[brooding dramatic music]
June 12, 2023 10:57 PM Subscribe

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On? (SLAtlantic - archive)

From Described and Captioned Media Program:
Elements of Quality Captioning:
    • Accurate
        Errorless captions are the goal for each production.
    • Consistent
        Uniformity in style and presentation of all captioning features is crucial for viewer understanding.
    • Clear
        A complete textual representation of the audio, including speaker identification and non-speech information, provides clarity.
    • Readable
        Captions are displayed with enough time to be read completely, are in synchronization with the audio, and are not obscured by (nor do they obscure) the visual content.
    • Equal
        Equal access requires that the meaning and intention of the material is completely preserved.
Sound Effects and Music: [dried leaves crunching], [coins jangling], [house moaning] ...
And: Some Music descriptions in TV captions

posted by ShooBoo (155 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite

I have found that the cognitive processes I use for reading and writing are different from the cognitive processes that I use for speaking and listening, in some interesting and hard-to-describe ways. This makes watching television with the captions on into a very different experience from watching television with the captions off. I personally enjoy the process a lot less with the captions. It takes me back to discovering that, while I find reading Shakespeare's plays silently to be a difficult, boring slog, I find reading Shakespeare's plays out loud to be an awful lot of fun.

I have used closed-captioning as a language acquisition tool, watching television in the target language with closed captions also in the target language. That makes it much easier to parse the rapid fire of native speakers interacting with other native speakers. There are also gems like when the angry dog appears onscreen and the caption says [gruñido]. But even in a foreign language, having the script appear onscreen has side effects I dislike. For example, sometimes you'll wonder whether some background noise is significant foreshadowing or just some background noise. But if closed captions are showing you the entire script, then the significant noises are clearly delineated as [significant background noise].
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 11:36 PM on June 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

There seems to be a lot of streaming content whose sound design is just bad.

I don't think it's my ears, even though I am officially an Old now. I have a media server with loads of TV on it from the 1960s all the way to current, and the dialogue in almost all the older shows is way easier to understand than many of the newer ones, which seem to have much more music and sound effects piled carelessly on top of it.

Apple, in particular, makes productions that are much easier to follow with the subtitles on. Visually gorgeous, but their audio is almost always muddy.

Maybe I'd have an easier time of it if I weren't mixing 5.1 down to 2 channels for my fairly unexciting TV. But I have shows from the early 2010s also in 5.1, and almost all of those are easier to parse than Apple's modern output.
posted by flabdablet at 11:51 PM on June 12, 2023 [67 favorites]

Once again years spent watching subbed anime proved to be the superior choice. Processing onscreen subs is just automatic at this point and takes basically zero extra attention or concentration. Pity and contempt for this weak writer (though he comes across as absolutely insufferable).
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:52 PM on June 12, 2023 [36 favorites]

I, for one, am now your subtitle-using overlord. CAPTION ALL YOUR CONTENT AND KNEEL BEFORE ME.
posted by Soliloquy at 11:55 PM on June 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

I found the Atlantic article's swerves toward and away from ableism disturbing.

Sean Zdenek's academic work on accessibility and captioning in "Designing captions: Disruptive experiments with typography, color, icons, and effects" counters the assumption (also operating in the Atlantic article) that "Uniformity in style and presentation of all captioning features is crucial for viewer understanding." That assumed "uniformity" suggests the idea that text should recede into the background while language should not—that text, in other words, should be perfectly transparent in its un-stylized rendering of the language it represents. That's a really weird route toward a notion of perfect textual mimesis of language—and a notion obviously and easily complicated by comic book speech bubbles and sound effects.

Zdenek's work imagines captions as honoring the language captioned by treating it like poetry: as language of precisely the kind that the Atlantic author seeks in well-produced and well-written TV—language that calls attention to itself.
posted by vitia at 11:59 PM on June 12, 2023 [20 favorites]

I am sorry that subtitles killed this author's family
posted by taquito sunrise at 12:33 AM on June 13, 2023 [92 favorites]

the dialogue in almost all the older shows is way easier to understand than many of the newer ones

Oh... yeah now that you mention it!
My media diet at the moment includes a weekly voyager episode and a full SG1 binge, neither of which do I ever turn on subtitles. Conversely for almost all of the newer shows I've been watching I will usually turn on the subtitles.
I hadn't noticed this behaviour until now.

I think the muddification of audio mixing wasn't a thing in 2002 as a cut off.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 12:57 AM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

I find reading Shakespeare's plays silently to be a difficult, boring slog, I find reading Shakespeare's plays out loud to be an awful lot of fun

No mystery there. The plays were written to be performed, after all, and a good actor can make even the most obscure passages easy to understand simply through the emphasis and rhythm they give the reading.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:02 AM on June 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

Maybe if someone could persuade my father that subtitles were actually the cool thing that all the young people were doing, he wouldn’t need to have the TV so deafeningly loud.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 1:17 AM on June 13, 2023 [30 favorites]

I always have subtitles on, because it turns out I have this weird sensory thing with sounds and prefer the TV so quiet I can only just hear it and would miss a lot without subtitles.

Having the tv loud enough that I can actually make out all the words without prompting is... Too loud! It grates on my brain after not that long.

fantabulous timewaster that's an interesting point I had not considered. I do not think I process words and images that differently, I sometimes genuinely can't remember if a story is something that I read or watched.

(I like to watch anime dubbed AND subbed at the same time, which always got me weird looks amongst the anime crowd, but which I found particularly good because often the dub and the sub didn't match! And I liked having both perspectives!)
posted by stillnocturnal at 1:26 AM on June 13, 2023 [21 favorites]

Once again years spent watching subbed anime proved to be the superior choice. Processing onscreen subs is just automatic at this point and takes basically zero extra attention or concentration.[...]
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:52 AM on June 13

Your username makes this comment even better - I get the reference and I can just about guess when you started watching subbed anime from it.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 1:40 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I guess I'm the odd one out here, because I have absolutely zero problem making out what people are saying in movies, both old and new. I don't even get why people have problems with Christopher Nolan movies -- they all sound fine to me (with one exception, Bane, but that's the only one).

On the other hand, I have zero problem with other people watching with subtitles. Do whatcha wanna, it's no skin off my nose.

Personally, I'm not a big fan because when I'm looking at the bottom of the screen I'm not looking at the visuals. That's fine for some shows, where honestly it may as well be a radio play, but for movies with a lot of detail, I'd personally rather spend my time looking at the movie bits and just listening to the script bits.

One thing I will say I have strong feelings about, though, are subtitles in dark scenes. You're watching someone inching though a pitch-black room, trying to make out if that's just a shadow in the background or if it's a person, and then !!BLINDING WHITE SUBTITLES!!...and then dark again...darkness...your eyes start to become accustomed...and then...!!SOUND OF A PLATE FALLING ON THE FLOOR!!

My own personal problem, and it's nobody's fault, it's just something that sucks, is that I'm bilingual and live in a non-English-speaking country, which means that when I watch an English movie in the theaters, there are subtitles, and I just end out reading them all the time and noticing translation quirks and omissions and stylistic choices. It's super-distracting, but, again, it's not really anybody's fault. One of the wonderful things about the shift from VHS to DVD (and then streaming) is the ability to turn off subtitles for American movies.

Until recently, a lot of Amazon Prime movies here had burned in English subtitles -- it was either watch it dubbed (eww...) or watch it with big white blurry subs. Recently, all the stuff I've watched has selectable subtitles, which means Amazon is going back through their back catalog and switching burned-in to opt-in, or I've just been lucky enough to coincidentally only be watching their movies without the burned-in subs.
posted by Bugbread at 2:02 AM on June 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

I love subtitles, I’ve been using them for close to 20 years whenever available.

I have one complaint about subtitles: I notice that the timing of the subtitles is such that they often step on jokes or big reveals before the audio dialog. I notice this a lot if I rewatch a show with my family that they haven’t seen. “Oh, here comes the big shocker… fuck, the subtitles gave it away before the dialog.”
posted by jzb at 2:08 AM on June 13, 2023 [44 favorites]

Yeah, subtitles for comedies are the worst. There's a big difference between comedy that works when read and comedy that works when heard.
posted by Bugbread at 2:19 AM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

mrs graymouser has taken to watching everything with subtitles on and, even though I was a subtitle partisan back when anime was on VHS, I kind of get distracted by them. I do think the vocals on newer shows and movies are much harder to distinguish, for instance we’re watching older Simpsons episodes with our daughter lately and the subtitles seem entirely unnecessary to me, but when newer shows are on the dialogue is hard to make out without them.
posted by graymouser at 2:35 AM on June 13, 2023

This bit was interesting:

The good news, according to Onnalee Blank, the four-time Emmy Award–winning sound mixer on Game of Thrones, is that it’s not your fault that you can’t hear well enough to follow this stuff. It’s not your TV’s fault either, or your speakers—your sound system might be lousy, but that’s not why you can’t hear the dialogue. “It has everything to do with the streaming services and how they’re choosing to air these shows,” Blank told me.

Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.

“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.”

It kind of explains Whisper & Explosion: The Movie.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:43 AM on June 13, 2023 [110 favorites]

TV dialogue today is, indeed, harder to hear, especially when compared to older shows. My kneejerk, non-professional, personal theory is this is due to a mismatch between how the sound in shows is designed and mixed versus the actual sound setups found in homes.

I think shows today are probably mixed assuming a multi-channel “home theater” sort of playback. But many, many people simply use the speakers in the tv itself, and not an external array of speakers. Thus, they’re hearing a multi-channel soundtrack being pushed through the rudimentary stereo output of the tv’s inboard speakers. And, wthere are audio settings on the tv to help rebalance the sound, they really don’t do much to help.

I personally don’t rely on subtitles (save for shows in languages I don’t understand). I find them distracting, for the most part.

And then there’s the issue of how the subtitles themselves are designed and displayed for legibility. That’s an entirely different, and heated, debate.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:23 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Or, to echo Blank, you could just air it the way she mixed it.

This can only help for things mixed well, or rather well for the home. And a lot of movies are mixed for the theater so the dialogue will sound good (or at least as intended) with the movie hitting reference peaklevels of 105dB with 115dB for bass. Which is deafening.

It really wouldn't hurt for regulators to limit sound pressure levels in theaters. Or for *sigh* yet another audio standard that's similar to HDR10 where it includes metadata for SPL to allow the receiver to compress the dynamic range intelligently.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:25 AM on June 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

fantabulous timewaster: I have used closed-captioning as a language acquisition tool, watching television in the target language with closed captions also in the target language.
Me too. But after a while I try to toss the waterwings, make eye-contact with the protagonists, and really listen to the target language. Part of the plan is to immerse in the soundscape. Obviously easier if they are speaking s l o w l y with less slang.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:26 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

But many, many people simply use the speakers in the tv itself, and not an external array of speakers.

Also many tv speakers probably aren't as good as they were back in the CRT days just to fit in ultra-thin cases.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:27 AM on June 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yeah, if people are really straight-up listening to the built-in TV speakers, not even one of those sound bars or whatever, then the mystery of why I can understand Christopher Nolan movies may be solved. I know that people don't have fancy 5.1 setups at home, but neither do I, so I didn't think that was the issue. I just have my TV hooked up to my stereo, like I always have. It's not an audiophile setup (honestly, I have no idea the difference even between an an amp and a pre-amp, all I know is that my red and white cables go into a little box with a volume dial, and that box is attached to two speakers). But I figured most people at least had something other than the speakers in the TV itself, because those are nightmares to listen to. If that's the baseline, then a lot of previous mysteries fall away.

(Nolan movies sound decent in movie theaters here because movie theater speakers sound good here, so the in-theater part of the Nolan equation wasn't much of a mystery)
posted by Bugbread at 3:41 AM on June 13, 2023

TheophileEscarogot hits it on the head here. It seems like the mixing of most TV shows today is designed for situations where the TV is the sole focus of existence while that show is airing ... never mind that most people are watching TV while other things are going on around them: other family members living their lives, kids or spouses sleeping, apartment neighbors existing, etc.
By the time the volume is high enough to hear the dialogue, the explosions, orchestral stings, etc are so loud that they affect not just the watcher but anyone around them. This is fine if I'm watching a movie in a theater, but doesn't work for television. It feels like a fundamental disconnect between the creators of content and their audience, that leads to a sub par experience all around.
posted by jferg at 4:09 AM on June 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

My partner has hearing issues so to keep the volume at a "normal" level for me and others, subtitles make it better for everyone. However I wish I could move them to the top all the time. When credits are still rolling at the top of a show, the titles temporarily move to the top. I LOVE THIS. My eyes follow it so much better, and I don't have to do the up-and-down thing, and I also don't find myself simply reading and not watching the actual show. There are many settings but none of them offer this option (not yet at least).
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:19 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

+1 to stillnocturnal I watched a lupin movie this way and it was fun!

I binge shows late in a small house so that means headphones or captions and i like captions. I do not love the similarity of sound design in shows like Alone where if you are binging without commercials it is like hours of swoosh, bong, etc. Now if I could auto skip past the 120 seconds of repeat after each commercial break I’d be all set.
posted by drowsy at 4:22 AM on June 13, 2023

TheophileEscargot pulls a very interesting quote that I'm sure is true. However, not all cable shows are produced under AT&T's standard. As someone else pointed out upthread, Apple TV has this issue, too. And I've encountered it elsewhere, like Amazon Prime for example.

I think part of it is there is no standard anymore. Sound mixers and picture/visual artists and color/brightness corrections are done on extremely high end AV equipment so that it looks and sounds perfect in the studio's viewing/listening room. This probably varies from production to production by a bit. But most people—even people with very high end AV home equipment—are not always watching while centered on the setup in a dark room with the surround sound up loud and balanced correctly.

And many people pull their $2000 TVs out of the box and never even touch the picture settings, for instance. Likely the same for people with $5000 surround sound systems.

(not saying I am an audio or visual -phile, but equipment out of the box is tuned to sell in a noisy showroom competing with other TVs all next to each other)

AND there's the fact that some content simply streams extremely quietly compared to other content. That's an undeniable fact that doesn't need an expert to prove. How many times have you turned on some specific movie and have had to crank the volume way, way up just to hear it at all? And then accidentally switched back to live streaming HBO (for instance) and been jarred out of your chair by an excruciatingly loud blast of noise and had to pounce for the volume control to turn it down?
posted by SoberHighland at 4:42 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

(mumbles incoherently)
posted by Servo5678 at 4:44 AM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

I will also argue that actors are not speaking as clearly as they used to. In addition to mixes being shit.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:46 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

That assumed "uniformity" suggests the idea that text should recede into the background while language should not—that text, in other words, should be perfectly transparent in its un-stylized rendering of the language it represents.

To be fair, fancy-ass typography can often be an accessibility issue in itself. Uniformity may not be super exciting, but it does ensure that it can be read by as baby people as possible. And I'm not sure the broadcast closed captioning channels allow for much typesetting or layouting (though you could of course just bake the subs into the video stream itself).

But many, many people simply use the speakers in the tv itself, and not an external array of speakers.

Also many tv speakers probably aren't as good as they were back in the CRT days just to fit in ultra-thin cases.

And yet, with my shitty built-in TV speakers from my modern flatscreen, I can clearly hear and understand dialogue from TV made in the era of bulky CRTs on a way that's not true of more recent productions.

It's not the speakers that are the problem, at least no more so than it ever was.
posted by Dysk at 4:46 AM on June 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

Sometimes I watch subtitled foreign language films with English captioning also on. They are generally the same or very similar, but sometimes important words are different in a way that changes the meaning of the story. I wonder how and why that happens, and why the captions aren't just a clone of the subtitles.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:53 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hulu has been really bad lately with having the subtitles he completely off, a scene or two ahead even! I’m learning German and have tried using subtitles to help, but a lot of the time the subtitles don’t match the German that’s actually spoken, so that’s not really helpful.

Few reasons I watch with subtitles:

1) the audio mixing is bad and the dialogue is too quiet to make out. This happens more often than it used to. I feel like it used to just be the action scenes that were so loud, but sometimes it’s the music too.

2) the actors are mumbling or have an accent I can’t understand too well (for example, Brad Pitt in Snatch)

3) I have my doors and windows open (no AC where I live) and I don’t want my tv to be so loud it can overpower the cars on the street. I just can’t stand a TV that loud.

My best friend lives on a train line and keeps her tv at a volume that is louder than a passing train…all the time. I swear I’m deaf when I leave her place. She comes to my place and complains about the subtitles and the tv being so quiet. *facepalm*
posted by LizBoBiz at 4:57 AM on June 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Since it was mentioned, Lupin is one example I can think of where the English subs did not match the French dialogue all the time, and if you were only reading the subs (and not able to understand French) then you were missing out on some humor.

My years as a proofreader/editor mean I can't help but notice when the the subs don't match the spoken dialogue, and it happens a lot even in 1:1 English dialogue/English subs shows.
posted by emelenjr at 5:02 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

but it does ensure that it can be read by as baby people as possible

As many people as possible. Phone typo!
posted by Dysk at 5:09 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I usually use them just for the comedic value.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:11 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

And yet, with my shitty built-in TV speakers from my modern flatscreen, I can clearly hear and understand dialogue from TV made in the era of bulky CRTs on a way that's not true of more recent productions.

Yes. Exactly. Those old shows were mixed during an era where it was assumed people would only be using the speakers in the tv. This is why those old shows still sound good when using just the speakers in your modern flatscreen.

Today’s shows are, apparently, mixed assuming people will be listening using (at the very least) a 4.1 home sound system, which is why vocals get drowned-out when just using the speakers in the tv.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:12 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

This thread sent me on a hunt for a great article I read a while back on the sources of the decline in audio quality. In addition to mixing, issues include method acting and a blithe expectation that any concerns the on-set audio crew raises will be easily "fixed in post".
posted by itsatextfile at 5:16 AM on June 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

Count me in on Team Subtitles. I'm sick of muddy sound-mixing on streaming shows, I've gotten to where I leave subtitles on all the time. I have external speakers, and on live broadcasts, I don't have as much trouble hearing spoken dialogue.

The language learning/practicing aspect is interesting for me, too. I've noticed that physical media in French used to be really lacking in subtitles, that seems to have gotten better in recent years. I'll buy a physical DVD from Archambault or Indigo once in a while for French-language titles--the Canada to U.S. shipping isn't bad at all, I get more reliable subtitles, and avoid potential compatibility/region issues on playback.
posted by gimonca at 5:17 AM on June 13, 2023

I think shows today are probably mixed assuming a multi-channel “home theater” sort of playback.

They absolutely are mixed for 5.1 surround with a dedicated center channel where the dialogue goes. How do I know? Because Netflix, alone among the streaming services, lets you choose the mix. And for every single show, I switch from "English (5.1)" to "English" (which is in plain old stereo), and BOOM, the dialogue pops. The LKFS is certainly a problem, but that doesn't actually lower the dialogue in the mix.

That said, I think there is multi-generational hearing loss from the widespread use of earbuds. Or, in my case, being a musician.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:33 AM on June 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

The Deaf/Hard of Hearing communities have been fighting so hard to have access to media via captioning and the author has a teeny-tiny mention at the end of the article.

Hearing loss comes for a LOT of us as we age, and some kids experience it through fever or infection. Would there even be an article if the family with the captioning said one of us won’t understand the movie because of a disability if the captioning is not enabled?

TV Ears and Hearing Aids are imperfect solutions, and many people don’t even try them because of disability stigma, but solid captioning helps include so many people, like parents who want to enjoy a movie without waking a light-sleeping toddler in the next room.

I’m team Caption All Video, and use them with pride/no shame.
posted by childofTethys at 5:34 AM on June 13, 2023 [30 favorites]

The thing that really boggles my mind when watching shows that have been both dubbed and subbed from another language is the fact that they frequently don't line up. When it's a language I sort-of speak like Spanish, it's not obvious to me that one source is reliably better than the other, they're just different. It's most notable with things like swearing and idioms where it seems like there's more latitude for choice.

I understand that the two have very different constraints on what makes for a good translation (all my internet research on the differences focuses on explaining what these are), but I guess I'm just surprised that everyone seems to have the budget for translating a movie twice over.
posted by itsatextfile at 5:38 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hearing loss comes for a LOT of us as we age

Yes. As someone who is experiencing this, I can say that subtitles are my friend. I only wish that they were available in everyday conversation, especially in crowded settings (grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, etc.).
posted by virago at 5:38 AM on June 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

And re:type faces and styles for subtitles, I'd be interested in the experience of anyone who's seen the John Wick franchise and needs subtitles for accessibility reasons - the movie makes some very bold choices with the fairly frequent non-English dialog.
posted by itsatextfile at 5:39 AM on June 13, 2023

Wow, I had no idea so many others are doing this. Anyhow, I've thought that the reason I love having the subtitles so much (I really love it) my brain will choose written words over image or sound every single time (that's hyperlexia and a part of my autism). And I've found that my ADHD gets bored watching shows, so it helps keep my brain busy to read the subtitle a few milliseconds before the actor says the line. I'm sure I'm not the only one and I'm a little surprised the article didn't hit on this. It may be that I overestimate how many people are just like me in this regard. But I bet there are a lot of them here.

tldr; auHD
posted by kitcat at 5:40 AM on June 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

I saw Dune in the theater. The music was loud; the explosions were loud; Timothee Chalamet mumbles. Fortunately I had read the book and could follow it, but I think subtitles on the big screen might have been an improvement.
posted by pangolin party at 5:50 AM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've been watching TV and movies with subtitles since I was a teen, and I have no idea why I started. Nowadays, at 46, I feel like I was just getting ahead of the eventual need to watch things with them. Thanks, Past Me!
posted by Kitteh at 5:51 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Subtitles so good for so many reasons -- including that I often eat crunchy things while watching TV.

(I have a sound bar that comes with a small speaker and I have yet to figure out how to hook it up to the TV. It's been... eleven? Years.)
posted by tzikeh at 6:09 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, translating comedy seems absolutely impossible to do well in general. My spouse has recently had some gigs translating subtitles for Spanish comedies into English, and it seems like almost every single line presents some kind of untranslatable conundrum, even for someone fluently bilingual for most of their life. Factor in slang, etc., and it quickly becomes a series of unsatisfying choices between bad options.
posted by mubba at 6:14 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I watch a lot of non-English movies and series with subtitles, and while I'm a long way from being multilingual, I know just enough of several languages to be able to notice when the subtitles are wrong or incomplete, which is much of the time. Sometimes they do a great job with capturing idiomatic nuances in subtitles, but a lot of the time they clearly just try to get kind of close.

Right now I don't have a standalone TV so I'm watching things on my ipad, usually with headphones. With the headphones, I have no need for subtitles with English language media, but without the headphones I have the same trouble hearing dialogue as everyone is describing. I've been assuming that when I go shopping for a TV I'll need to get some kind of external speaker setup, and this discussion is confirming that.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:17 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've been assuming that when I go shopping for a TV I'll need to get some kind of external speaker setup, and this discussion is confirming that.

A soundbar will probably suffice. They're pretty awesome these days - Dolby Atmos is astounding technology with its ability to do borderline binaural (3D / surround) effects.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:19 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Subtitle translation is an impossible beast. I've never had to do it with fiction, but even with dry commercial videos without wordplay, it's simply impossible to translate accurately within the restrictions on sentence length, number of lines per screen, number of words per line, etc. It's not a question of "can you accurately translate the sentence" but "within the restrictions given, what can you forgive yourself for cutting?"

It's like the Sophie's Choice of translation.
posted by Bugbread at 6:25 AM on June 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have to defend against "hearing loss" as a reason why I use subtitles now. My hearing is still exceptionally good at 56 because I've always protected it with earplugs and careful control of volume levels. Actors are mumbling & mixes are shittier now, there doesn't need to be any more reason than that.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:29 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I use subtitles because they let me understand speech more reliably--I often will miss little things and subtitles ensure that I actually parse the signal that the show intended to send. It's like a safety net. I have some auditory processing issues and I just overall comprehend way better with subtitles, and when I'm streaming or watching things with friends we always take the time to throw them up.

I should also note that there's a difference between subtitles and closed captioning (intended for Deaf/HoH audiences) in that subtitles assume you can mostly hear and closed captioning will also transcribe background sounds if they're relevant, speaker changes, and that sort of thing. Personally I vastly prefer full closed captioning, if only because the description of sounds are so often very funny to me in their own right.

There's also massive variation in the quality of subtitle placement and how distracting it should be on the screen. Maybe don't put it directly onto the face of the speaking character in a comedy, guys.
posted by sciatrix at 6:30 AM on June 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

I can hear fine, but I often have problems processing speech, since I was a kid.
I want speech-processing-issues subtitles, with no music or sound effects tags, because I find those distracting. I realize that’s a narrow use case I won’t be able to find, but I think it would be nice if “English captions” included all the non-speech-event tags, and “English subtitles” were speech-only.

All of that said, I am amused by the frequency of the [birds chirping] tag, which seems to appear more on Hulu than on other services, and which, via my constant-Spoonerism filter in my brain, I refer to as “[chirds birping].”
[Chirds birping] amuses me endlessly.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 6:34 AM on June 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

Sciatrix, high five!
posted by Mister Moofoo at 6:35 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I should also note that there's a difference between subtitles and closed captioning (intended for Deaf/HoH audiences) in that subtitles assume you can mostly hear and closed captioning will also transcribe background sounds if they're relevant, speaker changes, and that sort of thing.

Bingo.

This interview with some folks from WGBH's Media Access Group is worth the time if you thought something was...off in that Atlantic piece: A History of Captions and Audio Descriptions (the link also contains a transcript of the interview).

WGBH: Major Milestones In Media Accessibility

Fun fact: the first open-captioned program broadcast in the U.S. was Julia Child's The French Chef.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:38 AM on June 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

I happen to be wearing my "[spooky synth music playing]" t-shirt today.

For a while I was collecting screenshots of descriptions of music in captions. I gave up when we watched the last season of Stranger Things...
posted by Foosnark at 6:39 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The last time I went to the movies I had to leave the theater before the trailers finished because the sound and visuals were just too much. It was too overwhelming. I find more and more that even with captions on I can’t enjoy a lot of new tv for the same reason.
posted by interogative mood at 6:52 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

shout out to the best subtitles ever
posted by Pachylad at 6:55 AM on June 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

I know, I know about the cap/sub difference, and if the upshot of this national conversation is that captioning and subtitles get better (timing, placement, legibility/font), that would be HUGE. I get that live captioning will lag, but could it be kerned back to synchronous display? The Daily Show would get captions ahead of what was being spoken, which could blow a punchline. The technology is evolving well, I work with a number of people who will use Microsoft Dictation, Otter AI and Zoom/WebEx/Google Meet captioning to support interpersonal communication. These are for audio situations. For visual access options (blind/legally blind/low vision), Netflix has better than average audio description.
posted by childofTethys at 7:03 AM on June 13, 2023

For me, it's often about laziness. Because I watch so many non-English shows on Netflix and some of my other streaming services, and I can't be bothered to toggle captions on and off all the time, I default to just always having captions on. It doesn't bother me much, except for two things: when captions move to the top of the screen and OVER actors' faces because credits are on the bottom of the screen during opening/closing screens, and when captions are hard to read because of the color/background in a scene. (I'm so happy that Netflix finally offered options in how captions appear!).

When I'm watching regular TV I prefer to have no captions, even though I agree that the general sound mixing/enunciation by actors today is shittier than in the past. I'm fine with running my TV a bit louder to compensate. (Though the trend of blasting commercials at like 50% louder volume than the show needs to be killed). MY SO, on the other hand, really likes a quieter TV and asks that we always watch with captions on.
posted by TwoStride at 7:04 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Fuck you, I use them because I am disabled and they are GREAT. I hate every time they come up people complaining about how they ruin the experience. I’m sorry accessibility is such a burden.
posted by Bottlecap at 7:08 AM on June 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

My partner and I were sitting across from each other at a noisy restaurant the other day, and I said... this is why I want to have some AR goggles so that I have my subtitles when people are speaking... That and maybe the ability to edit out all the other people...
posted by rozcakj at 7:08 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

(To be clear, that is largely directed at the article and not some particular person. Although this thread certainly isn’t great.)
posted by Bottlecap at 7:09 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

The weird thing about getting old is that everything that I want to hear is too quiet at the same time as everything I don't want to hear is too loud.
posted by srboisvert at 7:19 AM on June 13, 2023 [18 favorites]

Unless some comments have been deleted, I've seen literally zero comments complaining about how the existence of close captioning for people with disabilities somehow ruins the experience for anyone else. The closest anyone has come was perhaps my own comment about burned-in Amazon subtitles (which wasn't about close captioning for the hearing impaired, it was about foreign language subtitling for the hearing) or my comment about bright captioning in dark scenes, which did include a close caption example but was not close caption specific (non-close caption subtitles involve the exact same phenomenon).
posted by Bugbread at 7:21 AM on June 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

(seconding that I can't really see any criticism of the existence of subtitles here in this thread? I see a lot of people complaining that they are often done POORLY, which would seem to be just as much of a problem for someone who is disabled as for someone who isn't?)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:28 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Subtitle translation is an impossible beast.

My favorite subtitle translation fun is watching how "putain" gets translated from French to English differently depending on context.
posted by srboisvert at 7:29 AM on June 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I can't remember if it was Netflix or Amazon or Disney or what, but one thing I saw which was really, really nice was the apparently European norm of subtitling different characters in different colors. I'd never thought single color subs were hard to understand until I saw multicolor subs, and then it felt like when I got my first pair of glasses as a kid, where I went from a pre-glasses "what, things look fine" to a post-glasses "hot shit, the leaves on the tree are so crisp! And I can see every single blade of grass! This is amazing!"
posted by Bugbread at 7:30 AM on June 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

2) the actors are mumbling or have an accent I can’t understand too well (for example, Brad Pitt in Snatch )

Pitt's character being unintelligible was part of the joke, so the subtitles there seem counterproductive. However, I am 100% behind you on shows like Happy Valley and Derry Girls where the accents are so thick I very often could not understand a goddamn word they were saying.

Overall though, I'm a no subtitles person because - as I think someone said above - if I don't absolutely need them they're simply distracting me from the action.
posted by schoolgirl report at 7:31 AM on June 13, 2023

I can clear this up, it's because our dogs like taking loud, long drinks during the quiet conversation bits of TV shows and if the captions weren't on our partners would insist on pausing the show until the dog is done. Sometimes this takes like, literally two entire minutes. Nobody's got that kind of time. Glad I could set the record straight on this one
posted by potrzebie at 7:37 AM on June 13, 2023 [16 favorites]

Supposedly the hearing children of Deaf parents pick up reading faster than hearing children of hearing parents. I encourage every parent of small kids to just put subtitles/captions on everything their kids watch, because then screen time is roughly equivalent to being read to. (more than just regular old screen time). And if they develop a taste for international film, they have all the requisite closed-captioning skills baked in :)

Also, if you miss key dialog on a DVD, you press a button and can hear that section again. I've got good internet but every time I try to skip ahead/back on a stream, I spend something like a minute waiting for the stream to pick back up.
posted by adekllny at 7:38 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

One option I would like in a perfect world is "turn on names" so that the characters' names would appear over their heads.

Then you put on an adaptation of something by Tolstoy and the whole screen is filled with an incomprehensible swirling tornado of the 134953490 names each character gets called.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:45 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

In this house we've been known to watch stuff with both the audio description and closed captioning on at the same time, because we live an absolutely wild life.

I get that live captioning will lag, but could it be kerned back to synchronous display? The Daily Show would get captions ahead of what was being spoken, which could blow a punchline.

This is where CART (communication access real-time translation) comes in - basically, it combines the skills of someone who is a trained live captioner (with court-stenographer-level skills and then some) with speech-to-text software.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:55 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

At first I was annoyed that my partner had the subtitles on, as I found them distracting. But I learned that the way her mind is wired with ADHD they help her enjoy. So I got used to them. They improve her experience more than they take away from mine.
posted by gestalt saloon at 7:55 AM on June 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

They watch almost everything now with the subtitles on, she told us, even Ken’s own show, which is full of rapid-fire financial jargon coming at you in about a dozen languages and a riot of accents

For many years thick foreign accents were for secondary characters and usually played for laughs. They’re much more common now, and even leads may have enough of an accent that you miss a line here and there.

And it’s not just thick accents. 95% of the dialog in Everything Everywhere All At Once is perfectly clear to me, but missing even one line of dialogue annoys me and means a rewind. That takes me out of a movie far more than some easily ignored text on the bottom of the screen.

In real life dealing with accents occasionally requires asking someone to repeat themselves or even just to talk slower. Subtitles make up the gap when watching visual media.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:58 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

One option I would like in a perfect world is "turn on names" so that the characters' names would appear over their heads.

Amazon Prime Video almost has this feature. When you pause you can see actor and character names with a picture. They also often have the music and I noticed with The Peripheral they showed the source book as well. It's great for when you have that "Who's that actor?" moments.
posted by srboisvert at 8:04 AM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

Interestingly, my husband with ADHD gets distracted by the subtitles. Fortunately for me subtitles are just a preference so they get toggled off when we're watching something together, unless we're watching something with accents we're not used to. I also like lower volume levels on the TV, but we're not too far apart on that...at least not yet.

I think I developed the habit of low volume with subtitles while living with roommates on different schedules, so it just seemed like the polite thing at the time and now it's what I'm used to.
posted by ghost phoneme at 8:05 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

(seconding that I can't really see any criticism of the existence of subtitles here in this thread? I see a lot of people complaining that they are often done POORLY, which would seem to be just as much of a problem for someone who is disabled as for someone who isn't?)

There was one comment from someone who didn't like descriptive text. Personally, I often find the descriptive text really droll and love it for that.
posted by srboisvert at 8:08 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Pet subtitle peeve: watching as "[Speaks foreign language]" appears exactly over the top of the actually translated subtitles shown in the video. Even when they have the same text, if overlapped they just look like spaghetti.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 8:09 AM on June 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

I am not fond of watching subtitled media in my native language. I find it distracting in a way that is difficult to describe. It adds a cognitive load, I guess? My eyes can not ever resist looking at text because words are love and life, but the bit of my brain that processes them is not anywhere near the bit of my brain that works on speech. At all. So if there's dialog text on the screen, I'm now using two parallel paths of my brain in a way that... kinda hurts, I guess?

This is completely a me problem. Subtitles should be excellent, and ought to be carefully designed meet as many needs as possible, in as many ways as possible. Modern stream and video container formats are highly multichannel and can offer lots of different sub options to choose from. Modern subtitle formats have tons of rendering methods.

Audio mixes should be less shit, less flat, and mixed with the target in mind; they've become largely terrible even on carefully tuned 5.1 systems like mine where I've finally given in to enabling dialog compensation.

Since subtitles are completely optional it's rarely a problem for me, and that's great. People have different needs and preferences. We want options, and options that work!
posted by majick at 8:15 AM on June 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

If the dialogue is unintelligible in the audio mix, wouldn't proper accessibility require the subtitles to be too blurry to read?
posted by straight at 8:18 AM on June 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

It really wouldn't hurt for regulators to limit sound pressure levels in theaters.

Oh yes. I get infuriated whenever I see a director whining about how HIS movie should get to be louder than all the other movies. My response is to swear I'll never watch their movie in a theater but instead pirate it and watch it on an iPhone with the built-in speaker.
posted by straight at 8:24 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

On paper I have excellent hearing, I've been tested from doing jobs with loud equipment and come up nearly perfect every time, buuuuuuuut I don't have the ability to tune out outside noise from speech. I need subs for a lot of tv because if there's any crosstalk (a car driving by outside, a loud fan, a shitty audio mix) I can't understand anything. I do notice modern tv/film is far worse about this. Everything is a sludgy mix where even the music/sound effects from the show/movie obliterate the dialogue.
posted by Ferreous at 8:26 AM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

It really wouldn't hurt for regulators to limit sound pressure levels in theaters.

I recently went to see my first movie in a theater since the pandemic. My biggest complaint, other than people looking at bright phone screens during the movie and then other people getting mad and lecturing them, was that the sound was turned way down. Maybe they had had a bunch of complaints or something, but it was way too quiet for me and made understanding dialogue harder than it needed to be.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:32 AM on June 13, 2023

One option I would like in a perfect world is "turn on names" so that the characters' names would appear over their heads.

IRL pls.
posted by The Bellman at 8:43 AM on June 13, 2023 [19 favorites]

One option I would like in a perfect world is "turn on names" so that the characters' names would appear over their heads. I don't need this often, but when watching something like Dark, which is a) in a language I don't speak and b) very convoluted with nine million interrelated characters, it would be *incredibly* helpful.

Man, this would be useful. Many of my friends and also my spouse have varying degrees of face-blindness--to the extent that my spouse used to frequently confuse Gwen and Tosh on Torchwood, because they were both dark-haired women. More recently we watched the IT movies and they could not tell the white boys apart reliably for more than half the movie. I think a feature like that could really enhance the experience for face-blind folks!

On paper I have excellent hearing, I've been tested from doing jobs with loud equipment and come up nearly perfect every time, buuuuuuuut I don't have the ability to tune out outside noise from speech.

Yep, this is generally what people mean when they refer to auditory processing issues. The perceptual landscape isn't a neutral surface that picks up all sounds equally; the human brain is tuned to focus in on specific frequencies and pick them up more effectively than others, which includes the range in which most human voices occupy. Comprehension requires being able to hear the full sound and decompose it into the original sound that was produced by the speaker, then translate that sound into the meaning encoded within the signal. There are lots of places for that to break down! Signals can be degraded by environments, brains can be bad at capturing the signal out of environmental noise, etc.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that auditory processing is easily distinguished from hearing loss by general broad-frequency hearing tests, but may impede actual understanding of spoken speech even without degradation in hearing generally. It's a common feature of a number of neurodivergent types of brain. (Face-blindness is a similar phenomenon in some respects, actually.)
posted by sciatrix at 8:43 AM on June 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Since subtitles are completely optional it's rarely a problem for me, and that's great. People have different needs and preferences. We want options, and options that work!

quoted for motherfucking truth. this. this this this.
posted by sciatrix at 8:45 AM on June 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Is anyone, anywhere, opposed to the existence of the option to have subtitles turned on?
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:51 AM on June 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

The mumbling really is wild – I noticed it a bunch on Ted Lasso. It seems like an artifact of the ADR process, where actors are not modulating their voices to match the context of the scene – ie not speaking a louder if the person they're talking to is across the room. Everything is mic'd close and everybody is talking like they're right next to someone. It's maddening!!
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:58 AM on June 13, 2023

I'm current watching Dark, which is one of the more convoluted sagas I've encountered of late. The topic is time travel. The language is German. There are dozens of characters, some of whom seem to not be who you thought they were (time travel's like that, I guess).

Anyway, I'm finding I love the option of sometimes watching the original German version (with English close-captioning) but other times flipping to the dubbed-into-English option. It's never as good this way (the performances can't help but suffer) but, in terms of figuring out what's going on, it helps big time to be both reading the close-captioning and hearing the English ... with the added bonus that sometimes they don't say the same thing. Which I find more feature than bug because so much of the charm of this show is being constantly confused ... as soon as you think you've got it all figured out, somebody goes and trips through a wormhole and the reality barrier fraps out again.

It all ends up feeling very modern.
posted by philip-random at 9:10 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Everything is mic'd close and everybody is talking like they're right next to someone. It's maddening!!

The early 2000s fantastic 4 movie had this effect where every line from Dr Doom sounded like he was relaxing in a sound booth with no mixing and it produced the silliest effects.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that auditory processing is easily distinguished from hearing loss by general broad-frequency hearing tests, but may impede actual understanding of spoken speech even without degradation in hearing generally. It's a common feature of a number of neurodivergent types of brain. (Face-blindness is a similar phenomenon in some respects, actually.)

Yeah I've known I have this issue for a long time, I'm hoping that now that I have decent insurance I can actually go to an audiologist and see if I can find some sort of solution. I have ADHD and probably some TBI to boot and it's really an issue that's fucked up my quality of life.
posted by Ferreous at 9:11 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is anyone, anywhere, opposed to the existence of the option to have subtitles turned on?

There's tons of opposition from the video production companies that actually have to produce them, yes. Much of that is grounded in the reality that access can require more effort and resources to achieve than leaving access barriers in place does. The end product is usually better for everyone, but it's common for people to resent the "extra" effort to create services "nobody" uses.
posted by sciatrix at 9:12 AM on June 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

If I was making a movie, I would make damn sure everyone could “see,” “hear” everything. Otherwise, what is the point? Those words are in quotes because I am trying to say that there are more modalities to doing those things than just the obvious.

If you want to have a character that mumbles and you don’t care if anyone can follow their dialog, fine. But you have to make that obvious to everyone. Unintelligible subtitles for example.

I’m still dealing with the horrible audio mixing where background music is LOUD followed by dialog which is quiet. And explosions? Idiot directors… Somewhere, sometime, someone decided that audiences need to be pummeled. No thanks…
posted by njohnson23 at 9:13 AM on June 13, 2023

There's tons of opposition from the video production companies that actually have to produce them, yes.

Well that is some serious bullshit, and can see why you're upset about it.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:15 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I know that people don't have fancy 5.1 setups at home…

Mixing problems aside, dropping US$100-200 on a budget soundbar is a massive step-up in sound quality over the speakers in your TV. Speakers in flat panel TVs are pretty small and usually downward or rearward firing. Any soundbar will have at least two front firing speakers that are likely larger and better quality than what's crammed into the TV. A slightly nicer soundbar that come with a subwoofer will have better bass but can also help with dialog because the smaller speakers aren't simultaneously trying to handle the deeper bass tones.
posted by nathan_teske at 9:19 AM on June 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, one of the reasons I was so enthusiastic about that comment a few rounds up is that it foregrounds the concept of options and separated spaces to give everyone as much access as possible. I think sometimes people don't take into account, when talking about access issues, is that making things accessible comes at a cost--sometimes considerable cost!--and that arguing the most powerful institutions in our world into paying that cost is not an easy thing.

Even assuming no access conflicts (like a situation where one of y'all who prefers no subtitles sits down to watch a movie with one of y'all who prefers them), the act of executing accessible options, working out where the subtitles should be imposes, creating captions, and so forth is labor in its own right. Labor is expensive. And then you factor in the cost of doing these things well, and it gets even more expensive.

That's why the US' ADA, which is a truly revolutionary piece of legislation even if it's more often honored in the breach, explicitly talks about concepts like undue burden when it comes to access needs. If you're a mega million company, it's certainly cheaper to skip the subtitles and wait to see if anyone notices than to produce them or quality check them. Giant corporations don't get giant by providing features that aren't used by everyone, and at the beginning of a new kind of accessibility technology or intervention request's life cycle relatively few people will demand the tech or miss a feature they don't know to look for. It takes a lot of effort, campaigning, and sorting out technical problems to make these accessibility features widely used--at which point they are often cheerfully adopted by new groups who find them useful outside the use case of people who initially advocated for them.

Accessible design isn't easy, cheap, or fast, but it's important.
posted by sciatrix at 9:30 AM on June 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

It is truly disappointing when subtitles are done really badly and are pasted over characters faces, sometimes in a different position with each line of dialog. It reminds me of when I was tasked with creating a brochure for my stepdad's auto shop and thought it would be delightful to use a wildly different font for each page.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:40 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Accessible design isn't easy, cheap, or fast, but it's important.

on the spectrum of building accessibility into things, I have a passing familiarity with sidewalks having worked in concrete a lifetime ago. Sidewalks are not cheap, and when you add those swales for wheeled access on/off street you add labour and cost for sure. When you add mechanisms in doors (sensors/touch plates) you add complexity and cost. But the cost when you don't is so much greater. I really wonder about people who make decisions to lowball and cut corners, the advantages are so illusory and short sighted. Then again I really shouldn't wonder, but it's a damn shame we get caught up in lowest bid bullshit so often. We are just offsetting costs to more people over a much longer period. Sorry for the tangent, feel free to delete.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:42 AM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you don't want to go the whole 5.1 route, I added a centre channel speaker to my receiver and watched tv in 3.0. It made the dialog that much easier to make out. Then I had to downsize and replaced all of the stereo gear with a decent (not great, not terrible). But between the A/C and the garbage truck and all the other city noises out our window, we still watch everything with subtitles. Except live sports - the delay to do real-time captioning just throws me off.
posted by thecjm at 9:51 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I really wonder about people who make decisions to lowball and cut corners, the advantages are so illusory and short sighted.

This mentality of saving a penny to spend a thousand dollars is everywhere and I utterly do not understand it at all. I run into it professionally -- outside of access issues or anything related to the context of this discussion -- and constantly point it out. When I do I frequently run into a level of resistance that baffles me. You are not only shooting yourself in the foot and looking like a jackass, you are costing yourself money you just told me you didn't want to spend!

We're only in the beginning stages of seeing that in media, but as media consumption becomes ever more entwined with technology and consumers clearly become ever more interested in access features it's going to start being more of an issue. Expect more subtitle shitty quality corner cutting foot shooting.
posted by majick at 9:59 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is anyone, anywhere, opposed to the existence of the option to have subtitles turned on?

From the article:

I asked Fidell how she would feel if a friend turned on the subtitles while watching the pilot episode of A Teacher.
She went quiet for a moment. “I would be so pissed,” she said.

I think Fidell would likely vote, at least in that case, against the option to have subtitles turned on.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:03 AM on June 13, 2023

If you don't want to go the whole 5.1 route

Also, not to totally dominate the thread or suck all the air out of the room but the "TV" I wound up putting in my bedroom (actually just a spare monitor I had in my office, hanging off an old Apple TV cube) is just using a single Sonos Roam. The Roam is Sonos' very worst product ever, and is a single speaker. I turned off the monitor's speakers, which are not totally awful, and just use the Roam. My "TV" is a mono TV thing with no surround or anything but the speaker is still good enough that I can hear almost everything just fine.

A little over a hundred bucks. People do not need fancy hifi solutions to be able to enjoy their media audio just fine. A barely-better-than-bluetooth-speaker thing is enough to make a difference!
posted by majick at 10:04 AM on June 13, 2023

Team headphones here. I like the subtitles, but they annoy my gf, so I bluetooth headphone while she listens to the speaker and asks me what they said.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:05 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wish the option without the audio description was more widely available, that would cut down some of the distraction factor.
posted by Artw at 10:06 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you don't want to go the whole 5.1 route

I have a 5.1 system, not super expensive, but it's fine for my home. In terms of dialogue it doesn't help, without movie-specific adjustments that I'm just not willing to do.

I honestly find most arguments about picture quality and sound quality in movies complete non-sense, considering sports can be filmed at 100% clarity with a camera on wires and a bazillion reality shows can be shot in 4k with 100% clear voices while they whisper across a giant room or out of doors. Are these shows really getting the best at sound and picture while movies get castoffs? No, movies are currently making poor choices that watchers have to suffer through.

My kids watch with subtitles all the time. I don't mind them one way or another.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:09 AM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have fine hearing and a strong preference for subtitles. I don't use sound on my phone unless a trusted friend tells me "sound on" for a video. I didn't think this was too weird until my partner started commenting on it. I have other sensory issues so now I am wondering if this is an extension of that. Like maybe it's easier for me to focus on a video if I only have to worry about one sense at a time.
posted by tofu_crouton at 10:13 AM on June 13, 2023

Yeah, Artw, I want more granular options on everything, instead of five percent (a number I completely grabbed out of nowhere) of stuff doing it well, thereby making the other ninety-five percent suffer in comparison.
It would mean a bigger menu of options, but ideally that's only really a greater cognitive load for users like once, or at worst once in a while.
And I realize, of course, that "ideally" is asking a lot.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 10:15 AM on June 13, 2023

I honestly find most arguments about picture quality and sound quality in movies complete non-sense, considering sports can be filmed at 100% clarity with a camera on wires and a bazillion reality shows can be shot in 4k with 100% clear voices while they whisper across a giant room or out of doors. Are these shows really getting the best at sound and picture while movies get castoffs? No, movies are currently making poor choices that watchers have to suffer through.

tbf these are dealing with consistent bright lighting and people with mics on them for clarity. These aren't really thing you can do in a film/tv show most of the time. Production speed issues are a big part of the problem where the idea of "fix it in post" is standing in for getting a properly placed boom mic or a well lit shot.
posted by Ferreous at 10:16 AM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

on the spectrum of building accessibility into things, I have a passing familiarity with sidewalks having worked in concrete a lifetime ago. Sidewalks are not cheap, and when you add those swales for wheeled access on/off street you add labour and cost for sure. When you add mechanisms in doors (sensors/touch plates) you add complexity and cost. But the cost when you don't is so much greater.

A near-universal rule in these things is that adding accessibility features helps everyone, not just the people in immediate need. Accessible sidewalks help wheelchair users, but also help anyone pushing a child's stroller, delivering boxes with a dolly, or who sprained their ankle. Having subtitles and closed captioning both available helps everyone, also, whether or not you need those on a given day.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:58 AM on June 13, 2023 [15 favorites]

I have a pretty decent receiver and sound set up (subwoofer, center channel, two front and two rear speakers) and I still turn on subtitles for certain shows/circumstances. *ahem* Supernatural on Netflix *ahem*

I don't like having the loud parts be painfully loud, and if the choice is between painfully loud tv and subtitles, I'd rather deal with the annoyances of the captions spoiling a joke or a plot twist a millisecond too early. My partner likes loud TV so it's usually only when I'm alone that they are on.

I also think that over time I've trained myself to watch with subtitles, so the text on the screen doesn't pull in my entire focus and my brain seems to switch from paying attention to the visuals to jumping to the words when I'm struggling to hear, automatically.
posted by misskaz at 11:33 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ctrl-F "subtitles for Jeopardy!"
Yeah, don't do it if you're playing along unless you want to hold your hand or a magazine over the lower third of the screen for the entirety of the episode.

Also, I use subtitles for everything. It may have started with watching overseas-English shows/movies, but my hearing is just dodgy enough now, and I've always been terrible at picking out lyrics—that has now extended to dialogue. Plus, I always prefer subs to dubs for non-Anglophone films and cartoons because I want to hear the original actors' voices.

So, yeah, Team Subtitles Go!
posted by the sobsister at 12:08 PM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

... I always prefer subs to dubs for non-Anglophone films and cartoons because I want to hear the original actors' voices.

this. We much prefer watching foreign-language films and shows in their original language plus English subtitles, to get the performance. The English-dubbed version is usually disappointing in comparison.

It's fun to spot colloquialisms in the onscreen dialogue that are not accurately or fully translated in the subtitles.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:33 PM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Team subtitles here. It started with watching BBC productions and facing some formidable accents. Broadchurch may have been the breaking point. It was like a whole new world of comprehension had opened. We left it on for everything.

My wife suffers from depression and gets lost up in her own business often, losing concentration. Subtitles help her keep focused. I've got ADHD and to me, the subtitles can be distracting at times. It takes a different kind of focus. The subtitles really help us when there's rapid fire dialog, like Succession. The failchildren speak FAST. And it does somewhat compensate for the loss of dialog on loud movies. I watched the last two Avengers movies in the theater and caught maybe half the dialog, despite having great hearing for my age. At home, with subtitles, I caught everything despite the bad mix on Disney+.

We have noticed that our wretched local news can have some truly awful transcriptions. High comedy while they're throwing red meat to the knuckle-dragging MAGA viewers. Local sports are even worse. The state basketball tournaments is a nonstop parade of misspelled names, sports terms, even common phrases. My wife takes photos of the truly bad ones and sends them to her friends living in civilization (Minnesota).
posted by Ber at 1:29 PM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have very poor hearing. Without captions, I have to have the volume quite high, and even then I miss a lot. Sometimes captions drop out, no idea why, but it's aggravating.
posted by theora55 at 1:36 PM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I generally prefer not using subtitles when possible because it means I focus more on what I'm watching. I have no proof of this but I feel when I am watching something with subtitles too much of my attention is on the subtitles. BUT the way the sound is mixed for most shows means that for the dialogue to be at a reasonable level the other sounds can be louder than I'd prefer so I end up going with subtitles.
English isn't my spouse's first language so they want subtitles on for comprehension purposes as they'll miss things otherwise.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:56 PM on June 13, 2023

relatedly: Jamie also has a rant about subtitles; there are many ... relatedly ... but this one is his.

Derry Girls, Broadchurch and Happy Valley needed some 'elp? Fair dos.
posted by k3ninho at 2:51 PM on June 13, 2023

Without doubt the best subtitles appear on Robot Chicken.

[bawk!]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:58 PM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

You know what sucks?

Yelling WHAT? across the room at people who are speaking to you at what you know is a reasonable volume. Super embarrassing. Wear those earplugs, kids.
posted by East14thTaco at 3:57 PM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have always assumed people who have trouble with subtitles just don’t process that kind of information well, just as I don’t process auditory information well. Team subtitles.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:21 PM on June 13, 2023

I think people (including myself) are wanting to find a Single Reason, when really it's a smorgasbord. Some people have hearing difficulties. Some are okay with hearing but have information processing difficulties. Some are watching in places with lots of ambient sound. Some have poor speakers. Audio is sometimes recorded/mixed/mastered less clearly than it once was.

Different things pull the needle different degrees one way or the other. I have good hearing (+) but am bad at processing language when there are extraneous sounds (-) but I like to watch TV and movies with no sound around me (+) and I have decent speakers (+) so although the less-clear mixing (-) has a negative effect, all together they all balance out (✓) and I can understand dialog in modern TV and movies fine.

In any specific person's case, there may be a factor that overrides all the rest, but I think it's a bit misguided to assume that if factor X is the reason that you like/dislike subtitles, it must also be the reason that everybody else likes/dislikes subtitles.
posted by Bugbread at 5:01 PM on June 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I want a “What’d they say?” button. Then, I’d watch with subtitles off, but press the button to pause and display the last 15 seconds or so of subtitles until I press Resume.
posted by daisyace at 5:21 PM on June 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

Definitely team subtitles here, and also that Atlantic writer can fuck off right into the sun with his ableist concern trolling.
posted by Aleyn at 5:24 PM on June 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have subtitles on for everything due to hearing issues, and I find even with hearing aids, often actors diction leaves a lot to be desired. I have the advantage of a media player that can download subtitles for almost anything.

What I'd REALLY like to see is some kind of wireless 'subtitles glasses' - I think this would solve the problem of people who need subtitles while watching with people who find them distracting/annoying. Also it would mean that people like me might go back to movie theaters again.

Now if there was just a way to figure out what's going on in those scenes where people in dark clothing are doing something in the dark...
posted by HiroProtagonist at 5:46 PM on June 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I really don't like having subtitles on unless the dialogue is unintelligible (unless someone else in the room needs them on for their own reasons, obviously). But I could stand it a lot better if the people who added them did so in a way that didn't get in the way of the performances. Timing matters. Seeing the punchline before the actor has finished delivering the setup sucks. There's no reason that caption couldn't have a delay. Seeing things like "yells in German" is useless and distracting - if the film's director includes someone speaking in another language, so the audience will or won't understand it depending on their knowledge of the language, then those are the words the caption should say as well. And I really want the option to turn off the music and sound effects cues - nothing makes an ominous moment less dramatic than [ominous music plays].
posted by Mchelly at 6:05 PM on June 13, 2023

I think what everyone here can agree on is that in a better world, there would be:

* Close captions in the source language (for the hearing impaired)
* Subtitles in the source language (for the hearing)

I'm not sure I've ever seen the latter. In the past, there just wasn't much of a demand for it, but that's changed a lot over the last decade or so.
posted by Bugbread at 6:18 PM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apple TV kinda has the feature you’re asking about, daisyace. The command is literally, “Siri, what did they say?” after which the show will rewind 5 seconds and begin playing again with subtitles just up until the point it was at when you made the command. It’s kinda cool.
posted by Night_owl at 7:33 PM on June 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apple TV kinda has the feature you’re asking about, daisyace. The command is literally, “Siri, what did they say?” after which the show will rewind 5 seconds and begin playing again with subtitles just up until the point it was at when you made the command. It’s kinda cool.

Ooh, neat!
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:40 PM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Because I’m watching tv after the kids go to bed and this house ECHOES and I got tired of turning it UP when we all decide to whisper mumble and then suddenly scramble to TURN IT DOWN when out of nowhere there’s gunshots or EXPLOSIONS because if you wake my kid with tv noise one more time I swear to god and then they sneak down and need one more snuggle and I will never have my life back to myself again will I? All I want is one hour of the day to my self is that too much to ask
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:23 PM on June 13, 2023 [12 favorites]

MetaFilter: it quickly becomes a series of unsatisfying choices between bad options.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:29 AM on June 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is anyone, anywhere, opposed to the existence of the option to have subtitles turned on?

The premise of the article seems to be that turning subtitles or captions on is an intellectual failing. As quoted above, the author may not object to the option (though perhaps if only due to fear of their albeism being even more glaring), but they certainly don't like people availing themselves of the option.
posted by hoyland at 5:38 AM on June 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Maybe someone here can refresh me on the delivery of a gag I saw in some subtitles thirty-plus years ago and which I have now forgotten how they pulled off:

In Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), we see five taxi rides in five cities; two in the US and three in Europe. In the Paris segment, the passengers are joking around with their African driver. They ask where he is from and he replies that he is from the Côte d’Ivoire.

One of the passengers makes a pun about him being an Ivorien and how that is a bad idea for a taxi driver — the pun hinges on “Ivorien” being a near homophone for “il voit rien” (“he sees nothing”) but I can’t recall how the English subtitles made the joke work in English as well. Anyone have a DVD they can pop in the machine and remind me?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:40 AM on June 14, 2023

Counterpoint! My wife hates subtitles because reading them is extremely tiring for her, for reasons unknown. She is not a fast reader, so she nearly always misses dialogue (movies with intro text on screen? I have to pause it for her so she can finish reading it). This means that if we watch non-English movies together, we watch them dubbed. It’s less of a cognitive load for her and she can listen faster than she reads.

As an English speaker, I don’t mind subs for non-English language, but words really draw my attention so I do feel that I have a hard time not looking at the subs when English captions are on for English speakers. However, both my wife and I have come to really like the AppleTV “what did they just say?” feature, where the system will automatically rewind 30 seconds and briefly turn on subtitles. It really helps for the muffled bits of audio or really strong accents without needing to default to all subs all the time.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:46 AM on June 14, 2023

What I'd REALLY like to see is some kind of wireless 'subtitles glasses' - I think this would solve the problem of people who need subtitles while watching with people who find them distracting/annoying. Also it would mean that people like me might go back to movie theaters again.

These already exist (although they are often wired). They're called "captioning devices" and there are a number of different forms. Theaters are supposed to provide them on demand, although you might have to call ahead.

I have friends who use them, and I do have to let you know that they definitely kind of suck relative to being able to turn captions on at the level of the screen itself. But they are in fact a thing.
posted by sciatrix at 6:09 AM on June 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

One of the passengers makes a pun about him being an Ivorien and how that is a bad idea for a taxi driver — the pun hinges on “Ivorien” being a near homophone for “il voit rien” (“he sees nothing”) but I can’t recall how the English subtitles made the joke work in English as well.

I remember being amused by one of the translation notes in Walter Kaufmann's translation of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which amounted to "This was a pun in German, but I couldn't get it to work for the life of me. Assume there is a clever pun here."
posted by hoyland at 6:48 AM on June 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have mixed feelings about having subtitles on movies because I tend to get distracted seeing an actor's mouth moving in a way that doesn't agree with the words being displayed. The same kind of disparity can happen when dubbing is used but that doesn't seem to bother me as much.

However, I get a kick out using of closed captioning for live TV programming when sometimes either the captioning service can't keep up or the service has an issue with what's being said. For example, back in 2008, Academy Awards host Jon Stewart used the expression "an historic" and the closed captioning went blank for a moment. Then shortly later he said it again and the closed captioning "corrected" his words to "a historic." I don't know who went rogue, Stewart or the captioning service, but it was funny to me.
posted by fuse theorem at 7:09 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

One option I would like in a perfect world is "turn on names" so that the characters' names would appear over their heads.

IRL pls.

I'd be a huge fan of this because I have already made more than a thousand bucks via class action suits for privacy violations thanks to Illinois' nice broad biometric law that makes photo tagging illegal. I should be getting another $70-100 from Google soon.
posted by srboisvert at 8:09 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love subtitles. Initially because I was watching movies or TV in a language that I was just learning; now I leave them on all the time. I feel that I remember the plot / show better when it’s reinforced by reading as well as listening (and watching the action on screen).

I also like to watch movies while flying. No earbuds, just the screen and subtitles. Then I can also doze off without hurting my ears because of ill-fitting earbuds.
posted by seawallrunner at 8:28 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

One option I would like in a perfect world is "turn on names" so that the characters' names would appear over their heads.

I worked on a past project where an 'enhanced tv' product would tag outfits, people, products for advertising, music played in a scene, etc because there is real customer dream desire for that, but the tech is just not good enough yet, or at least it wasn't then. Getting the data was a nightmare even with a sponsored clothing client for the test show. That stuff is just not fully available in a historical on-line version. Even a company as large and generic as Old Navy doesn't keep their past lines online very long, and occasionally have products in-store than have no online presence.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:43 AM on June 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, if anyone is struggling with audio like this on their computers, I found a lot of improvement by applying some EQ to the output: -6 db at 64Hz and below, curved up to +8db at 4KHz, then back down to 0 at 16K. It made Ted Lasso actually understandable for me!

On mac I use Rogue Amoeba's SoundSource which lets you do all kinds of things with your audio output, per-app. Highly recommend!
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:54 AM on June 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Amazon does pretty well at identifying onscreen actors during pause.
posted by Artw at 8:56 AM on June 14, 2023

daisyace: I want a “What’d they say?” button. Then, I’d watch with subtitles off, but press the button to pause and display the last 15 seconds or so of subtitles until I press Resume.

I don't know what kind of TV you have, but mine has several options in the captions menu:

Off
On always
On replay
On mute

So if you set it for "On replay," you'll get captions when you rewind and re-watch something, but not any other time. Check your TV accessibility options.

Artw: Amazon does pretty well at identifying onscreen actors during pause.

I don't need the actors' names; I need the characters' names.
posted by tzikeh at 10:11 AM on June 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I watch with subtitles and the volume too low because it's the only fucking way to both understand the dialog and not have your eardrums shattered by the asshole sound editor who keeps putting the dialog at whisper volume and the music and explosions at Mt Vesuvius eruption levels.

And that article linked on MeFi a while back claiming it was just totally not their fault because filming live people is hard a) doesn't explain why this is a new thing, and b) doesn't explain why animation has the same goddamn whisper/ROAR problem.

Subtitles are great for people with disabilities of course, but these days they're pretty much mandatory for anyone who wants to know what the actors are saying.
posted by sotonohito at 10:11 AM on June 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't need the actors' names; I need the characters' names.

It’s both and a headshot.
posted by Artw at 10:25 AM on June 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I need subtitles in face-to-face conversations...I've never been great at parsing sounds into distinct words. I can read super fast though, so subtitles have never bothered me...
posted by schyler523 at 11:20 AM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I keep English subtitles on to make sure I catch all the dialogue, but I've also seen the benefits of English audio with English text for adults learning English as a second language, and for infants learning to read. It's a huge passive education tool I'd recommend to all adult learners and parents.
posted by kdilla at 12:09 PM on June 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you ask me, there’s no defense for anything that requires us to take our eyes off Rachel Weisz, let alone two Rachel Weiszes

Rachels Weisz, surely
posted by Cogito at 3:48 PM on June 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I wish I had a TV or receiver with a built in compressor or even just a compressor with HDMI IO. The ability to squash the dynamic range of a movie or show's audio so the level of the dialouge matches the level of the explosions would go a long way to alleviating my personal need for subtitles. What did we even fight that loudness war for if not this?
posted by Television Name at 6:22 PM on June 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm currently working my way through the Shock of the New DVDs. They don't have subtitles. All of us I'm watching it with wish they did, for different reasons: not-great hearing, finding it easier to absorb information when it's read rather than spoken, not being familiar with the names and wanting to see them written down. I was surprised that captions weren't an option, but I guess that's what I get for watching old DVDs from the library.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:33 PM on June 14, 2023

The Criterion DVD for Night on Earth has that exchange subtitled like so:

He's an Ivoirien.
"Can't see a thing!"
That explains it!
He's an "Yvoit rien."
posted by otsebyatina at 10:19 PM on June 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

One nice thing for both the pro- and anti-caption folks who have an Apple TV: if you use the voice command "what did {he/she/they} say?", it will rewind ~10 seconds, turn on captions for a brief period and then turn them off again (if they were off to begin with).

Apologies if this has been mentioned already. I'm still working through the thread, but didn't find it with a cursory search
posted by Cogito at 5:02 AM on June 15, 2023

(birds chirping)

posted by exlotuseater at 2:23 PM on June 15, 2023

[indistinct squelching]

posted by Cogito at 4:25 PM on June 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

A few more anecdotes:

I've watched with closed captions turned on ever since childhood (read: 1990s) once I realized that the captions were generated from the script and sometimes the script gets changed late in production. I have a distinct memory of a Simpsons episode where an explosive device failed to detonate and the audible line was something like, "it worked on the test dummy" and the captioned line was something quite a bit spicier, either "it worked on the test corpse" or "it worked on the test goat". I'm guessing there might've been a note from BS&P.

Japanese TV isn't typically subtitled by default, but especially variety shows have long had a practice of putting important statements in large, playfully rendered text on screen. I have no idea why this became a cultural standard, but thought it was an interesting point related to this conversation.

In the last month or two I've gone to several films in theaters that were in English and had subtitles nonetheless. The ticket seller informed me there would be "open captions" with this screening, which I was frankly delighted by. Given the habits of the younger generations, I expect this trend to continue.
posted by Cogito at 4:32 PM on June 15, 2023

Ummmm. I had no idea that the reason we can’t hear dialog was because the speakers in the flat screen are not the right tools for the job.
We now have a sound bar with some sort of dialog enhancement setting.
TV has just gotten a lot less frustrating.
Thanks, all!
posted by hilaryjade at 5:36 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

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