> If you create custom controls and then enable native captions, unless you're Crunchyroll, your controls probably take up space at the bottom of the display area. This is the same area where the captions appear, which means that when the controls are displayed, they may overlay the captions. (Please don't hide the captions altogether! Unfortunately, I've seen this on some players that shall remain nameless.)
My previous job was doing digital distribution of advertising content. There's a thing called 'safe area'
Where all text/legal content must be inside this safe area, we create a new player and got alot of upset customers because the controls overlaid on the video, this was especially annoying for them when they paused the video as the controls would stay until you unpause.
It wasn't until I was fixing this that I realised how annoying it is that the controls overlay on top of captions. Youtube does well by pusing the captions up if the controls are overlaid. But all streaming services put the controls over the top which annoys the hell out of me.
Edit: As a side note Unilever i believe it is, is doing a huge push for accessibility in Europe to support sign language, subtitles, closed captions, (and another one i cannot think of) in all their advertising. I think its a really good initiative.
> Edit: As a side note Unilever i believe it is, is doing a huge push for accessibility in Europe to support sign language, subtitles, closed captions, (and another one i cannot think of) in all their advertising. I think its a really good initiative.
Maybe I am a bit grumpy but I can only imagine that they are the only ones that benefit from it. Is it a common wish of persons with impairments to have better access to advertising?
The safe zone is great for focused content you need or want to make visible such as legal disclaimers, title cards, or ads but it's not really that great of an approach when it comes to positioning subtitles in the actual content since it means you're intentionally overlaying blocks of text over where you just said the most visible regions of the picture are. Sure it's great for making sure the captions are visible the 1% of time you're interacting with the video UI but a horrible trade-off for the 99% of time you're trying to actually watch the content. Ideally of all situations the content has positioning info for the captions but barring that nicety doing what YouTube does and be smart enough to offset the captions when you want to display controls is the only other good way to do it.
Now if you want to get fancy and meet up with what analog TVs from the 90s did you can allow the user to customize and override the subtitle rendering too. I'm trying to remember which streaming service had the most extensive options (it might have been Amazon?) that let you set the foreground/background color, transparency level, position, size, weight, and maybe even font. It'd be nice if at least some of those preferences were part of things like Web VTT standards so they followed you across your browser.
I know safe areas are not great for subtitles. My point is that when you’re checking content the controls overlay on the video so when trying to view the safe area is annoying because the controls impede the ability to check the video.
Subtitles over the video is annoying to me now. I would prefer a black bar on the bottom and not lose any picture.
Even though I’m not deaf or hard of hearing, I find myself using captions more and more when I consume video content. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I saw something a while ago that tracked this as a broad trend. Today’s accessibility is tomorrow’s usability.
I also work on player stuff with OP and learned a lot in this process.
As someone who IS deaf, but has a cochlear implant I have been telling companies for years that it's not only people like me who get use from it, it's people that can read English, but may find oral/listening harder. It allows them to reach a wider audience especially if they have the captions translated. The last couple of years I told people that a lot of phone users for example will be browsing their phone in public and if your video requires sound people will continue scrolling instead of taking the time to watch.
I did manage to get Air NZ to caption videos too, but not sure if they still do. Their marketing person changed years back and they didn't bother continuing with it (for a time anyway - with uBlock and such, I don't see any marketing from them anymore), even though the metrics that came back from the captioning experiment were incredible.
Then I got on an international flight and the safety video had captions for every language... except English. Ha.
If only a senior dev could get a job in which a11y is a priority. It is something I wish to specialise in more so.
I've found with NZ companies nobody seems to care (because there's bugger all legislation in NZ for this).
I can't stand captions being on. I tolerate them for foreign language stuff, obviously, but otherwise they really reduce me enjoyment of the material.
The funny thing is I'm someone who finds it difficult to hear people in noisy environments. But I never seem to have a problem with films or TV. Even films that many people seem to have trouble with, like Tenet.
My girlfriend always wants them on, though. I don't get it. But I have at least a couple of theories about why this is.
Firstly, she's a way faster reader than me. She reads easily twice as fast as me. But reading always takes priority in my brain. I can't not read a caption if it's on screen and that increased mental burden reduces my enjoyment.
Secondly, we watch things in different ways. When I watch something, it has 100% of my attention. Anything else is background noise, which I don't like. I'm much more selective about what I watch for that reason, as it's a bigger commitment. That means my listening circuits are fully engaged, but also I'm fully immersed in the film which means I benefit from additional context which is super important for listening.
I remember that story. I’m definitely in that group although older. For reasons I don’t fully understand there is no meaningful difference for me in watching foreign media or media in my native English, and in both cases I require captions to understand dialogue. I am not hard of hearing in any way and don’t have problems in conversation, but I just can’t understand what anyone is saying on movies and TV. I rely nearly entirely on captions.
Do you have issues understanding people in noisy (a lot of background noise, not necessarily loud) environments (e.g. at private parties where there are other groups talking in the same room)? I have this issue (apparently dubbed "hearing in noise"), and it gets triggered by dialogue in TV shows as well.
I recently watched Rings of Power, and I found the dialogue nearly impossible to understand without subtitles - everyone was so quiet all the time, almost whispering to each other, and almost never speaking towards the camera, so I wasn't getting the aid of seeing the sounds they were making either. The Numenoreans were ok usually but no one else was intelligible without subtitles. It happens in movies a lot too, mixing is often done to prioritize effects & music, rather than people actually understanding wtf anyone is saying.
All this to say, I turned on subtitles within one episode and it made for a much better viewing experience. Once I was able to read along I had no issue at all understanding the words too, but without the cue it was impossible.
This effect is especially bad for originally English series and movies. I understand English pretty well, but it's incredibly difficult for me to watch movies on a TV. Either I have to wear headphones, or set the TV volume uncomfortably loud.
I find the audio mix on a lot of movies is such that turning it up makes almost no difference. It barely improved the dialog loudness, just increases the obnoxiously loud music and sound effects.
Older media seems to have a more even mix. It is probably a 5.1 through my stereo speakers thing but I'm not sure how to fix it or if even can be fixed.
Japaneses put captions on everything due to the large amount of homophones in the Japanese speaking language; Words sound the same but are written with different kanji, having the text form avoid confusion.
They handle it just fine, of course. I disagree with the statement that Japanese has a relatively high incidence of homophones. It is true that Japanese TV shows, particularly variety shoes and lighter fare like that, have a lot of on-screen captions and I don’t know the reason for that, but I doubt it’s homophones, and at any rates more “serious” shows like dramas as well as all movies are caption-free (but will likely have a subtle track you can enable).
I lived in Japan in the 90s and watched a LOT of TV there. From my experience most subtitling on TV fell into 2 categories:
On anime and children's shows, the theme songs were frequently subtitled. I assumed this was so viewers could appreciate the lyrics
Comedy, skit and variety shows, where the dialog and commentary is mostly banter amongst a cast of "wacky" hosts. Here, subtitles (almost always in a garish, colorful font) served to punctuate jokes or funny lines, in the same way that a laugh track on an American sitcom is used to let the audience know when to laugh (even though the Japanese shows usually had a laughing studio audience as well).
Some shows did (do?) go overboard with the "comedic" subtitles, to a point where they were subtitling almost every other line a host said.
Going by my poor Japanese listening skills and some interviews from documentaries I've seen, Japanese speakers mostly stick to common words and idioms in conversations. They also "over-explain" by repeating, rephrasing, or even reacting to their own points.
So, it's just like conversations in any language: basic, rambling, and emotive.
What do you mean by working better with speed controls? The playback speed multiplier affects both the video and captions for me on Youtube. I like opening up the "transcript" too from the hamburger menu on YT.
For local playback of media files, I use daum kakao Potplayer, I have never come across something more power user friendly. MPV is weaker in a lot of areas, in my opinion. Potplayer interfaces with everything I'd want including vaporsynth and madvr and it has options for subtitle resync based on a multiplier and also converting based on framerate 60 -> 30. There is even an option for live subtitle translations. I personally like using it with smooth video project, but I understand it's not everyone's taste.
I enabled captions to watch the AppleTV series Slow Horses. I’m a native English speaker without hearing problems, but something about the slurred fast dialog and oddball slang made it hard to follow.
I really enjoyed having the captions for so many other reasons that I never turned them off. It’s great for multi-tasking and avoiding interruptions from environmental sounds like barking dogs, loud annoying children, phone calls, et cetera.
I think the trend comes from services, like YouTube, enabling captions by default. I almost always disable them, because they’re distracting. However, sometimes I can’t be bothered. I suspect many people can’t be bothered even more often.
I enable captions sometimes for single words, which I failed to hear right, although usually in those instances captions show something completely nonsensical.
Captions are broken everywhere, on streaming services but also blu-ray. The whole system seems incredibly poorly thought out.
Basically, you only get to chose two settings: captions on/off, and caption language.
Now, personally I think captions are very distracting and I prefer them off. However, some content is not completely in a language I can understand, so those parts need captions.
For example: I was watching a movie the other day where 99% of the movie was in English. However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again. This happened several times during the movie.
It seems to me that the system could have been so much better with a tiny bit more metadata and some additional settings.
Simply let me select the following:
- Languages that I can understand when spoken.
- Caption language for parts that are not in one of the languages I can understand.
The only thing that is needed to implement this is to add a ‘source’ language tag to each captioned line. If the source language is one of those understood by the viewer then don’t display the caption.
> However, there were a few short scenes where some characters spoke in Chinese. Since I can’t understand Chinese I had to stop the movie, rewind a bit, enable captions, re-watch the scene and then disable captions again.
When I was young (in the days of VHS) you got hard subs if James Bond's Russian enemy was saying something plot-important in Russian, and no subs if it was just flavour, or obvious from the context (hello, yes sir, raise the alarm, take the prisoner to the cells etc)
I don't think most filmmakers expect you to rewind and enable subtitles.
This was unnerving to read (I gave up)with all the animated gifs in the text. Whoever thought it's a good idea to interlace text with moving pictures was an evil human being.
Broken and severely lacking. Would be nice for support of AAS/SSA subtitles that enables location placement and typography customization that made watching anime fansubs a hoot. Also glad there's more describe audio these days, but describe audio captions still not a thing.
On the topic of AAS/SSA, someone rendered an entire episode of animation in subtitles for lulz.
Web .ass support exists via javascript libraries, and is used almost exclusively by crunchyroll. I think it's lacking in some small areas.
While I'm sure it'd be harder to actually implement, that episode animated in subtitles would probably run correctly if they went with vector based subs rather than a straight bitmap.
> location placement and typography customization that made watching anime fansubs a hoot
Shoutout to the ITW release of Noucome for this. And honourable mention to the EP1 OP for Nisemonogatari from UTW.
What I can't understand is why we still have controls overlaying the video.
It does make sense in fullscreen (there's no other place to put them). But in any other context? Have them below the video, damnit. You don't even need to hide them then.
Fully agree. There have been so many issues with overlaid controls and none of them have been fixed. For example, ever since YouTube introduced them, it's very difficult to impossible to read small text at the bottom of videos. If you want to pause the video to be able to read the text, the controls will stay there forever, obfuscating the text. So the other option would be to keep the video playing and keep skipping back a few seconds until you have read the text, except... skipping back brings up the controls, so it's the same problem all over again.
I think the reason, other than easier implementation, is there is a rule/heuristic that you shouldn't move controls around. So having the controls work one way in full screen and a slightly different way outside of the fullscreen would violate the rule. I think I agree with you though, this is probably a scenario that benefits from breaking the heuristic.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to read (or not read), or what caption? I can read the article and the caption on the Sailor Moon clip. What's wrong with that?
The title is a little click-baity, I think they're really just saying current browsers don't handle subtitles adequately and should be improved. As in, "if you can read this, your browser captions are broken, because all browser captions are broken".
There's also some browser-specific bugs mentioned in the article, but I don't think those are really what the title is about.
I find captions too distracting to have them constantly on but often have to turn them on for periods of time when I can't understand what actors are saying.
It's single words or phrases but I think it's happening more often now that actors don't care about proper diction, or for some reasons are no longer filmed until they they say their dialogues clearly.
Speaking in a way that is clearly understood, no matter what the accent.
It's lisping, various mannerisms, speaking too fast - sometimes all at once - which I seem to have issues with understanding. Not an English native but I have less problems with understanding oldschool actors.
Sean Connery had a particular way of pronouncing words but his speech was flawless. Bruce Willis has his speech impaired these days and he's speaking more slowly but is recorded until he sounds right. Younger actors say "blahblehboo", smile cutely and this hits Netflix screen.
They used to teach speaking and enunciation etc. differently in acting/radio/tv differently, than now, apparently.
My dad had to learn all these specific ways to enunciate and they made them do practice work. He was in communications in the military and later for the whitehouse and then radio and TV after the military.
It is interesting to see differences over the decades.
An annoyance of mine is that video controls seem to always overlay videos even when they're not full screen and there is room available below, this for obvious reasons goes hand-in-hand with the video controls then auto hiding themselves after a short period making skipping through things like meeting recordings far more painful than I'd like.
I've had to resort to a browser addon which allows me to use shortcut keys for any video to do things like skip ahead 10s, but it would still be nice to be able to see the time complete/remaining on a video without having to move my mouse to temporarily unhide the controls.
Another problem are open captions, especially if the video is multi-lingual, say both French and English and English open captions appear when there is French dialogue. Youtube automatic closed captions tries to caption the French talk and covers the open captions.
Because I can read French and am Deaf I would prever to have French closed captions neatly covering or replacing the open captions. One can dream...
Slightly off-topic, what is the current status on the progress of VLC and other local players rendering WebVTT? There's certain effects, like karaoke, on certain Youtube videos that, when downloaded in the right format can covert perfectly from srv3/ytt to .ass/substation alpha but .vtt to .ass fails.
My previous job was doing digital distribution of advertising content. There's a thing called 'safe area'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_area_(television)
Where all text/legal content must be inside this safe area, we create a new player and got alot of upset customers because the controls overlaid on the video, this was especially annoying for them when they paused the video as the controls would stay until you unpause.
It wasn't until I was fixing this that I realised how annoying it is that the controls overlay on top of captions. Youtube does well by pusing the captions up if the controls are overlaid. But all streaming services put the controls over the top which annoys the hell out of me.
Edit: As a side note Unilever i believe it is, is doing a huge push for accessibility in Europe to support sign language, subtitles, closed captions, (and another one i cannot think of) in all their advertising. I think its a really good initiative.