It'd be great if they were closed captioned, true. But it's already "good enough" that they're public. Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.
A disservice to society is treating some people who, through no fault of their own, as worth less than everyone else.
> Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.
So you'll allow them to hold their data hostage to get special favors and exceptions from federal law? Where do you draw the line then?
They already provide wheelchair ramps, braille (and low vision) compatible signs, ARIA tags on their websites, door openers, all for free for anybody who comes to their campus; what makes their videos exempt?
That they have gotten away this long is them not paying attention to the laws; these lawsuits are simply an attempt to get them to follow the laws in the country they live and work in.
If these laws go through, Harvard and MIT should just set up a small subsidiary in another country and upload the videos through those. Problem solved.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...
So rather than helping anyone, you're sabotaging many.
I would like to point out though that merely uploading a video to YouTube results in it being captioned, for free, by a machine learning algorithm.
If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care. But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.
I've asked some hearing-impaired friends what they thought about this article. Their reaction was that it was ridiculous to sue over the accessibility of information given away for free.
Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine? These aren't poor, barely solvent community colleges, these are private institutions with huge revenues and investment funds in the hundreds of millions.
> If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care
If it were created with money from a federal grant, then yeah, people would still care.
Do you have any sources that shed light on whether any of this material is the product of federal grant money? You assume it is, when the article and other sources I can find offer no suggestions or evidence that the universities are releasing federally funded information in an inaccessible format. Based on your comments here, you have made a set of assumptions and concluded that because the universities accept federal funding, and because they have released course material to the public, that this course material is the product of federal money. That has not to my knowledge been shown to be the case. If you're including loans/grants that are awarded to students, then all colleges, even the poor, little, barely solvent ones, are to be subject to the same principles. But when you make what sound like snide remarks about an institution's investment funds and revenues, you somewhat betray that you're only outraged because the university has money, and isn't doing what you think it should with that money.