38 ms·

Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses

135 points by greenburger 12y ago

nimblegorilla 12y ago
I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and review sections which were confusing.
- saosebastiao 12y ago
  Agreed. If I see a link to a video without a transcript or description or even a TLDR, I just won't bother. Maybe to some people I am just another impatient millenial, but I can't help but feel like I have better things to do than to sit through bad jokes, equipment problems, stuttering, and umm-ahhhs. 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.
  - cordite 12y ago
    Here's an idea, a transcript where you can click on a word in the transcript, and it jumps to the point in the presentation so you also have the context of the slide shown during speaking.
    - chrisabrams 12y ago
      This would be such a great learning tool!
      - haberdasher 12y ago
        I'm the developer of this, which has: A transcript editor, Full-text search over the transcripts, The ability to use the transcript to seek. For example: http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e (edited to fix formatting)
      - cordite 12y ago
        It reminded me of a certain notebook and pen (an expensive set) where each page of the notebook had a unique background pattern and the pen would record the lectures as you wrote. 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.
        hga 12y ago
        I think you're talking about this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ the Livescribe Echo Smartpen 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-brandtextbin=Livescribe&node=541966 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtext... I see much cheaper versions, including ones for iOS.
        cordite 12y ago
        This is indeed the unit a fellow student used. He dealt with ADHD, anxiety, and many other things in conjunction with medication side effects. For him, this was an invaluable study tool.
    - kiranb13 12y ago
      Someone at MIT's User Interface Design group is working on something like this, with a searchable transcript -- http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/ http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/
    - fakename 12y ago
      I've seen a few places that do this. edx was doing it for some courses at one point. Here's a demo from 3play: http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interactive-transcript/ http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interact...
    - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
      You can do something like that with YouTube right now - any captioned video will have a rolling transcript window available to open, which you can scroll through and click on to jump around the video in a non-linear fashion.
- skwirl 12y ago
  Why not just read books then?
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  - Symmetry 12y ago
    Some information hasn't been written down in books.
    - hga 12y ago
      Indeed. I'm pretty sure there's no book treatment of Lady Gaga being greeted by Harvard students. (I swear I am not making this up: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content 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.
      - Sanddancer 12y ago
        You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context. It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad out of videos. Your alma mater can do better than that.
        hga 12y ago
        Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment: “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....
- handojin 12y ago
  A thousand times yes. With a suitably rocking implementation (as outlined by other posters up/down of me) this would be a net benefit to everyone not just the deaf. The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.
skwirl 12y ago
Is this referring to free MOOCs on Coursera/edX/etc and free published course videos? Or online courses that enrolled students are paying for? Or both?
kelukelugames 12y ago
Does it really need to come to litigation?
- Chevalier 12y ago
  Nope. My apologies on behalf of our profession. This is probably just a shakedown -- it'll be cheaper to settle than it will be to defend against this lawsuit, so the game is to find a mistake that could plausibly fall afoul of the ADA and file away. I hope they don't settle, to put it mildly. Few institutions are as well-equipped to combat trolls as Harvard.
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  - alistairSH 12y ago
    I'm not sure this is a shakedown. The article mentions a previous case against Netflix that was settled with an agreement from Netflix to provide closed captioning in the near future.
    - kelukelugames 12y ago
      The government provides mediation and reconciliation before these things go to court. I don't think anyone disagrees on adding captions. They probably went a head with the suit because they couldn't settle on a dollar figure.
      - Bootvis 12y ago
        Or not basically you don't know and just stating this must be shakedown because mediation exists. A pretty weak argument IMO.
  - kelukelugames 12y ago
    I really hope this is not a shakedown because I believe asking MIT and Harvard to caption their courses is good. But I can't believe two leading universities would willfully ignore that request. On a related note, EEOC has been tweeting a lot of disability settlements. https://twitter.com/EEOCNews https://twitter.com/EEOCNews
jdreaver 12y ago
I don't like this type of precedent. 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.
- chrisabrams 12y ago
  I share a similar viewpoint. Wouldn't it be a better usage of funds to donate to these projects for caption support instead of using those funds to pay attorneys? Why is it so hard to be constructive?
  - jdreaver 12y ago
    Agreed. Really, I do applaud people going out of their way to accommodate others. If I had just one personal, direct request to create closed captions along with a "please," you bet I would try to help someone out. But making it illegal not to do so puts a sour taste in my mouth.
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  - harperlee 12y ago
    To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free. But yes, the current option is distasteful.
    - chc 12y ago
      > To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free. Not necessarily. They still aren't obligated to close-caption any materials for free — they just have to not provide any materials.
Someone1234 12y ago
I am a big supporter of accessibility (i.e. access for the blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled). 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?
deleted 12y ago
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epochwolf 12y ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
dhbradshaw 12y ago
This can use a software fix: 1) everyone agrees that having captions and transcripts is a good thing 2) requiring schools to have them is problematic because it increases the cost of producing the videos--we want the cost to be low because the videos are a social good and we want more of them. 3) with software maybe we can make it inexpensive to add transcripts and captions to videos. Suddenly the world is a better place
- Chronic31 12y ago
  Go now. Make a mobile app. Hire your founding engineers and live a long, prosperous life.
  - lucaspiller 12y ago
    Now how to turn that into a social network...?
- loco5niner 12y ago
  I'm just the idea guy
pekk 12y ago
As someone who makes free content, this is scary. I understand the Harvard has a lot more money to take care of accessibility than I do, but why would that exempt me? What is the legal formula determining who is in danger from lawsuits about whether they provided an accessible alternative to a completely free thing? 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.
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  But as someone who makes free content, you'll know how nice it is when you get lots more views/downloads/clicks (etc) of your content. Captioning enables that because not only do you reach visitors who are unable to hear, but you also reach non-English speakers in the Entire Rest Of The World who can with a few clicks automatically translate those captions into the language which they speak. More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that.
  - hga 12y ago
    "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.
    - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
      If you've got a script then software like CMU Sphinx (open source) can use voice recognition to align the words of the script with the time of the soundtrack. Services like YouTube will even do that for you, if you can provide the bare minimum of a transcript. 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.)
stolio 12y ago
MIT's OpenCourseWare is Creative Commons licensed, the only restrictions placed on a third party who wanted to caption the courses are 1) attribution, 2) the derivative work must be non-commercial in nature, 3) that the license remains the same. 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.
- hga 12y ago
  Now would be a really good time to make sure there are copies of those elsewhere. MIT is not wealthy like Harvard sort of is (long story), and in all cases one needs to remember that the vast majority of endowment money is earmarked (somehow donors trust college administrators only so much, and then there's Princeton). 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-discrimination-public-online-content 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.
  - hullo 12y ago
    MIT's endowment is 12b. That's a ways off Harvard's outlier of 36b, but if they're paying out 5% a year as a benchmark, that's $600m a year just off the endowment. Not being as rich as Bill Gates does not make one not wealthy if one still has over a billion dollars. One can not imagine it would be that hard for the folks at MIT to put together a program to crowdsource quality captioning. (Let alone some kind of "technological" solution, isn't text to speech a thing these days?)
morgante 12y ago
This is beyond ridiculous and will have a serious chilling effect on the growth of online learning content. 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.
- aldordeah 12y ago
  Please explain to me how it is fair that, by studying a free online uncaptioned lecture, someone gets even more of an advantage over me just because they weren't born deaf.
  - wyager 12y ago
    Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population. 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.
    - jasonlotito 12y ago
      > Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population. 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.
sadfaceunread 12y ago
Penn&Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.
- tagawa 12y ago
  This is not a "sue first" case, it just hit the news when the process reached the suing stage.
- vacri 12y ago
  I love watching P&T's Bullshit, passing the time counting logical fallacies. For example, the good old No True Scotsman in 'you don't have problems unless you're (registered as) legally blind'. Their ringers in that episode each had some point were they talk about true disabled people. 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.
ausjke 12y ago
Don't like this kind of litigation at all. Aren't they private schools, please don't mandate good free stuff to be perfect, at least not using this method.
- strictnein 12y ago
  They're private, but the amount of federal funds that filter through them is staggering, in federally backed students alone.
blfr 12y ago
Isn't every lecture, on-line or off, unavailable to deaf students? How does it work in legacy education? Is there a sign language interpreter in every hall?
- jff 12y ago
  At my school, they did indeed put an interpreter in any class with deaf kids (we had a lot of deaf students). The school would also pay hearing students for their course notes for distribution to deaf students, so if you were deaf and felt like sleeping in, no worries you'll get the notes anyway.
tn13 12y ago
I really like how people quickly develop a sense of entitlement for things that did not exist a while back. There were no online courses few years back, but now you think you are entitled to some captions. 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.
hudibras 12y ago
Everybody chill out, it's just a lawsuit. Four Americans disagree with how Harvard and M.I.T. are interpreting the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and so they're asking the courts to help out with the disagreement. I doubt anybody here will disagree with Americans being able to use their courts to redress perceived injustices. 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.
- hga 12y ago
  Read this mendacious, invidious PR thuggery http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and tell me again it's "just a lawsuit". 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.
  - psychometry 12y ago
    Some details on the NAD vs. Netflix case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-with-deaf-rights-group-agrees-to-caption-all-videos-by-2014/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-w...
  - hudibras 12y ago
binarysolo 12y ago
I know several of the lawyers involved on the plaintiff's end (several of them blind and/or deaf) on a friendship, nonprofessional level -- and I'm noticing there's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments. However I am not a lawyer nor am I hugely aware of the nuances of the issues, so take this with a grain of salt. 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.
- cwbrandsma 12y ago
  The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.
  - hga 12y ago
    And ongoing costs for a new ADA compliance office, and the red tape everyone in the community will have to wade through with that office to publish an officially vetted video. 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.
    - binarysolo 12y ago
      In the grand scheme of things I'd probably liken it to disability ramps, braille on room signage, etc. It'll probably add a few points to the total cost, but in the grand scheme we're talking about 3-5%, not 30-50% in additional costs. What'll probably happen is that each prof will need to assign a TA to basically deal with it. (Remember, these specialized technical costs are particularly cheap for universities.) I unfortunately don't have a lot of insight on the case itself, but I surmise the reason why these activist lawyers are going after Harvard and MIT is because they have plenty of resources to solve these issues. Part of being a leading academic institution is to "do the right thing", and at this juncture it's up to highly specialized legal people to figure out what that means.
readme 12y ago
All these disabled Americans do is collect a fat paycheck every month for doing nothing and now they want free education in suitable formats? Bunch of entitled leeches! How dare they tell HARVARD and MIT to make their free instruction accessible. /s
WalterBright 12y ago
Aren't there all these speech=>text software programs? They should be built in to browser software. Problem solved, no more need for lawsuits.
- hga 12y ago
  As far as we can tell, the specific complaints about poorly captioned videos were from just such software, only automatically generated by Google's servers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...
chrischen 12y ago
The government should provide a the money for implementing a government mandated captioning. The company should be sued if they choose not to use the money to implement captioning.
- loco5niner 12y ago
  > The government should provide a the money So... the taxpayers.
  - chrischen 12y ago
    Well, since everyone has to implement it, everyone should pay for it.
  - chrischen 12y ago
    Well, since everyone has to implement it, everyone should pay for it. Otherwise someone who doesn't have the money to implement it would be "discriminating."
SeanLuke 12y ago
> The lawsuits, filed by the National Association of the Deaf, which is seeking class-action status, say the universities have “largely denied access to this content to the approximately 48 million — nearly one out of five — Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing.” 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. https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php
- neilcrj 12y ago
  I think this is their source: "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." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    Ah lawyer weaselwords. From the paper, that definition consists almost entirely of people who don't need closed captioning,
    - loco5niner 12y ago
      > lawyer weaselwords I like it
ylem 12y ago
Say, does anyone know if there is any open source software that would do this (or for that matter, any software that isn't ridiculously expensive)? Years back, I ran a workshop (applying group theory to understanding magnetism) and we recorded it. We got releases for the videos and have the bandwidth to put them on the web for free, but I believe that I have to have them subtitled in order to release them online. So, if people have asked for the videos in person, I've given out copies, but they're not generally available...Automation does seem to be the answer here...
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  Decent speech-to-text is a long way from being a solved problem, so automation isn't a complete solution, but it's certainly a huge assist over doing it completely manually. 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 http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net
4ydx 12y ago
The comparisons with physical locations are not the same because an owner of a property will not let somebody come along and just build a random alternate access point into the building. As far as I am aware, these videos are released in a manner that somebody else can use them. Somebody wants to add captions? They can. Freely. 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?
igonvalue 12y ago
Here are the complaints for Harvard[0] and MIT[1]. 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-MIT-Complaint.pdf http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MI... [1] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Harvard-Complaint.pdf http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...
datashovel 12y ago
I think the sad thing here is not that deaf people are suing for access to educational materials. I think it's sad that they are ignored to the point that they feel their only option is to sue in order to have their voices heard. 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.
karmacondon 12y ago
Legitimate question: Why isn't this being done with software? The Speech-to-Text problem has been around for a long time, and it seems like there are a lot of people who are financially motivated to solve it. If the best solutions on the market, or ideally a combination of the best solutions, can't provide a baseline decent transcript then why aren't people tripping over themselves to solve this problem? 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.
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  Speech to text is simply not a solved problem. The technology gets better all the time, enormous strides have been made, but voice recognition is something that the human brain does well and computers generally do not, at this time. 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.
strictnein 12y ago
From fairly early in the article: "Harvard expected the Justice Department to propose rules this year “to provide much-needed guidance in this area,” and that the university would follow whatever rules were adopted."
localfugue 12y ago
This is a very bad precedent. I'm hearing impaired and I would never think of demanding this when I'm getting these things for free. Perhaps, I would not be saying this if I were paying for it - still, I may consider the other party when it comes to this. 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.

135 points by greenburger 12y ago

I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and review sections which were confusing.

saosebastiao 12y ago
Agreed. If I see a link to a video without a transcript or description or even a TLDR, I just won't bother. Maybe to some people I am just another impatient millenial, but I can't help but feel like I have better things to do than to sit through bad jokes, equipment problems, stuttering, and umm-ahhhs. 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.
- cordite 12y ago
  Here's an idea, a transcript where you can click on a word in the transcript, and it jumps to the point in the presentation so you also have the context of the slide shown during speaking.
  - chrisabrams 12y ago
    This would be such a great learning tool!
    - haberdasher 12y ago
      I'm the developer of this, which has: A transcript editor, Full-text search over the transcripts, The ability to use the transcript to seek. For example: http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e (edited to fix formatting)
    - cordite 12y ago
      It reminded me of a certain notebook and pen (an expensive set) where each page of the notebook had a unique background pattern and the pen would record the lectures as you wrote. 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.
      - hga 12y ago
        I think you're talking about this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ the Livescribe Echo Smartpen 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-brandtextbin=Livescribe&node=541966 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtext... I see much cheaper versions, including ones for iOS.
        cordite 12y ago
        This is indeed the unit a fellow student used. He dealt with ADHD, anxiety, and many other things in conjunction with medication side effects. For him, this was an invaluable study tool.
  - kiranb13 12y ago
    Someone at MIT's User Interface Design group is working on something like this, with a searchable transcript -- http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/ http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/
  - fakename 12y ago
    I've seen a few places that do this. edx was doing it for some courses at one point. Here's a demo from 3play: http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interactive-transcript/ http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interact...
  - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
    You can do something like that with YouTube right now - any captioned video will have a rolling transcript window available to open, which you can scroll through and click on to jump around the video in a non-linear fashion.
skwirl 12y ago
Why not just read books then?
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- Symmetry 12y ago
  Some information hasn't been written down in books.
  - hga 12y ago
    Indeed. I'm pretty sure there's no book treatment of Lady Gaga being greeted by Harvard students. (I swear I am not making this up: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content 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.
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context. It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad out of videos. Your alma mater can do better than that.
      - hga 12y ago
        Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment: “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....
handojin 12y ago
A thousand times yes. With a suitably rocking implementation (as outlined by other posters up/down of me) this would be a net benefit to everyone not just the deaf. The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.

skwirl 12y ago

Is this referring to free MOOCs on Coursera/edX/etc and free published course videos? Or online courses that enrolled students are paying for? Or both?

kelukelugames 12y ago

Does it really need to come to litigation?

Chevalier 12y ago
Nope. My apologies on behalf of our profession. This is probably just a shakedown -- it'll be cheaper to settle than it will be to defend against this lawsuit, so the game is to find a mistake that could plausibly fall afoul of the ADA and file away. I hope they don't settle, to put it mildly. Few institutions are as well-equipped to combat trolls as Harvard.
- deleted 12y ago
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- alistairSH 12y ago
  I'm not sure this is a shakedown. The article mentions a previous case against Netflix that was settled with an agreement from Netflix to provide closed captioning in the near future.
  - kelukelugames 12y ago
    The government provides mediation and reconciliation before these things go to court. I don't think anyone disagrees on adding captions. They probably went a head with the suit because they couldn't settle on a dollar figure.
    - Bootvis 12y ago
      Or not basically you don't know and just stating this must be shakedown because mediation exists. A pretty weak argument IMO.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  I really hope this is not a shakedown because I believe asking MIT and Harvard to caption their courses is good. But I can't believe two leading universities would willfully ignore that request. On a related note, EEOC has been tweeting a lot of disability settlements. https://twitter.com/EEOCNews https://twitter.com/EEOCNews

jdreaver 12y ago

I don't like this type of precedent. 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.

chrisabrams 12y ago
I share a similar viewpoint. Wouldn't it be a better usage of funds to donate to these projects for caption support instead of using those funds to pay attorneys? Why is it so hard to be constructive?
- jdreaver 12y ago
  Agreed. Really, I do applaud people going out of their way to accommodate others. If I had just one personal, direct request to create closed captions along with a "please," you bet I would try to help someone out. But making it illegal not to do so puts a sour taste in my mouth.
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- harperlee 12y ago
  To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free. But yes, the current option is distasteful.
  - chc 12y ago
    > To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free. Not necessarily. They still aren't obligated to close-caption any materials for free — they just have to not provide any materials.

Someone1234 12y ago

I am a big supporter of accessibility (i.e. access for the blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled). 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?

deleted 12y ago

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epochwolf 12y ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

dhbradshaw 12y ago

This can use a software fix: 1) everyone agrees that having captions and transcripts is a good thing 2) requiring schools to have them is problematic because it increases the cost of producing the videos--we want the cost to be low because the videos are a social good and we want more of them. 3) with software maybe we can make it inexpensive to add transcripts and captions to videos. Suddenly the world is a better place

Chronic31 12y ago
Go now. Make a mobile app. Hire your founding engineers and live a long, prosperous life.
- lucaspiller 12y ago
  Now how to turn that into a social network...?
loco5niner 12y ago
I'm just the idea guy

pekk 12y ago

As someone who makes free content, this is scary. I understand the Harvard has a lot more money to take care of accessibility than I do, but why would that exempt me? What is the legal formula determining who is in danger from lawsuits about whether they provided an accessible alternative to a completely free thing? 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.

jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
But as someone who makes free content, you'll know how nice it is when you get lots more views/downloads/clicks (etc) of your content. Captioning enables that because not only do you reach visitors who are unable to hear, but you also reach non-English speakers in the Entire Rest Of The World who can with a few clicks automatically translate those captions into the language which they speak. More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that.
- hga 12y ago
  "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.
  - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
    If you've got a script then software like CMU Sphinx (open source) can use voice recognition to align the words of the script with the time of the soundtrack. Services like YouTube will even do that for you, if you can provide the bare minimum of a transcript. 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.)

stolio 12y ago

MIT's OpenCourseWare is Creative Commons licensed, the only restrictions placed on a third party who wanted to caption the courses are 1) attribution, 2) the derivative work must be non-commercial in nature, 3) that the license remains the same. 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.

hga 12y ago
Now would be a really good time to make sure there are copies of those elsewhere. MIT is not wealthy like Harvard sort of is (long story), and in all cases one needs to remember that the vast majority of endowment money is earmarked (somehow donors trust college administrators only so much, and then there's Princeton). 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-discrimination-public-online-content 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.
- hullo 12y ago
  MIT's endowment is 12b. That's a ways off Harvard's outlier of 36b, but if they're paying out 5% a year as a benchmark, that's $600m a year just off the endowment. Not being as rich as Bill Gates does not make one not wealthy if one still has over a billion dollars. One can not imagine it would be that hard for the folks at MIT to put together a program to crowdsource quality captioning. (Let alone some kind of "technological" solution, isn't text to speech a thing these days?)

morgante 12y ago

This is beyond ridiculous and will have a serious chilling effect on the growth of online learning content. 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.

aldordeah 12y ago
Please explain to me how it is fair that, by studying a free online uncaptioned lecture, someone gets even more of an advantage over me just because they weren't born deaf.
- wyager 12y ago
  Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population. 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.
  - jasonlotito 12y ago
    > Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population. 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.

sadfaceunread 12y ago

Penn&Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.

tagawa 12y ago
This is not a "sue first" case, it just hit the news when the process reached the suing stage.
vacri 12y ago
I love watching P&T's Bullshit, passing the time counting logical fallacies. For example, the good old No True Scotsman in 'you don't have problems unless you're (registered as) legally blind'. Their ringers in that episode each had some point were they talk about true disabled people. 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.

ausjke 12y ago

Don't like this kind of litigation at all. Aren't they private schools, please don't mandate good free stuff to be perfect, at least not using this method.

strictnein 12y ago
They're private, but the amount of federal funds that filter through them is staggering, in federally backed students alone.

blfr 12y ago

Isn't every lecture, on-line or off, unavailable to deaf students? How does it work in legacy education? Is there a sign language interpreter in every hall?

jff 12y ago
At my school, they did indeed put an interpreter in any class with deaf kids (we had a lot of deaf students). The school would also pay hearing students for their course notes for distribution to deaf students, so if you were deaf and felt like sleeping in, no worries you'll get the notes anyway.

tn13 12y ago

I really like how people quickly develop a sense of entitlement for things that did not exist a while back. There were no online courses few years back, but now you think you are entitled to some captions. 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.

hudibras 12y ago

Everybody chill out, it's just a lawsuit. Four Americans disagree with how Harvard and M.I.T. are interpreting the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and so they're asking the courts to help out with the disagreement. I doubt anybody here will disagree with Americans being able to use their courts to redress perceived injustices. 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.

hga 12y ago
Read this mendacious, invidious PR thuggery http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and tell me again it's "just a lawsuit". 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.
- psychometry 12y ago
  Some details on the NAD vs. Netflix case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-with-deaf-rights-group-agrees-to-caption-all-videos-by-2014/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-w...
- hudibras 12y ago

binarysolo 12y ago

I know several of the lawyers involved on the plaintiff's end (several of them blind and/or deaf) on a friendship, nonprofessional level -- and I'm noticing there's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments. However I am not a lawyer nor am I hugely aware of the nuances of the issues, so take this with a grain of salt. 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.

cwbrandsma 12y ago
The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.
- hga 12y ago
  And ongoing costs for a new ADA compliance office, and the red tape everyone in the community will have to wade through with that office to publish an officially vetted video. 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.
  - binarysolo 12y ago
    In the grand scheme of things I'd probably liken it to disability ramps, braille on room signage, etc. It'll probably add a few points to the total cost, but in the grand scheme we're talking about 3-5%, not 30-50% in additional costs. What'll probably happen is that each prof will need to assign a TA to basically deal with it. (Remember, these specialized technical costs are particularly cheap for universities.) I unfortunately don't have a lot of insight on the case itself, but I surmise the reason why these activist lawyers are going after Harvard and MIT is because they have plenty of resources to solve these issues. Part of being a leading academic institution is to "do the right thing", and at this juncture it's up to highly specialized legal people to figure out what that means.

readme 12y ago

All these disabled Americans do is collect a fat paycheck every month for doing nothing and now they want free education in suitable formats? Bunch of entitled leeches! How dare they tell HARVARD and MIT to make their free instruction accessible. /s

WalterBright 12y ago

Aren't there all these speech=>text software programs? They should be built in to browser software. Problem solved, no more need for lawsuits.

hga 12y ago
As far as we can tell, the specific complaints about poorly captioned videos were from just such software, only automatically generated by Google's servers: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...

chrischen 12y ago

The government should provide a the money for implementing a government mandated captioning. The company should be sued if they choose not to use the money to implement captioning.

loco5niner 12y ago
> The government should provide a the money So... the taxpayers.
- chrischen 12y ago
  Well, since everyone has to implement it, everyone should pay for it.
- chrischen 12y ago
  Well, since everyone has to implement it, everyone should pay for it. Otherwise someone who doesn't have the money to implement it would be "discriminating."

SeanLuke 12y ago

> The lawsuits, filed by the National Association of the Deaf, which is seeking class-action status, say the universities have “largely denied access to this content to the approximately 48 million — nearly one out of five — Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing.” 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. https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php

neilcrj 12y ago
I think this is their source: "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." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  Ah lawyer weaselwords. From the paper, that definition consists almost entirely of people who don't need closed captioning,
  - loco5niner 12y ago
    > lawyer weaselwords I like it

ylem 12y ago

Say, does anyone know if there is any open source software that would do this (or for that matter, any software that isn't ridiculously expensive)? Years back, I ran a workshop (applying group theory to understanding magnetism) and we recorded it. We got releases for the videos and have the bandwidth to put them on the web for free, but I believe that I have to have them subtitled in order to release them online. So, if people have asked for the videos in person, I've given out copies, but they're not generally available...Automation does seem to be the answer here...

jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
Decent speech-to-text is a long way from being a solved problem, so automation isn't a complete solution, but it's certainly a huge assist over doing it completely manually. 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 http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net

4ydx 12y ago

The comparisons with physical locations are not the same because an owner of a property will not let somebody come along and just build a random alternate access point into the building. As far as I am aware, these videos are released in a manner that somebody else can use them. Somebody wants to add captions? They can. Freely. 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?

igonvalue 12y ago

Here are the complaints for Harvard[0] and MIT[1]. 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-MIT-Complaint.pdf http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MI... [1] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Harvard-Complaint.pdf http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...

datashovel 12y ago

I think the sad thing here is not that deaf people are suing for access to educational materials. I think it's sad that they are ignored to the point that they feel their only option is to sue in order to have their voices heard. 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.

karmacondon 12y ago

Legitimate question: Why isn't this being done with software? The Speech-to-Text problem has been around for a long time, and it seems like there are a lot of people who are financially motivated to solve it. If the best solutions on the market, or ideally a combination of the best solutions, can't provide a baseline decent transcript then why aren't people tripping over themselves to solve this problem? 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.

jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
Speech to text is simply not a solved problem. The technology gets better all the time, enormous strides have been made, but voice recognition is something that the human brain does well and computers generally do not, at this time. 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.

strictnein 12y ago

From fairly early in the article: "Harvard expected the Justice Department to propose rules this year “to provide much-needed guidance in this area,” and that the university would follow whatever rules were adopted."

localfugue 12y ago

This is a very bad precedent. I'm hearing impaired and I would never think of demanding this when I'm getting these things for free. Perhaps, I would not be saying this if I were paying for it - still, I may consider the other party when it comes to this. 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.