Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

[CenSin]

Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

Disability group that sued Netflix over online captions turns to universities.

 

The National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Harvard and MIT yesterday, saying the two universities are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act because they don't properly caption their online course offerings.

 

Harvard's online courses aren't really intended for students at the Ivy League university. Rather, the thousands of videos made available are part of the University's "commitment to equity,” an effort "to create effective, accessible avenues for people who desire to learn but who may not have an opportunity to obtain a Harvard education."

…read more…

 

The lawsuit against the universities raises a thorny issue: how to provide accommodations for disabled people without raising costs to the point that it could slow or stop public service initiatives. Harvard and MIT may have substantial resources to address captioning issues, but those well-known schools are clearly intended as test cases—NAD has made it clear that it expects all universities to caption content, just as they must make their physical spaces accessible to wheelchair users.

 

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have become popular with smaller institutions as well. Some of them may choose not to broadcast courses online if the cost of doing so is the type of 100-percent accurate captioning that Netflix and Vudu have agreed to.

This is why we can't have nice things. The comments below pretty much echo my sentiments regarding ADA:

 

 

Are all YouTube tutorial videos close-captioned?

 

Not sure how I feel about this... While I appreciate the needs of disabled folks (helping my friend in high school, pre ADA, meant a lot of huffing a wheelchair up and down stairs), at what point does something like this, just cause someone to just give up on a project. Sure, I get it with Netflix, it is a for pay service. If a free service doesn't support 100% of the population, then nobody gets it?

 

I can't help wondering if the end result of lawsuits like this will not be better services for deaf people. Instead, groups will simply be discouraged from making free online services without first lawyering up and huge financial investment in captioning ... or just not making the services at all because suddenly they become too expensive to bother with.

 

So if I put a sign on my lawn in the summer that says "thirsty people can get a drink from my water spigot" I have to make sure it's wheelchair-accessible?

 

It's a free service. It's a favor to the public. I wouldn't blame Harvard and MIT if they decided to just remove all free online content instead of dealing with this whiny, entitled lawsuit. These people can go f**k themselves with a rake.

 

In a perfect world, yes. But are they really arguing that we have to hire an ASL person to sign every lecture?

 

Because that will immediately lead to these lessons being cancelled and the video's removed. Presumably they know this, right? It's like sawing off the branch you are standing on because you need to patch a hole in the side of the treehouse. Tis better to have the hole than to have no treehouse at all!

 

Here is what I see. These institutions just say that they will just pull their FREE offerings and everyone loses.

 

This group is just throwing it's weight around. If this was a paid for service, I would say yes. But this is a free service.

 

This has gotten well out of hand of late. I understand doing what can be done for the portion of the audience that is deaf or blind, but at at a certain point this impacts the ability to even be able to provide that content at all.

 

I have dealt with this of late via the FCC requirements for captioning that have been greatly expanded in the last 2 years, some of which has prevented content from being able to be offered simply because of the threat of fines if its wrong. In another instance the hardware to do the requirement doesn't even exist yet, but the deadline is later this year.

 

100% accuracy is a nice goal but when it has to be considered every tiny thing, to the point that it can impact the timeliness of delivering critical info I think the scales have gone to far. Captioning is very hard and is not a cheap process, live captioning is notoriously inaccurate as they struggle to keep up with the pace, spell words they may not know, or deal with accents that are hard to hear. Captioning classroom lectures I can only imagine how difficult that will be, and the costs involved, its not like we can do it all via machine yet.

 

Not all info will be available to all people, but the ADA is used like a bludgeon and its very not PC to point out the ridiculousness of it.

 

That would definitely be my concern as well. There are many instances where distinctions are reasonably made between commercial services or free but government provided public services versus private stuff put up entirely gratis. There are plenty of instances on the Net where content exists purely because the marginal cost is zero. It's stuff that was getting produced anyway, and somebody went to a bit of one-time trouble to set up an entirely automated way to digitize and upload it with absolutely no further human intervention. The only ongoing cost is a effectively immaterial minuscule amount of storage space and electricity.

 

But the instant any sort of extra time has to get inserted there, with the cost going from 0 to any value >0, the calculation can change significantly. It can be hard enough to get bureaucracy to sign off on an effort that's free, but "free" is a powerful word. Once "running cost" and "legal risk" enter suddenly stuff that could be justified even for a handful of good will is naturally going to get canned. Path of least resistance, there are always other more important things to deal with.

 

While yes, the likes of Harvard and MIT might be able to handle this, and might choose to do so as well, I'll admit that I'm always a little concerned when far reach regulatory precedent is set on the backs of outliers.

Though it's technically not the same issue as with construction of public facilities like subways, it illustrates how ADA groups pour their efforts and resources into the wrong places. Rather than threatening fines and punishment, those folks could do more good by lobbying for funds that help meet the goal or directly contribute to making something ADA-compliant.

[Kamen Rider]

Well, there is precedent to rule against them. A blind man sued Southwest because he couldn't use their online ticket counter. The judge found that the ADA deals in physical existence and can't control cyberspace. I've filmed and recorded a few collectible toy reviews and put them on Youtube. Do I have to then sit down and caption everything I say?