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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

#91

Post by chc »

harperlee wrote: post #22
chrisabrams wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free. But yes, the current option is distasteful.

> To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free.

Not necessarily. They still aren't obligated to close-caption any materials for free — they just have to not provide any materials.

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

#92

Post by fennecfoxen »

jerf wrote: post #84
fennecfoxen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sho…

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...

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

#93

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

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?"

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.

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

#95

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

erok wrote: post #75
fps wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-harvar…

This will just change all of it though.

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.

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

#96

Post by jamesbrownuhh »

Kalium wrote: post #87
jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#97

Post by SamReidHughes »

sp332 wrote: post #55
DocSavage wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the "discriminatory cause" you're talking about here?

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

#98

Post by jamesbrownuhh »

murbard2 wrote: post #86
jdreaver wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The effort of putting closed captions on your informal video would be much too great.

$1 per minute (if you farm it out) or even less if you do it yourself. In exchange you get 7-15% more views - is that really an unbearable deal?

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

#99

Post by hga »

hullo wrote: post #79
hga wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 "tech…

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.

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

#100

Post by Kalium »

jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #90
hga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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…

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.
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