I don't think so :( UC Berkeley were forced to take down lecture videos as a result of some slight violation of the ADA. There are a couple links about that further down this page.
I don't know what ADA is in this context (misspelling of NDA maybe?), but hopefully this means that the next time they run the course -- in 2018 -- they will avoid those violations and be able to distribute video recordings.
UC Berkeley was hit with a lawsuit saying that their videos were inaccessible because they had no subtitles. So they're just taking them all down to avoid it.
Some people just don't want others to have nice things.
The stuff costs money, too. Money that might have gone on other things even more important. Just one class of disability combined with sidewalks might cost LA over a billion dollars:
>Some people just don't want others to have nice things.
I don't know you or your situation, but it's easy to think that while not really being how this works. ADA lawsuits are filed for a variety of reasons and at least some are intended solely to be the stick that gets a company to do the right thing for a group of people who have protection under the law. Often, these lawsuits are accompanied by timelines for implementation that are pretty reasonable (months or longer). I can't speak to this particular one, but that was an experience at my company. Some companies/organizations choose to provide the benefit in one way or another, and others choose to behave in the manner of UC-Berkeley (and, presumably, they know why they are choosing to take down videos instead of captioning). It isn't fair to single out people w/ that empty platitude. Sucks that the content is being taken down, but I bet UC-Berkeley had a choice.
ADA is the American Disabilities Act, which require equal access for those with hearing, visual or manual disabilities. The videos in question most likely lacked captions for the hearing impaired, which would have been prohibitively expensive for Berkeley to add to the thousands of videos that they offered. Therefore to comply with the letter of the law, Berkeley removed access to the videos.
It's the acronym for American Disabilities Act or something. I get ADA-related results every time I look for updates on what people are doing with the Ada programming language. It gets more unfortunate when one realizes how much words like safety, formal policies, and so on are used by web sites dedicated to both. I almost got fooled a few times thinking I was reading a result about the language but it was some ADA safety initiative. (rolls eyes) Have to work the filters carefully.
I will say you don't want to screw around with ADA requirements. I've seen plenty of news reports of companies taking hits in court over it. Best for business owners to see what they need to do and do it whenever they can afford.
