231–240 of 309 posts
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Accepted. Far better than nothing at all (in most cases) though, I'd suggest.
I think the point people are making is that a video without captions is also far better than no video at all.
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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.
That's according to a narrow view of "equal access."
Many people (if not a majority) have an entirely different definition "equal access." On this view, simply putting text or a video up on the Internet without captions is providing equal access: everyone is equally free to download and make use of that information, to the best of their ability.
If I am free to publish a video on my own accord without captions, shouldn't I be free to do the same with a video I've made with a group of my friends? And if this is the case, why not a group of my colleagues? Present law aside, I don't see why should I lose my right to do something just because I'm doing it as part of a group.
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No-one is saying that anyone should be forced to do anything. Personally, I caption the hobby videos that I put on YouTube, because doing so brings in far more views, both domestically and from around the world.
>No-one is saying that anyone should be forced to do anything. This lawsuit is literally about forcing the universities to pay to caption the educational materials they release for free.
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>People are asking (by means of the public courts, as is their right) for equal access to that knowledge. "Equal access" is not free. If universities are given the choice of not providing free educational resources and paying shit-tons of money to provide free educational resources accessible to every random group that sues the university over the way these free materials are presented, universities will obviously ch…
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…
I suppose it rests on the definition of reasonable accommodation which could range anywhere from "making the material available for transcription" to "full professional subtitles should be made available".
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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…
> More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that. In a world where perfectly accurate captions are zero-cost and zero-effort, absolutely. That is not this world.
Tyranny of the minority.
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…
In terms of accuracy, once you start falling beneath the high-nineties percentage threshold, it becomes increasingly hard for humans to make sense of the text. Dropping to 66% accuracy means that one word in three is wrong - it's almost impossible to make sense of something that badly degraded.
Here's a nice example, here are the 'Automatic Captions' - provided by YouTube's voice recognition technology - of an MIT YouTube video. This is a 'best of all possible worlds' example - there is a single speaker, whose words are pronounced slowly and clearly, with no background noise or undue slurring or interference. You'll see that this is good, but nevertheless in a 90 second video there are 20+ errors (not all of them obvious or easy to decipher.)
"0:00 the use of microneedles in the gastrointestinal tract 0:03 presents a unique opportunity to enable the oral delivery of large molecules 0:08 again sewing that are currently limited to injection 0:11 and adjustable capsules such as the one shown could be imagine 0:14 it would contain a reservoir to house the therapeutic payload 0:18 and have a pH responsive coating to cover the neil's 0:21 allowing for easy ingestion 0:23 after ingestion the bill would pass through the stomach and into the 0:26 intestine 0:27 there because I'm a dissolved revealing the microneedles 0:30 the pair started motion in the tissue would compress the reservoir 0:34 expelling the drug out the needles and into the tissue 0:37 insulin injections were tested in the GI tract a pig's 0:40 as a result injection a small bowl can be seen in the tissue 0:44 this small injection result in a robust drop in the animal's blood glucose 0:49 that superior to the effect elicited by traditional subcutaneous injection 0:54 oil administration as expected has no effect 1:01 the safety impasse 1:02 manga vice was also tested in pics the model device was placed her in over two 1:08 into the stomach the pics once in the stomach 1:11 it was released 1:16 by look 1:17 radio graphic 1:18 image to the pill shown here the progress on the bill through the animal 1:22 can be tracked by serial X-rayed 1:25 the pill was found to be safe and well-tolerated"
As you can see, this is very, very good in the circumstances - but it's still not quite there.
This whole thing is a shame, because MIT do provide captioning on a good number of their YouTube videos, which deserves credit. It seems righteously unfair for NAD to pick on an uncaptioned video and then point out isolated errors in YouTube's (not MIT's) transcriptions of same, a point which I hope is made in MIT's defence.
There are 263 videos on MIT's YouTube channel, of which 91 are captioned. Most of the videos are only a few minutes long, so getting that channel 100% captioned would take maybe a day or two, if that - I'm almost tempted to donate a weekend of my time to it (assuming that MIT would even take the finished results, which is of course by no means certain.)
Obviously that's just YouTube - the wider selection of courses is another matter. But it illustrates why things like this aren't always solvable with software. It can certainly help, and save the humans some time, but it's not a "fit and forget" solution, and isn't likely to be for quite some time yet.
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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?"
>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 can't see how the right to individual free speech could be compatible with your view.
By the way, equality before the law means that the same law applies to everyone equally, regardless of social standing, race, etc. It does not make anyone equal in any other sense. Equality before the law does not mean that the law should make everyone equally good at hearing, doing math, playing basketball, dating, or anything else. Human beings are inherently unequal in every other sense but the law, and this is a fundamental fact of existence that can never be eliminated! Examples: none of us will ever have the exact same genetic makeup as any other (and it is monstrous to attempt to force people to attempt to do this). Nor will any of us have the exact same opportunities as any other (a man that lives in Kansas can't also live in Idaho at the same time; the people he meets and interacts with are determined in part by geography!)
Say, does anyone know if there is any open source software that would do this (or for that matter, any software that isn't ridiculously expensive)? Years back, I ran a workshop (applying group theory to understanding magnetism) and we recorded it. We got releases for the videos and have the bandwidth to put them on the web for free, but I believe that I have to have them subtitled in order to release them online. So,…
A good place to start looking if you're after an OSS solution is what Carnegie Mellon University are doing - there's a variety of tools at http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net
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Captioning celluloid film is a wholly different thing to transcribing an online video - the prices are in no way comparable. I create captions for hundreds of hours of video every year - I know exactly how much work it can be, and, at the same time, exactly how easy it can be.
As I understand it, Rear Window Captioning Systems specifically don't modify the actual film of the movie. That's their advantage over baked-in captions.
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The legal implications go to many schools, so I don't think we're talking about luxury in the context of two elite schools. I think we're talking about the inclusion of minority populations in publicly funded institutions of education, and just how much we want them in our society. Perhaps we do, perhaps we don't, perhaps it's somewhere midway.
Neither MIT nor Harvard are public schools, they are both private.