Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If I make a video wherein I teach some concept, but don't provide closed captions, and then distribute the video for free, am I discriminating against the deaf? If I knew I had to create closed captions, and then make a braille transcript, or maybe even make my video colorblind friendly, I just wouldn't make the video in the first place. I sympathize with folks with disabilities, and I applaud those who go the extra mile to accommodate them, but making it mandatory under the law seems ridiculous to me.
It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these products and do not maintain quality standards respective of existing laws. No musician has to include a print out of their lyrics in the liner notes, it's a completely voluntary transaction without stipulation of such ADA compliance, in that the terms of the relationship are different than this case where Harvard is a 'service provider' of sorts (the service being the transmission of knowledge).
This is different than the occasional lawsuit trolling where a person in a wheelchair finds small businesses not in compliance with the ADA and brings a case...this is...well, an educational institution with the resources and capability for compliance, but they aren't complying. Seems pretty workable from a high-level standpoint to me.
Because the law embodies certain moral conclusions. The ADA is premised on the idea that businesses have an obligation to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled. At least in 1990, this moral conclusion was compelling enough that the ADA carried a 377-28 margin in the House, and a 91-6 margin in the Senate.
As an aside, to me, laws like the ADA are one of the things that make America great. It is a virtuous people that decides that the lucky among them should take on the burden of enabling the unlucky among them to live life as normally as their disabilities allow.
Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"?
I think we should, because I think people with disability have the same right to move or to learn than I do. And accommodating to them is important.
All those countless millions living in near poverty in Africa and Asia and in that dingy corner of your city you never drive through... do you deprive them of a leg up in life just because you don't get closed captions?
that's not a world i want to live in; access to knowledge is foundational infrastructure.
"Equal access" is not free. If universities are given the choice of not providing free educational resources and paying shit-tons of money to provide free educational resources accessible to every random group that sues the university over the way these free materials are presented, universities will obviously choose not to offer free educational resources.
Old joke:
A marxist economist meets a market economist at a conference. After listening to an exposition on Smith and Hayek he nods vigorously and says "Yes, yes! I know it works in fact but does it work in theory?"
I suppose it rests on the definition of reasonable accommodation which could range anywhere from "making the material available for transcription" to "full professional subtitles should be made available".
It sure was applied to buildings that were built before the ADA was passed.
And what videos of interest would those be? Ableson and Sussman's SICP/6.001 lectures come to mind, and some Feynman lectures I assume are that old.
"Or a private conversation that was published."
Well, aren't we about to find that out in the legal arena?
You're only escape is "private", which suggests it should not be published at all. Especially in a two-party consent state like Massachusetts.
That's according to a narrow view of "equal access."
Many people (if not a majority) have an entirely different definition "equal access." On this view, simply putting text or a video up on the Internet without captions is providing equal access: everyone is equally free to download and make use of that information, to the best of their ability.
If I am free to publish a video on my own accord without captions, shouldn't I be free to do the same with a video I've made with a group of my friends? And if this is the case, why not a group of my colleagues? Present law aside, I don't see why should I lose my right to do something just because I'm doing it as part of a group.
Just taking this and doing an analysis ...
A) The initial premise is that: one should make reasonable allowances, eg of low cost, to accommodate those who might otherwise be excluded from society in some way due to accident, genetics, medical conditions and such.
B) The subsidiary premise is that: this allowance should be provided as a legal right to those who would otherwise be disproportionately excluded from society.
I don't think that argument holds water against this initial premise. A group has more resources. Making multimedia content accessible isn't required of individuals because it's proportionally excessive. In the same way a small store might not be expected to fit a wheelchair ramp but a supermarket would be expected to (indeed floor level access would probably be stipulated at the planning stage if it weren't already by the supermarket corp).
To put it a different way: if one child comes up to you and asks for food out of a genuine need, you've got a truck full of food. You're probably going to feel morally obligated to feed them. Now suppose a whole country comes to you and says they need food. With that same amount of food you're not going to feel morally obligated.
So, it seems there is some cut off at which the available resources compared to the size of the problem make a difference. I think that is enshrined in the ADA in USA and certainly is in the DDA in UK law.
The final element then in the OP is that (C) Harvard and MIT have the resources and so should also carry the obligation.
I think this is actually where I don't agree. That whilst as a whole they have the resources, for this project they do not. The allocated resources for this project mean that if the obligation were applied to make release of videos require captions and braille transcripts and such that the means available would not be sufficient to continue the project.
An analogue question might be: Does a chain of tiny convenience stores have an obligation to put in wheelchair ramps in some stores even though for the specific store it would be an excessive cost relative to their income.
tl;dr I think it comes down to compartmentalisation of the institutions.
[Perhaps maxharris you're right but just need to present your argument differently?]
However, I do think that there should be more mechanism than the purse to persuade institutions to make material accessible to disabled populations -- but for major institutions only, since I'm not sure smaller organizations can cope with the burden. Perhaps organizations above some revenue?
If central government just gave them a stipend and didn't specify the projects it was to be used on then the argument you're supporting would perhaps have some mileage; but it's payment for a specific service. If the schools aren't making their research centres accessible or are unnecessarily excluding disabled people [from research related tasks/benefits/etc.] then, yes, this argument would be valid.
And I'm only talking about MIT's OCW here, their edX courses are all captioned. OCW was scheduled to run out of funding last year[0] and they apparently don't even have the funds to update their FAQ. I'm just saying you have to pick your battles.
I never said I supported the lawsuit or even its goals; but ignoring accessibility shortcomings for certain groups because of financial or other barriers sort of misses the point of aiming to make knowledge accessible to all.
edit: just noticed sensory references in first paragraph
Now that OCW has run out of its original block of money and is passing around its hat, that could of course change, then again it shows every sign of being only a step away from maintenance mode right now (all the mojo is presumably with edX, which OCW obviously helped to blaze a path to).
So it this "ignoring", or simply a trade-off in the face of limited resources? If you want the properly captioned option, what are you willing to give up to achieve that?
But for me personally, accessibility seems like something worth raising separate streams of funding for if it weren't terribly popular. In sort of the same way, I would've been thrilled if my donations to EFF could've been earmarked for their WIPO Treaty for the Blind work.
I understand the need to make trade-offs and don't begrudge OCW for the ones they've made, but I don't really see having to spend extra money for captioning, etc. as having to give stuff up. To me, it's more that the job isn't really finished until we've done it for everyone.
Without looking at the lawsuit (waiting for lawyers like the Instapundit to tear into it, he's big on non-traditional learning like this), I suspect the mention of MOOCs is bullshit, confounding perhaps a MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) offering with the edX ones you're talking about, which others in this discussion have ensured us are properly treated.
[1]: http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-6-008-digital-signal-proces...
[2]: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-851-effective-field-the...
Now if edX, contrary to everything we've heard in this discussion, doesn't do the right thing, they have a much stronger case. But that's not the case they're making in the PR thuggery, and I thank you for confirming one part of what I suspected.
And just to be crystal clear, OCW is pretty much out of money and mandate, it's mostly in maintenance mode (already past its budgeted life, now begging for cash). The best outcome of this is that such lectures will be picked up by edX and properly captioned. The more likely one is that they'll be pulled altogether, although we hope copies will be captured before that happens.
Is a dog in the manger outcome one you favor?
I understand how that happens, but, given the subject of the lawsuit, it's still very ironic.
If it makes it easier to have a sidewalk that would still benefit the vast majority built, sure.
Whatever slack I might be inclined to give to others, I am not inclined to give to Harvard. This is Harvard. If the brand "Harvard" means anything, shouldn't it mean going above and beyond the call of duty in providing educational services like this?
The civil lawsuit is a step above and beyond this, and I for one don't know that "poetic justice" is the best foundation for a legal regime...
Yes.
To prevent this exact line of thinking, laws exist. Not just to protect the majority, but to protect EVERYONE as equals, under the rule of law.
May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?
In other words, if an organization only has the resources to do a little bit of good in the world, unless they can treat everyone as equals, they shouldn't be allowed to act at all?
In your scenario, you only have fixed set of resources and wanted to do as much good as you can.
I would imagine in that situation, to make things "fair" you would have some set of criteria in which a poor person could qualify for assistance.
As long as those criteria were objective (geographic, income based, etc) I would support your organization.
If you only wanted to help poor whites, or poor men, or otherwise discriminated against protected classes, then I wouldn't be okay with that.
To put this back to MIT and Harvard: They made learning accessible to everyone except for people who are deaf and those without internet access. The law protects the first group, and not the second.
Yes, I'm assuming an individual who has finite (but possibly significant) resources. Let's assume s/he wants to do as much good as s/he can.
Who determines whether some proposed action is sufficiently good, so as to allow them to take that action?
In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?
For example, if Bill & Melinda Gates wanted to donate a great deal of money to help the poor, would you say that someone other than Bill and Melinda had a right to say how their resources may be distributed?
As a private citizen, wishing to donate their money-or other resources, I believe it should be left up to the individual to decide. There are edge cases, such as donating money to support illegal activity--such as "terrorism", or if the donation will be counted towards tax benefits.
Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace.
MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have to learn at a much faster pace than is the norm, a lot of material in a fairly compressed schedule of 13 weeks of instruction if I remember correctly as of the '80s. That's not believed to be good for most STEM students, but we at least believe there's a place in the world for institutions like MIT and CalTech. One meme is that a fair amount of what you learn will be obsolete before your career is over, but there's merit in learning how to learn difficult stuff quickly.
But we're talking about gross ingratitude here. That OCW is not perfect in this is a crime (literally, unless you think they can get away with ignoring a civil legal settlement or judgement), with a punishment requiring either removing the videos or spending a lot of money it and MIT doesn't have to perfect them under an inflexible legal mandate.
I again repeat, this is not going to end well. Especially for the truly deaf people this is ostensibly being done for.
I can't see how the right to individual free speech could be compatible with your view.
By the way, equality before the law means that the same law applies to everyone equally, regardless of social standing, race, etc. It does not make anyone equal in any other sense. Equality before the law does not mean that the law should make everyone equally good at hearing, doing math, playing basketball, dating, or anything else. Human beings are inherently unequal in every other sense but the law, and this is a fundamental fact of existence that can never be eliminated! Examples: none of us will ever have the exact same genetic makeup as any other (and it is monstrous to attempt to force people to attempt to do this). Nor will any of us have the exact same opportunities as any other (a man that lives in Kansas can't also live in Idaho at the same time; the people he meets and interacts with are determined in part by geography!)
You're forgetting the part where these Universities are taking public funds as well
As long as you're willing to pay for it, you can take this stance.
If I were to be the devil's advocate however, I would say that the difference between you putting a video out there, and MIT doing it is one of elasticity.
The effort of putting closed captions on your informal video would be much too great and would be very likely to prevent you from releasing the video. However, for large, well endowed organisations like MIT and Harvard, mandating close captioning of their videos is much more likely to result in them incurring the cost of closed captioning than in them not releasing the video.
By focusing on businesses, the law attempts to target those inelastic actors.
$1 per minute (if you farm it out) or even less if you do it yourself. In exchange you get 7-15% more views - is that really an unbearable deal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window_Captioning_System
I have no idea why it would be "even less if you do it yourself", unless you do not value your own labour.
I create captions for hundreds of hours of video every year - I know exactly how much work it can be, and, at the same time, exactly how easy it can be.
You can argue that people ought to be okay with the extra effort of closed captioning, but don't mistake that for an argument that they will be.
The creator of a video has no more of an obligation towards the deaf than anyone else.
If I were uncharitable, I would suggest that such a discussion would serve only one function: that is , to create a distraction from the law 'as is'.
I'd prefer to assume your intent is to understand or construct a notion of morality. In that spirit, I offer the following question:
What is just?
I am visually impaired. And I have been helping people make the web accessible since 2001. If you plan it from the beginning, it's only a few extra yards, not an extra mile.
As for expensive? I'll agree. Going cost is about $1 per minute minimum. And they're not releasing that material "for free." Make no mistake - it's either because they got a grant (that's what we face) or part of some marketing thing.
I apologize if it sounds like I'm frustrated and angry, but I run into all sorts of inaccessible things created for the web by people who use "difficult and expensive" as the go-to excuse.
If you are preparing a video for something online, you should be planning it and writing a script, which you can easily turn into a transcript. If it's a lecture recording, well, workstudy students can transcribe it for you and caption it.
These are all things responsible educators do. Proudly.
So slowing down the video to half speed, means a half hour video takes an hour to transcribe. At a labor cost of $15.00 per hour, that is 25 cents/minute of video. Much less if it is off shored.
Edit: Would it be helpful if Google added a captioning interface to YouTube? That is, an adjustable playback speed (which they have now, but I'd like to see more speed levels), and a capture window where users (volunteers) could provide captioning of any video, including educational ones.
Slowing down to half speed and listening to it once isn't enough. You need a first pass to write all of it down which is usually not done with simple playback at half speed (which isn't that easy to understand) but instead with foot pedal switch for pausing and rewinding. It takes much longer than the video (well, depends on the video - different speakers speak at very different speeds), and at least a full pass re-listening everything for proofreading.
Technical videos take extra time - you often need to take minute or two to clarify a single term that you don't know, verify that you're not confusing it with another word and that it's spelled properly; and during an hour-long video such terms and the required time add up The same goes up for surnames - it takes a second to blurt out "paper by Mumblemumble et al", and it takes much longer to transcribe that even if the paper can be looked up in other related documents (and not always it can). A single neccessary clarification + a few related emails to solve it already can taka half an hour.
Captioning is some extra work in getting sure that the written segments align with the speech - it basically means that you have to note the start/end information, usually it's done at the initial transcript stage by the play/pause switches (the software packages apply the previously played segment start/end timestamps) and then you need to adjust many of them in proofreading. Not really an extra stage, but takes more work and care.
Transcribing at double speed, as you propose, is not really practical. People speak at 130-180wpm. Decent typists usually type at 65-75wpm. At that rate you would barely manage to 'type what you think you hear right now', which is usable for some purposes not really a transcript.
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/
$60 per hour audio is in the low end.
http://www.transcriptionlive.com/pricing.html http://www.transcriptionwing.com/price.html http://www.transcriptionwave.com/pricing.html
Please don't presume to tell content providers how they should produce content, or presume to tell them that a part of the process is easy. That's not up to you to decide for anyone but yourself.
>These are all things responsible educators do. Proudly.
Nice; insult the awesome folks over at MIT and Harvard who are giving us this material for free because they are "not responsible".
I'd be a hell of a lot more proud releasing content that happens to be inaccessible to deaf people than never releasing anything at all because I'm afraid of getting sued under the ADA.
What is the standard by which we define 'widest possible audience'? Reasonable accommodation.
Your argument reduces to a statement that it is better for Harvard and MIT to offer this content without making an accommodation for certain individuals (of class D), because:
a/it is unreasonable for them to do so
b/certain individuals (of class A) benefit
It's an interesting argument, but one you've introduced no facts in support of.
Take a step back and look at the potential side effects of what the plaintiff is asking. If a university, with all their money already earmarked, is told that if they want to keep distributing free educational materials then they must pay to transcribe them, what are they going to do? A very likely outcome is that they're going to scrap their free educational materials program. It doesn't take a lot of foresight to see this.
Also, how do you define "widest possible audience"? Should the universities be legally compelled to translate all videos into Chinese as well? There are a lot more Chinese speakers than deaf people.
This just makes it that much more likely that institutions will hesitate before offering free access to materials online.
Nothing good will come of this.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
No, it doesn't "just" do that.
Not necessarily. They still aren't obligated to close-caption any materials for free — they just have to not provide any materials.
Keep in mind that these are recordings of a professor talking - there is no script, no captions exist already.
The choice is paying for captioning, or not releasing at all.
If they are unwilling to pay, which should, in your opinion, they pick: Not release, or release without captions?
I don't speak Hindi, I'll happoly outsource the translation of video to an agency that can do this for me.
Same with sign language, I don't know it. I'll happily outsource to an agency that can do the sign language translation.
Care to explain why you think I should have the skills inhouse to suport multiple types of accessibility when those skills can be hired in via a third party?
Can you see why this would have a stifling effect on giving things away for free?
What would be the net gain to the world - is it better to have only a few free things that are accessible, or have many free things, only a fraction of which are accessible?
Making things accessible isn't free. Somebody has to pay. Forcing the producer to pay will reduce production. It's that simple.
Personally, I caption the hobby videos that I put on YouTube, because doing so brings in far more views, both domestically and from around the world.
This lawsuit is literally about forcing the universities to pay to caption the educational materials they release for free.
That's actually exactly what they are saying...
(If I have the resources to make something accessible, and if I value making something accessible to deaf people over other uses of those resources, then of course it's a good thing to make it accessible. Personally, I think making these videos accessible would be a very good thing; I also think that, as long as it's reasonably feasible, the universities should . But the existence of deaf people does not represent any kind of a claim on my (or anyone else's) resources, nor a shackle on my behaviour; and if it does under current, it damn well shouldn't, and that law is unjust and oppressive.)
Edit: For instance, for Hobbes, that pretty much is the definition of the state of nature, in which everyone has the natural right to their own self-preservation and goals. The rise of sovereign power is often conceived of as the enforcement of obligations that override natural rights to complete liberty (through something that is probably even more properly called "thuggery" than deaf advocacy groups' political actions).
It just defends negative rights, instead of positives ones, not a lack of rights and obligations. See Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty[2].
EDIT to your EDIT: in Hobbes' state of nature, everyone has the right do to whatever one thinks is necessary for one's own preservation (including, say, killing others). For Rand, one has the right to not be attacked by others, even if that goes reduces the others' chances of self-preservation. The two are very different, and the latter does impose (negative) obligations on individuals towards others.
> To destroy other people's access to a good because you have the power to, in order to coerce them into acting so that you receive such a good yourself, is wrong.
Sorry, Ms Parks, but you can't sit in that seat...
That doesn't mean we must agree with those principles, of course.
[1]: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...
What I don't see is a requirement for free courses. That would be ridiculous. Why would anyone want to make anything available if someone is going to come around and sue?
Instead of suing, why not start a project to automatically CC the videos, something like audio-recaptcha?
At least in that community, people went to a lot of effort to accommodate the blind and deaf. It was a bit before my time, but there was an ITS etc. wizard (who later was hired to do the TCP/IP stack for ITS) who was deaf, and a lot of the people in my social group learned a sign language to better communicate with him.
They find it unacceptable (which in the cherry picked examples is unarguable), and have made that a very significant part of their PR campaign.
Persuade people to help you, don't force people to help you, you'll get better results.
"Discrimination is action that denies social participation or human rights to categories of people based on prejudice." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination)
[1] Not in this context; of course a visual communication discriminates among those who can and can not receive it, but what prejudice is there in just recording yourself talking?
I know the law says yes, but is it what we want? Have the extra building codes discouraged potential altruists?
I wonder if there's a government subsidy for that part of it, and if so could a similar provision be allowed for educational institutions opening their courseware.
The law is not as black and white as you make it out to be.
This is why we can't have nice things.
However unfortunately in this specific case I am conflicted. On one hand we have far more free content available to us because the "cost" of providing this content is relatively low. They just reproduce the course's normal materials, and have a camera rolling during lectures (and, yes, someone has to do basic editing, transcoding, and so on).
If someone has to go through every single lecture and transcribe it (since I assume auto-transcription wouldn't be acceptable) then they will likely just start pulling less popular/niche content because the viewership/return wouldn't be high enough to justify the cost.
And to be honest the niche content is far more interesting than the common stuff. You can find Computer Science 101 lectures all over the place, but want to watch a video on metallurgy for industrial tooling there is like one lecture several years old with just a hundred or so views.
So I really think if the Advocates for the deaf win here they'll gain a small victory but at a large-ish cost to the rest of society. And how long before YouTube is next?
Basically the law firm in question is using lawsuits as a method of social activism to compel large orgs to adhere to the ADA. (Similar thing happened to Scribd.) Basically deaf/blind nonprofits ask these entities in question for open accessibility accommodations and typically do NOT get denied the request, but this ends up being a low-priority task that gets tabled for years. Unfortunately between asking nicely, mobilizing social support to effect change, and lawsuits, the legal stick is by-and-large most effective at making things happen.
This is also NOT a shakedown; the end goal is NOT that lawyers or plaintiffs get fat stacks of cash, but that these accommodations be implemented. To the disabilities orgs, these requests are similar to asking for accessibility ramps and what not.
This will have a severe chilling effect on such productions, above and beyond the not trivial costs of getting high quality captions, which for technical material---which includes plenty of specialized humanities stuff, not just math, physics, etc.---is particularly expensive.
Also I think one of the hidden merits of lawsuits and original intents is to basically have two parties sort things out, with a third party to facilitate and enforce the disagreement. Believe me, as a non-law person this took me QUITE a while to get to this opinion until I see law being one of the only venues to effect change on issues such as discrimination, which at this point is something the deaf see as an issue but many able-bodied people do not. So at this point: bring in people who figure out exactly what the letter/spirit of the law, and let the right thing prevail.
As to the ultimate outcome, I'm calling it: Either DOJ will clarify the rules so that captions are required, or the schools will settle the lawsuit by agreeing that captions are required, or the courts will decide that captions are required.
And then 30 years from now, at least one person in this thread will have lost their hearing but will click open and watch a captioned M.I.T. or Harvard video without even thinking about how much they railed against that one article on HN back in 2015.
And as has been amply pointed out, in the case of any of the outcomes you're calling, a great deal of material will be withdrawn from the net (or campus servers and official Youtube channels), little will be returned, at least from MIT, which doesn't have the money (well, absent a big fundraising campaign, which would crowd out other things), and perhaps most importantly, it will have a serious chilling effect on future offerings, since they will have to be vetted for not just captioning, but sufficient quality captioning, "by legal". MIT students, at least, have better things to do with their time.
And 3 years from now, let along 30, at least one person will click on a "see the video" link and get a 404.
And you severely underestimate people's memories, and ability to hold grudges.
The only line I had any kind of problem with was "No captions is like no ramp for people in wheelchairs or signs stating ‘people with disabilities are not welcome.’" I do think that's hyperbolic, but I understand the idea that these schools were given the resources to "build a ramp" and just decided not to. Regardless, it's not "thuggery", it's just a point of view I disagree with.
Where are the lies?
And I'll take that bet: In 3 years, every video on the Harvard and M.I.T. websites will be captioned.
Um, what?
U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people account for 0.4% of the US population.
"We estimate that 30.0 million or 12.7% of Americans ≥ 12 years had bilateral hearing loss from 2001–2008, and this estimate increases to 48.1 million or 20.3% when also including individuals with unilateral hearing loss."
I like it
A building without a ramp can't be copied and rebuilt with a ramp without rebuilding the entire thing, but a video without a caption can be copied and captioned without having to recreate the original. MIT went out of their way to make sure this sort of thing is legal to do.
OCW is now in maintenance mode as far as I can tell, with terrible gaps in offerings, like 2nd term bio- and organic chemistry but no 1st term offering, and given the astounding breath of the demand, there's every chance a very large fraction of MIT's video and audio offerings will simply go dark, and future production burdened by red tape (which MIT students do not respond to well...).
Especially since the lawsuit demands quality captioning. Granted, there examples on their web page are awful, then again they're nothingburgers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... at least if my understanding of the lack of real power of the President of Liberia is correct, and it says something that they put Lady Gaga being welcomed by Harvard students right after it. If this is the best they can come up with....
Not that I know any SJW deaf types right now, but if I did, they'd be treated to the one of the very few bits of sign language I know :-(.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
This has entered the legal arena. It's not hard to imagine the red tape of the remedies of a settlement or lawsuit loss being significant, very possibly exceeding the costs of the closed captioning (e.g. mandatory QA). In this context, the idea this quality problem could be addressed by crowd-sourcing is patently ludicrous.
Does anyone have a better solution than Google, which is where the cited bad captions apparently come from? Yeah, it's "a thing" alright, a thing that just handed MIT a nasty, no win lawsuit.
But, in any case leaving aside MIT's 5th largest endowment, it's only one of the factors in determining whether a school is well off. One could also look, say, at the budget. Or research funding.
By just about any metric one could imagine, MIT is one of the richest schools in the nation.
Like helping to allocate a fixed budget and running requisitions through the always skeptical procurement office. So I know MIT didn't switch from cleaning every bathroom every day to "frequent cleaning" because it had a large surplus of funds, and that it's been hurting as the Cold War ended, and now with the Great Recession.
But you're in part moving the goalposts. No one is denying MIT doesn't have a lot of money, we're discussing whether it has such an unrestricted surplus it can all of a sudden properly caption all the video it formally publishes. In a legal regime that'll make that all the more expensive and time and energy consuming. And what will have to be sacrificed to do this, aside from all the videos that will go dark and stay dark.
Especially in the case of the targeted OCW, which most certainly doesn't have the money to do this, and based on its ability to fund raise after it fulfilled its original mandate, would have trouble doing this, and would also certainly have to initially remove all its videos after an adverse outcome. Heck, is MIT going to have to institute policy of cost recovery to cover the expenses of making sure no video gets them into further trouble?
Another thing to consider is that Harvard and MIT were chosen as the initial targets for the obvious reasons. Just how much will the world be enriched when this filters down to every college in the US? Like the one my family shares a property boundary with, which prides itself in providing a low cost education and rents out textbooks. Right now it's very cheap for them to put video on the web. If you're successful, that'll end.
And of course the significant albeit limited success of OCW was part of the motivation to create edX.
I'm usually pretty critical of a lot of Amazon's culture, but one thing I think is absolutely brilliant is its reliance on whitepapers and its shunning of presentations. With a presentation, the presenter retains 100% control over information flow, which can magnify the agitation that you feel when they just aren't spitting it out fast enough. With a whitepaper, a quick skim allows you to know exactly where you want to focus and you can control the information flow from there. Whitepapers take significantly more effort, which is why a lot of amazonians criticize them, but the reward is easily proportional to the effort.
Later you could put the pen down on a word in your notes and start listening to the lecture just as you were writing those notes.
Can't remember the name though.
Or at least as of 2010 when I put it in an Amazon.com wishlist (and #%&^%& but Amazon's search function sucks, "pen" didn't find the "smartpen" by which it's named).
Going to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtext... I see much cheaper versions, including ones for iOS.
For example: http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e
(edited to fix formatting)
The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.
(I swear I am not making this up: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and if those are the best examples they can come up with for a national campaign....)
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
“Worse still,” said attorney Timothy Fox, “a sampling of the videos available illustrates the problem with inaccurate captioning, making them confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.”
Where he's explicitly saying those above examples are not as bad as Lady Gaga et. al. being inaccurately captioned (apparently auto-captioned by Youtube).
"The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is..."
If so, it's entirely unapparent in the link (supply a quote if you disagree). Which as far as wel can tell starts out with false framing by claiming MOOCs are included in the problems, at least if the claims elsewhere in this discussion about all edX courses being professionally treated are true. Looks like, at least for MIT, that NAD is trying to confound that with Open CourseWare, which has an explicit mission limiting it's remit to making MIT course material useful to other teachers; anything else is gravy.
This is mendacious, invidious PR thuggery; we'll see what the lawyers have to say after analyzing the lawsuit; ah, yeah, the Instapundit is going to be all over this.
When faced with the above, my alma mater simply cannot win. And it certainly doesn't have the money to caption all this stuff; see elsewhere where I speculate one outcome will be a large fraction if not all the content will simply be pulled, the creation of future content will be severely curtailed due to this being moved from the arena of (not) good (enough) works to the legal one, and the remediation of the pulled works will be limited at best.
One wonders just how many people in the entire world these SJWs will seriously piss off....
That you should be obligated to spend additional money on captioning your free videos is incredibly unfair and also unjustifiable. Unfortunately, in many cases it will make the costs unsustainable so we'll see videos taken down entirely—thus, the deaf are selfishly insisting that if they can't have something nobody can.
It's like someone with a peanut allergy suing me for handing out free cookies.
But if the net effect is that good free content will just become unavailable for everyone to achieve a sense of fairness, Then that seems petty and I'm not on board.
I hope they lose this case spectacularly as it would set a terrible precedent.
If a free lecture provides benefit to someone, but forcing it to be captioned causes it not to be released, would you be happy with that outcome? It's the same principle.
Whatever your opinion is here, they are not the same principle.
Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe not everyone will be able to use it.
Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if they can't have it, nobody can.
Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA. They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.
> Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe not everyone will be able to use it.
They do not want everyone to lose access. Instead, what they want, is for everyone to be able to use the content. Regardless, they do not want everyone to lose access. Your question is merely based on ignorance of the desires of the plaintiffs.
> Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if they can't have it, nobody can.
Because when someone breaks the law and it harms you, you have the right to seek redress in our system.
I've answered your questions. Now, please answer mine, which are written with the same care that you wrote yours.
Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.
Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.
Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?
I look forward to your reply.
Something being the law doesn't mean that it's fair. I shouldn't have to explain that. Also, it hasn't been established that these universities are actually breaking the ADA.
>They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.
What do you mean by this?
>They do not want everyone to lose access.
Well, that's the likely outcome of suing a university trying to offer a free service.
>Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.
Again, it's not established that they were breaking the law.
I see nothing wrong with breaking immoral laws. If the ADA forbids disseminating educational material for free unless it follows a certain format, the ADA is immoral.
>Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.
I don't feel that I have this right. I feel that deaf people don't have the right to demand that educational organizations curate information in a way that suits their fancy. How would you feel if the swahili speakers of America sued MIT for not translating their free educational videos to swahili?
>Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?
Nice ad hominem. You aren't even explaining why you're calling me that; you're literally just name-calling.
Strictly speaking it's not ad hominem. A careful reader will see that nowhere has (s)he called you a "spoiled petulant, self entitled child". You're merely being asked to explain your understanding of the meaning of a highly pejorative term which you introduced into the discourse.
So if someone or a company feels they shouldn't have to follow a law, you are okay with them not having to answer for breaking the law?
> Also, it hasn't been established that these universities are actually breaking the ADA.
This is why they are being sued. Some think they are. Considering your swahili statement, you disagree with the American legal system and the way it works.
> What do you mean by this?
I'm not sure what you don't understand. It's English, and it says exactly what I wanted it to say. Are you suggesting they were forced to break the law?
> Well, that's the likely outcome of suing a university trying to offer a free service.
Considering the other provisions of the ADA and their non-impact on free services offered by countless other business both big and small all across the country, you'd need to back this up with real, hard evidence. Please do.
> I see nothing wrong with breaking immoral laws.
In your opinion immoral laws. Clearly others do not agree with you.
Would you support someone breaking a law they considered immoral and you considered moral if breaking the law harmed you?
> If the ADA forbids disseminating educational material for free unless it follows a certain format, the ADA is immoral.
It does not forbid this. If you think this is what the case is about, you are ignorant.
> How would you feel if the swahili speakers of America sued MIT for not translating their free educational videos to swahili?
People are allowed to sue others they feel have wronged them.
Why do you think people shouldn't be allowed to sue others they feel have broken the law or wronged them?
> Nice ad hominem.
So you can dish it out but can't take it yourself. So you really are a petulant, self-entitled child.
Oh, and right, the endowments are earmarked for other purposes as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, so I am also glad that none of the donors cared about making the educational material accessible to people with disabilities, and that the staff of those two organizations catered to the donors.
On an even more tangential note, let's not forget to praise the lack of social stigma against the use of expressions like "petulant children" in a thread discussing people who are trying to use legal means to prevent discrimination and giving even more advantage to the already advantaged. The comment of yours would have been unimaginable if it had been about racial minorities expressing the same sentiment. But feel free to dismiss my reply as being from a throwaway account, which I am using because I have time and time again encountered the sentiment "Oh... You are deaf. I thought you were smart" or words to that effect when people learned that I am deaf from my main Web identity.
[1] Looking at your GitHub page, you probably aren't. But, for just one example, consider that you have most likely run some of my code when using Python (I have contributed to the base CPython implementation). I am not employed, and hearing people right out of school who are seeing Python for the first time in their lives are employed by the dozen..
[2] Watching lectures and learning from them — a way that is completely inaccessible to me since I can't even pay for someone to transcribe the lectures.
I mean, look at this. You're blaming your situation (which at least includes being unemployed) on your disability, while simultaneously trying to convince yourself that you're better than random people on the internet. You literally clicked through some random person's profile so that you could find some piece of evidence that they're inferior to you, in the hopes of convincing yourself that it can't be your fault; it's everyone else's.
I wish you the best.
I hope they don't settle, to put it mildly. Few institutions are as well-equipped to combat trolls as Harvard.
Unless I'm mistaken, the article says that National Association of the Deaf requested Harvard and MIT provide options accessible to the deaf on multiples occasions. They're seeking comparable materials for the hearing impaired, not millions of dollars.
On a related note, EEOC has been tweeting a lot of disability settlements. https://twitter.com/EEOCNews
According to the complaints, the relevant laws are Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The former deals with institutions that receive federal financial assistance and the latter deals with places of "public accommodation".
[0] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MI...
[1] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...
People don't just wake up one morning and say "Hey, I have an idea. Let's go sue M.I.T. and Harvard". There is likely alot of stuff that happens leading up to that moment.
If you think that this is just a random thing where the "big bully deaf people are trying to push poor little M.I.T. and Harvard around" I legitimately feel sorry for you. Your sheltered view of the world is so out of touch with reality it isn't funny.
It seems like an 80% solution would be good enough. Hell, even a 66% solution seems like a good compromise or starting point. If an automatically generated transcript can convey at least 2/3rds of the information from a lecture for a one time or small incremental cost then I don't see why both parties wouldn't be ok with it. Those with disabilities would have to do some extra work to look up garbled words or ideas that don't translate well to text, but it would be within the bounds of reason (say a 1 hour lecture would now take 2 hours to parse). The organizations producing the content would most likely having to pay for speech-to-text software, either several thousand dollars per year per class or $X per lecture, but they would still come out cheaper than paying someone per minute to do the transcription. It isn't a win-win situation, but more of an equitable lose-lose.
They say a fair deal has been reached when both sides in a negotiation are a little bit unhappy. A software solution would seem to do that without ignoring the rights of the disabled or placing prohibitive costs on the content producers. And it would set a precedent going forward: Content producers must make an effort to accommodate those with disabilities, but the disabled should be willing to make some extra effort themselves. Asking an elderly woman in a wheelchair to lift herself over a sidewalk curb is not reasonable. Asking the same person to spend an extra 30 minutes to decipher an unclear transcript might be.
Worse, you've got accept that throwing this into the legal arena adds costs way beyond just proper captioning. Any settlement that will make the plaintiffs happy will require the establishment of a ADA enforcement unit at these institutions, and resultant red tape for anyone in the communities to publish anything with audio. Which going forward will have a clear chilling effect; we're not just talking about a lot of Harvard and MIT potentially going dark, but continuing in that mode except for the most important things that are worth the extra captioning and legal effort.
In terms of accuracy, once you start falling beneath the high-nineties percentage threshold, it becomes increasingly hard for humans to make sense of the text. Dropping to 66% accuracy means that one word in three is wrong - it's almost impossible to make sense of something that badly degraded.
Here's a nice example, here are the 'Automatic Captions' - provided by YouTube's voice recognition technology - of an MIT YouTube video. This is a 'best of all possible worlds' example - there is a single speaker, whose words are pronounced slowly and clearly, with no background noise or undue slurring or interference. You'll see that this is good, but nevertheless in a 90 second video there are 20+ errors (not all of them obvious or easy to decipher.)
"0:00 the use of microneedles in the gastrointestinal tract 0:03 presents a unique opportunity to enable the oral delivery of large molecules 0:08 again sewing that are currently limited to injection 0:11 and adjustable capsules such as the one shown could be imagine 0:14 it would contain a reservoir to house the therapeutic payload 0:18 and have a pH responsive coating to cover the neil's 0:21 allowing for easy ingestion 0:23 after ingestion the bill would pass through the stomach and into the 0:26 intestine 0:27 there because I'm a dissolved revealing the microneedles 0:30 the pair started motion in the tissue would compress the reservoir 0:34 expelling the drug out the needles and into the tissue 0:37 insulin injections were tested in the GI tract a pig's 0:40 as a result injection a small bowl can be seen in the tissue 0:44 this small injection result in a robust drop in the animal's blood glucose 0:49 that superior to the effect elicited by traditional subcutaneous injection 0:54 oil administration as expected has no effect 1:01 the safety impasse 1:02 manga vice was also tested in pics the model device was placed her in over two 1:08 into the stomach the pics once in the stomach 1:11 it was released 1:16 by look 1:17 radio graphic 1:18 image to the pill shown here the progress on the bill through the animal 1:22 can be tracked by serial X-rayed 1:25 the pill was found to be safe and well-tolerated"
As you can see, this is very, very good in the circumstances - but it's still not quite there.
This whole thing is a shame, because MIT do provide captioning on a good number of their YouTube videos, which deserves credit. It seems righteously unfair for NAD to pick on an uncaptioned video and then point out isolated errors in YouTube's (not MIT's) transcriptions of same, a point which I hope is made in MIT's defence.
There are 263 videos on MIT's YouTube channel, of which 91 are captioned. Most of the videos are only a few minutes long, so getting that channel 100% captioned would take maybe a day or two, if that - I'm almost tempted to donate a weekend of my time to it (assuming that MIT would even take the finished results, which is of course by no means certain.)
Obviously that's just YouTube - the wider selection of courses is another matter. But it illustrates why things like this aren't always solvable with software. It can certainly help, and save the humans some time, but it's not a "fit and forget" solution, and isn't likely to be for quite some time yet.
A good place to start looking if you're after an OSS solution is what Carnegie Mellon University are doing - there's a variety of tools at http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net
Using the law as a weapon to demand something where we have alternatives[slides, notes or manuals] is, in my opinion, like "biting the hand that offers help".
That said, I have been seriously putting in effort to listen to videos without captioning. Yes, it's an uphill task and I'm willing to do it.
So... the taxpayers.
Just like there was no Uber few years back but when they are you suddenly think you are entitled for lower prices and other blah.
Also nice was the "zomg, an empty parking space, that's due to a gun put to the business owner's head!"... in a place where there are plenty of other empty parking spaces in shot. Curiously, this point is put forward by a prolific author with a disability, who they present as a typical example of people with disabilities. My favourite part was towards the end, talking about workforce participation: "The ADA has had no effect and hasn't helped increase workforce participation, which has stayed around 30%. That means it's done a lot of harm". What?
Rather curiously, Penn keeps talking about how you can't legislate compassion, and even make a point of it explicitly - "If this wasn't legislated, people would be more compassionate" - referencing the parking spaces in particular. But hey, nothing is stopping business owners from being more compassionate than is legally required. It's almost like the arguments they're making are... somethingsomething :)
P&T heavily editorialise their Bullshit show, use selective sources, and pull all kinds of psychological tricks to make their case (which they're fully aware of, being veteran magicians). If it were a different kind of show, it wouldn't matter, but it's pretty unethical to position yourself as calling out others on their bullshit when you're making up as much yourself.
If adding captions is really so simple, then the deaf institution needs to make the captions on its own. The information, after all, is freely available.
If this is not simple to do, then we should be sympathizing with the organizations that provide the content for free. Clearly the cost will be higher and the amount of available information will be restricted which hurts the larger number of users who can hear.
Maybe we should shut off the internet because there are poor people in the world who are not able to access it in the first place?
If there isn't a strong protection here then it means you might as well not offer any free content at all unless you have the money to make it accessible to everyone (and for lawyers to defend yourself). That would be an astonishingly broad chilling effect.
I found two pieces of conflicting info 1) ADA doesn't really apply to businesses under 15 persons and 2) ADA requires all business to provide TDD.
If you can dig it out of the ADA guidelines then please help me.
More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that.
Not that easy. Script -> timing -> correctly muxing, right? Not super hard (I'm an old school, from the very early '90s anime fan), yeah, but what about cheap?
Then to move it into the context of this lawsuit, a likely outcome is red tape to put anything with a audio track on the net, even if it's just to determine that close captioning it is not required (and let me invoke the slippery slope here), or doing that a certain sufficient quality, will be allowed.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
If even that sounds too hard, you can let YouTube's automatic subtitling produce an initial transcript - sometimes this can be surprisingly good, depending on audio quality and speaker clarity - and just fix up the mistakes yourself.
I'm not saying it's painless (and like you I come from a fansubbing background) but it's well worth the time, and it's easier now than it has ever been.
If you don't want to do it yourself, services like zencaptions.com will caption your video for just $1 per minute.
We've come a long way - it has never, ever, been this easy and cheap to do this stuff.
(Am a little sad to see that I'm being downvoted for saying that, in all honesty. I'm not endorsing this particular lawsuit, just making a general point overall that access is good.)
Perhaps because you can't conceive that one inevitable result of this is that whole lot less material with audio is going to be published by US institutions going forward?
Especially if a legal regime has to be set up to vet everything posted in any formal way by a member of these communities? In the case of MIT students, they have better things to do with their time than wade through red tape, which they hate.
And how much valuable material already published will likely be pulled?
I'm saying that ultimately if you put things online for free, your motivation is probably that you want people to see them. Adding captions substantially increases the number of people who can, and will.
Under NO circumstances should anything be pulled or not published at all purely because it isn't captioned. Captions are good but obviously if they're not there, they're not there.
I don't see why I'm being systematically downvoted for saying that. It's not controversial, surely.
Consider how many people can't even be arsed to write a README for projects that they throw up on github.
Stopped reading right there.
And they don't seem to realise that it's not just deaf people that benefit from captions. There are a bunch of situations where I could really do with captions -- coffee shops; planes; late nights; etc etc.
In the scheme of things adding captions costs very little and provides benefits to many people, not just those with a hearing impairment.
The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions.
So should Google be added to the lawsuit, since they're the ones hosting the called out badly auto-captioned videos, unless of course they're charging Harvard and MIT for the whole service?
I also strongly challenge your contention that noways initial costs of production are so high. Hosting, I don't know, but isn't it getting steadily cheaper?
And no, production and hosting costs are not nearly as high as they used to be. It's now possible to produce content for minimal marginal cost.
In a world where perfectly accurate captions are zero-cost and zero-effort, absolutely. That is not this world.
Tyranny of the minority.
Obviously all content is different, but for the benefit you get, it's hard to understand how any creator of any size at all does anything other than gain from such a simple and basic step.
It seems to me if it's the responsibility of people who can't understand the video to deal with that themselves (learn the language, hire a translator, etc...). Why is that different if your language is sign language or something else?
What a creator gets as a benefit is not having to do all the work of subtitling for the benefit of what will ultimately be a rather small - if not zero - boost in audience.
There's a very real scenario in which you throw an accessibility party and nobody comes.
Subtitling is not hard. It really isn't. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but there are many genuine, measurable benefits if you do.