The ADA was passed in 1990, so it was in place a full 17 years before Berkeley started adding video to the web.
The university strongly agreed with disability accessibility law. They put policies in place to make sure content was accessible. They offered free support to professors to make content accessible, and they required professors to sign documents saying "I have made this accessible". People lied by signing these forms when they had not made the material accessible.
If they hadn't lied, and had made use of the free support when creating content, the material would have been accessible from the beginning, and the university would not have been dumped into the massively unlawful position they were.
This wasn't some "opportunistic ADA lawyer", it was the inevitable result when hundreds of employees lied about accessibility.
Here's the list of statements that people said they'd done that they mostly had not done:
1.I have reviewed and implemented edX’s “ Guidelines for Creating Accessible Content.”
2.All PDFs attached to my course follow the University of California Office of the President recommendations.
3.I have reviewed and implemented applicable guidelines into my course from the Web Accessibility team’s resource “Top 10 Tips for Making your Website Accessible.”
4.All mp3 and mp4 files in my course have been submitted for transcripts for SubRip Text (SRT) files.
5.All video and audio in my course have accurate captioning available to users through the edX HTML5 player
What's the point of removing content because its not accessible to some small fraction of the population? Is this meant to punish the professors who signed something they likely didn't fully read? It seems that it's punishing individuals who would find this information useful.
What's the point of a law that can just be ignored with no consequences?
> who signed something they likely didn't fully read?
I'm always surprised when I hear this. Signing a document to say you've complied with the law when you haven't complied with the law is a pretty big deal. Maybe I'm missing some context, but you should read the things you're signing.
If I was reading Medium as part of my employment then yes, I would have read the ToS.
If you're saying that Berkeley was paying lip-service to accessibility by having boiler-plate that faculty didn't really need to comply with, well, that makes the situation worse, not better.
"We tried but we didn't account for human factors so we failed" is much better than "we didn't really try, we just pretended, because we wanted to give a good impression without actually making any changes".
Fair enough, I do read every license for any code I use at work.
However, I would certainly think that "we wanted to give a good impression without actually making any changes" is probably closer to the truth. I doubt Berkeley as an institution really cares about accessibility; it sounded like a good thing and policies were enacted without a lot of thought given to the ramifications. If multiple professors signed off that their courses were accessible, then it certainly strikes me that this was a low priority that was largely ignored.
The ADA was passed in 1990, so it was in place a full 17 years before Berkeley started adding video to the web.
The university strongly agreed with disability accessibility law. They put policies in place to make sure content was accessible. They offered free support to professors to make content accessible, and they required professors to sign documents saying "I have made this accessible". People lied by signing these forms when they had not made the material accessible.
If they hadn't lied, and had made use of the free support when creating content, the material would have been accessible from the beginning, and the university would not have been dumped into the massively unlawful position they were.
This wasn't some "opportunistic ADA lawyer", it was the inevitable result when hundreds of employees lied about accessibility.
Pages 3 and 4 https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
Here's the list of statements that people said they'd done that they mostly had not done:
1.I have reviewed and implemented edX’s “ Guidelines for Creating Accessible Content.”
2.All PDFs attached to my course follow the University of California Office of the President recommendations.
3.I have reviewed and implemented applicable guidelines into my course from the Web Accessibility team’s resource “Top 10 Tips for Making your Website Accessible.”
4.All mp3 and mp4 files in my course have been submitted for transcripts for SubRip Text (SRT) files.
5.All video and audio in my course have accurate captioning available to users through the edX HTML5 player