Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
If I were to build a new shopping centre, but decided not to put in wheelchair access, would you argue that everyone will suffer from not having access to the shops, and thus it's a lose-lose for everyone?
In this situation we are in fact saying that a large volume of user-submitted or professional porn should not be accessible because it might not be worth the money to transcribe. I don't think any stores are closing because a mall had to add wheelchair ramps. It's not like an inspiring technological undertaking.
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...
Correct interpretations of these nuances are applied by Youtube, Google however translates "you" by default to the most formal option.
So to me $1 dollar per minute sounds like an awesome deal because there is not much to adjust.
Out of curiosity, can you link to such a gig company?
The same with any voice control, It doesn't work with my west country accent.
The one mentioned in the article is https://www.rev.com/
As others say it’s not perfect but I have to believe it would be good enough and probably isn’t a bad idea in any case.
Pornhub should not be responsible for the lack of captions on videos uploaded by users.
Think about what the point is; the point is to give hearing-impaired people the same experience as hearing people. If you quizzed some people who only had the audio and others who only read the captions, both groups should be able to answer questions at the same rate of success (caption readers may get more questions right, like naming a speaker).
Some video captions could have numerous errors but of a type that the reader can easily tell what was meant. Other videos might have highly accurate captions but one essential word was missed, changing the whole meaning.
Correct
It should be responsible for those clips it chooses to make available as part of its business
It's worth re-iterating that it didn't have to happen this way: Berkeley could have captioned the videos; but there's no indication that they seriously considered this option. In fact, I cannot find any indication that Berkeley tried to find any sort of compromise with the DOJ - despite the letter from the DOJ strongly urging Berkeley to work with the department towards a solution.
The DOJ letter is also worth a read, in that they find the management of UC Berkeley did not seriously attempt to enforce any sort of compliance with accessibility standards.
It would have been expensive, sure. But it's wise to keep in mind that the UC system operates with a yearly budget exceeding nine billion dollars - and as much as we want to worry about the cost of transcribing those old courses, at the end of the day it is a drop in the bucket of their overall expenditures.
Otherwise YouTube would also have a huge problem. Their auto-generated CC's are laughable most of the time.
And I don't mean someone from France or Turkey for instance. But Brits, and in particular Scots, usually break the automatically generated CCs.
Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript.
That actually makes me wonder re podcasts and other audio. Is there any reason they’d have a different requirement or are these lawsuits specifically about video for some reason?
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.
The phonetic alphabet would probably be helpful here, given the "text" material. Quite a challenge. But since this is for pornography, I do not doubt it will exist in a short amount of time.
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 apply and if so why do they apply?
As a somewhat contrived example, are Spotify required to provide captions/lyrics with each song they stream?
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.
The article says one of the videos in the complaint was "hot step aunt"
If you remove the audio from incest porn, doesn't that turn it into regular vanilla porn?
Oh, perhaps that was back in the 1980s?
Not to mention that this is actually mentioned in the article
This is just pure discrimination. :)
Or that he has a particular preference for PH ?
"A deaf man has sued Pornhub and other pornographic websites"
You could always try reading an article to see if it answers questions you have based on skimming a headline.
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.
Should the society support them to lead normal lives as much as possible? We can pretty much agree on that, at least as long as the costs are reasonable (for example one billion per inner ear implant is definitely not).
If you put the problem like this it's obvious there is room for discussion. Is PH captioning helping them live normal lives? Is the cost reasonable? Is it really the best direction for society to put resources?
People will answer differently, of course, not being identical copies. But the conversation itself is legitimate.
Your resource argument doesn't hold up either, especially with money. Things can become cheap if society values them enough to invest time to make them cheap. Most of that time is currently being invested in making middle- and upper-class people's lives more comfortable (eg most unicorns out of SF) but that doesn't mean it _has_ to be that way.
Drugs could be cheaper (or not become absurdly expensive), places could be accessible, people wouldn't have to be homeless... It's clearly a resource allocation problem, but you make it sound like resources are very well allocated right now. I don't think they are.