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A statement on online course content and accessibility

news.berkeley.edu

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Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#91

Post by marbletiles »

josinalvo wrote: post #82
marbletiles wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but people would say they food they give away should still comply with health regulations. Just because you're making a gift doesn't mean the law doesn't apply to you.

Should it, though? I mean, if you want to impose costs (check carefully food, possibility of lawsuit) on a donation, what you get, predictably, is less donations. It seems to be the case that you have an assymetrical view of harm: harm by not giving food is always acceptable, harm by giving food, usually unacceptable. Why would it be the case?

Yes, it should. What you get is arguably fewer donations, but the donations you get are better donations. You raise the standard. And others want to follow suit, so they up their game too.

This is already happening. UK supermarkets used to lock their bins to stop people stealing waste food because they were concerned they'd be liable for health violations. There were public protests, so they raised their games and began properly managed waste-food donation programmes.

It's asymmetrical because it's bigger than the one donation you have before you. When you look at the big picture, you have to say sometimes "this thing isn't good enough. Even though it might hurt society in the short term to refuse it, it will hurt it more in the long-term to accept it. So we refuse."

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#92

Post by marbletiles »

crazy2be wrote: post #85
cortesoft wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, they haven't made it clear that they need to take them down; they said they are going to do whatever they can first, but leave open the possibility that they will be unable to meet the regulations and would need to remove the content. I understand your argument, but if you only have to say "I can't afford to support disabled people!" in order to not have to be in compliance with the ADA, then the ADA becomes…

While your comparison to wheelchair ramps seems analogous, it in fact has a significant flaw. Wheelchair ramps cost the business almost nothing to build relative to the cost of operating the business. The tax for these sort of physical accommodations is almost certainly less than 1%, which nearly everyone would consider acceptable. In the case of captioning the videos, the captioning costs several times more than put…

> In the case of captioning the videos, the captioning costs several times more than putting up the videos in the first place. Probably on the order of 100x more

Automatic caption creation is coming on in leaps, well beyond what YouTube is achieving already. The quality is startlingly good in some cases, certainly good enough to allow a (crowd-sourced) editing pass. The cost is nothing, nothing like 100x. Hell, the BBC has a project that will automatically translate content into other languages [0], and they have that publishing to a live site without editorial intervention.

If the will is there, these things are eminently possible. The ADA is trying to make sure the will is there.

[0] http://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/alto/

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#93

Post by sandworm101 »

josinalvo wrote: post #84
sandworm101 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A business does it because it is the law. A person may do or not do something based on personal choice, but in this situation there is no room. Businesses must meet the minimum standard of behavior. In this case the government has issued a warning that this particular business seems not to have met the bar. If you are trying to pitch something, something that is going to cost a business money, "the right thing" isn't…

And the candidate did not bother to try to solve the issue with the startup directly first ?!

At the time, the ADA was harsh. He went to a lawyer when then sent a demand letter. This person was what some would call a 'professional plaintiff'. Laws in recent years have made that sort of thing more difficult, but the ADA still needs to be respected if you want to avoid headaches. Don't interview people in an non-accessible location.

But part of me does side with the guy. The startup wasn't wheelchair accessible. And they were small enough that making it accessible would have been very costly. Even if he had made it to the interview there was a good chance they might have passed him over because of his chair. That's the sort of discrimination that the ADA was meant to address. The startup should never have setup at that location.

Frankly, they had so many people crammed in that they were probably in violation of the fire code, another law that they don't teach you about at coding bootcamps.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#94

Post by SapphireSun »

daenney wrote: post #3
malloryerik wrote: post #2

U.C. Berkeley has some fantastic classes online. It would truly be a shame to lose them. Many were clearly produced on shoestring budgets. The Department of Justice seems to have received complaints mainly regarding absence of transcripts for audio or video content. Can't speech-to-text tech help? Other complaints include poor formatting of pdf's. If the courses are indeed taken down, I can only hope that at least th…

Agreed. I've had access to a few of their courses, they're pretty awesome. I know it sucks for people with disabilities and Berkeley should invest into making it accessible to everyone, but it would be a loss for everyone if the consequence of this is that their courses become entirely unavailable :(.

I think your reaction is the law working as intended. Without the ADA, there is little will to go above and beyond. With the ADA, everyone is outraged that they have to go above and beyond and somehow find the resources to do it.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#95

Post by bramd »

anotheryou wrote: post #30

I feel like it's about time to ditch all that accessibility stuff and join forces to create a more human screen reader. Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of th…

> Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?"

Sadly? I strongly disagree. If all my human-computer interaction would be like communicating with Siri/Google Now (e.g. conversational), I would have ditched computers years ago. It's all about giving semantic information to screenreaders so the user can eficiently navigate that content. In the rare case that I need some kind of human description, I just share my screen with someone that has working eyeballs.

FYI, I'm totally blind.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#96

Post by arieskg »

extra88 wrote: post #86
arieskg wrote: post #68

Classic lobbying. The Department of Justice is filing the complaints against the institutions offering free online courses with an illogical argument masked with virtuous intent. The DOJ is okay with the paid online courses because the levying cost on consumers provides immunity to such violations. Depriving everyone's access to the free content because it did not accommodate those with disabilities sets dangerous pr…

You have no idea what you're talking about. Paid online courses are also required to make their courses accessible to students, what's different for them is they can make a course accessible to each specific student which can be easier (e.g. if a student is deaf, they need captions but not written descriptions of visuals). Most cases involved brick 'n mortar businesses and institutions and in many online cases they'v…

I respect several points you made, but there's no reason for me to rebuttal since the argument became unintelligible with your first sentence.

If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about.

FYI, Harvard and MIT were received with the same letters few months ago. It was on the New York Times, but I could still be wrong since I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#97

Post by extra88 »

arieskg wrote: post #96
extra88 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Paid online courses are also required to make their courses accessible to students, what's different for them is they can make a course accessible to each specific student which can be easier (e.g. if a student is deaf, they need captions but not written descriptions of visuals). Most cases involved brick 'n mortar businesses and institutions and in many online cases they'v…

I respect several points you made, but there's no reason for me to rebuttal since the argument became unintelligible with your first sentence. If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about…

Harvard and MIT did not receive the same letter, they've actually been sued by the National Association for the Deaf. The DoJ and I think the DoEd. have also been involved. That case is also about freely offered online educational material but specifically video lacking quality captions.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#98

Post by anotheryou »

bramd wrote: post #95
anotheryou wrote: post #30

I feel like it's about time to ditch all that accessibility stuff and join forces to create a more human screen reader. Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of th…

> Though sadly it will be a while until we will hear: "You are visiting Hacker News, in a simple look and without any images, it features a list of links to articles and a menu at the top. Do you want me to read the articles titles, continue with accessing the menu or a more detailed description of the page?" Sadly? I strongly disagree. If all my human-computer interaction would be like communicating with Siri/Google…

oh, great to hear from someone actually needing this. But than I'd still argue, that semantics should be possible to parse from the style of the site. Big letters? Must be a headline.

Well actually I would love html to be more to be like latex/markdown, I just thought, that if I recognize it as a list, it should be parsed by a screen reader as such too.

May I ask you which screen reader you use and at what speeds? (or do you use some braille screen?)

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#99

Post by wfunction »

sandworm101 wrote: post #40
jasode wrote: post #7

Fyi ... a related (not duplicate) HN discussion from Feb 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798 In both this case about UC Berkeley and the lawsuit against Harvard & MIT, the legal attacks seem very wrong. What I see is: - Scenario A: spend $X to release free courses that benefits most of humanity - Scenario B: spend $X+$Y to release free courses that also benefits the disabled population (The $Y is extra…

There are plenty of other areas where this same law has similar effects but is tolerated. One niche area is the provision of legal services to the deaf. The lawyer must not charge extra, despite the need to hire a translator. That means taking a case involving a deaf defendant/plaintiff might be unprofitable. But you have to do it all the same. We do such things, foot the bill, because the law is the law. The governm…

It's had similar effects because there is no legal alternative. The lawyer can't just stop working altogether, so the society is forced to get the benefit of the law. Over here the alternative is to just not release the courses for free which is not the outcome society would seem to prefer.

Re: A statement on online course content and accessibility

#100

Post by bdhess »

jasode wrote: post #75
bdhess wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, that seems justifiable for commercial businesses but many find the ADA to be an ugly legal weapon for attacking free donations. The spiritual intentions of "free" should be exempted. I dispute labeling this program as a "donation". It's an official program run by a quasi-governmental institution that is supported by taxpayer dollars. Disabled people pay taxes in California, and yet cannot avail themselves of…

>I dispute labeling this program as a "donation". It's a release of course videos that they don't charge for. Making free videos available for the public certainly isn't going to help UC Berkeley's $150 million budget deficit.[1] It's not going to make anybody rich. If any university wants to provide free videos to the public with no strings attached, I consider that a generous gesture on their part. I want us (socie…

Your examples of chairlifts and helicopters are strained because obviously they would fundamentally alter the experience and cause extreme financial burdens, which make for allowable exceptions under the ADA. This is not parallel to the Berkeley case-- from the DOJ letter: "...UC Berkeley has not established that making its online content accessible would result in a fundamental alteration or undue administrative and financial burdens."

This rings true in my mind; obviously adding accessibility features wouldn't fundamentally alter the experience for non-disabled users. And training and employing work-study students to audit and improve the accessibility of the content seems like a low-cost approach that could bring them substantially into compliance. Rather than allowing untrained faculty to self-certify accessibility compliance of their self-maintained content with a checkbox, which is allowed today.

"Freedom of spreading knowledge" certainly doesn't make for a valid set of exceptions. By that logic, as a knowledge-spreading institution, Berkeley wouldn't need to build wheelchair ramps and elevators on its physical campus. I assume you'd agree that that's a settled question.

In some ways and in some cases, online education is already a reasonable substitute for in-classroom education. It seems logical that we begin to push online learning toward making parallel accommodations to what we've already deemed just in the physical world.

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