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Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

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Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#31

Post by aequitas »

breakingcups wrote: post #21

Does anyone with more experience with this law know whether the ADA would apply to all video content on a website or just a subset? Otherwise YouTube would also have a huge problem. Their auto-generated CC's are laughable most of the time.

I find their CC to be pretty accurate most of the time with sometimes some words misunderstood. It's not perfect, but for me it often is very usable as aid in a noisy environment (mind you I have no hearing disability, just don't want to crank the volume to 11 when my kids are playing in the same room).

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#32

Post by ryanlol »

pyr0hu wrote: post #14
Beltiras wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be because I have worked with advocates for disabled people. I don't see the funny aspect. I'm glad for the laws. Either they apply or they do not. Either our hearing-disabled brothers and sisters are equal or they are not. It's juvenile to somehow factor porn out and say it shouldn't count there.

Yeah, but what about the case that @threatofrain mentioned? If a company has no resources to auto-generate CCs for every video uploaded, then it should be punished and sued? (Of course this case does not apply to PH)

Who decides when the autogenerated CCs are good enough quality?

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#33

Post by michaelt »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #28

This is funny (who cares about what do they speak in porn, really? I know some people learn German just to understand that but that's hardly essential for the experience) but there have been more alike case which were sad: universities removing (!) freely-available lecture videos as there were no subtitles (even those published on YouTube, I don't know why generated subtitles wouldn't qualify).

> who cares about what do they speak in porn, really?

The article says one of the videos in the complaint was "hot step aunt"

If you remove the audio from incest porn, doesn't that turn it into regular vanilla porn?

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#34

Post by tw1010 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #26
tw1010 wrote: post #11

Curious: why isn't all porn sites sued for this? I don't quite get why they're only going after PH? Is it because it's harder to win a case against 1000 websites? Is it because it's more overhead to go after multiple sites and they expect the biggest return on investment only going after the biggest one? Anyone smarter than me who has a take?

The very first sentence says, "A deaf man has sued Pornhub and other pornographic websites" You could always try reading an article to see if it answers questions you have based on skimming a headline.

Thank you

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#35

Post by tpaksoy »

aequitas wrote: post #31
breakingcups wrote: post #21

Does anyone with more experience with this law know whether the ADA would apply to all video content on a website or just a subset? Otherwise YouTube would also have a huge problem. Their auto-generated CC's are laughable most of the time.

I find their CC to be pretty accurate most of the time with sometimes some words misunderstood. It's not perfect, but for me it often is very usable as aid in a noisy environment (mind you I have no hearing disability, just don't want to crank the volume to 11 when my kids are playing in the same room).

Until someone with an accent appears on the screen.

And I don't mean someone from France or Turkey for instance. But Brits, and in particular Scots, usually break the automatically generated CCs.

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#36

Post by Myrmornis »

chrxr wrote: post #29

Relevant precedent: Harvard recently settled with National Association of the Deaf, resulting in all videos made publically available after Dec 2019 requiring captions, and a required 5 day turnaround for captioning of older videos. https://dredf.org/2019/11/27/landmark-settlement-with-harvar...

That sounds positive. In contrast, a similar situation at Berkeley had a disastrous outcome -- all Berkeley's historical non-captioned videos of lectures were taken down.

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#37

Post by x3ro »

radu_floricica wrote: post #20
Beltiras wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be because I have worked with advocates for disabled people. I don't see the funny aspect. I'm glad for the laws. Either they apply or they do not. Either our hearing-disabled brothers and sisters are equal or they are not. It's juvenile to somehow factor porn out and say it shouldn't count there.

They are obviously not equal. They are hearing disabled. That's a red herring. Should the society support them to lead normal lives as much as possible? We can pretty much agree on that, at least as long as the costs are reasonable (for example one billion per inner ear implant is definitely not). If you put the problem like this it's obvious there is room for discussion. Is PH captioning helping them live normal liv…

Honestly I'd say you accusing the parent of a red herring is pretty much a red herring, given that the parent is very aware that the people in question are deaf.

Your resource argument doesn't hold up either, especially with money. Things can become cheap if society values them enough to invest time to make them cheap. Most of that time is currently being invested in making middle- and upper-class people's lives more comfortable (eg most unicorns out of SF) but that doesn't mean it _has_ to be that way.

Drugs could be cheaper (or not become absurdly expensive), places could be accessible, people wouldn't have to be homeless... It's clearly a resource allocation problem, but you make it sound like resources are very well allocated right now. I don't think they are.

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#38

Post by bhaak »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #28

This is funny (who cares about what do they speak in porn, really? I know some people learn German just to understand that but that's hardly essential for the experience) but there have been more alike case which were sad: universities removing (!) freely-available lecture videos as there were no subtitles (even those published on YouTube, I don't know why generated subtitles wouldn't qualify).

Erm, could you explain what's so special about German porn that people would want to learn the language to understand it?

Re: Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA

#40

Post by lowdose »

michaelt wrote: post #19
threatofrain wrote: post #6

If a company doesn't have the kind of technology to effectively transcribe their large volume of videos and the daily rate of uploads, then must they simply start taking down videos? If a company started hiring inhouse to develop such tech, how long would it take?

Given the performance of Google's auto-captioning, I suspect developing worthwhile auto-captioning is pretty difficult; according to [1] the better Youtube channels use gig economy captioning at $1 per minute. Of course, there would be some scope for efficiency - no need to pay for captioning when the performers aren't speaking! [1] https://www.wired.com/story/problem-with-youtubes-terrible-c...

While Youtube auto captioning has a superior performance compared to Google Translate output. In youtube translations there is much more language specific nuance. In many European languages a more formal word for the English word "you" exists, in German it is "Sie", French "Vous".

Correct interpretations of these nuances are applied by Youtube, Google however translates "you" by default to the most formal option.

So to me $1 dollar per minute sounds like an awesome deal because there is not much to adjust.

Out of curiosity, can you link to such a gig company?

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