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.
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.
non sequitur
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.
It sounds like you think there should be no disability accommodations. Is that the root of the disagreement?
I've been paid to implement accessibility. I made a lot of money.
A "sidewalk" is a footpath adjacent to a road.
A "curb cut" is ramp from footpath to road.
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.
I think this article from yesterday might be related:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/san-francisco-and-los-a...
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.
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.
Further, it is drawing lines on the basis of number of employees/operating revenue/etc (the use of the word “global” in this case is clearly a colloquial reference to a very large firm along these metrics), is already a very common and well understood basis for drawing such lines, so such and insinuation on your part that this is some ex post facto finger pointing is without serious grounding.
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.
A website is a work of art, and nobody has a right to someone else's art. Disabled or not.
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.
This argument is absurd. Nobody has a right to prevent someone form expressing themselves just because they can't enjoy it.
That is a bit of a strawman argument though, is there anyone saying that? The actual situation is likely more like if a blind person can't see your painting you have to describe it to them. And I don't see how this is going to fit in with your original point on multi-billion dollar corporations.
If we want to keep to the idea of absurd outcomes, why is it so much more absurd that Mr Michael has to make accessible videos but world's best phone design company isn't considered competent to design a phone? These are both pretty absurd.
Yes, you did. And then followed up with the same line of reasoning again in the next sentence:
> The actual situation is likely more like if a blind person can't see your painting you have to describe it to them.
But my painting is only meant to be appreciated visually because that is how I choose to express it. The idea that I should be forced to represent my art in a way I never intended it to be, is absurd.
But why you think that you can apply that sort of standard to yourself, but not see a level of absurdity in the EU commission trying to wrest phone design away from Apple of all companies is still a profound mystery even after all these posts. They have as much a "right" to design integrity as an artist does.
It has nothing to do with dignity it has to do with artistic vision. If you don't want to present your art in ways you don't intend it to be consumed, you shouldn't be forced. If someone else wants to do it for others, that's fine. You could even start a business taking art forms and describing them for people who can't appreciate them in their natural setting.
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.
I don't know about Sony and Nintendo, but Microsoft and 3rd parties on PC have absolutely ploughed resources into making sure that's the case.
Notable examples include the Xbox Adaptive Controller [1] which greatly simplifies making custom setups for the specific needs of gamers with limited motor control or limb difference etc.
Features like Co-pilot [2] which allow cooperative controller use.
And that's JUST from Microsoft, there's plenty more from third parties and hackers.
Hell, one absolute lunatic [3] has been playing COD and SF4 with a recorder (the musical instrument). You can absolutely build custom controllers, be that for limb difference or just to make ridiculous Twitch streams as you headshot someone with a C Sharp.
Most games now include the obvious traditional stuff like subtitles. Useful for me personally.
Plus stuff like visual changes for the visually impaired (inc specific palettes for colour blindness) are common.
And we're starting to see many more with newer "cognitive accessibility" options like motion sickness reduction presets for graphical options, objective assists and difficulty reduction, etc.
[1] https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/accessories/controllers/xbox-adap... [2] https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/account-profile/accessib... [3] https://www.twitch.tv/DeanoBeano
I think you're completely wrong on this. Gaming should be accessible and there's no excuse for it not to be in future.
It's not aimed at killing any companies. It's about enabling us all to kill each other, race each other, build stupid forts with each other, and hunt demons together. Armless or not.
Hence proving my point that this is the stuff of big companies. If you had to develop solutions as a small manufacturer because it is "mandated" you would go bankrupt before accomplishing anything
> I think you're completely wrong on this. Gaming should be accessible and there's no excuse for it not to be in future.
"should"'s are meaningless. Resources are limited and you can't expect to serve all the needs out there when you make a product. Making choices matter, and that's precisely why you cannot make a product for "everyone".
No, it doesn't and no it isn't. Your rhetorical question is fundamentally wrong, and I gave you examples to prove it.
And I'm not talking generally, I've destroyed the specific example you gave.
>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?
Yes. Yes they can.
But to address the other stuff you're saying...
Just because even big companies are doing it now, doesn't mean it is necessarily difficult or expensive. Microsoft went big and hard on it not because it needed massive investment, but because it warranted it and is a subject they're passionate about.
Accessibility is and deserves to be expected. There's no excuse for lacking it in the gaming space.
They did it at Microsoft scale and made a product that's effectively a standard now.
And disabled gamers represents more potential revenue. Win win.
(It wasn't immediate clear if you were arguing about the first or second part of the sentence. I'm assuming second, but in case it was the first "Sony and Nintendo" bit:
I didn't know the specifics of non-MS consoles because not owned a Nintendo console newer than a Wii, and have no reason to have a Playstation. Especially as many of the Sony exclusives are coming to PC anyway.
A quick look at PS4/PS5 accessibility features, they include RT transcription for squad comms in addition to standard closed captions, controller remapping, visual accessibility features. First game I picked to look at was TLoU Part 2 has a LOT of accessibility features with sensible presets for physical and cognitive disability.
And you possibly need an adapter, but you can use the Xbox Accessibility Controller with PS4/PS5 as well.)
All the controller-level stuff could literally be done by hobbyists and was done by hobbyists and small companies, and big companies.
A quick Google will show you stuff like the [Thomas] Controller from 2013.[1] AbleGamers have been going since mid-2000.
Big companies have started bringing economies of scale to help drive adoption. You are wrong with your fundamental premise, and I'm proving you wrong with the specific rhetorical question you posed.
And at the software level we're mostly talking about features that aren't expensive to implement. They're as close to free as you can get. Even solo devs can do the majority of it because it's largely stuff you'll have in for ease of debugging, localisation and QA.
With the possible exception of high-end new stuff like comms transcription, slap 'em under the right menu headers, add some sensible presets, GOOD TO GO.
It's basically a modern cheat menu.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2013/06/20/building-custom-game-control...
>"should"'s are meaningless.
No they aren't.
>Resources are limited and you can't expect to serve all the needs out there when you make a product.
Agreed.
>Making choices matter, and that's precisely why you cannot make a product for "everyone".
I'm not disputing that. But you're fundamentally wrong about accessibility. "Should" does matter, and the very example you used demonstrates why.
People without arms DO enjoy the same video games as I do. Just as it should be.
Edit: I forgot physical-level stuff with Nintendo. HORI (who aren't even Nintendo-sized, although not tiny either, have a similar product to the XAC for the Switch, the HORI Flex controller. [2] But you can use the XAC with the Switch anyway with adapters, possibly without adapters via BT.)
But while looking that up, I spotted a new line of Microsoft accessibility products ("Adaptive Accessories") that are hopefully dropping in a few days. Nice.
- Mandatory canteens.
- Mandatory retirement savings plan.
- Break rooms (in Sweden my company had a nap room that had to have a locked door from inside).
I assert that it is rational to expect a large bank or city government to have accessibility standards and at the same time, not expect Hacker News or a personal blog to have the same.
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
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.
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.
Sending random legal action letters and forcing small companies to settle hardly sounds like "enforcement" but rather blackmail/extortion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2. Assuming you're referring to the Telemediengesetz, there's a second law (Medienstaatsvertrag) which mandates an imprint for anything that's not strictly for "personal or family purposes". Depending on who you ask, those two terms also require a rather narrow reading, so anything beyond a strictly private family diary (careful not to make references to any outside persons or businesses, though, because those entities will then have a legal interest in being able to identify you in case you malign them!) or family pictures or your private Dropbox replacement (ideally all the above should be password-protected and therefore not accessible by the general public anyway) might again already be in a grey area.
2b. Additionally, blogs can enter another grey area where depending on what and how you're blogging about, they might be classified as a journalistic service offering and therefore require an extended imprint, too.
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.
Google is specifically known to be using their fonts for tracking users across the web.
The interesting thing specifically about the fonts case is that, unlike other privacy regulation that defines only fines, and not compensation/damages (fines are levied by the data protection authorities). However in the font case there was a precedent that awarded damages to the claimant in the tune of 500€. Now we see a wave of ambulance chasing lawyers exploiting this ruling to shake up companies. Sad, but potentially useful for privacy. IANAL and all that jazz.
I mean... is it?
"I'm sorry Officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that."
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that your lawyer will never tell you "just pay them" if they can suggest that you have a chance in court. That's how they get paid after all.
“Wheelchairs of Fortune”
https://web.archive.org/web/20220209194711/https://archives....
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-d...
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.
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"?).
Only one party here is purposeful in their actions
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.
Nobody "deserves" to go to a resturant.
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.
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?
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...
Suing is the enforcement mechanism chosen by the Israelis and the US, not the reasoning behind the requirement. The reasoning is: The disabled should have equal access to dining and it's not an undue burden to expect ramps outside of businesses. Most of the developed world is like this.
You might disagree with that reasoning but clearly a political majority in the US didn't and doesn't.
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.
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.
Not only would this be an insane job for the legislature, they aren't equipped to handle the volume.
> 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?
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.
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.
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!
If you wanted to rent an office, an apartment, or even a '5 x 10' self-storage unit, would you find it reasonable for Step 1 to be "hire a team of property lawyers and inspectors, to find out if the place I want to rent is in compliance with all current Federal, State, County, City, and Historical District laws, standards, rules, regulations..."? I'm thinking "no". "Accessibility" is one of many legal requirements for a restaurant, and very few of the people who might want to open a restaurant are property lawyers.
Penalizing the landlord is the only way to ensure that the lawsuit leads to curative action to the property rather than a tenant change without action.
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.
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?
Weren't they going to pave the sky to sea trail at one point? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyline-to-the-Sea_Trail
Why "unfortunately"? It seems to me this is the intended outcome. It's how these laws actually get enforced.
And hopefully one where a punitive fine/fee is not assessed. I don't think anyone who puts a video online should be punished if they didn't know they had to put closed captions on it.
There's a reason you can't claim ignorance of the law, because it would be extremely difficult to prove a person was aware something was illegal
Private suits like we see here (and other ADA-type regulations), where lawyers serve to profit directly, are the problem. Not accessibility regulations in general.
The unfortunate end result of that is certain segments of the population treated as second-class citizens.
I've heard excuses my entire life why accessibility laws are impossible and costly to apply. Meanwhile most infractions I see are egregious, easy to fix, and not punished.
With Covid we changed our entire lifestyle, we modified facilities with plastic screens, markers on the floors, instituted work from home, all of this practically overnight. Meanwhile all over the western world you've got decades-long ongoing lawsuits to make the most basic of accessibility accommodations available.
In addition to that every public space, physical or digital, is made and thought through according to very specific accessibility requirements: the normal range of human abilities. In the majority of cases it's not anymore complicated to make a website accessible for the people who sit slightly out of that range.
Open your website, put a blindfold on, install a screenreader and go through it. Next put on earplugs and do the same thing, next tie your arm behind your back and do the same thing. It sounds silly but it'll take two hours max and the issues will be self-evident.
Don't tell me the guy who has been at it for 15 years didn't have time to do this, and don't tell me he gives a crap if he didn't. He didn't give a crap then and he doesn't give a crap now. I'm sure he put plenty of thought into making his website responsive so it's accessible to mobile users but you don't see him complaining about that.
It literally exists: https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...
I could have done that with two interns over a summer in 2017, I've done much larger labeling projects with fewer resources. Had they even thought about accessibility before being called on it, they could even have done it over time as they were recording the videos, surely they put resources into that.
If a professor is lecturing a class that has no disabled students in it, does it really make sense to hire someone to sign or transcribe the lecture on the off chance someone disabled in the future who isn't even enrolled will want to watch it for free online? I can totally understand requiring the university to accommodate students who are currently enrolled with disabilities. But it doesn't seem right to mandate this for every individual lecture that has been recorded.
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 forethought you have when you care about these things. If you don't you can do the harder version where you hire a couple interns to do it afterward. It's not an insurmountable task either way.
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 expectation is that they accommodate actively enrolled students and if any disabled student wants to access some archived content they provide resources to do so. But I don't expect them to make the entire archive accessible on-demand for people online.
Presumably the UC System considered text-to-speech transcription. I assume that for some reason it would have been deemed inadequate or unacceptable to the people who brought the suit against them. You've mentioned having interns and volunteers do this, which, yes, they could, but it also implies that this work is indeed expensive. I'm also unsure if there is a certain level of quality or detail that is expected in order for it to be considered sufficiently accessible. Even if we generously assume a 1:2 ratio on the length of content vs the time to transcribe, edit, and verify, they would still be looking at something like 40,000 person hours. (~20,000 lectures, assuming 2 hour classes).
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.
The toilets on your campus, which you have kept untouched for 27 years since the law passed, have a sign at the entrance that says "whites-only".
Which of these options do you feel is right:
1) Pay someone to take down the sign
2) Condemn the toilet
3) Leave it as is.
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 billion dollars fund raising campaign.
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.
Do you know why she didn't have a single wheelchair-bound customer? Because disabled people can't go out to most restaurants due to lack of accessibility. If you think it's the broken-window fallacy, buy a 30$ wheelchair off craigslist and try to go have a date at a restaurant, make sure to call beforehand or you'll be stuck at the door, if you're lucky the accessible entrance won't be in the back-alley by the garbage bins. It's what I've been doing for 30 years and I didn't imagine it along with every other disabled person who relates the same exact experience. Also I assume she didn't complain about having to follow the health and safety code and the many stipulations it has with regards to her kitchen installation and the room it's built in. Maybe she should have made sure to rent a building that enables her business to follow the law, especially those passed years ago, rather than put her hands up when the landlord told her he'd do nothing.
In fact, the problem wasn’t even the ADA. The ADA is a Federal law, but California also has a similar accessibility law (the name of which I have forgotten). But while the ADA exempts old buildings from most of its requirements, the California law does not. This definitely makes the California law worse than the ADA; it destroys (and has destroyed) more valuable things than the ADA does.
> Maybe she should have made sure to rent a building that enables her business to follow the law
She thought she was! The building is decades older than the ADA, so she thought it was exempt. She wanted larger, more accessible restrooms, but if she had tried to remodel before opening the restaurant it would have bankrupted her. I’m surprised the recent remodel didn’t bankrupt the restaurant; I’m sure she had to take out a loan to cover it. Either way it’s destroyed at lot of value.
Going back to the subject of Berkeley briefly, it doesn’t matter how much money they have. What matters is that they had a collection of educational videos that they were making available for free, but they had to take it down because they couldn’t make it accessible. It doesn’t matter why they were incapable of it; it could be internal politics, budgeting problems, or simply a lack of manpower in that department. What matters is that they couldn’t get it done. That’s a destruction of value that could have been avoided if the law had been better written.
But we don't require every single house to have a wheelchair lift or ramp, but we can help pay for those to be installed on the houses that have someone who needs them.
Similarly, instead of requiring every website to comply with X, Y, or Zed, require it of the "commercial players" and provide assistance services to those who cannot access the rest of the web.
That's already the case. The ADA doesn't apply to your house or personal non-commercial websites.
When it’s a business I don’t feel quite “as bad” even if they were offering “free contents” - business free content is ALWAYS marketing and they can just pay marketing expenses or not do it.
I am hugely in favor of accessibility programs and legislation, but this is plainly a poor implementation. The fact is that, if you're differently abled, you will have different experiences and resources you can utilize. Government + enterprise services should absolutely accommodate this, but the average person or nonprofit should not be bound by these restrictions. You would never require all residential properties to have ramp access, for instance.
I wouldn't go that far. The uncomfortable truth is that we do have people who require special accommodations and those accommodations can often be expensive and rarely utilized. It makes sense to enforce such accommodations for things like building codes and government websites. But for most individuals making content online, full compliance is too costly for something that isn't going to be seen by a wide audience in the first place.
I think if the author hadn't been sued and someone approached him asking for captions there is a good chance that person could have been reasonably accommodated.
Why arbitrarily stop at wheelchairs?
Ultimately, if society thinks disabled people deserve full access to all private establishments, society should pay for it. Raise taxes, and fund it.
You could outlaw guns with this, eliminate interracial marriage, prevent women from voting, censor arbitrary speech.
[1] I don’t want to say crime because it’s a civil suit. Texas could in theory pass a law like this about anything.
This is a long way of saying that the Texas abortion law is a whole different league from ADA where you actually have to be harmed and prove it to sue.
It seems equally possible that they decided for business reasons to scrap their free tier offering and used this as an excuse to do so.
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.
There's a whole different level of effort between recording a presentation and posting it and recording it, subtitling it, and posting it.
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 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.
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.
By this measure, I'd expect SUBtitles to be under the damn video, not overlaid on it.
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
"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."
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.
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 think it's about time we flattened the Great Pyramid at Giza for lack of wheelchair access.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220603100412/http://javabook.c...
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.
Agreed with the cost impact on a small business or nonprofit. We make money on the films so it's a no-brainer for us (and is legally required in places like Canada).
Even for much less exotic languages such as French automatic speech recognition systems don't work or are extremely bad.
Depending on how you define "work", Whisper also works with Hebrew. Not sure if the word error rate is acceptable though https://github.com/openai/whisper/#available-models-and-lang...
"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?"
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:
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.
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.
* Israeli companies were given 22 years to comply. * Small businesses were required to comply as of 2020.
It's a ridiculous argument.
His about section: My name is Haim Michael, I am an eternal student and a lecturer. I chose to start running this web site to serve as my professional personal blog. Through this blog, I plan to provide more information about the services my company provides, publish my professional articles over the web and maintain my professional relationships both with my students and clients.
As per the regulations:
"Here are a few important points regarding IS 5568 compliance:
The law applies to public entities and every private organization that offers services to the general public. Private contractors with an average revenue of 100,000 New Shekels (NS) (Approximately $30,000 USD) or less are exempt from IS 5568. IS 5568 immediately applied to medium and large businesses with an average annual revenue of 300,000 NS or more. Small businesses must also comply with the law as of October 2020."
But thank you, this is insightful.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 year, which is not a small amount of traffic: https://illuminea.com/israeli-website-accessibility-guidelin...
At the end of the day OP is making a paid learning course of technical material and still whinging about needed to provide subtitles, yet that's exactly the kind of "pain" these laws should enforce.
There are predatory lawyers looking to sue people for having .01" too tall of a lip at their restaurant's door or something knowing full well they'll lose in court but want to settle... that's where these laws can go wrong. Not basic subtitles.
Honestly it feels like they wanted to launch a new paid service and got a free angle to share it from.
> 4) A business that makes 100,000 – 300,000 NIS per year has an exemption until 2020 and has to make an accessibility declaration and make at least the contact form accessible.
This probably is the exemption that expired.
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.
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.
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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.
What do you think is a reasonable price? Why is every company I find wrong?
It's not like you can hire an assistant that can work on it for many hours for a quarter of $30k/year.
And yeah I'm assuming he won't do it himself, which I think is reasonable. Service prices are fair here.
> thousandths of the cost you quoted.
Thousandths? So they can transcribe an hour of audio by hand for under a dollar? Be reasonable.
Though I think you did the math wrong, I was citing $300, and that's for a good few hours of labor to get everything written down, cleaned up, and synced.
If there's a way to do it with just a computer then ignore everything I said, but I thought the point here was that tech doesn't work well enough on hebrew.
> It's not a long article, but apparently you couldn't be bothered to even skim the one section explaining the exemptions.
I didn't click the link with exemptions because I was just giving an example of video content. Sorry? It doesn't invalidate my entire point. And what if those twitch streams were educational?
> 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.
I admit that just fine. But if you want to prove the "maybe" you need to give me a real citation on cost that shows it's affordable.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
Oh I totally agree that we need accessibility laws of some sort otherwise it would be almost entirely ignored, which is a terrible outcome. It is just think that clearly some places have crafted these laws in such a way as to also lead to some pretty terrible outcomes, and I personally think another approach would be better (I know this is very armchair general of me, I'm not an expert, and if people who work in this space think otherwise I'd be happy to listen).
I do think the enlightened self interest is an obvious argument, but I also would like to think that compassion alone would suffice for wanting to improve the quality of life for those who have been given a raw deal.
I'm glad my turn of phrase at the end was enjoyed.
Well met indeed.
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.
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.
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?
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
Think auto-subtitles in YouTube in English that often barely work.
In other languages it's much harder, because sentences don't necessarily work the same way as the system was designed/trained for.
When e.g Google Translate actually works really well, we can talk. Before that, human translators are needed.
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.