MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-03-16 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] One step forward,
|
On 03/15/2017 11:19 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> If you ever decide to get serious about this, you need to go back and
> learn some civics, including how administrative law (codified in the
> Code of Federal Regulations) works within confines set by enabling
> legislastion (codified in US COde). 42 USC 12131(1)(B), 42 USC 12133,
> and 42 USC 12132 are the enabling legislation in this case. 28 CFR
> 35.104, 28 CFR 35.172, 28 CFR 35.130(a), and 28 CFR 35 subpart F are
> administrative law.
what are you talking about. You have groups sueing MIT and Harvard over
this directly with Obama support. The lawyers there are currently Obama
lawyers and they sent letters in support of those suits.
http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Harvard-Complaint.pdf
http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MIT-Complaint.pdf
http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2015-06-25-34-DOJ-Amicus-Brief.pdf
http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2016-02-09-50-Report-and-Rec-re-MTD.pdf
http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2016-02-09-51-Report-and-Rec-re-MTD.pdf
https://creeclaw.org/online-content-lawsuit-harvard-mit/
http://www.centerdigitaled.com/higher-ed/Web-Accessibility-Investigation-Higher-Ed.html
UC Berkeley is figuring out what to do next as the U.S. Department of
Justice tells it to make its online audio and video content accessible.
by Tanya Roscorla / September 23, 2016 <<=====
A little before the election FWIW
UC Berkeley is figuring out what to do next as the U.S. Department of
Justice tells it to make its online audio and video content accessible.
by Tanya Roscorla / September 23, 2016
https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf
August 30, 2016 <<== Again before the election
In the event that we are unable to reach such a resolution, the
Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit pursuant to the ADA. 42 U.S.C.
§ 12133; 28 C.F.R § 35.174. Please contact Charlotte Lanvers at (202)
305-0706 or charlotte.lanvers-at-usdoj.gov
or Elisabeth Oppenheimer at (202) 616
-3653 or elisabeth.oppenheimer-at-usdoj.gov
within two weeks of the date of this letter if you are willing to
resolve this matter voluntarily or if you have any questions regarding
this letter
NUh - what is that. Do what we tellyou or we will take you to court and
make you do it.
https://www.overlawyered.com/2017/03/ada-takes-berkeley-courses-offline/
http://www.weeklystandard.com/berkeley-goes-offline/article/2007153
Berkeley Goes Offline
Another victory for the grievance industry.
Mar 20, 2017 | By Andrew Ferguson
The Berkeley online-course website in early March
A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist
named Stacy Nowak went to take a look at a college course offered online
by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called
"Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to
UC Berkeley; she teaches art at Gallaudet University. But she was
displeased with the quality of the closed captioning the university
provided on the course's video.
Nowak, who declined to be interviewed for this article, got hold of the
National Association of the Deaf, which she's a member of. In doing so
she set in motion a train of events that will come to a head on March
15. Already famous for other reasons, the Ides of March will likely
stand as a signal day in the development of modern liberalism, or
progressivism, as we are supposed to call it. That's when one bastion of
left-wingery, UC Berkeley, will give in to the demands of another, the
disability-rights movement, to deprive the rest of us of a uniquely
wonderful resource of modern technology. It's not as complicated as it
sounds.
Since 2012, UC Berkeley (among many other schools) has offered video and
audio recordings of many of its courses to the general public, via
YouTube and iTunes U. The Seussian acronym is MOOCs, for massive open
online courses. Over the years Berkeley's catalogue of MOOCs has grown
to more than 40,000 hours of high-end pedagogy. There are introductory
courses in economics, European history, statistics, physics, geography,
and pretty much everything else. More advanced courses range from
"Scientific Approaches to Consciousness" and "Game Theory" to "The
Planets" and "Philosophy of Language," this last taught by John Searle,
the country's, and maybe the world's, greatest living philosopher. Not
all of the content will be to everyone's taste, of course, and I'm sure
there's something to annoy anyone sooner or later. Professor Michael
Nagler's simpering "Intro to Nonviolence" makes me want to punch
something. I probably wouldn't like "Journalism for Social Change," either.
But still, wandering around this digital edifice one can't help but
marvel. Has the Internet ever seemed so close to fulfilling the promise
of its salad days? Think of it: Anyone anywhere can take a class at UC
Berkeley, at their own pace, without tests or note-taking or waking up
before noon! And despite the reflexive slanders from conservatives and
its well-earned reputation as a hive of left-wingers, Berkeley remains
one of the great intellectual centers of the world when it's not being
torched by its students. Clicking on a course that seems even vaguely
interesting, a former liberal arts major will now and then feel a
reawakening of the thrill and sense of elation and limitless possibility
that are among the great rewards of brainy adventures. Berkeley's MOOCs
constitute an expansion of intellectual opportunity unimaginable 25
years ago.
Unfortunately, that's about the time Americans saw the imposition of the
Americans with Disabilities Act. The act, passed in 1990, ordered
American businesses and other institutions, public and private, to make
"reasonable accommodations" to employees, customers, or even random
passersby, as long as federal regulators dubbed them disabled. The
disability could be mental or physical. A drunkard no less than a deaf
person is considered disabled for purposes of the ADA.
The law was called "bipartisan"—a word that should ring like a firebell
in the ears of every lover of liberty—because it was passed by a
Democratic Congress and signed by a Republican president, George H. W.
Bush. Mostly, though, it was the work of the newly minted
"disability-rights movement." Disability activists insisted their cause
was the next stage in the same movement that brought legal liberation to
African Americans. This has since become a common strategy for rent
seekers of all kinds. Yet the rationale for inventing rights based on
mental or physical disability bore no resemblance to the civil rights
movement of earlier decades. The ADA was a brazen exercise in moral
free-riding.
The only opposition to it came from a brave band of libertarians and
constitutionalists who saw it as a gluttonous and unprecedented
expansion of state power. The ADA gave the federal bureaucracy the
authority to muscle its way into the interactions of private citizens as
never before. For the first time, a civil servant in Washington could
reach across the country to demand, for example, that a store owner in
Spittoon, Kansas, build his grocery shelves to whatever height the
bureaucrat chose. For good measure the grocer could be fined if his
water fountain spouted water at the incorrect angle.
The ADA spread a feast for plaintiffs' lawyers. Its provisions are so
comprehensively intrusive that no business could hope to be in perfect
compliance. One federal manual, covering the single topic of "accessible
design," comes to more than 275 pages. Walter Olson, author of The
Litigation Explosion, has tracked many of the tens of thousands of
lawsuits—from the deaf patient awarded $400,000 because his
rheumatologist failed to provide a sign language interpreter, to the
police dispatcher who won a settlement for discrimination after she was
fired. Her disability was narcolepsy.
Beyond the fate of individual businesses, and despite the warnings of a
few economists, the unconquerable American economy absorbed the expense
and market inefficiencies of the ADA with only the slightest
indigestion. It swallowed, burped, and moved on. By now the act's
reshaping of the landscape is so pervasive as to be invisible—curb cuts
on street corners, ramps jerry-rigged on old office buildings, doors
that open magically of themselves, and so on. After the ADA the country
was much less free but its rulers were much more pleased with themselves.
https://www.cato.org/blog/adas-assault-web-turn-congress
[Texas attorney Omar Weaver] Rosales says extending ADA rules to
websites will allow him to begin suing companies that use color
combinations problematic for the color-blind and layouts that are
confusing for people with a limited field of vision.
a National Association of the Deaf lawsuit against Harvard for not
subtitling or transcribing videos and audio files posted online. As such
cases multiply, content may be taken offline. Paying an accessibility
consultant to spot the bits of website coding and metadata that might
trip up a blind user’s screen-reading software can cost $50,000 for a
website with 100 pages.
And of course brick-and-mortar businesses continue to be exposed to the
full force of opportunistic complaints from ADA filing mills:
The hundreds of pages of technical requirements [relating to ADA’s
Title III] have become so “frankly overwhelming” that a good 95% of
Arizona businesses haven’t fully complied, says Peter Strojnik, a lawyer
in Phoenix. He has sued more than 500 since starting in February, and
says he will hit thousands more in the state and hire staff to begin
out-of-state suits. … Violators must pay all legal fees [and courts
ordinarily find violations].
With the Obama administration committed to pushing a view of the ADA
inconsistent with online liberty, it is up to Congress to act, both by
cutting off funds for DoJ adventurism and, more fundamentally, by
amending the law to curtail theories that leave most current online
content vulnerable to being chased off the web as non-compliant. While
it’s at it, why doesn’t it address the ADA plight of brick-and-mortar
Main Street businesses too?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
The University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to
tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts in response to a U.S.
Justice Department order that it make the educational content accessible
to people with disabilities.
Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and
the university’s webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will
begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those
platforms -- a process that will take three to five months -- and
require users sign in with University of California credentials to view
or listen to them.
The university will continue to offer massive open online courses on edX
and said it plans to create new public content that is accessible to
listeners or viewers with disabilities.
Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education, made the
announcement in a March 1 statement.
“This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department
of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes U content meet
higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly
available,” Koshland said. “Finally, moving our content behind
authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual
property from ‘pirates’ who have reused content for personal profit
without consent.”
The Justice Department, following an investigation, in August determined
that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of
1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints
from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free
online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people
because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.
Stacy Nowak, one of the complainants, referred comments to the Justice
Department and the National Association of the Deaf. The NAD did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
The department ordered the university to make the content accessible to
people with disabilities. Berkeley, however, publicly floated an
alternative: removing everything from public view.
“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,” Koshland wrote
in a Sept. 20 statement. “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.”
Now the university has settled on that option.
Koshland said that Berkeley has since 2015 piloted requiring university
credentials to access recorded lecture content. That system has so far
proved more effective at helping the university accommodate students and
others at Berkeley with disabilities.
The Justice Department’s investigation did not look at how Berkeley
serves students with disabilities, only the accessibility of content it
offers to the public.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/14/after-uc-berkeley-announcement-universities-say-they-will-continue-offer-free
The recent decision by the University of California, Berkeley, to
restrict public access to free online educational content has raised
questions about whether other colleges and universities will do the same
to avoid legal action.
The university this month announced it will remove audio and video
lectures currently available to the public on platforms such as iTunes U
and YouTube. Berkeley said it reached that decision after determining
that retroactively making the content accessible to people with
disabilities would be “extremely expensive.”
Berkeley has pledged to create new publicly available content that
conforms to web accessibility standards, but restocking its online
libraries will take a long time -- its decision to remove content
encompasses tens of thousands of publications. The university’s YouTube
channel, for example, includes 9,897 videos.
The U.S. Department of Justice in August found Berkeley was in violation
of Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and ordered
it to make the content accessible. The department's investigation only
looked at content available to the public, and not how Berkeley serves
students with disabilities.
It is unclear whether the Justice Department will take as active a role
in accessibility lawsuits under President Trump. Disability rights
groups, however, have been open about continuing to take the legal route
-- “university by university,” as a spokesperson for the National
Federation of the Blind once said -- to ensure that institutions don’t
discriminate against students with disabilities.
and the ARE.
So Law suites are flying all over the place and CLEARLY the government
said it was gong to sue in court if Berkeley didn't comply with its ruling.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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