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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

#331

Post by knewter »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #259
jacobsenscott wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Ahh yes, the ol' "only wealthy people may start a business" plan

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

#332

Post by robocat »

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…

How is the law firm profiting?

As a New Zealander, I think only the government can enforce similar laws. I am unsure whether a private citizen could get representation here, or whether there could be any civil penalties.

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

#333

Post by roenxi »

yucky wrote: post #266
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…

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?

Because that would be treating the value of an individual as dependent on the power of the entity they are interacting with, which is a bit weird.

It isn't really a defensible position to say that you have an interaction with someone and to work out how they ought behave you need to go and do a tally of their assets and mull over their balance sheets. It'd be tantamount to saying we'd need to know what Haim Michael's assets were to know how to feel about this article. The law shouldn't change depending on whether he is broke, has $100k in savings or is a multi-millionaire. The issue here under the law is whether disabled people can access his website or not.

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

#334

Post by yucky »

roenxi wrote: post #333
yucky wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because that would be treating the value of an individual as dependent on the power of the entity they are interacting with, which is a bit weird. It isn't really a defensible position to say that you have an interaction with someone and to work out how they ought behave you need to go and do a tally of their assets and mull over their balance sheets. It'd be tantamount to saying we'd need to know what Haim Michael's…

>The issue here under the law is whether disabled people can access his website or not.

A website is a work of art, and nobody has a right to someone else's art. Disabled or not.

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

#335

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> Now we have a comment that Californian web accessibility laws are being enforced

Sending random legal action letters and forcing small companies to settle hardly sounds like "enforcement" but rather blackmail/extortion.

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

#336

Post by ekianjo »

roenxi wrote: post #333
yucky wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because that would be treating the value of an individual as dependent on the power of the entity they are interacting with, which is a bit weird. It isn't really a defensible position to say that you have an interaction with someone and to work out how they ought behave you need to go and do a tally of their assets and mull over their balance sheets. It'd be tantamount to saying we'd need to know what Haim Michael's…

>The issue here under the law is whether disabled people can access his website or not.

Soon you will apply the same standard for video games too? After all, why can't people without arms enjoy the same video games as you do? This kind of line of thinking has no end in sight, and is purely aimed at killing smaller companies and reinforcing the centralization of a few actors.

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

#337

Post by BoorishBears »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #300
BoorishBears wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

The guy lives in Israel, and is making classes in a language he speaks, he's not going to get hoodwinked into paying $3000 an hour captions.

Just because there are offers for $3000 an hour subtitles to businesses with more money than sense doesn't mean he couldn't post this job on one of hundreds of translation markets that would this at thousandths of the cost you quoted.

-

And twitch streamer does not have to submit to this. Literally the preface to the exemptions:

> Websites providing a public service, such as utilities, education, health, must have accessible websites.

It's not a long article, but apparently you couldn't be bothered to even skim the one section explaining the exemptions.

But now before you go weaving an new intricate example of how oppressive it is to ask public services to be accessible, let me save you some trouble.

I understand this is Hacker News where I am sure you'd gladly spend days coming up with every contrarian corner case to basic affordances for the disabled in existence than accept, maybe just maybe, you were wrong based off your initial assessment of a situation.

Fortunately I don't have that problem, so I'll very enthusiastically leave it at that, feel free to believe what you will about providing basic subtitles for technical content.

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

#338

Post by nnf »

punyearthling wrote: post #194
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…

That's pretty specific - maybe a California thing - but I'd heard as an engineer, you just had to show an attempt was made at making your site accessible. Targeting specific ADA violations is odd to me.

Showing an attempt might or might not help you with a judge, but the attempt alone doesn’t release you from your accessibility obligations.

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

#339

Post by roenxi »

yucky wrote: post #334
roenxi wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that would be treating the value of an individual as dependent on the power of the entity they are interacting with, which is a bit weird. It isn't really a defensible position to say that you have an interaction with someone and to work out how they ought behave you need to go and do a tally of their assets and mull over their balance sheets. It'd be tantamount to saying we'd need to know what Haim Michael's…

>The issue here under the law is whether disabled people can access his website or not. A website is a work of art, and nobody has a right to someone else's art. Disabled or not.

On what basis do you say that? You seem to be in conflict with Israeli law on this one, and I think on a moral level that is a bit shaky. If your art could be appreciated by disabled people, it seems a bit questionable to assert that there is a 'right' to exclude them.

I want to be clear - I think all this regulatory interference is doing more harm than good. But I don't see why this case is different because it is working on behalf of disabled people rather than ... I can't figure out who the charger stuff is meant to be helping, I see a lot of people outraged that they bought 2x chargers, which seems like a funny group of people to be protecting.

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

#340

Post by nicbou »

slyall wrote: post #277
camillomiller wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have a small website that happens to be hosted in Germany since a German company donated a server. We had to add an "Impressum" with our contact details to make sure we didn't get hit with a letter demanding money from one of the law firms that specialise in shaking down sites that are missing them.

You can just tell them to sod off. The Impressum requirement is for German commercial websites. If you are not bound by this law, you don't have to obey it.
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