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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

#71

Post by Kalium »

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…

> 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.

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

#72

Post by kryptiskt »

jdreaver wrote: post #8

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,…

A precedent that big institutions aren't allowed to shut out disabled people? Sounds like a pretty reasonable precedent to me.

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

#73

Post by fennecfoxen »

6stringmerc wrote: post #47
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.

Well, I think you're misapplying your principle in this instance. I think Harvard or MIT should have to provide captions in the spirit of the law that exists. It's not like the ADA was passed last year, so to think that the physical Harvard/MIT facilities would be ADA compliant but online facilities would not strikes me as a necessary coming to grips with the law as it's written. Hence the lawyers will fight this out…

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?"

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

#74

Post by hullo »

kryptiskt wrote: post #72
jdreaver wrote: post #8

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,…

A precedent that big institutions aren't allowed to shut out disabled people? Sounds like a pretty reasonable precedent to me.

Wow to the downvotes on this. Leaving aside their toxic personal politics, they don't even know how to use the site. (This one can be correctly downvoted as meta)

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

#75

Post by erok »

fps wrote: post #49
erok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There goes free online courses from MIT and Harvard due to the impending legal fees implied. Thank you National Association of the Deaf.

On EdX.org, where Harvard and MIT put many online courses for free, all course videos already are professionally captioned and accessible. The cited videos in the lawsuit aren't even course videos, they're promotional videos or streaming versions of conferences. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President Obama and Lady Gaga visiting campus for an event. - see http://creeclaw.org/online-content-lawsuit-harvar…

This will just change all of it though.

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

#76

Post by toomuchtodo »

6stringmerc wrote: post #47
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.

Well, I think you're misapplying your principle in this instance. I think Harvard or MIT should have to provide captions in the spirit of the law that exists. It's not like the ADA was passed last year, so to think that the physical Harvard/MIT facilities would be ADA compliant but online facilities would not strikes me as a necessary coming to grips with the law as it's written. Hence the lawyers will fight this out…

> I think Harvard or MIT should have to provide captions in the spirit of the law that exists.

As long as you're willing to pay for it, you can take this stance.

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

#77

Post by pstrateman »

hga wrote: post #64
dougabug wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No good deed goes unpunished... This just makes it that much more likely that institutions will hesitate before offering free access to materials online.

Based on the breath of the demands per http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... it sounds like just about anything that's vaguely formal, way beyond instructional video and audio. And since they highlight quality problems, albeit bad ones but of mostly silly/very limited utility content.... Nothing good will come of this. Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.

It appears that they're at least partially misunderstanding where the captains on youtube videos come from.... they're entirely automated voice recognition.

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

#78

Post by morgante »

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 nobody can.

It's like someone with a peanut allergy suing me for handing out free cookies.

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

#79

Post by hullo »

hga wrote: post #62
stolio wrote: post #60

MIT's OpenCourseWare is Creative Commons licensed, the only restrictions placed on a third party who wanted to caption the courses are 1) attribution, 2) the derivative work must be non-commercial in nature, 3) that the license remains the same. A building without a ramp can't be copied and rebuilt with a ramp without rebuilding the entire thing, but a video without a caption can be copied and captioned without havin…

Now would be a really good time to make sure there are copies of those elsewhere. MIT is not wealthy like Harvard sort of is (long story), and in all cases one needs to remember that the vast majority of endowment money is earmarked (somehow donors trust college administrators only so much, and then there's Princeton). OCW is now in maintenance mode as far as I can tell, with terrible gaps in offerings, like 2nd term…

MIT's endowment is 12b. That's a ways off Harvard's outlier of 36b, but if they're paying out 5% a year as a benchmark, that's $600m a year just off the endowment. Not being as rich as Bill Gates does not make one not wealthy if one still has over a billion dollars. One can not imagine it would be that hard for the folks at MIT to put together a program to crowdsource quality captioning. (Let alone some kind of "technological" solution, isn't text to speech a thing these days?)

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

#80

Post by cordite »

hga wrote: post #70
cordite wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminded me of a certain notebook and pen (an expensive set) where each page of the notebook had a unique background pattern and the pen would record the lectures as you wrote. Later you could put the pen down on a word in your notes and start listening to the lecture just as you were writing those notes. Can't remember the name though.

I think you're talking about this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ the Livescribe Echo Smartpen Or at least as of 2010 when I put it in an Amazon.com wishlist (and #%& ^%& but Amazon's search function sucks, "pen" didn't find the "smartpen" by which it's named). Going to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtext... I see much cheaper versions, including ones for iOS.

This is indeed the unit a fellow student used. He dealt with ADHD, anxiety, and many other things in conjunction with medication side effects. For him, this was an invaluable study tool.
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