It's a tough spot to be in. On the one hand, it's great to make all the content accessible to handicapped folks, but on the other hand, is society better off not having this material at all or having it without accessibility?
It won't be expensive once we have better speech recognition and NLP 10 years from now. Seriously, just make the content available. Not to mention that leaving the content up might even inspire volunteer and crowd-sourced efforts to caption some of the higher-quality content.
I'm all for promoting accessibiltiy but can we not do it at the expense of impairing others? Hiking trails in Yosemite are not handicapped-accessible; does that mean we should shut them down?
Barring some public funding to make it possible for institutions to caption videos, which would be the reasonable solution, the demand for captioning vastly raises the barriers towards putting content online.
Because it's prohibitively expensive, or because they can't be arsed?
I used to assume the prohibitively expensive angle, but DEF CON has had live closed captioning for 3 or 4 years now, and is done so the recorded material can be used in classrooms with accessibility requirements. If DT can afford it, I have little regard for people who pretend to be committed to educating the masses and still don't bother.
They could have spread the cost over the 25 years the law has been in place instead of leaving it all until now.
This is entirely separate from your examples, as people in india arent taking american buses or elevators - but they most certainly are taking advantage of american educational content that is publicly available.
legacy content that is 3-10 years oldSome wider implications are very alarming. Consider all of the video content that libraries hold. If it's not ADA-compliant, having it available to the general public is arguably discriminatory.
The approach typically applies to retrofits for fueling stations, coal power plants, etc.
This content is new enough (by 15-22 years by UCB's count) tht it should have had support for everyone. They just didn't notice or didn't care.
In a few years perhaps it can come back for everyone through a new tool. In fact they could spend some of the captioning money on a better autocaptioner than youtube. In fact I am surprised that KLH's auto-captioner didn't already do this since the letter says this material is on youtube.
I don't think it's either one. If I'm a prof and I want to make my lectures more accessible, I'm going to put them online, and be glad that 95% of the population can see it. If I have time and budget, maybe I'll hire someone to caption it. But still, I'd rather have it out there for 95% of the world to see than not at all.
> In fact I am surprised that KLH's auto-captioner didn't already do this since the letter says this material is on youtube.
They were sued because the auto-captioner was wrong enough to be considered harmful.
The benefit was to the public to have access to the material, much less so to Berkeley. By putting the onus on Berkeley to caption the videos, they've (very reasonably) just pulled them down, and the public loses.
You mean some of the public loses. Others in the public never had access to lose.
People said the same thing when the government decided buildings should have ramps, public bathrooms, etc. Things worked out OK.
I think that's the most tame and non-sarcastic way I can respond to your question. This sort of stuff makes me furious and it's only going to keep happening.
Or maybe there are other considerations at stake.
> For better or worse, large portions of society (especially those found in academia and cities) have decided that a level playing field is more important than having any playing field.
That's completely false. What people has decided is that sometimes is worth having a small cost for the big benefit for everyone that it is to have accessibility. Without a more careful case your arguments falls into the Straw Man fallacy. (This fallacy includes an attempt to "prove" an argument by overstating, exaggerating, or over-simplifying the arguments of the opposing side and attacking that "straw man" argument instead of the original one.)
> This sort of stuff makes me furious and it's only going to keep happening.
I hope that this video helps you to understand what's suggested for help people with disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPymLgfXSY
It is about helping them, not about making things difficult for the rest. If you have the opportunity to talk with some disabled people that have seen their lives improved thanks to this measures probably you are going to be less furious and more happy about it. :)
These "legacy" things are between 3 and 10 years old.
The law had been in effect for 17 years before Berkeley started producing video.
There's likely a fairer way of doing this instead of denying access to all for the sake of a few. For example, a JIT system for accessibility. A disabled person, if interested, could make a request to have material translated to their preferred mode.
Still, I think it's a matter of interpretation. Access is being denied for all i.e. the public.
The amount of video that is being produced and uploaded today makes a requirement to put traditional closed captioning on each one absolutely laughable and ridiculous. It's telling that the requirement was dreamed up in 1990, probably by people without a lot of vision for how cheap bandwidth might become and the amount of content that would be produced and shared within a few decades.
The public is the loser, here. Institutions like Berkeley will have to pull down high-quality content, but amateur content isn't affected. So the overall quality of content available to the public just got worse.
There is no way in which this is a win for the majority.