One of the leading players in the adult film industry, PornHub, has recently announced that they are making a new service available to blind people. It is called “descriptive video” and the new service allows viewers to receive a live narration of the film clip they have chosen to watch.
There is an estimated 285 million blind or severely visually impaired people in the world and few, if any, websites pay them any mind. PornHub, however, wants to enhance their viewing experience for as many people as possible. The film clips are narrated by a female actress and she will set the scene, describe the set, describe the actors and actresses and even what everyone is wearing. From the initial set up, the narrator will continue to describe the film as it goes along without stepping on the audio that is already part of the clip. It is almost similar to a sports broadcast or listening to a book on tape. Thus far, the company has around 50 clips that have full narration and they plan to do many more.
“It’s our way of giving back and we really want to know what people think,” said Corey Price, who is Vice President of Operations at PornHub. “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 although given the relative ambiguity of the concept and the sheer number of people who are visually impaired around the world.”
Scripting and having the clips narrated seemed quite the challenge, relates Price.
“We put a considerable amount of effort into having the scripts for the loaded audio tracks to be descriptive and enticing; adding enough while leaving enough space for the video’s original audio and have everything matching up just right.”
While it remains a bit early in the game to measure the overall affects of the newly narrated clips, Price believes that PornHub will continue to make these videos accessible to the visually impaired and believes that they may be on the cutting edge with regard to making video more available to the blind everywhere else on the Web.
PHOTO CREDIT: PornHub