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

lifemichael.com

121–130 of 450 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If it were wrong it would be illegal."

Quoted post unavailable.

> companies doing that

Doing which, making services unavailable to disabled people or suing those that do?

I mean if my health insurer, for example, couldn't accommodate a disability of mine, especially something as common as low vision or hearing, I'd certainly feel like getting revenge but doesn't everyone feel that way about every health insurer every year or two?

If you meant the other way around, like if someone sued me because I was the one essentially locking people with a disability out from using my service I'd probably just take a really logical approach to handling it (for instance, making the accommodation they request). From what I've read the most common outcome in these cases is that the defendant is ordered to make the accommodation.

Getting sued or even just threatened with a lawsuit is pretty scary though, if anyone here is facing threat of lawsuit I'd suggest you consult with several attorneys right away but also find a YouTube attorney to set your expectations of the process. It's super easy to get fleeced by your own attorney unless you direct them pretty intentionally.

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

#122
post #75

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.

Not in Hebrew there aren't.

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

#123
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn't you feed the English auto-generated subtitles through Google Translate?

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're offering to do the work.

What a wonderful idea! I've sent him a tweet offering to help and get access to the videos in order to transcribe them.

Do you speak Hebrew?

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

#125
Just a fun tidbit that I only realized today:

Israel did not invent its own accessibility standard. The law simply enforces "Israeli Standard 5568", which is a PDF that links to WCAG 2.0 with a short figure that changes certain compliance levels (e.g. captions are classified as Level AA instead of Level A).

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

#126
post #69

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.

That can be solved by providing assistance directly to those segments in some cases. For example, we require wheelchair ramps at commercial buildings and apartments of a certain size and even motels must have "wheelchair accessible" units, even if some are only accessible by stairs. But we don't require every single house to have a wheelchair lift or ramp, but we can help pay for those to be installed on the houses t…

> Similarly, instead of requiring every website to comply with X, Y, or Zed, require it of the "commercial players" and provide assistance services to those who cannot access the rest of the web.

That's already the case. The ADA doesn't apply to your house or personal non-commercial websites.

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

#127

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…

This. I cannot believe the amount of strident anti-accessibility sentiment in this thread, it has to be coming mostly from the young and able-bodied? This has already been discussed and the question is settled, to the point of being actual law: civilized societies make allowances for people with disabilities. We are not some "Lord of the Flies" barbarians to say "f*ck the deaf" are we? It's 2022, captioning is a solv…

Captioning in English may be a solved problem (and admittedly the auto-captioning by YouTube is moderately decent).

Requiring captioning for all content obviously puts more of a burden on someone. Have you close-captioned all videos you've uploaded to various platforms?

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

#128

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.

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

Do you feel the same about requiring healthcare workers to wear gloves during surgery, to accommodate my need to not get an infection?

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

#129
post #114

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?

I'm afraid I don't have that information. I believe they did their scan last July.

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

#130

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.

Laws are not programming. All laws are vague, it's the entire purview of the justice system to work through the vagueness and ambiguity, ask any judge.
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