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.
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.
If you've got a script then software like CMU Sphinx (open source) can use voice recognition to align the words of the script with the time of the soundtrack. Services like YouTube will even do that for you, if you can provide the bare minimum of a transcript.
If even that sounds too hard, you can let YouTube's automatic subtitling produce an initial transcript - sometimes this can be surprisingly good, depending on audio quality and speaker clarity - and just fix up the mistakes yourself.
I'm not saying it's painless (and like you I come from a fansubbing background) but it's well worth the time, and it's easier now than it has ever been.
If you don't want to do it yourself, services like zencaptions.com will caption your video for just $1 per minute.
We've come a long way - it has never, ever, been this easy and cheap to do this stuff.
(Am a little sad to see that I'm being downvoted for saying that, in all honesty. I'm not endorsing this particular lawsuit, just making a general point overall that access is good.)
Perhaps you're getting down voted because of who's pocket you want this "access" to come out of?
Perhaps because you can't conceive that one inevitable result of this is that whole lot less material with audio is going to be published by US institutions going forward?
Especially if a legal regime has to be set up to vet everything posted in any formal way by a member of these communities? In the case of MIT students, they have better things to do with their time than wade through red tape, which they hate.
And how much valuable material already published will likely be pulled?
My single and only point is that access is good. I'm not talking about costs, because it doesn't NEED to cost ANY money - and even when it does, the below-sweatshop rate card of $1/minute is hardly going to break the bank.
I'm saying that ultimately if you put things online for free, your motivation is probably that you want people to see them. Adding captions substantially increases the number of people who can, and will.
Under NO circumstances should anything be pulled or not published at all purely because it isn't captioned. Captions are good but obviously if they're not there, they're not there.
I don't see why I'm being systematically downvoted for saying that. It's not controversial, surely.
Bluntly, when I make and release content for free I'm generally not very interested in paying for small boost in user numbers. Especially since for most videos, that 7-15% boost is maybe ten views.
It's weird that some sections of HN obsess over AB testing the colours of buttons and are happy to pay for that, but putting captions on a video and it's fuck those deaf people.
And they don't seem to realise that it's not just deaf people that benefit from captions. There are a bunch of situations where I could really do with captions -- coffee shops; planes; late nights; etc etc.
"The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions."
So should Google be added to the lawsuit, since they're the ones hosting the called out badly auto-captioned videos, unless of course they're charging Harvard and MIT for the whole service?
I also strongly challenge your contention that noways initial costs of production are so high. Hosting, I don't know, but isn't it getting steadily cheaper?
For me it's not about fuck those deaf people, or about captions being bad. It's about "I am not a big company and I have finite time and dollars to caption every bit of content I produce".
but it doesn't stop here. Next there will be people taking offense because the captions are not provided in all languages. There will likely be all sorts of hurdles thrown up by "concerned groups" of which some are merely looking for a payout.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
Subbing is a surprisingly difficult thing to get right in anything but the most simplistic of cases.
What a creator gets as a benefit is not having to do all the work of subtitling for the benefit of what will ultimately be a rather small - if not zero - boost in audience.
There's a very real scenario in which you throw an accessibility party and nobody comes.
A recent study of videos captioned by Discovery Digital Networks showed a 7-15% increase in views to captioned videos, compared to non-captioned equivalents. Genuinely properly studied and controlled to remove any other factors.
Subtitling is not hard. It really isn't. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but there are many genuine, measurable benefits if you do.
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...
She would probably find the lectures much easier to understand than films. It's not only the background noise (the background music is worse) it's also that the voices in today films are often much quieter than the effects and that the acting and directing style for films favours "natural" sounding vocalizing vs. the one used on the theater stage (where ther's really care about pronouncing everything clear).
More viewers is more better. Captions are a really easy way to achieve that.