[breakingcups]

Does anyone with more experience with this law know whether the ADA would apply to all video content on a website or just a subset?

Otherwise YouTube would also have a huge problem. Their auto-generated CC's are laughable most of the time.

[aequitas]

I find their CC to be pretty accurate most of the time with sometimes some words misunderstood. It's not perfect, but for me it often is very usable as aid in a noisy environment (mind you I have no hearing disability, just don't want to crank the volume to 11 when my kids are playing in the same room).

[tpaksoy]

Until someone with an accent appears on the screen.

And I don't mean someone from France or Turkey for instance. But Brits, and in particular Scots, usually break the automatically generated CCs.

[ghaff]

TBH, even human transcribers have their limits. I often get transcripts of my podcasts. But if I have someone with a strong accent, I’ll often skip because I know I’ll be charged for a difficult transcription especially around technical terms and I’ll still have to do a lot of cleanup.

Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript.

That actually makes me wonder re podcasts and other audio. Is there any reason they’d have a different requirement or are these lawsuits specifically about video for some reason?

[extra88]

> Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript.

The law requires "reasonable accommodations" to provide a equivalent experience. Expecting perfection would not be reasonable. Also with heavy accents, the hearing audience probably doesn't understand every word so if some words in the transcript were wrong, the hearing impaired have the same experience.

There's nothing special about video, the law can also require podcasts and other audio-only content to provide transcripts. But the law doesn't apply to everything and everybody, it applies to "places of public accommodation," and many podcasts are personal projects, to which it doesn't apply. The legal precedent for what is a place of public accommodation is evolving, even including anything online is not universally held, I don't know what counts; having an ad spot in a podcast is probably not sufficient to suddenly make it a business to which the law applies. It almost certainly applies to an operation like Gimlet.

[ghaff]

And it’s possibly complicated by the fact that many podcasts don’t even carry advertising but are clearly content marketing for businesses. Mind you for SEO and other reasons, transcripts are often a good idea but probably the vast majority of even quasi-pro podcasts don’t do them.