Porn for the Blind… Do we need it in Vancouver?
http://www.pornfortheblind.org/
Porn preview sites aren’t known for their usability. You’re familiar with the template, I’m sure. The standard design looks like someone spilled a box of dirty photos across a black laminate floor and then vandalized the result with several colors of primary paint. In all caps. With lots of misspellings and exclamation points!!!
It’s bad enough when you can see it. But what if you have a visual impairment? Your screen-reader software would probably spit out a few choice words and crash out of sheer spite.
Porn for the Blind, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., was established for the sole purpose of making the millions of free porn clips available online accessible to people with visual impairments.
Given the abundance of audio erotica, pornographic podcasts and adult online radio, you might think that Porn for the Blind is at best unnecessary, or at worst, a hoax.
Yet there’s something hot about the absolute amateur quality of the submissions, just like a homemade snapshot capturing real sexual energy can have more impact than a studio photograph of a professional model.
“We imagine that visually impaired people benefit from this service in many of the same ways that non-visually impaired people benefit from the raw hard-core pornography that’s being described,” says the site’s co-founder, who asked to be identified simply as Elmer.
The method? Volunteer audiodescribers watch porn preview videos and describe the content as it unfolds, using the site’s recording software to capture the audio and post it to the home page.
read more http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle
