If I make a video wherein I teach some concept, but don't provide closed captions, and then distribute the video for free, am I discriminating against the deaf? If I knew I had to create closed captions, and then make a braille transcript, or maybe even make my video colorblind friendly, I just wouldn't make the video in the first place. I sympathize with folks with disabilities, and I applaud those who go the extra mile to accommodate them, but making it mandatory under the law seems ridiculous to me.
When it comes to individual works, I don't see how this would have any bearing on your product. You're not beholden to the ADA in your creative works, from what I understand. Double the exemption for making something for free.
It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these products and do not maintain quality standards respective of existing laws. No musician has to include a print out of their lyrics in the liner notes, it's a completely voluntary transaction without stipulation of such ADA compliance, in that the terms of the relationship are different than this case where Harvard is a 'service provider' of sorts (the service being the transmission of knowledge).
This is different than the occasional lawsuit trolling where a person in a wheelchair finds small businesses not in compliance with the ADA and brings a case...this is...well, an educational institution with the resources and capability for compliance, but they aren't complying. Seems pretty workable from a high-level standpoint to me.
I understand that the law may not strictly apply to me. I am making a statement on the principle of the situation. I don't think MIT or Harvard should be forced to provide captions for their videos either.
Well, I think you're misapplying your principle in this instance. I think Harvard or MIT should have to provide captions in the spirit of the law that exists. It's not like the ADA was passed last year, so to think that the physical Harvard/MIT facilities would be ADA compliant but online facilities would not strikes me as a necessary coming to grips with the law as it's written. Hence the lawyers will fight this out and we'll probably get an answer.
For the purposes of armchair moralizing, who cares about the law as written? Pretend we're making the law, instead of deferring to the law as written. Should we in fact tell them "it is illegal for you to put out this material to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the deaf part of humanity?"
> For the purposes of armchair moralizing, who cares about the law as written?
Because the law embodies certain moral conclusions. The ADA is premised on the idea that businesses have an obligation to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled. At least in 1990, this moral conclusion was compelling enough that the ADA carried a 377-28 margin in the House, and a 91-6 margin in the Senate.
As an aside, to me, laws like the ADA are one of the things that make America great. It is a virtuous people that decides that the lucky among them should take on the burden of enabling the unlucky among them to live life as normally as their disabilities allow.
My understanding of the law is that a reasonable accommodation must be made when requested, not that everything must always be ADA compliant for all disabilities. One may conceive of different disabilities for which two reasonable accommodations might be mutually exclusive, so requiring two or more mutually exclusive accommodations to always be present is by definition unreasonable. Of course, it isn't impossible or unreasonable to caption a video; but it might be so expensive to caption all videos as to have the result that some just won't bother to post them. That would be unfortunate.
Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"?
I think we should, because I think people with disability have the same right to move or to learn than I do. And accommodating to them is important.
Do you know a disabled parent who says their non-disabled child shouldn't be provided an education unless they themselves also have access?
All those countless millions living in near poverty in Africa and Asia and in that dingy corner of your city you never drive through... do you deprive them of a leg up in life just because you don't get closed captions?
so access to knowledge--most of which, it's worth noting, is massively subsidized by taxpayers in the form of grants and related overhead--is a luxury good?
that's not a world i want to live in; access to knowledge is foundational infrastructure.
>People are asking (by means of the public courts, as is their right) for equal access to that knowledge.
"Equal access" is not free. If universities are given the choice of not providing free educational resources and paying shit-tons of money to provide free educational resources accessible to every random group that sues the university over the way these free materials are presented, universities will obviously choose not to offer free educational resources.
You are arguing from an abstract position. The universities in question have already chosen to provide free educational resources and are now being sued to provide a reasonable accommodation to allow a subset of the population access to those resources under the aegis of the law.
Old joke:
A marxist economist meets a market economist at a conference. After listening to an exposition on Smith and Hayek he nods vigorously and says "Yes, yes! I know it works in fact but does it work in theory?"
Just to clarify the position you're arguing for. A university has a bunch of existing videos that have been taken of lectures. Someone asks "can I put these online for free?". The answer should be no you can't unless you're willing to have them all transcribed.
I suppose it rests on the definition of reasonable accommodation which could range anywhere from "making the material available for transcription" to "full professional subtitles should be made available".
I think the law applies to new videos that are created for distribution online. I don't think it applies to videos created before the ADA was passed that are put online now. Or a private conversation that was published.
A building is not a video. An older private residence does not have to be upgraded to be ADA-compliant. A video which is intended for mass distribution should have some effort put into accessibility.
That's according to a narrow view of "equal access."
Many people (if not a majority) have an entirely different definition "equal access." On this view, simply putting text or a video up on the Internet without captions is providing equal access: everyone is equally free to download and make use of that information, to the best of their ability.
If I am free to publish a video on my own accord without captions, shouldn't I be free to do the same with a video I've made with a group of my friends? And if this is the case, why not a group of my colleagues? Present law aside, I don't see why should I lose my right to do something just because I'm doing it as part of a group.
>"I don't see why should I lose my right to do something just because I'm doing it as part of a group" (maxharris) //
Just taking this and doing an analysis ...
A) The initial premise is that: one should make reasonable allowances, eg of low cost, to accommodate those who might otherwise be excluded from society in some way due to accident, genetics, medical conditions and such.
B) The subsidiary premise is that: this allowance should be provided as a legal right to those who would otherwise be disproportionately excluded from society.
I don't think that argument holds water against this initial premise. A group has more resources. Making multimedia content accessible isn't required of individuals because it's proportionally excessive. In the same way a small store might not be expected to fit a wheelchair ramp but a supermarket would be expected to (indeed floor level access would probably be stipulated at the planning stage if it weren't already by the supermarket corp).
To put it a different way: if one child comes up to you and asks for food out of a genuine need, you've got a truck full of food. You're probably going to feel morally obligated to feed them. Now suppose a whole country comes to you and says they need food. With that same amount of food you're not going to feel morally obligated.
So, it seems there is some cut off at which the available resources compared to the size of the problem make a difference. I think that is enshrined in the ADA in USA and certainly is in the DDA in UK law.
The final element then in the OP is that (C) Harvard and MIT have the resources and so should also carry the obligation.
I think this is actually where I don't agree. That whilst as a whole they have the resources, for this project they do not. The allocated resources for this project mean that if the obligation were applied to make release of videos require captions and braille transcripts and such that the means available would not be sufficient to continue the project.
An analogue question might be: Does a chain of tiny convenience stores have an obligation to put in wheelchair ramps in some stores even though for the specific store it would be an excessive cost relative to their income.
tl;dr I think it comes down to compartmentalisation of the institutions.
[Perhaps maxharris you're right but just need to present your argument differently?]
Considering that the course materials in question used to only be accessible to a very small subset of very smart people who happen to have a very large money to afford tuition at MIT/Harvard, yes, that particular material is a luxury good.
The legal implications go to many schools, so I don't think we're talking about luxury in the context of two elite schools. I think we're talking about the inclusion of minority populations in publicly funded institutions of education, and just how much we want them in our society. Perhaps we do, perhaps we don't, perhaps it's somewhere midway.
Yes, but they accept federal and state money, just like when the UC's accepted federal money and decided to submit on the issue of military recruiters on campus, because getting federal funds is voluntary and to the nearly arbitrary discretion of the executive branch.
However, I do think that there should be more mechanism than the purse to persuade institutions to make material accessible to disabled populations -- but for major institutions only, since I'm not sure smaller organizations can cope with the burden. Perhaps organizations above some revenue?
Doesn't that parenthetical comment destroy the rest of the [small sub-]argument: because you paid someone for doing research doesn't mean that if they decide to make something else free to access that you have a right to make further demands of them.
If central government just gave them a stipend and didn't specify the projects it was to be used on then the argument you're supporting would perhaps have some mileage; but it's payment for a specific service. If the schools aren't making their research centres accessible or are unnecessarily excluding disabled people [from research related tasks/benefits/etc.] then, yes, this argument would be valid.
There are different levels of accessibility. The courses are still there, there isn't an audio captcha making sure deaf people can't read the notes, read the book (when available) or do the problem sets. This is nothing like an inaccessible sidewalk keeping somebody in a wheelchair from getting to the grocery store.
And I'm only talking about MIT's OCW here, their edX courses are all captioned. OCW was scheduled to run out of funding last year[0] and they apparently don't even have the funds to update their FAQ. I'm just saying you have to pick your battles.
As a longtime OCW donor myself, I definitely hear you but would still say we still have miles to go until we've made OCW accessible to all. I could see how OCW might not feel very open to the blind and deaf.
I never said I supported the lawsuit or even its goals; but ignoring accessibility shortcomings for certain groups because of financial or other barriers sort of misses the point of aiming to make knowledge accessible to all.
edit: just noticed sensory references in first paragraph
One problem is that, unless you're a deaf teacher, it was not in OCW's remit to make it's offering accessible to you.
Now that OCW has run out of its original block of money and is passing around its hat, that could of course change, then again it shows every sign of being only a step away from maintenance mode right now (all the mojo is presumably with edX, which OCW obviously helped to blaze a path to).
So it this "ignoring", or simply a trade-off in the face of limited resources? If you want the properly captioned option, what are you willing to give up to achieve that?
What I want OCW to be and what OCW set out to accomplish are not necessarily the same things, so in a bunch of ways it's unfair for me to have expectations that don't comport with theirs.
But for me personally, accessibility seems like something worth raising separate streams of funding for if it weren't terribly popular. In sort of the same way, I would've been thrilled if my donations to EFF could've been earmarked for their WIPO Treaty for the Blind work.
I understand the need to make trade-offs and don't begrudge OCW for the ones they've made, but I don't really see having to spend extra money for captioning, etc. as having to give stuff up. To me, it's more that the job isn't really finished until we've done it for everyone.
Some of these courses have "certificates" awarded for fees; and said certificates are the entry point to some businesses; just like the steep steps in front of the building.
And if you read the PR release carefully, no where does it specifically say one of those courses isn't properly captioned. The examples it gives of non- or poorly captioned items aren't even courses at all (http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... which is a really nasty piece of work).
Without looking at the lawsuit (waiting for lawyers like the Instapundit to tear into it, he's big on non-traditional learning like this), I suspect the mention of MOOCs is bullshit, confounding perhaps a MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) offering with the edX ones you're talking about, which others in this discussion have ensured us are properly treated.
I am deaf and I specifically remember about MIT OCW from a couple years ago that, whenever I found something that seemed interesting and had video lectures available, the lectures didn't even have a transcript, much less captions. I went to their website again and literally the first course I picked lacked captions,[1] unless you count the YouTube-generated "love with a system age to have an with a system" as captions. It wasn't very hard to find another seemingly interesting course that doesn't have captions either.[2] Admittedly, after further inspection, more courses seem to have captions than before.
For better or worse, OCW's remit was to publish materials about MIT's courses that would be useful to other teachers. Anything beyond that, like what you tried to do, is gravy.
Now if edX, contrary to everything we've heard in this discussion, doesn't do the right thing, they have a much stronger case. But that's not the case they're making in the PR thuggery, and I thank you for confirming one part of what I suspected.
And just to be crystal clear, OCW is pretty much out of money and mandate, it's mostly in maintenance mode (already past its budgeted life, now begging for cash). The best outcome of this is that such lectures will be picked up by edX and properly captioned. The more likely one is that they'll be pulled altogether, although we hope copies will be captured before that happens.
>Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"?
If it makes it easier to have a sidewalk that would still benefit the vast majority built, sure.
For the second time today, I can't resist pointing out that Harvard would, in any other circumstance, be rushing to tell everybody else about how important it is to be inclusive and scrupulously comply with not just the letter "as written", but the spirit of the law.
Whatever slack I might be inclined to give to others, I am not inclined to give to Harvard. This is Harvard. If the brand "Harvard" means anything, shouldn't it mean going above and beyond the call of duty in providing educational services like this?
In light of Harvard's rhetoric, it is reasonable to expect excellence of this sort. However, with respect to rhetoric about the spirit of a law, it seems to be that they ought to receive charges of hypocrisy.
The civil lawsuit is a step above and beyond this, and I for one don't know that "poetic justice" is the best foundation for a legal regime...
>Should we in fact tell them "it is illegal for you to put out this material to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the deaf part of humanity?"
Yes.
To prevent this exact line of thinking, laws exist. Not just to protect the majority, but to protect EVERYONE as equals, under the rule of law.
I think your comment is thoughtful and well-intentioned, but I find myself wondering about the seemingly egalitarian nature of it.
May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?
In other words, if an organization only has the resources to do a little bit of good in the world, unless they can treat everyone as equals, they shouldn't be allowed to act at all?
> May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?
In your scenario, you only have fixed set of resources and wanted to do as much good as you can.
I would imagine in that situation, to make things "fair" you would have some set of criteria in which a poor person could qualify for assistance.
As long as those criteria were objective (geographic, income based, etc) I would support your organization.
If you only wanted to help poor whites, or poor men, or otherwise discriminated against protected classes, then I wouldn't be okay with that.
To put this back to MIT and Harvard: They made learning accessible to everyone except for people who are deaf and those without internet access. The law protects the first group, and not the second.
Thank you – I genuinely appreciate the clarification.
Yes, I'm assuming an individual who has finite (but possibly significant) resources. Let's assume s/he wants to do as much good as s/he can.
Who determines whether some proposed action is sufficiently good, so as to allow them to take that action?
In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?
For example, if Bill & Melinda Gates wanted to donate a great deal of money to help the poor, would you say that someone other than Bill and Melinda had a right to say how their resources may be distributed?
> In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?
As a private citizen, wishing to donate their money-or other resources, I believe it should be left up to the individual to decide. There are edge cases, such as donating money to support illegal activity--such as "terrorism", or if the donation will be counted towards tax benefits.
With that attitude, MIT would never exist in the first place!!!
Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace.
MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have to learn at a much faster pace than is the norm, a lot of material in a fairly compressed schedule of 13 weeks of instruction if I remember correctly as of the '80s. That's not believed to be good for most STEM students, but we at least believe there's a place in the world for institutions like MIT and CalTech. One meme is that a fair amount of what you learn will be obsolete before your career is over, but there's merit in learning how to learn difficult stuff quickly.
If MIT is all about giving more privilege to the privileged, why did they start the OCW project in the first place? I submit that MIT actually wants these videos to be as accessible as possible, including captions. This is supported by the fast the many of the videos already have captions.
Indeed, and one of its initial and still strong missions is to bring the benefits of rapidly developing science and engineering to the world. As far as I know, the single biggest boost to health and material well being in the US occurred in the post-Civil War period, not much later when we got "modern medicine" as in antibiotics (although what they could often pull off with antiseptics and infection control was amazing, read a history of the Mayo brothers if you're interested).
But we're talking about gross ingratitude here. That OCW is not perfect in this is a crime (literally, unless you think they can get away with ignoring a civil legal settlement or judgement), with a punishment requiring either removing the videos or spending a lot of money it and MIT doesn't have to perfect them under an inflexible legal mandate.
I again repeat, this is not going to end well. Especially for the truly deaf people this is ostensibly being done for.
What about the right to free speech? Do I have the right to write a book that might be hard or impossible to read in braille or not? Do I have a right to make a video without captions or not?
I can't see how the right to individual free speech could be compatible with your view.
By the way, equality before the law means that the same law applies to everyone equally, regardless of social standing, race, etc. It does not make anyone equal in any other sense. Equality before the law does not mean that the law should make everyone equally good at hearing, doing math, playing basketball, dating, or anything else. Human beings are inherently unequal in every other sense but the law, and this is a fundamental fact of existence that can never be eliminated! Examples: none of us will ever have the exact same genetic makeup as any other (and it is monstrous to attempt to force people to attempt to do this). Nor will any of us have the exact same opportunities as any other (a man that lives in Kansas can't also live in Idaho at the same time; the people he meets and interacts with are determined in part by geography!)
>"it is illegal for you to put out this material to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the deaf part of humanity?"
You're forgetting the part where these Universities are taking public funds as well
Harvard and MIT receive (accept) grants from the federal government for producing their content. It's reasonable to expect that in making this content available, they will accommodate all taxpayers. IOW, I'm not sure you understand the principle of the situation.
I agree with you and find it immoral to compel MIT and Harvard to close caption their courses. This is because I embrace a deontological ethic.
If I were to be the devil's advocate however, I would say that the difference between you putting a video out there, and MIT doing it is one of elasticity.
The effort of putting closed captions on your informal video would be much too great and would be very likely to prevent you from releasing the video. However, for large, well endowed organisations like MIT and Harvard, mandating close captioning of their videos is much more likely to result in them incurring the cost of closed captioning than in them not releasing the video.
By focusing on businesses, the law attempts to target those inelastic actors.
Captioning celluloid film is a wholly different thing to transcribing an online video - the prices are in no way comparable.
I create captions for hundreds of hours of video every year - I know exactly how much work it can be, and, at the same time, exactly how easy it can be.
As I understand it, Rear Window Captioning Systems specifically don't modify the actual film of the movie. That's their advantage over baked-in captions.
For a whole lot of people, I think it's safe to say that the answer is yes: the deal is unbearable. I personally would not bother putting videos online if I had to go through some closed captioning hassle, and I doubt I'm particularly special here.
You can argue that people ought to be okay with the extra effort of closed captioning, but don't mistake that for an argument that they will be.
Not OP, but I would defend it with something similar to his statement above. Basically, I want to get the content out, and the extra effort (if required) would be enough for me to say basically "forget it". I'd rather get the content out and have a small subset of people not be able to access it, than not get it out at all. Certainly, there are other ways to make content available to specific user groups that requiring the original content creator to build it in from the beginning.
Perhaps a good first step would be to have a discussion "For the purposes of armchair moralizing", not about the law as it is written, but how it should be.
Once you learn how to do these things, they become second nature. That's the problem though. People don't think twice about learning a new programming language. But learning how to caption videos, choose colorblind friendly colors, or turn transcripts of a video into something that's braile-display or screen-reader friendly are skills that are relatively simple to acquire and will definitely outlast whatever new framework comes out this year.
I am visually impaired. And I have been helping people make the web accessible since 2001. If you plan it from the beginning, it's only a few extra yards, not an extra mile.
It's not a matter of "thinking about it"; captioning is difficult and expensive, and if we force universities to caption educational materials they release * for free *, we're incentivizing them to never release these materials again.
HN is a community where people solve difficult problems for a living. So someone using "difficult" as a reason for something doesn't really fly with me.
As for expensive? I'll agree. Going cost is about $1 per minute minimum. And they're not releasing that material "for free." Make no mistake - it's either because they got a grant (that's what we face) or part of some marketing thing.
I apologize if it sounds like I'm frustrated and angry, but I run into all sorts of inaccessible things created for the web by people who use "difficult and expensive" as the go-to excuse.
If you are preparing a video for something online, you should be planning it and writing a script, which you can easily turn into a transcript. If it's a lecture recording, well, workstudy students can transcribe it for you and caption it.
These are all things responsible educators do. Proudly.
I'm curious, is it just as expensive to have someone produce a transcript of a video, vs. captioning it? Because I'm having a hard time coming up with the 60 dollars per hour or more figure. Lets say you slow down the video (using one of the techniques that doesn't alter the audio pitch), so that it matches your typing speed. Then you can transcribe it in "real time" (i.e., without having to stop, back up, and restart the audio). And it would easy to have the software record timing information (if the transcription is done real time).
So slowing down the video to half speed, means a half hour video takes an hour to transcribe. At a labor cost of $15.00 per hour, that is 25 cents/minute of video. Much less if it is off shored.
Edit: Would it be helpful if Google added a captioning interface to YouTube? That is, an adjustable playback speed (which they have now, but I'd like to see more speed levels), and a capture window where users (volunteers) could provide captioning of any video, including educational ones.
In practice, professional transcription requires 5-10 times longer than the source material, depending on its content.
Slowing down to half speed and listening to it once isn't enough. You need a first pass to write all of it down which is usually not done with simple playback at half speed (which isn't that easy to understand) but instead with foot pedal switch for pausing and rewinding. It takes much longer than the video (well, depends on the video - different speakers speak at very different speeds), and at least a full pass re-listening everything for proofreading.
Technical videos take extra time - you often need to take minute or two to clarify a single term that you don't know, verify that you're not confusing it with another word and that it's spelled properly; and during an hour-long video such terms and the required time add up The same goes up for surnames - it takes a second to blurt out "paper by Mumblemumble et al", and it takes much longer to transcribe that even if the paper can be looked up in other related documents (and not always it can). A single neccessary clarification + a few related emails to solve it already can taka half an hour.
Captioning is some extra work in getting sure that the written segments align with the speech - it basically means that you have to note the start/end information, usually it's done at the initial transcript stage by the play/pause switches (the software packages apply the previously played segment start/end timestamps) and then you need to adjust many of them in proofreading. Not really an extra stage, but takes more work and care.
Transcribing at double speed, as you propose, is not really practical. People speak at 130-180wpm. Decent typists usually type at 65-75wpm. At that rate you would barely manage to 'type what you think you hear right now', which is usable for some purposes not really a transcript.
You are way off. Standard charge for transcription (without timing) is 1 hour work for 15 minutes audio. You can try subtitling yourself and see how difficult your real-time idea is in practice.
>If you are preparing a video for something online, you should be planning it and writing a script, which you can easily turn into a transcript.
Please don't presume to tell content providers how they should produce content, or presume to tell them that a part of the process is easy. That's not up to you to decide for anyone but yourself.
>These are all things responsible educators do. Proudly.
Nice; insult the awesome folks over at MIT and Harvard who are giving us this material for free because they are "not responsible".
I'd be a hell of a lot more proud releasing content that happens to be inaccessible to deaf people than never releasing anything at all because I'm afraid of getting sued under the ADA.
You seem angry and you are constructing a false dichotomy. No one is arguing that content should not be released, just that content, produced in institutions which are recipients of federal grants, should be made available to the widest possible audience.
What is the standard by which we define 'widest possible audience'? Reasonable accommodation.
Your argument reduces to a statement that it is better for Harvard and MIT to offer this content without making an accommodation for certain individuals (of class D), because:
a/it is unreasonable for them to do so
b/certain individuals (of class A) benefit
It's an interesting argument, but one you've introduced no facts in support of.
>No one is arguing that content should not be released, just that content, produced in institutions which are recipients of federal grants, should be made available to the widest possible audience.
Take a step back and look at the potential side effects of what the plaintiff is asking. If a university, with all their money already earmarked, is told that if they want to keep distributing free educational materials then they must pay to transcribe them, what are they going to do? A very likely outcome is that they're going to scrap their free educational materials program. It doesn't take a lot of foresight to see this.
Also, how do you define "widest possible audience"? Should the universities be legally compelled to translate all videos into Chinese as well? There are a lot more Chinese speakers than deaf people.
Based on the breath of the demands per http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... it sounds like just about anything that's vaguely formal, way beyond instructional video and audio. And since they highlight quality problems, albeit bad ones but of mostly silly/very limited utility content....
Nothing good will come of this.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
It appears that they're at least partially misunderstanding where the captains on youtube videos come from.... they're entirely automated voice recognition.
I share a similar viewpoint. Wouldn't it be a better usage of funds to donate to these projects for caption support instead of using those funds to pay attorneys? Why is it so hard to be constructive?
Agreed. Really, I do applaud people going out of their way to accommodate others. If I had just one personal, direct request to create closed captions along with a "please," you bet I would try to help someone out. But making it illegal not to do so puts a sour taste in my mouth.
That's a confusing sentiment. So deaf people shouldn't be given something for free, but they should get something for free "from the beginning?" Which is it?
The communication needs to be made accessible by the person or group who produces it. Not by some outside organization that goes around cleaning up other people's accessibility messes.
Fair enough. So you're saying that deaf people ARE a charity case, you just want them to be a charity case for the original content producer rather than a third party?
Yeah, that could have been clearer. Deaf people are 100% as deserving of this content as non-deaf people. They should not be treated as a separate group. Captions are a required part of the distribution, not an optional add-on. There is not "the real message" and then "the message for deaf people".
this is a false choice; no one would credibly make that sort of claim about audio-only courses in podcast form or video recordings without audio. you're focusing on the economics, and that's fine, but the court is focusing on whether it complies with the law.
This makes no sense. What's wrong with outsourcing something you're not very good at?
I don't speak Hindi, I'll happoly outsource the translation of video to an agency that can do this for me.
Same with sign language, I don't know it. I'll happily outsource to an agency that can do the sign language translation.
Care to explain why you think I should have the skills inhouse to suport multiple types of accessibility when those skills can be hired in via a third party?
All languages in the target society, I guess. If e.g. Harvard doesn't have much presence in Swahili-speaking societies, there's not much damage in not having the video translated to Swahili. But if you are giving an advantage to some members of a society over others, you're treating the others as second-class citizens. They might even feel separated, because they can't participate in something that everyone else has access to.
If you want to give away something for free, why should you be forced to spend time and effort (and possibly money) to increase the value of your free offering?
Can you see why this would have a stifling effect on giving things away for free?
What would be the net gain to the world - is it better to have only a few free things that are accessible, or have many free things, only a fraction of which are accessible?
Making things accessible isn't free. Somebody has to pay. Forcing the producer to pay will reduce production. It's that simple.
Alright, then who will pay for it, either in time or money? You are free to go caption videos all you want, but why should people be forced to caption videos they make in their spare time?
Actually, all consumers of free online courses are charity cases. Deaf people are suing because MIT's and Harvard's largesse doesn't always include them.
MIT and Harvard's "largess" is funded in part by tax money collected from deaf people. Anyway, donating to a a discriminatory cause is still discrimination even if it is generous or well-intentioned.
So what about any charitable effort that discriminates on the basis of a protected class. If you can't do something for free to help one group without excluding some others no charity would be possible. Should MIT/Harvard intentionally avoid captioning? No. Should the government force them to use CCing? Hell no.
Your charitable cause is putting some people at a disadvantage then. If your charitable effort somehow must discriminate, it should do it in favor of the less-privileged group.
On EdX.org, where Harvard and MIT put many online courses for free, all course videos already are professionally captioned and accessible. The cited videos in the lawsuit aren't even course videos, they're promotional videos or streaming versions of conferences. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President Obama and Lady Gaga visiting campus for an event. - see http://creeclaw.org/online-content-lawsuit-harvard-mit/
Most of these videos are already being captioned. What's needed in large part is just higher quality captions. Nobody is shutting anything down for the mere lack of a better captioning system.
Deaf people's problems are not my problems (except insofar as I choose to act on empathy I may feel), and making something accessible is a choice, and not something deaf people have any right to, nor I any obligation to provide. They are entitled to nothing (from me) I do not freely choose to give. They may have achieved sufficient political power to force others to do what they want, whether or not the other person wants to - but that is just coercion and nothing more than thuggery, and should be treated as such. To destroy other people's access to a good because you have the power to, in order to coerce them into acting so that you receive such a good yourself, is wrong.
(If I have the resources to make something accessible, and if I value making something accessible to deaf people over other uses of those resources, then of course it's a good thing to make it accessible. Personally, I think making these videos accessible would be a very good thing; I also think that, as long as it's reasonably feasible, the universities should . But the existence of deaf people does not represent any kind of a claim on my (or anyone else's) resources, nor a shackle on my behaviour; and if it does under current, it damn well shouldn't, and that law is unjust and oppressive.)
How does that even square? According to your initial premise, your problems are not deaf people's problems (except insofar as they choose to act on empathy they may feel), and they should do everything in their power to maximize their access, even if it costs you. If you want to live in the state of nature, everyone has the right to trample on everyone else. Mercifully, our social structure still is more in line with Rawls than Rand.
I consider Rand's political theories misguided, but it's certainly not "the state of nature", nor is that aneeshm's position. Claiming so is just flamebait, not having an honest discussion.
"Flamebait" was certainly not my intention. I may be naive, but what is the difference between a society comprised of people with no obligations toward each other and the state of nature?
Edit: For instance, for Hobbes, that pretty much is the definition of the state of nature, in which everyone has the natural right to their own self-preservation and goals. The rise of sovereign power is often conceived of as the enforcement of obligations that override natural rights to complete liberty (through something that is probably even more properly called "thuggery" than deaf advocacy groups' political actions).
Objectivism (Rand's philosophy) didn't defend a society comprised of people with no obligations toward each other. Like most libertarians/classical liberal philosophies, it supports the NAP[1], as well as defending the necessity of an impartial law system.
It just defends negative rights, instead of positives ones, not a lack of rights and obligations. See Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty[2].
EDIT to your EDIT: in Hobbes' state of nature, everyone has the right do to whatever one thinks is necessary for one's own preservation (including, say, killing others). For Rand, one has the right to not be attacked by others, even if that goes reduces the others' chances of self-preservation. The two are very different, and the latter does impose (negative) obligations on individuals towards others.
Ah, those links refreshed my memory- I was incorrect in my edit- that approach more closely resembles Locke's state of nature. But thank you for showing me that Rand gets there from another angle.
Equally, you have no more right to Harvard's free videos than a deaf person, and Harvard has no right to government funding. Turtles all the way down, with that argument.
> To destroy other people's access to a good because you have the power to, in order to coerce them into acting so that you receive such a good yourself, is wrong.
Sorry, Ms Parks, but you can't sit in that seat...
That's not actually true, since a deaf person (or community) could pay to get them captioned. That doesn't mean they should have to, but it's not the same as not having the video in the first place.
You have a good point, but I would point out that deaf people watching a silent un-captioned video is more access to knowledge than watching no video at all.
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei8fyGwsy1o without looking at the captions and see how much you get from it. You're not going to get much if anything from the video. Now, add a professor who will be turning to write on a blackboard, doesn't move their lips enough for you to read them, etc, and you can start to see how this is a real problem.
Wow to the downvotes on this. Leaving aside their toxic personal politics, they don't even know how to use the site. (This one can be correctly downvoted as meta)
I don't mind the downvotes really, it's kinda interesting to see how the wind blows. But damn, must it be frustrating to be deaf and see how how little thought goes in that direction, compared to the tears shed for Harvard ($32B endowment 2013) and MIT ($11B endowment 2013).
Not everyone stands by the side they consider more sympathetic; some people actually try to be impartial and apply judgment based on their principles, whether they benefit a big institution or a poor person.
That doesn't mean we must agree with those principles, of course.
The article doesn't specify who is suing them, whether it's a MOOC user or an enrolled student, and what lectures they're suing over. There's a big difference between a MOOC lecture lacking captions and required online lecture for an undergraduate course lacking caption.
None of the plaintiffs are enrolled students, the suit is only about videos offered for free to the public. Enrolled students with disabilities (not just in degree programs but also those in single continuing ed. courses) do receive accommodations like captioning for course videos.
I can see the requirement for actually matriculated students. (I wonder if they have to provide ASL signers in-class for deaf students and braille books for the blind.)
What I don't see is a requirement for free courses. That would be ridiculous. Why would anyone want to make anything available if someone is going to come around and sue?
Instead of suing, why not start a project to automatically CC the videos, something like audio-recaptcha?
The suit is not about access for students enrolled in Harvard or MIT college credit courses, they do indeed have accommodations: ASL interpreters, CART service (a person, similar to a court stenographer, types what's said where the student can read it), digitized text for the vision impaired, etc. Printing Braille is slow and the output cumbersome so providing digital text that can be read by text to speech software or displayed on a refreshable Braille display are much more common.
As a for instance of this, in the very early '80s MIT's EECS department put together its first really big computer lab. In the machine room there was a DECSYSTEM-20/60 (repackaged PDP-10 with a fast ECL KL-10 processor) and later 3 CADR Lisp Machines, across the hall a big open space with terminals for these machines. And in one small room off of that, a station with a keyboard and a Braille hard copy printer, which I remember being used by a blind student.
At least in that community, people went to a lot of effort to accommodate the blind and deaf. It was a bit before my time, but there was an ITS etc. wizard (who later was hired to do the TCP/IP stack for ITS) who was deaf, and a lot of the people in my social group learned a sign language to better communicate with him.
Yes, this is exactly the thing they should pursue. This antagonistic tactic is disheartening. I mean, WTF, yes, contribute and provide CC, fansubs, whatever, but this kind of sue-happiness is a total turn-off.
Persuade people to help you, don't force people to help you, you'll get better results.
"Discrimination is action that denies social participation or human rights to categories of people based on prejudice." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination)
Note the prejudice part.
[1] Not in this context; of course a visual communication discriminates among those who can and can not receive it, but what prejudice is there in just recording yourself talking?
Well it's wrong. Wikipedia's source for that definition is listed as https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/discri... but it says: "The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex."
Is this because they offer certification or degrees through these programs? I think you create something on your own with no measurable achievement it wouldn't matter. That's the only reason I can see this being a suit.
I generally agree with you, but the counter argument would be something like, If you opened a soup kitchen downtown to provide food for the homeless, should you be required to install accessibility facilities (ramps, elevator, bathroom, etc.)?
I know the law says yes, but is it what we want? Have the extra building codes discouraged potential altruists?
I wonder if there's a government subsidy for that part of it, and if so could a similar provision be allowed for educational institutions opening their courseware.
Absolutely, people will not buy / old buildings in buildings older than ADA passage date because there is so much money that needs to be spent to retrofit it to code. Building a new building is cheaper long term, but how can you start a soup kitchen to gauge demand.
The standard is reasonable accommodation. Having someone walk the soup to people unable to climb the steps might perhaps constitute reasonable accommodation and not be an undue burden on the soup kitchen (which we'll assume for the sake of argument to be the recipient of a federal grant).
The law is not as black and white as you make it out to be.
I am a big supporter of accessibility (i.e. access for the blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled).
However unfortunately in this specific case I am conflicted. On one hand we have far more free content available to us because the "cost" of providing this content is relatively low. They just reproduce the course's normal materials, and have a camera rolling during lectures (and, yes, someone has to do basic editing, transcoding, and so on).
If someone has to go through every single lecture and transcribe it (since I assume auto-transcription wouldn't be acceptable) then they will likely just start pulling less popular/niche content because the viewership/return wouldn't be high enough to justify the cost.
And to be honest the niche content is far more interesting than the common stuff. You can find Computer Science 101 lectures all over the place, but want to watch a video on metallurgy for industrial tooling there is like one lecture several years old with just a hundred or so views.
So I really think if the Advocates for the deaf win here they'll gain a small victory but at a large-ish cost to the rest of society. And how long before YouTube is next?
I know several of the lawyers involved on the plaintiff's end (several of them blind and/or deaf) on a friendship, nonprofessional level -- and I'm noticing there's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments. However I am not a lawyer nor am I hugely aware of the nuances of the issues, so take this with a grain of salt.
Basically the law firm in question is using lawsuits as a method of social activism to compel large orgs to adhere to the ADA. (Similar thing happened to Scribd.) Basically deaf/blind nonprofits ask these entities in question for open accessibility accommodations and typically do NOT get denied the request, but this ends up being a low-priority task that gets tabled for years. Unfortunately between asking nicely, mobilizing social support to effect change, and lawsuits, the legal stick is by-and-large most effective at making things happen.
This is also NOT a shakedown; the end goal is NOT that lawyers or plaintiffs get fat stacks of cash, but that these accommodations be implemented. To the disabilities orgs, these requests are similar to asking for accessibility ramps and what not.
The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.
And ongoing costs for a new ADA compliance office, and the red tape everyone in the community will have to wade through with that office to publish an officially vetted video.
This will have a severe chilling effect on such productions, above and beyond the not trivial costs of getting high quality captions, which for technical material---which includes plenty of specialized humanities stuff, not just math, physics, etc.---is particularly expensive.
In the grand scheme of things I'd probably liken it to disability ramps, braille on room signage, etc. It'll probably add a few points to the total cost, but in the grand scheme we're talking about 3-5%, not 30-50% in additional costs. What'll probably happen is that each prof will need to assign a TA to basically deal with it. (Remember, these specialized technical costs are particularly cheap for universities.)
I unfortunately don't have a lot of insight on the case itself, but I surmise the reason why these activist lawyers are going after Harvard and MIT is because they have plenty of resources to solve these issues. Part of being a leading academic institution is to "do the right thing", and at this juncture it's up to highly specialized legal people to figure out what that means.
Almost all TAs would take forever to caption video and would do a bad job. TAs don't grow on trees and transcribing captions for all the lectures would use up their full 20hrs/week. A lot of the cited videos in the suit are not of course lectures but from events on campus. Good commercial transcription service costs about ~$150/hour with markups for difficult video (bad audio quality, accents, obscure subject vocabulary) but an institution doing a lot of business will get a discount.
An advantage of bringing the suit is it brings in the federal government as "referee." The advocates have their ideas about what "the right thing" is and Harvard administrators and lawyers will have their own but the feds will basically create regulation for how these long-standing laws should be applied in these cases. They might say that certain kinds of content should be captioned as a matter of course but that others can be left uncaptioned until an individual requests it, the analogy being that the school doesn't have to have an ASL interpreter at every on-campus event, just at the ones where one is requested.
This is terrible. What about lawyer costs for the defendants? This is exactly what old-school corporate world does (e.g. IBM): abusing the legal system for a shake-down.
I think we have a different definition of shakedown.
Also I think one of the hidden merits of lawsuits and original intents is to basically have two parties sort things out, with a third party to facilitate and enforce the disagreement. Believe me, as a non-law person this took me QUITE a while to get to this opinion until I see law being one of the only venues to effect change on issues such as discrimination, which at this point is something the deaf see as an issue but many able-bodied people do not. So at this point: bring in people who figure out exactly what the letter/spirit of the law, and let the right thing prevail.
Everybody chill out, it's just a lawsuit. Four Americans disagree with how Harvard and M.I.T. are interpreting the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and so they're asking the courts to help out with the disagreement. I doubt anybody here will disagree with Americans being able to use their courts to redress perceived injustices.
As to the ultimate outcome, I'm calling it: Either DOJ will clarify the rules so that captions are required, or the schools will settle the lawsuit by agreeing that captions are required, or the courts will decide that captions are required.
And then 30 years from now, at least one person in this thread will have lost their hearing but will click open and watch a captioned M.I.T. or Harvard video without even thinking about how much they railed against that one article on HN back in 2015.
And as has been amply pointed out, in the case of any of the outcomes you're calling, a great deal of material will be withdrawn from the net (or campus servers and official Youtube channels), little will be returned, at least from MIT, which doesn't have the money (well, absent a big fundraising campaign, which would crowd out other things), and perhaps most importantly, it will have a serious chilling effect on future offerings, since they will have to be vetted for not just captioning, but sufficient quality captioning, "by legal". MIT students, at least, have better things to do with their time.
And 3 years from now, let along 30, at least one person will click on a "see the video" link and get a 404.
And you severely underestimate people's memories, and ability to hold grudges.
Well, I had to look up mendacious and invidious, but I believe you're claiming they're lying to provoke an angry reaction. It seemed pretty straightforward to me; they present the lawsuit, explain their interpretation of the law, explain the goals of the suit, and demonstrate why the current captioning system is insufficient.
The only line I had any kind of problem with was "No captions is like no ramp for people in wheelchairs or signs stating ‘people with disabilities are not welcome.’" I do think that's hyperbolic, but I understand the idea that these schools were given the resources to "build a ramp" and just decided not to. Regardless, it's not "thuggery", it's just a point of view I disagree with.
And I had to look them up to make sure I'd remembered their meanings correctly.
The Big Lie, if what everyone is saying about Harvard and MIT's joint edX project properly handling their courses correctly is true, is confounding that with MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) "best effort" offerings which we've had the deaf "aldordeah" helpfully confirm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042399 (OCW's remit was to publish materials useful to other teachers, with things like self-learning gravy).
Things like, from their PR:
“Online content represents the next frontier for learning and lifelong education,” said Howard A. Rosenblum, NAD’s CEO. “Yet both Harvard and MIT betray their legendary leadership in quality education by denying access to approximately 48 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing. All they have to do is provide accurate captioning to such online educational content, yet they provide no or inaccurate captioning which is contrary to these schools’ ideals of excellence and service to all.”
"Betray" is a very strong word, just the sort of thing to provoke an angry reaction.
Then there's the fact that they don't actually call out any specific online courses for not having captioning (which unless OCW has been spending a lot of their money in their new mode on this should have been trivial), but stuff of much less importance, of course leading with a discussion of the holy Brown v. Board of Education, as well as e.g. Bill Gates and Chomsky talking.
Then there's the criticism of the quality of what appears to be Youtube auto-captioning of videos of nothingburger Lady Gaga and Obama visits placed on official Harvard and MIT Youtube channels. Unlike the 3rd example of the President of Liberia talking about Ebola at a Harvard Political Institute event, the only sane thing for institutions to do with the former sorts of events is to not publish them in any form with audio on any venue.
That, plus a lot of the wording, including stuff you incorrectly assume implies that "that these schools were given the resources to "build a ramp" and just decided not to", is clearly designed to provoke an angry reaction. As I've detailed elsewhere, MIT's Open CourseWare was explicitly not "given" the resources to do that, nor do I remember it being part of their fundraising appeals. And I hope you're not claiming Harvard, let alone the much less wealthy MIT, were given the resources to properly caption video of every vacuous celebrity who visits.
If you want, I seem to remember there are more lies that I can detail, but seeing as it not just made me angry, but enraged me after a close reading.... Although see e.g. their gross overstatement of how many people are truly blocked from hearing these soundtracks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042760 Not 48 million, "U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people account for 0.4% of the US population." per SeanLuke.
Especially if you understand that endowment does not equal arbitrarily spendable wealth, the vast majority of gifts are earmarked.
And I suppose it's time again to make the disclaimer that I'm MIT Class of '83 and donate to OCW.
I guess I'm missing some nuances you're seeing in that press release, but it seems pretty innocuous. Certainly don't see any evidence of those thugs you mention, just some people concerned about deaf Americans not having their civil rights protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And I'll take that bet: In 3 years, every video on the Harvard and M.I.T. websites will be captioned.
You can only take my bet (and I used 3 years for symmetry, make it more like 1-8), if you take the whole thing, which includes there being precious few of those nicely captioned videos on MIT websites and Youtube channels.
But, yeah, every video you will be able find on an accessible to the outside of MIT website will be perfect. Yea!
BTW, MIT has rather nicely developed fine grained control over what can and can't be seen by outsiders, all this sort of thing developed for Project Athena starting back in the '80s.
> The lawsuits, filed by the National Association of the Deaf, which is seeking class-action status, say the universities have “largely denied access to this content to the approximately 48 million — nearly one out of five — Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing.”
Um, what?
U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people account for 0.4% of the US population.
"We estimate that 30.0 million or 12.7% of Americans ≥ 12 years had bilateral hearing loss from 2001–2008, and this estimate increases to 48.1 million or 20.3% when also including individuals with unilateral hearing loss."
MIT's OpenCourseWare is Creative Commons licensed, the only restrictions placed on a third party who wanted to caption the courses are 1) attribution, 2) the derivative work must be non-commercial in nature, 3) that the license remains the same.
A building without a ramp can't be copied and rebuilt with a ramp without rebuilding the entire thing, but a video without a caption can be copied and captioned without having to recreate the original. MIT went out of their way to make sure this sort of thing is legal to do.
Now would be a really good time to make sure there are copies of those elsewhere. MIT is not wealthy like Harvard sort of is (long story), and in all cases one needs to remember that the vast majority of endowment money is earmarked (somehow donors trust college administrators only so much, and then there's Princeton).
OCW is now in maintenance mode as far as I can tell, with terrible gaps in offerings, like 2nd term bio- and organic chemistry but no 1st term offering, and given the astounding breath of the demand, there's every chance a very large fraction of MIT's video and audio offerings will simply go dark, and future production burdened by red tape (which MIT students do not respond to well...).
Especially since the lawsuit demands quality captioning. Granted, there examples on their web page are awful, then again they're nothingburgers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... at least if my understanding of the lack of real power of the President of Liberia is correct, and it says something that they put Lady Gaga being welcomed by Harvard students right after it. If this is the best they can come up with....
Not that I know any SJW deaf types right now, but if I did, they'd be treated to the one of the very few bits of sign language I know :-(.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
MIT's endowment is 12b. That's a ways off Harvard's outlier of 36b, but if they're paying out 5% a year as a benchmark, that's $600m a year just off the endowment. Not being as rich as Bill Gates does not make one not wealthy if one still has over a billion dollars. One can not imagine it would be that hard for the folks at MIT to put together a program to crowdsource quality captioning. (Let alone some kind of "technological" solution, isn't text to speech a thing these days?)
Do you deny my statement that "the vast majority of" MIT's endowment is earmarked, so it cannot arbitrarily reprogram that money to this purpose? From the insider's viewpoint, MIT has not been "wealthy" since the end Cold War and got hard hit by the Great Recession, although I haven't checked details as of the last few years.
This has entered the legal arena. It's not hard to imagine the red tape of the remedies of a settlement or lawsuit loss being significant, very possibly exceeding the costs of the closed captioning (e.g. mandatory QA). In this context, the idea this quality problem could be addressed by crowd-sourcing is patently ludicrous.
Does anyone have a better solution than Google, which is where the cited bad captions apparently come from? Yeah, it's "a thing" alright, a thing that just handed MIT a nasty, no win lawsuit.
The hallmark of a successful development program is to simultaneously convince you of two things (1) the school is of the highest quality and (2) it is drastically underfunded. Yes endowment funds are earmarked, but in most cases they're going to fund things that would need to be funded anyway (scholarships, professorships, center & department expenses). One of the strengths of a large endowment is that it increases the share of general funds that are discretionary, giving them room to do things that alumni don't get excited about, like cutting the grass and (yes) making campuses accessible to those with different physical capabilities.
But, in any case leaving aside MIT's 5th largest endowment, it's only one of the factors in determining whether a school is well off. One could also look, say, at the budget. Or research funding.
By just about any metric one could imagine, MIT is one of the richest schools in the nation.
As I said, inside viewpoint. I don't look at anything the development program produces besides the occasional headline. Instead, I actually worked at MIT job in 1980, and a job in the end of the '80s (IT). I keep up with contacts and friends from those jobs, plus I just plain hung around the campus for a dozen year period including those jobs, and I know how it is at "the sharp end of the spear".
Like helping to allocate a fixed budget and running requisitions through the always skeptical procurement office. So I know MIT didn't switch from cleaning every bathroom every day to "frequent cleaning" because it had a large surplus of funds, and that it's been hurting as the Cold War ended, and now with the Great Recession.
But you're in part moving the goalposts. No one is denying MIT doesn't have a lot of money, we're discussing whether it has such an unrestricted surplus it can all of a sudden properly caption all the video it formally publishes. In a legal regime that'll make that all the more expensive and time and energy consuming. And what will have to be sacrificed to do this, aside from all the videos that will go dark and stay dark.
Especially in the case of the targeted OCW, which most certainly doesn't have the money to do this, and based on its ability to fund raise after it fulfilled its original mandate, would have trouble doing this, and would also certainly have to initially remove all its videos after an adverse outcome. Heck, is MIT going to have to institute policy of cost recovery to cover the expenses of making sure no video gets them into further trouble?
Another thing to consider is that Harvard and MIT were chosen as the initial targets for the obvious reasons. Just how much will the world be enriched when this filters down to every college in the US? Like the one my family shares a property boundary with, which prides itself in providing a low cost education and rents out textbooks. Right now it's very cheap for them to put video on the web. If you're successful, that'll end.
Luckily, folks who care about making things accessible for those with disabilities have already won (god forbid something like the ADA getting passed today), so I don't actually need to fight this battle. These videos will be captioned, MIT will not go broke (or stop putting up new things). Set up a tickle file, one year from today, see how it all looks.
I don't think they "got bored" so much as OCW fulfilled its limited mandate modulo gaps like I mentioned, which require cooperation from the departments in question, which they implied might be the cause when I emailed them (it was a form letter so who knows, but at least the chemistry department isn't swimming in money for this sort of thing, especially with all the service courses they have to teach, with biochemistry being a joint class with the biology department).
And of course the significant albeit limited success of OCW was part of the motivation to create edX.
This makes me so sad, it makes me wonder why the National Association of the Deaf doesn't try to encourage recruiting volunteers to the association to help with closed captioning. With this litigation I feel they're only alienating those that can actually help their cause.
In what way? Both are suggesting that it is the responsibility of charities to support the changes that disabled people need to be able to participate in society. If you believe that deal charities should pay for subtitling, why shouldn't other charities convert my business to make it accessible?
I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and review sections which were confusing.
Agreed. If I see a link to a video without a transcript or description or even a TLDR, I just won't bother. Maybe to some people I am just another impatient millenial, but I can't help but feel like I have better things to do than to sit through bad jokes, equipment problems, stuttering, and umm-ahhhs.
I'm usually pretty critical of a lot of Amazon's culture, but one thing I think is absolutely brilliant is its reliance on whitepapers and its shunning of presentations. With a presentation, the presenter retains 100% control over information flow, which can magnify the agitation that you feel when they just aren't spitting it out fast enough. With a whitepaper, a quick skim allows you to know exactly where you want to focus and you can control the information flow from there. Whitepapers take significantly more effort, which is why a lot of amazonians criticize them, but the reward is easily proportional to the effort.
Here's an idea, a transcript where you can click on a word in the transcript, and it jumps to the point in the presentation so you also have the context of the slide shown during speaking.
You can do something like that with YouTube right now - any captioned video will have a rolling transcript window available to open, which you can scroll through and click on to jump around the video in a non-linear fashion.
It reminded me of a certain notebook and pen (an expensive set) where each page of the notebook had a unique background pattern and the pen would record the lectures as you wrote.
Later you could put the pen down on a word in your notes and start listening to the lecture just as you were writing those notes.
Or at least as of 2010 when I put it in an Amazon.com wishlist (and #%&^%& but Amazon's search function sucks, "pen" didn't find the "smartpen" by which it's named).
This is indeed the unit a fellow student used. He dealt with ADHD, anxiety, and many other things in conjunction with medication side effects. For him, this was an invaluable study tool.
A thousand times yes. With a suitably rocking implementation (as outlined by other posters up/down of me) this would be a net benefit to everyone not just the deaf.
The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.
You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context. It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad out of videos. Your alma mater can do better than that.
Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment:
“Worse still,” said attorney Timothy Fox, “a sampling of the videos available illustrates the problem with inaccurate captioning, making them confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.”
Where he's explicitly saying those above examples are not as bad as Lady Gaga et. al. being inaccurately captioned (apparently auto-captioned by Youtube).
"The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is..."
If so, it's entirely unapparent in the link (supply a quote if you disagree). Which as far as wel can tell starts out with false framing by claiming MOOCs are included in the problems, at least if the claims elsewhere in this discussion about all edX courses being professionally treated are true. Looks like, at least for MIT, that NAD is trying to confound that with Open CourseWare, which has an explicit mission limiting it's remit to making MIT course material useful to other teachers; anything else is gravy.
This is mendacious, invidious PR thuggery; we'll see what the lawyers have to say after analyzing the lawsuit; ah, yeah, the Instapundit is going to be all over this.
When faced with the above, my alma mater simply cannot win. And it certainly doesn't have the money to caption all this stuff; see elsewhere where I speculate one outcome will be a large fraction if not all the content will simply be pulled, the creation of future content will be severely curtailed due to this being moved from the arena of (not) good (enough) works to the legal one, and the remediation of the pulled works will be limited at best.
One wonders just how many people in the entire world these SJWs will seriously piss off....
This is beyond ridiculous and will have a serious chilling effect on the growth of online learning content.
That you should be obligated to spend additional money on captioning your free videos is incredibly unfair and also unjustifiable. Unfortunately, in many cases it will make the costs unsustainable so we'll see videos taken down entirely—thus, the deaf are selfishly insisting that if they can't have something nobody can.
It's like someone with a peanut allergy suing me for handing out free cookies.
Please explain to me how it is fair that, by studying a free online uncaptioned lecture, someone gets even more of an advantage over me just because they weren't born deaf.
Its not fair. By the definition that you were born deaf the situation is already unfair. Its also unfair that people are born with such good looks they can breeze through life.
But if the net effect is that good free content will just become unavailable for everyone to achieve a sense of fairness, Then that seems petty and I'm not on board.
I hope they lose this case spectacularly as it would set a terrible precedent.
If you follow the principle behind that logic, everybody should be blinded, deafened and crippled immediately after birth, reduced to the lowest common denominator, because otherwise they get an advantage because they weren't born blind, deafened, or crippled.
If a free lecture provides benefit to someone, but forcing it to be captioned causes it not to be released, would you be happy with that outcome? It's the same principle.
The population of deaf people in the USA is comparable to the population of Asian Americans (ranging from about 1% to 4% by state in both cases). If an organization gave a leg up in life to everyone except Asian Americans (e.g. by covering some share of the education costs), would you be happy with that outcome? Now this really is the same principle.
No, it's not, since it's equivalent covering of cost for Asian-Americans and everyone else. That's an example of straightforward discrimination. This is demanding that an organization put forward additional specialized effort at its own expense for materials it is releasing for free.
Whatever your opinion is here, they are not the same principle.
Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population.
Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe not everyone will be able to use it.
Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if they can't have it, nobody can.
> Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population.
Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA. They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.
> Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe not everyone will be able to use it.
They do not want everyone to lose access. Instead, what they want, is for everyone to be able to use the content. Regardless, they do not want everyone to lose access. Your question is merely based on ignorance of the desires of the plaintiffs.
> Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if they can't have it, nobody can.
Because when someone breaks the law and it harms you, you have the right to seek redress in our system.
I've answered your questions. Now, please answer mine, which are written with the same care that you wrote yours.
Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.
Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.
Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?
>Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA.
Something being the law doesn't mean that it's fair. I shouldn't have to explain that. Also, it hasn't been established that these universities are actually breaking the ADA.
>They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.
What do you mean by this?
>They do not want everyone to lose access.
Well, that's the likely outcome of suing a university trying to offer a free service.
>Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.
Again, it's not established that they were breaking the law.
I see nothing wrong with breaking immoral laws. If the ADA forbids disseminating educational material for free unless it follows a certain format, the ADA is immoral.
>Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.
I don't feel that I have this right. I feel that deaf people don't have the right to demand that educational organizations curate information in a way that suits their fancy. How would you feel if the swahili speakers of America sued MIT for not translating their free educational videos to swahili?
>Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?
Nice ad hominem. You aren't even explaining why you're calling me that; you're literally just name-calling.
Strictly speaking it's not ad hominem. A careful reader will see that nowhere has (s)he called you a "spoiled petulant, self entitled child". You're merely being asked to explain your understanding of the meaning of a highly pejorative term which you introduced into the discourse.
> Something being the law doesn't mean that it's fair. I shouldn't have to explain that.
So if someone or a company feels they shouldn't have to follow a law, you are okay with them not having to answer for breaking the law?
> Also, it hasn't been established that these universities are actually breaking the ADA.
This is why they are being sued. Some think they are. Considering your swahili statement, you disagree with the American
legal system and the way it works.
> What do you mean by this?
I'm not sure what you don't understand. It's English, and it says exactly what I wanted it to say. Are you suggesting they were forced to break the law?
> Well, that's the likely outcome of suing a university trying to offer a free service.
Considering the other provisions of the ADA and their non-impact on free services offered by countless other business both big and small all across the country, you'd need to back this up with real, hard evidence. Please do.
> I see nothing wrong with breaking immoral laws.
In your opinion immoral laws. Clearly others do not agree with you.
Would you support someone breaking a law they considered immoral and you considered moral if breaking the law harmed you?
> If the ADA forbids disseminating educational material for free unless it follows a certain format, the ADA is immoral.
It does not forbid this. If you think this is what the case is about, you are ignorant.
> How would you feel if the swahili speakers of America sued MIT for not translating their free educational videos to swahili?
People are allowed to sue others they feel have wronged them.
Why do you think people shouldn't be allowed to sue others they feel have broken the law or wronged them?
> Nice ad hominem.
So you can dish it out but can't take it yourself. So you really are a petulant, self-entitled child.
Fine. You win. I am happy that even if you were a tenth of the programmer that I am[1], you would still be an employer's top pick over me. I am grateful to the two organizations (with $11B and $32B endowments) for the fact that, on top of the above, they provide you with a free way[2] to make yourself even more employable over me.
Oh, and right, the endowments are earmarked for other purposes as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, so I am also glad that none of the donors cared about making the educational material accessible to people with disabilities, and that the staff of those two organizations catered to the donors.
On an even more tangential note, let's not forget to praise the lack of social stigma against the use of expressions like "petulant children" in a thread discussing people who are trying to use legal means to prevent discrimination and giving even more advantage to the already advantaged. The comment of yours would have been unimaginable if it had been about racial minorities expressing the same sentiment. But feel free to dismiss my reply as being from a throwaway account, which I am using because I have time and time again encountered the sentiment "Oh... You are deaf. I thought you were smart" or words to that effect when people learned that I am deaf from my main Web identity.
[1] Looking at your GitHub page, you probably aren't. But, for just one example, consider that you have most likely run some of my code when using Python (I have contributed to the base CPython implementation). I am not employed, and hearing people right out of school who are seeing Python for the first time in their lives are employed by the dozen..
[2] Watching lectures and learning from them — a way that is completely inaccessible to me since I can't even pay for someone to transcribe the lectures.
I would message you directly, but you don't have any contact info listed in your account. I think you may have some major self esteem issues, and you're taking it out on other people. I really think you should talk to a professional.
I mean, look at this. You're blaming your situation (which at least includes being unemployed) on your disability, while simultaneously trying to convince yourself that you're better than random people on the internet. You literally clicked through some random person's profile so that you could find some piece of evidence that they're inferior to you, in the hopes of convincing yourself that it can't be your fault; it's everyone else's.
Life isn't fair. You have access to a computer. Please explain to me how it is fair that you can view free online uncaptioned lectures, when someone in the jungles of the Philippines has never even seen a keyboard?
Is this referring to free MOOCs on Coursera/edX/etc and free published course videos? Or online courses that enrolled students are paying for? Or both?
Nope. My apologies on behalf of our profession. This is probably just a shakedown -- it'll be cheaper to settle than it will be to defend against this lawsuit, so the game is to find a mistake that could plausibly fall afoul of the ADA and file away.
I hope they don't settle, to put it mildly. Few institutions are as well-equipped to combat trolls as Harvard.
"This is probably just a shakedown -- it'll be cheaper to settle than it will be to defend against this lawsuit, so the game is to find a mistake that could plausibly fall afoul of the ADA and file away."
Unless I'm mistaken, the article says that National Association of the Deaf requested Harvard and MIT provide options accessible to the deaf on multiples occasions. They're seeking comparable materials for the hearing impaired, not millions of dollars.
The National Association for the Deaf settled with Netflix in 2012. I couldn't find any follow up lawsuits since. It seems like an advocacy group just trying to make sure their members are represented.
I really hope this is not a shakedown because I believe asking MIT and Harvard to caption their courses is good. But I can't believe two leading universities would willfully ignore that request.
I'm not sure this is a shakedown. The article mentions a previous case against Netflix that was settled with an agreement from Netflix to provide closed captioning in the near future.
The government provides mediation and reconciliation before these things go to court. I don't think anyone disagrees on adding captions. They probably went a head with the suit because they couldn't settle on a dollar figure.
This can use a software fix:
1) everyone agrees that having captions and transcripts is a good thing
2) requiring schools to have them is problematic because it increases the cost of producing the videos--we want the cost to be low because the videos are a social good and we want more of them.
3) with software maybe we can make it inexpensive to add transcripts and captions to videos. Suddenly the world is a better place
Here are the complaints for Harvard[0] and MIT[1].
According to the complaints, the relevant laws are Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The former deals with institutions that receive federal financial assistance and the latter deals with places of "public accommodation".
I think the sad thing here is not that deaf people are suing for access to educational materials. I think it's sad that they are ignored to the point that they feel their only option is to sue in order to have their voices heard.
People don't just wake up one morning and say "Hey, I have an idea. Let's go sue M.I.T. and Harvard". There is likely alot of stuff that happens leading up to that moment.
If you think that this is just a random thing where the "big bully deaf people are trying to push poor little M.I.T. and Harvard around" I legitimately feel sorry for you. Your sheltered view of the world is so out of touch with reality it isn't funny.
From fairly early in the article:
"Harvard expected the Justice Department to propose rules this year “to provide much-needed guidance in this area,” and that the university would follow whatever rules were adopted."
Don't like this kind of litigation at all. Aren't they private schools, please don't mandate good free stuff to be perfect, at least not using this method.
Isn't every lecture, on-line or off, unavailable to deaf students? How does it work in legacy education? Is there a sign language interpreter in every hall?
At my school, they did indeed put an interpreter in any class with deaf kids (we had a lot of deaf students). The school would also pay hearing students for their course notes for distribution to deaf students, so if you were deaf and felt like sleeping in, no worries you'll get the notes anyway.
Legitimate question: Why isn't this being done with software? The Speech-to-Text problem has been around for a long time, and it seems like there are a lot of people who are financially motivated to solve it. If the best solutions on the market, or ideally a combination of the best solutions, can't provide a baseline decent transcript then why aren't people tripping over themselves to solve this problem?
It seems like an 80% solution would be good enough. Hell, even a 66% solution seems like a good compromise or starting point. If an automatically generated transcript can convey at least 2/3rds of the information from a lecture for a one time or small incremental cost then I don't see why both parties wouldn't be ok with it. Those with disabilities would have to do some extra work to look up garbled words or ideas that don't translate well to text, but it would be within the bounds of reason (say a 1 hour lecture would now take 2 hours to parse). The organizations producing the content would most likely having to pay for speech-to-text software, either several thousand dollars per year per class or $X per lecture, but they would still come out cheaper than paying someone per minute to do the transcription. It isn't a win-win situation, but more of an equitable lose-lose.
They say a fair deal has been reached when both sides in a negotiation are a little bit unhappy. A software solution would seem to do that without ignoring the rights of the disabled or placing prohibitive costs on the content producers. And it would set a precedent going forward: Content producers must make an effort to accommodate those with disabilities, but the disabled should be willing to make some extra effort themselves. Asking an elderly woman in a wheelchair to lift herself over a sidewalk curb is not reasonable. Asking the same person to spend an extra 30 minutes to decipher an unclear transcript might be.
Echoing jamesbrownuhh, the vicious PR for this lawsuit at http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... specifically calls out what appears to be nonsense YouTube auto-captioning ... and two of the examples are of nothingburger visits by Lady Gaga and Obama. It's unclear jamesbrownuhh's generosity would extend to properly captioning video of every vacuous celebrity's visit.
Worse, you've got accept that throwing this into the legal arena adds costs way beyond just proper captioning. Any settlement that will make the plaintiffs happy will require the establishment of a ADA enforcement unit at these institutions, and resultant red tape for anyone in the communities to publish anything with audio. Which going forward will have a clear chilling effect; we're not just talking about a lot of Harvard and MIT potentially going dark, but continuing in that mode except for the most important things that are worth the extra captioning and legal effort.
Speech to text is simply not a solved problem. The technology gets better all the time, enormous strides have been made, but voice recognition is something that the human brain does well and computers generally do not, at this time.
In terms of accuracy, once you start falling beneath the high-nineties percentage threshold, it becomes increasingly hard for humans to make sense of the text. Dropping to 66% accuracy means that one word in three is wrong - it's almost impossible to make sense of something that badly degraded.
Here's a nice example, here are the 'Automatic Captions' - provided by YouTube's voice recognition technology - of an MIT YouTube video. This is a 'best of all possible worlds' example - there is a single speaker, whose words are pronounced slowly and clearly, with no background noise or undue slurring or interference. You'll see that this is good, but nevertheless in a 90 second video there are 20+ errors (not all of them obvious or easy to decipher.)
"0:00 the use of microneedles in the gastrointestinal tract
0:03 presents a unique opportunity to enable the oral delivery of large molecules
0:08 again sewing that are currently limited to injection
0:11 and adjustable capsules such as the one shown could be imagine
0:14 it would contain a reservoir to house the therapeutic payload
0:18 and have a pH responsive coating to cover the neil's
0:21 allowing for easy ingestion
0:23 after ingestion the bill would pass through the stomach and into the
0:26 intestine
0:27 there because I'm a dissolved revealing the microneedles
0:30 the pair started motion in the tissue would compress the reservoir
0:34 expelling the drug out the needles and into the tissue
0:37 insulin injections were tested in the GI tract a pig's
0:40 as a result injection a small bowl can be seen in the tissue
0:44 this small injection result in a robust drop in the animal's blood glucose
0:49 that superior to the effect elicited by traditional subcutaneous injection
0:54 oil administration as expected has no effect
1:01 the safety impasse
1:02 manga vice was also tested in pics the model device was placed her in over two
1:08 into the stomach the pics once in the stomach
1:11 it was released
1:16 by look
1:17 radio graphic
1:18 image to the pill shown here the progress on the bill through the animal
1:22 can be tracked by serial X-rayed
1:25 the pill was found to be safe and well-tolerated"
As you can see, this is very, very good in the circumstances - but it's still not quite there.
This whole thing is a shame, because MIT do provide captioning on a good number of their YouTube videos, which deserves credit. It seems righteously unfair for NAD to pick on an uncaptioned video and then point out isolated errors in YouTube's (not MIT's) transcriptions of same, a point which I hope is made in MIT's defence.
There are 263 videos on MIT's YouTube channel, of which 91 are captioned. Most of the videos are only a few minutes long, so getting that channel 100% captioned would take maybe a day or two, if that - I'm almost tempted to donate a weekend of my time to it (assuming that MIT would even take the finished results, which is of course by no means certain.)
Obviously that's just YouTube - the wider selection of courses is another matter. But it illustrates why things like this aren't always solvable with software. It can certainly help, and save the humans some time, but it's not a "fit and forget" solution, and isn't likely to be for quite some time yet.
Say, does anyone know if there is any open source software that would do this (or for that matter, any software that isn't ridiculously expensive)? Years back, I ran a workshop (applying group theory to understanding magnetism) and we recorded it. We got releases for the videos and have the bandwidth to put them on the web for free, but I believe that I have to have them subtitled in order to release them online. So, if people have asked for the videos in person, I've given out copies, but they're not generally available...Automation does seem to be the answer here...
Decent speech-to-text is a long way from being a solved problem, so automation isn't a complete solution, but it's certainly a huge assist over doing it completely manually.
A good place to start looking if you're after an OSS solution is what Carnegie Mellon University are doing - there's a variety of tools at http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net
This is a very bad precedent. I'm hearing impaired and I would never think of demanding this when I'm getting these things for free. Perhaps, I would not be saying this if I were paying for it - still, I may consider the other party when it comes to this.
Using the law as a weapon to demand something where we have alternatives[slides, notes or manuals] is, in my opinion, like "biting the hand that offers help".
That said, I have been seriously putting in effort to listen to videos without captioning. Yes, it's an uphill task and I'm willing to do it.
The government should provide a the money for implementing a government mandated captioning. The company should be sued if they choose not to use the money to implement captioning.
Well, since everyone has to implement it, everyone should pay for it. Otherwise someone who doesn't have the money to implement it would be "discriminating."
I really like how people quickly develop a sense of entitlement for things that did not exist a while back. There were no online courses few years back, but now you think you are entitled to some captions.
Just like there was no Uber few years back but when they are you suddenly think you are entitled for lower prices and other blah.
Penn&Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.
I love watching P&T's Bullshit, passing the time counting logical fallacies. For example, the good old No True Scotsman in 'you don't have problems unless you're (registered as) legally blind'. Their ringers in that episode each had some point were they talk about true disabled people.
Also nice was the "zomg, an empty parking space, that's due to a gun put to the business owner's head!"... in a place where there are plenty of other empty parking spaces in shot. Curiously, this point is put forward by a prolific author with a disability, who they present as a typical example of people with disabilities. My favourite part was towards the end, talking about workforce participation: "The ADA has had no effect and hasn't helped increase workforce participation, which has stayed around 30%. That means it's done a lot of harm". What?
Rather curiously, Penn keeps talking about how you can't legislate compassion, and even make a point of it explicitly - "If this wasn't legislated, people would be more compassionate" - referencing the parking spaces in particular. But hey, nothing is stopping business owners from being more compassionate than is legally required. It's almost like the arguments they're making are... somethingsomething :)
P&T heavily editorialise their Bullshit show, use selective sources, and pull all kinds of psychological tricks to make their case (which they're fully aware of, being veteran magicians). If it were a different kind of show, it wouldn't matter, but it's pretty unethical to position yourself as calling out others on their bullshit when you're making up as much yourself.
The comparisons with physical locations are not the same because an owner of a property will not let somebody come along and just build a random alternate access point into the building. As far as I am aware, these videos are released in a manner that somebody else can use them. Somebody wants to add captions? They can. Freely.
If adding captions is really so simple, then the deaf institution needs to make the captions on its own. The information, after all, is freely available.
If this is not simple to do, then we should be sympathizing with the organizations that provide the content for free. Clearly the cost will be higher and the amount of available information will be restricted which hurts the larger number of users who can hear.
Maybe we should shut off the internet because there are poor people in the world who are not able to access it in the first place?
All these disabled Americans do is collect a fat paycheck every month for doing nothing and now they want free education in suitable formats? Bunch of entitled leeches! How dare they tell HARVARD and MIT to make their free instruction accessible. /s
As someone who makes free content, this is scary. I understand the Harvard has a lot more money to take care of accessibility than I do, but why would that exempt me? What is the legal formula determining who is in danger from lawsuits about whether they provided an accessible alternative to a completely free thing?
If there isn't a strong protection here then it means you might as well not offer any free content at all unless you have the money to make it accessible to everyone (and for lawyers to defend yourself). That would be an astonishingly broad chilling effect.
But as someone who makes free content, you'll know how nice it is when you get lots more views/downloads/clicks (etc) of your content. Captioning enables that because not only do you reach visitors who are unable to hear, but you also reach non-English speakers in the Entire Rest Of The World who can with a few clicks automatically translate those captions into the language which they speak.
More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that.
Not that easy. Script -> timing -> correctly muxing, right? Not super hard (I'm an old school, from the very early '90s anime fan), yeah, but what about cheap?
Then to move it into the context of this lawsuit, a likely outcome is red tape to put anything with a audio track on the net, even if it's just to determine that close captioning it is not required (and let me invoke the slippery slope here), or doing that a certain sufficient quality, will be allowed.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
If you've got a script then software like CMU Sphinx (open source) can use voice recognition to align the words of the script with the time of the soundtrack. Services like YouTube will even do that for you, if you can provide the bare minimum of a transcript.
If even that sounds too hard, you can let YouTube's automatic subtitling produce an initial transcript - sometimes this can be surprisingly good, depending on audio quality and speaker clarity - and just fix up the mistakes yourself.
I'm not saying it's painless (and like you I come from a fansubbing background) but it's well worth the time, and it's easier now than it has ever been.
If you don't want to do it yourself, services like zencaptions.com will caption your video for just $1 per minute.
We've come a long way - it has never, ever, been this easy and cheap to do this stuff.
(Am a little sad to see that I'm being downvoted for saying that, in all honesty. I'm not endorsing this particular lawsuit, just making a general point overall that access is good.)
Perhaps you're getting down voted because of who's pocket you want this "access" to come out of?
Perhaps because you can't conceive that one inevitable result of this is that whole lot less material with audio is going to be published by US institutions going forward?
Especially if a legal regime has to be set up to vet everything posted in any formal way by a member of these communities? In the case of MIT students, they have better things to do with their time than wade through red tape, which they hate.
And how much valuable material already published will likely be pulled?
My single and only point is that access is good. I'm not talking about costs, because it doesn't NEED to cost ANY money - and even when it does, the below-sweatshop rate card of $1/minute is hardly going to break the bank.
I'm saying that ultimately if you put things online for free, your motivation is probably that you want people to see them. Adding captions substantially increases the number of people who can, and will.
Under NO circumstances should anything be pulled or not published at all purely because it isn't captioned. Captions are good but obviously if they're not there, they're not there.
I don't see why I'm being systematically downvoted for saying that. It's not controversial, surely.
Bluntly, when I make and release content for free I'm generally not very interested in paying for small boost in user numbers. Especially since for most videos, that 7-15% boost is maybe ten views.
It's weird that some sections of HN obsess over AB testing the colours of buttons and are happy to pay for that, but putting captions on a video and it's fuck those deaf people.
And they don't seem to realise that it's not just deaf people that benefit from captions. There are a bunch of situations where I could really do with captions -- coffee shops; planes; late nights; etc etc.
"The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions."
So should Google be added to the lawsuit, since they're the ones hosting the called out badly auto-captioned videos, unless of course they're charging Harvard and MIT for the whole service?
I also strongly challenge your contention that noways initial costs of production are so high. Hosting, I don't know, but isn't it getting steadily cheaper?
For me it's not about fuck those deaf people, or about captions being bad. It's about "I am not a big company and I have finite time and dollars to caption every bit of content I produce".
but it doesn't stop here. Next there will be people taking offense because the captions are not provided in all languages. There will likely be all sorts of hurdles thrown up by "concerned groups" of which some are merely looking for a payout.
It really shouldn't be beyond anyone's capabilities, though. In its simplest form all you need is a plain .txt file with the spoken words. Major services like YouTube can take that file and align it to the timing of the video, automatically. Almost all the hard work is done for you.
Obviously all content is different, but for the benefit you get, it's hard to understand how any creator of any size at all does anything other than gain from such a simple and basic step.
Why only captions? Why not require translations into all 300+ languages? I mean there are billions of people who can't understand whatever language the video is in and therefore can't access these videos.
It seems to me if it's the responsibility of people who can't understand the video to deal with that themselves (learn the language, hire a translator, etc...). Why is that different if your language is sign language or something else?
Just a single native-language caption track is all that's necessary. Computers can already do a pretty good job of translating that into the hundreds of other possible languages.
This is extremely dependent on which languages you're talking about. For instance, my experience with automatic translation between Japanese and English varies from "jumbled, but conveys the gist of the original text" to "entirely incoherent". (Bing seems to do slightly better than Google, incidentally.)
Subbing is a surprisingly difficult thing to get right in anything but the most simplistic of cases.
What a creator gets as a benefit is not having to do all the work of subtitling for the benefit of what will ultimately be a rather small - if not zero - boost in audience.
There's a very real scenario in which you throw an accessibility party and nobody comes.
A recent study of videos captioned by Discovery Digital Networks showed a 7-15% increase in views to captioned videos, compared to non-captioned equivalents. Genuinely properly studied and controlled to remove any other factors.
Subtitling is not hard. It really isn't. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but there are many genuine, measurable benefits if you do.
Just for context my SO is a nom-native English speaker. She speaks and understands English fine in person (her job involves dealing with demanding people from all over the world, who often don't speak very good English), but whenever we watch something on Netflix or such she can't understand what's going on without subtitles. Films are a bit different from an online cause because of background noise, but don't forget how many technical talks you have probably watched that have terrible audio...
She would probably find the lectures much easier to understand than films. It's not only the background noise (the background music is worse) it's also that the voices in today films are often much quieter than the effects and that the acting and directing style for films favours "natural" sounding vocalizing vs. the one used on the theater stage (where ther's really care about pronouncing everything clear).
If I make a video wherein I teach some concept, but don't provide closed captions, and then distribute the video for free, am I discriminating against the deaf? If I knew I had to create closed captions, and then make a braille transcript, or maybe even make my video colorblind friendly, I just wouldn't make the video in the first place. I sympathize with folks with disabilities, and I applaud those who go the extra mile to accommodate them, but making it mandatory under the law seems ridiculous to me.