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Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now. I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint?

I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.

I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.

The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI

[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...

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The Department seemed to be aware of it though.

   The Department found that [...] many had automatic captioning
   generated by YouTube’s speech recognition technology. In March 2015, the Department
   selected 30 videos. [..] for review. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the
   content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities.

"Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete"

Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished.

Reminds me of this Louis CK bit: https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s

"How does the world owe you something you didn't even know existed 30 seconds ago?"

The same way it owes people with disabilities the best parking spaces, loading zones, ramps, automatic doors, accessible restrooms, elevators, places to put wheelchairs on buses and subways, TTY phone numbers for essential services, the right to bring service dogs where pets are not allowed, etc.

Mandatory disability accommodation is a huge part of our society. There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).

> There can certainly be reasonable limits (for example, noncompliant buildings that predate the ADA were not torn down).

And yet, here we are, with a building build after the ADA, that is noncompliant. It's too expensive to make it compliant, so the only legal option is to tear it down.

While I understand the strive for equality, the destruction of information is a price that should not have to be paid in today's world.

The question is why would you build a non-compliant building after the ADA, and what is a regulation if it's not enforced?

Right. What was going through the head of the producers of those 20,000 videos, flouting the regulations for all that time.

Apparently Berkeley doesn't owe us free lectures. It's definitely a crappy resolution to the issue though.

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