Christmas Village shoppers no longer will be allowed to enter booths
phillyvoice.com>At the 2025 market, vendors and Christmas Village staff had temporary ramps that they could place out to accommodate shoppers who used wheelchairs or walkers.
>"Well, it was a great approach, but a very small group of people do not like that they need assistance to enter booths which able bodied don't need to ask for," Bauer wrote.
I wonder if that small group of people are pleased with the outcome.
This is why envy is a sin.
This is a very Harrison Bergeron outcome, enforcing equality with a least common denominator. I wonder how many bureaucrats could read that story as a guidebook.
>how many bureaucrats could read that story as a guidebook.
All of them
This required a solution so creative and comprehensive that it took 32 months of many stakeholders and the best legal minds they could get.
If you can't add access for all, then add barriers for all.
Too bad the regulators didn't spell out plainly that the default under imperfect conditions is always more barriers not less. They should have made it obvious that the law primarily requires more barriers the whole time without having to waste almost 3 years to achieve clarity.
And the additional barriers have to be so effective even the most able-bodied can't overcome them.
It's the law.
I liked it better when there were more able-minded regulators.
Or maybe the designers of the booths could have simply familiarized themselves with the most basic of laws they were required to comply with before designing the damn thing with an unnecessary step.
That's the problem right there, only with "bureaucracy as usual" it can be virtually forbidden to do any root cause analysis.
That could be so shocking that the whole chain-of-command could have a heart attack :\
Malicious compliance strikes again.
Alternatively, they could have designed booths without unnecessary steps. But sure, blame it on the ADA.
I'm tired of this world
"And the trees are all kept equal / By hatchet, axe, and saw"
Thank you for the reference. A really, really good one!
Reminds me of all the smaller/local newspapers and stations in the US that geo-block the EU from their content because complying with the GDPR - and paying the appropriate folks to ensure you are in compliance - simply made no business sense.
Another ADA disaster, along the same lines as when UC Berkeley was forced to get rid of all their free online course videos, because they didn't have the budget to have someone write captions for them. You should never have to take something away from people who aren't disabled just because making it accessible isn't feasible.
> You should never have to take something away from people who aren't disabled just because making it accessible isn't feasible.
The ADA is a horribly-designed law precisely because it encourages this behavior. Reforming it is necessary, but doing so would be so politically toxic that it will probably never happen.
Yeah the ADA can both be a good idea, while also having perverse incentives/externalities. Reform is the answer.
Really just a case of needing common sense judges and enforcement or this law.
Temporary event and with an accommodation solution for the minority of disabled guests shouldn't have to inconvenience everyone just because a few people "feel" inconvenciend for having to ask for the accommodation. It's not like this is a subway station, public building, or some other kind of venue where a permanent access solution is needed.
I think some people who are disabled are just miserable people who go around trying to make everyone else miserable too. That's the only reason these lawsuits are filed.
Seems to me both are examples of institutions not complying with the rules (laws, regs, etc.) by choice.
The Philadelphia government could have budgeted for ADA compliance and it chose not to, just as Berkeley could have budgeted for captioning. Budgets reflect our priorities. It is clear from both examples that meeting the needs of people with disabilities is not a priority.
Why would Berkeley budget for captioning on a series of videos that they're giving to the public for free?
Expecting them to accommodate everyone for loss-making global educational philanthropy is a ridiculous overreach. It has made the world poorer and entrenched the disadvantage of everyone not in the US. Thanks, disability advocates.
The same reason the free sidewalks in front of Berkeley can fit a wheelchair. Because it is illegal to make one that discriminates against people who use one. Even if it's free.
Counter point is captions are also really cheap. I presume the lecturer read from a script, just use that.
They were archival footage of old lectures.
But also, "really cheap" is only cheap when something is done for profit. When it's done as a charitable side gig then pretty much any expense is expensive.
For many charitable activities it may be, but also, the University of California system has a 53.6 billion dollar budget. They could pay some people to caption them if they cared to do so.
They could have, but they didn't, then they got sued, and now kids in Kenya can't watch world-class lectures. Thanks, disability advocates! Thanks, UC!
It was solely UC's decision to pull the lectures rather than comply with the 36 year old law that they were already well aware of but decided of their own accord to ignore. They never cared about being charitable, they cared about the ROI on their marketing stunt to make themselves look charitable.
Good thing we all had the ADA to protect us from free educational material distributed for cynical reasons.
Unironically, yes.
They are a government land-grant public institution that is supposed to provide services equitably to their citizens. They shouldn’t be pinching pennies to enrich their administrators. They should be held accountable for following the law and their obligations in the work they are required to do. If anyone should be setting an example for equity, or at the least following its own damn laws, it should be our government itself.
My response to that would be
“Hey intern/grad student, enjoy your new assignment”
We made a few videos 14 minute for math for the first year of the university. It was similar to stand-up, the speaker has a clear ideas of she was going to say, we took like 1 or 2 hours to pick the best examples and discus the path,. Anyway most of the details were improvised on the spot, with many sentences skipped or added or changed. We made a few takes of each 2-3 minute part, and glued the best.
Also we had to fix a lot of typos in the blackboard of the talk. I remember a "one plus zero is zero" that I had to fix. The hard part is finding a "one" that comes after a word that ends with an "s" because otherwise it sounds horrible.
>I presume the lecturer read from a script.
You presume wrong. No college professor will waste the amount of time required to fully write out everything they will say in class in advance. Notes, yes. Detailed notes, not unlikely. Full script to be read verbatim, nope.
The ADA isn't some surprise gotcha that crept up on any of these people, it has been around for 36 years. The problem is that 36 years later, people are still ignoring the fact that disabled people even exist.
Whether or not we want to admit it, this stuff happens because people think and act like it is okay to disregard accessibility.
> The ADA isn't some surprise gotcha that crept up on any of these people
The ADA was written in an extremely non-specific way that allows unelected bureaucrats to reinterpret it every so often. To be honest, the US would probably have a more accessible society if the law was better written.
That's a problem with executive political appointees more so than the unelected bureaucrats. Career civil servants working in a regulatory capacity are typically very consistent experts who do a good job of taking vague shit that congress would otherwise fuck up trying to define more specifically and interpreting it in a way that makes practical sense to people who know what the fuck is actually going on. It's the political appointee leadership that tries to pull the creative reinterpretation nonsense you're talking about.
Already had accessibility. Now there's none.
This is exactly the case that came to mind when I saw the headline. They had gobs of course videos that they released online so that anybody could watch them. I was incredibly delighted to see a state funded school doing this. And they had to pull them all because they didn't have a feasible way of adding subtitles.
I agree but also is it really that difficult to use some sort of auto-caption program with maybe an asterick not assuring accuracy? I feel like it would be impossible to legislate the quality of captioning and it isn't like mistakes don't happen even with a human transcriber.
Automatic Captions are not ADA compliant.
https://www.speechpad.com/blog/ada-compliant-captions-vs-aut...
If you have a risk of getting sued because someone notices a transcription error versus just not uploading videos, people will choose the latter.
That article (slash advertisement for Speechpad) spends a lot of words not explaining why human captioning is preferable in general to automated captioning. If I, a human, make a mistake in captioning my videos, am I any better off than if I'd used whisper and it messed up?
The page lists some of the requirements, e.g. accuracy, completeness, equivalence in access, etc. The point of their pitch is that you can't simply tell your SWEs to slap automated captions on something, check a box, and call it a day. You'd need to actually confirm you're meeting the requirements, which is something that a human who is trained in this compliance activity would do. (and something that unaware SWEs often miss)
A common compliance mistake (for any type of compliance, not just ADA) is:
* someone tells an SWE to implement [compliance measure]
* they implement poor quality [compliance measure] that doesn't actually meet the compliance requirement, close jira ticket
* they don't realize they didn't meet the compliance requirement because they don't use or need [compliance measure] and they are a SWE without any expertise with the law or the understanding of reason for the need for that requirement
How does one auto-caption a white/black-board in a world before insanely cheap computer vision?
Captions are for audio. I presume if someone is reading captions they can read the whiteboard.
Now if you are talking about the blind then sure thats different but the blind don't need captions.
Are you sure? When I went to college, the whiteboard was a supplement to the lecture, so either/or would not have worked.
What if they are hard of sight and can't read the whiteboard or blackboard, even if they might be able to read a captioned video?
Lord knows I remember barely being able to read some professors handwriting, even in person, or being able to understand what the hell a professor was saying in person.
How many people are there that can efficiently caption complex mathematical equations?