Update February 25, 2017: Check out a related blog post about Stanford’s CS 231n class.

In the future, I will try not to discuss random news articles here, because often the subject might be a fad and fade in obscurity. Today, I’ll make an exception with this recent New York Times article about how Harvard and MIT are being sued over lack of closed captions. The actual suing/lawsuit action itself will probably be forgotten by most soon, but the overall theme of lack of captions and accessibility is a recurring news topic. Online education is real, and accommodations for those materials will also be necessary to ensure a maximal range of potential beneficiaries.

I don’t take part in online courses or video resources that much since there’s already plenty that I can learn from standard in-person lectures, and the material that I need to know (advanced math, for instance) is not something that I can learn from MOOCs, which by their very definition are for popular and broadly accessible subjects. For better or worse, the concepts I do need to know inside-out are embedded in dense, technical research papers.

Fortunately, the few online education resources I have experience with provide closed captions. The two that I’m most familiar with are MIT OpenCourseWare and Cousera, and both are terrific with captions. Coursera is slightly better, being more “modern” and also allows the video to be paused and sped up, while for MIT OCW one needs to use external tools, but both are great.

Apparently, using MIT OCW and Coursera (and sparingly at that) has probably led me to forget about how most online sources do not contain closed captions. It’s especially frustrating to me since in the few cases when I want to look at videos, I have to rely on extensive rewinding and judicious pauses to make sense of the material. I think in the next few years, I may need to employ those cumbersome tactics when I watch research talks.

It’s nice to see that captions are getting more attention, and I believe this issue will continue to reappear in news in the near future. Perhaps the brand names of “Harvard” and “MIT” are playing a role here, but I don’t view that as a bad sign: if they can take the initiative and be leaders in accessibility, then other universities should try and emulate them. After all, those universities want Harvard and MIT’s ranking…