Thanks To Federal Regulations, UC-Berkeley May Have To Remove 20,000 Pieces Of Online Educational Content

It’s UC-Berkeley. OF COURSE they’re going to cave to Big Daddy Government (the government is basically their god. What the government says, goes).

According to this and this, UC-Berkeley offers upwards of 20,000 educational videos and podcasts online FOR FREE. Many universities are doing that now for distance students or simply for people who want to learn about a particular subject, but aren’t college students and don’t necessarily want to pay the tuition or get the college credit. They are simply interested in a topic and want to know more about it.

But apparently two deaf individuals from a university in Washington DC complained that Berkeley’s online classes weren’t accessible for people who are hard-of-hearing. So under federal ADA regulations, the Justice Department ruled that Berkeley had to fix these materials, or remove them –

The department investigation followed complaints by two individuals who are deaf — one of them a faculty member at Gallaudet University and one at its school for elementary and secondary school students. Both said that they are unable to use Berkeley online material because it has not been formatted for use by people with hearing disabilities.

Berkeley released the Justice Department letter finding the university in violation of ADA. The letter outlined numerous concerns about issues related to those who are deaf as well as those who have visual disabilities:

• Many videos do not have captions.
• Many videos lack “an alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs, charts, animations or URLs on slides), such as audio description, alternative text, PDF files or Word documents).
• Many documents “associated with online courses were inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities who use screen readers because the document was not formatted properly.”
• Some videos that had automatically generated captions were “inaccurate and incomplete.”

To recap: Berkeley either has to comply with federal regulation because of two complaints, or deny access to these materials for EVERYBODY.

Remind me again why federal regulations suck?

Soooo… because these videos don’t help you or your students, you had to get them removed so nobody could see or hear them? You couldn’t… oh, I dunno… find another source that suited your needs better? I’m certain they exist somewhere in the vast expanse of the internet.

Now, Berkeley claims that removing the videos and podcasts looks like the more viable option because of the time and cost that it’d take to fix these materials – perhaps that’s true. Though I do wonder why they couldn’t make it a project for students in their ASL department or something. That would be infinitely preferable than capitulating to the federal regulation ban-hammer.

I’m just going by what’s in the article talking about this, so I freely admit that I don’t know all the circumstances. But I do hope that they at least considered that option.

Look, I understand the importance of helping people with disabilities gain access to educational materials. When I was in college, I had a part-time job with the university’s Disability Resource Center taking notes for deaf students. I attended their classes, listened to the lectures, and took notes so they could pay attention to the sign language interpreter in the class, rather than have to worry about missing something important said by the instructor. It was a job that I thoroughly enjoyed! Sure, I was attending classes that lead to precisely zero college credit for myself (and the pay wasn’t exactly wonderful), but I was helping other people with their college education.

But just because you have a disability does not mean that you get to dictate how things are going to be for other people who do not share your specific challenges. What’s next? Will all colleges and universities be forced to take down their online videos and podcasts as well? Beyond higher education, what about amateur podcasters and video creators? Will ALL podcasters and YouTubers – educational or otherwise – be forced to make their content accessible to the deaf and blind? In my spare time, I’m a co-host of a podcast that discusses geek culture and we’re super low-budget and low-tech. If anything like that happened to us, we’d have to close down completely. There is no way that we could capitulate to a federal regulation like that.

So yes – this whole thing bugs me.