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

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued-over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html?_r=0

by greenburger • 11 years ago

135 298 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

cordite3• 11 years 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.

skwirl2• 11 years ago

Why not just read books then?

Symmetry• 11 years ago

Some information hasn't been written down in books.

handojin10• 11 years 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.

skwirl2• 11 years 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?

kelukelugames4• 11 years ago

Does it really need to come to litigation?

Chevalier• 11 years 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.

alistairSH• 11 years 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.

kelukelugames4• 11 years 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

sueders1012• 11 years ago

"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."

Unless I'm mistaken, the article says that National Association of the Deaf requested Harvard and MIT provide options accessible to the deaf on multiples occasions. They're seeking comparable materials for the hearing impaired, not millions of dollars.

jdreaver4• 11 years 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.

chrisabrams2• 11 years 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?

jdreaver4• 11 years 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.

harperlee2• 11 years 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.

sp33215• 11 years ago

Deaf people aren't a charity case. The content needs to be accessible from the beginning, not as an afterthought.

Agustus3• 11 years ago

Then how would the attorneys keep their job and fund their lavish lifestyle?

dougabug• 11 years ago

No good deed goes unpunished...

This just makes it that much more likely that institutions will hesitate before offering free access to materials online.

hga27• 11 years ago

Based on the breath of the demands per http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... it sounds like just about anything that's vaguely formal, way beyond instructional video and audio. And since they highlight quality problems, albeit bad ones but of mostly silly/very limited utility content....

Nothing good will come of this.

Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.

jasonwocky• 11 years ago

This just makes it that much more likely that institutions will hesitate before offering free access to materials online.

No, it doesn't "just" do that.

sp33215• 11 years ago

Yes, of course that is discrimination. But it's only illegal in certain circumstances.

harperlee2• 11 years ago

Well, I don't agree [1]. Neither does Wikipedia:

  "Discrimination is action that denies social participation or human rights to categories of people based on prejudice." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination)

Note the prejudice part.

[1] Not in this context; of course a visual communication discriminates among those who can and can not receive it, but what prejudice is there in just recording yourself talking?

erok2• 11 years ago

I agree. There goes free online courses from MIT and Harvard due to the impending legal fees implied. Thank you National Association of the Deaf.

fps• 11 years ago

On EdX.org, where Harvard and MIT put many online courses for free, all course videos already are professionally captioned and accessible. The cited videos in the lawsuit aren't even course videos, they're promotional videos or streaming versions of conferences. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President Obama and Lady Gaga visiting campus for an event. - see http://creeclaw.org/online-content-lawsuit-harvard-mit/

Sanddancer3• 11 years ago

Which means you'll have just as much access to the knowledge as deaf people. Accessibility should never be an add-on.

psychometry2• 11 years ago

The article doesn't specify who is suing them, whether it's a MOOC user or an enrolled student, and what lectures they're suing over. There's a big difference between a MOOC lecture lacking captions and required online lecture for an undergraduate course lacking caption.

lovelearning• 11 years ago

All public online videos published by Harvard and MIT, including such gems as "video of students welcoming Lady Gaga to the Harvard campus".

[1] http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...

rtkwe• 11 years ago

It sounds like it's talking about their MOOC offerings but it very ambiguous and could really be either.

extra883• 11 years ago

None of the plaintiffs are enrolled students, the suit is only about videos offered for free to the public. Enrolled students with disabilities (not just in degree programs but also those in single continuing ed. courses) do receive accommodations like captioning for course videos.

notadocta• 11 years ago

I agree. Perhaps someone should step in and make the closed captions, braille transcript -- a third party.

This is why we can't have nice things.

libria• 11 years ago

I generally agree with you, but the counter argument would be something like, If you opened a soup kitchen downtown to provide food for the homeless, should you be required to install accessibility facilities (ramps, elevator, bathroom, etc.)?

I know the law says yes, but is it what we want? Have the extra building codes discouraged potential altruists?

I wonder if there's a government subsidy for that part of it, and if so could a similar provision be allowed for educational institutions opening their courseware.

Agustus3• 11 years ago

Absolutely, people will not buy / old buildings in buildings older than ADA passage date because there is so much money that needs to be spent to retrofit it to code. Building a new building is cheaper long term, but how can you start a soup kitchen to gauge demand.

handojin10• 11 years ago

The standard is reasonable accommodation. Having someone walk the soup to people unable to climb the steps might perhaps constitute reasonable accommodation and not be an undue burden on the soup kitchen (which we'll assume for the sake of argument to be the recipient of a federal grant).

The law is not as black and white as you make it out to be.

ProAm• 11 years ago

Is this because they offer certification or degrees through these programs? I think you create something on your own with no measurable achievement it wouldn't matter. That's the only reason I can see this being a suit.

6stringmerc2• 11 years ago

When it comes to individual works, I don't see how this would have any bearing on your product. You're not beholden to the ADA in your creative works, from what I understand. Double the exemption for making something for free.

It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these products and do not maintain quality standards respective of existing laws. No musician has to include a print out of their lyrics in the liner notes, it's a completely voluntary transaction without stipulation of such ADA compliance, in that the terms of the relationship are different than this case where Harvard is a 'service provider' of sorts (the service being the transmission of knowledge).

This is different than the occasional lawsuit trolling where a person in a wheelchair finds small businesses not in compliance with the ADA and brings a case...this is...well, an educational institution with the resources and capability for compliance, but they aren't complying. Seems pretty workable from a high-level standpoint to me.

jdreaver4• 11 years ago

I understand that the law may not strictly apply to me. I am making a statement on the principle of the situation. I don't think MIT or Harvard should be forced to provide captions for their videos either.

kryptiskt2• 11 years ago

A precedent that big institutions aren't allowed to shut out disabled people? Sounds like a pretty reasonable precedent to me.

hullo4• 11 years ago

Wow to the downvotes on this. Leaving aside their toxic personal politics, they don't even know how to use the site. (This one can be correctly downvoted as meta)

bphogan2• 11 years ago

Once you learn how to do these things, they become second nature. That's the problem though. People don't think twice about learning a new programming language. But learning how to caption videos, choose colorblind friendly colors, or turn transcripts of a video into something that's braile-display or screen-reader friendly are skills that are relatively simple to acquire and will definitely outlast whatever new framework comes out this year.

I am visually impaired. And I have been helping people make the web accessible since 2001. If you plan it from the beginning, it's only a few extra yards, not an extra mile.

wyager9• 11 years ago

It's not a matter of "thinking about it"; captioning is difficult and expensive, and if we force universities to caption educational materials they release * for free *, we're incentivizing them to never release these materials again.

mc322• 11 years ago

I can see the requirement for actually matriculated students. (I wonder if they have to provide ASL signers in-class for deaf students and braille books for the blind.)

What I don't see is a requirement for free courses. That would be ridiculous. Why would anyone want to make anything available if someone is going to come around and sue?

Instead of suing, why not start a project to automatically CC the videos, something like audio-recaptcha?

lucaspiller3• 11 years ago

YouTube will already automatically transcribe and add subtitles to some videos, I can't comment on the quality though:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3038280?hl=en-GB

ToastyMallows• 11 years ago

As a graduate from RIT, colleges definitely provide ASL interpreters in class for Deaf students.

extra883• 11 years ago

The suit is not about access for students enrolled in Harvard or MIT college credit courses, they do indeed have accommodations: ASL interpreters, CART service (a person, similar to a court stenographer, types what's said where the student can read it), digitized text for the vision impaired, etc. Printing Braille is slow and the output cumbersome so providing digital text that can be read by text to speech software or displayed on a refreshable Braille display are much more common.

Someone12343• 11 years 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?

epochwolf• 11 years ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

dhbradshaw• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Go now. Make a mobile app. Hire your founding engineers and live a long, prosperous life.

lucaspiller3• 11 years ago

Now how to turn that into a social network...?

loco5niner14• 11 years ago

I'm just the idea guy

pekk2• 11 years 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.

jamesbrownuhh17• 11 years 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.

hga27• 11 years 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.

Kalium4• 11 years ago

More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that.

In a world where perfectly accurate captions are zero-cost and zero-effort, absolutely. That is not this world.

wyager9• 11 years ago

How about you let content providers decide for themselves what market they want to target, rather than presuming to decide for them?

lucaspiller3• 11 years ago

Just for context my SO is a nom-native English speaker. She speaks and understands English fine in person (her job involves dealing with demanding people from all over the world, who often don't speak very good English), but whenever we watch something on Netflix or such she can't understand what's going on without subtitles. Films are a bit different from an online cause because of background noise, but don't forget how many technical talks you have probably watched that have terrible audio...

kelukelugames4• 11 years ago

I honestly think people who say "what about me" are uninformed. I went to search for facts to prove my opinion but couldn't find anything specific.

I found two pieces of conflicting info 1) ADA doesn't really apply to businesses under 15 persons and 2) ADA requires all business to provide TDD.

If you can dig it out of the ADA guidelines then please help me.

http://www.ada.gov/reg3a.html

stolio3• 11 years 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.

hga27• 11 years 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-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.

hullo4• 11 years 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?)

cpks• 11 years ago

OCW is insanely expensive, and sponsors got bored with it after a decade.

shaunol• 11 years ago

This makes me so sad, it makes me wonder why the National Association of the Deaf doesn't try to encourage recruiting volunteers to the association to help with closed captioning. With this litigation I feel they're only alienating those that can actually help their cause.

ljf2• 11 years ago

Yeah, we could get other charities to build their own ramps and accessible parking too...

morgante• 11 years 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.

aldordeah4• 11 years 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.

wyager9• 11 years 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.

barrkel2• 11 years ago

If you follow the principle behind that logic, everybody should be blinded, deafened and crippled immediately after birth, reduced to the lowest common denominator, because otherwise they get an advantage because they weren't born blind, deafened, or crippled.

If a free lecture provides benefit to someone, but forcing it to be captioned causes it not to be released, would you be happy with that outcome? It's the same principle.

theVirginian• 11 years ago

because being deaf is a disadvantage... you can't hear.

ramblerman• 11 years ago

Its not fair. By the definition that you were born deaf the situation is already unfair. Its also unfair that people are born with such good looks they can breeze through life.

But if the net effect is that good free content will just become unavailable for everyone to achieve a sense of fairness, Then that seems petty and I'm not on board.

I hope they lose this case spectacularly as it would set a terrible precedent.

loco5niner14• 11 years ago

Life isn't fair. You have access to a computer. Please explain to me how it is fair that you can view free online uncaptioned lectures, when someone in the jungles of the Philippines has never even seen a keyboard?

sadfaceunread2• 11 years ago

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

tagawa• 11 years ago

This is not a "sue first" case, it just hit the news when the process reached the suing stage.

vacri2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

strictnein2• 11 years ago

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

blfr• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

hudibras2• 11 years 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.

hga27• 11 years ago

Read this mendacious, invidious PR thuggery 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.

psychometry2• 11 years ago

Some details on the NAD vs. Netflix case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-w...

hudibras2• 11 years ago

I guess I'm missing some nuances you're seeing in that press release, but it seems pretty innocuous. Certainly don't see any evidence of those thugs you mention, just some people concerned about deaf Americans not having their civil rights protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

And I'll take that bet: In 3 years, every video on the Harvard and M.I.T. websites will be captioned.

burkaman• 11 years ago

Well, I had to look up mendacious and invidious, but I believe you're claiming they're lying to provoke an angry reaction. It seemed pretty straightforward to me; they present the lawsuit, explain their interpretation of the law, explain the goals of the suit, and demonstrate why the current captioning system is insufficient.

The only line I had any kind of problem with was "No captions is like no ramp for people in wheelchairs or signs stating ‘people with disabilities are not welcome.’" I do think that's hyperbolic, but I understand the idea that these schools were given the resources to "build a ramp" and just decided not to. Regardless, it's not "thuggery", it's just a point of view I disagree with.

Where are the lies?

binarysolo3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

hga27• 11 years 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.

alecco• 11 years 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.

binarysolo3• 11 years 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.

readme• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

hga27• 11 years 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-discrimi...

chrischen3• 11 years 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.

loco5niner14• 11 years ago

The government should provide a the money

So... the taxpayers.

chrischen3• 11 years ago

Well, since everyone has to implement it, everyone should pay for it.

chrischen3• 11 years 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."

SeanLuke2• 11 years 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

neilcrj• 11 years 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/

SeanLuke2• 11 years ago

Ah lawyer weaselwords. From the paper, that definition consists almost entirely of people who don't need closed captioning,

ylem• 11 years 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...

jamesbrownuhh17• 11 years 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

4ydx• 11 years 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• 11 years 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-MI...

[1] http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...

datashovel• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

jamesbrownuhh17• 11 years 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.

hga27• 11 years ago

Echoing jamesbrownuhh, the vicious PR for this lawsuit at http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... specifically calls out what appears to be nonsense YouTube auto-captioning ... and two of the examples are of nothingburger visits by Lady Gaga and Obama. It's unclear jamesbrownuhh's generosity would extend to properly captioning video of every vacuous celebrity's visit.

Worse, you've got accept that throwing this into the legal arena adds costs way beyond just proper captioning. Any settlement that will make the plaintiffs happy will require the establishment of a ADA enforcement unit at these institutions, and resultant red tape for anyone in the communities to publish anything with audio. Which going forward will have a clear chilling effect; we're not just talking about a lot of Harvard and MIT potentially going dark, but continuing in that mode except for the most important things that are worth the extra captioning and legal effort.

strictnein2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

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

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