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

lifemichael.com

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

#251

Post by bell-cot »

themitigating wrote: post #180
no_butterscotch wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If the restaurant merely rents, how responsible is it for the landlord's property being less than accessible?

If the restaurant is in a Historic District, and the board/commission/whatever in charge of that is generally opposed to pro-accessibility changes - who (other than the lawyers) benefits when the restaurant ends up as a de-facto abandoned building?

If my "handicap" is a severe peanut allergy, should I be able to demand that every restaurant have a separate, peanut-free kitchen - with only certified peanut-free ingredients, etc.? (One can repeat this argument for other allergies, people whose personal beliefs require kosher/halal/vegan/etc. food, and so on.)

If there are (say) 100 restaurants in a city, what is the marginal value for handicapped people of forcing a 101th restaurant to spend $$$$ to qualify as handicap-accessible?

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

#252

Post by collegeburner »

themitigating wrote: post #180
no_butterscotch wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yeah to at least some restaurants. but it's ok to say that not every restaurant has to be accessible. we should minimize the extent to which someone's disability is everyone else's problem. same reason a lot of these new tech laws affect companies with over 2 million users or whatever, small companies don't have the resources to deal with it. so should a big chain restaurant have ramps? yeah. should a small mom and pop shop have to close cause it cant afford it? nahh screw that.

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

#253

Post by MichaelCollins »

themitigating wrote: post #180
no_butterscotch wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are there reasonable limits to this expectation? Would businesses have to accommodate people who need iron lungs (if those were still in use)?

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

#254

Post by roenxi »

angst_ridden wrote: post #65

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…

> It's all ADA abuse...

The HN gestalt confuses me on this one. The other week the EU had that charger standardisation law and the mood on HN was undeniably positive. Now we have a comment that Californian web accessibility laws are being enforced and the top voted comment is decidedly negative. These laws are remarkably similar in intent and likely outcome.

What is different here? Is it the same people but you're all drawing a distinction that I don't see? different people and a US vs EU thing? Hardware vs Software?

When there is a law saying that websites are supposed to be accessible, suing websites that aren't accessible doesn't seem like abuse to me. This sounds like the intended outcome.

Enforcing laws isn't a pretty business.

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

#255

Post by jbirer »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #77
angst_ridden wrote: post #65

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

We often assume that most people have empathy / conscience. It's simply not true.

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

#256

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

db48x wrote: post #235
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A thing which isn’t accessible still has value. If a new law causes the thing to be destroyed rather than be made accessible, then the new law is a bad one.

You are a public university with students who have a wide variety of skin colors. 27 years ago a law is put into effect that forbids discrimination based on skin color.

The toilets on your campus, which you have kept untouched for 27 years since the law passed, have a sign at the entrance that says "whites-only".

Which of these options do you feel is right:

1) Pay someone to take down the sign

2) Condemn the toilet

3) Leave it as is.

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

#257

Post by xbar »

endominus wrote: post #244
ryandrake wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

I have multiple issues with your argument, but the most pertinent in this case is that the law in question was passed only 5 years ago and apparently applies retroactively to all video content hosted on Israeli sites. This is the government deciding that the video you put up ten years ago can get you sued for failing to have a requirement they just passed. It imposes a financial and temporal burden on everyone and th…

Well-reasoned.

I think it's about time we flattened the Great Pyramid at Giza for lack of wheelchair access.

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

#258

Post by bell-cot »

ahtihn wrote: post #199
pnw wrote: 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...

> Unfortunately every time you create a new law with a private right of action, lawyers will monetize it at industrial scale. Why "unfortunately"? It seems to me this is the intended outcome. It's how these laws actually get enforced.

No post body was provided.

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

#259

Post by ivan_gammel »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #208
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…

> 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.

On the contrary, we could have accessibility by design and accesstech industry enabling it at low cost. Every business deterred by the effort required to make interfaces accessible would inevitably be replaced by those who think they can still earn a lot of money (we are talking about trillion dollar industry here, people are ready to kill for much less).

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

#260

Post by angst_ridden »

chriscjcj wrote: post #152
angst_ridden wrote: post #65

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…

Is it Potter Handy, LLP? I think this article from yesterday might be related: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-and-los-a...

I'm not at liberty to give specifics right now.
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