[bionsuba]

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.

[csydas]

> 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...

[darkmouth]

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]

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.

[Bartweiss]

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]

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]

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.