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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

#291

Post by loco5niner »

handojin wrote: post #222
wyager wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 off…

EDIT: for clarity, removing rhetoricals 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.

Don't worry, he got there eventually

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

#292

Post by loco5niner »

jasonlotito wrote: post #281
wyager wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 off…

> 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 wi…

Ah, there's the ad hominem! (with respect given to handojins comment above)

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

#293

Post by loco5niner »

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…

I'm just the idea guy

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

#294

Post by loco5niner »

chrischen wrote: post #187

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.

> The government should provide a the money

So... the taxpayers.

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

#295

Post by loco5niner »

jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #112
hga wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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…

> I'm not talking about costs, because it doesn't NEED to cost ANY money

Stopped reading right there.

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

#296

Post by jes »

balls187 wrote: post #275
jes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 obje…

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?

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

#297

Post by pjscott »

sp332 wrote: post #262
pjscott wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you defend that attitude to all the deaf people out there who want to know what you put in your video and can't?

I don't defend it. Why would I? I have taken on no obligation here.

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

#298

Post by aldordeah »

wyager wrote: post #169
aldordeah wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

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.

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

#299

Post by Trinidad031 »

aldordeah wrote: post #298
wyager wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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…

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.

I wish you the best.

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

#300

Post by pekk »

DanBC wrote: post #111
Kalium wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".
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