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

lifemichael.com

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

#81

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.

"If it were wrong it would be illegal."

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

#82

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.

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

#83

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 fa…

I feel like a law that is open to exploitation is an issue it itself.

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

#84

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 fa…

> these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it.

The law is the issue. To say otherwise would be like saying that we didn't need to fix Log4shell and should have instead just tried to do something about the people who exploited it.

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

#86
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?

Near the end: unless this requirement is met, there will be a need to add subtitles to all video clips in all of the courses This doesn't seem like an onerous requirement to me. There is a variety of both commercial and free tools to automate that process, and while it would involve some effort in proofreading and uploading the subtitle data, that represents at most a few days of labor.

Not if the videos are in Hebrew. English and other languages have excellent support and tools that less common languages don't.

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

#87

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...

> Berkeley had two choices: spend a fortune adding closed captioning to the videos, or remove them from public view. Cost-conscious administrators chose the latter option.

There's no kind of "attack" here. It's UC Berkley refusing to spend money to add subtitles.

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

#88
post #33

This already happens in the US with ADA laws, and it will happen with California's new privacy and wage transparency laws. Unfortunately every time you create a new law with a private right of action, lawyers will monetize it at industrial scale. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-d...

You might say that this is bad (and on its face, it certainly does feel that way), but OTOH, it rapidly resulted in an enormous quality-of-life change for disabled people, it is the reason that the US is vastly more accessible than many other places

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

#89

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s boneheaded stuff like this that turned me against most accessibility laws in general. They sound like a good idea, but the implementations tend to make the perfect the enemy of the good and raise the barrier to entry too high for anyone who doesn’t have their own legal team.

There needs to be a system where accessibility issues can be raised and addressed without allowing attorneys to profiteer from the system.

Do you understand that "issues can be raised" is necessarily a euphemism for "people can be threatened with fines, bankruptcy, or jail time"?
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