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If the only requirement is "subtitles" and not "100% accurate subtitles" or "time synced subs" it may be a bit of a headache, but not too bad.
The linked article doesn't give a lot of detail on the specific complaints or what you would need to do to make those sites accessible. Do you have any information on that?
Lawyers have a distinct upper-hand here because they are doing this in bulk and are probably using this as more of a "side-gig" to fill in extra work hours that they can't otherwise bill to clients. So the opportunity costs for them are pretty low, basically court fees, but the potential earnings are pretty high, since it's probably cheaper to pay out the lawsuit than it would be to hire a lawyer to fight it.
Plus, these are a potentially huge lottery ticket. If the company fails to respond to the lawsuit, a default judgement is issued and who knows how much they could earn from that. So like 4 hours of work for tens of thousands in payouts.
And it's only mom-and-pop companies that suffer. Companies that can afford staff counsel are just going to spend the few hours to become compliant and get the lawsuit dismissed.
Getting sued sucks. You have to quickly come up with a retainer to give your counsel. Probably a few hundred or so to respond to the suit, but after that, five figures isn't unusual. Yeah, you'll get some of that back if you win, but you still have to be able to come up with it at short notice.
Not much of a description of the new accessibility requirements, so I don't think people can have much insight about what exactly broke down here. I'm guessing if a website has more than 500 viewers/visitors a month, it's required that the videos must be captioned? Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? This all seems a bit dramatic from the guy,…
Yes, and that is neither cheap or easy.
This is a problem with accessibility laws in general, not with Israel in particular. Remember when UC Berkeley was a victim of the same kind of attack? https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...
The linked article doesn't give a lot of detail on the specific complaints or what you would need to do to make those sites accessible. Do you have any information on that?
Sounds like the videos need closed captions. Not a particularly difficult task to add them. It can be frustrating to go back and do this with older content, but captions make the videos accessible to a lot more people. Automated captioning software is also very high quality these days. There’s really no reason not to do it these days.
Not much of a description of the new accessibility requirements, so I don't think people can have much insight about what exactly broke down here. I'm guessing if a website has more than 500 viewers/visitors a month, it's required that the videos must be captioned? Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? This all seems a bit dramatic from the guy,…
> Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? Yes, and that is neither cheap or easy.