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

Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by jamesbrownuhh on Thursday February 12, 2015 @05:00PM (#9041645)

> The effort of putting closed captions on your informal video would be much too great.

$1 per minute (if you farm it out) or even less if you do it yourself. In exchange you get 7-15% more views - is that really an unbearable deal?

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by Crito on Thursday February 12, 2015 @05:55PM (#9041907)

Wikipedia suggests that it costs more like $40 per minute. For movies anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window_Captioning_System

I have no idea why it would be "even less if you do it yourself", unless you do not value your own labour.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by jamesbrownuhh on Thursday February 12, 2015 @06:03PM (#9041934)

Captioning celluloid film is a wholly different thing to transcribing an online video - the prices are in no way comparable.

I create captions for hundreds of hours of video every year - I know exactly how much work it can be, and, at the same time, exactly how easy it can be.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by Crito on Thursday February 12, 2015 @06:39PM (#9042072)

As I understand it, Rear Window Captioning Systems specifically don't modify the actual film of the movie. That's their advantage over baked-in captions.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by jamesbrownuhh on Friday February 13, 2015 @06:36AM (#9043831)

True, but nevertheless, I assure you that almost nobody pays $40 per minute for captioning, no matter what it says on Wikipedia.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by pjscott on Friday February 13, 2015 @02:04AM (#9043248)

For a whole lot of people, I think it's safe to say that the answer is yes: the deal is unbearable. I personally would not bother putting videos online if I had to go through some closed captioning hassle, and I doubt I'm particularly special here.

You can argue that people ought to be okay with the extra effort of closed captioning, but don't mistake that for an argument that they will be.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by sp332 on Friday February 13, 2015 @09:59AM (#9044613)

How do you defend that attitude to all the deaf people out there who want to know what you put in your video and can't?

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by murbard2 on Sunday February 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#9053039)

How do you defend not paying from your own pocket to caption all the non captioned content out there?

The creator of a video has no more of an obligation towards the deaf than anyone else.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by loco5niner on Friday February 13, 2015 @02:13PM (#9046483)

Not OP, but I would defend it with something similar to his statement above. Basically, I want to get the content out, and the extra effort (if required) would be enough for me to say basically "forget it". I'd rather get the content out and have a small subset of people not be able to access it, than not get it out at all. Certainly, there are other ways to make content available to specific user groups that requiring the original content creator to build it in from the beginning.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by pjscott on Friday February 13, 2015 @09:42PM (#9048509)

I don't defend it. Why would I? I have taken on no obligation here.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by murbard2 on Thursday February 12, 2015 @05:10PM (#9041703)

It totally depends on your means, your audience, your goals, etc.

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