Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guidii | Hacker News Reader

The linked article doesn't give a lot of detail on the specific complaints or what you would need to do to make those sites accessible. Do you have any information on that?

View on HN

I think the issue is less about the changes they need to make, and more of the spectre of a potential lawsuit.

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.

Most importantly, plaintiffs do not need to prove damages in these accessibility lawsuits in israel, which is an awful desig,. So, these lawyers are likely not even impacted by the websites they are suing.

I have sympathy if your site is fully compliant with the law and you get sued in error, because of some bad automation or something. Now you have to hire a lawyer and eat that cost having done nothing wrong. It would be best if this didn’t happen. But if the law specifically says web videos need captions, and you put web videos up without captions and subsequently get sued… I dunno what to say—Surprised Pikachu Face?

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 have multiple issues with your argument, but the most pertinent in this case is that the law in question was passed only 5 years ago and apparently applies retroactively to all video content hosted on Israeli sites. This is the government deciding that the video you put up ten years ago can get you sued for failing to have a requirement they just passed. It imposes a financial and temporal burden on everyone and the actual, practical effect of it, in this case, is not to increase accessibility but reduce it - by reducing everyone's ability to access these learning materials.

Well-reasoned.

I think it's about time we flattened the Great Pyramid at Giza for lack of wheelchair access.

> But if the law specifically says web videos need captions, and you put web videos up without captions and subsequently get sued…

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.

His videos aren't subtitled, and are required to include subtitles.

Upload the videos to a private YouTube channel and then download the autogenerated subtitles?

Doesn't work in Hebrew.

I was wondering if he uploads to YouTube, would the same still apply? I mean if he doesn’t link them but just uses YouTube? All videos on YouTube must also have Hebrew subs?

If his site qualifies as a public site in Israel, and the main content of the site is the videos, it would be required. Since his sites' purpose was almost entirely the videos, I think it would be hard for him to defend his case in court.

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.

What if you used excerpts from Shakespeare for subtitles, regardless of the video's actual content?

Then they wouldn't be subtitles.

I think the question is obvious — is this going to pass on a technicality or does the law stipulate that text is required to exactly follow the speech in audio? I'm asking because in my country that's how you usually pass various government audits — by following the letter of the law and ignoring its spirit. I've had to do it a few times at $DAYJOB because of budget constraints and other reasons.

The Israeli law uses WCAG's definition. I'm not kidding, the law refers to an "Israeli standard" which is just a PDF that links to WCAG and includes an errata of changes; e.g. captions are Level AA instead of Level A in the Israeli standard.

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

Don't know how Israel's courts work but in England and Wales judges will seek to implement the will of Parliament. That's done by, among other things, interpreting words as they are ordinarily used. Do you know anyone who would expect 'subtitles' to mean text unrelated to the video?

> Do you know anyone who would expect 'subtitles' to mean text unrelated to the video?

By this measure, I'd expect SUBtitles to be under the damn video, not overlaid on it.

You're not making a good faith argument.

No of course not the law is not stupid

If there are some mistakes (due to sloppy or autogenerated speech to text) it might work but not if it's totally wrong

Near the end: unless this requirement is met, there will be a need to add subtitles to all video clips in all of the courses

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.

Not if the videos are in Hebrew. English and other languages have excellent support and tools that less common languages don't.

Couldn't you feed the English auto-generated subtitles through Google Translate?

How would you get English subtitles from videos in Hebrew?

Anyone who has tried to do significant translation knows that Google Translate is pretty bad. If you just want to translate a word or even a single sentence, it's fine. But if you want to venture into larger pieces of text(like a script for example) then you couldn't do much worse than Google Translate.

There are definitely options available for Hebrew transcription, and Israel has no shortage of domestic computer talent. Human transcription services run about $150 per hour of program material, which is not a huge expense for a business. It's certainly an inconvenience, but a predictable one for the market they're operating in.

Except, OP is not a business; as is read from their post, their content is completely free and they make no money. Then 150 per hour is pretty steep.

There was at least one mentioned:

"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."

That is a lot of students. If he's got more than 500 students then he definitely needs to worry about accessibility.

Honest questions: if some students have a disability that makes it they can’t view a video of a lecture, how do they attend an actual lecture? Lectures aren’t more accessible than videos of a lecture, are they?

The last line mentioned having to caption videos, so I believe this is the accessibility issue.

Israeli law wants subtitles on all videos.

Sounds like the videos need closed captions. Not a particularly difficult task to add them. It can be frustrating to go back and do this with older content, but captions make the videos accessible to a lot more people. Automated captioning software is also very high quality these days. There’s really no reason not to do it these days.

There are also commercial services that use a combination of automation and people fluent in the languages at play that are both very inexpensive and rather quick in terms of turnaround. We've used them for internationalizing training videos and the like as well as subtitling movies — we have to use essentially "airline" edits of movies, and sometimes they don't have the languages we need (e.g. French for Canadian customers).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com