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.
Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
81–90 of 450 posts
Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#82Earlier 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.
Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#83Like 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…
Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#84Like 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…
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
#85Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#86The 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.
Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#87This 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...
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
#88This 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
Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#89you 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…
Re: Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
#90Earlier 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.