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?
I think the issue is less about the changes they need to make, and more of the spectre of a potential lawsuit.
Lawyers have a distinct upper-hand here because they are doing this in bulk and are probably using this as more of a "side-gig" to fill in extra work hours that they can't otherwise bill to clients. So the opportunity costs for them are pretty low, basically court fees, but the potential earnings are pretty high, since it's probably cheaper to pay out the lawsuit than it would be to hire a lawyer to fight it.
Plus, these are a potentially huge lottery ticket. If the company fails to respond to the lawsuit, a default judgement is issued and who knows how much they could earn from that. So like 4 hours of work for tens of thousands in payouts.
And it's only mom-and-pop companies that suffer. Companies that can afford staff counsel are just going to spend the few hours to become compliant and get the lawsuit dismissed.
Getting sued sucks. You have to quickly come up with a retainer to give your counsel. Probably a few hundred or so to respond to the suit, but after that, five figures isn't unusual. Yeah, you'll get some of that back if you win, but you still have to be able to come up with it at short notice.
Most importantly, plaintiffs do not need to prove damages in these accessibility lawsuits in israel, which is an awful desig,. So, these lawyers are likely not even impacted by the websites they are suing.
I have sympathy if your site is fully compliant with the law and you get sued in error, because of some bad automation or something. Now you have to hire a lawyer and eat that cost having done nothing wrong. It would be best if this didn’t happen. But if the law specifically says web videos need captions, and you put web videos up without captions and subsequently get sued… I dunno what to say—Surprised Pikachu Face?
If a web site would rather take their ball and go home rather than comply with the law, we’ll that’s totally their valid option, but nobody is forcing them to do it.
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.
"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."
Sounds like the videos need closed captions. Not a particularly difficult task to add them. It can be frustrating to go back and do this with older content, but captions make the videos accessible to a lot more people. Automated captioning software is also very high quality these days. There’s really no reason not to do it these days.
There are also commercial services that use a combination of automation and people fluent in the languages at play that are both very inexpensive and rather quick in terms of turnaround. We've used them for internationalizing training videos and the like as well as subtitling movies — we have to use essentially "airline" edits of movies, and sometimes they don't have the languages we need (e.g. French for Canadian customers).
mywittyname|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
ryandrake|3 years ago
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.
pwinnski|3 years ago
ortusdux|3 years ago
5e92cb50239222b|3 years ago
anigbrowl|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
ergonaught|3 years ago
"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|3 years ago
mike_d|3 years ago
zackees|3 years ago
skywhopper|3 years ago
aerostable_slug|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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