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>"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

>"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.

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.