教育视频制作的逆向设计

在过去的15年里, software accessibility has matured from a niche specialty to a mainstream expectation. 直到2010年左右, 信不信由你, it wouldn’t have been considered unusual for a student or employee who is legally blind to use completely different software from their peers while doing what would pass as the same tasks. Now, with the success of the Universal Design movement and improved standards in HTML and other technologies, that sort of accommodation would be considered at best a profound failure in procurement and at worst a form of illegal discrimination. Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer’s code testing procedures. 尽管取得了这些进展, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

这些力量中较短期的是关于“重新执政”的争论.” The mass adoption of synchronous video conferencing platforms proved since 2020 that it is possible to participate in business meetings from anywhere. Whereas previously it was possible—inadvertently or not—for someone in a wheelchair to be excluded from attending a meeting held in an older building without an elevator, 现在不是这样了，要么把他们带到极速那边, 找一个更好的位置, 或者准备好面对昂贵而不讨人喜欢的诉讼. Many disabled employees learned how much decision-making they were being left out of due to these constraints and will fight tooth-and-nail to retain the inclusion they enjoyed when fully remote leveled the playing field for them. 严格实行复职政策可能会让人觉得不公平, differential treatment for employees with disabilities for whom accommodations are necessary or discriminatory hiring policies to avoid such conflicts.

The other threat to universal design and the trend towards better technological accessibility is the emergence of Large-Language Models (LLMs). 我在今年的百家乐app下载(go2sm)中讨论了法学硕士的重要性.com/edstate), contending that the LLM-based ChatGPT was a much-improved generator of mediocre writing than we’d seen previously and an impressive demonstration of how far we’ve come with software interpretation of natural language prompts. The more exciting LLM product for the online video industry released by OpenAI was the Whisper speech-to-text engine. 在写完这些之后，GPT-4模型推出了，生成了比普通文本更好的文本. Whisper remains a tremendously exciting tool and the “why” of that supports this point.

在低语, one of the open-source speech-to-text engines I’d hoped would pan out was Mozilla Foundation’s DeepSpeech. 回到2018年, we discussed the importance of Language Models in the speech-to-text problem with the example 秋季辅助帽檐. The limiting factor in the accuracy of speech recognition for automatic captions was the ability to predict what words were being spoken, 通过对语言模型进行推理来执行的任务. DeepSpeech是在Mozilla的Common Voice语言数据库之上构建的, an ethically pure data set in that all its content was voluntarily provided: currently sitting at 3,209小时的语音数据. Whisper’s data set was scraped from the internet and consists of 211x the amount of speech data. 有了这样一个更大的语言模型，Whisper的表现大大超过了DeepSpeech.

The LLM that Whisper is built on was not as ethically immaculately conceived as DeepSpeech. Observations that ChatGPT is simply a plagiarism engine—generating text based on a language model pilfered from the creative writing people shared on the internet—apply equally to Whisper (although I’d argue that Whisper provides a substantial public good in providing accurate video captions). The backlash will be how people try to prevent companies building LLMs from accessing their creative output. 我看到的建议包括一个更有牙齿的机器人.TXT类型的解决方案. But making text and video on the internet less accessible to machine reading (and thus assistive technology) is another solution with severe consequences to the disabled. 教育视频, the solution for protecting faculty intellectual property and student privacy is strict content security: platforms that better protect access to video (and captions) stand out from the field.

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现在就订阅最新一期过去的问题

WCAG 2.2、Web内容可访问性标准与您

而不是拼凑加州的无障碍标准, 伊利诺斯州, Europe, 还有其他地方, the current standard is set by a broad cross-section of experts from the industry and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

2017年11月17日

即将到来的可访问性反弹

Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. 尽管取得了这些进展, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

2023年6月27日