4 ms·

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 the

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.
    - extra88 12y ago
      Almost all TAs would take forever to caption video and would do a bad job. TAs don't grow on trees and transcribing captions for all the lectures would use up their full 20hrs/week. A lot of the cited videos in the suit are not of course lectures but from events on campus. Good commercial transcription service costs about ~$150/hour with markups for difficult video (bad audio quality, accents, obscure subject vocabulary) but an institution doing a lot of business will get a discount. An advantage of bringing the suit is it brings in the federal government as "referee." The advocates have their ideas about what "the right thing" is and Harvard administrators and lawyers will have their own but the feds will basically create regulation for how these long-standing laws should be applied in these cases. They might say that certain kinds of content should be captioned as a matter of course but that others can be left uncaptioned until an individual requests it, the analogy being that the school doesn't have to have an ASL interpreter at every on-campus event, just at the ones where one is requested.
alecco 12y ago
This is terrible. What about lawyer costs for the defendants? This is exactly what old-school corporate world does (e.g. IBM): abusing the legal system for a shake-down.
- binarysolo 12y ago
  I think we have a different definition of shakedown. 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.

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.
  - extra88 12y ago
    Almost all TAs would take forever to caption video and would do a bad job. TAs don't grow on trees and transcribing captions for all the lectures would use up their full 20hrs/week. A lot of the cited videos in the suit are not of course lectures but from events on campus. Good commercial transcription service costs about ~$150/hour with markups for difficult video (bad audio quality, accents, obscure subject vocabulary) but an institution doing a lot of business will get a discount. An advantage of bringing the suit is it brings in the federal government as "referee." The advocates have their ideas about what "the right thing" is and Harvard administrators and lawyers will have their own but the feds will basically create regulation for how these long-standing laws should be applied in these cases. They might say that certain kinds of content should be captioned as a matter of course but that others can be left uncaptioned until an individual requests it, the analogy being that the school doesn't have to have an ASL interpreter at every on-campus event, just at the ones where one is requested.

alecco 12y ago

This is terrible. What about lawyer costs for the defendants? This is exactly what old-school corporate world does (e.g. IBM): abusing the legal system for a shake-down.

binarysolo 12y ago
I think we have a different definition of shakedown. 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.