There's no way of knowing from the information provided if this is really "I can't do that" or "I just don't want to do that." What effort did he make? What cost was he facing? This is just a little foot-stomping rant. It might feel good, but provides little illumination.

Does your moral system really have no separation between "capable of doing X" and "obligated to do X under threat of prosecution"?

Sure, but the complaint is that the cost Is burdensome, but the details are lacking. One sees a lot of mountains being made of molehills on the interwebs.

That sounds expensive for something that he is giving away free.

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.

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.

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.

They were lead generation for his paid services. Unless premium means something different in Israel.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220603100412/http://javabook.c...

If the business case were here then we wouldn't need to argue anything. It seems natural that for some companies the business case is trivial; the question is if for some it's not, and whether the consequence is that those businesses should die.

> Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it

"Can't this guy doing something for free do even more work, under threat of prosecution, for the putative but questionable benefit of a small minority?"

This is a fair enough point, I'm not saying the host isn't being wronged by the state in this instance. It is a burden to fund such things that he may not reasonably be able to afford. But I don't know what the standards for required captions actually are because there was no effort made to elaborate or even link to the accessibility law being discussed. It's assumed that auto-generated captions won't work for one reason or another, since that would reasonably be the easiest and most accessible option (for the creator) to implement. I understand that professional captions cost money but cheap alternatives and community-driven efforts certainly exist. Respectfully, if the guy is hosting 15 websites just for these resources, it seems odd that he wouldn't make an effort to at least mention this circumstance or a timeline to shutdown with his users before a total ragequit. There's obviously many details missing throughout all this so while the situation is sad I don't think this is the best example to illustrate exactly what's going on in the HebrewNet.

> Couldn't this guy just hire a professional captioning service or offer transcripts to users that may need it?

Yes, and that is neither cheap or easy.

Whisper is free and classroom instruction should be a breeze and require little correction, as there likely isn't much background noise or music.

And it only works with English. As discussed elsewhere in the thread, the majority of the videos are in Hebrew.

Even for much less exotic languages such as French automatic speech recognition systems don't work or are extremely bad.

I mentioned Whisper because it works with a lot of languages. But I understand your confusion, because there are additional lightweight models that are only available for English. Its accuracy is less good for Hebrew, but instructional materials are likely optimal input.

https://github.com/openai/whisper

> And it only works with English.

Depending on how you define "work", Whisper also works with Hebrew. Not sure if the word error rate is acceptable though https://github.com/openai/whisper/#available-models-and-lang...

It is actually quite inexpensive for most and very easy, but expense is of course always measured in relative terms.

Is it easy though? I had a professor do it for his own videos because ‘it is easy’; it is a horror show; everything is badly out of sync etc. I don’t think it’s easy for an average person at all. I am a programmer but I have 2 left hands where it comes to video or photo editing and then it gets expensive fast. People here saying ‘it costs only $150/hr to fix’ probably don’t provide anything free nor have a small business. Throwing 1000s against something that will never make you a penny but is a hobby/something you like because of some lawyers is insanity.

I for instance script my videos, so I have the subtitles already, I just have no way of putting them in so I provide the transcript. Which seems fine for people.

I can't speak to your professor, but we regularly have many dozens of films subtitled and so far we've had sterling results and no complaints from our audience.

Agreed with the cost impact on a small business or nonprofit. We make money on the films so it's a no-brainer for us (and is legally required in places like Canada).