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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

#301

Post by hedora »

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…

In most cases, businesses are given a grace period to address the complaint before civil liability creeps in. As I understand it, that is not the case in California or New York.

So, you can either hire a full time ADA attorney to continuously audit literally 100% of the public facing surface of your business, or pay random extortionists every time you (alegedly) violate an obscure ADA standard in some minor way.

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

#302

Post by tasuki »

TheNorthman wrote: post #275
Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

should all resturants also be vegan? Nut free? We don't want to segregate, right? Nobody "deserves" to go to a resturant.

Is being vegan a disability? Regarding nuts, I don't know about the rest of the world but in my country, restaurants are required to disclose allergens in their foods, if asked.

Disclosing allergens is a different thing though: that's akin to "disclosing" that the restaurant isn't wheelchair accessible.

Should all restaurants also be required to serve food for whatever combination of allergies one might have?

My mother has several food allergies, there are restaurants where she can't eat any meal. Would you welcome a law mandating each and every restaurant to start serving meals she can eat?

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

#303

Post by hedora »

orangepurple wrote: post #162
galangalalgol wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially a legal protection money racket. People running a racket never leave you with nothing left to lose. Most obviously because they can't come back for more. But also because people with nothing left to lose will burn down al Capone's house and not care that they are about to be killed in some horrible way. These legal rackets know if they hit you for something you can afford to pay and keep your busi…

Cameras don't work if the neighborhood transformer is down for unscheduled reconfiguration

These days, they do. Batteries and solar panels cost less then running a cable.

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

#304

Post by db48x »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #278
josephcsible wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If captioning videos were as easy and cheap as taking down a sign, then these would be equivalent.

It's a load-bearing sign, either way not important to the allegory I don't know anyone who would defend options 2 or 3 under any circumstances. In this scenario you also have 27 years to amortize the costs, enroll 40000 students every year who pay tuition and are ready to do free labour, receive 100 million dollars worth of donations every year, and over the course of these years completed a 2 billion, then a 3 billi…

Your straw–man situation isn’t relevant, and it doesn’t matter which option bystanders like us think is “right”. What matters is what is observed after the fact. If we observe that things with value are destroyed because of an accessibility law, then the law is a bad one.

Just three or four years ago one of the best restaurants in my town was shut down because the restrooms weren’t accessible. The restaurant owner hadn’t realized it was a problem; she didn’t own the building, and the building predates the ADA. 26 years ago when she moved in she had asked the owner to rebuild the restrooms, but the landlord refused. Then one day a lawyer walked into the restaurant, looked at the restrooms, and walked out. A week later he is back with a lawsuit. The landlord still doesn’t care because the lawsuit is against the restaurant owner, and if she goes out of business the landlord can have another tenant in there in a week.

Between the settlement, the cost of the remodel, and 9 months of lost revenue, the restaurant owner spent approximately half a million dollars on a restroom. Worse, she’s never had a customer in a wheelchair in the years since. Nobody except the lawyer and the contractors benefited at all; it’s pure broken–window fallacy.

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

#305

Post by gigel82 »

camillomiller wrote: post #265
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…

I mean... it is, isn't it?

Google is specifically known to be using their fonts for tracking users across the web.

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

#306

Post by nadavwr »

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…

I also sampled his scalabook domain on wayback machine, and for the life of me I couldn't find any scala book ever having been hosted there -- not within the last few years anyway. My impression is that these sites have always been more SEO than content, and that even now OP might just be hawking his merchandise.

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

#307

Post by tasuki »

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…

You do raise good points.

> If the restaurant owners, none. If the disabled, all. And there isn't really an in-between is there?

Are you sure there's no in-between? I gave this grand total of few seconds of thought. Could perhaps the government or the city step in and provide wheelchair accessibility to select restaurants, based on feasibility, cost, location, and perhaps some other criteria?

Restaurant owners suffer because of these laws. Are you 100% sure the suffering of the restaurant owners under these laws is lesser than the suffering of the disabled without these laws?

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

#308

Post by hedora »

tehwebguy wrote: post #203
angst_ridden wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That doesn't apply in California or New York. I heard California is trying to bring back the grace period.

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

#309

Post by hedora »

drc500free wrote: post #217
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…

You'll recognize the same rage that there was against the mcdonald's coffee lady. These cases get stoked by tort-reform interests to show "what's wrong with the legal system." It took several decades and a documentary for people to understand they were misled about that personal injury case, it will take a while for them to understand disability law.

Those cases are completely different from each other.

If McDonalds coffee lady was buying coffees everywhere, checking them with a thermometer, suing because she could have burnt herself, and then used the proceeds to hire more people to do the same in a profit sharing scheme then her case would be comparable to the current ADA abusers in California.

Instead, the McDonald's in question had been repeatedly warned by health inspectors, was in violation of corporate policy, and the woman was an actual customer that was hospitalized as a result of the business violating the law.

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

#310

Post by [deleted] »

camillomiller wrote: post #265
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…

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