Thanks to the Israeli accessibility law, I have to delete my websites
lifemichael.com
lifemichael.com
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 parses the TRACK tag from a video container in certain circumstances. I was able to defend an organization by demonstrating this.
A vigorous countersuit is in the discussion stages.
Happily, the first hit is this article:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/attorney-scott-johns...
It's nice to see karma at work.
Seems trial date is January 2023. He’s still doing it, but possibly some pushback from the legal system regarding standing (do you really intend to come back there)
well that's just cold.
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.
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.
Charger standardization around USB-C really isn't that abusive or produces much if any regulatory capture, and it is pretty easy to understand what needs to be done.
These disability laws hit every business with a website and there's no easy standard to show that websites are compliant, they are an example of regulatory capture since larger corporations will be able to hire the staff to audit and implement the changes required, and they're vague enough that they produce an army of lawyers.
The principle and intentions behind the disabilities laws are fine, but they either need to solely target larger firms or they need to have clear guidelines for what gets audited and remediated. If the government ran a free service which would scan your website and give you either a clean bill of health or a list of remediation steps that would be better. Tossing it over the fence to let the lawyers have a field day is poor.
My car light was broken once without me knowing. The police stopped us, gave an official notice. I should go to theur building in a week and show a working car light, or I would get a fine.
Here we have random people standing at the side of the street, demanding money from everyone with a minor spec of dust on their taillight.
There is no chance to cure.
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.
Odd complaint seeing as how Apple no longer includes chargers with iPhones, on environmental grounds. There are many people who complained about that, as well.
As for harming the environment, that's unrelated
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.
Both.
The EU people are large companies that can afford the legal costs, and capable of either changing charger or not.
The US people are small business that can often not afford the legal costs (ie settle wether guilty or not), and completely following the law is almost impossible if a manual mistake on a single video opens liability.
Sending random legal action letters and forcing small companies to settle hardly sounds like "enforcement" but rather blackmail/extortion.
I expect Walmart to pay people a "living wage" more than I expect that of a small business owner with three employees.
I expect a clean kitchen with sanitization stations from McDonalds more than I do from a kid selling lemonade.
I expect a trillion dollar company, or a bank, to have an accessible website more than I expect it from an individual running a blog.
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.
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.
Why?
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.
Google is specifically known to be using their fonts for tracking users across the web.
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.
If you are not located in Germany and do not have business there (I mean monetary business, one you can draw money from) then good luck for them trying to get something from you.
All the web server do is presenting the URL to the google server. You should be responsible for the behaviour of your computer and the web browser run on top of it.
"I'm sorry Officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that."
I think this article from yesterday might be related:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-and-los-a...
“Wheelchairs of Fortune”
https://web.archive.org/web/20220209194711/https://archives....
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.
You can refuse the cost and prepare for a possibly expensive battle, or pay the costs and call it a day.
Usually, you are guilty of the minor crime you're accused of, so they have a case.
A competent regulatory scheme would have had the government enforcing this from the beginning, instead of depending on private action that seldom happens, but here we are. Uber ignores taxi regulations, AirBnB ignores zoning regulations, and everyone ignores accessibility regulations.
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.
A "sidewalk" is a footpath adjacent to a road.
A "curb cut" is ramp from footpath to road.
non sequitur
For all the hate the "bloated" web frameworks get, the one thing they usually have out of the box is accessibility.
1. Or other assistive tech.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-d...
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 of that article from a few years ago "hiking has an able-ist problem" because hiking trails weren't wheelchair accessible. We can't fix all the things for people in wheelchairs (paved trails up half-dome?) or people who are blind (should the trails have megaphones every 10 feet saying "watch your step here because there's rocks"?).
Two of the lawsuits against Kwan and the cafe were filed by serial ADA litigants
https://padailypost.com/2019/05/01/cafe-closes-after-third-a...
It in no way excuses the frankly bullshit lawsuits the parent is referencing but in general I think everything should be accessible. Like in all things there needs to be an element of good faith. There’s a world of difference between painted lines being slightly faded and “I genuinely can’t get into your business.”
We’re talking about privately owned establishments. No one deserves to be able to go to these places. It’s a privilege to go, not a right. The disabled should have access to any public spaces, but extending that to private spaces is asinine.
Sorry no, I haven’t been to the ramen place, the state mandated they add a wheelchair ramp and they couldn’t afford it. Now it’s a Starbucks.
Who is actually winning here, again?
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?
Why stop there? There also needs to be a separate nut-free section of the restaurant for dining. Inaccessibility is frustrating but nuts are deadly!
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?
Btw, I love hiking. If I were to become disabled and not be able to go hiking, I'd miss it more than going to restaurants. Is that fair?
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 to visit restaurants, even if they were wheelchair accessible. Was that fair?
It is more fair than if restaurants weren't wheelchair accessible.
> Is it more fair to exclude someone on the basis of their financial situation rather than based on their physical disability?
It is more fair than if they were also excluded based on their physical disability.
>If I were to become disabled and not be able to go hiking, I'd miss it more than going to restaurants. Is that fair?
It is more fair than if you were also not able to go to restaurants.
You see? These are all still better. It is not perfect, but arguing that we should do away with these laws because they are not perfect doesn't help it become better, just worse.
I think this is why some laws state “reasonable accommodations”. If a ramp is impossible or unaffordable with the restaurants margins, what should be the course of action? Should the restaurant close? If so, that doesn’t actually improve accessibility.
The current law may already use this barometer and the horror story examples may be overblown, but at least this seems like a reasonable way to approach things.
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.
> 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?
2. I don't know what your situation was so I don't know but I think your point was that the world isn't fair so why. We strive to do our best within reason. Just because not every situation is fair isn't an argument against making more situations unfair.
3. On poor people not being able go:
A.No restaurant could afford to pay for all the meals if they were required to cover the cost for any person who can't afford it.
B. Most people can afford to go to almost restaurant at least once in their life. When does it become unfair? 2 times a year, 5 a week.
C. How would you determine who could afford it? how would the restaurant verify it?
D. If I spend all my money gambling then want to eat is that fair? If no. How would you determine what a person spent and catalog what's acceptable
E. Come on, this like one of those "they deserved it" remarks from the "being selfish is now socially acceptable " right wing crowd.
In the other two states (California and New York) there are cottage industries where people look for subtle infractions (even at businesses that have made good faith efforts to comply with the ADA), then file shake down suits.
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.
Suing every hole in the wall out of business is hardly in line with reasonable accommodation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_Pe...
Nobody "deserves" to go to a resturant.
Weren't they going to pave the sky to sea trail at one point? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyline-to-the-Sea_Trail
Only one party here is purposeful in their actions
This is one of many choices around enforcement that's available - and it seems to be much more generally palatable to Americans than increased government enforcement resources (like the government employing accessibility agents to review websites for compliance).
If you're small and everybody likes you this system often lets you get away with lots of violations - but when you grow in size or if someone is purposefully targeting you it does mean that they can shine an "unfair" amount of light on the particulars of your practice to make sure you're compliant. At the end of the day the good news is that judges have a very central role in mediating these disputes and if complaints are clearly irrational and made in bad faith they'll usually be thrown out - the bad news is that it takes a fair amount of money to get the gears on this process turning and there's no guarantee you'll ever get any of it back.
No it isn't. It's just evidence that the world isn't perfect. Those "scummy" lawyers are performing an important function, and if not for them things probably wouldn't be anywhere near as accessible for disabled people as they are now.
It's kind of ironic that the libertarian-types who are often the loudest ones condemning stuff like this are also the first to defend people similarly motivated by greed as performing important functions, such as price gougers and the like.
I've read court transcripts of attorneys who march into court wanting to measure the incline of a ramp with a 3 inch ruler (because a 6 inch ruler doesn't prove what they're after). Furthermore, they also want to measure a part of the ramp right under the railing where a handicapped person isn't even able to walk, because that's the only place they could find a violation. This is the type of behavior you get from some of these folks. The way the ADA is written encourages this type of behavior (which doesn't serve anyone but the attorney), because the laws are written so very poorly.
> It's kind of ironic that the libertarian-types who are often the loudest ones condemning stuff like this are also the first to defend people similarly motivated by greed as performing important functions, such as price gougers and the like.
There is no irony. There is a world of difference in acknowledging that someone has the right to do something as opposed to deciding whether that act is morale. For example, just because someone (e.g. the attorney) has the right to do something (e.g. practice law), I can also at the same time think their behavior (e.g. in the courtroom) is unethical. Furthermore like someone might sell a very poorly made product, they're allowed to do such things, but one could also still find that behavior terribly unethical. With these sorts of attorneys, any small good they may incidentally create, is drowned out by the splash damage they create. The pursuit of you and your family's interests is a moral ideal, that can be corrupted by people who do so without ethics nor regard for the damage they create.
Why "unfortunately"? It seems to me this is the intended outcome. It's how these laws actually get enforced.
That's by design. Megacorps can hire an army of lawyers, mom and pop can't. They'll lobby for "standards" only they can meet to squeeze the competition.
There's a whole different level of effort between recording a presentation and posting it and recording it, subtitling it, and posting it.
There's no kind of "attack" here. It's UC Berkley refusing to spend money to add subtitles.
There is maybe something here if the law was active before they made all the videos, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Lawyers have a distinct upper-hand here because they are doing this in bulk and are probably using this as more of a "side-gig" to fill in extra work hours that they can't otherwise bill to clients. So the opportunity costs for them are pretty low, basically court fees, but the potential earnings are pretty high, since it's probably cheaper to pay out the lawsuit than it would be to hire a lawyer to fight it.
Plus, these are a potentially huge lottery ticket. If the company fails to respond to the lawsuit, a default judgement is issued and who knows how much they could earn from that. So like 4 hours of work for tens of thousands in payouts.
And it's only mom-and-pop companies that suffer. Companies that can afford staff counsel are just going to spend the few hours to become compliant and get the lawsuit dismissed.
Getting sued sucks. You have to quickly come up with a retainer to give your counsel. Probably a few hundred or so to respond to the suit, but after that, five figures isn't unusual. Yeah, you'll get some of that back if you win, but you still have to be able to come up with it at short notice.
If a web site would rather take their ball and go home rather than comply with the law, we’ll that’s totally their valid option, but nobody is forcing them to do it.
I think it's about time we flattened the Great Pyramid at Giza for lack of wheelchair access.
Except that's not really what happened. The site has a bunch of videos that were legal when created, but are no longer legal. And rather than going back and bringing them up to code, the author has decided to shut down shop.
Plus, being compliant doesn't save them from having to deal with the lawsuits. As has been discussed throughout this thread, these laws are abused a lot to bully and shutdown smaller companies that don't have the resources to defend themselves.
I don't know what happens to sites that are collecting links to videos that were not made by the site author, because clearly the author can't modify other people's videos and can't rehost them without violating copyright. But a human judge wouldn't be fooled by it in this case :)
Also note: the law requires captions, not Hebrew captions. The captions must match the spoken language in the video.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/?versions=2.0#qr-medi...
Failure F8 seems relevant to the loophole: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F8.html
If there are some mistakes (due to sloppy or autogenerated speech to text) it might work but not if it's totally wrong
This doesn't seem like an onerous requirement to me. There is a variety of both commercial and free tools to automate that process, and while it would involve some effort in proofreading and uploading the subtitle data, that represents at most a few days of labor.
"Given the Israeli accessibility law, the use of the courses on this new website will be limited (up to 500 students). According to the Israeli accessibility law, unless this requirement is met, there will be a need to add subtitles to all video clips in all of the courses that the website includes."
"Can't this guy doing something for free do even more work, under threat of prosecution, for the putative but questionable benefit of a small minority?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20220603100412/http://javabook.c...
In these cases, it seems like it would be much more reasonable to allow scripts/transcripts in place of subtitles. Putting together a written version is something that many educators do already.
Yes, and that is neither cheap or easy.
I for instance script my videos, so I have the subtitles already, I just have no way of putting them in so I provide the transcript. Which seems fine for people.
Even for much less exotic languages such as French automatic speech recognition systems don't work or are extremely bad.
Either just auto-generate them with a service (can even use YouTube as someone mentioned), ask for the community to add subtitles, or hire transcribers if you’re willing to pay
Can re-show the videos one at a time when subtitles are added rather than immediately doing it to the full batch.
You could even just move the site to a Youtube channel, as youtube provides subtitles.
Besides getting around this, having subtitles or a transcription of your videos actually makes them more useful. My hearing is 100% fine but I find that subtitles make me absorb the information better.
I get that this is a PITA, and I agree that subtitles shouldn’t be required. But if you really want your site/videos to stay up it shouldn’t be that hard to just add the subtitles
https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/news/significance-harvard...
I don't know how it works in Israel, but in the US, the ADA requires educational institutions to provide equal access to deaf users. They can meet that requirement in several ways, including sign-language interpreters or closed captions. But automatically generated captions do not meet the requirement.
This applies whether the institution hosts the content themselves, on YouTube, or on any other service. For example, a few years ago, UC Berkeley had to take down over 20,000 of its videos from YouTube and iTunes because they only had automatic captions:
Imagine having to record your post in American sign language before being allowed to post it on Hacker News. At some point it becomes silly.
Seems like that would only be useful for deaf people actually at the event whereas deaf people could be better served by captions.
What if archive.org had to comply to this for all their videos, audio and sites (no matter the language); they can delete mostly everything at that point.
Not to mention: how about games? In game video, game content; many games from the 80s and 90s etc (or current ones but there I do think accessibility should be addressed where possible) can be played by people with certain kind of disabilities if ‘fixed’, but they won’t be or cannot be; they should be removed from the web?
They either comply with the ordinance or fight it in court if they think it goes against the letter of the law. If they don't like the law, petition their representatives to change the law.
It's just grifting at this point.
The problem isn't how easy it is, nor how we should do this. It's that someone has a gun to every small business' head telling them to spend money/time/resources on something they may not have the ability to do immediately. No one should be able to tell me how to run my company, or my life. It's up to me to decide to be compliant to accessibility and if I don't it may cost me customers. It's not like handicap ramps that save people's lives in fires. This is a transcription. Ostensibly not NEARLY as important as other ADA regulations. But because of it's ambiguity and relative ease to determine who and who isn't following using data miners it's a cash cow for legal vultures.
If youtube is the example, annunciation and speed greatly influence the accuracy, the the point that on some videos they're straight useless... even if easily understood by the human ear.
I'm positive that, in general, the web needs to do so much better when it comes to web accessibility, but we might not be ready for regulation without a lot of guardrail around what types of sites are regulated. At least start with government sites, education, etc. and work out the kinks first.
The other way of thinking about it is this: if these drop-in scripts were sufficient, why aren't people with disabilities using them via some sort of browser extension, thus negating any need for the law in the first place? After all, if it works so well, people with disabilities should have no issues browsing any site on their own... In practice, these scripts tend to oversell their benefits and be targeted at able-bodied people who don't have as good an idea of the full set of needs (and tools) that people with different disabilities have.
In general, being accessible is expensive, time consuming and requires care and forethought. Back in the days when businesses did get to decide whether or not they cared about the disabled (pre ADA in the us, for example) they largely decided they did not. This created a class of people shut out of the world. This is a bad outcome.
Accessibility laws need to be well crafted (which the israeli one may not be) and carefully balanced, but many societies decided to reduce the absolute freedom of choice for business owners in order to prevent a poverty stricken and secluded underclass of disabled people. I think that was a wise choice.
This works well for large, well established businesses. Businesses with big turnover and investment. They also have the financial ability to add accessibility. Unfortunately it doesn't work well for small businesses who are left defenseless against threats from lawyers.
In general, giving government more power without strong guardrails about how it's used it isn't very effective at making people's lives better.
You could imagine ways to make the private right of action work. Perhaps penalties and remedies for frivolous lawsuits like anti-SLAPP statutes. Or make it so that you can take a product/building/whatever through some approval process with some regulatory agency after which the product/building/whatever is presumed to be accessible and lawsuits have a higher burdern.
Less than 30 minutes later I was splayed out on the ground with my lower right leg broken clean in half and my tibia sticking out of my shin while an onlookers called me an ambulance. For 2 months afterwards I was confined to wheelchairs and walkers, and I only just recently was able to start walking independently again.
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People make comments like this because they think it's a disabled market with disabled people, and another market beside... it doesn't work like that.
No matter how young you are, how careful you are, how healthy you are, we are all one bad morning away from being disabled for an indeterminate amount of time. And we all benefit from accessibility because at any time we might need to rely on it.
There's this mentality of seeing accessibility as an overpriced nice to have that's akin to seeing insurance as an overpriced nice to have just because you haven't made a claim yet
We need laws like what the ADA affords to back accessibility because (for the vast majority of businesses) it will never be profitable to cater to the disabled at a high level of quality.
I mean look at the OP. They pivoted to being a paid product yet still they're saying that they want to skirt the law by limiting the class size instead of paying some transcribers to add subtitles that would honestly benefit everyone (especially for technical content)
The disabled deserve to be catered to regardless of profitability because the inverse is unjust: that they'd live with greatly reduced access to goods and services based on something completely out of their control
The US ADA has struck a pretty decent balance, few people are actively against wheelchair ramps, and elevators do add to the cost of a building but most buildings of that size are moderately expensive anyway.
But imagine if it was determined that the ADA required wheelchair ramps be installed at any house that was offering candy for trick-or-treating. The result would be entirely predictable; trick-or-treating would die out.
Much of this (and perhaps this case here) could be solved by forbidding the lawyers from profiting from it - you can sue someone for violating the ADA but you can't "win damages" - any such damages won would go to the state to help provide ADA accessibility.
The damages are the incentive to sue. If you don't have that, you might as well not have the law. Or you need to fund an agency for enforcement.
That's a really patronizing comment. If we're going there, I'd like someone to point out the law that says that "everything possible must be done for the disabled and borne by the people providing it".
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Did you read the article? The only requirement put on this person was to add subtitles.
Asking someone to add subtitles to their videos seen by thousands is like "requiring wheelchair ramps to be installed at any house that was offering candy for trick or treating"?
I mean even OP calls out the exemption for up to 500 users... that's a lot of trick or treaters for one house.
While there have been abuses of accessibility laws, this isn't that. This is definitely a lot closer to basic affordances like wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms. Actually if anything I clicked the link expecting to see someone had weaponized W3C-style guidelines and was raking them over using #111111 instead of #000000 for black or something... but subtitles?
They're even pivoting to running a for-profit business and still complaining about that basic affordance, so it's exactly appropriate to bring up those concepts.
Eventually they made the mistake of trying to silence a thread about them on a legal advice forum, which resulted in an interesting legal battle during which it was established that a fragment of a map does not constitute copyrighted material, so their threats were empty from the get go.
If someone wants to throw up a website that has tips for wiring home electricity, or how to fix old arcade cabinets .. they want this info on their platform.
This is unfortunate because there is no need to use youtube and other sites if you don’t want to.
Just because I decide to publish for free a simple website that has info on old arcade units from the late 80’s and early 90’s I should have no legal requirement to make it “accessible”. This is just a hobby and I like to toss information out on the web.
Now the suggestion of just use google/youtube and let them make it accessible … is a dark corporate controlled future of the web.
Israel did not invent its own accessibility standard. The law simply enforces "Israeli Standard 5568", which is a PDF that links to WCAG 2.0 with a short figure that changes certain compliance levels (e.g. captions are classified as Level AA instead of Level A).
If the only requirement is "subtitles" and not "100% accurate subtitles" or "time synced subs" it may be a bit of a headache, but not too bad.
Maybe before shutting down you should consider making your content a11y friendly by adding captions to your videos. It is extra work but consider you may be helping a portion of the population that is often underserved.
I cannot believe the amount of strident anti-accessibility sentiment in this thread, it has to be coming mostly from the young and able-bodied? This has already been discussed and the question is settled, to the point of being actual law: civilized societies make allowances for people with disabilities.
We are not some "Lord of the Flies" barbarians to say "f*ck the deaf" are we?
It's 2022, captioning is a solved problem.
This is a fact and he is disabled as such; you might be young and able bodied but he wants to listen to your comment in French otherwise he cannot understand it.
Nothing is solved in 2022 unless you are native english and don’t have a disability like some form of speech aphasia.
Even captioning is hard in other languages, like OP has to do it in Hebrew which is so much harder than english as you cannot really do auto caption and then change it around a bit like you can do with english.
Not saying that we shouldn’t do it, but it is not solved at all for many cases; you would basically want to pick the language and if you want subtitles or transcript in that language. We can do english (almost) auto, the rest (at least as far as I can read) is pretty crap.
And sure, you can hire a specialised company for it; we are talking about people providing free content and often making nothing or a few cents from that. Most won’t be companies, but private persons filming their hobbies. There is nothing to spend. Companies should put this in their budget, but there should be a startup/grace period: we don’t all have 100m$ investment (and many of these are violators; Airtable was(is?) a good example).
Requiring captioning for all content obviously puts more of a burden on someone. Have you close-captioned all videos you've uploaded to various platforms?
Going around with him in his electric wheelchair was a learning experience for me. Simple things like using the sidewalk or taking the bus could be extremely challenging for him. You want to talk about "burden" to me? Go sleep in a parking lot next to a crippled man for a few months and "then we'll talk" as the dramatic idiots like to say.
Civilized people make allowances for folks who, as we say, are challenged. It's only natural. It's no burden to be a good person, it's its own reward.
> Have you close-captioned all videos you've uploaded to various platforms?
FFS yes. It's not that bleedin' hard, innit?
I'm only bothering to type this because I have a level of basic respect for you bombcar based on some of your other comments. You're on the wrong side of this argument amigo.
My screen reader gets tripped up with whatever "f*ck" is supposed to mean, it sounds like a zipper.
I do think the loss of previously recorded course videos (https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...) that had been free in order to prevent being sued is a net loss though, and I think there are most likely much better ways to incentivize accessibility than allowing people to sue "without harm".
Perhaps the most important thing to point out is that if the videos are taken down the deaf will not be able to access them at all; which is worse than them only being able to access them by relying on someone to help them.
Note that I do understand in certain circumstances inequitable access can have knock on effects such that nobody having access is better than creating an unfair playing field: for example in the case of these previously recorded lectures enrolled students would have an unfair playing field in that deaf students wouldn't have access to the same resources students with hearing would. I agree this is a problem as deaf students deserve a level playing field with their peers. However there are options other than removing the videos, such as requiring the university provide accessibility support services to actually enrolled students. Those support services could create captions based on student request.
Additionally (though it would involve higher taxation) providing people with disabilities support they can access as a government service would also help a lot I think in terms of providing access without leading to existing good things being destroyed.
There are a lot of things I do support doing to make sure the deaf can, as much as possible, access these sorts of materials so describing my position as "fuck the deaf" feels.... uncharitable.
> I do think the loss of previously recorded course videos (https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...) that had been free in order to prevent being sued is a net loss though, and I think there are most likely much better ways to incentivize accessibility than allowing people to sue "without harm".
I agree completely. I feel compelled to point out that these accessibility laws would never have gained traction if we (speaking generally) had made things accessible in the first place, eh?
The thing that really bothers me about people being anti-accessibility (and there was a lot of strident strident BS in this thread) is the blindingly oblivious argument from "enlightened" self-interest, to wit: you (speaking generally) may well become deaf someday, or blind, or paralyzed or something. It happens, all the time. (And here I would add something about OXO and how making things easier for seniors makes them easier for everybody, etc... but the kettle is about to boil...) :)
In any event, let's remember the end goal: Michael Levin et. al. makes organ regeneration a reality and there are no more handicapped people. Everyone everywhere has everything in good working order. And we live for centuries too, eh?
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(I get off on irony. That last sentence of yours has me giggling. Cheers, well met.)
It is! Every deaf person I know has a handy device in their pocket that can 'listen' to the audio going on and output the text on the screen.
It probably makes more sense to have professional third parties handle accessibility than to try to force it upon the industry that decided to add 25MB of JS animations to their non-legally-compliant cookie popups, etc.
somebody has a handicap, they are not underserved, that's a political euphemism, they underappreciate the standard servings.
I'm all for helping people, but it needs to be in light of a cost-benefit calculation, including who pays the cost and who-all receives benefits, public and private goods (closed captions do benefit more than the deaf)... I guess I'm saying, this needs to be done in the light of day and judiciously, with more balance than just private aggrievement. If this guy in Israel or Berkeley is sharing material that we-the-people benefit from and think needs to be accessible, this "wound" should be allowed to fester a bit while a reasonable cure is found, rather than shutting the whole things down.
Reminds me of a thought I often have when old laws apply to novel new situations and harsh judgements are passed down, I wish the judge could rule "hey, nobody thought of this before, so we're going to let this one go, but we're gonna rule the opposite way in the future so correct the law, and/or get your act together".
I suspect the only practical solution to this problem is AI.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220513045030/http://www.python...
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 categories where the accessibility law applies (closest thing would be the educational services sector, which I don't think applies here) but I thought, well, maybe he's just being careful?
But what stroke me ad odd, other than never hearing about these free resources in Hebrew (my mother tongue), is that it seems odd for free resource provider to have _so many domain names_ in any language, but Hebrew in particular (.co.il domain names are expensive and Hebrew speakers is quite small even if you don't deduct those who feel comfortable studying in English).
So I clicked few of the links which by now redirect back from each of the the domain names to https://lifemichael.com/corporate/ where he offers his courses (which are not for free, not that there's any issue with that).
But I wanted to take a look what he offered in the past though these websites and plugging them into archive.org I found that each of them seemed to have served identical content, which prometes his non-free courses, including in-person courses (it's in Hebrew but it's easy to see that it seems identical even if you can't read the language):
* http://web.archive.org/web/20210510183659/http://www.phpbook...
* http://web.archive.org/web/20220513044948/http://www.htmlboo...
I see that he does have a youtube channel with free content though. It's in Enlish and I'm pretty sure there's no ground for the accessibility law to bite here (though I have no authority to skay so): https://www.youtube.com/c/lifemichael
At any rate, this post makes little sense to me in the context of free online resources as being subject to the Israeli accessibility law, and IMO the author does little to none in leading the reader to any other conclusion.
Since the websites he removed were mostly offering paid services, they may have been subject to the accessibility law is my guess.
It's an English version is just a partial translation so I'm not sure it'd be of much help.
The only benefit to our industry is for people not trying to make money you can release things anonymously and avoid the pain. Unfortunately for everyone else once this happens here it's curtains for small business.
> Berkeley had two choices: spend a fortune adding closed captioning to the videos, or remove them from public view. Cost-conscious administrators chose the latter option.
If the hosted on youtube, they would get auto generated captions for free correct? In this day and age, which open source models like Open AI whisper, almost every video could get auto captioned.
Does the law state how accurate the captions need to be?
It seems like a no brainer to just go down that path.
Maybe even invite your viewers to share errors in the captions.
How's its handling of Hebrew with intermingled programming language keywords in English and variable and procedure names that aren't going to be found in any dictionary?
The best services use a combination of automation and a human fluent in both languages. There are quite a lot of the latter who work from home in various countries and hence don't charge American-level rates.
Just the domain name, or register an overseas company which pays you royalties or something.
Many laws recognize this, and have exceptions built in. For example, the ADA itself:
>Exemptions and exclusions. This part does not apply to any private club (except to the extent that the facilities of the private club are made available to customers or patrons of a place of public accommodation), or to any religious entity or public entity.
(Amusingly enough it doesn't apply to airplanes or trains, as those are regulated elsewhere)
also what actually are the accessibility requirements?
as it is it’s really hard to judge the validity of the complaints in this article
(Because that is what he is being asked / required to do...)
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 failed to address these issues for decades and end up leaving behind all those people which accessibility laws were made for.
The law is the issue. To say otherwise would be like saying that we didn't need to fix Log4shell and should have instead just tried to do something about the people who exploited it.
Sounds like someone has never been on the business end of a lawsuit
No need to blame the law, when the solution to comply with it is readily available - there are plenty of subtitling services around, even mostly-automated ones.