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发帖数: 1034 | 1 Disability group that sued Netflix over online captions turns to
universities.
by Joe Mullin - Feb 13 2015, 11:20am PST
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."
The problem with Harvard's offering, NAD lawyers say, is that it leaves out
hard-of-hearing people. "Much of Harvard’s online content is either not
captioned, or is inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned, making it
inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing," the complaint
reads. "Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs,
online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf or hard of
hearing."
A similar lawsuit was filed against MIT. Both universities were early
adopters of edX, a service that offers lectures from top universities online.
In the Harvard suit, the platforms named include YouTube, iTunes U,
SoundCloud, and Harvard@Home.
Both schools declined to comment on the suits. A Harvard spokesperson told
Reuters that the university was expecting guidelines from the Department of
Justice on the issue to be published in June and that Harvard would follow
those guidelines.
The same law firm represented NAD in its lawsuit against Netflix, which
ended in a 2012 settlement in which Netflix agreed to caption all of its "
Watch Instantly" offerings. The advocacy group reached a deal with Vudu
earlier this week.
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. |
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