Initially I was quite confused about why the ADA/Rehabilitation Act applied to Harvard/MIT. It seemed like it was largely about employers and federal agencies, but at least the Rehabilitation Act covers "any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance", so I'm guessing that's why it applied to edX, though I wonder if it would apply if edX was an entirely separate entity that licensed the content from Harvard/MIT, or if they would still have an obligation to provide captions when licensing their content.
> Under Title III, no individual may be discriminated against on the basis of disability with regards to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases, or operates a place of public accommodation. Public accommodations include most places of lodging (such as inns and hotels), recreation, transportation, education, and dining, along with stores, care providers, and places of public displays.
[...]
> The statutory definition of "readily achievable" calls for a balancing test between the cost of the proposed "fix" and the wherewithal of the business and/or owners of the business. Thus, what might be "readily achievable" for a sophisticated and financially capable corporation might not be readily achievable for a small or local business.
It's a 25 year old law. I don't have much sympathy for large organisations that are still choosing to discriminate against disabled people.
They have chosen to not make the material accessible to deaf people, even though laws around closed captioning equipment started coming in 25 years ago (more recent changes include Internet streaming), and even though the ADA is 25 years old. There's no excuse to not know about it. They knew about it (because they provide reasonable adjustments to very many students all the time, and they have departments to do so), but they chose to ignore it.
It is clearly, unambiguously, discrimination. It might be legal (for the reasons I quoted around practicability), but that legality does not stop it being discriminatory.
It seems like what you're saying in your first paragraph supports the idea that what they're doing is wrong because it's illegal.
But then you do a 180 and say it's wrong because it's immoral.
Obviously, it could be both, but even if the first argument is kind of a "duh" it seems more cogent than going back and forth between those two positions (as many people seem to do in the thread).
Society decided it was immoral to discriminate against people with disabilities. We tried asking nicely, and got ignored, and so we passed laws to drive change. Those laws were made some time ago, and while it takes time for change to happen we've had long enough for people to bring things into compliance with those laws.
This is especially true for large well funded organisations producing new material. There's not much excuse for a large well funded organisation, who is well aware of reasonable adjustments, to not make new material accessible.
Arguments against making material accessible are "it's too hard" or "it's too expensive". That's covered by the law (I included reference to it in my post).
But the fact that we still don't have useful speech-to-text or good transcription shows the contempt much of the tech industry has for people with disabilities. See also the choice to exclude people by choosing pale grey text on a bright white background. (Note that this doesn't just exclude people with disability levels of eyesight loss, but also people with mild visual loss).
I used to be skeptical of the ADA but on a recent trip to France my girlfriend broke her foot and I had to push here around in a wheelchair. I realized how difficult life can be for disabled people when elevators are not working or a curb doesn't have a ramp. These are all very simple things and don't cost that much in comparison to other features of the building.
So if I understand correctly, this has nothing to do with the students attending these schools and instead concerns the course materials made free to the public.
I don't know -- I understand that it must not be helpful for deaf students, but it seems like it would be cheaper for the schools to just stop sharing the courses instead of dealing with a lawsuit. What does the NAD expect to have happen?
> it seems like it would be cheaper for the schools to just stop sharing the courses instead of dealing with a lawsuit.
Indeed. That's exactly what happened at UC Berkeley, once news of these lawsuits got out. We used to have all of our class lectures available free to the public, but now they're restricted only to students.
I see that as an embarrassing result for UC Berkeley and any institution that follows suit. Clearly, there is value to making the material available, otherwise it would not have been posted in the first place. Discriminating against a few or against everyone because of a negligible cost is a failure.
Furthermore, the fact that these considerations are not at the forefront of people's minds when releasing materials reinforces the merits of the lawsuit and the law.
Negligible is a relative terms, which is why I used it.
My school has an annual operating budget in excess of $100MM. It's a small school in the Midwest. They could slice something off to accommodate the closed-captioning.
I worked in post-production in Los Angeles and Manhattan and I have a reference for closed-captioning service fees. They could do it, or even better they could hire a person (maybe more) full-time and save money.
A technology solution that improves access for everyone sounds like a great starting point for a startup.
They could set up a crowdsourced model for it. I don't know if they host their videos on Youtube, but it offers that option and there are services they could utilize if not such as Amara [0] which is used by Udacity and Khan Academy.
> I see that as an embarrassing result for UC Berkeley and any institution that follows suit. Clearly, there is value to making the material available
It's not "clear" at all that there's value to put it up for them. They probably did it out of good-will, in which case the easiest option was to simply record the lecture. I don't think it's fair to imply malice at all.
So the solution is for them to give you a call, and you'll do it for a cut of the profit (i.e. free), right?
There is value for them and for the public:
goodwill - business : the amount of value that a company's good reputation adds to its overall value[0]
[0] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goodwill
I didn't imply malice at all.
No, they should not call me. They should start with an inclusive perspective that eliminates the need for lawsuits. And when things slip through the cracks because of advancements in technology, or cultural shifts in perspective they should lead.
My point is that it's embarrassing because they had the opportunity to do the right thing, and instead they did the easy thing, which was to take it away.
I was being facetious about them calling you, but somebody has to make a start.
> they had the opportunity to do the right thing, and instead they did the easy thing, which was to take it away.
Nope, by providing it for free they definitely were adding. As you will see when they take it offline, it was completely additional.
EDIT: I see you were talking about UC Berkley, I though "they" referred to Harvard and M.I.T, my mistake. Yeah, they took it away, but lawsuits have that effect. I doubt the plaintiffs would have settled for "we'll crowdsource the captions" :)
> They should start with an inclusive perspective that eliminates the need for lawsuits
IDK. It's taken millennia to get to where we are. Improvement isn't an option? A campaign to crowdsource the close captions might have been far more effective and definitely less mean-spirited than a lawsuit.
The all-or-nothing approach isn't practical and will likely result in nothing.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, "Nope, by providing it for free they definitely were adding. As you will see when they take it offline, it was completely additional."
I think your crowd-sourcing idea is a good one. I think that would be great, but in this instance it is circuitous.
The simple reality is that in the US, we have agreed as a society that lawsuits are how we settle things. That is how we improve things.
In the specific case of Berkeley, campus officials estimated that it would have cost a few extra hundred thousand dollars in order to put in the infrastructure to caption all of the videos that they made public. Given that the return for the University on making these videos public isn't really clear - and could be very low - it's hard to justify that investment, especially in Berkeley's present financial situation. For context, we have an enormous budget deficit, state funding is not keeping up with rising costs, and the UCs in general had their first budget deficit ever this year.
It's worth mentioning that captioning services are provided for students with disabilities, but that infrastructure simply isn't a part of what was made public, and is only provided in those classes that have students with disabilities in them.
It's one thing for them to provide public access to exactly the same portal that students used to access the webcasts that are being made anyway, but an entirely different one to also a). Run the risk of expensive lawsuits on the university's dime, and also b). ensure that those videos are up to federal accessibility standards.
IANAL but think it's related to the institutions accepting federal money, if you do that, you're often necessarily obligated to provide equal access everything.
no one "needs" it. its free lectures online that are posted from the goodwill of the schools, which have no real incentive to do it. all of a sudden if they have to CC them they probably would rather not post them anymore and now thousands of people will get screwed over.
There are formulas drawn, I could attempt reading lips and I could try using speech recognition software. Alternative: they pull down all the courses and no one gets anything.
There's no reason to deny other people of the free lessons, other than green envy.
You can get the material anyways from the recommended course books, which are probably available in the public library at request. Or the course notes in the course's web page.
It almost always incurs a cost to provide convenience to the handicaps which is why laws have been created so that they are threated equally... For example, do you really need to be able to access this store with your wheel chair? probably not, you could use Amazon.
"The DOJ counters that the disability discrimination laws have clear jurisdiction over video on the internet, and that closed captions are required to make videos accessible to deaf or hard of hearing students.[0]"
"Harvard and MIT both requested a Motion to Stay or Dismiss the cases on the grounds that current accessibility law doesn’t explicitly require universities to caption video on the web.
In June, the US Department of Justice weighed in on the issue in a statement of interest to the court. The USDOJ argued in favor of the NAD and urged the judge to deny the Motion to Stay of Dismiss. Judge Robertson agreed.
That means that, barring an objection from the District Judge, the lawsuit will proceed without delay.[1]"
If this causes a chilling effect such that universities find it easier or less costly to withhold the free lectures, it means the net effect on society from ADA lawsuits [about the free learning videos] is harmful.
If the universities avoid releasing free videos, that punishes all of us including the majority of people who don't have disabilities. I'd prefer to find another way to caption these videos besides throwing around lawsuits.
If a Federal appeals court rules that Netflix doesn't have to caption their commercial videos[1], surely we can cut some slack for free education videos.
Your argument here applies against all services which provide access to people with disabilities at increased expense, and is furthermore highly dependent on how you define net effect.
Disability advocacy groups have pursued this cause through other channels, to no effect. This lawsuit is a last resort. The institutions have had a long time to get it together; as the article says, a letter was sent by the DOJ way back in 2010.
>Your argument here applies against all services [...]
No, not all. I was restricting my argument to things given away for free with no commercial gain.
As society, we've agreed that making commercial entities like restaurants install wheelchair ramps is good.
However, if we see a soup kitchen feeding the hungry poor and notice that the building they use doesn't have a wheelchair ramp, we should threaten them with a lawsuit?!? (Yes, the hungry poor can be wheelchair bound too.) It seems means-spirited and a misguided use of the ADA.
Okay. So your argument is if a service is provided for free and there is no commercial gain for the provider, it should be exempt from accessibility requirements. Furthermore, you argue free online courses satisfy these two tests and thus should be exempt from accessibility requirements.
There are several lines of attack on this argument. The first is against your contention that these institutions enjoy no commercial gain. There are clear PR gains from offering these courses, both through engendering goodwill and increasing prestige. I am not saying these courses are offered only for PR reasons, but it is difficult to deny their effect.
The second line of attack is against your belief that free goods & services should not be subject to accessibility requirements. You use the example of a soup kitchen. Here I will digress for a moment and say I believe analogies are an exceptionally poor form of argument in civil rights contexts, which operate on abstract principles such as the value of equality. Thus an emotional appeal to our intuition about what is mean-spirited is unlikely to be useful. Returning to the argument at hand, we can question what is special about a free good or service which enables its exemption from accessibility requirements while remaining consistent with our principles of equality. So, I pass the ball back to you - what is your answer for this question?
How is someone supposed to respond to an abstract question without analogy to similar questions? The ADA only demands "reasonable accommodation," and frankly that's what we are arguing about: what is "reasonable?"
Our law provides many special cases when the entity is engaging in non-profit activities: taxes, labor requirements, among others.
So you ask why non-commercial should entities be excluded from accessibility requirements: because they already get excluded from other onerous requirements we place on businesses, and it seems like a "reasonable" line to draw.
Maybe you don't find it reasonable, but now it's up to a court decide.
If you believe the ADA is a net negative, it's good thing that you have no opportunity to ever become disabled then.
> the majority of people who don't have disabilities
Almost 19% of the US' population is disabled in one way or another. That's a lot of folks to discriminate against. But you're right, they're the minority, so what rights should they have to get access to publicly available services? Rip out those ramps, get rid of the parking spaces, close up the isles, and shut down those elevators.
> Netflix doesn't have to caption
Netflix won that appeal, and lost the next. Rather than take it further, they made a deal and added closed captioning. So, yes, if you offer public content, it should be available for everybody. Cost of doing business.
While this content may be nominally free, it's an advertisement for MIT and Harvard classes. As much money as these universities spend on their regular marketing materials, they can afford a few TAs to add captions to their video courses.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with GP here. Even if they're ads for MIT and Harvard, they're "good ads". We absolutely don't want to disincentivize them. Forcing these kind of regulations against them is a disservice to society, as it puts more knowledge away.
It'd be great if they were closed captioned, true. But it's already "good enough" that they're public. Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.
A disservice to society is treating some people who, through no fault of their own, as worth less than everyone else.
> Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.
So you'll allow them to hold their data hostage to get special favors and exceptions from federal law? Where do you draw the line then?
They already provide wheelchair ramps, braille (and low vision) compatible signs, ARIA tags on their websites, door openers, all for free for anybody who comes to their campus; what makes their videos exempt?
That they have gotten away this long is them not paying attention to the laws; these lawsuits are simply an attempt to get them to follow the laws in the country they live and work in.
So you'd rather have it be that no one has access to these free educational lectures/videos than that a small minority (<20%) can't use them? That's pretty much the perfect example of cutting of your nose to spite your face.
If these laws go through, Harvard and MIT should just set up a small subsidiary in another country and upload the videos through those. Problem solved.
The laws already exist, and Harvard et.al. have been operating under them for years. If they followed those laws and subtitled the videos, the problem would also be solved.
But why should the extra expense be forced upon them ? As has been announced, this will result in the videos being taken offline, not in anything that helps the disabled.
The line is, their content is free, even though they were not required to.
If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care. But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.
I've asked some hearing-impaired friends what they thought about this article. Their reaction was that it was ridiculous to sue over the accessibility of information given away for free.
> But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.
Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine? These aren't poor, barely solvent community colleges, these are private institutions with huge revenues and investment funds in the hundreds of millions.
> If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care
If it were created with money from a federal grant, then yeah, people would still care.
> Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine?
Do you have any sources that shed light on whether any of this material is the product of federal grant money? You assume it is, when the article and other sources I can find offer no suggestions or evidence that the universities are releasing federally funded information in an inaccessible format. Based on your comments here, you have made a set of assumptions and concluded that because the universities accept federal funding, and because they have released course material to the public, that this course material is the product of federal money. That has not to my knowledge been shown to be the case. If you're including loans/grants that are awarded to students, then all colleges, even the poor, little, barely solvent ones, are to be subject to the same principles. But when you make what sound like snide remarks about an institution's investment funds and revenues, you somewhat betray that you're only outraged because the university has money, and isn't doing what you think it should with that money.
I originally didn't word that clear enough to avoid misinterpretation. The "net negative" was specifically about the free education videos and not about all ADA lawsuits in general. I added the "[about the free learning videos]" to make that reference clearer.
>Netflix won that appeal, and lost the next.
I see no cites that says Netflix lost another appeal to NAD after April 2015.
> was specifically about the free education videos
MIT and Harvard were not following the law; the lawsuit simply attempts to bring them back in line. Free videos or not. MIT and Harvard both provide multiple ADA allowances as part of the cost of doing business; I think the question should be why are they trying to get around this one? The ADA has a history of trying to resolve these issues directly before resorting to lawsuits.
> I see no cites that says Netflix lost another appeal to NAD after April 2015.
My mistake; they were approached with a new lawsuit, and immediately decided to settle; the settlement document from April of this year:
It's kind of tongue-in-cheek but NAD is ruining this great resource for he rest of us.
Thinking about what's easier if the choice is take down all material and not spend money on a lawsuit or spend even more money to add captions there is an obvious choice for universities to make :-/
Universities, as institutions charged with shaping our future should absolutely be held to a higher standard. It's not about what's easy, but about what's right.
Additionally, providing inclusive access should be a point of pride and a highlight of the community and culture that executes it.
What is Youtube going to do when it's their turn? Netflix already got sued. With 300-400 hours of user content uploaded _per minute_, Youtube would need to employ a small country to provide human subtitling at that rate. The automated subtitles have a ways to go still.
Do they get a pass because it's not their content? Do they get a pass because it's almost impossible to provide? Or do they suck it up and CC everything at great expense to everyone?
That's a reasonable belief, which is why the ADA does not require compliance by individuals. However, these are not individuals; they are large institutions with the means to provide transcription. Can you formulate an argument for why online courses published by large institutions should be exempt from accessibility requirements which does not extend to an attack on accessibility requirements everywhere?
Can you formulate an argument for why course material collected, published, and shared for free--with no tie to actual courses that provide graduating credit--by large institutions should be subjected to accessibility requirements which does not extend to an attack on freely sharing information everywhere?
EDIT: For online course material that is offered to enrolled students and required for the completion of a degree, I do not believe anyone is arguing in opposition.
Excellent question! I like playing the role of gadfly, but will now try to construct my own argument for demolition to the enjoyment of others.
First, let's examine the virtue of accessibility. We start with the observation that nearly 1 in 5 Americans are disabled[0]. The source provides a breakdown by disability type. 1 in 5 is a high enough ratio to appeal to purely selfish reasons for the virtue of accessibility: there is quite a good chance you yourself will become disabled and require accommodation, so you should advocate for accessibility while you are still fortunate enough to be healthy. Other reasons to support accessibility include improved economic output by including the disabled in the workforce, ensuring a path to success for exceptional disabled people, increased quality of life among the disabled populace (about which you may or may not care), and an appeal to the abstract ideal of equality.
Now that we have established the virtue of accessibility, let's consider the virtue of enshrining accessibility requirements in law with penalty for non-compliance. Clearly, not all services desired by the disabled will implement accessibility (an example is the topic of this thread). Of those services which do not voluntarily implement accessibility, does the government have any interest in compelling implementation? Your answer to this question will depend on your own beliefs about the role of government; to head off an enormous digression, we'll just assume that yes, the government does have such an interest.
If the government has an interest in compelling implementation of accessibility, to what services does this interest extend? Certainly not all; it would be absurd to require every favor or interaction between individuals maintain full access compliance. For our purposes here let's use a classification function unlikely to be controversial (and more restrictive than is practiced): services provided by the government, and services provided by institutions receiving money from the government.
Both MIT ($460m in 2015[1]) and Harvard ($656m in 2012[2]) receive funding from the federal government. Thus they satisfy our restrictive classification, and so services offered should implement accessibility measures subject to penalty. These free online courses are services offered by MIT and Harvard. Thus they should implement accessibility measures. They certainly have the means.
In an effort to both help and ensure I am responding to the strongest form of an argument, and not just picking apart easy weaknesses, would you care to bolster your claims that:
- freely publishing course materials to the internet-at-large is the same thing as providing educational services for which the universities receive federal funding
- services provided by institutions receiving money from the government includes all services provided--pending your clarification on how releasing information equates to a service provided--entirely, without exemption, and not just those services to which federal funds are directly allocated
- applying federal compulsion to meet desired accessibility goals should apply to individuals who are not the official recipients of the benefits of the programs funded by the federal government (in this instance, meaning the general public of internet users who are non-students desiring to consume freely available information)
I find this automatic set of claims/assumptions to be highly dubious, as it equates releasing information--even if organized by originating course, thus giving the appearance of being an "online course", but actually lacking any involvement or service from the university beyond releasing the material, and thus not really an "online course"--to providing education to enrolled students (for which the university receives funding and is inarguably subject to accessibility restrictions with associated penalties). I think these are, if one does not ignore the nuances of the circumstances, quite different things that weaken the argument for considering them to be services provided by the university. How do you enshrine this in a principle that applies to all actors? Does everything a university sponsors or engages in fall under these principles? Meaning, because they received federal funding for programs A, B, and C, do programs X, Y, and Z fall under federal purview and penalty, as well? Should the internet public really be granted the latitude to expect they can have their cake and eat it, too, where consuming course material for personal edification as a non-student is concerned?
You can check my much lengthier thoughts elsewhere in the thread on this, if you'd like. Also, let's exclude your "They certainly have the means" comment. That, to me, diminishes the force of your argument for principles by concluding it as an argument that the alleged principles only matter because the affected party has the perceived means. I think that severely weakens the case for why this isn't just a grab to hold an entity to a higher standard because they have the money to pay for the burden.
All good areas of inquiry. You call for a stronger chain of reasoning connecting the free online courses to federal funding. I'll start by setting myself back a bit: I don't think Harvard and MIT receive federal funding earmarked for educational services, only research. We can toss in a caveat characterizing federal student loans as funding, but it doesn't change the central issue: no federal funds are explicitly earmarked for free online courses. All that said, it isn't obvious why this should be an issue; the above classification function is significantly weaker than that used in real life, and federal funding binding an entire organization avoids the hairy problems that come with tracking what money goes where in fungible currency. Organizations know the strings attached to federal dollars before choosing to accept them. So yes, receiving federal funding for programs A, B, and C require programs X, Y, and Z to fall under federal purview and penalty.
You raise a possible distinction between free online courses, which you reduce to releasing information, and services. This might be delving into semantic argument territory. I would say the onus is on you here to argue why free online courses should not be considered a service offered by the university and thus possibly not subject to accessibility requirements.
Edit: Please forgive posting a link to another comment. I'm pointing to the other comment only because I feel it is quite thorough, and am not sure the conversation is helped by duplicating the same sentiments, thoughts, and questions.
Edit 2: I hope my consideration of the issues and perspectives can pass the smell test of invoking a semantic argument. I genuinely find this particular issue to be one that is nuanced and important, and do not wish to subvert reasoned consideration by quibbling too much over words. Suffice to say, I think this is far more a matter of situational and conceptual difference, not just whether we should rightly use a word to indicate a thing.
Well, I was being a bit unfair. Semantic arguments aren't useless per se when value is derived from satisfying a definition or not (as might be the case here). I will take a look at your linked comment.
Even given the importance of disability accomodation, this provision doesn't make sense. Why apply it to a non-profit making giveaway that's mostly an artifact of something they wanted to do (compliantly) anyway?
That's like saying that if a store donates usable meat, they have to give a vegetarian option.
All it accomplishes is to punish those who go through the effort to make sure that byproducts of their mission can reach more people, and make it harder to "recycle" such products.
Think about it this way: it's already legal for me to make blind-incompatible blog posts and videos and give them away for free. This law is saying "hey prestigious institution, it's okay to give away your course materials for free, but you better durn well funnel it through a no-name blogger so no one knows where to find it!"
Oh, absolutely! You know how else they can save money? By stopping offering wheelchair accessible ramps. I bet they could save a few bucks by not using signs which also offer braile. And who needs elevators? Not their able-bodied students, obviously.
I'm really surprised to see this anti-accesibility sentiment on HN, where you see comments about contrast/scroll hijacking/Javascript requirability and numerous other things the WCAG recommends against on nearly every link posted. You'd expect Harvard and M.I.T. to have wheelchair ramps so disabled students could get to class right? It shouldn't be so controversial that their lectures should be accessible as well. Maybe some are concerned over the possible costs but there are solutions to that such as crowdsourcing. Universities are meant to spread knowledge for all and even if they're a public good, they should still be held accountable for it.
Or the reasonable thing for them to do is address the issue? No organization in the article said they were going to stop but instead reiterated their commitment to spreading knowledge, as they should. As for your last point, it's very disingenuous to paint the NAD as wanting to deprive others of something rather than wanting to allow disabled people to access something. We're not talking about food which has alternatives, but rather something which isn't accessible at all to deaf people, something which the law mandates with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
> the only reasonable thing for these organizations to do is stop giving it away for free
Yeah, it's not like MIT and Harvard have spare money lying around to spend on captioning (apart from the $13.5B and $37.5B, respectively, in their endowments). Let Big Deaf use their deep pockets to pay for captioning, if that's what they want!
That's such an absurd argument. "They have so much money, so let's MAKE them spend it on ME." MIT and Harvard had nothing to gain from releasing their lectures online for free, and plenty to lose by continuing to do so. When you stare a gift horse in the mouth, expect to be kicked in the face.
Why should lectures given away to the public for free obligate the university to make them accessible? We aren't talking about enrolled students here. If we were, that would likely not even be an argument. But placing an obligation on a university to provide as much accessibility as they would for their students to the masses of the internet as a condition of freely sharing with the world? That's not the same thing. There's nuance here, and people are missing it.
Why is everyone getting so caught up in the free part? If the lectures were a dollar would you say that they're obligated to subtitle them then? Nope, then you'd say that they're forcing a private organization to do things. (Or do you have a specific cost threshold before you expect subtitles? Hint: deaf people don't.) It's great that they're releasing them for free, very altruistic, but they're also depriving disabled people of them which the ADA specifically requires. Besides, they could easily provide a mechanism for crowd-sourcing subtitles which I noted in another comment so the cost wouldn't really be as burdensome as people want to think. Also, are people forgetting that these are Harvard and MIT? The NAD isn't going to be suing your mom and pop website. Harvard and MIT can afford it and should be held to higher standards. I hate to use the word due to the anti-SJW frenzy the internet is in these days, but the ableism in this thread is appalling. No one is trying to see from the side of the NAD, with one user even suggesting that it just wants to line its coffers...
> Why is everyone getting so caught up in the free part?
To restate my final point: there is nuance here, and people are missing it. I'm commenting for the purpose of interrogating the nuance, because I feel somewhat mixed on the issue. For online course material that is offered to enrolled students and required for the completion of a degree, I do not believe anyone is arguing in opposition. However, the collection and publishing of course material provided to enrolled students, then sharing it for free to non-enrolled students is a different matter entirely. The free part is an important detail in this particular matter and its circumstances, and shouldn't be wholly ignored, or treated as if it isn't part of the equation.
> If the lectures were a dollar would you say that they're obligated to subtitle them then?
Possibly. Most likely, only if paying for the material and following the courses was somehow tied to earning enrolled status and credit toward a degree, though. Because at that point, someone is actually a student looking to obtain something in exchange for studying the material, the university is engaged in the activity for which it receives federal funding, and we would rightly expect the institution to treat them as students according to the law and all its glorious regulations that seek to provide all students with a level playing field. Giving the material to the public at large with no fees or strings attached--meaning no strings attached to either party--isn't something I think we should discourage.
> Or do you have a specific cost threshold before you expect subtitles?
There is no cost threshold on my mind, no. There is only the threshold of whether the parties consuming the materials are enrolled students seeking a degree at the institution.
> ... but they're also depriving disabled people of them ...
I'm not convinced this is true. The internet is full of freely available information from a variety of sources, much of it in video and audio form, and we do not have a longstanding debate centering on how much of the freely available information in video and audio form is depriving the hearing impaired of that information and should be made accessible. What's happening here is singling out a particularly easy target and asserting that they should be held to a different standard than all the other parties producing free, inaccessible content, and calling it "depriving disabled people" of the content. This stirs my something-isn't-quite-right detector, because we are attempting to provide a very narrowly scoped requirement onto a narrowly scoped party, on the basis of taking rules that inarguably apply to their services in one particular set of conditions, and applying them to another, quite different set of conditions.
> Also, are people forgetting that these are Harvard and MIT? The NAD isn't going to be suing your mom and pop website. Harvard and MIT can afford it and should be held to higher standards.
This is an argument from a pretty low set of standards, honestly. The ability of the party to afford increased accessibility sets up a rather disingenuous cash-gate on the issue, and completely debases the argument for accessibility into an argument about money. We're either concerned about establishing a proper set of guidelines and cultural expectations for making information accessible, regardless of its cost, or we're targeting entities with cash who are otherwise doing something we applaud, and saying because they have the means to do more, they should do more, and bringing the force of the state against them to compel them to do so. This is the kind of thinking that inexorably leads to crafting laws that target specific parties, leave open loopholes for other parties, and wind up subverting our intended goals by allowing those who wish to avoid a particular set of regulations and obligations by reorganizing under an uncovered entity type. We'...
When a student is paying for an education in a federally-funded institution, it's reasonable to expect video-captioning, braille, text-scalable HTML (not PDF) wherever feasible. What about Sign Language interpretation? Simple English?
It would be great if everyone could afford to offer accessible content.
Maybe, instead of paying instructors, all lectures should be typed verbarim - in advance - and delivered by Text-to-Speech software (with gestural scripting and intonation). All in the same voice.
- Ahead-of-time lecture scripts could be used to help improve automated speech recognition accuracy.
- Provide additional support for paid captioning
-- Tools
-- Labor
- Provide support for crowdsourced captioning services
-- Feature: Upvote to prioritize
-- Feature: Flag as garbled
- Develop video-platform-agnostic transcription software (and make it available for free)
-- Desktop offline Speech-to-Text
-- Mobile offline Speech-to-Text
-- Speaker-specific language model training
- Require use of a video-platform with support for automated transcription
-- YouTube
--
- Companies with research in this space:
-- Speech Recognition, [Automated] Transcription, Autocomplete hinting for [Crowd-sourced] captioning
-- IBM
-- Google
--- YouTube has automated transcription
--- Google Voice supports transcription corrections, but AFAIU it's not speaker-specific
-- Baidu
-- Nuance (Dragon,)
--
... Textual lecture transcriptions are useful for everyone; because Ctrl-F to search.
- Label (with RDFa structured data) accessible content to make it easy to find
-- Schema.org accessibility structured data (for Places, Events)
-- Human-verified crowdsourced corrections can/could be used to train recognizing and generative speaker-specific models
-- In the film A.I. (2001), there's a scene where they're asking questions of Robin Williams and the intonation/inflection inadvertantly wastes one of their 3 wishes / requests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence
I was focusing on monetary issues because that's what most in the thread bought up. You're correct that I'm holding these universities to a specific standard and that's because I mentioned before they are universities, and because they are considered some of the eminent. If we can't even expect America's top universities to accommodate them, who can? (The government certainly can't go around subtitling everything) From your response it seems you're worried that this will lead to a slipper slope where subtitles become an oppressive expectations and might lead to even more specific demands by other groups. While I don't agree with that, I don't think that's as bad of a thing as it sounds; would the world really be worst off if we actually tried to consider the needs of those that are disabled? Regarding your question about expectations, the government already has guidelines on this, those are the base expectations. There are also groups specifically educating people on this like the WCAG for web accessibility. Anything extra you do such as accommodating the colorblind for example would be great and if a case like this forces people to consider the limitations their audiences might face. I see that as a win.
The lawyers just want the ADA fees from institutions with deep pockets. It's not about these universities deliberately refusing to accommodate the hearing impaired. I think they would, if a serious student needed that assistance.
A few thoughts, somewhat orthogonal to each other:
1) Disability rights are often portrayed as a special privilege for a subgroup of society. But in reality, all of us start our lives mobility impaired and illiterate, and many of us who are lucky enough to grow old become sight, hearing, and mobility impaired to some extent. Accessibility helps all of us.
2) Accessibility helps not just humans. High quality captions add a lot of value to videos, because they make the videos searchable, which provides immense benefits to all users, hearing impaired or not.
3) Disability rights are the one aspect of social policies where the USA might be ahead of much of the rest of the world. Compared to my native Switzerland, the USA is far ahead in empowering disabled individuals to participate in public life. This is something the US should be proud of.
This could set a new precedent if the decision extends beyond videos.
Sample scenarios:
- Color red is banned because colorblind people can't see it
- "screeching nails on blackboard" Youtube video is pulled because deaf people can't enjoy it
- Public datasets are pulled because the numbers are too complicated for ordinary people to understand
IMO there should be a general divide between "public data" and "public accommodation". Data is just bits; 0's and 1's can be communicated to anyone. Requiring them to be something else as well is going too far. To put it another way: the accessibility problem is in the human-computer interface, not in the service on the other end of the network.
That being said, it seems like the NAD only expects this to apply to public accommodations, so perhaps all that's needed is to move (donate) the videos to a separate (non-public-accommodation) location, e.g. Bittorrent.
85 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread> Under Title III, no individual may be discriminated against on the basis of disability with regards to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases, or operates a place of public accommodation. Public accommodations include most places of lodging (such as inns and hotels), recreation, transportation, education, and dining, along with stores, care providers, and places of public displays.
[...]
> The statutory definition of "readily achievable" calls for a balancing test between the cost of the proposed "fix" and the wherewithal of the business and/or owners of the business. Thus, what might be "readily achievable" for a sophisticated and financially capable corporation might not be readily achievable for a small or local business.
It's a 25 year old law. I don't have much sympathy for large organisations that are still choosing to discriminate against disabled people.
It is clearly, unambiguously, discrimination. It might be legal (for the reasons I quoted around practicability), but that legality does not stop it being discriminatory.
But then you do a 180 and say it's wrong because it's immoral.
Obviously, it could be both, but even if the first argument is kind of a "duh" it seems more cogent than going back and forth between those two positions (as many people seem to do in the thread).
Society decided it was immoral to discriminate against people with disabilities. We tried asking nicely, and got ignored, and so we passed laws to drive change. Those laws were made some time ago, and while it takes time for change to happen we've had long enough for people to bring things into compliance with those laws.
This is especially true for large well funded organisations producing new material. There's not much excuse for a large well funded organisation, who is well aware of reasonable adjustments, to not make new material accessible.
Arguments against making material accessible are "it's too hard" or "it's too expensive". That's covered by the law (I included reference to it in my post).
But the fact that we still don't have useful speech-to-text or good transcription shows the contempt much of the tech industry has for people with disabilities. See also the choice to exclude people by choosing pale grey text on a bright white background. (Note that this doesn't just exclude people with disability levels of eyesight loss, but also people with mild visual loss).
Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798
Since then I am a strong supporter of the ADA.
I don't know -- I understand that it must not be helpful for deaf students, but it seems like it would be cheaper for the schools to just stop sharing the courses instead of dealing with a lawsuit. What does the NAD expect to have happen?
Indeed. That's exactly what happened at UC Berkeley, once news of these lawsuits got out. We used to have all of our class lectures available free to the public, but now they're restricted only to students.
Furthermore, the fact that these considerations are not at the forefront of people's minds when releasing materials reinforces the merits of the lawsuit and the law.
It's not a negligible cost to transcribe every single phrase the lecturer utters, for hours and hours and hours of lessons.
Would it be better if the captions were generated by Youtube? Come on, that system is not good enough yet.
My school has an annual operating budget in excess of $100MM. It's a small school in the Midwest. They could slice something off to accommodate the closed-captioning.
I worked in post-production in Los Angeles and Manhattan and I have a reference for closed-captioning service fees. They could do it, or even better they could hire a person (maybe more) full-time and save money.
A technology solution that improves access for everyone sounds like a great starting point for a startup.
[0]: https://pro.amara.org/education
It's not "clear" at all that there's value to put it up for them. They probably did it out of good-will, in which case the easiest option was to simply record the lecture. I don't think it's fair to imply malice at all.
So the solution is for them to give you a call, and you'll do it for a cut of the profit (i.e. free), right?
I didn't imply malice at all.
No, they should not call me. They should start with an inclusive perspective that eliminates the need for lawsuits. And when things slip through the cracks because of advancements in technology, or cultural shifts in perspective they should lead.
My point is that it's embarrassing because they had the opportunity to do the right thing, and instead they did the easy thing, which was to take it away.
> they had the opportunity to do the right thing, and instead they did the easy thing, which was to take it away.
Nope, by providing it for free they definitely were adding. As you will see when they take it offline, it was completely additional.
EDIT: I see you were talking about UC Berkley, I though "they" referred to Harvard and M.I.T, my mistake. Yeah, they took it away, but lawsuits have that effect. I doubt the plaintiffs would have settled for "we'll crowdsource the captions" :)
> They should start with an inclusive perspective that eliminates the need for lawsuits
IDK. It's taken millennia to get to where we are. Improvement isn't an option? A campaign to crowdsource the close captions might have been far more effective and definitely less mean-spirited than a lawsuit.
The all-or-nothing approach isn't practical and will likely result in nothing.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, "Nope, by providing it for free they definitely were adding. As you will see when they take it offline, it was completely additional."
I think your crowd-sourcing idea is a good one. I think that would be great, but in this instance it is circuitous.
The simple reality is that in the US, we have agreed as a society that lawsuits are how we settle things. That is how we improve things.
It's worth mentioning that captioning services are provided for students with disabilities, but that infrastructure simply isn't a part of what was made public, and is only provided in those classes that have students with disabilities in them.
It's one thing for them to provide public access to exactly the same portal that students used to access the webcasts that are being made anyway, but an entirely different one to also a). Run the risk of expensive lawsuits on the university's dime, and also b). ensure that those videos are up to federal accessibility standards.
Edit: wording and fixing dictation errors.
I agree with your point, however speech recognition likely resulted in the mentioned "inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned" videos ;)
You can get the material anyways from the recommended course books, which are probably available in the public library at request. Or the course notes in the course's web page.
"Harvard and MIT both requested a Motion to Stay or Dismiss the cases on the grounds that current accessibility law doesn’t explicitly require universities to caption video on the web.
In June, the US Department of Justice weighed in on the issue in a statement of interest to the court. The USDOJ argued in favor of the NAD and urged the judge to deny the Motion to Stay of Dismiss. Judge Robertson agreed.
That means that, barring an objection from the District Judge, the lawsuit will proceed without delay.[1]"
[0] http://www.3playmedia.com/2015/06/26/usdoj-sides-with-nad-in... [1] http://www.3playmedia.com/2016/02/23/judge-denies-motion-to-...
Similar discussion as previous thread on UC Berkley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519761
If the universities avoid releasing free videos, that punishes all of us including the majority of people who don't have disabilities. I'd prefer to find another way to caption these videos besides throwing around lawsuits.
If a Federal appeals court rules that Netflix doesn't have to caption their commercial videos[1], surely we can cut some slack for free education videos.
[1]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/9th-circuit-rules...
Disability advocacy groups have pursued this cause through other channels, to no effect. This lawsuit is a last resort. The institutions have had a long time to get it together; as the article says, a letter was sent by the DOJ way back in 2010.
No, not all. I was restricting my argument to things given away for free with no commercial gain.
As society, we've agreed that making commercial entities like restaurants install wheelchair ramps is good.
However, if we see a soup kitchen feeding the hungry poor and notice that the building they use doesn't have a wheelchair ramp, we should threaten them with a lawsuit?!? (Yes, the hungry poor can be wheelchair bound too.) It seems means-spirited and a misguided use of the ADA.
There are several lines of attack on this argument. The first is against your contention that these institutions enjoy no commercial gain. There are clear PR gains from offering these courses, both through engendering goodwill and increasing prestige. I am not saying these courses are offered only for PR reasons, but it is difficult to deny their effect.
The second line of attack is against your belief that free goods & services should not be subject to accessibility requirements. You use the example of a soup kitchen. Here I will digress for a moment and say I believe analogies are an exceptionally poor form of argument in civil rights contexts, which operate on abstract principles such as the value of equality. Thus an emotional appeal to our intuition about what is mean-spirited is unlikely to be useful. Returning to the argument at hand, we can question what is special about a free good or service which enables its exemption from accessibility requirements while remaining consistent with our principles of equality. So, I pass the ball back to you - what is your answer for this question?
Our law provides many special cases when the entity is engaging in non-profit activities: taxes, labor requirements, among others.
So you ask why non-commercial should entities be excluded from accessibility requirements: because they already get excluded from other onerous requirements we place on businesses, and it seems like a "reasonable" line to draw.
Maybe you don't find it reasonable, but now it's up to a court decide.
> the majority of people who don't have disabilities
Almost 19% of the US' population is disabled in one way or another. That's a lot of folks to discriminate against. But you're right, they're the minority, so what rights should they have to get access to publicly available services? Rip out those ramps, get rid of the parking spaces, close up the isles, and shut down those elevators.
> Netflix doesn't have to caption
Netflix won that appeal, and lost the next. Rather than take it further, they made a deal and added closed captioning. So, yes, if you offer public content, it should be available for everybody. Cost of doing business.
While this content may be nominally free, it's an advertisement for MIT and Harvard classes. As much money as these universities spend on their regular marketing materials, they can afford a few TAs to add captions to their video courses.
It'd be great if they were closed captioned, true. But it's already "good enough" that they're public. Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.
A disservice to society is treating some people who, through no fault of their own, as worth less than everyone else.
> Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.
So you'll allow them to hold their data hostage to get special favors and exceptions from federal law? Where do you draw the line then?
They already provide wheelchair ramps, braille (and low vision) compatible signs, ARIA tags on their websites, door openers, all for free for anybody who comes to their campus; what makes their videos exempt?
That they have gotten away this long is them not paying attention to the laws; these lawsuits are simply an attempt to get them to follow the laws in the country they live and work in.
If these laws go through, Harvard and MIT should just set up a small subsidiary in another country and upload the videos through those. Problem solved.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...
So rather than helping anyone, you're sabotaging many.
I would like to point out though that merely uploading a video to YouTube results in it being captioned, for free, by a machine learning algorithm.
If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care. But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.
I've asked some hearing-impaired friends what they thought about this article. Their reaction was that it was ridiculous to sue over the accessibility of information given away for free.
Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine? These aren't poor, barely solvent community colleges, these are private institutions with huge revenues and investment funds in the hundreds of millions.
> If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care
If it were created with money from a federal grant, then yeah, people would still care.
Do you have any sources that shed light on whether any of this material is the product of federal grant money? You assume it is, when the article and other sources I can find offer no suggestions or evidence that the universities are releasing federally funded information in an inaccessible format. Based on your comments here, you have made a set of assumptions and concluded that because the universities accept federal funding, and because they have released course material to the public, that this course material is the product of federal money. That has not to my knowledge been shown to be the case. If you're including loans/grants that are awarded to students, then all colleges, even the poor, little, barely solvent ones, are to be subject to the same principles. But when you make what sound like snide remarks about an institution's investment funds and revenues, you somewhat betray that you're only outraged because the university has money, and isn't doing what you think it should with that money.
I originally didn't word that clear enough to avoid misinterpretation. The "net negative" was specifically about the free education videos and not about all ADA lawsuits in general. I added the "[about the free learning videos]" to make that reference clearer.
>Netflix won that appeal, and lost the next.
I see no cites that says Netflix lost another appeal to NAD after April 2015.
MIT and Harvard were not following the law; the lawsuit simply attempts to bring them back in line. Free videos or not. MIT and Harvard both provide multiple ADA allowances as part of the cost of doing business; I think the question should be why are they trying to get around this one? The ADA has a history of trying to resolve these issues directly before resorting to lawsuits.
> I see no cites that says Netflix lost another appeal to NAD after April 2015.
My mistake; they were approached with a new lawsuit, and immediately decided to settle; the settlement document from April of this year:
http://www.adatitleiii.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/121/2016...
Thinking about what's easier if the choice is take down all material and not spend money on a lawsuit or spend even more money to add captions there is an obvious choice for universities to make :-/
Additionally, providing inclusive access should be a point of pride and a highlight of the community and culture that executes it.
Do they get a pass because it's not their content? Do they get a pass because it's almost impossible to provide? Or do they suck it up and CC everything at great expense to everyone?
I mean, that would be equivalent to suing a gallery because paintings are "discriminatory". Or the painter. Obviously ridiculous.
You don't sue a guy doing good deeds just because he is not 100% good to all, or missed someone in his efforts. Gosh.
EDIT: For online course material that is offered to enrolled students and required for the completion of a degree, I do not believe anyone is arguing in opposition.
First, let's examine the virtue of accessibility. We start with the observation that nearly 1 in 5 Americans are disabled[0]. The source provides a breakdown by disability type. 1 in 5 is a high enough ratio to appeal to purely selfish reasons for the virtue of accessibility: there is quite a good chance you yourself will become disabled and require accommodation, so you should advocate for accessibility while you are still fortunate enough to be healthy. Other reasons to support accessibility include improved economic output by including the disabled in the workforce, ensuring a path to success for exceptional disabled people, increased quality of life among the disabled populace (about which you may or may not care), and an appeal to the abstract ideal of equality.
Now that we have established the virtue of accessibility, let's consider the virtue of enshrining accessibility requirements in law with penalty for non-compliance. Clearly, not all services desired by the disabled will implement accessibility (an example is the topic of this thread). Of those services which do not voluntarily implement accessibility, does the government have any interest in compelling implementation? Your answer to this question will depend on your own beliefs about the role of government; to head off an enormous digression, we'll just assume that yes, the government does have such an interest.
If the government has an interest in compelling implementation of accessibility, to what services does this interest extend? Certainly not all; it would be absurd to require every favor or interaction between individuals maintain full access compliance. For our purposes here let's use a classification function unlikely to be controversial (and more restrictive than is practiced): services provided by the government, and services provided by institutions receiving money from the government.
Both MIT ($460m in 2015[1]) and Harvard ($656m in 2012[2]) receive funding from the federal government. Thus they satisfy our restrictive classification, and so services offered should implement accessibility measures subject to penalty. These free online courses are services offered by MIT and Harvard. Thus they should implement accessibility measures. They certainly have the means.
[0] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/miscellane...
[1] http://web.mit.edu/ir/financial/re.html
[2] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/12/30/sequestration-r...
- freely publishing course materials to the internet-at-large is the same thing as providing educational services for which the universities receive federal funding
- services provided by institutions receiving money from the government includes all services provided--pending your clarification on how releasing information equates to a service provided--entirely, without exemption, and not just those services to which federal funds are directly allocated
- applying federal compulsion to meet desired accessibility goals should apply to individuals who are not the official recipients of the benefits of the programs funded by the federal government (in this instance, meaning the general public of internet users who are non-students desiring to consume freely available information)
I find this automatic set of claims/assumptions to be highly dubious, as it equates releasing information--even if organized by originating course, thus giving the appearance of being an "online course", but actually lacking any involvement or service from the university beyond releasing the material, and thus not really an "online course"--to providing education to enrolled students (for which the university receives funding and is inarguably subject to accessibility restrictions with associated penalties). I think these are, if one does not ignore the nuances of the circumstances, quite different things that weaken the argument for considering them to be services provided by the university. How do you enshrine this in a principle that applies to all actors? Does everything a university sponsors or engages in fall under these principles? Meaning, because they received federal funding for programs A, B, and C, do programs X, Y, and Z fall under federal purview and penalty, as well? Should the internet public really be granted the latitude to expect they can have their cake and eat it, too, where consuming course material for personal edification as a non-student is concerned?
You can check my much lengthier thoughts elsewhere in the thread on this, if you'd like. Also, let's exclude your "They certainly have the means" comment. That, to me, diminishes the force of your argument for principles by concluding it as an argument that the alleged principles only matter because the affected party has the perceived means. I think that severely weakens the case for why this isn't just a grab to hold an entity to a higher standard because they have the money to pay for the burden.
You raise a possible distinction between free online courses, which you reduce to releasing information, and services. This might be delving into semantic argument territory. I would say the onus is on you here to argue why free online courses should not be considered a service offered by the university and thus possibly not subject to accessibility requirements.
Edit: Please forgive posting a link to another comment. I'm pointing to the other comment only because I feel it is quite thorough, and am not sure the conversation is helped by duplicating the same sentiments, thoughts, and questions.
Edit 2: I hope my consideration of the issues and perspectives can pass the smell test of invoking a semantic argument. I genuinely find this particular issue to be one that is nuanced and important, and do not wish to subvert reasoned consideration by quibbling too much over words. Suffice to say, I think this is far more a matter of situational and conceptual difference, not just whether we should rightly use a word to indicate a thing.
That's like saying that if a store donates usable meat, they have to give a vegetarian option.
All it accomplishes is to punish those who go through the effort to make sure that byproducts of their mission can reach more people, and make it harder to "recycle" such products.
Think about it this way: it's already legal for me to make blind-incompatible blog posts and videos and give them away for free. This law is saying "hey prestigious institution, it's okay to give away your course materials for free, but you better durn well funnel it through a no-name blogger so no one knows where to find it!"
/s
It's like if an organization is giving away food and then gets sued for not providing a gluten or nut-free option.
Its the sentiment that if some people can't have it, no one should.
Yeah, it's not like MIT and Harvard have spare money lying around to spend on captioning (apart from the $13.5B and $37.5B, respectively, in their endowments). Let Big Deaf use their deep pockets to pay for captioning, if that's what they want!
To restate my final point: there is nuance here, and people are missing it. I'm commenting for the purpose of interrogating the nuance, because I feel somewhat mixed on the issue. For online course material that is offered to enrolled students and required for the completion of a degree, I do not believe anyone is arguing in opposition. However, the collection and publishing of course material provided to enrolled students, then sharing it for free to non-enrolled students is a different matter entirely. The free part is an important detail in this particular matter and its circumstances, and shouldn't be wholly ignored, or treated as if it isn't part of the equation.
> If the lectures were a dollar would you say that they're obligated to subtitle them then?
Possibly. Most likely, only if paying for the material and following the courses was somehow tied to earning enrolled status and credit toward a degree, though. Because at that point, someone is actually a student looking to obtain something in exchange for studying the material, the university is engaged in the activity for which it receives federal funding, and we would rightly expect the institution to treat them as students according to the law and all its glorious regulations that seek to provide all students with a level playing field. Giving the material to the public at large with no fees or strings attached--meaning no strings attached to either party--isn't something I think we should discourage.
> Or do you have a specific cost threshold before you expect subtitles?
There is no cost threshold on my mind, no. There is only the threshold of whether the parties consuming the materials are enrolled students seeking a degree at the institution.
> ... but they're also depriving disabled people of them ...
I'm not convinced this is true. The internet is full of freely available information from a variety of sources, much of it in video and audio form, and we do not have a longstanding debate centering on how much of the freely available information in video and audio form is depriving the hearing impaired of that information and should be made accessible. What's happening here is singling out a particularly easy target and asserting that they should be held to a different standard than all the other parties producing free, inaccessible content, and calling it "depriving disabled people" of the content. This stirs my something-isn't-quite-right detector, because we are attempting to provide a very narrowly scoped requirement onto a narrowly scoped party, on the basis of taking rules that inarguably apply to their services in one particular set of conditions, and applying them to another, quite different set of conditions.
> Also, are people forgetting that these are Harvard and MIT? The NAD isn't going to be suing your mom and pop website. Harvard and MIT can afford it and should be held to higher standards.
This is an argument from a pretty low set of standards, honestly. The ability of the party to afford increased accessibility sets up a rather disingenuous cash-gate on the issue, and completely debases the argument for accessibility into an argument about money. We're either concerned about establishing a proper set of guidelines and cultural expectations for making information accessible, regardless of its cost, or we're targeting entities with cash who are otherwise doing something we applaud, and saying because they have the means to do more, they should do more, and bringing the force of the state against them to compel them to do so. This is the kind of thinking that inexorably leads to crafting laws that target specific parties, leave open loopholes for other parties, and wind up subverting our intended goals by allowing those who wish to avoid a particular set of regulations and obligations by reorganizing under an uncovered entity type. We'...
It would be great if everyone could afford to offer accessible content.
Maybe, instead of paying instructors, all lectures should be typed verbarim - in advance - and delivered by Text-to-Speech software (with gestural scripting and intonation). All in the same voice.
- Ahead-of-time lecture scripts could be used to help improve automated speech recognition accuracy.
- Provide additional support for paid captioning
-- Tools
-- Labor
- Provide support for crowdsourced captioning services
-- Feature: Upvote to prioritize
-- Feature: Flag as garbled
- Develop video-platform-agnostic transcription software (and make it available for free)
-- Desktop offline Speech-to-Text
-- Mobile offline Speech-to-Text
-- Speaker-specific language model training
- Require use of a video-platform with support for automated transcription
-- YouTube
--
- Companies with research in this space:
-- Speech Recognition, [Automated] Transcription, Autocomplete hinting for [Crowd-sourced] captioning
-- IBM
-- Google
--- YouTube has automated transcription
--- Google Voice supports transcription corrections, but AFAIU it's not speaker-specific
-- Baidu
-- Nuance (Dragon,)
--
... Textual lecture transcriptions are useful for everyone; because Ctrl-F to search.
- Label (with RDFa structured data) accessible content to make it easy to find
-- Schema.org accessibility structured data (for Places, Events)
--- https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/254
--- http://schema.org/accessibilityFeature
--- http://schema.org/accessibilityPhysicalFeature and/or
--- http://schema.org/amenityFeature
-- http://schema.org/Course
--- https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/254
- Challenges
-- Funding
-- CPU Time
-- Error Rate
-- Mitigating spam and vandalism
-- Human-verified crowdsourced corrections can/could be used to train recognizing and generative speaker-specific models
-- In the film A.I. (2001), there's a scene where they're asking questions of Robin Williams and the intonation/inflection inadvertantly wastes one of their 3 wishes / requests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence
That's not what we are talking about.
[Solutions for solving the problem (providing transcripts of lectures) most cost-efficiently]
- Microsoft
-- "conversational speech recognition"
- Apple
1) Disability rights are often portrayed as a special privilege for a subgroup of society. But in reality, all of us start our lives mobility impaired and illiterate, and many of us who are lucky enough to grow old become sight, hearing, and mobility impaired to some extent. Accessibility helps all of us.
2) Accessibility helps not just humans. High quality captions add a lot of value to videos, because they make the videos searchable, which provides immense benefits to all users, hearing impaired or not.
3) Disability rights are the one aspect of social policies where the USA might be ahead of much of the rest of the world. Compared to my native Switzerland, the USA is far ahead in empowering disabled individuals to participate in public life. This is something the US should be proud of.
Sample scenarios:
- Color red is banned because colorblind people can't see it
- "screeching nails on blackboard" Youtube video is pulled because deaf people can't enjoy it
- Public datasets are pulled because the numbers are too complicated for ordinary people to understand
IMO there should be a general divide between "public data" and "public accommodation". Data is just bits; 0's and 1's can be communicated to anyone. Requiring them to be something else as well is going too far. To put it another way: the accessibility problem is in the human-computer interface, not in the service on the other end of the network.
And here's Harvard's brief agreeing with me, categorizing the videos as "goods" rather than "services": http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=235493653&...
That being said, it seems like the NAD only expects this to apply to public accommodations, so perhaps all that's needed is to move (donate) the videos to a separate (non-public-accommodation) location, e.g. Bittorrent.