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Not a dichotomy, the third option of making your website accessible is right there within their reach. Them putting their hands up and saying "guess we'll do no

Not a dichotomy, the third option of making your website accessible is right there within their reach. Them putting their hands up and saying "guess we'll do nothing" is not evidence that they couldn't have. I could have done that with two interns over a summer in 2017, I've done much larger labeling projects with fewer resources. Had they even thought about accessibility before being called on it, they could even have done it over time as they were recording the videos, surely they put resources into that.

BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"they could even have done it over time as they were recording the videos, surely they put resources into that." If a professor is lecturing a class that has no disabled students in it, does it really make sense to hire someone to sign or transcribe the lecture on the off chance someone disabled in the future who isn't even enrolled will want to watch it for free online? I can totally understand requiring the university to accommodate students who are currently enrolled with disabilities. But it doesn't seem right to mandate this for every individual lecture that has been recorded.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Does it make sense to build a ramp in a building which has currently no wheelchair-bound residents? There is a reason access to higher-ed is so difficult for the disabled. You don't need to hire someone to transcribe a lecture, you can push it through a speech to text algorithm and ask one of your 300 students to volunteer to make the few corrections necessary with a minimum amount of work. And this is the forethought you have when you care about these things. If you don't you can do the harder version where you hire a couple interns to do it afterward. It's not an insurmountable task either way.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I don't believe the ramp comparison is appropriate because physical accommodations are concrete and long lasting whereas access accommodation on things like recordings and lectures require specialized work on every single instance. As for your "There is a reason access to higher-ed is so difficult for the disabled" point, I fully endorse the requirement that the university has to accommodate disabled students. But my expectation is that they accommodate actively enrolled students and if any disabled student wants to access some archived content they provide resources to do so. But I don't expect them to make the entire archive accessible on-demand for people online. Presumably the UC System considered text-to-speech transcription. I assume that for some reason it would have been deemed inadequate or unacceptable to the people who brought the suit against them. You've mentioned having interns and volunteers do this, which, yes, they could, but it also implies that this work is indeed expensive. I'm also unsure if there is a certain level of quality or detail that is expected in order for it to be considered sufficiently accessible. Even if we generously assume a 1:2 ratio on the length of content vs the time to transcribe, edit, and verify, they would still be looking at something like 40,000 person hours. (~20,000 lectures, assuming 2 hour classes).
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
      Neither interns nor students are expensive, the latter are free and are begging to work for you. I can get them in the snap of a finger and I work in a much smaller university. For reference Berkeley got 5 billions through fund raising campaigns since the ADA was implemented, regularly gets a 100 million dollars from donors in a year, and enrolls 40000 students every year (there's your 40000 hours) who pay tuition. Also they committed to adhering to ADA for every new piece of content they produce. What I proposed is text-to-speech with a human in the loop, semi-automatic transcription. I've worked as a data scientist and machine learning engineer then researcher in the industry and in academia, on speech recognition and generation models among other things. I've labelled time-series datasets containing hundreds of thousands of items by myself. It's not rocket science, there are very efficient tools, and if you can't find one for your purpose it's a couple of weeks of work to create one. The ADA captioning requirements aren't very complicated either, you can check them out yourself it's like 5 things.
db48x 4y ago
A thing which isn’t accessible still has value. If a new law causes the thing to be destroyed rather than be made accessible, then the new law is a bad one.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  You are a public university with students who have a wide variety of skin colors. 27 years ago a law is put into effect that forbids discrimination based on skin color. The toilets on your campus, which you have kept untouched for 27 years since the law passed, have a sign at the entrance that says "whites-only". Which of these options do you feel is right: 1) Pay someone to take down the sign 2) Condemn the toilet 3) Leave it as is.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    If captioning videos were as easy and cheap as taking down a sign, then these would be equivalent.
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
      It's a load-bearing sign, either way not important to the allegory I don't know anyone who would defend options 2 or 3 under any circumstances. In this scenario you also have 27 years to amortize the costs, enroll 40000 students every year who pay tuition and are ready to do free labour, receive 100 million dollars worth of donations every year, and over the course of these years completed a 2 billion, then a 3 billion dollars fund raising campaign.
      - db48x 4y ago
        Your straw–man situation isn’t relevant, and it doesn’t matter which option bystanders like us think is “right”. What matters is what is observed after the fact. If we observe that things with value are destroyed because of an accessibility law, then the law is a bad one. Just three or four years ago one of the best restaurants in my town was shut down because the restrooms weren’t accessible. The restaurant owner hadn’t realized it was a problem; she didn’t own the building, and the building predates the ADA. 26 years ago when she moved in she had asked the owner to rebuild the restrooms, but the landlord refused. Then one day a lawyer walked into the restaurant, looked at the restrooms, and walked out. A week later he is back with a lawsuit. The landlord still doesn’t care because the lawsuit is against the restaurant owner, and if she goes out of business the landlord can have another tenant in there in a week. Between the settlement, the cost of the remodel, and 9 months of lost revenue, the restaurant owner spent approximately half a million dollars on a restroom. Worse, she’s never had a customer in a wheelchair in the years since. Nobody except the lawyer and the contractors benefited at all; it’s pure broken–window fallacy.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

>"they could even have done it over time as they were recording the videos, surely they put resources into that." If a professor is lecturing a class that has no disabled students in it, does it really make sense to hire someone to sign or transcribe the lecture on the off chance someone disabled in the future who isn't even enrolled will want to watch it for free online? I can totally understand requiring the university to accommodate students who are currently enrolled with disabilities. But it doesn't seem right to mandate this for every individual lecture that has been recorded.

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Does it make sense to build a ramp in a building which has currently no wheelchair-bound residents? There is a reason access to higher-ed is so difficult for the disabled. You don't need to hire someone to transcribe a lecture, you can push it through a speech to text algorithm and ask one of your 300 students to volunteer to make the few corrections necessary with a minimum amount of work. And this is the forethought you have when you care about these things. If you don't you can do the harder version where you hire a couple interns to do it afterward. It's not an insurmountable task either way.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I don't believe the ramp comparison is appropriate because physical accommodations are concrete and long lasting whereas access accommodation on things like recordings and lectures require specialized work on every single instance. As for your "There is a reason access to higher-ed is so difficult for the disabled" point, I fully endorse the requirement that the university has to accommodate disabled students. But my expectation is that they accommodate actively enrolled students and if any disabled student wants to access some archived content they provide resources to do so. But I don't expect them to make the entire archive accessible on-demand for people online. Presumably the UC System considered text-to-speech transcription. I assume that for some reason it would have been deemed inadequate or unacceptable to the people who brought the suit against them. You've mentioned having interns and volunteers do this, which, yes, they could, but it also implies that this work is indeed expensive. I'm also unsure if there is a certain level of quality or detail that is expected in order for it to be considered sufficiently accessible. Even if we generously assume a 1:2 ratio on the length of content vs the time to transcribe, edit, and verify, they would still be looking at something like 40,000 person hours. (~20,000 lectures, assuming 2 hour classes).
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    Neither interns nor students are expensive, the latter are free and are begging to work for you. I can get them in the snap of a finger and I work in a much smaller university. For reference Berkeley got 5 billions through fund raising campaigns since the ADA was implemented, regularly gets a 100 million dollars from donors in a year, and enrolls 40000 students every year (there's your 40000 hours) who pay tuition. Also they committed to adhering to ADA for every new piece of content they produce. What I proposed is text-to-speech with a human in the loop, semi-automatic transcription. I've worked as a data scientist and machine learning engineer then researcher in the industry and in academia, on speech recognition and generation models among other things. I've labelled time-series datasets containing hundreds of thousands of items by myself. It's not rocket science, there are very efficient tools, and if you can't find one for your purpose it's a couple of weeks of work to create one. The ADA captioning requirements aren't very complicated either, you can check them out yourself it's like 5 things.

db48x 4y ago

A thing which isn’t accessible still has value. If a new law causes the thing to be destroyed rather than be made accessible, then the new law is a bad one.

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
You are a public university with students who have a wide variety of skin colors. 27 years ago a law is put into effect that forbids discrimination based on skin color. The toilets on your campus, which you have kept untouched for 27 years since the law passed, have a sign at the entrance that says "whites-only". Which of these options do you feel is right: 1) Pay someone to take down the sign 2) Condemn the toilet 3) Leave it as is.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  If captioning videos were as easy and cheap as taking down a sign, then these would be equivalent.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    It's a load-bearing sign, either way not important to the allegory I don't know anyone who would defend options 2 or 3 under any circumstances. In this scenario you also have 27 years to amortize the costs, enroll 40000 students every year who pay tuition and are ready to do free labour, receive 100 million dollars worth of donations every year, and over the course of these years completed a 2 billion, then a 3 billion dollars fund raising campaign.
    - db48x 4y ago
      Your straw–man situation isn’t relevant, and it doesn’t matter which option bystanders like us think is “right”. What matters is what is observed after the fact. If we observe that things with value are destroyed because of an accessibility law, then the law is a bad one. Just three or four years ago one of the best restaurants in my town was shut down because the restrooms weren’t accessible. The restaurant owner hadn’t realized it was a problem; she didn’t own the building, and the building predates the ADA. 26 years ago when she moved in she had asked the owner to rebuild the restrooms, but the landlord refused. Then one day a lawyer walked into the restaurant, looked at the restrooms, and walked out. A week later he is back with a lawsuit. The landlord still doesn’t care because the lawsuit is against the restaurant owner, and if she goes out of business the landlord can have another tenant in there in a week. Between the settlement, the cost of the remodel, and 9 months of lost revenue, the restaurant owner spent approximately half a million dollars on a restroom. Worse, she’s never had a customer in a wheelchair in the years since. Nobody except the lawyer and the contractors benefited at all; it’s pure broken–window fallacy.