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

lifemichael.com

171–180 of 450 posts

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

#171

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…

It is! Every deaf person I know has a handy device in their pocket that can 'listen' to the audio going on and output the text on the screen.

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

#172
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...

There was a disabled guy in the Bay Area going around suing all sorts of restaurants and other places if they didn't have ramps. Small hole in the wall restaurants couldn't afford renovations and had to just close, resulting in more Mc-chain restaurants moving in that can afford to play ball. Disabled people need access, but I (perhaps controversially) don't think they need access to 100% of the things. I'm reminded…

[deleted]

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What was the total cost of producing those videos to begin with?

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

#175
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...

There was a disabled guy in the Bay Area going around suing all sorts of restaurants and other places if they didn't have ramps. Small hole in the wall restaurants couldn't afford renovations and had to just close, resulting in more Mc-chain restaurants moving in that can afford to play ball. Disabled people need access, but I (perhaps controversially) don't think they need access to 100% of the things. I'm reminded…

The disabled litigant is of course bottom feeding scum, but the real fault is with the law itself.

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

#176
This sounds like the sort of scam that a certain company in my corner of the world tried to pull - they bought rights to map data and threatened small businesses that had maps on their websites(even small, "hand-drawn" ones) that they'll report them to the authorities for copyright infringement(prosecuted ex officio), unless the businesses in question pay a "licensing fee".

Eventually they made the mistake of trying to silence a thread about them on a legal advice forum, which resulted in an interesting legal battle during which it was established that a fragment of a map does not constitute copyrighted material, so their threats were empty from the get go.

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

#177
Similar to 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.

If the hosted on youtube, they would get auto generated captions for free correct? In this day and age, which open source models like Open AI whisper, almost every video could get auto captioned.

Does the law state how accurate the captions need to be?

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The ADA is not the law of the land in Israel unless something changed drastically recently.

[deleted]

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

#179
The problem of web accessibility is that, while critically important to a large segment of society (over 40% of Americans have some kind of disability) - the world doesn’t actually have the resources to make all existing content accessible with current methods. Every university has mountains of inaccessible PDFs and videos, and no budget for doing anything about it.

I suspect the only practical solution to this problem is AI.

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

#180
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...

There was a disabled guy in the Bay Area going around suing all sorts of restaurants and other places if they didn't have ramps. Small hole in the wall restaurants couldn't afford renovations and had to just close, resulting in more Mc-chain restaurants moving in that can afford to play ball. Disabled people need access, but I (perhaps controversially) don't think they need access to 100% of the things. I'm reminded…

If you're handicapped you don't expect to be able to go hiking. However you do expect to be able to go to restaurants
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