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Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

nytimes.com

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Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#81

Post by Chronic31 »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #42

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 p…

Go now. Make a mobile app. Hire your founding engineers and live a long, prosperous life.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#82

Post by jamesbrownuhh »

Kalium wrote: post #71
jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

> More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that. In a world where perfectly accurate captions are zero-cost and zero-effort, absolutely. That is not this world.

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.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#83

Post by shaunol »

stolio wrote: post #60

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 havin…

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.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#84

Post by jerf »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #73
6stringmerc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 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?

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#85

Post by kryptiskt »

hullo wrote: post #74
kryptiskt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A precedent that big institutions aren't allowed to shut out disabled people? Sounds like a pretty reasonable precedent to me.

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).

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#86

Post by murbard2 »

jdreaver wrote: post #44
6stringmerc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

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.

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.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#87

Post by Kalium »

jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #82
Kalium wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that. In a world where perfectly accurate captions are zero-cost and zero-effort, absolutely. That is not this world.

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 anythin…

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.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#88

Post by cmelbye »

sp332 wrote: post #37
Someone1234 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm kind of blown away by the down votes you're getting. I would be curious to hear why people are down voting?

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#89

Post by hga »

pstrateman wrote: post #77
hga wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aaah. But if those are official university Youtube "channels" or whatever they're called as they appear to be, does that matter?

Doesn't matter if "MIT goes dark" if the servers are Google's or MIT's.

Re: Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

#90

Post by jamesbrownuhh »

hga wrote: post #67
jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

" 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 m…

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.)

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