Live data from Hacker News

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

lifemichael.com

221–230 of 450 posts

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

#221

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).

Generally, the Israeli regulatory approach is built on the realization that a country the size of a large urban area just cannot spend the money and time to write its own regs. Everything from pharmaceuticals to (recently) food are regulated based on "use rules from the US or EU [depending on market] with a list of specific Israeli changes".

The EU rules also use WCAG, so I don't know if it's their size as much as WCAG just being that good.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you can sue someone for violating the ADA but you can't "win damages"

The damages are the incentive to sue. If you don't have that, you might as well not have the law. Or you need to fund an agency for enforcement.

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

#223

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.

No of course not the law is not stupid

If there are some mistakes (due to sloppy or autogenerated speech to text) it might work but not if it's totally wrong

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

#224

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?

You might feel different when you're disabled.

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

#225
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would you get English subtitles from videos in Hebrew?

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

#227
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't. Computers do though

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". 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". - Did you read the ar…

Consider that for certain kinds of video (one or two people, minimal editing, not in english), subtitles could cost ten times as much as the video itself.

Well yeah, it doesn't hurt that the video itself extremely cheap...

The point of the law is that it should be the cost of doing business once you reach a certain size (in this case 500 users).

No one is making you subtitle your class presentation. In fact I went to confirm the 500 user rule, the law was actually updated specifically to carve out extensive exceptions based on revenue. A website needs to make 30k a year, which is not a small amount of traffic: https://illuminea.com/israeli-website-accessibility-guidelin...

At the end of the day OP is making a paid learning course of technical material and still whinging about needed to provide subtitles, yet that's exactly the kind of "pain" these laws should enforce.

There are predatory lawyers looking to sue people for having .01" too tall of a lip at their restaurant's door or something knowing full well they'll lose in court but want to settle... that's where these laws can go wrong. Not basic subtitles.

Honestly it feels like they wanted to launch a new paid service and got a free angle to share it from.

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

#229

Not much of a description of the new accessibility requirements, so I don't think people can have much insight about what exactly broke down here. I'm guessing if a website has more than 500 viewers/visitors a month, it's required that the videos must be captioned? Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? This all seems a bit dramatic from the guy,…

> Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it "Can't this guy doing something for free do even more work, under threat of prosecution, for the putative but questionable benefit of a small minority?"

This is a fair enough point, I'm not saying the host isn't being wronged by the state in this instance. It is a burden to fund such things that he may not reasonably be able to afford. But I don't know what the standards for required captions actually are because there was no effort made to elaborate or even link to the accessibility law being discussed. It's assumed that auto-generated captions won't work for one reason or another, since that would reasonably be the easiest and most accessible option (for the creator) to implement. I understand that professional captions cost money but cheap alternatives and community-driven efforts certainly exist. Respectfully, if the guy is hosting 15 websites just for these resources, it seems odd that he wouldn't make an effort to at least mention this circumstance or a timeline to shutdown with his users before a total ragequit. There's obviously many details missing throughout all this so while the situation is sad I don't think this is the best example to illustrate exactly what's going on in the HebrewNet.
Post reply on HN