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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

I'm very curious, how long does it actually take to make captions? Seriously, the slowest it could be is probably the length of the actual lecture. Just pay some student $20 to do it. $20 for an hour of work. Am I missing something?

EDIT:

Hmm, I think I was unclear. I am not referring to making a "professional grade" captioned video. I am simply referring to having literally what the speaker says included with the video as a transcription.

I do admit it would probably take more than $20. Even if it was $200 a video that would still be pretty cheap. It's probably what, less than a cent extra per student per semester? Unless of course you do this for every new iteration/instance of the class.

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Transcribing actually takes significantly longer than the length of the actual lecture. I randomly picked a psychology course (from http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ ) and tried to transcribe a minute of it. It was wholly undoable at normal speed, so I changed it to 1/2 speed and it was tough at best. Keep in mind that I type at 100 wpm, which is well above normal.

Furthermore, transcribing _just_ the audio is not sufficient to meet the ADA requirements. You also have to create an accessible way to describe all graphs and pictures for the visually impaired (generally, that means you have to describe each and every photo using words).

$20 will pay for a days work somewhere in the world. Surely a 15min video can be transcribed in 6hrs, charts included.

Sure, but what would be the accuracy of the transcription? In addition, I can't imagine someone able to transcribe high-level English would be very cheap (then again, I could be entirely wrong; I can't say for certain).

Furthermore, I can't imagine any public university administrators wants to get questioned by legislators about why they're outsourcing work nowadays. Nor do I think the administrators want to admit that they're paying (by first world standards) sweatshop wages.

Have you heard of the medical transcription industry?

If you find yourself in a US or UK hospital, it's very likely that your medical reports and prescriptions dictated by your doctor are sent off to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, or elsewhere to be converted into text.

So yeah, English isn't a problem, and there is already a huge pool of talent in the 3rd world trained in turning audio into text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_transcription

>You also have to create an accessible way to describe all graphs and pictures

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and the video is 30fps. Then a one hour video would require well over 100 million words. I agree, too much to do in real time.

> the slowest it could be is probably the length of the actual lecture

Have you ever transcribed content? The length of the recording is the lower bound on time it takes to transcribe, not the upper bound.

How do you assure quality? How much total budget are you interested in using for this? How will you update the videos when you have the captioning?

It's harder than it sounds.

Or use Amazon mechanical turk. Probably even cheaper.

not as cheap as taking them down.

I suspect that the cost ($20 * 20000 videos = $400,000) is unpaletable.

$20? Try $2 a minute with each video being 60 minutes. It's more like $2.4 million.

I didn't come up with the $20 number, I'm quoting tabeth.

Still, a very small amount of money for content this valuable.

Good, so you'll pay for it, then?

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