I bet this lawsuit just brought to the attention of some upper level administrators that they weren't monetizing these videos. It's a great excuse to do something they'd want to do anyway.
Something doesn't add up here. There are so many organizations that would partner with them to make a good faith effort at adding accessibility to the content. Especially for podcasts, automated transcription software really could take it most of the way. Are they really arguing that Berkley's course work is of so little value that its not worth being transcribed?
So I'm afraid I am very closely involved with this takedown process, and 1-3 are wrong. No one, administrators or peons, is happy about this, and there are no backdoor monetization schemes in the works. Over the past year a fair amount of effort was expended trying to figure out how we could keep the content public by partnering up with transcription services. Automation might get you 80% of the way there, but the remaining 20% can't be tackled by software (in part because so many course instructors are ESL), and it's still far too large a mountain of material to pay humans to transcribe when you're a fairly small department within a large institution that's in ongoing fiscal crisis because of state disinvestment. No conspiracies, just a hugely perverse incentive that we don't have the resources to work around. It sucks.
I want to hear more about this idea of 80/20 but I can't find any online management classes to teach me the concept.
5. The Pareto principle. Neither new nor particularly sophisticated.
Hey kids, stop all the downloadin'
My intuition, coming from a place of complete ignorance, was to be suspicious as per 1 and 3. I then Googled the DOJ's input into the situation, so it's a little clearer to me now.
It is unfortunate that the school itself chose to frame the issue partly in IP terms:
Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from "pirates" who have reused content for personal profit without consent.
Also, 6 needs to be moved over to Standpipe's blog.
80% of the time you make a bad joke 20% of the commentariat will take it seriously.
The quote in 8 was part of what lead me to my opinion in 1. Are we supposed to believe that person just doesn't know what they're talking about?
Google suggests the cost for fixing things is around $2 million. That's obviously a lot in the current budget environment, but I'm a little surprised there's not some Silicon Valley corporation that would step in with a donation. $2 million isn't that much money for a rich person or company.
little surprised there's not some Silicon Valley corporation that would step in with a donation.
People say things like this a lot but it never seems to happen. You've experienced general public infrastructure in Silicon Valley proximate locations, right? It's often pretty crappy.
The mention of IP in that statement was acknowledging a minority of instructors who can get tetchy about how their courses are distributed. There's also a related technical issue having to do with automated YouTube filters - if ten seconds of a pop song are played during a course video, YouTube will notice and either block or silence the whole clip.
The drop in state funding means departments across the university suddenly have to do a lot more work on "development," so there's stiff competition for the attention of rich people and Berkeley isn't as enmeshed with Silicon Valley as Stanford is. It's also not a one-time cost - accessibility would have to be budgeted in on an ongoing basis.
Only some fields have new knowledge.
I keep writing and deleting comments.
I don't care about this at all! I'll try to feign sympathy to mask my bitter resignation, I guess. Aw, you guys, that must be so hard not to be able to access all those free courses!
The trick to feigning sympathy is to pretend the person is a puppy.
Meanwhile, IBM is bragging about how good they are at speech recognition. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to prove it?
Decent transcripts also have a lot more applications than just what they can do for people who are deaf. If you attach transcripts to digital media files, suddenly they become searchable. That's no small thing.
14: I was wondering if you would weigh in.
But for real, it's not ok to discriminate even though it would be inconvenient and expensive to accommodate everyone and even though people who might have did not properly fund the initiative. Yes, the courses should be taken down.
It's also not just a matter of captions. Some examples from the DOJ letter:
1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.
2. Approximately half the videos did not provide audio description or any other alternative format for the visual information (graphs, charts, animations, or items on the chalkboard) contained in the videos. For example, in one video lecture, a professor pointed to and talked about an image and its structure without describing the image, making it inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities.
3. Some visual content presented in the slide presentations had low color contrast. For example, two video lectures referenced computer code on the screen that had insufficient color contrast, making it difficult for an individual with low vision to discern. Another video lecture used different colored lines on a graph, but the colors could not be differentiated by an individual with low vision.
There are just huge inherent accessibility problems with online courses that consist of someone turning on a camera in the back of the room. The university has plenty of interest in developing online course content that has accessibility baked in, but that requires changing how instructors prepare their courses, and educating the educators takes time.
Those issues sound like they would be issues with the original in-person presentation of the material. I mean seriously, have you ever seen academic slideware, ever been to a lecture at a university? The rules sort of imply that if you are a student these problems aren't important, but the material can't be released to the public because the standards for accessibility are higher. Pretty crazy.
But for real, it's not ok to discriminate even though it would be inconvenient and expensive to accommodate everyone and even though people who might have did not properly fund the initiative. Yes, the courses should be taken down.
Walk me through this a little bit. I feel like I don't know enough for that to be obvious to me.
I agree that people shouldn't be allowed to discriminate. On the other hand, there's all sorts of content online and on youtube which isn't accessible.
I feel like there is (and should be) some dividing line based on how official the content is. Somebody just filming an event or lecture and putting it online for the heck of it should be fine (assuming no intellectual property concerns) and, on the the other end of the spectrum, something which could be used to receive college credit, or something which is being used to serve explicit institutional goals (e.g., something which has demonstrable value to either the audience or the person putting it online) should be made accessible.
But I'm not sure where the Berkley material falls on that spectrum and what basis is being used to decide.
If there were a student in the classroom with a relevant disability, the instructor would have to make accommodations to provide access. The difference isn't that it's unimportant to students in a live class, it's that you know who the students are and whether or not they need accommodations. So, yes, when you release it to the general public you make it accessible on the assumption that the general public includes people with disabilities.
21: The rationale is that if you're a student you're receiving accommodation from the university's accessibility office that is tasked to provide it; maybe someone's taking notes for you, maybe an interpreter accompanies you to the lecture hall. If you're a member of the public all you get is what's on the webpage.
22- for ADA compliance, it's mainly a question of who's posting it. Big state schools are expected to comply in a more thorough and enthusiastic way than a local city council or individual poster of videos.
For best practices, it'd sure be nice if everybody added captions where possible and summaries and descriptions always.
That seems fair, but it would really kill Rick Rolling.
"In this video, a woman poops in a tub. Like lots."
23
I haven't been in school for a long time, and there were few accommodations or rules on accessibility then. If it is truly the case today that students who need such are getting them, that's great. How widespread is the policing? Is there training so that (e.g.) professors create readable slides?
Professors generally get notified by the student and/or the disability services office at the beginning of the semester, with specific accommodations (extended testing times, notetaker, interpreter, large-print handouts, etc) and then the professor's in charge of making that happen. With help from the disability services office as needed.
Most of those the professor isn't really responsible for making it happen, certainly not for a notetaker or interpreter, but if your school is rich also probably the disabilities office does the proctoring themselves. (Poorer schools do rely on professors doing extra-time proctoring themselves, but also the number of students getting extra time is a tenth what it is at a fancy private school.)
Sure. "With help from the disability services office as needed."
My experience has been more the opposite, it's done by the disabilities office with occasionally a minor assist from faculty. Videos would have to be the same way: most work done by full-time staff in the disabilities office. Producing a transcript would more than double the amount of prep time I do, which is just not going to happen on any kind of regular basis at a research school like Berkeley.
What about a research school that's not as good as Berkeley. Like UC Davis.
Well, whether or not you are the one doing the work, you are the one responsible for making sure your classroom is complying with whatever the notification slip told you to do. Nobody else is "policing" that- the professor is in charge of it.
For most people, in most schools, that would involve either using a different video, or producing a transcript, or having planned things out ahead of time in order to get a loan of a captioned version, or whatever. The argument "I don't have time to do that kind of thing, I'm a researcher!" has not been a successful one. Part of your job is teaching in a way that is accessible to the students in your classroom, even if that means it takes longer to prep.
In my school, it's generally a conversation between disabilities services, the student, and the professor. Most things they do (proctor exams with extra time) or are easy for me to do/arrange (get volunteer note takers). When they've asked for things I can't easily do (i.e. give notes a week ahead to the person who was going to transcribe the lecture in real time, when it was a new lecture prep I was writing class by class) we were able to figure out compromises that worked for the student.
My experience has been more the opposite, it's done by the disabilities office with occasionally a minor assist from faculty.
For us, the disabilities office arranges the final exam, but we're responsible for scheduling and proctoring midterm exams, or arranging for other students to share notes if that's one of the requirements.
It turns out that roughly one undergraduate in any given class has a concussion at any given time. Who knew?
I'm not saying not having the time is an excuse that should get the university out of their responsibilities, just that's it's an argument that would convince the university to handle their responsibilities in a more efficient way. My experience so far (both teaching and when I was a student with a broken hand) is that one of the big goals seems to be to have any extra work done by someone other than faculty whenever at all possible.
The high quality math video courses that I know do have captions available. But they're high quality videos that have a lot of planning and full-time work behind them and aren't just videos of a lecture. Certainly anytime there's someone who is making the videos as their job it's easy enough to have captions, because professional videos are already a lot of work.
I don't think I'm aware of any math lectures ever that are accessible to blind people. Googling a little suggests it's just really hard to do and requires highly specialized Braille knowledge. I know Berkeley had a blind math major when I was there, and I think what he did was have someone take notes in latex and then have a computer read the raw latex code aloud at home later. It's hard for me to imagine understanding anything that way, but he was obviously super sharp. It's not clear to me how one could comply with that part of the order for online video math (or physics) lectures.
Yes. I've worked with a blind student. I think he didn't really use Braille at all, or at least minimally. Mostly he used text-to-speech programs. He definitely preferred raw LaTeX files to PDF files, which could confuse his reader.
I had a blind classmate at MIT. Text-to-speech was definitely the big thing, and yes to LaTeX markup as a preferred form. He had the speed on his reader cranked all the way up, and I got a certain sense of accomplishment one semester when we worked on a coding project together and I heard it reading our code enough that I learned to understand it.
Taking the ice skating class with him was also something of an experience.
I had a blind friend majoring in math at MIT back in the early 70s. She met another friend of mine in one of our study groups and he became her translator and boyfriend. (I think they're still together. She later got a PhD in math, and BTW, her dad was a classmate of my dad's back at CCNY.) He told me that there is a mathematics extension to braille for math. It is a bit esoteric and context dependent. e.g. He once mentioned that the braille symbol for an integral is the same as for the word "the". He translated a number of textbooks into braille, including Thomas, the basic calculus text. When they went to LSC movies, he would explain the action. He was pretty good, but sometimes it was like listening to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Our whole group would be laughing with the rest of the audience wondering what drug we were on. (Hey, this was the 70s. They were curious.)
I also knew a blind programmer who used to hang around the computer center, and he was able to listen to the old IBM Selectric "golf balls" on the terminal and figure out what the computer was saying. I remember him once or twice asking me to read an error message for him when the computer got just a bit too clever. Another software guy I knew was deaf, but he was an excellent lip reader. I didn't even realize he was deaf until someone told me that I wouldn't be able to wake him up by shouting at him. (He was catching a few z's after an all nighter.) He hacked the displays to flash instead of ringing a bell and testified in Congress to get the laws enabling those TDDs, special teletypes for the death in public facilities.
Things have gotten a lot better since then. Kurzweil, for all his flakiness, did come up with a usable reading machine, and I gather Apple has done a pretty good job making its gadgets accessible for people with all sorts of problems.
First time I used tdd with my stepson it was soooo awkward and I couldn't imagine this stilted process pretending the middle aged lady in a cubicle in Sacramento reading my stepson's lines wasn't part of the convo could ever work. And then there i was 6-7 years later reading him the riot act unconstrainedly at 1 a.m. after he'd totalled the car (he was uninjured BUT a v expensive hearing aid was lost). I remember after hanging up marvelling that I had been completely unaware of the pauses etc during the call. Ha! Then we all became super early texting adopters, the end.
I probably shouldn't laugh, but the typo in 44 now has me imagining gladiator teletype machines - an early version of CoreWars, perhaps?
My best friend worked for awhile at a telephone captioning service. Her job was to simultaneously translate speech into robot voice so it could be picked up better by the speech to text dictation program, and to correct any errors in the captions as they came up.