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Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

I agree but also is it really that difficult to use some sort of auto-caption program with maybe an asterick not assuring accuracy? I feel like it would be impossible to legislate the quality of captioning and it isn't like mistakes don't happen even with a human transcriber.

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Automatic Captions are not ADA compliant.

https://www.speechpad.com/blog/ada-compliant-captions-vs-aut...

If you have a risk of getting sued because someone notices a transcription error versus just not uploading videos, people will choose the latter.

That article (slash advertisement for Speechpad) spends a lot of words not explaining why human captioning is preferable in general to automated captioning. If I, a human, make a mistake in captioning my videos, am I any better off than if I'd used whisper and it messed up?

The page lists some of the requirements, e.g. accuracy, completeness, equivalence in access, etc. The point of their pitch is that you can't simply tell your SWEs to slap automated captions on something, check a box, and call it a day. You'd need to actually confirm you're meeting the requirements, which is something that a human who is trained in this compliance activity would do. (and something that unaware SWEs often miss)

A common compliance mistake (for any type of compliance, not just ADA) is:

* someone tells an SWE to implement [compliance measure]

* they implement poor quality [compliance measure] that doesn't actually meet the compliance requirement, close jira ticket

* they don't realize they didn't meet the compliance requirement because they don't use or need [compliance measure] and they are a SWE without any expertise with the law or the understanding of reason for the need for that requirement

How does one auto-caption a white/black-board in a world before insanely cheap computer vision?

Captions are for audio. I presume if someone is reading captions they can read the whiteboard.

Now if you are talking about the blind then sure thats different but the blind don't need captions.

Are you sure? When I went to college, the whiteboard was a supplement to the lecture, so either/or would not have worked.

What if they are hard of sight and can't read the whiteboard or blackboard, even if they might be able to read a captioned video?

Lord knows I remember barely being able to read some professors handwriting, even in person, or being able to understand what the hell a professor was saying in person.

How many people are there that can efficiently caption complex mathematical equations?

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