Wednesday, September 21, 2016

College: We'd rather remove videos than make them accessable

A California university would rather remove its online videos rather than accurately caption them and make them accessable to everyone. That's basically what administrators at the University of California at Berkeley are telling the Justice Department. A statement released by the school (which you can read here) says a final decision has not be made but that Berkeley things it's too expensive to make the online material accessible, even if it is a violation of ADA law not to make it accessible. The statement says:
In many cases the requirements proposed by the department would require the university to implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources available to the public for free. We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from public access.
The controversy began when a faculty member and a student at Gallaudet University complained. Not only do many of Berkeley's videos lack captioning, much of the captioning that is available is inaccurate. The material is also not accessable for those who are blind.