Pornhub Wants To Be More Accessible To The Blind

The site is reaching out to a visually impaired audience with narrated videos.
"Described video" makes it possible for blind or visually impaired people to enjoy the same films and programs as sighted people -- including porn.
"Described video" makes it possible for blind or visually impaired people to enjoy the same films and programs as sighted people -- including porn.
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There are more than 285 million people in the world who are blind or visually impaired, but not many porn websites cater to them.

Fortunately, Pornhub.com has just created a new category of porn called "described video" that adds special narration to already-existing porn films.

The female narrators fill in the details for visually impaired viewers, describing the setting, the actors, what positions they are in and even their outfits.

For instance, one video begins: "A white woman in a cheap-looking red power suit sits next to a tall, white, lanky, middle-aged man with brown hair, a white shirt, a gray suit and a red-striped tie."

Trust us, it gets slightly more exciting after that.

So far, Pornhub.com offers 50 enhanced-audio videos made from the site’s top-viewed straight, female-friendly, gay and bi videos.

Curious? Here's a mashup of some of the less-erotic scenes from various enhanced-audio porn clips on the site. The clips contain some expletives, but they're bleeped out, and the actors are clothed.

Pornhub Vice President Corey Price says the new genre makes porn more accessible to those who may not otherwise be able to appreciate it.

“It’s our way of giving back, and we’re excited to hear what people think,” Price told The Huffington Post by email. “With over 60 million people visiting our site each day, we did feel it important to start to include this type of more-accessible content on our platform though, given the relative ambiguity of the concept and the sheer number of people who are visually impaired around the world.”

Adding descriptions to existing videos was a challenge, Price said.

“We put a considerable amount of effort into having the scripts for the added audio tracks be descriptive and enticing, to add enough while leaving enough space for the video’s original audio and having everything match up just right,” he explained.

Described video is intended for visually impaired porn fans, but Price suspects it may have broader appeal. Will they like it more than the videos they are accustomed to? You never know. Some just might,” he said.

It’s too soon to tell if the videos will be a hit with visually impaired people, however.

HuffPost reached out to the National Federation of the Blind, but the group declined to comment.

Still, Price is enthusiastic enough about his site’s audience-expanding efforts to consider closed-captioning grunts and moans for the hearing-impaired.

“This initiative is meant to mark the start of a larger dialogue surrounding accessibility and our site and how we can do better,” he said.

Whether the website can do anything for people with no sense of taste is another matter entirely.

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