Subtitles

Watching video programs including broadcasts, live events, conferences, movies, music, television shows, and news supplies the deaf audience with four options of captions: Subtitles, Live Captions, Closed Captions, and SDH (Subtitles for the Deaf or Hard of hearing), which are tools of accessibility. They are more accessible for better understanding and enjoying the contents. A theater play should provide on-demand closed captions through an app on a personal device or through I-Caption devices. In movie theaters, captioning Smart Glasses and CaptiView are not user-friendly products as they are heavy and uncomfortable for making their eye movements, and speed reading much. Nevertheless, movie theaters provide open captions in some of their movies and limited schedule times. Live conferences, events, and classes provide Live captions that are translated by real-time captioners or CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) providers in-person or remotely. In the video platforms, Spotify, podcasts, youtube or Vimeo, the videos do not have any captions, so the descriptive transcripts and interactive transcript are a good solution. The Interactive transcript is a transcript that highlights the specific text when the speaker speaks.

As claimed by Zárate (2021), subtitles are intended for hearing viewers who do not understand the video’s original language. They translate the video’s dialogue and narration with the original audible information from the foreign video/film. Closed captioning is contemplated or aimed to translate the non-dialogue, narration, and non-verbal elements including the background noises and song lyrics for people with hearing loss, Deaf, and Hard of hearing communities. Closed Captions have lines of text including any audience information from the video and includes the background noises such as barking, sound effects, and music cues. Although, these closed captions are not unlike subtitles and SDH.

Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH) is a sort of caption which merges closed captions and subtitles. It displays the visual and acoustic presentation of the video’s verbal and non-verbal elements. (Zárate, 2021) It has translated non-verbal sounds that are sound effects, music, background sounds, intonation, accents, and voices. It gives us all the information about the speakers including names, gestures, responses, and background noises. It provides the audio and visual information in the language by the speakers in the video or other language. As an example, if the video’s speaker speaks English and Japanese, SDH translates both languages from the audio. This SDH is different from closed captioned as the video’s speaker speaks English and Japanese, and SDH will indicate both while the closed captioned translates only one language.

Deaf individuals have very different needs and requirements so SDH offers three customized features - the font style (Standard AlphaMosaic, Arial, Tiresias, and Verdana), the size of letters (small, medium, or large), the position (top or bottom of the screen), the frame (black ground or transparent), and the box (with or without a box). Deaf individuals are good at their eye movement with tighter connection more than hearing individuals because they are more extremely adapted to the visual orthographic make up of words. (Zárate, 2021) Subtitles should be well-timed to allow the viewer to read them while watching the visuals. The text should be synced with the actual audio. It should not edit out strong language like complicated words or metaphors. They use labels for an inaudible speech explaining causes like (Slurred speech). Each subtitle should be produced into a single complete sentence with a maximum length of two lines. (Zárate, 2021) Subtitles should have a maximum of 37 - 39 characters on each line, but 12 to 14 for Japanese and Korean, and 14 to 16 for Chinese. They should be positioned centered on-screen and center-justified. They should propose the four colors of the subtitles - white, yellow, cyan, and green. They should also be set up in upper case, italics, colors, and others. There are four typographical syntaxes (ortho typographical conventions): intonation, pauses, interruptions, accents, emphasis, singing, and the like. (Zárate, 2021)

Labels and dashes/hyphens are displayed for distinguishing between the speakers or the speaker’s identity. They are used based on how the speakers will look using color and two spaces before dialogue (Zárate, 2021). For example:

[Mother] I will go to the grocery store soon.
[Kid] Okay mom
and
Woman: I will go to the grocery store soon.
Kid: Okay mom

For the accents and pronunciation, the speaker says like tk.. tk.. tk…, which is meant to transmit the stereotypical sound of the language in question or pronunciation (Zárate, 2021). For the music, the subtitles should describe a pace or mood using adjectives such as rapid, slow, and fast when the action is playful or epic. They should show the variety of sound elements of an instrument like soft rousing music, high pitch, eerie music, whimsical music, and beats. Using hashtag symbols (#) for the beginning and end of the singing. Sound effects are important aspects of dialogue for Deaf individuals as they can not recognize anything. It should be the appearance of the door closing or footsteps, telephone beeps, or silence like [FOOTSTEPS], [DOOR CREAKS], [BEEP BEEP], [SILENCE].

Subtitles are usually not accurate in every video platform because the speakers are not matched to the subtitles. These videos are used by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or average translators. There is a limitation of languages. Subtitles are not provided on the platforms including television and theater movies everywhere across the globe. They may need more time to edit or change the language. Deaf individuals are behind when it comes to local and world news because they do not understand the news without subtitles or sign language.