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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

#51

Post by leppr »

Beltiras wrote: post #10
azdacha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World cannot laugh enough about this. Let's be transparently honest about this!

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.

The problem with this kind of regulation is that it stifles entrepreneurship with unfair financial burden. If the quality level of YouTube auto-generated CCs is considered passable, then don't you think tax money would be better invested in developing client-side captioning software that would be universal and work everywhere ?

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

#52

Post by leppr »

PudgePacket wrote: post #49
pyr0hu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think in real life these things are on a sliding scale, similar to business obligations as the business grows in $ and employee count. So if the mum & pop corner store has a video on their site without captions it'll slide, but if a bank doesn't have captions they're in trouble.

It's a very bad thing if in real life, everyone has to be in illegality in order to function. This is when the rule of law loses meaning and becomes a mere weapon to be used by those in power.

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

#53

Post by qwerty456127 »

bhaak wrote: post #38
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?

In the past German porn used to be the only (or the only reasonable) porn many people could get. Some people felt curious about what do the people in the porn speak (which seems natural when all you have is a couple of VHS movies rather than tons of short clips you can navigate in instants), some of them had too much spare time (that was during the days before widespread Internet availability).

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

#54

Post by qwerty456127 »

lowdose wrote: post #40
michaelt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In many European languages a more formal word for the English word "you" exists, in German it is "Sie", French "Vous".

Using formally-incorrect word for You is probably the least serious mistranslation possible. Everybody is going to get the meaning and, as long as they know that's a translation, nobody but a complete retard would complain about that seriously.

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

#55

Post by ghaff »

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...

That’s what I do for podcasts. Machine translation is getting pretty good but, for publishing an interview transcript, I’d still be spending a lot of my time to clean it up. For a human transcript it’s maybe 15 minutes work.

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

#56

Post by ghaff »

lowdose wrote: post #40
michaelt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t know if it’s a gig company necessarily. As I understand it they don’t use Amazon Turk anymore but I use CastingWords and have been very happy with them. I think they’re just English though.

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

#57

Post by extra88 »

dbetteridge wrote: post #50

Honest question here If you are building a system that is focused on a specific audience, i.e you're building a video site not intended for those with disabilities, how does that work? Can you be forced to provide additional content outside of your systems intended use case? We build sites to meet WCAG standards when doing Government work, but for other sites that are personal/startup projects do these same rules app…

> If you are building a system that is focused on a specific audience, i.e you're building a video site not intended for those with disabilities

That in itself would be discriminatory, excluding people belonging to a protected class (i.e. people with disabilities).

The law does not apply to personal sites, it applies to "places of public accommodation." Most court case outcomes have agreed that it's not only physical places, websites and apps of businesses are included.

A private club might be exempt but I'm sure there are limitations on what can be a private club; i.e. Dollar Shave Club can't call themselves a private club so their website can be inaccessible to people with disabilities.

> As a somewhat contrived example, are Spotify required to provide captions/lyrics with each song they stream?

Probably lyrics, which are basically a transcript, they wouldn't have to be synchronized to the music, as captions are. The law requires "reasonable accommodations" to be made and lyrics to songs are readily available from the rights holders; if those rights holders wanted a lot more money for the lyrics along with the songs, that could be an undue burden on Spotify and mean they don't have to do it.

I thought Pornhub hosted videos uploaded by users. If they're just a platform, they shouldn't be liable for the lack of captions. The article mentions there is a section for captioned videos (though I wonder if they're actually subtitles translating a language, not captions for the hearing-impaired) so I assume their video player supports caption files.

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

#58

Post by extra88 »

ghaff wrote: post #41
tpaksoy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TBH, even human transcribers have their limits. I often get transcripts of my podcasts. But if I have someone with a strong accent, I’ll often skip because I know I’ll be charged for a difficult transcription especially around technical terms and I’ll still have to do a lot of cleanup. Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript. That actually makes me wonder re podcasts and other audio. Is there a…

> Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript.

The law requires "reasonable accommodations" to provide a equivalent experience. Expecting perfection would not be reasonable. Also with heavy accents, the hearing audience probably doesn't understand every word so if some words in the transcript were wrong, the hearing impaired have the same experience.

There's nothing special about video, the law can also require podcasts and other audio-only content to provide transcripts. But the law doesn't apply to everything and everybody, it applies to "places of public accommodation," and many podcasts are personal projects, to which it doesn't apply. The legal precedent for what is a place of public accommodation is evolving, even including anything online is not universally held, I don't know what counts; having an ad spot in a podcast is probably not sufficient to suddenly make it a business to which the law applies. It almost certainly applies to an operation like Gimlet.

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

#59

Post by lowdose »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #54
lowdose wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In many European languages a more formal word for the English word "you" exists, in German it is "Sie", French "Vous". Using formally-incorrect word for You is probably the least serious mistranslation possible. Everybody is going to get the meaning and, as long as they know that's a translation, nobody but a complete retard would complain about that seriously.

I just mentioned in this respect Youtube performance is better than Google.

I do think the formal nuance is outdated and should be deleted. We know from Korean pilots that after switching to English as default in the cockpit a significant decrease in crash rates was accomplished. This was 100% ascribed to the lack of formal nuance in English. I have a hunch a lot of European languages are handicapped by similar conditions.

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

#60

Post by extra88 »

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?

Automated captioning is not considered good enough to meet the standards.

Pornhub should not be responsible for the lack of captions on videos uploaded by users.

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