Pornhub, the World's Biggest Adult Site, Gives Blind Users an Upgrade

Accessing the web presents unique challenges for the blind and visually impaired. Text-to-speech programs can be unreliable. Too many developers don’t follow best practices for navigating sites without visual cues. Destinations that lean heavily on images can prove inscrutable. They don’t have to, though. And Pornhub, the largest adult site on the web, is taking steps toward making its wares available even for those who can’t easily see it.

One doesn’t necessarily associate porn sites with conscientious site design. But Pornhub has a recent history of doing just that. Earlier this year, it implemented HTTPS encryption, making it safer to peruse its highly sensitive content. And last year, Pornhub took another major step toward accessibility by introducing a “Described Video” category, in which videos include a scripted voiceover that describes each scene in extensive detail.

Now, Pornhub will push its accessibility efforts further in significant ways. The site will now offer enlarged text and customized color contrasts, for viewers with limited visual acuity or colorblindness. It will introduce keyboard shortcuts to make navigation easier for the blind. And it will add alternative text to better describe images for visitors who cannot see them.

In combination, these features will make browsing Pornhub much easier for the blind and visually impaired—no small feat for a site that relies so much on imagery.

“The screen-reader technology that blind people use can’t yet read or analyze pictures,” says Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind. “At the very least, there need to be alt-tags that describe the image enough so that a blind person knows what the function of the image is. If you’re dealing with an image-heavy site that displays works of art or something like that, it becomes a little more difficult.”

Think of most captions you see online. They typically work in conjunction with the image, and build on those basics. But while omitting redundant details makes sense for sighted internet users, it leaves blind visitors without much to go on. It’s the difference between “A school trip to the American Museum of Natural History,” and “A group of teenagers stand next to each other looking up at a giant fiberglass model of a blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History.”

It’s also critical for functional icons, like shopping carts, to explain exactly what they are to users who can’t see them. In the case of Pornhub, that means easier navigation. “Screen readers will call out the name of the link or button so that our visually impaired user can better navigate the site,” says Pornhub vice-president Corey Price, “such as “Most Viewed Link,” or “Pornstars Link.”

The keyboard shortcuts should help with navigation as well. There are two specific to Pornhub now; the Escape key works as Back, and the S key brings up search. Pornhub is now also optimized to work with various screen readers.

“Each screen reader has its own set of keyboard shortcuts that its user must learn,” says Price. “We structured the site and its contents so that our users can easily navigate through the different regions of the site, including the navigation region and the video listings.”

For visually impaired and colorblind users, Pornhub increased the color contrast between the website text and background and mouseovers, in addition to upping the font size and weight. “Enhancing the ability to contrast colors or to flip the text color and the background color or things like that can be very helpful to people who have low vision, which means they’re legally and functionally blind but they have some vision left,” says Danielsen. “Maybe they’re not using text to speech or braille to read the site.”

You can find much of what Pornhub is enabling at major sites around the web, although Danielsen says the narrated videos and keyboard shortcuts goes a step beyond what might be considered standard. Pornhub also gets credit for enabling the accessibility upgrades across the entire platform; a visitor just has to select Visually Impaired mode, or click a link to that version of the site at the bottom of the page.

Pornhub embracing accessibility matters more than you might think, and not just because of the titillating content. According to analytics service Alexa, Pornhub is the 38th largest site on the internet. More people visit it on a daily basis than do Ebay, or Imgur, or WordPress. When web properties of that size act, it has an immediate, tangible impact for millions of people.

“Accessibility obviously is very important,” says Danielsen. “We believe that all websites that are providing products or services to the public should use accessibility best practices.”

Now, the world’s largest porn site has done just that, with particularly challenging content. And with the upgrade, whatever excuses the rest of the web may have had not to do the same have officially faded from view.

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