301–309 of 309 posts
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.
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.
I don't like this type of precedent. 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,…
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, someth…
I don't like this type of precedent. 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,…
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.
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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,…
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 u…
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.
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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, someth…
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…
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.
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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?
The creator of a video has no more of an obligation towards the deaf than anyone else.
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> 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? Fo…
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.
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Yeah, we could get other charities to build their own ramps and accessible parking too...
Not a fair comparison