151–160 of 450 posts
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 think this article from yesterday might be related:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-and-los-a...
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> Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? Yes, and that is neither cheap or easy.
Whisper is free and classroom instruction should be a breeze and require little correction, as there likely isn't much background noise or music.
Even for much less exotic languages such as French automatic speech recognition systems don't work or are extremely bad.
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One Saturday morning 3 months ago I got on my bike like I had the week before, and the week before that. Less than 30 minutes later I was splayed out on the ground with my lower right leg broken clean in half and my tibia sticking out of my shin while an onlookers called me an ambulance. For 2 months afterwards I was confined to wheelchairs and walkers, and I only just recently was able to start walking independently…
There's a vast difference between "businesses should have wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms" and "everything possible must be done for the disabled and borne by the people providing it". The US ADA has struck a pretty decent balance, few people are actively against wheelchair ramps, and elevators do add to the cost of a building but most buildings of that size are moderately expensive anyway. But imagine if i…
That's a really patronizing comment. If we're going there, I'd like someone to point out the law that says that "everything possible must be done for the disabled and borne by the people providing it".
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Did you read the article? The only requirement put on this person was to add subtitles.
Asking someone to add subtitles to their videos seen by thousands is like "requiring wheelchair ramps to be installed at any house that was offering candy for trick or treating"?
I mean even OP calls out the exemption for up to 500 users... that's a lot of trick or treaters for one house.
While there have been abuses of accessibility laws, this isn't that. This is definitely a lot closer to basic affordances like wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms. Actually if anything I clicked the link expecting to see someone had weaponized W3C-style guidelines and was raking them over using #111111 instead of #000000 for black or something... but subtitles?
They're even pivoting to running a for-profit business and still complaining about that basic affordance, so it's exactly appropriate to bring up those concepts.
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).
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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?
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?
I think the issue is less about the changes they need to make, and more of the spectre of a potential lawsuit. Lawyers have a distinct upper-hand here because they are doing this in bulk and are probably using this as more of a "side-gig" to fill in extra work hours that they can't otherwise bill to clients. So the opportunity costs for them are pretty low, basically court fees, but the potential earnings are pretty…
If a web site would rather take their ball and go home rather than comply with the law, we’ll that’s totally their valid option, but nobody is forcing them to do it.
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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?
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 about I should be able to do whatever I want with my content without some slimy lawyer or smarmy internet commenter giving me a hard time?
They either comply with the ordinance or fight it in court if they think it goes against the letter of the law. If they don't like the law, petition their representatives to change the law.
It's just grifting at this point.