Within the next week, UC Berkeley will be forced to remove over 20,000 lectures, videos, and other digital documents from its free online library. While the prestigious school has been generous in making its electronic resources available to the public, a violation of the Americans with Disability Act has left the University with no other choice but to remove the online archive in its entirety.
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Like many institutions of higher education, including many other Ivy League schools, UC Berkeley has contributed to open source learning by sharing its curricula and other materials to online platforms like YouTube and iTunes, as well as its own site.
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Nearly 3,000 miles away from the iconic Sather Gate entrance at UC Berkeley, two employees of Washington D.C.’s Gallaudet University—a school for the deaf— were outraged to learn that Berkeley’s online archives, though extensive in scope, were not accessible to those with hearing impairments.
Instead of contacting Berkeley to see if accommodations could be made without resorting to state intervention, the complainants sought help from the Department of Justice (DOJ).
After investigating the claims made by the two Gallaudet employees, the DOJ came to the conclusion that yes, Berkeley’s free online archive had in fact violated the ADA, particularly Title II, which mandates that all public audio and video content provide accommodations for the deaf and hard of hearing. Among these stipulations is the requirement that all applicable content offer closed captioning, which, regrettably, 543 of Berkeley’s videos were missing.
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All 20,000 files will have to be removed from the online library. Now, instead of one group of people having limited access to a very small portion of Berkeley’s extensive online library, the whole world will lose access to the entire archive.
UC Berkeley was put in the unfortunate position of being demonized for providing free information. To satisfy the ADA requirements and keep the content live, the University was going to have to reformat all the videos in question. However, this process is both timely and extraordinarily expensive, which left Berkeley with only one remaining option if it wished to comply with the DOJ’s demands.
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To add insult to injury, it turns out that removing this digital library will ultimately end up requiring about five months worth of work— a cost UC Berkeley will be forced to pay.
- Discussion
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Ms Hunter concludes with:
Imagine an alternative reality where instead of pursuing legal action against UC Berkley, those who felt passionately about this matter joined together as a community and raised awareness and funds in order to provide the funding needed to have the 543 videos reformatted. If they had “criticized by creating,” instead of by litigating, not only would the problem have been solved in a more productive manner than it actually was, but all parties would actually benefited in the end.
Sad, isn’t it?
As Diane Merriam said,
The classic standard of progressive quality … the equality of misery. If one person can’t get something they want, then nobody should.
Thanks to mdak06 for this:
Now there’s no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet ….
Axe ….
And saw.
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