
Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses - greenburger
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued-over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html?_r=0
======
jdreaver
I don't like this type of precedent.

If I make a video wherein I teach some concept, but don't provide closed
captions, and then distribute the video for free, am I discriminating against
the deaf? If I knew I had to create closed captions, and then make a braille
transcript, or maybe even make my video colorblind friendly, I just wouldn't
make the video in the first place. I sympathize with folks with disabilities,
and I applaud those who go the extra mile to accommodate them, but making it
mandatory under the law seems ridiculous to me.

~~~
chrisabrams
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?

~~~
sp332
Deaf people aren't a charity case. The content needs to be accessible from the
beginning, not as an afterthought.

~~~
Someone1234
That's a confusing sentiment. So deaf people shouldn't be given something for
free, but they should get something for free "from the beginning?" Which is
it?

~~~
sp332
The communication needs to be made accessible by the person or group who
produces it. Not by some outside organization that goes around cleaning up
other people's accessibility messes.

~~~
Someone1234
Fair enough. So you're saying that deaf people ARE a charity case, you just
want them to be a charity case for the original content producer rather than a
third party?

~~~
sp332
Yeah, that could have been clearer. Deaf people are 100% as deserving of this
content as non-deaf people. They should not be treated as a separate group.
Captions are a required part of the distribution, not an optional add-on.
There is not "the real message" and then "the message for deaf people".

~~~
ars
So would you rather they don't distribute it at all, if they can't (or won't)
caption it? (Not a rhetorical question, I'm actually asking you.)

Keep in mind that these are recordings of a professor talking - there is no
script, no captions exist already.

The choice is paying for captioning, or not releasing at all.

If they are unwilling to pay, which should, in your opinion, they pick: Not
release, or release without captions?

~~~
justcommenting
this is a false choice; no one would credibly make that sort of claim about
audio-only courses in podcast form or video recordings without audio. you're
focusing on the economics, and that's fine, but the court is focusing on
whether it complies with the law.

~~~
hga
In their vicious PR [http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-
discrimi...](http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-
discrimination-public-online-content) they specifically call out a particular
Harvard podcast.

------
Someone1234
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?

------
binarysolo
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
The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to
remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the
intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would
do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.

~~~
hga
And ongoing costs for a new ADA compliance office, and the red tape everyone
in the community will have to wade through with that office to publish an
officially vetted video.

This will have a severe chilling effect on such productions, above and beyond
the not trivial costs of getting high quality captions, which for technical
material---which includes plenty of specialized humanities stuff, not just
math, physics, etc.---is particularly expensive.

~~~
binarysolo
In the grand scheme of things I'd probably liken it to disability ramps,
braille on room signage, etc. It'll probably add a few points to the total
cost, but in the grand scheme we're talking about 3-5%, not 30-50% in
additional costs. What'll probably happen is that each prof will need to
assign a TA to basically deal with it. (Remember, these specialized technical
costs are particularly cheap for universities.)

I unfortunately don't have a lot of insight on the case itself, but I surmise
the reason why these activist lawyers are going after Harvard and MIT is
because they have plenty of resources to solve these issues. Part of being a
leading academic institution is to "do the right thing", and at this juncture
it's up to highly specialized legal people to figure out what that means.

~~~
extra88
Almost all TAs would take forever to caption video and would do a bad job. TAs
don't grow on trees and transcribing captions for all the lectures would use
up their full 20hrs/week. A lot of the cited videos in the suit are not of
course lectures but from events on campus. Good commercial transcription
service costs about ~$150/hour with markups for difficult video (bad audio
quality, accents, obscure subject vocabulary) but an institution doing a lot
of business will get a discount.

An advantage of bringing the suit is it brings in the federal government as
"referee." The advocates have their ideas about what "the right thing" is and
Harvard administrators and lawyers will have their own but the feds will
basically create regulation for how these long-standing laws should be applied
in these cases. They might say that certain kinds of content should be
captioned as a matter of course but that others can be left uncaptioned until
an individual requests it, the analogy being that the school doesn't have to
have an ASL interpreter at every on-campus event, just at the ones where one
is requested.

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

As to the ultimate outcome, I'm calling it: Either DOJ will clarify the rules
so that captions are required, or the schools will settle the lawsuit by
agreeing that captions are required, or the courts will decide that captions
are required.

And then 30 years from now, at least one person in this thread will have lost
their hearing but will click open and watch a captioned M.I.T. or Harvard
video without even thinking about how much they railed against that one
article on HN back in 2015.

~~~
hga
Read this mendacious, invidious PR thuggery [http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-
sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...](http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-
and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content) 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.

~~~
burkaman
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?

~~~
hga
And I had to look them up to make sure I'd remembered their meanings
correctly.

The Big Lie, if what everyone is saying about Harvard and MIT's joint edX
project properly handling their courses correctly is true, is confounding that
with MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) "best effort" offerings which we've had the
deaf "aldordeah" helpfully confirm:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042399)
(OCW's remit was to publish materials useful to other teachers, with things
like self-learning gravy).

Things like, from their PR:

 _“Online content represents the next frontier for learning and lifelong
education,” said Howard A. Rosenblum, NAD’s CEO. “Yet both Harvard and MIT
betray their legendary leadership in quality education by denying access to
approximately 48 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing. All they
have to do is provide accurate captioning to such online educational content,
yet they provide no or inaccurate captioning which is contrary to these
schools’ ideals of excellence and service to all.”_

"Betray" is a _very_ strong word, just the sort of thing to provoke an angry
reaction.

Then there's the fact that they don't actually call out any specific online
courses for not having captioning (which unless OCW has been spending a lot of
their money in their new mode on this should have been trivial), but stuff of
much less importance, of course leading with a discussion of the holy _Brown
v. Board of Education_ , as well as e.g. Bill Gates and Chomsky talking.

Then there's the criticism of the quality of what appears to be Youtube auto-
captioning of videos of nothingburger Lady Gaga and Obama visits placed on
official Harvard and MIT Youtube channels. Unlike the 3rd example of the
President of Liberia talking about Ebola at a Harvard Political Institute
event, the only sane thing for institutions to do with the former sorts of
events is to not publish them in any form with audio on any venue.

That, plus a lot of the wording, including stuff you incorrectly assume
implies that " _that these schools were given the resources to "build a ramp"
and just decided not to_", is _clearly_ designed to provoke an angry reaction.
As I've detailed elsewhere, MIT's Open CourseWare was explicitly _not_ "given"
the resources to do that, nor do I remember it being part of their fundraising
appeals. And I hope you're not claiming Harvard, let alone the much less
wealthy MIT, were given the resources to properly caption video of every
vacuous celebrity who visits.

If you want, I seem to remember there are more lies that I can detail, but
seeing as it not just made me angry, but _enraged_ me after a close
reading.... Although see e.g. their gross overstatement of how many people are
truly blocked from hearing these soundtracks:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042760)
Not 48 million, " _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._ " per
SeanLuke.

Especially if you understand that endowment does not equal arbitrarily
spendable wealth, the vast majority of gifts are earmarked.

And I suppose it's time again to make the disclaimer that I'm MIT Class of '83
and donate to OCW.

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

Um, what?

U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing
loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people
account for 0.4% of the US population.

[https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-
US.php](https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php)

~~~
neilcrj
I think this is their source:

"We estimate that 30.0 million or 12.7% of Americans ≥ 12 years had bilateral
hearing loss from 2001–2008, and this estimate increases to 48.1 million or
20.3% when also including individuals with unilateral hearing loss."

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3564588/)

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

~~~
loco5niner
> lawyer weaselwords

I like it

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

A building without a ramp can't be copied and rebuilt with a ramp without
rebuilding the entire thing, but a video without a caption can be copied and
captioned without having to recreate the original. MIT went out of their way
to make sure this sort of thing is legal to do.

~~~
hga
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...](http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-
discrimination-public-online-content) at least if my understanding of the lack
of real power of the President of Liberia is correct, and it says something
that they put Lady Gaga being welcomed by Harvard students right after it. If
this is the best they can come up with....

Not that I know any SJW deaf types right now, but if I did, they'd be treated
to the one of the very few bits of sign language I know :-(.

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

~~~
hullo
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?)

~~~
hga
Do you deny my statement that " _the vast majority of_ " MIT's endowment is
earmarked, so it cannot arbitrarily reprogram that money to this purpose? From
the insider's viewpoint, MIT has not been "wealthy" since the end Cold War and
got hard hit by the Great Recession, although I haven't checked details as of
the last few years.

This has entered the legal arena. It's not hard to imagine the red tape of the
remedies of a settlement or lawsuit loss being significant, very possibly
exceeding the costs of the closed captioning (e.g. mandatory QA). In this
context, the idea this _quality_ problem could be addressed by crowd-sourcing
is patently _ludicrous_.

Does anyone have a better solution than Google, which is where the cited bad
captions apparently come from? Yeah, it's "a thing" alright, a thing that just
handed MIT a nasty, no win lawsuit.

~~~
hullo
The hallmark of a successful development program is to simultaneously convince
you of two things (1) the school is of the highest quality and (2) it is
drastically underfunded. Yes endowment funds are earmarked, but in most cases
they're going to fund things that would need to be funded anyway
(scholarships, professorships, center & department expenses). One of the
strengths of a large endowment is that it increases the share of general funds
that are discretionary, giving them room to do things that alumni don't get
excited about, like cutting the grass and (yes) making campuses accessible to
those with different physical capabilities.

But, in any case leaving aside MIT's 5th largest endowment, it's only one of
the factors in determining whether a school is well off. One could also look,
say, at the budget. Or research funding.

By just about any metric one could imagine, MIT is one of the richest schools
in the nation.

~~~
hga
As I said, _inside_ viewpoint. I don't look at _anything_ the development
program produces besides the occasional headline. Instead, I actually worked
at MIT job in 1980, and a job in the end of the '80s (IT). I keep up with
contacts and friends from those jobs, plus I just plain hung around the campus
for a dozen year period including those jobs, and I know how it is at "the
sharp end of the spear".

Like helping to allocate a fixed budget and running requisitions through the
always skeptical procurement office. So I know MIT didn't switch from cleaning
every bathroom every day to "frequent cleaning" because it had a large surplus
of funds, and that it's been hurting as the Cold War ended, and now with the
Great Recession.

But you're in part moving the goalposts. No one is denying MIT doesn't have a
lot of money, we're discussing whether it has such an unrestricted surplus it
can all of a sudden properly caption all the video it formally publishes. In a
legal regime that'll make that all the more expensive and time and energy
consuming. And what will have to be sacrificed to do this, aside from all the
videos that will go dark and stay dark.

Especially in the case of the targeted OCW, which most certainly doesn't have
the money to do this, and based on its ability to fund raise after it
fulfilled its original mandate, would have trouble doing this, and would also
certainly have to initially remove _all_ its videos after an adverse outcome.
Heck, is MIT going to have to institute policy of cost recovery to cover the
expenses of making sure no video gets them into further trouble?

Another thing to consider is that Harvard and MIT were chosen as the initial
targets for the obvious reasons. Just how much will the world be enriched when
this filters down to every college in the US? Like the one my family shares a
property boundary with, which prides itself in providing a low cost education
and rents out textbooks. Right now it's very cheap for them to put video on
the web. If you're successful, that'll end.

~~~
hullo
Luckily, folks who care about making things accessible for those with
disabilities have already won (god forbid something like the ADA getting
passed today), so I don't actually need to fight this battle. These videos
will be captioned, MIT will not go broke (or stop putting up new things). Set
up a tickle file, one year from today, see how it all looks.

------
nimblegorilla
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.

~~~
skwirl
Why not just read books then?

~~~
Symmetry
Some information hasn't been written down in books.

~~~
hga
Indeed. I'm pretty sure there's no book treatment of Lady Gaga being greeted
by Harvard students.

(I swear I am not making this up: [http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-
harvard-and-mit-discrimi...](http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-
mit-discrimination-public-online-content) and if those are the best examples
they can come up with for a national campaign....)

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

~~~
Sanddancer
You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context.
It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of
Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with
Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how
laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad
out of videos. Your alma mater can do better than that.

~~~
hga
Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment:

 _“Worse still,” said attorney Timothy Fox, “a sampling of the videos
available illustrates the problem with inaccurate captioning, making them
confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.”_

Where he's explicitly saying those above examples are not as bad as Lady Gaga
et. al. being inaccurately captioned (apparently auto-captioned by Youtube).

" _The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated
captioning system is..._ "

If so, it's _entirely_ unapparent in the link (supply a quote if you
disagree). Which as far as wel can tell starts out with false framing by
claiming MOOCs are included in the problems, at least if the claims elsewhere
in this discussion about all edX courses being professionally treated are
true. Looks like, at least for MIT, that NAD is trying to confound that with
Open CourseWare, which has an explicit mission limiting it's remit to making
MIT course material useful to other teachers; anything else is gravy.

This is mendacious, invidious PR thuggery; we'll see what the lawyers have to
say after analyzing the lawsuit; ah, yeah, the Instapundit is going to be all
over this.

When faced with the above, my alma mater simply cannot win. And it certainly
doesn't have the money to caption all this stuff; see elsewhere where I
speculate one outcome will be a large fraction if not all the content will
simply be pulled, the creation of future content will be _severely_ curtailed
due to this being moved from the arena of (not) good (enough) works to the
legal one, and the remediation of the pulled works will be limited at best.

One wonders just how many people in the entire world these SJWs will seriously
piss off....

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

That you should be obligated to spend additional money on captioning your
_free_ videos is incredibly unfair and also unjustifiable. Unfortunately, in
many cases it will make the costs unsustainable so we'll see videos taken down
entirely—thus, the deaf are selfishly insisting that if they can't have
something nobody can.

It's like someone with a peanut allergy suing me for handing out free cookies.

~~~
aldordeah
Please explain to me how it is fair that, by studying a free online
uncaptioned lecture, someone gets even more of an advantage over me just
because they weren't born deaf.

~~~
wyager
Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing educational
materials _for free_ should be forced to pay extra money (which they possibly
can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more accessible to a
vanishingly small portion of the population.

Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone
lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe
not everyone will be able to use it.

Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if
they can't have it, nobody can.

~~~
jasonlotito
> Please explain how it's fair that organizations who are releasing
> educational materials for free should be forced to pay extra money (which
> they possibly can't afford to spare) so that their content is slightly more
> accessible to a vanishingly small portion of the population.

Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA. They have options if they
choose not to follow the laws.

> Please explain how it's fair that the plaintiffs would rather that everyone
> lose access to this educational material than deal with the fact that maybe
> not everyone will be able to use it.

They do not want everyone to lose access. Instead, what they want, is for
everyone to be able to use the content. Regardless, they do not want everyone
to lose access. Your question is merely based on ignorance of the desires of
the plaintiffs.

> Please explain how it's fair to act like a petulant child, screaming that if
> they can't have it, nobody can.

Because when someone breaks the law and it harms you, you have the right to
seek redress in our system.

I've answered your questions. Now, please answer mine, which are written with
the same care that you wrote yours.

Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to
ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.

Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.

Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?

I look forward to your reply.

~~~
wyager
>Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA.

Something being the law doesn't mean that it's fair. I shouldn't have to
explain that. Also, it hasn't been established that these universities are
actually breaking the ADA.

>They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.

What do you mean by this?

>They do not want everyone to lose access.

Well, that's the likely outcome of suing a university trying to offer a free
service.

>Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to
ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.

Again, it's not established that they were breaking the law.

I see nothing wrong with breaking immoral laws. If the ADA forbids
disseminating educational material for free unless it follows a certain
format, the ADA is immoral.

>Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.

I don't feel that I have this right. I feel that deaf people don't have the
right to demand that educational organizations curate information in a way
that suits their fancy. How would you feel if the swahili speakers of America
sued MIT for not translating their free educational videos to swahili?

>Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?

Nice ad hominem. You aren't even explaining _why_ you're calling me that;
you're literally just name-calling.

~~~
handojin
EDIT: for clarity, removing rhetoricals

Strictly speaking it's not _ad hominem_. A careful reader will see that
nowhere has (s)he called you a "spoiled petulant, self entitled child". You're
merely being asked to explain your understanding of the meaning of a _highly
pejorative term_ which _you_ introduced into the discourse.

~~~
loco5niner
Don't worry, he got there eventually

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

------
kelukelugames
Does it really need to come to litigation?

~~~
Chevalier
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.

~~~
sueders101
"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.

~~~
Agustus
That's always the request, but then when you admit fault, there are follow up
lawsuits.

~~~
sueders101
The National Association for the Deaf settled with Netflix in 2012. I couldn't
find any follow up lawsuits since. It seems like an advocacy group just trying
to make sure their members are represented.

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

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

------
igonvalue
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...](http://creeclaw.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MIT-Complaint.pdf)

[1] [http://creeclaw.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Ha...](http://creeclaw.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Harvard-Complaint.pdf)

------
datashovel
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.

------
strictnein
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."

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

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

------
blfr
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
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.

------
karmacondon
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.

~~~
hga
Echoing jamesbrownuhh, the vicious PR for this lawsuit at
[http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-
discrimi...](http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-
discrimination-public-online-content) 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.

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

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
Decent speech-to-text is a long way from being a solved problem, so automation
isn't a complete solution, but it's certainly a huge assist over doing it
completely manually.

A good place to start looking if you're after an OSS solution is what Carnegie
Mellon University are doing - there's a variety of tools at
[http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net](http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net)

------
localfugue
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.

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

~~~
loco5niner
> The government should provide a the money

So... the taxpayers.

~~~
chrischen
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."

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

~~~
hga
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...](http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-
discrimination-public-online-content)

------
tn13
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.

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

~~~
vacri
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.

------
4ydx
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?

------
epochwolf
This is why we can't have nice things.

------
readme
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

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

If there isn't a strong protection here then it means you might as well not
offer any free content at all unless you have the money to make it accessible
to everyone (and for lawyers to defend yourself). That would be an
astonishingly broad chilling effect.

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
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.

~~~
Kalium
> 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.

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
It really shouldn't be beyond anyone's capabilities, though. In its simplest
form all you need is a plain .txt file with the spoken words. Major services
like YouTube can take that file and align it to the timing of the video,
automatically. Almost all the hard work is done for you.

Obviously all content is different, but for the benefit you get, it's hard to
understand how any creator of any size at all does anything other than gain
from such a simple and basic step.

~~~
greggman
Why only captions? Why not require translations into all 300+ languages? I
mean there are billions of people who can't understand whatever language the
video is in and therefore can't access these videos.

It seems to me if it's the responsibility of people who can't understand the
video to deal with that themselves (learn the language, hire a translator,
etc...). Why is that different if your language is sign language or something
else?

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
Just a single native-language caption track is all that's necessary. Computers
can already do a pretty good job of translating that into the hundreds of
other possible languages.

~~~
teraflop
This is _extremely_ dependent on which languages you're talking about. For
instance, my experience with automatic translation between Japanese and
English varies from "jumbled, but conveys the gist of the original text" to
"entirely incoherent". (Bing seems to do slightly better than Google,
incidentally.)

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
Accepted. Far better than nothing at all (in most cases) though, I'd suggest.

~~~
icebraining
I think the point people are making is that a video without captions is also
far better than no video at all.

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
I don't disagree with that in the slightest. Even a video that is not
captioned today, could be captioned tomorrow.

