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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

#291

Post by 3836293648 »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #78

Like complaints about the GDPR, these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it. It's not like these laws are without issue or room for abuse, in truth most laws are like this, but a lot of the time people don't know the law and don't care to put in the minimum effort to apply it. So we get people clamoring for free-market solutions which have demonstrably fa…

There's a major difference between this and GDPR complaints. The GDPR says you cannot abuse your customers. This is requiring someone who is offering a free service to spend a tonne of money on it because someone says that something they got for free isn't good enough.

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

#292

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #289
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make sense to build a ramp in a building which has currently no wheelchair-bound residents? There is a reason access to higher-ed is so difficult for the disabled. You don't need to hire someone to transcribe a lecture, you can push it through a speech to text algorithm and ask one of your 300 students to volunteer to make the few corrections necessary with a minimum amount of work. And this is the forethough…

I don't believe the ramp comparison is appropriate because physical accommodations are concrete and long lasting whereas access accommodation on things like recordings and lectures require specialized work on every single instance. As for your "There is a reason access to higher-ed is so difficult for the disabled" point, I fully endorse the requirement that the university has to accommodate disabled students. But my…

Neither interns nor students are expensive, the latter are free and are begging to work for you. I can get them in the snap of a finger and I work in a much smaller university. For reference Berkeley got 5 billions through fund raising campaigns since the ADA was implemented, regularly gets a 100 million dollars from donors in a year, and enrolls 40000 students every year (there's your 40000 hours) who pay tuition. Also they committed to adhering to ADA for every new piece of content they produce.

What I proposed is text-to-speech with a human in the loop, semi-automatic transcription. I've worked as a data scientist and machine learning engineer then researcher in the industry and in academia, on speech recognition and generation models among other things. I've labelled time-series datasets containing hundreds of thousands of items by myself. It's not rocket science, there are very efficient tools, and if you can't find one for your purpose it's a couple of weeks of work to create one. The ADA captioning requirements aren't very complicated either, you can check them out yourself it's like 5 things.

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

#293

Post by almog »

permo-w wrote: post #268
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

Right, that too. And since I was only vaguely familiar with the concept of that law, I schemed through Kol Zchut (All Rights in Hebrew), a non-profit organization which tries to make one's right as an Israeli citizen/resident more, well... accessible (no pun intended).

It's an English version is just a partial translation so I'm not sure it'd be of much help.

https://www.kolzchut.org.il/en/Accessibility

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

#294

Post by twblalock »

anigbrowl wrote: post #245
Entinel wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do that before or while you get sued for violations? I think you should organize for reform of the law but it doesn't change the fact that in the meantime you'll be getting sued by 100 lawyers for violations.

I'd be surprised if there weren't any way to escape liability for by compliance within a reasonable timeframe from when a complaint is first made. This sort of thing is a predictable overhead for a business, and this firm has had a disability compliance statement since 2016 so it's not a wholly new concept to them. It seems equally possible that they decided for business reasons to scrap their free tier offering and…

> This sort of thing is a predictable overhead for a business

A lot of people who want to create online content are not part of a business, but they get snared up by these laws too.

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

#295

Post by kylebyproxy »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #287
tasuki wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each and every restaurant? I agree we want the world to be fair. I recently went through a difficult situation, during which my partner was unable to visit restaurants, even if they were wheelchair accessible. Was that fair? What about people who can't financially afford going to a restaurant? Is it more fair to exclude someone on the basis of their financial situation rather than based on their physical disability?…

Yes. Because if not each and every restaurant, who gets to pick and choose? If the restaurant owners, none. If the disabled, all. And there isn't really an in-between is there? So all is better than none. Are you arguing we shouldn't have such laws because they don't reach 100% of people? That's letting perfect be the enemy of good. > I recently went through a difficult situation, during which my partner was unable t…

> who gets to pick and choose?

Generally, that's the role of a legislature. We could, for instance, exempt restaurants unable to afford renovations from that burden. Unfortunately, there are sticklers like you that would rather those restaurant not exist.

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

#296

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

3836293648 wrote: post #291
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #78

Like complaints about the GDPR, these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it. It's not like these laws are without issue or room for abuse, in truth most laws are like this, but a lot of the time people don't know the law and don't care to put in the minimum effort to apply it. So we get people clamoring for free-market solutions which have demonstrably fa…

There's a major difference between this and GDPR complaints. The GDPR says you cannot abuse your customers. This is requiring someone who is offering a free service to spend a tonne of money on it because someone says that something they got for free isn't good enough.

This is requiring someone who runs a business not to discriminate against some of their customers on the website of their business where they sell courses and seminars with the aforementioned free clips.

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

#297

Post by kyleee »

collegeburner wrote: post #252
themitigating wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

also because the cost / feasibility of coming into compliance can vary greatly, ex some places basically don't have space for a ramp without wholesale changes to the building, etc.

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

#298

Post by hedora »

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…

See also, Scott Johnson. He files bogus shakedown suits over wheelchair accessibility throughout the state.

Happily, the first hit is this article:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/attorney-scott-johns...

It's nice to see karma at work.

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

#299

Post by krainboltgreene »

kylebyproxy wrote: post #295
ThatPlayer wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Because if not each and every restaurant, who gets to pick and choose? If the restaurant owners, none. If the disabled, all. And there isn't really an in-between is there? So all is better than none. Are you arguing we shouldn't have such laws because they don't reach 100% of people? That's letting perfect be the enemy of good. > I recently went through a difficult situation, during which my partner was unable t…

> who gets to pick and choose? Generally, that's the role of a legislature. We could, for instance, exempt restaurants unable to afford renovations from that burden. Unfortunately, there are sticklers like you that would rather those restaurant not exist.

> Generally, that's the role of a legislature.

Not only would this be an insane job for the legislature, they aren't equipped to handle the volume.

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

#300

Post by Dylan16807 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #228
Dylan16807 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

$30k a year is a notable amount of money, sure.

But in terms of paying for non-english subtitling? A single hour of video could eat 1-2% of that!

I can easily see a situation where it's an enormous and disproportionate burden. Imagine a twitch streamer that does 20 hours a week and makes $4000 a month. If they had to pay $5 a minute for a subtitling service, which is lower than what I'm seeing for many languages, they'd go bankrupt within the first week.

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