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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

#261

Post by Gordonjcp »

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…

Interesting. I had an email from a Californian law firm, claiming that my website was not sufficiently accessible for vision-impaired readers and I could be sued in California because of it, and would I like to pay them for their legal assistance in making it meet ADA legislation?

I suggested they consider Arkell v. Pressdram, and haven't heard a cheep from them since. The site looks perfectly okay with javascript and styling turned off (it's a forum, it's all text, there are some photos), so I expect it'll be fine in any practical screen reader. The demographic for the forum (people who want to repair and operate very old Range Rovers) already probably doesn't really include partially-sighted people, who would not be allowed to drive anyway if their vision was so poor they couldn't read text on a screen with reasonable adaptations.

I don't expect I will ever travel to California anyway, so I'm certain I've heard the last of them.

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

#262

Post by comte7092 »

roenxi wrote: post #254
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 al…

Does it actually confuse you or is that a rhetorical question?

On the one have you have global manufacturers being required to switch from one well established standard to another, it’s a requirement that barely touches on their resources as a firm and has more to do with their business strategy.

Contrast that with organizations that are likely well meaning but barely have the technical competence to put up and maintain a website. What they are currently doing is at the limit of their technical capacity.

The two situations couldn’t be more different.

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

#263

Post by eecc »

ceejayoz wrote: post #198
bombcar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article says "chase innocent businesses" and that their new venture has courses limited to 500 people, which seems to indicate similar exemptions in their version.

Never seen the previous sites but I get the impression they were free CC stuff. The author flipped out when he got _required_ to implement accessibility for a best-effort, free thing he gave away and is now commercializing; maintaining it under the exemption he couldn’t afford for a free service, out of spite

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

#264

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

TheNorthman wrote: post #249
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you expect that?

I mean, aside from the obvious principle of reasonable accommodation guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? Or, perhaps more specifically the guarantee from Article 19, barring segregation from the community at large? Expecting the declarations on human rights to be followed is not unreasonable.

should all resturants also be vegan? Nut free? We don't want to segregate, right?

Nobody "deserves" to go to a resturant.

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

#265

Post by camillomiller »

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…

Currently in Germany there’s a wave of lawyers letters making the rounds. They claim a website violates the privacy of some dummy client when they accessed the website and their IP was transmitted to Google’s servers to download Google Fonts from the cloud. I’ve been putting in some extra hours this week to help scared clients localize their Google Fonts. The wave started after an half-assed sentence from a court in Munich back in January decided that Google Fonts server seeing a user’s IP number is a punishable privacy violation.

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

#266

Post by yucky »

roenxi wrote: post #254
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 al…

You think it's weird that people expect random website owners with limited resources not to be held to the same accessibility standards as multi-billion dollar manufactures?

Why?

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

#268

Post by permo-w »

almog wrote: post #104

> Israel excels in bureaucracy. Ask every Israeli businessman. I don’t have an alternative but to close these websites. Providing free resources to assist others with learning programming for free has become too expensive. I'm quite confused after reading this and seeing the list of websites where he was providing "free resources". At first I thought it'd be unlikely that a free resource would fall under one of the c…

it also doesn’t help that the article doesn’t illustrate what any of the accessibility laws actually require

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

#269

Post by dereg »

comte7092 wrote: post #262
roenxi wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 al…

Does it actually confuse you or is that a rhetorical question? On the one have you have global manufacturers being required to switch from one well established standard to another, it’s a requirement that barely touches on their resources as a firm and has more to do with their business strategy. Contrast that with organizations that are likely well meaning but barely have the technical competence to put up and maint…

Do you see how many qualifiers you added to this? What if it significantly touches on their resources as a firm? What if the company is “global” but revenue is primarily domestic?

It’s always easy to carve these lines in the sand ex post facto. Good legislation lays out a set on consistent principles and enforcements, ex ante.

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

#270

Post by jtsuken »

roenxi wrote: post #254
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 al…

> you're all drawing a distinction that I don't see?

The distinction you are not seeing is between actual harm and a pretext for lawyers to sue.

Actual harm to the environment and real business profits result from manufacturers producing and selling proprietary charing devices (I bought at least 3 and disposed of at least 2 Apple magsafe2 chargers, while having perfectly working generic chargers around my home).

An indie developer hosting a free website is neither causing permanent and irreversible damage to the environment nor is he making any money as a result of his websites not being accessibility compliant.

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