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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

#111

Post by yieldcrv »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #77
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.

In their minds they are just chasing alpha to sleep at all. They have probably been burned along the way and just passing the trauma forward. Everyone has to save themselves.

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

#112

Post by rsstack »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #73
incone123 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Israeli law uses WCAG's definition. I'm not kidding, the law refers to an "Israeli standard" which is just a PDF that links to WCAG and includes an errata of changes; e.g. captions are Level AA instead of Level A in the Israeli standard.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/?versions=2.0#qr-medi...

Failure F8 seems relevant to the loophole: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F8.html

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

#113

Post by mminer237 »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #67
twblalock wrote: post #26

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.

While I generally agree, I think adding subtitles are a fairly low bar to pass that help the able & disabled in equal amounts. If you're in public and don't feel like wearing headphones or want to listen to music instead, than even shitty auto-generated captions are a massive improvement in quality

Even only hiring the cheapest, outsourced, $1/minute captioning, for 20,000 videos at 50 minutes each that's at least a million dollars they'd be paying to give content away for free. I don't think that's a low bar.

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

#114

Post by ronsor »

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…

Can you list their IP addresses so I can firewall them... and drop the ranges from my BGP tables?

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

#115

Post by drdeca »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #110
drdeca wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then either whoever wants to fix that problem should pay for the additional costs, or accept that they aren't willing to do what is needed to fix the problem.

Conflating "willingness to do" with "ability to pay" is a fundamental attribution error.

ok, not willing-and-able then.

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

#117

Post by warkdarrior »

inetknght wrote: post #87
josephcsible wrote: post #14

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.

It was an attack on the non-disabled public, who lost access to those videos (or who would have had to pay for subtitles via taxes to fund UC Berkeley).

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

#118

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

josephcsible wrote: post #68
ceejayoz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the way to make people not be "second-class citizens" is just by taking away and destroying other people's things, rather than by making more things available to them, then I don't think it's something we should do.

You're arguing for a dichotomy that doesn't exist.

I've heard excuses my entire life why accessibility laws are impossible and costly to apply. Meanwhile most infractions I see are egregious, easy to fix, and not punished.

With Covid we changed our entire lifestyle, we modified facilities with plastic screens, markers on the floors, instituted work from home, all of this practically overnight. Meanwhile all over the western world you've got decades-long ongoing lawsuits to make the most basic of accessibility accommodations available.

In addition to that every public space, physical or digital, is made and thought through according to very specific accessibility requirements: the normal range of human abilities. In the majority of cases it's not anymore complicated to make a website accessible for the people who sit slightly out of that range.

Open your website, put a blindfold on, install a screenreader and go through it. Next put on earplugs and do the same thing, next tie your arm behind your back and do the same thing. It sounds silly but it'll take two hours max and the issues will be self-evident.

Don't tell me the guy who has been at it for 15 years didn't have time to do this, and don't tell me he gives a crap if he didn't. He didn't give a crap then and he doesn't give a crap now. I'm sure he put plenty of thought into making his website responsive so it's accessible to mobile users but you don't see him complaining about that.

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

#119

Post by bombcar »

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…

Autogeneration for non-English languages often is relatively bad or simply doesn't exist at all.

Imagine having to record your post in American sign language before being allowed to post it on Hacker News. At some point it becomes silly.

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

#120

Post by mminer237 »

pwinnski wrote: post #13

"Thanks to [a lack of subtitles on all of my videos], I [choose] to delete my websites" rather than add subtitles.

Accurate subtitles are expensive. He's willing to spend some effort to help some people but not some more effort and a lot of money to help some more people.
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