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, and I applaud those who go the extra mile to accommodate them, but making it mandatory under the law seems ridiculous to me.
When it comes to individual works, I don't see how this would have any bearing on your product. You're not beholden to the ADA in your creative works, from what I understand. Double the exemption for making something for free.
It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these products and do not maintain quality standards respective of existing laws. No musician has to include a print out of their lyrics in the liner notes, it's a completely voluntary transaction without stipulation of such ADA compliance, in that the terms of the relationship are different than this case where Harvard is a 'service provider' of sorts (the service being the transmission of knowledge).
This is different than the occasional lawsuit trolling where a person in a wheelchair finds small businesses not in compliance with the ADA and brings a case...this is...well, an educational institution with the resources and capability for compliance, but they aren't complying. Seems pretty workable from a high-level standpoint to me.
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 framework comes out this year.
I am visually impaired. And I have been helping people make the web accessible since 2001. If you plan it from the beginning, it's only a few extra yards, not an extra mile.
I share a similar viewpoint. Wouldn't it be a better usage of funds to donate to these projects for caption support instead of using those funds to pay attorneys? Why is it so hard to be constructive?
The article doesn't specify who is suing them, whether it's a MOOC user or an enrolled student, and what lectures they're suing over. There's a big difference between a MOOC lecture lacking captions and required online lecture for an undergraduate course lacking caption.
I can see the requirement for actually matriculated students. (I wonder if they have to provide ASL signers in-class for deaf students and braille books for the blind.)
What I don't see is a requirement for free courses. That would be ridiculous. Why would anyone want to make anything available if someone is going to come around and sue?
Instead of suing, why not start a project to automatically CC the videos, something like audio-recaptcha?
Is this because they offer certification or degrees through these programs? I think you create something on your own with no measurable achievement it wouldn't matter. That's the only reason I can see this being a suit.
I generally agree with you, but the counter argument would be something like, If you opened a soup kitchen downtown to provide food for the homeless, should you be required to install accessibility facilities (ramps, elevator, bathroom, etc.)?
I know the law says yes, but is it what we want? Have the extra building codes discouraged potential altruists?
I wonder if there's a government subsidy for that part of it, and if so could a similar provision be allowed for educational institutions opening their courseware.
I am a big supporter of accessibility (i.e. access for the blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled).
However unfortunately in this specific case I am conflicted. On one hand we have far more free content available to us because the "cost" of providing this content is relatively low. They just reproduce the course's normal materials, and have a camera rolling during lectures (and, yes, someone has to do basic editing, transcoding, and so on).
If someone has to go through every single lecture and transcribe it (since I assume auto-transcription wouldn't be acceptable) then they will likely just start pulling less popular/niche content because the viewership/return wouldn't be high enough to justify the cost.
And to be honest the niche content is far more interesting than the common stuff. You can find Computer Science 101 lectures all over the place, but want to watch a video on metallurgy for industrial tooling there is like one lecture several years old with just a hundred or so views.
So I really think if the Advocates for the deaf win here they'll gain a small victory but at a large-ish cost to the rest of society. And how long before YouTube is next?
I know several of the lawyers involved on the plaintiff's end (several of them blind and/or deaf) on a friendship, nonprofessional level -- and I'm noticing there's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments. However I am not a lawyer nor am I hugely aware of the nuances of the issues, so take this with a grain of salt.
Basically the law firm in question is using lawsuits as a method of social activism to compel large orgs to adhere to the ADA. (Similar thing happened to Scribd.) Basically deaf/blind nonprofits ask these entities in question for open accessibility accommodations and typically do NOT get denied the request, but this ends up being a low-priority task that gets tabled for years. Unfortunately between asking nicely, mobilizing social support to effect change, and lawsuits, the legal stick is by-and-large most effective at making things happen.
This is also NOT a shakedown; the end goal is NOT that lawyers or plaintiffs get fat stacks of cash, but that these accommodations be implemented. To the disabilities orgs, these requests are similar to asking for accessibility ramps and what not.
The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.
This is terrible. What about lawyer costs for the defendants? This is exactly what old-school corporate world does (e.g. IBM): abusing the legal system for a shake-down.
Everybody chill out, it's just a lawsuit. Four Americans disagree with how Harvard and M.I.T. are interpreting the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and so they're asking the courts to help out with the disagreement. I doubt anybody here will disagree with Americans being able to use their courts to redress perceived injustices.
As to the ultimate outcome, I'm calling it: Either DOJ will clarify the rules so that captions are required, or the schools will settle the lawsuit by agreeing that captions are required, or the courts will decide that captions are required.
And then 30 years from now, at least one person in this thread will have lost their hearing but will click open and watch a captioned M.I.T. or Harvard video without even thinking about how much they railed against that one article on HN back in 2015.
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, absent a big fundraising campaign, which would crowd out other things), and perhaps most importantly, it will have a serious chilling effect on future offerings, since they will have to be vetted for not just captioning, but sufficient quality captioning, "by legal". MIT students, at least, have better things to do with their time.
And 3 years from now, let along 30, at least one person will click on a "see the video" link and get a 404.
And you severely underestimate people's memories, and ability to hold grudges.
> The lawsuits, filed by the National Association of the Deaf, which is seeking class-action status, say the universities have “largely denied access to this content to the approximately 48 million — nearly one out of five — Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing.”
Um, what?
U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people account for 0.4% of the US population.
"We estimate that 30.0 million or 12.7% of Americans ≥ 12 years had bilateral hearing loss from 2001–2008, and this estimate increases to 48.1 million or 20.3% when also including individuals with unilateral hearing loss."
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 having to recreate the original. MIT went out of their way to make sure this sort of thing is legal to do.
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 bio- and organic chemistry but no 1st term offering, and given the astounding breath of the demand, there's every chance a very large fraction of MIT's video and audio offerings will simply go dark, and future production burdened by red tape (which MIT students do not respond to well...).
Especially since the lawsuit demands quality captioning. Granted, there examples on their web page are awful, then again they're nothingburgers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... at least if my understanding of the lack of real power of the President of Liberia is correct, and it says something that they put Lady Gaga being welcomed by Harvard students right after it. If this is the best they can come up with....
Not that I know any SJW deaf types right now, but if I did, they'd be treated to the one of the very few bits of sign language I know :-(.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
This makes me so sad, it makes me wonder why the National Association of the Deaf doesn't try to encourage recruiting volunteers to the association to help with closed captioning. With this litigation I feel they're only alienating those that can actually help their cause.
I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and review sections which were confusing.
Agreed. If I see a link to a video without a transcript or description or even a TLDR, I just won't bother. Maybe to some people I am just another impatient millenial, but I can't help but feel like I have better things to do than to sit through bad jokes, equipment problems, stuttering, and umm-ahhhs.
I'm usually pretty critical of a lot of Amazon's culture, but one thing I think is absolutely brilliant is its reliance on whitepapers and its shunning of presentations. With a presentation, the presenter retains 100% control over information flow, which can magnify the agitation that you feel when they just aren't spitting it out fast enough. With a whitepaper, a quick skim allows you to know exactly where you want to focus and you can control the information flow from there. Whitepapers take significantly more effort, which is why a lot of amazonians criticize them, but the reward is easily proportional to the effort.
A thousand times yes. With a suitably rocking implementation (as outlined by other posters up/down of me) this would be a net benefit to everyone not just the deaf.
The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.
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.
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.
Is this referring to free MOOCs on Coursera/edX/etc and free published course videos? Or online courses that enrolled students are paying for? Or both?
Nope. My apologies on behalf of our profession. This is probably just a shakedown -- it'll be cheaper to settle than it will be to defend against this lawsuit, so the game is to find a mistake that could plausibly fall afoul of the ADA and file away.
I hope they don't settle, to put it mildly. Few institutions are as well-equipped to combat trolls as Harvard.
This can use a software fix:
1) everyone agrees that having captions and transcripts is a good thing
2) requiring schools to have them is problematic because it increases the cost of producing the videos--we want the cost to be low because the videos are a social good and we want more of them.
3) with software maybe we can make it inexpensive to add transcripts and captions to videos. Suddenly the world is a better place
Here are the complaints for Harvard[0] and MIT[1].
According to the complaints, the relevant laws are Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The former deals with institutions that receive federal financial assistance and the latter deals with places of "public accommodation".
I think the sad thing here is not that deaf people are suing for access to educational materials. I think it's sad that they are ignored to the point that they feel their only option is to sue in order to have their voices heard.
People don't just wake up one morning and say "Hey, I have an idea. Let's go sue M.I.T. and Harvard". There is likely alot of stuff that happens leading up to that moment.
If you think that this is just a random thing where the "big bully deaf people are trying to push poor little M.I.T. and Harvard around" I legitimately feel sorry for you. Your sheltered view of the world is so out of touch with reality it isn't funny.
From fairly early in the article:
"Harvard expected the Justice Department to propose rules this year “to provide much-needed guidance in this area,” and that the university would follow whatever rules were adopted."
Don't like this kind of litigation at all. Aren't they private schools, please don't mandate good free stuff to be perfect, at least not using this method.
Isn't every lecture, on-line or off, unavailable to deaf students? How does it work in legacy education? Is there a sign language interpreter in every hall?
At my school, they did indeed put an interpreter in any class with deaf kids (we had a lot of deaf students). The school would also pay hearing students for their course notes for distribution to deaf students, so if you were deaf and felt like sleeping in, no worries you'll get the notes anyway.
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 like an 80% solution would be good enough. Hell, even a 66% solution seems like a good compromise or starting point. If an automatically generated transcript can convey at least 2/3rds of the information from a lecture for a one time or small incremental cost then I don't see why both parties wouldn't be ok with it. Those with disabilities would have to do some extra work to look up garbled words or ideas that don't translate well to text, but it would be within the bounds of reason (say a 1 hour lecture would now take 2 hours to parse). The organizations producing the content would most likely having to pay for speech-to-text software, either several thousand dollars per year per class or $X per lecture, but they would still come out cheaper than paying someone per minute to do the transcription. It isn't a win-win situation, but more of an equitable lose-lose.
They say a fair deal has been reached when both sides in a negotiation are a little bit unhappy. A software solution would seem to do that without ignoring the rights of the disabled or placing prohibitive costs on the content producers. And it would set a precedent going forward: Content producers must make an effort to accommodate those with disabilities, but the disabled should be willing to make some extra effort themselves. Asking an elderly woman in a wheelchair to lift herself over a sidewalk curb is not reasonable. Asking the same person to spend an extra 30 minutes to decipher an unclear transcript might be.
Echoing jamesbrownuhh, the vicious PR for this lawsuit at http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... specifically calls out what appears to be nonsense YouTube auto-captioning ... and two of the examples are of nothingburger visits by Lady Gaga and Obama. It's unclear jamesbrownuhh's generosity would extend to properly captioning video of every vacuous celebrity's visit.
Worse, you've got accept that throwing this into the legal arena adds costs way beyond just proper captioning. Any settlement that will make the plaintiffs happy will require the establishment of a ADA enforcement unit at these institutions, and resultant red tape for anyone in the communities to publish anything with audio. Which going forward will have a clear chilling effect; we're not just talking about a lot of Harvard and MIT potentially going dark, but continuing in that mode except for the most important things that are worth the extra captioning and legal effort.
Speech to text is simply not a solved problem. The technology gets better all the time, enormous strides have been made, but voice recognition is something that the human brain does well and computers generally do not, at this time.
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.
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, if people have asked for the videos in person, I've given out copies, but they're not generally available...Automation does seem to be the answer here...
This is a very bad precedent. I'm hearing impaired and I would never think of demanding this when I'm getting these things for free. Perhaps, I would not be saying this if I were paying for it - still, I may consider the other party when it comes to this.
Using the law as a weapon to demand something where we have alternatives[slides, notes or manuals] is, in my opinion, like "biting the hand that offers help".
That said, I have been seriously putting in effort to listen to videos without captioning. Yes, it's an uphill task and I'm willing to do it.
The government should provide a the money for implementing a government mandated captioning. The company should be sued if they choose not to use the money to implement captioning.
[+] [-] jdreaver|11 years ago|reply
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, and I applaud those who go the extra mile to accommodate them, but making it mandatory under the law seems ridiculous to me.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|11 years ago|reply
It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these products and do not maintain quality standards respective of existing laws. No musician has to include a print out of their lyrics in the liner notes, it's a completely voluntary transaction without stipulation of such ADA compliance, in that the terms of the relationship are different than this case where Harvard is a 'service provider' of sorts (the service being the transmission of knowledge).
This is different than the occasional lawsuit trolling where a person in a wheelchair finds small businesses not in compliance with the ADA and brings a case...this is...well, an educational institution with the resources and capability for compliance, but they aren't complying. Seems pretty workable from a high-level standpoint to me.
[+] [-] bphogan|11 years ago|reply
I am visually impaired. And I have been helping people make the web accessible since 2001. If you plan it from the beginning, it's only a few extra yards, not an extra mile.
[+] [-] dougabug|11 years ago|reply
This just makes it that much more likely that institutions will hesitate before offering free access to materials online.
[+] [-] chrisabrams|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erok|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kryptiskt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psychometry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|11 years ago|reply
What I don't see is a requirement for free courses. That would be ridiculous. Why would anyone want to make anything available if someone is going to come around and sue?
Instead of suing, why not start a project to automatically CC the videos, something like audio-recaptcha?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProAm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libria|11 years ago|reply
I know the law says yes, but is it what we want? Have the extra building codes discouraged potential altruists?
I wonder if there's a government subsidy for that part of it, and if so could a similar provision be allowed for educational institutions opening their courseware.
[+] [-] notadocta|11 years ago|reply
This is why we can't have nice things.
[+] [-] Someone1234|11 years ago|reply
However unfortunately in this specific case I am conflicted. On one hand we have far more free content available to us because the "cost" of providing this content is relatively low. They just reproduce the course's normal materials, and have a camera rolling during lectures (and, yes, someone has to do basic editing, transcoding, and so on).
If someone has to go through every single lecture and transcribe it (since I assume auto-transcription wouldn't be acceptable) then they will likely just start pulling less popular/niche content because the viewership/return wouldn't be high enough to justify the cost.
And to be honest the niche content is far more interesting than the common stuff. You can find Computer Science 101 lectures all over the place, but want to watch a video on metallurgy for industrial tooling there is like one lecture several years old with just a hundred or so views.
So I really think if the Advocates for the deaf win here they'll gain a small victory but at a large-ish cost to the rest of society. And how long before YouTube is next?
[+] [-] binarysolo|11 years ago|reply
Basically the law firm in question is using lawsuits as a method of social activism to compel large orgs to adhere to the ADA. (Similar thing happened to Scribd.) Basically deaf/blind nonprofits ask these entities in question for open accessibility accommodations and typically do NOT get denied the request, but this ends up being a low-priority task that gets tabled for years. Unfortunately between asking nicely, mobilizing social support to effect change, and lawsuits, the legal stick is by-and-large most effective at making things happen.
This is also NOT a shakedown; the end goal is NOT that lawyers or plaintiffs get fat stacks of cash, but that these accommodations be implemented. To the disabilities orgs, these requests are similar to asking for accessibility ramps and what not.
[+] [-] cwbrandsma|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hudibras|11 years ago|reply
As to the ultimate outcome, I'm calling it: Either DOJ will clarify the rules so that captions are required, or the schools will settle the lawsuit by agreeing that captions are required, or the courts will decide that captions are required.
And then 30 years from now, at least one person in this thread will have lost their hearing but will click open and watch a captioned M.I.T. or Harvard video without even thinking about how much they railed against that one article on HN back in 2015.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
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, absent a big fundraising campaign, which would crowd out other things), and perhaps most importantly, it will have a serious chilling effect on future offerings, since they will have to be vetted for not just captioning, but sufficient quality captioning, "by legal". MIT students, at least, have better things to do with their time.
And 3 years from now, let along 30, at least one person will click on a "see the video" link and get a 404.
And you severely underestimate people's memories, and ability to hold grudges.
[+] [-] SeanLuke|11 years ago|reply
Um, what?
U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people account for 0.4% of the US population.
https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php
[+] [-] neilcrj|11 years ago|reply
"We estimate that 30.0 million or 12.7% of Americans ≥ 12 years had bilateral hearing loss from 2001–2008, and this estimate increases to 48.1 million or 20.3% when also including individuals with unilateral hearing loss."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/
[+] [-] stolio|11 years ago|reply
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 having to recreate the original. MIT went out of their way to make sure this sort of thing is legal to do.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
OCW is now in maintenance mode as far as I can tell, with terrible gaps in offerings, like 2nd term bio- and organic chemistry but no 1st term offering, and given the astounding breath of the demand, there's every chance a very large fraction of MIT's video and audio offerings will simply go dark, and future production burdened by red tape (which MIT students do not respond to well...).
Especially since the lawsuit demands quality captioning. Granted, there examples on their web page are awful, then again they're nothingburgers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... at least if my understanding of the lack of real power of the President of Liberia is correct, and it says something that they put Lady Gaga being welcomed by Harvard students right after it. If this is the best they can come up with....
Not that I know any SJW deaf types right now, but if I did, they'd be treated to the one of the very few bits of sign language I know :-(.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
[+] [-] shaunol|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimblegorilla|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saosebastiao|11 years ago|reply
I'm usually pretty critical of a lot of Amazon's culture, but one thing I think is absolutely brilliant is its reliance on whitepapers and its shunning of presentations. With a presentation, the presenter retains 100% control over information flow, which can magnify the agitation that you feel when they just aren't spitting it out fast enough. With a whitepaper, a quick skim allows you to know exactly where you want to focus and you can control the information flow from there. Whitepapers take significantly more effort, which is why a lot of amazonians criticize them, but the reward is easily proportional to the effort.
[+] [-] handojin|11 years ago|reply
The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.
[+] [-] skwirl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgante|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aldordeah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skwirl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelukelugames|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chevalier|11 years ago|reply
I hope they don't settle, to put it mildly. Few institutions are as well-equipped to combat trolls as Harvard.
[+] [-] dhbradshaw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chronic31|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igonvalue|11 years ago|reply
According to the complaints, the relevant laws are Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The former deals with institutions that receive federal financial assistance and the latter deals with places of "public accommodation".
[0] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MI...
[1] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...
[+] [-] datashovel|11 years ago|reply
People don't just wake up one morning and say "Hey, I have an idea. Let's go sue M.I.T. and Harvard". There is likely alot of stuff that happens leading up to that moment.
If you think that this is just a random thing where the "big bully deaf people are trying to push poor little M.I.T. and Harvard around" I legitimately feel sorry for you. Your sheltered view of the world is so out of touch with reality it isn't funny.
[+] [-] strictnein|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strictnein|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blfr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jff|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmacondon|11 years ago|reply
It seems like an 80% solution would be good enough. Hell, even a 66% solution seems like a good compromise or starting point. If an automatically generated transcript can convey at least 2/3rds of the information from a lecture for a one time or small incremental cost then I don't see why both parties wouldn't be ok with it. Those with disabilities would have to do some extra work to look up garbled words or ideas that don't translate well to text, but it would be within the bounds of reason (say a 1 hour lecture would now take 2 hours to parse). The organizations producing the content would most likely having to pay for speech-to-text software, either several thousand dollars per year per class or $X per lecture, but they would still come out cheaper than paying someone per minute to do the transcription. It isn't a win-win situation, but more of an equitable lose-lose.
They say a fair deal has been reached when both sides in a negotiation are a little bit unhappy. A software solution would seem to do that without ignoring the rights of the disabled or placing prohibitive costs on the content producers. And it would set a precedent going forward: Content producers must make an effort to accommodate those with disabilities, but the disabled should be willing to make some extra effort themselves. Asking an elderly woman in a wheelchair to lift herself over a sidewalk curb is not reasonable. Asking the same person to spend an extra 30 minutes to decipher an unclear transcript might be.
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
Worse, you've got accept that throwing this into the legal arena adds costs way beyond just proper captioning. Any settlement that will make the plaintiffs happy will require the establishment of a ADA enforcement unit at these institutions, and resultant red tape for anyone in the communities to publish anything with audio. Which going forward will have a clear chilling effect; we're not just talking about a lot of Harvard and MIT potentially going dark, but continuing in that mode except for the most important things that are worth the extra captioning and legal effort.
[+] [-] jamesbrownuhh|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ylem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] localfugue|11 years ago|reply
Using the law as a weapon to demand something where we have alternatives[slides, notes or manuals] is, in my opinion, like "biting the hand that offers help".
That said, I have been seriously putting in effort to listen to videos without captioning. Yes, it's an uphill task and I'm willing to do it.
[+] [-] chrischen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loco5niner|11 years ago|reply
So... the taxpayers.