Some would argue that Pornhub (and its associated sites) has done quite a bit to improve the accessibility of its site, what with a new site for the visually impaired and close captioning on some videos for the deaf. But apparently that isn’t enough, because the company is being sued for not having enough closed-captioning subtitles.
New York man Yaroslave Suris is deaf, and he’s suing the porn site over claims that a lack of closed-captioning violates the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. Apparently he was trying to watch the videos Hot Step Aunt Babysits Disobedient Nephew,” “Sexy Cop Gets Witness to Talk”, and “Daddy 4K — Allison comes to Talk About Money to Her Boys’ Naughty Father” and found that he couldn’t understand the audio portion of the videos.
He even paid up for a premium subscription in the hopes that it would change things, only to claim that it did not. The premium subscription was then useless as a result, according to Suris. So he’s suing for Pornhub to add closed captioning, plus damages.
The weird thing is, though, is that Pornhub does offer closed captions. Or subtitles, whatever you want to call them. The feature was launched in June of 2018, is visible in the categories list, and claims to have 1,246 videos. Pornhub VP Cory Price has even commented on this fact, telling TMZ:
“We understand that Yaroslav Suris is suing Pornhub for claiming we’ve denied the deaf and hearing impaired access to our videos. While we do not generally comment on active lawsuits, we’d like to take this opportunity to point out that we do have a closed captions category.”
Granted the CC category doesn’t have nearly as many videos as others. It’s sitting between Celebrity and College on the official list, both of which have 7,668 and 11,706 videos respectively. The category launched with 1,000 videos, and clearly not much has publicly happened to increase that number by any significant amount.
Who knows how this will play out. [TMZ]
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.