Aaron Gibson at
Berkeley Deletes 200,000 Free Online Videos to Comply with Insane Department of Justice Ruling
>> George Standish:
“I blame the policy here, and NOT UC Berkeley”
The policy of requiring thing to be accessible if not the problem here.. This is a clear example of why such laws exist. Without them we end up living in a non-inclusive distopia.
Let me illustrate.
UC Berkeley COULD fix this by stripping the audio off of all the videos as that would put everyone on an equal footing.. But people would scream and rail against the fact that the videos are now useless..
Why then should the videos be useless to a sizable chunk of the population. Remember hearing impaired isn't just the mainly invisible deaf minority. It's the elderly, those that have suffered trauma to their hearing apparatus.
All of us are one bad day away from being in that group. Or a couple of decades if you count age related hearing loss.
To say that requiring stuff to be accessible by all those people is, what, wrong? bad? unfair? Really. Pull the sound card out of your computer and see just how "fair" media content is. Don't even get me started on how the interwebs treat the visually impaired.
IMHO the only villian here is Berkeley's administration.
Ok I'll get off my soap box now...
Inclusion is IMPORTANT, but it can't be the ONLY criteria.
>> George Standish:
“Inclusion is IMPORTANT, but it can't be the ONLY criteria.”
True.. But from what I've seen of this UC Berkeley a resource rich, connection heavy, institution didn't even try. Instead of putting in the smallest iota of effort they instead decide to pull it all down and create a controversy.