Note that Berkeley is in theory not required to remove the video archive. It's just that by law, they are required to add captions. So, if they want to keep it up, that's what they could do. Except that it's not really a choice - the costs for doing so would be prohibitive. So, really, Berkeley is left with no choice: making the recording accessible or don't offer them at all means - in practice - "don't offer them at all".

Clearly the result of a regulation that meant well. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It's a bit reminiscent of a law that prevents institutions from continually offering employees non-permanent work contracts. As in, after two fixed-term contracts, the third one must be permanent. The idea is to guarantee workers more stable and long-term perspectives. The result, however, is that the employee's contract won't get renewed at all after the second one, and instead someone else will be hired on a non-permanent contract.

In the past, my university was publishing and mailing me a print magazine, and making it available in pdf form online. Then they stopped making the pdf available. I emailed them and asked why. They said it's because the pdf wasn't accessible.

But the print form was even less accessible, and they kept publishing that...

It's one of those "to motivate the horse to run 1% faster, you add shit ton of weight on top of it" strategy.

The problem is that having that rule results in those 1%s always being excluded. It's probably worth just going back and looking at the arguments for laws around accessibility.

I have a few Deaf/Hard of Hearing friends who find the auto-captions to be basically useless.

Anything that's even remotely domain specific becomes a garbled mess. Even watching documentaries about light engineering/archeology/history subjects are hilariously bad. Names of historical places and people are randomly correct and almost always never consistent.

The second anyone has a bit of an accent then it's completely useless.

I keep them on partially because I'm of the "everything needs to have subtitles else I can't hear the words they're saying" cohort. So I can figure out what they really mean, but if you couldn't hear anything I can see it being hugely distracting/distressing/confusing/frustrating.

Yes, but the DOJ determined that the auto-generated captions were "inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities." [1]

If the automatically-generated captions are now of a similar quality as human-generated ones, then that changes things.

[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...

Definitely depends on audio quality and how closely a speaker's dialect matches the mid-atlantic accent, if you catch my drift.

IME youtube transcripts are completely devoid of meaningful information, especially when domain-specific vocabulary is used.

Youtube auto-captions are extremely poor compared to e.g. running the audio through Wisper.

What happened here is a specific scam where companies are targeted for ADA violations, which are so vague it’s impossible to “comply”.

Neat, thanks!

My repo doesn't re process the audio track: instead it makes the raw ASR text transcript better by feeding it additional info (title and description) and asking the LLM to fix errors.

It is not perfect, it'd sometimes replace words with a synonym, but it is much faster and cheaper.

The low cost of Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B costs $1 per 500 hours of transcript.

With a RTX4090 and insanly-fast-whisper on whisper-large-v3-turbo (see Whisper-WebUI for easy testing) you can transscribe 5000h on consumer hardware in about 50h with timestamps. So, yeah. I also know someone.

Well. The legal complaint was that transcripts don't exist. The issue was that it was prohibitively expensive to resolve the complaint. Now that transcription is 0.1% of the cost it was 8 years ago, maybe the complaint could have been resolved.

Is building a ramp to meet ADA requirements not using technology to solve a legal issue?

Yet. Legal issues don't get solved by tech yet!