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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

#251

Post by hga »

karmacondon wrote: post #229

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 lik…

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.

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

#252

Post by totony »

jes wrote: post #225
balls187 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sho…

Just writing this comment to approve (and follow discussion). I also would like to know parent's point of view.

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

#253

Post by hga »

cpks wrote: post #246
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…

OCW is insanely expensive, and sponsors got bored with it after a decade.

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.

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

#254

Post by wolfgke »

handojin wrote: post #207
wyager wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want widespread knowledge, don't make it impossible to give knowledge away for free.

Nobody is making it impossible. People are asking (by means of the public courts, as is their right) for equal access to that knowledge.

Why don't they simply set up a wiki for creating subtitles collaboratively?

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

#255

Post by SeanLuke »

neilcrj wrote: post #215
SeanLuke wrote: post #190

> 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 d…

I think this is their source: "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." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/

Ah lawyer weaselwords. From the paper, that definition consists almost entirely of people who don't need closed captioning,

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

#256

Post by strictnein »

ausjke wrote: post #126

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.

They're private, but the amount of federal funds that filter through them is staggering, in federally backed students alone.

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

#257

Post by DanBC »

netheril96 wrote: post #193
DanBC wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because AB testing is for business and for earning money, and the caption thing is about free content that you get nothing in return?

So why bother putting out that free content in the first place?

In the scheme of things adding captions costs very little and provides benefits to many people, not just those with a hearing impairment.

The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions.

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

#258

Post by sp332 »

lifeformed wrote: post #120
sp332 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsource if you like, but at least pay for it. Don't make deaf people pay for something you gave for free to everyone else.

Should they also have to pay for translation to all languages?

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.

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

#260

Post by sp332 »

new299 wrote: post #234
handojin wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vigorou…

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 pr…

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.
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