If you can read this, your browser captions are broken
mux.com
mux.com
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.
Why won't you name them?
EDIT: Ignore this ^^^ please, it was a rather stupid question. (See reply below.)
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?
Edit: I am actually genuinely curious.
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.
Subtitles over the video is annoying to me now. I would prefer a black bar on the bottom and not lose any picture.
I also work on player stuff with OP and learned a lot in this process.
I do wish closed captioning worked better with speed controls, though.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
So, it's just like conversations in any language: basic, rambling, and emotive.
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 enable captions sometimes for single words, which I failed to hear right, although usually in those instances captions show something completely nonsensical.
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.
I also don’t want Dutch subtitles (my native language) in an otherwise English movie.
So basically: give me English subtitles, but not for anything spoken in English, Dutch or German.
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.
But I agree that many clips were pointless in OP's article (and distract, given lack of pausing controls).
On the topic of AAS/SSA, someone rendered an entire episode of animation in subtitles for lulz.
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.
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.
There's also some browser-specific bugs mentioned in the article, but I don't think those are really what the title is about.
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.
Proper diction?
Is that Mid-Atlantic accent, Received Pronunciation, or something else?
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.
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.
Also, it would be cool if peoples speech would not be impossibly while explosions so loud, everyone in other rooms or even apartments can hear it.
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.
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...