[lohi]

"how will they make their content easy enough to grasp for the guy with an IQ of 60? He's disabled too, after all..."

Not only is it false equivalence, it's also addressed in the first (and second) paragraph in the letter from the DoJ: "The ADA prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities by public entities. [0]".

"If it feels insane, it's because it is insane"

It only "feels insane" because they violated the law in so many instances. If we consider all the effort, time and cost that went in to making the content in the first place, the cost of compliance is marginal.

[0] https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

[Myrmornis]

> If we consider all the effort, time and cost that went in to making the content in the first place, the cost of compliance is marginal.

Nonsense. The content is normal undergrad lectures recorded using no special techniques, with YouTube/Google providing automated captioning. The DOJ letter states specifically that the automated captioning is non-compliant (at least it was in March 2015) and that additionally, the videos would need to be edited such that all relevant visible content is described by the lecturer, and poor color contrast is avoided etc. For 20,000 hours of video the cost of doing that manually is huge relative to the funds available to such a project in a public university struggling with a budget deficit and generally with the difficult financial climate for public higher education.

[lohi]

I would still say it's small compared to the size of the activity. But let's not argue that and take another approach.

Someone below said that they assessed it would cost (at least) $1,000,000. There are 20,000 lectures so that's $50 per lecture, which seems reasonable. With a $3 CPM on youtube, that's ~16,000 views per video. I'm sure there's some hurdle in the way to enable ads, but the point still stands. The costs here per video is small enough that it's hard to at claim that the videos are both very valuable and at the same time impossible to make compliant.

[Myrmornis]

Wouldn't you say that something on the internet can be valuable without attracting page impressions at a rate high enough to generate advertising revenue?

[lohi]

Many things are valuable. The problem here is that the school don't want to, or can't, pay the full price that it costs to legally distribute the videos. Maybe it's actually fair that the people who want the videos contribute to the cost in some way. Whether that is donations, ads or labor in the form of transcription.

[Myrmornis]

With respect, I think you're over-thinking it.

1. UC Berkeley is an entity that uses the internet

2. The internet can be used, to great advantage, for distributing video files

3. The video files in this case were made with the best intentions of improving the world, and this is also the reason for wanting them to be available to the internet-connected world, for free. They harm no-one, and they make the world a better place.

4. So they should be able to use the internet to distribute their video files, without any special extra costs.

[csydas]

I don't think anyone disagrees that the videos are good to have, but it's not the issue of whether or not Berkley should have been distributing the videos, it's that Berkley was not fulfilling its obligations. As outlined in the Department of Justice report [1], Berkley was making these videos after the guidelines were put in place and after Berkley adopted its own guidelines and had a required signoff for all such projects going forward. They also had and have a resource on campus that assists with compliance as required and conceived by Berkley itself.

The issue isn't 20000 formerly made videos aren't compliant, it's that Berkley was making the videos out of compliance while claiming to be compliant.

THe DoJ's assessment is that Berkley has the resources to correct their error without "undue ... [burden]", so their options were take the videos down or engage in a program to meet compliance witht he videos, less they be penalized.

Berkley opted to just take the videos down. I get this from a financial standpoint, even though it'd be nice if they aimed for compliance.

But don't mistake them taking it down as an order so much; they weren't making the videos accessible as they had pledged to, they claimed they were, and they were continuing not to comply. The complaintants called them on it, and it's unfortunate, but they should have been complying from the beginning before they had a video queue of 20000.

I hope from here on out they will make compliant videos and use their on-campus resources; Berkley's response certainly seems to suggest interest in compliance, so I hope that this can just be a tragedy that we can move past.

[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...