| I'm from a country that uses subtitles for foreign movies, but in the last decade I have begun to activate subtitles for native movies as well. Good subtitles are not distracting and I sometimes even forget that they are there. It's a seamless experience for me. Somwtimes I watch American movies that are missing translated subtitles and have to use English subtitles. These are often closed captions instead of normal subtitles. I think those can actually be distracting. Unless [DOG BARKING] is an essential part of the story, they should just leave it. It often has no relevance to the story and is just added to fill an otherwise silent scene. A classic example is someone walking in a neighborhood at night, and the director felt they had to add some type of noise to justify their budget. A person who does not have problems with hearing also does not need subtitles to be prefixed with the name of the character. What you need is two sets of subtitles. If the streaming services insist on badly mixed audio, they should at least provide good subtitles for everyone. I think the issue with American subtitles is that viewers are not yet used to them, and the producers don't have enough experience to make good subtitles. When HBO started streaming in my country, the app used white text without any background... It's things like these that adds up to a bad experience. I could spend hours writing about them Netflix also used to have subtitles that were difficult to read, so I assume it's due to the lack of experienced product managers/designers in this particular area |