Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lifemichael.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 450 posts

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

#201

Post by weatherlight »

Test0129 wrote: post #170
weatherlight wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they knew what the law existed prior to making the business.... Then it sounds like the business owner is at fault here. (Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, either way!) 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.

Or perhaps the business couldn't afford transcription/translation. The GP seems to suggest it's "trivial" to add subtitles. Great! What happens when those subtitles are terrible quality? The goal post will get moved further and further by those in charge until you need professional grade transcription. If you're a small enough business you probably don't have the XX,XXX in legal capital to fight a firm that can throw…

* The law has existed since 1998 - https://www.boia.org/blog/israels-digital-accessibility-laws....

* Israeli companies were given 22 years to comply. * Small businesses were required to comply as of 2020.

It's a ridiculous argument.

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

#203

Post by tehwebguy »

angst_ridden wrote: post #135
tehwebguy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I believe in making things accessible, and strive to do that on all my projects. I object to abuse of the ADA. Businesses / organizations should be given an opportunity to remediate their web sites before an automated script files an erroneous lawsuit.

That is already the most common out come of ADA website suits it would seem:

> The most common penalty at the federal level is a demand that the website be updated swiftly to better cater to people with disabilities.

[0] https://ddiy.co/can-you-be-sued-if-your-website-is-not-ada-c...

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

#204

Post by mywittyname »

ryandrake wrote: post #158
mywittyname wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have sympathy if your site is fully compliant with the law and you get sued in error, because of some bad automation or something. Now you have to hire a lawyer and eat that cost having done nothing wrong. It would be best if this didn’t happen. But if the law specifically says web videos need captions, and you put web videos up without captions and subsequently get sued… I dunno what to say—Surprised Pikachu Face?…

> But if the law specifically says web videos need captions, and you put web videos up without captions and subsequently get sued…

Except that's not really what happened. The site has a bunch of videos that were legal when created, but are no longer legal. And rather than going back and bringing them up to code, the author has decided to shut down shop.

Plus, being compliant doesn't save them from having to deal with the lawsuits. As has been discussed throughout this thread, these laws are abused a lot to bully and shutdown smaller companies that don't have the resources to defend themselves.

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

#205

Post by drc500free »

extantproject wrote: post #189
drc500free wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no different from not having curb cuts on your sidewalk. Culturally tech companies have gotten away with selling non-compliant products and websites, and feel like it's unacceptable to be required to follow regulations because everyone has level-set their expectations around not doing that. A competent regulatory scheme would have had the government enforcing this from the beginning, instead of depending on priv…

> If people followed the law, they wouldn't get sued. non sequitur

Great point, and I just edited that out on re-read because I realized it's simply not true. In fact, it's the core problem with using private action as an enforcement mechanism. You pass a specialized regulatory problem to a generic court and waste everyone's time with cases like this one where the companies may in fact be perfectly compliant - but first you need to spend money teaching the judge what the facts are.

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

#206

Post by josephcsible »

crummy wrote: post #141
josephcsible wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that how handicap parking spaces work? Destroying availability of parking spaces for abled people? What's your take on that that?

No. Distinguish between "reserved for use by disabled people" from "completely unavailable for use by anyone".

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

#207

Post by pessimizer »

knaekhoved wrote: post #88
anaisbetts wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Quoted post unavailable.

> Is also rapidly resulted in a quality-of-life change for the vast majority of people,

It should be noted that it was an insignificant quality of life change for the vast majority of people, and that if laws didn't inconvenience people we wouldn't need any. It's too bad that we can't help the disabled by giving everybody ice cream, but that's the situation we're in.

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

#208

Post by jacobsenscott »

drc500free wrote: post #165
Forgeties79 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely do not understand how they can sleep at night. Thanks for pushing back.

It's no different from not having curb cuts on your sidewalk. Culturally tech companies have gotten away with selling non-compliant products and websites, and feel like it's unacceptable to be required to follow regulations because everyone has level-set their expectations around not doing that. A competent regulatory scheme would have had the government enforcing this from the beginning, instead of depending on priv…

> A competent regulatory scheme would have had the government enforcing this from the beginning

If there was a regulatory scheme (competent can't really be defined) at the beginning of the internet we would all still be using aol dial up at best, there would be 3 content creating entities at most, and we would be paying for monthly "bundles" of web sites.

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

#209

Post by mannerheim »

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

Auto-generated captions were deemed by the court to not be an acceptable solution.

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

#210

Post by BitwiseFool »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #166
coryrc wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're arguing for a dichotomy that doesn't exist. It literally exists: https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...

Not a dichotomy, the third option of making your website accessible is right there within their reach. Them putting their hands up and saying "guess we'll do nothing" is not evidence that they couldn't have. I could have done that with two interns over a summer in 2017, I've done much larger labeling projects with fewer resources. Had they even thought about accessibility before being called on it, they could even ha…

>"they could even have done it over time as they were recording the videos, surely they put resources into that."

If a professor is lecturing a class that has no disabled students in it, does it really make sense to hire someone to sign or transcribe the lecture on the off chance someone disabled in the future who isn't even enrolled will want to watch it for free online? I can totally understand requiring the university to accommodate students who are currently enrolled with disabilities. But it doesn't seem right to mandate this for every individual lecture that has been recorded.

Post reply on HN