Berkeley Settlement on Remote Education

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

There has been litigation against UC-Berkeley under the Americans with Disabilities Act regarding educational materials online and access to them by disabled persons who may have problems with sight or hearing. Yours truly dimly recalls that UC-Berkeley at one point handed over videos of past lectures to some kind of nonprofit entity independent of the university so the material could remain online.

A settlement by Berkeley with the US Department of Justice has now been reached. Presumably, it would affect all UC campuses, not just Berkeley, regarding future access to such material. What remains unclear is exactly how this settlement affects the proliferation of online courses that developed during the pandemic. For example, Zoom will create a transcript - essentially computer-written and thus not always accurate - of lectures. But it does not have a mechanism for generating sign language. Many faculty have posted recordings of lectures for in-person classes. What is the status of that activity?

In any case, the news release announcing the consent decree agreed to by Berkeley and the Justice Department is below:

The Justice Department announced today that it has filed a proposed consent decree in federal court to resolve allegations that the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the University of California, Berkeley (collectively, UC Berkeley) violated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) because much of UC Berkeley’s free online content is inaccessible to individuals with hearing, vision, and manual disabilities. The proposed consent decree was filed together with a complaint setting forth the allegations of discrimination.

“By entering into this consent decree, UC Berkeley will make its content accessible to the many people with disabilities who want to participate in and access the same online educational opportunities provided to people without disabilities,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “This decree will provide people with disabilities access to the numerous free online courses, conferences, lectures, performances and other programming offered by UC Berkeley and its faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to millions of people.”

UC Berkeley makes conferences, lectures, sporting events, graduation ceremonies and other university events available to the public on its websites and on other online platforms, including its YouTube and Apple Podcasts channels. It also makes courses available on its UC BerkeleyX platform. Much of this online content is not accessible to

people with disabilities because it lacks captions and transcripts for individuals who are deaf and alternative text describing visual images for individuals who are blind. It is also formatted in a way that does not allow individuals with disabilities to access the content using screen readers or other assistive technology.

Under the three-and-a-half-year long consent decree, which requires court approval, UC Berkeley will make all future and the vast majority of its existing online content accessible to people with disabilities. This includes BerkeleyX courses, university websites and video and podcast content on its YouTube, Apple Podcasts and other third-party platforms. UC Berkeley will also revise its policies, train relevant personnel, designate a web accessibility coordinator, conduct accessibility testing of its online content and hire an independent auditor to evaluate the accessibility of its content...

Full news release at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-securesagreement-university-california-berkeley-make-online-content.

To hear the text above, click on the link below:

https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/ada.mp3