BERKELEY – The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a proposed consent degree in federal court with the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Berkeley campus after the school violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by failing to make online content accessible to people with disabilities, the DOJ announced on Monday.
“This decree will provide people with disabilities access to the numerous free online courses, conferences, lectures, performances, and other programming offered by U.C. Berkeley and its faculty, providing lifelong learning opportunities to millions of people,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.
The consent decree still requires court approval.
The DOJ’s complaint spotlights people with hearing, vision and manual disabilities who have had trouble fully taking part in UC Berkeley-sponsored online content.
Adam Jarshow is a deaf man who teaches at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, the government said in its complaint. Jarshow would like to share UC’s free educational content with his students but says he cannot do so because it is not accessible.
“He feels like he is less of a human being because he cannot use the same content that is readily accessible to individuals who are not deaf,” said the DOJ.
In addition to making its online content on YouTube, Berkeley X, university websites, videos and podcasts accessible, upon the consent decree’s approval, UC Berkeley will be required to 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.
The court action stems from a complaint filed to the DOJ in 2014 from the National Association of the Deaf alleging that “thousands” of UC Berkeley’s online courses, lectures and other content were inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The government found the complaint valid, and in 2016 the DOJ notified UC Berkeley that it was violating the ADA. The DOJ told UC Berkeley that it needed to take measures necessary to come into compliance with the federal civil rights law. By 2021, the DOJ said that UC Berkeley still had not addressed many of these problems.
People with hearing, vision or manual disabilities have tools that they can use to access online words, images and other materials. However, institutions still need to make sure their online content is “readable” by these interactive tools.
For example, the government found that the way certain websites were organized made them difficult for someone with a screen-reader to navigate. Math equations, for example, were not always defined in a comprehensible way for people with vision disabilities. The tag structures of some PDFs were also difficult for screen-readers to access.
Other sites such as the university’s YouTube channel, which has thousands of videos related to admissions, studying abroad, sporting events, symposia, graduation ceremonies and other programming were also inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. On YouTube, UC content either lacks captions or relies on YouTube’s “inaccurate or incomplete” captioning capability.
“Although UC Berkeley can remediate inaccurate or incomplete automatic captioning rendered by YouTube,” said the DOJ, “UC fails to do so.”
Lectures and other programming shared on Apple’s iTunes were also not ADA compliant, the government said.
In its complaint, the government alleges that the university “had knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that its online content did not comply with the ADA, but nonetheless… failed to implement necessary corrective measures and continues to discriminate against individuals with disabilities.”
A spokesperson for the University of California, Berkeley was not immediately available for comment.
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