I’ve only watched a few videos but the subtitles are pretty challenging to follow along with as a deaf person. Given that this is not a free course, I would have expected higher quality subtitling, but there are frequent mistranscriptions, poor pacing, and unnatural line breaks that suggest the transcription was not proofread and the audio was not professionally aligned. Could you please proofread the subtitles and redo the subtitling for the courses following guidelines like BBC or Netflix publish for readability?
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Hi Alex! Welcome to Discourse! Thank you for this feedback and we’ve already informed our partners in Coursera about this. Fixing the subtitles is indeed in our priority list. Thank you for pointing out the BBC and Netflix guidelines. Will forward it as well and hopefully the next revisions will be close to these standards. Will keep you posted!
Hi Chris,
How long will it take to get this fixed? I am doing this course with several teammates and it is crucial that the subtitling is accurate in order for me to participate effectively as an equal member of the team. Can you please prioritize this as it is a critical accessibility deficiency in this paid course?
Also this video linked in the references section for week 1 doesn’t have captions. Could you please add captions to this video?
Hi Alex! Unfortunately, I can’t give you a timeframe yet. But rest assured that this is a hot topic recently and Coursera has already started looking into it even before you posted this thread. It is in their best interest to make content hosted on their platform accessible for all. We’ve passed your message along and hopefully it will help expedite the process in making all transcripts accurate.
As for the youtube video, I’m not yet sure what we can do about that since it is a free webinar hosted on another platform. But I’ll forward this. Thanks.
Hi @chris.favila ,
Nobody’s gotten back to me from your side or Coursera, yet I’ve been continually charged $60 a month for an inaccessible course while I’ve been extremely patient. What is going to happen to remediate this issue?
Hi Alex! I’m sorry for the lack of feedback. I’ve pinged our partner in Coursera just now to follow up. Hopefully, they can share some details about their discussions before regarding improving the transcripts.
Hi Alex. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get too much info aside from it’s “in progress”. I also brought it up with the team to see what other actions we could take. I’ll keep you posted on any developments. In the meantime, I suggest you pause your subscription first so as not to get continually charged while waiting for a resolution. The process is described here. If you need more details about what will happen to your Coursera account when you pause, you can inquire through their support agents using this form. Thank you for being very patient and I’m sorry again that this is still not resolved. Hope that I’ll have good news to share with you soon.
Hi Alex! By any chance, are you still enrolled in the course? There are some developments for the subtitles in Course 1 and we might be able to push it out this week. Hoping to get your feedback on it if you still have access. Thank you!
I agree that there are a lot of problems with the subtitles. I like having the subtitles available to help me understand what is being said, but there are a lot of typos. It might be helpful if the English subtitles could also be improved, perhaps through the same site that handles volunteer translations. Volunteers could improve the subtitles and users could choose those subtitles rather than the ones provided.