Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

lifemichael.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 450 posts

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#71

Post by pfortuny »

danny_taco wrote: post #45

People with disabilities often struggle to find content they can consume because it's not a11y friendly. Unfortunately in this case lawyers are capitalizing on this law that was made to help people with disabilities to go after websites that are not a11y friendly. Maybe before shutting down you should consider making your content a11y friendly by adding captions to your videos. It is extra work but consider you may b…

He has been helping people. Please do not frame this as “not helping”. Frame this as what it is: an excellent example of abuse of the law which is per se wrong and harmful.

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#72

Post by [deleted] »

skywhopper wrote: post #16
Guidii wrote: post #2

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.

[deleted]

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#73

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

incone123 wrote: post #60
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you used excerpts from Shakespeare for subtitles, regardless of the video's actual content?

Then they wouldn't be subtitles.

I think the question is obvious — is this going to pass on a technicality or does the law stipulate that text is required to exactly follow the speech in audio? I'm asking because in my country that's how you usually pass various government audits — by following the letter of the law and ignoring its spirit. I've had to do it a few times at $DAYJOB because of budget constraints and other reasons.

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#75

Post by yurtin »

It is of course his choice not to subtitle his videos to help those of us who are hard of hearing.

No need to blame the law, when the solution to comply with it is readily available - there are plenty of subtitling services around, even mostly-automated ones.

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#76

Post by duxup »

armchairhacker wrote: post #31

you should add subtitles to your videos. Either just auto-generate them with a service (can even use YouTube as someone mentioned), ask for the community to add subtitles, or hire transcribers if you’re willing to pay Can re-show the videos one at a time when subtitles are added rather than immediately doing it to the full batch. You could even just move the site to a Youtube channel, as youtube provides subtitles. B…

How effective is that?

If youtube is the example, annunciation and speed greatly influence the accuracy, the the point that on some videos they're straight useless... even if easily understood by the human ear.

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#77

Post by Forgeties79 »

angst_ridden wrote: post #65

There's a firm in Southern California that's suing restaurants / small theaters / community organizations / etc after bulk-scanning web sites for embedded video that lack links to caption files. It's all ADA abuse, lawsuits in the $5k-$7k range. A huge percentage of those sued don't have the means to fight back, and settle. The company that's suing people had some incompetent coder write their scanner, so it only par…

I genuinely do not understand how they can sleep at night. Thanks for pushing back.

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#78

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

Like complaints about the GDPR, these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it.

It's not like these laws are without issue or room for abuse, in truth most laws are like this, but a lot of the time people don't know the law and don't care to put in the minimum effort to apply it.

So we get people clamoring for free-market solutions which have demonstrably failed to address these issues for decades and end up leaving behind all those people which accessibility laws were made for.

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#79

Post by some_random »

ceejayoz wrote: post #53
josephcsible wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that attorneys can profiteer. The problem is that if you spend a bunch of time and money to make available a public resource that you're not making any money off of, you shouldn't be forced to choose between spending way more money on it or taking it away from everyone.

> you shouldn't be forced to choose between spending way more money on it or taking it away from everyone... The unfortunate end result of that is certain segments of the population treated as second-class citizens.

I'm not sure if "not being allowed to force people giving free resources to do more work to accommodate you" is what makes someone a second-class citizen

Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites

#80

Post by edflsafoiewq »

crummy wrote: post #18

My phone can autocaption audio from any website, I assume there are services that would do this for videos. Is this worth considering?

Then why does the author need to add them? People who want subtitles should use that or pay someone to do a transcription.
Post reply on HN