No one believes this.
And when the fuck did adaher become reasonable???
I’ve got a couple of unreasonable lines of argument going in other threads, don’t worry.
Without pointing fingers of blame, I’m wondering if UCB decided to be practical about this. With the DOJ warning, UCB saw this as an opportunity to legitimately take down material they viewed as obsolete, and no longer applicable to their current educational standards. They can certainly give their current video library the proper ADA requirements as they produce them, but giving the same treatment to their legacy courses isn’t worth the effort, if those courses have diminishing educational value.
My workplace did the same thing in switching to a cloud-based system. They left all the old content on the old servers and eventually phased them out. We were given the option to preserve our files on Microsoft’s One Drive, so maybe some UCB course developers did the same.
All I’d need is 50% + 1. I’m cheerfully confident.
When they had the site up, lot’s of people could get a free education & deaf people could take advantage of many of the free courses. Now no one can. What a tragedy.
This is a *pro bono *act. The stuff generates no revenue for them. It is free to the world. Any cost is more expensive than not offering at all. They already have to pay to provide bandwidth. (IIRC, they estimated 1 million to fix the problem)
It would be like me complaining, “Your post did not include Braille, c’mon, get with it, fix that (and all your previous posts). How are blind people supposed to benefit from your wisdom, that you cast out so freely to the sighted?”
I know this is a sensitive subject to you, and it is to me, too. I’ve experienced pushing my brother’s wheelchair halfway around a huge building in the cold and wandering through a maze of corridors and elevators in an ADA compliant building, just because the store we wanted to visit only permitted use of its revolving doors, and not its swinging doors. But we probably wouldn’t have been happier with no store at all.
In a slightly more perfect world, the ADA regulators could identify the offending videos, and mark them for removal.
But having heard the expression “we can neither prescribe or advise”* before, I’m guessing that was not possible.
*this means “we can’t tell you how to do it, we can only tell you when you’re doing it wrong”
Berkely could have reviewed everything on its own, and only left up compliant material, but that costs, too. I guess it is possible that some at Berkely wanted to do away with this program anyway, and this provided a good excuse.
In what world is the line between “reasonable accommodation” and “unreasonable accommodation” determined by cost?
It has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s cheap and/or easy to implement and everything to do with its function. “Reasonable accommodations” exist to bring disabled people to the same level as the average abled person, regardless of cost. “Unreasonable accommodations” are the ones that go beyond that.
For example, a reasonable accommodation would be allowing a student to participate on their school’s track team with the assistance of a service animal. An unreasonable accommodation would be allowing said to participate by riding said service animal.
Or to use a classroom example, given the general topic, a reasonable accommodation is allowing a student with learning disabilities some extra time to take a test or have the questions read to them or take the test in a quiet room. An unreasonable accommodation is allowing them until the end of the semester to finish the test or to Google the answers.
Surely even someone thick enough to believe that cost or ease even enter into the equation is able to see the difference has nothing to do with either.
Berkley spending a pile of money, or really any money, to change something they are giving out for free so that a minor percentage of the population can access it in the way they want to is unreasonable. And, under the law, they do have the option to just stop offering the free service.
That someone actually brought suit - was allowed to bring suit - against an organization that was providing something for free because she didn’t like the quality of the closed captioning is asinine.
“Want to” has nothing to do with it. People want plenty of things. The word “reasonable” is in there specifically to shield from people claiming that they should be allowed to do what they want.
Once again, the amount it costs is wholly irrelevant.
That’s right, they do.
Nobody is forcing them to offer anything. When they make the decision to offer something, that’s their call–and with it, comes the obligation to make it available to everyone, regardless of race, color, gender, disability, etc.
Luckily, the ADA disagrees with you.
Why do you keep emphasizing “free”? What should be the cost cut off where discrimination should be legal? Should that cut off also apply to race or gender?
Would you be making the same argument if a McDonald’s got sued because they decided to have “Free burgers for White People” day? I mean, it’s free, so the people who can’t partake can’t complain, right?
Of course not. That’s incredibly stupid. And, thanks to the ADA, disability is right there with race and gender when it comes to discrimination.
The bottom line is this: if the closed captioning wasn’t at a level that put a deaf viewer on par with the average abled viewer in terms of accuracy in comprehension, then that’s on Berkeley, not the deaf viewer.
I wouldn’t call this an unintended consequence of the ADA any more than shutting down polluters is an unintended consequence of EPA regulation. This is that ADA working the way it has to work. If I write the regulations so as to say that you must have closed captioning unless doing so would be so prohibitively expensive as to prevent making content available, the result will be that every entity would claim that closed captioning was prohibitively expensive and no one would close caption anything. Similarly if you want to have a businesses accessible to people in wheel chairs, then you can’t exempt any ice cream store that says it can’t afford a ramp, even if doing so means that many able bodied people have to go without ice cream. To do otherwise would mean that no places would bother being handicapped accessible.
So if I own an ice cream shop, and decide to go to a beach one day and GIVE AWAY ice cream for the day, I have to make sure that my FREE ice cream stand is handicap accessible to anyone, or else I shouldn’t be giving away ice cream to everybody, and in fact, is against the law?
No. The captioning was bad. It may be that some of the videos weren’t captioned at all, but I think more to the point, a captioning service was being used that did voice recognition, and automatically added the captions-- it’s how they are frequently done on the cheap-- but you get lousy captions that way. The word “Catastrophe” comes out “cat ass trophy,” and so forth. And then, there are things the computer doesn’t recognize, so it “autocorrects”-- “Uber” to refer to the car service is new in the vocabulary, so it isn’t a word the system recognizes. If it is articulated well, it comes out right, but doesn’t get capitalized; if it’s mumbled, it comes out “super,” or “earlier,” or something. Sometimes the system just throws up a series of black rectangles, and several words are left out. And it usually has no idea how to deal with non-European based names. And then, sometimes the captions cover an important part of the screen.
Watch the captioning on a live news broadcast, or sports event, and you’ll get the idea. Captions on network TV shows are prepared by actual people who sit down and work from the original script, and choose the placement of the text blocks so that it is clear who is speaking, and nothing important on the screen is covered. The quality of captions varies so much depending on how they are done, you can’t assume that just because you’ve seen quality captions somewhere, every caption, everywhere, is high quality. Sometimes they suck so much, they might as well not be there.
Since you’re giving it away, can you also ignore the health code rules for food preparation and storage?
If you set your free ice cream tubs on a platform, and people have to climb up a few steps to get to them, and guy in a wheelchair rolls over and gets your attention, and says “Hey, could you hand me one?”
And you answer “Sorry, buddy. You’ve got to get onto the platform and come and get it. No platform, no ice cream,” then yes, you have committed illegal discrimination.
Strange. Do I similarly have to hold the cone for a person with no arms, or am I discriminating against them too for not having ice cream cone neck harnesses?
Now that you mention it, at a recent tailgate party I threw, I gave away hamburgers and hot dogs and I doubt that I followed any health code rules for food preparation and storage. Surprisingly, no police or health inspectors showed up.
“Want to” has everything to do with this particular case. I don’t know the exact details, but the fact remains that Berkley did comply with ADA and did provide closed captioning, which the plaintiff says wasn’t good enough. Since this is an older bunch of videos, it’s possible that the CC on there is what was state of the art back then; given that this is Berkley, it probably was. Yet for some reason the plaintiff thinks it is reasonable for Berkley to pay to upgrade something they are already paying to give her for free.
Actually, it is relevant. “Reasonable” includes cost to the service provider. The ADA cannot be used to insist that an upgrade is made that is not actually necessary for access just because someone wants it.
And, it was available until yesterday, to everyone. This one deaf person decided that this free service wasn’t good enough for her and that someone else should pay to fix it. It’s like someone in a wheelchair saying that the ADA compliant ramp into a business is too steep and the business should pay to alter it.
What makes you think that?
Because this isn’t discrimination. The videos had CC, old CC that didn’t work well, but then the videos were also old. You and she are demanding that a lot of money be spent to upgrade something that was being offered for free, and the result of that demand was Berkley deciding that the money they were currently putting into offering this service was now a bad investment.
Look, I am actually a card carrying honest to gawd crip. I travel a lot and can’t do motel rooms that aren’t first floor. Most of the lower end ones, like Motel 6, Super 8, etc, don’t have elevators. To me, demanding that Berkley upgrade old videos would be the same thing as demanding that Motel 6 pay to put in elevators. Disability isn’t like race, gender and all that - you cannot turn someone away because they are the “wrong” color, but if all of your downstairs rooms are full, you can turn a disabled person away if they cannot access the upper floors. It’s on the disabled person to plan ahead or find another motel. Same with this - if the plaintiff wants better access to the information on those videos, it’s on her to find it.
Do you own a restaurant or grocery store where hamburgers and hot dogs are sold?
Like ladies’ days/nights at bars and other businesses? Those need to go. If I’m giving a couch away I don’t have to provide any assistance in moving it if someone in a wheelchair rolls up.