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

I don&#x27;t like this type of precedent.<p>If I make a video wherein I teach some concept, but don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I am a big supporter of accessibility (i.e. access for the blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled).<p>However unfortunately in this specific case I am conflicted. On one hand we have far more free content available to us because the &quot;cost&quot; of providing this content is relatively low. They just reproduce the course&#x27;s normal materials, and have a camera rolling during lectures (and, yes, someone has to do basic editing, transcoding, and so on).<p>If someone has to go through every single lecture and transcribe it (since I assume auto-transcription wouldn&#x27;t be acceptable) then they will likely just start pulling less popular&#x2F;niche content because the viewership&#x2F;return wouldn&#x27;t be high enough to justify the cost.<p>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.<p>So I really think if the Advocates for the deaf win here they&#x27;ll gain a small victory but at a large-ish cost to the rest of society. And how long before YouTube is next?

I know several of the lawyers involved on the plaintiff&#x27;s end (several of them blind and&#x2F;or deaf) on a friendship, nonprofessional level -- and I&#x27;m noticing there&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>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.

Everybody chill out, it&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>As to the ultimate outcome, I&#x27;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.<p>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.

&gt; 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.”<p>Um, what?<p>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.<p><a href="https://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.gallaudet.edu&#x2F;Demographics&#x2F;deaf-US.php</a>

MIT&#x27;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.<p>A building without a ramp can&#x27;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.

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.

This is beyond ridiculous and will have a serious chilling effect on the growth of online learning content.<p>That you should be obligated to spend additional money on captioning your <i>free</i> videos is incredibly unfair and also unjustifiable. Unfortunately, in many cases it will make the costs unsustainable so we&#x27;ll see videos taken down entirely—thus, the deaf are selfishly insisting that if they can&#x27;t have something nobody can.<p>It&#x27;s like someone with a peanut allergy suing me for handing out free cookies.

Is this referring to free MOOCs on Coursera&#x2F;edX&#x2F;etc and free published course videos? Or online courses that enrolled students are paying for? Or both?

Does it really need to come to litigation?

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

Here are the complaints for Harvard[0] and MIT[1].<p>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 &quot;public accommodation&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-MIT-Complaint.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;creeclaw.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;2015-02-11-MI...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://creeclaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015-02-11-Harvard-Complaint.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;creeclaw.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;2015-02-11-Ha...</a>

I think the sad thing here is not that deaf people are suing for access to educational materials. I think it&#x27;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.<p>People don&#x27;t just wake up one morning and say &quot;Hey, I have an idea. Let&#x27;s go sue M.I.T. and Harvard&quot;. There is likely alot of stuff that happens leading up to that moment.<p>If you think that this is just a random thing where the &quot;big bully deaf people are trying to push poor little M.I.T. and Harvard around&quot; I legitimately feel sorry for you. Your sheltered view of the world is so out of touch with reality it isn&#x27;t funny.

From fairly early in the article: &quot;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.&quot;

Don&#x27;t like this kind of litigation at all. Aren&#x27;t they private schools, please don&#x27;t mandate good free stuff to be perfect, at least not using this method.

Isn&#x27;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?

Legitimate question: Why isn&#x27;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&#x27;t provide a baseline decent transcript then why aren&#x27;t people tripping over themselves to solve this problem?<p>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&#x2F;3rds of the information from a lecture for a one time or small incremental cost then I don&#x27;t see why both parties wouldn&#x27;t be ok with it. Those with disabilities would have to do some extra work to look up garbled words or ideas that don&#x27;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&#x27;t a win-win situation, but more of an equitable lose-lose.<p>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.

Say, does anyone know if there is any open source software that would do this (or for that matter, any software that isn&#x27;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&#x27;ve given out copies, but they&#x27;re not generally available...Automation does seem to be the answer here...

This is a very bad precedent. I&#x27;m hearing impaired and I would never think of demanding this when I&#x27;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.<p>Using the law as a weapon to demand something where we have alternatives[slides, notes or manuals] is, in my opinion, like &quot;biting the hand that offers help&quot;.<p>That said, I have been seriously putting in effort to listen to videos without captioning. Yes, it&#x27;s an uphill task and I&#x27;m willing to do it.

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.

Aren&#x27;t there all these speech=&gt;text software programs? They should be built in to browser software. Problem solved, no more need for lawsuits.

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.<p>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.

Penn&amp;Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rLfo979TDaY</a> . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?

This is why we can&#x27;t have nice things.

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. &#x2F;s

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?<p>If there isn&#x27;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.