> If companies fail to comply with the European Accessibility Act they could be hit with fines and even prison sentences for senior staff.
That seems extremely excessive. A prime example of regulatory overreach.
That seems extremely excessive. A prime example of regulatory overreach.
The reality is that if you're ignoring this stuff, you are effectively eliminating a significant chunk of the population from participating in public life. It's about as bad as not having wheelchair ramps in public places, except the same software runs everywhere, so it's not the one virtual 'building' missing it, but all buildings made by the same architect.
You can impose arbitrarily high financial penalties, or even shut down the business, and that's plenty enough for the incentives to tilt in the correct direction. But prison? How the heck is that necessary for this?
In the EU the directives define a max range. Eg. 10% of global revenue or 20 million EUR whichever is higher.
Then the court figures out to what extend the company broke the law.
This system is needed to make sure that there are not some member states that are more forgiving and provides a competitive edge for companies to move there.
There is a range of fines, and a minor non-repeat infringement will obviously not get you the maximum penalty.
But consider the case where a person cannot book a medical appointment, or ask a refund, or claim insurance. The company will be fined, and if the offense does not get fixed than _at some point_ the responsible person may face jail time.
The judge in that case held that doing so is a privacy violation since the webpage now connects to Google without the users' consent. Total fine? €150. An extremely token amount because the blog owner obviously didn't intend to break the law. Quite the contrast to the million dollar fines you hear about for big tech companies.
Laws are not computer code. They're not run, unthinkingly, by a judge acting as a CPU.
We have humans (like juries) looking to see whether an offence was committed. Are they going to find someone guilty of an offence like this?
Then we have judges who look at the whole facts of a case to determine a sentence[0]. Would they think it proportionate for a first-time offender to be imprisoned for this?
On the other hand, if a large content creator has been repeatedly warned not to break the law and they've ignored those warnings, why shouldn't they be punished?
[0] Yes, some jurisdictions have sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.
"providing captions on an OF video" likely will not lead to full non-compliance.
Anywho, to what extend I agree with stuff like this is another conversation. Just don't misrepresent how the legal system works.