Pornhub, the Latest Legal Target for Failing to Provide Closed Captioning for its Content
By Destiny Anderson
Last month, the popular Canadian-based adult entertainment website, Pornhub, along with its sister sites and parent company, MindGeek, were accused of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by Yaroslav Suris, a deaf New York resident. Suris claims that most of the site’s content lacks captions and, therefore, he does not have access to essential information needed to understand the videos’ storylines. Suris’ lawsuit launched from the view that this lack of access is discriminatory and violates the equal access laws outlined in the ADA.
Pornhub’s Vice President, Corey Price, said in a statement to Global News, “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.”[1]
I guess we will have to wait and see if having a closed captions category, rather than a site that is fully captioned, will be deemed non-discriminatory by the courts.
This lawsuit follows on the heels of a settlement reached in November 2019 between the National Association of the Deaf and Harvard University for a lawsuit also based on the grounds of alleged discrimination. In this case, the Ivy League school did not provide closed captioning for their public online content or, where closed captions displayed, they were so inaccurate that they were useless to the people who needed them. NAD’s win of their four-year litigation with Harvard will result in new guidelines that will enable the university’s online materials and the website to be accessible to deaf and hard of hearing learners.
A lawsuit filed in 2015 on similar grounds against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is still in the courts.
These types of lawsuits will not be going away anytime soon, at least not until content providers start taking inclusion seriously by providing high-quality captions.
According to Diversity & Inclusion writer Sarah Kim, “In the United States alone, approximately 50 million people are considered deaf or hard of hearing. The failure to provide appropriate accommodations to this community is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.” [2]
These laws were put into place for a reason- to protect people from discrimination. Not only is it the law to provide the hearing impaired and deaf communities with accurate captions, but it is also the morally right thing to do. Why exclude people when there is a means to include them?
We stand for inclusion. Do you?
References
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/6425543/deaf-man-sues-pornhub-closed-captioning/