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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

#171

Post by barrkel »

aldordeah wrote: post #140
morgante wrote: post #78

This is beyond ridiculous and will have a serious chilling effect on the growth of online learning content. That you should be obligated to spend additional money on captioning your free videos is incredibly unfair and also unjustifiable. Unfortunately, in many cases it will make the costs unsustainable so we'll see videos taken down entirely—thus, the deaf are selfishly insisting that if they can't have something no…

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.

If you follow the principle behind that logic, everybody should be blinded, deafened and crippled immediately after birth, reduced to the lowest common denominator, because otherwise they get an advantage because they weren't born blind, deafened, or crippled.

If a free lecture provides benefit to someone, but forcing it to be captioned causes it not to be released, would you be happy with that outcome? It's the same principle.

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

#172

Post by wyager »

justcommenting wrote: post #155
stolio wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sidewalks are infrastructure. Free online courses from MIT are not. They're a luxury.

so access to knowledge--most of which, it's worth noting, is massively subsidized by taxpayers in the form of grants and related overhead--is a luxury good? that's not a world i want to live in; access to knowledge is foundational infrastructure.

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

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

#174

Post by bphogan »

wyager wrote: post #165
bphogan wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you learn how to do these things, they become second nature. That's the problem though. People don't think twice about learning a new programming language. But learning how to caption videos, choose colorblind friendly colors, or turn transcripts of a video into something that's braile-display or screen-reader friendly are skills that are relatively simple to acquire and will definitely outlast whatever new fram…

It's not a matter of "thinking about it"; captioning is difficult and expensive, and if we force universities to caption educational materials they release * for free *, we're incentivizing them to never release these materials again.

HN is a community where people solve difficult problems for a living. So someone using "difficult" as a reason for something doesn't really fly with me.

As for expensive? I'll agree. Going cost is about $1 per minute minimum. And they're not releasing that material "for free." Make no mistake - it's either because they got a grant (that's what we face) or part of some marketing thing.

I apologize if it sounds like I'm frustrated and angry, but I run into all sorts of inaccessible things created for the web by people who use "difficult and expensive" as the go-to excuse.

If you are preparing a video for something online, you should be planning it and writing a script, which you can easily turn into a transcript. If it's a lecture recording, well, workstudy students can transcribe it for you and caption it.

These are all things responsible educators do. Proudly.

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

#175

Post by hga »

hudibras wrote: post #160
hga wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read this mendacious, invidious PR thuggery http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and tell me again it's "just a lawsuit". And as has been amply pointed out, in the case of any of the outcomes you're calling, a great deal of material will be withdrawn from the net (or campus servers and official Youtube channels), little will be returned, at least from MIT, which doesn't have the money (well…

I guess I'm missing some nuances you're seeing in that press release, but it seems pretty innocuous. Certainly don't see any evidence of those thugs you mention, just some people concerned about deaf Americans not having their civil rights protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And I'll take that bet: In 3 years, every video on the Harvard and M.I.T. websites will be captioned.

You can only take my bet (and I used 3 years for symmetry, make it more like 1-8), if you take the whole thing, which includes there being precious few of those nicely captioned videos on MIT websites and Youtube channels.

But, yeah, every video you will be able find on an accessible to the outside of MIT website will be perfect. Yea!

BTW, MIT has rather nicely developed fine grained control over what can and can't be seen by outsiders, all this sort of thing developed for Project Athena starting back in the '80s.

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

#176

Post by seanflyon »

eli wrote: post #134
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.

So lobby to change the law?

Perhaps a good first step would be to have a discussion "For the purposes of armchair moralizing", not about the law as it is written, but how it should be.

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

#177

Post by wyager »

jamesbrownuhh wrote: post #66
pekk wrote: post #50

As someone who makes free content, this is scary. I understand the Harvard has a lot more money to take care of accessibility than I do, but why would that exempt me? What is the legal formula determining who is in danger from lawsuits about whether they provided an accessible alternative to a completely free thing? If there isn't a strong protection here then it means you might as well not offer any free content at…

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…

How about you let content providers decide for themselves what market they want to target, rather than presuming to decide for them?

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

#178

Post by eseehausen »

icebraining wrote: post #162
eseehausen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flamebait" was certainly not my intention. I may be naive, but what is the difference between a society comprised of people with no obligations toward each other and the state of nature? Edit: For instance, for Hobbes, that pretty much is the definition of the state of nature, in which everyone has the natural right to their own self-preservation and goals. The rise of sovereign power is often conceived of as the en…

Objectivism (Rand's philosophy) didn't defend a society comprised of people with no obligations toward each other. Like most libertarians/classical liberal philosophies, it supports the NAP[1], as well as defending the necessity of an impartial law system. It just defends negative rights, instead of positives ones, not a lack of rights and obligations. See Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty [2]. EDIT to your EDI…

Ah, those links refreshed my memory- I was incorrect in my edit- that approach more closely resembles Locke's state of nature. But thank you for showing me that Rand gets there from another angle.

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

#179

Post by hga »

WalterBright wrote: post #173

Aren't there all these speech=>text software programs? They should be built in to browser software. Problem solved, no more need for lawsuits.

As far as we can tell, the specific complaints about poorly captioned videos were from just such software, only automatically generated by Google's servers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...

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

#180

Post by aldordeah »

barrkel wrote: post #171
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.

If you follow the principle behind that logic, everybody should be blinded, deafened and crippled immediately after birth, reduced to the lowest common denominator, because otherwise they get an advantage because they weren't born blind, deafened, or crippled. If a free lecture provides benefit to someone, but forcing it to be captioned causes it not to be released, would you be happy with that outcome? It's the same…

The population of deaf people in the USA is comparable to the population of Asian Americans (ranging from about 1% to 4% by state in both cases). If an organization gave a leg up in life to everyone except Asian Americans (e.g. by covering some share of the education costs), would you be happy with that outcome? Now this really is the same principle.
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