Last year Pornhub introduced a “Described Video” category, in which videos include a scripted voiceover that describes each scene in extensive detail.
Now, Pornhub 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.
“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.
Throughout the developmental phase of the optimized platform Pornhub consulted with visually impaired users who had reached out previously at accessibility@pornhub.com to help test and develop this new way of experiencing the site for users who have low vision, color deficiencies or are blind. Many of the changes made also help ease navigation and improve functionality of the site for visitors to the site using screen-reading software.
Following its rollout, Pornhub will continue to make optimizations to the platform to better enhance the overall experience. Users are encouraged to reach out with questions, concerns or recommendations to accessibility@pornhub.com.
To check out the newly optimized platform for visually impaired users, click here.
Source: Wired
