because opposing such legislation is unpopular. Who decides what's reasonable, anyway? If you're a small business, building some ramp can easily break your budget. If you're McDonalds, it make no difference. Are you going to treat both companies equally? If so, you're sponsoring big corporate.
• idiot_stick 10y ago
  >How is society improved by taking them down? First of all, I agree with you. I think most others do as well. The problem is, we can look at a case like this and say, "Obviously we shouldn't lose access to this." Then there's a next time, and a next time, and a next time. And eventually the deaf are at a measurable informational disadvantage to those who can hear. That's why these laws exist. So, everyone should take a step back and figure out a reasonable solution. I hope that's the reason for the judgment.
  • darawk 10y ago
    The deaf are already at a measurable disadvantage. They're deaf. We should take steps to mitigate that. We should make their lives easier in whatever ways are practical. This is obviously not one of them. We can't make being deaf the same as not being deaf. Disabled people will always be at some disadvantage to their abled counterparts. All we can do is make reasonable compromises. And it should be utterly obvious to everyone involved that this is not a reasonable compromise.
    • idiot_stick 10y ago
      >The deaf are already at a measurable disadvantage. They're deaf. We should take steps to mitigate that. Which is why we're not trying to cure their deafness. Instead, we're trying to ensure that the deaf have access to the same information those who aren't deaf have.
      • darawk 10y ago
        By taking information away from those who can hear.
        • sbarre 10y ago
          No, by passing laws that require institutions to provide their content in an accessible manner. The law didn't force UCB to take the videos down, they chose to take them down rather than comply with the law. Not the same thing..
• tedsanders 10y ago
  It's the same justification for most regulations. It's the benefit of having high-quality goods produced vs the cost of having fewer goods produced. You could argue that a car with no seatbelts is better than no car at all, but as a society we've decided that seatbelts are needed or else the car cannot be driven. This incentivizes car producers to produce cars with seatbelts, even though cars get slightly more expensive and slightly fewer cars may be sold. If someone builds a car with no seatbelts, upon being told by a court that the car needs seatbelts, they may even choose to junk the car rather than pay to install the legally required seatbelts. Their choice. The same principle applies here. Of course, this case might be different for two reasons. First, the videos have already been produced, so we see the direct harm of the regulation (often the harm is invisible). Second, the trade-off here between higher-quality goods vs more goods might have a different balance in this situation than others.
• Berobero 10y ago
  Then what is the proper vector of attack for enforcement? If not fines (and the secondary effects of fines as seen here), then what? Public funds?
• VarFarYonder 10y ago
  > While I understand wanting to make things available to the deaf, making them unavailable to everyone else is nuts. Especially as they're being offered for free. The "If X group cannot have it, nobody can have it" reasoning seems mad. So because the deaf cannot get value from those videos, others cannot either. I'm not deaf, but I cannot imagine many deaf people thinking this is reasonable. You might also think of other minorities. Why isn't it also illegal for free lectures not to accommodate blind people? Or those without internet access at all. If you take the "X group doesn't have it, nobody can have it" reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, it seems to me that nothing can be provided for free to anyone.
  • byoung2 10y ago
    You might also think of other minorities. Why isn't it also illegal for free lectures not to accommodate blind people? The lawsuit addressed both deaf and blind students. In addition to captions, there should be screen-reader friendly versions of pages and documents, audio descriptions of visual data, etc. Public universities have limited budgets, so to spend possibly millions of dollars to support a free offering may not have been feasible. Compare this to a free art museum operated by a local non-profit , and suddenly being forced to bring the building up to ADA code, building wheelchair ramps, installing elevators, providing audio descriptions of artwork, braille descriptions, etc. Instead of spending millions that they don't have to complete that work, they shut down the museum. 1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-remove-free-online-content-rather-complying-disability-law https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...
• kazinator 10y ago
  Taking them down also makes them less available to deaf people. If you're deaf, and a video without CC is available that you're interested in, you can get someone who can hear to translate it for you (perhaps in real time into sign language or do the CC work or whatever). If the video is gone, you're out of luck, no matter your auditory capability or lack thereof. "I can't hear it, so I'm better off if nobody else can either" doesn't really compute. Note that on YouTube you can open access to a video for community contribution. Someone other than the original uploader can come along and provide closed captioning.