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Comment by FfejL | Hacker News Reader

If there is no penalty for not making them available for the deaf, why would any institution pay for captioning?

UCB wasn't ordered to take them down. UCB was ordered to make them accessible, and chose to take them down rather than spend the money.

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Out of interest, I tried to work out how much it would cost. A couple of companies offering subtitling services offer basic subtitling for $1/min, and closed captioning (which I think you need for accessibility?) at $5/min. Assuming 1 hour lectures, that's either $1.2 million or $6 million, though you might be able to negotiate a better rate for a big job.

CC includes description of relevant non-verbal sounds, but it's not clear to me why the price difference is so big.

There seems to be a lot of duplication too, some courses have 4 different copies uploaded from 4 years.

There were also issues with diagrams, charts, maps, tables, etc presented in the videos that should have links to screen-reader friendly versions for the blind, or audio descriptions.

There may be legal matters of certification. Since CC is required by law, it probably has to meet certain requirements. You probably can't just hand the job off to some native-English-speaking teenager armed with Subtitle Workshop. It likely has to be someone who knows what they are doing and whose work is somehow validated for some sort of compliance. I would imagine.

I believe subtitling is done from the script for a show, which is why sometimes what is on the screen doesn't match what the actress says. Typically, it's the same concept, just with slightly different words. They probably just load it up and make sure it's synced.

CC (I think) is done live by transcribing what is actually said. That's certainly true for live events where there is no script.

I wonder what kind of legal footing they would have had if they open-sourced the closed captioning and had it crowd-sourced

Rather than shouting in an echo chamber about how just or unjust this is, coming up with solutions like this is a much better idea.

We already have the videos, we really don't need the original school's help. Would it be possible for someone to make a web interface where this could be done in 5 or 10 minute chunks?

The consequence of which was forcing an organization to choose between spending an enormous amount of money, or making a previously free resource unavailable. How is this a good thing?

> If there is no penalty for not making them available for the deaf, why would any institution pay for captioning?

Do you realize the insanity of that kind of logic? If there is no penalty for not curing HIV, how can McDonald's sell hamburgers? Where does it end?

>How is this a good thing?

If I'm deaf, I know that you have no advantage over me merely because you can hear. I think that's "good". The laws are in place to protect minorities.

Yes, but deaf people are always at a disadvantage. The law cannot eliminate that. All it can do is make reasonable compromises to mitigate it. This compromise is very clearly not reasonable.

>Yes, but deaf people are always at a disadvantage.

I agree.

>The law cannot eliminate that. All it can do is make reasonable compromises to mitigate it.

I also agree with this. And I believe that's what this law is doing: saying "you may be at a disadvantage in these ways, but you won't be in this way if we can help it."

The law doesn't say to remove the content. It says to make it accessible.

At the risk misinterpreting what may be an obvious attempt to be sarcastic...

Surely you jest. As the parent noted, such reasoning is squarely on the path to insanity.

What a society could possibly attempt to ensure is "equity". What you are suggesting should be sought is "equality". Since this is (trivially) impossible to attain, to attempt to do so is a fool's errand.

You may be measurably more intelligent than me. Should society force some crippling drug on you, to ensure I am not relatively hindered, merely because you can think more effectively than me?

Some appear to believe so...

>Surely you jest. As the parent noted, such reasoning is squarely on the path to insanity.

What's insane is people comparing the government drugging us to equalize our IQ to the enforcement of a law that requires a publicly funded institution to put closed captions on their videos if they're to be publicly available.

I'll bet a reasonable solution comes from this, sets a precedent for the future, and the huffing and puffing will be for naught.

Harrison Bergeron comes to mind...

It's everything that's wrong with regulation. Even the logic of punishment rather than reward is flawed (you train humans with positive feedback/reinforcement, the negative kind works comparatively worse or not at all).

Edit: I understand the downvotes, relatively (e.g. as seen by Californians relatively to the US in general). Just know that I speak from France, a country where regulation has gone way, way overboard insofar as it cripples the economy moreso than it protects individuals, by ultimately preventing any reform/change/disruption whatsoever in many, many sectors. There's such a thing as "balance" and "intelligence in regulating". On a general level I very much advocate for a strict body of regulation; I just think it should be as minimal, solid, logical and simple (intelligible) as possible. Which is very much not the case in my country.

Reinforcement (including positive reinforcement) training for adult humans works especially poorly and attempts to implement it often have perverse, demotivating effects.

Regulation is more about creating incentives than conditioning.

Do you have sources about that? My current understanding is completely otherwise. Taken from the general wiki article[1]:

> The study of reinforcement has produced an enormous body of reproducible experimental results. Reinforcement is the central concept and procedure in special education, applied behavior analysis, and the experimental analysis of behavior and is a core concept in some medical and psychopharmacology models, particularly addiction, dependence, and compulsion.

Which also confirms pretty much everything an ex-gf, who completed a master in Psychology when we were dating, told me about positive versus negative reinforcement. Basically, stick doesn't work much, carrot does.

I agree that it's a widely different topic for regulation. I probably shouldn't have mixed the two so directly, there are many discrepancies. However it's been shown that incentives (i.e. rewards, positive reinforcement of some behaviors) work at the societal level, e.g. family/reproduction incentives (giving money to people who have children; I don't know how these policies are called in the US), or incentives to buy houses, newer cars, etc.

> more about creating incentives than conditioning

I fail to grasp how the former isn't a particular subset of the latter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement

Americans with Disabilities Act is law.

The logic isn't insane if applied to a better example.

If there's no penalty to making cars without seatbelts, then carmakers will make cars without seatbelts. So we outlaw cars without seatbelts. This is exactly the society we live in.

Sure, a car with no seatbelts might be better than no car at all. But society has decided that cost is worth it, in order to incentivize widespread installation of seatbelts.

Berkeley has chosen to throw its car away rather than install the legally required seatbelts.

Not all regulations are good (and this one may not be), but I think the logic behind them is understandable, not insane.

Yes, but there are limits to that logic. And people seem to be taking the position that the moral hazard inherently justifies the policy. While I am taking the position that the moral hazard justifies the policy within reason, and that this particular example falls clearly outside that definition.

Cars without seatbelt affect everyone. Subtitle-less videos only affect a minority.

People pay for cars with seatbelt. Free videos don't earn income.

That seems like a poor example. Seatbelts are a measurable safety benefit to nearly every single person who drives or rides in a car.

The deaf OR hard of hearing population of the united states is roughly 4.1% (10.6 million).

A closer example would maybe be: if paraplegics needed special seatbelts to be safe in cars, should we mandate that all car makers be required to install special seatbelts that are paraplegic compatible? (Paraplegics make up a small fraction of the population of the United States - somewhere around 300,000).

Obviously that comparison has holes in it as well, but it is a lot closer. And I would think the answer would be no, not because of heartlessness, but simply because it doesn't make sense. I assume, again not heartlessly, that most paraplegics do not drive. Likewise, most deaf people will not access these videos.

It seems closer to insanity than reasonableness to mandate either of these things.

> The consequence of which was forcing an organization to choose between spending an enormous amount of money, or making a previously free resource unavailable.

Or going to court and challenging the government's interpretation, as, in fact, the ADA requires only reasonable accommodation.

The university chose that it would be a better use of its time to spend the effort making future content more accessible than establishing, as it quite possibly could, that it had no obligation to do so for this kind of content in the circumstances in which it was offered. Which is clearly it's decision to make, but when the University deliberately chose not to seek an authoritative resolution of it's obligations under the law, it is misleading to claim that the outcome represents it's obligation under the law.

These are videos they're voluntarily uploading for the benefit of non-students, why should they have to make them accessible? If it was an issue where one of their own students needed the videos then that would be different, but these are non-UCB students.

So you're recognizing that there is no penalty. Not to the institution; just to everyone else, deaf or not.

Why would any institution pay for captioning if they can just come around to compliance by taking the videos down without any penalty.

This is now how you use legislation to move toward a the goal of greater (ultimately universal) accessibility.

Easy, the rule should be for newly posted content. Most rules aren't retroactive for obvious reasons.

The ADA was a pre-existing rule that went into effect many years ago; they were just recently challenged for allegedly breaking it. There is no retroactive application at issue.

OK. All videos posted after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed.

So you only need to subtitle video posted on the web after 1990? Not a big difference there.

Yes.

And UCB is also a really really poor university which cannot afford to make them accessible, right?

BTW this would be a good crowdsourcing project.

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