27 ms·

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

235 points by avip 4y ago

Guidii 4y ago
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?
- zackees 4y ago
  Israeli law wants subtitles on all videos.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  His videos aren't subtitled, and are required to include subtitles.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    What if you used excerpts from Shakespeare for subtitles, regardless of the video's actual content?
    - incone123 4y ago
      Then they wouldn't be subtitles.
      - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
        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.
        incone123 4y ago
        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?
        jen20 4y ago
        > 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.
        incone123 4y ago
        You're not making a good faith argument.
        rsstack 4y ago
        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-media-equiv-captions 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 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F8.html
        rat87 4y ago
        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
  - ortusdux 4y ago
    Upload the videos to a private YouTube channel and then download the autogenerated subtitles?
    - rsstack 4y ago
      Doesn't work in Hebrew.
      - tluyben2 4y ago
        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?
        rsstack 4y ago
        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.
- ergonaught 4y ago
  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."
  - behringer 4y ago
    That is a lot of students. If he's got more than 500 students then he definitely needs to worry about accessibility.
    - thiht 4y ago
      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?
- mike_d 4y ago
  The last line mentioned having to caption videos, so I believe this is the accessibility issue.
- skywhopper 4y ago
  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.
  - aerostable_slug 4y ago
    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).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mywittyname 4y ago
  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.
  - iepathos 4y ago
    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.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    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.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      > 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.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  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.
  - alonmln 4y ago
    Not if the videos are in Hebrew. English and other languages have excellent support and tools that less common languages don't.
    - warkdarrior 4y ago
      Couldn't you feed the English auto-generated subtitles through Google Translate?
      - Entinel 4y ago
        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.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        How would you get English subtitles from videos in Hebrew?
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      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.
sgt 4y ago
Sounds like someone giving up way too early.
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  > Sounds like someone giving up way too early. Sounds like someone has never been on the business end of a lawsuit
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Lawsuits are terrifying for an average person. They are also expensive.
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  It’s like saying you’re going to stop development of a new product because patent trolls exist.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    That sometimes sounds like a good idea.
  - manfre 4y ago
    Not simply existing, but targeting you directly. Big difference.
  - phil9909 4y ago
    There is a big difference between taking a risk to make a profit and taking a risk to provide something for free.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Sounds like you're offering to do the work.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    What a wonderful idea! I've sent him a tweet offering to help and get access to the videos in order to transcribe them.
jslaD 4y ago
crummy 4y ago
My phone can autocaption audio from any website, I assume there are services that would do this for videos. Is this worth considering?
- aerostable_slug 4y ago
  There are a variety of services out there. Many are quite inexpensive and produce extremely good results (as in translating idioms & slang from one language to another in an effective manner). We do this at work all the time because we serve an audience that speak a relatively large number of languages. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  Then why does the author need to add them? People who want subtitles should use that or pay someone to do a transcription.
- fencepost 4y ago
  My phone can autocaption audio from any website 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?
golemotron 4y ago
Time to register a new domain and incorporate someplace else.
pwinnski 4y ago
"Thanks to [a lack of subtitles on all of my videos], I [choose] to delete my websites" rather than add subtitles.
- Xylakant 4y ago
  It’s their content, offered for free. It would be great if they would add subtitles, but it’s asking them to invest extra labor or money to do so - for free again. I mourn the loss of the content, but I understand their decision.
  - butz 4y ago
    Add a paywall to videos and any other problematic content, fund production of subtitles that way. Or just move them to Patreon or similar platform, so they technically are on different website.
- mminer237 4y ago
  Accurate subtitles are expensive. He's willing to spend some effort to help some people but not some more effort and a lot of money to help some more people.
josephcsible 4y ago
This is a problem with accessibility laws in general, not with Israel in particular. Remember when UC Berkeley was a victim of the same kind of attack? https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-online-vide/ https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...
- twblalock 4y ago
  It’s boneheaded stuff like this that turned me against most accessibility laws in general. They sound like a good idea, but the implementations tend to make the perfect the enemy of the good and raise the barrier to entry too high for anyone who doesn’t have their own legal team.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    There needs to be a system where accessibility issues can be raised and addressed without allowing attorneys to profiteer from the system.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      Most countries do this through government enforcement of regulations through licensing, fees and fines. The US actively avoids this in favor of having private citizens enforce regulations through lawsuits.
      - hedora 4y ago
        The US gets this right (businesses can only be successfully sued if they ignore complaints). California and New York are the only states where you can sue for damages before giving the business a chance to fix it. Those are the states where the ADA is abused.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Why, so the arbitrators of that system can profit instead? And so the people who appoint them can profit from having such a lucrative power?
synthpop 4y ago
Not much of a description of the new accessibility requirements, so I don't think people can have much insight about what exactly broke down here. I'm guessing if a website has more than 500 viewers/visitors a month, it's required that the videos must be captioned? Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? This all seems a bit dramatic from the guy, but I've never heard of this accessibility law nor am I familiar with how Israel enforces such things, so some more context would be appreciated.
- xupybd 4y ago
  That sounds expensive for something that he is giving away free.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    I feel like accessibility laws should be targeting businesses. If there isn't a carve out for personally hosted free content, that's a horrible oversight.
  - slaymaker1907 4y ago
    I think this is the big issue. Subtitling video is much more difficult than just recording it and while maybe reasonable for well funded groups, it isn't for your average one person shop. 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.
  - synthpop 4y ago
    Then if it's free, can it really be considered a business in the eyes of the state? Why aren't free auto-generated captions from YouTube sufficient for appeasing the law if no money is being made by the creator from the work? Is it being targeted despite being free because YouTube is still generating ad revenue? Which would mean that it should be YouTube's responsibility for content on its platform to meet the new accessibility standard? Again, I don't know how legal affairs like this work over there and he didn't elaborate, so readers are basically forced to ask questions like this in order to actually understand or sympathize with what's happening here.
user_7832 4y ago
Hey OP if you are reading this - could you not perhaps use one of the recent free voice to text converters (I think openAI recently released one - whisper, Mozilla also had an old one that was bought by Baidu I think) to add subtitles? - assuming the language is covered (edit Hebrew does appear to be covered by whisper) 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rado 4y ago
Good riddance. Don't forget the innocent subscription and cookie popups.
armchairhacker 4y ago
you should add subtitles to your videos. 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
- jonas21 4y ago
  I don't know the specifics of this law, but in other cases, automatically-generated captions have been found to not be good enough. https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/news/significance-harvard%E2%80%99s-settlement-video-accessibility https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/news/significance-harvard...
  - armchairhacker 4y ago
    YouTube has automatically-generated captions. What makes his content under the law different than YouTube?
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      YouTube can afford good lawyers, so they get to play by different rules. What, you thought the playing field was level?
    - jonas21 4y ago
      YouTube doesn't create the content. They host content created by others. It's the creator's responsibility to comply with accessibility laws. 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: https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/
pnw 4y ago
This already happens in the US with ADA laws, and it will happen with California's new privacy and wage transparency laws. Unfortunately every time you create a new law with a private right of action, lawyers will monetize it at industrial scale. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-disabilities-act.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-d...
- munk-a 4y ago
  Well, a lot of corporate compliance in the US is, by design, set up to be private action instigated. Unless you're running directly afoul of the EPA or some other government organization then the enforcement instigation is meant to be triggered by harm to an individual that seeks redress. 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.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Have many judges thrown out accessibility lawsuits?
- anaisbetts 4y ago
  You might say that this is bad (and on its face, it certainly does feel that way), but OTOH, it rapidly resulted in an enormous quality-of-life change for disabled people, it is the reason that the US is vastly more accessible than many other places
mdmglr 4y ago
Wouldn’t an easy fix be to switch to a domain managed by a more sane organization? Like .com? And of course not use an Israeli hosting providers.
- bragr 4y ago
  Looking at the sites on wayback[1], and it appears that they are all Hebrew language tutorials, so I suspect the '.il' TLD is an important signal to potential victors in this regard. And since this means the audience is almost entirely Israeli, it doesn't make much sense from a web performance perspective to host elsewhere. Just my $0.02. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220513045030/http://www.pythonbook.co.il/wordpress/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220513045030/http://www.python...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's also likely the case that hosting outside the country doesn't absolve an entity in that country from whatever requirements apply to it, just like European companies can't skirt the GDPR by hosting the servers in the US.
troon-lover 4y ago
snotrockets 4y ago
micromacrofoot 4y ago
- josephcsible 4y ago
  That's not true, though. If it were true, he'd add DRM or something to his videos to prevent them from using their own auto-captioning services, rather than just not spending a boatload of money on captioning them for them.
danny_taco 4y ago
People with disabilities often struggle to find content they can consume because it's not a11y friendly. Unfortunately in this case lawyers are capitalizing on this law that was made to help people with disabilities to go after websites that are not a11y friendly. 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.
- pfortuny 4y ago
  He has been helping people. Please do not frame this as “not helping”. Frame this as what it is: an excellent example of abuse of the law which is per se wrong and harmful.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > 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".
- carapace 4y ago
  This. 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.
namesbc 4y ago
It is really easy to add subtitles to videos now-a-days
- sib 4y ago
  Please provide this service for free to the author of the article. (Because that is what he is being asked / required to do...)
throwaway4837 4y ago
This is like saying you can't post a poster on a bulletin board if it doesn't follow a specific format. These laws make no sense and are a perfect example of out-of-touch policy. It should be my prerogative as to whether or not I care about the disabled market. I _should_ care if I'm a good person, but it shouldn't prevent me from being able to serve other markets.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  > It should be my prerogative as to whether or not I care about the disabled market 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.
  - invalidname 4y ago
    The failure in these laws is the freedom to sue. That removes the burden from the government and places it on lawyers who try to capitalize on it. A lawyer can then use this as a money making scheme regardless of the size of an individual. This is the failure of the ADA too. 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.
    - advisedwang 4y ago
      On the other hand, we can't rely on state attourneys to protect the rights of minorities. Many would, but they can just as easily not enforce such a law. In fact, because disabled people are a small voting block, elected state attourneys really are not incentivised to do so. (This is why we need rights in a democracy - protecting minority interests that a government representing majority interests is not incentivised to care about). 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.
angst_ridden 4y ago
There's a firm in Southern California that's suing restaurants / small theaters / community organizations / etc after bulk-scanning web sites for embedded video that lack links to caption files. It's all ADA abuse, lawsuits in the $5k-$7k range. A huge percentage of those sued don't have the means to fight back, and settle. The company that's suing people had some incompetent coder write their scanner, so it only 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.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  I genuinely do not understand how they can sleep at night. Thanks for pushing back.
  - plussed_reader 4y ago
    "If it were wrong it would be illegal."
    - littlestymaar 4y ago
      - ccvannorman 4y ago
        This "wonder" you find yourself with is a result of the mismatch between observable data, statistics, and our intuition. On the news we may read about Arson (or other "angry actions" by individuals) but this is highly negative selection bias - the actual incidence rate is near zero. Because we have a lot of data like this (negative news that you are exposed to) we tend to over-estimate the incidence rate of arson (e.g. 1% instead of 0.001%) So, when you ask the question "Why isn't $action provoking more $arson here", the answer is simple: statistically speaking, each individual is extremely unlikely to do arson (or similar), so even though they've been perturbed, the incidence doesn't really go up. Another way to say it: Everyone knows the ROI on arson is negative, no matter how upset you are, crime is never worth it as a response, because you have zero upside. So almost everyone (overwhelming majority) don't do this (but we might think they would, again because we're exposed to negative bias news data)
vfclists 4y ago
Why not move the videos into a different jurisdiction? Just the domain name, or register an overseas company which pays you royalties or something.
yurtin 4y ago
It is of course his choice not to subtitle his videos to help those of us who are hard of hearing. 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.
- ars 4y ago
  Not in Hebrew there aren't.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Like complaints about the GDPR, these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it. 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.
- ohCh6zos 4y ago
  I feel like a law that is open to exploitation is an issue it itself.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it. 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.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    Laws are not programming. All laws are vague, it's the entire purview of the justice system to work through the vagueness and ambiguity, ask any judge.
    - chatterhead 4y ago
      You mean the judges who belong to the same guild as the lawyers and most lawmakers (who are lawyers) that use the ambiguity of the laws they make to profit?
- 3836293648 4y ago
  There's a major difference between this and GDPR complaints. The GDPR says you cannot abuse your customers. This is requiring someone who is offering a free service to spend a tonne of money on it because someone says that something they got for free isn't good enough.
draw_down 4y ago
almog 4y ago
> Israel excels in bureaucracy. Ask every Israeli businessman. I don’t have an alternative but to close these websites. Providing free resources to assist others with learning programming for free has become too expensive. 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/ 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.co.il/wordpress/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210510183659/http://www.phpbook... * http://web.archive.org/web/20220513044948/http://www.htmlbook.co.il/wordpress/ 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 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.
- permo-w 4y ago
  it also doesn’t help that the article doesn’t illustrate what any of the accessibility laws actually require
shmerl 4y ago
Wait, it's illegal to publish sites that offer free information if they don't comply with some accessibility rules?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Usually this comes into play with captioning (it's why YouTube in the US asks if the video uploaded was ever broadcast on TV), but yes, often "it's free" is not an excuse to avoid accessibility laws. 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)
rsstack 4y ago
Just a fun tidbit that I only realized today: 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).
- azernik 4y ago
  Generally, the Israeli regulatory approach is built on the realization that a country the size of a large urban area just cannot spend the money and time to write its own regs. Everything from pharmaceuticals to (recently) food are regulated based on "use rules from the US or EU [depending on market] with a list of specific Israeli changes".
  - rsstack 4y ago
    The EU rules also use WCAG, so I don't know if it's their size as much as WCAG just being that good.
im3w1l 4y ago
The darknet: Your source for child pornography, drugs, and educational videos without subtitles.
rekabis 4y ago
Become an Estonian eCitizen, launch an Estonian company with you as a shareholder, use a dot-com with appropriately themed subdomains for each portal, host internationally, avoid using anything local to Israel, and even if you have Hebrew content you can tell them to go pound sand.
strangattractor 4y ago
Time for you to incorporate in the US or Estonia. https://stripe.com/atlas https://stripe.com/atlas https://incorporate.ee/ https://incorporate.ee/
Test0129 4y ago
Not surprised. I remember pushing back pretty aggressively against some people trying to get this stuff codified into law here. Ostensibly it stands to benefit people by increasing accessibility. However, it hamstrings the average Joe because as it turns out the ADA is a labyrinth of gotchas and compliance is often expensive. In the case of software, a simple app doable by one person could easily take 10x as long if you are required by law to do this. 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.
60secs 4y ago
Hypothetically, what if you were to host the content on github and then reference that content from the website?
Tade0 4y ago
This sounds like the sort of scam that a certain company in my corner of the world tried to pull - they bought rights to map data and threatened small businesses that had maps on their websites(even small, "hand-drawn" ones) that they'll report them to the authorities for copyright infringement(prosecuted ex officio), unless the businesses in question pay a "licensing fee". 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.
- rat87 4y ago
  What scam? This is disability accomodation law that tells companies have to follow the professional web dev accessibility standards
nojvek 4y ago
Similar to https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-online-vide/ https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o... > 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?
- mannerheim 4y ago
  The court determined that auto-generated captions were not good enough.
thorum 4y ago
The problem of web accessibility is that, while critically important to a large segment of society (over 40% of Americans have some kind of disability) - the world doesn’t actually have the resources to make all existing content accessible with current methods. Every university has mountains of inaccessible PDFs and videos, and no budget for doing anything about it. I suspect the only practical solution to this problem is AI.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lallysingh 4y ago
Isn't transcription easy to do automatically now? If you're just doing it for compliance you can do it pretty cheap AFAICT.
HWR_14 4y ago
If there is a more reliable source than a free content provider self-reporting on what drove them to put everything behind paywalls, I'm not sure I know of one.
permo-w 4y ago
just host them elsewhere under a different TLD. I understand this is a protest piece against Israeli govt policy, but it’s disingenuous to say that he’ll have to delete his websites also what actually are the accessibility requirements? as it is it’s really hard to judge the validity of the complaints in this article
cush 4y ago
Any sort of regulation around web accessibility is so much more nuanced than building a ramp up to a restaurant, having the right clearance under a sink, or offering braille menus. It's orders of magnitude more complex in scale and requirements. 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.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  I was surprised to find how easily https://accessibe.com/ https://accessibe.com/ can add some accessibility options to an existing site this week. I was half expecting it to break the site styles when toggling through the options but it did a really fine job while keeping the character of the site intact. It was a one-line script include. Sure, it’s complex to build that all from scratch but thankfully we have services coming in to help.
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    My understanding is that most of these "just as a script" type tools are of minimal value to people with real disabilities. Most of the options they offer are already available as browser settings or external tools in the first place, and any additional support could be more effectively done by just making the right choices in the first place: proper accessibility tags on things like images and icons, text over iconography (or better yet text with iconography), proper semantic markup, etc. For more complicated things you need to start working more with aria tags, but in my experience they're a lot less complicated than they seem. And in card where interaction is involved (e.g. drop-down search bars) are usually better handled by either the browser, or an external library that will also handle the accessibility aspects. (This is true for pretty much all users - I use a lot of websites where their custom widgets are really hard to navigate if I'm using the keyboard. Doing this properly benefits pretty much everyone.) 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.
addicted 4y ago
There are free captions generators for many languages that can do this. It seems like a no brainer to just go down that path. Maybe even invite your viewers to share errors in the captions.
Kenji 4y ago
roody15 4y ago
The dark side of these ADA like laws regarding websites (IMO) is that they are often used as a way of controlling content. Big companies like traffic to hit their sites and services so they actively support legislation that limits the playing field. 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.
fijiaarone 4y ago
Wouldn’t that make them less accessible?
a-ha 4y ago

235 points by avip 4y ago

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?

zackees 4y ago
Israeli law wants subtitles on all videos.
pwinnski 4y ago
His videos aren't subtitled, and are required to include subtitles.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  What if you used excerpts from Shakespeare for subtitles, regardless of the video's actual content?
  - incone123 4y ago
    Then they wouldn't be subtitles.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      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.
      - incone123 4y ago
        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?
        jen20 4y ago
        > 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.
        incone123 4y ago
        You're not making a good faith argument.
      - rsstack 4y ago
        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-media-equiv-captions 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 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/failures/F8.html
      - rat87 4y ago
        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
- ortusdux 4y ago
  Upload the videos to a private YouTube channel and then download the autogenerated subtitles?
  - rsstack 4y ago
    Doesn't work in Hebrew.
    - tluyben2 4y ago
      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?
      - rsstack 4y ago
        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.
ergonaught 4y ago
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."
- behringer 4y ago
  That is a lot of students. If he's got more than 500 students then he definitely needs to worry about accessibility.
  - thiht 4y ago
    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?
mike_d 4y ago
The last line mentioned having to caption videos, so I believe this is the accessibility issue.
skywhopper 4y ago
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.
- aerostable_slug 4y ago
  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).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mywittyname 4y ago
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.
- iepathos 4y ago
  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.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  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.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    > 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.
anigbrowl 4y ago
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.
- alonmln 4y ago
  Not if the videos are in Hebrew. English and other languages have excellent support and tools that less common languages don't.
  - warkdarrior 4y ago
    Couldn't you feed the English auto-generated subtitles through Google Translate?
    - Entinel 4y ago
      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.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      How would you get English subtitles from videos in Hebrew?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    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.

sgt 4y ago

Sounds like someone giving up way too early.

dmitrygr 4y ago
> Sounds like someone giving up way too early. Sounds like someone has never been on the business end of a lawsuit
BitwiseFool 4y ago
Lawsuits are terrifying for an average person. They are also expensive.
Our_Benefactors 4y ago
It’s like saying you’re going to stop development of a new product because patent trolls exist.
- nottorp 4y ago
  That sometimes sounds like a good idea.
- manfre 4y ago
  Not simply existing, but targeting you directly. Big difference.
- phil9909 4y ago
  There is a big difference between taking a risk to make a profit and taking a risk to provide something for free.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Sounds like you're offering to do the work.
- fragmede 4y ago
  What a wonderful idea! I've sent him a tweet offering to help and get access to the videos in order to transcribe them.

jslaD 4y ago

crummy 4y ago

My phone can autocaption audio from any website, I assume there are services that would do this for videos. Is this worth considering?

aerostable_slug 4y ago
There are a variety of services out there. Many are quite inexpensive and produce extremely good results (as in translating idioms & slang from one language to another in an effective manner). We do this at work all the time because we serve an audience that speak a relatively large number of languages. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
edflsafoiewq 4y ago
Then why does the author need to add them? People who want subtitles should use that or pay someone to do a transcription.
fencepost 4y ago
My phone can autocaption audio from any website 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?

golemotron 4y ago

Time to register a new domain and incorporate someplace else.

pwinnski 4y ago

"Thanks to [a lack of subtitles on all of my videos], I [choose] to delete my websites" rather than add subtitles.

Xylakant 4y ago
It’s their content, offered for free. It would be great if they would add subtitles, but it’s asking them to invest extra labor or money to do so - for free again. I mourn the loss of the content, but I understand their decision.
- butz 4y ago
  Add a paywall to videos and any other problematic content, fund production of subtitles that way. Or just move them to Patreon or similar platform, so they technically are on different website.
mminer237 4y ago
Accurate subtitles are expensive. He's willing to spend some effort to help some people but not some more effort and a lot of money to help some more people.

josephcsible 4y ago

This is a problem with accessibility laws in general, not with Israel in particular. Remember when UC Berkeley was a victim of the same kind of attack? https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-online-vide/ https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o...

twblalock 4y ago
It’s boneheaded stuff like this that turned me against most accessibility laws in general. They sound like a good idea, but the implementations tend to make the perfect the enemy of the good and raise the barrier to entry too high for anyone who doesn’t have their own legal team.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  There needs to be a system where accessibility issues can be raised and addressed without allowing attorneys to profiteer from the system.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    Most countries do this through government enforcement of regulations through licensing, fees and fines. The US actively avoids this in favor of having private citizens enforce regulations through lawsuits.
    - hedora 4y ago
      The US gets this right (businesses can only be successfully sued if they ignore complaints). California and New York are the only states where you can sue for damages before giving the business a chance to fix it. Those are the states where the ADA is abused.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Why, so the arbitrators of that system can profit instead? And so the people who appoint them can profit from having such a lucrative power?

synthpop 4y ago

Not much of a description of the new accessibility requirements, so I don't think people can have much insight about what exactly broke down here. I'm guessing if a website has more than 500 viewers/visitors a month, it's required that the videos must be captioned? Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it? This all seems a bit dramatic from the guy, but I've never heard of this accessibility law nor am I familiar with how Israel enforces such things, so some more context would be appreciated.

xupybd 4y ago
That sounds expensive for something that he is giving away free.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I feel like accessibility laws should be targeting businesses. If there isn't a carve out for personally hosted free content, that's a horrible oversight.
- slaymaker1907 4y ago
  I think this is the big issue. Subtitling video is much more difficult than just recording it and while maybe reasonable for well funded groups, it isn't for your average one person shop. 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.
- synthpop 4y ago
  Then if it's free, can it really be considered a business in the eyes of the state? Why aren't free auto-generated captions from YouTube sufficient for appeasing the law if no money is being made by the creator from the work? Is it being targeted despite being free because YouTube is still generating ad revenue? Which would mean that it should be YouTube's responsibility for content on its platform to meet the new accessibility standard? Again, I don't know how legal affairs like this work over there and he didn't elaborate, so readers are basically forced to ask questions like this in order to actually understand or sympathize with what's happening here.

user_7832 4y ago

Hey OP if you are reading this - could you not perhaps use one of the recent free voice to text converters (I think openAI recently released one - whisper, Mozilla also had an old one that was bought by Baidu I think) to add subtitles? - assuming the language is covered (edit Hebrew does appear to be covered by whisper) 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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rado 4y ago

Good riddance. Don't forget the innocent subscription and cookie popups.

armchairhacker 4y ago

you should add subtitles to your videos. 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

jonas21 4y ago
I don't know the specifics of this law, but in other cases, automatically-generated captions have been found to not be good enough. https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/news/significance-harvard%E2%80%99s-settlement-video-accessibility https://www.nationaldeafcenter.org/news/significance-harvard...
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  YouTube has automatically-generated captions. What makes his content under the law different than YouTube?
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    YouTube can afford good lawyers, so they get to play by different rules. What, you thought the playing field was level?
  - jonas21 4y ago
    YouTube doesn't create the content. They host content created by others. It's the creator's responsibility to comply with accessibility laws. 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: https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/

pnw 4y ago

This already happens in the US with ADA laws, and it will happen with California's new privacy and wage transparency laws. Unfortunately every time you create a new law with a private right of action, lawyers will monetize it at industrial scale. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-disabilities-act.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-d...

munk-a 4y ago
Well, a lot of corporate compliance in the US is, by design, set up to be private action instigated. Unless you're running directly afoul of the EPA or some other government organization then the enforcement instigation is meant to be triggered by harm to an individual that seeks redress. 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.
- duxup 4y ago
  Have many judges thrown out accessibility lawsuits?
anaisbetts 4y ago
You might say that this is bad (and on its face, it certainly does feel that way), but OTOH, it rapidly resulted in an enormous quality-of-life change for disabled people, it is the reason that the US is vastly more accessible than many other places

mdmglr 4y ago

Wouldn’t an easy fix be to switch to a domain managed by a more sane organization? Like .com? And of course not use an Israeli hosting providers.

bragr 4y ago
Looking at the sites on wayback[1], and it appears that they are all Hebrew language tutorials, so I suspect the '.il' TLD is an important signal to potential victors in this regard. And since this means the audience is almost entirely Israeli, it doesn't make much sense from a web performance perspective to host elsewhere. Just my $0.02. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220513045030/http://www.pythonbook.co.il/wordpress/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220513045030/http://www.python...
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's also likely the case that hosting outside the country doesn't absolve an entity in that country from whatever requirements apply to it, just like European companies can't skirt the GDPR by hosting the servers in the US.

troon-lover 4y ago

snotrockets 4y ago

micromacrofoot 4y ago

josephcsible 4y ago
That's not true, though. If it were true, he'd add DRM or something to his videos to prevent them from using their own auto-captioning services, rather than just not spending a boatload of money on captioning them for them.

danny_taco 4y ago

People with disabilities often struggle to find content they can consume because it's not a11y friendly. Unfortunately in this case lawyers are capitalizing on this law that was made to help people with disabilities to go after websites that are not a11y friendly. 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.

pfortuny 4y ago
He has been helping people. Please do not frame this as “not helping”. Frame this as what it is: an excellent example of abuse of the law which is per se wrong and harmful.
fsckboy 4y ago
> 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".
carapace 4y ago
This. 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.

namesbc 4y ago

It is really easy to add subtitles to videos now-a-days

sib 4y ago
Please provide this service for free to the author of the article. (Because that is what he is being asked / required to do...)

throwaway4837 4y ago

This is like saying you can't post a poster on a bulletin board if it doesn't follow a specific format. These laws make no sense and are a perfect example of out-of-touch policy. It should be my prerogative as to whether or not I care about the disabled market. I _should_ care if I'm a good person, but it shouldn't prevent me from being able to serve other markets.

advisedwang 4y ago
> It should be my prerogative as to whether or not I care about the disabled market 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.
- invalidname 4y ago
  The failure in these laws is the freedom to sue. That removes the burden from the government and places it on lawyers who try to capitalize on it. A lawyer can then use this as a money making scheme regardless of the size of an individual. This is the failure of the ADA too. 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.
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    On the other hand, we can't rely on state attourneys to protect the rights of minorities. Many would, but they can just as easily not enforce such a law. In fact, because disabled people are a small voting block, elected state attourneys really are not incentivised to do so. (This is why we need rights in a democracy - protecting minority interests that a government representing majority interests is not incentivised to care about). 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.

angst_ridden 4y ago

There's a firm in Southern California that's suing restaurants / small theaters / community organizations / etc after bulk-scanning web sites for embedded video that lack links to caption files. It's all ADA abuse, lawsuits in the $5k-$7k range. A huge percentage of those sued don't have the means to fight back, and settle. The company that's suing people had some incompetent coder write their scanner, so it only 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.

Forgeties79 4y ago
I genuinely do not understand how they can sleep at night. Thanks for pushing back.
- plussed_reader 4y ago
  "If it were wrong it would be illegal."
  - littlestymaar 4y ago
    - ccvannorman 4y ago
      This "wonder" you find yourself with is a result of the mismatch between observable data, statistics, and our intuition. On the news we may read about Arson (or other "angry actions" by individuals) but this is highly negative selection bias - the actual incidence rate is near zero. Because we have a lot of data like this (negative news that you are exposed to) we tend to over-estimate the incidence rate of arson (e.g. 1% instead of 0.001%) So, when you ask the question "Why isn't $action provoking more $arson here", the answer is simple: statistically speaking, each individual is extremely unlikely to do arson (or similar), so even though they've been perturbed, the incidence doesn't really go up. Another way to say it: Everyone knows the ROI on arson is negative, no matter how upset you are, crime is never worth it as a response, because you have zero upside. So almost everyone (overwhelming majority) don't do this (but we might think they would, again because we're exposed to negative bias news data)

vfclists 4y ago

Why not move the videos into a different jurisdiction? Just the domain name, or register an overseas company which pays you royalties or something.

yurtin 4y ago

It is of course his choice not to subtitle his videos to help those of us who are hard of hearing. 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.

ars 4y ago
Not in Hebrew there aren't.

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

Like complaints about the GDPR, these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it. 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.

ohCh6zos 4y ago
I feel like a law that is open to exploitation is an issue it itself.
josephcsible 4y ago
> these types of blog posts are always worded like the law is the issue instead of the people who exploit it. 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.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Laws are not programming. All laws are vague, it's the entire purview of the justice system to work through the vagueness and ambiguity, ask any judge.
  - chatterhead 4y ago
    You mean the judges who belong to the same guild as the lawyers and most lawmakers (who are lawyers) that use the ambiguity of the laws they make to profit?
3836293648 4y ago
There's a major difference between this and GDPR complaints. The GDPR says you cannot abuse your customers. This is requiring someone who is offering a free service to spend a tonne of money on it because someone says that something they got for free isn't good enough.

draw_down 4y ago

almog 4y ago

> Israel excels in bureaucracy. Ask every Israeli businessman. I don’t have an alternative but to close these websites. Providing free resources to assist others with learning programming for free has become too expensive. 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/ 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.co.il/wordpress/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210510183659/http://www.phpbook... * http://web.archive.org/web/20220513044948/http://www.htmlbook.co.il/wordpress/ 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 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.

permo-w 4y ago
it also doesn’t help that the article doesn’t illustrate what any of the accessibility laws actually require

shmerl 4y ago

Wait, it's illegal to publish sites that offer free information if they don't comply with some accessibility rules?

bombcar 4y ago
Usually this comes into play with captioning (it's why YouTube in the US asks if the video uploaded was ever broadcast on TV), but yes, often "it's free" is not an excuse to avoid accessibility laws. 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)

rsstack 4y ago

Just a fun tidbit that I only realized today: 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).

azernik 4y ago
Generally, the Israeli regulatory approach is built on the realization that a country the size of a large urban area just cannot spend the money and time to write its own regs. Everything from pharmaceuticals to (recently) food are regulated based on "use rules from the US or EU [depending on market] with a list of specific Israeli changes".
- rsstack 4y ago
  The EU rules also use WCAG, so I don't know if it's their size as much as WCAG just being that good.

im3w1l 4y ago

The darknet: Your source for child pornography, drugs, and educational videos without subtitles.

rekabis 4y ago

Become an Estonian eCitizen, launch an Estonian company with you as a shareholder, use a dot-com with appropriately themed subdomains for each portal, host internationally, avoid using anything local to Israel, and even if you have Hebrew content you can tell them to go pound sand.

strangattractor 4y ago

Time for you to incorporate in the US or Estonia. https://stripe.com/atlas https://stripe.com/atlas https://incorporate.ee/ https://incorporate.ee/

Test0129 4y ago

Not surprised. I remember pushing back pretty aggressively against some people trying to get this stuff codified into law here. Ostensibly it stands to benefit people by increasing accessibility. However, it hamstrings the average Joe because as it turns out the ADA is a labyrinth of gotchas and compliance is often expensive. In the case of software, a simple app doable by one person could easily take 10x as long if you are required by law to do this. 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.

60secs 4y ago

Hypothetically, what if you were to host the content on github and then reference that content from the website?

Tade0 4y ago

This sounds like the sort of scam that a certain company in my corner of the world tried to pull - they bought rights to map data and threatened small businesses that had maps on their websites(even small, "hand-drawn" ones) that they'll report them to the authorities for copyright infringement(prosecuted ex officio), unless the businesses in question pay a "licensing fee". 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.

rat87 4y ago
What scam? This is disability accomodation law that tells companies have to follow the professional web dev accessibility standards

nojvek 4y ago

Similar to https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-online-vide/ https://reason.com/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-o... > 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?

mannerheim 4y ago
The court determined that auto-generated captions were not good enough.

thorum 4y ago

The problem of web accessibility is that, while critically important to a large segment of society (over 40% of Americans have some kind of disability) - the world doesn’t actually have the resources to make all existing content accessible with current methods. Every university has mountains of inaccessible PDFs and videos, and no budget for doing anything about it. I suspect the only practical solution to this problem is AI.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lallysingh 4y ago

Isn't transcription easy to do automatically now? If you're just doing it for compliance you can do it pretty cheap AFAICT.

HWR_14 4y ago

If there is a more reliable source than a free content provider self-reporting on what drove them to put everything behind paywalls, I'm not sure I know of one.

permo-w 4y ago

just host them elsewhere under a different TLD. I understand this is a protest piece against Israeli govt policy, but it’s disingenuous to say that he’ll have to delete his websites also what actually are the accessibility requirements? as it is it’s really hard to judge the validity of the complaints in this article

cush 4y ago

Any sort of regulation around web accessibility is so much more nuanced than building a ramp up to a restaurant, having the right clearance under a sink, or offering braille menus. It's orders of magnitude more complex in scale and requirements. 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.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
I was surprised to find how easily https://accessibe.com/ https://accessibe.com/ can add some accessibility options to an existing site this week. I was half expecting it to break the site styles when toggling through the options but it did a really fine job while keeping the character of the site intact. It was a one-line script include. Sure, it’s complex to build that all from scratch but thankfully we have services coming in to help.
- MrJohz 4y ago
  My understanding is that most of these "just as a script" type tools are of minimal value to people with real disabilities. Most of the options they offer are already available as browser settings or external tools in the first place, and any additional support could be more effectively done by just making the right choices in the first place: proper accessibility tags on things like images and icons, text over iconography (or better yet text with iconography), proper semantic markup, etc. For more complicated things you need to start working more with aria tags, but in my experience they're a lot less complicated than they seem. And in card where interaction is involved (e.g. drop-down search bars) are usually better handled by either the browser, or an external library that will also handle the accessibility aspects. (This is true for pretty much all users - I use a lot of websites where their custom widgets are really hard to navigate if I'm using the keyboard. Doing this properly benefits pretty much everyone.) 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.

addicted 4y ago

There are free captions generators for many languages that can do this. It seems like a no brainer to just go down that path. Maybe even invite your viewers to share errors in the captions.

Kenji 4y ago

roody15 4y ago

The dark side of these ADA like laws regarding websites (IMO) is that they are often used as a way of controlling content. Big companies like traffic to hit their sites and services so they actively support legislation that limits the playing field. 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.

fijiaarone 4y ago

Wouldn’t that make them less accessible?

a-ha 4y ago