Pornhub sued by deaf man over adult video site's alleged lack of subtitles | Hacker News Reader

Pornhub sued by deaf man over adult video site's alleged lack of subtitles

foxnews.com

40 pointskoolba34 comments

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This reminds me of a university (I can't remember which) that supposedly posted free videos of lectures on their website. The content was said to be absolutely awesome. Then they got sued for not having subtitles and the university decided to just take the videos down. It was a loss to all.

I believe that was s/Stanford/Berkeley. Automated text to speech is so cheap now though. Lectures could be uploaded to YouTube and Google would do it for them.

so that google can make money on their content?

Context is important. This is Berkeley. They can do text to speech at an inconsequential cost. Other websites probably not so much.

It's important to acknowledge economic/technical realities separately from value systems.

We can disagree on whether a society should provide for their blind members.

But it's harder to disagree on the proposition that Stanford can definitely provide subtitles for these videos without sacrificing anything of consequence on their end.

It's also difficult to disagree on the proposition that requiring this of all individual bloggers would be an onerous requirement on them.

It's also important that Berkeley is a public school, so a question is "should the government, or parts of the government, be inaccessible to blind people".

Right now it's hard to know what the current legal requirements even are, so we tend to only argue over what they should be. And that's more of a discussion of value than fact.

I still believe they shouldn't be obligated. It's stuff they're giving away for free. It's like giving a beggar a sandwich and then having to compensate the beggar for having included cheese in the sandwich I gifted them when they're lactose-intolerant. I'd just not give away sandwiches in the future, then.

Most people would agree we need clearer legal framework around this.

I like a business vs home analogy. If you build a storefront, it needs to be wheelchair accessible. That seems reasonable to me.

If I build a home in the middle of nowhere, my own home does not have to be wheelchair accessible but if I want to build a home in a city, that city may require my home to be wheelchair accessible.

I suspect Berkeley thought they were building an addition on their home, not their business.

Still, it's clear that my analogy is NOT how it works in the real world. There's a critical lack of clarity here, and answers are needed especially for blogs and personal sites.

I personally strongly believe that when we build things for people with disabilities, they become so much easier for people without disabilities to use. I'd personally like to see websites easier to use with screenreaders and other 3rd party aides. But I don't think it should apply to personal webpages or small blogs.

It doesn't really matter what I think though. The legal requirements today are quite unknown.

The analogy fails. Consider instead a charity kitchen in a town with a fairly substantial Jewish or Muslim community, but the charity kitchen insists on serving pork.

Here are some statistics about hearing loss: https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics...

They are enlightening. 25 % of people between 65 and 75 are hearing-impaired, rising to 50 % of people over 75. What exactly is the argument for excluding the aged from Berkeley's online offerings? It would be wiser to argue in favour of accommodation for disabilities because it may be that you will need them sometime in the future.

> Consider instead a charity kitchen in a town with a fairly substantial Jewish or Muslim community, but the charity kitchen insists on serving pork.

...less sympathetic than GP's example, religion is a choice.

religion is a choice

That's true for both sides. Why someone would do charity but leave a well-defined group out of it is a mystery.

How about, instead of a charity kitchen, it's a restaurant that gives away its leftovers? If they only have pork leftovers, should they not give those away to those in need? By disallowing them, their choice would either be to throw the food in the trash or obtain other food to give away in addition to the pork. Of course, most businesses would just shrug and throw it away.

Are you seriously suggesting that a charity kitchen dispensing pork should be illegal?

Maybe Stanford too, but the case I know was Berkeley.

Edited mine to correct this. I think the Berkeley case has had a chilling effect on other universities, such as Stanford. They also have not released lecturers since then as far as I can tell.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It's super depressing. My friend made the impolite and glib comment that perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to have math classes online either because the mentally disabled can't understand them. Emotionally, it's a pretty bad argument. But it definitely stuck with me as an interesting point...

Interestingly enough, for the blind folks looking for adult entertainment Pornhub offers "described videos".

There's an interesting computer vision problem. Can we teach computers to narrate porn?

Narrated porn would not engage as much as regular porn ;(

There is excellent* speech to text now. YouTube uses it for auto cc. I guess it could be used in this case as well.

I imagine it could really be optimized as it would only need to pull from a dictionary with 100 words or so

And then they’d get sued over poor quality subtitles when the STT fails?

The headline is bursting at the seams with the promise of low effort jokes. Let us throw those tiny fish back into the pond.

A human being should be entitled to accessibility, especially by this point in time where much of it can be machine generated.

But entitled to damages? We are opening the doors to some very shady law firms to shake down tech companies based on laws that were written before the internet.

Accessibility is not an entitlement, it's a right.

What types of sites can be shut down for not having braille and subtitle support? Can I lose my hobby/blog domains?

I believe that's an open question currently and badly needs legal clarification.

One standard proposed at HN from time to time is that maybe websites with high revenue should be required to conform with a specific standard such as W3C's WCAG 2.1 AA.

But it's an open question and I don't know if lawmakers are even aware of WCAG, that would be nice.

I believe you're mostly correct in terms of current legal situation in the USA.

Downvotes are primarily going to be from people who would prefer that wasn't the case.

However, I believe most accessibility improvements must be "reasonable" accomodations and generally I think aren't intended to be onerous costs (unreasonable).

So there's room for debate on whether accessibility should NO LONGER be a right in the USA. And also room for debate on what's reasonable.

But I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law, due to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

> I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law

This is a global community, though. Many probably interpret the statement from a moral/idealistic standpoint rather than whether or not it's a legal right in any particular jurisdiction.

The situation's essentially the same in the UK (EU?) due to it being a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

You can't say 'well disabled people aren't the target demographic, so no I don't have a ramp' any more than you can say 'whites only'.

The other commenter didn't claim it was a moral (as opposed to statutory) right, but even if that was the intention, I think that's a reasonable position to take and argue for, even if others disagree.

It should be a class action suit if anything, but I can see there being an argument for it on platforms that meet a certain threshold of popularity.

What does the Internet not existing before the ADA have to do with it? Also, movies existed before the law did, and so did online services (for example, AOL, CompuServe).

By the way, the Internet existed, but it wasn't available to the general public.

Just gotta say. I really appreciate this comment.

But why should this right be absolute? Surely if there ever was a case for subtitles not being essential this is it. So if we accept it we have de facto risk for damages for all non-accessible commercial videos everywhere. This should have a considerable chilling effect.

I happen to feel this keenly since I'm in the process of dropping a client who insists of putting damage transfer in our consulting colaboration, in an industry vulnerable to GDPR fines. There is no hourly rate that can make me risk bankrupcy for a bug.

I'm sure this guy also reads playboy for the articles.

Someone watches those videos with the sound on?

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