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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

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Machine transcriptions are obviously better than they used to be. But requiring perfect human transcriptions in this day and age would IMO be unreasonable for most purposes.

Certainly machine transcriptions are used these days for purposes that most intelligent people would judge to be perfectly reasonable.

The perfect being the enemy of good.

It sounds almost like you're saying that quality information shouldn't be accessible to anyone if it's not accessible to everyone?

That would be an unreasonably high standard and would set an incentive to withhold. Which is exactly the outcome we got here?

Wouldn't it be better to cheer the improved accessiblity? Then acknowledge shortcomings and ask for community contributions to improve things?

Why must perfect be the enemy of good?

This was free content. The end result is that the content was made inaccessible to everyone, adding zero benefit to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

So if 4% of the population cannot partake, then the other 96% should be barred from participating?

People really believe this. And also if you mention other disabilities that affect a similar ratio to the one they care about, ie 0.16% of people, they'll say it's too expensive and doesn't affect enough people. Like what if I want this content to be consumable by people who have such heavy learning disabilities that the whole content would need to be 20x as long and explained much more step by step?

If 4% of the population cannot partake of your services, then it is you who are being the asshole, not the 4% of people asking for an accommodation.

They were uploading these for free. The end result of the videos being taken down is that they are now even more inaccessible to that 4% than they were before.

Making things more accessible is a worthy goal, but the world is imperfect and making things better requires resources.

ok Handicapper General

This is exactly why we can't have nice things in this brand new world... there's always a guardian of ethics, of what's right and what's supposed to be done so as not to upset absolutely anyone...

So the rest of the world should have the access removed out of some delusion of fairness?

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