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 mc32 on Thursday February 12, 2015 @11:27PM (#9042861)

I can see the requirement for actually matriculated students. (I wonder if they have to provide ASL signers in-class for deaf students and braille books for the blind.)

What I don't see is a requirement for free courses. That would be ridiculous. Why would anyone want to make anything available if someone is going to come around and sue?

Instead of suing, why not start a project to automatically CC the videos, something like audio-recaptcha?

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by extra88 on Sunday February 15, 2015 @06:34AM (#9052371)

The suit is not about access for students enrolled in Harvard or MIT college credit courses, they do indeed have accommodations: ASL interpreters, CART service (a person, similar to a court stenographer, types what's said where the student can read it), digitized text for the vision impaired, etc. Printing Braille is slow and the output cumbersome so providing digital text that can be read by text to speech software or displayed on a refreshable Braille display are much more common.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by hga on Sunday February 15, 2015 @09:24AM (#9052661)

As a for instance of this, in the very early '80s MIT's EECS department put together its first really big computer lab. In the machine room there was a DECSYSTEM-20/60 (repackaged PDP-10 with a fast ECL KL-10 processor) and later 3 CADR Lisp Machines, across the hall a big open space with terminals for these machines. And in one small room off of that, a station with a keyboard and a Braille hard copy printer, which I remember being used by a blind student.

At least in that community, people went to a lot of effort to accommodate the blind and deaf. It was a bit before my time, but there was an ITS etc. wizard (who later was hired to do the TCP/IP stack for ITS) who was deaf, and a lot of the people in my social group learned a sign language to better communicate with him.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by lucaspiller on Thursday February 12, 2015 @11:45PM (#9042904)

YouTube will already automatically transcribe and add subtitles to some videos, I can't comment on the quality though:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3038280?hl=en-GB

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by hga on Friday February 13, 2015 @07:03AM (#9043911)

But it appears the people suing most certainly can comment on the quality http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...

They find it unacceptable (which in the cherry picked examples is unarguable), and have made that a very significant part of their PR campaign.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by mc32 on Friday February 13, 2015 @12:10AM (#9042979)

Yes, this is exactly the thing they should pursue. This antagonistic tactic is disheartening. I mean, WTF, yes, contribute and provide CC, fansubs, whatever, but this kind of sue-happiness is a total turn-off.

Persuade people to help you, don't force people to help you, you'll get better results.

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Re:Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Co... by ToastyMallows on Friday February 13, 2015 @10:19AM (#9044726)

As a graduate from RIT, colleges definitely provide ASL interpreters in class for Deaf students.

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